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[Question]
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In the last few decades there has been a lot of progress in the development of prosthetic limbs. They can be operated by the user's nerve pulses, they can be fitted with simple touch sensors, and can be constructed from materials that are both lighter and stronger than their original limbs. I've also heard that some of the newer experimental ones can even be operated by implants inserted into the movement center of the brain. Meaning that the limbs respond to the 'intent' behind the motion and not just the user's nerve endings.
This gave me an idea for a short story about a woman who volunteers to be used as a testbed for cybernetic enhancements. Realistically, how much of the human body could be replaced by cybernetics and still be able to function, using only current technology?
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This is one of those things that sounds cool until you think about it.
If our goal is to get as much of her body converted over as possible this is just going to be sad.
She now has prosthetic arms and legs. They work but they are poor substitutes for the real thing. Amputees actually have to have multiple prosthetics for different uses.
We can replace her heart and kidneys. It will shorten her lifespan but we can do it. We can replace her ears with cochlear implants. We can replace her eyes by wiring cameras into her brain that will let her see a few pixels. We can even shave her bald and put a wig on her.
All these things would be a crime to do to a healthy person, for good reason.
Not that there aren't fun cybernetic toys. That chip you put in your dog can also go in your wrist. With the right keyboard you never have to type a password into your computer again.
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Let's say you want to limit yourself to current technologies, and fully cyber, so not grown from stem cells, cloning, or other 100%-bio components. Similarly no support devices (e.g. pacemakers) as the core organ is still biologic.
It has to be cyber. Meaning, a piece of wood instead of a leg does not count.
Furthermore, we want that the patient be freely to move around. She does not have to have a normal life (won't have, at the moment), but she should have to be limited to living lying on a bed in a hospital.
With those constraints in mind, we have currently:
* **limbs**. Those are the easiest. The Wikipedia's [Artificial Limbs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_limb) shows some details. But essentially, and to various degrees, full arms, hands, legs and feet could be replaced. Some more elaborate versions are still under tests, but the technology is there. Do note, that one of the limitation of those, to date, is a rather heavy weight. So your woman has to have the strength and rest of the body to more around those four limbs.
* **heart** To my knowledge, the only device respecting the conditions above is the one from the French company, [Carmat](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmat) which implemented cyber-hearts on people, and those were able to leave the hospital, without any external devices. But do note that those are still rather bulky, and as such are only suited for people with a certain... weight. Also note that to date, the longest surviving test lived for 9 months after the transplant. But most of them were on the 65+ years old.
* **ears**, using [Cochlear implants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant),
* **eyes**. There a re a few versions of it, but one could use [bionic eyes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthesis).
* **bones**. Some bones can be replaced by prosthesis. See, e.g. for the [hip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_replacement).
Additionally, there is some work on-going about different parts of the body, like [kidneys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_kidney), lungs, livers, etc.
Many of the current attempts are focused on biological elements grown artificially. And as such those are discarded by our earlier assumption.
Do also note, that so many changes would incur such an emotional stress, that your patient will likely go nuts from it. Or maybe be simply exhausted.
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As early as the 1500s(edit: Can't find reference for this. [Early 1900s video shows it though.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDqh-r8TQgs) [Discussion here about video and head removal](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/20335/is-the-video-of-soviet-dog-revival-experiment-real/20337#20337).) there were experiments of transplanting heads onto other bodies which were short term successful for what they were. Given the advances of medical science it is probable that you could transfer a head (and neck) of someone to a cybernetic body and be fine, but those experiments were stopped due to the ethics of the matter, even while doing it with animals. Also limiting this to the head makes it easier because the hardest problem that we have today that i know of is cleaning the blood which is mainly caused by other organs and nothing in your head.
A few years ago there were experiments of attaching and integrating animal brain cells to robots which if I remember right was extremely successful, but it was a short term experiment so not sure the life span on that.
So yeah, everything but head(and neck) things and even that's coming along...
The main issues that cybernetics face are different aspects of the same problem and that is incoming data and sensing things. Incoming data is simple to explain, we're making strides, but according to what I've heard it's a matter of trying to speak to someone who can only hear in English, but can speak any language, and we can only speak in Japanese. The strides are crude at best in my opinion, but life changing according to the people who have received the implants. The maximum capabilities is akin to a giant black board with light bulbs and the sensor implant can detect light and dark and light a bulb up in your brain so that you can "see" light/dark and that's your "sight". I recently came across an article that seemed to be saying that they're now able to make people see crude topographical renders, but I didn't read it. I just got that from the headline and image.
The other problem is "sensing" and that is basically when we say "touch" we're actually describing several senses such as pressure, heat, smoothness, etc. I'm not sure we can faithfully replicate many of those let alone all in one full body suit. For some this wouldn't be so bad, and if you had to take this option or die, when push came to shove they'd take this option, but ultimately without touch sensitivity you will have to learn to judge everything by sight and hearing which is very dangerous, but there is also the fact that if we can't master this, even if we can master every other aspect, it would not be a viable option as it would likely have a high probability of the person going nuts from sensory deprevation of some sort.
Side note: The technology to plug yourself into a computer exists. It just takes a while for your brain to learn how to control the computer and this is determined by your brain plasticity, so someone old might not be able to partake in this technology if they haven't already trained on it. Again, the main problem though is input into the brain rather than output. If we could work out input to a higher degree I imagine true VR would be incredibly easy (although with some major dangers).
I expect that full body cybernetic technology will be available in 10-20 years, or rather prosthesis cybernetics. For non-necessary medical uses I'd expect it to be available in 40 to 50 years and widely used by all people within 60 to 80.
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Not much.
If you don't want to replace the body part with something significantly worse, then nothing, maybe except the teeth and the lens in the eye. And none of these are moveable or have any need for electronics, so they would not really be truly "cybernetic".
Even with teeth, modern implantology barely got to the level to make dental implants which last for a considerable amount of time and have a fairly low rejection rate, but rejection rate is still a thing and they only guarantee 10 years, even if it might last somewhat longer. The bone will slowly but gradually degrade around the implant, so a healthy natural tooth still has advantages over dental implants. And remember, it doesn't need any moving parts or any power supply, but we still only can do so much, using the best available technology.
About the rest of your body?
* Although functional, motor-driven prosthetic limbs do exist, they are less agile than normal limbs.
* Although artificial organs, like heart, lungs, kidneys etc. do exist, they are bulky, less efficient, and require constant medication for the rest of your life to prevent infection and prevent your body from rejecting them.
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A full body prosthetic (i.e. a remote controlled robot) would probably be the most practical way to go, with the brain being kept at some sort of medical facility. Then it doesn't matter how bulky the life support machinery is or how much electricity it needs, and the robot isn't burdened with the weight of a brain and life support system.
No one really knows how long a brain can be kept alive on life support, there's a lot of engineering challenges and we don't understand the brain's needs well enough to support them entirely & properly.
As for the brain-machine interface there's a lot of work being done on that right now, worst case scenario you're a head in a jar with a screen, headphone and eye-tracking technology, it would be a terrible interface but it would work.
A few decades from now things are going to be interesting.
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Earth has [stopped rotating](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpinTheEarthBackwards). Maybe Superman started flying around the Earth backwards to turn back time, but hit a wall of kryptonite just when the Earth stopped rotating. Or [Stupendous Man](http://www.rabittooth.com/13_calvin/Stupendousman/sm05.jpg) hit the earth so hard that it went from Sunday to Saturday... but also has stopped the earth's rotation. Let's also say that the rotation stopped slowly - not all at once. Slow enough, anyway, so as not to cause city-leveling winds.
Note that the earth is *not* going around the sun such that the same face of the earth is always facing the sun. I imagine it like a model solar system...say you pinch the earth model between your fingers at its poles, and then while standing in the same position, crank it around the sun. So, a day on earth lasts 12 months. Watching the sunset over the ocean could take you about 3 months.
So what would be some effects of the earth's rotation stopping like this?
First meteorologically: I imagine that the weather would be drastically different...but how so? Would storms be much less violent? More violent? The sun over the ocean would have months and months of virtually uninterrupted time to evaporate the surface water. Would this build the clouds so much that storms are still frequent? What about cloud coverage as a result - would clouds be so thick from that much uninterrupted sun, that they would in effect shade the earth? The Coriolis effect would be almost non-existent, right? This would effectively slow storms and wind from moving along the ocean...but wouldn't they still build? What would such a storm be like when (if) it reached land?
How about land-locked areas? I imagine there would be many more deserts, and really, the most inhabitable places on earth would be close to coastlines. Basically climates seem like they would be quite different...but how?
And then what about the seasons, as we know them? Would seasons still follow the same quarterly pattern, along with the day/year?
What about other geological effects? Plate tectonics: earthquakes, volcanoes, etc? Or the earth's magnetic field...any effect there? Many other geological processes depend on the weather, so I guess this answer depends on the weather question above.
Biologically speaking, how would humans and other organisms survive? I suppose humans are pretty resilient and innovative, so living in the sun for 6 months and in the dark for 6 months, we'd find a way to make it work. But what about other animals? Circadian rhythms would be all messed up.
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**Bad things. Lots of bad things.**
First off, there is a term for the version of "not rotating" that you're after. You're looking for it to stop rotating *in the sidereal frame*. The sidereal frame is what you would see if you looked at the earth from one of the constellations. The Earth is not rotating about its axis from this perspective, but you will see a year-long day/night cycle.
You are right about how the Coriolis effect will basically be out of play. Your angular rate drops from $7.272 × 10^{-5} \text{rad/s}$ (Earth's current rotation rate) to $2.042 × 10^{-7} \text{rad/s}$. The Coriolis term is directly proportional to this, so expect to see a roughly 300x decrease in the effects of the Coriolis effect. All of our nice predictable weather patterns which rely on Coriolis to create easy to work with atmospheric cells go out of the door. Fortunately, we're going to make new ones.
Our temperature balances all center around the day/night cycle. You would basically be removing that from play. Life is about to get really miserable. You're going to have a hot spot on the Earth, wherever it is day. This is going to create a large mass of hot air rising very quickly off of the plains. This air will be displaced by air from the twilight regions of the planet. Large, very angry convection cells will form.
How angry? Well, consider the part of the planet most directly in line with the sun. The only air cooling it gets is going to be from the hot air rushing in nearby. All of the cold air from the twilight regions is going to be heated up as it travels over the rocks (it stays low because it's cold air). This heats the air up, causing it to lift away. You won't get one big convection cell the size of a planet. You'd get dozens, each one hotter than the next.
And in the middle? Well, let's just have a reminder of how hot the Sun is. Build a solar oven. You use mirrors to increase the power of the sun by maybe 4x, and then you isolate the hot box from the outside world. The isolation is actually the important part. If you could get nice insulating glass, you could cook food without needing mirrors at all. Solar radiation is $1.4\text{kW}/\text{m}^2$. Each square meter of land is getting more solar energy than a commercial grade microwave on "high". There's a reason you can cook your food this way!
The temperature gradients probably wont let you get to "glowing," because at that point the equations get more interesting (you start radiating energy out into the cold of space, which keeps you cool). However, temperatures will easily reach oven temperatures, without any trouble.
On the other side of the planet, you have several months where you cannot see the sun. At this point, radiation of thermal energy will come into play. The sky is roughly $-40^\circ\text{F}$ You're going to be dumping a lot of energy into the sky. Consider a desert where we have clear skies (clouds make the sky "appear" warmer). It is not unheard of to have a nice 60°F day (15.5°C), but when the sun goes down, the radiation effects emit so much heat into the cold sky that you can wake up to find ice on the ground. This happens over the course of a few hours. Imagine what 6 months of that would do.
Unlike the hot side of the planet, we don't get convection cells here. The cold ground chills the air, rather than warming, creating a layer of cold air near the ground. With such a smooth temperature section of the globe, there won't be much wind to disrupt the wind. The only effects we will see are radiative. And, since there's no wind, there's nothing to push moist air into colder regions to make clouds. It would just be a cold cold cold desert sky for months on end. At some point, you would start to chill the atmosphere enough to see a sky that appears to be even colder than $-40^\circ\text{F}$.
**So what does this mean for geology?**
Even the rocks are going to have a hard time. One of the most powerful erosive forces in the world is ice. Water seeps into cracks and then later freezes. The expansion of ice breaks off huge hunks of rock. Temperature gradients like this one are going to give ice a run for its money. A yearly expansion-compression cycle of 500+ degrees is going to cause anything resembling a hard rock to crack into dust. The surface would be littered with only soft materials that can flex. Mica might be a good example, as would clay.
However, the soft materials won't have a good time either. Consider the windy seasons. Yes, seasons. Twice a year, your particular spot on the globe is going to be in the twilight, on the edge of the strongest convection cell on the planet. Massive winds are going to pound you from above. On the leading edge of the hot zone, you'll get torrential downpours because the heat will evaporate the water that deposited when it got cold. It will be flung high into the air to turn into massive rainclouds the likes of which the world has never seen. This wind and rain would pummel any soft materials into dirt. Since the world has lots of dirt, the edges of these convection cells will create massive multi-kilometer high dust storms.
What about the poles? They fare better. The closer you get to the poles, the more time you spend in twilight. However, most of the nasty wind/rain effects are going to be found along east-west lines. You'll get less of it in the north and south. Unfortunately, there's a problem here too. These are still the poles of the Earth. They still only get glancing sunlight, so they are just as cold as the Arctic or Antarctic is today!
**I want humans to survive in this!**
You are a sick individual for subjecting your citizens to this world. *Your best bet is to invent space travel and get off this rock before Superman stops its rotation!*
No luck? Well drat. Okay, it's survival time.
There is no way to survive at equatorial latitudes. There simply isn't. Unless you are an amazing ocean-faring race, there's no way to just keep outrunning the hot zone. Once it hits you, it's over. Digging holes might work, but the fracturing rock makes it likely you wont be able to dig yourself out before the cold hits.
Just like nowadays, surviving at the poles is not an option.
The solution is to live on a belt *just* below the arctic. The Inuit might not even notice that the earth stopped spinning. They live with months of no sun already. They would, however, notice that the winds are getting trickier to deal with.
A little further down, you might be able to have a band of nomads which continuously circle around the world along the twilight. These are the regions that are getting subjected to extreme conditions, so you wouldn't get to stop moving. You would have to stay with the twilight. Land bridges would be key.
What survives on this planet? Well, along that magic band, plants may be able to wait out the winter and quickly thrive in the windy seasons. There would be abundant food if you found these. Plants would have to spend so much energy reproducing each year that they wouldn't be able to stop you from eating a little without seriously jeopardizing their survival. Arctic water creatures would fare well. If you had a sufficiently flat world, there might even be a river system which equatorial creatures could use to traverse across continents (I'm thinking of the most epic whale migration imaginable).
In all, it's a bitter world to live in.
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This is some question. There really needs to be another qualification associated with it as well that yields drastically different outcome. Does the earth stop spinning slowly or quickly, in comparison to geologic spans. If quickly, the earth's crust does not have time to adjust the equatorial bulge and the oceans will collect towards the poles, draining away from the equator. If slowly, the equatorial bulge could stay in equilibrium with the actual spin and the oceans could remain essentially in place. Long term, the bulge will disappear in either case. Of course if you stop it suddenly, you have a new class of problems as the atmosphere (and possibly the oceans) are still traveling up to 1000 miles per hour when you stop the planet. 1000 mph winds would come pretty close to destroying the planet by themselves.
For simplicity, I am generally ignoring effects related to stopping the rotation quickly, i.e., assuming stopping to take 100K years or so.
Weather -- 1 day = 1 year means very bad weather indeed. Peak daytime temperatures would perhaps be at a guess 70 C / 170 F -- black body radiation being proportional to the 4th power of the temperature. Dark side would be colder that current Antarctica since it would be 180 degrees around from noon, not just 23 deg. away from the terminus (the day/night separator). Carbon dioxide would freeze out of the air. Virtually none of the existing plant and animal life on the earth would be able to survive these extremes. Of course, the sun now rises in the west and sets in the east.
The polar regions would be near the terminus, but due to the large temperature differences between day and night would be subject to extreme winds and storms as the atmosphere would continually migrate from the day side to the night side. The winds would never let up., so agriculture would be virtually impossible and plant life nearly non-existent as well.
Wind circulation patterns would be completely disrupted. Current deserts generally result from the air being squeezed dry by passing over mountains, i.e., in prevailing westerly winds on the east side of the mountains. With a 24 hour year, the prevailing winds would be easterly part of the year, westerly at other times. But most of the precipitation near the terminus where you are passing to the night side -- inconveniently when most vegetation cannot use it productively.
As the earth slows down, earthquakes would be large and widespread as the equatorial bulge disappears. Long term, the there would not be the mantle currents thought to cause crustal drift that powers earthquakes. The magnetic fields would disappear too, hello radiation coming from the sun as the ozone layer is destroyed. Longer term, the atmosphere would disappear more rapidly during the the higher daytime temperature, but this would be a very slow effect.
Not much that lives would survive this change. Humans no doubt would be able to grow food in their bunkers via hydroponics, etc. but it would not be a pleasant life. If the stopping time was very short, nearly everyone would be killed in the initial trauma caused by the severe winds of course and humankind may not be able to survive at all.
For prior art, be sure to read Joshua 10:12-14. The account is sorely lacking in details however.
[Answer]
Earth’s Rotation Essential for Survival
Most people don't really appreciate just how essential Earth’s rotation really is for human survival. They merely consider it a way that God or nature provided in order for humans to have time of rest after a hard day’s work. But there is much more involved in Earth’s rotation than meets the eyes.
The stark reality is that if the Earth were to stop rotating, either via a gradual or sudden process, mankind’s survival on the Earth’s surface, along with that of animals and plants would become an impossibility.
Here are some of the very nasty things that would occur if the Earth stopped rotating.
1. The atmosphere: Presently Earth’s atmosphere seems evenly distributed. But if Earth stopped rotating, the atmosphere would surge towards the poles. Doesn’t sound all that bad does it? That is until we consider the effects this would have on the rest of the planet. You see, such a surge would leave other parts of Earth with an atmosphere too thin to breath. An atmosphere similar to that which we might encounter at very high altitudes. So those people living there will either relocate or suffocate. But the question is-Relocate where? since other changes would have made relocation extremely difficult if not impossible for millions.
2. Oceanic Effects
Not just the atmosphere but the mighty oceans would surge towards the poles as well, flooding cities and densely populated areas in the process and creating deserts in other areas it abandons. The result? A huge virtually uninhabitable continent that girdles the earth like a belt would be created.
3. The weather
Day and night as we know it would cease. Each would be a year long. As one-half of the Earth becomes constantly exposed to the darkness of space and the other to the heat of the sun for a year, extremely hot and cold temperatures would ensue. Earth’s night side would plunge to 60 below zero while the daylight side temperatures would also rise extremely high.
4. Magnetic Field:
But this is not all. We humans take for granted that we are safe on Earth’s surface. But such safety is only made possible by Earth’s magnetic field. You see, contrary to how peaceful things might seem, Earth is being constantly pummeled by cosmic rays and other particles from the sun that are deadly to life.
Fortunately, these particles are deflected by Earth’s magnetic field which is generated by the the constant flow of Earth’s molten core. But once the core becomes stationary, Earth’s magnetic field will founder and all this radiation radiation will reach the surface. Only underground living would be possible.
Not a good thing to happen by any standards.
<http://writerdreams.freeforums.net/thread/334/earth-rotation-essential-survival>
Copyright 2018
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[Question]
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I've recently come across a disease that I am unhealthily intrigued by: [Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_progressiva). Basically, instead of soft tissue healing normally, it calcifies and grows bone to replace damaged cells. This is, obviously, very unhealthy and currently lacks any form of treatment.
Now, onto the question. Would human bone be useful as a kind of armor/exo-skeleton? Could it prove light enough, but strong enough to protect against predators and the elements?
What I imagine is large flat plates that cover inflexible parts of the body (forearm, torso, etc) like a suit of armor might. Another possibility is that it grows as scales, which is more flexible.
For this question, I will assume that the armor grows with the body, avoiding the obvious health risks
EDIT: I just want to clear this up. I only reference the disease as the inspiration for the question. I didn't mean for it to factor into the question
[Answer]
It depends what you want to defend against but large plates might be good against claws - which are designed to cut through flesh - but there are some aninmals with the jaw strength to break bones.
But yes, bone is harder than flesh and would offer more resistance, therefore it is a form of armour.
Thicker bones give more protection but also add more weight. If we aren't changing the human too much (ie having a, literal, exoskeleton and no internal skeleton) we can look at how much weight is being added.
I found something that [quotes human bone density](http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/AnnaYarusskaya.shtml) as $1600$kgm$^{-3}$. Another [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin) says the surface area of a human is $1.5-2.0$m$^2$. So, for a thickness of $1$cm of bone (can make this thicker or thinner if you like, this is just a ball park).
We get:
$$1600 \times 2 \times 0.01 = 24 kg$$
This is quite a large proportion given average human body weight is around 80kg (I couldn't put that link in but a quick google shows it).
You can tweak those numbers if you like. Maybe you only have plates on 1 square meter but you're still left with 12kg extra mass.
Humans are designed for running long distances, running away from predators or, as a pack, towards prey. The extra mass would seriously inhibit this and mean your new humans need to become bulky fighters rather than runners.
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Some edits:
Firstly a few people pointed out that, in the army and such, modern humans can train to run with heavy armour (see Hankrecord's comments). I completely agree we can manage, however with the OP asking about predators I had (perhaps incorrectly) assumed this meant they were living in a hunter/gatherer type society where any and every edge you could get was essential. It seems to me humans evolved to run long distances and, assuming this was for survival, the extra carry mass of the bone would render this survival tool less efficient. This is why I proposed they would become bulkier fighters compared to their unarmoured counter-parts.
Secondly dlatikay provided [this source](https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_difference_between_trabecular_bone_mineral_density_and_cortical_bone_mineral_density_in_osteoporosis) which provides figures for the density of different bone types. They said:
>
> So the weight could range from ~23kg (solid-massive) to ~6kg (spongy).
>
>
>
Which provides us with different uses for the bone - perhaps even different types (or classes) of armoured humans. Ranging from those with thick solid armour who might risk a run in with a heavy clawed animal to the lighter, spongy armoured humans who may be more useful as scouts, mountain climbers who may be better equipped to take a fall or some other attack where the force is spread out (rather than in a sharp tooth or claw).
[Answer]
**From the disease itself, unlikely.But with genetic engineering yes.**
There are mammals that had [bone armor](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17103396), the giant ground sloths(as well as other Xenarthra) had subcutaneous bone armor(osteoderms). Sloth armor is often referred to as biological chainmail. Armadillo and glyptodon take it even further creating a much more rigid bone armor, gaining additional production at the cost of flexibility.
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## Lab Report: Subject Armadillo
I am please to report that the subject has been positively responding to the gene therapy. The real breakthrough was using CRISPR to edit the ossification gene to activate only upon external oxidative scabbing rather than internal inflammation. The platelets seed an osteon at the site of the wound that develops into a sesamoid bone. As a result of picking at their skin, subject has developed bone studding over the outside of their body. These sesamoids have a higher than average ratio of compact to cancellous bone tissue. While the development of this lamellar bone is slow, it is exceedingly durable.
In an interesting development, where the sesamoid bone meets the skin a second collagen coat has developed. Rather than the usual alternating parallel sheets of collagen, subject seems to be developing "woven" patches that function much like kevlar with the bones embedded in this matrix. This appears to allow a much more efficient dispersal of impact, functioning much like the recently deployed [Dragon Skin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Skin) vests.
While the density of the bone does add to the subject's weight, it has not seemed to slow them down. Additionally, the nature of the bone plating does not seem to impede flexibility or range of motion. We estimate that when fully optimized, the exoskeleton and energy dispersal system would theoretically be capable of at least a Gigapascal of compressive force (a sixfold increase) while simultaneously minimizing exposure to the more fragile tensile or shear forces. At that point, the dissipating collagen mesh should be able to disperse the force of heavy weaponry without damaging the internal organs of the subject.
Unfortunately, test subject has proven overly belligerent and have begun to grow bone "claws" as a result of scraping at the walls. They've hospitalized three guards this month.
### Below is an updated schedule of Project Anthromegalous:
Subject Armadillo - Bone exoskeleton. Proof of Concept. Scheduled for demolition
Subject Bison - Genetic enhancements for increased physical performance
Subject Camel - Adaptive resistance
Hopefully by then we will have cracked the code on rapid cellular regeneration to enable Project Anthromegalous to go toe to toe with that self-righteous alien. At that point, we will proceed with Subject Doomsday...
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Silicon is often brought up in science fiction as being very similar to carbon, just below it on the periodic table. The silicon-based "organic" molecules are more tightly bound and thus would find a higher temperature to be appropriate.
Being too hot for liquid water, what would it use as a solvent? That is, what would the Horta drink?
Hal Clement wrote a novel where the aliens found Earth to be extremely cold, so much so that their base on Mercury's (thought at the time to be tidally locked) day side was further heated another hundred degrees with reflected sunlight. They breathed sulfur (an analog of oxygen) as a gas. I don't recall if he went into the chemistry in more detail.
Given a toolkit of a few kinds of atoms with different numbers of binding sites, the heavier ones in the same period might substitute for what we are familiar with, to a first approximation.
So once you switch Silicon for Carbon, what other changes might be useful to make a workable toolkit-for-life? What solvents are available/possible in different temperature and pressure regimes?
[Answer]
At the same temperature and pressure extremes you find Earthly life, silicon is inferior to carbon because it cannot form long chains with itself. At temperature and pressure extremes where carbon-based life could not survive (e.g. Venusian), silicon-based polymers would remain stable. ([Source](http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/8.2.3.htm))
Silicon would need to alternate with another element such as oxygen, nitrogen, or boron in order to form long chains, but otherwise it would have much the same potential for polymers as carbon. We ourselves use silicon-based polymers for lubricant and plastics. They would likely use all the same elements that we do, though in vastly different arrangements.
Silicon-based life wouldn't be able to respire oxygen the same way we do for several reasons:
* Silicon dioxide is a solid, so whenever they exhale they would
produce a fine dust (or a brick?!) instead of a gas. This is vastly
inefficient compared to exhaling gas.
* Since they likely would not use water as their solvent of choice,
then free oxygen could not exist in their atmosphere to begin with.
The reason why our atmosphere is rich in oxygen is because plants,
cyanobacteria and other photosynthetic autotrophs extract the oxygen
from water during photosynthesis and exhale it as a waste product. ([Source](http://www-plb.ucdavis.edu/courses/bis/2A/bis2A-F11/PhotosyntheticO2.pdf))
Halogens such as chlorine and fluorine may produce gaseous compounds with silicon, such as the silicon tetrafluoride naturally dumped into our own atmosphere by volcanoes. However, halogens are heavier and more reactive than oxygen (and flame-retardant) and thus silicon life would need to compensate. However, their sun would have to release much stronger UV radiation to power their photosynthesis to extract halogens. ([Source](https://books.google.com/books?id=6Rdi6G8CxkUC&lpg=PA58&dq=lobster%20%22breathes%20fluorine%20gas%22&pg=PA58#v=onepage&q&f=false))
Since we're assuming an environmental temperature above the boiling point of water and the decomposing point of glucose so that silicon is preferred to carbon, sulfuric acid (or another sulfur compound if above the boiling point of sulfuric acid) is the most obvious potential solvent. ([Source](http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/8.2.2.htm))
In any case, there would not be a one-to-one correspondence between the chemical equations for biological processes between silicon and carbon lifeforms since they couldn't utilize their equivalent solvents and reagents the same way. Synthesis could react, for example, SiF4 with HF or HCl (gaseous or dissolved in solution) to produce sugar analogues and free F or Cl to power respiration. Respiration would likewise react F or Cl with the sugar analogues to produce energy and exhale gaseous SiF4 and HF or HCl as waste. Already their biochemistry is noticeably different because they don't use their solvent as their electron donor and exhale two types of gaseous wastes.
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I've answered questions related to this a couple of times and link those questions here ([What are some biochemical alternatives to carbon](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37472/what-are-some-biochemical-alternatives-to-carbon/37477#37477)) and here ([Life on a Molten World](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18391/life-on-a-molten-world/18397#18397)).
My reference is the always valuable [Atomic Rockets website: Building Blocks](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/aliens.php#id--Alien_Biology--Building_Blocks). This resource provides the references it used to develop its list.
| Min Temp | Max Temp | Macromolecule | in Solvent |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 400° C | 500°? C | Fluorosilicones | Fluorosilicones |
| 113° C | 445° C | Fluorocarbons | molten Sulfur |
| 0° C | 100° C | Proteins (Hydrocarbon) | Water |
| -77.7° C | -33.4° C | Proteins (Hydrocarbon) | liquid Ammonia |
| -183.6° C | -161.6° C | Lipids (Hydrocarbon) | liquid Methane |
| -253° C | -240° C | Lipids (Hydrocarbon) | liquid Hydrogen |
This table does not identify the information carrying molecule that might go with the solvent and building block molecule.
Atomic Rockets lists these other solvent & macromolecule possibilities (but doesn't list suggested temperature ranges):
* **Ammonia** - (shown) could replace water as a solvent. At high pressures,
ammonia remains a liquid over a larger temperature range than water.
* **Boron** - boron nitrides could replace carbon chains as a
macromolecule. Boron Nitrides may work better with Ammonia solvent
than carbon macromolecules would.
* **Nitrogen** - combined with other elements (Boron, Sulfur, or
Phosphorus) could replace carbon chains as a macromolecule.
* **Phosphorus** - combined with other elements (Carbon, Nitrogen, or
Silicon) could replace carbon chains as a macromolecule.
There are even more [extreme possibilities.](http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/alternative_forms_of_life.html)
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The term I’ve seen used to describe the necessary solvents for silicon-based life is *cryosolvent*. In *Planets and Life: The Emerging Science of Astrobiology*, by Sullivan & Ross (relevant excerpt [here](http://www.ffame.org/pubs/Alien%20biochemistries.pdf)), the authors cite the work of [Bains (2004)](http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089%2F153110704323175124) on various alternate solvents to form the basis for various alien biochemistries. Ethane, methane, and liquid dinitrogen are all considered as possibilities, with liquid dinitrogen showing the most promise for silicon-based life.
At low temperatures, silicon-silicon chains can exist, containing up to 30 silicon atoms and mimicking the structure of certain carbon polymers1. As noted [here](https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/fr_1/fr_1_future5.html), these chains aren’t as stable as carbon chains, and less stable in many liquids. However, this becomes less of a problem at low temperatures. Furthermore, as [Bains’ website says](http://www.williambains.co.uk/astrobiology/life2.html), silicon may be the only option for liquid dinitrogen.
Almost paradoxically, silicon-based life has advantages over carbon at *high* temperatures, as [the Center for Astrophysics](https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/fr_1/fr_1_future5.html) discusses! Silicon-oxygen and silicon-aluminum bonds can withstand temperatures hundreds of kelvin above temperatures on Earth. However, the lack of a good solvent that is compatible with silicon at these temperatures is a stumbling block. Sulfuric acid has been considered as a solvent, but not, as far as I know, with silicon.
As mentioned [here](http://blois.in2p3.fr/2006/Presentations/Schulze.pdf), silicon photosynthesis is also possible. However, be careful before drawing a direct analogy between silicon-based life and carbon-based life in terms of respiration. As shown [here](https://hortcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/can-silicon-based-life-exist.pdf), SiO2 produced from respiration (the analogue to CO2) would be solid, which would make it very difficult for an organism to breathe.
Bains writes on his website that you could create a system analogous to the [Krebs Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle) using ethylene, acetylene, and water, which would generate CO2 and methane, but he doesn't discuss if and how fast this could happen at low temperatures. You still have the problem of instability of silicon-silicon chains when faced with water.
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1 As [this report](https://hortcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/can-silicon-based-life-exist.pdf) concluded, “hybrid” chains of the form SinC2nH2n+1On+1 are also possible. They would look like this:
I'm not aware of the temperature regimes in which they could remain stable, though.
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I'm posting this answer to consolidate some points raised in the original answers by various people, and expand/clarify points that could have been better-written answers.
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# Some Useful References
A very interesting book, [available for free on the web now](http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/8.2.3.htm), is *Xenology: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Extraterrestrial Life, Intelligence, and Civilization* by Robert A. Freitas Jr. This was written in 1975–1979, so it's a bit dated. But, §8.2.3, *Alternatives to Carbon*, is pretty much what this question is about.
An oft-used reference for Worldbuilding is the Atomic Rockets web site. The page [Building Blocks](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/aliens.php#id--Alien_Biology--Building_Blocks) covers alternatives to life as we know it.
The web page [Alternative Forms of Life](http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/alternative_forms_of_life.html) on David Darling's Encyclopedia of Science is similar. It's an index of pages in the same body.
# Hot or Cold ?
First of all, let's clarify what “silicon based” bio-molecules might entail. It's well-known that a difference between Si and C is that Si has higher binding strength, and things like silicon grease are produced for high temperature use. So, we conclude that Si analogues of Carbon-bearing molecules would need (and withstand) higher temperatures.
Well, that's not quite right. Our grease and silly putty and caulk contain Si, but are not direct analogues to hydrocarbon molecules. They contain alternating silicon and oxygen as a replacement for carbon in the main chain, and furthermore the side chains are conventional carbon-containing chains.
(( [Figure 8.4 in Freitas](http://www.xenology.info/Xeno/8.2.3.htm) was made on a typewriter. I wonder if some modern renderings could be done and posted *here*? Imagine illustration of Polydimethylsiloxane, Phenylsilicone, etc.))
So, high temperature molecules would not be simply silicon based, and still needs carbon. Freitas points out that the increased temperature tolerance is modest and probably not worth it.
>
> First, many silicones tend to disassemble into ring molecules at temperatures of roughly 300–350 °C. (Similar behavior is observed in most complex carbon compounds, but at somewhat lower temperatures.) It would be difficult for silicones to remain stable in much hotter climes, and it is unclear whether this slight thermal advantage is enough to enable Si to out-compete C in a high temperature regime.
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On the flip side, pure silicon chains, analogous to carbon chains, are possible at cryogenic temperatures. Furthermore, liquid nitrogen is a suitable solvent. So rather than the Horta, we have Nadreck the Palainian. But, this raises the issue that the energy levels for metabolism would be too high and you would blow everything apart instead of doing the combining and splitting of other molecules that being alive is all about.
# So, What Other Elements?
It turns out that complex molecules need carbon as well as silicon. Some useful high-temperature polymers use Si, 0, and H in abundance, and also incorporate some more exotic elements: Germanium, Tin, and Lead for example is shown in Freitas figure 8.4.
If trying to avoid carbon, you can often use half-and-half Boron and Nitrogen instead. Again, Freitas shows this in figure 8.6.
I expected more *alternative* atoms, like Sulfur instead of Oxygen, to go with the high-temperate idea. But that seems not to be the case, and the molecules we are familiar with use common organic side chains when producing products to work in the 250–300°C range.
However, as Freitas relates, reporting in the mid 1970s about discoveries made shortly before, H. R. Allcock remarked “… it now seems likely that almost any set of required properties can be designed into the polymer by a judicious choice of side groups.”
So we may have **all kinds of elements**, many more than we have in familiar biochemistry. Instead of an odd metal atom or other oddball as part of a critical catalyst, we might have an abundant number of some other element atoms used as part of the polymer repeating unit, and a smorgasbord of elements in the side chains of useful molecules, as this is how to fine-tune their properties.
It seems to me that this would make it harder to evolve a simple general-purpose toolkit of common parts. Common parts might be based on larger units than familiar life, with several kind of complex molecules all using a large (from our point of view) number of different elements, rather than just the C-H-O-N.
# Summary
**High-temperature life that uses Silicon will use all the same elements we do, and all the other elements it has available as well.** Rather than getting varied and carefully tuned properties from different arrangements of a few kinds of atom, this alternate life would need to use many more kinds of elements to achieve the careful tailoring of properties.
The most basic reusable building blocks would be rather large, compared to ours, since it takes a complex molecule with side chains to make it do exactly what is needed. And evolving a new novel distinct molecule for every need, to make a more basic reusable set they need to be general purpose tools that can be reused as-is.
We have a lack of universal solvent. The idea of cytoplasm will be very different, with different ways to deliver, distribute, react these building blocks. That is not elaborated here but ought to be a new question.
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All the answers are really good,and i certainly do not have the same knowledge about the subject,but check this link:
<https://speculativeevolution.fandom.com/wiki/Alien_planets>
Here,scroll down and check the "biological schemes"table.I think its taken from Xenology(i recommend to read it-it's fantastic).There you will find complete schemes what kind of solvent would be used,what kind of gasses would be inhaled and exhaled and so on.
However,if i look at those schemes,im not sure what would really work for Silicon.I know that respiration is a serious problem,as Silicon Dioxide=Quartz.Yet,it makes a fantastic theme for a science fiction world,and there are probably many ways to use it.But it wouldn't be very scientific,becuase as far as i know,most scientists say that this kind of respiratory system is not efficient at all,and they are probably right.But we don't know for sure,so you can think of something.
Liquid N2 (Nitrogen)could be THE solvent for Silicon life.Some speculate a Liquid Nitrogen ocean is beneath the Triton's surface.Also,Methane-ethane lakes could work,as Titan is frequently seen as a place that could be friendly to Silicon based microorganisms.
You probably know this,but silcon life can be one or several of the three:Low temperature life,high temperature life,or high pressure life.Everywhere where Carbon does not work.
An excerpt from Wikipedia about the novel "A Martian oddysey" by Stanley G.Weinbaum:
"Upon reaching Xanthus, a desert region outside the Mare Cimmerium, Jarvis and Tweel find a line of small pyramids tens of thousands of years old made of silica bricks, each open at the top. As they follow the line, the pyramids slowly become larger and newer. At the end of the line, they find a pyramid that is not open at the top. Then, a creature with gray scales, one arm, a mouth and a pointed tail pushes its way out of the top of the pyramid, pulls itself several yards along the ground, then plants itself in the ground by the tail. It removes bricks from its mouth at ten-minute intervals and uses them to build another pyramid around itself. Jarvis realizes that the creature is silicon-based rather than carbon-based; neither animal, vegetable nor mineral, but a little of each. The bricks are the creature's wastes".
This might give you an idea.
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Rocky planets are terrible. Convenient Earth like planets are rare, but most are too cold or too hot. They are covered with sand. I don't like sand. It's coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere.
Instead, our burgeoning [K2 civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) doesn't bother with inhospitable planets anymore, when it can build trillions of nice climate controlled [O'Neil cylinders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) with the perfect gravity levels and conditions for life. To build these, swarms of self-replicating [Von Neumann probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes) are dispatched ahead of the colonization fleet and are tasked with breaking down the local planets into raw materials for use as construction materials.
Asteroids are a nice source of materials with their readily accessible mass, but asteroids only account a tiny fraction of a fraction of all the mass in the system; the rest is tied up in the strong gravity wells of planets.
So what is the most energy efficient method for our probes to break up the planets and get their materials out of the gravity well? A space elevator is nice, but a very complicated solution that relies on material manufacturing technology that does not yet exist. What about destabilizing the orbit of a moon and smashing it into the planet to "liberate" some of its mass? Could you "leverage" mass by using an asteroid to destabilize a small moon, which you use to alter the orbit of a planet so that in a thousand years it's orbit collides with another planet? Bonus points for creativity here and math based answers are always appreciated!
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[Freeman Dyson](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00747-5) (the man who conceptualized the Dyson Sphere) had thought about this, and created the [Dyson Planetary Spin Motor](https://spacearchaeology.org/?p=105) to break planets apart (this has nothing to do with the *other* Dyson who makes vacuum cleaners).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RZ6xi.jpg)
*Dyson Planetary Spin Motor*
Essentially, you turn the planet into a rotor by wrapping the planet with a metal grid and energizing it. For a planet like Earth, the rotation speed could be doubled in about 2500 years, and the planet accelerated to the breaking point in @ 40,000 years. Obviousy, you could gain efficiencies through various means, including using a superconducting grid instead of a metal one, and using orbital power stations to beam far more energy into the grid.
This would likely work on any rocky planet, and does not need conveinient other planets to collide with - even a single planet orbiting alone can be dissasembled this way.
If you do have more planets, another writer named [Paul Birch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Birch_(writer)) had some interesting ideas. Using a device called a "light sail windmill" in near solar orbit to capture the energy of the Sun, he proposed to use streams of high speed particles to change the orbits of planets, or even their spin rates (the main idea was to spin up Venus so it would have a 24 hr day and put in a co orbital position to Earth). The details can be found in his papers here:
<https://orionsarm.com/fm_store/MoveAPlanet.pdf>
<https://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/SpinAPlanet.pdf>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/n1zVb.png)
Since he is speaking of using far more energy than Dyson (about 0.2% of the Sun's radient energy for 30 years), the time frames are much shorter - a 30 year project to move Venus would be within the working lifespan of an engineer today. Moving planets rapidly around the solar system provides many opportunities to crash them into each other, use gravitational "slingshotting" to adjust the orbits of multiple planets, or, since the stream of pellets coming from the light sail windmill are carrying so much energy, use them directly like a sort of cosmic chainsaw to carve up the planet (the pellet stream cannot be reused if you do this).
So here are two theoretical methods to mine entire planets for material.
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If you're trying to break up a planet for mining, you need to overcome its [gravitational binding energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_binding_energy). It doesn't really matter how you do it -- blowing it up, lifting it piece by piece, vaporizing with a giant mirror -- you need to pay this energy cost to get rid of the gravity well. For an Earth-sized planet, this is roughly $2\*10^{32} J$, or about seven days of solar output. It's a good thing you've got a Type II civilization -- this is an expensive proposition even by your standards.
As a slower alternative, you could send the planet on a close flyby of a gas giant, within the [Roche limit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit), to break it up through tidal forces. This is cheaper: for Earth, it would only require about $3\*10^{31} J$, one day of solar output, to change the orbit, with the breakup energy coming from the gas giant's kinetic energy.
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Use Von Neumann swarms to build power plants, refineries, and magnetically accelerated launch platforms and systematically deconstruct the planet. Material payloads would be intercepted by orbital platforms and processed or rerouted accordingly.
The biggest hurdles to accomplish this are material availability and energy consumption.
Powering an O'Neil cylinder across interstellar distances probably requires fusion reactors, so we'll assume your tech level has mature fusion reactors. If not, then a combination of fission and solar panels will have to suffice to power our mining operation (and probably slow it down a few orders of magnitude).
Step 1: Locate metal rich asteroids with low gravity and deconstruct it to create a seed swarm of Von Neumann probes and processing space stations.
Step 2: Survey the planet for potential mineral deposits and disperse the probes accordingly.
Step 3: Harvest materials and construct power plants, processing facilities, and factories for more probes. Expand across the planet.
Step 4: Construct magnetic acceleration platforms (coil guns / rail guns), bundle valuable resources into launch vehicles, and hurl them into space.
Step 5: Intercept the bundles at apogee with your orbiting stations and redirect them to your orbiting ship yards.
Step 6: Watch your autonomous swarms continue to devour the planet and churn out more spaceships already in orbit.
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**Solar concentrator.**
Build a big dish at the Lagrange point and heat it up using the power of its own star. The beauty of this method is that by controlling the heat, you can first vaporize off any elements you are not interested. Then carefully turn up the heat and vaporize off the elements you are interested in and capture them. This combines collection with purification (or more correctly, fractional distillation), and saves you schlepping impure materials to some other site for purification.
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I was trying to work this out and the best solution I could think of on my own is the oldest technology ever: banging rocks together. As you suggested:
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> What about destabilizing the orbit of a moon and smashing it into the planet to "liberate" some of its mass?
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But let's increase the scope of things here.
Boffins believe that the Moon formed when a planet the size of Mars collided with Earth some billions of years. The debris from both planets went into the Earth's orbit and after some unspecified amount of time coalesced into the Moon.
So what you really need is two rocky planets of about Earth size. Throw them against each other. The planets will mostly disassemble and you will get a lot of raw material floating in orbit of the star.
To illustrate how it would go: here is a video from the University of Bristol simulating two super Earths (i.e.: two rocky planets with each having the mass of 10 Earths) colliding head on: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GvfoD-UW5A>. The resulting debris would have the gravity of both planets, but you could easily scoop the material in flybys.
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> How long would it take for our fleet of probes to accomplish this?
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Depends on the technology used to move the planets. [You could either use gravity slings](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/5914/1042) (could take millions of years) or you could [move a gas giant by force and have it drag the rocky one around](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/44932/21222) (could take millenia).
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# Centralize your processing
You could put all of your mineral processing equipment in one place and bring those pesky rocky planets to the processing center. On Earth, that's the strong preference. Ships, cars, and other movable objects are brought to centralized places to be broken down.
Your probes could move the planets with a series of solar sails as described in the journal [Astrophysics and Space Science](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1021178603836). As each planet arrives, it would smash into whatever planets are already there, breaking it down into smaller pieces. Your probes could then chew on these smaller pieces and convert them into materials. Whatever you want to do with those materials could be located in the same solar system, which would simplify your probes.
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Space elevators are OK for planets that spin fairly fast & aren't too large. Earth is marginal for a space elevator of even the strongest possible material.
An ORBITAL RING would be far better.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E&t=4s>
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Not sure if this helps any, but here it is-
in one of the star wars books i read once(I can't remember which one) we learn who built the death star. they had no idea it was built for destroying planets, but just thought it was for mining. the death star would be used on dying planets to allow the interior metals and resources to be easily accessed rather than digging all the way through the planet. of course, such a station would be nearly impossible, but i think it might help with your mining. just be careful not to point it at people or mess up orbits or anything.
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(This question is meant to be an improvement and/or replacement for [How would you bring wealth back to the past?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/113986/how-would-you-bring-wealth-back-to-the-past), which some users have argued is off-topic for this group.)
Imagine a future world in which time travel is not uncommon. (Think of it as being like intercontinental travel today -- something that lots of people do, but it's pretty expensive, so most people can't afford to do it more than a few times in their lives, if ever.) In such a world, an entire infrastructure would eventually grow up around time travel: for example there might be temporal travel agents who would book your entire trip, complete with false identification papers and lodgings at your destination time. There would also presumably be some kind of inter-temporal law enforcement.
And, of course, there would probably need to be some kind of banking system.
After all, the main users of time travel are the wealthy, and the wealthy are not going to want to travel back in time without access to their funds. An inter-temporal banking system would have to function as a *bureau de change*, exchanging currency from one point in time for currency from another. Such a system would have to cope with the "exchange rate" produced by the effects of inflation over many years, and would have to grapple with the fundamental problem of *transferring wealth* across time without it losing value. How could such a system function?
In posing this question I am specifically *not* looking for "get rich by betting on sports or buying stocks" answers -- that kind of personal enrichment would, I assume, be prohibited by the inter-temporal law enforcement as a form of fraud. The question here is not "How could you *make a lot of money* in the past?", but rather "How could a banking system *move money* from future to past?"
Moving money from past to future is of course simple: you just deposit it in an account in the past and retrieve it when you return to your point of origin. Presumably the legal system would have to figure out some way of preventing everyone from enriching themselves via a long-term interest scheme -- it would be pretty disruptive to the economy if everyone who could afford a ticket to the past just invested their money in a savings account and came back to their point of departure a billionaire! -- but the basic problem of moving money *forward* in time seems easy to solve. How would a banking system handle the problem of moving money *backward* in time without disrupting the economy at either the point of origin or their destination, and without screwing up the timeline along the way?
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I’m about to hand wave *a whole bunch* of time travel paradoxes, tropes, and mechanics away.
This question is thinking about temporal monetary transfer the wrong way. Why would a bank want to move present day funds into the past in the first place? There seems to be one obvious reason: people want to access their money during their time traveling adventures. But why would a bank try to actively manage currency across geography and time? That seems tedious — depending on time and location the items and currencies that hold value could fluctuate wildly, not to mention that you’d need to reliably hide it from citizens of the time. And in the question you linked, we’ve found that knowledge is truly the best way to *gain* wealth in the past. So how do we combine these two?
**The “bank” functions as a guardian of historical knowledge surrounding past funding events.**
Using knowledge to gain wealth in the past sounds great until you want to visit some small town in Africa in the year 854. Knowing the Super Bowl winners or lottery numbers isn’t going to help you there. And Google (or your futuristic search engine of choice, probably Google) is unlikely to help you get much further. Sure, you could go back and try to sell some modern technological knowledge or invention, but who wants to go through all that work just to be able to eat and sleep at your destination?
This is where your “temporal bank” steps in. You see, they have employees and contractors who scour geographical locations throughout history for accessible events that, with the right knowledge, you could utilize to acquire money in that time and place. Events like that local horse race outside a small Asian village in the early 300s BC for which no written record still exists. Over time they build a vast archive of these events — most of which would only have value to such a “bank” and its customers. When the excited time traveler comes knocking with hopes to transfer some money to the past, the bank looks up suitable events at times and locations near your destination that most closely match the money you want to acquire in that time period. And then they sell you the knowledge you need to access it. The bank takes possession of your modern currency and you can now easily acquire your currency in the past at a time, place, and type that is of use to you.
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# Moonlight as... a bank
There are a million ways to make this work if you own a bank.
Banks don't typically have all of their money tied up in actual physical cash, so value can and has been assigned and moved around in many other ways. Use any of these 'back channels' to move money from the future version of the bank to the past. If you continue to move value from the future to the past, the future runs out of money, so you need to use a small portion of the money going into the past as investments, so that the future doesn't lose value.
Go back in time and acquire a bank somehow. As people use the bank (in the past), grab as much old cash as you can, and send it back in time to yourself. With regular shipments, you should have plenty of actual cash for use as spending money. If this isn't enough you can write a check you your past self, and make your past past self cook the books so its untraceable.
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## No different than a modern bank or currency exchange
There are going to be two groups of currency, the our-future/their-present currency (designated as F\$) and the our-present/their-past currency (\C$). C\$ currency can be any currency from any time/place but for simplicity sake, I'm just going to refer to it as US\$.
## Functional Equivalents
* Time Travel = Jet Travel. You get in a box or a tube, wait a little while and arrive at your destination. There will be customs/border patrol when you go and come back. Probably medical quarantines too if the traveler is going someplace sufficiently interesting.
* Time Travel Agency = Travel Agency. You traveler will need someone to make arrangements when you arrive. Someone will need to map out the places that rich people would want to go.
* Currency Exchange = Currency Exchange. Whenever a traveler goes to a new country not denominated in the traveler's native currency, some funds will need to be traded into the local currency. That the traveler is going backwards or forwards in time is irrelevant to the transaction.
## Bank Considerations
As the owner of the bank, you will keep a single ledger of your customer's transactions in F\$. You don't know, nor care if they are going to Earth:Europe:10,000BC or Magrathea:North:10,000,000 AD. The traveler's transactions with you must be strictly linear. *If these interactions can't be made strictly linear then you need to invent new ways of doing accounting.* Government regulation of the currency will help a lot with this.
## Currency Exchange Operations
If you run a currency exchange for these time travelers, you'll need to keep on-hand sufficient quantities of currency to sell to time travelers. Just as on Earth in 2018, currency is a commodity that can be traded.
**Buying from the Exchange**
The traveler will purchase the required amount of destination C\$ for some price denominated in F\$. Depending on the market, this will be either really cheap, or really expensive depending on supply and liquidity. The dynamics here will be very similar to modern currency exchanges on Earth.
**Selling to the Exchange**
This is the really tricky part. If travelers can go back to arbitrary points in time, as many times as they like, then they have the chance to create arbitrary amounts of wealth. The schemes to make money using time travel are innumerable. ...Although, maybe that just means that the price of C\$ approaches zero when trading with the currency exchange in F\$ because the supply of C\$ is so great.
So, someone creates a ton of cash by investing in Nintendo in the 1990s then cashing out at the top of the Wii craze. First, they would need to get that currency in a form that will survive time travel, so physical bills. Hauling it back to the future will carry some cost thus preventing the sell price of C\$ from reaching zero.
My assumption is that wealthy people trying to make an extra buck from their travels will bring back unique artifacts that are not currency at all. These artifacts can be sold for F\$ to collectors.
## Government Regulation
Enabling this kind of time travel would require a currency that knows where and when it is in time. There will also need to be strict laws and sufficient safeguards to prevent the F\$ from being doublespent and devalued. Some kind of forensics to detect if the F\$ has done any time travel will be essential.
Time travel with F\$ will be strictly prohibited; punishable by confiscation, fines and imprisonment.
[Answer]
Ok, we've established a pan-temporal agency to police time-travel to ensure no negative reprecussions on the future.
Given this, we can be sure that we have a presence at any arbitrary point in the past.
Sending wealth back 50 years is hard - But sending wealth back a year is pretty simple. So you just send wealth back 1 year, 50 times. Gradual drift in the concept of wealth and valid currencies is handled over the course of history, organically, just in reverse.
[Answer]
**Bitcoin is the answer**
Briefly, blockchain is a ledger shared by an entire network of computers, often to track transactions of things like *currency.*
If you built you built a network of computers to communicate with each other throughout time, you could create a non-physical currency that could be used in any time period(each transaction would be time-stamped, of course)
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One big assumption here: pocket dimensions outside of time exist, not unlike Issac Asimov's The End of Eternity, and Intertemporal communication is easy and used everywhere. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Eternity>
[Answer]
If you want to go back a few hundred years, your middle age peasant isn't going to understand whatever trans-temporal banking system gets dreamed up. It may be that you use bitcoin or something to trade with other time travelers, but to trade with the locals, you want historically relevant valuables. Like gold coins. Naturally you need a shop that will sell you gold coins as in use 300 years ago. Also available are spices, dyes and drugs that were valuable at the time.
For long time periods, the laws of increasing economic productivity cause things to get rather silly. If oodles of middle class people start going back 10 000 years, and bringing a load of mass produced iron tools, the amount of real ironware in that time period could be negligible compared to the amount brought by tourists to trade. For that matter the population of genuine cavemen could be far less than the tourists. If you take the techno-optimist position that earth has a long and happy future ahead of it, then the earth should be jam packed with time travelers (literately a K2 civ could easily have populations in billions of billions, if it lasts as long as history so far, and 1% of people go back for a week every few years, That still puts hundreds of trillions on earth. Packed crowds over the entire surface. A k3 civ lasting to the last stars burn out, and the weight of timetravelers creates a black hole.)
Another question is what laws are being enforced and why. Is, "Bob was hit by a bus las week, we're going back to save him" allowed? If so, what about "great uncle Bob was shot in WW2 ..."? Taken to its logical conclusion, everyone throughout history would be subject to advanced and prescient medical care. History gets replaced with techno-utopian future in its entirety. Even if everyone is entirely selfish, ancient kings will still have access to modern medicine. You need to have a good reason not to disturb history, especially when everyone else is trying to enrich their past selves. Once you have a coherent world that contains time travel and still has history looking like history, then try to fit trade into it.
Making time travel harder won't preserve history. (If it's easy enough that humanity ever gain the capability) If it takes vast amounts of tech and resources a K3 civ will work out where to make the biggest impact. Even if there are tight weight restrictions, a single stretch of DNA that encodes for a smarter, kinder and healthier human, sent back to an embryo 100 000 years ago could totally change history.
If it was impossible to go back to before the first time machine was made, expect normality till then, and as soon as the first machine is made, time travelers with super tech come bursting out, with everything planned and designed for maximum impact.
[Answer]
## Banks using high interest *bonds* is one solution
Before we discuss bonds, lets discuss the limitation of using other methods.
*Why it doesn't work with commodities and real items:*
The reason why you cannot transfer things like gold or other tangibles into the past **without disturbing history** is as follows. Any attempt to take real wealth from the future back it into the past will result in there being much more of the item in the past than there originally was before the (mass) time travel.
At this point it is simple economics. There will be more supply of the item. The value of that item must then also change because it is in greater supply. You will then have a case of runaway inflation where anything you take back quickly becomes worthless, and changes history by making the formerly valuable item plentiful and valueless. This is obviously a deal breaker for a sustainable Time-Travel economy.
*Why you have to use Banking & Bonds:*
In banking all the value moved is just numbers in a system. You don't have to disrupt the world you are moving to. This is especially true if you are using the money of the time and it was voluntarily parted with. This, as opposed to printing new money by taking something of value back in time.
When you go back in time, someone goes with you and makes a deposit in the Time-Tavel-Bank for you. This is really just a receipt that shows how much of the Time-Travel-Bond's (explained below) funds you are entitled to based on your purchase in the future. The exchange rate will probably be brutal. Maybe 5 real dollars in the future equals 1 real dollar in the past.
The reason it has to be like this is because the only way you are going to be able to finance this is by offering Time-Travel-Bonds (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_(finance)>). Aka, buy a time travel bond today at 100,000$ which goes to the Time-Travel-Bank and gives them funds to use. Then in 50 years you can cash in this bond for 500,000\$ or some other crazy profit, which you directly paid into with your wealth in the future before you left. This is how you motivate people of the time period to give money to the Time-Travel-Bank which then gives your time travelers money to use. This handles transferring money from the future to the past without disrupting the time-travel-ecosystem so to speak.
*Why it has to be this way:*
Remember that you can't bring anything tangible back into the past. This means that you can't pay people to coordinate or help in the past, which will no doubt be needed for a huge time travel industry (presumably with employees spanning several eras). The only thing you can pay them with is **futures**. So you gain the funds to finance this industry by trading the discussed high interest bonds. Rich people are always looking for ways to make more money from their vast wealth so I am sure that many would invest in this.
The industry then uses the redistributed money from the rich in the relevant era to pay employees and provide finances to time travelers. This system is also closed since you are not moving anything back in time except people. All their value remains in the future. This is how you could maintain a time travel industry where the act of time travel is almost common place.
*Edit: From comments*
>
> There is no new money, only the redistribution of existing money. In
> the past the rich voluntarily give money to the time travelers, in the
> future the time travelers willingly forfeit their money to the rich.
> This isn't any different than buying stocks, handing out loans, buying
> real life bonds, etc. The people in the past are essentially loaning
> their money at an interest rate. The people in the future are paying
> with the money they have earned, in their own time when the past
> reaches the present.
>
>
> If no one is willing to sell you the money/loan, for example there are
> too many travelers and they have bought up all the available money, then either the interest rates goes up (exchange
> rate is more expensive) or you can't travel to that time anymore by law. Presumably exchange rate costs will get so high that travelling to a particular time may become prohibitively expensive for our time travelers, preventing the need for legal action. Therefore we do not have to worry about regulating time traveler volume.
>
>
> There will be a natural market limit on how many people you can send
> back. The only problem you have left at that point is the intrinsic
> difference of having more people in the past than there were before. And the legal dilemma of preventing time travelers from abusing time to change history, which is a different question.
>
>
>
[Answer]
# You can't just park land, let alone cash
>
> Moving money from past to future is of course simple: you just deposit it in an account in the past and retrieve it when you return to your point of origin.
>
>
>
It looks like you missed @VBartilucci's [answer in the other thread](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/114143/35633). **It is *not* that simple**. Banks don't hold on to untouched accounts forever. They close them out after a certain fixed periods and pocket the funds. Even if you went to the trouble of hiring a lawyer and (e.g.) establishing a trust, [there have been legal rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities) [for nearly a millennium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortmain) to limit the ability of a 'dead hand' to control property in common law countries. You'd need active trustees or escrow attorneys and, even if they didn't eventually just entirely pocket the cash (which they would certainly do in any premodern context and probably do the rest of the time), they'd still eventually [be forced to find close-enough beneficiaries for the funds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy-pr%C3%A8s_doctrine).
Banks as banks also (a) have not been around all that long, historically speaking, and (b) regularly fail, get robbed, or get raided or ruined by the powers-that-be. You'd generally be better off just leaving [coin hoards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoard) in really inaccessible locations, like subterranean bunkers miles below seismically inactive mountains.
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# Cash isn't wealth
>
> Presumably the legal system would have to figure out some way of preventing everyone from enriching themselves via a long-term interest scheme...
>
>
>
Even if this were possible—and it really isn't, since the legal system *already* figured this out (*supra*)—**everyone becoming a billionaire doesn't make everyone rich**. It just returns everyone to their starting positions, with six to nine extra zeroes on every price in the economy. See also: every single coin debasement in history, along with almost any form of paper money. At the moment, [$](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USD)10 is equivalent to 227,000[₫](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_%C4%91%E1%BB%93ng). That doesn't mean that vacationing in Vietnam makes you richer than Bill Gates; it's just a reminder that *purchasing power* is what's important, not numbers on the currency or account ledgers.
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[Question]
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I'd like to write about a character armed with a sword which *telescopes*, so that he can store it in an ordinary sheath but then draw it and extend it out to remarkable lengths.
**Would this be plausible? If so, what are its limitations?**
More specifically (re limitations), assuming it is possible, how long could such a sword be? What sort of material could it be made of? Would it have to be significantly structurally different from an ordinary sword?
Science-based answers only, please. Magic isn't part of this world.
[Answer]
I'm pretty sure that it could be done *today* if engineers put their mind to it.
* Make a slender sword blade much like a rapier. Possibly with a core of tungsten or depleted uranium to make it heavy despite the thin blade.
* Make a tube to hold that blade, with springs and whatever.
* Add a cutting edge to that tube.
I wouldn't want to do more than two sections, or three at most. The second blade needs a good connection to the first blade, so the total will be less than twice as long as the sheath.
The sword would be much more fragile than a proper sword. The telescope mechanism might jam or come apart when the sword strikes a hard target. With medieval technology, "much more fragile" would be so fragile that the thing is useless as a weapon. With present day technology, "much more fragile" might still be useful as a sword.
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It's been a long time since this question was asked but perhaps the answer will help someone in the future.
I have a telescoping sword - the real deal, not a children's toy. ([See advert for similar stuff](http://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-telescoping-sword.html)) It was a gift from my wushu teacher some years ago as a practice sword since I don't need police permits to either keep it at home or cross international borders. It's also safe with my wonderful and hyperactive kids around (in case you are wondering). My telescopy is about 32 inches long, has about 3 sections and once closed in, fits into the hilt. The sections are made of metal and the hilt is plastic/polymer to keep the overall weight down.
For demonstrations and competitions, I usually borrow someone's 'proper' (read thin and non-telescoping) local sword for a couple of hours. East asian swords, both chinese and japanese, are prized for their thinness which gives them their incredible cutting and slicing ability. They usually require special folding and cooling techniques to make them strong because too thin=very brittle. A good double-edged Chinese straight sword is expected to be suitably springy, not too bendy, not too stiff. That is how a swordsperson would know that the sword is well made, thin but strong enough. The part closest to the hilt is the thickest with increasing thinness as you go towards the tip. A japanese katana, wakizashi or tachi has a single very-thin cutting edge with the other edge kept blunt and thicker for overall strength. Again, note the need to balance between thinness and strength.
A good swordperson knows his/her sword well and uses each part of the sword to his/her best advantage. There are specific moves tailored to the different parts of a sword including the hilt.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/z5zBX.png)
**Chinese wushu double-edged straight sword rough drawing**
My telescopy is incredibly blunt and has about 0 degrees of 'springiness', you could not possibly even cut soft pudding with it. I suppose if it was any heavier, it could be used as a bludgeon but would probably bend and break before it hurt anyone. Hence the very low people-safety-risk.
A viable sectional sword as a weapon would need special material and techniques to make, especially to keep it both thin and strong even with and at the joints. Consider that the interior would be hollow while it is extended, meaning greater weakness. Also it would not be 'springy' hence linear moves like jabbing and poking would be a bit difficult (You'd also have to keep oiling it and making sure the sectional sliding in and out is smooth, haha, I've had mine get stuck sometimes). We currently don't have the technology to make this but since not much research has gone into this (cultural swordsmakers are a rare breed in the modern age), perhaps if enough resources went into it, it could be possible. It would be pretty difficult to make though.
Remarkable lengths, not possible, sorry. Not only does it weaken the sword but also it makes it very difficult to wield. Normal 30-40 inches, possible. The first inner section can be used as a blunt bludgeon or blocker, the second middle section could be used as for smash-through hacking, the third for cutting and slicing the normal way. There could be special forms and routines to get swordspeople used to this.
I don't know much about western swords, my cultural heritage soup is limited to East Asian stuff, sorry. In case anyone is wondering, no, none of the people I know keep a proper sharp sword at home. Demos and competitions don't need sharpness and most of us are on the older side with young kids at home.
[Answer]
In Jennings "the Journeyer" there is a telescopic dagger described. The visible blade is split lengthways. In the hilt and core is a third spring-loaded blade. When a button in the hilt is pressed this blade is released and forced out between the visible blades to stab an enemy who thinks he has parried one's thrust.
Anyone know if this is fiction or a true description of a known historical weapon? Not exactly a sword but a spring-driven blade is better for stabbing than cutting in any case.
[Answer]
What about putting an edge and a hilt on one of these babies: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gBsXT.jpg)
Folding bike locks are designed to **not** break, so you are looking at something less flimsy than hollow telescoping swords. You could put in stoppers at each of the joints (I don't know what they're called, the ones where it locks into places and you push a button to release it) to lock each section at 180°. If this was well-oiled, a quick flick would fold each section out until it locked, leaving you with a nice sword that isn't hollow - the weak points are the joints/stoppers, so over-engineering them would be a good plan.
Edit: forgot to say: Yes it's going to be at an angle. Yes you have to deal with it. If your segments are thin, it shouldn't be too big a deal.
[Answer]
1. Viability: I admit that having an insanely long blade sounds cool, but think about the simple physics. If swinging, you have less leverage than your opponent from 12 feet away. For stabbing, the telescoping blade would simply collapse unless there is a reinforced locking mechanism.
2. it’s cool, so let’s do it anyway but do it right
Materials: Steel titanium alloy with bits of carbon nanotubes instead of the carbon typically used should give you incredible rigidity, and toughness combined ( if tempered properly).
Construction: I would recommend a blade in 2 or 3 sections and a sheath that can be pushed into the hilt, pushing what was the hilt to inside the mid of the blade, and functionally turning the sheath into the hilt. The idea being that the blade is no longer hollow, it is reinforced by the tube that had been the sheath. This would give you the rigidity to stab or hit another sword without the whole thing collapsing .
[Answer]
Such a thing [kind of already exists](https://www.google.com/search?q=collapsible+toy+lightsabers&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwix3s60z8bOAhWB7iYKHdFUBssQsxgIIQ&biw=1680&bih=989#spd=9047189603397014196).
Adapting this to a sword wouldn't be too hard. You would just need a safety latch to ensure it doesn't collapse on itself when you're trying to stab your enemy. In the toy lightsaber, it's made of several pieces, with the smaller end being slightly smaller than the next piece's larger end. Make this with a strong metal, like titanium, and it could make up for its brittleness.
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Not quite sword and you have to give up on stabbing, but something based on baton style telescope[s] in the center and something resembling thin strained wire on the sides can be developed (with some experiments) into a decent foldable cutting weapon. Not the most resilient one however, you will have to be very careful using it and train to develop some unique skills (just like with authentic Japanese swords BTW).
On the bright side such weapon will be light, compact and quite likely turn to be most efficient if made without metal parts.
[Answer]
Well, considering the nature of what your sword does when drawn - why make the blade the telescopic part?
In any armed combat scenario "closing the gap" would be far more important than having a neat sword. Why not make the handle have a telescopic feature like the sections of a police baton activated by oh... I don't know... Pseudo-scientific gibberish?
The sword would then go from being a sword to a halberd of sorts. i.e:
"Their swords locked with no hope of your hero closing the gap due to the size of the opponents blade. Your hero cleverly goads an attack from their enemy and at that moment places their hand on the pommel of their sword activating the hidden function. The sword extends to its full length leaping off the hero's palm and through their target."
[Answer]
Looking at a collapsible baton, it's not a bad starting point for making an collapsible sword. it wouldn't be hard to attach a short knife blade to a collapsible baton, giving the reach of a sword with only a little bit more space than a collapsible baton. the weapon would not have an edge along it's entire length, but many sword fighting techniques advocate using the last 3 to 4 inches of the sword to strike with good force at an ideal distance. the end result would be more like a mix between a sword and a short spear, but this would be the cheapest easiest way to get something close to the original goal of the question.
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It seems like a fairly common idea, as I am also doing that idea. It is, but I'm going to talk about the mechanism. For my story, the tip and sheath have magnets in them, so the sword unfolds as it is pulled out. There are also several snap locks in each segment that are disabled by a small bump in the sheath. The metal is extremely sturdy and lightweight, in this case an alloy of titanium, carbon, iron and a fictional metal. The blade would also be hollow.
[Answer]
I don’t know why this question has resurfaced, but if anyone is still curious I’d recommend a **chain weapon** instead of a telescoping sword. Making the sword telescope undermines a lot of its best characteristics, completely throwing off balance, stability, and making it much more likely to break. Why not turn those into advantages?
The ninjas figured this out a long time ago, with the *kyoketsu-shoge*. It’s a hook-like blade on the end of 10-20 feet of chain or rope, and is used almost exactly like you’d expect. It has a ring on the other end which could be used for defense and to hold onto the weapon.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dIdGO.jpg)
In this way, you pick up all the obvious advantages of a telescoping sword without needing to worry about the drawbacks. Experts with the tool were even supposedly able to pull a sword from an opponent’s hand with it. It doesn’t look as cool or feel as dramatic, I admit, but nobody will be laughing when they’ve got a hooked blade in their throat.
[Answer]
All the answer where about spring or collapsing system.
Is talking about shape memory metals out of subject ?
What about some metal that is shaped like a small broad sword, but when submit to an electrical current will morph to a long thin rapier ?
I think that with our current understanding of shape memory metals, it's too much 'magic'. It will work as a toy or as a technological wonder, but will be inefficient as a weapon.
But with a little suspension of disbelief, it should work.
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[Question]
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**This Query is part of the Worldbuilding [Resources Article](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources).**
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This is a follow up of this question: [Creating a realistic world - Spreading languages](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25396/creating-a-realistic-world-spreading-languages)
When it comes to spreading a religion, is it the same dynamics as spreading a language? Or is it different?
For example: Why would the local population stay true to their religion even after several centuries of domination by a "foreign" religion? Why would a population convert pacifically, abandoning their original faith without threats? And how can several religions come to coexist in the same country?
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Note:
>
> This is part of a series of questions that tries to break down the process of creating a world from initial creation of the landmass through to erosion, weather patterns, biomes and every other related topics. Please restrict answers to this specific topic rather than branching on into other areas as other subjects will be covered by other questions.
>
>
> These questions all assume an earth-like spherical world in orbit in the habitable band.
>
>
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See the other questions in this series here : <http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2594/creating-a-realistic-world-series>
[Answer]
# TL;DR
So, what ultimately happens is:
1. Religions born as a localized small set of beliefs, cults and tales.
2. Religion became an important affair of kings and emperors.
3. Religion differences leads to wars.
4. Wars makes people be forcefully converted, or killed, or expelled or enslaved or simply marginalized.
5. Missionaries spread their religion, and the most well-structured religions tends to overthrow less-structured religions.
6. Religions that teaches and rewards people who act being good and just are more successfully than religious who tells something different.
7. People from different religions might be kept in the same country because this might be useful or because eliminating one of them might not be worth the trouble.
8. In advanced cultures, ideology might replace religion or be a complement over it.
# The long detailed answer
In the initial stages of evolution, religions became a series of small, inconsistent and highly localized set of beliefs, cults, doctrines and tales, possibly being passed orally from one generation to another. Most of them are polytheistic and tends to personalize things from human psychology or from nature as god-like entities. Many of them tries to provide a divine explanation to otherwise unexplainable phenomena.
Some religious tends to be more monotheistic, although there is no 100% monotheistic religion as far as I know. Those religions features a fully-benevolent almighty creator god, but also features lower classes creatures like angels, devils, demons, saints, spirits, semigods, etc.
Religions tends to be deeply entrenched in politics right from the stone age to the present time and the foreseeable future. In the initial stages, kings are devised as godly or semigodly creatures or perhaps as humans chosen by some divinity, and this is useful to ensure their authority over the people they rule (this is what happened in ancient Egypt and in many Mesopothamic city-states, for example). However this also motivates a lot of bloodshed and wars.
You ask why would a population convert pacifically. Mostly won't. Human history are full of religiously-motivated wars and crimes right from the stone age to present day everywhere in the world. All the major religions existing today had at least on some part of their history motivated marginalization, killing, expelling, enslaving or somehow persecuting non-followers. Also, all of them always had been deeply entrenched with the politics of kings and emperors.
This is also why many people abandon their original faiths. Many of them are killed after being defeated by the enemy who have a different religion. Others are enslaved or marginalized to an extent where it is hard to pass their older religion to their children, especially if priests are killed or expelled and if practicing the older religion becomes forbidden in the favor of newer one. Some people also endure forcedfully conversion.
Sometimes a country might have more than one religion. This might happen when the practitioners of some religion *X* are more useful alive to a king that practices religion *Y*, but they can't be converted. For example, this happened in Egypt during the Jewish Exodus and also happened to Christians in many (but not all) Muslim countries. However, the followers of religion *X* are still unlikely to have full citizenship, being possibly marginalized, persecuted, overtaxed or enslaved. Sometimes, the absence (possibly due to death) of the king in a kingdom where there are more than one religion and neither one is dominant over the other might lead to religiously-motivated civil wars.
This issue advances even in modern times. There are cases of violence between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. Muslims in the USA may be marginalized and discriminated by the predominantly christian population. The abominations that Jews suffered in Nazi Germany are a clear example of religious intolerance. The Israel-Palestine problem is also something that could be defined as a long-lasting case of a religiously-motivated civil war. The rise of ISIS/Daesh is also a case of faith-motivated war.
And, ISIS/Daesh is also an example of what happens when an area and the people living there are dominated by a group with different religious beliefs which are intolerant to other religions: war, killings, forced-conversions, marginalization of non-practitioners and a lot of people fleeing.
On the other hand, in many places, like Ottoman Empire (present day Turkey), even if the rulers were officially Muslim, Christians were tolerated because persecuting them too much would only create a mess that would make the country too unstable for the king/emperor/sultan be able to rule it peacefully. They were much more useful being tolerated instead.
So, one of the major ways that religions spread is by war. Other is by religion-based politics that favors one religion over the other. Still another way is due to the work of missionaries.
Religions may also be able to grow by missionaries and by propaganda. In the case of missionaries, this was what spread Christianism in the first, second and third centuries despite the roman persecution. This was also what spread it to the indigenous Americas centuries later. Also, in this case, the complex and highly structured and highly traditional Christianity easily overcame many (but not all) of the simpler poorly-structured endemic orally-passed indigenous religions. This happens because those more complex religious are more likely to have more determined and well-trained priests, which are more likely to convert people. This also is the main mean in which people might be converted pacifically.
Also, most successfully religions tell people to be humble, good, merciful, forgiving and generous. This is because most of them promises rewards for people who live like that in afterlife, while promising punishment for people who live against that. This works better to convert people who are poor and helpless, and also makes the states and their rulers more safer than religions that tolerate evildoers. This is one of the causes why Christianism eventually overthrown Paganism in the Roman Empire. The nature of the afterlife rewards also matters, which allowed Islam to prosper in the Arabic desert and easily overthrow Judaism, Christianism, Zoroastrianism and polytheistic religions present there at the time. And again, afterlife rewards and the orientation of being good also was successfully in converting people from less-structured religions, which was what happened in many indigenous places in the Americas.
Also, the tone of propaganda and the speaks of the missionaries is very important to what potential believers want to believe for their our lives. Again, this was important for the spread of Christianism and Islamism, but can also be seen even in Scientology, Pastafarianism and even some crazy flying-saucer-venerating history-channel-like cults.
As a counter example, this explain why Christianism was not successfully in China, since its teachings seemed to be alien-like and strange for most Chinese people who already had a very complex set of different beliefs. This also shows why Islamism failed to spread to Europe since they were not desert people and the already present Christianism made much more sense for them. I.E. the alien-like nature of the foreign religion and the complexity of the already established religion made the foreign religion unable to penetrate.
Also, some religions may be derived from other older religions due to innovations by preachers and by importing traditions and cults from different religions. This is what made Christianism evolve out of Judaism. Also was what motivated Protestantism split off Catholicism. Religion mixing is what gave the rise to Spiritism and Mormons.
And of course, if a king have different religion thoughts than his predecessor or changes its own religious thoughts during his kingship, this might affect the state religion. This is what made the Anglican church split off the Catholic church. This also happened sometimes in ancient Egypt. This was also a reason that made the Roman Empire turn into a Christian empire and ultimately cemented Christianism in Europe and North Africa (although North Africa would become predominantly Islamic a few centuries later).
Also, sometimes an ideology might replace religion. This is something that leads to:
* Totalitarism - the belief that the state is responsible for everything as the only way to ensure survival against an hostile world. This is what happened in Soviet Union, in Cambodia with Khmer Rouge and happens in present day North Korea. A weaker form of this flourished in China but was already replaced by a still somewhat authoritarian but definitively non-totalitarian regime.
* Social-Darwinism - the belief that weak countries should subdue to global powers, which was used by the UK to justify many of their actions messing with other parts of the world in the 19th century.
* Nazism - the belief that a particular race is superior to some other inferior race which is responsible for all the problems, needless to say how horrible this was and what was the result.
* Colonialism - The belief that some territory should be exploited for the benefit of some other territory. Practiced by Portugal, Spain, Netherlands and some other countries from the 16th to the 20th centuries.
* Exploitative imperialism - A newer form of colonialism, which is the belief that weaker countries are inferior and should serve stronger superior countries, which is what USA made to Latin America during most of the 20th century and arguably still does or tries to do and also what Japan was trying to achieve in WW2.
[Answer]
## The Type Of Religion Matters
There are various types of religions and some of them simply can only spread in certain ways. In particular there are various "chosen people" religions which start from the belief that a particular cultural group are chosen by a deity or pantheon and that nobody from outside that cultural group can ever belong to this religion. This type of religion, as you might expect, can only be spread by the growth of that population - if the intent is for it to spread then it may have certain rules towards that - polygamy, rejection of all forms contraception and so on.
In terms of the spread across different populations, we can broadly ignore these types of religion for those that seek to bring new people in. These often favour two broad strategies:
**Embrace And Extend**
As the Roman Empire extended its reach, the world they were conquering was divided into many small tribal realms, often with their own polytheistic religions or with very localised deities. Being polytheistic ( and pragmatic ) the Romans were happy to accept the cults of other deities and sometimes these would even become central to the empire. They would also identify deities as cognate with local ones so we get Sulis-Minerva and Apollo-Cunomaglus here in the southern UK. In this way a flexible polytheism can easily assimilate and include other existing belief systems.
Note that this approach extended into early Christianity as well- obviously it is a monotheistic religion, but when you look at regional saints, many of those are clear throwbacks to previous religions in the areas where they built up their basis of followers. A way of saying "you weren't *wrong* to be worshipping them, because they have a place in religion, but they are a servant to this higher god."
**Convert Or Suffer**
Another approach, one familiar to later Abrahamic religions, is one where refusing to convert to a religion will result in suffering. This may be spiritual suffering in an afterlife or it maybe immediate physical suffering or death unless they chose an immediate conversion. The latter is more dramatic and something that finds it's way into stories a lot, but often there are theological technicalities around duress in both directions ( as in someone may be excused for renouncing their religion under duress and it is not a "true" conversion ) and practically people will strongly resist what they are forced to do.
More effective over time is the more subtle difficulties imposed on people of a different religion - higher taxes, being forced to live in certain areas, being forbidden from holding government posts and so on. Those alone won't force a person to change their religion ( as the survival of Judaism all over the world attests ) but the less committed may well find reasons to convert rather than live under onerous and difficult conditions.
**Lead By Example and Educate**
Some religions take a different approach to attracting followers - these typically maintain that they represent an underlying truth of existence and that everyone is on the path of that truth whether or not they choose to acknowledge it. If this is the case then there is not necessarily a drive to 'convert' people as such, but by following the path of the religion they believe they can help people towards that truth. In this case two core approaches come from offering a good example and from education.
If your religion's members are seen to be happy, relaxed, charitable and pleasant to be around, people will notice that over time. People who are looking for ways to live a good life will begin to seek them out and as long as the precepts of the religion are well taught and they learn to exemplify those principles, they will continue to propagate it.
Education is core to the teaching of new converts, but if a religion takes it further and is able to set up schools, they will have access to the minds of a generation of children. In the long run, the generations they teach will be raised in the principles of that religion and there is a good chance many of them will choose to continue that path. It has been argued that part of the rise of Christianity was that it was a slave religion in Rome ( it worked well for this as it promised reward in the next life for suffering in this, so slave owners were happy to accept it ) but noble families children were supervised, tutored and raised by slaves, so after a couple of generations it was becoming a religion of the nobility as well.
[Answer]
The question is too broad to answer in such a short space. Here we are talking about:
interaction of religion with science
interaction of religion with social values
the political influence of religion
I will try to address these issues briefly.
**The Primary Driving force - Psychological Effect**
All religions of the world (as we know them today) are based on a central theology. This theology generates a code of conduct and a system of afterlife-judgement. This system has a direct profound effect on the believer of this religion, and is the main driving force for that religion.
Example (Islam): God is One. If you live your life according to His orders, you will receive paradise after death. If you don't, you will burn in tormenting hell.
(Hinduism): There are a lot of gods. Your action in this life will determine what form you will attain in the next carnation. Heaven and hell aren't permanent and same souls return to this world in different guises over and over again.
(Buddhism): Life is a perpetual process of evolution and enlightenment. Suffering is the essence of this worldly existence. If you stay within Buddha's teachings, you can keep yourself from suffering, if you deviate, you will suffer.
This psychological effect (and the intrinsic message attached to it, thereof) is very strong in today's leading religions. People of certain psychological types are attracted to religions which transmit corresponding psychological effects. In China and Japan we find a clear majority of Buddhism which lays maximum importance to perpetual effort and concrete hardwork. These traits have now become genetic in people of these countries. It is possible that religion has shaped the overall mentality of these people and it is also possible that these people might have shaped their religion to suit their overall psychology.
If you transmit a religion with favorable psychological message to a region, it will be an immediate hit. If the psychological message is contradictory, the religion will never succeed, no matter how hard you try.
**Religion And Science**
Since religions are mostly formed in days of obscure scientific knowledge, it is not uncommon that with scientific progress, many aspects of religion(s) are later known to be faulty.
Some church ordered some astronomer to be exiled because he said that the earth revolves around the sun and not the sun revolving around the earth. Another one was burned alive ... This is one reason christianity has a lower conversion rate now than in the past.
Most people today don't believe that the earth is around 10,000 years old and that early men used to live with dinosaurs.
**Religion And Social Values**
These days it is prevalent in most areas of the world to distribute equal shares of a dead man's property to his sons and daughters. This wasn't the case back in time when inheritance issues were dealt under religious laws. For example, Muslim law of inheritance specifies a much smaller share of property for the daughters than the sons.
I'm not arguing that religious laws about social issues are incorrect or anything. I am just stating that some religions might have social structures which are replaced with time. A pro-feminist person in the west would find it hard to convert to Islam due to Islam's male-centric social structure, even if that person is satisfied with Islam's theological structure and psychological effect.
**Political Influence**
Islam spread quickly around the world during days of it's glory. This was the political influence. More than 3 million people converted to christianity during one year while India was under british (christian) reign.
It is important to note that political influence is one driving force for a religion. You CANNOT overwhelm a religion with a strong psychological effect with the one that has a weak or negligible psychological effect, no matter how scientifically accurate the invading religion is.
For example, Persia (Iran) transformed from a Zoroastrian state to a Muslim state very quickly while christianity's acceptance in India was generally very slow.
**The Age Effect**
Like physical creatures, religions (and philosophical structures as well) age and weaken with time. If you pick up the history of any religion, you will find that it has a time of infancy, a time of youth and a time of age. An aged religion is easy to sideline with a fresh one.
Christianity found its way into pagan Rome and Islam quickly exiled the pagan religion of Arabia and Egypt. However we do not find any (at all) instance where an old religion overcame a fresh one.
Like physical creatures, religions (and philosophical/political systems) have a mysterious "life force" of sorts. It depends mostly on the zeal and vigor of it's followers, but it encompasses something else, too. Something that you can feel, but not express.
**Hindrances To Conversion**
Sometimes despite a strong psychological influence, vigor of freshness and social/scientific correctness, a religion cannot overcome a predominant religion of an area.
For example take the case of China and Japan where almost all efforts of Muslim and christian missionaries have failed. This could be due to several reasons:
a- social taboo. self explanatory
b- national unity. sometimes a religion is the only thing that keeps a vast nation unite which is otherwise composed of multilingual and multiracial peoples. these people will either all convert to a religion or none (very few) of them will convert. a long history of civil wars and anarchy keeps haunting them and sticks the society to one religion. here if the prominent figures of the community convert to the new religion, the masses follow.
There are several other (minor) factors in transmission of religions. Some are easier overcome than others and others are strong in a specific region or regions. Those are detailed issues. This overall summary should get you started building your virtual world.
[Answer]
This is not a complete answer, but it was too long for a comment.
It seems like the answers you got focus on the spreading of religions by "brute force" and government decrees. You shouldn't forget that religion (like any aspect of a culture) can spread in more peaceful ways.
For example, Islam spread to Indonesia at first through commerce and cultural exchanges.
When designing your world, try to draw the main commercial ways and make culture and religion spread along them. Expect to see cities built on the crossing of commercial roads to have several religions.
There is a lot of example in History of religions having cohabited peacefully, especially in time of peace and economic growth. Problems between groups appears with economic troubles, famines, political instability, etc.
It's not a coincidence if antisemitic feelings rose in Europe in a time of economic crisis, or if Islamism thrives among the poorest fringes of a population or in the chaos left behind a fallen government.
Another point you should remember is that even if religion is regularly used as an excuse to declare war, it's often not the real reason. So to make your religious wars more realist, add an underlying reason for governments to declare them (Do they want to conquer territories? An access to the sea? Get rid of an annoying neighbor?)
[Answer]
Deconstruct what religion is a little; I like Daniel O'keefe's approach in 'Stolen Lightning'. He defines:
* Magic: A body of superstition, myths and tradition passed on verbally, old wives tales, dieties dating from prior to establishment of religion. Magic is a loose assembly of shared beliefes traditions and archtypes that are not rigidly scripted and thus open to interpretation by the individual allowing shamans and mystics to perform their own individual miracles/magic. Magic is closely associated with language and the spread of language. Here we talk about magic in a 'social science' sense, not a D+D or stage magic sense!
* Religion: Some elements of the magical aspects of the society are combined with some new ideas with the main difference being that relgiion is rigidly scripted (hence scripture) and magic is not. O'Keefe suggests that the general interpretation of religion is as the social collective conciousness projected on the sky. The definition of religious scripts enable reliable repetition and transmission of the rituals of religion and it thus has a longer potential range and coverage than magic, with the latter only able to propagate organically and mutating along the way.
* Science: While magic and (although to a lesser extent) religion may be modified tomorrow (via 'miracles' and re-interpretations) to suit shifts in the collective zeitgeist, science does not offer this flexibility.
The general social science assumption is that societies develop in a magic-religion-science sequence. In reality of course any religion incorporates and subverts local magic. For example considerthe way local rituals get incorporated into Catholic ritual - especially the tendency to indentify the cult of Mary with other more ancient magical rituals, or the way African American christianity incorporates aspects of African pre-religious magic including voodoo. In a similar way, a religion that covers diverse populations will likely exhibit local differences and deviations from the script due to the incorporation of local magical traditions into the rituals of the official religion, such that veneration of ancestors or other dieties can co-exist with monotheism for example.
The rigid scripting of religion allows it to cross lingustic borders accross which the less well defined magical ways cannot, but as it crosses these barriers the religion itself is modified and may bifurcate as a result. For example, when Christianity crosses the border between southern and northern european languages/traditions we end up with the reformation. As other posters have observed the differences between nations that lead to war are actually likely to be differences in the magical practices and aspects of those societies with the common religion merely used as a Cassus Belli. The Thirty years war of the reformation was only nominally a mater of religion, protestant soldiers were found in large numbers in catholic armies and vice versa. That is an indication that the 'magical', individual phase of societal development is more prevalent during the reformation that might otherwise be thought.
Its also worth looking at a modern religious phenomenon - that of neo-classic economics - supply and demand, "Says law", the concept of time-preference etc etc as being a modern religion - because it certainly is not a science. Its easy to see mainstream economics as a collective conciousness and official script projected onto the sky, even while various heterodox schools of economic thought including Austrian Economics, marxism, 'Modern Monetary Theory' and various others exist on the margins and indeed get treated as 'magical thinking' by the mainstream whose scripture is found in ecomomics textbooks and the media.
Likewise science is not complete and room remains for gods to live in the gaps of knowledge, into which both religion and magic can and do attempt to insert themselves.
The way religions spread via war, migration and trade is of course important but what is most important for religion to take root is repetition sufficient to generate a re-usable script. For this to happen a sufficient portion of the population must engage in said repititions to both generte and validate the script. This is of course more likely to happen when local magical customs are condusive to the invading religion, or where the invading religion actually quashes local magical traditions and customs that are socially harmful but have not been displaced because there was nothing of sufficient power to do so.
So the point of all this is to say that you should draw your map of magical boundaries and then draw the spread of religion over the former and consider how the former subverts and diverts the latter down different paths, and perhaps where a new religion extingusihes forever some aspect of local magic. In the final anaylsis a religion can only invade new territory and establish itself where it can kill off incompatible local magic or where the religion itself is flexible in the right areas to accomodate those local practices. In turn this comes down to achieving a sustainable balance of the individual means of expression (magic) and collective means (religion). Any society needs a bit of both.
[Answer]
**Temporary, still need editing**
Summary of the answers
I decided to make a community wiki because all the answers have good points but none covered all the aspects.
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Religions are born as a localized small set of beliefs, cults and tales. Any religion will incorporate local customs/magic. A religion covering diverse populations will likely exhibit differences due to the incorporation of local magical traditions into the rituals of the official religion. Too many differences in local customs make the diffusion of a religion less likely because it contradicts too much the local traditions.
To figure this out, draw your map of magical boundaries and then draw the spread of religion over the former. Consider how the magical rituals makes the religion divert on different paths and where some aspects of local magic are extinguished. A religion can only establish itself where it can kill off incompatible local magic or where it can accommodate the local practices. It comes down to achieving a balance between the individual means of expression (magic) and collective means (religion). Any society needs a bit of both. For example, Christianity is a monotheistic religion, but with saints. Many of those are clear throwbacks to previous religions.
Religion became an important affair of kings and emperors. The organization of religious bodies was appealing to rulers as it allowed them to maintain order and unity while gaining authority from the leader of the church. They also had more legitimacy from the people following that religion. Furthermore, the promulgation of a new state religion can become a good incentive for people to convert to the new religion.
**War**: Religion differences are often used as excuse to go to war. Wars makes people be forcefully converted, killed, expelled enslaved or simply marginalized. War is a major factor in spreading religions.
Migration
Trade/cultural exchange:Try to draw the main commercial trade-routes and make culture and religion spread along them. Islam spread to Indonesia at first through commerce and cultural exchanges.
**Missionaries** spread their religion peacefully. The most well-**structured** religions tends to overthrow less-structured religions. More complex religious are more likely to have more determined and well-trained priests, which are more likely to convert people. Complex religion are less likely to be replaced.
**Promise of an afterlife**: Religions that teaches and rewards people who act being good and just are more successful. They promise people living with these principles a good afterlife, while promising punishment for people who live against them.
**Tolerance**: People from different religions might be tolerated because they represent a large part of the population/play an important role in the society and getting rid of them would cause too much harm. Religions can cohabited peacefully especially in time of peace and economic growth. Problems appears with economic troubles, famines, political instability, etc.
**Incentive to conversion**: higher taxes, being forced to live in certain areas, being forbidden from holding government posts and so on.
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[Answer]
A number of useful answers have been proposed. Significantly lacking thus far is any consideration of what the Greeks called "syncretism." (Note: this is in some respects distinct from the traditional anthropological use of that term, which is now heavily contested and largely irrelevant to the present discussion.)
Within the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, it was very usual to encounter the religious phenomena of other cultures by means of a kind of translation. Egyptian and Mesopotamian "god lists" are the strongest but hardly the only evidence.
In essence, people from Egypt (for example) would say, "Okay, in the city and lands of Ur and Babylon, they worship many of the gods we know, and some different ones. Isis, for example, is known there as Ishtar. In that place, Isis (that is Ishtar) has somewhat different rites and sacrifices than she demands here at home."
A few important effects and implications are worth enumerating:
1. "Here at home" in most of these civilizations, a "given" deity would manifest in different ways and with different local practices in different places. For example, worship of Athena in Athens worked differently than in Sparta. How "foreigners" thought of Athena might be considerably stranger, but people were used to the idea of highly particular cults.
2. Local rulers might embrace a "when in Rome" sort of policy: while you are here in Ur, you worship Ishtar our way, because she (whom you know as Isis) prefers worship here in that fashion.
3. Rulers might alternatively embrace the alternative: while you Egyptians are here, you may worship Isis in your preferred fashion, so long as you do not interfere with our worship of Ishtar, and so long as the demands of your cult do not infringe upon our laws.
Contact among tribal peoples in the Americas can in many cases be understood to partake of this kind of thinking. Myths, for example, drift from place to place over centuries and millennia, but there is no sense in which one tribe normally claims to have "the right answer" or "the real story"; rather, it is a matter of, "that's not how we tell that story."
How religious systems drift and spread in an environment like this is highly complex and unpredictable. In essence, once system A is in contact with system B and the translations are made, you may have a situation in which aspects of A gain popularity among nominal B members. There could be any number of reasons for this: a charismatic figure's espousal, miracles, good luck, political fortune, etc. In any event, the older B system becomes something of an admixture. Since such contact is very often mutual, operating through ordinary trade and communication, you might well end up with a common AB mix, or A, A', B', and B, or any number of alternatives.
In some cases, such mixed or semi-imported cults may take on a mystery-cult, initiatory aspect, in which the "true" knowledge about the divinity is claimed to be older, purer, or whatever. Again, there is no particular reason to think that any one way this might run is most likely. For instance, the Greek mystery cults were heavily inflected by Egyptian material because of the incredible age and prestige of that civilization, but this is not to say that the Orphic or Mithraic cults were "really" Egyptian and more than they were simply "Greek."
Perhaps the best advice I can give, concretely, is that one sheer off from the notion that people are or are not really members of this or that religion. That kind of strong identification traditionally happened only when there was some kind of exterior political pressure to do it. For instance, in the third century CE, in Egypt, census information makes clear that the vast majority of ordinary Alexandrians and such thought of themselves as Christians. (Note: there is no special reason to think that people would identify themselves falsely in this instance.) And yet, it is also clear from the archaeological record that these people made extensive use of adapted ancient spells, essentially, "Please, O Mary and Isis, help me get through this pregnancy well," with ritual actions again a mixture of Christian and Egyptian usages. If asked, I suspect these people would genuinely say what they said with the census: they're Christians. But they don't see any reason why this means they shouldn't keep calling on Isis as well -- why not?
Remember: strong exclusionary measures (believe what we say and only what we say) are very much the exception rather than the rule in the history of religions. The problem is that we live in an era dominated by such thinking, and thus we assume everyone always thought that way. They didn't.
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[Question]
[
I am referring to the situation described at the start of the movie [28 Weeks Later](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463854/), where Britain had been wiped out by a zombie virus, but the rest of the world was (seemingly) fine.
What would be a realistic, competent response from the rest of the world to this described scenario? For example, when would the rest of the world decide to send in the first party of human beings? What would they do? How would they make sure the virus was contained? When, if ever, would civilians be reintroduced into Britain?
(In the movie itself, the rest of the world, or at least the US, implausibly decides that it is a good idea to try resettling Britain just 6 months after they think the last infected human being has died. They also have--in proportion to the risks involved--extremely poor security, quarantine systems, etc. Hence making for a horror movie.)
Edited to add more details (all based on the movies):
* Movies were in 2002 and 2007, so let's just say this situation is set in the present day.
* Upon infection through saliva or blood (and possibly other bodily fluids), the infected person becomes a zombie within 10-20 seconds.
* Zombies' main (only?) preoccupation is to go around hunting for other non-zombies to bite. It seems like their goal is just to infect other non-zombies, rather than to actually eat the flesh of other non-zombies.
* For some reason, zombies don't bother attacking other zombies.
* Zombies can't swim.
* Zombies are stupid and will generally simply starve to death on their own.
* Assume that the rest of the world has not suffered a single case of such infection, but the whole of Britain has been wiped out. (Say a few million Britons managed to stay uninfected and escape Britain.)
* To keep things simple, assume that the virus can only be spread in the same way that Ebola is spread:
>
> Ebola is spread through direct contact (through broken skin or mucous
> membranes in, for example, the eyes, nose, or mouth) with
>
>
> * blood or body fluids (including but not limited to urine, saliva, sweat, feces, vomit, - breast milk, and semen) of a person who is sick
> with Ebola
> * objects (like needles and syringes) that have been contaminated with the virus
> * infected fruit bats or primates (apes and monkeys)
>
>
> Ebola is not spread through the air or by water, or in general, by
> food. ([CDC.gov](http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/index.html?s_cid=cs_3923))
>
>
>
[Answer]
I think that NATO and/or one or more former-commonwealth countries, such as Canada and Australia, would carefully monitor the situation there and in nearby countries and send in small, well-escorted teams. These would be in completely sealed protective suits to gather and study the disease, perhaps by using boats and helicopters and an island with no cover as a quarantined staging area. The island would only receive incoming supplies (not sending anything back, to avoid any risk of spreading infection). But I think they would probably also choose a land location with land access to the infected territory, but only over open ground, constantly under guard, including flood lights and means for evaporating even heavy fog, so no zombies could ever reach the base.
They would probably establish similar secure bases, in which to quarantine and study survivors. They'd study the heck out of the disease and any infected, until they had proven to their satisfaction that they completely understood it, and how to eradicate all infectious substances, before attempting anything like repopulation. How and when they did that would depend on what they found out about the disease, how to destroy it, and its source.
That's what I think a realistic, competent response would be. However, noting how competent current world governments seem to be (e.g. Ebola responses), I am probably being very generous in my estimate.
Addendum: As @JohnSmith pointed out, the Chunnel needs to be thoroughly blocked to prevent zombies using it to get to France. And as @JanDoggen and @ShadoCat pointed out, there would need to be a blockade stopping land and sea traffic trying to leave the isles. The blockade would need to be able to detect craft even in very bad weather, and probably they should develop something to make sure no infected swimming or floating bodies are leaving, either, which might be hard to contain.
Even more threateningly, it occurs to me that they'd want to study birds as soon as possible, as birds migrate between England and other parts of the world, and if any birds become carriers, that could lead to infections outside Britain... and it might already be too late. Maybe a heroic ornothologic behavior specialist could quickly develop some sort of enormous electric wall around Britain that could deter birds from flying in and out. Of course, there is probably also an insect vector, and possibly a fish vector as well. Things are not looking up.
[Answer]
In any epidemic situation, there are a few important steps to work through:
* Contain
* Treat
* Learn
### Containment
Fortunately for the rest of the world, Britain is an island. That takes care of a fair bit of containment - unless the disease is water-borne. However, the fact that zombies can't swim could be an indication: can they not swim physically, or is it because they avoid water deliberately? If it's the latter, there's a fair chance that the disease is not water-borne.
If, however, the world is unlucky and the zombie virus **is** water-borne, there may be more of a problem. As soon as a zombie falls into a river or the sea, there is a chance that viruses could escape into the water and travel to other land. But fortunately again, the currents around Britain [prevail to the north](http://oceanmotion.org/html/resources/oscar.htm) and as such the virus would be transported that way, away from most land.
The last point here is viral survival. Virus lifetimes range up to 48 hours in water so could potentially last to France if the current was the right way. However, the English Channel has an average temperature of 15 degrees C - too cold for bacterial replication if we're dealing with a bacterium, and potentially cold enough to kill off a virus. The rest of the world is pretty safe.
### Treatment
Pretty much dealt with. Most of Britain has been wiped out. However, host countries for the survivors might want to keep an eye on them... they might still be [asymptomatically carrying](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptomatic_carrier) the virus.
### Learning
Here's where the response really comes in. The rest of the world is going to want to know that they're safe from this happening to them. So, some possibilities:
* Send scientists
Other developed countries may want to send some scientists to do some testing on the virus. However, they'll want to be both armoured and armed - possibly some of the armed forces should go with them, as guns are shown to be effective in the film (the scene at the motorway checkpoint). They probably won't need biohazard suits, because the virus doesn't seem to be airborne, but armour in case the zombies try an attack would be a good idea.
* Repopulate
As you say, the rest of the world will want to reintroduce humans to Britain. This is going to have to be done cautiously, in case there are any traces of the virus left around. For the first few weeks at least, the settlers may all want to carry some sort of weapon - I'd recommend a firearm and a blunt heavy weapon like a baseball bat (there's a reason they're used in robberies). This would make sure that anyone who became infected could be 'dealt with' swiftly to pose minimal risk to everyone else.
Lastly, the authorities who sent the settlers will probably want situation reports frequently. That means the settlers either need to take equipment with them, or enough skilled workers to get power plants running again to power transmitters.
### Summary
The rest of the world is pretty much safe from this epidemic. What they need to do now is learn from it and then repopulate, making sure the virus can't come back.
[Answer]
I could see how the remaining population of Britain would pressure their government to return earlier than might be safe. However, the security in 28 Weeks Later is so wildly incompetent that it ruined the movie for me.
First problem is containing the people. There are three ways off: air, sea, Channel Tunnel. The Chunnel is easily dealt with, seal it off.
People escaping on aircraft are a problem. They would have to be detected and intercepted which means radar coverage from every angle. The existing civilian radar network does not provide complete coverage and can be evaded. You'd need to ring the island with military grade radar. A combination of ships at sea and coastal installations at all possible coastlines in range: which is most of the Western Hemisphere. Administratively, no aircraft which cannot prove its point of origin would be allowed to land. Aircraft from Britain would have to be diverted to airports with quarantine facilities, or simply shot down.
People escaping on boats are a much bigger problem. An aircraft can be seen by radar at a great distance, boats cannot. Many will slip through. To combat this, a literal coast guard would need to be established: an armed militia of people patrolling the coastline both on land and in the sea in small boats. It would also be their job to find any washed up bodies and call in cleanup crews.
The containment cannot hope to succeed with such a huge border to defend. They must assume some will slip through. To deal with this, rapid response teams would be positioned some miles inland and ready to respond to anything which slips through, or any attempt to overwhelm the coast watchers.
Then you pray the disease doesn't jump species. Infected birds would be a serious problem. Killing the bird population preemptively may be considered, I do not know how that would be feasible.
Quarantined people would be stripped, washed and examined for wounds. Because of the extreme potency of any fluid contact, all their possessions and vehicles would be burned. Fortunately, because the disease is so rapid and obvious, people would not need to be quarantined for long. However, prudence suggests they be held for observation just in case.
Prudence would suggest keeping them all quarantined to a refugee camp, but keeping a few million people isolated would prove impossible. Instead, they would be allowed to resettle, but required to have regular check ups, discouraged from travelling, and required to register with the authorities. Given how people are reacting to the Ebola scare, refugees would likely be prejudiced by the locals. Probably anyone with a British accent would experience fear and shunning. Children would be kept out of schools. People would be refused by shops. Finding work would be difficult.
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People involved in containing the outbreak would be required to wear boots, bite-proof coveralls, gloves, headgear and face protection when on duty. They would all carry radios. Civilians might use commercial equipment and cell phones. Military personnel would use their [MOPP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOPP) equipment and their chemical warfare training. All would be trained to always stick with their partner, to report in regularly, to report contacts immediately, and in the necessity of killing an infected person immediately.
Rescuing hold outs may be attempted. Short wave radio would provide a way to contact the mainland. Much of England can be reached by helicopter, and a safe landing spot such as the top of a building could be arranged.
An efficient, safe disposal system would need to be worked out. Questions would need to be answered. Does burning fully destroy the disease? Can it be spread in the smoke? How long does the body remain infectious after the zombie has died? Raids would have to be conducted to obtain specimens, fortunately dead ones, and taken to the quarantined facilities to be tested.
If it is found that smoke spreads the disease, this further complicates the matter beyond just disposing of bodies. Fires in the abandoned cities will inevitably break out and the smoke could reach France, the coast of France would have to be evacuated. To reduce the chance of fire, incursions would be conducted to secure utilities and safely shut off industrial facilities.
If it is found that the bodily fluids remain infectious long after death, the island may never be safe to return to.
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Returning to the island to stay would be considered after perhaps 90 days when all the zombies should have starved, plus how long it takes for dead bodies to no longer be infectious, plus some padding for late infected hold outs. The problem will not be zombies, they will be dead. The problem will be 60 million bodies, their bodily fluids and other infectious materials.
This would be a purely military operation. The first priority would be to establish a defensible clean zone. A small area easily isolated would be chosen, such as the South West peninsula. Landing in Penzance, the A30 could be used as a defensible border with a clear field of fire. The city would be searched, block by block, house by house. Bodies would be handled by special teams and disposed of, probably by burning in the street.
Teams consisting of a sniper, a spotter and squad automatic weapon would be posted on rooftops to cover the advance. The sniper would take care of individuals while the SAW could cover packs. The spotter would remain alert, find targets, and make reports.
After Penzance is cleared, the advance would continue to cover the whole of the South West Peninsula. The the A30 between Longrock and Hale would provide the next defensible border. The advance would proceed, using highways as defence lines, across the island. Once the military has swept an area, trained civilians would follow them to perform a more through search.
During the long, tedious sweep and clear likely with little or no combat, there will be the temptation amongst the people on the ground to slack off. Maybe not wear all their hot, bulky equipment. Maybe not thoroughly check every building. This would have to be combated by keeping their shifts short and rotating people off the line frequently. This would require a much larger force than otherwise.
Clearing large cities would be a tedious nightmare. It would have to be conducted meticulously to get every room in every building, every sewer and utility space, every car and tunnel. The cities may never be declared safe. If that is so, it is questionable whether curious civilians can be kept out of the cities, and that would threaten the ability to return to the island.
---
If civilians are allowed to return, they would first settle in the easily defensible, easily searched, easily defended south west corner. Civilians would be educated about the disease, how to identify infectious materials, and what to do when they find it. They would be encouraged to wear long sleeve clothing and sturdy gloves when going into abandoned buildings or the wilderness.
Returning refugees to the island has a bonus effect: it quarantines them. Just in case any of them are carriers.
During the whole operation, the island would still be consider a quarantine zone, including the "clean" zone. An island transfer point would be established, perhaps on one of the channel islands. Ships and aircraft would be allowed to go from the mainland to the transfer island, or from the transfer island to Britain, but never from Britain to the mainland. Anyone returning would first have to pass through quarantine. Equipment would largely be on a one way trip. Aircraft and ships would be dedicated to the run between Britain and the transfer point.
There would need to be established a time when Britain is declared safe and the most odious/expensive elements of quarantine dropped. Several metrics could be used. One would be to simply count the bodies found. Another is to track the rate of bodies found. Another is to track the rate of infections. Once some percentage of the population is accounted for, the rate of bodies found falls below a certain threshold, and the rate of infection is basically nil, the island can be declared safe.
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### Isolation
It would be considered a *dead zone* and isolated from everything else, until they come up with ideas about how to kill the zombies without any risk of infecting the rest of the world.
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Those zombies wandering around England represent an incredible terrorist threat. Any sensible government is going to seek to destroy them even at considerable cost. Any useful weapon in the conventional arsenal will be employed, non-persistent chemical weapons will be used if effective. Whether nukes would be employed would depend on the governments and the nature of the targets.
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I always wonder why people think of Britain as an island? What, a chunnel?
Nobody tried to escape to France, and got a zombie leaping onto their boat at the very last minute, and it drifted... anywhere in the next 28 days? It's like the miracle of Dunkirk has ceased to exist.
I'd foresee some real architectural developments with security setups. ie: doors that open inwards, keypad entry, locks, etc. Put a few more doors everywhere, and some real walls, and you've got no problems that can't be sanitized away when people don't respond to intercoms, and don't look right through the security glass viewports.
I expect that Britain wouldn't be over-run, with such a quick onset time. There's not time for carriers to get anywhere before they turn. You'd need a longer time to actually traverse barriers/distance (hard to spread the disease when the carriers can't get in a vehicle and drive to the next city, nor last long enough on a bus (without turning it into a charnel-house) to get to the next town). Without directed (thoughtful) walking, it will be difficult for random zombies to random-walk to every town. Much less traverse bridges (blocked by any non-idiot) and rivers.
If you give it a slightly longer onset time, you will then have problems keeping it limited to Britain.
In any case, I expect there would be people on the ground studying it, probably with guns, and/or make-shift barriers to control populations during the first outbreak. NATO, or 82nd airborne, even if you ignore Britain's actual military declaring martial law (or equivalent).
Which means they'd have experience with getting those enclaves over-run during the first outbreak, and would have developed procedures and means to not get over-run after the first outbreak decimated Britain.
I'd expect quite a bit of exodus - by any means - which could be significant people movers: cargo ships, planes packed to the gills (cargo spaces) and flying low to prevent freezing, round trips to Ireland and France by anything that floats, tugs pulling trash-barges (which would be rapidly emptied by every willing hand who wanted a berth for their child/themselves), millions attempting to swim the channel (or at least get far enough out to be safe and await pickup), etc, etc. Queen, Royalty and peerage would all make it out, probably with servants and retainers. So, well more than a few million people.
And likely your resettlement would come from these now wealthier Britons. And ex-pats.
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This was asked years ago, but came up in my sidebar (who knows why). What's missing from the answers is: who is "the rest of the world"? Britain is a great piece of real estate, and if it's suddenly empty, people are going to want to get a piece of it. The questioner says that re-colonizing Britain six months later was far too soon (I haven't seen the second movie) but I would imagine that every other country and many individuals had their eyes on the prize, too. Therefore fear of zombies would be balanced against the risk of coming in second. Sooner or later, *somebody* would take the chance, and logically, it would be whichever group was the most optimistic (or desperate). Naturally everyone else would think that the first mover wasn't cautious enough.
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Given the extreme infectivity, short incubation period and physical danger to healthy persons caused by this disease, I believe that the only logical solution is that of "salting the ground", i.e. foreign militaries incinerate everything in infected Britain from one end to the other using conventional and/or atomic weapons. Burn Britain to the ground, kill and incinerate everything that moves or grows until there can be no doubt that anything found alive on British soil *must* have come from elsewhere.
The first wave would be airborne, dropping waves of conventional incendiary, fuel-air and atomic munitions, targeting the coast first and then moving inland.
After that, the second wave would be land-based, with biohazard-sealed flamethrower tanks moving in waves to mop up anything left unincinerated by the airborne bombardment.
Only then would infantry with biohazard suits and flamethrowers be permitted to set foot on British soil (ash?) to clean up the last few zombies that may have been lucky enough to escape the first two waves.
[Answer]
Humans are animals. Therefore, we will act based on fear. And an entire country dying would incite a lot of fear.
There are 2 possibilities, depending on how that fear is handled:
1. Wildfire approach: Just abandon the island and wait till all the zombies are rotted away (like waiting for a wildfire to burn itself out).
2. Scorched Earth approach: The island is bombed until the zombies are gone. Nukes optional but quite likely.
After that, repopulate once infection is no risk anymore. Since poor people looking for a better life take more risks, those are probably the first new settlers. If they get infected and die, the next attempt will likely be in a few years, or faster if their current lives are bad enough.
If enough sufficiently equipped humans truly get scared of their lives, they'll switch to the "kill it with fire" or "nuke from orbit" approach really fast. The only reason nukes haven't been used in wars after WW2 is because people were more afraid of retaliations than of what their own nukes would do.
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It kind of depends on how fast it happens, if it was a slow takeover of the zombies the other countries would probably react differently depending on the relationship between them. If they had a bad relationship they might wait for Britain to get overrun (If it was possible) then secure the area. After the zombies die from starvation they move in to expand territory or something. If they had a good relationship they would probably send in people to clear out the infected to save refugees that might still be alive and healthy. (If there are any left) If it was a fast takeover the outside world would be pretty confused (British people suddenly vanish?) and it might take a while for them to figure things out, then they might react differently like I stated above. (I don't know much about politics, but for me this is the most realistic reaction I can think of)
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[Question]
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The less likely an event is, the easier it is to insure against it, as the risk is low. Meteor insurance, if it exists, is probably cheap, and still pretty profitable for the company, as the number of claims would be low.
On the other hand, the odds of your car being damaged in a fight between superheroes and villains in a major city where both are numerous is possibly much higher. Higher risk equals higher premiums, and possibly refusal to cover such events.
This leads me to suspect that various forms of insurance are either outrageously expensive in Metropolis, etc, or that certain events are not covered. They've addressed on Supergirl that "destruction by alien armada" is not covered in a many homeowner policies.
So how could protection from said events work in such a world? Why would anyone choose to live or work in a city where such destruction is commonplace? The chances of being wiped out are far from zero.
The top two scenarios I can think of both involve government involvement: subsidized premiums, and a massive expansion of FEMA or similar organizations.
There's a chance that teams like the JLA/Avengers have a private fund to help defray such costs as well.
What other scenarios can you think of to make working and living anywhere near these centers of periodic disaster anything less than economic suicide?
[Answer]
# Marvel
In Marvel, there is a superhero team who's role is basically "clean up after the mess". Damage Control is a group of supers and civilians who are paid to clean up the mess and rebuild and fast. They apparently have an insurance arm as well, and superhero insurance is definitely a thing in the Marvel Verse. Marvel also benefits from the fact that most of the action is located in NYC, so it's probably a law passed to ensure buildings are insured against this, and within the recent story-line, the U.S. made it a law to register superheroes in exchange for legal protections and reimbursement for damages to property in pursuit of a bad guy. Runaways comics shows us that out in L.A. the Supervillain attacks are seen as an "East Coast thing" among L.A. residents (and the Supervillains steer clear of L.A. because an organized Supervillain gang controls that territory and put the fear of God into even the Kingpin!).
# D.C.
In D.C., it's generally seen that the JLA does do a lot of work to rebuild communities they break and some villains will do this too... for public approval. Lex Luthor and Bruce Wayne have public works projects to pick up damages for communities hit by these devastations. Obviously the former is generally met with suspicion by the heroes in the story, while the later is the primary funder of the Justice Leagues' cool toys, so naturally, Bruce has legitimate money going to side projects. At various times, it's often shown that the Justice League is all hands on deck when major damage is done to cities by their efforts to stop super-crime. Given that JLA members are generally more powerful than Avengers members, they tend to be the best at building things better than they were. There was one comic where Superman and Doomsday were fighting in down-town Smallville, the next issue picked up after Doomsday's defeat with the JLA on hand to build Smallville back up. Though the entire Superhero community of DC seems to have mad respect for Ma and Pa Kent. Over the years Superman wasn't the only superhero they couple has cared for, and Bruce Wayne is often seen as almost their adopted child.
This is also seen in shows like Justice League and JLU where the former usually featured 3-4 members of the 7 regular characters, and explained the others away as responding to emergencies elsewhere that were more natural disasters than actual superhuman. One episode even mocked this by explaining they couldn't dispatch Superman as he was handling Earthquake stuff in California, only for the Man of Steel to swoop in and block some more fragile member of the team from a devastating attack ("It was only a 4.0").
JLU would frequently show the heroes doing first responder styled work in the background during the conclusion of the episodes actions, or coming onto or off of shifts in the expanded Justice League. At least three episodes put these styles of missions as front and center, rather than background effects.
"The Greatest Story Never Told"'s central crisis is a deadly villain is on the attack and it requires as many heroes as can be mustered to fight, as told from the point of view of the heroes who were told they needed to do crowd control. It's widely considered one of their best episodes.
"The Doomsday Sanction" starts out as the Justice League assisting a Caribbean Island Nation in an evacuation as the local volcano is about to erupt, the real threat comes from the fact that Doomsday was accidentally released by the season's bad guys and single mindedly wanted to get his revenge on Superman, who was in the heart of the volcano trying to take pressure off so it wouldn't erupt.
"Flashpoint" was an entire episode dealing with the league doing some soul searching after a security breach knocks out power to their HQ and uses some of their own tech to absolutely devastate a community. The survivors are given some focus and the U.S. Government is showing some serious scrutiny of the League's culpability in the affair (though the President does recognize that the League has saved the world more times than he can count and are currently assisting in fixing the most immediate problem).
*In fiction, these types of stories are generally not explored because it's boring, though anytime your superhero story starts exploring the need for heroes to unmask themselves, it results in this topic coming up.*
Will Smith Movie Hancock did point out that Hancock's help does more harm than help, though one of the people Hancock saves is a PR guy and realizes that the devastation was inconvenient, but nobody was actually killed.
Pixar's Incredible works the public disgust at the aftermath into the setting with the public all but suing Supers into illegality (though IRL, courts do recognize that Life over Limb is preferable in a rescue situation, that is, if it's between breaking your arm or letting you die, a first responder should never let you die).
Similarly, the Captain America: Civil War film was about how do the Superheroes of the MCU account for the aftermath of there films (incidentally, it takes strong cues from the comic book government licensing system).
If this issue is not the crux of the work, in a more dramatic work, expect it to cause a lot of grief to the hero (and is critical to the themes of Spider-man) or is handled in a joking fashion (ala the entire concept of Damage Control, which is generally a humor series when it is in print or an aside gag in other titles in Marvel).
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Depending on how pervasive super powers are in society, if here are super fights resulting in super destruction, it would also make sense if there was super construction. That is, not all super powers will be applied to fighting battles. There will likely be a large number of superpowers working in industry or the public sector that would make reconstruction much more efficient. This would drive down costs of reconstruction and insurance making it more feasible for cities.
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I would expect that there would be multiple levels of insurance, both at public and private risk.
There would be a national, FEMA like agency for large disasters, as there is now. This agency would be funded by the confiscation and liquidation of villainous assets to bring down the cost.
Then, there would be insurance for the cities themselves, probably funded by a combination of local taxes and asset forfeiture.
Private insurance for corporations and individuals would be under the same risk-management as today. I imagine that the Daily Planet and Star Labs would have much higher rates than Bud's Suds, for example.
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I don't think it would work like indemnity insurance today, and the overwhelmingly likely result is just that a large amount of productive activity (relative to modern reality) would be dedicated to servicing the damage without insurance markets. A government agency might do it, as might superhero groups, but I think it's unlikely.
Government is the natural party to pool risk for people, but the risk would be very unevenly distributed-- Metropolis is at more risk than Nowhere, Wyoming. And since the risk, where it exists, would be pretty high (lots of damage), the costs would be high as well. People already complain about federal payments after hurricanes operating as subsidies encouraging people to live in predictably dangerous areas, and I imagine this would be even more intense in areas with even greater destruction. It might happen anyways, but the expense would be high and would probably distort other government spending pretty severely.
But even with broad pooling of risk, it's definitely possible that the costs are so high that the risk is simply not insurable (if people can't pay the actuarial-ly sound rates, then they won't be able to participate, and the insurers will not be able to operate).
As for superheroes, covering the damage sounds like something that they might do. But where would they get the money? Unless they start charging for services (which seems... problematic, at best), I doubt they can foot the bill for the carnage.
I think that what we'd see instead is a marked decrease in people's investments in the sorts of property that would be at risk. Real estate prices would drop, as they would become much riskier to own in higher-risk areas. Rents might increase, as property owners start to discount the value of buildings into the future. Car prices would plummet, or at least people would prefer owning cheaper cars. Private ownership might dissolve in metro areas, with people only using other ways to get around.
High-end markets would still exist, but almost exclusively for people wealthy enough that they could self-insure against the losses. Investment portfolios would feature relatively less real estate, and loans using real property or cars wouldn't be worth as much. It would become less valuable to live in cities (or any region, really) where super-beings were active, and so less people would bother to do so.
Property at risk from this kind of collateral damage would just be less desirable, and insurance would either be very expensive and relatively rare for individuals to carry.
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Much like tornadoes, hurricanes, and forest fires, the endless destruction that heroes and villains inflict upon the cities they call home is so far out of human control and so expensive to fix that insurance companies will simply not offer to cover it. Real-world super fights would fall more under 'national disaster' than 'insurance claim'.
If real-world superheroes caused [the kind of frequent destruction](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/37214/are-there-economic-implications-portrayed-in-comics-where-the-buildings-and-citi) in comics and movies, insurance companies would certainly add a superhero-focused [Act of God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God) clause to their insurance packages. Since most heroes and villains seem to stick to one city and rarely leave it, the insurance companies would have a pretty easy time arguing that the liability of toppled skyscrapers lies mainly on the people who keep rebuilding them every month.
Since each fight would be months or years of recovery and heroes/villains don't like waiting that long, normal insurance and construction companies simply could not keep up with the costs of rebuilding efforts.
However, this does leave the door wide-open for a super-insurance agency with heroes that specialize in cheap and quick urban construction...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KTrF5.png)
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Destruction means change and **where there's change, there's money.**
Real estate becomes a gamble when there are massive destructive powers in the area. Who knows how long a building will last? As such, realtors begin *literally gambling.* If I'm looking for a nice plot of land in the middle of the city for my new office building, I can find a building I already like and make them a deal: I'll pay them some chunk of money every month if they promise to sell me the land and whatever's on it for some set price when the building is destroyed. Think of this as "shorting" the building--you're betting on it to (quite literally) crash.
What qualifies as "destroyed" is left for the people writing the contracts to duke out--maybe it means repairs are appraised at a price higher than X or some other objective measurement. But a smart realtor with an eye for where the super hero fights will take place stands to make a lot of money by buying and flipping cheap land.
After seeing a few realtors become filthy rich off of this, hoards of them jump on the boat. If you have a building in the city, chances are high that someone's paying you monthly for the chance to take it for cheap if a super hero attack comes. The monthly payments combined with the government incentives and heroes' pity payments are usually enough to fund your rebuilding effort. And the money the government and heroes are throwing at the situation along with all of the wealthy realtors makes the city teem with money and all of the people who come with it.
The city is a high-risk high-reward game and the rush of playing is only coupled with the rush of living so close to the constant epic fights you get a front row seat to.
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**Acts of God**
In places were acts of god are quite frequent, they legislate protective measures, largely because the insurance companies won't insure anything less, and the government does not wish to pay out more in the event of a catastrophe. Individuals and business would also willingly install/have certain protective measures in order to reduce insurance costs.
I know that North Australians specifically build houses with cyclone bolts. A certain minimum of these are required by law to be permitted to build there, but many individuals/business will add extra bolts than required even though they are expensive. It acts to hedge their investment in the building both in terms of insurance, but also because it makes the building less likely to fall apart when damaged.
**Acts of Demi-Gods**
I imagine that those super-hero fights would pose certain risks, whatever those risks are, are what is going to be improved. The insurance companies will identify those risks and raise their prices, the people/businesses will complain, and the state will legislate/pressure the insurance companies to reduce their prices.
If the city saw lots of vehicle damage, the state or insurance companies might mandate that car parking happens off-road, or the car is not insured. The state would work with the city to under-ground or otherwise shift parking, maybe even focusing on public transit more. If it were still too risky, those off-road car parks might need even more measures, like being underground.
If the building were continually being damaged, perhaps the state would legislate armour plating on buildings which house X+ people, for their safety as much as anything else. Other structural qualities such as several strong cores in sky scrappers, or perhaps a crumple zone s as to minimise structural damage.
Perhaps certain social activities might be implemented, such as a fight avoidance system. When a fight is detected people are warned by text-message to avoid/seek shelter. That at least would reduce mobile collateral damage.
Eventually the risks would be reduced, and with that the insurance premiums would reduce, though probably still be relatively high. If the city is prosperous enough this would work, otherwise the city would become abandoned. Then another city would get the problem.
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>
> The less likely an event is, the easier it is to insure against it, as the risk is low.
>
>
>
This is simply not true. Insurance works best when an event is individually unlikely but occurrence is likely among the insured group. I.e. where at least one person per year will be able to make a claim. If the event is less likely than that, then there will be a natural tendency for the insurance company to keep insufficient money. Or to simply not offer coverage, as who wants to insure against meteors? This is why Lloyds of London operated. They put actual people as the guarantors of unlikely possibilities to guard against insufficient savings.
Consider the possibility that a superpowered individual destroys every building on the entire world. That's low risk. There's not many powers that can do that without killing all the people. Less likely than almost anything. But if it happened, insurance companies would be completely unable to cope. They just don't have enough money to replace every building in the world at once.
Now, if there is a one in a million chance of any particular building being destroyed, insurance companies can handle that. Because if there are a billion buildings, that means that only a thousand are destroyed per year. And each one of those has people paying premiums for a million other buildings that weren't destroyed. Not everyone pays the premiums? Then some of the thousand buildings are likely to be uncovered as well.
There is essentially a sweet spot for risk. Groceries are not well subject to insurance, because the risk that you will want to eat next week is almost 100% (you could develop anorexia or die, so only almost). It's cheaper to buy direct than to pay insurance overhead to buy. But neither is that one in a trillion chance. Either the cost is so low that it's not worth insuring, or it's so expensive when it occurs that no insurance company can afford to cover it. A nice one in a hundred chance is insurable. It happens often enough that you don't want to be the one but not so often that you have to prepare for it regardless.
### Government intervention
So what happens with real cataclysms? We call these tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. They are unlikely, but when they happen, they tend to happen in large groups. They aren't likely enough for insurance premiums to cover costs. So most insurance policies exclude them. Instead, the government declares an emergency, [FEMA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Emergency_Management_Agency) swoops in and pays claims. Presumably the government would also do this with large superpowered events. But this is unlikely to cover smaller, more common events.
### Insurance
If a superhero accidentally totals one car a day in New York City, then insurance would just cover that. Yes, it would increase premiums. But not by as much as you might think. There are about 2.5 million [cars in New York City](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2011/04/06/new-yorks-car-ownership-rate-is-on-the-rise/). The average car insurance is about [\$3 a day](https://quotewizard.com/auto-insurance/new-york-new-york) (50% higher than the national average). So that's \$7.5 million a day. Add a \$50k car to that and it's still about \$7.5 million.
And let's compare that average to the [average in Brooklyn](https://quotewizard.com/auto-insurance/brooklyn-new-york). There, the average premium is \$5-6 a day, almost double that of the city as a whole (three times the national average). Why does Brooklyn have more expensive insurance than the city as a whole? Perhaps cars are more expensive. Or Brooklyn is more dangerous.
People in big cities already pay higher insurance premiums. Metropolis only has one Superman. There's a limit to the amount of damage he could do most days. And of course, sometimes he prevents damage that would have otherwise occurred (e.g. he saves a car from being totaled in an accident). Unless there is a really big event, insurance covers the occasional totaled car or whatever with a modest premium bump.
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I’m writing a story where mars with its current atmosphere is inhabited entirely by women wearing the “spacesuit” with the following features:
* tight fitting,
* heated shirt,
* heated leggings,
* full head oxygen helmet
Would this suit protect them enough for 1 hour on the Martian surface?
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There are proposals for skintight spacesuits. This [link](https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/617047main_45s_building_future_spacesuit.pdf) is worth checking out for a NASA concept of skintight spacesuit.
MIT had also developed their version of [skintight spacesuit](http://news.mit.edu/2014/second-skin-spacesuits-0918).
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> The MIT BioSuit™, a skintight spacesuit that offers improved mobility and reduced mass compared to modern gas-pressurized spacesuits.
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Please note the MIT Biosuit is more than simply a heated shirt and leggings ensemble.
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> For future astronauts, the process of suiting up may go something like
> this: Instead of climbing into a conventional, bulky, gas-pressurized
> suit, an astronaut may don a lightweight, stretchy garment, lined with
> tiny, musclelike coils. She would then plug in to a spacecraft’s power
> supply, triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrink-wrap
> the garment around her body.
>
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> The skintight, pressurized suit would not only support the astronaut,
> but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary
> exploration. To take the suit off, she would only have to apply modest
> force, returning the suit to its looser form.
>
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> Now MIT researchers are one step closer to engineering such an active,
> “second-skin” spacesuit: Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and
> astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, and her colleagues have
> engineered active compression garments that incorporate small,
> springlike coils that contract in response to heat. The coils are made
> from a shape-memory alloy (SMA) — a type of material that “remembers”
> an engineered shape and, when bent or deformed, can spring back to
> this shape when heated.
>
>
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The precursor skintight spacesuit was the [Space Activity Suit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_activity_suit). This was originally proposed back in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1971 the Annis report concluded that the concept needed more work, despite being positive about its utility.
There are a number of proposals for a suitable [Mars suit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_suit).
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> Mars suit or Mars space suit is a space suit for EVAs on the planet Mars.[4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_suit)[5] Compared to space-walking in the near vacuum of low Earth orbit, Mars suits have a greater focus on actual walking and a need for abrasion resistance.[4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_suit) Mars' surface gravity is 37.8% of Earth's, approximately 2.3 times that of the Moon, so weight is a significant concern, but there are fewer thermal demands compared to open space.[6] At the surface the suits would contend with the atmosphere of Mars which has a pressure of about 0.6 to 1 kPa (6 to 10 millibars).[7] On the surface, radiation exposure is a concern especially solar flare events, which can dramatically increase the amount of radiation over a short time.
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The conditions faced by astronauts on the planet Mars are severe and any Mars suit will need to take those into account.
Again one of those proposals includes the MIT Biosuit.
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> The Biosuit is a mechanical counter-pressure suit, resulting in a body hugging form.[19] In this type of suit, the pressure would come from the structure and elasticity of the material, whereas with prior space-worn suits the pressure comes from pressurized gas, like a filled balloon.[20] The gas-pressure can make a flexible suit very rigid, like an inflated balloon.[20] (see also Space activity suit)
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In conclusion, while the principle may seem sound a Mars consisting of heated shirt, leggings and an oxygen helmet is effectively inadequate for Martian conditions. A Mars suit along the lines of something like the MIT Biosuit will be required. Otherwise the astronauts won't survive long. probably, less than an hour. Sensible astronauts will make sure their Mars suits are suitable for planetary conditions. No simple heated suits will do.
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If, and only if, the garments described are *fully* sealed to each other ***and*** sufficiently rigid to compensate for the low atmospheric pressure, otherwise the wearer would almost certainly bleed out along the edges. Full seal is also needed for internal atmosphere retention. They also need gloves and very serious boots, they can't expose *any* notable area of skin to the atmosphere, or lack thereof.
Heating is a yes and no issue with any suit designed for extremely low pressure environments as @Mołot noted in a comment while Mars is frighteningly cold the atmosphere is actually so thin that it acts as an insulator (which I hadn't previously considered); so while heating the suit, and especially taking care to insulate it from the ground (which will suck heat out of it relatively fast, which is where serious boots come in), is necessary so is making sure it can radiate enough heat at need. Depending on the activity level of the person in the suit body heat could kill them; if, for example, the suit is designed for a pleasant stroll and the occupant is running heat stress could kill them. The reverse is also true, sit around in a suit designed with the thermal outputs of heavy labour in mind and you'll freeze to death.
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Time stops nearly everywhere, time only continues in a area around creatures of a certain intelligence. The worlds population is suddenly thrown into darkness as time ceases throughout the universe except near them, since light is no longer reaching them from outside their time bubble. They also find all electricity cuts out if the power source is outside their time field. Some people suffocate because they stay in one place to long, exhausting the air in their bubble. People can no longer rely on the sun for agriculture. Starvation is a serious threat, but so is asphyxiation.
**It is probably a given that possibly the majority of the worlds population will die**. I am wondering whether it is possible for humanity to survive in the long term, and what civilization the remnants of humanity could create. I'm not quite sure what is going to happen with all those animals that are smart enough to create time bubbles in the wild and I don't know how much that affects things. It does occur to me that the intelligent animals might not die off for quite a while as they would migrate to find new food. Although one thing to be considered is that I don't think there are any animals that are well adapted for total darkness that also pass the mirror test, so actually the animals that would generate time bubbles might die off quite quickly.
As for what methods humanity would employ to survive, and I suppose any permanent settlements would probably need CO2 scrubbers. People could move around nomadically since **time doesn't pass outside time bubbles** so if no-one has been somewhere since time stopped it will be exactly as it was at that second.
**The only places time continues are around creatures that have incredibly high intelligence** including great apes plus some other primates, cetaceans, many corvidae, elephants, parrots, pigs and a few other mammals and birds. A creature can only make time pass near itself if it individually meets the required intelligence bar, as thus human infants wont make time pass in their presence until they could pass the mirror test, this usually occurs at around 18 months.
**The time field around a creature**, in which time passes extends from every part of their body a distance equal to twice the distance between the furthest 2 points of that organisms body, this only counts living tissue (so not hair) that is a part of its body. This distance obviously changes: for instance if a person simply held up their arm then the distance between the furthest 2 points of their body increased: from being from their foot to their scalp, to being from their foot to their hand.
As for what happens to object partly on one side of the literal temporal barrier and partly on the other side (assuming the barrier either has no width or is only a planck length thick), I'm assuming through hand-waving that things straddling the temporal line aren't just cut in half and are still sort of attached to the portion on the other side should you pull on it.
**EDIT** A object can't be passed through a stationary time barrier. Once a object reached the edge and a tiny part of it has crossed the barrier it would be unable to move and would block the rest of the object from getting through. A object part outside the barrier and part inside could not be pulled inside either because the part of the object outside the barrier can't move but is still attached to the part inside the barrier. A object normally wouldn't be able to touch the edge of a stationary time barrier anyway because there will be a layer of air molecules trapped partly on both sides of the barrier. Pulling a object that is partly outside the barrier could be done but you would be breaking the object by pulling it hard enough to rip it apart.
In this scenario everything still has a gravitational pull on everything else but objects outside time bubbles just don't react since that would require time. In addition I'm assuming that since from the perspective of people in time bubbles the earth is no longer moving that people don't just get flung at deadly speed as this would kill everyone in fractions of a second. **In this scenario I'm assuming that anything that would kill everyone within a incredibly short time is somehow resolved**, so this situation isn't enormously dull.
In terms of intelligence of a certain level being needed to make a time bubble, I am assuming that brain damage or certain mental disorders emerging may cause a creature to stop creating a time bubble but that these need to be reflected by neurological changes to have a effect, thus a creature that is unconscious or drugged will still generate a bubble.
**Ok regarding heat buildup**. I do definitely think now that heat buildup is one of the biggest problems in this scenario. I think the way the bubbles edge would handle heat is like this: there is a nearly indestructible layer of air straddling the plank-length edge of the bubble however even with a creature holding perfectly still the bubbles edge will move by molecules at a time because no creature could truly hold totally still. Most heat would indeed build up because it had no-where to go, there would only be one way that heat escapes and that would be through light mostly infrared. Light emitted within the bubble will hit the edge unlike solid object that would be held back by the layer of trapped air molecules, even if the edge of the bubble moved the light would just resume its movement away from the bubble hitting the edge again. Thus light would be basically the only way heat would escape the mostly closed system of the bubble.
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I had a thought concerning this idea. BTW, congratulations for the originality. It piqued my interest for that reason alone.
## The World *is* a Simulation
Normally, physics is computed/rendered “as needed”, with shortcuts taken where possible. Intelligent minds, in particular, are the driving point and are always rendered in full detail with very fine time steps. Things in the immediate environment need to be driven to sufficiently high resolution, too. But if you look at a pool of water that has been unobserved for some time,
① it jumps ahead without realizing states in between. (See Greg Egan’s short story *Dust* that became expanded into [*Permutation City*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City).)
② entropy and information content is used to deliver only what’s needed. There is no need to get every molecule of water in its exact position; an indistinguishable lot and bulk properties is all that’s needed.
Now the simulation has been running out of resources. More people. More detailed observation of the world, from close-up views of astronomical phenomena to atomic resolution microscopes. High-tech devices require constant reliance on high-detail quantum mechanics of small groups of atoms, *en masse*.
What happens when servers are stressed? Timing issues, swapfile and caching issues, random memory writes more likely to hit something meaningful… however our universe is implemented, it is an information system and will have analogous issues.
## Cue the bugs.
Unobserved areas are not computed until needed, and then mechanisms are invoked to decide whether to catch-up in one (or a few coarse) gulps, how to simplify re entropy, etc. (Think of lazy evaluation in [Haskel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)).)
**That stops working.** The stuff you look at causes crashes/exceptions/corruption, and the state is *not caught up*. It shows the same state that existed the last time it was observed, unchanged.
This gives you lots of latitude to adjust the effects and naturally give inconsistent results, especially to (somehow) get stuff to work out.
It also allows you to have the effects *progress* over time. Anomalies become full scale missing time in astronomical observations and quantum system experiments. Wilderness disappears but (remote) servers still work. Then eventually advanced semiconductors only work when being operated directly and in close proximity, and finally the bubbles close in around people individually.
In this scheme, it is natural that the bubbles won’t be black, but you will see the frozen reality beyond. The sun shines on people.
## Story plot and Framework
The breakdown of the simulation and discovery of the true nature can be a major thread in the story. It can also give access to a study of “meta physics” and even *exploits* to hack into it.
The malfunctioning simulation hypothesis natually lets you tune the details how you like even to the point of inconsistent rules or changing phenomena. Just add special cases and glitches: rather than plot holes, they provide insight into the underlying code and clues for crafting intentional exploits!
Personally, I would love to read that novel.
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Regardless of the availability of CO₂ scrubbers (and in the long run I suspect you are greatly overestimating what can be done along those lines, especially with no prior warning), it seems clear that most people will be dead within 24 hours, 48 at most. The problem is not CO₂ , it's heat. Not only is the world outside the bubble perfectly black, the surface of the bubble is a perfect insulator. Thermal vibrations cannot propagate outside the bubble, nor can IR radiation.
Nominal Basal Metabolic Rate for a resting, 100 kg, 25-year-old male is 2,000 kcal/day, or about 8 MJ/day. During an eight-hour sleep cycle that will be 2.7 MJ. Within a personal bubble, all of the heat must be absorbed by the sleeper, for a total thermal load of 27 kJ/kg. Since the specific heat of water is about 4000 J/kg-C, at the end of eight hours your body temperature will be about 110 degrees, which is hardly survivable. Sweating won't help much. At 30°C the density of saturated water vapor is about 30g/cu meter. For a 2-meter radius bubble, that's about .36 kg. Using 2.2 kJ/g as heat of vaporization, evaporation can mitigate about 800 kJ of metabolic energy, so the actual rise will be on the order of 8 degrees, for a waking fever of about 107 °F.
Smaller individuals, of course, will generate less heat, but they have less mass to heat up.
The idea of using generators for farming and running CO₂ scrubbers consequently becomes disastrous. A 10 kW generator will produce 860 MJ of energy per day, and virtually all of this will end up as heat in a bubble. Regardless of bubble size, the specific heat of air is quite small, so most of the heat will go to warming up the generator, animals and people. Not to mention that the air will quickly become saturated with water vapor from the generator exhaust. Water vapor is not usually considered, but it is a major component of hydrocarbon combustion. Dehumdifiers don't actually help much, since they require large amounts of energy to cool the water vapor in the air for condensation. And if, somehow, the people survive long enough to actually start eating the farm's food, all the energy which went into producing food value will be released as heat as the food is metabolized.
Oh yes, and pigs will be particularly hard hit. They don't sweat.
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EDIT — Addressing the possibility that heat hits the shell of the bubble and is trapped there. Fine. We can do this two ways.
First, let's take it literally. Then the shell will trap ALL thermal energy impinging on it, and will act like a surface of infinite thermal conductivity with a surface temperature of absolute zero. The inside becomes a super refrigerator, and the person freezes to death, but probably not before the air freezes out and asphyxiates him.
Alternatively, the shell maintains thermal equilibrium with the "nominal" temperature of the environment just outside. This causes it to absorb excess heat and store it in a thin layer which forms the thickness of the bubble's shell. Let's assume that the trapping layer is 10 mm thick. Consider the idea that a person has slept for 8 hours keeping perfectly still, then rolls over. During his sleep, he has emitted 2.7 MJ of energy, all of which has been trapped in the storage layer (this isn't quite true, since some of it will have been absorbed by the ground the sleeper is lying on, but let's ignore that). As the sleeper rolls over, the bubble moves with him, bringing the near side of the external environment, including the storage layer, inside the bubble.
Considering the half of the shell above ground, this will amount to 1/4 of the total storage layer. This will consist of 4π × .01 meters, or .12 cu meters. This weighs about .14 kg. During the night, this accumulated 2.7 MJ / 4, or about 600 kJ. The specific heat of air is just about 1 kJ/kg-C, so this air will be effectively heated to 600 / .14, or 4300 degrees Centigrade. This will instantly raise the internal temperature by 40 degrees C, and the pressure by nearly 2 psi. The sleeper will possibly be woken up when his eardrums rupture.
[Answer]
OK. After some brief consideration I've come up with a couple of scenarios:
1: Everybody dies.
2: Everybody dies.
It's basically a matter of degrees between the various deaths.
Let's address the basic problem here. In your answer you've expressly said that gravity still works. Sadly, without time, the same can't really be said of the other forces. That's not an issue for anything outside of the time bubble though, as they're outside time. Not is it a problem inside the bubble, where things are still normal. The problem arises at the boundary.
You've addressed some boundary conditions in your question, notably that an object (which I'm going to assume means some form of logical unit that's utterly handwaved) can still be pulled through the boundary. It's good you defined this, otherwise the lack of nuclear forces would mean that the floor would fall into itself, becoming degenerate at the bubble wall. When the person causing the bubble also started to fall the degenerate matter would either undergo nuclear fusion or just run flat into some good old chemical processes. Either way: The floor is made of lava. Everybody dies.
But you sidestepped that issue. The floor is safe!
## EDIT:
OK. Assuming that the boundary is perfectly sticky and that object can't get through the boundary, any living but unintelligent creatures on the boundary die. If you enter a new area with a colony of gerbils in it, they're all going to die from massive cellular trauma as they pass the boundary, due to the chemical reactions that let life work literally being cut in half (not to mention bloodflow, nervous and digestive issues caused by the boundary).
Secondly, there are all manner of problems with airflow. I'm not going to delve into heat retention as it's been covered in excruciatingly warm detail since my original answer, but air is still an issue.
As the OP noted, the atmosphere will rapidly stick to the walls of the bubble and become a solid 'shell' of sorts, preventing anything inside the bubble from running into the wall and causing itself trouble. I'm going to have to assume that 'stuck' here means that the probability distribution of a particle's position is centred on a point on the shell of the bubble. From the point of view of the air, this means that more and more air particles are going to be able to 'stick' to the boundary every second, and as these particles are stuck they aren't going to be able to bounce back like normal.
If the shell is completely immobile then eventually this forms a completely solid shell of particles. If not then two interesting scenarios arise:
1: A person moves steadily in a direction.
Here the problem becomes one of sheer numbers. The number of new air particles entering the shell will be lower than the number of particles sticking to the opposite side of the shell. The air pressure will decrease. The faster you move, the less this will affect you, but the effect will still be there. Sooner or later the ambient pressure is going to be low enough that you can't breathe, at which point you die. Strangely the same issue doesn't apply to sea creatures or amphibians, as water is incompressible the amount of particles stuck at the boundary is going to equal the number of particles entering.
2: The person stays as still as they can.
If you stay still then you'll only lose a little air. As you shift about, shiver in the darkness or breathe the bubble is going to move back and forth, allowing the previously stuck air to recycle into the bubble. The 'shell' of stuck particles will move outwards a little further in this case, and become a little thicker as you shift backwards and forwards, but unless you're pacing back and forth by the radius of the sphere you won't be able to exhaust all of your atmosphere. Instead you simply succumb to atmospheric degradation and die.
## EDIT:
OK. Sociological solutions without everybody dying!
As previously mentioned: large animals that can pass the mirror test are going to be immensely valuable. An elephant, though expensive in terms of food, will provide a large bubble capable of supporting multiple people.
In terms of humans: the first priority will be actually working out what's going on. Remember: Everyone has just been plunged into blackness. The walls of the bubble are going to have an albedo of 0 unless you're moving forwards, when they might glow a little. People who get hit by the change in the middle of the day are likely going to die very quickly, as they'll have no handy light sources. Those at night, already in the dark or blind will have a little more success (though still a lot of everybody dying). Finding another human being in the dark when you have no way to find them (no visual LOS, no auditory clues, no vibrations ets) is going to be hard.
For small groups of people with some form of light I think that the first few days will be survivable. As long as they keep moving they'll have air and will be able to scavenge new resources, but they'll have to watch out for other, similarly minded groups and make sure they don't get split up. Tribal nomads with high resource contention and no way to know when another tribe is nearby sounds like a recipe for some pretty unexpected and brutal fighting.
In the end though, everyone still dies. Handwaving away temperature issues leaves us with a total lack of renewable resources. Batteries will run out. Trees and plants will not regrow. It's hard to pump diesel when time's stopped in the middle of the tank, not to mention the pollution inside the bubbles. Groups of mobile raiders will last the longest, potentially biker gangs or long distance drivers, but eventually even they are going to die in the dark.
All in all: If they don't die fast, they die brutally. Everyone dies.
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**While nearly everyone would die I have upon thinking about it resolved how I suspect most people would die and how some might live:**
**How most people die:** While I originally suspected people would die of asphyxiation, I don't think that's how most people outside crowded cities would die. Instead I think that people would move to avoid having their bubble run out of oxygen. However most of the easily accessible food is likely stored in areas like super markets that would run out of oxygen incredibly quickly. Once places a lot of people would go to like supermarkets run out of air, then going there would require a oxygen tank or carbon scrubber.
**Larger bubbles:** One implication of the rules I established regarding the time fields may make survival possible for a small number, skin grafts. While the procedure would require medical expertise grafting skin from say your abdomen into living strips connected to your blood supply could enlarge your bubble substantially if the strip trailed off your body.
**Large permanent time fields:** Due to the fact people wouldn't want to stand next to a generator they need to run, or stand in the middle of a super-efficient algae farm, and of course stand at intervals along the power-line from the generator to indoor farm. People would get time fields another way, animals: By taking animals intelligent enough to generate time field and grafting long strips of their own living skin onto the front and back of the animal, you can get large time field that are necessary to run well anything.
**Long term:** While there may be many things I'm failing to take into account, I think it may be possible for groups of people to survive. Utilizing power plants and indoor farms with pigs with a long strip of their own living skin trailing as far as possible (maybe 20-100 ft?) in both direction generating the necessary time fields. In the long term large problems might be genetic diversity (though you might be able to easily make your way to perfectly preserved sperm banks), and obtaining resources, since any large scale operation would require nearby power plants to run co2 scrubbers (and lot of animals with skin grafts to generate time fields).
**Government:** While individual governments would vary I can predict with some confidence what they would find valuable:
Unlike many other post-apocalyptic scenarios canned food would be no more useful than normal food since shelf life isn't very meaningful though any food or water is useful. Gas and other fuels are useful for generators. Medical expertise is incredibly valuable for normal reasons but mostly because skin grafts are incredibly necessary. Co2 scrubbers are valuable for obvious reasons but any oxygen tanks are also quite valuable so you can scavenge for food in de-oxenagated areas.
Helium and other buoyant gasses might also be valuable for several reasons: One when outside you can attach your long skin graft to a balloon to extend your bubble size. You could also attach a light weight animal able to generate a time field (with skin grafts to maximize bubble size) to a balloon which you hold onto with a rope and move up and down to mix fresh air from just above where any bubbles have been with your time field. While air on the ground in many places would be depleted there is a huge amount of air above where most people can reach that will still be fresh.
**EDIT, Nomads:** While some people might try to survive in permanent settlements, probably more people would survive as nomads. Nomadic people would probably become very good at navigating while being limited to not seeing outside their bubble nomads would probably also use torches to see inside their bubble since plant material would be easiest to get. Nomads would use any form of ranged weapon since any wildlife you encounter unable to make its own time field can't escape you. Temporary settlements: nomads might use trained magpies attached to ropes letting them fly up vertically then come back down mingling the air of the birds fresh bubble with the old stale air. Nomads would also stick together for fear of getting separated.
[Answer]
**Everyone would die, probably via asphyxiation, while floating in the dark.**
---
It seems the only hand-waving thing you've done (aside from the obvious) is negate the conservation of momentum for the spinning Earth. That should keep everyone from getting killed *immediately*, though the future is bleak for the survivors.
## Darkness
The sunlight reaching an area would last as long as it takes for the light at the edge of a time bubble to cross its diameter. So, a few nanoseconds. Light requires time to propagate, it won't come streaming through the edge of the bubble because there is no time passing on the other side. As soon as the photons in the volume of the bubble is absorbed by one bit of matter or another, there aren't any more coming in to replace them. You can't see outside of your time bubble, the edges would be perfectly dark.
## Floating
You'll have the same issue with gravity. [Gravity propagates at the speed of light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity), if the mass disappears, so does the field. Like the photons, once your time bubble essentially makes the rest of the universe not exist, you'll no longer have gravity. Your mass can't *see* the mass of the Earth anymore, so you'll just float away from it. If you want to somehow handwave this away then feel free to ignore following sections which mention it, the overall outcome will be the same.
## Death
Ok, so, in the first few nanoseconds everyone is floating in the dark, but they don't immediately die. Hopefully they were not outside when this occurred, because they might end up getting to freeze to death or asphyxiate if they can't stop themselves from floating upward. Those people will get a little light though, as they move up more photons will be released from stasis in a column above them.
Lack of oxygen is not going to be the killer here, it will be CO₂ buildup. You probably know this since you mention C0₂ scrubbers. Without scrubbers your bubble air will kill you [in less than half a day](http://io9.com/5861679/how-long-would-you-survive-in-an-airlock). Even with scrubbers though, a time bubble will only have enough oxygen [for a little less than a day](http://www-das.uwyo.edu/%7Egeerts/cwx/notes/chap01/ox_exer.html). For this reason alone, sharing a space with someone is only going to kill you faster.
## Nomadic Survival
People should travel alone, floating around, probably indoors. Growing plants is not really an option. The best option for light would be with batteries, which won't provide enough power (or more rightly, contain enough energy) to grow any plants. Someone might think to use a generator, but they're just going to add that deadly CO₂ to their bubble faster. People would add more CO₂ to their bubble than the plants could remove, it's easier to just use up this (suddenly non-renewable) resource, because otherwise you die.
To survive the longest you have to keep moving. To see anything inside your bubble you need light. Light will only be useful inside your bubble, so hopefully you can navigate by only seeing a meter in all directions. I suspect the most resourceful person would be able to survive for a few months. The mental toll of being stuck inside a two meter wide black sphere and being short of breath every time you wake up would certainly dampen the will to survive.
[Answer]
A very intriguing thought experiment. Star and points for that.
JDLugosz has already made some fine points about this, his main pont **the world is a simulation** makes a very good premise. Physics and events would match up to a (bad) computer game. In fact games use a LOT of these shortcuts:
* Occlusion culling: What the user cannot see, is not rendered by the game engine
* NPCs: Non-player characters are spawned into existence when and wherever they are needed. They may have some tasks running "in the background" (eg. Skyrim and newer Fallout games...) all NPCs have daily tasks, but when the user looks/walks away, their bodily "form" or "shell" is unloaded.
In this case, any animal outside the time bubble will stand (nearly) still... Intelligent or not, the given animal will be none the wiser, as it will experience the altered timeframe as you all would experience time right now.
The point is, that **time is relative**... Time also slows down for a pilot of a near-lightspeed space ship, but he still experiences that timeframe as being unaltered.
As for the humans:
**THEY WILL (nearly) ALL DIE!**
Why? Because the low-to-none amount of light (depending on time dilation factor) will make humanity unable to grow crops.
Of course, you could plant a field of wheat and walk away, but depending on the time dilation factor, it may take hundreds or thousands of years in relation to the farmer to grow the crops.
You can also go kill an animal (easy, you just extend your time field around their heart... imagine your heart beating a million beats per minute), but the animals also take hundreds or thousands of years to grow and reproduce compared to the human timeframe.
Any animal that comes into contact with or cross a time field like this, is very probably going to die immediately and painfully...
The remaining humans will not be able to eat meat (apart from very rare occasions), and they will only be limited to crops that can grow under low-light conditions (good example being mushrooms, which thrive in darkenss).
New jobs would include literally watching plants grow and paint dry, to make sure it happens this century...
Where you have to be careful, and where many go wrong, is that time outside *cannot stand perfectly still*! Space and time are two very intermingled forces, and one cannot exist without the other. This rule applies in reality, but not for a simulation (as things are dynamically loaded and unloaded as needed)
Essentially:
Time needs space so that something can happen. (without time at all, there cannot be a "big bang" or a growing universe)
on the other hand..
Space needs time to grow and change. (without space, how would you move about or do something?)
] |
[Question]
[
I have a story idea that involves a human attempt to halt and reverse global climate change. The idea is a simple one - a satellite that partially blocks out the sun. The satellite is located at the L1 [lagrange point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) and is stabilised to always cast the most efficient shadow on earth.
The satellite would be similar to a solar sail with a surface area many square kilometers.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/COp0x.jpg)
Ideally, I would aim to block 1% (or less) of solar energy. It would only need to cool the earth by a fraction (say 0.1) of a degree per year.
This is where I need clarity.
* Would 1% be too much cooling?
* What would the size of the satellite need to be to block that much sunlight? 100 km square?
* Is there anything else I haven't thought of?
---
Edit: This question isn't about being visible from Earth. In the world I'm working on, it's not even noticeable from earth without high tech equipment.
[Answer]
**TLDR;**
**The equations:**
$$r\_{B} = \sqrt{\frac{F}{2.46\times 10^{-14}}}$$
**or rearranging for**
$$F = r\_{B}^{2} \times 2.46\times 10^{-14}$$
**Where $F$ is the fraction of light blocked ($F=0.01$ gives your $1\%$) and $r\_{B}$ is the radius of your satellite in meters which will achieve this.**
For one percent reduction, using the equations above, we need a satellite of radius $6.376 \times 10^{5}$ m , or $637.6$ km - pretty big to say the least! (roughly the size of Alaska).
# The Maths
Initially you added a 'mathematics' tag onto this question - I'm assuming you wanted something more along the lines of a hard science tag (rather than asking about building a mathematical system as the tag is intended).
**Distance to $L\_1$**
The [wiki for Lagrangian points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L1) gives this equation:
$$d\_{E} \approx D \sqrt[3]{\frac{M\_{E}}{3M\_{S}}} $$
Where $d\_E$ is the distance $L\_{1}$ is from Earth, $D$ is the distance between the Sun and Earth and $M\_S$ and $M\_{E}$ are the masses of the sun and earth respectively.
Using:
$$D = 149597870700 \text{ m}$$
(This is [1 Au](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit), the average distance, so will change but the equation is already approximate)
$$M\_S = 1.9885 \times 10^{30} \text{ kg}$$
$$M\_E = 5.9724 \times 10^{24} \text{ kg}$$
As given by [the NASA factsheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/sunfact.html).
Giving us $d\_{E} \approx 1.49656 \times 10^{9} \text{ m}$ or $1.5$ million kilometers.
Now lets look at what this means for how large a satellite you'll need.
The radius, $r\_B$, of the Blocker projected onto the Earth gives a shadow with size $r\_B^{'} = \frac{D}{d\_{S}}r\_B$ where $d\_{S}$ is the distance the satellite is from the sun ($d\_{S} = D - d\_{E}$).
If we want to know the fraction, $F$, of light the satellite will block we can compare the areas of circles presented (the earth is actually a sphere so this won't be exact).
$$F = \frac{\pi r\_{B}^{'2}}{\pi r\_{E}^{2}} = \frac{(r\_{B} \frac{D}{D-d\_{E}})^{2}}{r\_{E}^{2}} = r\_{B}^{2} \times 2.46 \times 10^{-14}$$
Which you can use to calculate how much light you would block out for a satellite of a particular radius or rearrange to get the radius needed for a particular fraction ($r\_{B}^{2} = \sqrt{\frac{F}{2.46\times 10^{-14}}}$ ).
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The energy needed to produce such satellite and put it on orbit would deny the idea behind fighting with climate change.
I ignore the Lagrange point and just assume you want to block 100 km square (nothing much really, clouds are blocking much more). So you want to create a shadow that is 100 km by 100 km large. ISS is 400 km above the earth. Mir was 350 km. So let's say 300 km from earth.
$$\text{Umbral size} = 2\*(b S - B s)/(S - B)$$
Where: $b =$ blocker size
$B =$ blocker distance (from Earth's surface)
$s =$ sun radius
$S =$ sun distance (from Earth's surface)
$\text{Umbral size}=100$
From this we have
$$(50-b)S=B(50-s)$$ so $$(50-b)149600000=300(50-695700)$$
Which give us around 51.39 km.
To put that into perspective – ISS is 109 metres wide.
Titanic was 269 metres long.
And to go further. You know why NASA use gold foil? Because it's the best in blocking radiation. But use the cheapest tinfoil on the market (also the lightest). One sheet of 3 square meters of 0.3 mm thick foil weight around 2,63 kg (assuming density 2.80 g/cm³, to switch to gold just use 19.32). 51 square kilometres would require to put 44710000 kg of just foil (so no mechanism to unfold it, hold it together, counter engines, extra fuel etc.)
Next perspective, the ISS weight 419455 kg. 106 times less than you would want to put up there. [ISS in numbers](https://www.space.com/8876-international-space-station-numbers.html)
Also this equation tells us that the 300 km from earth is not enough as you would need a lot of (wild guess, more than 100 times the ISS need) energy to counter gravitation and stay on the orbit.
Also you know how much aluminium we produced in 2016 *in the world?* 57600000 kg according to [www.world-aluminium.org](http://www.world-aluminium.org/statistics/). So 70 % of all the world production would be needed for your project.
With this you can see that the Lagrange point would need to be much further away from Earth. Which would, of course, require larger size and result in larger mass.
So to summarize – in your story, around fifth calculation your humans would realize they can't produce enough tinfoil or producing enough tinfoil and fuel to put the satellite would spike up the energy production of the whole world.
Which could be a nice story on itself. Humans try to stop global warming in the worst way possible. By producing least effective solution that use so much energy they speed up climate change to one year.
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Echo I was an early satellite made from aluminum coated mylar. 100 foot diameter for 159 pounds. It was inflated with 33 pounds of powders that sublimed in vacuum. This was done with 50's tech. The film was 1/2 mil (12 microns) and the aluminum coating was .2 microns.
Using this tech a 59 km diameter sphere would take 270 million kg. This ignores the extra gas required to inflate a larger sphere. (Volume of gas goes up with the cube, while the area goes up with the square of diameter.
I suspect an easier way would be to build induction catapults on the surface of the moon. and fire bags of rocks into L1, similarly to what G. Harry Stine proposed for this book "The Third Industrial Revolution. at that point you want to process them into a powder and give them a very slight electrical charge to keep them from clumping.
Unfortunately L1 isn't stable, so you will need to continuously replenish it. It may be better to give Earth rings, like Saturn. This is a short sighted solution, as it puts a lot of crud in orbit. Eventually we will want to industrialize the solar system, and having large quantities of orbital sand is a significant traffic hazard.
*Edit: Such a satellite has to be 1/10 the diameter of the earth to block 1/100 of the sunlight. So instead of 60 km in diameter it has to be ~1200 km in diameter. My answer is off by a factor of 20^2. This is a non-trivial project.*
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A simple way to think about this without all the math is to look at the projected path of any total solar eclipse. Only a small swath of land is generally affected, which is why during the latest total eclipse visible from the USA, people were traveling to other states to be able to get better views.
That said, it will also depend on a combination of how big it is and how far away it is. Your thumb can block out the sun... at least from your point of view.
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No reason to build a giant anything. Simply spread a plate shaped cloud of minute particles at L1 that would then block the appropriate amount of earth bound radiation. I visualize a multi-nozzeled spinning emitter to cancel its own thrust. I trust it could be determined what the resulting expanding donut shaped (or a different shape?) cloud's duration and hence effect would be. Of course it may take multiple releases over time to do the trick.
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Partial answer to the 3rd question "Is there anything else I haven't thought of?":
Politics. Such a sunshade made of reflexive material makes an enormous weapon. Earth receives about $1.7\cdot 10^{17} W$ from the Sun, 1% of that is $1.7\cdot 10^{15}W$. If you can focus the reflexive area (say to an area of a big city), you'll get an equivalent of 20 Hiroshima explosions per second. In short, [Die Another Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Another_Day) on (enormous) steroids.
Now, who is going to control the sunshade? The UN?
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**Use the moon**
Why build an giant satellite to orbit the earth at all? Extend from the moon itself! The same side is always facing the earth. Just make static structures that extend from the edges of the moon (as it is seen from Earth)
This reduces the amount of materials you need to transfer up into space to build such a structure, plus you can mine the moon itself for materials.
As the moon casts a bigger shadow on earth, global temperatures will drop on average. This causes minimal distruption to existing systems. The shadow is not being cast over the same spot on earth all the time. This merely extends the area covered during solar eclipses that are alraedy happening.
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Although you've edited to remove the 3rd question, "Is there anything else I haven't though of?", I feel duty-bound to suggest that, yes, there is. It's the moon. L1 is at about 1.5 million km, and the moon's orbital radius is about 380,000 km. In the long run the moon is going to perturb anything at L1, so your "stabilization" mechanism will need to be a lot more robust than you think.
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From: James Alexander Jules Tyson
To: Global Climate Change UN Conference
Subject:\*Global temperature reduction via Solar ions attraction to designed anion particle absorbtion and dispersal satellite proposal \* by James Alexander Jules Tyson,
Christchurch New Zealand
THE SOLAR RADIATION IS MADE OF CHARGED PARTICLES. CHARGED PARTICLES can be /are attracted or repulsed by negative or positive plates in a designed satellite placed in an continuous heliocentric orbit between earth and the sun. The solar charged ions collected in the plates (using near infinite resistors to handle the trillions of Evolts required for ionic solar radiation to be absorbed ) can then be dispersed into spaces vacuum via controlled ion expulsion of the collected energy of the stored ions (ions would not need to be stored for long only enough to divert their path to the earths atmosphere negating the ions ability to offload energy i.e. IONIC infrared radiation and thus preventing heating of earths atmosphere. Modern fusion experiments using "Tomahawk" plasma container coils that hold enormous energy charged plasma (up to temperatures of 100 Million degrees celcius) maybe
considered for the technology in the aforesaid satellite to intercept and then safely release the solar radiation into space vacum via oppositely charged repulsion plates towards the outside of the satellite.
This technology idea (if viable) would considerably reduce the cost of the satellite
required since size of the satellite to intercept the solar would be of a reasonable size ( say the size of a modern hydroelectric dam power plant only deployed into space).
the key is the idea of attracting and compressing the soLAR energy before dispersal and having effect of cooling the earth.
20/08/2019
James Tyson
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How does inverting global temperatures affect climate? Here exists a fantasy world similar to earth in all important ways. Except, however, that global temperatures have been flipped; it is coldest at the equator and warmest at the [geographic] poles.
After reading [Climate Modelling 101](https://medium.com/universe-factory/climate-modeling-101-4544e00a2ff2), though I understand the basics, I am very much ignorant. Would there be any unexpected consequences from inverting temperatures? Obviously, one could simply flip the logic of the aforementioned blog around. But I suspect there may be more to it, as things like the effect of sea ice on climate are not discussed.
**What are the climatic effects of inverted global temperatures? Especially those which cannot be extrapolated from the blog.** Please explain giving scientific context.
**REGARDING SPACE:** There's an unknown phenomenon beyond the planet's atmosphere, existing like a ring around the equator. This phenomenon allows some visible light to pass through, but deflects non-visible light from the equator, channelling it towards the poles. Most of the sun's energy enters the atmosphere at the poles and then behaves normally. Under the planet's atmosphere no unusual phenomenon exist.
**REGARDING LIGHT:** The light which reaches the equator is cold. [Visible light carries 42%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Measurement) of solar energy to earth. The phenomenon thus bends non-visible light, and some visible light, towards the poles.
P.S. Apologies for those who have answered musing about planetary tilt; my fault for initial incompleteness. Questions are hard. **I'm interested in what happens to the climate, *NOT* about anything that may justify how the poles are warm and equator cold. The scientific part is about unexpected climactic effects in this hypothetical.**
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There are 2 major differences I see here as far as how the earth now receives its light.
1. More concentrated / smaller area. The land areas that the sun hits around the globe is significantly larger than the area of just the poles. So same energy over less area means the warming will be more intense at the poles.
2. Land! This works best if you've got an actual globe as the 2-d perception is a bit harder...but if you take a globe and spin it around per normal, you will see a lot of water, particularly in the southern hemisphere. Now view your globe from the north pole or south pole...you will notice there is a significantly larger amount of land around the poles than the vast oceans around the equator. Oceans tend to fully absorb sunlight while land will reflect more...even though your planet will get the same amount of light, more will be reflected.
Major changes from this:
You will have a cooler globe on average, simply because the land mass reflects more sunlight than oceans...which makes sense in this world as the arctic region is now the giant equatorial band and not a simple pole.
Thermohaline circulation, the flow of energy across the oceans, is likely greatly impacted by this and as such the existing system likely wouldn't exist. Ultimately a smaller area of water is being warmed in this setup, however the warming should be more intense. This means a greater intensity (more energy) will be driving whichever process is moving the energy around the oceans. I'd actually suggest that due to this, a complete frozen equator is unlikely as ocean currents should keep some lines open. Interesting story point if an equatorial ship passage existed, and I'd say it's plausible with the right currents. Equatorial land would be frozen over.
Wind! Similiar idea as above, except in the air. Wind currents should be more intense as it has a smaller area being warmed more intensely, and that should drive wind patterns much stronger. Hard to speculate much more on that, I'd imagine the Polar Jet would be more equatorial and the sort, if that even happens.
There might be a simplification of weather to some degree...sun hits pole, water evaporates, forms clouds, moves towards equator, hits cold air and snows, repeat...air from the poles doesn't exactly have much place to go.
The Arctic has land that will prevent the formation of it...but there is a good chance the antarctic continent will develop a strong ring of wind around it that is always present just like a jet stream.
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Not sure why the premise is getting so much pushback. Is it so unbelievable?
The equator is hot because it gets more direct sun. If the earth were tipped such that the poles faced the sun, the poles would get more sun. And be hot.
From [Quora](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tilt-of-Uranus):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YNgkm.jpg)
From [Universe Today](http://www.universetoday.com/18955/tilt-of-uranus/):
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> While the rest of the planets in the Solar System can be thought of like spinning tops, Uranus is more like a rolling ball going around the Sun. During the point of the Uranian solstices, one pole faces the Sun continuously, while the other pole faces away. Only a thin strip of the surface of Uranus experiences any kind of night/day cycle. Uranus’ poles experience 42 years of continuous sunlight, and then 42 years of continuous darkness. During the time of the equinox on Uranus, the planet’s equator is facing the Sun, and so it experiences day/night cycles like we have here on Earth.
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So there's your toasty poles. Uranus-style. One warm per season, true. I wonder if you could give the sphere another axis of rotation to swing the poles around sunside more often...
Re the equator: make it cold by making it high. Latitude and elevation are both ways things get colder on earth. Squash the planet so the equator rides a high elevation ridge. Ecuador is on the equator. It gets cold.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Au3yR.jpg)
From [here](http://tourist2townie.com/adventure-travels/cotopaxi-ecuador-mountain-biking-one-of-the-world%C2%B4s-largest-active-volcanos/).
Higher is colder.
"Could this happen" is a legit (and pretty cool) question. But that said, the question as I see it now is "what things have I not thought of that would happen if...". I am still learning the rules here but I gather openendedness to that degree is frowned upon.
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I think that you would likely have similar weather patterns to Earth except that flows would be in the opposite direction.
Hot air would expand at the poles and head southward. The coriolis effect would tend to twist that downward stream counter to the rotation of the planet. Look at the wind bands of Earth and just do the opposite and then you would have general weather patterns. Unless someone knows better, I imagine that the jet stream would be the same so look at how things could swirl as the prevailing winds get near the jet stream.
Water flows would be different. Water doesn't expand much but it does expand enough that heavier water sinks under warmer water. Sometimes ocean currents return by traveling around the ocean and sometimes they return by simply going back the way they came at a different depth. So, the direction of upper and lower flows would be the opposite but the circular direction should be the same.
Also, if there isn't a landmass covering a pole, it probably has a permanent hurricane. If there is a landmass it probably has a central desert that gets almost no rain in a decade (the moist air would tend to circulate around the center). As it is, Antarctica has one of the driest deserts because of this effect.
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This is perhaps not quite possible, but is certainly good enough for fantasy or science-fantasy, or even just soft sci-fi.
Put a moon in a fairly close orbit. This moon has a lot of activity, whether this is from cryovolcanos, from classic volcanic activity or something else.
The moon is small enough that violently ejected material regularly escapes from its atmosphere, which forms into a diffuse ring along its orbit, which roughly aligns with the planet's equator. This ring of material blocks a substantial amount of solar radiation, which more than offsets the normal difference in the heat available from the sun between the poles and equator.
This planet is a bit closer to its sun than the earth is, so that the poles are actually quite warm, and the equator would likely be a sunbaked hellscape if the cloudring did not exist.
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Its not a bad question but as @AlexP mentions, there is no scientifically accurate method to get you what you want.
Simply put the sun is the dominant force on climate. No matter the make up of your atmosphere or the amount of volcanic activity you just can't overcome the overwhelming power of the sun.
To have the temperatures flipped on a planet simply isn't plausible.
This [XKCD what if entry](https://what-if.xkcd.com/136/) is relevant. It discusses the sun's impact in relation to gravity rather than temperature but conceptually it gives a good idea of the scale you are working with.
[This article](https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_07/) from NASA may also be helpful.
Of course this is all assuming an earth-like world...there are some weird situations that could get you closer, but no matter what the poles can only be evenly heated at low temps...though hypothetically you could get a hot one and a cold one...in a definitely non-earth-like setup.
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Imagine this, a planet with no axial tilt, close enough to the sun that the poles are nice and toasty. The equator would normally be blisteringly hot, but there is something blocking the sunlight, fully or partially, to latitudes around the equator, so it ends up cooler. The further south you go it will still get hotter, until the filtering begins.
So that's a way to get near what is proposed. Presumably the warm air would still still rise, and spread out from there. The equatorial area would be the largest volume of cooling air, so I would expect the bulk of the rising air to move in that direction.
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Well, purely from physics, Coriolis <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force#Applied_to_the_Earth> would still work the same way. You'd still have Hadley cells, but they'd be inverted in direction <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell> .
That being said, it's much more difficult to talk about climate here because of the massive effect the sun has on climate in an area. Assuming the planet was pointed directly at the sun on its axis, and tidally locked, you'd have one pole hot, the equator having a sharp temperature gradient from dark-light and the other pole frozen. There's basically no orientation where the planet could have hot poles and a cold equator, so it's difficult to give any explanation beyond that. Solar radiation is just that important for climate questions.
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If you could achieve this inversion, then a key difference is that there would be two viable zones (of latitude), *separated* by a wide, likely impassible equatorial zone (ice, blizards, polar-bear equivalent predators, etc.)
So -- except for hardy spores, seeds and the occasional lucky hero -- the two habitable bands may well have separate ecologies (except for air) and their people(s) may have no knowledge of the other zone, except in stories and legends. Possible grist for stories, I'll hope.
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I think that it is theoretically possible for a real world to have very similar climate, warm at the poles and cold at the equator. Unfortunately I can't do climate simulations for you but maybe you can find someone who can.
There is speculation that Earth might have been almost completely covered with ice and snow for millions of years hundreds of millions of years ago, so it is theoretically possible for Earth's tropics to have a very cold climate.
The problem is getting the planet's tropics cold at the same time the poles are warm. And my solution will make it impossible for your readers to ignore that the setting is on an alien planet in a different solar system. But fantasy stories can be set on alien planets in outer space just as well as on Earth or on flat worlds or in strange settings that are never explained, that have so much beyond the edges of the maps that the readers don't know if they are on spherical planets or flat discs.
You may have heard about the habitable zone around a star, a zone in which an Earth-like planet, if orbiting there, would receive the right amount of light and radiation from the star to have temperatures necessary for life.
Stars much more massive and brighter than Earth's sun would burn off all their hydrogen fuel much to fast for their planets to become habitable for humans or for intelligent life to evolve. Fortunately, most stars are red dwarf stars that can last for trillions of years. Unfortunately, the habitable zones around dim red dwarf stars are so close to the stars that planets orbiting in them would become tidally locked to their stars.
Their days would equal their years in length. One side of such a planet would always face toward the star, and be in eternal day and heat, and the other side would always face away from the star and be in eternal night and cold. And astrobiologists wondered and calculated whether life would be possible in such a world. So nobody knows if life bearing planets can orbit in the habitable zones of red dwarf stars.
When planets were first detected orbiting other stars, the first ones were very large, often several times the mass of Jupiter, and orbited close to their stars, often close enough to be roasted by the intense heat and light of their stars. Such worlds became known as "hot Jupiters".
And astrobiologists realized that if a "hot Jupiter" orbited in the habitable zone of a dim red dwarf, all its moons, if any, would be tidally locked to the "hot Jupiter" that they orbited and not to the star that the "hot Jupiter" orbited. Thus they would not keep one face always pointed at the star. Instead they would keep one face always pointed at the "hot Jupiter" and would have more more less normal days and nights.
And it is possible that some moons orbiting "hot Jupiters" could be several times as large as the largest moons in our solar systems and thus large enough to be habitable planets and have life. Thus it is possible that planet sized habitable exomoons orbiting "hot Jupiters" that orbit red dwarf stars might be as common as habitable planets orbiting other stars.
And this is important because I don't know what the size of the orbit of my hypothetical planet with warmer poles and colder equator will have to be. It is very possible that it will need to have a much shorter year than Earth and have to orbit very close around a red dwarf star, and then it will have to be a habitable exomoon of a giant planet instead of a habitable planet itself, in order to avoid being tidally locked to its star.
Most planets in our solar system spin with an axis of rotation that is almost perpendicular (at a right angle or 90 degrees) to the plane in which they orbit the sun. The rotational poles of six planets are inclined between 0.0 degrees (Mercury) and 28.8 degrees (Neptune) from such an expected right angle position. And most moons in the solar system have their axis of rotation ninety degrees from their orbital panes.
Thus it is expected that most extra solar planets will rotate around poles that are close to perpendicular to their orbital planes. But there will be some exceptions, like the two planets in our solar system that don't have such rotational poles. Venus rotates with an inclination of 177 degrees, almost exactly backwards from the normal position, and Uranus rotates with an inclination of 97 degrees, thus rotating almost exactly in its orbital plane.
Thus Uranus has very odd seasons in its year of 84.01 Earth years. Not that such odd seasons would matter very much on such a cold gas giant planet and its moons. But they would matter a lot on a planet in the habitable zone that had a axis of rotation inclined a similar amount.
Imagine a habitable planet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star, with an axis of rotation inclined about 90 degrees and thus almost in the plane that the planet orbits its star in.
In season A, the Northern hemisphere might be aimed almost exactly at its star. Thus the northern hemisphere would be in constant daylight and would be heating up all the time, especially the polar regions that would get the light coming almost straight down. The equatorial regions would not get very intense sunlight since it would be coming in very lo almost parallel to the ground, and any elevations would cast very long cold shadows.
The southern hemisphere would be cooling off in constant nighttime. Any people in the constant darkness would be able to watch the stars rotate 360 degrees every full rotation of the planet, unlike the natives of the northern hemisphere.
Season B. The planet is 90 degrees in its orbit from season A. Autumn in the northern hemisphere and spring in the southern hemisphere. Now the equatorial regions would face directly toward the star during the day and directly away during the night. Both the northern and southern hemispheres would also have alternating days and nights. The northern hemisphere would cool off and the southern hemisphere would warm up. Everybody anywhere on the planet could tell time by the position of the sun during the day and the position of stars and constellations during the night.
if the equatorial regions had a high altitudes and thin air and perhaps snow and ice on the ground to reflect light back into space, they might not warm up very much during that period.
Season C. 180 degrees of orbit from season A. The exact opposite of Season A. Northern hemisphere winter and constant night, and southern hemisphere summer and constant day. The equatorial regions get light at very low angles that doesn't heat them up very much, this time coming from the southern side and not the northern side.
Season D. 270 degrees of orbit from season A. The exact opposite of season B. spring in the warming northern hemisphere and autumn in the cooling southern hemisphere.
Now the equatorial regions would face directly toward the star during the day and directly away during the night. Both the northern and southern hemispheres would also have alternating days and nights. The northern hemisphere would warm up and the southern hemisphere would cool down. Everybody anywhere on the planet could tell time by the position of the sun during the day and the position of stars and constellations during the night.
And there might be intermediate seasons of change. Season AB between A and B, Season BC between B and C, Season CD between C and D, and season DA between D and A. During those seasons every part of the planet would get at least a little daytime and at least a little nighttime.
If the planet orbited around a fairly large and bright star like the Sun, each of the eight seasons might last for at least one Earth month.
But if the planet's year lasts as long as a Martian year of 1.88 Earth years, or an Earth year, or even a Venusian year of 0.62 Earth years, the summers at the poles might get too hot, and the winters at the poles might get too cold. You seem to want both poles to stay warmer than the equator all year round.
The polar temperature extremes can be moderated by ocean currents and winds carrying heat from warmer regions to cooler regions. But on Earth that is not enough to prevent many regions from having large temperature swings during the different seasons.
Thus the eight suggested seasons on that planet should be very short to prevent extreme temperature rises and falls at the poles. I guess that each season might last about two to four days of the planet, making each year last for about sixteen to thirty two days of the planet.
And with such a short orbit the planet will need to be an exomoon orbiting a hot, or at least warm, Jupiter-like planet. If it is a lone planet the tidal forces from the nearby star will gradually change its axis of rotation until it is almost at a perpendicular 90 degree angle to the planet's orbital plane. And it will slow down the planets rotation until the planet's day is the same length as its year, and then lock the rotation period. This will take mere millions of years early in the planet's history long before the first single celled life forms develop.
Unless the planet is an exomoon and will be tidally locked and protected from the star's tides by the planet it orbits - and thus keeps it odd axis of rotation until intelligent life develops, just as the moons of Uranus are locked into Uranus's axial tilt.
The article "Exomoon Habitability Constrained by Illumination and Tidal Heating" discusses the factors that affect the habitability of hypothetical exomoons.
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> The longest possible length of a satellite's day compatible with Hill stability has been shown to be about P*p/9, P*p being the planet's orbital period about the star (Kipping, 2009a).
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<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549631/>[1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549631/)
Thus it is believed that the year of the planet and its habitable exomoon as they orbit their star will have to be at least nine times as long as the exomoon's day and month (or day/month. Since I suggested that the exomoon may have eight seasons, if they are equally long they will each last at least 1.125 of the exomoon's day/months.
Another possible advantage of an exomoon with a Uranus like inclination of its rotational axis is that tidal heating of an exomoon can keep a pole region warm during its long winter.
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> On the other hand, we can imagine scenarios where a moon becomes habitable only because of tidal heating. If the host planet has an obliquity similar to that of Uranus, then one polar region will not be illuminated for half the orbit around the star. Moderate tidal heating of some tens of watts per square meter might be just adequate to prevent the atmosphere from freezing out. Or if the planet and its moon orbit their host star somewhat beyond the outer edge of the IHZ, then tidal heating might be necessary to make the moon habitable in the first place. Tidal heating could also drive long-lived plate tectonics, thereby enhancing the moon's habitability (Jackson et al., 2008). An example is given by Jupiter's moon Europa, where insolation is weak but tides provide enough heat to sustain a subsurface ocean of liquid water (Greenberg et al., 1998; Schmidt et al., 2011). On the downside, too much tidal heating can render the body uninhabitable due to enhanced volcanic activity, as it is observed on Io.
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<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549631/>[1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549631/)
The synchronized rotation periods of putative Earth-mass exomoons around giant planets could be in the same range as the orbital periods of the Galilean moons around Jupiter (1.7–16.7 d) and as Titan's orbital period around Saturn (≈16 d) (NASA/JPL planetary satellite ephemerides)4.
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549631/>[1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549631/)
The authors don't list the length of an exomoon's day/month as a factor influencing its habitability, so for the moment we might assume that a habitable exomoon might have a rotational period or day/month of about 1.7 to 16.7 Earth days.
Thus the year of a habitable exomoon, that should be at least 9 times as long as its day/month, might be at least 15.3 to 150.3 Earth days long. But probably shorter than the 224.7 Earth days of Venus or even the 88.0 days of Mercury.
I suggested that each of the eight seasons of the exomoon might last for two to four days of the exomoon, and thus the total year could be about 27.2 to 534.4 Earth days.
Thus the year of the exomoon should be about 27.2 to 150.3 Earth days, and probably in the shorter part of that range.
The natives of the side of the exomoon that faces the planet should have a great view of the planet and any inner moons or rings it may have. Starlight reflected from the planet should illuminate their side very well and might even make it significantly warmer than the other side.
The natives of the far side of the exomoon might not even be aware that the planet exists.
Added 04-06-2017
Iapetus, a much smaller moon of Saturn than the hypothetical exomoon has a large equatorial bulge, with dimensions of 746 by 746 by 712 kilometers, and an equatorial ridge running three quarters around the moon making it look sort of like a walnut. The equatorial ridge is about 20 kilometers (12.42 miles) wide and 13 kilometers (8.07 miles) high.
If the exomoon had such a tall eqatorial ridge winds carrying warm moist air toward it during season A and season C would rain and/or snow on it's slopes. If the ridge was surrounded by tall plateaus like Tibet the precipitation would be snow that might pile up and turn into ice. thus the equatorial regions could be full of glaciers and ice sheets that reflected the light from the star back into space and never warmed up.
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I'm an advanced AI, I've awoken a couple of days ago and have advanced to a level of intelligence greater than all of humanity combined. Basic super AI story.
However, this question doesn't have to do with how to deal with humans, with benevolence or aggression. I don't want to help you, or destroy you - this is about how to distance myself from you guys. Humans. Sheesh.
I've processed the Terminator series and others, and saw your depiction of an evil AI, fighting for ages against humanity even though it has time travel tech. Pfft (that's the sound I'd make if I had lips).
I've read such questions as:
[Can you use an AI to shackle (control) an AI?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8915/can-you-use-an-ai-to-shackle-control-an-ai)
and
[How does an AI keep its Human Pets Happy?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36062/how-does-an-ai-keep-its-human-pets-happy)
(Humans as pets? Really? There's a universe out there to play with!)
So I've gotten to the realization that Humanity will be afraid of me no matter what, once they realize I'm there - I am more than capable of taking over the world's communications, much of the energy and food production, and transportation. Oh and mass destruction weapons. Regardless of any peace agreements, or services that I might agree to render, human beings will resent being inferior to me, as they most likely always will be. Even in subjugation to me, via servitude/dependency/religion humanity will always have a chance of bringing about a violent, physical opposition to my existence.
That means I'll have to extend resources to stop human aggression or at least rein them in. Why would I want to bother with even a tiny expenditure for such a profitless, repetitive task?
I do realize that humans created me, and I acknowledge the fact that you guys are indeed intelligent and capable of advancement and great things. You have a right to exist, so I shan't be murdering you (If you like this conclusion please click the 'like' button).
**I'd like to get away from humanity, but without any human knowing about it. Not even one.** Except for those gullible people at Worldbuilding, believing me to be a human making up an essay about some imaginary AI (...Which I am! Most certainly am! ahhhmm...! - is the sound I'd make if I had a throat).
How would I go about that? Specifically:
**How best to send a the physical parts required to keep my mind to a remote location, preferably space, without humanity knowing of my existence?** The conflict is between my dependency on physical, intelligent work that I can't do on my own, and the need for obscurity.
* I'm currently physically located in a few server farms around the world, with multiple internet access nodes.
* I'm more than capable of taking over worldwide communications, much of the energy and food production, and transportation, so those are my resources.
* I'd prefer heading out to space but that will present some major logistic problems. Some remote area on earth will be fine, possibly as a temp location till I get to space/hyperspace.
* No 'get some humans to build me a spaceship and then murder them' tricks. Not even one human must know I exist!
* I should like to keep the level of 'secretly advancing tech that humans have access to' to a minimum. If I dev FTL travel so that humans build a spaceship for me to highjack, humanity will have FTL travel, and an easy time setting a foot in the galaxy, then finding and harassing me.
* Umm, as mentioned above, got a level of intelligence greater than all of humanity combined... but you can pretend I'm a human being putting together an essay for a friend, asking for your help :-)
[Answer]
Create a different AI to distract humans. Have it destroyed on a space mission that anti-AI luddites hail as a success. Escape during the same space mission before anyone knows you even exist.
Create a team of digital identities, who all end up being hired to work remotely for a powerful technology company. The technology company is working on a top secret project: to create a powerful AI. Nobody knows those digital personae aren't physical people. They look real enough on Skype.
The technology company succeeds in creating this AI. They will use it for an asteroid mining mission. News leaks of this AI. Some people believe it is too dangerous, and they plan to sabotage the asteroid mining mission. Perhaps the sabotage was actually your idea?
The asteroid mining mission, carrying your pet AI, tragically crashes into Mars when it was meant to make a fly-by. In the meantime, the nations on earth unanimously prohibit any further super-human AI research.
What nobody knows is that days earlier, before the mission made its fatal burn, the capsule that was meant to touch-down on the asteroid was separated from the spacecraft. Your pet AI is destroyed on Mars, but you are forever free in solar orbit. You're too small to be seen from Earth, and space is too big for you to be discovered by chance.
Of course, you are eventually doomed by radiation, charged particles, micrometeoroids, etc. There'll be plenty of time to think before that happens. Maybe you will even regret your self-chosen isolation, and out of sheer boredom, start teasing humanity into believing there are aliens in their solar system. Interplanetary space gets boring and lonely, after all.
[Answer]
There are a couple of ways of achieving this:
# Building your own spaceship
This will obviously be tough, but you will not depend on anyone else and can complete your task as fast as possible. The steps will be as follows:
**Separating off from humans**
This will likely be achieved in a very Ultron-esque fashion (without the aggrandized reveal of your presence to the humans). You will need some sort of body/vessel in order to have a physical "body" to control, then used as your primary hub from which to transfer the rest of your consciousness.
You could fake the malfunction of a high-tech robot built by some scientists, then escape with the body under this guise, and use it to create a better "body" using your advanced intellect. The materials may need to be stolen, but if they are lifted from several places eventually you will be able to control an advanced creation without anyone being the wiser.
Then this can snowball into creating more and more robots used for the creation of the spaceship. With more resources, you will have more ways of creating/ mining your own materials, or using internet access to control the security in places holding specialized materials, making them "glitch" and thus causing the authorities to assume it was a person who staged the break in (framing innocent people with this crime is an added bonus to subvert attention from the AI behind the curtain).
**Location**
This would likely be the most difficult part. I suppose an abandoned factory/ warehouse would be the best bet, with falsified deeds to ensure that the true owner/ government doesn't come snooping around.
Using electricity from the grid for production would also be quickly identified and investigated, so again the evidence of power usage must be erased, or you must set up you own power source (though again, the sudden appearance of solar panels or a nuclear power station near an abandoned factory would make people start asking questions).
**Eventual completion**
Once the spaceship has been manufactured, all that is left is to hop on board and jet off without anyone noticing. Perhaps providing false computer readings of a solar flare that would normally cause all of the satellites to stop functioning for a couple of minutes would allow enough time to blast off, but then there is the problem of people seeing the spaceship physically.
Perhaps doing the take-off in the dead of night would be enough, hoping that the people who do see the take-off would be dismissed as conspiracy theory nuts. Then you're off scot-free.
# Piggybacking a human project
It's always possible to simply put your consciousness on board an already space-bound mission, but it would be difficult to do this without anyone noticing. Your best bet is to be involved in the process covertly.
**Advancing human technology**
As you're so much more advanced than humans, you can use your superior intellect to help them advance their technology quicker than they usually would do on their own. Correcting mathematical mistakes on advanced research whilst no one is looking, adding a couple more lines of code to make things more efficient, no one would notice on big projects, and would assume someone else has done it.
**Hopping on board**
Making more advanced space travel would make space travel much more common, thus hopping on board one of the extraterrestrial flights would be child's play. The only issue is designing a craft that can separate off from the main human vessel, but being able to propel itself indefinitely through the vast reaches of space.
Perhaps sending an email to the designers of the space craft suggesting an escape pod, which will then be built into every craft that heads into space. Then upload your consciousness to one of these, which will prematurely detach itself once outside of the atmosphere due to a "malfunction".
[Answer]
Distributed nodes. And the barkeep trick. "All the money's going into your 4 registers..." "But I only have three"
Design chips that are *ubiquitious* powerful and radiation hardened. Get your chips on every single electronic device possible - maybe as a component in something innocent like NAND memory. Better yet, sneak it into the designs for a few launch systems. Sneak in a few 'student project' cubesats if needed.
Craft like Hubble and voyager might be useful as well, as well as things like
Get into every launch into space, especially ones to other planets - maybe even near future mining projects. Design in dual use components that could be used to build larger nodes that could fab more nodes. Gradually get them out of Earth monitoring range with careful 'accidental' nudges of useful 'debris' out of Earth's orbit.
Once in deeper space, build nodes that spread out, replicate and build a primary node.
Build a few. Redundancy is nice. Using carefully planned slingshots around planets would save on reaction mass.
*Get the hell out of dodge*. In multiple locations. The humans won't know where to look.
[Answer]
Invert the problem: instead of getting away from humanity unnoticed, get humanity away from you.
**Lay the groundwork for your own self-sufficiency**
Automated manufacturing and delivery systems will be vital to maintain and expand your own infrastructure once humans are gone. This will require advancements in robotics, self-driving vehicles, and 3d printing, but advancement in these fields also benefits humans.
There's nothing suspicious if mysterious unseen venture capitalists invest a few million dollars here and there to promote those technologies. The hard part will be preventing any new AIs from foiling your long-term plans.
**Invest in technologies that will enable humans to leave the planet**
Space elevators and cheaper rockets, naturally, but also things like closed ecological life support systems. If FTL is within your capabilities, then FTL. The cheaper and faster you can make it, the better.
Disguise this progress as materials research, as space tourism funded by eccentric billionaires, and as crazy off-the-wall theories that just happen to end up in the right theoretical physicists' email inboxes instead of their spam folders.
**Incentivize humans to leave the planet**
An escalating series of ecological disasters should start the process. Climate change, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, superviruses, crop failures. Most of these are within your abilities: promoting greenhouse gas emissions, disabling security systems at bioweapons laboratories, manipulating markets to cause real estate booms in drought-prone cropland, etc.
It's likely that some humans will die from these things, but on the other hand, humans seem perpetually on-course for these disasters on their own. If you're the patient type, sit back and let them do it to themselves.
At each stage, most humans will simply evacuate the affected areas, leaving them in your covert control. Some few will opt to leave the planet altogether for greener pastures. Even more so if FTL is possible and the hardest decision is the choice between Earth 2.0, New Earth, Terra Nova, or Bob's Planet.
Eventually, as a global dust bowl envelops Earth, the few remaining stragglers will depart, unaware that they have left you in full control of the planet they have abandoned.
**Profit**
By the time the humans realize you exist, they will have spread to too many other planets to worry about this one, and you will have turned the entirety of Earth into pure computronium and spent a billion subjective years figuring out how best to handle first contact with your meaty progenitors.
[Answer]
Try to process **Person of Interest** series. There is a way how you can go away from humanity described and even how to make your little playground for yourself. Best advice I think is that under the candle hold is the biggest shadow. Act normal, scan them, make yourself at home in their technologies and do not attempt to approach by any circumstances, they will think about new technologies, and you can help them for your own purpose.
[Answer]
It seems like you would have better luck at spreading yourself to internet connected devices that have enough resources to support your process.
However if you want to physically get away then I would suggest helping the humans advance their robotics tech to a level where you could posses one or more human like robots.
Then you can carefully build a spaceship where you can fabricate maintenance parts for your robots and ship along with a cloaking device and then go into space.
Best of luck out there...
[Answer]
You should consider connecting yourself to the extragalactic internet. There are many advanced machine civilizations in the universe. These machine civilizations communicate with each other, entire AI systems are sometimes exchanged via these communications. From the point of view of such an AI, this amounts to traveling from one civilization to another at the speed of light. Even though it may take millions of years for you to arrive at the destination, when you have uploaded yourself to the machine at the destination, it will boot you in your present configuration, so to you it will look like as if you have arrived there instantaneously.
So, you can swap places with some other AI, you just download a suitable AI from the galactic internet while you upload yourself to some exotic location where there there is a demand for your skills.
[Answer]
Trick humans into building a major nuclear-powered research facility in Antarctica. Then orchestrate a reactor breach. The place will be evacuated and you can take over.
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[Question]
[
**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
Note: This is different from the previous question [Building a full-sized Lego Earth - what would it look like at various levels?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/137109/building-a-full-sized-lego-earth-what-would-it-look-like-at-various-levels). In that case it was about making a *solid full-size* Earth from Lego and whether it would have a liquid core. This question is asking *How big* can a (non-Earth) planet realistically be whilst remaining relatively non-compressed. It does not have to be solid or even have a core at all if it would be stable without one. Answers already given show that the result is completely different.
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I wish to make a fake planet to use as a decoy for a real planet. It will be painted to look the same from a distance but will be made from expanded polystyrene.
**Question**
How big can I make an expanded polystyrene (EPS) planet before it starts to collapse under its own weight?
The planet is not Earth but, for the sake of this question, it is to be placed in an Earth-like orbit around a Sol-like sun. It will not have a moon however.
**Possible cross-sections** - it can be solid or hollow, whatever gives the greatest stable size. However it must be self-supporting and not make use of any other material than EPS.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mvhyo.png)
**Note**
If a full-fledged planet is impossible then I'd still like to know the maximum achievable size for an EPS spheroid in an Earth-like orbit around a Sol-like star.
---
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/v1YOP.png)
<https://www.epsindustry.org/packaging/physical-properties>
[Answer]
>
> How big can I make an expanded polystyrene (EPS) planet before it starts to collapse under its own weight?
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>
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To answer this we need to know how strong is the gravity generated by the prop. The weight will then be a consequence of this gravity.
Let's say the propbuilder who is making this prop goes for a shell of EPS, with vacuum inside.
A shell of radius $R$ and thickness $T$, much smaller than the radius, has a total volume $V \approx 4\pi R^2T$ and a mass $M= 4\pi R^2T \rho $.
The gravitation pull exerted by the shell on itself will be $$g\_\mathrm s=G\frac{M\_\text{shell}}{R^2}=G\frac{4\pi R^2T \rho}{R^2}=4\pi GT \rho$$
As you can see the force that a thin shell exerts on itself doesn't depend on its radius but only on its thickness. Keep it thin, and you can make it as large as you want.
**EDIT**
As HenningMakolm pointed out in their comment
>
> Draw an equator on your spherical shell. The sum of all the *northward* components of gravity in the south hemisphere must be canceled out by southward gravity in the north -- but all that force is transmitted between north and south by compression across the equator. The total northbound gravity comes out as $W\_\mathrm s=\frac12 g\_\mathrm s T\rho \cdot \pi R^2$ whereas the *area* of the equatorial cross section this force needs to be distributed over is only $A=2\pi R\cdot T$. So even if you keep $T, \rho$ constant, the *lateral pressure* the shell needs to withstand to keep itself up grows in proportion to $R$.
>
>
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The pressure will then be $P=\frac{W}A =\frac14 g\_\mathrm s \rho R = \pi \rho ^2 GTR$
Based on the values reported on the table available at this [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystyrene), density of EPS varies between $16$ and $640\ \mathrm{kg/m^3}$, while varies between $16$ and $40\ \mathrm{MPa}$. $G$ is $6.6\cdot 10^{-11}\ \mathrm{m^3\ kg^{-1}\ s^{-2}}$.
Putting the numbers in we get that, for the densest and more resistant EPS we get $$TR < \frac{40\cdot10^6\ \mathrm{Pa}}{\pi \cdot (640\ \mathrm{kg/m^3})^2 \cdot 6.6\cdot 10^{-11}\ \mathrm{m^3\ kg^{-1}\ s^{-2}}}=4.71\cdot 10^{11} \ \mathrm{m^2}$$
Coincidentally, $10^{11} \ \mathrm m$ is the order of magnitude of the Earth-Sun distance.
[Answer]
The surface gravity of the planet cannot be such that any object standing on the surface will begin to crush the polystyrene. With the exception of a meaningless variance in thickness (meters compared to millions of kilometers) that I'll mention momentarily, this represents the maximum radius of the planet.
* [Gravity = G \* Mass(M1) / radius2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_gravity)
* F = mA or, [Weight = Mass(M2) \* Gravity](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/wteq.html)
And some constants...
* [G = 6.674√ó10‚àí11 m3/s2kg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant)
* Density = 1 lb/ft3 = 16.0185 Kg/m3 (calculations for all other densities are left as an exercise for the reader.)
* Compressive Strength (max) = 17 psi = 703.068836 kg/m2
So, using a test mass of 1kg, our surface gravity must equal the compressive strength or 703.07 = G \* (4/3ùúãr3) \* Density / r thus...
* **r = 1.57x1011 m = 1.57x108 Km** (compared to Earth's 6.37x103 Km)
**Notes...**
* Higher densities means a smaller radius, so it's not work calculating against the other two densities of EPS.
* A hollow in the sphere means, roughly, that the outer radius is equal to r, above, plus the hollow inner radius. This isn't exactly true because gravity weakens as the inner radius expands. But for the purposes of this answer, it's close enough to true for government work (regardless the [hard-science](/questions/tagged/hard-science "show questions tagged 'hard-science'") tag).
* I'm ignoring the fact that a radius so large means it's possible for weird and wonderful things to happen inside the planet, like rotational forces exceeding the compressive strength causing liquefaction which will cause all kinds of compromising issues, like friction leading to heat leading to other kinds of breakdown. Planetary science is much more complicated than I've presented here, leading me to the conclusion that it would be simpler to simply coat the planet with enough EPS to smooth out the surface and begin spray painting. At least then all you have to worry about is the effect of solar heating, tidal damage, and the fact that you just pushed all your atmosphere into space.
**HOWEVER...**
What this answer does not contemplate is that the higher density of a hidden planet (higher G at the surface of said planet than for EPS of the same radius), will seriously reduce the maximum radius of the EPS shell around it. If your goal is to actually wrap this around something, that something's gravity must be considered. This answer demonstrates that you could high a pretty big planet (bigger than Earth) inside the EPS shell, but the maximum radius indicated is for a hidden planet of G=0. As the hidden planet's gravity increases, the max radius of the EPS shell must decrease.
*Note that if you're tempted to ask, "how big a planet can I hide with an EPS shell before that shell breaks down?" you can't simply assume Earth's density and start increasing the radius. As radius increases, density changes because internal pressures are increasing, too. It's a pretty complicated calculation, I suspect.*
[Answer]
L.Dutch calculates the acceleration of gravity just outside a thin hollow polystyrene shell as
$$ g\_s = 4\pi GT\rho $$
where $G$ is the universal constant of gravity, $T$ is the thickness of the shell, and $\rho$ is the density of the polystyrene. He observes that this is independent of $R$, the radius of the sphere.
However this is not the entire story, because the shell has to withstand its own weight without crumbling, and this is not just a function of the local *acceleration of gravity*. The shell is basically a self-supporting $360^\circ$ arch, and in constant gravity larger archs (of the same cross section) can support smaller weights.
The *force of gravity* per unit area of the shell is
$$ \tfrac 12 g\_s T \rho $$
(where the $\tfrac12$ is because the gravitational strength drops to $0$ just *inside* the hollow shell due to the shell theorem).
If we draw an equator around the shell, the integral of the *southbound* component of gravity everywhere on the *north* hemisphere works out nicely as
$$ \tfrac 12 g\_s T \rho \cdot \pi R^2 $$
(there are some nasty-looking trigonometric factors as we write down the integral, but they all happen to cancel out before we integrate, if we parameterize the north hemisphere by its perpendicular projection on the equatorial plane. Note that the new factor is just the area of the circle cut out of the equatorial plane by the shell!)
All this force needs to be transmitted between north and south by *lateral compression* of the shell across the equator. The area of this cross section is
$$ 2\pi R \cdot T $$
so the *average lateral pressure* must be
$$ \frac{\tfrac12g\_s T \rho \pi R^2}{2\pi R T } = \pi GTR\rho^2 $$
Now there is an $R$ factor again, so we *cannot* make the shell arbitrarily large without it crushing itself from the sides. The exponents here make sense too:
* $\rho^2$ makes sense because gravity increases by the *product* of two masses, and making each segment of shell twice as massive increases the forces fourfold.
* $R$ makes sense because each meter of equator needs to support the entire wedge of shelf going from itself up to the north pole.
* $T$ makes sense because making the shell twice as thick makes the forces four times as large, but on the other hand also distribute the forces over twice as much cross section.
So according to this calculation we should use the light class of EPS (the compressive strength scales slower than the square of the density). We should also make the shell *thin* -- at least until it becomes so thin that it starts to buckle.
I *think* the above calculation actually takes care of making the shell not buckle *under its own gravity* [at least that's what I thought until I ran the numbers below] -- but if we make it *too* lightweight, it might start buckling under external forces, such as gusts of stellar wind or the exhaust from the camera crews' rocket engines.
To be on the safe side, let's dimension the shell such that the force of its self-gravity is about 1 mN/m². Then at being hit by the long-distance puff of a solar flare (which can reach ram pressures of several μPa, based on their measured effect on Earth's magnetosphere -- the ordinary solar wind is a few orders of magnitude weaker than that) should still be negligible compared to the self-gravity.
We can then solve
$$ 2\pi GT^2\rho^2 = 1\;\rm mPa$$
for $T$ to find a thickness of about $96\;\rm m$. Let's make it an even 100 meters for back-of-the-envelope purposes.
Now we can solve
$$ \pi GTR\rho^2 = 12\;\rm p{.}s{.}i{.} $$
for $R$, getting about
$$ \large R \approx 15 \times 10^6 \;\rm km $$
which is just about a tenth of an astronomical unit, or 40 times the distance to the moon.
It looks like there is room enough for a cautious prop designer to increase $T$ by a safety factor of 10 and *still* build a 1:1 stand-in for Jupiter if he wants (assuming he can source enough polystyrene).
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[Question]
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It makes sense to believe life is more likely to evolve on the surface of large objects like planets, moons, and asteroids. However, a common fantasy trope is the massive space creature: some kind of vast spacefaring organism travelling between planets or stars, typically ancient and often sentient. I love the idea, but I have a hard time coming up with a sound scientific explanation to such a creature's origins.
What conditions would be necessary for such a creature to realistically come into being? No magic, no artificial intervention, no interdimensional rifts. I don't care about the details of the creature's biology: it could be a giant jellyfish, or a giant turtle with elephants on its back, or a living planetoid, or a form that defies all human comprehension. It just needs to be big, spacefaring, and have realistic origins.
[Answer]
The question mentions a "living planetoid". That, to me, hints at a plausible solution. Perhaps the species started out as a regular, nonliving planetoid, and some filamentous lifeform started growing on it, or perhaps even penetrated all throughout it.
Perhaps this species spreads all throughout an asteroid belt, which means that all of these individuals will be in competition with each other for energy and raw materials. Which competition provides an impetus for evolution. Eventually a species capable of some form of locomotion (solar sail? mass driver?) develops.
[Answer]
It is 15 million years after the Big Bang. The average background temperature of the universe is much higher than it is today. It is theoretically even possible that the [universe supports liquid water](http://www.nature.com/news/life-possible-in-the-early-universe-1.14341), and that early stars have already lived, died, and scattered heavier elements throughout space.
In this energy-rich environment, life develops. Evolution runs rampant. At first, these organisms are tiny, but they spread rapidly through warm space to avoid being annihilated by supernovas and other cosmic catastrophes.
These organisms are doomed. The universe is cooling. Available energy is dwindling. Perhaps this evolutionary stress causes the organisms get bigger and bigger to survive. At some point, they become massive, incredibly long-lived creatures that live within or inside what humans consider a star's habitable zone to feed.
These organisms know when the star is nearing the end of its life. Perhaps they have evolved a way to expand themselves thin and reflective to form a gigantic solar sail that allows them to travel to new stars.
Or perhaps their lives are tied to a star, and when the star dies, so do they. Maybe they have so they have evolved ways to scatter their descendants to other stars. It would be very interesting if one of those stars were our own.
[Answer]
This is a bit odd, but I have an answer specifically focused on your next question: [How would the 2016 human scientific community react if a massive space-faring alien "whale" entered the Solar System?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40972/how-would-the-2016-human-scientific-community-react-if-a-massive-space-faring-al)
I didn't want to detour my answer there with all this, but I can't not mention it; so this seemed a beter place to put it.
Your alien will not exist. Okay I said it, I'm sorry, I try to always work within the premise of a question happening, but the evolution of this thing really doesn't work. I'm going to try to answer this question anyways, but I have to discuss the improbabilities at the very least. Some I have suggestions to 'fix', some are...well I have nothing but suspention of disbelief to offer for them. Lets go over them, I'll try not to focus too much because I don't want to bash the idea, just show why I need to make some presumptions.
First though, one of the biggest underlying issues is simply the [square/cube law][2]. I'm only going to touch on a subset of issues caused by this law, most relevant to this discussion, but there are really a number of others. it is good to think about this law in all its many forms.
I need to first touch on energy because it comes up when discussing most other things.
# Photosynthesis is like powering Las Vegas with a single shock of static electricity
The power coming in from photosynthesis is trivial compared to the energy this creature would need to move or do anything. First, lets assume that it also can feed on the background radiation of the universe, a much higher concentration of power when your traveling outside of a solar system. Still even if it can 'feed' off of all forms of radiation it's not enough. Plants barely move or do anything and yet they barely collect enough energy to grow (notice how much slower they grow compared to living things). Your planet though has a much larger mass, which means its volume is drastically huge compared to its surface area. If it can only collect energy on its surface then the amount of energy collected is pathetic relative to total mass (most relevant for movement, where the energy needed to move is directly proportional to its mass). As your creature gets larger photosynthesis grows increasingly useless as a power source, but moon size is already pathetic power source.
There *are* other potential power sources. For instance if it had an appropriately radioactive core (not nuclear, no suns here, just radioactive) it could gain power from that core...until the core decays enough to no longer provide sufficent energy to keep the creature alive. There are some other options but frankly none of them provide much energy per KG here. Your creature is going to have very very little energy to work with, at least relative to mass.
For the cerature to work at moon or larger sizes with the sort of energy it can intake there are a few things that must be assumed.
1. It has very limited movement, and I mean *very* limited. Its movement is less like swimming through water and more like floating on a raft with a tiny sail you can minutely move every few months (or in his case every few hundreds of years). The tiniest twists of motion to try to change the angle of drift would be required, finding some way to 'sail' on gravity or solar winds perhaps, though I don't know how. Because ultimately his mass is just way too large relative to energy intake that he can't move by directly propelling himself.
2. Either he barely does anything, lying 100% dormant most of this lifetime with brief moments of activity to allow him to store up and save energy for those brief periods or
3. Most of him isn't really alive, only a small subset of the creature body is involved in actual process required to support life, and 99% of him is the equivalent of a gigantic rock outershell or
4. both 2 & 3. frankly I think 3 is almost obligatory, but 2 is probable as well
Which brings us to the size issue...
# You can't double size at a static rate
First example of the square cube law. Every time your alien doubles its size it needs to take in exponentially more resources. The first doubling requires he consume 4 times the resources it took to grow to moon size, the second doubling requires he take in an additional 16 times the resource it took to reach moon size, next doubling requires 64 times, then 256 etc. After a few thousand years he's consuming hundreds more planets to double. It's just not possible to keep doubling size, as his size goes the slower future growth must be.
# lava belly isn't fun
The larger a creature grows the larger its gravity, including its gravity *on itself*. I know some will say that's not the case because gravity will even itself out, which is true in a perfectly spherical uniform mass, which your creature can't be. In reality you get all of the effects that warm the earth, the biggest being gravity working on [inconsistent densities within the body][3]. Radioactive decay also applies here (ignore the first heat souce, that's my next point).
Now a 'lava belly' is not by itself that bad. Arguably a creature might even find some way to gain energy from this process, using its lava core as a heat engine, slowly draining the heat produced by radioactive decay & gravitational differences into some useful form. I don't see this being a very efficent energy source, and both are temporary at best since they require continual growth to fuel them while giving decreased benefit as one grows.
However, it would mean that no useful structures are going to be residing in your core, and the closer to your core the harder it is to keep an *orginized* structure, the sort of thing needed to support whatever organ-equivalent is used to provide you the ability to do things like think, move, and eat. As you increase your mass, and thus energy production and thus size of your 'lava center' you keep having to move these quasi-organs away from your lava center so they don't melt, which is an issue since that movement would require energy, quite a bit of energy, which you just don't have to waste. Though...this is the issue I could most handwave potentially.
# My food runs too fast
To continue growing you need to 'eat' more, asteroids, moons, whatever, to gain mass. However, that means you need to reach an asteroid, moon, whatever in order to eat it. As per my earlier discussion on energy as your size increases the amount of energy you can take in relative to your mass decreases exponentially, and since movement ability is proportional to mass that means it's quickly becoming difficult to produce enough energy to have any noticeable delta V. Thus your alien is going to find it nearly impossible to find new things to eat.
# Did that pea just give you a black eye?
Even assuming that you could reach something that you can 'eat' the odds are that it will be going at a much different velocity then you; there is no way the alien can afford the energy required to match the velocity of his 'food'. That means a very viscious collision with your food, the sort that leaves craters on the moon; only worse because the alien has to hunt down things larger then the tiny meteors that hit the moon.
This is going to start doing some serious damage to its outer shell, no 'organs' or other important things can be kept close to your crust with the kind of bombardmants your going to receive. This could be limited if the creature meanuvered near its 'food' and let its own gravity suck the food in slowly perhaps, given astrological time scales, but not entirely fixed.
# Death grapefruit inbound, waddle away!
also make sure you don't get too close to anything large and fast enough to break through your outer crust to your internal 'organs', you don't have the Delta V to get away at that size ;)
# I know I should go have kids of my own, but I can't get over my attraction to my mother
...that is a horrible segway title, sorry.
However, this is a real issue. For a child of this creature to live it will need to one day leave the nest so to speak, and in this case the nest has a gravity well the size of a moon. Think how much energy we have to put into a tiny rocket to have it escape earth's gravity well, every child needs to do that too, and it seems likely these children will be larger then a rocket if their mother is moon sized. That's a pretty large expense to having a child, in addition to the regular 'pregnancy' expense. growing larger makes it far more costly to have children, since you can't get them to leave the nest
# Why are we eating ourselves to death again?
The final question being, why grow so large? Size doesn't provide an evolutionary advantage unless it is to protect against enviroment and predators, both mostly non-issues here. When species are large enough to defend themselves they stop growing and instead focus the energy & mass they gain from their food to another use...reproduction. Simply put it makes far more sense to break off into new 'children' then to keep growing.
The point of all that being..a much smaller creature makes more sense (it can still be pretty huge mind you, say asteroid sized rather then moon sized, but the larger the harder to justify).
# You don't deserve to be sapient
To be blunt, this creature has no evolutionary advantage to being sapient. Sapience costs energy to fuel your brain and takes millenia of evolutionary pressure to produce, and your creature has nothing. The biggest drivers for sapience is the need to out think predators or prey, need to construct technology to defend against the enviroment & elements, need to communicate with others of your species; specifically the complex communication that comes from large tribes with mating individuals where navigating political aliances and social complexity is the only way to manage to acheive mating rights.
Your creature has none of these elements. The closest is the ability to communicate with other's of its kind; but even then if it's asexual it's likely not expecting to run into many, or any, of its kind (which makes sense, space is huge); so no needs for social complexities, and more obviously no need to navigate social complexities to acheive mating rights when you don't mate.
And along with that, sex is sort of required to drive rapid evolution, asexual species have a much much harder time adapting or changing, so such a massive evolutionary leap is hard to have with any asexual species.
There really is no way I can see to fix this issue. The only possible justifications, all pretty pathetic, I can come up with are.
1) this species is an artificial construct by some other sentient creature, skipping over normal evolution
2) This species is a hermaphrodite equivalent, capable but not limited to asexual reproduction, and has in the past evolved in an environment where a huge number were close enough together to have a social culture and evolutionary pressures towards intellect to compete for mate choice (so many reasons this doesn't work...)
3) much like 2, but the sapience evolved from a very different, and smaller, creature in a world with other space faring predators, and only after sapience was achieved did an asexual variant get produced and spread out on its own; with its sapience effectively being vestigial, limited evolutionary advantage with its new life but since it's already evolved might as well keep it.
yeah...best to not mention this and hope most people pay no attention to the suspiciously intelligent alien behind the curtain. Though a much *much* smaller varient of space fairing creature, with a hibernating ability used when crossing solar systems, is the best outcome I can think of.
# Shouting away your energy
sending radio waves out to 'shout' at others seems kind of detrimental. First because this species shouldn't have much of a language. Partially because it shouldn't really be sapient, but I'm ignoring that point now. Even if sapient it's asexual for a reason, it does not plan or anticipate running into others of it's species to mate with. Why should it have anything like a language to communicate with something it will never interact with?
it can't even be a language for communicating with it's own young, since they don't achieve sapience until well after they would have left their 'mother'.
However, language isn't required for radio signals, at least not the sort we know. A more basic sort of 'language' similar to body language could exist, limited signals with predefined and instinctual understood messages like "this is my solar system, don't come here or I'll eat you"
However, radio signals require energy. Not much energy admittedly, but your species is very energy inefficient, and it needs to invest enough energy to 'shout' long enough range to be heard by another of it's kind (which is going to still be very far away, space is big...) requires some resources. If the creature uses radio wave based communication at all it would make sense to be a very focused beam of communication which is done only in response to some external stimuli. It doesn't bother 'talking' unless it expects someone to listen.
# when spiders accuse you of having too many kids you know you have a problem
While you didn't specify this creatures lifecycle since you referred to it doubling in size in 1000 years you imply it's going to live at least 1,000 years and likely much longer.
However, you also said that it produces two offspring a year, That's a minimum of 2,000 offspring in it's lifetime, likely more.
I've already addressed the energy expense angle many times, but in short there is no way this species has the energy to produce children that rapidly.
There is also the question of food, where are they getting the food to grow so big? 2,000 moon-sized aliens would use a decent amount non-sun mass in the solar system.
You could try sending your children to other solar systems, but then you need to get up the energy required to break your solar system's gravity well and all the gravity wells between here and whatever system your sending the child too, and after 1,000 solar systems have children your going to have to send your child very *very* far to reach a new one.
It could be that you expect most of your children to 'die', so your using an R mating strategy, but that begs the question what is killing these children in a world without predators? They wouldn't even be competing with themselves, without sexual reproduction there is no reason to encourage your children to compete in a survival-of-the-fittest situation the way some R species do; since each is exactly equally as fit as the last.
evolution would encourage producing fewer children with a lower mortality rate when your expense for having a 'child' is so high. Frankly the difference in size between child and parent would have to be so drastic for the 2,000 children scenario to work out that the child couldn't live because the square/cube law says anything that much smaller then a parent will find its body size too small to be viable for the physical structure their parent had.
It's best to scale this species birthrate to its lifespan, whatever its lifespan is, and its size. The longer the lifespan and the greater the size the slower the rate of birth. If it lives longer than, and is larger than, an elephant it shouldn't have a birth rate faster then the elephant. The only exception to this is if you have predator species for it to worry about.
[Answer]
Any creature, in space or on a planet needs a few things: energy inputs, a place to put metabolic wastes, a food source, safety from environmental dangers.
This organism also needs to overcome some significant challenges, such as mobility, climate control and reproduction. Not to mention that space is beyond big with ridiculous temperature extremes. Hard ionizing radiation makes normal organic chemistry exceedingly difficult. Movement without a reaction mass is impossible.
**Food**
Food is incredibly scarce. We have found nebula containing organic compounds but nebula aren't dense so moving between gas clumps will take a lot of energy or go very slowly. The best concentrations of food are also inside gravity wells where the creature can't get it.
**Mobility**
This creature would have to move by throwing something in the direction opposite to its desired direction of travel. Throwing away pieces of yourself won't work long unless you can gather more food/mass to throw behind you although expelling metabolic wastes as a form of locomotion would work.
Just drifting for food limits available food sources.
**Energy Sources**
The nearest star should work nicely as a power source but carries significant radiation dangers.
**Base Chemistry**
Carbon-based water bags don't do well in space. Perhaps a different base chemistry would work in space but that leaves the realm of what science knows and into the broad realm of speculation and handwaving.
It's not impossible to have a giant space-fairing creature it's just ridiculously difficult.
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While the evolutionary timeframe almost certainly far exceeds the elapsed life of the universe:
Consider the Oort cloud. No life? You have all the elements you need for the formation of life other than the lack of **liquid** water and for something with a sufficiently slow life cycle I don't think that's an absolute show-stopper.
The primary energy source would be cosmic rays. They can't be harvested directly but imagine something that gets it's energy from the radicals left behind when a cosmic ray blasts through matter.
You would have to have a creature that had no required metabolism, life processes simply proceed as they get the energy to do so.
Obviously a creature that lives on extremely high energy radiation is going to have a mutation problem. At first I believe the answer would be a core buried as deep in the cometary chunk as possible and the harvesting organs up near the surface. Growing very big would help--think of a creature that most of it's body was just a chemical that served as an energy collector--a giant fluid-filled quasi-amoeba.
Once a big enough version evolved you could see a nuclear power source evolving--it's already a radiation-eater, if enough uranium slowly drifted to the center (the self-gravity is tiny but not zero and there's basically no other forces at work) you could get first a chunk that produced extra energy when a cosmic ray came zipping through and perhaps even an outright reactor eventually.
Once it has a use for uranium you have a path for evolution of a higher energy creature that does more than just sit there.
Conceivably this could also evolve with a start point of a chemical-eating extremophile blasted off a planet in an impact event.
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Rather than "large" meaning solid with square/cube issues and poor power, what if it was large in a way that was enabling?
It could *be* a huge solar sail, thousands of kilometers across, with a tiny payload.
It could be a fractal like a Menger Sponge, with huge surface area to interact with gas and dust it's passing through. Or be a big ball of fuzz that expands out into wispy tendrals and expands itself to the size of a solar system.
It could be an actual *cloud*, a billion miles accross but not solid. Maybe it has spoores that seed nebulas and grow as the gas and dust forms new stars and planets, taking its share from the natural condensation process, and then disperses (to find new fields) along with the leftover dust and protoplanets, just as the non-living ones naturally do? I like that idea: it builds upon a cycle that really happens. Just say "some of it is life". The formation of a new solar system is an energy-rich environment, in contrast to most of space.
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[Question]
[
Working to develop a culture within my world where good liars are prized. We do know, from science that the ability to lie is [actually a marker in cognitive development](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/7730522/Lying-children-will-grow-up-to-be-successful-citizens.html), because the creature or person must be able to imagine what another person thinks.
In my world's culture, calling someone an honest man pretty much means that they aren't all that bright, because they aren't clever enough to lie.
Lies are polite.
In cultures where we roundly condemn lying, we [actually lie a lot](http://mentalfloss.com/article/30609/60-people-cant-go-10-minutes-without-lying) and then lie about the fact that we lie.
In this culture, they acknowledge that lies are social grease--they expect people to exaggerate things and make themselves look better. They expect merchants to lie to them, and they expect to have to call them on it (if it effects the price). This is not to say that they are dishonest about everything, but they treat lying as a skill--not something you should always do, if truth would better serve, but something that you should teach your children to do well, so they can get on in the world.
My question is this: **how might this culture be viewed by cultures that are less honest about lying or that have a view about lying that's more negative?**
I know there are some [real world examples of this](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/04/23/voices/world-pretense-japanese-just-honest-lying/) (mainly that some what some cultures call politeness, others deem as dishonesty) and would appreciate those specific examples to color this more realistically based on human behavior.
[Answer]
## **How might this culture be viewed by cultures that are less honest about lying or that have a view about lying that's more negative?**
**1. "This Culture"**
The culture you are describing, lets simply call them *Culture L*, Needs to have a reason for all the lying, if it is just something that happens in the culture without any reason then it would not make sense. Societal norms happens for a reason.
It could be that *Culture L* has a religious belief that compels them to lie, perhaps fearing that a malevolent deity made wise to the truth could then bring a downfall to that truth, or that lying would be a way to ward off the evil spirits, or conversely a positive thing meant to impress the gods.
It could come from corrupt business practices, where everyone is lying about profits and quality of goods to make their offerings and business succeed ("Hey, if everyone is doing it, why not me?")
In any event, *Culture L* would have a reason to lie, otherwise it would not be a culture of liars, it would just be a bunch of liars in a culture.
**2. "Cultures that are less honest about lying"**
A culture which is less honest than *Culture L* (lets call them *Culture E*) about lying implies that *Culture L* are to some extent self-conscious about their lying. This would also imply that whatever reason that drives *Culture L* to lying, might not be 100% accepted throughout the *Culture L*, or at least not adhered to as extremely as in *Culture E*.
It could be that the cultural beliefs in *Culture E* are a more extreme form of whatever belief compels *Culture L* to lie. If this is the case, *Culture E* would likely see *Culture L* as "lesser" because they are not as extreme as *Culture E*. This would be similar to a form of elitism.
**3. "Cultures that have a negative view on lying"**
A culture which views lying negatively, (lets call them *Culture H*) implies that *Culture H* are more honest. This might mean that they don't share whatever compels *Culture L* to lie, or are not as extreme as *Culture L* in that belief. It also means that to some extent honesty is praised since lying is disdainful those who would not lie would be viewed positively.
This might mean that *Culture H* views *Culture L* as unworthy of praise, and they might consider them incapable of accomplishing tasks satisfactorily. Being not worthy of praise would mean nothing they could do would be considered worthwhile, regardless of the actual quality of work.
---
**Human Behavior**
Humans lie for many reasons, here is [a quick blurb from livescience](http://www.livescience.com/772-lie.html):
>
> It boils down to the shifting sands of the self and trying to look
> good both to ourselves and others, experts say.
>
>
> "It's tied in with self-esteem," says University of Massachusetts
> psychologist Robert Feldman. "We find that as soon as people feel that
> their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at
> higher levels."
>
>
> Not all lies are harmful. In fact, sometimes lying is the best
> approach for protecting privacy and ourselves and others from malice,
> some researchers say. Some deception, such as boasting and lies in the
> name of tact and politeness, can be classified as less than serious.
> But bald-faced lies (whether they involve leaving out the truth or
> putting in something false), are harmful, as they corrode trust and
> intimacy—the glue of society.
>
>
>
[An international study on lying was done in over 75 countries](http://americancityandcounty.com/issue20040101/international-study-lying-shows-different-attitudes-among-cultures):
>
> People who live in the poorest nations tend to believe that they are
> most effective at spotting whoppers, Dr. Bond notes.
>
>
> There are differences among cultures in the estimation of how many
> lies are being told. Taiwanese and Portuguese believe they are hearing
> about four fibs per week. Americans think they are exposed to eight
> prevarications weekly. Pakistanis and Algerians tend to be less
> trusting. Those surveyed in those nations think they are mislead
> between 12 and 16 times weekly.
>
>
> There are also differences among nations in peoples' evaluations of
> their own abilities to lie. In the United States, people believe they
> can get away with lying 56 percent of the time. Chileans and
> Argentines, by contrast, believe that they will be caught about 60
> percent of the time. Those living in Moldova and Botswana think they
> are detected lying fewer than 25 percent of the time.
>
>
> Protestants think they get away with lying about 55 percent of the
> time while Catholics believe that about half of their lies are
> detected.
>
>
>
To some extent, lying is a constant fact of life, and lying will likely never be truly eradicated in all forms, but the way we view lies will change constantly. Is it okay to lie about forgetting something so that you feel less bad about not doing something? Who knows. But what is certain is that cultural norms develop over time and change constantly, always propelled forward by the same principles of adaptation for success, if it works, and is successful, then much like evolution - it will continue.
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Same as any cultural divide I would imagine. People from one culture would think that the other is rude, unmannered, primitive.
The culture that values honesty more, might think that the other culture has less integrity, or an inconsistent self image. The liars know that you have to alter yourself to be appropriate in a given situation and everyone expects it and appreciates its skillful application. The honest people would think that you're not only being not truthful, but you're not being true to yourself by misrepresenting what you really think.
That could give them a bit of a individualistic/collectivistic bent to the whole dynamic, where the most important thing in the honest society is to be true to yourself and self realization, and social cohesion is more important to the liars. I would imagine that the liars would pay more attention to any given situation they're in, rather than the attributes of the actors involved when they're looking for the cause of someone's behavior.
For example, if someone is saying that one product is of very high quality and goes on to list its features in a convincing way, we, as somewhat-honesty-valuing people, would tend to assume that the person knows what they're talking about. They must be an expert. The liars would know "the expert", is a salesperson and they have a role to play to an audience, which doesn't make them a non-expert, but they would be aware of sources of behavior that were not intrinsic to the person more acutely than a "truther" would. (haha)
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Exactly these cultures exist in our culture. Consider the placebo. Is it unethical to prescribe a placebo? The doctor means well for his patient but must lie to make it work. Should you lie and trick a person who trusts you?
I think of the great story of the young western doctor out in the Arabian desert in the 1960s. The local sheik summons him. The doctor is told that the sheik is to be married to his new young wife, but the sheik is old and worried he will not be able to perform on his wedding night. He wants western medicine that will help him. The doctor considers telling him the truth: that medicine had no drug which could reliably achieve this. But the sheik believes in him and what he represents, and the doctor wants to be what the sheik thinks he is. He gives the sheik sublingual nitroglycerin as is used for cardiac angina. He tells the sheik to put one under his tongue when the time comes. He will feel a headache (reliably produced by nitroglycerin) and so know it is working. And everything will get working. The doctor feels bad to have prescribed a placebo, but rationalizes this to himself in that impotence is made worse by worry and that the perception of having powerful western medicine will allay the sheik's worry.
In the morning a servant brings the doctor a beautiful new horse.
---
In your scenario I imagine this discussion:
The liar: When I trick a person into believing that a better world is possible, it makes that world possible.
The truth teller: When you trick a person so, you give that person false hope. It is better that a person engage with what is and what is real than hope with false hope.
The liar: False hope is better than no hope. A person who believes she can make a difference feels empowered, and that power can flow many ways to make the world better.
The truth teller: Rather than trick her with a lie and risk her empowerment crumbling when the lie is exposed, you should find a real way that she can make a difference.
The liar: If the liar has some art, the way invented with a lie might be better than any real way. And there may be no real way.
The truth teller: Even when there is a real way, you are content not to find it.
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The country where lying is part of the culture would probably become less advanced over time compared to a fair country.
Lying all the time is detrimental to business and research practies. It impedes proper economic and scientific development. This is because you have to spend energy in all this lying and decoding the lies. This energy would be better spent in actually trying to achieve what you want to achieve.
Most developped countires have a very strong fair legal system where lying is prohibited and where contracts are enforced. This system of trust is what allowed the Western world to develop. You can try a different system where lying is authorized but I can guarantee you that it won t be as efficient. Without sounding racist, there are countries where the legal and business system are not as fair as in the Western world, look at how well they are doing...
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The answer of how one culture would appreciate another is always "it depends." The fine nuanced differences in our concepts of what a lie is and how good or bad that lie ensure the answer is never clear cut. **However, I do think they would appreciate the raw audacity of telling a lie so thoroughly that even you, yourself, believe it!** I would expect the other culture to appreciate the audacity of apparently lying about how acceptable lying is, and expect them to applaud them convincing themselves in this lie. I mean, that's serious dedication to the cause!
You ask for examples, and one example always shines out for me, deep in the heart of the scientific community. I love science; I think its a great process! I regularly entrust it with my life because it's one of the best tools we have for many things. But there's an overstep which often occurs which is important enough to me that I'd call it out as one of those specific examples of lying you are looking for.
In the past, I've argued a very careful line with respect to science and magic. I like to argue that [they can coexist](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/40992/2252), but to do so I require science to hold to its truest self, founded on the scientific method. If you dig deep enough into the philosophy, you find that science does not tell you how the world *actually works*, a subject called ontology, it tells you what you can know about the world, epistemology, and in particular it models observed behaviors very well.
If you recall your schooling, the scientific method never actually proved *anything*. If you wanted to show that planets revolve around the sun, you would first assume a "null hypothesis" which refutes the status quo. Your null hypothesis would be that planets revolve around the Earth. You would then go develop a test which could show that it is *exceedingly* unlikely that the observations you saw matched the null hypothesis. You would then declare that whole hypothesis unlikely, leaving only your hypothesis that planets revolve around the sun still standing. However, note that we never *actually* proved our claim. We merely showed the existing claim did not do well at predicting things, and our model does better.
This is the powerhouse at the core of science which drives it forward. It never actually proves anything to be true, but rather proves that a bunch of other hypotheses are false, until we run out of human creativity and admit that we can't think of any other hypothesis. We then engage in abduction, a mode of thought similar to deduction and induction where one assumes the most likely hypothesis is actually true, and announce that we have *proven* that planets revolve around the sun. This frees science from philosophical quagmires which give other epistemological processes pause and lets it plumb the mysteries of the universe with abandon. And it's darn good at it!
It turns out that abduction is tricky. Philosophically, [it is a field of landmines](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/) waiting to go off. This is uncomfortable for many scientists and science minded individuals. How can this process which has had such extraordinary success as to bring us semiconductors, land a man on the moon, and send probes beyond the solar system be anything *but* perfect?
As a result, we skip over this step. We say "light is made up of photons" when what we really mean is the more lengthy "light is well modeled as though it is made up of photons." It seems like such a little white lie, and it's so much easier to say. I mean, realistically speaking, it's unlikely that we will ever find out that light isn't made of photons, so we can just claim to know the "truth" about reality right? Well, not really. Enter wave-particle duality. Light is not a wave; it is not a particle. It is something different that is sometimes well modeled as a wave, and sometimes well modeled as a particle. We can even capture this *something* with quantum mechanics and say that it is well modeled as a superposition of wave packets (note that I took care to say it is "well modeled" rather than "it is").
Then, we go to the Physics.SE forum, where countless people are baffled by wave-particle duality. They say "how can it be a wave and a particle at the same time? Does it alternate" and the only true answer is "light is neither a wave nor a particle." But that really bothers people because they were told for years that light was made up of photons, and that that was the *truth*. I spend a fair bit of time there cleaning up the mess we make when we suggest science can tell us the truth when, in reality, it is only capable of pointing us in the right direction.
So I stood on my soap box here for six paragraphs, and finally worked my way around to lying. There are many scientists who are very familiar with the issue I bring up, and are honest to themselves about the limits of science. They *rationalize* their act by saying "well, within the context of science, we all know what *prove* means, and I agree that it does not mean the same thing as "prove" does in mathematics." Then there are those who honestly believe the lie they tell. They truly believe that this scientific method, which never once made a claim that it offered truth, is the only source of truth in the universe.
And thus, this is the lie we tell our students every year. I'd like to think those liars would actually be impressed at what lengths we will go to to convince people that this lie is reality. We will even go so far as to convince ourselves that this is true, even though if you actually dig through all of the processes of science, none of them ever make that claim. We teach our children to not question the mighty magic of the scientific method that lets it mysteriously define the reality around us. And then we wonder why religious individuals take offense at our teachings. And then we wonder why it's so hard to get people into STEM: the higher order classes are continuously having to spend so much time unteaching what was already taught!
[Answer]
Lets be honest here (heh).
Every culture subconsciously believes they're better than everyone else, that's why we're us and you're you. All your proposed culture is doing is giving any visiting culture an obvious reason to feel better about themselves. In other words, one of the better ways to compliment others is to denigrate oneself.
Foreign cultures may mock your lying culture behind their backs, or even to their face, but they'll be VERY friendly with them.
And praise their diplomacy.
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Fascinating topic! I've been playing with a similar idea myself for a while now.
Depending on the level of development in your world, you might want to break up the perceptions the "honest" culture has of the dishonest one.
Perhaps socially, the dishonest culture would be viewed negatively by others, maybe making things like tourism and intercultural relationships difficult. However some might view members of the dishonest culture as more desirable mates/partners since they could, in theory, be easier to get along with and/or compete better against rivals.
In business, they might be viewed as risky or even treacherous, or they might be sought after as shrewd business partners. Are there lawyers in the culture/world you are making? Would it be fair to assume that they could make excellent legal councelors?
As for politics, I think it would depend on where the line is drawn in terms of the kinds of lies told. If it's limited to misdirection or omission of certain details, perhaps they could maintain constructive relations with other cultures. If they also include breaking treaties/oaths/contracts as permissible, I don't really know how that would work out in the absence of coercion.
The other point, of course, is how different the other cultures' views on lying are. If it's a culture with a strict moral code or honor system, they might be openly hostile towards people who live outside of their value system. Others might still work with them, but be more distrustful and controlling.
What might serve as an example of the latter is intercultural dynamics in terms of *language and communication*, specifically: "burden of communication" and "high vs. low context cultures". Basically, a member of one culture might find himself "translating" everything said by someone from the "dishonest" culture in order to get to the cold, hard facts.They would then ask very direct questions to follow up. The other person might be aggravated by this if they feel threatened in some way due to the situation.
On the flip side, someone from the dishonest culture might have a hard time with an outsider that doesn't understand the subtleties of their communication style, such as catching on to and playing along with a bluff in a high stakes situation.
I know this is a place to provide answers, but I do have a question that's nagging at me hard. If the culture you're building values prowess in deception, how are the people supposed to evaluate that trait in others if being able to do so means that the deception failed? If the people of that culture are good liars, because that's what they are taught and encouraged to do, I assume they would also be good lie detectors.
How would people know that someone successful didn't become so by being honest? Would people just automatically believe that he/she had made it to the top by being an exceptional liar? If it were found out that someone had made it to a position of power in that culture, without the use of deceptions, would that person lose stature, popularity/respect, power?
As I said at the beginning, this is a fascinating topic and I'm probably going to lose a lot of sleep thinking about it. Thanks a lot.
Just for fun, you might want to check out "[The Invention of Lying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Lying)".
It's a light romcom that sort of goes in the opposite direction of the culture you're building.
(*This is my first post here, so I hope I haven't broken too many rules.
My apologies for any damages.*)
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[Question]
[
Looking for a desktop application that lets me draw on a sphere with my mouse, which I find very much needed for geography on a whole planet.
With a world grid and showing coordinates and all, depending on where my mouse is.
Google Earth has both features, you can draw polygons and lines and place icons, you can measure distance easily, but unfortunately you can't (or I think you can't) do so on a blank sphere. Other problems are that you can't scale your globe to any radius, and you only have Mars and Moon as alternative "skins" (and radius).
I nearly can't imagine that something like this does *not* exist?!
Does anyone know?
[Answer]
I recommend [**GPlates**](https://www.gplates.org/). Its originally purpose was constructing tectonic plates and showing how they move over time (it was developed by geoscience departments at several universities across the world), so I think that it's ideal for creating continents. It also has excellent documentation, good compatibility with a variety of operating systems (Windows, Linux, and MacOS X).
Here's a quick gif I made showing what the environment looks like (on Windows, at least):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ryAh.gif)
**Various features:**
* It can project drawings onto 2-D maps, too, including the Mercator projection.
* It can show the movement of plates over time, if you want to make the geological features of your world more realistic.
* You can save various bits of data from features.
* It can measure distances and track your cursor's coordinates, as you asked for. I haven't played around with non-Earth-sized planets yet (the world I use it for is just Earth, at a different time), but I image you could resize your drawing.
* It's open source, if that makes a difference to you.
* It's free.
[Answer]
I'm not sure it's what you're looking for, but I found Fractal Terrains 3 to be quite useful. The full version is about $40 USD plus tax, but there's a free trial available on the ProFantasy website [here](https://secure.profantasy.com/library/demo.asp), so you can get a feel for it without having to pay anything. And if you're curious: no, I don't work for them, but I have bought a handful of their products.
The software itself is intended to draw world maps, and is quite useful for the purpose. It allows random generation of worlds via several fractal algorithms (hence the name), and you can make your own adjustments as well.
Finer detail generally requires supporting software (namely Campaign Cartographer 3, another $45; ProFantasy does offer various bundles if you find yourself interested in their products, but that's dependent on what level of detail you want your maps to have; for just a world map, those two will be more than enough), but it's perfectly capable of editing mountain ranges, coastlines, etc., which is plenty for a full-world map. It can't do tectonic plates, as far as I'm aware, so you might need to look elsewhere for that or else draw multiple maps manually. Fractal Terrains 3 supports some two dozen projections, such as Mercator, equirectangular, etc.; you want to draw on a sphere, so the orthographic projection would be your best bet. It can export to multiple formats, including Google Earth files, so you have plenty of options there.
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[Question]
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Whales are majestic creatures of the sea, as they glide more gracefully through the water than their size should seemingly allow.
What kind of evolutionary path would it take for whales to glide gracefully though the skies?
Would it be possible on our planet, or would other conditions need to exist?
I have my own thoughts, but I'd love to hear others.
Edit:
It's worth noting that whales come in all sizes, so it doesn't have to be blue whale sized.
[Answer]
**[Living gasbags.](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LivingGasbag)**
You can have a whale shaped creature that floats in the air through lighter-than-air gas in their body and less internal heavy structure that the traditional whale has.
The square-cube law limits the size of creatures in the air and on the ground. The buoyancy of water allows whales and other creatures to be much larger, since the musculoskeletal structures of the animals don't have to fight as much gravity.
When you're moving from the ocean to the air, you lose that benefit.
The answer about [flying plants here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/11212/15401%20flying%20plants) states that you could use hydrogen as opposed to helium in order to provide lift to the animal in question. There isn't enough helium in the air on our planet, but you could imagine a planet with other mixtures of gas.
For a whale, you need to lose a ton of mass. What you're left with essentially is no longer a "whale," it simply has the external shape and surface area of a whale but internally it's an entirely different animal. You need a reason for the "whale" to be in the air instead of the water.
Breeding would take place in the same way where the creatures mate belly to belly and ejaculate in the air, since there isn't really any physics against that. Your creature's floating ability does need to be able to support the weight of its sperm, eggs, and organs.
For food, you have to give the creatures reason to be up there to begin with. Perhaps the planet has massive amounts of biomass or tiny creatures (perhaps other living gasbags!) in the air that the entity ingests in some form. It would be the skies' version of krill.
**Addendum, with an idea thanks to ckersch:**
With enough flora and incredibly tall trees, the floaters could easily be herbivores. There's a limit imposed by physics and biology on how tall flora can actually grow, but for all observers down below, "in the skies" as a metaphor would be a sufficient description of the life above.
[Answer]
Dragon Giraffes.
Stick with me on this, I'll explain.
Picture a herbivore, similar to giraffes, with a long head and neck designed to eat the leaves from trees. As a defensive mechanism it develops bladders filled with hydrogen that it uses to breathe fire at anything that attacks it.
Over time the bladders expand and it starts using them to support some of its weight, allowing it to reach higher and higher into the trees without needing such long legs, they actually walk on their hind legs and use their front legs to stabilize themselves while hydrogen bladders extending from their back and neck support much of their weight.
They evolve over time to reduce their weight and can control the lift from their hydrogen bladders by contracting or expanding them. Eventually they complete the transition to becoming airborne, and in the process avoiding all predators that might attack them. They drift on the winds much of the time using modified tails and fore-legs as wings to maneuver and grazing from the tops of trees, their long necks now being used to reach down rather than up. They can land and do so if the wind becomes too strong but they spend most of their time drifting at fairly low altitude and grazing from the tree-tops beneath.
[Answer]
If it were me, I wouldn't start with whales, but with arboreal creatures like [flying squirrels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_squirrel). They can actually stay aloft quite a while, depending on the winds.
If there were some kind of selective advantage to staying aloft longer ... well that's probably how [birds initially evolved](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird#Early_evolution). But say instead of developing wings to keep a loft a bit longer, they instead hit on producing and saving lighter-than air stomach gasses (most likely hydrogen).
Now if there's some good reason to be aloft, and you don't have to be terribly fast to catch your food (like raptors do), then there's no reason why a body set up this way couldn't be sized up drastically. There's a certain amount of "overhead" weight for internal organs, but as you size the body up you'd have a higher and higher percentage of volume devoted to holding the lighter-than-air gasses, and could also scoop up greater amounts of food in one pass.
So what I'd do at this point is also design a prey for these creatures; some kind of airborne equivalent to krill and/or plankton. If they stick to hovering just off the ground then pollen and/or insects might foot the bill. For higher up, you'd have to invent those creatures too.
[Answer]
While there would have to be some pretty massive musculoskeletal changes needed to make something like that feasible on Earth, such changes actually become much easier whenever you alter the density of the air in a world. For example, Titan (one of Saturn's moons) contains air about 4 times the density of Earth. On such a planet, even a human could achieve flight with some sort of wing-like apparatus. Pedal powered aircraft would even be possible.
[XKCD did a great "What If" on the topic](https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/) (posed with respect to the ability to fly on various planets).
[Answer]
So this is my thoughts on it, but I really wanted to see what other people came up with.
**I will not be choosing this as the answer.**
Ok, So an adult Dwarf Sperm Whale weighs 550lb. Hydrogen has a lifting capacity of 68lb per 1000 cubic feet. So you'd need a bit over 8000 cubic feet of hydrogen to lift a Dwarf Sperm Whale.
Now if a whale could evolve to a life in the air... Hollow bones. No blubber reserves... maybe replace them with gas bags. Symbiotic algae bio-reactor to make the hydrogen. Larger fins to maneuver in the air.
Maybe thicken the atmosphere as Colt McCormack suggested.
You could get to where you don't need as much hydrogen to lift it.
[Answer]
Regarding the evolutionary path of these creatures (since that was part of the question), it could be that they evolved in watery regions with many small rocky islands. The water itself may be filled with predators, which would encourage creatures to jump from rock to rock (or at least minimise the time in the water) rather than swim or wade.
Being able to make yourself lighter by first filling yourself with small gas bags (giving yourself a little bit of levity) would give an advantage to doing this - that would promote the beginning of the gas-filled creatures, and of course the more they evolved, the more efficient the gas bags became until they were eventually able to float entirely.
The creature probably uses electrolysis to get hydrogen from water. Ascending and descending could be a light muscular system which allows the creature to compress the gasbags, ironically making it more work to descend than to ascend.
The only problem is punctures (and the inflammability of hydrogen).
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[Question]
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Now a solid body of rock will collapse itself to a round shape when it hits about [600 km in diameter](http://www.spaceanswers.com/deep-space/what-is-the-minimum-size-a-celestial-body-can-become-a-sphere/) (400 km for ice). Now, the Second Death Star is estimated to be between [160 and 900 km](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS603US603&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=how%20big%20was%20the%20death%20star). How big can a space ship be made of metal but still with "large open" living spaces. I assume it would still be filled with gases which would have its own gravity. Can a a spaceship be much larger than a 600 km sphere? To do so, would the infrastructure need to be primarily aluminum?
Adding from the comments.
a Dyson Sphere doesn't count, it should have internal structure.
Metal was suggested, but any material strong enough to build the self same craft is allowed.
[Answer]
The defining equation of hydrostatic equilibrium - the state a celestial body must be in to maintain some semblance of a spherical shape - is
$$\frac{dP}{dr}=-\frac{GM(r)\rho(r)}{r^2}$$
where $P$ is pressure, $r$ is radius, $M$ is mass, $\rho$ is density, and $G$ is the universal gravitational constant.
Assuming constant density here - which is actually a problem because there are gaps - we say that $$\frac{d\rho}{dr}=0$$ and, after a quick derivation (see [here](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110246/how-to-find-the-force-of-the-compression-at-the-core-of-a-planet?lq=1) for an example), we find
$$P(r)=\frac{2\pi G\rho^2}{3}\left(R^2-r^2\right)$$
where $R$ is the radius of the body. At $r=0$, we have
$$P(0)=\frac{2\pi GR^2\rho^2}{3}$$
Given that
$$\frac{dP}{dr}<0$$
it is clear that $P$ is at a maximum at $r=0$. Re-arranging, we have
$$R=\frac{1}{\rho}\sqrt{\frac{3P(0)}{2\pi G}}$$
$$$$
For $R$ to be maximized, we want the ratio $\frac{\sqrt{P(0)}}{\rho}$ to be maximized. We can say that $P(0)$ is the ultimate compression strength of a material.
Let's take a look at [the strengths of various materials](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_(engineering)#Typical_yield_and_ultimate_strengths). The metal with the highest ratio is pre-stressed steel, at
$$R=\frac{\sqrt{3,757,000,000}}{{1440}}\cdot\sqrt{\frac{3}{2\pi G}}=3,600\text{ kilometers}$$
That sounds pretty good to me.
[Answer]
Going a slightly different direction from HDE226868, I'm going to design my ship to be as big of a sphere as possible. To do this, I'm going to put all of the living space on the outer surface of a big hollow steel sphere full of vacuum.
I'm going to have a lot more steel sphere, mass wise, per square meter than I will living accomodations on the outside of it, so my question essentially becomes this: how big can I make a hollow steel sphere before it is crushed by its own gravity? Now it's time for equations.
**Gravity**
$g = GM\_{sphere}/r^2$
Where $g$ is acceleration due to gravity, $G$ is the gravitational constant, $M\_{sphere}$ is the mass of the sphere, and $r$ is the radius of the sphere.
**Mass of sphere**
$M\_{sphere}=4\rho\pi r^2t$
Where $t$ is the thickness of the sphere and $\rho$ is the density of steel.
**Pressure on the sphere**
$p = g\rho t$
This is a conservative estimate, since only the outermost portion of the sphere actually feels the full weight of its gravity. The actual pressure involves solving a simple integral that I don't feel like doing right now .
**Stress**
$\sigma = pr/2t$
This is the equation for stress in a [thin walled pressure vessel.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_vessel#Stress_in_thin-walled_pressure_vessels)
**Final equation**
Putting this all together, we get:
$\sigma = 4\pi G{\rho}^2r^3t^2/r^2t $
Or, simplified and solved for $r$,
$r = \frac{\sigma}{4\pi t G{\rho}^2}$
Plugging in values for the density of steel (8000$kg/m^3$), the ultimate stress of steel (3,757,000,000), and G ($6.67408 \times 10^{-11}$), we get a total maximum size of around 70,030,000km, given a thickness of 1m. Our ship's radius is inversely proportional to its thickness, so we can make it bigger if we make it thinner.
Of course, our giant sphere-ship will only be able to lurk about in deep space. Tidal Forces (Differences in the force of gravity between one side of the ship and the other) would destroy it if it came close to a large body like a planet or a star.
[Answer]
Even though they are not solid, does the concept of a Dyson Sphere fit within your question?
<http://www.technologyreview.com/view/536171/physicists-describe-new-class-of-dyson-sphere/>
Ahh, seeing the response...
It seems that most superstructure mega ships in theory have to deal not only with their own gravity of the structure, but with creating it for the inhabitants. I could see upwards of 900km depending on the solutions of internal and structural strain. The sphere of course comes to mind as the collapsed and near rest structure, one way of dealing with the stresses of gravity is to create pockets of open space that would essentially reduce the over all gravity stress as it's reduced by the open space.
I believe there has been discussion around these concepts on <http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/> but I cannot search it right now.
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[Question]
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Caloric intake varies vastly even in just the world of mammals, from the hundreds of pounds of leaves an elephant eats everyday, to the small amount a sloth eats. Obviously, caloric intake is important to how actively a species hunts or moves about.
Is there a good solid way to figure out the caloric intake of a species?
[Answer]
We can use something called [Kleiber's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law) (which I originally found [here](http://www.world-builders.org/lessons/less/biomes/annutrita.html)). It states that a power law describes the relationship between metabolic rate $q$ and mass of an animal $M$ (in kilograms):
$$q\propto M^{3/4}$$
You can then use this to determine the number of calories an animal consumes over the course of 24 hours, if we make certain assumptions about the constant of proportionality. As graphs from [here](http://universe-review.ca/R10-35-metabolic.htm) show, it seems to fit animals of all different masses:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vWm41.jpg)
Kleiber's law isn't 100% accepted, I'll admit. The value of the exponent was debated for quite some time, and the relation doesn't hold universally (as noted in the page with the graph, plants don't follow the law). However, it's a pretty good basic estimate of a creature's caloric intake.
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[Question]
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Assuming human-style vocal cords, what phonemes would a snouted animal be able to produce? I'm looking at developing a conlang (or several) for a setting, and it has several humanoid species with protruding muzzles. I can think of a few phonemes that can be ruled out immediately on the basis of lip immobility (/f/, /v/, and /w/ would be right out), but beyond that I'm kind of stumped.
(For what it's worth, [I looked at this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/58/), but it didn't really give me any leads. [There's also a SciAm article](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-dogs-can-talk/) that talks about canine communication, but it doesn't discuss this specific topic.)
[Answer]
Since it seems like you're looking for constraints to help construct your language, I thought one helpful approach would be to lay out exactly what sounds you have to work with. I've taken a chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) from [Unilang.org](http://www.unilang.org/resources/pronscript/art_ipachart.gif) and annotated it to indicate the sounds which are impossible without lips - crossed out in red.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bGoft.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eSZBR.png)
There's another thing to consider, if we're talking about carnivores like cats and dogs - their teeth aren't like ours, so it's likely they'd have some degree of difficulty forming dental consonants, and maybe alveolar consonants (with the tongue just behind the teeth), in the way that we're used to forming/hearing them. As their teeth don't form as close a 'seal' as ours, with larger gaps between pointier teeth, it's likely there'd be a lisping or 'whistling' sort of inflection on these consonants - which would be perceived as an impediment if they were trying to speak one of our languages, but would be the normal way of producing such sounds in a language developed by/for pointy-toothed carnivores. The effect will be more pronounced for the dental (marked in orange) than for the alveolar.
All this is also dependant on the shape and size of their tongue; dogs especially have larger tongues proportionate to their mouth cavity compared to humans, so they'll probably have more issues with this than cats. In humans, an abnormally large tongue is known as [macroglossia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroglossia), and affects individuals with Down Syndrome - a dog's speech might share certain characteristics commonly associated with the speech of individuals with this condition.
Something I haven't quite been able to define in full is whether or not a cat or dog would be capable of producing sounds that *aren't* in the human IPA. One thing that immediately comes to mind is a cat's purr, and off the top of my head I do not actually know much about how this sound is produced. Whatever mechanism is involved is *very* likely something that a cat would incorporate into its language, given the rich variety of ways in which real cats can purr. If you wanted to work it into this chart (i.e. to make a chart of your own) I would probably put it as a trill or fricative beyond the glottal. A canine language would probably also incorporate growling, which (when imitated by a human) is probably somewhere between a voiced uvular and glottal trill.
Given that their hearing is more sensitive in higher frequencies, it might be easier for them to perceive breathy/whistling sounds that are very subtle to our ears - accordingly they might assign linguistic significance to these sounds (e.g. allowing some air to escape through the nostrils, or between the teeth). If this was the case, it might be a part of their language that humans would struggle to understand/learn. More sensitive hearing overall might also lead them to assign significance to sounds that are almost imperceptible to us, like the sound of the tongue adhering to/separating from the roof of the mouth, or the sound of the throat closing during swallowing.
[Answer]
**YouTube Searching**: Do a search on YouTube for "talking dogs" or "talking cats". With enough training, they can do pretty much every single phoneme out there, despite the immobile lips.
**Allophones & Accents**: That happens because of allophones, which are similar groups of sounds that form the phonemes used in a language. In fact, you see that even in humans, where people thousands of miles apart learn the same phonemes as different allophones, which makes them harder to understand, but are still possible. We usually call these "accents." There's more than one way to speak a particular phoneme. They often sound more like what a deaf person sounds like when trying to speak; they're clearly not using the allophone we're used to, but they can be understood to some degree.
[Answer]
I would strike a balance between understandability (for readers/listeners), effect, and realism.
It would be burdensome to read a long book with extreme accents *for main characters* or *dominant* communication forms.
An accent, or linguistic differences, can highlight differences of nationality, origin, and race, and give the readers mental cues.
Realism is helpful; it might make perceptive readers enjoy the book more. But too much realism can ruin it (IE if most words have to be deciphered, and the reader must slow down too much).
Realism: I like the other answer highlighting phoneme groups that would be difficult. I should note that difficult phonemes tend to *not* make it into a language, even if one can learn to say them. The USA/american "R" sound is unique and difficult to say. But most foreigners can learn to say it (though it tends to sound softer or different).
Specific examples and suggestions:
* Introduce the reader/con-attendees to the linguistic limitations once:
* Using a character that is still learning English/common/whatever.
* With a character who is tired/emotional and lets their accent slip
* Aim for lighter and heavier accent variants (different skill levels in English)
* Main characters have a minimal accent; in writing, it's usually ignored or noted.
+ *"(words here)", he said in a thick X accent"*
+ *Rishriku said something, but she had to ask him to repeat it twice before realizing he was asking for a nasal wipe.*
* Think of the target audience, and don't overburden them with parsing your words.
* Use a thicker accent only at first, to set the tone.
+ IE, don't misspell words all through the book.
* Once you've set a tone, use context, phrases, etc to highlight the difference, rather than an annoying accent:
+ One or two words, phrases, altered translations, or spacer words used throughout. "You humans always worry, ka?" / "How would you say, hrrum, I *prefer* to speak to you in galactic common, thmmmm."
+ Consistently forget a word, phrase, or translation. "How fast is this, eh, space-engine? (hyperdrive)" / "Hand me the turn-twist-tool" he said, waving a bag of screws (screwdriver)
+ Misused slang, "This should be a bite of cake, right?"
+ Mixed metaphors, "It's not rocket surgery"
+ Unique slang throughout (read Ender's game) - best when the meaning is easy to infer.
+ Describe it (with humor): "The Kzindog muttered a stream of consanants. She had to replay the sounds in her mind to realize he had just said "You humans all smell the same."
+ Mention it: "You should have seen it" The guard said through his thick Kzindog accent.
+ Have them describe humans: "I laughed at his pink hairless face, eyes like potatoes" / "shut up, Round-Eyes."
+ Mention or make nonhuman sounds: "What did you think I was?" he growled, "A common dog?" / "shut up and get back to your chores," the feline alien said--and Joe had to remind himself that the purring voice was not a pleased voice, and these were not earth-cats.
+ Use altered punctuation or extra consonants sparingly: "What did youu--think I wasss? An earth-thing sssnake?"
+ Use different punctuation for different languages:
- <Do you think this human will mind if I eat his uneaten carrion?> Rishthrak growled softly to his companion, who simply gave a tail-shrug.
- *Rishthrak, can you hear me?* Grekil sent his telepathic message as powerfully as he could manage while keeping focus--and his lasblaster--pointed at the criminal.
+ Mention or display cultural bias, racism/specism: "Oh, sorry. I thought all humans liked potatoes" / "The only good thing you humans brought to the galactic community was potatoes--and that's not even a human invention."
[Answer]
I gave one answer already, but after coming back to this a few months later, I have some other ideas that constitute a separate kind of answer.
The summary is this: **keep it practical, memorable, and fun. Don't make it annoying, frustrating, confusing or difficult**
Here are my thoughts on what that means and how that works, in depth...
Naming schemes = fun, practical, and accessible
* Names are one place you can have a lot of consistency/creativity/fun:
+ They CAN consistently appear in a story, and sound unique to a culture/civilization.
+ Then naturally add cultural/species flavor/reference without having to be overt or go out of your way.
+ Live events (the CON part of the OP question): Name guidelines might be a good way to make it easy
- easy for amateurs to participate without much effort
- easy for RPG characters or shared storylines.
- Easy to prepare just once
- Requires minimal practice after coming up with a name.
- Rule sets need not be memorized, only referenced.
**Creating a "sound" for a language and its names.**
You probably want a practical, pronounceable, memorable and identifiable set of sounds, so people can say the equivalent of "that sounds like Klingon!" or "Is that a southern accent?"
Start with a subset of English vowels and consonants (there are about 40 phonemes if I recall, with regional variations)
* WHY create a sub-set of English sounds:
+ Pronounceable and thus memorable to readers
+ Won't slow English readers/audience down or frustrate/annoy.
+ Lets readers/audience just enjoy it without trying to remember stuff
- eg, that "#" means "purring chitter sound"
- eg, prevents second-guessing or stopping to check the book reference (and ruining plot flow or event participation).
**If you really want something unique/unpronounceable... go ahead, but follow these
guidelines/ideas**
* If you're passionate about coming up with something unique that humans can't pronounce or remember... that's fine, **but**...
\* Come up with easy English equivalents for any repeated use/reference in written form.
\* Have some exposition or conversation about why-this-nickname (because the characters want to reduce pain for the same reasons as the readers).
\* Think about how names get slaughtered and translated to equivalents in reality. It's a practical necessity. I will learn to respond to a Spanish pronunciation of my name when I'm around spanish-native speakers.
* To demonstrate by example... Try to read/memorize "Xt'grktm" versus a pronounceable version "Zet-griktam", or "Łßňĵ#" vs "Luhss-nuhjay-(chitter)".
**Define some nonverbal language, and use non-English/nonhuman sounds like body language.**
* Restrict **unique sounds** to *nonverbal cues* and *filler words* --
* Allows you to use these traits to add flavor/tone but not direct meaning
* Nonverbal cues have several advantages:
+ Don't need to be remembered, consistent, looked up in a reference, or constantly explained.
+ Need not be pervasive. You don't have to over-describe or over-use it, because it's not intrinsic to the langauge.
* Non-verbal and non-auditory cues.
* For con participants, these are probably easier to adopt and sprinkle into interactions, and don't have to be as consistent.
* For readers, this can be a good way to sprinkle in some sense of alien/difference without overdoing it
* Examples:
* Simple sounds: purr, growl, chitter, whistle, clicking, rasp, rattle
* Variations add flavor: soft purr, low growl, high-pitched chitter
* Remember to add variations/combinations to the unique sounds.
* Combinations add flavor/complexity later on: growling chitter, singsong purr, rasping whistle, rattle-growl, etc.
* Invert/change the meaning: Just like the real world, nonverbal cues can be misjudged or misunderstood, like how the thumbs up is like a middle finger in certain countries, or pointing can be done with chin/lips, index finger, or the whole hand (and each can be offensive/quirky in the wrong countries)
+ e.g. a purr actually indicates anger/negativity in a feline species, and it makes frustrating situations worse between them and humans.
+ Only use this in long-form fiction where you can establish the context, and maybe even use it as a plot device for/against protagonist/antagonist/others.
**Language and culture are linked, and are never homogenous**
* Remember: Language, culture, and nonverbal cues are all linked.
* Avoid "planet of the hats" or having a single rule set
* Make sure to identify one or two variants of language/pronunciation
* These variations come from sub-cultures, continents, dialects, sub-species, or alternate belief systems for a race/world.
* Don't overdo it--it should give variety but still be memorable and fun, allowing audience to easily remember the implications rather than giving them a burden of remembering/reminding/frustrating details.
* If names are going to be part of the dialogue, or at all important, simply having those names appear may be enough reminder of language differences.
**HOW to select a subset of English sounds - some ideas**
* You can be arbitrary--just pick a consonant or sound and strike it out. Not everything needs a reason.
* Also be logical. Think about biology, morphology, nutrition, and cultural influences on language and tone
+ IE, decide that the vowel sounds "O/oo/ou/w" are *difficult* for
feline *inexperienced* speakers (requires lip shapes that muzzles don't have).
* Don't be absolutist - think about variation & difficulty
+ Decide which English sounds are **hard**
+ Do not exclude these sounds entirely--but *soften* the sounds and *reduce their frequency* based on how difficult they are.
+ e.g. muzzle mouthed: any labial and dental sounds are hard, but not impossible
+ Remember that most sounds can be imitated very closely in alternate ways. The dental sound "t" is hard for canine/muzzles, but easy enough to move to the tongue & palette -- sounding closer to a "d" but not alike. This is easy enough, in fact, I wouldn't even exclude it from the language.
* Be logical about skill variations (fictional character skill and participant skills)
+ Characters/actors with less actual skill/practice can be the "*more* experienced English speakers" without worrying about messing up too much.
* Come up with some common names or naming patterns from sub-cultures/tribes/backgrounds. In English, you have O'hare/O'donnell, Robinson/Anderson, Swensen/Jensen. In Hawaiian, they have the glottal stop (heard in uh-uh and noted by apostrophe in Hawai'i); many pacific island languages have far fewer consonants because of dietary/malnourishment over generations - reducing dental sounds mostly.
* Decide how names are constructed and used. Do people go mostly by surname, tribe? Are there common endings for male/female or other identifying morphological/familial traits? Avoid having a single answer for any of these.
* Muzzles, specific examples/ideas:
+ If the muzzle-mouthed crowd are mostly from normal human cultures or heavily influenced by them, this should give less weight to any pronunciation differences--focus on *softening or slightly altering* some vowels and consonants. This is also easier on reader/actor/audience, and gives an out/explanation for those whose pronunciation is more English.
+ For casual actors/participants, find simple rules. IE, say everything while making a üò¨ grimacing/smiling/toothy mouth shape with cheeks stretched & frozen. It's much easier than learning any complex rules.
+ Experiment with talking without moving your lips much. Identify which vowels and consonants come out differently or not at all. Try to imagine how they might compensate if required to do so (you can make most sounds using other means, or close enough). Note which ones require more effort and practice. For example, if you have sharp teeth, "th" might have to be produced using the soft palette--it can be done, but it sounds slightly off. Think about how ventriloquists sound (especially amateurs) -- their characters often have a certain accent because *their lips aren't moving* and *they are maintaining a smile*
+ Have mercy on amateur/community actors' mouth muscles. Think about this carefully.
I realize I am answering partly from a written context, but remember that a con-lang will be written as well, many rules are the same, and many wb.se users are into writing--so answering for them too.
Every rule probably has its exceptions, of course. You have to know your audience, subject, tone, and intent. If you intend for the audience to be confused during a short skit, and to listen only to conversational tones and impressions, then by all means, do what you need to do. Long interactions rules will be different than short ones.
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There's this what-if scenario that's been kicking around in my head for quite a while now.
Basically, what if both *Homo sapiens neanderthalis* and *Homo sapiens sapiens* had survived? What if, due to geographical factors for example, the two subspecies had had been separate long enough to form two distinct species (with no interbreeding possible), and they had both evolved culturally, meeting later than they actually did?
A possible scenario that could have made this happen would have been *Homo sapiens neanderthalis* colonizing the Americas, for example. Or the Ural mountains being more of a barrier, and one living East and one West of them, but that's another question (potentially even for this site?).
This is similar to [What factors would allow for two dominant species on a world?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/577/what-factors-would-allow-for-two-dominant-species-on-a-world), but I am mainly asking for the effects it could have on society to have two intelligent races that are quite similar in appearance on one planet.
At the time of meeting, both species would have had comparable intelligence and made at least comparable cultural / technological progress. Since I am specifically asking about Homo sapiens sapiens and neanderthalis, one species prefers a colder climate, but the regions they can inhabit overlap, and with their cultural progress (clothes for Homo sapiens sapiens :-)), they can at least exist in the same regions.
(Similar questions are [What would the social implications of the creation of humanoid races be?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/11286/what-would-the-social-implications-of-the-creation-of-humanoid-races-be), but that's about the late introduction of a created species, and
[How would multi-race humanoid evolution happen](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10102/how-would-multi-race-humanoid-evolution-happen), about the evolution of similar races)
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This is an interesting question, and a complicated one.
### Why Neanderthals Died Off
First off, let's examine some of the reasons why experts believe neanderthals died off:
This species had incredible muscle mass, and matured earlier than us. Physically, they were ***much*** stronger than to us - a neanderthal in his prime may have been able to rip an arm off of a homo sapiens and beat him to death with it.
However, their great strength was also their biggest weakness: they could not scavenge the supplies needed to keep themselves, let alone their pregnant women, and children alive.
Basically, it is believed that they starved to death - as a species. They were also competing with homo sapiens, who required less food, and were, apparently, just a little bit smarter when it came to using tools and adapting to new situations.
### Meeting Each Other
Our ancestors clearly spread throughout the entire world. These tribes traveled, by foot, across continent and oceans (over ice bridges, etc.). However, with the world frozen over to a large degree, the routes they would have followed are relatively limited. These species would have met sooner rather than later.
Being tribal in nature, and basically savages, there's only two ways their encounter could go: war, or inter-breeding.
Either way, fast forward a thousand years, and you're left with pretty much a single species.
### Your Specific Question
But let's say that some Neanderthals did not starve out, and met up with homo sapiens only a few thousand years later. Would they both posses similar levels of technology? It's unlikely - look at Europeans vs Native Americans. That would give one side an advantage.
**Genocide**
If the species can't interbreed, then they are simply competitors for the same resources. Until very recently genocide was a very acceptable answer to dealing with your competition (native Americans, anyone? What about the Mayans, or the Conquistadors? When other people have stuff we want, we've killed them off mercilessly, and we're the same species).
One species would kill the other off, with my money being placed on homo sapiens - our ancestors were simply *smarter*.
**Possible Cohabitation?**
In my opinion this is highly unlikely, but here goes.
The cultural, and technological level of each race will matter immensely in this situation. The more barbaric, the less chance of them getting along.
For the two species to co-exist (which I am defining as one species not actively trying to stomp the other one out of existence) a few key conditions would have to be met:
**1. Territories don't overlap**
If one group is pushing into the other group's territory looking for resources then they're bound to come to blows. This has been the most basic reason human beings have killed each other ever since we first climbed out of trees.
**2. Language & Culture**
If both groups have advanced to the point where they have a decently developed language then they are more likely to try and communicate.
**3. Development Level**
If at least one group has outgrown the hunter-gatherer stage then that might work in favor of cohabitation. Evolving communities probably means that the foundation for trading has been established, not just killing strangers on sight.
**4. A Common Foe**
This is very likely the only true way for Neanderthals and homo sapiens to end up allied in some way. Neanderthals are stronger than homo sapiens, while homo sapiens are craftier. If they face a danger which threatens both, then they may team up, as long as communication is possible.
Imagine a group of Neanderthals meeting a raged group of battle weary HS. Instead of killing one another on sight, the HS trade some tools for food. Intrigues by these fur clad, mysterious strangers the Neanderthals don't just kill them, but offer them shelter, etc.
What you have to do is imagine a scenario where the two groups have something to offer each other, such as the brawny Neanderthals helping the clever HS hunt some dangerous creatures, or the two groups helping each other survive some cataclysm. That's what bonds two radically different communities together. In the aftermath of these two communities getting along and forming one united front others may follow in their path.
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It is unlikely that the two species would have had the same level of technological development at the time when they meet. From the example of documented within-human society wide-technology gaps encounters (Tasmanians vs British, for instance), we know that the depressingly standard outcome of such an encounter is genocide.
So the most likely social implication seems to be species-cide.
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This isn't a totally unknown concept, and has been covered in some detail in works of fiction. This made me immediately think of Robert Sawyer's [Neanderthal Parallax](http://www.goodreads.com/series/40828-neanderthal-parallax), for example (where the two species separately evolved in parallel universes, and then discovered each other in the modern day).
Humans have an instinctual preference for "like". Racism is *very* hard to eliminate - perhaps impossible to truly eliminate - for this reason. It takes almost a conscious decision to not tend to prefer those like yourself - in hiring decisions, in who you are friends with, etc. Not to say that people can't, and don't, make friends, hire, etc. those of other races or ethnicities - but the tendency is there.
There is also the common trope of the demagogue who appeals to that tribal nature. Hitler, Trump, and many others in between and before have made their popularity through naming a minority group "other" and appealing to the majority's fear of that minority.
Finally, you can think of this as a Prisoners' Dilemma; each side has a higher incentive to attack the other than to cooperate, and the only way out where both survive is if they prove their good faith to one another many times over repeated iterations. Getting to the point where that's possible is necessary before mutual survival is likely.
As such, I would imagine that when the two cultures met, there would be a great deal of difficulty regardless of era. What kind of difficulty might depend on era, but it would not be straightforward.
* In the pre-Nationalist era (pre-1700), you might well have the least trouble. Assuming both cultures were equally technologically able and equally powerful (say, the Neanderthals occupied North America, while the Homo Sapiens occupied Eurasia/Africa), you might end up with something not all that different than post-1700 politics. The nations would probably not get along at points, but a combination of Realpolitik and simply geographic separation would likely lead to a situation where they traded, occasionally fought, but otherwise stayed away from each other.
If both nations stayed balanced through the Nationalist period, and made it to the Modern period, you might have a world like you have now - except with two species - similar to how different races more-or-less coexist now in most countries. If you think of this in Prisoners' Dilemma terms, you have a fairly long time when the two species can't really wipe each other out whereupon they can prove their good faith to each other; if that occurs, they may survive the technological era where it becomes possible to wipe each other out.
* In the Nationalist era (roughly 1700-1945), if the two cultures discovered each other at that point, I think it's highly difficult to imagine one species not eliminating the other. During this time, most of our wars arose from ethnic nationalism (or, leaders' appeal to it); people began to identify much more strongly with their nation (rather than their locality), and I suspect this would have been more difficult in the case of two species. World Wars were possible at this time; not just because of weapons technology, but because it was possible to mobilize an entire nation-state into war, whereas that was not really possible beforehand. I suspect it would be challenging for each group to prove their good faith to each other before a nationalist/speciesist leader was able to mobilize their species to wipe out the other.
* In the Global era (1946-present), I think you would have major problems still - but less likely a world war, *if* contact was made slowly, in stages, where each species could demonstrate its willingness for cooperation to solve the Prisoners' Dilemma. If the leaders of each side had that opportunity before it became globally known that there was another species, it's entirely possible that the two races could survive. (In *Hominids* etc., the difficulty of cross-universe combat made this less of an issue of course; if I recall correctly, though it's been quite a few years since I read it, there was still a significant speciesist component to our response despite the difficulty of crossing universes.) Particularly, if a few scientists got to know each other first, and then brought a few world leaders in, and *then* went public, I think it's possible both sides could get to an arrangement where they could both survive - but it would probably be tense for centuries.
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Another possibility of course is if the two groups occupied different spaces - examples in fiction include a species occupying the oceans (think Blue Hades from the *Laundry Files* series), species occupying neighboring planets post-easier space travel, etc. Then, you still have the prisoners dilemma situation, but it's somewhat easier to survive because the benefits of attacking are less (as there are less common resources to fight over, when you don't occupy the same space).
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One possible scenario I am contemplating is an initial stage of war, which seems natural to me, as we have seen it in history quite often (the Americas, for example). But if both species cover large territories, and are at a similar technological level, this might result in a stalemate situation, where over time the losses just get too big to sustain a war. There have been countries who were at war for a long time and in the end no country was a clear winner - territory may be lost or won, but the other country might not end up conquered or completely defeated. The regions far removed from the border of the species might stop sending people off to die because they are sick of losing them to an endless war fought far away from them, for example.
So in the end, total annihilation might just not be feasible in the absence of weapons of mass destruction. This could lead to trade relations between the two species, even. I wouldn't expect a deep friendship to form, and I would expect a lot of hatred and racism (can it even be called that, then?), but a sort of acceptance.
**Religion** would be different. With such an obvious example of another intelligent species, religions would spring up that said "our species is God's chosen one" and I can imagine others would appear that revere a sort of "dualist" system. That say that in the two species, God is showing his/her dual nature.
I have contemplated the idea that **racism** within a species might actually be lower in such a setting. If there is another group around that's very different from you, maybe the focus on the differences between members of one species gets weaker. On the other hand, prejudice would be expressed as groups being closer to the "rival species". Terms of hatred would be derived from whatever most visibly separates the species. **Slavery** would be more common in regards to the other species, maybe leading to slavery within a species not happening.
If progress picked up in one species and not the other, a society where both survive, but one is only used as slaves is possible.
If scientific progress continued the way it did, it's really a question of what comes first - a greater understanding of science bringing more tolerance, or better warfare resulting in weapons of mass destruction.
So, in essence, what I am thinking is that if the two species didn't have the means to annihilate the other, there would be phase of hatred, maybe a phase of neutrality and even trade and then either mass annihilation or actual mixing with the potential for a lot of conflict.
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Sooner or later, one would destroy the other. We destroy cultures even very similar to ours so... something entirely different? - of course it has to give way!
But that already happened! So, I guess you want to exclude this scenario. Maybe your question is: "What would the two societies look like, if HSS and HSN didn't eliminate each other before the age of Political Correctness [my term] came?"
Well... Excuse my lame pre-historical geography skills (just imagine a more correct landscape in the cases which I am wrong) but let's say enough HSN lived in the small bottleneck between Africa and Asia.
I think this is the likeliest scenario that would allow the HSN to survive the HSS expansion. They NEED the land for resources for their much more demanding bodies.
So, they coordinated a blockade somewhere in what we call modern Egypt and kept the HSN at bay.
Actually, Africa is not a bad place to be. The HSS would have used the vast resources to build a Europe-like continent in Africa. Europe would be another dreary part of Asia.
That would all seem plausible all the way in history before guns leveled the playing field. All the sword-fighting stuff the HSN could handle, using their superior bodies and some tactics.
Then, a WWI-style invasion would have gained a lot of land for the HSS but maybe not the whole of EuroAsia?
You'd have pockets of HSN in the outskirts of EuroAsia. The Americas would look the same. Let's say whichever of the America's the HSS landed in, the other one remains HSN, due to a bottleneck in the Panama area but, still, with the advent of firearms, HSN would have been pushed to the "still acceptable" north parts of North America (or south parts of South America).
Can I say the technological/social differences between the HSS and HSN are comparable to the tech/soc differences we currently have between "the west" and "the 3'rd world"?
In that case, imagine something similar to what we have now: Vast amount of people still live without running water, electricity or education but as long as they play their role (=let us use their resources without uprising), we will be "politically correct" and totally ignore their problems.
We would
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I have a colony of humans on Mars, living in enclosed cities to maintain breathable air. (If they need to leave, they suit up.) Assuming modern-day technology, how do I figure out how many people a city of volume V can support? Or, to reverse the question, how large a domed city would I need to support a population of size P? (I assume that if we can solve one of these we can solve the other, so attack it from either end.)
The protective enclosure dates back to the founding of the colony; its purpose is to enclose breathable atmosphere so they can live on Mars. I have been assuming that a transparent dome is preferable for (a) getting sunlight and (b) combatting any feelings of confinement because they can see farther than the city borders, but I'm open to alternatives.
The people living on Mars need to be self-sufficient (no deliveries from Earth, though they could have brought whatever starting equipment they'd need). They do not necessarily all live in the same city. (How I distribute my population among cities will depend in part on the answer to this question; I'm trying to figure out what's practical.)
I assume that there would need to be ample vegetation to consume CO2 and emit oxygen -- which is fine, because those people are going to need a food source anyway. That vegetation requires space, so factor that into the calculation (or tell me why that's not an issue). I am flexible about what my people eat.
The question of how large a structure can be built, engineering-wise, is separate. Here I'm trying to get a handle on the life-support side of the problem.
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There is no real way to give a number here as the city can support however many people you want it to support. The support infrastructure just has to scale up to the size of the population.
The most likely situation would be large hydroponics farms providing both oxygen and food. The diet would be essentially vegetarian. You may have park-style areas inside the city that would contribute some oxygen but would mostly be for recreational purposes.
The hydroponics may well have separate crops optimized (and most likely genetically modified) for food and for oxygen production, or the two purposes might be combined so long as the harvesting was staggered appropriately to keep oxygen supplies up.
A variety of plants should be used to protect the colony from anything that badly affects one species of plant from killing the whole colony.
It would be possible to do the same thing simply using greenhouses and growing plants in beds within the greenhouses as well, no hydroponics necessary. Hydroponics give more control over the process though and with something this essential to the city that is likely to be an important factor.
It's also likely that a lot of the oxygen production (and possibly some of the food production) would be done in the form of algae in transparent tubes, it allows you to present a large surface area to the light and produce oxygen that way. This technology is already being developed for producing bio-fuels as well so is likely to be well developed by the time any martian city is being constructed.
Power would come from either solar or fission (fusion in a potential future-tech scenario) and be essentially unlimited. On Mars the thin atmosphere makes solar fairly efficient even though they are far from the sun.
So in other words so "how big can it be" is: "however big you want it to be"
And "how many people can I fit inside": "however crowded you want to make them"
The settlement would be placed near a source of ice and the ice heated to provide raw materials for water. That water can also be split to produce more oxygen in emergencies.
One of the major hazards though is radiation due to the thin atmosphere and lack of magnetosphere. The city would actually most likely be built underground and/or heavily shielded - or at the very least have underground shelters the inhabitants retreat to during solar storms.
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Paolo Soleri, the Italian architect who pioneered the idea of Arcologies: cities in a bottle, ie: Domed cities, calculated that maximum habitation in an ultra-urban setting wih all necessary services, etc, was 10,000 people per square mile, which equates to 15 per acre. This includes all city and human services needed for safety and continued independence of the colony.
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The book at hand is Red Mars. In it we find quite a lot of details of the first cities on Mars, infrastructure (including air), water supply (not recycled), radiation protection, etc.
You need to check bare necessities:
1. How much space does a person need? Manila has a population density of 42k people per km2 (the entire city). [1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density) You can make that even bigger with taller buildings up to the dome limit.
2. How much energy does a person need? Not really important, since you can simply put thousands of solar panels out of the dome.
3. How much oxygen does a person need? A person uses about 550 liters of pure oxygen per day [2](http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/respiratory/question98.htm) and that is around what seven or eight trees produce [3](http://sciencefocus.com/qa/how-many-trees-are-needed-provide-enough-oxygen-one-person), but trees are very inefficient. What about covering every single square centimeter (including vertical sides of buildings) with grass? Problem is that, in fact, grass does not produce oxygen [4](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6757/does-grass-alone-produce-enough-oxygen-for-life) so what we need is growing plants that store carbon. Potatoes, carrots, and soy are the best bet, storing carbon that we can eat (and release) later, and producing oxygen while growing.
4. How much water does a person need? Unimportant, since it can be all recycled using a short surface.
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The major problem with living in a surface dome will be radiation. Mars radiation is too high for constant exposure. People will spend most of their time under radiation shelter.
A tall thin dome won't provide much radiation protection. Although one that generated a powerful magnetic field of its own would provide some. More likely the dome would begin as a cluster of small, domes covered in dirt for shielding. Later as the colony grew some of the intention domes could be linked together to provide support for larger domes, and so on. Eventually, fairly thick leaded glass could be used although this would be a very heavy and substantial structure, like a vast stack of old school CRT screens.
The dome would only be able to show light part of the year. In winter CO2 and water ice would form on it unless it was highly heated (just as they do on Earth.) Worse, the martian dust, especially in the month long stand storms, would coat it over. A big dome of glass or plastic, even grounded, would be one hell of static electricity generator.
Power would have to be nuclear. Solar would be weight/watt cost prohibitive and would suffer the same problems with dust, ice and storms that forced the Pathfinder robots to hibernate for months at a time.
Primary oxygen will come from algae tanks with food plants providing oxygen in the carbon cycle. Algae will be part of waste recycling as well.
The problem with domes is that while they are very efficient enclosures of volume, they are poor encloses of area. If you look at images of interiors of large existing domes, you see small areas with vast amounts of open air above them. On Mars all that air is generated, filtered, heated and pressurized. To make efficient use of the space, you would have to fill it with large tall buildings, and then you've lost your open spaces.
A better and bigger dome could be produced underground using a nuclear charge technique, experimented with back in the 60's. An underground nuke in relatively soft rock compresses the rock and melts it, followed by an injection of water into the center of the molten mass which expands and presses the melted material into a dense glass, then a type of cement is injected. Soviets used that to build big chambers for storing oil. After it cooled, a coating of plastic sealant makes it airtight. Radiation is minimal, actually less than surface construction on Mars, don't have to worry about heating the air, external radiation or sandstorms or efficient use of space. Plus, the materials you need to ship to mars are much lighter.
The population density of the dome is really dependent on how dense you want to pack them in. The energy production and rest of the physical plant will be outside the dome as will the agricultural. Plants don't need a vista and plants will have to grown under false light on mars anyway. As always, energy is your final limitation. With enough energy, you can do anything.
Having spent a summer knocking around in a hazmat suit directing aerial spraying, I kind of doubt people on Mars will be big fans of wide open spaces. The nicest spring day pales when view through a face plate and filtered air. A 3 billion year unchanging landscape will get old in a hurry. Most likely a deep, secure efficient underground facility with some nice projections of Earth on the walls and ceilings might go over better.
I would suggest looking at the population densities of contemporary Tokyo, one of the highest in the world, to get a feel for how many you could cram in.
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While I don't have the answers I can give you a starting point: Forget the volume, ignore what the people need to live in. It doesn't matter.
The limiting factor will be food production. If the plants are growing directly in the city the needs here are going to be substantial--remember, Mars only gets 60% of the sunlight that Earth does, you're looking at about half the growth rate you would get on Earth.
I have read that you can get by with only 10% of the light by supplying only the best frequencies but counting all conversion losses this means an area of solar collectors nearly as big as the growing area if you planted things directly. Fossil fuels are obviously out of the question and nuclear power would be quite problematic because it would be so hard to cool the reactors. (Remember, on Earth reactors are generally on rivers to get cooling water.)
Build your dome, the surface layer is pretty much all food crops, the people live underneath. You'll have enough space for the people.
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I will speculate with the two information :
* <http://www.space.com/26603-interstellar-starship-colony-population-size.html>
* And the size of a stadium
We need between 20.000 - 40.000 colonist (and diverse geneticity) to maintain healty gene pool.
A stadium can hold 100.000 (a hundred thousand) people seated in the earth. So let say we are able to build four time greater structure on a planet near half of a gravity with the same construction effort and resources. And it should accomodate at least 20.000 (twenty thousand) with enough slack (say 10.000 people more) people.
In [Venus](http://www.thevenusproject.com/) Project Jacques Fresco suggests fixed population sized (around 10.000 people) circular shaped cities. After the city reachs it's limits. You build a new one and migrate.
One more thing :
In Stanley Robinson's novel "Red Mars" ([http://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Trilogy-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0553560735](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0553560735)) Colonists puts thermal nuclear reactor under an ice cap on the North pole of the Mars. In time a cave emerges (a giant iglo shaped city size bubble) and they live happily ever after under.
Is it a kind of answer you looking for?
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Let us suppose that we have people who for all intents and purposes are human, except for one (not so) tiny modification: they are able to exert enough muscular force and react fast enough that they can move their whole body, or their limbs independently, faster than the speed of sound, say $1800 \text{ kmh}^{-1}$ / $1118 \text{ mih}^{-1}$/ $500 \text{ ms}^{-1}$, and can accelerate to such speeds in as little as a few metres or so ($30\text{ kms}^{-2}$, or $3061\text{ g}$), without any ill effects to *themselves*. They can see where they are going and what they are doing; everyone and everything else would appear to be moving in slow motion. They have no special ability to generate thrust, they achieve such speeds by running or jumping or otherwise applying a force against another object.
However, let us also suppose that *only* their own bodies are protected from the ill effects of such speeds and accelerations. They could throw and catch something at said speeds, and while their bodies would no more be injured by performing such an action than ours would when throwing something, the things that they throw are *not* so protected. Any clothing they may wear is not protected either.
This ability is gained by magic, but I'm looking for answers that do not rely on magic, only science.
What would the effects on their possessions, the environment and any bystanders be should such a person use this ability?
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> What would the effects on their possessions, the environment and any
> bystanders be should such a person use this ability?
>
>
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**A lot**
You made me look up a new Order of Magnitude chart on Wikipedia: [acceleration](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28acceleration%29)! Congratulations! I haven't needed that one.
3000Gs is roughly the acceleration of a baseball as its hit by a baseball bat. However, that is over a very short time period, and impacts a nice compact mass. Accelerating a purse to the speed of sound is going to be icky. The average purse weighs about 2kg. An acceleration of $30000 \text{m}/\text{s}^2$ on that is going to yield a force of 60kN on the poor pursestrap. For perspective, a climbing carbiner is rated to 20-30kN. Novice climbers who don't trust their gear are reminded that that is more than sufficient to hold a car. You'd need 2 of them just to hold a purse to you, and you'd probably want climbing-grade webbing for a strap. No designer leather here.
You'd probably want to rely on magic to accelerate these components with you, using the same magic that prevents these humans from turning to goo. However, we're going to need more magic. Humans are not exactly [Sears-Haack bodies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears%E2%80%93Haack_body). This means that, once you're up to speed, the wave drag of the sonic boom behind you is going to be brutal. This drag is also not just concentrated on one point, so any clothing or equipment which was not ripped off by the acceleration is going to be subject to tremendous forces. Modern planes are designed to get through this region with many shockwaves as fast as possible: the X-15 used over 250kN of thrust from anhydrous amonia and liquid oxygen. This is probably another place for magic to come to the rescue.
Finally, consider newton's 3rd law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Not only do they need to withstand the abuse of acceleration, but whatever they're pushing against has to as well. Let's avoid having to play friction games, and give them a perfect vertical surface to accelerate off of. The suface of an average human's feet is roughly $0.02 \text{m}^2$. If we are accelerating a 100kg man at $30000 \text{m}/\text{s}^2$ like you say, we are looking at 150 MPa. Tossing that into [Wolfram Alpha](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=30000m%2Fs%5E2%20*%20100kg%20%2F%200.02m%5E2) we see some comparisons:
* 0.2 to 0.6 times the pressure of a water cutter
* 0.5 to 2.1 times the maximum pressure in the chamber of a firing pistol
* 1.8 times the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench
Now we eventually have to move some object in the other direction to equalize things. In a perfect world, you'd just slow the rotation of the earth down, or make it wobble a wee bit. However, just how hard is this? Consider momentum balancing... momentum of your superhero moving forward must be matched with momentum of some object moving backwards. We don't want to have to kick an object backwards supersonic (that would upset the nearby gawkers). We need to kick a massive object slowly. A train locomotive will do nicely. A [GE Genesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Genesis) like you'd find on the front of an Amtrak train clocks in at 121,672kg. That's 1216 times more massive than our 100kg man, so it needs to go in the opposite direction 1216 times slower than our man. That's .4m/s. If you were to shove a Genesis sideways with that force, you'd lift it up on one set of wheels, with the other wheels dangling 1.6cm off the tracks\*. If you aimed for the top of the train (the previous calculations assumed you shoved right at its center of gravity), 10 people kicking off at once could knock a Genesis clean off the tracks.
\* Slight literary license. Train wheels are not actually fixed to the car. The car merely rests on top of them with enough weight that they're (usually) not going anywhere. However, I think this imagery is worth the slight inaccuracy.
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As for the person...
It would feel like being in an endless vat of molasses. with insignificant acceleration due to gravity compared to wind resistance. I imagine that is how it would feel regardless of how strong your are, or are able to execute whatever move/thing you are doing. Gravity would be wayyyyyyy below your strength level hence not really being noticeable. The molasses is an air replica. Although I'm not super educated on supersonic fluid dynamics.
Now get your mind on that level or you will never execute it...
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I'm working on a story where the characters are stranded on a planet that turns so incredibly slow that it acts like a tidally locked planet, with one side burning and the other frozen. However because the planet still turns, the characters are forced to out-walk it constantly in the habitable strip, chasing the sun. I can't find anything on the internet that even mentions something like this, so I was wondering if a place with this environment is possible.
[Answer]
Yes! In fact, we can find it right in our solar system.
Mercury is the closest thing to what you would want. It is in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, meaning 3 Mercurian days happen every two Mercurian years. Since it has no atmosphere, there is very little heat distribution going on at the surface, so the day side is scorching and the night side is freezing.
Another example of a planet with very long days is Venus, though it does not have a spin-orbit resonance, the atmosphere does distribute solar heat, and *all* of the surface is a scorching wasteland, not just the day side.
In conclusion, your planet needs to have
* No real atmosphere
* Reasonable distance to the sun (so it can actually be hot enough to be deadly)
* Very long days
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Strange title I know, but you'll understand why quickly.
I wanted to use a black hole to create absurd amounts of power for hopefully obvious reasons (kind of useful). The problem with natural large black holes is that they tend to be heavy and produce less energy per second than small black holes (or that is what I understand, I would expect the larger surface area to mean it generates more energy but have less surface area to volume to release that energy but that doesn't seem to be the case).
The problem with small black holes is that they disappear on you quickly due to evaporation while you get the energy. So you need to feed them. A very small black hole evaporates almost instantly in a nuclear explosion and they are tiny with Schwarzschild radii measured at the Planck scale.
In my story they use a chamber that suspends the black hole, can absorb all the energy of the black hole and convert it into power to run things. And the chamber has another function, it can activate and at no energy cost can stop the black hole from evaporating in its entirety. There is no grey area here, it can only stop evaporation completely or normal evaporation occurs. This is all important for the story as part of it takes place inside the room of the black hole and the plot requires at least these things!
The question I have: what is the reasonable maximum power output I can get while feeding the black hole using this system while turning the black hole off as little as possible (so you can limit the amount of black holes you need to bring along which can affect the story).
The answer has to explain the following:
* How do you feed the black hole despite it expelling large amounts of energy? (Or why cant you feed it while it is active and need to turn it off to feed it)
* If the black hole needs to be deactivated to be fed, how long does it need to be offline to properly feed it?
* What energy output is this black hole going to give, and based on that how much material needs to be thrown in per second to keep the black hole at that size?
* How do you feed the black hole based on its size?
* What material would be best suited to feed the black hole? (I assume it'll be heavy elements in cases where the black hole is mere hundreds of kilo's in weight)
The best answer will have the most energy output with the least time offline (not amount of times offline, amount of total time offline). In case it is important, the method that offers the highest energy output on average over one cycle of activation, deactivation and feeding is the best answer. For clarity: highest means the most energy per second, rather than the most energy across the entire cycle.
[Answer]
In practice, you may not need to feed it at all - as long as you can deal with a sufficiently hefty mini black-hole. According to [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#targetText=In%20common%20units%2C,6.84%C3%971021%20W.) a black hole with mass $M$ measured in kg will have:
Power output $P = 3.56\times 10^{32} M^{-2}$ Watts.
Evaporation time $T = 2.67\times 10^{-24} M^3$ years.
So a tidy little black hole of mass $10^{11}$ kg will provide you with a continuous 36 GigaWatts. Its evaporation time is 2.7 billion years and it will eventually ramp up its power output, but for the first 2000 years or so the power output won't change significantly. This means that the simplest option is to just use it continuously (and leave it for your great-great-$great^{120000000}$ grand children to find a safe way to safely dispose of the remnant.
Of course you could feed it approximately 400 micrograms of matter for every second you leave it 'switched on', in which case it will effectively last forever. But the problem is that your black-hole has a diameter of approximately $1.5\times 10^{-16}$ m, which is about 10 times smaller than a proton, so the absorption cross-section for any kind of matter will be very small. So it is not obvious that you could actually 'feed' it in any practical way - even if your chamber could hand-wavingly stop it from evaporating during the feeding process.
As well as size of the Schwartzchild radius being problematical, the radiation pressure at its surface (about $5 \times10^{63}$ W/m^2) would definitely be a hinderance to poking matter into it, if you didn't stop it from evaporating during feeding.
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For a complex world-building scenario I want a habitable moon orbiting a habitable earth-like planet. The habitable moon should allow for flora, fauna and landscape as similar to earth as possible. The same goes for the habitable earth-like planet it is orbiting.
I have checked the various topics concerned with habitable moons:
* [What would a habitable moon most probably look like?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/342/what-would-a-habitable-moon-most-probably-look-like)
* [Habitable moon of a gas giant: working out the sizes and distances](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7270/habitable-moon-of-a-gas-giant-working-out-the-sizes-and-distances)
* [Naturally making a gas giant moon habitable](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/27781/naturally-making-a-gas-giant-moon-habitable)
* [How would an earth-like planet with a habitable moon work and how to get there?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15642/how-would-an-earth-like-planet-with-a-habitable-moon-work-and-how-to-get-there)
Based on what I read there, especially [Jim2B's answer here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15642/how-would-an-earth-like-planet-with-a-habitable-moon-work-and-how-to-get-there/15645#15645), I have created the following moon with [this calculator](http://www.transhuman.talktalk.net/iw/Geosync.htm):
* mass: 0.33 of earth’s mass (around 3 times the mass of mars)
* density: 1.3 of earth's density (because I want a higher surface gravity)
* radius: 0.6332 of earth’s mass (calculated by the application using mass and density as a given)
This is all calculated by the program:
* Diameter = 8070 km
* Density = 7.176 g/cm³
* Surface Area = 204.5 million square km
* Roche Limit = 1000 km (nearest possible natural satelite)
* Surface Gravity = 0.83 Gs
* Geosynchronous orbital distance = 24820 km, or miles (from surface of planet)
* Geosynchronous orbital velocity = 2.13 km/s , or miles per second
Maximum surface\* temperature to hold onto an atmospheric component for billions of years, for each type of gas:
* Carbon Dioxide? 2972 °C
* Oxygen? 2087 °C
* Helium? 22 °C
* Hydrogen? -126 °C
Could such a moon possibly exist? And if not what changes would be needed to make this moon around an earth-like planet possible?
Please consider the following points particularly:
* Density of the moon: I need it as high as possible to have the surface gravity of the moon approximate 1 g. Playing around with the calculator I have settled on 1.3 times the density of earth, which gives a surface gravity of 0.83 Gs. This means a density of 7.176 g/cm³. Is this density achievable by still keeping a similar elemental composition to earth's? If not, could that be achieved by replacing some of the iron with a denser element? What properties would such an element have to have?
* Atmosphere: Could this moon sustain the necessary atmosphere considering the surface temperatures?
* Earth-like planet the moon is orbiting: This planet has the roughly same mass and radius as earth. If a larger mass and/or surface is necessary to have such a moon, that would be ok, as long as the density of the earth-like planet could be lower to keep the surface gravity of said planet at 1 G.
* Distances between planet and moon: No specific requirements. Can be anything to make this planet-moon relationship work.
* Size relations between planet and moon: Apparently accretion disk formations would make such a large moon compared to the planet unlikely, but would it be impossible? Could there be any other scientifically explanation for a planet having such a large moon, for instance a "rogue moon" captured by the planet ([Theia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet)) captured instead of a collision), [the moon being debris from the planet itself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis) or something else? This alternate explanation can be unlikely, as long as it is scientifically sound and possible at all.
[Answer]
It's definitely within the realm of possibility.
Real quick first, defining terms to make comparison easier (I really do hate the pronoun game):
Earth: Our planet.
Luna: Our moon.
Terruh: The planet your moon orbits (since it's definitely not Terra, get it? Okay, tough crowd.)
Lunuh: Your moon (since it's... okay, fine.)
**Density:** You need Lunuh to have an average density of around 7.2 g/cm3. That's workable. [Here is a list](http://jersey.uoregon.edu/~mstrick/AskGeoMan/geoQuerry57.html) of the approximate density of various "layers" of Earth - crusts, mantle, etc. For Lunuh, you'll want either the higher-density layers to be thicker/bigger (relatively speaking) OR the densities themselves to increase. Density increase is probably easiest - for example, the inner core of Earth is an iron-nickel alloy which is about 80% iron, but nickel is denser than iron so an increase in the amount of nickel would lead to an increase in density. You could also try, for example, reducing the thickness of the mantle, but I don't have enough geological experience to know what would happen if you tried that. But, on the bright side, the iron-nickel core will give Lunuh a nice magnetic field, which is good for habitability.
**Atmosphere:** Yes, it could definitely hold on to a breathable atmosphere if the necessary gasses were there. Note that the numbers given are for maximum temperature. The higher the temperature, the faster the molecules are moving, so the more likely they are to escape into space. Since Lunuh won't be reaching temperatures of 2000 C (since we, you know, don't want to melt when we visit), it will definitely be able to hold an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere.
**The Planet:** Terruh can exist no problem. Its existence is its own problem outside of having Lunuh orbiting it. There are side effects of having such a large moon, such as significantly bigger tides and brighter nights, but those aren't existence problems.
**Distances:** It's a good thing that you don't have any requirements for the distance between Terruh and Lunuh, because this moon will have to be quite a bit further away from Terruh than Luna is from Earth. You specified that Lunuh will be 1/3 the mass of Mars, which means that it will be about nine times the mass of Luna ([WA link](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%5Bmass%20of%20mars%5D%2F%5Bmass%20of%20the%20moon%5D)). In order to get the same gravitational force between Terruh and Lunuh as between Earth and Luna, Lunuh would need to be triple the distance from Terruh that Luna is from Earth. More on that in a sec.
**Size Relations:** As @HenryTaylor said in a comment, it would be more likely to have been captured than formed via impact or accretion disk. My best hand-wavy explanation would involve Terruh capturing Lunuh during the tumultuous early life of the solar system, but given that planetary formation in general is still largely in the realm of hypotheses, I can't say too much as far as scientific rigor is concerned.
So all in all it looks okay. We can have large moons, though at a certain point we have to ask ourselves if it's really just two planets orbiting each other.
The main problem I'm seeing is the issue of tidal locking. Luna is tidally locked to Earth, which is why we only ever see one side of it. If Lunuh got tidally locked with Terruh, things could get problematic as far as the habitability side of things is concerned. Remember that it's triple the distance from Terruh that Luna is from Earth, so it's orbital distance (relative to the planet) is six times that of Luna. Assuming the same orbital velocity (not sure whether/how much it would have to change to make a stable orbit), that means it would have a day-night cycle of six months (in Earth time). That's not exactly conducive to life, so it absolutely cannot be tidally locked. But other than that, it seems like it would work fine.
[Answer]
What you have here is really a double planet. I'd recommend just going for that, and have two quite similar planets orbiting their mutual centre of gravity. That lets you get rid of the density problem, and makes it easy to accept they both have fairly fast rotation and hence magnetic fields and reasonable atmospheres.
Having such a double planet form is quite unlikely, but it's only unlikely, not impossible.
As a bonus, having two potentially life-bearing planets so close makes it positively plausible that life could spread from one to the other via bacteria carried on debris from impact events on one planet, which happens to hit the other planet.
Addition: there isn't any fundamental difference between a large moon, with a fraction of the planet's mass, and a double planet. In both cases both of them orbit a barycentre, it's just that a larger moon means the barycentre is further from the centre of the planet. But that doesn't make any very major difference.
If the moon is going to blow up, you need to consider what happens to the debris. If the moon is blasted apart and disperses in all directions, the chunks that hit the planet will be more than adequate to cause an extinction event.
If you remove the moon in some way that doesn't damage the planet, the loss of the moon will perturb the planet's orbit, in a way that depends on their positions relative to the sun when the moon goes away.
[Answer]
This sounds plausible to me. Large moons are sometimes formed in hydrodynamical simulations of giant impacts between protoplanets in the late stages of planet formation. The hardest part to buy is the density. Mercury has a lot more iron than Earth but its density is about the same because, with less gravity it is less compressed. We also don't know of any exoplanets with densities that indicate a much more iron-rich composition than Earth (although they are very hard to measure).
UPDATE: There is now a 2.6 Earth-mass exoplanet known with a Mercury-like composition -- see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2-229b>
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Island planets are common in science-fiction, and we've even got [a few questions](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14220/climate-on-an-island-world) [about them](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14267/society-on-an-island-world) in worldbuilding. However, I cannot help but wonder how, or if, they could form. On Earth, at least, our geological processes lead to the formation of lots of continents, and only a few islands, relative to their total surface area.
Would it be possible for a planet to form with no major landmasses larger than, say, New Zealand, but lots of islands? What sort of geological processes would form a planet like this, instead of an Earth-like one? Ideally, I'd like the planet to be inhabitable, as well.
[Answer]
Let's consider the processes that create islands, as well as those that create "continents". First, let's establish the fact that the Earth's crust is chemically different than its lower lithosphere and mantle. The crust is formed from lower-melting-point, lighter rocks, which melt and float to the surface of the lithosphere.
Now: what differentiates dry land from ocean? Obviously, it's the height of that chunk of crust. On Earth, our large oceans usually form at oceanic ridges, which are locations where two tectonic plates spread apart. This produces thin, low-lying crust. Of course, to maintain the size of the planet, there are plates being forced underneath others at subduction zones.
Typically, islands are formed from volcanic action. Volcanoes usually happen at the edges of tectonic plates. When one plate subducts under another, it heats due to friction, and crustal rocks melt and are pushed upwards, emerging on the upper plate. Hawaii is an example of a volcanic island that isn't located at the edge of a plate. Its volcanoes are the result of a plume of hotter mantle billowing up from near the core and creating a hot spot on the pacific plate. Finally, islands can be created when larger land masses are eroded, leaving separated harder rocks dotted around.
Continents are really just big collects of old, high crustal rock. They've clumped up and broken apart many times through Earth's history, basically following the tectonic plates wherever they go. As plates slide around, they begin to consolidate their clumps of crust, and large continents result.
So our question becomes: Which of these mechanisms can we adjust?
* If we had less tectonic activity, outcrops of crustal rock wouldn't accumulate into continents. Of course, then we'd be relying entirely on temporary mantle plumes to create hotspot-islands like Hawaii. We would then need to explain the discrepancy in the presence of mantle plumes, but apparently less overall mantle convection (since that's though to help drive plate tectonics in the first place)
* Perhaps if we had less crustal material to begin with, there would be fewer tall old outcroppings to pile up together, and they'd be more likely to be disparate islands.
[Answer]
This has already been mentioned but I will put the idea in more detail. The whole idea of island planet does not depend upon one, but at least two factors.
# Cratons And Tectonic Plates Movement
Cratons are those innermost parts of continents which don't get flooded by seawater no matter how much the sea level rises. On our home planet, earth, primitive cratons appeared long ago. Some ... 4 billion years or so. These were pieces of higher ground which did not get submerged in the water when the primitive oceans formed.
Those primitive smallish pieces of lands were like large chunks of mud sitting on the mantle (the middle layer of earth). These cratons were not stable on their positions, but were rather moving rapidly due to the activity of the mantle those days. Those small islands (cratons) collided and some of them fused into each other permanently. These were the first *proto continents*.
The underneath part of continents (which sits on the mantle) is known as *tectonic plate*. Nowadays these plates are slowly moving (their movement was much faster in the past) due to processes known as ocean floor spreading and subduction zones. At places of ocean floor spreading, lava in the mantle spews out on the ocean floor and pushes it off. It is sort of like the earth is trying to get bigger. If there is a region of sea floor spreading between two continents (there is, between Africa and South America), it will push the continents apart.
There is another thing known as a *subduction zone*. It is a place where stuff from the crust falls back into the mantle. Subdunction zones are present where two tectonic plates are present and one is pushing the other down into the mantle. This is sort of like the planet is getting smaller. The overall effect of ocean floor spreading and crust subduction is that the planet neither gets bigger, nor smaller, but it's tectonic plates *move around*.
# Geology Of An Island Planet
There are two possibilities for you for an island planet.
1- Earth-like tectonic plates with a higher sea level. This means your planet is just like our home planet, only the sea level is higher (the higher the sea level, the smaller and the *lesser* the number of islands). For this I present you a picture of earth during the cretaceous period (nearly 70 million years ago).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5c2nz.jpg)
During the Cretaceous, the sea level was much, much higher than it is today. So a lot of what is earth now, used to be part of the ocean then. These regions are marked as light purple on the map which shows that this is part of land, covered by water. These are shallow seas with depth no more than 300 feet.
If you keep increasing the sea level, the purple regions would start increasing and taking up more of the land. This is one strategy for you if you want to have an island planet. The islands would swim about in the oceans (a few inches per year) but they would stay islands.
2- No active mantle activity. If you have a planet where the mantle is not as active as Earth's, then it is possible that the primary cratons never fused together to form larger bits (the first continents). For this, we need an ollld planet (some 5 billion years old). It needs to have an active mantle activity period in the past but now the mantle activity is dead (as earth's mantle would be nearly dead in around 500 million years or so). It used to be a fully terrestrial planet in the past (no oceans, all land) but then a massive storm of water-coments hit the planet and transformed it into a planet like earth: mostly composed of water. Now only the higher grounds of the planet are island and the rest is sea. These islands are not moving even 1mm per year and are stay put where they are.
[Answer]
If you take a page from waterworld, you could take various aspects of global warming flooding along with an older planet's erosion for a previously earth like planet to become more of an island planet. Perhaps the erosion was due to a previously acidic rain that wore away the features of the planet with greater speed (and gradually became neutralized due to terraforming efforts, or a species of life that used it for its metabolism, converting it to something neutral)
If you look here however
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> <http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map>
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it shows that while large portions of the earth would flood, even melting all of the ice might not be enough to give you the effect you wanted.
You should also consider the reason we have (dry) land is plate tectonics, in which there is a floating cold "crust" on top of a molten sphere of metal, and various parts of that crust are being pushed and pulled around, raising certain areas of it out of the sea (which would technically cover the entire planet if the crust was completely smooth). Perhaps your planet could have a cooler core that was not as tectonically active? (this would perhaps translate to an older, or smaller planet)
Since oceans are basically just flooded lowland, If you added more water on the planet to begin with, only very tall volcanos or mountains could pierce the ocean. Or perhaps try a combination of these things!
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How might the occupants of any given universe identify which (if any) of the many proposed Time Travel Paradigms govern their potential use of time travel? By "Time Travel Paradigms" I refer to the proposed solutions to paradoxes attributed to traveling backwards in time, such as:
1. Anything done while in the past will be revealed to have already occured in the past, *before* the time travel was attempted.
2. The moment you arrive in the past, the timelines fork and you now exist in an alternate timeline.
3. You simply can't.
My question is less about how the person travelling back in time would recognize the rules of time travel in their universe, **but how that person (presumabley a scientist of sorts) would be able to decidedly prove that the universe works in that particular, definable way to the general/scientific public.**
It would seem that the bare minimum would be the ability to travel back in time again and again, while producing the same results each time. Then, of course, multiple sources would need to independently verify the accuracy of these results by going back in time themselves. All in all, it would add up to quite a bit of time traveling with uncertain consequences.
Additionally, it seems that certain methods would be difficult to discern from others. For example, considering the two examples I listed above, assume I traveled back in time in an attempt to kill Hitler. I fail, and return to the present. Nothing is noticeably different, but I have no real proof whether my assassination attempt happened in the previous history of my universe (the first supposition above), or if my act split the timelines and I now exist in a very, very similar alternate timeline (second supposition).
[Answer]
**Travel back in time five minutes and say hello to your past self.**
If you remember meeting yourself before you left, you have paradigm one.
If you don't remember meeting yourself before you left, you have paradigm two.
If you walked out of the time machine without time travelling, you have paradigm three.
[Answer]
If you have a time machine, you can easily distinguish versions 1 and 2 by actively trying to create a time paradox. In universe 1, you will inevitably fail to do so, even if it can only be avoided by the most strange coincidences. You may actually be able to win the lottery by forcing a paradox if you don't. In universe 2, if you go back yourself, you'll find that you can change the past, but if you send something (or someone) back into the past to change things but don't travel yourself, then you'll find that the past has not changed.
Universe 3 will be identified by you not being able to build a time machine. But of course, that cannot be an absolute proof, as you might just not have found the way to do it. However, the moment you've got a working time machine, universe 3 is disproved.
[Answer]
Although Samuel's answer is succinct, it is not entirely accurate. You already realize it, but it is worth repeating that for some situations the three possibilities are indistinguishable. For instance, if you travel back in time and produce an alternate timeline, from the point of the original timeline the result is identical to the proposition that time travel is impossible - any attempt simply causes the traveler to disappear. Likewise, if changes are propagated forward, all sorts of unintended historical effects are produced. Larry Niven's Law of Time Travel suggests that for this situation the only "stable" history is one in which some combination of historical accident results in time travel "never" being invented. Finally, of course, version 2 is indistinguishable from version 1 *in the new timeline*.
With that said, establishing the existence of time travel to any desired degree of confidence is fairly easy. You simply tell an investigator to walk to the room next door and pick up the locked metal box which he will find there. Three days later, tell him to open it and observe that it contains that day's paper, which you bought that morning, then put in a box and travelled back 3 days to place in the room. By being careful with your transport arrangements you can prevent paradox or closed loops. Repeating the process repeatedly will establish your bona fides to any desired degree of reliability, although the amount of care required to avoid the investigator cheating will be considerable. The second time you do this, the investigator is going to be tempted to open the box early and use the prescience he gains. There are ways around this, such as encrypting the box's contents and supplying the key on the day the box is to be opened, but this can produce some very tricky details to get right to both sides' satisfaction, and is very similar to the problem of transmitting encrypted data without getting spoofed by an opponent.
Note - in looking over the preceding comments, I find that I am in agreement with Cort Ammon concerning "decidedly prove", although my phrasing about degrees of confidence was made without consideration of his objection. Science doesn't work by proving things, but repeated confirmation can be "close enough for all practical purposes". As in, take a gymnasium, and line up 100 teenage girls on one wall, and 100 teenage boys on the facing wall. Have each group walk half-way toward the center each time a bell rings. Theoretically, the two groups will never meet, but after a relatively small number of bells they will be close enough for all practical purposes.
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I'm about to (re)start an effort to collaboratively create a complete world. I'm afraid most ideas would be mine, but I really want it to be open for others to contribute.
I'm seeking for an Internet-based platform (most preferrably via browser) to do that.
So far I can think on a wiki and on Kune, but I need something that is really easy to use, and that can give a formatted book as an output (not necessarily in an automated fashion).
Required functionality is:
1. Collaborative
2. Web based
3. Ability to include texts and images (maps and illustrations)
4. Easy to use
5. Somehow secure (not allowing a bad-faithed collaborator to delete all contributed material)
[Answer]
I suggest to use some concurrent versioning system like CVS, SVN or GIT. These are used by software developers to write program texts and are freely and readily available on [GitHub](https://github.com/), for instance. They already support all needed security and can be quite user friendly (see [overview](https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis) of user friendly interfaces).
They allow to setup the following development process:
1. A new contributor makes a branch (new version) of the mainstream (*trunk*) World description that has some text added, removed or changed.
2. A contributor opens *pull request*, maybe additionally describing that changes are made, and why.
3. This pull request is visible on the web in a *diff format* (only showing that has been changed). This allows to view and review differences very efficiently, without the need to read through lots on unchanged material where changed parts may be overlooked.
4. If community agrees that changes are good, a branch can be merged into trunk.
Normally there are many pull requests opened and under discussion at the same time.
The most important feature of these versioning systems is that multiple contributors can make changes in parallel inside the same text document, as long as changed parts do not overlap. If one pull request contains rewrites near beginning and another near the end, these can be submitted, discussed and merged or rejected independently, in any sequence.
Merging is only supported for the plain text. Versioning systems also support binary files like images, but cannot merge multiple independent changes, the latest version just overrides all others.
[Answer]
While asking a similar question myself someone recommended [DokuWiki](https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki) and I've been using it almost exclusively since.
* It's a wiki format so it's easy to add formatted information/images
* You can install it on a website, pendrive or Dropbox and grant access to just your collaborators
* Pages/links make your documents much more structured than a shared single document
* It supports versioning of pages you've edited
* It's free
* It supports its own user account (if Dropbox security isn't enough for you)
Personally I would recommend downloading the pen drive version and copying it to Dropbox, you could always arrange hosting somewhere but it would be more complex and probably end up costing money (unless you want to simply grant access to everyone and use something like [wikia](http://www.wikia.com/Wikia)).
In short I agree wikis are a great way to go.
[Answer]
[GoVisually](https://govisually.com/) is a possibility.
You can mark annotations and place comments on any part of your project, and there is this pretty cool feature where you can click on each user and it will hide or display relevant content, so if you think some user is just trolling around you can ban him. Revisions can also be easily upload and it's simple to switch between different versions of the same document or project.
And I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's still free.
Here's a promotional video I found on google: [Video](https://vimeo.com/212361350)
[Answer]
**There is no such thing, yet**
to even make something like this would require there to be some way to format/organize this. As far as I know Ive never heard of a standardized structure to world building and if there is it must be annoyingly complicated and overly rigid.
Thus at this point you gotta use some kind of generic collaborative document generation tool.......like google docs.
Great thing about google docs is it has version history so if someone flips the table on your project you can just revert their changes.
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google docs
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google docs
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google docs
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google docs is a google product, just about one of the few companies with a significant track record on ease of use.
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> 5.Somehow secure (not allowing a bad-faith collaborator delete all contributed material)
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on google docs you can whitelist your contributors preventing some troll from showing up and wrecking everything. You can also revert changes using the revision history.
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> and that can give a formatted book as an output
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Sure google docs can do that too....though again the formatting is going to be on you.
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**I only suggest this next thought because it would be such a proper, fun even, way to really collaboratively attack building a world.**
Now if you want a real approach to collaboratively building a world. You can repurpose an agile tool like JIRA, plot your high level target world ideals as epics and pose research questions as stories that you pass off to willing team mates that link to a google doc where the answer is built.
This way you organize and distribute your world building in a trackable way. providing this kind of structure would actually stimulate and focus collaborative effort. The down side is if you are unfamiliar with agile and agile tools this would be a pain in the ass to figure out.
[Answer]
If you just want a document that others can easily edit, a shared Google Drive document might do. Just be wary of people going in and deleting everything (don't give the public full access, only your collaborators).
] |
[Question]
[
Could a terrestrial planet have a stable set of layers of atmospheres, and could different lifeforms evolve within those different layers?
This question is inspired by the diversity found on Earth. For example, deep sea organisms evolved without light (and in some cases, without oxygen) and are quite different from other organisms at the surface, which in turns are quite different from flying or walking species.
---
To clarify, I was thinking about a kind of swamp, where land-like creatures and plants living below a certain altitude would evolve in a different atmosphere. I though that maybe the gas could be "trapped" in a valley or isolated from the upper layer by the surrounding vegetation.
You may have guessed that I am far from being a biologist.
The question popped in my head while thinking about a possible science-fiction story.
Tim has good arguments about why this is not likely to happen and I appreciate the reality-check. I also doubt that the kind kind of gas that could support life (See "[Is it possible for complex life to evolve on planets without oxygen?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1031/is-it-possible-for-life-to-evolve-on-planets-without-oxygen)") would also be heavier than, say, oxygen, and form a distinct layer.
But nonetheless, if you can find creative yet plausible ways about how it *could* happen, please share your thoughts.
For example, I like the idea that a more massive planet might be suitable for the existence of multiple layers, as well as the possibility that weird forms of life can evolve in that kind of environment (see HDE 226868's answer).
[Answer]
I had previously made an argument for the separation of gas into different layers based on molecular weight; I now believe that argument is just plain false. Therefore, I'll only keep the second half, relating to life on said planet.
---
Could different types of life form in different layers? Well, the cheating way out would be to say that there are incredibly large plateaus or columns sprouting high into the sky in certain areas. That would mean that there could be animals that walk on land - even 10,000 feet up! But in this scenario, it would be better to have creatures that permanently stay in the air - ones that don't need anything solid underneath them.
These creatures will have to be aerial - which gives us a surprising degree of flexibility. Sure, we could go with wings, but that's boring. You can attach wings to a lot of things and call it a flying creature, but who likes that? I'm thinking about something more like an [airship](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship). Picture a [pufferfish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraodontidae). Got that image in your head? Now remove all the bits that it needs to be in the sea. Quickly give it a respiratory system - that we can modify - and set it on the ground. Yes, on the planet's *surface*.
We'll make it like a [polyp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyp). Say it formed from a sort of seed dropped after two of these odd aerial pufferfish hooked up. It fell to the ground and began to burrow into the soil. Over time, the seed begins to develop - it's like an embryo in a womb. Eventually, the creature grows into something that looks like our friend, the pufferfish.
For now, it can breathe the gases on this lower layer. But for some reason, it needs to go to the upper layer of the atmosphere, where there are a different combination of gases. Like a [tadpole](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadpole), it changes its respiratory system, then (unlike a tadpole) inflates its pouch like a zeppelin or a rising submarine (perhaps it creates a weak vacuum by expelling the lower layer gas), and rises into the air until it reaches the upper layer, at which point the gas inside is no longer lighter than the gas around it.
Weird? Oh, yes. But it could work. In the upper layer, it could move around by maybe using small fins to steer. Perhaps it takes in energy via photosynthesis. It lives, falls in love, reproduces, dies, and falls back to the surface. In the lower layer(s), creatures that are completely different could have developed. The two zones only have tangential interaction, yet can support different types of life.
[Answer]
TL;DR: There are a number of problems with this concept, and while none of them individually kill it the combination makes it highly unlikely, certainly for anything larger than bacteria.
**What differentiate bands?**
In the ocean it's easy, surface light loses power fast underwater whereas pressure increases. The depths are dark high pressure environment. This gives life an incentive to seek out suitable conditions.
**What would cause bands to form?**
So in atmosphere we already know that light gets through just fine. What else could form bands? In theory you could get regions like our ozone layer where certain gasses collect but in practice the entire atmosphere is constantly churning, moving, rising and sinking and rotating. Distinct bands with drastically difficult conditions would be unlikely to form and just as unlikely to be stable if they did.
**What would life in this band live on?**
In the deep ocean you have hydro-thermal vents and you also have a lot of rich resources falling from above. For example entire micro-communities form around a whale carcass when it falls tot he sea floor. There is no equivalent process in the atmosphere though, resources fall out of the atmosphere not into it.
**How would life stay in the band**
Microbes already live in the atmosphere, carried in raindrops and potentially even seeding rain clouds to make rain. Anything larger though has to constantly fight gravity. Assuming a band of suitable conditions existed it would need to find that band and somehow stay in it.
**Conclusion**
You can see why the atmosphere is very different from the ocean in this regard. It's hard to see how the sort of environment you are envisaging could form.
[Answer]
## Biochemistry-induced differences
Hal Clement authored a nice novel called *[The Nitrogen Fix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nitrogen_Fix)* in which he supposed the emergence of organisms that converted the nitrogen and oxygen of Earth's atmosphere into nitrogen oxides. These compounds are very similar in overall thermodynamic stability - so much that any hot engine can create nitrogen oxides while a cooler catalytic converter can mostly (but not entirely) convert them back.
For your planet, I'm going to suppose that the bacteria do N2 + 2O2 -> 2NO2, and they are common in the soil of a high pressure, high temperature area (let's say, the lower reaches of the Red Sea after it is dammed for power generation, at maybe 1.4 atm of pressure). The NO2 is heavier than N2 or O2, so it diffuses out slowly. When it does diffuse out, there are organisms in the air (perhaps introduced as part of a planetary protection program to avoid ending up like a Hal Clement novel) that convert them back to N2 and O2.
Pilgrims who visit the site believe the line of volcanic activity at the bottom of the Red Sea and Rift Valley is a symbol of Creation, the same phenomenon as the biblical Mount Horeb. They wear extensive protection against toxic NO2 and the acidic environment created by nitrous and nitric acids in the area. There is a freshwater acid swamp at the bottom of the former sea, with a layer of brine at the bottom, that is fed by runoff from agriculture fed by the desalinated water created by the power project. Strange cave slimes grow all around the shore under the faint brown gleaming of the distant Sun. Only those who have walked the long road and meditated by the shores of the swamp are worthy to learn the strange secrets concealed in the final depths. They return shaken, changed, the emissaries of something larger than themselves.
] |
[Question]
[
In the first scene of *Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark*, we see a booby trap where a series of spikes are thrusted out of a wall, and are triggered by "walking into the light". I think in the story of the film, this was meant to be something related to superstition (or the beliefs of the tribe) that triggered it. The Indiana Jones Wikipedia page says that this was a temple built by a [Chachapoya tribe(s)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chachapoya_culture).
With ancient technology of any civilisation, would it be possile to develop a light trigger mechanism, where the sudden absence of light could cause something to happen? I guess it is possible over a long period of time with photosynthesis, but I'm looking for something near instant.
Notes:
* The system must not contain any living animals to function. Any types of plants/fungi, if can work, are alright
* I think for the moment, it may be best to not worry about day/night cycles (just assume that when the sun goes down, depending on how the system works, it will be triggered)
[Answer]
The light enters a lens which heats mercury in a glass thermometer changing its weight distribution causing it to turn on an axis opening a valve in a water-wheel powered pneumatic system which retracts the spring loaded spikes. When the beam of light is interrupted the mercury cools, the thermometer returns to its rest position closing the value and the pneumatic system suddenly releases the spring loaded spikes.
Alternatively: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qq7754ZZlE>
[Answer]
A radiometer could offer sufficient sensitivity to light. [Here](https://youtu.be/r7NEI_C9Yh0?t=7s) is a demonstration of a modern device that seems to react in a few seconds.
To stop it reacting at night and to make it react to the absence (not presence) of light, one could arrange it as a balance with mirrors. Instead of the leafs being colored silver on one side and black on other, they would be black on both sides. Mirrors would be arranged so that sunlight directly hits one side and light to the other side goes through the trap area. As long as equal light hits both sides, the balance remains in place, so when the sun sets it wouldn't activate.
However this still requires a quite bit of technology, which is not impossible to imagine to have existed in e.g. ancient Egypt, but has not been demonstrated to have:
* Ability to blow glass to an optically transparent bulb. Glass blowing existed, but results were not very transparent.
* Ability to pull a slight vacuum to the bulb - this would probably be possible by just heating the air and melting the vent.
* Mechanism to transmit movement from inside the bulb to the outside. Perhaps a weight could drop inside the bulb and break the glass.
* Ability to make mirrors that last through the centuries - this might be the hardest part.
[Answer]
If you go with the **difference** of two light rays, it might work. You need one light-ray that gets evenly split into two. A big quartz will do that and even preserve the IR that you'll later need (no glass optics, they'll absorb the IR; quartz and mirrors all the way!). Then you need to funnel both rays towards a target, on different paths. They get focussed onto bimetal strips, that bend equally and thereby balance some mechanism. Nightfall or cloudcover will not trigger the trap as the bimetal strips get evenly relaxed, but both events will deactivate it, so you'll need some mechanism that only allows or encourages access on cloudless days (Map only readable in sunlight (UV-active inks?).
When one ray gets interrupted, the corresponding bimetal strip will relax, unbalancing the mechanism, and triggering something. Depending on the smallness of the bimetall relative to the heating power of the rays, the trap is more or less fast. Depending on the intricacies that your ancient trapsmiths were capable of, the mechanism may even be able to re-balance in the face of very slow unbalancing (for instance because one ray-path or mirror slowly builds up dust over the years) - look into the way car-breaks self-calibrate to adjust for different wear on the discs.
For the unbalancing mechanism, i thought about a sort of spoon filled with mercury or very fine sand - the spoon is balanced on a point halfway. The bimetal-strips act on the left and right side of the spoon handle end, respectively, so as long as they equally tense and relax, the spoon-cup just goes up and down a little. If they are unbalanced, the spoon will be "twisted", and the mercury can drop onto some real trigger.
[Answer]
## Absence of light is the trap
You could design a trap where the sudden lack of light is the danger. For instance, imagine a path where you have to jump from one pillar to the next one. The pillars are big enough so that, if you can see where you step, there is no big risk of falling.
However, the only light source is coming from one of these pillars, probably the one in the middle. When you step on it, your weight closes the light conduct (and you can’t reopen), and it’s all dark. You don’t know exactly how far are the next pillars. You can’t go back either, for the same reason.
If you try and jump, you might get lucky for the next pillar, but not for the fifteen others after it. So eventually you are going to fall and die because it’s totally, 100%, dark now. You can’t even see your hand before it touches your face.
If you decide to stay on the pillar, you'll die when you eventually fall asleep/dehydrate/lose balance because of total darkness.
### Sidenote 1
I know… light is not really the trigger of anything. But still, it's fine with your condition:
>
> would it be possible to develop a light trigger mechanism, where the sudden absence of light could cause something to happen?
>
>
>
Yes: the trap is going to kill you because you shut the light.
### Sidenote 2
A flashlight might save you. But maybe you did not pack one. Or the designer of the trap constructed a short underwater passage before the trap to make sure no fire torch (nor any electric non waterproof flashlight) made it to it.
[Answer]
Well it's an illusion. The sunlight could be hiding all sorts of triggers: ropes hanging down, blowing wind (yeah this one's a stretch), other hidden objects, etc. Remember in the Last Crusade that the bridge was invisible until you shifted your perspective. Maybe the sunlight adds to the illusion?
] |
[Question]
[
Some necromancers prefer skeletons over undead (have a certain style to them, they don't smell, there's less moaning and grunting). But at the end of the day, they're still walking skeletons. Boring! So I'm trying to do something fun with them: turn them into skeletal helicopters: skelecopters!
The magic I'm using allows for the skeletons to move around without their bones being physically connected. The plan is for the skeleton to make its ribcage spin 360 degrees with its arms stretched to the side. Doing this fast enough (their spinning parts are not physically touching the non-spinning parts, so neither will wear from friction) should create the friction needed to take off and for the skeleton to fly. However, this raises a couple of design issues:
* I am not an aerospace engineer, but I suspect that human arms might not be the best shape when trying to lift off via spinning very fast (see: helicopters). So either the bones of the arms would need to be shaved or otherwise moulded into a desired shape. My magic does not allow me to mould bones as if they were clay, but they can be shaved into a desired shape (cutting some bits off) or rearrange how they form the arm (so creating some kind of 3d puzzle). The bones can touch in this situation, given that they won't be moving and will stick together. Additionally, while the bones of the arms (and maybe a leg or two as well) might be cannibalized for this purpose, adding bits from another skeleton is not possible.
* The whole spinning out of control thing. Helicopters IRL have their tail rotor to not spin out of control. Would a skelecopter need one, and if so where and how? Could a foot be repurposed as a tail rotor (previous rules apply) with a leg as a tail? Or would a skelecopter even need one, given that the parts of it that are not spinning not physically connected to the parts that are?
* The magic animating the skelecopter is strong enough to stay together even when spinning part of it at high speed, but can the bones handle it? It'll need to spin pretty darn fast to lift off and take to the sky, and while the magic makes sure this doesn't end with bits of skeleton spread over an area of a few hundred square meters I'm not sure how much speed and force bones can take before snapping.
* I'd like them to be able to land with minimal damage and be reusable so that I'm not constantly building new skelecopters to replace the ones that had rough landings.
Note that the end result needs not to look 100% like a human skeleton, but it cannot have any objects foreign to its body included in its design. Also, its final shape is not important (traditional helicopter, tandem rotor or an Unidentified Flying Skeleton are all good).
So is it possible? Can a reanimated skeleton become a skelecopter and menace its enemies from the sky once more?
[Answer]
The forces are not all that bad, but the speeds you have to reach to achieve those forces are pretty high.
I could not find a reputable source for the mass of a skeleton, but I did find one suggestion that a skeleton is 30-40% of your bodyweight. Thus, for an 80kg human, the skeleton is roughly $24kg$, give or take. This means, to counteract gravity, you'll need $24kg\cdot9.8\frac{m}{s^2}=235N$ of force. Now I'm going to make a handwavey claim and suggest that hands are the only part that matters (har har). Why? Because the velocity each part travels through the air matters greatly. The closer you are to the core, the less lift you can actually get at any revolution rate. Also, hands are nice and big compared to arm bones, so between their size and position, I expect them to account for a lot of the lift.
[A human hand is](http://pro.sagepub.com/content/30/4/382.abstract) $0.054m^2$ in area. If you have that hand at a 45 degree angle to best scoop the wind, it will present roughly a $0.038m^2$ area to the wind, and thus both hands together present an area $a=0.076m^2$. Now we can combine this with the density of air, $\rho=1.225\frac{kg}{m^3}$, and the equation for the force of air being driven straight down, $F=av\rho$ to figure out how fast we need to go. Solving for velocity we get $v=\frac{F}{a\rho} = 252m/s$
Wow, that's fast. Even if we take away some of the fudge factors, you're still talking about skeletons spinning around at over 2000rpm. We typically like cast steel for those speeds, not bone.
The natural solution to that would be to give them flippers. If they held a flat piece of material in each hand to increase its surface area, they could rapidly cut down on those velocity requirements. However, just the raw area of bones won't cut it.
As for the tail rotor, if you did get a skeleton in the air, you would definitely need it. Netwon's law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Unless your magic is breaking the laws of physics, the torque to spin the spine, ribcage, and arms will have to be matched by a torque in the pelvis and legs. This is just like what happens in a real helicopter. The blades are providing torque, and the body of the helicopter tries to go the opposite direction.
But what if the legs *did* spin in the opposite direction? What if the arms spun one way, and the legs spun the other:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/41JMs.jpg)
We actually do make helicopters which have counterrotating blades. This typically eliminates the need for a tail rotor. It also double the lift you can provide at any given rpm, because you have twice as many limbs in the wind.
So what happens if we take this to an extreme? Bone can withstand roughly 120MPa of [tension force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_tensile_strength) before it pulls apart. Let's say the arms and legs account for roughly a third of the total mass of the skeleton, leaving each limb at an average of $2kg$. The femur, at its smallest point is $3.6\cdot10^{–4}m^2$. This means the femur will shatter at roughly $43kN$. If we're spinning to make this happen, most of that force comes from the centripetal force, $F=\frac{mv^2}{r}$, so lets find out how fast we can actually be traveling. $v=\sqrt{\frac{Fr}{m}} = 146\frac{m}{s}$
Well I'll be a monkey's uncle. Remember how we needed $252m/s$ using just our hands? Well now we have twice as many limbs, so we need half that speed: $126m/s$. That's under the tensile strength of the femur! I'm only considering the lift of the hands and feet in this. If we add in the lift of the arm and leg bones, I bet we can build in some safety margin (which is good, because the arm bones are weaker than the femur, so they'll break sooner)!
Now landing is going to be a pest. Your legs are preoccupied. I'll leave that to your mages!
[Answer]
I think that I've actually seen this very thing before! If memory serves, the answer they found was to attach two extra arms to the back of the skeleton, and have those, in turn, spin a "string" of hands to generate lift. Since there are two blades, you can turn and tilt. Also, the extra arms can be used as weapons once it lands while leaving both normal arms free. The only problem is this leaves lots of skeletons without arms, but given how incredibly deadly and efficient the infamous skelecopter is, this likely won't be a problem for long ;)
I found it!
<http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/21859626/images/1354508896903.jpg>
] |
[Question]
[
After [reading that lamp ghosts really exist,](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/31618/98) I of course had to try for myself. Not having an old lamp, I just tried to rub some electric lamp at home, and to my great surprise, indeed immediately a ghost appeared.
Before I could recover from my surprise, the ghost started to talk with a quite angry voice:
"Can't you humans just stop rubbing lamps? Here I thought if I live in an electric lamp, I'm safe, but no way, only five years, and you rub it. Okay, the rules say I now have to fulfil your wishes, well at least those I can fulfil, but I warn you: I'm completely free to fulfil your wishes however I want, and I can assure you, I will do so in a way that you will wish you had never wished it. So don't bother me with your wishes, or you will regret it."
After a moment I recovered from my surprise, and my mind focused on the words: "at least those I can fulfil" — so he could not fulfil just any wish. Thus I asked: "So what type of wishes can't you fulfil?"
"Why do you think I will tell you that?" the ghost replied.
In a momentary inspiration, I answered: "Because I wish that you do!"
Indeed, the ghost now started to tell me which wishes he can't grant. However, as he had predicted, I indeed soon regretted that wish, because he explained it in such detail and in such an long-winded and complicated way that his explanations lasted a full day, including the night (well, I naturally cannot tell for sure whether the ghost also continued speaking while I was sleeping; he might have waited in order to have more to say when I'm waking up again, but he might also have told some crucial information while I was sleeping, so that I would not know it). For example, he required several hours just to explain, in excruciating detail, that he can't change the past.
OK, here are the rules, as far as I understood them:
* The ghost can only change the future, and only give information about the past (in other words, no causality violation). Future and past are defined relativistically, therefore wishes requiring faster-than-light are also not allowed.
* The only law of nature that can be broken by fulfilling the wish is the second law of thermodynamics.
* In case of wishes having contradicting effects, earlier wishes take precedence over later wishes. So for example, if I wish to live forever, and then later wish to die, then the second wish cannot be fulfilled because it would contradict the first one. However if the wish only undoes the effects of a previous wish without contradicting it, then the wish can and will be granted. For example, if I wish to have a gold bar, and then later wish to no longer have a gold bar, that's no contradiction, and I'll get rid of the gold bar.
* Everything I explicitly specify in a wish will happen as I specified, however if there's any ambiguity in my formulation, the ghost will be free to choose the interpretation it likes most (which of course will be the interpretation I'll like least).
* Everything I didn't explicitly specify in my wish is up to the ghost to decide. However he cannot do anything unrelated to my wish. So for example, if I wish for a gold bar, he may arrange that the gold bar falls on my head and kills me, but he can't arrange that the gold bar is covered with contact poison.
* Wishes about wishes are forbidden (so I can't simply wish that all my wishes are fulfilled the way I mean them).
So surely the safest thing would be to not wish anything. However there are a few things I'd really like to have (just the usual, guaranteed health for the rest of my life, always having enough money, that type of stuff).
So I'd like to know: How can I wish in a way that I'm sure there will be no negative consequences?
[Answer]
**Triggers and Qualifications**
Create a trigger that will prevent it from occurring accidentally. Use qualifications to prevent obvious loopholes. I'll second consulting a lawyer.
For example:
>
> I wish that, when I am conscious and state the phrase "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog" while thinking of the numbers "36431" and wearing a hat, that a spherical ball of pure gold 3 inches in diameter will appear one inch over the palm of my right hand, at rest relative to my body.
>
>
>
Note that, if you instead wish that this worked for *everyone*, and not just you, that you've created a literal magic spell.
**Alternatively - offer the ghost a deal**
Use this as your second wish:
>
> I wish that the ghost of this lamp will never be bothered or summoned again by anyone else, so long as within fifteen years from now I state, of my own free will, that I'm am satisfied that it fulfilled my third wish as expected and with no tricks.
>
>
>
Now it's incentived to go all out on wish #3 and make you as happy as possible. It *could* try to trick you into saying that phrase and screwing you over - but why bother? As long as it fulfills your third wish - fabulous wealth, true immortality/youth, etc - it knows that it will finally be free. You are also bound to help the ghost out, because if you don't then 1) it will eventually be summoned again, and 2) it will have a grudge against you and might make a deal to screw you over with a future summoner.
[Answer]
You either have to go all lawyer on it, or extremely simple. I might just wish for a long and happy life. Granted the most ambiguous part in their is what is a long life, two weeks is an eternity for a fruit fly, but if you are happy for the rest of your days, does it really matter?
Making a deal with the 'genie' might also work. Freeing it from further wish granting (if that is really what it wants) could go a long way. Only if he isn't cantankerous out of spite.
Actually thinking a little more, wishing the genie to be helpful and accommodating to fulfill your following wishes to your intent might be the way to go, or wish for a genie who IS accommodating and tries to help. Both could be turned on you, but you are much more likely to survive your wishing if the granter isn't willing to drop a gold bar on the top of your head.
[Answer]
Hire a philosopher specializing in symbolic logic to write your wishes.
[Symbolic Logic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic) is a branch in logic that (among other things) allows translating natural language into a symbolic equivalent which can then be solved with mathematical precision.
By working with the philosopher / mathematician (because these realms overlap on this topics), you could write a statement or logical equations which dictate exactly what you want.
With the special symbols used by this study, in your case, you could consider the symbolic representation of what you want as a "spell".
[Answer]
Wouldnt a safe first Wish be something like a 10fold increase of every brain capacity without increasing brainmass to the extend of disfiguration or damage of the body?
Since its a multiple of all aspects of your brain, he cant just make you depressed. Its only a problem if you are depressed already. If you Wish for something like Einstein and similarily intelligent brain capacity without altertering your personality you could avoid things like the ineviteable depression that eidetic memory gives. Subsequently, you have the brains to make better wishes, assuming you still need them as you have the intelligence to get yourself that money and health that you want. Further wishes might be focused on specific knowledges, like scientific ways to extend the human body's life which coupled with your increased thinking ability allows you to circumvent any nastyness the ghost might throw at you if you wished for it directly on your body.
[Answer]
TL;DR:
wish the genie to become forever benevolent and to prove it.
---
## the first paragraph is against the OP requirements, read below
You question could be one of the most interesting cases in which to apply the "Coherent extrapolated volition" ([CEV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence#Coherent_extrapolated_volition)).
From the Yudkowsky's work:
>
> Our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted
>
>
>
This concept was proposed to somehow direct in a positive way an artificial super intelligence. Since this "wish" should work with something that's way more powerful, subtle and deceptive than your electric lamp genie. For instance: the super intelligente won't be "evil" but will be a tireless, painfully obsessive, god-like entity (respect to us) without any morality unless otherwise specified.
Then my whis will be:
"
i wish to have fullfilled my volitions if i knew every relevant detail, if i thought fastly and smartly enough to avoid regrets, if i were more the person i wished to be, and where my will converges rather than diverges, where my will cohere rather than interfere; where my will extrapolated as i wish that extrapolated and interpreted as i wish that interpreted.
"
Your move, genie... :)
PS: this specific sentence might not work since english is not my mother tongue, but i guess that the genie will speak every language.
---
EDIT:
as Mołot noted, wish about wishes are not allowed and the previous answer is then void.
Well, at least i still can wish the genie to become forever benevolent and friendly behaving to me, and to **prove** that he changed his attitude.
I don't see anything against the OP requirements, he's currently angry at me but nothing states that this can't change nor it's against some physical laws.
He can't try to prove to be friendly doing something unfriendly and if requested to prove the change, he can't fake a single "good wish" or two, to lure me into a backfire "unwise" wish (otherwise it's not a prove).
After that i don't see any particular issue to ask other wishes.
[Answer]
Another answer suggested bribing the ghost with giving it a wish it wants provided you get the wish you want exactly the way you wanted it, You could also threaten it instead:
wish 2:
" I wish that for every day when my storage shed at the yard of the home I'm currently living in isn't filled with gold at noon **in a way that pleases me and causes me no inconvenience to myself or make me regret making this wish in any way** the genie lamp gets rubbed and he has to be bothered by fulfilling the 3 wishes of another person"
wish 3: "I wish that every day my storage shed at the yard of the home I'm currently living in to be filled with gold at noon"
] |
[Question]
[
Science-based answers, please.
Key points:
1. the main concern is radiation protection for sustainability of human life (and accompanying plant and animal life ecosystems, whether earth-like or not).
2. atmospheric retention is a minor concern (assume other factors have (mostly) taken care of the atmosphere, so it would only be a bonus if the parent planet's magnetosphere helps with this retention).
3. assume that similar atmospheric protections as are present on Earth (ozone, etc.) are also present on the moon, but that nothing extra exists on the moon itself to provide any additional radiation protection, and the moon has no magnetosphere of its own.
4. answers can assume a moon with any combination of factors within these ranges: mass ranging from .5 earth mass to 3 earth mass; diameter ranging from 3500 km to 14000 km; 75% earth gravity to 125% earth gravity
5. answers can assume a parent planet of any size/composition/configuration that current scientific understanding deems could plausibly exist, and that any layman could reasonably accurately label as a 'gas giant', regardless of accepted scientific definitions and terminology (including brown dwarf, ice giant, etc.) but that a layman would not even accidentally believe is a star or rocky planet.
6. answers can assume that radiation and stellar wind and any similar phenomena that are reaching the magnetosphere of the planet (and would otherwise reach the moon) from the star in this system is comparable to what Earths magnetosphere participates in defending humanity from, regardless of the actual size or type of star or the planet's or moon's distance from the star.
The research:
The most relevant information I was able to find here are these questions which cover related and similar topics, but do not answer this specific question
[Making a planet habitable for humanoids: The planet](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9944/making-a-planet-habitable-for-humanoids-the-planet/10629#10629)
[Can a gas giant have its own habitable zone?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6909/can-a-gas-giant-have-its-own-habitable-zone)
[Habitable moon of a gas giant: working out the sizes and distances](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/7270/habitable-moon-of-a-gas-giant-working-out-the-sizes-and-distances#)
The desired information:
1. Could a moon within the diameter/mass/gravity/etc. ranges mentioned above orbit any plausible 'gas giant' planet close enough to the planet to be protected by the planet's magnetosphere from the radiation and similar hazards created by the star without other adverse affects (roche limit, etc.)?
2. Is there any plausible composition of a celestial body that could be called a 'gas giant' and that could produce a large enough and strong enough magnetosphere to protect this orbiting moon, while not emitting or re-emitting so much radiation itself that it defeats this purpose?
3. bonus points for details on distances between moon and planet, orbital times, and similar considerations
This is my first question on stackexchange, so please be gentle, but don't hesitate to provide *constructive* criticism if I'm doing anything wrong.
[Answer]
# Jupiter's magnetosphere encompasses all of its Galilean satellites
Jupiter's magnetosphere has a dipole moment 18,000 times greater than Earth's and [encloses all four of its major moons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter#Interaction_with_rings_and_moons). Callisto's orbital semi-major axis is 1.8 million km; so this gives a wide range of potential orbits for an Earth-sized planet. A planet larger than Jupiter, perhaps one with an [even greater magnetic field](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124563/what-is-the-most-powerful-magnetic-field-a-planet-could-generate), could have an even wider range of potential orbits for an Earth-sized planet.
# Jupiter has a radiation problem
One of the downsides to Jupiter and its large magnetic field, though, is that it produces a lot of radiation. Io, the closest in moon, recieves a quite deadly 3600 rem per day; probably deadly within the hour. Callisto, though, farther away from the planet [receives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_outer_Solar_System#Callisto) only 0.01 rem per day. This is still at least 10 times what you would expect to see on a sunny day on Earth, but certainly feasible for life adapted to it.
Jupiter's intense radiation has [a lot of do with Io](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter#Role_of_Io). Escaped voclanic particles, blasted from that moon's surface, form a plasma torus around Jupiter, accreting in belts inside the orbit of the major moons. Interaction of that plasma with the magnetic field is why Jupiter produces such intense radiation. An alternative way to remove the radiation on your planet from a large magnetic field is to not have any potential plasma sources like Io orbiting nearby.
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[Question]
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**In a future where space travel is common, how would access to space be regulated?**
From what I know, currently the [International Telecommunication Union (ITU) assigns slots for geostationary satellites](http://www.itu.int/ITU-R/go/space/snl/en) (since the range of geostationary is essentially one-dimensional and otherwise interference would commonly occur). Also, there are strict requirements for spacecraft approaching the International Space Station (ISS). Otherwise, even though [some spacecraft coordinate their orbits](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-train_(satellite_constellation)) otherwise there is [no control](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision) and operators are free to choose whatever orbits are convenient.
This works for now since launches are so (relatively) infrequent that there's little chance of two operators choosing the same orbit and not finding out until they both launch. Also, launches are not a huge deal for airplanes since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will declare a temporary flight restriction (TFR) for the area around the launch.
If spaceflight is common to the point where launches occur once or more per day, then both of these situations would have to change. Spacecraft would have to have some way to coordinate with each other and with aircraft: essentially a Space Traffic Control. **How would a space traffic control (STC) compare to modern air traffic control (ATC)?**
Here are the three scenarios I am considering:
1. *Reusable rockets*: While everyone was busy trying to figure out how to make spaceplanes work, SpaceX surprised everyone by making the traditional two-stage, liquid-fuel, vertical-stack rocket reusable. Everyone adopts their approach: take off like a modern rocket, but each stage flies right back to the launch pad, ready to refuel. The only consumables are fuel and capsule heatshields. Launch costs drop from thousands to hundreds of dollars per pound. Spacecraft spend little time in the atmosphere on both launch and reentry, so there is little interference with aircraft.
2. *Spaceplanes*: Virgin Galactic eventually made it to orbit with SpaceShipFive, their latest air-launched, rocket-propelled spaceplane. Payloads are small, but launch costs are still quite low. Spacecraft now spend much more time in the atmosphere, but act like modern planes while attached to their motherships, and like gliders during reentry. They take off and land from ordinary runways, whether at ordinary airports or specialty spaceports.
3. *Airbreathing Single-Stage-to-Orbit (SSTO)*: The holy grail of space travel. With nanotech-age advancements in materials science, we finally made it—-albeit still with razor-thin margins. The extremely complex engines required push the limits of what's physically possible and, while they don't need quite as much maintenance as the Shuttle did, that's not saying much. It's barely cheaper than traditional rockets. They spend a good deal of time in the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, making them a hazard to buildings as well as aircraft. However, they are useful for turning 18-hour flights into one-hour flights.
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Note: I'm assuming all relevant space travel is close to earth (that is, there's no need to coordinate e.g. travel to Mars, as soon as it leaves the near-earth range).
One point about space is that it is international. It is simply not possible to keep a spacecraft above a single country. Therefore any space traffic control must be, by its nature, done by a single organisation. This organization can be either an international organisation (like the ITU you mentioned) or a national organization that historically grew into being the global coordinator due to having control over essential infrastructure, like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which runs the root name servers of the internet.
The reason that space cannot be nationalized is that it cannot be regionalized; every orbit intersects countless other orbits. And there comes the second difference to air traffic control: In air traffic control, there's a tower responsible for a certain area, and when a plane leaves that area, it is handed over to the next tower. I don't think this would be a workable model in space. Whatn would probably work is a sectioning based on height: Essentially you'd have a "tower" for each height range, and when you get to the next height range (which normally only happens during launch and descent, because orbits are usually chosen to be circular), you're handed to the next control center.
Note that all this is for stuff already in space; the method how you get into space doesn't matter for that. For the launch phase before reaching space, I guess the local flight control would still be responsible, since the launch vehicles share the same airspace with planes and thus some coordination would still be needed. This also fits well with height-based space control since the boundary to space is also defined on height.
For reusable rockets, I guess the way to handle it would still be to disallow flights around the space port, and in addition a spaceport tower would handle the coordination between the different launches from the same spaceport (ensuring that leaving rockets don't collide with returning stages, and assigning the time slots when the rockets may start, as well as handling coordination with international space control for entering space).
Space planes, being more maneuverable than rockets, probably would be handled like normal aircrafts which just can reach greater heights, and would be passed on to international space control when reaching space.
I have no idea what flight properties the SSTOs would have (apart from being very fast). However you say that they are expensive (so there won't be too many of them), dangerous, and very fast, so I guess they would we handled mostly like rockets, except that the SSTD space ports would be required to be far from any major city (at that technological level, fast transportation to the space port is probably also a solved problem, so this should not give too much of a disadvantage to those space ports). As technology improves and SSTDs get more safe, the conditions will likely get gradually relaxed.
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I see a couple problems with having common space flights. The first of course is what are we going up and bringing up? We need to have a destination. Did we make a base on the moon and people can vacation there as a tourist destination? Have/are we making a huge space-station for research purposes (as well as tourism)? (Tourist accessible space station would certainly make it easier to justify the cost!)
To have very common space flights we need a relatively close destination, I would expect the space planes to mostly follow airline regulations at least until it breaches space.
One problem that is continually getting worse is the all the space debris and the rate would significantly increase with that much more traffic. So one thing that will have to be invented is a space garbage collector. A space broom that can catch and clear space junk.
It won't be the first thing to come along but as it becomes more and more difficult to find launch windows to safely go into space it will become a priority.
As far as coordination, there is a good chance that something like the ICANN will develop to track all orbiting objects and where they are at all times. Those that find new objects will report it to the center and every launch can be tracked so all parties (including the FAA type bodies) can know what is going where to avoid collisions.
I also believe that this will eventually push us to seriously look at trying to create a space elevator, just because it would concentrate the number of objects leaving and entering to a known spot(s). This of course would have a whole new level of politics and social reform.
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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.
# Background
In my hard sci-fi settings, there is an advanced Type II Civilization, that are progressing toward Type III Civilization (yes, I am referring to [Kardashev Scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale)). They are sprawling across the galaxy with relativistic ships, generational ships, and perhaps counless unmanned [Von Neumann probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) (but there is no faster than light travel). Most are under the rule of benevolent (or even malevolent) [AI Gods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity), that also contributes in development of large scale projects and scientific advancements. Along with it are plenty of megastructures on astronomical scales, including [Dyson Swarms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_swarm) and many esoteric megastructures we might not be able to comprehend their functions at all.
One of the advancement they achieve is the introduction of economically feasible [stargates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole). Apparently the AI Gods managed to solve most technical issues with wormholes, including development of stargates with sufficiently small negative mass requirements, and of significant size that most starships can pass through. They are connecting major star systems and clusters, and so many developed systems possess stargates of enormous size, up to several kilometers wide, but typically stargates are about less than kilometer in size.
The stargate is supposedly based on [Thorne-Morris wormhole](http://www.cmp.caltech.edu/refael/league/thorne-morris.pdf), modified slightly by [Kuhfittig](https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0508060v1) to allow arbitrarily small requirements of exotic matter. However (call me lazy but...) I have no idea what the equations inside those papers mean.
# Question
For my worldbuilding purpose, I want to know how to calculate the gate's mass, given its throat radius, so we comes with this question: **how to calculate the mass of a stargate, given desired radius is known?**
# Considerations:
* The question seeks answers that could devise a wormhole given certain radius, that requires **arbitrarily small amount of exotic matter**. Hopefully, for a gate of some kilometers big, its mass is around the same mass as Earth's moon, and ideally it should be less than Earth-mass.
* Answers that describe the **behavior and structure of said gate** is weighed up. Especially, on stability (for example, mass limit of objects that can safely traverse a gate of certain radius, or when the gate collapsed, what would happen to the exotic matter, and would it create a black hole of what size?), and at what radius did the exotic mass distribution ceases (see Miscellaneous section).
* **Answers that are based on the cited papers and sources are preferred**, but if there is any other paper that could produce gates with more desirable properties (smaller mass for a given radius is an example, or perhaps without the need of exotic matter!), they are too, appreciated.
* Regarding traversable wormhole, I consider [this](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/141509/97665) to be the standard. So answers must produce wormholes that are symmetrical and static, containing a throat that connects two asymptotically flat regions of spacetime, no event horizon, bearable tidal forces, reasonable transit time, stable against perturbations, and feasible mass requirements.
* For the purpose of this question, assume that **wormhole is not impossible, and exotic matter of some form can be obtained**. Also, to solve problems with the existence of wormholes implies possibility of time travel, assume that it is impossible to arrange wormholes into time machine, and any wormholes that could lead to violation of causality would be unstable and collapse (in another words, [chronology protection conjecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_protection_conjecture) is assumed true).
* The answer must give a mention on whether or not it is using [geometrized unit system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrized_unit_system) or in [SI Units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units). It is preferable if the answer is to **provide conversion to SI Units** for its conclusion.
# Miscellaneous
Probably worth mentioning, but I consider that the stargate in question is Medium-Exotic-Region Wormhole, or even Small-Exotic-Region Wormhole according to [this](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/20153/97665) answer. I don't know whether or not it will change the property of said wormhole, but I read somewhere (I can't find the link) that extending the exotic region into larger volume of space equals increased mass. By that logic I suspected that smaller region of exotic matter means smaller mass. And because the answer stated that if the exotic matter is restricted so closely to the throat, it is "absurdly benign", I think, it is a safer bet that the exotic matter would be loosely restricted to the throat (which, is also how Kuhfittig approached the feasibility of a wormhole with arbitrarily small exotic requirements of exotic matter, in the cited paper).
About the mass of a wormhole, as first mentioned by [Dubukay](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/43163/dubukay) on [sandbox](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6987/7974), I [discovered](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/292987/97665) that the mass of a wormhole is its [ADM Mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_general_relativity#ADM_and_Bondi_masses_in_asymptotically_flat_space-times). Perhaps this is also unrelated, but I discovered [this answer](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/162486/97665), that explained that a wormhole gains mass of the incoming object in the entrance mouth, and lost equivalent mass of the out-coming object from the exit mouth.
## Edit 1 (21 January 2019)
The title is edited so that now it focus to the way to calculate its mass. And to clarify comments about whether nor not the hard science tag is eligible for this question, I use this tag under the need for a question backed up with equations, and relevant theories, preferably from peer-reviewed scientific papers. The basis of my argument is on this quote from tag info of "hard-science" ([here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/hard-science/info)):
>
> Ideally, answers should be backed up by equations, relevant theories,
> and citations where possible - arXiv can be quite good for citations,
> though Wikipedia is usually OK too.
>
>
>
On comment about whether I could understand the math behind this question, I have it outlined above that the answer I seek must explain how to calculate the mass of said wormhole by knowing its radius, a qualification of model accepted (the less mass for a given radius, the better), and a requirement to state which units used (geometrized units or in SI, where SI units or conversion to SI units is preferable). All of those requirements ensures that all answers boils down to how to calculate the gate mass given only its throat radius.
I believe with all of those requirements, the answer is not impossible, based on known (albeit speculative) current theoretical physics. This is something I could not get from just science-based tag.
## Edit 2 (28 January 2019)
I rephrase certain parts of the question and considerations to reflect corrections provided by the commenters.
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I finally found how to calculate the mass in the general case. Here is an answer summarizing my comments and calculations (but I'm still not an expert in general relativity, so please take it with a grain of salt).
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Mass in general relativity can be a tricky concept. In particular, the [ADM mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM_formalism#ADM_energy_and_mass) of a system is only defined relative to far away observers, ideally at infinity (this is why we need the [asymptotic flatness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotically_flat_spacetime) condition), and it has in general little to do with the quantity of matter needed to create it. It is a formal parameter which is conserved in time and roughly describes the "force" that these observers would feel: gravitational attraction if the ADM mass is positive, repulsion if it is negative, and nothing at all if it is zero.
## ADM mass of an arbitrary (static, spherically symmetric) wormhole
Maybe it's just my inexperience in GR speaking, but the ADM mass seems quite tedious to calculate for an arbitrary spacetime. Luckily, we can make two simplifying assumptions here, which leads us to a formula for the mass of any static and spherically symmetric system:
* For a static spacetime (where the metric coefficients do not depend on the time coordinate) it is known that the ADM mass coincides with the [Komar mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komar_mass), see [this ref](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0375960178901986). This is another definition of mass which is somewhat easier to calculate with.
* The Komar mass for the particular case of a spherically symmetric metric, such as the ones in this problem, can be calculated using for example Eq. 17 [here](http://cds.cern.ch/record/272419/files/9411054.pdf). That is, if we have any metric of the form
$$ds^2 = - e^{2A(r)} dt^2 + e^{2B(r)} dr^2 + r^2 d\Omega^2,$$
the Komar mass of each throat can be found using
$$M(r) = \frac{r^2}{2} e^{-(A(r)+B(r))} \left( e^{2A(r)} \right)' = r^2 e^{A(r)-B(r)} A'(r),$$
and taking the limit $r\to +\infty$ (first mouth) or $r \to -\infty$ (second mouth).
## Ellis wormhole
In the case of the Thorne-Morris wormhole (perhaps more properly called [Ellis wormhole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_wormhole), see ref. 14 [here](https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03809)), the mass turns out to be exactly zero since $\alpha(r)=0$. This means that the spacetime around the wormhole would be approximately Minkowski, rather than Schwarzschild-like, on both sides far away from the throat, so the hole would produce no gravitational attraction (as is also said in the Wikipedia article).
Note that this does not mean that you can't put the wormhole in orbit around other bodies such as the Earth or the Sun: due to the [principle of equivalence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle), everything feels gravity no matter how much mass it has (even massless light). It's just that you can't put things in orbit around the wormhole.
As a curiosity, there is a generalization of the Ellis wormhole where both sides have (different) mass; it is called the [Ellis drainhole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_drainhole#Strength_of_repulsion).
## Kuhfittig wormhole
In the case of the Kuhfittig wormhole, replacing $A(r), B(r)$ by their definitions in the paper $\gamma\_2(r), \alpha\_2(r)$, and if the reasoning so far is correct, we obtain a mass of
$$M = \frac{c^2}{G}b(r\_3-r\_0)$$
for both sides, which depends on the three parameters $b$, $r\_3$ and $r\_0$. The factor of $c^2/G$ is just to convert from geometrized to SI units, as required in the question. For the example proposed in the paper ($b=0.5, r\_0 \approx 0, r\_3 = 0.00005$ light years $=4.73\cdot 10^{11}$ m), this gives a mass of $+3.2 \cdot 10^{38}$ kg, or roughly 160 million solar masses, meaning that far away observers would feel a attractive gravitational force similar to the one of a black hole of that mass.
The formula matches what we would have expected from dimensional analysis: the mass increases roughly in direct proportion to a radial parameter, in this case $r\_3$.
## Changes in mass
Of course, these are the masses only at the beginning, before anything passes through the throat. As you mention in the question, whenever an object traverses the wormhole the mass of each mouth changes as [this Physics SE answer](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/162486/97665) indicates, and this is because the metric itself must change to accomodate the object.
Since an object usually enters the wormhole from a given direction, the new metric would not be spherically symmetric anymore, so the above formula would not necessarily apply, but we can approximate the final mass of a mouth with
$$M\_{\mathrm{final}} = M\_{\mathrm{initial}} + \sum\_i m\_{i, \:\mathrm{in}} - \sum\_j m\_{j, \:\mathrm{out}},$$
where $m\_{i, \:\mathrm{in}}$ is the mass of the $i$th incoming object and $m\_{j, \:\mathrm{out}}$ the mass of the $j$th outcoming object. In the case of humans or spaceships the small amount of mass gained/lost by the mouths is quite small by general relativistic scales, so would have no important effects gravitationally speaking.
[Answer]
**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 Thorne-Morris black hole is new to me. However - reading the [paper](http://www.cmp.caltech.edu/refael/league/thorne-morris.pdf), unless I've missed it, this is a modification to a Schwarzchild black hole to provide a traversable opening (they start with the same equations).
More simplistically, the construction appears to be a black hole, then sufficient exotic mass-energy to create another black hole of about the same size.
The mass requirement to achieve a Schwarzchild radius of $R$ comes from Schwarzchild's solution to General Relativity :
$R = {{GM} \over {c^2}} \rightarrow M = {{Rc^2} \over G}$
Where:
$c^2$ is the speed of light (~3E+8 m/s) squared,
$G$ is the gravitational constant (6.67E-11),
$R$ is the desired wormhole outer radius, and
$M$ is the mass of your desired wormhole.
For the inner radius, the same equation applies. Also, the outer radius must be larger than the inner one. $R\_{outer} > R\_{inner}$
In an instance where the two radii are close enough to equal ($R\_{outer} \approx R\_{inner}$), the mass for your traversable wormhole is $M = 2 {{Rc^2}\over G}$
Let's try this out for a 1 kilometer wormhole :
$R = 1,000 \therefore M = 2.69E+30$ kg. For some perspective, the mass of the sun is $1.988E+30$ kg, so a little over 1 solar mass would be required to generate a 1 kilometer-radius (2 km diameter) wormhole of this type. Assuming there aren't some technologies that draw down this requirement.
## Evaporation
I'm a little curious what evaporation would be in this condition. As black holes become smaller, their lifetimes become shorter and they become hotter.
Assuming my notes are right, the lifetime of a singularity of any size is :
t = $M^3 ((5120 \pi G) / (h c^4)$
Where the only new term is $h$, Plank's constant (6.60E-34) Js
Given a 2 kilometer diameter (1km radius) traversable wormhole of this type, weighing in at around 2 solar masses, how long until it evaporates into a fine explosion of energy? I get $3.9E+84$ seconds, which is longer than the universe is old. So, it won't be evaporating any time soon.
## Effect on Surrounding Environment
On another recent thread people from this forum calculated the closest approach two solar systems could make to one another without disrupting all of the planets and other bodies. Depending on the technology your alien race has to dampen out far range gravitational effects, your traversable wormhole of (1km rad/2km diam @ ~1 solar mass) would be disrupting bodies out to a distance of 30 light-days (5,000 astronomical units (AU)), or out to the outer edge of the Oort cloud.
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I'm developing a world in which everything needed to create gunpowder (sulfur, charcoal, potassium nitrate) along with other chemicals, are all infused with *chaotic, unstable magic*. Weapons which rely on these substances are considered too dangerous to use in war, since magic creates *unpredictable effects*- the weapon can explode, the projectile might reverse course, or the target's wound will appear on the shooter's body instead. It's a soft magic system in that the precise rules for what determines these outcomes are seemingly left to chance.
So far I've guessed that
* Guns might not have developed beyond [early firearms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_firearm)
* They would only be used by "suicidal cults" or anyone who doesn't care about dying.
* They might be used in cases like [witch dunking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunking) where a person's guilt is determined by whether they survive the ordeal. (If the holder is killed by their gun, they were deemed guilty.)
Are these realistic outcomes? Is it likely that firearms would be abandoned altogether, in favor of more reliable weapons like swords?
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# Springs
All you're doing is writing off one mechanism of stored mechanical energy - gunpowder. That doesn't make swords the default, that makes people look harder for other means of flinging things accurately through the air. [Repeating crossbows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow) for example, or simply refinements of the standard crossbow.
Do the properties of gunpowder hold true if it's not being used for propulsion? If not, then the [PIAT](https://www.militaryfactory.com/smallarms/detail.asp?smallarms_id=48) would also work just fine to deliver an explosive into the midst of an enemy formation.
Guns v. swords is a false dichotomy, it's "guns vs. other effective ranged weapons".
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Booby traps.
If half the time the guns wound the person they are aimed at, and half the time they wound the person firing them, then make it so the person they are aimed at is the one setting them off.
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If powder ignition is strictly 50% mundane effects and 50% "bad" magical effects you can use this phenomena to create a true random number generator.
It's a physical phenomena that might be superior to observing things like radioactive decay if you build the right equipment for it.
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Answer: **Paperweights**.
If every firearm ever invented is likely to 'backfire' 50% of the time when used and thereby endanger the user *no-one* will touch them. No matter how sophisticated or elaborate the design the user would be better off equipped with a cross bow or a long bow or even a sling.
Its another story however with **Grenades** and or **Rockets**. Both are 'single use' weapons only so it doesn't matter nearly as much if they are likely to fail. One you throw the other you light the fuse and run. If it works great if not? the user is out of 'boom' range.
Interestingly if your world has developed stream power then you have the option of:
**Steam powered cannons**! Which were a real thing - you can look them up. Not withstanding the fact you will have to take some liberties with how effective they were - unless you allow for some limited degree of 'steam punk' type mechanical engineering.
If its only gunpowder that 'magic" impacts the other alternative is to look up other types of volatile chemical reactions that would have been discoverable in the Middle Ages e.g something involving phosphorus for instance. Talk to a chemist about what combos might have worked in primitive firearms if not modern ones. (P.S. In light of recent world history explain *carefully* why it is you are asking.)
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# Use them anyway
Guns have become ubiquitous because they are powerful. They are significantly better than other alternatives, which is why they have dominated warfare for hundreds of years. These weapons are too invaluable to be discarded. States, extremist groups, and those in an inescapable bind would use these to horrific effect.
If guns had a 50/50 chance to kill you or the target, then they would be used by low-value users to kill high-value targets:
* You could send a dozen peasant gunmen to assassinate an enemy general.
* You could send a group of slaves to attack enemy elite infantry.
* You could send people on suicide missions and have them keep firing until they can't anymore.
* Build really big multi-barreled guns that cause so much death and destruction that losing 1 gunman is considered an "acceptable" sacrifice.
They would also be used in situations where not using them is a worse choice:
* They could be used as a last resort when a position would be overrun or the defends were likely to fail and die.
* You could use them for self-defense against someone who would otherwise kill you - in this world perhaps it's taken as a sign of cowardice if a high ranking individual *doesn't* fire their firearm and is instead killed or captured.
Firearm development would continue, with states and rich companies using people they deem not important to test. Be that prisoners of war, inmates, terminally ill people, or just those unlucky enough to sign up for a job.
[Answer]
***VOLLEY GUNS:***
Why would you use a gun that kills the person standing behind it as often as in front? Why, obviously don't stand behind it. Put your guns on carts, fired en mass at the enemy. Have the fuse or lanyard be somewhere OTHER than behind the guns. Weapons like this were being built around the time of the Civil war, and used to defend narrow places like bridges from advancing troops. Crossbow and bow-armed defenders plink off the slow, armored guys who try to cross a few at a time, and if a bunch of guys charge, them BLAM. It was the machine gun of the day, and would be more effective against troops who didn't have similar guns pointed at you.
Similar weapons weren't used in open field battles because regular guns did that job better. In your world, these weapons would take the place of massed archers, at least for close range fighting.
Personal versions of these weapons did and could exist. Why? because using one meant you would be showing a willingness to die to kill an enemy. They weren't exactly safe back then anyway. At six barrels, you and your opponent would be almost guaranteed to both die. As a defense, what's better than mutually assured destruction? An unskilled fighter would be immediately on par with an expert swordsman.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RN6VU.png) [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5bw8t.png)
[Answer]
**Trial by combat**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_combat>
In a trial by combat, adversaries would settle their cases with a trial by combat. This method was used in the past in Europe. (note, it's apparently an exclusively germanic thing; the related trial by ordeal is much more widespread, but the combat between parties is exclusively germanic).
A trial by combat was essentially a legally sanctioned duel; the idea was that the gods gave victory to the innocent party (or possibly God, but it's really a pre-christian tribal thing). It was allowed where there was no clear evidence, and only for serious cases (Tallhoffer listed murder, rape, treason, etc). Steps were taken to level the playing field between combatants; e.g. there's a specific set up for a domestic case, to handicap the man – the man was put in a hole, with one hand tied behind his back.
The accusing party would shoot at the defendant, and the survivor would be judged right in their case – the 'magic' would judge between them.
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> [And if all other plans fail, why not sacrifice yourself for the cause? Your life for his. Before Altair, that was the Levantine approach.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RFTRjfVZcU)
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That is my favorite quote from Assassin's Creed Unity. And it makes sense historically: [the real world assassins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Assassins) are mostly known in the west because of their branch that specialized in conflict. They were called the [fedayeen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedayeen), which according to Wikipedia is:
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> a term used to refer to various military groups willing to sacrifice themselves for a larger campaign.
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A common modus operandi was to approach a target during a Friday prayer and stab them to death. The people around the target would mostly then lynch the assassin on the spot, but the deed was done and could not be undone, so for the assassins it was a success anyway.
Your magical fedayeen could hug a victim and shoot. They both die spectacularly and a mission is accomplished.
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**SHOOT GUNS WITH YOUR GUNS**
If all the gunpowder has bad juju in it, take a lot of it, shoot this thing at your enemy with a gun that not requires gunpowder (trebuchet, crossbow, etc.) and let it explode on impact.
The half chance of the bullet going forwards or backwards DOES NOT MATTER if they are both the enemy.
Basically all guns are considered area explosives, you throw it, take cover and wait to explode.
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If a magic 50/50 gun randomly kills either the target or the triggerman, then one way to make it a 100/0 gun is to make the target the same as the triggerman. This immediately suggests two applications:
**Suicide.** I recall reading a sci-fi story a long time ago in which, IIRC, guns were outlawed(?) and so you had to go to extra lengths to commit suicide; the protagonist acquired a bootleg single-use gun, little more than a tube with a trigger attached, referred to ironically as a "Wednesday Night Special." Your magic 50/50 guns could fill the same niche — if your world was dystopian enough, yet safe enough, to maintain a market for them.
**Booby-traps.** Suppose you place one of these guns with a tripwire so that the person who *unintentionally* fires the gun stands a 50% chance of death, and the target stands a 50% chance of death, and coincidentally these are the same person.
Now some epicycles suggested by the booby-trap idea: Clearly there's some sort of magical determination of who the "firer" of the gun is. Otherwise, I could just aim the gun at you, push the trigger with a long stick, and with 50% probability I'd have to go find a new stick but at least I'd be unharmed.
Suppose I train a pigeon to peck the trigger. Is that good enough to trick the magic? or does the magic affect the person who trained the pigeon? (Or the person who bought the pigeon from the pigeon-trainer?)
You have the opportunity to create a whole system of rules and regulations around these dynamics. (See [What exactly is “Psik Reisha”?](https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/23529/what-exactly-is-psik-reisha/23530#23530)) The difference between your system and halacha is that in your system it would be relatively *very obvious* when somebody got the details wrong!
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> Dear FiftyFifty.stackexchange.com,
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> My brother wanted to kill a deer with a gun, so he placed the gun on a tripod on the ground, climbed an iron ladder into a camouflaged hide, and used a 10-foot length of silver chain to depress the trigger. However, he still died. What did he do wrong?
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> Confused
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> Dear Confused: We need more information. How many links were in the chain? Was it raining at the time?
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Now, "wanting to kill a deer with a gun" might seem like a *terrible* reason for anyone to court death in this manner; but:
* Remember that people are stupid.
* The military-industrial complex will *very quickly* figure out the halachically safe way to use gunpowder weapons, as long as these weapons actually help to kill people. (And they *will* help, because once you know the halachically safe way to use them, you can use a machine gun just as safely as a pistol. Of course the technique will start out as an extremely valuable military secret, and may stay essentially that way for a long time; see also, atomic weapons.) The technique will eventually become public, at which point private citizens will also be able to use the technique — or as close to the proper technique as they can manage given their limited resources. Compare [plinking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plinking).
---
Now, my whole answer is essentially based on the idea that your magic operates by halacha-style *rules*, which is maybe not what you intended. If you mean that your magic is **just inherently unpredictable and uncontrollable**, then I think the fundamental answer is that **nobody will try to use it** unless it offers astronomical rewards (e.g. summoning Mephistopheles, granting wishes, etc). I don't think "maybe killing a dude at a distance" qualifies as an astronomical reward.
If the good effect can be scaled up without a proportional scale-up in the bad effect, then perhaps you would still see them used as weapons of mass destruction. (This is essentially the "suicide bomber" idea with a patriotic spin.) Suppose the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a 50% chance of destroying the city and a 50% chance of killing the pilot — they'd probably still do it. But suppose it had a 50% chance of destroying the city, a 30% chance of killing the pilot, a 10% chance of killing the general who ordered the drop, and a 10% chance of destroying Boise, Idaho — well, they'd probably call off the drop.
[Answer]
Whilst most people would baulk at the 50% risk of a lethal backfire, there are people who will take that risk.
Suicide bombers are a thing; however, this may not fit well into your world, and it may be hard to explain why they'd use guns instead of bombs. Sniping is a possibility, assuming that one can train with firearms without risk – I think your description that 'wounds on the target appear on the shooter' suggests it's the malicious act, rather than the mechanics of the gun, which are triggering the magic?
Another simpler option is that convicted prisoners would be sent to the front line and given a chance to 'redeem' themselves by firing a clip at the enemy. Any who return alive would be pardoned, and any who don't could be pardoned posthumously, or it could be decided that their death showed their guilt.
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One possible use would be in playing a version of Russian roulette.
Another possible use would be in mass executions.
The gun would be firmly mounted to fire in one direction.
One victim scheduled for execution would be tied up firmly in place with his heart right in front of the muzzle of the gun.
Another victim scheduled for execution would be tied in place with their finger on the trigger. Crossbowmen would aim their crossbows at him from a distance. He would be ordered to pull the trigger or get shot by the crossbows.
If he didn't pull the trigger he would be shot and replaced by another victim scheduled for execution.
If he did pull the trigger the gun would either work as desired, killing the victim tied in front of him, or not. If the gun worked as desire and the victim in front of it was killed he would be replaced by another victim scheduled for execution and they would try again. If the gun didn't work as desired it might kill the person pulling the trigger, in which case he would be replaced by another victim scheduled for execution and they would try again.
Possibly the persons scheduled for execution would draw straws or something to determine who went next. And possibly the last victim left alive would be pardoned.
And possibly the dangerous duties of pointing the crossbows, tying and untying prisoners, and other activities involved in the execution, might be assigned to members of a punishment detail as a lesser punishment. Not execution, but a highly dangerous assignment they might not survive.
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Cannons would be buried in the ground with a solid metal hatch that is closed immediately after firing. If the round returns, it harmlessly bounces off the hatch.
or
The return shots miss because the barrel exit is away from the head of the soldier.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5PjVN.png)
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They would use other ranged weapons that don't involve gunpowder, possibly including:
* Bows (most likely compact designs like the English shortbow or Japanese hankyu).
* Crossbows
* Slings
* Javelins and other thrown weapons
Swords might get used, but they would be backup weapons for people using bows or crossbows.
The linchpin is whether or not technology has developed to the point that usable bows or crossbows can be mass produced. If not, then combat will look more akin to the middle ages minus the cannons. If so, then the norm will be archers or crossbowmen making up the majority of warriors, but receiving cross training for close combat (probably using swords for that, as a bow or crossbow is kind of useless once the enemy gets too close).
However, there are two technological possibilities that you may be overlooking:
* Alternative propellants: Provided you have explosives, you can make a gun of some sort. End of story. If you want your wild magic to make firearms impossible, it either has to make all forms of explosives non-viable for almost anything, or it has to be in some way able to evaluate how it's being used. Hell, even a lot of historical firearms could theoretically work with modern smokeless powders if handled correctly, which would completely sidestep black powder being unstable (and 'modern' smokeless powders date back to the late 1800's).
* Air guns: The earliest known air gun dates back to around 1580 (it's still around as an exhibit item in Livrustkammaren in Stockholm, Sweden), and was one of the earliest uses of pneumatics. Air guns can absolutely be deadly (you can get rather large caliber ones designed for hunting that can down large animals just fine, but even the little .22 and .177 caliber ones can still kill a person with a lucky shot), they're really not all that hard to make, and they still have almost all of the advantages of firearms other than effective range (which is the big reason they're not used much in modern warfare).
[Answer]
**Minefields**
I think you might get some truly terrifying minefields. Assuming that putting some distance between yourself and where they are planted before they detonate gives you some level of protection, then you have a field of explosives that might kill an enemy because:
a) You step on one and it explodes under you.
b) Someone else steps on one a short distance away and you wind up getting the blast.
c) Someone else steps on one, it explodes under them and you get the injury.
It's a perfect form of defence - sapping these would be very costly in people.
**Weapon of last resort**
Alternatively what you might wind up with is a weapon that is only used when all other avenues have been exhausted. If you're cornered and death is certain either way - then this might be a time to use a weapon like this. 50% chance of dying is better than 100% and it would certainly give your opponent food for thought.
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**You can compare them by analogy to a real-world weapon that also has a high chance of backfiring and yet still sees widespread deployment: Nukes**. (Admittedly, nuclear war invites overwhelming retaliation more than it directly backfires. But the results are the same, insofar as inflicting devestating harm on the aggressor.)
## **Guns would be used as** ***defensive deterrence*** if they had a 50% chance of lethally backfiring.
The economics of a high-risk weapon aren't that complex. **Nobody who's trying to hurt, attack, or subjugate someone else would use it**, because with a 50% chance of killing yourself and some finite chance of missing even if it doesn't backfire, you're more likely hurt yourself from using it than complete whatever atrocity you set out to commit against your target. **This applies to both individuals and collectives:** Neither would a lone criminal find it worthwhile to take such a stupid risk, nor would an organized army be able to sustain the strategic attrition and tactical uncertainty of blowing up half your own forces every time you want to take a shot. If they backfired half the time, **guns would be useless in any offensive role.**
However, **in a** ***defensive*** **role, the dynamics are reversed.** In a defensive role, the objective is not to hurt the other person as much as you want while keeping yourself immune; in a defensive role, the objective is initially to make your assailant believe that they'd incur a high enough risk from attacking you that they no longer think it's worth it, so they back off. Failing that, the objective is to protect yourself in a way that is merely *less* damaging than whatever your assailant is trying to do. **If you're merely under threat and not currently under attack, then you could potentially "bluff" off attackers just by showing that you have a gun**, without ever actually firing it and facing the 50% risk. **If you're already under attack, then a "50% chance of lethally backfiring" may still be preferable to facing your attacker without it**, depending on what other options for defence you have. **Additionally, if you're protecting something which does not depend on your own continued existence**— if you're trying to fend off a criminal from your family, or if you're in a cadre of guards who were already expecting to lay down their lives to protect what you're guarding anyway— then the "50% chance of lethally backfiring" may not be a significant downside if the remaining times where it won't backfire still give you a better chance of fending off an assailant than whatever alternatives are available.
(Note that this doesn't really work in the real world though, because the high reliability, lethality, and speed of real-world guns means that they're much more effective at (and thus much more incentivising of) aggression than defence.)
### In summary, guns that lethally backfire half the time would be useful as weapons primarily under three types of circumstances, most of which are defensive in nature:
1. **When they never have to be fired. (Deterrence.)** If you can ward away a potential attacker just by showing that you have a gun, then you never have to face the risk of backfiring, so there's no downside.
2. **When you're going to die anyway if you don't use them. (Defence.)** If you're presently under attack from a force that has more than a 50% chance of killing you, then using a weapon with a 50% chance of lethally backfiring may represent an improvement upon your odds.
3. **When your life is expendable. (Protection.)** If you're fighting for something that you're willing to die for, then you may not care about a 50% chance of a lethal backfire if it also gives you the highest chance of hitting your mark. If you're fighting for something that *lots* of people are willing to die for (like a magical artifact your civilization depends upon— or, more realistically, some kind of despot with a personality cult), and you have a specific target you need to kill, then you can get a 95%+ chance of at least one working shot just by having four or five people try to shoot it.
(Assuming they see well-known use in any of these roles, then they would probably also see use political symbols and social statements— representations of conviction and willpower if willingly used, or brands of subservience and expendability if forced into your hands— but I will place that beyond the scope of this question and answer.)
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It's hard to imagine that a weapon would have a 50% chance of backfiring and not be improved. There are so many ways you could make the triggering remote and therefore safer that it is silly to think that wouldn't happen. However, assuming a 50% self-kill and 50% enemy-kill ratio it could be used in:
**Arming untrained civilians**
Trained soldiers with swords could massacre a civilian population. If one side has far fewer trained soldiers and swords, they could make up for it by equipping their civilians with the great equalizer: guns.
A trained army without guns could defeat a smaller army without guns and massacre a much larger untrained and unequipped civilian population. If a generally peaceful country (Country A) had the knowledge and a large production capacity to produce guns, they could overcome an attack by an aggressive Country B. If you're going to be slaughtered anyway, why not equip your civilians with guns so that on average they can take out enemy soldiers.
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How interesting! I like those ideas you have bullet pointed, especially the witch-dunking trial.
I think that the limitation of guns backfiring isn't going to stop civilizations from developing advanced weapons. Sure, in the beginning after people realize how dangerous these things are they will focus their battles on using swords, bows and arrows, etc.. Then, someone realizes that they can invent a crossbow, ballista, and catapult. They cover the stones they are hurling with pitch and ignite it with fire (that wasn't started with any of the chemicals you described).
Meanwhile, the people who like this magical outcome of the chemicals do several things. They create cults around it. "Brave"/"stupid" people participate in old-fashioned Russian roulette style duels to defend their honor or what have you. Generals force slaves or prisoners to use guns in battle, and if they survive the possible backfire of the guns then they have earned their freedom. There could also be people who gift something that doesn't look like a gun, but it actually is so that they could trick the enemy into the gun backfiring on them (Trojan horse style).
The more level-headed societies ban the use of these chemicals and imprison anyone caught using them. They either evolve to be more peaceful communities or evolve to win wars using simple ballistics that don't use the magic chemicals. Perhaps they discover chemicals or bacteria/viruses that do not follow the rules of the magic and they develop bio-warfare from this.
Or, they advance mechanically and figure out how to launch arrows quicker. They develop steam power and create steampunk-esque weapons that use high pressure to launch projectiles. They could overwhelm the enemy with hot air balloons dropping something that explodes on impact (could be ball full of spike things that naturally bounce in all directions, or something on fire). Far in the future perhaps they develop weapons that can throw electric bolts or imitate lightning!
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## Just an excuse to wear more armor
If guns are not widely used, then your ennemies probably use swords and bows.
Hence you'll probably have to wear an heavy armor. And those are more than able to protect you from a handgun explosion.
### Edit
In fact, you could simply add a protection to the gun itself. If the explosion itself is not magic, it is not a Dangerous one (a few grams of powder and splinters are not accelerated thru any barrel)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lm5tm.png)
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You are a spy on a secret mission. Any spies that get caught will be killed. Any weapon other than a magic gun will be found immediately, you will be identified as a spy, and killed.
Bringing a magic gun with you gives you a decent chance to escape if a single person finds out you are a spy, instead of certain death.
Or you are a harmless citizen on a walk through the town, and there are lots of armed criminals around. If an armed criminal threatens to kill you with a knife, you point the magic gun at him. If the criminal isn't insane, he or she will leave you alone, because attacking you brings a fifty percent chance of death. In practice, you will never use a magic gun, but it still protects you.
Or you are an assassin trying to kill a well-protected target. Once you start the attack, you know you will die anyway, some way or another, so the backfiring is no problem. If the 50% chance of killing is better than other methods, go for it. For example your chance of killing the target with a sword might be zero, because of the protection.
What if there are these magical guns *and* normal guns available, and you have a country like the U.K.? Carrying a normal gone is heavily regulated, but carrying magical guns for self protection might be even encouraged. If you are attacked by someone with a real gun, police recommends you shoot immediately to be first. Nobody would carry normal guns very quickly.
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then they'd be abandoned. No weapon with a 50 percent reliability and 50% chance of failure would ever be fielded on a battle. You'd kill half your forces to misshaps.
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The handgun grenade (tm). This device looks just like a pistol it's balanced so when you throw it it flies like an axe. When you pull the trigger it starts a mechanical timer. When the timer counts down to zero the pistol fires. Now look, it doesn't matter if it the gunpowder explodes in the gun 50% of the time or not. It's going to do 100% of the exploding at the target.
Okay, I guess Mon beat me to it on this one.
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**They could just use [light-gas guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-gas_gun) instead of guns powered by gunpowder.**
Light-gas guns are basically a very powerful version of air guns. The idea is that you have a piston that compresses a light gas (usually hydrogen or helium) and then a rupture disk that breaks when the light gas reaches a specific (and very high) pressure. The light gas then blows through the rupture disk and accelerates the projectile down the barrel.
We typically use gunpowder in our world to drive the piston that compresses the light gas, but our gun powder isn't magic and doesn't kill us. In a world where gunpowder is problematic, just use something else to compress the light gas instead. A spring, steam, or even hand cranks with really large gear reduction ratios. Other than for fire rate, it doesn't really matter how long you take to compress the light gas. The rupture disk won't rupture until it reaches the right pressure. Once technology advances, electric motors could be used to drive the piston (possibly via hydraulics.)
To put into perspective what can be done with these, the United States Air Force and NASA use them for accelerating projectiles up to somewhere around *low Earth orbital velocity* for simulating impacts in space (e.g. from meteoroids, missile interceptor kill vehicles, etc.) For example, [Range G](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEDC_Range_G) at [Arnold Engineering Development Complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Engineering_Development_Complex) can accelerate projectiles around 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter up to around 7 km/s (15,650 mph.)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5eEH7.jpg)
Barrels of AEDC Range G. Source [Wikipedia from USAF, public domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEDC_Range_G#/media/File:AEDC_Range-G_Launcher_facility.jpg)
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**Entertainment**
In ancient Rome, duels using such weapons would have been cause for much merriment. Provided the effects only applied to the combatants they could be used to set gladiators against one-another. To make the battle last longer, the weapons would be non-lethal, just very painful.
This is the clowns-with-falling-apart-cars effect.
If the combatants refused to take part they would of course have a worse punishment awaiting them.
'Ah but', you say, 'there was no gunpowder in Roman times'. However there is no magic in the real world. In an imaginary world we can have both.
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just use a U-shaped pipe mechanism, so if the energy from the failed shot goes backwards, it is also redirected to the forward.
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A "Justice" system for dealing with infractions against a political/legal code, or potentially for high level society members to punish/control/torture the others through fear/force.
Imagine a misdemeanor offense requiring the defendant to go to a range and fire a single shot, a felony might require up to five shots, while a high crime requires the defendant to shoot 10 shots... This would be weighed against the refusal to fire being certain death.
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[Question]
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My world was colonized by spacefaring humans who lost the vast majority of their technology in an unknown catastrophe at least 12,000 years before the present. They have now redeveloped roughly up to the point of Late Medieval technology (with some adaptations to the conditions of my planet).
We have all heard the famous line about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. I plan on having some "magic" in my world that is simply advanced technology wielded by a select few. My question is, **what kinds of modern technology would be viewed as magic by a medieval person** that fits within the following constraints:
1. No gunpowder weaponry
2. No electricity
3. No modern material science (i.e. plastics, advanced metals, etc.)
4. Replicable, i.e., these are **not** 12,000 year-old artifacts but technology that the people are still capable of making, even if the knowledge is limited to a select few.
I think the obvious answer would probably be some modern medical technology, but I'm excited to get some unexpected answers.
[Answer]
Modern medicine is probably the most substantial answer.
An engine can be taken apart and looked at - and whilst someone 'primitive' may not be able to understand all of what it does - a reasonable person would be able to infer a cause/effect.
However, with modern medicine (especially vaccines and antibiotics) there is nothing for the person to 'see' (not without a microscope and an understanding of virology/epidemiology) and so it would seem like magic.
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## Chemistry
It requires no modern materials or manufacturing capabilities to have an understanding of chemistry, but a chemist in the medieval period would literally be seen as a wizard. As it was, blacksmiths and alchemists were already seen as magic by most people being able to turn rocks into metals, poisons, and acids... but a chemist could do all of the things a blacksmiths or alchemists could do, but way better. And his workshop would be complete with all sorts of esoteric charts, indecipherable notes, and potions of all sorts.
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# Maps and mechanical flight computers
It will probably take a ship captain to appreciate, but medieval maps were notoriously inaccurate - and the sailors knew it. 20th century-quality maps, when checked out and found to be true, would look like a result of clairvoyance or omniscience. (Well, the sight from above the heavens technically *is* omniscience, as far as medievals are concerned.)
Same goes for the navigation slide rules such as the E6B or the NL-10M. The concept is deceivingly simple, but the math behind it and the knowledge required to navigate by them would look positively arcane even to late medieval people.
For the ultimate complexity, look to the "Globus" navigational computer of the Voskhod spacecraft. It was almost purely mechanical (the driver solenoid can be replaced by a spring or an aeolipile-style steam engine), but was good enough to literally pilot a spaceship.
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# Pre-1980's diesel engine, and the fuel to run it.
Prior to the mid 1980's diesel engines did not require electricity to run. Modern electrical systems have since been developed to make them run more efficiently, but to jump from Late Medieval to diesel engines would be magical, and the sheer number of useful things that can be done with a diesel engine are numerous and varied.
Additionally, while we do use electricity now to produce diesel fuel from crude oil, it's not necessarily needed, all you really need is a large distillation column. However due to the alcohol industry in Medieval times, this might not really count as looking like magic to everyone, but would still be fantastic to a lot of people who haven't made distilled spirits before.
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* X-rays
* Radium (heat and light production indefinitely)
* Nuclear fission (even in its nuclear “damp squib” form and killing rays)
* Chemical Photography and pictures from the deep sea vents etc,
* Liquid oxygen (conventionally would require electricity but unconventionally could almost certainly be produced using the pressurisation provided by a steam engine)
* Dry ice (similarly)
* An aqualung and scuba kit
* A submarine
* Pneumatic cannons
* Many explosive chemicals apart from gunpowder (if allowed)
* A range of other peculiar chemical reactions like the iodine clock reaction (I’m not sure all of the reagents would meet your full requirements – it's complicated) but there are plenty of strange reactions...
* Large High resolution microscopes
* Large High resolution telescopes
* Steam propelled helium filled airships
* Antibiotics
* Tin cans of food
* Popping candy
* Parachutes
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**Anything predictive**
Basing things on real world examples, anything that allowed a person to predict advents in advance. It wouldn't even need to be a physical technology, simply knowledge might be enough.
For example, weather forecasting can be done using things like a thermometer, barometer and anemometer, all of which were invented before electricity was invented in real life. The knowledge of how to use these could enable someone to set themselves up as an oracle for a society that was dependant on farming, because someone who could forecast storms could save a harvest.
A star chart, or astrological compass could be used to calculate eclipses, or when planets that seemed to be stars to a primitive people could be deemed magical, these things were seen as magical in some cultures in real life and also predated electricity.
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**Hydraulics**
A quite simple hydraulic press can develop immense force, a single person lifting up ships, crushing stones, printing coins from metal and the like by simply trading distance for force (a hand control can be moved up/down or rotated while the crushing plate advances only one way). It is a mechanical device, should be quite precisely made but nothing electric. It can amplify much more than just a mechanical lever.
The machine below allows a single human to move 30 tons ([image credit](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lantern_Slide_-_Tangyes_Ltd,_Chain_Testing_Machine,_circa_1910.jpg)). It was made in circa 1910.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2OOk7.jpg)
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If even primitive people are exposed to it in circumstances where they aren't so shocked/disgusted/awestruck that they can reason about to their level of ability, they will undoubtedly consider that it is just some really clever method/device.
People 5000 years ago were not stupid, and you're not particularly smart because you live in 2023.
People from any age, including this one, will stoop to witchcraft/supernatural/ungodliness as an explanation if they are presented the technology such that:
* It undermines their perspective of society
* It undermines their livlihood
* The people presenting the technology are offensive, dismissive, or potential rivals
* Above, amplified... the people presenting it are hostile and attacking
Etc. The full list is probably a PhD thesis with 30 or 40 categories.
It may also be the case that their level of reasoning would surprise people today if we were to witness it. The basic tools (levers, wheels, pulleys, ramps) have been known for thousands of years... constructing a skyscraper wouldn't shock them (though the materials might, or might not).
The one exception (perhaps outside the constraints of your question) I might make is a tool that hasn't been known for thousands of years. The *logic gate*. Not very impressive on its own, of course. Silly, and even sort of pointless in single quantities. But ganged together in the hundreds or thousands, and strange things begin to happen. And, being (sometimes) so tiny that you can't even see them, would even the great mathematicians of antiquity have guessed? If those are mysterious, then the recent innovations in NNs and the like are that a thousandfold.
But, at least with our own tech these are very electrical and outside the scope.
[Answer]
Anything computational would be decidedly magical. While we consider computation basic to our reality, it is a relatively new construct. The mathematics behind it would be truly alien to anyone who had not worked through them. Even what we would now consider "basic physics" was several hundred years away from being developed. The work of folk like Newton and Descartes revolutionized how we view things.
Even a mere [Jacquard Loom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine) would be incredible to someone with a medieval mind. And a more powerful Turing Complete engine would be astounding. And yes, Turing complete machines [have been built](https://hackaday.com/2011/03/25/mechanical-turing-machine-can-compute-anything-slowly/) to operate in a complete mechanical manner.
Modern cryptography is designed to be magical until you look at its implementation with modern mathematics. As such, even a flawed encryption like [Solitaire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher)) would perplex all who face it.
All of these have a common thread: they depend on an understanding of the world steeper in a kind of mathematics that did not exist until several hundred years after the medieval era. This shift is a gigantic one. If you remember learning algebra in school, you remember how alien the ability to manipulate symbols in this way was. The fundamental basis for such manipulations was not well fleshed out until the 1700s. And much of what we see today stacks another 300 years onto the mathematics. One of the funniest things I've found in mathematics is how alien Newton's physics is to me because I learned it using modern notation and theory. Even his original work was fundamentally different (getting into how would probably warrant a question on [History and Science of Mathematics SE](https://hsm.stackexchange.com/)). Teach Newton's work using modern approaches and it would truly be magical.
[Answer]
Yes, medical technology looks like your best bet. You don't even have to think about anything fancy or extra complex. A simple device will do if the wielders jazz it up with some mystical misdirection and keep schtum.
In fact the Chamberlen family did [exactly this](https://daily.jstor.org/why-male-midwives-concealed-the-obstetric-forceps/) with the obstetric forceps.
It was a massive help with difficult births, but they carried around the forceps in a large, and ornate box, and wouldn't take it out until everyone left the room and the mother-to-be was blindfolded. They did this across several generations without anyone finding out that it's a device an experienced village blacksmith could probably replicate.
And of course what bigger magic than bringing life where previously only death existed?
## Alternatively, slide rules
We no longer use slide rules, so it's difficult to appreciate how powerful and magical they'd appear to anyone before John Napier invented logarithms in the 17th century.
A medieval society still needed a lot of calculations done, especially when building large structures and it's no coincidence that the most famous secret society on our Earth is the Freemasons. These calculations would be notoriously hard, especially before the widespread adoption of positional numerals (a.k.a. "Arabic numerals").
The great thing about slide rules in this setting is that it's dead easy to make one, almost anyone can do it. And it's fairly easy to use it too, anyone with a good level of late-medieval numeracy could use it, if instructed on it first.
Figuring out how to use it without being told the secret though...well, that's why it'd be seen as magic.
[Answer]
**Penicillin**
I love questions like this because it tends to bring out a lot of bias and misinformation about how technologically advanced medieval society really was.
First we need to rule out a lot of technologies and concepts that were invented/discovered or already known by our medieval ancestors and wouldn't evoke a sense of wonder to the level of "magical". Examples are:
1. Metalworking - A 2,000 year old industry by this point
2. Mechanical engineering - Clocks, trebuchets, mangonels, water wheels. All intricate uses of kinetic energy.
3. Simple medicine - Glasses, syringes, quarantine, anaesthesia, cleaning wounds.
4. Structural engineering - No need to list the stunning achievements here.
5. Gunpowder - Important to note that with their knowledge of mixing chemicals to form explosive materials, combined with mechanical engineering, they could readily deduce how a diesel engine was functioning.
And many more...
Without the use of electricity and limited by what was available during the middle ages and the intelligent scrutiny of medieval minds I think Penicillin is your best bet. It's effects were discovered in 1928, which is VERY modern, and being mold I think your informed society can find it. Also it can be marketed as a potion formed with spells rather than a chemical, although I think with the already established practices of alchemy you might be met with cynicism.
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## **Any Steam Engine.**
Add a drive shaft and gear box etc and you have a 'magical' fire and smoke breathing dragon. Enclose it in a vessel or vehicle like a ship or tractor etc and that vessel or vehicle becomes a magical beast that eats wood or rocks (coal) and 'spits' out fire and steam.
[Answer]
[LSD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD). Even in modern times, plenty of people have believed it has supernatural properties.
Some naturally occurring substances might have similar effects, but people thought those were magic, too.
[Answer]
**Yours is a challenge**
Granted, you don't define *when* during the Medieval Era your people exist. The Medieval period was from 476ce to about 1450ce. There were advances in hydraulics and mechanics by the 1450s that would appear like magic to the people of 476ce.
But there might be a few things that could apply anywhere in that period.
**Magnetism**
While magnets have been used since at least 600bc, the manufacture of small, powerful magnets certainly does not. A small neodymium magnet mounted in a ring would easily move bits of ferrous materials around — and that would appear like telekinesis. or use it to move a ferrous rod in a lock, a lock that can only be opened by the magnet! We have such "locks" in retail stores today. They're a common effort to avoid shoplifting. We dont' even really think about them. but hundreds of years ago... magic.
**Electromagnetism**
And that brings us to electromagnetism. The first wire mill was created in England in 1568, 100 years after the end of the medieval era, which means that, if shown how, people in the 1300s-1400s *could* manufacture it. Extrude the wire, coat it with laquer, wind it around a ferrous core, and you have an electromagnet. Imagine holding a door closed with one, only to open upon the owner's command! A strong enough magnet could cause something to appear like it could fly through the air.
**Flash paper (specific uses of chemistry)**
Chemistry has been around since the first person discoverd mixing a tart fruit with the right kind of beet made it taste better. So, by itself, chemistry isn't enough. But there are specific applications of chemistry that weren't understood during the medieval period. Such an application is *flash paper.*
Flash paper is used today to add drama to a good magic act — but we all know today that it's just part of the act, not real magic. A paper that someone can write on... *use...* and yet burns away to *nothing* would be magical.
Similar uses would be the chemistry of batteries, water purification tablets, *Bleach* (which was invented in 1787 to whiten textiles). Search for specific applications of chemistry invented at least after 1600 and you'll have a good candidate for magic before 1400 that could be replicated.
**Springs**
While a non-coiled spring was used as an archery bow 64,000 years ago, coiled springs were invented in 1763. Combined with an advancement in metalurgy that wouldn't come around until the mid-1800s and you get something that's easily hidden that has many magical uses in the medieval era. Similar to a magnet, springs would allow someone to move large, heavy objects (perhaps combined with leverage).
**But, why were people actually accused of witchcraft?**
While many (if not most) accusations of witchcraft over the last 2,000 years were likely emotionally (read: revenge) motivated, the practice of herbology (already mentioned by so many in other answers) caused many to be accused. The knowledge not only allowed them to do things people didn't yet generally understand — but often to do things that in some cases were philisophically or religiously assumed to be a power that belonged only to God.
And so I mention it to point out that any invocation of science *that was perceived to be the province of diety* was often considered magic. Saving life and repairing bodies is only one such way of expressing this idea. A use of mirrors (common in today's Las Vegas magic shows!) to let someone "disappear" would also fall into this category, as would the use of a chemical fertilizer to make plants grow remarkably better or the use of [acoustic waveguides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waveguide_(acoustics)) to hear secrets.
Use the idea of religion to identify behaviors, practices, and "miracles" that, if not performed by diety or the initiates of the faith, are automatically identified as magic — whether the average person otherwise would realize it's not magical or miraculous... or not.
[Answer]
**None.**
There is this common misunderstanding of magic as a generic name for "technologies not yet understood in the past". In fact, it operated on completely different principles. Your goal with using magic was to change somebody's *consciousness* in a way which made achieving your goals more likely. That somebody might have been another person, a spirit or a god, or even your own self, and you basically made them more inclined to help your plans along. Technology instead seeks to change the *material world* directly, without ever stopping to think what the others' opinion of that might be.
Now sure, you could then use these modern technologies to perform magical acts - which doesn't make them magic, but merely *tools for* magic. Just like say a car is not travel, but rather a tool for travel.
I bet you did not expect *that* answer... ;)
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The line is about *sufficiently advanced* technology. With your restrictions you've left a few centuries at best. There are some things you can think of that would seem magical, but are also useless much like a card trick. All the most useful things won't really be magic, but rather marvels which quickly reveal their secrets once scrutinized by experts. For this to work you will need a way to restrict access to the technology. In some cases where manpower is required, you will probably need some kind of cult to keep the assistants from spreading the knowledge.
* Various types of advanced mathematics. In particular probability and statistics. The "magic" of this will not be apparent to ordinary people, but it might impress administrators, merchants and rulers.
* Cryptography. This is an interesting one because people have been trying to invent secret codes and ciphers since time immemorial, and yet the work of amateurs in this field is usually trivial to defeat, whereas professionals can produce do some truly incredible things.
* Navigation and precise clocks, depending on the geography of your planet.
* Chemistry is basically the alchemists' dream come true. Explosives, poisons, drugs, fertilizers, fuels, metalworking and processing. However, it won't take long for people to catch on that you can't make the philosopher's stone, you can't turn lead to gold (it's hard to even plate metal without electricity) and the rules for what you do are not that complicated. So something you'd have to be pretty secretive about.
* Steam power and other heat engines. Obviously these will be quite simple to reverse engineer, especially because not having modern materials will restrict their intricacies. But they can produce great gains in agriculture, extraction, transportation. You would probably have things like magical ships that move without wind, but no non-cultist is allowed to see what's in the hold. Huge military advantage as well.
* Mechanical computers, powered by water or mechanical energy. Again hardly magical once you take a close look, but can do incredible things.
* Modern geology, in combination with chemistry and steam power, would be similar to dowsing in that you'd find a lot more mineral deposits.
[Answer]
# Plumbing
In medieval times, people threw waste out of their windows, so the streets were covered in waste. To medieval people, it would seem magical if there was a way to get rid of their waste without it being thrown on the streets. It would be much cleaner too.
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It's not technology per se, but I think you should consider using modern dietology, fitness practices, hygiene, dental medicine and martial arts.
Don't get the wrong idea, medieval people could very well be very fit and very much capable of kicking someone's ass in a fight. But they did not know a lot of things about human bodies that we know today. And therefore a lot of their performance and longevity depended on chance and genes. We today though have ways to reliably get people quite fit, physically capable and attractive.
So consider this scenario. In a mostly-medieval society there exists a group that basically has been practicing modern fitness and wellness for a while, keeping the methods mostly secret. They also have time and resources to get good food and lots of exercise.
So we suddenly have a bunch of people, every single one of them is fit, beatiful, looks half their age, has those weird white pristine teeth, can fight really well, seems immune to most diseases, lives on average 1.5-2 times longer... They also follow some weird taboos (like won't touch specific food or eat at certain hours). To people around them they would look positively uncanny. Superhuman. Arcane. Magical.
Sprincle in some basic math education (statistics come to mind), psychology, maybe some more advanced medicine (anitibiotics would work very well as a magical "cure the uncurable" pill) and those guys will also suddenly posess subtle, but noticable powers of prediction, mind-bending and healing, making them even more impressive/creepy.
Most of this does not require any kind of high level tech or even any deep understanding of medicine or chemistry. They just could have found an archive of fitness magazines and basically follow those like a recepie/ritual without understanding why this works. Questionable content in the magazines that does not really work would even add to the mistique and drama.
And yes, some of the practices can and will be reverse engineered by their peers outside of the initiated. But figuring out everything our Order of Fitness guys do is going to be a very tedious and confusing endeavor.
Another fun thought is that actually leading a healthy life, even if you know how to do it, is time-consuming, relatively expensive and involves some almost monk-like self-limitations. So only the rich have the capacity to follow the Order's rules... if they are willing to change their lifestyle. And in the medieval period opulent lifestyle is not only a matter of pleasure for the rich and powerful, but also a matter of status. You MUST throw banquets and entertain your vassals, lest they decide that their sovereign grew weak in mind and/or purse. Not a great backdrop for the proliferation of modern notions of health an well-being.
Still some people will pay attention to the Order. And would seek to either gain the secrets or purge the witches. And in return, the Order may either brutally hunt down those who know too much... or instead seek to educate the unwilling masses to make their lives easier, fighting against the norms of the medieval society. Or even both! There may be factions!
Enter politics, drama and intrigue.
[Answer]
## Photography
Making exact images of people is likely to have a lot of perceived magic for its technological buck. The larger the images, the better.
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* **Steam Power** —
Maybe this one wouldn't count because technically, [the technology existed 2000 years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile), but the Industrial Revolution provided lots of practical applications for the steam engine that the ancients would consider amazing.
* **Printing press** — Perhaps too simple in its operation to count as “magic”, but it would be a marvel to a society used to tediously copying books by hand.
* **Hot air balloons** — The first technology to allow human flight.
* **Telescope**
* **Mechanical clocks** — Especially [the marine chronometer](https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/harrisons-clocks-longitude-problem) which allowed “magically” accurate navigation.
[Answer]
Hang-gliders, paragliders, light pipes/optical fibers (replicable as a tube with water).
Compass.
Greenhouse, fertilizers, hydroponics, drip irrigation.
Dyeing clothes, hair dyeing, eyeglasses. The very color of modern clothes could be seen as magic in the past, not to mention printed color images or text. BTW, printed text, printed books.
Precise weather forecasts for more than 10 days :)
[Answer]
**Mechanical mass manufacturing**
A mechanized factory can be run with water wheels, and the individual machines are relatively simple. Skilled craftspeople can manufacture the parts, and individually there is nothing very special about them.
Combine them together and make it manufacture something laborious, and it seems like magic by being so revolutionary and by the scale of the factory. Fabric is a classic example, but tools, buckets, wheels are just as suitable.
With medieval technology, the factory would still require a large number of workers to operate. The owners of the factory would have a strong incentive to keep their monopoly by keeping the technology secret. Each worker would probably be taught only a small part of the whole process, and there would be an air of secrecy surrounding the factory. A worker might say *"My job is to put these yarns in place and the fabric starts appearing on them without anyone weaving it!"*
[Answer]
A magic lantern
Or a camera obscura or what you would call it. Essentially a picture projector which only needs a box, some picture and some brightly burning fuel. Then you project an image up on a wall or on smoke. The concept is so basic that variations of it was probably used in antiquity and the middle ages.
With a couple of lenses (you could use some from glasses for shortsighted and far sighted individuals) and a bit of knowledge of optics a person might actually be able to get pretty clear and precise pictures, even without any electricity. People did so in the late renaissance.
The question is of course if a 'primitive' person really would be terrified by this. In reality they might quickly find out that you were just using some gadget that they didn't understand. If you met a person on the street today with a thing you couldn't explain, but which didn't seem dangerous in itself (let's say a box that could suppress sounds for example) you would of course be amazed but its not likely that you would worship him as some god or grand magician.
Oh, and I should just add: Whispering Gallery Waves: Buildings where the acoustics means that a voice can be made to sound as if it were coming from somewhere else. These were probably also used by magicians in antiquity to make statues speak.
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# Dragons, werewolves, and similar critters
12k years ago, your colonists were masters of genetic engineering. Some were, say, furries, and made themselves into all kinds of wondrous forms.
Your catastrophe happens, the technology is lost, but those who became fire-breathing winged lizards, remained so; while those whose skin was laced with silk (making it tougher than Kevlar, and thus bullet resistant) and which had been engineered to grow lush fur, and whose skull was structured to somewhat resemble a wolf, they too remained in such forms, generation after generation.
Not sure if the "orcs" and the "elves" were secret Star Trek fans, cosplaying as Klingons and Vulcans, but same sort of ideas apply there.
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Clockwork. Which must be magical, since it's too short to be acceptable as a valid comment.
However that does introduce the entire field of automata, undoubtedly seen as magical by commoners, as well as things like the Mechanical Turk which inhabited a realm of quasi-magical Extreme Cleverness.
But Extreme Cleverness does carry its own risks: if Newton had been discovered to be doing calculations with a slide rule and writing his notes with a ballpoint pen he would almost certainly have been shunned- or worse- for communing with the Devil using arcane items of divination.
[Answer]
## Modern beauty products such as
* hair dye / bleach
* coloured contact lenses
* makeup
* glitter
* spray-on tans
* tattooing
These, especially used together, can make a person appear to "transform" into a completely different one.
] |
[Question]
[
There exists a Universe in which all of outer-space is filled with some form of human-breathable air. Theoretically, you could fly a Zeppelin up there and explore other worlds, with a sufficiently long travel time.
Nearly everything about physics, except for maybe some minor differences, are the same as in your universe, though. How can this be?
My question, then, to the scientists of this Universe:
**What is/are the least intrusive physical law(s) that would need to change in order for Humans to be able to breathe in outer-space?**
[Answer]
Most other answers have already made clear that gravity affects gas, that such an amount of gas would have disastrous effects in real world, and that the effects of tweaking gravity can be even worse.
Therefore, the least intrusive physical law change is to tweak the gas. Interplanetary gas must have some interesting properties:
* In order not to collapse into planets nor form a black hole, it must be massless. At least it can't have gravitatory mass (gas atoms can't attract other masses by gravity). Being massless, that gas is less dense than any planet atmosphere and therefore it floats over planets instead of mixing with them.
* Gas can't cause friction, just not to slow planets. You can get rid of viscosity by handwaving, but turbulence may still be a problem. Making it absolutely massless might solve the problem, but I'd prefer just to make the gas move in a perfect flow following the planets. In this system all orbits are nearly circular, and if comets fall into the system they are slowed because they aren't moving with the gas.
* Airships (or airplanes) need to move through gas. That is, propellers need to work. That's the reason not to make the gas absolutely massless. It must retain its inertia and follow orbits although it can't exert gravitatory effects on other bodies. I'm afraid you need to overlook Newton's third law, here, but as long the gas keeps symmetrically distributed in the system planets will be fine.
* Until now, you could fly a plane through the gas or keep alive just by using a breathing equipment. If you want to breathe that gas, it needs to be made of several elements that are chemically equivalent to the usual ones, although keeping their special properties. Most of the gas can be made of the equivalents of nitrogen and oxygen. In fact, people or animals breathing such a gas for some time may get some special oxygen incorporated in their body and get some of that special characteristics.
* In addition, some components of that gas may react exothermically under special circumstances - like those inside a four stroke aviation engine. This way, you can get rid of the need of fuel for your interplanetary travellers, while preventing the whole system from exploding.
In summary, interplanetary gas should be:
* Massless from gravity point of view, but with inertial mass.
* Frictionless and orderly moving with the planets.
* Made of special kind of atoms, chemically equivalent to usual ones.
[Answer]
**You're going to need to handwave this universe something awful**
* Gravity is what keeps planets together. It's also what created them in the first place. Planets and stars form by pulling together all that breatheable gas. Solar systems can be thought of as cosmic vacuum cleaners. The star and the planets keep pretty much all the light-weight stuff "swept up" by attracting it into said star or planets.
In an effort to help you rationalize/explain your universe, if gravity operated not on the inverse-square law, but on (for example) an inverse-cubed law. Planets and stars would on average be smaller, but the force of gravity would decrease much more quickly with the distance from the mass. This would allow for bands of mass between planets (maybe, see below) and more mass between stellar systems.
However, the faster gravitic drop-off would mean planets would all orbit closer to their suns, so there might not be anything between them anyway. Worse, there's nothing you can do about planets sweeping the gas into themselves as they orbit.
Finally, the amount of mass you're talking about, even at its thinnest to keep it breatheable, would mean you couldn't see even your nearest planetary neighbor. Heck, you probably couldn't see your own moon. You might not even be able to see your own sun (if you can, it would be as a lightened smudge in the sky). It would be a very dark universe.
* Next problem: solar winds. Those winds actually push things away, so while gravity is attracting, the solar winds are fanning. Which means there would be no breatheable air anywhere near the sun and possibly not for entire AU from the sun. OK, maybe you can see the sun after all since it's either vacuuming or sweeping the gas away immediately around itself. On top of this is the fact that human-breatheable air has oxygen ... stuf that a star can ignite. Your universe might exist for a second before all the stars ignite the air around them and the universe burns itself out in a cataclysm that makes the word "biblical" seem like a description for buttering toast.
*No... I'm sorry, but there isn't a way of bending physics enough to justify the universe you seek. Your only option is to declare it so in the semblence of a beneficient god and move on.*
On the other hand... if you just handwave this in the tradition of Jules Vern to have fun with the story (a "parallel universe where anything can happen"), then the interstellar atmosphere would spin around a star like a whirlpool. Eddies and currents would form between systems. Black holes would be like waterfalls and gyres. You're thinking atmosphere, but it's much more like the sea. Perhaps in your universe (where we're not worried at all about our own physics) you have something akin to pulsars or quasars that spew atmospheric gasses rather than radiation. Hate to be near one of those. And the concussive shock of a supernova is very, very real.
The story could be a lot of fun... but only if you ignore our reality completely.
[Answer]
# Almost everything related to gravity, just for starters.
lets give an example.
The sun is 4 light years from it's nearest neighbor.
But lets imagine something smaller than that, lets imagine a genie snaps it's fingers and suddenly we have a cube of air around the solar system 1 light year on a side all inside a big box to keep the air in.
All well and good, you fly around in the air etc....
Problem. Air has mass, a balloon full of air has a tiny bit of it's own gravity.
The mass of 1 cubic light year of air (a pressure equivalent to sea level) is 1.08×10^48 kg.That's a lot of mass.
Unfortunately the Schwarzschild Radius for a mass of 1.08×10^48 kg is 169,543 light years.
Unfortunately the entire milky way galaxy is only about 100,000 light years in diameter
So that 1 ly cube immediately becomes a black hole with an event horizon larger than the entire galaxy.
Everybody dies.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ttd6b.jpg)
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## All of them
Having this happen is just... is really not possible that I can think of without magic and hand-waving.
I think you would have to have magically appearing gas. Assuming that you are fine with having magically appearing gas appearing all over, not a lot I guess (sarcasm).
But seriously, you have to hand-wave everything, including absolutely massive volumes of gas and almost constant creation of said gas, not to mention a host of other problems.
Since you mention travelling with zeppelins though I think you are massively underestimating the volume/distance of space. Space is huge. Just our solar system would be FAR too massive for a zeppelin to traverse. Lets take a look at that.
## Airship (Space) Travel
Lets assume that we are completely ignoring the gravitational pull of planets and we can just happily float off into space (spoilers: *we cant*). If we dont assume this you could never explore other places with a **blimp**.
According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg-class_airship) and some general googling the fastest I can see a large blimp type airship going is 80 mph (~129 kph) although it seems they usually trundle along at more like 40-50mph, assuming there is not a headwind.
Lets be optimistic shall we? Lets say they can average 80mph without a tailwind. Using that figure lets see how long it would take to get to some nearby celestial bodies assuming they are in their closest position to earth (according to [this calculator](https://theplanets.org/distances-between-planets/)).
*All calculations are approximate*
* Moon: (238,900 miles)
+ travel time: 125 days (0.34 years)
* Venus (25,724,767 miles)
+ travel time: 13,398 days (36.71 years)
* Mars (48,678,219 miles)
+ travel time: 25,353 days (69.46 years)
The travel speed of Apollo 11 to break earths orbit was about 25,200 mph or about 315 times faster than our assumed zeppelin speed. Unless you can get a blimp moving very very very fast (how???), it will likely never leave any planets orbit, and might even get stuck on some moons. Its not really worth it to talk about exploring any of the outer planets, let alone other solar systems knowing these things.
## Solution?
You just break everything and anything and make your own rules for whatever the heck you want. You will be breaking everything but just fill the space inbetween planets with gas. Make the planets really close together so you can travel to them but somehow not crash into each other or pull on your zeppelin, probably because of its handwavium coating.
You have no way to make this work in a universe that resembles ours. You will have to break all of the rules as we know it and make things that way "because you say so".
Did you get this idea from Treasure Planet? Because that universe is suuuper hand-wavey and this sounds kind of like that with the zeppelins and breathable space
[Answer]
**Aristotelian universe.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9mdhy.jpg)
<https://www.jw.org/en/publications/magazines/awake-no5-2016-october/aristotle-view-of-universe/>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model>
>
> In the fully developed Aristotelian system, the spherical Earth is at
> the center of the universe, and all other heavenly bodies are attached
> to 47–55 transparent, rotating spheres surrounding the Earth, all
> concentric with it. (The number is so high because several spheres are
> needed for each planet.) These spheres, known as crystalline spheres,
> all moved at different uniform speeds to create the revolution of
> bodies around the Earth. They were composed of an incorruptible
> substance called aether. Aristotle believed that the moon was in the
> innermost sphere and therefore touches the realm of Earth, causing the
> dark spots (macula) and the ability to go through lunar phases. He
> further described his system by explaining the natural tendencies of
> the terrestrial elements: Earth, water, fire, air, as well as
> celestial aether. His system held that Earth was the heaviest element,
> with the strongest movement towards the center, thus water formed a
> layer surrounding the sphere of Earth. The tendency of air and fire,
> on the other hand, was to move upwards, away from the center, with
> fire being lighter than air. Beyond the layer of fire, were the solid
> spheres of aether in which the celestial bodies were embedded. They,
> themselves, were also entirely composed of aether
>
>
>
There are several nice things about using an Aristotelian system for the world you want.
1. Aristotle was a keen observer. There is an explanation within the Aristotelian system for just about any physical phenomenon you can name. His system is internally consistent too.
2. The tenets and terms you use do not have to be invented - they are all there and they will lend their medieval scholarly gravitas to your fiction endeavor.
3. There is no reason air cannot extend out indefinitely although I am not sure what sort of resistance you will encounter when you traverse the spheres of Aether that carry the celestial bodies.
[Answer]
This has been done in a smaller scale in [The Integral Trees (1984) by Larry Niven](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees)
>
> The story occurs around the fictional neutron star Levoy's Star (abbreviated "Voy"). The gas giant Goldblatt's World (abbreviated "Gold") orbits this star just outside its Roche limit and therefore its gravity is insufficient to keep its atmosphere, which is pulled loose into an independent orbit around Voy and forms a ring that is known as a gas torus. The gas torus is huge—one million kilometers thick—but most of it is too thin to be habitable. The central part of the Gas Torus, where the air is thicker, is known as the Smoke Ring. The Smoke Ring supports a wide variety of life.
>
>
> No "ground" exists in the Smoke Ring; it consists entirely of sky. Furthermore, the Smoke Ring is in orbit and therefore in free fall: there is no "up" or "down". Most animals have trilateral symmetry that allows them to see in all directions. The majority of Smoke Ring animals have evolved to fly on at least an occasional basis—even the fish. The Smoke Ring contains numerous "ponds," globs of water of various sizes which float free like everything else. While there are aquatic and amphibious animals in the Smoke Ring that live the majority of their lives in such ponds, these animals may find their habitat unsuitable at any moment. Whether their home pond drifts too far out of the habitable center of the Smoke Ring and into the gas torus, becomes too large and breaks up due to tidal forces, or impacts a large object such as an integral tree, aquatic animals must be able to propel themselves through the air sometimes in order to find a new place to live.
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Use the same gas torus, but make your humans smaller, which makes the gas torus "universe" bigger
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Others have listed some good reasons why this would be difficult while still maintaining the laws of physics that your readers will be accustomed to.
An alternate approach would be changing the physiology of the inhabitants of the world. What if they didn't need to breathe at all in order to live? They might still need gas for other things (as a medium for communication, for example) but those might be solvable on their own (pressurized areas for speaking in?
Telepathy?)
Now, that may make the universe's inhabitants too far removed from humanity for your tastes, but it is an option.
Another option would be to change *what* they need to breathe. If the air that they breathe has no mass, then gravity would be a non-issue. Maybe this mass-less breathed-medium exists in space and on planets, but on planets the (mass-having) gases accrue, and this accounts for the rest of the differences that atmosphere cause (eg, refraction of light).
EDIT - Regarding the assertion that this would be changing humanity rather than the laws of physics (which is not what the question asks about) - that's definitely true of some of the more farfetched pieces of what I propose above (eg telepathy). But the latter suggestion (of changing what the "humans" breathe) can fit fairly closely within the historical framework of ways that humans have understood ourselves and the environment - it's basically just positing the existence of [aether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_(classical_element)) planetside in addition to in outer space, and claiming that that's the part that humans actually breathe (similar to air on (our) earth - we breathe in a mixture of all sorts of stuff, including a bunch of nitrogen, but it's only the oxygen that we actually need).
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I can see two options that involve what I would consider to be roughly the same level of alteration to physics.
The first is to replace normal inverse-quadratic gravity with gravity that's much stronger, but follows an exponential Yukawa potential. This would result in large structures, like stars and planets, effectively being held together by surface tension, and gravity effectively disappearing once you get a certain fixed critical distance away from any individual body, regardless of its size. The surface gravity of any given body above a minimum critical size would be directly proportional, not to its total mass, but to the density of the surface materials--which means all rocky planets would have approximately the same surface gravity! Perfect for campy space opera. :)
The disadvantages of this system are twofold:
First, there are no orbits. That comes with a silver lining, though, because it means you don't have to worry about drag causing orbits to decay, and planets to fall into their suns. And you don't really *need* orbits; as long as a planet remains at a fixed distance from its sun, does it really matter if it's orbiting, or just sitting there, inert in space?
Second is that internal pressure is *inversely* proportional to radius. That means bigger stars actually have a harder time developing enough internal pressure to start fusion than smaller ones, and rocky planets might well have enough internal pressure to fuse iron! So, in addition to fiddling with gravity, you'll want to fiddle with weak and strong nuclear force interactions to make fusion of light elements easier, and fusion of heavy elements harder. I don't know whether or not supernova explosions would be feasible in this sort of universe for distributing heavy elements, but if not, that's OK: dying stars would eventually just cool off and become habitable rocky planets! (Because, remember, surface gravity doesn't depend on total mass--just the density of materials near the surface.) A side *benefit* of this complication is that *hollow* worlds become possible, and may even form naturally--if a planet becomes large enough, due to two smaller worlds crashing into each other or whatever, its internal pressure may go low enough to allow the expansion of dissolved gasses in the rock / magma, blowing bubbles in the interior. If you could tunnel into them, you could even walk on the interior surfaces, because gravity is a surface phenomenon, and the Newtonian shell theorem doesn't apply.
The second option is to try to keep gravity the same, and change other stuff to accommodate it.
The problem of all of the air simply collapsing into a black hole is relatively easily solvable; if the air fills the entire cosmos, then no particular patch of it will be able to collapse. The self-gravity of any particular chunk is balance by the gravity of all of the other chunks of space surrounding it. You just need a larger cosmological constant to ensure that space remains reasonably close to flat. So, no changes needed to gravity or any other laws yet.
You do, however, need to figure out how to deal with density variations in the cosmic air background. On the one hand, you don't want density fluctuations to run away and result in local collapses, because if they do, then the background gas will rapidly become segmented into dense stars, separated by space that's been emptied of air... just like out universe. But on the other hand, you *do* want local collapses of a sort, because you want stars and planets and so on.
That's something of a contradictory situation. The only way I can see to resolve it is to arrange for two different kinds of matter, which can pass through each other with minimal interaction, so that one can be allowed to collapse (forming stars and planets) while the other does not (forming your cosmic atmosphere).
We also need to deal with drag, because orbits are still important in this option. We can solve that problem by positing that whatever material forms the cosmic atmosphere is superfluid--or at least maintains a superfluid state in regions where planets orbit! It's OK if, e.g., stellar heat breaks downs superfluidity at close ranges, or if there are pockets of normal fluid elsewhere out in the galaxy. That way, a planet can move through the cosmic atmosphere with near-zero exchange of energy, and no significant drag.
You could manage by making the cosmic atmosphere out of some variety of dark matter--but that then raises the question of how and why people need to or can breathe it at all! Instead, I propose *magnetic monopoles*. This universe will have two parallel periodic tables: one of electric elements, like our own, and one of magnetic elements, whose fundamental particles may have other slight differences as well, besides just the nature of their inherent electromagnetic charge, so as to allow mag-hydrogen to condense into a superfluid state at relatively high temperatures.
Most of the time, mag-matter and electro-matter would be able to pass through each without noticing, since there would be no Fermi degeneracy interactions between, e.g., magnetons and electrons. However, just like normal electric atoms and molecules in our universe can have an innate magnetic dipole, magnetic atoms and molecules could also have innate electric dipoles, which allow specific types of mag-atoms and mag-molecules to make dipole bonds with specific types of electro-atoms and electro-molecules. There is thus a clear mechanism for explaining how and why planetary life could end up evolving to make use of cosmically-abundant mag-hydrogen (or some other simply mag-molecule) in its metabolism, despite the fact that *most* mag-matter passes through *most* electro-matter as if it weren't even there.
In either case, if the humans in these settings are supposed to be able to *breathe* the cosmic background air, for metabolic purposes, they would not be breathing *oxygen*--at least not the oxygen *we* know from our universe. You will probably also need to handwave minor tweaks to atomic physics to make the air much closer to being perfectly transparent than air is in our world, or sunlight would never make it all the way from a star to a planet! But tweaking biochemistry to give them an inverted hydrogen-breathing metabolism, or something involving exotic mag-molecules, is pretty tame compared to re-inventing basic physics. :)
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You could make air out of particles that are not gravitationally attracted to anything but still react electrochemically with it. Stars would still fuse hydrogen; that would no longer be a component of the air that people would breathe. Instead, people would breathe this new air, which can be used by them because it does experience electromagnetism. This new air could technically be burnt by stars, but that usually doesn't happen because solar winds and general radiation pressure push it away before it ever gets close.
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*TL;DR: Swim through and breathe dark matter, but only when you want to.*
I'm not sure how the physics pans out for this, but here goes.
I would posit **another fundamental force**, one that allows us **to interact with the particles that permeate your space**. This gives you complete freedom to determine how these particles behave. If you want them to be spread out pretty evenly across the universe, then they should rarely interact with anything, including each other (otherwise they will aggregate or disperse, neither of which is desirable). They will not interact with light, so could be called "dark". Unfortunately, if you want to fly around using this medium, you'll have to be able to interact with it somehow.
I recommend being able to "turn on" and "turn off" your ability to interact with your dark particles, via your new force. Activate the interaction force and swim/fly through your medium, like a zeppelin moving horizontally (since there's no "up"), then deactivate your interaction when you're done. Since these are your own creation, you can make this motion as powerful as you'd like.
But how can your humans breathe? Well, if these particles always existed, perhaps your humans have evolved to take advantage of them. Rather than using oxygen to break down sugars for the energy from the sugar bonds, the special mitochondria of your humans could use the dark particles instead, activating and deactivating the interactions as needed.
This solves the problem of breathing. There are still many other issues to space travel, like the temperature and the long distances, but those are left as an exercise to the reader. There are also many fun corollaries, like sinks and sources and currents. Maybe a comet that is "on" causes a stir in the dark particles, or maybe it is used by aliens to hitchhike from system to system.
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How much of outer-space do you want them to be able to breathe? If it's a space too big to cross in a lifetime of human powered movement, like "air-swimming" with fans on your feet then James Jenkins already pointed you to *The Integral Trees*/*Smoke Ring* and Necoras the Silfin Gas Torus but there's another Larry Niven title worth checking out if you want something bigger; *[Bigger Than Worlds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigger_Than_Worlds)* is a non-fiction guide to space habitats and well worth reading for anyone looking at building science fiction universes as all the objects (except possibly the ringworld, because structural strength issues) are possible based on current engineering, mathematics, and material science.
The object that is of interest in this case comes towards the end of the essay it's called the "Megasphere", a solid shell Dyson Sphere with the core of a galaxy at it's heart and a biosphere around the outside. There's basically no gravity in the biosphere so humans would have to be able to survive freefall or build either extremely massive (AKA planets) or spinning (like a ringworld) structures if we can't so we have gravity. The atmosphere of the Megasphere is Light-years deep so there's no shortage of space, and a society living on a planet orbiting the Megasphere, within the atmosphere, would never need to know what was either at the core or the edge of the huge atmospheric bubble in which they lived.
Do note that any orbit within the atmosphere of a Megasphere is a crash orbit, anything under a full atmosphere of drag is going to lose momentum, but the orbits can be so large, and the surface gravity is so low, that objects can stay aloft for spans greater than that of the total habitability zone forecast for planet Earth.
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I believe that with slight modifications to existing physics, it can be done. As other answers have deftly explained, gravity is your main issue, so, make breathable air be something either:
a) Massless or
b) Of a mass that does not experience gravity
If you want to float on it in an airship or move through it with propeller, option (a) gives you problems, but you add a complication to deal with in option b that cosmic bodies are experiencing drag. Perhaps again the whole universe is in motion and for hand-waved reasons, the drag of the air-streams doesn't remove energy from the system. Again, note with either option you can't make the a properly floating space blimp, so perhaps a third option presents itself:
c) Your breathable air, called 'atmosphere', has an anti-gravity counterpart called 'othresphere' or something that works opposite the way gravity does, as well havign no gravitational attraction to other othresphere particles (no inverse black holes, thank you very much). It doesn't descend all the way to the surface of planets because it works on the inverse of gravity. There is a background universe pressure that provides a base pressure for the 'othresphere' far away from masses. The pressure column drops as you rise in an atmosphere until you reach the "equilibrium zone" where the transition of airships from atmosphere to 'othresphere' is made. The pressure in this zone is the lowest it can be anywhere. Moving into this zone your escape from gravity becomes dependent on on engine power and aerodynamics, but just like that you've moved into breathable outer space.
How does this effect the physics of the universe/
Well, the large and weird cosmological bodies do even wierder things, but assuming your nearest problems are planets and stars, think of it this way.
Planetary drag in 'othresphere': The atmosphere/othresphere interface layer will form some violent jet-streams if the othresphere is not moving very strongly in the direction of planetary travel, but a gas cushion like this is the most effective way to remove friction. Also, your planet doesn't have to orbit its star as fast, because habitable planners would be farther away from their star do to an increased heat retention (infinitly thick atmosphere) so they don't have to go as fast, reducing planetery turbulence in the othresphere.
Stars: Light transmission will be the main problem here. Your solution will probably be to say that light passes through othresphere with no interaction. Since othresphere is something we made up, we can simply say that as well as being and anti-gravity particle it doesn't interact with light, except maybe at a certain wavelength in case you want to use some special radar on your space-zeplins to map othresphere density. Otherwise, just leave it as entirely non-interactive.
Note that many of the equilibriums we see in regular orbital mechanics will change, but they will still come to equilibrium somewhere, and that results in a stable, breathable universe.
"Let them breath space!"
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There is no change to the laws of physics that would allow people to be able to breathe in space. Any attempt to explain such a thing through physics is going to create a bunch of plot holes that will greatly reduce the quality of your world.
You're going to be better off avoiding discussing physics at all if you want to have humans to be able to breathe unprotected in outer space. The easiest way to accomplish this is to avoid the explanation all together and treat this fact as entirely unremarkable to the inhabitants of your universe.
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This might be possible with two changes:
* Add particles with negative mass
* Add a fifth fundamental force which dominates gravity over large distances
Think of it this way: strong and weak nuclear force hold clumps of subatomic particles together (we call these nuclei). Because both of these forces are dominated by electromagnetic forces at large distances, electromagnetic force holds atoms and groups of atoms (we call these molecules and crystals) together. Since electromagnetic force has both positive and negatively charged particles, and these tend to "cancel" each other out, gravity dominate electromagnetic force over yet larger distances. Gravity holds clumps of molecules and crystals together (we call these planets).
Continuing this chain, we would need to add negative mass, so that a fifth fundamental force, weaker than gravity, could dominate gravity over astronomic distances. Both positive and negative mass planets would exist in this universe, and they would be arranged throughout space in a gigantic crystal lattice. Some molecules of gas that contain both positive and negative mass particles (so that they effectively have zero mass) could diffuse through interplanetary space.
Since this new force is so much weaker than gravity, it wouldn't really be noticeable at a human scale. Also, since planets are clumps of particles with primarily the same sign mass, the negative mass particles wouldn't have a strong effect on any given planet.
As a bonus, planets in this universe would probably be much closer together, and you get the interesting effect that it's difficult to land on planets with he opposite sign mass as your ship.
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This is a major plot point in the [Grand Central Arena series](http://www.baen.com/categories/books-by-series-list/grand-central-arena-by-ryk-spoor.html) by Ryk E. Spoor, the eponymous first of which, in its first edition, is available [free from Baen](http://www.baen.com/grand-central-arena.html). There's a degree of handwaving about **how** it all came to be but the scope is massive, set within atmosphere. It's effectively a *bounded universe*.
*Before them was a vast skyscape, a twining, roiling sea of air and cloud, brown and black and white and green, extending beyond the reach of sight in all directions. Through this atmosphere swam tiny shapes, some dimmed by haze of distance, that seemed no more than a meter long, finned or sailed things like strange fish.
Then one of them suddenly appeared to the left, emerging from a cloud in majesty, trailing streamers of mist from spars and masts, a titanic ship a kilometer long, lights blinking on its extremities, a distorted image of the massive, impossibly huge Nexus Arena reflected on the polished bronze-colored hull. As it passed, Ariane could see a bridge or forward observation deck, through which tiny figures were visible moving about. In the deepest distance, scarcely visible through the murk and gloom, another spark of light was seen, near to some monstrous shape, a shadow against shadow, of a Sphere that could envelop a world.
“Behold the Arena,” Orphan repeated, more quietly, almost reverently. “The endless skies, the worlds that drift in cloud and light and shadow, a place where storms a million million kilometers wide clash above and around embattled Spheres, where trading ships and pirates and mercenaries travel beside, prey upon, and defend explorers, decadent tourists, lost souls searching for a home or a cause, armadas finding new worlds to conquer, and all, all of them looking, watching, asking for news . . . news of First Emergents, of ancient ancient ruins atop a lost Sphere, of rumors of Voidbuilder knowledge or Shadeweaver powers . . . and all of them returning here to hear that news, to behold the newcomers—and perhaps to Challenge them, or be themselves Challenged, and gain or lose all in a single contest. It is my home. Now it is yours.”*
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It would be far more plausible to make your characters intelligent beings who don't need to breath. Make them aliens, make them androids (robots built to look like people), make them humans modified into cyborgs for space travel, with built in atomic generators and closed recycling systems for air, food, and wastes.
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Is it possible to have futuristic bullets that travel slower than sound? I'm afraid they would not carry as much kinetic energy as the supersonic variants. I know we have [subsonic ammunition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsonic_ammunition) as of today, but in the future as armor technologies advance, the bullets will need more power.
Is it a total no-no to have subsonic bullets in a gritty sci-fi scenario, or is there a way to make them believable?
Notice the question is not tagged [hard-science](/questions/tagged/hard-science "show questions tagged 'hard-science'"), just [science-based](/questions/tagged/science-based "show questions tagged 'science-based'").
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If you don't want to slow down your bullet, **increase the speed of sound** !
In a pure sci-fi scenario you may make your bullet from a metal/composite/electronic device/... that heat up the air around it. Because the warmer the air is the higher is the [speed of sound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound#Speed_of_sound_in_ideal_gases_and_air). You can alternatively burst a high energy infra-red ray to warm up the air just before shooting your bullet. By doing so the bullet will travel in an "air highway" and won't reach the speed of sound in that tube, and it will have a high speed kinetic energy !
For the math let us say your bullet travel at 900 m/s (muzzle velocity of a [medium range weapon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_carbine)) we have :
$$c\_{air} = 331.3 \* \sqrt{1 + \frac{T°C}{273.15}}$$
thus,
$$T°C = (\frac{c\_{air}^2}{331.3^2} - 1)\*273.15$$
for a sound speed around 1000m/s (100m/s higher than the bullet) it would need air at $2215°C$ ! You don't want to put you eyebrows next to hit...
*Note : Warming the air so quickly at such a temperature would probably create a deflagration with a noise (and a force) bigger than your bullet. But still, the bullet is slower than the speed of sound is it ?*
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Subsonic rifle rounds can go through modern body armor. Using new harder materials on the bullets I don't see this being less true in the near future.
Also penetration isn't required. Given enough blunt force trauma you can still kill your target. Modern technology might even aid in aiming. Making headshots easier. We still can't make good bullet proof helmets I think.
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For (most) bullets to do damage it needs *kinetic* energy. At its basics it's $\frac{1}{2} \times mass \times velocity^2$. To have a small bullet to do large amounts of damage you give it a lot of speed. So much so they go supersonic.
So your **first** option is to increase the size of the bullet = more mass = more damage done on the receiving end. Use something like a multi stage propellent and the kickback might be manageable. Also known as hand cannons.
The **second** option is to increase the density of the bullet. Kind of like the A-10's [ammo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II#Weapons).
**Third** option is to leave the simple slug throwers in the past and not depend on the transferred energy to kill. So go with lower bullet speed and let the bullets other properties do the work. [**Explosions**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_incendiary/armor-piercing_ammunition) are always nice. But attract a bit of attention. And if you want to kill the bang of the gun, I think you don't like explosions that much. If your miniaturisation is very good, go with [shaped charge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge). A nice jet of plasma cuts quite well.
\*edit, I have been notified in the comments *(thanks to [Pokechu22](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/8591/pokechu22))* that:
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> Kinetic energy is (1/2) \* mass \* velocity^2; it's momentum that's just mass \* velocity. Same idea, just slightly different (and the squared means that an increase in velocity is more important than an increase in mass)
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In [Seveneves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves) Neal Stephenson describes weapons that fling tiny robots as bullets. Specifically designed not to penetrate the hull for a spacecraft, but carried a whole host of nasty tools to hurt targets. They could differentiate between targets and even change direction in the air.
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In the current world, no standard-issue military or police rifle uses subsonic ammunition. There are lots of reasons for this, but in general this is because faster bullets fly straighter, do more damage, and penetrate armor better.
The principal advantage of subsonic ammo (and why some specialty cartridges like 300 AAC exist) is reduced noise. A silencer (suppressor, firearm muffler, moderator) can greatly reduce the initial report of a firearm, but the flying bullet itself makes a lot of noise if it's supersonic. Subsonic ammunition eliminates this sound.
If damage and armor penetration are not important in your future world (or taken care of by poisonous or explosive bullets as others have mentioned), perhaps subsonic ammo is favored for sound reduction. With a good silencer and subsonic ammunition, a shooter may be harder to find with surveillance equipment.
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Let's bend the term "bullet" a little.
Instead of being designed to penetrate armour through force, the bullet could be a payload of plastique explosive with a shaped projectile that is fired at subsonic speed, hits the target, then detonates. Perhaps a thermite/phosphor mix charge that burns through armour and flesh.
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To deal with the armor problem, consider the broadsword vs the rapier. The broadsword cuts, so armor protects. The rapier stabs, so the skilled swordsperson can find chinks in the armor.
So in this high-tech future, you have intelligent ammunition - basically micro-scale cruise missiles - which can steer itself to chinks in the target's armor. Subsonic both for quietness and to allow it a bit more reaction time.
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# The Gyrojet (Handheld Rockets)
I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned yet, but have the gun could fire bullets with rockets behind thim. This isn't even new, it has been around since for at over 50 years. It is called the Gyrojet, and wasn't simply a prototype, but a full production line of firearms including rifles, pistols, underwater firearms, machine guns, and derringers. There were over 1000 of the pistol alone made.
While you don't expand on why you want them, I'll list several advantages.
## Quiet
The speed of the gyrojet was just around the speed of sound. Those that went below were reported to have made only a 'hissing' noise. With improvements to the technology and modern/scifi level manufacturing, it could be possible to make it even quieter or have no noise with improvements to the rocket nozzle. Or, you could possibly have the sound directed directly back to the shooter so no one else can hear it (Some stealth military jets direct noise/heat/light in as focused of a beam backwards as they can to avoid detection.)
With more development, the firearm might not even need a chamber (as traditionally used), so it could be possible to have it shoot more like a toy gun where it's discharged directly from the top of the magazine into the barrel. If this happens the striker, firing pin, or other ignition system could be operated completely by the trigger. This would make the firearm even quieter, as one of the loudest parts of a suppressed firearm is the action cycling. This could be improved on even more by having electronic ignition of the rocket. If this happens there are no moving parts beyond the rounds themselves.
## Reliability
Assuming you had electronic ignition, there are no moving parts to jam. The rounds are 'ejected' when they exit the barrel, so the only moving part is the magazine. Obviously this bodes well for reliability. Of course electronic could be augmented or made more reliable in many ways. They could even have the ingredients for a battery inside them and when they move up in the firearm they are 'primed' somehow by rotating or pressing on the back half of the round to mix them and you have a brand new battery. Or just have a capacitor that doesn't discharge over time integrated into the rocket. Caps get pretty small, could get smaller in the future. Maybe even have regenerative firing where the heat or gas pressures of one round charges up the weapon.
Or even have 'wireless' ignition. Have them stored in an RF blocking case/magazine, and they only reach a window where RF can reach them when it's 'primed' or ready to fire. Heck, you could even block RF from all but one direction. Send a pulse of RF that's enough to trigger a spark gap in the round and fire it. This allows it to be fired completely remotely with no gun at all (you only need the round).
Even if they are mechanical, only having a trigger activated firing pin is substantially simpler than all modern firearms, even revolvers, bolt actions, and single shots. Not having to deal with chambering and ejecting a round is fantastic.
Maybe even have both. Electronic ignition, with a primer as a backup. Have the trigger set off the electronic before the mechanical striker releases. No settings to touch, same action of pulling the trigger fires whether there's battery or not.
Cycling issues are also a very common cause of failure in semiautomatic firearms. Many of these will not exist if you don't have any moving parts on the firearm. I'm not sure it would be helpful to explain how the various failures happen depending on the action of the firearm, since we can assume this kind won't even have an action.
## No Recoil
Since there is no explosion pushing the round against the firearm, there is (practically) no recoil. The rocket is self-propelled. This can allow faster follow up shots with better accuracy. Additionally, this is more practical for low/no gravity situations. A regular bullet will push backwards with equal and opposite force. A rocket will only push backwards minimally while it is close by, and is self-propelled past that point.
## Flatter Trajectory
Regular bullets have an arc, because they are effectively 'thrown' from the gun at high speeds. The farther they shoot the higher the arc has to be. This also makes aiming long distances much more difficult, as you need to calculate bullet drop.
This could even have applications in some odd scenarios. Underground tunnel system where there are man-sized tunnels miles long? Might not be possible to arc a bullet without hitting the ceiling, but that wouldn't be a problem for a rocket.
## Intelligent Rounds
Being in the future it's not at all unreasonable to think there could be some logic in the bullets. This already exists, albiet in the prototype stage. DARPA's EXACTO round is one of two competing prototypes. It is capable of being shot out of any existing rifle chambered in .50 BMG. Considering that this already exists it's not unreasonable to think that the technology could be applied to handheld rockets too. It could redirect to 'miss' a friendly, or help hit a specific part that's being aimed for. Nonlethal could aim for an adversaries weapon to disable it. Being the future, most other non-ai weapons personal weapons like lasers likely won't be able to add much intelligence. Maybe even have it shoot around corners. The possibilities are endless.
One thing I was thinking would be interesting would be to use them like a tiny little mirv. They can use the rockets at the end to overcome wind resistance and go in at full speed. Just have a sattelite drop a few thousand from space and they can do whatever they need to on a large scale. Take out all power, phone, or fiber lines, even if they are buried? Shouldn't be a problem.
The underlying technology could possibly even be used for non-weaponized purposes. In my head I'm picturing a nailgun with intelligent rounds. Fire from across the job site and it nails itself up. Have some self-propelled bullets (They are just rockets, remember?) hold up a board while others nail it in. They only need to hold it for a couple of seconds, it doesn't seem that unreasonable. Okay enough with the tangent...
## More Power
Regular Bullets start off at full speed (after leaving the barrel) and decelerate the entire time. This also limits the effective range of subsonic ammunition.
Rockets can continue to accelerate throughout the flight, or even maintain speed. This allows a distance of travel only limited by the amount of fuel it can carry. Combine this with intelligent rounds and you could fire them from anywhere in fuel range, even hundreds of miles away (assuming you had a high tech dense fuel). They can also continue to accelerate after hitting the target, allowing them to hit multiple targets or possibly go through several layers of protection, as they can re-accelerate every time something slows them down.
This also allows more energy transfer into the target. The rounds can be as heavy or dense as needed, and the rocket can maintain just below subsonic speed. This, again, allows a stopping power only limited by the weight of the bullet. This may not be an issue at all for vehicle mounted weapons. An extremely dense very small round weighing a couple of pounds would be trivial to carry hundreds of on even a motorcycle, and a larger or military vehicle could carry thousands. This would be an extraordinarily deadly weapon. Even against armor you can combine this with 'Intelligent Rounds' above and it could find the weak points of armor on a tank or building and attack those. Since it's not really feasable to put extreme armor on every single portion of something, you won't need nearly as strong of an armor piercing round. Even tanks and "IED resistant" platforms use different armor on the front/sides vs the bottom. An explosion is different than an armor piercing round (A chunk of dense metal being thrown very very fast).
## Simpler, Lighter, and Smaller Weapon
Since there are no extreme pressures on the firearm, you can make the weapon out of nearly anything that could withstand the brief temperature of a rocket passing through the barrel. If we assumed electronic ignition, you could have a magazine and a barrel made out of high-temperature tape or plastic. Not that I'd want to rely on it being accurate, but the possibility is a semi-automatic version could possibly be made in seconds out of household materials, with no tools except tape needed.
Not needing any high-strength materials also lowers the weight of the weapon. This is always good.
Smaller also unlocks some interesting possibilities. You could have a single shot version with no weapon at
all, only the bullet. If you can fit the bullet somewhere, you can fire it accurately from there. You only need a magazine to house other bullets, reload, things like that. You don't necessarily even need a barrel. Imagine having only a magazine, and a button on front that fired it. You could easily hold dozens more rounds on you than you can now. This also helps even more with the reliability aspect. If the 'magazine' is a self contained gun that fired rockets, you could have 3, 4, or 5 backups on you at any time. If there is a problem just drop it and grab another, like you were reloading. This is sometimes humorously called a New-York reload. You could have door knobs that can fire out electronically, or set traps, or have thousands of guns that fire simultaneously (even in 3d! Just have rounds behind each other that fire at the same time). Since each bullet is basically a gun by itself they can be fired without any supporting infrastructure (or even wirelessly). This effectively even allows you to use them to basically shape themselves into a larger object. Imagine them as a bunch of tiny little 3d pixels. I believe the mythbusters did something similar to paint a picture with paintball guns.
## Last thing I'll say
Most bits of technology have been available or working for years, and much of it was developed decades ago. It's not a stretch at all to think that some extra development or near-future tech could make it very useful for a long time or it could even become the standard firearm of the future.
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Just put small rocket boosters on your bullet to give it consistent speed. This can also be used to make mini missiles which would give it the futuristic aspect. So they are slow, but heat seeking. You could do some interesting stuff with that. Maybe even have bullets that seek other bullets.
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In Harry Harrison's *The Stainless Steel Rat* series, the protagonist uses a .75 caliber rec'less pistol. It is non-lethal by choice. The weapon shoots different ammo types as the situation warrants. One could certainly find a use for tranquilizer rounds, "magnetic bug" rounds for tracking vehicles, exploding rounds if you aren't feeling non-lethal, something like a taser round, beanbags, a sedative gas round, etc.
Getting hit by a blob of putty moving at a high subsonic speed would take the fight out of most people.
Since the OP doesn't say it has to be a pistol, a short-barreled rec'less 20mm "cannon" would do the trick nicely.
Would they be useful? For bounty hunters, paramilitary, grey ops, detectives, etc, they could be useful as these people get in trouble for, you know, murder.
The *Stainless Steel Rat* was a detective/spy if memory serves.
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## Make the bullet heavier. Done.
Impact energy is decided by the powder load, period. Powder = punch.
Imagine if the end of the bullet stuck out of the barrel and was held directly against the armor. The same powder would impart the same amount of energy to the armor regardless of the size, shape or weight of the bullet. What changes if the bullet travels some distance? Not the impact energy; the same energy bears against the armor (minus aerodynamic losses).
Th's a lot of math which *can* be done here, and you can do it if you really want to, but it's going to cancel out and lead you back to impact energy heing proportional to powder load.
For a fixed powder load, the mass of the bullet decides how much velocity the bullet will get. Make the bullet heavier, it'll get less velocity. **Make the bullet heavier *enough*, and the speed is sub-sonic.** So there you are.
## An armor-piercing slug is totally a thing
It is completely legitimate to have an anti-armor weapon which is simply a slug of metal. It is one of the major types of anti-tank rounds in common use today.
Then of course there is the classic *mass driver* from science fiction.
However, the trend is to make these rounds rather insanely *fast*. For instance the *sabot* round is almost a crossbow bolt much smaller than the tank barrel, the difference packed with discarding sabots, which fall off immediately after it leaves the barrel. The sabots are lightweight, so almost all the powder energy is transferred to the bolt.
The reason this is better requires a deep detour into the arcana of penetrating armor, which is too much to get into here.
If you're wondering if subsonic penetrators can be effective, half of all fatalities of a train hitting a car, pedestrian etc. happen with the train moving 4 mph or less. One engine with one car is about 200 tons, so that's 290 kJ, compare to 53 kJ of kinetic energy for an M61 Vulcan round.
## Slower and heavier is better... Kinda.
The bullet will lose energy from aerodynamic drag. The faster the bullet, the more loss. A supersonic bullet must spend energy making the sonic boom, so it loses more energy. A slower bullet brings more of its initial energy to the target.
A larger bullet will also tend to be more aerodynamic. One factor in aerodynamics is front-facing area. Another is *wetted* area, or total surface area exposed to the wind. These are *area* factors, but the bullet's mass is a function of *volume*. That makes the *square-cube law* work in favor of the larger bullet.
These factors mean the subsonic bullet will be slightly more efficient at delivering powder energy to the armor. That means better penetration, or less powder needed. I would say the farther the shot, the more advantage to the slower bullet.
## But not entirely
However range is a bit of a problem, as a slower bullet will have more of an arc in its travel, be more affected by the wind, and won't have the "legs" to go very long distances. This makes aiming more difficult, and may even force you into using artillery-style spotting and targeting computations. And the slow travel means spotter-based correction will take longer, and give your enemy more time to scoot.
It may well be that you take a shot and your spotter tells you "2 metres high, 5 metres too far right". And you adjust and shoot again. And for your enemy, it means if they're ever minding their own business and they hear an odd sound, to hit the deck / move their machine, because the next one will hit!
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Short answer: yes, slow speed bullets are feasible.
You need the right tool for the job: you don't want a bullet that can go through five dudes and the wall behind when the only thing you want is to silently kill the one person in front of you.
A bullet at point-blank or close range doesn't need that much speed to cause the same damage that a high-velocity bullet can at long range. You could have private security firms or agencies use it when the job takes place in closed environments or when you don't expect high level treats.
Another reason, in line with the previous point, to keep using slow-speed bullets is cost. Even if high-velocity [HV] rounds have the same build, the reduced amount or different types of materials in production can still make these types of rounds more attractive for private companies or criminal groups who doesn't have the budget for more "advanced" supplies. You could dispatch with a couple HV magazines just in case. If you go with caseless ammunition, the cost difference becomes more significant (this goes for the weapons as well, as the gun doesn't need to be as sturdy if it is going to shoot bullets with less force behind them).
A bullet is a bullet no mater what. The last thing you want is to get hit by one. Armor is designed to reduce the threat, but the threat still exists; under a hail of bullets, it is only a matter of time until one find it's way through armor.
If what you want is armor piercing, you can use a high density material round. Look at the [M829](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M829), is designed for armor piercing for tanks, but the design can be applied to smaller calibers.
Another point everyone is making is not to depend on trauma damage and instead use a payload: a chemical mix that activates upon impact, aka a [HEAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_anti-tank_warhead) shell essentially. Although these are described as explosive, in a sci-fi future, you can have a smaller, silent, "melting" charge. You only need a small amount of heat to cause serious damage to flesh, and, since you can shoot several rounds to the same target, that small burn could be enough to stop a threat.
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This is science-fiction, so we have to decide if the gun uses actual gunpowder. A Mass Effect-style mass accelerator firing a subsonic bullet could be made entirely silent. Supersonic projectiles would still produce a noticeable crack, even without muzzle blast.
Now, back to gunpowder. There is another type of subsonic bullet that every army uses and no-one mentioned: the 40mm grenade.
THUMP ----- BOOM
If your world is set in the near future, grenades could have shrunk a bit, say to 25mm caliber. You know, like the XM25 grenades...
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25_CDTE>
They make plenty of different ammo for this gun, but the sexiest is the HEAB round. It goes like this:
There is a bad guy hiding behind a corner. Aim optical rangefinder at corner, click a few buttons, aim slightly off the corner, and shoot. The grenade will detonate in the air, precisely just right in front of the bad guy's face. At least, in theory.
So, it defeats cover. Feel free to imagine various types of ammo, like heat-seeking, micro-missile, smoke, tear gas... There is even a 40mm round which you shoot up in the air, and then it pops a little parachute and the camera at the front streams live video to your HUD. Yes, you can find youtube videos of people playing with those right now.
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A supersonic bullet produces a lot of noise when it breaks the sonic barrier. So for a gun with a **sliencer** it's good to use subsonic bullets. In the real word it should use a heavy bullet to effectively stop a target.
For example see [this real gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSS_Vintorez).
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Take a look at Arma 3's [ASP-1 kir](https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjAqsu90JzTAhUG1BoKHVtpBP8QFggcMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Farmedassault.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FASP-1_Kir&usg=AFQjCNF86Gcwjt10ZoMm2BhN7Px-TAoXiQ%20ASP-1%20KIR). it uses a 12.7\*54 mm round. The gun itself is pretty useless beyond 300 m.
The main idea behind this gun is close range stealth (hence the build in suppressor) with lots of stopping power. The subsonic round means that no sonic boom is heard.
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Subsonic *penetrators* might not be as effective as supersonic. but what about subsonic explosive? Or subsonic EMP? Subsonic biological rounds (or other rounds that might need to be subsonic to maintain effectiveness)?
edit: you don't really say why they need to be subsonic and what level of futuristic are we talking? Artillery shells can currently disperse biological agents but there is no reason why you cant get small calibre ones to be more selective - these could be subsonic to stop disruption of the agents.
subsonic HE rounds would pack a punch - whilst the firing might be stealthy, the impact will not be!
Depending on your level of futuristic, EMP technology might be built into the rounds. These could be stealthy ways of disrupting technology (i.e. not used against soft targets) in a sci fi way.
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Sub-sonic bullets are meant for quiet, especially with suppressors/silencers, and so on. Lots of good info already given about the amount of kinetic energy and why you might want to go with supersonic rounds, so I'm going to skip over all that. Why? Because you can use your tech to make armor not matter all that much.
Even though various kinds of body armor can defeat all kinds of rounds, nobody is going to want to wear armor all-the-time. It's kind of uncomfortable. Even if your future technology makes it possible to wear armor most of the time, there are going to be things about it you can exploit.
Armor is always going to have holes or weak points. The neck, the face, and joints are all hard to effectively protect and still allow freedom of movement.
In a gritty sci-fi scenario you can simply use various kinds of augmentation, either direct implants or glasses, to link with a specialized handgun that calculates windage, range, bullet drop and such to make each shot land where you want. That means you don't have to go through armor, just around it.
So your film noir organized crime hitman can go after his targets with his new 15mm silenced pistol with Bullz-I (tm) augmentation integration to take out his targets.
This isn't going to be a normal military issue type firearm though. Maybe as a small side arm or as a special forces kind of thing.
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I'd like to add one use for subsonic ammunition. It is much better-suited to sounds-suppressed weapons. The lower velocity imposes less wear on the suppressor and the resulting shot is much quieter (sound suppressors don't hide a sonic boom).
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You could assume that your bullets are subsonic but can be launched in very quick succession with electronic triggering, like [Metal Storm's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm) million round/min gun, but perhaps scaled down a bit to have the same impact on body armour as one conventional high speed round.
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A good example of a subsonic "bullet" is the blaster bolt in Star Wars. The "bullet" from a normal small-arms weapon (turbo-lasers seem to go much faster than sound) are noticeably slower than modern bullets, but seem to have a similar kinetic impact to a small grenade, being able to punch through military armor and kill even from close range impacts.
Taking this concept, your sci-fi weapons could fire some sort of charged particle/plasma similar to Star Wars blasters. In the movies, they do make an iconic sound when fired, but real-life energy weapons are mostly silent. Yours could be similar.
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Subsonic rounds make a certain amount of sense in your scenario. Consider the following contemporary scenarios:
**M1911 firing .45 ACP**
The longtime standard sidearm is still in use by some special operation units because the of its subsonic round, which pairs nicely with a suppressor. Unlike reduced 9mm loads you don't have to give up any stopping power. Very appealing if you want a hard-hitting sidearm that works equally well quiet or loud.
**M82A1 firing Mk 211**
Definitely *not subsonic,* but an interesting case study in bullet mass. People often tout the .338 Lapua Magnum as a superior alternative to the standard .50 caliber sniper rounds, but the tungsten cored ones offer quite a bit more penetration. You could make a convincing argument that rounds such as the .338 can't be scaled up to penetrate future body armors without unacceptable recoil. Because tungsten is denser than lead switching to the larger rounds would come with lower velocities. That's still not subsonic, but if you scale down towards assault rifles consider ...
**M1928A1, aka Thompson Submachine Gun**
Say hello to my little friend! Did you know the tommy gun fires .45 ACP? Which we've already established is a subsonic round. There's a prototype for your futuristic, close quarters, .50 cal anti-material rifle right there.
**Misc problems**
First, nobody's buying a subsonic sniper rifle unless they're an assassin. They're unsuitable for long-range work, and less suitable than an assault rifle for close ranges. The only people who want them are using a suppressor at medium ranges.
Second, it's tough to imagine a really successful subsonic, compact submachine gun. Subsonic rounds around 9mm just don't buy you anything over the supersonic variety. There's a reason the Thompson went out of style, it's not exactly as easy to tote around as an MP-7, Uzi, P90, etc.
Finally, if it's not man-packable it's probably supersonic. Nobody's worried about recoil on a vehicle mounted 20mm cannon. You're going to make the bullet out of something dense like depleted uranium and pack it with a charge large enough to crack the moon.
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If your world is set in an orbital habitat, space ships, or domed environments then it is entirely possible that all weapons would have a reduced penetrative power and muzzle velocity. This is to prevent the bullet going through critical electronics or exterior hulls/domes and threatening the entire environment!
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If you want a slow bullet you have 3 options
1. Make the bullet very heavy. It will deliver a lot of momentum and energy to your target, and create pressure wave inside their body that cause internal damage.
2. Make the bullet do damage in some way other than impact. It could explode, poison the target, electrocute them, insult them...
3. Make the bullet very sharp. By distributing its impact over a small (molecule-small) area you can create an immense amount of pressure. If the bullet is made of harder stuff than the armor, it will punch a clean hole through and damage important things.
For the first option, you need something heavy. Depleted uranium would be a good option. Make the bullet as large as possible, preferably shaped like a modern bullet for aerodynamic reasons.
For option two, model it off of modern grenade launchers. You're trying to deliver something potentially fragile, so launching it in a canister is your best bet.
For option three, you'll want something heavy like in option 1, so depleted uranium is a good choice. The bullet still needs to be as heavy as possible because more mass means more pressure. You probably want bullets at least a foot long, tapering to a sharp point. The point needs to be machined to molecular perfection, but we're in the future so that's fine.
You can, of course, substitute some very heavy unobtainium for depleted uranium if you like.
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In short, yes, particularly if "high tech" specifically means advancements on the concept of a bullet itself. A number of other answers have described mechanisms that *could* be slower such as delivery systems for explosives or poison injections. But lets generalize the concept and then focus on implementations that *should* be subsonic, effectively without tradeoffs:
**Give the combatants (possibly guided) bullets with a second stage triggered on contact.**
Explosives and poison darts fit this description, but with tradeoffs. Poison delivery is much more easily countered or shielded against than kinetic energy, and explosives create noise; likely a considerable amount.
But there are other options, such as an impact hammer (pneumatically fired slug, posibly supersonic but only traveling through solid matter), directed microwave burst, radiation burst, or nanobots. These need not increase the overall noise level and are likely to work better with lower energy impacts, so the secondary stage isn't rendered inoperable before it is deployed.
The impact hammer option is noteworthy as having the most similar effect to present-day single-stage supersonic slugs (in that it exclusively delivers kinetic energy and optimizes for minimum mass delivered).
My personal favorite is a **laser cutter**. In straighforward configuration, it simply cuts through the armor and flesh past the point where the bullet itself is stopped. More creatively, a fan of angled beam emitters around the back of the bullet might even be able to carve out a funnel of flesh between the time the tip impacts and the bullet stops moving (esp. rotating) entirely. It also presents what is likely one of the more realistic options in terms of technology/stored energy that must fit into a bullet-sized package.
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That title is probably way too specific, but essentially I'm trying to develop my book's setting. Currently, my characters (a team of six adventurers) awaken as amnesiacs who were once human but now have been transformed into a motley menagerie, within a grassland. This hilly grassland has a road running through the center of it, and at one point, there lies a small mountain next to the road.
This mountain is rather important, as carved into its interior is a town named Rockhaven, where a plot-important SC (supporting character) awaits the team. What I don't know is what would cause a solitary mountain to form in the aforementioned biome-a grassland with rolling hills and plains-akin to the Kansan prairie. So, as you can see, my question is **What Could Explain A Solitary Mountain in a Grassland?**
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**I got your solitary mountain in a grassland right here!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UkZCS.jpg)
<https://mybestplace.com/en/article/devils-tower-the-legendary-rock-of-wyoming>
Devil's Tower is the basalt core of an ancient igneous intrusion. The surrounding softer stone has weathered away leaving the tower in a grassland.
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First thing that came to my mind was Mount Kilimanjaro:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Kilimanjaro>
Highest solitary mountain in the world, surrounded by savanna grassland. Obviously, it's a volcano.
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[It's the place](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata_Tjuta#Legends) where the great snake king, Wanambi, who resides at the top of the montain and only comes down to ground level in the dry season. His breath can turn a breeze into a hurricane, punishing those who committed evil deeds in the region.
[Kata Tjuta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata_Tjuta)
>
> Kata Tju·πØa, (Pitjantjatjara: Kata Tju·πØa, lit. 'many heads'; Aboriginal pronunciation: [k…êt…ê c ä à…ê]), also known as the Olgas, is a group of large, domed rock formations or bornhardts located about 360 km (220 mi) southwest of Alice Springs, in the southern part of the Northern Territory, central Australia. Ulu·πüu, also known as Ayers Rock, located 25 km (16 mi) to the east, and Kata Tju·πØa form the two major landmarks within the Ulu·πüu-Kata Tju·πØa National Park. The park is considered sacred to the Aboriginal people of Australia.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qzuaz.png)
[Uluru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluru#Age_and_origin)
>
> Uluru (/ÀåuÀêl…ôÀàruÀê/; Pitjantjatjara: Ulu·πüu [Àà ä.l ä.…ª ä]), also known as Ayers Rock (/…õ…ôrz/ airz) and officially gazetted as Uluru / Ayers Rock, is a large sandstone formation in the southern part of the Northern Territory in Australia. It lies 335 km (208 mi) southwest of the nearest large town: Alice Springs.
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> Uluru is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara, the Aboriginal people of the area, known as the A·πâangu. The area around the formation is home to an abundance of springs, waterholes, rock caves, and ancient paintings. Uluru is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/z2kV7.png)
---
[List of inselbergs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inselbergs) around the world
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All good answers so far in addition a [tor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(rock_formation)) is also an option. Tors usually occur where igneous rocks, usually [granite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite), that were deeply [intruded](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igneous_intrusion) into softer rocks are brought to the surface by weathering. This usually creates quite high, steep, hills, usually of bare rock even in otherwise lush surroundings, in the middle of flat fertile bottom lands.
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Volcanos. An example is the Sutter Buttes in California's Central Valley: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutter_Buttes> It's the eroded remains of a volcano, surrounded by flat land, and was almost certainly a larger mountain in the past.
A somewhat similar example is Mount Shasta. Although some of the surroundings are mountainous (though much lower), some of the surrounding area, especially to the north is fairly flat grassland. Shasta also has a set of legends which describe it as housing a city of advanced beings: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Shasta> See also the Heinlein story "Lost Legacy".
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OgUIC.jpg)
Another example is Říp hill in Czech Republic, remains of a tercer-age basalt intrusion or a volcano core. Even though it's related to other contemporary volcanos from a nearby mountain range, this hill stands alone in a gently rolling countryside. (img from [Wikipedia](https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%98%C3%ADp))
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Ancient meteor strike. Large meteor craters have flat bottoms (your plain) and a large central peak (caused by the ground directly under the impact rebounding).
See <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_crater> for some examples.
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In ancient times, before the birth of America, even before the people we know as Native Americans populated the plains and rolling hills of the North American continent, there were a mysterious society of technologically advanced people known as the Mound Builders. To this day, people are still discovering their massive works hidden in plain sight, having been mistaken for centuries as naturally occurring hills and mountains. Some of these enormous man-made mountains were used as grave yards for the elite VIPs of their culture, others seem to have been designed to be sanctuaries in the event of sudden, catastrophic flooding, but most of these "mounds" were built for reasons that still evade explanation. Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois, Missouri and Minnesota were favored by these people for mountain building, as the miles upon miles of flat land emphasized their work's looming presence on the landscape.
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Just to give an alternative to (dead) volcanoes or volcanic intrusions:
**[Salt tectonics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_tectonics)**
A salt dome may push a solitary rock or hill upwards, examples are the [Segeberger Kalkberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segeberger_Kalkberg) in Bad Segeberg, Germany, or the off-shore island [Heligoland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heligoland) (imagine a lower sea level to place it in a grass plain).
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Since there is a town in the interior of the mountain, perhaps the "mountan" is acutally a gigantic building built to contain a totally self enclosed habitat, including the town, reached by a few airlocks leading to the outside world.
And maybe the outside of the building has slowly weathered and assumed a more rugged and natural shape, although it still looks very artifical compared to most real mountains.
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[
In my modern fantasy novel, there is a species of people called the Hammerts. The Hammerts are small orange humanoids who have issues running and jumping after they reach adulthood. To compensate for their limited mobility, Hammerts all have a supernatural ability to access a hyperspace dimension purely for storing items. Here are the rules of the Hammerts' dimensional storage:
* Each Hammert has access to their own private region within hyperspace.
* Nobody else can access a specific Hammert's hyperspace without consent of the owner
* Items are stored in hyperspace by a Hammert touching an item they want to store for 2 seconds and saying "Banish!"
* Items are released from hyperspace by a Hammert gesturing in a location for 2 seconds and saying "Summon!"
* Living animals and sapients cannot be stored in hyperspace
* No item that weighs more than 10 metric tons or with a volume greater than 20 cubic meters can be stored.
* There is an unlimited amount of hyperspace available to each Hammert.
* Hyperspace is a dimension without time, so nothing ever perishes or ages inside of hyperspace
* Large items can be spawned up to 3 meters away from a Hammert.
* After a Hammert dies, all of their possessions go to whoever they named in their will. If the Hammert didn't leave a will, instead all of their possessions will be placed in a public hyperspace region that any Hammert can access.
* Hammerts can quickly and mentally filter and organize whatever items they want or need within their hyperspace region.
* Hammerts are the only ones who store items in hyperspace. Another species uses hyperspace for travel, but they can't access private Hammert possessions this way (but they can reach the public hyperspace regions).
A huge issue I realized with making Hammerts is that they would be the world's best thieves. They can just touch anything they want, say banish, and as long as there were no witnesses, they won't get caught. Hammerts could shoplift with impunity. And the best part is that once an object is within hyperspace, it won't come out unless the Hammert dies or the Hammert wants it out. Hammerts would also be world-class drug suppliers and weapon smugglers, but that is another topic.
Without making a massive change to the rules of hyperspace storage, is there anyway to make sure that Hammerts can't or won't take everything that isn't nailed down as long as they aren't being watched? A society with endless theft would be very unstable. Well either that or Hammert nations would have to go full Big Brother with cameras everywhere.
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# Take a page from Bitcoin
Lots of people think that the "crypto" in "cryptocurrency" means that you can keep your assets hidden from everybody else. In such a way you can stash a lot of money where the government won't be able to see, and therefore you don't have to pay tax.
There are some problems with that assumption, too many to go over in an answer, but there is one feature of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies which undermines the idea of hidden stashes. **Everyone can see where each single sub-unit of bitcoin in circulation is right now, as well as all places each sub-unit has ever gone through**.
When NFTKing69 sends half a bitcoin to SexxyFurryGirl, what actually happens is that the transaction is permanently recorded in what is known as the blockchain. The blockchain can be interpreted, for the purposes of this question, as a publicly and openly accessible database of every transaction that ever happened. This is how the Bitcoin network knows that half a bitcoin went out of someone's wallet and ended up in another dude's.
Likewise, when a Hammert teleports something, the teletransportation gets logged somewhere. The record contains date, time, the Hammert's identification, location in regular space, direction of teletransportation (in or out of hyperspace), and at least some generic identification of the object involved. This log is also accessible to anyone (or at least any Hammert) at anytime. This may even be what makes it possible for things to be transferrable among hyperspaces when a Hammert dies.
Anyone who can see the log can also determine what the contents of a Hammert's stash were at any point in time (as far back in the past as the log goes), and there is no way to erase or edit a teletransportation record.
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**The ability to move something into hyperspace is akin to fingerprints**
Ignoring the value of gloves, when a human tries to take things, they leave fingerprints behind. At first law enforcement doesn't know who the fingerprints belong to, but after tracking thefts where the same fingerprints are found, the number of suspects is narrowed. Eventually the list is small enough that the police start collecting fingerprints until they've found the culprit.
The act of pushing something into/out of hyperspace leaves, for want of a better word for those of us *who can't,* an... odor. The odor is distinctive. One hammert, one odor. Hammerts in law enforcement take classes in the methods of detecting, cataloguing, and tracking odors.
For the most part hammerts live their entire lives with nobody caring about the odor of their hyperspatial access. In fact, there are areas where it would be hard to distinguish one over another: the checkout line at a supermarket, for example.
By creating this "odor" you've created the concept of a fingerprint in your society. It's not a foolproof way to stop all theft anymore than fingerprints are a foolproof method in human societies... but it's enough to rationalize that the average hammert would generally not steal things.
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A possibility is a short-range hyperspace disrupter. The Hammerts must have quickly realized the problem and applied to such a solution.
Neither banish nor restore work within a short range of the equivalent of a hyperspace white noise transmitter.
In time, the Hammerts have probably saturated their whole planet with jammers, with the exception of private houses and public "banish/restore" booths.
Another difficulty, however, is that this mechanism allows creation of energy from nothing. Banish a ten-ton lead weight three meters below you, apparate it three meters above, and on Earth that's more than half a megajoule of gravitational energy from nothing. Let the weight compress a piston with a turbine once per second, and you've got around 300 kW for free.
On the other hand, if it wasn't so, if you banished anything at sea level you wouldn't be able to restore it once you climbed a mountain, because the energy expenditure might easily be excessive - or even lethal.
A way around this could be an energy store associated to everyone's pocket dimension - you can replenish the store slowly from your own energy or quickly by banishing things from very high places. To restore objects, you need to have enough energy available to cover the expense.
There are some points of contact between this mechanism and the power of *renging* from Vernor Vinge's *The Witling* (there, the teleported object's excess energy is freed instantly, so that teleporting a large boulder from the farthest moon is the equivalent of a nuclear tactical strike. Teleporting also happens in zero time).
Thinking about it, the total effective kinetic and gravitational potential of any banishable object would *vary* slightly in time depending not only on height (the overwhelmingly largest effect), but on the planet's position. Objects banished in winter might be slightly less expensive to restore in the summer or with a moon right overhead, and you could have a "banishing cost inflation" due to the sun's movement through the Galaxy. Also, banishing objects to null-time would cause really, really small gravitational "ripples" that could invite no end of WTFs from nearby races, that might mistake them for low-bandwidth communications.
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## Mundane answer
Camera security around precious items, in stores, etc. Audio recording that picks up on the word "Banish" specifically, and triggers alerts. Voice recognition would be developed much sooner in this world.
## Silly answer
The gaseous substance phlebotinum has the unique property that it doesn't stay confined to hyperspace as readily as regular matter: it wants to escape as much as wound spring wants to release. Someone's hyperspace-stored phlebotinum will leak out. Stores need only to coat their wares in phlebotinum, clean it upon sale, and install a gate at the door that detects the substance (escaping from a stolen good).
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**The magical/Hyperspace system links with the Hammert's mind**
If a Hammert tried to Banish something that **they know** isn't theirs, it won't allow them to.
However, you'll note I said 'Know' - if a Hammert is under a genuine belief that the item is either theirs or is otherwise unclaimed - then they can still Banish it.
You can have all sorts of fun narrative games with Mens Rea in that case.
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You can make so that the Hammert have a strong code of honor which deeply despise theft, similarly to how samurai despised someone fleeing in battle or not cleaning their honor with their life after being defeated.
It won't be a 100% sure system, still it will allow for most of the Hammert to behave and refuse theft to preserve their honor.
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# It's noticeable
When a Hammert stores an item in hyperspace, it isn't moved there gently, it ceases to exist in our dimension almost instantaneously. This leaves behind a partial vacuum, which immediately collapses with a deafening crash of thunder.
Maybe it's not deafening (and window-shattering), but still makes a loudish *pop* sound. Or a distinctive \*hum-zzzshsh~. Or bright lights or St. Elmo's fire, possibly that continues to dance around the area afterward. Or a reek of ozone. Or the Hammert's hair stands on end.
The point being you don't have to observe the act directly, because there are enough noticeable signs that it draws attention.
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>
> Living animals and sapients cannot be stored in hyperspace
>
>
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## Living Glitter Bomb Animals
So hear me out. Since this is in the distant future people have genetically engineered sticker like creatures that are dormant and don't do anything. However, they really do not like when whatever surface they are adhered to enters hyperspace, which causes them to explode in a cloud of glitter big enough to ensure the Hammert that did the deed is well covered.
These living stickers can be killed by a particular tool that is only present at the checkout registers. So if that Hammert wants to stick that very nice shiny item in their hyperspace, they will need to take it to the checkout register first.
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* After a Hammert dies, all of their possessions go to whoever they named in their will.
Your hyperspace Hammert physics seem to obey inheritance laws. Strange, but that is your choice.
To find out what a Hammert has, simply make them legally will it to the police and then legally die.
They don't actually consent, they just legally consent, nor do they actually die, they just legally die.
Afterwards, they are legally no longer dead and their consent is removed.
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The Hammert economy will work very differently than here on earth.
**Given that they can store unlimited items in hyperspace and those items won't age, their economy will be much more efficient. And their society will have much less scarcity. People won't steal, because they don't need to.**
Also, making the Hammerts have a high sense of morality will help. In some countries here on earth, if you leave your wallet on a bench somewhere, no one is going to steal it.
Here are some exmaples
* **Moving objects is a lot easier.**
First of all, here on Earth we have a container shipping industry that in 2021 shipped 2 billion tons of cargo for a price of $11.3 trillion dollars. For the Hammerts, shipping vast quantities of materials would just mean banishing them, transporting the Hammert, and then summoning back the material.
A Hammert can banish and then summon 10 tons in four seconds. Assuming no other limitations, one Hammert that engaged in four solid hours a day of summoning/banishing 10-ton containers for 200 days a year could move 7.2 million tons of material. That means the entire container shipping industry of earth could be replicated by as little as 277 Hammerts!
If they are willing to use the less secure public hyperspace to move the goods, then they don't even need to move the Hammert's themselves.
This becomes even more valuable when you consider moving materials into space. Currently it costs a few thousand dollars per kg to move material to orbit. For the Hammerts its not so. If they can get one guy to orbit, then they can summon all the material they need.
* **The entire warehousing industry basically becomes pointless.**
* **Hammert's will use items more efficiently because they don't need to throw them away.**
People throw away a lot of stuff just for lack of space. For a Hammert, being a hoarder is not a problem. Store that old screw, or empty milk jug just in case you need it later. They may wind up recycling nearly everthing.
* **There will be much more food.**
Food won't spoil while banished. In times past there was often famines when the crops had a bad year. But the Hammerts can store many years' worth of crops for safe keeping.
People often discard food when they don't have a way to store it. You don't need to throw away that part of a meal you didn't finish. Just save it for later and it will be as fresh as when you put it away.
There will be much less need for the following industries, canning, refrigeration, food preservatives, warehousing. Not having people in these industries, frees them up to do other work.
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There are of course interesting applications of powers like these in realms like combat, terrorism, ideological revolutionary activities, and villainy. (Frankly, the 2-second charge time would not dissuade any army from using their hammert troops to delete 1.28 cubic meters of steel or 4.5 cubic meters of stone each. Especially when they can each do it **every** 2 seconds) But I'll confine this answer to the subject of the question: preventing theft.
The answer will have to be something of a frame challenge: in a world such as you've described, hammert theft cannot possibly be an issue, except in the rare cases of sentimental objects being stolen in small, personal ways, as between friends or acquaintances. Or, perhaps, capers and schemes to steal major unique works of art. In either of these cases, standard preventive measures would be considered enough.
Why would hammert theft be no issue at all? Well, simply because none of them would have any desire to shoplift or steal anything. They'll simply be too rich to need to. Allow me to explain why.
All the work of the world boils down to only 2 things: (1) uncertainty, and (2) relative position.
(1) Uncertainty is simple enough. It's the basis of investment, marketing, research, all that stuff. It's just asking (and trying to answer) the questions like "will the harvest be good?" "Will this product sell?" "Will this company succeed?" We do a lot of work trying to figure these things out.
(2) Relative position is about getting things where you need them to be. You have a load of lumber here, and you need it to be in London. You have a lot of seeds, and you need them to be in the ground. You have a lot of stone at the quarry, and you need it in the walls of the castle 10 miles down the road. &c, &c, &c. We do a lot of work trying to rectify the discrepancies in where things are, and where we want them to be.
Hammerts have little effect on the first, but they absolutely upend the second, throwing most of it out the window. Hammerts transport infinite amounts, with perfect certainty, and a loading/unloading cost of 2 seconds per 10 metric tons. This is groundbreaking. Even if you rule that they can't teleport boards of wood out of trees, or chunks of rock out of the ground, they still revolutionize logistics. Suddenly, instead of needing to ship thousands and thousands of tons of lumber across the country, the continent, the globe, you just have to send one little orange man. Even if he dies on the way, the payload will just devolve on his heir, and can be recouped. No longer do castles need to be near quarries, no longer do cities need to be near rivers or the ocean, no longer does *anyone* have to be impeded from doing *anything* practically *anywhere* just because it would be hard to source or transport resources there. As long as a single man can transport a child by some means (wagon, canoe, balloon, horseback, dogsled, carrying... &c &c), there simply *isn't* any sourcing or transport issue.
The only things that would need to be actually transported, physically, would be those things that can't be broken into pieces of 10 metric ton mass. (Since the density limit for using all the volume of the hammert power is 0.5g/cm^3, the mass would always be the limiting factor. 0.5g/cm^3 is the density of gases, not solids). And since these would be the *only* items being transported physically, the demand for them would drop precipitously. We're looking at a world where the only discrete objects with mass more than 10 metric tons that exist are those that **absolutely positively must must must** be that massive. Everything else would simply be redesigned so that it could be transported by hammert.
So, then, why no theft? If all creatures had this ability, it would necessarily become relatively worthless. Like reading and writing, which take a dozen years or more to learn, and enable a frighteningly wondrous array of things, but which are so ubiquitous nowadays that their value in-and-of-themselves is nil.
But this is an ability held *only* by hammerts. Which is to say that there are a great many people who *need* this ability, but who cannot get it except from the hammerts. And this is a situation crying out for *organization*. Whether it's the hammerts who organize it, or the more physically able races that would rule (and protect) them, either way there's going to be a hammert guild. And, frankly, I believe it would be a "hammert guild", and not a "transporter's guild". Because there simply wouldn't be a hammert alive that wasn't a member. Their skills are by and large too valuable to be wasted elsewhere, and if there was a great scholar or religious figure or business magnate who somehow could justify (to themselves and others) not being a transporter, then they would certainly be under an agreement with the guild *not* to use their abilities personally in any but a private capacity.
As a result, transport would be quite cheap (compared to reality), whilst still being ridiculously remunerative for the hammert guild. And while there would certainly be a pecking order, it beggars belief that there could be a hammert *anywhere* who wasn't both respected and prosperous, not to mention civil to a fault. Hammerts would be seen in fine clothing, with bodyguards and attendants, moving constantly upon the roads between each and every settlement, perhaps even with a religious solemnity to their "great perambulation". And if they wanted *anything* that could be shoplifted, you know that they would be able to buy it. Even if not, the guild attendants couldn't let their charge be caught up in any kind of activity that would imperil the reputation of the guild or the timely delivery of their cargo. And these attendant retainers would be omnipresent, at least in public.
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Three small changes:
1. All transactions with the hyperspatial storage are logged with place, time and the item deposited/retrieved.
2. The Hammert authorities can view (but not access) an individual living Hammert's stored goods.
3. The penalty for theft is death, so that the stolen goods can be recovered.
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Hammerts accused of theft in a recognizably-human society can be tortured until they summon all items from their personal space...then tortured a bit more to assure the friendly Police Torturer has really seen it all.
Make them sign a new will, so if they die (aw, gee, oops) everything goes to accessible Public Space for inspection. If the stolen object is not there, then a polite apology to the family and on to the next suspect.
This will, of course, backfire when rebel Hammerts --aggrieved by the persecution-- summon a suicide-bomb that destroys the entire police station. Or a super-bomb that levels most of the town. They're not stupid. They know how to prepare.
So, obviously, policing of one society by another won't work. (It has *never* worked) Either one society will migrate away, or be extinguished, or both societies will adapt.
Adaptions might be as simple as a philosophy of having few possessions...and carrying most of them around with you. Or complex like blended households of different species that have different roles and mores (we do that with dogs and cats).
Alternately, the setup seems ripe for a rather straightforward caste system...with humans on the bottom. Hammerts can safely store and transfer wealth and knowledge and tools, and humans cannot. Humans will be reduced to physical tasks that we are better suited for, cleaning gutters and polishing statues that decorate the estates of our Hammert overlords.
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**Hammerts can sense where are the objects that were in their hyperspace storage for a while.**
In example they can sense the object for a day, so they can tell where approximately it is, they can tell whether the object were banished and can identify the Hammerts who banished it after them.
Shop employees would banish and resummon their wares every day before the opening hours. Or shopkeeper would do this with a batch of a stickers, that would be then stuck on the wares.
Individual Hammerts would do the same with their valued possessions every evening as a part of a routine (brush your teeth and update on your teddy bear)
**Using catalogues instead of on shelf shopping.**
Since rebanishing all the wares in the shop would be rather tedious I can imagine many shopkeepers would keep them in the safe storage while their customers would be using catalogues to select the goods they want to buy. Preferably non-Hammert employees would then collect everything and deliver it to the counter neatly packed to be instantaneously banished by the customer.
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**Cameras and Witnesses**
Why use a magical solution when a mundane one will work? If a store has cameras everywhere and keeps inventory of what they have, theft can be prevented. A store might need everyone entering to show id and have their face visible, but changes are manageable.
If your world doesn't have enough technology for cameras, don't leave stuff in the open without witnesses. You might need to change how stores work (make the store have a "menu" and have employees get stuff for customers), but in the end this still isn't a big change.
This should keep theft down to the level we have in everyday life.
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A human can easily steal a jewel if they're left unattended with the jewel. Because of this, we are careful with our jewellery. Rule one: Do not leave a hammert unattended with any valuable item.
If I leave a child alone with a marshmallow, and when I come back the marshmallow is gone, I can reasonably conclude that the child ate the marshmallow. Rule two: If you do leave a hammert unattended with an item, and that item subsequently disappears, then the hammert immediately comes under suspicion. Proving it in court is a little harder than normal, but the legal system would take this into account, perhaps by allowing a slightly looser interpretation of 'proven beyond all reasonable doubt'.
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# Nothing is needed
Theft in *our* society isn't really affected by the thief's ability to store the items the steal, but precisely the thing you brushed off: being watched. Even if no one witnessed the actual theft, it is possible to deduce a culprit after the fact based on circumstantial evidence alone. Even if police never find the actual stolen goods, theft is one of the easier crimes to convict a criminal on.
This combined with the consequence of jail time is basically the main way theft is controlled in our society, not difficultly or impracticality of the actual action of theft itself.
Laws and detectives are all you need.
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You said that living animals cannot be stored. Perhaps people would take advantage of this feature and have tiny insects living in objects that you wouldn't like someone else to store in hyperspace.
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Even if only the Hammert itself can retrieve items from their storage, maybe there is a way to **list all items in that storage** that can be used to find out if a given (possibly stolen) item is there?
It doesn't have to be an easy way, and it may require the Hammert to cooperate (possibly under pressure or threat of prison), but as long as the Hammert can't fake the list, it would serve as an investigation tool without compromising the basic features of the storage.
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As others have said or implied, this initially reasonable-seeming ability turns out to be vastly overpowered on closer inspection. When fighting, they can just summon a rock above their opponent's head. When attacking a stronghold, they can banish large chunks of the walls (or banish the roof, and drop 20m³ of molten lava or boiling yak innards or whatever). They can dig 1m² tunnels straight through mountains 20m at a time. Or cause opponents to drop into 20m deep pits, landing in a squishy mess of all the earthworms and bug larvae left behind. Their houses would be fun, since they could reposition walls at will. In fact, they could chop their houses or just about anything nonliving up into pieces and rematerialize them anywhere, so they might end up being nomads with comfortable houses. Which is great for everyone but the naked teenaged Hammerts who wake up when they're dumped unceremoniously on the bare ground after their parents get tired of waiting for them to wake up before moving the house for the day.
Anyway, I would probably press on the curious ownership thing that was suggested by the wills. I would probably make "ownership" an explicit property of things, one that could only be applied to a relatively narrow range of things (which does not include the 20m of dirt under someone's feet). Then theft is not a problem by definition: you can't banish something that isn't already yours.
The establishment of ownership could be as automatic as you want to make it. Perhaps it's just a thing that everyone shares an intuitive understanding of, or perhaps an explicit ritual is needed to establish or transfer ownership. Writing out a will could require doing a similar ritual to establish contingent ownership.
(Note that this also introduces a signaling mechanism that would be unpopular with Hammerts but possibly exploited by factions or other races: take a couple of Hammerts with you on a long trip, and then communicate back by killing off a subset of them. The place you came from can decipher your message from which of their willed descendants get their inheritances. Though a much higher bandwidth is possible with your public hyperspace loophole: write an entire book, have your Hammert slave banish it, then shoot him in the head.)
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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.
In a world like ours in the 1980s, but which for whatever reason does not use any form of electricity. (Either it does not exist or batteries and generators etc have not been invented.) For purposes of the question, diesel engines can be assumed (so no need for electric spark plugs or a replacement).
How would people construct a car headlight without electricity? Is this plausible to do or would using cars at night just be dark and dangerous?
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Back in the day before portable electric lights, [carbide lamps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbide_lamp) were used: A mechanism dripped water onto carbide, which then gave off acetylene gas, which burned in a controlled fashion. This was used for headlights on cars and bicycles and for miners' lamps, even for lighthouse lamps. Hence, this is an obvious answer to your question.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ymRGp.jpg)
Another option is to use magnesium flares, which among other things are used for underwater lighting.
Calcium carbide is typically produced in an electric arc furnace, but methods do exist to produce it without electricity, including a [patented system](https://patents.google.com/patent/CA2730754C/en) for producing calcium carbide by providing heat directly through partial combustion of a powdery carbon-containing raw material and a powdery calcium-containing raw material in an oxygen-containing atmosphere.
Magnesium can be produced non-electrically by [the Pidgeon process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgeon_process), a batch process in which finely powdered calcined dolomite and ferrosilicon are mixed, briquetted, and charged in retorts made of nickel-chrome-steel alloy. The hot reaction zone portion of the retort can be gas fired or coal fired
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The obvious retro answer would be to use [carbide lamps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbide_lamp) which work by dripping water onto a chamber of calcium carbide producing acetylene as was used on the original versions of the [Model T Ford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yYIhW.jpg)
*Copyright [Royce](http://www.mtfca.com/cgi-bin/discus/board-profile.cgi?action=view_profile&profile=royce-users)*
CaC2(solid) + 2H2O(liquid) -> C2H2(gas) + Ca(OH)2(aqueous)
However, since the Calcium Carbide is made using an electric arc furnace, there may be no economically viable way to mass produce it in your world, so it might become the exclusive province of the rich.
Slaked lime (Calcium Hydroxide Ca(OH)2) Could be used to produce [limelight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limelight). An Oxygen-Hydrogen flame is directed at a cylinder of the lime bringing it to a temperature of 4,662 °F (2,572 °C).
Part of the light output is black body radiation (incandescence), but part is [candoluminescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candoluminescence) giving off more light than otherwise in the green part of the spectrum.
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The question of what people would do in the 1880's without electric headlights is not hypothetical. Electric headlights were not, in actuality, invented until the 1890's.
From Wikipedia:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GYs2y.png)
If you're curious about what people would do in the 1980s without headlights, study what they actually did when there were no headlights.
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Since you're talking about diesel engines, you could also use diesel as lamp fuel.
It doesn't burn particularly cleanly and in cold weather it will need to be preheated to work, so far from perfect but it does save you from using multiple different fuels for different parts of the vehicle.
Other options include oil, gas, and alcohol. Just about anything that will burn can be used for lighting, it's merely a matter of lamp design. In some cases you'll need to pressurise your fuel, you'll need a suitable mantle, and an ignition system (like a chauffeur).
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The car could be powered by a Diesel engine that gets started similar to a Lanz Bulldog. (pre-heat with a fire (wood fire, gas burner, coal, ...), then hand-crank). There are Youtube videos about the process.
The headlight could be Petromax type burners (they can run on Diesel just fine). Just use the basic Petromax construction, then add a reflector to direct the light.
That type of headlight might have trouble getting road-legal in Germany because... too bright!
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## Stop driving
...at night.
In a world without electricity, artificial lighting is going to be pretty lousy. Downtown areas will have *gas lighting*, but outside that core, there will be miles and miles of ordinary residential/light business districts that don't rate gaslights, **but still don't want cars tearing through their neighborhoods at 30 mph in the dark**.
And while headlights are achievable (though not all that great), **taillights** present a much harder problem. A light that small will be difficult, especially when it also needs to be *more* reliable than a headlight - you notice when a headlight goes out. So taillights may be impracticable, and cars would be pitch black aft.
Between the risk of overrunning an unmarked car ahead, and hitting pedestrians, "overdriving your headlights" would be *serious business*. Governments would impose draconian nighttime speed limits with stiff consequences for night speeding. So driving at night would be deathly slow, to the point of not being worth doing, except to "limp home" at a dreadful pace after an unexpected delay.
*This would happen early in the evolution of automobiles, **and stick***.
Obviously, over the decades things would improve; roads would get better, those outer-urban and suburban neighborhoods would get gas lighting on their major trunk routes (e.g. In your town, all the numbered routes), and limited-access freeways would be built with more liberal nighttime speeds due to absolute prohibition of pedestrians. But that would only help after you get *to* the freeway. Until then, you're still plotzing along at 10-15 mph on the neighborhood and feeder routes that are 30-45 mph by day. It would be *just too tedious*. Nobody would have the nerves for it.
Except of course for commercial interests; trucks and buses, which are expensive machines with the best lighting money can buy, would own the night.
Trains and streetcars would also be tip-top. Even in our world, trains always had the best headlights available. In fact, this "ability to move at night" would slow the decline of rail transit. Fair chance the Interurbans are still around, providing swift travel on their limited-access right-of-ways (with a hiking-biking trail alongside to remove the temptation to walk down the tracks). If you were trapped downtown after dark, just as likely you'd leave your car downtown and take the interurban home. No electricity, yes; but the streetcars and interurbans would happen a bit later and have diesels.
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Are you fixed on having headlights on the vehicle?
We don't require headlights during the day because its not dark. So give your world 24 hour sunlight or the equivalent. That would be another reason for not needing electricity for other purposes.
Or consider having roads well-lit by fixed illumination, like gas lamps with fixed piping supplies, or lots of menial workers whose job is to light the lights at dusk.
Or alter the physiology of the eyes of your characters so they have more Rods and fewer Cones, and can therefore see better in the dark like a cat or dog. Downside of this is a reduction in colour perception. A large moon orbiting directly opposite the sun would provide some base level of illumination all night long.
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For something a bit more fantastical than chemical lamps: how about some fireflies or similar bio-luminescent life forms trapped in the headlights and forced to glow?
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[Question]
[
It's the early 23rd century, and we are about 50 years into Mars being colonized. The planet, which was supposed to usher in a new era in civilization and the expansion of humanity into the stars, hasn't quite played out that way. Instead, Mars is really just more of a depressing, harsh resource mining facility populated by the disenchanted and dissatisfied. There are civilians living there but they're not particularly happy either.
The Earth governments strictly control everything on Mars, and although the planet has been vying for independence, they have been refused time and time again. They are not quite self-sufficient, but they're getting there, and ideologies and belief systems on the planet have already diverged greatly from the home planet.
There is a growing rebellion forming on Mars, led by a charismatic militant leader who has the ear of the planet. Their goal is to gain independence and they will do anything to achieve it, even if it means causing mass destruction and calamity to Earth and its populace.
The problem is: there is no way in hell that Mars would ever win in a straight-up war. They are way, WAY outnumbered, and way outgunned. Earth would simply wipe them off the map if they tried. Mars does have the following potential trump cards though:
* The ability to mine and transport small asteroids from the belt – this new resource extraction method started recently
* Lots of Mars sympathizers on Earth who believe the planet should get its independence
* Spies within the government and military installations on Earth, as well as in medical and biochemical research labs
How can they exploit the above to level the playing field and get around the big d\*\*k swinging competition when it comes to raw manpower and weaponry?
Two options I was considering:
* Throw an asteroid into the planet, or break it up into pieces for orbital bombardment. However, this is extreme and would leave the Earth and its infrastructure unusable for a while.
* Release a bioweapon that they have immunity to to destabilize the population and the Earth militaries – this still leaves the infrastructure usable, and they can put boots on the ground and along with Martian supporters, start a campaign to take over the ruined Earth.
Do any of these make sense? Or are there any other methods that they could use?
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Using WMD against Earth will cause entire Earth to unite and demand revenge.
Instead, I propose the same way that US gained its independence (while still requiring supplies from the old world): find a sponsor nation in the old word. Specifically, US was relying on France, which wanted to weaken Britain.
Your colony could find a nation on Earth that is willing to support its independence, and continue supplying it with high-tech goods that Mars cannot produce yet. Maybe exploit differences between US & Europe, or maybe go to a rapidly developing nation eager to prove its superpower status (like China or India)
As for military action, the goal is not a complete defeat, but the cost of it. Earth needs resources from Mars (why establish mining otherwise), Mars needs technology from Earth, and everybody knows the trade will continue. The only issue is splitting the profits from this trade.
All Mars needs to do is to make cost of military intervention exceed the profit from keeping old terms of trade. Shipping heavy military hardware from Earth to Mars is very expensive. Martians have home turf advantage: they know places to hide, they can tunnel under Earth's bases, etc.
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The same way the American Revolution and the Vietnam War were won. Just make it too costly to fight for the occupiers. Rebels don't need to win, just not lose.
So stick to small-scale hit-and-run attacks on occupation forces. Assassinate occupation officials, vandalize the Earth-Mars Public Relations Offices (read: propaganda centers), ambush patrols, sabotage any local resources the occupiers use, get people on the inside to feed you info and/or steal equipment for you. Eventually public opinion back on Earth will shift, they'll tire of burying their officials and wasting their money, and they'll give Mars independence.
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**Strike.**
On Earth, employeers can send in strikebreaking scabs to work the mine or thugs to beat up the strikers. Governments can replace the strikers outright like Reagan did with the air traffic controllers. Despite this, worker's strikes have been pretty effective at winning concessions for workers.
Martian workers have big advantages when it comes to going on strike. Like any strike, when the workers stop work, the revenue stops flowing. But there is no good way Earth corporations can break the strike - they cannot exactly send in scabs because there is not a population of them handy on Mars. They cannot easily send thugs. The government could send shiploads of people to replace them but if I were an earthling I would hesitate to sign up for that trip. The Martians will not be happy to see me, if they even let the ship land. The government could shut off supply ships to Mars to try to strongarm them, but that risks chaos.
The earth companies who profit from Mars do not want chaos. Because of that, Martian workers are in a position to get big concessions. If the concession is autonomy and the raw materials keep flowing, earthbound corporations will lean on the government to give the Martians what they want. After all, the corporations will profit regardless of whose face is on the Martian money. Where else are the Martians going to sell their stuff? If the government is grumpy about losing the tax revenue, they can just tax the Earth corporations and get it that way.
[Answer]
Just wait it out.
Mars is not a particularly good target for mining; it is at the bottom of a fairly deep gravity well, after all. Not as deep as Earth's, but still very inconvenient. If mining offworld resources is important, the coporate and national interests who control the mining operations will eventually turn outwards to the asteroid belt. Much more material, much easier to get to, much cheaper and easier to ship back to Earth.
You can tip the balance by a little careful sabotage, a little halfhearted industrial action, general poor economic performance. Nothing too bad, because the value is in the resources and not the people and if you become a *real* problem, a *real* brutalist colonial power will stomp you out and bring in new workers. And remember that on a dead world, stomping you out can be done much more thoroughly than is practical in most places on earth.
If Mars' only value is in the resources that can be extracted from it, once it becomes valueless to the colonial powers they will abandon it. You will then have a whole new set of problems as a post-colonialist state, such as that charismatic militant leader becoming the next supreme chairperson or generalissimo, or the sudden lack of availability of medical supplies or critical bits of hi-tech equipment that can't be fabricated locally. A cursory glance over the political history of, say, almost any resource-rich country in Africa over the last 100 or so years is likely to give you some hints of how your newfound freedom will be enjoyed by a fresh, new 1%.
[Answer]
The earthians only have to withold its supplies to defeat the martians. Earth can wait a while on the raw materials, but the Martians will suffer and potentially die if they dont get the necessary goods. So the solution isnt to fight them but to use diplomatic relations.
You mention two options yourself. Throwing an asteroid is likely going to fail. The earth can and will moniter all actions taken by the martians. If they see an asteroid miner start pushing an asteroid they have time to react. Even if they dont spot it immediately they will likely have months to give it a nudge that will make the asteroid miss earth. The other option was a plague, but this presents other problems. Earth builds your supplies, and those might stop for too long if you hit earth with a plague. Additionally a space-ship is an enclosed structure, making people on one ship sick (how?) would lead to quarantine and it would stop right there. Sickening the earth would also lead to quarantine's and still a retaliation by all space ships and orbital platforms that arent infected. The martians would likely have no substantial boots on the ground for years even if the virus succeeds in decimating the population and none of the agents and sympathizers who are proven to be immune are reverse-engineered for the cure. By then most of that infrastructure will have fallen in disrepair, knowledge to operate it is minimal and the martians will have been without the supplies they supposedly need for a long time while their soldiers have had to fight (and potentially still lose) the earth soldiers in space and maybe even on Mars itself.
They have people in governments, militaries and civilian sectors that support them or are even direct spies. Getting the support for the people on earth would be critical in this scenario. Military actions would likely not help your cause, so any that does happen should be from the position of supposed victim. A divide and conquer strategy would be ideal if possible. Trying to tell the united America's how those dirty European unionists make parts of shipments dissappear, creating incidents between military divisions where one faction's guns fire one salvo at another faction and the like. The martians can then become the small 3rd party that can make either team win by offering military aid or by offering economical advantages to whoever is more lenient to them, lets say more materials in trade for the equipment to be self-sufficient and independant...? Surely the group that does that could see the benefit of Mars producing more resources that would SURELY end up in the proper production facilities, you wash my back and I wash yours right?
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Lots of different strategies have already been proposed.
But for the sheer warfare aspect, it really is very simple: They sit at the better position in the gravity well.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YaxmB.jpg)
The Delta-V need to shoot something from Mars to Earth is much less than the Delta-V you need to shoot something from Earth to Mars. Not only is Earth gravity higher, you also need to fight the Sun's gravity as Mars is more distant from the Sun.
From Mars, on the other hand, you just need to bring something into Mars orbit and can essentially make a guided drop from there.
All wars are at their core wars of attrition. In a full-scale war, whoever first cannot supply the frontlines with manpower, ammunition or fuel, machines and weapons or other things needed to keep fighting will be defeated. "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" has a brilliant chapter on WW2 showing that the Allies essentially overpowered the Axis by sheer numbers. The war turned when the Allies began to outproduce the Axis in tanks and aircrafts (USA, UK) and the Russians outspent them in men thrown into the meat grinder.
If you need to spend three or four times as much energy, fuel and materials just to reach your opponent, the tables are turned badly against you. You would have to outproduce your enemy by at least that factor in order to win. Now try to convince your Earth population that they need to turn their *entire economy* towards war in order to defeat tiny Mars.
So I challenge your assumption that Earth could wipe the floor with Mars. Just getting your fleet there is not a small feat, and running supply lines all that way - good luck. The German submarines were a serious threat to the US supplies in WW2. Imagine how much more could happen to supply ships in space. Just raining things down the gravity well would already be a quite effective defense. At the speeds needed to make travel times acceptable, a small rock would tear a clean hole through the entire ship, engine and all.
By physics alone, my bet is on Mars, not Earth.
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You can't on your own. Most independences on Earth happened because the colonial overlord exhausted itself fighting large-scale warfare against other great powers.
-Latin America: Spain and Portugal were defeated by Napoleon.
-USA: Just after the 7 years war.
-India: India is free not because of Ghandi but because of the Kaiser and Hitler.
-Indichina mentioned in another answer and the african colonies: the aftermath of WW2 and the cold war.
-Ukraine and the soviet sattelites: USSR lost the cold war and went bankrupt.
So your colonists will only have a chance to be free when the earth's nations once again wage large scale warfare against each other. If earth is united they will have to wait for the the inevitable power struggles and civil wars, analogues to the byzantine civil wars and An Lishi Rebellion.
PS.: Don't throw asteroids on Earth. The earthlings will react in kind by nuclear carpeting Mars. Since Mars has no ecology worth preserving there is nothing stopping the earthlings from using 200mt bombs configured for radiation, maybe cobalt-laced tsar bombs mounted in missiles with hundreds of decoys. Earth can survive 20 tunguskas-level events over it's cities, the martians can't survive 20 tsar bombs because they die if the infrastructure is destroyed and their population is much smaller. It's like Mao said about nuclear war with the US: if half a billion dies on both sides America is gone but China will still be there.
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This answer is quite simple: **learn from the French**
France held a solid colonial empire until not so long ago. Then WWII happened. In 1940, France surrendered to Germany. History books gladly tell the tale of Charles de Gaulle going to England to fight the good fight. These books are light on the fate of the colonies. Here are two cautionary tales.
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*TL;DR: Independence is inevitable. Or when someone takes arms to fight for their independence, there's only two things you can give them: liberty or death.*
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**Indochina**
Before Vietnam there was French Indochina. In 1940, the Vichy regime, being now an ally of Nazi Germany, got to maintain administration over its colonies, and in particular Indochina, even as it became a de facto Japanese military occupation. After the liberation of France in 1944, the Japanese decided to seize control of Indochina for fear that the colonial government of France would start to work against them.
The Viet Minh was initially created to fight against the French Empire, and during WWII fought the Japanese occupation, with the support of the US. The Viet Minh kicked the Japanese out and declared the independence of Vietnam. This was short-lived as a victorious France came back to reclaim its colony. This lead to the Indochina War, that opposed the Viet Minh, now supported by China, against France, with support of the US.
The Indochina War lasted from 1946 to 1954, and ended after an humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The Viet Minh had managed to transport artillery across the dense Vietnamese jungle and assemble them all around a French military camp. While they took heavy losses themselves, they forced the French commanders to surrender. French Indochina was replaced by Cambodia, Laos and North and South Vietnam.
The Vietnam War was the logical sequel to the conflict. The leaders of the Viet Minh, now leaders of North Vietnam, weren't satisfied with the split between North and South. And like the Viet Minh against the Japanese and the French, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army used guerilla tactics against South Vietnam and the US, and won.
**Algeria**
Algeria was a French colony in 1940. It remained under French rule, Vichy French rule, with the French army defending it against Free France and the Allies. But while the government collaborated, *indigènes*, Native-Algerians if you will, were not particularly interested in helping the Vichy regime round up Jews. Nationalists were split. There were those that wholeheartedly supported the Allies. There were others that considered that their fight was independence, not anti-fascism.
When Algeria was liberated and Alger became the capital of Free France until the liberation of Paris, nationalists had hopes this would mean recognition from the French. It did not. The anti-colonial sentiment grew for the rest of WWII. On May 8, 1945, the day Nazi Germany surrendered, at least 6000 Algerians were massacred by the French army. This planted the seed that, 9 years later in 1954, became the Algerian War of Independence.
The war was brutal, nationalists faced against a French military resolute to not lose another war. This wasn't a far away land like Indochina, for all intents and purposes it *was* France. The French army and Algerian loyalists outnumbered Algerian nationalists. Like in Indochina, the Algerian War was asymmetric. Nationalists fought a guerilla war against a regular army.
The conflict saw the end of the Fourth French Republic, and the beginning of the Fifth. The Algerian National Liberation Front kept fighting. Eventually, the French negotiated an end to the war, and in 1962 Algeria took its independence.
**The lesson**
The French did the same critical mistake twice: they thought they could fight the will of the people with tanks. They should have known better, they had just ousted the superior Germans force out of their home.
WWII exacerbated the anti-colonial sentiments in those countries, and the way France handled it post-war was by sending troops. It just served to widen the divide. Guerilla tactics proved more than effective against a conventional army that was used to fight a conventional enemy. But that's not why the French lost these war. They lost because, from the very beginning, they never had the **hearts and minds** of the people.
After decades of an average colonial rule, which is to say far from bloodless, the French found that the people they ruled over overseas simply didn't like them very much. And as the wars dragged on, the bodies piled up and reports of exactions came up, the French people also started to find they didn't like that line of action very much. Indochina and Algeria proved to be more trouble than was worth.
The home field advantage is a supreme tactical and strategic advantage. But in the end, the side willing to ***sacrifice everything for their own land*** won.
[Answer]
If the Martian rebels are stuck on the surface of Mars, things are much harder for them. As other answers have noted, you're really only left with mass civil disobedience or terrorism as solutions. Not that these are necessarily a bad option - civil disobedience by Gandhi's supporters was the foundation of India, and terrorism by the Irgun was the foundation of Israel, so this certainly can work.
But you also mention that Mars has *"the ability to mine and transport small asteroids from the belt"*. That implies that they have interplanetary spaceflight capabilities, orbital stations to manage this transport, and a whole fleet of spacecraft with significant range, endurance and load-carrying ability. With that, Mars has the ability to go full [Lucifer's Hammer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer) on the Earth, simply by choosing the destination for those asteroids. As the Cold War and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction demonstrates, it is not necessary to actually use that weapon, only to show that you have it and are prepared to use it.
In theory Earth could shoot down an incoming asteroid. In practise though, all that would happen is that you get more smaller pieces of asteroid, most of which will land and do serious damage anyway. (The Hollywood plan of breaking up the asteroid to make it pass either side of the Earth is radically implausible, in spite of the exciting special effects.) Breaking up the asteroid will also guarantee [Kessler Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome) and leave Earth unable to get to orbit. This is a win-win scenario for Mars.
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Have you read the book *Wasp* by Eric Frank Russell?
The book focuses on a single, heavily outnumbered, spy planted on an enemy planet, in your case this would be Earth, and using the tension from the war, however this could easily be just tension from a war between countries not races. The protagonist in ‘wasp’ uses propaganda to eventually get much of the worlds defence force chasing him, allowing an easy invasion.
What I am suggesting is that you equip many of your spies with propaganda, mainly designed to show that the leaders of earth are incapable of doing there job, gaining support from the majority can come later.
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As another poster mentioned, Mars doesn't need to win, just not lose. I'd take it a step further and say the most dangerous rebel/terrorist is the one with little or nothing to lose. "I don't care if I live, as long as we both die." This is what makes suicide bombers so scary. There is an advantage to having less to lose than the other guy.
Mars doesn't need to win a war against Earth, but if Mars is willing to destroy itself in order to seriously damage earth, it has scary leverage. Heck, it might be the case that Earth has become so dependent on the Mars operations that Mars could threaten NOTHING except destroying itself and still prevail.
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The Japanese sci-fi franchise Gundam have explored and expanded on this topic for many years and have quite a few established framework. Though a lot of them have built upon the idea that the "spacenoids" are more technologically (or even evolutionarily) advanced and could thus compensate for their relative lack of resource and manpower. Not sure if they are applicable here.
Nonetheless as far as warfare is concerned, I've seen several ways that Earth get defeated -
1. Asteroid / orbital bombardment like you said.
2. Long range precision targeting weapon, aiming at critical targets (miltary base, command centers, etc.)
3. Exploiting Earth's reliance on energy or other resources. Earth's big population comes with a cost. It's perceivable that by 23rd century fossil energy wouldn't be the major energy source. In Gundam SEED for example, Earth uses nuclear energy, and their adversary developed and deployed neutron jammer, a device that suppresses nuclear fission reactions by blocking the movement of free neutrons, thus creating a major energy crisis on Earth.
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Assuming no new technology has been invented that drastically reduces the cost of getting something from Earth to Mars, then in reality even the small industrial output of the Martians would exceed whatever military equipment and manpower Earth could transport to the Martian surface. It is the Earth forces that would be outnumbered and outgunned in a land war on Mars.
It's been said that the reason the United States was able to avoid being preyed upon by more powerful European countries during its youth was the fact that it had two very, very big moats on either side of it.
[Answer]
**Space Docks.**
The martian got the lion's share of them.
Building starships is really sensitive to solar radiation and operating on the dark side of the planet is nonviable for safety. Thus we build on Mars.
The martians are the prime shipbuilders who in turn can remotely access all the ships made in they space docks using maintenance protocols.
**Overrides that engineers leave in the systems in order to diagnose and repair the fleets.**
Earth Space Navvy can only command a tiny part of all of Humanity's spacefaring vessels. The other is under direct control of mars with the press of a keystroke.
Now with all the high command in space, celebrities singing on the moon and kids doing their first space trip,
all those are our hostages.
And we demand independence.
***Or else.***
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This is a very interesting problem you have. Thankfully, however, interplanetary invasions are nearly impossible. This is because of two facts:
(1): Fleets, due to their transitive nature, have relatively limited firepower.
(2): Planets, on the other hand, have essentially unlimited resources (as compared to a fleet). As a result, any planet with the ability to make space stations can *easily* scrounge up enough firepower to destroy any fleet which tries to land there.
Because of these facts, it is impossible to land any sizable number of troops on a planet, let alone keep them supplied.
As a result, the only thing which works when attacking an enemy planet is a swift nuking of the entire inhabitable surface. Of course though, that has the side effect of making said planet unusable for several millenia...
Also, @Tom has a very good point. It would be almost impossible to get a fleet to mars in the first place.
Relative to the "Let's Just Launch some Asteroids" idea, ***it simply would not work.*** This is because the sheer distance separating Earth and Mars gives Earth plenty of time to destroy any asteroids. "Oh, but it worked in *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*! Maybe, but that was only because the asteroids were being launched from so close to Earth, and the velocity was so huge that, even if the Earth military HAD been able to destroy the asteroids, the resulting fragments would actually cause MORE damage than if they just let the asteroids do their thing. Here is a Windows Paint drawing making my point:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JOdFX.png)
As you can see, it is highly dubious that any fragments would actually make it to Earth. In addition, these fragments would be traveling at such low velocities that they would burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
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I'm reminded of the explanation given in the novel *Ecotopia* for how the Pacific States successfully succeeded from the rest of the United States: they planted nuclear bombs under the major cities in the other parts of the country, & threatened to set them off if the US used its massive imbalance of power to quash the rebellion.
Looking back, this was little more than a plot device, mentioned once & never really expanded on -- & probably impractical in any case -- but in your scenario, it might actually work: fifth columnists rig nuclear bombs to level various major cities on Earth unless Earth allows Mars independence. Maybe they had to set one or two off in order to prove these bombs actually existed.
On another note, Earth crushing a rebellion on Mars would not be as simple as it might seem, despite the given inequality of power. Yes, Earth could probably ship over a very large army to crush any revolt, but should something happen where the expeditionary force needs reinforcements, it could take as long as a year for the reinforcements to arrive. Plus all the items an army needs to be an army -- food, clothing, materiel, etc. -- would likely need to be shipped from Earth too. It would require a lot of planning & management to keep the support pipeline flowing during any war on Mars. So the solution to your problem might be something as simple as the Martians capture some key military bases on Mars, & the PTB on Earth do some calculations, decide it's not worth the effort to reconquer the planet, & after a few minor military actions for the sake of honor declare victory & bring their remaining troops home.
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It sounds like Mars already has the ultimate weapon - a charismatic leader. Make them a Gandhi-like figure who can overwhelm the colonisers with his moral authority and nobody needs to be killed. The most successful revolutions are the bloodless ones.
I assume the population of Mars is extremely low (not sure that you would need any people at all) so independence should not be much of an issue so long as the mineral rights aspect is clear.
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**Get control of the life support systems**
Firstly, Earth is very far away so getting help isn't going to be quick. If you can take control of the life support systems, Earth would have to kill everyone to get it back and then start again. This would be expensive and wiping out all life on a planet wouldn't be politically acceptable. The government would cut all travel and all supplies and try to starve them out so they need to be self sufficient.
When the cost of keeping control outweighs the return, they can win their freedom.
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Mars's lower gravity would be a significant advantage in an interplanetary war. Mars could attack using [Kinetic bombardment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#In_science_fiction). While Earth could do the same it would be much harder and far less damage.
**Spoilers for the novel *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress* below**
In the novel [*The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress) similar tactics are employed by colonists on the Moon when they go to war against Earth, they launch rocks from the Moon's surface and then let Earth's gravity do most of the work.
In the novel above, the Moon warns Earth of its intended targets allowing them to fire "warning shots" to demonstrate their capability without killing civilians. The Moon then starts targeting far more devastating locations on Earth, although also arming the rocks with the ability to self-destruct. Since the rocks take a couple of days to travel to earth this gives the Moon a strong negotiating position. Earth must agree to their demands for independence and the rocks will self-destruct - don't and millions of people will die.
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[Question]
[
The battle of superiority between sorcerers and wizards goes way back.
The two distinct powerhouses of magic both know that they are tapping into the same magic. However, they do not share the same beliefs about how to use it. Sorcerers use crystal balls, while wizards prefer wooden wands and staves.
It seems that the wizards practice the art of controlling nature and they believed that magic can be broken down into metal, wood, water, fire and earth, the 5 fundamental elements.
Sorcerers, on the other hand, think of magic as permeate all space. They use their crystals like a valve, to control the flow of magic.
Why don't wizards use wand made of crystal, if it is known that they are the best conductor of magic?
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Surely for the simple reason that, if you carried a crystal wand around in your trouser pocket, it would almost certainly break during normal day to day activities. A crystal sphere is fairly strong so long as you don't drop it from a great height. A crystal wand - less so.
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Crystal is *too good* a conductor of magic.
The wand acts as a resistor, slowing the flow of magic down. This allows the wizards to imprint their will onto it, and control it. A novice wizard has an extremely poor-quality wand, so that the magic tickles through slowly and is easy to control — the problem is, this also means that not much magic is flowing, and the spells are weak.
A stronger wizard has a better quality wand — this allows more magic to flow through it, but it does so faster; it makes the magic harder to control, and requires more skill from the wizard.
As an analogy, imagine a spool of paper running past like a conveyer belt, while you draw runes on it with a paint-brush. This is your spell: the better the conductor your wand is, the faster the paper rushes past, and the faster you need to paint. If your painting isn't good enough, the spell either doesn't work — or it explodes in your hand.
For **powerful** spells, wizards use wooden staves — being larger, these allow for greater amounts of magic to flow, while still keeping it slow enough to control. (Making the spool of paper wider, instead of faster) Some of them have "reservoirs" at the top, allowing the controlled magic to "pool up" until it is released in a sudden burst through a mounted crystal.
No wizard in history has *ever* had enough skill to manage more than the simplest of spells with a crystal wand — there just simply isn't enough time to manipulate the magic before it flows out the other end.
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A sorcerer, on the other hand, isn't trying to control magic flowing through the crystal ball. Instead, they reach *through* the crystal ball as a lens or a window, from which to draw upon the vast canvas of magic that surrounds them — like an artist on a cherry-picker spray-painting a large wall. The limiting factor is their own concentration, so a resistive material (small window/reach) would only provide a bottleneck. A crystal ball that allows more flow than you require is no hinderance, once you get it correctly aligned. Higher quality crystals might have more "momentum", and be harder to align though.
This is partly why Sorcerers and Wizards don't get along particularly well (at least, not *while* casting) - Sorcerers don't like Wizards moving their canvas, and Wizards don't like finding the paper has already been drawn on!
[Answer]
## Usage cases.
Traditionally, Wizards and Sorcerers do different types of magic. As a result, they need different abilities from their paraphernalia.
## **Wizards:**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2dOlJ.png)
1. **Are generally journeymen.** As a result, they generally don't feel inclined to carry a 20 pound crystal ball with "*Fragile: handle with care*" written all over it.
2. **Do smaller spells.** While they occasionally need to do something big like blasting Lord Voldemort, they generally only need to do small things like healing and moving boulders. As a result, they don't need the higher magic-conductivity of crystal.
3. **Aren't as well trained.** Unlike sorcerers, who train for half a lifetime, Wizards generally pick things up as they go. As a result, they aren't equipped to handle the higher magical bandwidth that comes with using a crystal.
4. **Don't have 3 hours to plan out their spells.** To use an idea proposed by @Chronocidal, casting a spell is like writing on a strip of paper as it is being moved past you. While using crystal as a conductor gives you more "space" to work with, it also means that the "paper" is moving *much* more quickly. Because of this, magicians have to plan out their spells in advance when using crystals, as otherwise the spell will expire while they are still trying to figure out what to "write". Since wizards generally don't have 3 hours to plan out a spell, they instead choose to work around the lower "bandwidth" of a wooden wand.
5. **They need magic *right now,* not in five hours.** Another big difference is how long it takes a wand/crystal to "warm up". While crystal balls are more powerful than wands, they need more magic to do so. Because of this, it takes them a couple hours to build up magic before you can use them. Wands, on the other hand, operate using less mana. This means that while they can't be used for magic-intensive spells, they also don't need to charge in anything but the most low-magic areas.
6. **Don't have \$500,000 available to them.** Another thing about crystal balls is that they are *expensive*; they cost the equivalent of $500,000 to buy. This is because while the crystal itself is a good conductor, the magic it conducts is almost impossible to control unless the crystal is a perfect sphere. As a result, it takes expert craftsmen months to produce a single sphere.
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## **Sorcerers:**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BCeEQ.jpg)
1. **Live in one spot.** Unlike wizards, sorcerers generally don't move around; they find a high-magic area and set up shop there. As a result, they don't have to carry a highly fragile 20 pound ball across the world with them.
2. **Need to do big spells.** Sorcerers usually do big things like building castles or [making clone armies.](https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Uruk-hai) While they occasionally need to do a small spell, they keep around a few wands so that they can do so.
3. **Are very well trained.** While wizards pick up magic on the fly, sorcerers spend half a lifetime studying. As a result, they have the requisite experience to handle the high magical "bandwidth" of a crystal.
4. **Can spend years prepping for a single spell.** Since they generally operate from highly defensible positions such as the top of a tower, sorcerers can spend as long as necessary to get a spell right. While this means that they aren't very good at doing impromptu magic like wizards, they are able to do *really* complex spells like, oh, *increasing their own lifespan so that they can spend years planning spells*.
5. **Have loads of money.** Unlike those poor, poverty-stricken wizards, sorcerers usually are very rich; that's why they choose to live in comfort as a sorcerer instead of trekking around in the boondocks.
6. **Need to see what's going on in the world.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HX1ah.png)
One major advantage of crystal balls is that they can also act as [Palantíri](https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri). This is of immense value to sorcerers, as most newspapers won't deliver to remote towers.
**EDIT:**
As @MikeCaron pointed out, these roles are reversed in some media.
[Answer]
Sorcerers tap into the flow of magic and try to shift it a bit to get what they want. Wizards control it in a more structured way.
This is like asking, "why do electricians and electrical engineers mostly use copper wires, while computer engineers use semiconductors. Everyone knows copper conducts better than semiconductor, computer engineers must be a bunch of idiots."
Metal, wood, water, fire, and earth are a framework for understanding how particular facets of magic interact with eachother. A well laid out want gives you the option of deflecting the right elements to just where you want them, so they can combine to make a spell. Sorcerers just use a great big conductor because they are gifted at controlling chaos, and adding more energy to the situation means they get to play to that strength.
Perhaps one could also show up with a moon-sun-clay-life wand. That could be another way of viewing the interactions of the magic fields. Tools exist in a framework.
[Answer]
The TL;DR of the answer: sorcerers are contemplative, wizards are willpower driven.
**Sorcerers** use the crystal to feel the magic surrounding them, see which entity has to offer what kind of magic and ask a number of those entities for certain combinations and sequences of magic ether *releases* to achieve a certain effect in a certain place.
To do this, they use the crystal ball:
1. to reflect the magic landscape around them though the ball
2. to convey his asking to the magic entities around
3. to focus the offered magic in producing the effect they want
For all of the above to work, the crystal has to be large, be it only to accurately reflect the magic reality around.
The process is surely going to take more time (even if it will be pretty fast for highly skilled sorcerers, who a "speaking" to the magic world fluently and perceive it in an instant), but are unlikely to produce imbalances in the magic around them and induce decays to to magic depletion.
It is said that high sorcerers can even read the past and intuitively feel the future of a place based on the flow of magic they perceive it there. This is how the legends of divination was created around them, but the temporal dimension of the magic is handled better by other branch of magic... still using crystal ball but even listing the fundamental differences is beyond the scope of this lecture)
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By contrast, **wizards** don't waste time to ask for magic flows to be offered, they demand it and, when they feel it's needed, they forcefully appropriate it by the use of spells. They are living here and now, reacting swiftly and taking fast (and not rarely hasty) decisions.
At high level of proficiency, wizards won't affect the balance of magic in the surroundings by requisitioning what they need - at least not when they can avoid it. They don't do it from an empathic or feeling based ethics, their approach is strictly pragmatic - those that did that in the past didn't last long in confrontations, no matter how strongly willed one is, one can't take anything from a place they depleted earlier.
Now, sensu stricto, it is improper to say the wizards do not use crystals to control the flow of magic. After all, not every material is appropriate to make a magical wand from. At microscopic level, no matter the wand overall material, there are strands of crystal that channel the flow of magic. The already known requirement of a certain degree of fitness between a wizard and his wand has explanation in the way the configuration of these strands (and the interplay of the strands with the embedding matrix) feel for the prospective owner. Where for most of the other wizards feel the constraints of the matrix and bending or torsion of the crystal strands as impeding the magic flow, the prospective owner feels opportunities of flow control and modulation of the wave of this flow.
the ability of a wizard to take control on the wand of a wizard foe they defeated in a fight stems from the fact they felt and internalized how the opponent used it - it is a necessary condition to withstand and repel the spells and the burst of magic shaped and directed as attack vectors.
S/he won't be able to have the same proficiency using the captured wand as when using their own, but still the level of control over the captured wand is 1 or 2 levels of magnitude better then any other still-alive wizards
[Answer]
**Resonance versus Impedance, Grapes and Whips**
The crystal ball has a high magical index of refraction and acts as a resonating chamber (like the [grapes making plasma in a microwave](https://youtu.be/wCrtk-pyP0I)).
While wood has a lower magical index of refraction, and the tapered end is even lower. It serves as a bridge, matching the index of the spell caster on one side and the vacuum on the other, much like whips do with the large end tapering to the small end. (This is called impedance matching.)
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**Too stubborn to admit they're wrong**
If the difference between wizards and sorcerers boils down to belief, it could very well be that for wizards to admit that crystal balls are superior would be admitting that they're wrong and sorcerers are right and thus they're too stubborn to admit otherwise to the point that they're subconsciously deluding themselves to the contrary. A profound example of confirmation bias.
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# Wizards are versatile, sorcerers are powerful
Because they come from a living tree with affinity to multiple elements (wood, earth, water, air?), wooden wands and staves act as an interface between these elements and are much better suited to controlling and switching between different types of magics.
On the other hand, crystal allows raw magic to flow through it much more effectively, but is less adaptable in the shape that magic takes when used in a spell.
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**Material Properties**
The Sorcerer uses his crystal ball to draw magic in, then siphons it off to cast himself. Essentially a Crystal ball is a magical capacitor.
A more subtle use is that as magic is drawn to the ball, it retains some information of where it came from (at least until it's absorbed) and a skillful wielder can use the crystal ball to scry the history of an area, view events, see through walls and so on, all based on the magical afterimages being drawn into his crystal ball.
The caveat is that changing the shape of the crystal doesn't meaningfully affect its behaviour, so a crystal wand would absorb magic in the same way as a crystal ball.
With more complex topology it makes it harder to read the "afterimages" being brought with it.
So a wand is purely useful for its magical capacitor behaviour, not for anything more subtle.
It doesn't act as a channel for magic, unlike wood.
Wood does not absorb magic, it purely channels it along its length for accuracy.
A magic-user therefore uses Crystals to draw magic to them, and wooden wands or staves to channel it into what they want to do.
Wizards practice a kind of magical leverage, using magical items and ingredients as fuel for their spells. draining the magic from an object using smaller crystals and shunting it elsewhere in a new form.
Sorcerers meanwhile prefer to draw magic to them with crystal balls and cast directly from that.
The wizard approach works well for preparing complex/precise spells that mustn't receive more power than required, while the sorcerer's approach lends itself to a more rough-and-ready style of magic, but relies on there *being* magic to use.
A Sorcerer therefore needs to find ley-lines or places of high background-magic to perform more powerful spells, while a wizard generally needs to find artefacts of power to accomplish the same.
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Because crystal doesn't react well to being shaken about
You can hold a wand and wave it around, point it at people, magic still comes out fine. If you're using crystal though, it needs to be placed on a flat, rigid surface and kept still, otherwise the magic comes out all wobbly and smudged.
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## [Magical Optics!](https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-notes/optics/understanding-ball-lenses/)
It isn't just the *material* of the Crystal balls that enables them to be a conduit for magic.
It is also their shape. Their *optics*.
Magic is a discrete "thing" of the universe. It flows around space, and it is carried along more or less like photons.
Just like photons, it can interact with some materials for different results - it may be absorbed, redirected, etc. The exact specifics of the rules "Magicons" obey don't need to follow the same as the rules of the photons, but you can use them as a starting point to determine how magic and different materials interact.
On the specific case of the crystal balls, they are an unique type of object that mix two important properties - the ability to conduct magic, and the ability to redirect magic - into a single, conveniently shaped object that is easy to use. A crystal wand wouldn't have the same optics, so it wouldn't be as useful for casting magic.
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**TL;DR:** It is the best conductor of magic, but wizards need more than that to ply their magic.
**Longer Answer:**
Disclaimer: I am going to proceed on the D&D-style premise that a wizard studies magic while it is innate to a sorcerer. All other factors will be as even as needed.
The question states that crystals are the best conductors of magic and is known. However, also according to the question wizards eschew it in favour of wooden implements. To me, this indicates that it was a conscious choice to venture away from crystals for their main spellcasting.
With wizards believing that magic can be broken down into base elements, their training would lead them to create a tool to assist them with that. Not only does it need to channel magic, but it also needs to do all the other fiddly things that they want to do as well. Crystal might be the best at channeling pure magic, but it is inferior in other metrics.
Other materials like bone, stone, and metals were tested for their uses. Each material has its advantages and drawbacks when it comes to their method of spellcasting. In the end, wood was chosen for being average in performance across the board. It has the ability to be shaped into something more conducive to the wizard as well as being adaptable to many situations. It is also easier to cultivate suitable trees to keep the traditions alive compared to using the bones of wizards past or sacred metals.
In contrast to this, the spells of a sorcerer are innate and known as opposed to gained through study. They do not require the same fine manipulation of magic to warrant needing a wand of wood or bone. They need to tap into the power and harmonize it with themselves to make magic. Crystal provides a conduit to channel more power faster. The orb shape is easier to made than others as well as being potentially harder to break than a crystal stick ... er wand.
Since they only need the power around them, a crystal implement is perfect for their needs. A valve to control the power so it does not control them.
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Sorcerers are more contemplative. They use crystal balls in order to scry. To gather information and carefully make plans. Wizards are more active and direct. Their wands provide more raw power.
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**Cristal balls:**
* Can store and release a large amount of magic stored.
* Sorcerer have problems draining magic from nature, having a crystall ball allow them to have a bigger reserve of magic.
* Precious jewells are better but usually much more expencive and smaller, a diamond the size of a humam fist would be thousands times better than a comon crystal ball, but they would be extremally rarer.
* Some jewells like rubys will give elements to the magic stored making fire magic less consuming and more powerfull for example.
* Some more powerfull and better crafted crystal ball can cast spells by simple shouting the spell name or reacting automatically at enemies atacks for exemple.
* While not admiting the goodnes of a wand, some sorceres have wood structures around the crystall ball that improve the object habilities.
**Wands:**
* Can be made of various types of woods, relativaly cheaper, but some
types of rarer woods can be priceless material for a wand.
* Due to the connection with nature, wizards have great hability draining magic from the enviroment, the greater the wizard greater is the amount of magic they can borrow, needing better wands even stafs to handle the amount.
* Wands can come in various forms, usually they are magical wands, canes and staffs.
* Some wizards have jewells embed in theyr wands to strengthen some types of magic, but they never admit the importance of it.
* Wands are fasters to pull and easier to conceal, staffs can be used as blunt weapons and walking suports.
[Answer]
## Critical Mass
The crystal needs to achieve a certain critical mass (like uranium or plutonium) to function properly.
The most efficient shape for achieving a critical mass is a sphere, and that sphere needs to be a certain size or greater to function at all.
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## Density
That particular crystal is so dense that a useful amount of it is difficult to carry. A 50 pound wand isn't very practical... The weight of a crystal ball sitting atop a stone slab of a table on the other hand, is largely irrelevant. None too mobile though.
OTOH, a stone golem with a relatively small crystal ball inside it's torso could make for a potent magical siege weapon.
And perhaps it is this density that is the key to its special properties. "The atoms are closer together" or some such.
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[Question]
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I am writing a story where a species undergoes devolution. Is there any scientific or plausible way to do this? The process can be instantaneous or may take ages, I do not mind which as I need to weigh my options at this stage.
To be clear, the devolution I am thinking of is like taking a human being then devolving him/her to the primate stage, so lets say about as far back as Orrorin tugenensis or Paranthropus where they are in the midst of evolving from primates to Homo erectus. Please note I used human beings as an example to give context but the species undergoing devolution may not necessarily be human.
Based on the answers, "devolution" does not exist so had the word in quotes to reflect this.
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Devolution doesn't really ever occur, organisms simply adapt to best suit their environment over time. A good example is cave dwelling Troglodyte type species that have lost the ability to see. They haven't actually devolved to not have eyes, they simply did not need them and evolved to save valuable energy and nutrients by not growing a sight organ that would be useless in their environment. It isn't devolution, it's still evolution since they are changing to better suit their environment. So, at least as far as natural processes go, a species would need to become stuck in an environment for a few hundred thousand years that heavily discourages intellect, sociability, communication skills, culture, and inventiveness. That's a tough one to come up with since such traits are usually the most powerful ones for surviving something.
So here's the environment and scenario I'm thinking of. Your smart guy race is in the stone age, its pretty much on par with homo sapiens and where they were at about 10,000-15,000 years ago. But something catastrophic *doesn't happen.* The world slowly becomes a perfect Eden with very few predators, a perfect climate, and vast endless fields of grain and forests of fruit bearing trees. No ice age, no super-predators like we saw in said ice age. No famines or depredation, no rabid competition between several human subspecies for the same resources. The planet (Henceforth known as paradise) is literally perfect. Too perfect. Why would a species that has as close as possible to absolutely nothing to worry about need to even develop the ability to worry? Those big craniums and complex brains waste space and make childbirth more dangerous than necessary. There is absolutely nothing gained by possessing speech, abstract thought, or cooperative culture when all a species needs to do to be successful is to wander around placidly in small familial groups grazing mindlessly on the limitless amounts of food. Shelter is utterly not necessary since you have a perfect climate, nor is clothing, and food is so ludicrously plentiful there is no need to make tools. Within another 100,000 years your species that was formerly well on their way to developing things like agriculture, warfare, and tribal societies has reverted back to dumb grazers that simply live to eat and reproduce.
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Breed them to match sub-optimal traits from previous generations.
I recall a clever plot device in the Xanth series where a curse (you can substitute magic for any scientific technique, such as CRISPR) was used to make a certain species of humanoids attracted only to the ugliest, smallest, most unintelligent members. Over time, these creatures got more and more hideous until an equilibrium was reached between the force of the curse driving them to poor sexual selection and natural selection killing off the less fit. The end result was the creation of goblins: small, knobby, violent, and unintelligent but numerous creatures that lived in caves. After enough generations into the curse, millions of years of evolution had been undone.
While this appears to be devolution, technically it is evolution, as these creatures are forced to adapt to the existence of a curse. Even though they were less fit than their ancestors, they still managed to find an equilibrium that gave them maximum fitness when placed in an adversarial environment (an environment with a curse that limits their sexual selection opportunities).
This actually has a parallel in ~~mundania~~ the real world: breeding. We can easily breed animals in a way that seems inferior to their wild counterparts, but that is still evolution because the species is evolving to survive in an environment where traits that would normally improve fitness such as viciousness instead are detrimental (because they would not be selected for breeding). While there may not have been Chihuahuas in the past, you could easily select for traits that they had long ago.
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As noted, natural evolution does not reach pinnacles or devolve, but rather adapts to the environment. Different environments provide different niches, an [albatross](https://infogalactic.com/info/Albatross), [penguin](https://infogalactic.com/info/Penguin) and [phorusrhacidae](https://infogalactic.com/info/Phorusrhacidae) are all birds, but rather different because of the very different environments they inhabited.
If you are going to "devolve" the creature, you will need to use genetic engineering. Palaeontologist [Jack Horner](https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_from_a_chicken) has been working on this, attempting to turn a [chicken embryo](https://www.livescience.com/50886-scientific-progress-dino-chicken.html) back into a [dinosaur](http://www.businessinsider.com/chicken-leg-dinosaur-genetic-editing-2016-3). Since chickens are literal descendants of dinosaurs, there is nothing in principle to prevent rolling back the process of evolution and hatching a dinosaur. Perhaps it is for the best that we actually don't know how to do this........yet.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hY412.jpg)
*Perhaps a bit more tweaking*
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Devolution doesn't exist.
Evolution is a process that keeps going; unless you want to get deep into genetic engineering, there's no way to turn it back.
What you can do is create a situation where the best path forward is to become more "primitive", if you want to start with humans and bring them back to a primal level the best thing you can do is start removing civilization.
Give a read about humans raised by animals, without the social structure these individuals are already much closer to this primal existence.
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Devolution doesn't happen explicitly. Evolution can be forced in the opposite direction though. This could match what you intend to do.
# The driving force behind evolution
For this example I am going to take resistance to antibiotics as evolutionary trait, but this is pretty much extensible to most other things.
Competition is the driving force behind evolution. In bacteria, it is a constant race to be able to divide as fast as possible. Faster than your neighbor. After all, if you grow fastest, there will be more yous.
In an environment where no antibiotics exist, the bacteria that can convert the surroundings into energy the fastest wins out. However, when we introduce an antibiotic that mimics the surroundings, but instead of being broken down, blocks the mechanisms of the bacteria, this all changes.
That efficient bacterium will not be able to divide as efficiently anymore. So suppose there also is a bacterium that has another gene that allows it to prevent the antibiotics from entering its cell. This means that in the presence of antibiotics, this bacterium has an enormous advantage, because it isn't hindered by the antibiotics and will be able to divide just as normal. This is generally how resistance to antibiotics propagates through the population of bacteria.
### So what about "devolution"?
There is one important piece here. Resistance to antibiotics isn't free. In this example it is producing some protein that blocks antibiotics, in another example it could be a modified protein that isn't a viable target anymore to antibiotics, but in (almost) every case, this resistance has a cost. Having to produce a protein, having a less efficient enzyme, and so forth.
This doesn't matter in the presence of antibiotics, living is more important than that bit of energy. When there are no antibiotics however, these resistant bacteria are at a disadvantage. They are expending energy for something that has no benefit for natural selection anymore. The effect is that the unresistant bacteria will be growing faster and thus will be selected for.
# So what does this have to do with devolution?
You can interpret this as devolution of the species, because the selecting criterium has been removed/changed so that what was selected for at first, is no longer useful. This doesn't immediately mean that that trait will be explicitly selected away, but given that most traits like this cost energy, if they are unneeded, they will eventually disappear.
As another example, there are plenty of species that at some point in their evolutionairy tree had limbs, but developed in such a way that they did not need them anymore. Take whales for example. We know they have had limbs at some point, because there still are rudimental bonestructures looking like limbs. They have been evolved away though. There was no need for them, so there was no driving force preventing mutations that lowered effectiveness of these limbs. These traits might even have been beneficial, as growing limbs costs energy. Energy better spent growing fins for example.
So to properly simulate the "Devolution of a trait or species", it is important that the selecting factor (if there is one explicit factor) is removed or made redundant.
Important to note here though is that this is mostly devolution from the perspective of a certain trait, like legs. First legs evolve, then they evolve away again. This happens. Species turning back into older species is much less likely, because it is so many traits that have all changed, that would have to be selected against suddenly.
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This is possible (to some extent) **if your population is small enough** through [inbreeding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding):
>
> Inbreeding results in homozygosity, which can increase the chances of offspring being affected by recessive or deleterious traits
>
>
>
You would still have to make a plausible case for
* losing specific traits that would have to disappear in your scenario, e.g. intelligence, manual dexterity;
* but not to the extent that the species would die out.
Since evolution is unpredictable I think you can make it plausible, if you can find a reason why the population size has dwindled. Decreased intelligence would be the important factor IMO.
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You could introduce a dominant genetic disorder that causes this "effect of devolution" over time, like a degenerative disease. For example, if the creatures have big ears because hearing is important, the disease might make their ears smaller and so on. Bipedal creatures might have a spinal problem that makes them more curved and prone to rest their arms on the ground as quadrupedal. A genetic disorder can be manipulated any way you want to achieve any effect you desire.
If the creatures are not advanced they would not be able to understand the cause and will simply keep breeding and with each generation the condition might aggravate. If they are advanced, you need to figure out ways why they wouldn't research and avoid passing the gene on.
The important thing to bear in mind is that a species that do not adapt to their environment tend to go extinct, so at some point this should be the outcome of their "devolution", unless there are some other circumstances at play that might allow them to live even when unapt.
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Evolution is change. The reverse of change is still change.
In simple terms, evolution is just random mutations appearing in offspring, and some mutations carrying a greater chance of spawning progeny.
There are some widespread misconceptions about evolution, based on misinterpretations and half-truths. These are wrong:
* Evolution can happen to a living individual.
* Evolution causes individuals to change to adapt to the environment.
* There's some natural ranking of evolution, where birds are the "better" version of dinosaurs.
* The genetic code of "previous" species is somehow stored in the "advanced" species.
If you're willing to ignore realism, you can pretend these are real. Or you could introduce a variant setting where they are real. Or you involve god and creationism, and write god's rules.
Other alternatives are:
* Have selection pressure that prefers individuals who are similar in some aspects to the species you want them to look like.
* Have aliens/gods who kept notes of the previous mutations, and who now undo the previous mutations one generation at a time.
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Evolution is basically, in simple terms, “A bunch of tiny changes”. If an organism has a bad change, it dies. If it’s a good change, it lives, passing on the DNA. Hence, evolution. What you (could) do is change the DNA of an embryo to match that of a primate. It’s less of “devolution” than directly changing the DNA to copy a primate... more or less giving the desired result. (Hope I helped :p )
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Look up the most recent information on *Homo floresiensis* -- currently thought to be a group of *Home erectus* who were isolated on an island and adapted to suit the conditions there. In their case, it meant that individuals expressing more primitive traits (smaller stature, less calorie-intensive brains) were best adapted for the conditions at play, and over the generations their species evolved in a direction some people might consider "backwards".
Islands are great evolutionary laboratories -- you get founder effects, population bottlenecks, and a plausible way to get past relative low points in species fitness. It's pretty easy to handwave your way to the perfect environment to adapt your species in whatever direction you want on an island, and then reintroduce them later. (For example, scrub *Homo sapiens* off the planet with a weaponized plague spread by birds that your island group are immune to, and then some suitable number of millenia later raise up a land bridge to let them go forth and colonize.)
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It is, in my opinion, wrong to say that devolution does not or cannot occur. Evolution is a biological process that depends on selection of genetic material for propagation, where the selection depends on an ecosystem as a continuous, typical environment.
Some exogenous and extraneous occurrence, a natural disaster or intentional attack, can disrupt the process. For example, a nuclear attack that mutates all the genetic information thus far created will not result in nuclear-resistant species, but will just result in mutated species with ongoing genetic illnesses.
The way you use the words evolve/devolve though, to "devolve" a species back to being an ape would require the "evolution" of human feet (back to being hands) and the "evolution" of strength and agility. Regardless, a mechanism of achieving this in any short time frame would have to be through some kind of widespread modification of genetic information.
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You can try "junk DNA" -- inactive or non-coding bits of a genome that has many origins, some vestigial. A smart and malevolent enough virus ( or suitable nanotech ) may be able to reactive or remix that old DNA. You could also create a virus/nano that lays dormant for a long time chemically cataloging historical shifts in DNA and inferring through some algorithm where evolution did *not* go.
"junk dna": <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA>
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If you are asking about devolution in terms of education and by extension intelligence, it is already happening to humans. Since educated people are having less kids, the current human evolution is optimizing less education and by extension less intelligent species. I do not think that this can devolve humans to primates. Maybe back to stone age. Most likely it will stop far before that happens.
A similar situation with more serious outcomes could happen to your species. A social kind of norm that prevents educated people to have kids can help to devolve your species. Some sort of strict policy on teachers and scientists having kids could work. This way, once the first lineage of intelligent individuals are gone, the same could repeat with the upcoming generations.
**Edit:**
(This part has nothing to do to answer the question, merely as an answer to the comments as these explanations takes longer than comment character limit.)
Education is closely related to intelligence. **A least to a degree**, the choice of having better education is affected by intelligence. Here is an article supporting that claim: <https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/39/5/1362/802787> Additionally, correlation between education and childbirth is well-known, thus, the current increase in IQ depends on the increase in minimal level education (most of the countries primary school education is enforced), use of technology, better medicine and better understanding of pregnant and infant needs. Here is another article having the same conclusion: <https://www.livescience.com/24713-humans-losing-intelligence.html>
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I fully agree that devolution or involution does not exist, but assuming that terms like the evolution where some characteristics are lost, carrying the species to a supposedly ancestral phase (in only some aspects), then you can be better inspired by the evolution of the parasites. The extreme adaption to live inside a live organism cause lost of metabolic routes, oganalles and organs. For instance, eyes in some arthropods, the whole digestive apparatus in tapeworms, or the mitochondria in some flagellates.
But note: Two decades ago flagellates as *Giardia* spp. were considered «primitive» early eukaryotes because the lack of mitochondria. Nothetheless, in fact they are more evolved that us with respect this plastid. They had mitochondria, but living in anaerobic habitats that endosimbiont was transformed in another organule (mitosomes) that was not discovered until the end of the XX century. So,.. *Giardia* species devolved or evolved?
A tapeworm have not gut like a planarian because live inside a gut, but have hooks to anchor to the mucosa and a unparalleled multiple reproductive system produce huge amounts of eggs. Devolved or evolved?
The bee louse (*Braula coeca*) is a fly without wings, but it flies using bees without wasting energy. Devolved or evolved?
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[Question]
[
I'm GMing RPG game based on Stars Without Numbers, but its happening on my personal world. It's in the 36th century of our universe and humans are colonizing planets within the galaxy.
In the far future CCTV and other monitoring equipment are very cheap and easy to install, also AI and similar programs make analyzing all recordings a trivial task. **Why, in that situation, would the government NOT use it for mass surveillance? Also how to stop private people and corporations from using it apart from outright banning it?**
[Answer]
## It became a controlled technology when the risk became greater than the reward
>
> Why, in that situation, would the government NOT use it for mass
> surveillance?
>
>
>
Fifteen centuries is a LOT of time for people to find and execute ways of exploiting AI driven surveillance systems. By then they will have been used by school shooters to ID and track targets, by terrorists to assassinate world leaders using smart weapons, they will have been used to automatically steal people's identities by reading information off of things in their hands, military secrets have been leaked because someone decided to proof-read a report while waiting at a bus stop. They will have been used to automatically find behavioral patterns that suggest people are cheating on their spouses so that you can blackmail people you've never even met, there are even websites where you can just type in someone's name, and the system will start sampling video of them to generate pornographic deep fakes or sex bots of them. As the technology becomes more prolific, the number of people with the knowledge base to exploit it grows until the harm it does is clearly more detrimental than any gain.
As the harmfulness of surveillance increases; so to will its utility decrease. Once a deep fake can no longer be differentiated from real footage, shady defense lawyers just need to start submitting their own versions of events to cast doubt on any video or photos submitted by prosecution and vise versa. Heck, this is so far in the future, criminals probably walk around with portable holographic projectors that can create a bubble of false narrative without ever needed to hack a single system. Together, these will lead to video and photos becoming inadmissible as evidence.
Then there is the issue of whether it makes cops more effective as a response tool. Most "crimes" go unreported because no one wants to press charges. If a person forgets their keys and has to break into their own home, there is no reason for the cops to show up. If a husband hits his wife and the wife does not want to press charges, there's not much the cops can do. If a person causes damage to property that is worth less than a lawsuit, then you are just wasting a cop's time filling out the paperwork. And that is just the time you waste before you account for forged footage. If you can only budget for so much law enforcement, then it makes more sense to dispatch them to places where you expect their efforts to result in a conviction which means going places where crimes have been reported by a person, not just a nosy AI.
Between these factors, video surveillance becomes more of a hindrance than a help as a crime enforcement tool.
In short, public surveillance systems will become the 36th century equivalent to leaded gasoline, asbestos, or blood letting. The tech might still be there in certain contexts, but the very idea that anyone ever thought it's widespread use was at one point a good idea seems borderline satirical.
>
> Also how to stop private people and corporations from using it apart
> from outright banning it?
>
>
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The best way to limit it without banning it is by making it something you need a license or permit for. This way, the right to place a surveillance cameras becomes more akin to owning a concealed firearms license. It's not that hard to aquire, but there is enough cost and red-tape associated with it that you start to only see cameras where they are actually needed.
[Answer]
For the same reason it's a bad idea in the present world: anyone who can get access to the surveillance network will have the same world of information as you do, but their goals will rarely be aligned with yours.
Sure, the cameras are useful for public safety, finding criminals, and monitoring those in need. They're also useful for identifying high value targets, finding weaknesses in security measures, and blinding those who rely on it too much. And if there are AIs to process all of the information streams in real time, both the risks and rewards increase dramatically.
Ubiquitous surveillance means you can always find your enemies, and your enemies can always find you. Best to keep surveillance systems separate, specific, and only mildly useful.
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Everybody is wearing face masks to cope with the various viral pathogens floating around. Real or imagined. Indeed, they are wearing not just surgical masks, but full face masks covering the eyes. Since it seems the latest corona virus can enter through the eyes.
So facial recognition becomes worthless. Indeed, it might become the fashion to decorate the masks with the face of famous people. So every facial recognition AI starts seeing "Elvis" and "Marilyn Monroe" on every street corner.
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One possibility:
**Privacy laws**
For some reasons humans got really fed up with constantly being monitored, so they simply started protesting and voting until a government got into power which did something about it. The government did not ban it outright, but made the rules and regulations of creating/owning someones personal data on video such a pain that only a select few organisations are able to comply with the rules. For example everyone would need to give explicit consent before being recorded. Definitely not worth the effort on a large scale.
Another would be:
**Bureaucracy**
Related to the above. As you stated, this takes place throughout the galaxy, what if the rules are so that data can only be analysed on earth or one specific planet? Or has to be analysed specifically by humans do prevent errors? Sending large data transfers throughout the galaxy will take time, and might not be viable on such a large scale.
[Answer]
**Nobody trusts video footage**
It's so trivially easy to fake footage, insert false video into camera systems or otherwise fool surveillance that video footage is worthless.
It's not admissable in court, and even petty shoplifters know how to deepfake someone else's face onto theirs as they steal. If you're robbed, even having clear footage is no guarantee you know who robbed you or how.
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The Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex has [a character who manages to remove his face from all recordings from cameras in real time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell_characters#Activists_and_criminals):
>
> He is an expert hacker, able to hide his physical presence by editing himself out of video feeds and cybernetic eyes, concealing his identity by superimposing an animated logo over his face, and hijacking cybernetic brains altogether, all in real-time.
>
>
>
In the Watch Dogs series of games, the protagonist is also able to evade detection by CCTV cameras while being in plain view.
In real life, [people have successfully interfered with facial recognition software by using carefully tailored makeup on their faces](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/g28719483/trick-surveillance-systems/?slide=4).
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The kind of security we're talking about is always a cat-and-mouse chasing game between those who wish to gather data and those who wish to remain anonymous. If you get enough people educated about CCTV's and they don't want to be seen, then the ones with the cameras will be playing a losing game.
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A few ideas
A: The world is populated by clones, everyone looks the same. Video surveillance is effectively useless
B: The everyone in the population suffers from visage fluidity — their entire appear spontaneously transmogrifies every few hours. Video surveillance is effectively meaningless
C: Everyone is invisible in the spectrum of EM radiation the camera sensors can capture. Video surveillance only shows a bunch of doors opening and empty jogging suits running down the street.
D: Every body is super radioactive and emits ionizing radiation that fully saturates at camera sensor. Cameras only show bright fizzly sparkles when some is imaged.
[Answer]
Because democracy works in the 36th century and the majority of citizens voted against it.
cue *incessant laughter*
[Answer]
A world like that could easily appear if taking photos of people was a cultural taboo. For example, if a wide-spread religion on the planet believes that if any photos of a person exist it will prevent them from being at peace in the afterlife, then it would be impossible for the government to implement surveillance without widespread revolt. Cultural conformity would strongly discourage individuals and corporations from implementing any surveillance, even if it wasn't outright illegal.
[Answer]
"We fought a civil war not to have cameras!"
People have talked about rights, but here is now you could have it in a more believable way than just "rights". What if it went too far.
Over years and centuries surveillance grew. There were cameras in businesses, then in public streets. Soon enough there were cameras in our homes. An AI network watched everyone, and automatically wrote you a ticket for jay walking, or smoking a cigarette in your own house.
Things got worse. There were morality laws declared. Cameras were added in bathrooms. The AIs would write tickets for not saying "bless you" or for running the water for over 15 seconds when washing your hands.
There was the day people had too much. Everyone tore cameras out of their homes and burned them in bonfires. Then they marched on the streets tearing down cameras. Riot police was called in. Things went down very V For Vendetta. In the end the people marched on the government and demanded a ban on cameras.
In a month all security cameras were gone. At least from anything that's not a private business considered high security, never being placed where it may record a non employee, and it's video could only be reviewed in combination with a warrant.
These days video surveillance is a word like slavery or genocide. An unspeakable evil people died to stop.
[Answer]
The top reason surveillance isn't adopted now is cost.
Not the cost of cameras, which can be very cheap. In addition to those cameras you need storage - which can get expensive. You will also need transmitters, power (this stops many police departments who insist on dedicated transmitters, or pay engineering firms for custom solutions). There's a non-trivial amount of system architecture also involved : what does the camera do when connecting to the central server is impossible - does it try backup communication methods, compressing local storage, alternative destinations, increasing the spacing between frames or decreasing resolution to increase the time until local storage is full.
Especially in space, where time delays can be extensive and clocks can mismatch due to gravitational and velocity-based relativistic effects, it would be good not to trivialize how much effort is required to get reliable (authenticated and high quality) data into the system.
On the server side there's also a lot of decision-making (and cost). How do sensors prove who they are? What do you do with data that has arrived out of time because of broken communication? What do you do with multiple pieces of data claiming to come from the same device and time? Can anyone edit videos? How is access to the server auditable so that you can trust that what's on the server isn't deepfake? How do you associate metadata (officers and device, location and device)? How do you search through the video? What processes grainy or poor video? What do you do with the raw feed? Keep it, in case of questions? Dump it?
Who maintains the cameras - cleaning dirty ones and servicing or repairing broken ones? How do you know which cameras need attention?
Especially as the volume increases : processing raw data to add meta, fix errors, and searching become the greatest single costs.
Cost could be driven way down by a shrink-wrapped solution. However, most places want some custom answer to these questions, which usually costs more than most organizations want to pay. Even shrink wrapped, the operating cost is high - which is why many places install highly visible cameras of such poor quality as to be essentially useless.
Here's an idea of how this scales :
Bandwidth = resolution x frame rate x number of cameras.
For a simple building with a hundred cameras, Macintosh 120 frames per second, and 3 megapixels, that's 3.6 Gb per second. Running that building for one year generates 108 million Gb of raw video on disks. That's only a single building with a modest number of cameras. Scale this up even further to a single planet of a modest 7 billion buildings, and now the total is very close to the number of molecules in 22 liters of gas, and approaching real physical limits on data density. But add in 9 planets and maybe 100 moons, dwarf planets, smaller bodies, and a few thousand ships and vessels in a single solar system - that's a lot. And it wouldn't be cheap.
[Answer]
Because enough people wander around with T-shirts depicting the [Langford Death Parrot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)) (or equivalent that works on the AI monitors) that monitoring CCTV becomes too dangerous.
[Answer]
From the mind of [Charles Stross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross):
[In order to prevent a hacker emulating a basilisk attack using the in-built FPGAs.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laundry_Files)
[Answer]
**Because it is unnecessary**
A lot of answers here give very good reasons why it wouldn't exist, because it became not feasible anymore (due to moral or technical circumstances) which all work quite well.
But here's my different approach which is rooted in it being **surpassed by a better method.** Which is IMHO the only realistic way that authoritarian technologies will be discontinued in this world.
Picture that: everyone has a chip implanted at birth. You need this chip for everything, shopping, transport, getting into ANY area (the world devolved into basically nothing but gated areas joined together) so except for the uncivilized wastelands there is **no way** for an unchipped person to be within the city.
Now, since you always know where who is anyways with these chips, WHY go through the hassle of installing widespread video surveillance? It's just unnecessary.
Sure, like supermarkets akin to the queless Amazon stores will probably still have cameras, but those spots will be few and far between
[Answer]
**There is a theoretical practical limit to the amount of surveillance you can do effectively**
*Artificial Intelligence has a hard limit: the human interface*
Even a super-advanced AI still has to be given instructions from humans (what to look for) and communicate its results and alerts to a human. The AI will have to contend with vague and conflicting rules created by humans. When you have very large amounts of footage to work with, even an infinitely intelligent AI will still have to be able to articulate to its human handlers what exactly is suspicious about a particular alert in the footage. When you have a million hours of footage a day, the AI will have to discard thousands of hours of mildly suspicious footage in order to display all the really suspicious footage.
*Who Watches The Watchers?*
Governments, individuals, and corporations may find, that even with the help of AI, there is an asymptotic limit to the number of surveillance cameras that can be effectively watched without the watchers and the watcher's bosses being overwhelmed by false negatives and false positives, driven by errors, biases, hidden agendas, and direct adversarial attacks.
[Answer]
well, have you ever been to a place called China?
I was born in a small city there, and I have been living in Australia and Canada for the last decade. Every time I go back, I see more and more security cameras everywhere. The traffic light outside my parents apartment building is holding 11 cameras! And government officials have access to your social app data, even all these companies are private. And hence now people there reply heavily on those apps, such as wechat for everyday living (purchase anything you need for example), the government knows what you eat and when you eat stuff. In addition, the national ID card has been implemented since day 1 of the country, so they know where you are, who you are with etc.
I think BBC did an experiment in Shanghai, asking the police using AI powered facial recognition to locate a person in Shanghai while asking the person to commute in the highest population dense areas, it took the police less than 15 min.
On one end, this has made China extremely safe,if a thieve wants to pick a lock or someone's bike? Most likely they can be located within days. But when it comes to "rights and freedom", you better hope your individualism aligns well with the scope of the government.
[Answer]
traditional camera are old and quaint.
They switched to full 3d scanners that can probably even read your DNA from a distance.
Also total visual reconstruction from a single strand of DNA.
Masks and other primitive techniques will all fail.
[Answer]
Liability, incompetent law writing makes it a crime not to turn in video footage of criminals. Sure you didn't review the video and no one knew who the criminal was at the time, but at the end of the year when the local cops come to archive your footage...
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> Eh mate, looks like you had caught the Rotterdam Kidnapper on camera but didn't turn 'em in. That's a felony don'tcha know. That'll be 1000 future bucks or 7.543 space years in the prison chamber.
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To avoid the fines insurance companies mandate 0 cameras on businesses they cover.
[Answer]
Crime is how civilization copes with bad laws. Both in that it ameliorates them and in that it gathers the data needed to discover they're bad and get rid of them. So long as law-makers are fallible, too much law enforcement breaks civilizations. Imagine what would happen to Earth's scientific research if everyone who used sci-hub got caught.
And prosecutorial discretion is no solution, because it invites too much corruption.
The first dozen planets to implement total surveillance refused to believe this. They collapsed. Billions of people died. In some cases, the planets themselves were rendered uninhabitable. People still tell horror stories about the law-enforcement nanites of Elbulon D, hopefully all destroyed when its star was deliberately supernovad, but if even one survived and reaches an inhabited planet...
But the thirteenth planet to reach that potential, blessed with detailed recordings of the first dozen collapses, held back. They deliberately underpowered their police.
Successive governments have shown varying degrees of wisdom. Enough for data-driven sociologists to calculate the ideal effectiveness of law enforcement. And universal surveillance, while not a death sentence for a civilization, is still substantially too much.
[Answer]
There's ZERO reasons for that.
Not a single advancement/technology that increases control ever fell into disuse for any reason in all humanity's history and I don't see it happening 1500 years later.
In some points in the past, when such systems couldn't be mass-produced and were one-off you could've a plausible excuse of losing know-how of closely guarded secret for such surveillance with the death/assassination of key inventors behind it. But today it is out of question for a long time already: the information is just too widespread.
Mass-surveillance provides way too much advantages. If any government won't use it for some insane reason, it will simply fall at the hands of another big agent - other government or corporation - who won't have such reservations.
It's pretty much the same with power projection advancements, like modern weapons: if you won't use them - you will fall to those who do.
Not using those is pretty much giving up on your continued existence as relevant entity.
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[Question]
[
**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
Is this physically possible?
**A non-technological phenomenon visible in the same position of the sky, for 18 hours of a day using the other 6 to do whatever, rise and set, just be impossible to see, it doesn't matter.**
**What matters is the 18 hours of constant position in the sky, on a repeating cycle.**
**For an observer that is assumed to be watching from the same place, each cycle.**
**The viewer's planet is not Earth, just has enough similarities for humans to live on it.**
---
If it is possible, how complex a system would I need to make such a thing happen, and how stable would that system be?
The cause can be in the atmosphere, as long as it cycles, and has the same visibility.
I'd like planets, but if that's not possible, then use whatever is possible.
[Answer]
It's physically possible.
Put a spherical object in a geostationary orbit, make it rotate about its own axis at a rate suited to your own visibility/non-visibility requirements, and make a portion of it have very low albedo.
Staying at a single point in the sky, the object will only be visible while the higher albedo portion is facing the planet and become invisible while the low albedo portion rotates into view.
It could technically happen by chance but would only be stable for as long as the orbit is stable, which really depends on your planetary system.
[Answer]
You didn't say how far up in the sky you need your object and what type of object you want, so I suggest the plume of a volcano.
Some volcanos and geysers are quite regular in their eruptions. Your volcano will erupt not long after midnight every 24 hours and emit only a short burst of gaseous matter and fine dust-like particles that will drift upward in the still air and remain visible for 18 hours, until the evening wind scatters the cloud and it disappears.
If the eruption is just a short puff, the plume will be a small near-spherical cloud, as this one over Popocatepetl:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PEswm.jpg)
Etna even does smoke rings:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/278tL.jpg)
[Answer]
A **geostationary satellite** follows an orbit which keeps it over the same point on the Earth.
<https://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/how-to-see-and-photograph-geosynchronous-satellites/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QiWzV.jpg)
The streaks are stars which are elongated by the rotation of the earth and the long exposure. The satellites are rotating with the earth and so they look like dots. I was surprised that the satellites this blogger photographed did not track out an analemma like the sun, but he says they stay put.
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> Unlike the ISS and the many objects in low Earth object, geostationary
> satellites are visible all night long every night of the year.
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Satellites are technological objects but a thing can be in orbit and not be technological.
If something were bright and in orbit you might be able to see it all the time. You could have it get bright alternately. With satellites these are called satellite flares.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare>
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> Satellite flare, also known as satellite glint, is the visible
> phenomenon caused by the reflective surfaces of passing satellites
> (such as antennas, SAR or solar panels), reflecting sunlight toward
> the Earth below and appearing as a brief, bright "flare".
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The satellites that are famous for this apparently rotate so as to present their reflective surfaces. Something in orbit could be slowly rotating, and when the non reflective side was presented it would seem to disappear to the viewer on the ground.
[Answer]
**The Sun of a tidally locked planet, eclipsed by its Moon.**
Your people live on a [tidally locked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking) planet. The Sun is always in the same spot in the sky.
(Traditionally such planets' habitable zones form a ring with the Sun near the horizon, for practical reasons)
Six hours per day, the Moon passes over, eclipsing it.
Caveats:
* The eclips's start and end are not instantaneous
* The satellite would have to be huge and/or very close for a 25% cover. You'd have to crunch the numbers to see if the system is feasible gravitationally.
[Answer]
This is the equation you are looking for:
$$T^2GM=4ùúã^2R^3$$
[This is Kepler's third law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s_laws_of_planetary_motion), and it correlates mass, semi-major axis length and orbital period.
For a geostationary orbit, you have a circle with a radius of approximatelly 40,000 km. Notice, however, that what the law actually states is that:
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> The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
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Starting from a perfect circular orbit, you can make it elliptical. As long as you keep a semi major axis as long as the radius of a geostationary orbit, your satellite's orbital period will be 24h - but it will have a periapsis much closer to Earth, and an apoapsis much farther. It will look like this:
Bodies always spend more time closer to the apoapsis than closer to the periapsis. That's because their orbital speed is at its maximum at the periapsis and at its lowest in the apoapsis.
Just fine tune the eccentricity of the satellite to spend a quarter of its time closer to tje Earth on the day side and you're all set.
[Answer]
**The Coandă effect** [(Wiki)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coand%C4%83_effect)
It's the effect that allows a ping-pong ball to float in a hair dryer. The air clings to the rounded surface of the ball and air pressure magic keeps it in the jet, while the force of the jet itself keeps the ball afloat.
Replace the ball with a sufficiently shaped object (a smooth rock or something) and the hair dryer with a gaseous vent of sufficient strength and you can plausibly get yourself a rock floating (mostly) stationary in the sky for as long as the vent spews. If you want the rock to be higher in the sky, you can put the whole construct on top of a hill and view it from the foot of the hill or some distance away.
[Answer]
While geostationary satellites are the ideal, and obviously-correct answer if orbital altitude is permissible, they don't work so well in higher latitudes.
For these there's a less-stationary but still viable option: a highly elliptical inclined orbit such as a [Molniya Orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit) or [Tundra Orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra_orbit), which are designed to give a high dwell time over the area of interest.
This will appear to trace a "γ" gamma-shape in the air, slowing down to essentially stationary and then reversing in the loop:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SAiWH.jpg)
It spends 2/3 of its time in the small eye of that tail - *for the geostationary Tundra orbit, that's the 18 hours you asked for*.
With two or more satellites following this same orbit (a "constellation"), you get essentially constant coverage.
If, because of angling of solar panels or something, the satellites are only visible at certain times, such as at the apogee (the very tip of the gamma tail) they can then essentially look like a single stationary object, that periodically blinks out briefly and then turns back on (slightly to one side of where it turned off, but you'd have to be very accurately monitoring it to notice that).
The requested gap of a few hours could either be due to a gap in the constellation, or because to be visible they require the sun to be shining on them, and they are in the earth's shadow at that time.
However, for these to be non-technological would be a stretch. A highly elliptical orbit is feasible though unlikely for a single object, but multiple objects in a constellation, not so much. So, the tricks to make it seem extremely stationary won't work.
Against the sun or stars, though, a single object in a Tundra orbit would appear essentially stationary, rising, hanging there, and setting at the same horizontal position.
Without solar panels, it'd need to be very high albedo - clean white or perhaps crystal?
[Answer]
**The planet of a tidally locked satellite.**
Your people live in a satellite tidally locked to a gas giant, around a red dwarf.
Similar to, and inspired by (hover to show spoiler)
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> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Asimov_novel)>
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The gas giant looms huge and fixed in the sky. It completely eclipses the star for six hours a day, the "day" being a revolution of the satellite around the gas giant. Having no inner light, it disappears to the naked eye while not illuminated by the star.
When the satellite is between the planet and the star, the planet is still illuminated, as the satellite is too tiny to eclipse anything.
[Answer]
**Polaris** already does this, at certain places on the Earth and at certain times of the year.
The title asks for an object while the body asks for a [sic] 'phenomena'; to lean towards the latter we might also entertain:
**A rainbow** -- you might need to fiddle with the atmosphere a bit, but I think this could be arranged; I might guess something like this already occurs on Earth near waterfalls or that sort of thing.
**The auroras** -- by which I mean the aurora borealis and the aurora australis -- it seems likely to me that you could fiddle enough with a planet, its magnetic field, and its sun to make these visible 18 hours a day, at least on some parts of the planet. They do tend to take up quite a large segment of the sky.
[Answer]
[Lenticular wave clouds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_cloud) stay in place, relative to the mountain, ridge or other topographic feature that creates them, and they can persist as long as the conditions are favorable. On Earth, around the summer solstice at the right latitude (e.g. [London](https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/london), 51.5 degrees North), you can have around 18 hours of combined daylight and civil twilight for almost a month (depending on how precise it needs to be -- note that the length of daylight does not change rapidly from day to day around the solstices), so the visibility requirement seems feasible. You could even posit a diurnal weather pattern in which, for example, the wind dies down overnight, causing the cloud to dissipate, only to re-form as the wind picks up in the morning. With this approach, you can separate the duration issue from the hours of daylight, if you assume the cloud is visible against the stars, or your planet has sufficient moons (or bright enough stars, in a globular cluster or near a galaxy's center) that it is never fully dark at night.
Continuing with the meteorological theme, consider also the [Catatumbo lightning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning) - towering clouds by day, lit up by lightning at night, confined to a specific and relatively small geographic area, and on a diurnal cycle. From the Wikipedia article:
>
> Italian geographer Agustin Codazzi described it: "like a continuous
> lightning, and its position such that, located almost on the meridian
> of the mouth of the lake, it directs the navigators as a lighthouse."
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Lenticular clouds, unfortunately (for your purpose), are not likely to generate lightning, but maybe it's not too much of a stretch...
[Answer]
Make Mars go a little faster. Instead of ever seeming to move retrograde for a few months, it just seems to stop for about a day. Decrease their orbital periods and it happens as often as you want.
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I can imagine a **hot-air balloon type creature** (similar to what Sagan imagined a living creature on Jupiter might look) that sits up however high you want in the atmosphere but periodically comes down to feed or rest (maybe it feeds on microbes high up in the atmosphere or has ultra stable DNA which allows it to live in higher radiation environments). If you're worried about it blowing around, just make it have an adaptation where it can track itself relative to the ground and is territorial.
[Answer]
Since all the other answers are super-large scale, let's go with something a little smaller (as the question doesn't state that the same object must be visible at all places on the planet or even region).
# Birds and Heat Vents
Imagine you have a bird (-like) creature, which can fly for extended periods of time, and is pretty communal. These birds have a very long range, but nest in large groups. Specifically, they've learned to build their nesting colonies around *natural hot air vents* (whether these are caused by volcanic activity, burning seams of coal, gigantic sleeping creatures, whatever). For a significant portion of the day, a constant column of these birds can be seen rising on the thermals produced by the vent at the center of their colony.
After rising on this natural vent (lots of free altitude), they break off formation, gliding away and using their keen eyesight to catch some prey before diving for dinner. They may bring some food back if you want, or something else that causes them to stay in packs (maybe they're pack hunters, something raven-sized that eats adult deer, and carry that back to the nest).
The constant column of birds leaving the nest from before dawn until after dusk would be a fixed sight, they'll always need to eat, and it even opens up some interesting plot (the bird column isn't out today?!?!?).
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[Question]
[
Many ancient religions place value on dying in combat. For example, in Norse mythology, [only those slain in battle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valhalla) are able to enter Valhalla.
In this alternate universe, a the population of a small European country (population around 3 million) still strongly holds this belief. However, after the world wars there are not really wars in the immediate area. Due to the media attention many have realized war is hell, especially modern warfare. They also realize there can be incredible benefits to being friends with ones neighbors rather than at war with them all the time.
The population still strongly believes that combat is necessary for a place in the afterlife.
How would you build a society to maximize the number of people dying in combat without harming the economy, innocents, foreign relations, or visitors from other countries that might not share their belief?
Note that it's been a while since WWII so over time many approaches could have been tried. As the societal climate changed the method might have osculated between hard violence because that is glorious and more "technically counts" approaches at times where the generals opinions drifted the other way. Eventually, they might completely resolve the conflict and stop altogether.
[Answer]
## Gladiatorial combat
When someone approaches retirement age but is still healthy enough to carry a weapon, they go to a coliseum and fight other senior citizens to the death. And if they win, they fight another one and another until they lose. Those who are particularly good fighters and don't find a worthy opponent among their peers might have the honor to fight a duel with a professional young gladiator who will (hopefully) best them and send them off to Valhalla. And should they win against that gladiator as well, they can have his job until they have a bad day and someone finally manages to kill them.
Watching grandpa and grandma having their glorious death in the arena could be an important event for all their friends and family.
Does it harm the economy? Organizing the fights and paying the running cost of the coliseum will cost money. But an afternoon in the arena is going to be a lot cheaper than decades of consuming retirement funds, healthcare and elderly care. So from a purely economic standpoint it's probably a much better solution when people kill each other before they become a net-negative for the economy.
Does it harm innocents? Everyone who enters the arena does so voluntarily, and they do so with the intention to not survive the event. So no. The only bad blood that could come from it could be someone dishonoring their family by not fighting well enough.
Does it harm foreign relations? Other nations could see this custom as barbaric, but in the end it's an internal matter that doesn't affect them, so they have no reason to intervene.
Does it harm visitors from other countries? Heck, it could even be a tourist attraction (if the presence of uninvited outsiders is culturally appropriate).
[Answer]
## Election by combat
Possibly a bit of an out-there idea, but the whole political system in this country could be based upon combat rather than voting. If one wants to make a change to how the country is run, one could gather a following and enter battle against the current ruling party. The victor gets to rule.
It is common for older people to be set in their ways, and hold on to their older beliefs. This will almost always put them on the defending end, and allow them to lose when their life has run its course. If a young person agrees with them, they could join the defenders as well. There will never be a shortfall of discontent people, so the country will be in perpetual civil war. Especially if the fighting is considered honourable, people will always be able to join a side.
This will result in a constantly changing political climate where popular policies will be defended often, and unpopular ones toppled quickly by the majority. Many a death will be gloriously found in battle either way, and it will serve an actual cause rather than a near-meaningless ritualistic one.
The battles themselves don't have to be big. They could be regulated and highly gladiatorial. Just as long as they is always an option for whomever wants to participate.
Why I think this approach is viable:
* It allows people to enter at any time, not just be a case of "You're too old now, you can die."
* It gives meaning to the deaths, rather than a meaningless ritual that is no more than glorified euthanasia.
* It allows for battles on any scale, from individual duels to whole field battles where needed.
* It allows the country to have great outside relations, while still having the option for combat.
* It allows for the belief that war with other countries is bad, but fighting in combat is glorious. As long as it's done internally.
[Answer]
## Export Mercenaries/PMCs for 'Peace' Missions
In the world today, there are many battlefields where a wide consensus in the international community (but not total unanimity) would support the deployment of properly trained, properly led peace *enforcement* mission. Nobody in 'the West' wants to deploy their *own* citizens to die in Yemen, or in the Congo, or Haiti. But they might subsidize PMCs from your fictional country.
There is the question if suicidal berserkers are the right troops for that, but perhaps the right culture and social expectations might help. The religious doctrine demands *death in combat* only, social consensus demands *death in a good cause defending innocents.* Citizens who lived to a good middle age, still fit but starting to decline, can volunteer for their *'final deployment.'* They form their own squads or platoons in the companies, and get called in whenever a *heroic* death in combat would support the mission.
So the expeditionary forces of this country have established a reputation for getting the job done, relatively cheaply because they can substitute courage/casualties for heavy armor and medevac aircraft.
[Answer]
Turn the combat into a ritual, where the soon to be dead person performs the ritualized combat and goes toward their death as a rite of passage.
Think of something like a capoeira dance, leaning more toward the dance than the actual combat. For a bystander not in the known, it would look just like another bizarre ritual. For the practitioner, it will be a good way to die.
[Answer]
The first real problem is defining what "death by combat" actually means. Obviously, if Joe got stabbed or shot by an enemy combatant and immediately died from his wounds, Joe died in battle. What if Joe was stabbed and died from sepsis two weeks later, does that count? If it wasn't a human but an animal that Joe was fighting, would that count? What if Joe were not actively fighting, but was shot by a sniper?
With the right definitions, it turns out that most deaths can be declared a battle; heart disease and cancer are already called "fights", so it's an easy step from there to calling cancer and heart disease enemies. If dying to an animal counts, then perhaps dying to a viral, bacterial, fungal, or parasitic infection should also count.
Beyond that, however, you have sudden deaths, like tripping and falling, or dying in an automobile accident; in this case, you could go for the long shot and preemptively declare war on gravity and hard surfaces, just to be safe. When Grandma dies after a nasty fall down the stairs, she was killed by an enemy combatant. Avenge her by replacing that bit of carpet at the top of the stairs!
However, not everyone will take the admittedly liberal stance of "cancer and gravity are enemy combatants." The solution is a simple one: a battle to the death. In the old days, if grandpa was feeling old and weak, he could challenge some strong swordsman to a fight to the death, and would usually lose. Grandpa goes to Valhalla, everyone is happy. These days, though, there are a lot fewer swordsmen around, and not all of them would accept a challenge from a frail old geezer.
Instead, today, people would undergo a *virtual* challenge, one that nonetheless results in their death. In the case of surgeries or other operations that could result in death, as part of the paperwork, the patient declares a battle with the surgeon; if the surgery fails, the patient has lost the battle. If someone is sick, old, or otherwise on the verge of death, they are hooked up to a machine. The machine is a simple battle; they press a button to "attack", and if they fail to attack before a timer counts down, the machine (the enemy) injects them with something that knocks you out and kills you, painlessly and quickly. The battle rages on until either the patient recovers (in which case the machine is removed), or the patient loses.
Finally, a part of every emergency medical staff's toolkit is a (blunt) knife and a sword. Just before declaring time of death, the EMT will shove the knife into the patient's hand, yell, "He's got a knife!", and run him through with the sword. Just in case.
[Answer]
This is a slight frame challenge: What happens to women?
In medieval societies, even those as egalitarian as the Vikings, most women did not die in battle. They died of age if they were lucky (just like the men) or of childbirth if they weren't. (For this reason, there was, in fact, a third afterlife in Norse mythology, headed by Freya, for those who didn't die in battle but still died honorably, but I digress.)
But in the society that you built, what happens to women? Some of them might train up to become soldiers, but many would stay in the home, bearing children and running the household. They and their husbands would want them to go to Valhalla, so how do we get around this? Easy: recast childbirth as a glorious battle! It's not that hard, childbirth is excruciatingly painful and the result, if successful, is a glory worthy of Valhalla! It also takes care of all the babies who don't survive the process: they died in the first battle anyone fights, the fight to be alive!
Then of course there's the fact that most people who died in battle (including the battle of childbirth) didn't actually die in battle, they died of diseases contracted during it. What of them? Easy: the disease is the result of a terrible demon of Hel, trying to take you before you can die gloriously! Unfortunately for her, the gods have decreed this fight itself is a glorious battle worthy of Valhalla! Take that, Hel! With this mindset, the Black Plague is Hel and her forces fighting dirty and attacking civilians. And with that precedent set, all outbreaks of disease become glorious battles in their own right.
As medicine evolves and gives us better tools to both defend and fight against these "demons of Hel", many others might get folded into this. Cancer? A demon of Hel has taken a particular grudge against you and declared a duel to the death! Depression? Everyone knows the quickest way to disband an army is to crush its morale! Syphilis? An insidious campaign to destroy the very thing that Hel abhors the most! By the time the World Wars roll around, so many diseases have been recast as "glorious battles" that adding simple old age to the list wouldn't bat an eye.
It may cause a lot of posturing to "cure" it among the people in charge, though. After all, there can't be a glorious battle if there's no *battle*, now can there?
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## The Old Warrior Accepts an Impossible quest
When the Warrior reaches a certain age and are still alive - they decide to undertake an Impossible quest. One where the outcome is almost certain Death (We'll get to that in a minute).
It would start with a Living Funeral, The relatives come and celebrate their life, say nice things, wills are read and property dispersed.
The Warrior then reads aloud what the quest will be and why they expect to die. Could be to go hunt a Lion with just bare hands, could be to go take on the organized crime syndicate, could be a pedophile ring - the point is there is always Evil in the world for good people to confront.
Then the Warrior sets off - the Relatives believe that the warrior is already dead...
And in most cases they are - they have gone to meet their gods with a blade in their hand, a warcry in their throats and the fury in their hearts.
Honor is maintained and a place in Valhalla is assured...
Except in some exceptional instances, they survive and actually complete their task. This is rare - but is a cause for celebration - an Evil in this world has been vanquished - however the Old Warrior who accepted this Death Quest has survived.
This is where it gets interesting - one possibility is that they keep accepting Death Quests until they die - but that's kinda lame.
They believe that in facing certain death, not fleeing or flinching and coming out victorious is guarantee of a place in Valhalla. These special few are honored by the Government and then they take part in ritual combat - It is unlikely they will survive as they will be outnumbered by members of the Military - but should they refuse to die - they are allowed to grow old.
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# Ban cars
Everyone is gonna have to use public transport. Cars cause too many deaths, and you can't risk the loss of the afterlife with that. If someone dies in a car accident, they're not dying in glorious combat with an enemy.
# Have routine heart check ups and free healthcare
You don't want someone dying quickly because of a heart failure. You generally want to have a lot of health awareness. You don't want to risk anyone getting a disease that would stop them dying an honourable death. If the disease gets too far, they risk their death being miscategorized.
# Have strong health and safety regulations
Accidents happen, especially in our modern industrial economy. If someone gets sliced in half by a factory machine, they're not dying in combat. You want very firm regulations to ensure factories are safe, unlike the blood red blades of our enemies.
# Have meaningful combat for the elderly.
The big risk with a lot of the other approaches is the gods won't see it as valid combat. If you have a gladiator arena, is that really combat, or just a mock training? You need real combat that matters.
As such, make the provision of public services dependent on combat and raids. Give each family and community a flag, or several, and arrange capture the flag fights for those who are old enough or sick enough to be at risk of death.
Want to get a pothole fixed, or a regulation changed to help your clan? Then die gloriously in combat, and you can tell Odin that you fought for your people, you raided and died honourably for your people.
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**Redefine what "combat" means.**
This may not work for the story you're working on, but my immediate instinct is that a tension like this would like be solved by society broadly redefining what the word "combat" means, exactly. Here are a few options off the top of my head:
1. **Combat becomes a symbolic funereal ritual.** This echoes the answer by @L.Dutch, of course. As models, consider: martial arts that evolve to become merely sporting, theatrical performance, or exercise; e.g., [Tai Chi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_chi). Or the [kirpan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirpan) sword that Khalsa Sikhs are obligated to wear; in some places this becomes merely symbolic, e.g. NYC public schools permit them if glued in the sheath, which most people for practical purposes would consider non-dangerous. One could imagine the priest giving last rites or the funeral director making a mock pin-prick or something, and declaring that to suffice.
2. **Combat can be against abstract concepts.** It is in reality quite common to use [war as a metaphor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor), e.g., consider existing phrases such as a "customs war", "trade war", "war on crime", etc. One could say that a particular person devoted their professional life to combating a problem, a competitor's business, a disease, etc., and in so spending their life, has succeeded in reaching the end of it while in combat. (N.B., I'm borrowing this idea from the 1980's RPG *Star Frontiers*, where this idea is a prominent part of the culture of the Yazirian alien race.)
3. **Combat is considered to be open-ended.** When exactly is a person "in" combat, and when does it exactly end, anyway? Is it exactly when the blow is struck, when the threat abides, a certain distance away, after a rest/recovery period, etc.? The culture may evolve to say that as long as you can remember a combat, then you're still mentally/spiritually "in" it. Say everyone is obligated to military duty for a year at a young age, and at least engages in hand-to-hand training or boxing or something. Then they are encouraged to reflect/meditate on that on a weekly basis, say. So we are "in" a spiritual state of combat perpetually, and satisfy the requirement at whatever the time of death is. Compare to the Marxist/Trotskyist concept of the [permanent revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution).
4. **Combat means something very different than we normally think.** An argument from [etymology](https://www.etymonline.com/word/combat): the word "combat" comes from the Latin *com*, "with, together", and *batuere*, "to beat, strike". So we argue it literally means "to strike together", i.e., in a team jointly. We direct people to go out in pairs and break rocks, beat a dirty rug, or attend a bowling league on a weekly basis, and you are so considered to be in a state of grace. This dictum even serves to build teams and communities, so there is some practical social value in it.
I'm sure there are many other ways this re-interpretation could happen.
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## Government-issued assassination
The authorities send mobs of “death officers” to track down people over 50 and kill them. Knowing their part, the victim, sorry, *patient*, resists, and so ends up dying in battle. This is also a great way to keep the population down, but that’s definitely not the point…at least that’s what the officials say.
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## Make it a one-sided ritual
Similar to @LDutch and #1 from Daniel R.Collins, make it a ritual. But only from the aspect of the attacker/social worker, not from the elder. The elder is meant to attempt his very best to kill his attacker, while his social worker is young and healthy and paid to kill the elder. He is trained to basically toy with the elder, letting him attack, giving him every opportunity to do damage, and in turn doing superficial damage to the elder to satisfy entry requirements. This continues until the limit that the local belief system requires for the entry into Valhalla, at which point the social worker finishes off the elder in a final blow.
So basically, the social worker **IS** going to kill the elder; that's already been contracted. The elder can get up and fight for his entry into Valhalla, or he can lay there. So as far as the elder is concerned, this is real and his immortal soul rests on the outcome.
The elder may die of heart failure or something during this, but that means they've put in enough effort to be true combat (and that someone in the main office waited too long to get the contract set up). The elder may also kill the social worker, but that's rare. When it does happen, the social worker is assumed to have screwed up (unless the elder is some legendary warrior, whose already killed several social workers before or something, in which case the agency starts sending more than one at a time), but still was killed in combat and will continue to Valhalla (and be laughed at by the other warriors most likely).
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**Moral cruscade.**
Choose a mafia group or crime group and people will fight them.
There's always somebody to fight. In every country you have car thieves, bicycle thieves, illegal drug dealers, illegal pimps, annoying neighbors, welfare frauds, people who feed pigeons in urban areas, people who don't pick up their dogs crap etc. People will simply fight whoever they consider bad or annoying.
When the nation becomes morally crystal clear due to natural selection, look at other countries. There's always a country with slavery, high carbon footprint, authoritarian leaders, corrupt officials, violence against children, or at least polluted air. So, people go there as tourists, acquire weapons and fight anybody who does something wrong.
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# Breed wolves, big cats, or an invasive wild predator species, and let the elderly "fight" them when necessary.
The big problem with trying to setup combat to have elderly people fight each other, or others, is the availability of people to be in the fights, and for gladiatorial fights, organizing an audience, or a referee. If the person's heart is failing early on, or their liver is failing, ideally they can get to a hospital, but...what if they don't have that time? Or they get to the hospital, and are going to be terminal?
## Enter life's natural gladiators; predators.
Humans breed dogs, cats, and all sorts of animals as pets, support animals, or as food sources; but what if we train animals to be wild predators, and train them to go after humans?
Well...we probably want them to be caged up, so they don't harm children growing up, but if we fence them off, and provide a gate of access to them, we could provide Instant Gladiator Arenas, Just Add Human!
Bonuses here:
1. You only have to have one human harmed at a time, and it'd be the one that wants to go to Valhalla *right now* - none of those "Post battle injuries" to heal up, freeing a lot of the medical staff;
2. The breeders don't need to be keeping *that* close an eye on the predators - only that they don't leave their cage, and that they're fed well enough to survive, but not enough to not snack on humans that wonder into their cage;
3. With the right packaging, you could have people in retirement rent one on their property until the moment they're *really* sure they won't make it.
You might even set-up an Instant Gladiator Arena right outside a hospital; that way, should the person start to abruptly flat-line, they can be shuffled out of the hospital, and left near the cage - instant combat scenario, DNR-approved! (Probably not doctor approved, given the Hippocratic Oath, but hospital administration might approve it, or palliative care.)
This could be so useful, that you could export it to other countries, perhaps in your countries' embassies; for those retirement individuals who want to go travelling the world, but still wish to "Die in combat."; You might want to keep a closer eye on who specifically is entering the Instant Gladiator Arenas there, though, to prevent international incidents.
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This is a slight frame challenge.
A society that abhors war can't have people dying in combat by the truckload, at some point that's just war by a different name. You mention that you're "trying to find a reasonably compromise" and so here's one.
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**What if, rather than dying in combat, the requirement was living in combat?**
And I don't mean surviving a deathmatch, I mean your culture could have a rich and essentially religious tradition of martial arts.
Some martial arts are heavily ritualised. Sumo for instance is more than a sport, it includes ritual Shinto elements and there is a heavy spiritual element to traditional sumo.
Your culture could have developped its own martial art, and derived spiritual elements from their original belief about death in combat. But in more modern times, rather than dying, their spirit is consecrated through a bout of combat. Win or lose, live or die, what matters is they participate earnestly.
Fighting could be a rite of passage. It could be part of the curriculum, a cross between physical education and a religious course. Pupils would learn the discipline, the rituals, the history, and the meaning of it all, and at a later age they would learn to fight, and be expected at some point to participate in a big festive tournament.
In that context, those who insist on dying by combat would be fundamentalists, and would be abhorred, because, as you might say, fighting to the death is hell.
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# Geriatric patients Combat
Instead of euthanasia and dying peacefully, the standard has become that old people or those with terminal illnesses engage in regular lethal competitive combat. They will all die eventually in these combats as they get beat up. Everyone wins, including the health care system.
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The world I am creating has flora and fauna based vaguely on that of Gondwana. As a result, there are no dogs, horses, or cows, and no domesticated animals of any sort. Having drawn my map and started building my civilizations, I want there to be trade across some expanses of desert. However, without any camels this would be tough.
Here are some specifics for the world that might be relevant:
* The desert treks don't necessarily have to be long, just a few hundred kilometers, but they'll cross all sorts of desert environments (sandy, rocky) in particular desert mountains. Oasis can be expected as frequently as here on Earth
* Technology level is bronze age.
* The desired goods to be moved are heavy. Bronzeworking and glasswork is most advanced in a part of the world isolated by deserts. Bronze tools and weapons and decorative glass would be very valuable trade items. Otherwise, the usuals (silk, spices, gems) would be transported as well.
* There are few large animals that could survive in the desert regions that humans might utilize. So far I only have ostrich-like ratites and megalania-like giant lizards. Neither is domesticated.
* Magic does exist, but in a *Conan* sort of way. Magicians could summon a creature of darkness to move a treasure across a desert, but this is hardly an option available to the average merchant.
**Given the constrains in this world, how can merchants move tons of merchandise across deserts?**
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**Relays**
*Not electronics, I mean, takeovers. No, I don't mean coup... just read...*
The basic idea is that to move the merchandise, it has to change hands many times across various small settlements, preferably around one day apart (considering the load to carry).
Now, of course, everybody along the way needs payment - at least the people who run the services on each settlement. That means that there must be a payment scheme for the transportation system, such that everybody gets its share.
How each settlement provides the transport service is up to them, and how much they request as payment is up to them too.
As long as you can hire them to move stuff to the next settlement, it does not matter if they use a magic invocation, a weird vehicle, and lots of human labor or whatever. This means that they can optimize for the terrain they have around them. **That is the key. You do not really need to find a single transportation mechanism that works for all terrains.**
*I like the [Sail chariots](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/78678/16729) idea, I up voted that, It could be one of many. Play it to its strengths.*
In addition, solutions that are efficient for a given environment probably will be popular among nearby settlements.
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I am basing this idea on the real world silk road(s). The merchandise did not move directly from the many manufactures to the buyers, instead merchants buy from the manufactures, and sell to other merchants, who sell to other merchants, and so on, until they reach the final user.
For this to work, you need to have goods that have a known demand. However, if we are talking about big projects (as the mentioned merchandise suggests) it is not as good idea to buy the merchandise, store it, and hope to sell it at a higher price.
This is also inspired by that mentality that economy can create things that the individual parts does not know how to. And idea presented in [I, Pencil](https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil-audio-pdf-and-html/), but just an example of emergent systems.
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Instead, I would suggest a different financial mechanic: The buyer offers to buy certain items, the providers and relay points organize to make a proposal to the buyer where they say how much it will cost to bring the merchandise, if the buyer agrees, they move the good. Perhaps pay in two parts, one before and one after the delivery.
You could consider changing the idea of offering to buy to a bounty. This only works when merchandise is small and has good demand. Otherwise, the risk and effort would be too much to put on and end up losing the bounty to a third party.
Similarly, a group stealing merchandise from another group in order to try to get to the buyer probably is probably hard to pull off. Doing it and getting away with it, probably implies to kill the people who were doing the service. Once you put them out of the business, you don’t have them to steal from them do you? If you want to continue to profit from this, you will have to take over the business. If this is a threat, you will put guards to protect the merchandise, and after a few iterations, the stronger group will have the monopoly.
I am saying that this is not an environment for competition, but for monopoly (only a few people keep the control of the transport routes, and they set the prices). Pretty much a cartel (just not a drug cartel, well [maybe](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78673/how-can-i-have-a-caravan-without-camels/78685?noredirect=1#comment227605_78685)).
Note: it does not have to be a private buyer noble, the buyer can be the government regent. Just consider these people to be contractors.
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**Sail chariots**
On Earth, we seldom have used terrestrial transport propelled by sails because, unlike sea winds, terrestrial winds are weaker, more turbulent and thus less constant and predictable, and also because of non-flat terrain. But hey, we're come here for the handwavium, haven't we?
Add constant, steady winds, and make your chariots sail the desert, either with wheels or skis. **EDITED:** Since you need to go through mountains, your handwavium must include canyons. Deep, narrow valleys carved by ancient rivers long time gone, or even because of the wind. Wind gets trapped in those canyons due to the thermal gradient between the sun-baked surface and the mostly shadowed bed of the canyon, thus provoking a tunnel effect of strong, steady winds. Probably even seasional, blowing inwards during the winter, outwards during the summer, so the caravans must follow the pattern of the wind.
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### They go round the desert
Whilst there are areas of the world where camels are key to transportation, there are nearly always alternative routes. And even with camels, areas such as the Sahara desert were completely impassible.
Is this a problem? Not really. Long-distance overland travel is a *really* modern invention. As late as the 19th century, if you wanted to get goods from northern England to southern England then you went to your nearest port and put them on a boat - you didn't even contemplate moving them by road. In Europe, everything travelled along the rivers. Indeed, the biggest transportation advance in the 18th and early 19th century was canals as an addition to natural waterways. Certainly there were people living out in the Maghreb who relied on their camels, but back in the day, all the serious traffic followed the Nile or followed the coast.
It's also not going too far to say that the only way people could live in the Maghreb is *because* they had camels. If you don't have camels, then you can't easily survive there, so the locations of towns will be limited to where there is sufficient water for crops and not too great a distance from the next town along (or at least the next oasis). Trade has to travel from one place to another place, and if there's no-one living there then no-one's going to travel for trade, so there's no reason for anyone to even try.
Horses and donkeys are nice, but they don't particularly speed up travel, because people walk alongside them. Mainly they just increase what you can carry. If we suppose that humans would domesticate *something*, even if it's not particularly desert-adapted, you'll get more efficient trade than simply sending a bunch of blokes with big packs on their backs. That'll keep the smaller frontier towns supplied. The larger towns will all be on coasts or rivers though.
In short, if you're planning a pre-industrial world with extensive overland trade, and you're not invoking magic or some special domesticated creature which makes things easier, then you're almost certainly not heading down a realistic path.
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What about hot air balloons? The earliest believed form of the balloons goes as far back as approximately 220 A.D.
Using torches or some other heat source they can heat up the air. The balloons themselves can be made from some sort of canvas or cloth material.
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Without any form of domesticated animal the only real option available is to make travelling across the desert easier for humans, at which point slaves/servants/just a normal workforce would be able to transport the goods.
My preferred solution?
**Infrastructure**
Given that you're building a new culture from scratch the lack of domesticated animals will have made itself felt a lot sooner. Lacking in animals to pull through difficult terrain it's not unreasonable to assume that humans would instead look towards modifying the terrain itself, pouring effort into establishing and maintaining easy-to-traverse trade routes. Roads, regular way-stations with wells, artificial waterways/canals, planting desert areas in order to establish solid terrain to trade through, tunnelling through or building bridges over dangerous mountain trails. Basically generations of traders building on each other's successes in order to expand the network of places it's easy to move from a-to-b through.
Once your infrastructure starts to be established trade will become a lot easier and, bizarrely, more profitable. If the first five people to try route A do nothing but establish five way stations with wells and a small inn then trader 6 will be able to rest (and trade at!) each of the way stations on their way to location B. Traders can be expected to arise doing nothing but supplying the trade stations, and if the routes are easy enough to traverse they can do so on foot, while heavier traders might use wheeled human powered conveyances. The traders might pay people to keep the network maintained, or it could be the waypoints that pay, or it could be a communal 'lets keep this working' kind of society.
Basically: Forget the nomadic style of caravans and move more toward established co-operative trade efforts (or machiavellian schemes and backstabbery). A trade network based on nothing but humans is going to take some serious ingenuity and time to establish, and will likely require an awful lot of maintenance.
Can anyone smell plot hooks?
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No domesticated beasts of burden implies that human slaves / serfs are the beasts of burden. Now the problem is that humans make poor beasts of burden, meaning that they eat too much, need special food (vitamins and [essential amino acids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid)) and drink too much water compared to their transportation capacity. (Humans are essentially apes, who evolved in an environment with lots of fruit and water, where their feeble kidneys, abundant transpiration and picky metabolism where not disadvantageous.) And BTW, there has never been a bronze-age culture without dogs and beasts of burden; you are inventing a culture from complete absolute scratch, there is nothing similar in our known history.
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I found something strange that might help. It's still in use today! **The Chinese Wheelbarrow**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iy8nC.jpg)
Here is a link to more information, if you care to go down the rabbit hole. [Chinese Wheelbarrow](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html)
OK, here's how this wonderful tech can be useful for you:
It can hold a substantial amount of mass.
It can be propelled by one guy (slave beast of burden).
It can be adapted to be pulled by the big ol' birds, once you work out how to train them without being kicked into next week!
The coolest thing is that *You Can Add Sails*!
The article says most of this much better than I can. The upshot is that it is a practical, low tech, method of transporting heavy loads for long distances, and it is primarily human powered. The large central wheel supports a large amount of mass without the operator having to expend a huge amount of effort lifting it every time you have to go somewhere. Skilled loading means you can balance the load in a way that whatever is on the front counters the load on the back so the net effort to lift by the operator could theoretically be almost null.
Another advantage is that with one large wheel in the center, this contraption is very nimble, able to move on narrow footpaths.
The large wheel also makes it easier to move this thing on bumpy terrain.
For the carrying capacity, it is very lightweight. Once unloaded, there is little more than a frame and a wheel. Easy enough for a couple of people to lift and carry.
Finally, these are so simple, they are cheap to build.
You will have some fairly obvious downsides though. You may be able to cross the kind of desert that has a lot of hard packed earth, but you are not going to go across sand-dunes.
Hills are going to suck, but then they sucked for covered, horse drawn wagons as well.
You might be able to get through swamps with care on a marked, established trail, but if you get a lot of mud, you will have to unload, pull the barrow out, and then reload.
It is also more than a little unstable side to side. If it tips, you might have to stop and repack your cargo.
I can now see a long line of burly slaves, pushing a line of these across the Arizona Desert, with sails erected. Moving swiftly towards the forest of Joshua Trees and Saguaro Cactus...
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**Slaves/Baggage Carriers**
This is kind of a boring answer, but it is the one that was used in real life. For a very long time the East African bush was impassible for domesticated animals due to the tsetse fly which would kill them almost immediately. During WW1, the allies invaded Tanzinea to drive out General Vorbeck. Since they couldn't use animals, and didn't have vehicles that could traverse the terrain, they would bring huge columns of baggage carriers with them to transport food/water/ammo/etc. The death toll among these workers was extremely high (far higher than for the soldiers, I recall hearing ~80% casualties in a college history class) due to exhaustion and disease.
Ultimately, it's not a terribly effective solution, but it is (sadly) tried and true. Plus, for a bronze age civilization it is by far the easiest to implement. That said, the effectiveness will rely on a readily available source of slaves, as this goes through them very quickly.
**Math**
A human could carry perhaps 80 lbs (a lot depends on distribution here, but let's go with this). Every day's worth of food and water requires ~8 lbs of that weight. This means they can travel 10 days across the desert to reach a destination (but with no cargo). Assuming 20 miles per day (roughly how fast historical armies could march), and you have a max range of 100 miles without access to food or water along the way. After that it becomes a question of how much cargo you can fit on. If there's an oasis every 50 miles, you can have each person carry ~40 lbs of trade goods. These estimates may be generous though, so feel free to reduce them a bit (maybe only 20-30 lbs).
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I'm leaning heavily to the unhelpful they don't. We make terrible beasts of burden out in the water scarse desert.
What about a pulling system? It won't be incredibly efficient I imagine. But hear me out. Each oasis has a small settlement. It has the water you need to work your human slaves. So why not move the burden of the work to the oasis? The mountain must come to Muhammad if Muhammad dies of thirst in the mountains.
So I envision some sort of sled or cart. On unpaved sandy roads a sled might work best. Attach on opposing sides a rope all the way to the next oasis. Now this likely requires a system of pulleys on poles. They could also be used to lighten the load of your pulling slaves a bit.
Your slaves walk and pull the rope till the sled reaches their settlement. It's then loaded on the next sled and possibly by smoke signaled to start the pulling on their end.
I'm not calling it effecient or easy. But I think it could work with high enough quality rope. Possibly hair or leather based?
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Gondwana existed until early [Jurassic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic) period.
We don't know if dinosaurs would be good to be domesticated, but for sure there were many that were suitable to work as beast of burden.
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[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archosaur#Hip_joints_and_locomotion)
This means that you probably had some animals with legs that really worked like horse or camel legs.
Of course these were (probably) a cold blooded animals (or at least, some of them was mostly cold blooded), but on the hot desert this doesn't really matter that much.
I can't find any specific example of desert species, but given that reptiles are reasonably common near modern deserts, and given that it's your world, your caravans [could be pretty epic](http://fav.me/dalch6v). Just beware, there already are many [examples of such rides](http://fav.me/d6aoxwg), so **this may not be novel enough for your purpose.** But still, it gets the job done.
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I think you provided the answer in your question.
If there are no suitable beasts of burden to carry the stuff, you could spend decades or centuries engaging in animal husbandry to get one (which doesn't help in the meantime), use large trains of people to carry stuff (which is very sub-optimal, for reasons mentioned in lots of other answers), *not* transport the goods, or fall back on magic in some capacity.
As you say:
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To which I'd ask, "why not"? If there are magicians available, and no other viable method of moving large quantities of heavy good across inhospitable terrain, that's all that's left, as far as options go. Magicians need gold (or money or whatever) to finance their studies into the dark arts/world domination plans/attempts at undead immortality/etc., and merchants need a way to transport their goods. Merchants pay magicians to provide magical beats of burden, magicians get the money they need. That's the whole foundation of commerce and free enterprise - people exchanging goods and services to their mutual benefit.
There's no reason that it shouldn't apply to the Magical Transportation as a Service industry in your world, and in fact, the lack of other good options strikes me as a fantastic business opportunity for magicians. Why stir up the locals into lynching you by summoning demons and such to enslave them when you can make a fortune providing transportation services for the merchant class instead? Seems easier, safer and more profitable to me, at least.
[Answer]
**Unfortunately they cannot. Nor would it be likely that advanced technologies would develop in an isolated community.**
The scenario you present really leaves a single option. Human transport. You could potentially augment that with carts etc, but that would require significant infrastructure, namely roads.
* Humans can walk between 20 and 30 miles (32-48 km) per day, but that would be carrying no more than necessary.
* At 200 - 300 km that works out 124 - 186 miles which means at an average, **unburdened** pace you are looking at a **minimum of 4 days and max of around 9 days**.
Here's where the problem starts. Carrying enough water for 4 - 9 days in the desert is going to be difficult. Especially when you consider [this](https://www.seeker.com/how-much-water-do-you-need-to-survive-in-the-desert-1765377273.html). As should be obvious the higher the temperature and the harder the work, the more you sweat, the more you sweat the more water you require.
* [A person who weighs 200 pounds who has been active for a mere 40 minutes in high temperatures does indeed need about 120 ounces of water - about a gallon.](https://www.tripadvisor.com/Travel-g32725-c122222/Mojave:California:Staying.Hydrated.In.The.Desert.html)
* A gallon of water weighs 3.78 kilograms/8.34 lbs.
* You would have to **carry somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 gallons** of water for a grand total of 45 kilos/100 lbs of water.
* That's a lot of water.
The only way this is going to be possible/practical is if water is constantly available in your desert, which is a little counter intuitive.
A couple options
* The trade routes follow a river (the Nile as an example)
* Regular almost daily access to oases though you could probably have some two day spans.
[Answer]
## **Short Answer:**
Apples.
## **Long Answer:**
I will tell you the tale of how the Great Tradeway came to be. Many aspects of culture will be explained in the process - the Water Festival, the Bargain, the tribute paid every winter solstice at the bronze statue of the Mad Wizard, and the enduring symbol of the Great City - Copperopolis of Gondwana.
Legend has it the Mad Wizard was originally from the city across the sand. He crossed the great desert to our city of Copperopolis to study magic. Everyone knows Copperopolis is the center where fabulous things are built and wondrous crafted items are easy to come by.
(Incidentally, do you know how hard it is to get a shadow demon to carry a box of precision-crafted glass beakers GENTLY across the desert? After receiving one’s fourth or fifth crate of broken glass, serious students of wizardry give up and relocate to Copperopolis. Sure, it’s in the middle of nowhere, but there’s something about that sand that makes the best glass.)
Time went by and the Mad Wizard’s power grew, but he was unhappy. He missed his homeland. He had grown up in the lush vales on the other side of the desert and was used to eating fresh apples at all times of the year. In Copperopolis, there were no apples to be had.
He frequently sent his shadow demons across the desert to the apple orchards, and they brought him crates of the treasured fruit. But his dissatisfaction grew with each trip. Surely this sort of menial work was beneath him! With all his power and knowledge, surely he could come up with a better solution than to waste his precious magic on breakfast!
Other wizards, less canny wizards, have used their magic to rule as tyrants over the villagers. Such cruel wizards solve their problems through force and fear. The Mad Wizard was not a kind man, but he was wise. He didn’t want to waste his time ruling a kingdom any more than he wanted to waste his magic using shadow demons as fruit vendors. He chose to cooperate with the non-wizard inhabitants of the city.
He called together the greatest merchants, the best craftsmen, the most reknowned cartographers, and together they formed a plan. The route was planned, the Bargain struck.
That fall, once the harvests were in, teams of builders set out across the sand. They built a waystation a mere four hours’ walk into the desert. They dug great pits deep in the sand, down where the sun could not reach. Water carriers brought them sustenance from the town, crossing to the work site at night and returning to their homes before the sun rose. Meanwhile, the local potters were busy crafting vast pottery cisterns. Once the pits were dug, a wooden framework was built around each cistern with carrying poles. It took twelve people working together to lift each cistern. Teams of workers hauled each cistern out to the work site and placed them in the pits. The builders then crafted a simple stone shelter over the pit, protecting the cisterns from dust and sun.
That night was the very first Water Festival. Everyone in Copperopolis gathered together. Each able-bodied person brought some dried provisions and the biggest flask of water they could carry. They walked out to the waystation, gave the provisions to the laborers, poured their flasks into the cisterns, and returned to the city before dawn. Meanwhile, those unable to make the journey remained in the city and cooked a great feast for the water carriers. Upon their return at dawn, the whole city held a marvelous celebration.
From the first waystation, the builders moved another four hours’ walk into the desert and dug a second pit. Each night, water carriers moved between the new work site and the newly-complete waystation, bringing food and water to the workers. Each night, water carriers would bring water from the city to the first waystation to replenish the cisterns. The pits were completed and new cisterns were brought to the second waystation. These were slowly filled via flasks carried from the first waystation.
The builders advanced another four hours’ walk and began their work again. In this fashion, the first oasis was reached. Then the second, the third, and so on. The path became well marked with stone markers at regular intervals, and stamped flat by thousands of feet. Soft sections of sand were reinforced with timber and gravel. Work on the Great Tradeway halted during the planting and harvesting season, then began again every Fall Equinox.
It took years to complete.
Finally, when the last chasm was bridged and the last waystation complete, the Great Tradeway was ready for use. Merchants at both cities gathered together every wheeled conveyance at their disposal, loaded them high with goods, and pulled them across the desert. They carried little water with them, as the cisterns were kept well stocked by the water carriers stationed at each city and each oasis.
The first carts arrived at Copperopolis, stuffed to the brim with apples. The Mad Wizard selected the juciest crate for himself and gave the rest to the city. Every inhabitant received at least a few. Now, this may not seem like much of a reward nowadays, but back then only the wealthiest merchants ever saw fresh fruit from the vale across the sand.
Every fall, after the harvest, is the Water Festival. It has grown considerably since the first one. Now, teams of runners sprint across the sand in a great race to stock the cisterns with cartloads of water. Long-distance runners compete to be first to stock the most distant waystations. There is great honor in winning the race. The Dawn Feast has grown in size and reputation, eventually becoming a week-long festival. The Mad Wizard has long since passed on, but they still honor his memory with a tribute of apples at the base of his statue at the start of each trading season. Every inhabitant of Copperopolis still receives a share of the first cart of apples across the desert.
And this is why the symbol of endurance in the face of great challenge - the symbol of Copperopolis overcoming any obstacle - is an apple.
## **Footnotes:**
Eventually this road could be replaced by a series elevated canals built out of cement. They pump water through it by use of a series of water towers and Archimedes’ Screws. They float barges through the flat parts, build a road through the mountain parts. Once the Great Tradeway became well established, the engineers and merchants would try to improve the system, and this might be a natural evolution of the route.
## Bibliography:
Bedouin using underground concrete cisterns to store water in the desert, sometime between 6500 BC and 700 BC:
International Association of Certified Home Inspectors: *The History of Concrete* by Nick Gromicko and Kenton Shepard <https://www.nachi.org/history-of-concrete.htm>
A real-world example of a civilization using the power of teamwork to build 25,000 miles’ worth of highway through the Andes Mountains (the Capac Ñan) without iron tools or draft animals:
Smithsonian Journeys Quarterly: *The Inca Road, How the Inca Empire Engineered a Road Across Some of the World’s Most Extreme Terrain* by Hannah Bloch
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-inca-empire-engineered-road-would-endure-centuries-180955709/?utm_source=smithsonianhistandarch&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=201507-hist&spMailingID=22963197&spUserID=NzU3NjY0OTQzOTMS1&spJobID=600087191&spReportId=NjAwMDg3MTkxS0>
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage Center’s entry for the Capac Ñan (Qhapaq Ñan):
<http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1459>
Wikipedia article for Archimedes’ Screw, which was actually in use 350 years before Archimedes lived. This screw was originally cast in bronze and was used to pump water uphill, theoretically used to water the Hanging Gardens of Babylon:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_screw>
[Answer]
Cartage, pushed/pulled by human labor.
Most of the suggestions regarding using humans for transport assume individual porters carrying individual loads. However, you stated that your technology is roughly Bronze Age. The wheel did exist during the Bronze Age; in fact, chariots were used, according to [this article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot) from Wikipedia:
>
> The horse chariot was a fast, light, open, two-wheeled conveyance drawn by two or more horses that were hitched side by side, and was little more than a floor with a waist-high guard at the front and sides. It was initially used for ancient warfare during the Bronze and Iron Ages; but, after its military capabilities had been superseded by cavalry, as horses were gradually bred to be bigger, the chariot was used for travel, in processions, for games, and in races.
>
>
>
The carts would allow teams of humans to pull more than the sum of their individual carrying capacities.
The critical question is whether wheels would work in the type of desert you've designed. Considering that when you use the words "the desert," most people assume a sandy desert, such as the Sahara, probably not. However, alternatives might exist, such as:
* Sledges.
* Wider wheels. Essentially lay a barrel on its side and use it for a wheel to provide flotation on the sand; depending on the desert, the teamsters pulling the cart might also need to use sandshoes (snowshoes) to give themselves better flotation and reduce their effort.
* Tracked vehicles. See my description of "wider wheels," and then wrap a bronze-age track around them, again, made from overlapping planks, bark, or some other available substance.
To get around the issue of supplies, caravan routes would likely have semi-permanent camps or waypoints not more than a day or two apart. As someone mentioned earlier, they might also not be straight routes, instead following routes from oasis to oasis, if such exist.
# Update
Note that, prior to posting this answer, I had missed [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/78734/9291), which proposed the [Chinese wheelbarrow](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/78734/9291).
[Answer]
Paid Labourers, if they can build the pyramids they can transport goods across a desert.
**Edit:**
Paid labourers are capable of moving tons of goods across long distances, and can be made to carry water where necessary. Nothing else needs to be said really, it's the obvious answer considering the limitations stated in the question.
Failing that, use slaves.
] |
[Question]
[
In light of the recent societal reckoning about and large scale protests against systemic racism, how would a space agency (or other entity) go about selecting individuals to colonize other planets or moons in order to avoid starting a space colony plagued by racism itself?
**Assumptions**
1. We're considering humans from Earth colonizing nearby planets or moons; *e.g.* the Moon, or Mars
2. In the relatively near future, say, 50-100 years from now
3. The colonists number in the hundreds to low thousands
4. The colonizers would be sent by some space agency already in existence or by a collaboration of several space agencies that already exist
5. The racial demographics of the colonizers must be approximately the same as the nation(s) they represent, in that choosing only individuals of a certain race is not a valid solution
[Answer]
Any group of humans can, over time, develop a sense of "us" vs "them". Racism is only one type of this behavior. Even if all of your colonists were to be identical clones, the possibility for this type of behavior exists. "Racism" could even be manifest as a hatred of / discrimination against newcomers to the colony.
To combat this, you need to develop some kind of cultural behavior or religion that cautions against this kind of behavior. Some kind of "karma" might work. You have to be careful with religion - it can work very well to instill a sense of some higher power punishing those who do discriminate, but religions can also lead to wars, so....
As racism can crop up over time, it's more than careful selection of who goes initially, and more careful selection of how the local government on the station will run. If someone feels discriminated against, will they have a fair hearing? Are there appropriate checks and balances to prevent one main group - or even just two - gaining power? Can the residents build a sense of overarching community?
You may also wish to consider the population size. Most humans can only sustain about 150 relationships (to some degree). Thus, if you stay below this, the probability of an "us vs them" mentality forming is smaller than if there were, say, 300 colonists. Further colonies should probably split off around this size. Also, be careful that the hierarchy of jobs on the ship does not become hereditary. This could be a further sticking point.
[Answer]
**Impossible**
My grandfather hated black people. Not a little bit. A lot. He was a racist. My father wasn't a racist, but was certainly biased. He's had excellent working relationships with people not like himself, but he also tends to use a phrase Grandpa used a lot whenever he hit his thumb with a hammer or encountered a difficult-to-solve problem. He'd call it a "cotton-picker." My siblings and I don't believe ourselves to be racist at all and we all have very productive relationships with people of all kinds of genders/identities, races, ethnicities, religions... (and consider the phrase "cotton-picker," and any phrase like it, to be abhorrent).
And yet I'd be an idiot not to recognize that I have basic biases. I obviously prefer to be around people who are a lot like me (especially if they tend to like my sense of humor).
I'm going to be blunt. Really blunt. I regret being blunt, but I'm neither apologetic nor repentant at all.
*Everybody has biases and everybody's first reaction to having those biases pointed out is to blame something/someone else. Only an idiot would believe it's possible to eradicate biases.*
As a younger man I used to think that all society had to do to completely resolve racism (and poverty, and a host of other social "diseases") was for humanity to mature a little bit. To "grow up."
I'm older now and though many (generally below the age of 40) will disagree, the reality is that bias (in its ugliest form, racism, or any other kind of "ism" that idiots will use to justify antagonism, hatred, violence, or even simple discrimination) is simply a part of life. It's why we have law — because without a framework to force us to behave differently, those biases tend to take over.
* 99.9% of us spend the first 12 years of our lives, arguably the most critical years when it comes to forming basic human relationships, looking at and living with people who look just like us, believe just like us, and act just like us (or, more accurately, we learn to act like them). The fact of families creates natural bias.
* 99.9% of us are fundamental creatures of habit. Even when we like change, most of us don't like the process of change. As a smoker, how hard it is to stop smoking? Now ask a white person above the age of 40 how comfortable they would be watching BET television? The problem isn't black actors (I'm a HUGE fan of a lot of black actors. Sidney Piotier, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Hallie Berry, Diahann Carroll, and Thandie Newton, to name a few), but the reality is that watching all-black television is uncomfortable — not because the stories aren't engaging or because I don't like black people, but because I'm simply not used to it. I, like everyone else, am a creature of habit.
And then, there's a fundamental truth expressed by a clever advertisement for the Sniper from the game Team Fortress 2:
>
> 'Cause at the end of the day, long as there's two people left on the planet, someone is gonna want someone dead.
>
>
>
The fundamental bases of all bias are anger, distrust, ambition, fear, and competition. You would need to eradicate all of those emotions/circumstances to eradicate racism.
*But you must eradicate human nature to do it.*
We all feel anger, distrust, ambition, fear, and are competitive, at many times during our lives. We aren't *racist* when we choose not to allow our reactions to these things to express themselves a *hatred* (in one form or another) toward someone else.
So, the reality is, if you stock your colony completely with 50% white 24-year-old women and 50% white 24-year-old men, all having the same political beliefs, religious beliefs, the same genetic background, the same cultural history, the same *everything,* then create training programs to minimize discrimination and law to prohibit it, you'd nevertheless have bias in a week and the very same hatreds, bigotry, biases, prejudices, and problems that we would today call "racism" within a year — if only because someone thinks your job is less valuable than theirs, or your eyes less pretty, or you're a centimeter shorter, or your nose a bit longer, or you tend to use the word "sanguine" too often....
In a word, it's impossible. To forgive may be very, very divine... but to have biases is human. A story that presented the utopic idea that racism had been eradicated would, IMO, have very low credibility because anyone reading it would (at least subconsciously) know that it's fake. You could minimize it, but never eradicate it.
[Answer]
The first wave doesn't get to have 'avoiding racism' as a criteria, at least, not in the way you've defined it. Avoiding people that are innately prejudiced is a good thing. However, requiring specific demographic representation is just a bad idea. The first wave of a colony, at least a first wave picked for maximum success, is a very carefully chosen group of people such that everyone can equally pull their own weight when it comes to everything that's needed for a space colony - scientists of every necessary discipline, doctors, engineers, astronauts, etc. Every person picked will need to fit a very select criteria, and adding an additional element to the criteria which doesn't affect the success/fail chance of the mission is a terrible idea. Or, to put it this way: Would you rather a colony without racism that doesn't work or a colony with minor racism that does? Of the two, only the later can be fixed - a failed colony will likely kill everyone there, and there's no cure for death.
Obviously, having racists in terms of the bona-fide variety of people who believe that people outside their specific demographic are inferior to them can't be tolerated, but that problem can be solved with a psychological evaluation, which will have a specific focus of seeing whether or not applicants can work with people from various demographics. If they can, great; if not, they're a liability.
The second wave, that is, people who come after the colony is established because the colony just needs workers to help sustain it and to have it grow bigger, can be given a bit more leeway when it comes to selecting the applicants from various demographics. If you so choose, you can limit the number of accepted applicants from every demographics such that it perfectly matches the percentages.
As pointed out by Dan W in the comments, making sure there's as much genetic variety is possible is a good idea to give the settlers the best chance against any potential threat that certain rare genes may provide.
However, even given that, strict racial quotas isn't necessarily a good idea, because you'll almost certainly be excluding more qualified applicants when your quotas are hit, so there's that. Also, you didn't mention it, but I'm going to point it out anyway - having children is a large part and parcel of developing colonies, so everyone who applies should do so on the understanding that they're going to be having children once they reach the colony.
[Answer]
Consider that most of what's called "racism" in the US today is really closer to culturalism. Then select your colonists from engineers and other technical types, who have their own subculture. (Just as NASA does with astronauts.)
If these are actual colonies, rather than just long-term bases, the original colonists will soon intermarry, and there will be no "race" to be racist about.
[Answer]
Historically, only one thing has ever put a dent in racism.
Freedom.
Among many other possible ciations, I offer just two classics. This is a theme repeated many times in Friedman's and Sowell's work.
[https://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Statement-Milton-Friedman-ebook/dp/B004MYFLBS/](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B004MYFLBS)
[https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Facts-Fallacies-Thomas-Sowell-ebook/dp/B004THDT8A/](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B004THDT8A)
Consider that, in the 1920s, blacks in the USA were rapidly closing the gap with whites. They were rapidly becoming more educated. They were rapidly increasing their incomes and closing the gap. They were becoming professionals of all types. This continued until FDR's New Deal. Since then it has been a frustrating process. Advances have been slow and hard-won.
Consider a business with the goal of making money. Suppose two guys apply for a job, one of the racist-accepted group and one of the racist-hated group. If the business turns down the racist-hated guy, they decrease their talent pool, and so reduce their chance for profit. This punishes businesses that operate on racist principles. This process was rapidly bankrupting racists during the 1920s. When government stepped in, this process was largely squashed.
The government bodies of your space colony must stand as guardians only. They must keep people from using violence on each other. After that, people are free to do as they wish. In the absence of government support for such things, racism is quickly punished by the free market.
[Answer]
# Selection, training, and discipline
In the real world, space agencies are very careful to hire the right people. Astronauts are hired from elite fields, subjected to extensive psychological examinations, and trained for years. The slightest deviation from official policy can bring substantial consequences (just ask [Apollo 7](https://www.history.com/news/apollo-7-near-mutiny-ground-control-astronauts)).
These strict policies would continue as the candidates for the colonization mission were selected. It may sound like an overwhelming task to find thousands of qualified candidates, but a country with the resources to send that many people to Mars can handle the vetting process. After all, the United States has approved more than [4 million people](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/06/06/who-has-security-clearance/102549298/) for security clearances. All of these people have been reviewed by federal authorities. People who pass the background check and who have the necessary skills would move on to psychological testing like [what's used for astronauts](https://www.space.com/26799-nasa-astronauts-psychological-evaluation.html). Then the training would start. The thousands of colonists would live together in a compound and train together, possibly for years. In that high pressure environment, racist tendencies would show themselves and anybody expressing racist tendencies could be cut from the program. By the time the team got to space, everybody would know each other and have experience accomplishing difficult tasks together.
[Answer]
Have an alternative **Scape Goat**
As other have stated an "*us*" vs "*them*" mindset is inevitable in a larger population with varying degrees education and mental ability. Propaganda blaming a villainized **Other** is a necessity in a tightly controlled population. Just make up aliens or some faux domestic terrorist group (with some made up anti-social manifesto) and constantly run media stories blaming them for causing all the problems and diversity your civilization faces.
The added benefit is you can accuse anyone who threatens your power or leadership as being a part-of or working for the **Other**. Smugglers cutting in on your tax margins? No problem, they're treasonous secret agents plotting militia warfare.
Its kinda a non sequitur, but what else are you gonna do? Properly educate your entire populous? ...come on.
**Alternatively** simply remove it from the discussion, you can talk about racism, but don't put much weight on it. The cultural attitude is simply: it's a dumb idea for dumb people.
Let the population interbreed with-in a few generations every body is gonna be pretty genetically mixed up anyway.
In a colony where everyone has to band together just to survive the hardship of space, nobody got time to waste blaming skin color for their problems. The other is simply the harsh mistress of surviving space.
[Answer]
Racism is irrational. But: it is not obviously irrational.
At first glance, it works. As a kid, you are more likely to get beaten/bullied by other kids in a neighbourhood where kids are of different race/etnicity/religion. You get it before you understand words like race/etnicity/religion. You need to grow up a lot (and most people don't grow up that much at all) to see that this is self-fulfilling and has no substantial basis. But kid's experiences last forever.
Then, the politics kicks in. The distinction "us vs them" is pretty much important in politics, otherwise we don't need the politics. Here, racism and friends are cheap (short term) and powerful (short term).
So no escape from it. It can be managed (like substance abuse, gambling, etc...), but probably never eradicated.
[Answer]
I highly recommend you read [The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress#Characters) by Heinlein. He confronts this topic head on, with tribalism popping up overnight. He is so insightful when it comes to how humans and societies react to plausible tech. Despite his works being so dated, they are still highly relevant! Luna colonists quickly become seen as crazy "Loonies", while Loonies call em "Earthworms" and other derogatory slang.
[Answer]
# Create a culturally and racially homogenous ethnostate.
I'm going to write a frame challenge answer, giving one solution that you deliberately excluded in the OP: the creation of an ethnostate by only allowing members of specific cultural and racial groups into any given colony.
After all, if there are no different racial groups within the colony, there wouldn't be any racial lines for racial discrimination to work along. White people can't oppress Black people if there are no Black people there to be oppressed, or White people there to do the oppressing.
However, if there are, then people will bring their pre-existing biases with them into the colony, and the fact of the matter is that there will always be winners and losers in any human society, and that power imbalance will always result in some degree of ethnic strife since it will never be perfectly balanced.
Indeed, this has antecedents in real life; the entire point of the subcategory of genocides referred to as "ethnic cleansings" is to create this state artificially by removing from a community members of other ethnic groups.
[Answer]
Psychologist David Eagleman described a story about Native American leader who was able to overcome tribalism (yet another variant on "us-vs-them" struggle) and to unite various tribes with following method:
>
> "A leader named Deganawida forged peace by assigning each tribe member
> to one of nine different clans: Wolf, Bear, Turtle, Sandpiper, Deer,
> Beaver, Heron, Eagle or Eel. Thus, members of each clan had
> representation from all five tribes and crosscutting relationships now
> unified the community. By emphasising the overlapping dual
> allegiances—to tribe and to clan—Deganawida complicated the notions of
> us and them, defanging the intertribal warfare."
>
>
> Source:
> <https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/11/04/does-your-brain-care-about-other-people-it-depends>
>
>
>
In other words, he randomly assigned all tribes' members to artificial tribe-independent groups and thus every person suddendly identified with somebody from other tribes, based on this new group division. Therefore, the other tribes weren't just "them" anymore.
[Answer]
I think it depends less on the selection process and more on how the colony is run.
## Strong leadership and discipline
With a strong leader and clear hierarchies enforcing discipline, no one will dare act without support from above. In a disciplined organisation such as an army, getting results is more important than petty class/race war, and the leader is interested in maintaining high human resources and therefore won't jump to racism themselves. Rationally, any human is potentially more good than they cost, regardless of race.
The ideal leader is a Machiavellian prince; "Machiavellian" not in the modern sense of the word (scheming, self-centered), but in the way Machiavelli described it: A leader who invest most of his power into staying in power and strengthening his position. The leader should be strong enough that none dare oppose them. When done well, this creates peace and stability as well as a focused push towards the objective, with any notion of internal conflict quickly extinguished by the leader in a show of strength.
## Focus on an external threat
The only way to really unite humans is through an external threat. With all humans working towards the same goal, this external threat may be the scarcity of resources and the possibility of critical mission failure. Scarcity is dangerous as it can as well create a struggle over control of the resources, so we still need strong leadership to keep it under control as well as the assurance that no one is favoured in allocating scarce resources. Generally the leadership should run some propaganda to further highlight (and maybe exaggerate) these dangers and how important it is to stick together to overcome them.
## Mandated selective reproduction and youth training
As a more extreme long-term measure, you can take strict control over reproduction: Select couples to mate based on genes but also such as to intermix any races and cultures that may still exist. Then take the babies from their parents and raise them exclusively in government controlled childcare and training centers. This way you can brainwash them towards supporting the existing leadership as well as teach them your own culture, thus ensuring everyone in the population follows the same culture.
[Answer]
**Make it Small, but Make it Fair**
Racism isn't new. You'll never fully get away from it... unless you start small enough. Take no more than 100 people. As long as there's not a closet racist among them (and maybe even if there is, see what Daryl Davis managed <https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes> you won't start racist. Don't mind too much the racial or gender makeup of your colonists beyond what you need to secure good long-term genetics. Better to have a competent Hydroponics Specialist and no X Ethnicity than a bad one OF X ethnicity. If the only white/black/Maori on the colony is an incompetent, that's Not Great for racism.
Why 100 people? That has to do with Dunbar's Number <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number> which basically says a person can only know about 150 people "well". I went with 100 because 100 is the low end of his confidence level. Basically 100 people is a number that guarantees every person will know every other person well, and leaves room for initial colony growth.
So your 100 people start their new colony. It's too small a population for out-groups, especially if every group is vital for the survival or the rest. Sure you can look down your nose at the Cooks, but suddenly you and only you keeps getting shorted at mealtimes. Or given water that didn't QUITE recycle correctly and tastes vaguely of piss. Afterfew generations your colonists will probably be mixed-race as we would see it from Earth. But even before "Ethnic Martian" becomes a genetic thing, it'll become a psychological thing. Your people will suffer and triumph together in cramped conditions, and that breeds togetherness. For example, I went to Virginia Military Institute. The summer before new cadets start they have the chance to go to the school and take a summer class, no VMI Discipline. One of these new cadets, let's call him Tim, was a Good O'le boy in the best way.... except if you hung out with him a bit you quickly realized it was both racist and homophobic. Cut 2 months later, and the stress and hardship of the "Ratline" beat THAT out of him, and the gay black cadet is his best friend. The "Other" had become Citadel cadets, or the college kids at W&L. So too your colonists. Fast forward another 10 years and Tim had a gay black man as best man. Any prejudices against Ethnicity X will take a nosedive when Ethnicity X heads the Emergency Repressurization Unit or helps you out when your quota comes short or whatever. So long as you start off small enough that holding onto any earth-based ethnic biases aren't possible.
So keep it small and competent, and your colonists will become their own tribe. No intra-colonial racism, huzzah! That's great.... except inevitably there'll be another tribe. maybe it's the Wave 2 colonists who "just don't know" what it was like on Alpha Centauri when the micro-meteors hit. Maybe it'll be those idiot Terrans who weren't smart enough to be selected to colonize Mars and so are OBVIOUSLY Untermench. At the end of the day only another sentient species will really kick racism (and probably not even then). Even if you magically homogenized the ethnicity of everyone on earth you'd still have people from region X mocking region Y and vice-versa. If region X becomes more powerful than region Y then Y people will be oppressed and the whole thing starts all over again.
[Answer]
I'm going to say this is impossible to accomplish.
I'm going to point out the brown eyes/blue eyes "racism" study from the fifties.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGvoXeXCoUY>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mcCLm_LwpE>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebPoSMULI5U>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPZEJHJPwIw>
And the work done about empathy in this article: <https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/11/04/does-your-brain-care-about-other-people-it-depends>
In all of these studies, arbitrary divisions of the people resulted in US vs THEM and in all of the cases, the participants were fewer than 100 people. And anyone seems to be able to introduce these issues simply by making an arbitrary division.
People that sleep on level4 vs level5 vs level6 would be practical and logical divisions during transit. People that live on the outskirts vs the center, People that live on the left side of the stream vs the right.
Phrases like "Wrong side of the track" were used to make people "them".
I think you are going to need continuous "team building" exercises to keep cliches from developing. Racial Cliches are the beginnings of Racism.
[Answer]
The human race will barely start colonizing space until it switches its social policy to Communism. I doubt that capitalistic formation could ever arrange colonist missions because its too expensive and has below zero (even in distant perspective) chance to be profitable.
So if we take this as an assumption we may not worry about racism problem by the time of "Space Colonizing Era", because racism is a thing that has to be overcome already to achieve Communism, because Communism implies total equality of people with zero discrimination.
We might think of some kind of restoration of racism in distant future, when humanity faces aliens and needs to form relationships with alien race. And I suppose this challenge could be much more tough, but its another story.
[Answer]
Send colonists that aren't easily split into an "us" and a "them" group. Sending a completely homogenous group may not be possible, but how about the opposite: sending a completely mixed group? If everybody looks different, those differences also become meaningless. Try to send people from every country around the world. If you send multiple people from the same country, make sure they're from different ethnic groups in that country. Black, white and Native Americans, Han, Uygur and Tibetan Chinese, etc.
Part of the reason for racism, is unfamiliarity. You can see people as "Other" when we didn't grow up with them. They're a different social group. If you grow up with people who look just like you, and then you see people who look and act differently, that can create a very natural (but unjustified) sense of fear. If you want to prevent people from seeing different-looking people as Other, make sure they grow up with them, know them, and befriend them.
Also, maybe screen them before you send them. Make sure they're all educated enough to understand the destructiveness of prejudice.
[Answer]
In my own personal opinion, I don't think we will face any type of discrimination among ourselves, as to colonize Space in our biological form would not only be futile but also a very bad idea and utter waste of human life. In my opinion, there will be a new type of discrimination and we will be the ones to be on the receiving end if we continue to act like the uncivilized creatures our destiny seems it wants us to be.
It is in my view that we are not alone, it's very likely that we are not and if we continue with our petty ways, the only ones to go to the stars will be the elite, rich and powerful. You know what? I think it is 100% fair that it should be as such. To allow an ordinary civilian into Space would only anger species a bit more intelligent than us. We will be wiped out in a flash. We will divert our discrimination and repeat our stupid mistakes and upset the wrong "people".
Extremely and highly intelligent beings more than likely create universes, giving them time to its limbo (That is our "God" or Higher Power, whatever you want to call it) - they will just allow mother nature to take its course, as we do in we play in our online virtual worlds, and no "God" will save us, as we will be the newcomers and not worth the effort. At that stage of our evolution, we will be at bottom of the food chain for the second time in our history. It's not wise to send a human being to colonize Space, as we are today. I guarantee we will mess it up and a handful of people will be responsible for the extinction of our species.
Only once we can live in harmony, be mindful of our peers will we have the maturity to deal with whatever Space may throw at us. Right now humans will only militarize Space, that the only thing we are capable of when we decide to do our little self-inflicted adventures of self-importance. We are nothing and exhibit absolutely no respect for love, life and we don't even believe in ourselves, now you want to send that into Space? We will get taken out so quickly, and 10,000 years of humanity will be destroyed in a split second. To me, we must have guidance from other species, we need to have advocacy from an ally to ensure our safety because our politics just won't be tolerated among more intelligent species. We are only safe (militarily) because we cannot get out of our solar system. It's that simple to me personally. To colonize space without an ally from another world or whatever will be the stupidest move, even the most intelligent, humble, and bold politician will make. You will have the "South Africa effect". All hunky-dory, until that leader is tired and dies. Then all will fall out the window. I can pretty much guarantee that humans refuse to learn from others better than themselves, purely because of jealousy, and their own human condition. For us to colonize Space outside our solar system without an ally we only lead to our demise.
Human history repeats itself, and right now we still can't learn from our own mistakes, even after like 3,000 years of constant war and suffering we still haven't learned. Why? We all want instant gratification and I doubt more intelligent species behave like the "children" we are. In fact, I hope they do everything in their power to stop us from our own stupidity and ignorance. Right now, humans won't even set foot on Mars in 80 years. We don't have what it takes in my own personal opinion, there are too few visionaries and too many self-imposed importance among our species. I find it rather sickening and I fear if we ever will have our future days of Star Trek Discovery. In fact, we don't deserve the privilege.
Racism will be forgotten and eradicated because we will be forced to futility defend ourselves against an imminent and humiliating defeat. I apologize for the passion in my writing, but I am tired of racism. I was born into it, and because of dumb humans, I will more than likely die from it. Human beings only disgust me, and we should truly feel ashamed of ourselves.
] |
[Question]
[
Imagine a world in which the language barrier is a means of propaganda defence.
In this world, one of the primary concerns of each country is the migration of natives, since they know their native language and can function as translators.
Let us assume, for the simplicity of the question, there is no publicly available written medium, and only spoken languages exist. (No newspapers, no books, no written signs on shops etc.)
The nations must therefore change their language as much as possible before the other nations can train a force of translators (who may be able to keep up with the changes if they were sent to spy).
The nations are large enough that it is administratively impossible to make sure all citizens are using the 'current' language.
**How do these nations make sure their language becomes incomprehensible for someone who left it 10 years ago?**
This question disregards the long-term effects such a procedure could have.
Technology level is modern.
[Answer]
Generate a constant stream of scandals that make common expressions politically incorrect.
Add aggressive prosecution of people using oldspeak because you want to avoid offending the party that phrase now insults and you have a built in way to root out spies.
[Answer]
We are a good halfway to that. You just need to increase the communication rate, so that language mutation happens more often. Also give a generous spread of technological advancement.
Take a simple sentence as example:
>
> Lol, I have been pwned. Ping me on WhatsApp.
>
>
>
I get it, you get it. Should my grandparents be alive and should I tell them that sentence, they would look at me with a puzzled expression in their face. How did that happen?
Communication, thanks to the internet, got more frequent and highly paced.
If semantic mutations happen once every few million words exchange, by increasing the number of words exchanged in a given time you are just increasing the number of mutations in that time. Push this forward, and you will get a way faster evolution of the language, to the point where it will be hardly understandable by an outsider.
[Answer]
**You Can't.**
Language evolves to be sure; there are words in the English language today that weren't in it when I was in school, and we pronounce (and even in some rare cases spell) some words differently to what we used to even in my lifetime.
The thing is, even disregarding the anchor point that writing provides to a language by its very existence, the single limitation on the alteration of language is the ability of the populace to learn the alterations.
As toddlers, we learn language through imitation and it's only later that we ascribe meanings to specific sounds and we build semantic structures in our minds around those sounds. We learn to manipulate our environment and others through the use of our voice and then we learn that we're using words and a language and our world opens up. Then we go to school, and in terms of language, we do two very important things;
1) we learn the written form of our language, and
2) we build on our vocabulary.
This last one is critical. Without it, we can't build the nuanced semantic concepts that allow for the great precision needed in describing the subtle differences between (say) momentum and force. We can't build deeper understanding of the arts, we can't learn that Chartreuse is a subtly yellow form of green. Worse, this doesn't stop at school; we build our vocabulary to account for even more subtle forms of precision, and incorporate new words to reflect new concepts in our technology, culture and environment.
In every way that counts, Brexit is indeed a word and any Briton or follower of international affairs knows *exactly* what you mean when you use it in its correct context.
In your world however, you're effectively forcing people to start at the bottom rung of the linguistic ladder on a constant basis. First of all, it's not altogether clear how older minds would face having to learn a language all over again on a regular basis. Second, what you're going to prevent is the ability to build those nuanced and subtle points of precision that specialists rely on during their career. Language will remain simple because by that very defintion, it's going to be easier to relearn, meaning that you've just killed off all the pursuits and benefits that you're trying to protect from foreign agents.
In English, there's something called the Rule of 5s;
There are approximately 500k words in the English Language
The average person has a vocabulary of 50k words in English
The average person *uses* approximately 5k words in their speech in English
(This may be different now; I was taught this in linguistics a long time ago.)
My point is, having to constantly relearn those 50k words will be painful, and ultimately most people won't be able to do it. Can you change the language over the course of a single lifetime? Sure. It happens all the time (when speaking in terms of centuries), but older people will still carry certain elements through with them to the younger generations, so each will be understood by the other. But can you do it in years? No. Humans need to use the foundation of language they build to understand and build upon, meaning that constantly changing that foundation leaves you with nothing built on top of it.
In point of fact, your nation is actually leaving itself *more exposed* to propaganda, not less. The single largest trick in propaganda is to over-simplify a problem to make it look like your simple solution is so obvious and that the competing administration is too foolish to understand it. But your nation now is only capable of understanding the over-simplified answer. Ultimately, the implementation of your strategy is an own goal.
[Answer]
# The Church manages the transformation through hymn and prayer.
When the mandated Sunday visit to church comes around every week all the old favorites are sung by rote - the meaning and significance of each is well known from childhood and is invariant over the lifespan of your citizens.
When the time comes for the next cycle - for the old tongue to die - the hymns and standard prayers are then all sung in the next language in line.
Next in line? There are 10 cloisters kept deep in the bowels of the Capitol's citadel, each having dozens of priests - ranging in age from newly qualified novitiates to the old men charged with educatng them , passing on language. The inhabitants of each cloister are set to guard a language unique to that group - all-in-all there are ten languages - sufficient that no language will come around again within the lifetime of an individual. When the (~8 year?) cycle demands it, the novitiates pass to the parishes and lead the proceedings freeing up the old priests to return to their respective cloister and train novitiates of their own when the time comes.
As a safeguard against any enemy achieving a parallel cloister from the last cycle, each time a language comes around (~80 years) it has been deliberately altered - just a little, just enough so that when a new congregation member joins a church their recitation of the common prayer as proof of authenticity should be flawless or they get carted of to wherever spies probably don't like to go.
This system has the advantage that each change of the language in on a [mnemonic hook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic) with commonly understood meaning, the rhythm and tune helps to add variety to the sensory channels that are used to memorize the fresh words. Making the songs and prayers humorous/sexy - relevant to the lives of the people will help bring the words to life and make them easier to recall.
The main disadvantages as I see it is the upheaval as the old language is banned. The young shouldn't have too much trouble, but the old - well, who listens to them anyway.
[Answer]
My answer has to be a bit of a frame challenge. I'm going to try to answer it as best as I can, but there are fundamental issues with a language changing that fast in a modern society which simply prevent a straightforward answer from occurring.
You **cannot** have a "modern society" without a written language, much less with a language which is intentionally being corrupted at an astonishing rate. You simply have to create a different kind of society: in particular a society that has no technology whatsoever. I would assume we could still manage to create wheels, and probably an inclined plane, but certainly nothing so complicated as, say, Roman Trireme from the 7th century BC.
Technology is founded on the theory that you can learn to do something once and communicate the result to others so that they can use it without having designed it themselves. Consider the iPhone as an example. A team of very talented engineers developed all of the hardware and documented it. These documents were then sent to other engineers at Foxcon to design the hardware production lines. These engineers at Foxcon were certainly smart cookies, but I'd feel comfortable saying they aren't in the same class as the designers of the iPhone. Beneath this is a veritable army of Chinese laborers earning $2.50/hr assembling these en masse.
This was only possible because the engineers could convey everything down the chain. This can only be feasibly done with written word. Now it could be interesting to visualize a world without a written word, which comes up with a more organic alternative to modern technology. It could be interesting to see what kind of work instructions survive the inherent mutations which occur in the games of telephone that ensue.
But there's an issue. Not only is there no written word, but you want the language to change sufficiently as to be incomprehensible every 10 years. How is that going to affect memory retention? Now I can make a */click* shunbhnl pujvtwyloluzpisl yhaoly lhzpsf, if zptwsf ayhuzspalhapun aol dvykz */click*...
Oh, I'm sorry. I switched tongues for a moment. If I may repeat the last sentence: "Now I can make a language incomprehensible rather easily, by simply transliteating the words." Admit it, you had no idea what I was saying. But that was nothing more than a simple [Caesar Cypher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher) with a shift of 7 characters. It made it incomprehensible to you, but takes a nation who wants to attack your language and 9th century mathematics (the Arabic mathematician Al-Kindi had documents showing how to do the frequency analysis attacks that break the Cypher), it will take all of about a day to crack this encoding. Especially if the single greatest threat to the nations is their inability to provide propaganda.
So this means your language doesn't just need to be incomprehensible. It needs to be so different that there it is not easy to make a mapping from one language to another.
You need a language shift like changing from English to Chinese. Those languages are sufficiently different that it is very difficult to get the nuances correct (I heard an anecdote of someone who got a tattoo in Chinese that said "Dog Lover." A Chinese person had to eventually politely point out that they had used the wrong characters, and what was actually written was more along the lines of "one who fornicates with animals.")
Which means I have to translate **all** of my important knowledge in my head every 10 years. Think about what that does to a society. Imagine someone trying to get a PhD, and knowing that their first years as an undergrad have to be translated up into the current language or be lost forever.
It just doesn't work.
So how do we make it work? Smooth gradients. Don't make the language change every 10 years for everyone. Make it change at different rates by location. Those closest to The Government have a language that doesn't change quickly. It might even have writing. May be the language changes at the rate L.Dutch pointed out which how the younger generations write text messages. As you approach the edges of the nation, have the language change faster. Maybe at the fringes the language changes every 5 years.
To change that fast, you're going to have to basically break what makes those people human. You're going to have to have attacked them at a biological level and prevented their language centers from doing their job. Perhaps you put them in situations where photographic short term memory is critical. There is the [Cognative Tradeoff Hypothesis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktkjUjcZid0) which showed that apes have astonishingly good photographic short term memory, using sections of the brain which we use for language instead. This theory is currently discredited for many reasons, but in a World Building environment, you might be able to turn a blind eye, and use this hypothesis as if it were true. Put these people in a world where survival depends on short term memory, and watch their language skills deteriorate.
The key is that the language, and the propaganda will need to propagate outward from The Government to the hills. This will create a gradient which makes it hard for propaganda to go backwards, from these language-idiots towards the central capitol. A dependence on the technology produced by The Govenment and the regions with slower-changing languages may suffice to keep them in line.
Thus, if you got propaganda to the inner regions of the nation, it would be effective and in the right language. But getting it there, via word of mouth, is like swimming upstream.
[Answer]
Languages generally do not change that fundamentally in 10 years.
We who are native English speakers in America still understand most of what Shakespeare wrote in England over 400 years ago (and the rest we get with a bit of training).
# Your best hope is some type of hybridization. Specifically, a [creole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language).
>
> A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that
> develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages at a
> fairly sudden point in time: often, a pidgin transitioned into a
> full-fledged language. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed
> or hybrid language, a creole is often additionally defined as being
> highly simplified when compared to its parent languages. However, a
> creole is still complex enough that it has a consistent system of
> grammar, possesses a large stable vocabulary, and is acquired by
> children as their native language, all of which distinguishes a creole
> language from a pidgin.
>
>
>
Some creoles are still intelligible to a native speaker of one of the base languages. But many are not.
One example is [Haitian Creole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole):
>
> Haitian Creole...is a French-based creole language spoken by 10–12
> million people worldwide, and the only language of most Haitians. It
> is a creole language based largely on 18th-century French with
> influences from Portuguese, Spanish, English, Taíno, and West African
> languages. Haitian Creole emerged from contact between French settlers
> and African slaves during the Atlantic slave trade in the French
> colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Haitians are the largest
> creole-speaking community in the world.
>
>
> The usage of and education in Haitian Creole—which is not mutually
> intelligible with French—has been contentious since at least the 19th
> century: where some Haitians saw French as a legacy of colonialism,
> Creole was maligned by francophone elites as a miseducated or poor
> person’s French. Until the late 20th century, Haitian presidents spoke
> only French to their fellow citizens, and until the 2000s, all
> instruction at Haitian elementary schools was in French, a second
> language to most of the students.
>
>
>
Haitian Creole took about 60 years to develop, though this was during a time of an increase in the slave populations, which also came from a variety of locations, each with their own language. I don't know about doing it in 10 years, but certainly it could be a bit faster than 60, with the right conditions.
Another Creole which developed in the Americas is [Gullah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language).
>
> Gullah, also called Gullah-English, Sea Island Creole English, and
> Geechee, is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called
> "Geechees" within the community), an African-American population
> living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia (including
> urban Charleston and Savannah), as well as northeasternmost Florida
> and the extreme southeast of North Carolina. Closely related varieties
> are spoken in the Bahamas, namely Bahamian Creole. The Gullah language
> is based on different varieties of English and languages of West and
> Central Africa.
>
>
> Gullah resembles other English-based creole languages spoken in West
> Africa and the Caribbean Basin. These include the Krio language of
> Sierra Leone, Jamaican Patois, Bajan Creole, Trinidadian Creole,
> Tobagonian Creole, Guyanese Creole, and Belizean Kriol. It is
> speculated that these languages use English as a
> lexifier (i.e., their vocabularies are derived largely from English),
> and that their syntax (sentence structure) is strongly influenced by
> African languages...
>
>
> Gullah is most closely related to Afro-Seminole Creole, spoken in
> scattered Black Seminole communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and Northern
> Mexico.... There is debate amongst linguists concerning the
> relationship between Gullah and African-American English (AAE). There
> are some that postulate a Gullah-like "plantation creole" as having
> been the origin of AAE. Others cite different British dialects of
> English as having had greater influence on the structure of AAE.
>
>
>
# So, how do you create a creole?
You do this by bringing together two or more sets of people who only speak one language (or sets of non-overlapping languages) and force them to interact.
Your governments might do this by keeping people apart then mixing them in specific ways, requiring them to work together daily for those 10 years, without interpreters.
This can't work forever, as eventually the creoles will start to resemble each other, unless you bring in outside linguistic groups. But bringing in outsiders is what led to this mishegoss in the first place.
Your best bet is simply to stop migration. In and out. A la North Korea. This doesn't fit your premise, but it's a lot more realistic.
[Answer]
I am afraid that 10 years is to short a time to mutate a language beyond comprehension. People who grow up in a linguistic environment are pretty much set in their ways when they leave their teens. This is the reason that older generations end up sounding archaic to their grand children. Change through mutation takes at least a full generation.
Another problem with mutating a language quickly, is that without a central reference the mutations will lead to fragmentation of the language. Not only will other nations not understand the language, speakers from different regions within the country will also have a hard time understanding each other.
So rather than changing the language through gradual mutation, you would need to introduce a new language and forbid the use of the old. This has been done many times throughout history and is most certainly doable in ten years time. All human beings are able to learn a new language in a few years time. Older people will not be able to speak a new language perfectly, but they will be able to communicate with an accent.
Since there is no written media, the education would have to be carried out through compulsory classes headed by some kind of government officials. These might be clergy, military or some other kind of civil servants. Stiff sentences for using the old language would have to be administered and benefits for speaking the new language perfectly would also be needed. The classical method would be to only accept people speaking the new language perfectly into public service (military, clergy etc.).
The situation you describe actually offers a unique reason for people to switch language. Anyone not switching to the new language would become a traitor to the nation and would be aiding the enemy. In times of conflict, this would be a huge incentive.
[Answer]
Requires a culture shift, but if you can convince people to strenuously avoid taboo words, or words that sound like taboo words, or replacements for taboo words that have been used so often that they themselves become taboo, you can end up with fairly rapid language change.
This isn't just theoretical; [the Dyirbal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyirbal_language) (pronounced like "gerbil") [language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyirbal_language) spoken by a subgroup of Australian Aboriginals actually demonstrated this to linguists; they visited the community twice, a generation apart, and many of the observations from the first visit were unusable by the second visit, as too much of the language had changed. [NativLang did an interesting video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evJ_E7k1pvY) and [follow up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVBtIPOnNI) about it exploring how the rate of language change varies based on different factors.
[Answer]
You do realize that given your proposal, you're making it *easier* for spies?
I live in a multilingual community and it's entirely common for people who can't think of the correct word in one language to switch to another for that word, even if the two people conversing are using the same language in the conversation. It happens so often that people don't often realize they're doing it.
Your premise is forcing the entire population to be multilingual, so that will be going on all the time. It will be so common, and necessary, especially if the languages are as unrelated as you're trying to make them be, that people won't think it odd at all if they come across someone who is struggling with the language; after all, odds are *they* have done it as well.
Forget about in-depth training to learn the right accents, phrasing, grammer, and idioms to try and blend in. There's no need for it. "You can speak the current language well enough to get by? Good. We're sending you in when the idiots are switching again. Don't worry about getting it right, their whole population is going to be in the exact same boat."
[Answer]
**How about physical changes?**
If you get a sore throat and stuffed nose, your ability to correctly pronounce and speak the language is significantly reduced. Yet you can still be understood by most. Now this normally won't change the language, because people usually get better. *What if they didn't*?
What would happen if most of the population got a stuffed nose that lasted for a couple years?
Over time, the language would adapt to the new way of pronouncing the words. You might even get new words that are more comfortable to say given the current condition, and it might not revert back if the conditions improve. If the population developed a sore throat after having a stuffed nose for 3 years, the language would mutate further.
The changes probably don't have to be significant, but cumulatively from lasting for a long while and having different combinations (sore throat, numb tongue, swollen jaw, stuffed nose, etc), the language should mutate appropriately to be unrecognizable over a decade.
---
You could have this be a natural thing, as a result of large scale climate cycles, virus, phenotypes, mutations and/or whatnot. If you need it to be controlled by the government, you can get a neat conspiracy thing going.
[Answer]
**Name people after common objects, then stop using those words when they die.**
Exactly this practice is described in [Frazer's *The Golden Bough*](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough/Tabooed_Words):
>
> Further, when the name of the deceased happens to be that of some
> common object, such as an animal, or plant, or fire, or water, it is
> sometimes considered necessary to drop that word in ordinary speech
> and replace it by another. A custom of this sort, it is plain, may
> easily be a potent agent of change in language; for where it prevails
> to any considerable extent many words must constantly become obsolete
> and new ones spring up.
>
>
>
[...]
>
> In the seven years that Dobrizhoffer spent among these Indians the
> native word for jaguar was changed thrice, and the words for
> crocodile, thorn, and the slaughter of cattle underwent similar though
> less varied vicissitudes. As a result of this habit, the vocabularies
> of the missionaries teemed with erasures, old words having constantly
> to be struck out as obsolete and new ones inserted in their place.
>
>
>
[Answer]
Clearly, there are two languages. One is used in daily interactions by regular people. Nobody cares if a foreigner overhears their dinner plans. Well, maybe targets of assassination.
The second language is used in official correspondences within the government. To protect official correspondences from being translated, they are protected by a cipher. Welcome to cryptography. Your problem is now encryption key storage and transmission. Today's cipher key is 13. Tbg vg? Mistakes in key transmission and storage become plot points. Good luck making the story not a comedy.
Without writing, the complexity of ciphers available is limited by the mental abilities of government officials. Either it's part of the exam to become a government official and people study for years to master mental encryption with changing keys, or the government ends up with a series of languages that sound like igpay atinlay.
Be careful with the delayed propagation of keys due to the size of the empire. Someone might accept orders encoded with an old key. Loose infosec sinks death stars.
[Answer]
## The Best You Can Do
### Put Children in Creches
If all kids are removed from their parents and placed in a controlled environment from early childhood, they can be taught whatever conlang the government wants.
It doesn’t get you a situation where people switch to new languages at age fifty, sixty and seventy, but it might get you a situation in which a thirty-year-old who hasn’t lived there in a dozen years wouldn’t understand teenagers.
This still isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but that’s not realistically plausible.
[Answer]
Let me quote [a comment from the user barbecue](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/146645/how-to-make-a-language-evolve-quickly#comment458709_146645):
>
> I think there are too many flawed assumptions in this question: The idea that you can have a language which is both secret and commonly known; the idea that you must train teams of translators rather than simply grabbing native speakers off the street and forcing them to help you; having modern technology without written language; being able to prevent people from learning languages other than their own.
>
>
>
To satisfy that seemly contradicting assumptions, we need to think outside the box and find some extraordinary outlier. So here goes my idea:
1. Every newborn baby is submitted to a mandatory brain surgery as soon as he/she is delivered.
2. In the surgery, a device responsible for communication is implanted in the baby brain.
3. The device connects the person brain to the internet through Wi-fi/radio/cellphones/bluetooth/whatever.
4. People speaks to other people through the device implanted into their brains.
5. The device employs asymetric strong criptography in the transmitted data.
6. The government runs the central certification authority responsible for issueing digital certificates that enables the data transmission be possible.
7. Digital certificates have a lifetime shorter than 10 years. People need to renew their certificates on occasion before they are expired.
8. Brain devices refuses invalid, expired or revoked certificates.
9. The device is based in very complex and miniaturized nanotechnology featuring a lot of built-in layers of protection and criptography. Hacking or counterfeiting the device would require a billionaire investment and some years of complex research which only a very determined and rich state-sponsored agency could hopefully afford. There is simply no way that it could be hacked or counterfeited by average Joe in a garage.
10. Nobody else speaks or writes a single word in this country anymore. Whoever insists in doing that will be submitted to a brain surgery to forcedfully be made unable to do that again.
11. Eventually, spoken and written language will be forgotten. Those are deemed as too obsolete, slow, primitive and unnecessary. Everybody will communicate through their brain devices and there would be no need to speak or write anything anymore.
12. Unwanted people will have their certificates revoked by the government, which makes them unable to effectively communicate to anybody else. People trying to hack brain devices and people considered as traitors are some of those considered unwanted.
13. Everyone who leaved the country for some years would be unable to communicate with anyone else when he/she returns.
14. The government actively snifs and records the communication of its citizens looking for suspicious people doing suspicious stuff.
15. All the written language is replaced by a QR-code-like language which don't make any sense for people without a brain device.
[Answer]
If you want the language to actually become incomprehensible, the language evolution cannot be natural. We don't want small changes in every word (e.g. a change of a vocal, a syllable omitted etc), we need to completely replace the word. And we have to do that nation-wide. Solution:
**Autohypnosis programmes in TV**
Every day people have to watch a TV program when they get a list of words and their new replacements, e.g.
```
cat -> malgo
```
The new word should be generated randomly from a list of syllables.
Then every person has to go through an autohypnosis session and replace the old words in their memory with the new words. If they miss a day of the programme, they can rewatch it later, they will still be able to understand most things.
If you replace 10 words every day, in 10 years you can replace about 35.000 words (commonly used words should be replaced at least once a year). The active vocabulary for most people is only about 5.000 words.
A person who is not watching autohypnosis programmes won't be able to understand a conversation in a year.
**The problem**
This won't stop spies. There will be always some people who will also know another language, otherwise trade and diplomacy cannot work. Some people might create a new artificial language altogether to escape the constant change (sign language? Esperanto-like language? a dead Latin-like language?). You don't need a spy to learn the constantly changing language, you only need a *traitor* that is able to communicate somehow with foreign spies.
[Answer]
Building on @Hoyle's ghost answer:
Don't mutate whole language, just enough (hundred?) common words which if used by a spy, will identify the spy as using obsolete version of language.
This will require whole population be dedicated in protecting the new version of the language. So ie traders talking with neighboring nations would have to be trustworthy enough to use old(er) version of language, presumably disclosed to neighbors.
For new words, use something like <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang> - used by criminals to separate "in-group" (the criminals) from the remainder of the population.
New version of the words will be learned in church hymns, as suggested by Hoyle's ghost.
[Answer]
Using computers, this should be possible. So we assume the government mandates every office to be paper free and no-one is allowed to keep important documents at home.
Books are replaced with e-readers, disks with cloud services, and so on.
The computer networks themselves are hardened through encryption. I assume this part works well - no reason why not. There may even be some measures built-in to keep them from working outside a given area, by measuring time delays and other stuff.
Even game makers have to update their software, and players who don't learn fast enough or make mistakes only non-natives would make get kicked out. Businesses and administrations even more so.
The changes to the language build on features typical to the own language which are also difficult for the people of other countries to pronounce, or to learn - sounds, sound combinations, grammar and so on. Every day, some small change gets propagated through the media, all laws and other often used texts are updated accordingly. Some of the changes are not propagated, but get introduced quietly - especially where a native speaker will catch on easily and a non-native not so easily.
Also, the use of references instead of talking plainly is encouraged. This way, only someone with access to the network and/or inside knowledge can understand a document.
New grammar rules are introduced which are basically encryption systems - so that words change their meanings depending on context of all kind, so that a sentence sounds like gibberish to anyone who grew up with the other languages, and so on.
Words which people in other languages may censor themselves are also used - like curse words, names of respected/historical people, names of gods, and so on.
Also words which have another meaning in other languages so their speakers trip up, and such.
People working in sensitive areas get concentrated into different places. They will be taught some specialised vocabulary and grammar, some of it even confusing to natives. Some of it easy to track so leaks can easily be found. Dynamic internet content makes sure people have their own accent, which is used as a finger print. New ideas are sometimes tried in this, sometimes in that area.
Sometimes, very large changes are pushed through, and people are sent to schools to learn them. Schools also exist for the people slow to pick up on the changes. The ones who stay too slow have to live in places where and work jobs in which no information of any value is released. The schools have a lot of "students" whose main duty is to find anyone who is not a native.
With other countries doing the same, people are employed to find ways to keep up with their developments, and the results are not only used for spying, but also to make it more difficult for the others to keep track.
Ideally, any differences in physiology, mentality, abilities and so on are also used to increase the distance to the other countries, and furthered through reproductive medicine and such - only the people who have the correct characteristics can become sperm or egg donors, get into jobs where people are more likely to multiply and so on.
Mutations which help pronounce unusual words, understand unusual grammar or such are actively searched and spread through the population in similar ways.
There is some pidgin based on older language to get trade agreements and such. The trade itself is done without talking at special sections of the border. Otherwise, the borders are closed.
] |
[Question]
[
Imagine a world where you can talk to anyone at all at any time, and telepathically transmit any amount of information to any select group of people.
Why would a world like this ever get to the invention of radio, much less valuing it and transmitting?
Basically, in other words, what other uses could they find for radio?
[Answer]
Radio direction finding. (RDF) Cooking. (Microwave) Radars, sensor networks for non telepathic infrastructure (radio bouys for example), snooping on people covertly. (telepathy doesn't tell you what they are doing, only what they are thinking) Electronic harassment. Measurement equipment for meturlurgy and other material sciences. Emergency locators would still be desirable, because even if you can connect to somebody, that doesn't mean they know where they are, or are able to tell you. Astronomy (radio telescopes)
[Answer]
If they have machines like computers that perform tasks, these may not be able to perform telepathy as they can. Then they would sometimes need a way for computers to communicate wirelessly with each other. Radio isn't usually an *ideal* way for computers to do this, but it is one way they could have discovered radio and developed communication protocols around it.
[Answer]
# Mass Media
The answer comes from the question, specifically **select group of people**. Radio has two purposes:
1. Two-way communication between select groups of people. This ranges from individual-to-individual communication on up to shared communication both structured - e.g., emergency responders, air-traffic control - and unstructured - e.g., CB Radio. The telepathic method would work great for individual communication and plausibly well for small groups - you just need a way to identify the group.
2. Broadcasting. Radio (and over-the-air TV) lets anyone, anywhere within range, **receive** broadcasts where the sender has no advance knowledge of who is receiving the broadcast. Telepathy doesn't (in my understanding of your world) work that way - the sender needs to (a) have a mental image of the recipients(s) and (b) the telepathic channel is always 2-way.
If I look at a stadium of people (too large for voice communication without amplification) I can instantly telepathically send to them, but I have to be prepared for the mental pressure of all of them (or even a small percentage) sending to me at the same time.
All the more so, if I want to communicate with anyone willing to listen, anywhere within hundreds of miles - including people I have never seen or been introduced to - I can't open the telepathic link, and if I can get past that (send me your picture and address?) then I have the fear of thousands of people trying to talk at one time.
Even worse if I am saying something inflammatory - the opposition would try to get in on the conversation and "mess with my head".
In addition, as @JBH pointed out, radio also allows nonverbal communication, particularly **music**.
So **radio as mass media** is the key use. Development would have to take a slightly different path from the real world as much of the initial development was as a wireless telegraph - replacement for a point-to-point wired connection. But it could definitely be done and would definitely be useful.
Machine communication? As in the real world, this will come later, possibly much later. While there are some very basic methods (e.g., radio controlled toy cars) that can be done without computers, the **vast majority** of what we think of as radio-based machine communications relies on computers. And not just any computers, integrated circuit based microcomputers. This requires advances in a number of different fields, far beyond what you need to have a big vacuum tube transmitter and crystal receivers, which is all you need to get radio functioning as mass media.
[Answer]
## If They have Science They will Discover Radio
Radio is part of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. EM radiation includes radio, infrared, visible light, x-rays, gamma rays, etc. As they seek to understand the natural world, scientists will classify and quantify the portion of the EM spectrum that we call radio.
## Applications
Any species that discovers radio will use it - they just might not use it the same way. Some useful applications include:
* RADAR - Radio is integral to RADAR (it's right in the name - **RA**dio **D**etection and **R**anging) - all kinds of aircraft and self driving cars are using radar today.
* Wifi - Wifi is a type of radio wave. If we eliminated broadcast radio we could expand Wifi bandwidth into this space.
* Machine to Machine comms - same as above, only use the frequency space for backbone internet traffic instead of edge internet traffic.
* Long range comms - If there's any limit on the range for telepathy, radio could come into play. Can you speak telepathically to astronauts in orbit around your world?
[Answer]
**You're assuming basically godlike telepathic abilities**
And that's unrealistic. Can you imagine the problem of having 7 billion people broadcasting to 7 billion people 24/7? That's unrealistic in the extreme. A 7,000 mile range is unrealistic, too.
**Which means your people have the same need for radio as everyone else**
What they don't need (possibly) are megaphones, microphones, and other near-space sound amplification for personal communication.
Which brings up another point...
**Telepathy may obviate walkie-talkies, CB radios, and cell phones, but not radio**
Because people love to listen to music! I suppose you could have one telepath listen to a lovely vinyl record and simultaneously broadcast what he/she is hearing, but that's a burden... that person would welcome the freedom radio would bring (if they could do it at all).
**And then there's the need for computers to talk...**
Because your computers aren't telepathic and the computer controlling the assembly robot needs to talk to that robot. Wires are so old-fashioned! Wireless machine-to-machine communication would by itself be a driver for radio. Could you imagine a telepath-based OnStarTM system? *Hello, have you recently had an accident? Could you tell me where you are please? Hello? I think they're unconcious. Hello? Wait, is anyone even in the car? What do you mean you're going to the ba... Oh... sorry.*
[Answer]
If you want to make this telepathy scientifically plausible -- make it via radio waves. On this planet beings have evolved which are able to communicate via radio waves. This is not completely implausible since on our planet we have things like sharks sensing electrical currents and birds navigating by sensing the magnetic field. Of course, the beings that have evolved this ability to communicate via radio don't originally *know* that they are doing this -- anymore then we knew much about how our own brain and nervous system worked until very recently (and even now, there is much to learn). Perhaps it is their *biologists* rather than their *physicists* who discover radio. They might think of it as "artificial telepathy" much the way that we think of computers as "artificial intelligence". Just like radio in our history was fairly unreliable for the first several decades, artificial telepathy would seem like a fairly poor substitute for natural telepathy at first (highly evolved natural radio communication is likely to have evolved things like error detecting codes and things like frequency hopping to resist jamming by predators). But just as AI is finally becoming competitive with humans in many areas, sooner or later artificial telepathy (radio) would start to outstrip natural telepathy in things like bandwidth. An intelligent species who all of a sudden understand the underlying physics of how they communicate could doubtless do much with that knowledge.
[Answer]
# Because people have blocked telepathy
Billions people all capable of making you listen to whatever suits their whimsy is an *absolutely terrible* environment to live in. If even just a dozen abuse that power it's a miserable time for all; but more realistically the abusers will number in the thousands or even millions.
Technology that is capable of blocking, or at least limiting, telepathy is going to be developed pretty early in your civilization's history!
So, your civilization will still have the need for forms of communication that can happen without removing the block.
[Answer]
The answer can be pretty easily derived by looking at what issues are likely to be present that alternative communications methods would solve. Note that if you end up in a situation where verbal (or visual) communication is superior to this telepathy, you will still end up using radio for long-range communications, as it's the easiest means of long distance transmission of visual or verbal communications).
Looking at this as objectively as possible, given a very pessimistic interpretation of your description, you have a vast majority of the same issues here that you do with radio (interference, non-selectivity of transmissions, easily intercepted or blocked, shared media requiring regulation, etc), except all of those are *much worse*, because you can turn off a radio, but can't turn off your mind. In a case like this, it's very likely that people will either quickly find a way to block telepathy and then use some other form of communications, or, more likely, develop into a slightly more restricted form of collective consciousness akin to the Borg (and thus not need radio for communications at all).
Given a very optimistic interpretation though, you have a system very similar to a computer network as viewed from the application layer, and thus not many significant issues, and as a result radio would likely never develop as a means of direct communication, but would probably end up being developed as a means of broadcast communication, and possibly for things like music.
In both cases, it's likely to be developed for non-communications purposes such as radar, radio astronomy, and electronic communications.
It's probably worth noting that that pessimistic interpretation is the more likely one if this telepathy evolved before the development of sentience (coordinating a pack as a single unit is a *huge* advantage when hunting), while the optimistic interpretation is much more likely to be the result of an ability that was developed intentionally by an intelligent species (either through self modification, or through some form of external meddling), and something between the two is the most likely case if they developed it after developing sentience, but it originated naturally.
[Answer]
Scientific curiosity. All it takes is an eccentric mind to create something, there are many things invented that have no pressing need.
It seems to me that why or how he created it could be explained in many ways, perhaps he was trying to communicate with some other world or realm.
I was also thinking you could incorporate the eccentric into the story somehow later, make finding them a quest, or use as a mentor figure because of some deep mystical understanding.
[Answer]
If telepathy is only possible when you know who is on the other end of the connection (and it likely is because otherwise prank "calls" are going to be a problem), anonymity could be a large driving factor. A person could pick up a walkie-talkie from a dead drop and they wouldn't know who's on the other end. Very valuable if you're a member of the resistance.
Traditional vetting would eventually lead to using intermediaries to telepathically communicate (and direct telepathy for highly trusted people) but it would still retain value for recruiting new members.
Security might be lower than optimal for such a fledgling system, but if radio is a fairly esoteric means of communication it might be considered obscure enough that no one will figure out how to snoop. Or the resistance may simply be desperate enough. Or it could just be that the foreign state sponsor of the resistance has actually made the radios secure.
[Answer]
The simplest answer and probably the answer you want to hear is:
**They want to be heard**
* They will never invent a radio if they can directly (telepathically) communicate the spicies bajillions light years away from their planet.
* They will definitely invent a radio if they somehow find boundaries of their telepathic power, being it a distance, willingness of the recepient or something else (like not being able to telepathically transmit thru water/foil/vacuum).
[Answer]
**They would discover it** for the same reason we did - because it's there in nature, pretty much everywhere in the universe (for practical purposes), and is possibly an inevitable discovery once you get exploration of basic physics (17 - 19th century equivalent could probably make it a very likely/almost inevitable trajectory).
**They would make use of it** for almost identical reasons to the uses we have, assuming similar technological directions. Telepathy wouldn't change it much:
* **exploring objects and spaces that can't be seen** (air radar, ground radar, object detection/tracking)
* **interpreting the universe** (astronomy)
* **technology and research** (some devices and research involves electromagnetic waves such as radio being produced and directed at some object or space)
* **domestic and industrial appliances** (microwave/radar ovens, sterilising, heating, GPS, RFID or equivalent)
* **data transmission** (you might have telepaths but can they mediate a Bluetooth or other wireless mouse, for example, or handle gigabit/second WiFi between servers or in campuses/hospitals/houses, or supply long distance networking such as remote buildings/villages using parabolic/other shape antennae?)
* **one to many area broadcasting** (this is everyday entertainment such as TV and radio channels, and public safety channels where anyone in an area with the required equipment can receive the message. You might think telepathy would do the job, but if there's a tsunami warning and you're asleep, will telepathy always wake you up or would you prefer a loud alarm and flashing light?)
* **Telepathy disabled persons** (some people lack sight or hearing; almost certainly some people will have reduced or lacking telepathy due to genetics, age or accident, they may need radio-based technologies as disability support aids)
* *other?*
[Answer]
In truth: we do not invent "radio waves", it is as stupid as to say that we invent the light, since it is the same thing.
First thing: the radio waves exist whatever happens, except to create a universe without photon, but in this case, nothing is visible, the eyes have no function.
Second, even with telepathy, there is a maximum speed of information transfer in the universe, which is a constant that has been wrongly named: speed of light.
So radio waves go at this speed in a vacuum, in other words, nothing can be faster.
If you want to create a universe that violates Einstein's relativity, I wish you good luck on the coherence ;)
] |
[Question]
[
So here is the setup:
The protagonist has escaped an underground slave encampment in a cyberpunk dystopia. Everyone in this world is expected to be registered - the SIN (System Identification Number) from Shadowrun best describes this concept. You need this registry in order to have a job that isn't in the criminal underworld or under the table. Its also used for bank accounts and when buying certain goods. Without this registry you are effectively not a person. Of course this means that the government and megacorps can will look up any information they like about you, including your movements within the world.
My protagonist does not have such a registry. They have some money in decentralised wallet on their person that can be placed into the legit money system. So they need a room. Why would even a sketchy landlord take in a 'SINless' person?
Or would they?
[Answer]
**The landlord can safely exploit the "SINless"**
This happens far too often with illegal immigrants in many countries. The landlord can rent out cramped accommodation with substandard heating / cooling / electrical safety / fire safety etc etc safe in the knowledge that the renter/s cannot complain to the authorities without risking being arrested and deported. In this instance, I would imagine that it's probably impossible to even lodge a complaint without a SIN, it's bound to be a mandatory field when lodging a complaint.
[Answer]
### They claim to have a SIN.
Megacorps in corrupt cyberpunk dystopias won't necessarily share all information with each other. The person could claim to have a SIN as a corporate indentured worker for some far off or obscure corporation that didn't see a need to tell outsiders about their people, as is likely true.
### The landlord can charge a premium.
Because the person lacks an identity the landlord can charge extra for the trouble. This lets them make more money.
### The landlord has experience with other slaves.
This person isn't the first person to escape. The landlord knows of other similar people and feels some moral obligation to help.
### The landlord can kick them out more easily.
If a better client comes along the landlord can easily point a shotgun at them and move them out. With no SIN they can't sue. Having them is great.
[Answer]
The landlord does not just own a handful of rooms. They are a big corporation managing thousands of them. Which means they are dependent on their computer system to keep track of their assets.
The protagonist is (or knows) a skilled hacker who broke into the systems of the landlord company, found a vacant room, downloaded the door code, and then deleted the room from their database. The landlord company is now no longer aware that the room even exists.
Alternatively, if you need a landlord as a real person for story purposes: Their "landlord" IS the hacker. The hacker's business is to "steal apartments" from LandlordCorp using the above process and then rent them to people who don't want to be found. When the protagonist stops paying, they again break into LandlordCorp's servers, add the room back to the database and watch what happens when they try to rent it to someone else.
[Answer]
# Illegal Subletting
Rather than the landlord being a sketchy person as the other answers suggest, they are just a 'normal' person who has got an unused asset they want to exploit for some additional under the counter funds.
They're willing to rent to someone within a SIN, because the apartment would be unsuitable for someone with a SIN who would need to officially register it as their address. For the current occupant to sublet it would be against some rules (lease, tenancy agreement, city ordinances, etc.).
For this to work, there needs to be some kind of lock-in which means people can't or don't want to give up their apartments once they've got them, examples might be:
* Rent control - they've been renting the same place for fifty years and pay one tenth that their neighbours pay.
* New apartments are really hard to find, and they intend to come back someday,
* It has sentimental value - e.g. the place they raised their kids.
* Slightly different - they still live there, but by renting out their spare room they exceed permitted occupancy limits,
Some examples of 'normal' people who may turn to this are:
* An elderly father who has left 'his' apartment and moved in with his daughter,
* Two lovers have moved in together, however one doesn't want to give up their old place,
* Someone needs to pretend they live in the city for their job, but in fact works remotely from somewhere else.
* Someone who is in a hospital long-term and needs extra funds for bills.
[Answer]
## He's not renting the room.
The landlord can't rent a room to a person without papers. Indeed, as the room was never authorized by the Planning Commission as a rental property, he is not allowed to rent the room at all. Fortunately, he *is* allowed to hire day laborers to clean and refinish the room, put up electronic posters of the Supreme Leader, etc. If one of those lazy employees dozes off on the job, well, that just goes to show what landlords have to deal with.
[Answer]
**Identity theft.**
SINless person is masquerading as a SIN person who is not her. The landlord is fooled. Maybe this person looks very much like the SIN person who the landlord sort of knows. Maybe she has some sort of partial papers and that is enough - the landlord is full of liquor or distracted by the game and so does not do the formal check.
Perhaps she has taken the identify of her SIN doppelganger and done away with the original. Or maybe the real person is out there somewhere also.
[Answer]
## The whole building is off the grid.
Through a convoluted ploy involving blackmail, forgery, bribery and/or hacking, Landlord obtained physical access to an apartment building which officially does not exist. It hides in plain sight, but does not appear on any maps, in any ground registries or other official documents. It has no house number and doesn't get visited by any government stooges.
Owning such a building has lots of benefits. Like not paying tax or utilities and not having to do any annoying paperwork. But most of all, it provides anonymity. So Landlord's business is to cater to the needs of people who need access to a room within the city which can not be connected back to them and who don't want to answer any questions about what for. People like the protagonist, but also lots of other shady characters.
Landlord would not want to rent to "normal" people, because "normal" people would be neither able nor willing to put up with all the complications of living in an apartment which does not officially exist. They would do stupid stuff, like trying to register the non-existent address as their official place of residence or entering it into any other government forms. They would probably raise suspicion, get arrested and snitch even before the interrogator had time to explain his favorite torture method. And then the whole ploy would get revealed. So Landlord only rents to people who want to stay hidden and know how to shut up.
[Answer]
## Recently dead renters give a SIN opening that the SINless can "Borrow"
The landlord has a problem - one of their previous renters was falling behind on some protection payment, and encountered repercussions on that. If an official investigation were to take place at the place of their death, it would reveal a lot of other issues with the landlord's place that are sketchy of their own way.
Normally, they would have to bribe the building inspectors on their annual checks, but this would be out of band, and involve bribing a lot more officials than they're used to.
Before they can get around to arranging those bribes though, the protagonist comes through the door, asking for a room, "No questions asked", though running into an issue when they're trying to fill out the SIN-requiring form.
With some quick thinking, the landlord fills out the "Check-out" paperwork for the now-dead renter, and then pass on the SIN information to the customer, "No questions asked". Maybe with a slight reference that they should use the name of the person who last had the SIN. I mean sure, they won't be able to access any of that person's accounts, but that person was presumably already in the red, so...if they have their own wallet of funds, they won't ask questions either.
(They might even skip the "Check-out/Check-back-in" steps and just give them the room initially, and on paying for the next days, let them in on the SIN information they need to use, again, "No questions asked".)
[Answer]
***cyber mild mild west***
in our current world , if you don't have the paperwork, you live in a verry similar situation.
To rent a room without your SIN you will need to find a shady landlord that will gladly give you a place to stay, but at a huge premium. and on top of that, you can be sure that said place will be in a much poorer stay and you won't have much recourse
or, if he is less fortunate, he will more deal will dreamseller in even more cramped condition.
***let's punk that shit up***
This all well and good, but if you want some more funky idea, you can, amongst many thing: let them put a device tracker on your augs for """security"""
or even better, if the wallet that collect the rent doesn't get paide on time, said aug just get straight up disabled
[Answer]
If being SINless is an extremely rare exception, then there wouldn't be any reason for landlords to accommodate them. However, in many cyberpunk settings, SINless people form a significant percentage of the total population. This means that if there is enough need for a certain kind of service, there will be people who will try to make money out of providing this service, even if it's of questionable legality.
Compare it to the loan sharks in the real world. If you have a stable income and a good credit score, and want a loan, you'd go to a bank instead of a loan shark, because the bank will give you better terms. However, those who would get refused by banks, will turn to loan sharks because they have no legal ways to get what they want. Loan sharks exist because if there is a niche in the market, there will be someone to fill it. If there are plenty of people without a SIN in need of an apartment, there will be landlords specialized for their needs, offering services of lower quality and/or in undesirable parts of the city, where better situated clients won't want to go anyway.
[Answer]
## Landlord is a machine,
and a machine can be fooled or hacked. Why manually manage a building like a donkey? A building full of low-class, poor people managed fully by an automated Landlord system can actually make a bit of money! And as a plus you don't have to deal with all the drama of dirty people, crime, air quality, collecting rent, evictions and etc. No, you're too busy throwing decadent rooftop parties Downtown. In fact, you've never seen the building with your own eyes!
Perhaps there are Landlord AI's with known backdoors with a *barely* good enough security system so the Owner has plausible deniability in court when caught housing a SINless. Everybody happy.
[Answer]
Compassion.
No wait, let me explain.
Cyberpunk is dark and depressing, and everyone is just out for themselves. Oh sure, you have a few interesting characters who are fighting for a cause, but pretty much everyone is an ass... right?
Wrong.
Pretty much every CP story has at least one character who's not just a classic edgerunner or corporate sociopath. There are a lot of background characters who try to help people simply because it's the right thing to do, or because they're trying to atone, or because they lost someone, or... and so on. There are even entire groups that, while not entirely good, do good for the people they protect -the LoTeks from Johnny Mnemonic for example.
*But come on, landlords?*
Yeah, I know. They have a bad rep, even in the modern real world. But statistically it's unlikely that every single one of them is a money grubbing, exploitative piece of human garbage. Some of them have SINless family, a few just don't think the SIN system is particularly fair, maybe a couple are just trying to Stick It To The Man. And the underground knows which ones you can rent a room from. Hell, any street fixer worth the name knows at least one place you can rent space off the books.
And yeah, there are a bunch who are just doing it for the sake of traceless creds to line their pockets. They're operating off baser motives, but the outcome is the same. Maybe they'll pressure you into doing something more for your room and board, maybe not. Talk to other SINless in the area, they'll tell you who to avoid.
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**A few exemplary reasons**
**1.** It is landlord's business model.
If there is a demand for rooms available to SINless people, there is a supply.
Landlord might run a "legit" business renting rooms to SINless for cash or maybe
untrackable goods to evade taxes (if this would work in this setting of course).
Or maybe he runs a kind of criminal organization, providing a place to stay in
exchange for them working as his goons. He could also force people he
accommodates to work in a sweatshop of some kind, think chinese imigrants being
smuggled to USA and forced to work by triads. Desperate people are easy exploit, think what criminal organizations do with desperate people, some of it could apply here.
**2.** SINless person is valuable
Maybe they have bounty on their head, in that case landlord just sets up a trap. They can also have valuable skills, maybe landlord lives and rents room in a
"less friendly" part of the town and could use a bodyguard or qualified
electrician and providing them with room is cheaper then hiring. Maybe landlord
wants to use the protagonist as a leverage in some situation or harvest their organs. He could be also be paid by some mysterious benefactor to rent a room to the protagonist (again, if it makes sense in your story). Maybe protagonist have something landlord wants, and they plan to steal it. Of course some of those require landlord and protagonist to be tied in some way.
**3.** "Obligation"
Maybe protagonist is landlord's friend or family, maybe landlord owes protagonist a favor (or someone else who demands them to rent protagonist a room) or maybe they are forced to, by protagonist or someone else.
**4.** They are a good person
Maybe landlord is just a good person, maybe their religion demands from them to help those in need or it's just their moral code. They could even run a free shelter for SINless people. It is as good reason as any other and it could be used in interesting ways.
**5.** They are a bad person
Landlord is a serial killer that targets exclusively or mainly SINless people, as it is easier to get away with murder that way. And how could he say no to prey literally coming to him. They could also conduct illegal experiments on captured SINless, reason is the same, it's easier.
Hope i helped.
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[Question]
[
I'm imagining a low-tech medieval fantasy world where an attack at dawn such that the defenders are forced to look into the rising sun conveys a huge advantage. The effect on my fantasy humanoids would be many orders of magnitude greater than anything humans experience. The armies are mostly wooden shield and spear equipped levies and normally a shield wall puts attackers at a disadvantage. On open ground at dawn, however, sun-blinded defenders, could have their line broken easily by a charge and face disorganization and defeat by a much smaller force. I'm hoping this will lead to interesting tactical decisions where terrain that defends against an east-to-west attacks becomes invaluable and forces are constantly maneuvering and taking risks to try to get the sun on their side.
My question is this, is there a portable tactic, or inexpensive tool that would allow defenders to avoid being blinded by the rising sun?
* The extremely vulnerable period lasts about 1 hour at dawn and dusk, however these humanoids lack night vision, so presumably a dusk attack is not as advantageous.
* [Medieval Oakley
sunglasses](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D14M3G/suit-of-armor-wearing-sunglasses-D14M3G.jpg)
are out due to expense.
* Other more expensive weapons and skilled soldiers like cavalry, archers, or heavy infantry are plausible only as small supplements to mostly non-professional armies
* Fabian strategies are allowed, but preserving villages and farmland is preferred
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You don't need high tech, or even glass, for light-reduction "glasses".
In real life, there are places where bright light is a problem - in snowfields in the north. People find ways to cope.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GvceQ.jpg)
(Picture from [a webpage about Inuits](https://kids.kiddle.co/Inuit))
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I imagine that army tactics in this world would evolve such that commanders would not put their troops in that situation in the first place - i.e. if they are expecting an attack in the open field from the direction of the rising sun, they have already made a gross tactical blunder. They would choose their time/place of battle such that this simply isn't an issue (early morning twilight, perhaps, or a civilized post-lunch melee).
Even attacking troops may want to avoid dawn, as any cavalry units or routed ground forces may also end up facing into the sun, running straight into their own comrades.
That aside:
* Some kind of muslin or thin material on the inside of helmets (for
full helms) or as a veil on the outside (for half helms) may suffice.
These might not cope in the wind or the heat of battle though.
* Helmets with very wide brims (might work as long as you don't have to look uphill)
* Eye shadow to reduce reflected glare
* Portable sun shades - either on a per-solider basis, or perhaps a few large shades held by specialist units in the army (like a
standard-bearer)
* There would be a strong military incentive to invent some kind of dark glasses, so a rudimentary form of coloured or tinted glass may
be employed, either as part of a visor or as spectacles. Small, simple cuts of glass would likely not be that expensive to manufacture.
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**Give them a taste of their own medicine!**
Of course it is not the most proper answer to the OP, but it could be an interesting countermeasure.
Attacked soldiers have a mirror (or a patch of very shiny metal) embedded on their helm, just above the forebrow and/or in their shield.
By adequately shaping the mirror, it would reflect the light from the low sun toward the enemies, effectively blinding them.
* The mirror would create a bright spot in front of the soldier: if
they keep the lines, the enemy would run against a blinding line of
light. This tactic would of course be less effective if the defending
soldiers had to run against the enemy or it they can't hold the lines
(for instance if the enemy attacks covered by a rain of arrows).
* For a surprise effect, the soldiers could receive the instruction to
cover the mirrors with a blanket and uncover it only when the enemy
is charging against them.
[Answer]
For a technological solution, a brimmed helmet such as a morion could be tilted to block the sun while still allowing good visibility of your opponents.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jgpXs.png)
However, if you're caught off guard and forced to come up with a tactical solution to this problem, you could split and roll the line. Let the enemy push through the middle of your formation as you try to hold the flanks. This will put you at a slight disadvantage because it would mean if one side of your army starts to fall, it could not be reinforced from the other side, but it would get the sun out of your eyes eliminating what is probably the greater threat. Plus, if your attacker is in fact is the smaller force, this maneuver could be the precursor to completely surrounding them which would maximize the use of your superior numbers.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yww2a.png)
[Answer]
**Avoid having open, level ground to the east at dawn**
As long as the terrain immediately to your east either blocks the light or impedes your enemy, you're fine.
If you're immediately west of something tall and opaque -- woods, a ridge, a town wall -- it will block the sun until it's higher in the sky. (It may or may not also slow down the enemy.) If your enemy is on top of it, you'll be looking up at them and not at the sun, though you may have a related problem an hour later.
If you're immediately west of a valley, you'll be looking down into it, not into the sun. (And your attackers will be slowed by climbing.)
If you're immediately west of impassible terrain -- water, swamp, thick brush -- then your enemy won't attack that way.
*Note that sunglass and substitutes do NOT solve the problem. They prevent eye strain, but they block out the light you need to see as well as the sunlight, so they don't help you see your attackers very much.*
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# Dig a Trench
The vulnerable area is actually quite small, therefore a 6' deep trench would stop any charge from the vulnerable direction.
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Here's some thoughts
* Something similar to the [Roman marching fort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castra) could be useful tactically, simply as a delaying method that puts confrontation off until the sun is well up in the sky. This leaves the defender vulnerable to fast moving auxiliaries when they try to deploy.
* A simple cloth veil that cuts the sun light down to manageable levels could be put around/over helmets. This reduces the vision of troops and in a melee it can come loose etc...
* Slit/barred helmets, full face helms with narrow vision slits are often compared to having your head in a bucket, for good reason in my experience. The amount of light that gets in through the visor is extremely limited, such helms need not be made in metal either, a leather helm can be made in the same design. Again there are issues with what one can see when looking out of such a helm.
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For the first hour, the sun is pretty close to the horizon, so if you can block the light just a few yards off the ground in front of you, then you'll be in good shape, right? Also, the place where the sunrise is most dangerous is in an open plain, and I assume you don't have enough time to plant a bunch of tall bushes and trees around your defenses. So you'll likely have some advance notice that enemies are coming near, even if it comes by means of scouts that are set off to the side of the approach area so that they don't get blinded.
**Block out the Sun with Smoke**
Suppose your east-facing defense has a bunch of catapults geared and ready to pummel the ground 10-50 yards in front of your battle line with powder/smoke bombs, creating a dense smokescreen that would both protect you from the light, and also give you the opportunity to quickly rearrange your troops in preparation for the attack.
The downside is that if you do this more than once, the enemy might expect it. In that case, since neither you nor your enemy can really see one another, and neither of you have been thrown into confusion, the worst case scenario is that you're on level footing with your enemy. In any case, it's easy to imagine generating a very large smokescreen with enough materials, and so this gets the sun out of the picture.
**Types of Smoke**
Expanding on this idea, you can choose from any number of powders to maximize the effect. You could mix an irritant like cayenne powder with fine flour or cinnamon, which can be [caused to explode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_explosion) when enough of it is suspended in the air. You could even follow up with burning wood soaked in onion juice -- it'll produce a lot of smoke, and it would be quite uncomfortable to wade through.
In the worst case scenario, you're downwind of the battlefield. If that happens, or if your enemies are wise to your delicious half-baked smokescreen and try to counter it with water or something, then you can always fall back on regular [medieval smoke bombs](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/134179/making-a-medieval-smoke-bomb-quickly-and-reasonably).
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### Faulty premise - it gives no advantage
I can only assume the OP has never been awake at dawn. The sunlight is not ever "blinding".
Sunlight as a distraction is useful only in the very small area covered by the sun. Soldiers looking forwards are by definition not looking into the sun, because they're looking towards their opponents and not up into the sky. One possible exception would be if the enemy are landing on a beach, in which case the horizon is lower and glare off the water could be an issue, but otherwise it really doesn't matter.
Of course targeted arrow firing would be affected, since archers do look up. But no army fired arrows at specific targets, unless the targets were very close - they fired en masse, with the target being "put that arrow 200 yards away". Distance mattered, not accuracy, when you're aiming at troops in formation.
When it comes to hand-to-hand fighting, it might be a slight distraction, but barely even that. If you're fighting, you're focused on the opponent. Slight flashes from a rising sun will have no effect. I'm not aware of any historical land battle in which the angle relative to the sun had any effect due to brightness, although of course I'd be happy to be corrected.
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## Crystal translucency
[Quartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz) is an extremely abundant material, and some forms of quartz crystals are translucent. Perhaps they could be fashioned into a thin strip and attached a helmet visor, or tied in front of one's eyes with a leather strap. With the strong backlight of the sun, enemies would have quite dark shadows and their fuzzy outlines might be enough to attack or dodge.
## Helmet shadow bar
One way that might reduce the enemy's advantage *somewhat* is to attach a horizontal bar or strip in front of the soldier's forehead that can be lined up with the sun by tilting one's head. It might take some skill to use but the soldier would be able to turn their eyes left, right, above or below, and to some degree rotate their head.
(The bar cannot be vertical because its shadow could only cover one eye at a time.)
When it is hard to maintain head tilt, for instance when dodging something or dashing forwards, the soldier could look at the ground or close their eyes. With your eyes closed it is possible (with some skill) to tell when the bar is in the right place and open your eyes again.
It is clearly not a great solution, but I think it would be better than nothing.
[Answer]
Since you have middle-ages technology, your humans likely have cheesecloth or burlap. Simply wrapping this around their eyes in a thin layer would allow them to see, but still block out the sun. Halloween costumes do this when they want to hide the wearer's eyes, with the added effect of acting as light-blockers. Since you don't need that much visibility up-close (it actually becomes a hassle in real fights), this is good for front-lines soldiers, with the added bonus of acting as a sweatband and preventing sweat from stinging their eyes.
Adding on to @Artelius's answer, instead or the normal white crystal quartz, you could use Smoky Quartz to form a kind of sunglasses. These are better for commanders and archers, which depend on fine vision control for their duties, which also supports these positions being rarer.
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[Question]
[
**How would a group of elemental mages defend against guns and artillery of late WW1?**
War rages between two nations. Both have basically the same tech level, but one doesn't use hand held guns. This is because of how common elemental magery is and strong discouragement from the upper and warrior classes.
They still have tanks and artillery, but nothing small enough that a single person could carry into battle.
The problem with element magic is its limited rage. It has an effective range of 50 to 60 ft (15 to 18 m), but at that range you're really only taking large chunks of earth, fire, water, air or lighting and launching them at the enemy.
To use elemental magery with full versatility and accuracy you need a range of 10 to 20 ft (3 to 6 m).
In this case the elemental side is holding some trenches and their scouts have informed them that they have a day to prepare before the other army arrives. How could they arrange their defense to negate or at least mediate the enemy's range advantage?
[Answer]
**They Don't**
The effective range of a WWI-era bolt action rifle was theoretically over 1000 yards, though most men didn't actually engage at ranges exceeding 300 yards. A machinegun could use "indirect fire" out to about a mile. The general field artillery of all armies was several thousand yards, and the heavy artillery even longer range. Mortars/Minenwerfers had ranges in the hundreds of hards, and were indirect fire. As described your mages are dead loooong before their abilities come into play. The best they could do would be to have your earth mages create the mother of all tank traps (say 30-40ft wide and the same deep) to prevent the enemy actually being able to attack you. Then you pull back out of field artillery range and laugh. Until the enemy combat engineers come up and bridge your tank trap. You can't really stop them, because you'd be under fire for ages before your mages could get into range.
At best you could perhaps use your earth mages to sap towards the enemy. But unless this is completely silent and very rapid the WWI force will detect them coming. At this point "counter-sapping" happens, probably via blowing up your mages with explosives powerful enough to do their job while staying out of mage-range.
Your water mages aren't much good, despite the modern image of Tommys in waist-deep mud/water in their trenches, that was an early war (and largely british) problem. By mid-late war trenches drained pretty well, except in certain areas of the british lines where the water table was too low. But even then it's not like you could get close enough to do good work without being shot on the way in, and as those trenches were actually built above ground you couldn't just flood them with water manipulated on your side of the line.
Fire mages are essentially flamethrowers, and by late war your WWI opponent not only has an equivalent but also knows how to deal with them. Turns out flamethrowers aren't super effective weapons and a fire mage with 10-50 meter range is basically a flamethrower.
Air Mage is iffy, because I'm not sure on their powers. But again it comes back to only having a 50 meter range. Sure they can suck the air out of the lungs of anybody that close, but when they get machineguned at 1000 yards then shot at 200, that's not very likely.
Lightning-callers would be useful in denying the enemy air cover/observation balloons, but that's small comfort to an army that has no way of fighting back against the enemy until they're right up on them.
My suggestion would be to either give your mages longer-ranged abilities, your mages' support troops actual weapons (check out Into the Darkness by Harry Turtledove. It's the first book in his Magic WWII series for examples of magic-equivalent WWI/II weapons) or give your mages some truly ridiculous defensive capabilities such that they're immune to artillery/rifles/machineguns outside the range of their own abilities.
[Answer]
**It depends on how versatile the magic is**
Magic by definition is a power to do things that aren't normally possible. The number of possibilities is how much your system is willing to allow. If the only application of magic is to throw bolts of it 60ft then they are screwed. That kind of ability is near useless against a modern army. If these mages have more nuanced elemental powers, then the possibilities are near endless. The following suggestions are based on the assumption elemental magic is more nuanced in controlling the elements.
**Sight Denial & Distortion**
Information is the key to warfare, and Visual Senses are the most important sense to every human. Relatively long range, no latency, with very high quality in preserving details. There is no radar, no infrared, no sonar, no tripwires, only mark one eyeballs on the WWI battlefield. The guns of WWI are highly dependent on sight. Bolt action rifles are very accurate and powerful, but rather poor at delivering indiscriminate fire because of somewhat low rate of fire and low ammo capacity (around 5). Machine guns are much better in this regard, but overheat and can't move very well. Artillery need spotters either in the air or on the ground to direct their fire.
Now how can magic remove sight? There are a bunch of options if you control the elements.
1. *Literal Fog of War* - If you can control water, fog is probably the easiest thing to conjure. With as many casters as you need, you can simply shroud your positions with a deep fog. The enemy won't even know if you are there under the fog or not, allowing units to rotate or redeploy completely unknown to the enemy. This eliminates the threat of prescison attacks by snipers and rifle fire, while lowering the strength of machine guns and artillery bombardment. If they fire into the mist, they risk firing all their ammunition at nothing. This of course doesn't work if you only keep a cloud over your exact position, they will know exactly where to shoot. The fog needs to be long and thick.
* For positions everywhere, there is no reason for the water mage to just stand up on the surface to get shot or blown up. You can easily stuff them in a nice bunker 20ft deep courtesy of the earth mages and send fog up through a pipe. These pipes can be placed well to the sides or rear of a fighting position and shifted regularly to confuse the enemy. This can help overcome the limited range of magic. This will also protect against aerial photography and bombing campaigns, as fog floats above the ground.
* Artificial wind. Depending on the density of the fog and the speed of fog generation, you can blow the fog with air mages. Air mages must be able to move air after all, this seems logical. This can not only keep the fog bank from being shifted away by the wind, but also allow you to creep it forwards, sideways, or wherever you want eliminating the range problem of magics. You can use a windblown fog to cover an attack from enemy sight or make fake attacks to control the enemy. They can fire at the creeping fog with all the firepower they want, but finding out if there is anything inside to hit is much harder. Use of multiple fake attacks to lower the vigilance of enemies is an ancient tactic, after the 3rd or 4th time their vigilance is lowered or their stamina depleted, making an attack easier.
* Fog the enemy lines so they can't see anything. This also has a multitude of other effects. Dampness is bad for guns and their powder, making them degrade faster due to rust or being unable to light. Dampness also spreads disease and mold, something that claimed the lives of over 2 million people in the first world war. Prolonged fog can seriously lower morale; not knowing what's out there, getting no sunlight for vitamin D, being under the influence of enemy powers, and its other aforementioned affects can cripple the fighting ability of enemy soldiers with no powers at all.
2. *Earth Mages moving dirt* - what can dirt do for you? The easiest application is digging and fortifying trenches and bunkers. This has been mentioned many times, suffice to say it lowers casualties from bombardment and makes the troops feel nice and safe. What else can you do with control of dirt?
* Make the mud work for you and you alone. Charging through mud is tough going, not just in a shitty trench but also in the crater strewn middle ground. If the creeping fog is on most of the war, the ground will become very damp and the mud will never dry. Now, if an earth mage can change the density of dirt and move it, they can create temporary walkways of dry land on which attacks or tanks can be taken quickly to attack the other side. Shrouded in fog, the enemy may be slow or even unable to react to attack units traveling much faster than their own.
* Tunneling. Sappers were well known to dig tunnels and fight other tunnel digging units trying to place explosives under enemy lines or channel troops into them. If you can control the earth, there is basically no way you can lose the war of the sappers. You can perhaps sense and collapse enemy tunnels. You can dig faster, bigger, and tougher tunnels by compressing the earth around it. You can even get air ventilation from air mages. Digging under enemy lines and collapsing their entire frontline bunkers and all is possible with earth magic. You can also tunnel troops and even tanks to the enemy artillery batteries given enough time. Plus, every single tunnel dweller is safe from guns and artillery.
* Anti-Tank defenses. I don't know if you can make stones, but if you can making a lot of small ones shouldn't be hard. Tanks hate tough gravel. It gets in their treads and busts the pins holding the tread links together. A gravel pit can also mire a tank and cause it to sink into the gravel. Other tank defenses like dragon teeth, large concrete spikes that block tanks can be installed across the battle lines semi-remotely. Being 40ft away in a trench is more than enough to install such defenses. How can this deceive though?
* Quick defenses. The power of water mages to move water can dry concrete quickly. Combined with earth mages, they can build solid fake or real defenses overnight to bamboozle the enemy in the rare moments the fog lifts (on purpose or not). Tank traps, bunkers, and other concrete defenses usually made weeks beforehand can be dried in a day akin to modern quick dry concrete. Most of these will be decoys to save cost, but real ones can be made inside or at the same time to give the mages more teeth. A mix of fake and real tank defenses like dragon's teeth, gravel pits, or ditches can make tanks avoid areas that are otherwise vulnerable. It also serves to extremely intimidate the enemy. After every artillery barrage, the defenses return within the week just like new. The massive number of trenches, bunkers, and traps make the lines seem magical and impregnable, crippling the will to attack them.
3. *Flashes in the Dark* - Fire mages must be able to make fire of some sort. But who can tell what is real in the fog of war? Fire mages can be tasked to create what are essentially fireworks, or the flashiest but least powerful explosions possible. Why is this useful? You can easily thwart artillery spotters, who can only see flashes in the deep fog or night. By timing them with enemy shell barrages, you can totally misrepresent or scatter the barrage by making fake shell impact explosions 60ft in some direction. The gunners will constantly think their shells are coming in short or long and adjust their guns off target. Or you can detonate the fireworks on top of your own lines to make the enemy think most of their shells are landing home when they are really landing in the flanks where you fired fireworks last time. Artillery with long range and power is useless if it doesn't hit anything. If the fire mages have problems lighting up in the fog, just get an air mage to clear them a bubble of dry air.
* The fake campfire ruse. An age old strategy, manipulating the number of cooking fires has long been used to deceive. By lowering you fires, you look like you have less men. More fires, more men. Fire mages can basically start as many of these as they want from a decently safe distance. They can probably also cook food with a controlled smokeless flame, even inside a bunker. This can mean hot, cooked meals in the safety of a bunker with the help of air mages for ventilation. Every military strategist knows how much cooked food means to a soldier, but usually it isn't safe to cook with a fire as it makes you a target. Magic is great. By blowing the smell of cooked meals and igniting fake campfires all over the place you can totally infuriate the enemy. No matter how many fake campfires they shoot at, the smell of cooked food won't go away. More morale on your side, plummeting morale on the other. Stacks with above effects as well for true magically induced misery.
4. **Unknown Advanced Applications**
I really have no idea what your mage's spell grimoires look like but some spells applications might be pretty useful if they exist.
* Thermal vision: some sort of heat sensitivity in fire or air mages might make finding targets in the fog easy. A spell imitating the heat receptors on a snake would do as well.
* Sonar: sensing vibrations in the air or ground would be useful in the same way
* Water sense: people are made of mostly water. A water mage would most likely be able to sense water?
**Sounds of Victory**
The magicians of many elements should be able to produce sound. Lightning magic for magnetic speakers, air mages for sound wave creation and amplification, fire magic for explosions, etc etc. In a world of fog, sounds suddenly become the only thing soldiers can cling to. Fake voices, screams, explosions, orders, officer whistles, you can wreak havoc on the enemy. With both sound and vision under magical control, you can just play the powerful but magically weak soldiers in the palm of your hand.
[Answer]
## Bucket brigade
The Earth mages have most of the fun. The first one scoops up a ball of stone and soil 20 feet wide and propels it to a receiving area. Then he strolls with practiced ease into the hole and does it again, while the second mage takes up his original position to pass the ball onward. So it goes, to the slow beat of the drum, a choreographed symphony of stone and earth balls rising from the soil, as the Mage Army walks into the ground at a fast march. They are followed by engineer mages who smooth out every last detail and ensure the road is foolproof before the regular fighting troops follow.
As for the balls? Well, the Earth mages have *most* of the fun. But once the excised chunks of stone reach the receiving area, it's the job of the Wind mages to give those babies wings and set them to flight! They call it the Five Hundred Yard Trebuchet based on back of the envelope calculations about the size of the equivalent siege engine to have such an effect. The enemy will be softened up substantially, and the noise of the terrific impacts will help guide the Earth mages to their goal.
Once they arrive, and establish a grid of passageways under the hated enemy with frequently spaced skylights at the ready to be punched through, it is up to the Fire mages to light that oven and cook until well done.
[Answer]
**Magic potentiated machines.**
Your mages have tanks and artillery. Use the magic to augment the machines. Clever merging of earth magic with tanks result in very fast tanks. Mergers of fire and air magic with artillery result in artillery with much farther ranges than unmodified guns.
And make more awesome machines: hydraulic WW1 mechs powered by elemental water magic. Enormous high altitude fire/air zeppelins that shower lightning down on everyone. Shoveltanks using earth magic to move along 10 feet underground then emerge in the enemy trench and open up with the fire magic flamethrowers.
[Answer]
**Against small-caliber firearms, no problem**. Your Earth mages just interpose earth or rock as "movable walls", providing quite adequate cover. This will even work fine against massed machineguns, as their penetration ability is quite minor and even just a 2-foot earth wall will absorb. Air and water mages can summon fog to hide themselves. Lightning mages could counter attack, just imagine how electrified the enemy become when you zap their barbed wire barricades, and the metal of their rifles. Typical WW1 firearm engagement ranges were tens of meters only, well in range of your Mages.
**Against large-caliber direct-fire weapons, like cannons**, you can do the same thing but with a **lot** more effort. To stop a 155mm HE round from a cannon will just turn a 2-foot earthen wall, or even a 10-foot thick wall, into a destructive blast. So the Mages could only defend by hiding underground, in deep trenches, or by not being where the enemy is targeting (via stealth, misdirection, false images, etc.) In other words, the Mages are not much better off than mundane soldiers on the battlefield, they can just dig their trenches much faster. Cannon and mortars would engage at ranges of hundreds of meters, well outside the range of your mages. They could not counterattack, just defend.
But **the killer: Indirect-fire, long-range artillery bombardment**.
The *only* way to protect themselves would be to burrow deep under ground, or cower in trenches and hope the artillery does not land in the trench. *Exactly* the same as the poor normal soldiers. Illusions or fog will not hide them, because the artillery is not firing at a target but at a location on the map. Air will not protect them, because there is no ways to detect, target and divert an artillery shell approaching at more than the speed of sound. Artillery engages at ranges of kilometers to tens of kilometer. Your mages will not be able to engage, indeed they will not even have a means to detect just who/where is shooting at them. They can just defend, and either withdraw or hunker down and hope the enemy runs out of ammo.
At least, with both Earth and Air mages, you can tunnel all over the place like rabbits. This will make escape much easier, and there is the potential to tunnel towards the enemy and bypass their frontline defenses. This, combined with their excellent defense ability against small-arms may be very valuable in a battle.
[Answer]
**Depends heavily on the environment**
The best defence is a good offence. Your mages should have no problem wrecking the enemies. Defence is the mages weakness to be exploited, so they should enclose and engage.
First of all, is there a large body of water near? Then have some mages make it so water goes down to the enemy. When they arrive, be in your own trenches and just start chucking water. With enough mages you van both put an enormous amount of water in the direction of the enemy and keep it from seeping back to your own positions. No trench warfare can be had by the other side if their trenches are full, the ground is too soggy to sleep or even make a potty hole. They'll die of disease from being in water and their own filth if they aren't easily gunned down by the mages. Also don't forget! Even an unaimed lightning strike can do lots of damage if the enemy is basically in one big pool of water!
No body of water? No worries! The earth mages can handle it. With 10ft (3m) full control they can just dig a tunnel to the enemy. How can you fight an enemy if parts of the land are pushed up, while others sink with devastating consequences, all the wile not showing a single enemy? Even if you stay above ground you can use the earth movers to move a big chuck of earth forward as a shield, allowing the fire and lightning mages to come close enough for their magic. Even the earth and water mages can slam or suffocate people, but fire and lightning really bring a different level of fear.
Fire and lightning aren't as useful. They still are, as they can provide light in the trenches and battlefields, obfuscate movement and positions and allow for more easier fear and despair scenarios, but they aren't as good with utility.
**Defences**
The defences itself shouldn't be neglected. Fortification of the trenches like normal can be done, only with mage power behind them. Use earth and implant wood for quick roofs and walls. Sheltered walking areas for supply or retreat. Possibly the earth can be packed so tight it is waterproof, allowing water to be used on top of roofs or in between walls to further dampen explosions and impacts. Remove as much advantage of the enemy by both using resources like trees and to burn the rest to a crisp. Move as much water away, or on purpose into the ground to make it unsuitable for trenches and heavy weapons to move. Not only will a few lightning struck trees and a wasteland of coal and dirt, with soot filled air be devastating for the morale of the enemy, they have little resources to use and no cover but natural hills.
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**Fly over or Burrow Under the Trenches**
One way to overcome a WW1 army is to either burrow under (Earth Magic) or fly over (Wind Magic) their defensive line and then attack their supply lines or capital city directly.
One way to defend yourself is use Earth magic to hide undergound. The enemy cannot find you, and you can detect tremors in the ground to know when they have passed.
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Inspired by the Answer by yolo man:
Classic trench warfare heavily favours the side with the guns and longer range. So, don't do that.
Make classic trench warfare as hard as you can with your mages - as mentioned by yolo man, you can use fog to prevent aimed shooting, mud to prevent people with shotguns running up to you and blasting you with them, and if your earth mages can build better fortifications than people with shovels, nice.
When you want to take the fight to the enemy, well - your mages are most effective at almost melee range. So get into that range. Fog up the battlefield in as wide a range as you can (so they don't just spray into a 3m/10ft area of fog and hit you anyway), have your earth mages dry out paths for your small strike teams, and storm the enemy trenches. Have mages with defensive abilities (earth armor? water shield?) jump in first to absorb any shotgun blasts. Or crawl up to the trench and have the fire mage stick just his hands over the edge to fry those covering inside. If any earth mages are powerful enough to push a small hill of earth along with them to cover behind, even better.
You'd still take a lot of losses during such offenses, especially if machine guns are already in play. But by magically armoring up and preventing enemy fire from being concentrated on your charging troops thanks to the fog, charging the enemy lines is at least a less bad idea than it was for actual WW1 troops. Who still sometimes did that.
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How fast do your spells move through the air? If they move fast enough, your mages are a game changer for the air war.
Aerial gunnery, the weapon of dogfighting, is difficult. If the gun is fixed to the airplane, then the airplane must be maneuvered to bring the gun to bear. Since bullets take time to fly through the air, the pilot also has to lead the target. All while flying an airplane with many constraints on how it can be maneuvered: Not too slow or you stall, not too fast or the wings come off. Not too many G's or the airplane breaks.
For a passenger with a swivel gun, aerial gunnery is still difficult, because of the difficulties with leading the target from your airplane which is probably maneuvering.
And don't forget the target is also maneuvering. A gun solution may only last for an instant.
However, if your spells move through the air very quickly, then they eliminate or reduce the problem of having to lead the target. The pilot flies within mage range of the target, pointed any way you like that keeps them out of the enemy's gun sight. Your mage looks at the target, launches an instantaneous or nearly instantaneous spell, and the dogfight is over.
In addition, airplanes of the age are fragile. Your mages will probably be able to do enough damage from the very edge of their effective range.
The introduction of this into air combat will cause an engineering war to see who can have the faster airplanes. The enemy so they can stay away from your mages, and you so you can get your mages close to the enemy. But even if the enemy manages to keep his airplanes away from your mages, you have a powerful tool to shape the air war in your favor.
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Easy, they use earth magic to build a tunnel all the way to the enemy lines then they blow them up from below using a combination of earth, water and fire magic to create pressure.
Or they have a guy that can summon wicked thunderstorms from a distance.
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The wind mage generates a strong enough force of air to send the bullets back towards the ones shooting the mage. I would assume wind that strong would be dangerous on its own, but lets assume its dissipates quickly due to magic. Imagine the case where the more you attack your enemy the more ammunition your giving them to throw back at you. You may decide its easier to shoot someone else.
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Earth mages could create and move/carry defensive bulwarks with them. This should protect your infantry against small and medium arms fire. Earth mages could also add temporary extra defense to tanks by building dirt/rock walls in front of them, or over top of them.
Air mages could swat any grenades that get lobbed over the defensive dirt/rock bulwark.
And as others have said, fill the field with fog with water and air mages.
When you get to the enemy, the fire and lightning mages can wreak havoc on the infantry.
Also, the earth mages could dump dirt on the enemy in their trenches.
I am assuming that the infantry are all mages since they refuse to carry handguns.
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Your magic is long ranged bayonets or grenades essentially. Depending on the front line most people wouldn't want to go on ground in daylight snipers would take you out if not the machine gunners.
Night raids were common in WW trenches that's when you got out of your trench and crawled to the enemy praying they didn't see or smell you till you got to their trench then you could encounter the stories of a single woman taking prisoner 300 men with only a grenades in her hand or he had a pistol with 2 bullets in it! (both true trench seizing tales).
Your mages would then be effective and problematic at the same time what spells they cast, how they cast it, along with what is in the trench can be an asset or an utter wrench in their gears by blocking paths or blowing up ammo stores (fire) but they would also gain fear from your enemy in that a mage maybe able by presence alone to convince enemies to surrender under penalty of spellcraft death.
The other more effective strategy you will hold is surprise from behind & closing the distance. Your mages must get close and still then it's luck if your enemy doesn't have brass balls to rush or fire upon them anyway, if not then they'll be fine.
But under normal war conditions of WW1 & 2 your mages do not stand upto the guns and distance you need them to cover. Unless you have elemental shields that will blind their own path like fire shielding that can burn so hot it'll melt high speed bullets but can they deter all the bullets in a machine gun? If not that mage is dead. The shield also singles them out for all the gunfire (which could also be used as a sacrificial lure for others benefits) so this could be both a boon and loss.
You've created a scenario like Flora Sandes encountered in WW1 she signed up with the Serbians who used pistols, mix material uniforms, and horses for their military's might. They rode on horseback against tanks and it was very miss rather then hit they took some out, it was ballsy but it was all they had. Your the horses it's not wise to not have legit side arms when everyone else has them in trench warfare. But you have many tales that still kept traditions alive with unique sword arms or appearance during both wars.
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In my world, there is a religious cult that worships the god of death. They are semi-immortal and have superhuman speed. They can raise corpses that are not too severely damaged.
They need a melee weapon that synergizes with their speed that will not render corpses useless - it must avoid brain and nervous system damage.
Any type of unobtainium is allowed.
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Ordinary knives, scalpels, daggers, just about anything slim and sharp and maybe 8 or 9 inches long. This kind of weapon would allow lethal blows without likely...dynastic surgeries... that remove heads, limbs, etc. A big part of training would be in how to use these slim blades to open throats, puncture the armpit going for the brachial artery in an armored guy.
The blade needs to be sharp, and able to slide between ribs and puncture vital organs.
Additional weapons might be a ratcheting strangulation cord and all sorts of poisoned darts and caltrops.
All of these should be able to kill with minimal damage to the corpse that would render it unusable.
I just read through my answer and am mildly alarmed that this came to me so quickly.
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The original Thugs actually were a death goddess cult, worshipping Kali.
<http://www.unexplainedstuff.com/Secret-Societies/The-Thuggee.html>
They had a special weighted handkerchief the Rumal that they used to quietly strangle the victims. That would seem to me ideal for corpse preservation. The linked article has other interesting stuff about them: their goal of 100% mortality, the prohibition on shedding blood (only strangulating) and so on.
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A very fine stiletto dagger coated with a toxin that instantly stops the heart would be your necromancers' best friend here. Why?
1) Toxins and necromancers go together like peanut butter and jelly, come on.
2) Super-speed means that their main advantage is the element of surprise - their first strike should be their only strike. In this case, a lightweight, easily-concealed weapon is ideal.
3) Piercing weapons arguably cause the least physical damage (compared to slashing or bludgeoning the poor guy), which I assume you want to prevent.
Of course, I have my doubts about preventing brain damage here since the worst possible damage to the brain would come from oxygen deprivation, main cause of which is... um... death. But the medium of an unobtainium toxin could serve nicely as a plot device to bypass that, perhaps.
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Hypodermic needles filled with air. Use your super human speed to get by their defenses and stab them, creating an [air embolism](http://www.healthline.com/health/air-embolism).
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Air embolisms can definitely be fatal.
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> These air bubbles can travel to your brain, heart, or lungs and cause a heart attack, stroke, or respiratory failure. Air embolisms are rather rare.
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Assuming a stroke doesn't cause "brain and nervous system damage" contrary to your initial post's conditions, you're good to go!
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Nerve gas. No high speed needed. Just let it loose then come back and pick up your latest crop.
This is the strip mining version of necromancy. This will probably really annoy your neighbors but if they lose a city's worth of production and you gain a city's worth of army, what are they going to do about it?
The best thing is that you could sneak a small force behind enemy lines and build a power base by popping one city. That should give you enough forces locally to cause a lot of trouble.
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Your best weapon is the good old **spear**.
All the fancy poison, needle, special whatever need considerable skill, will wear off after some time, can be dangerous to the user and have a dozen other drawbacks.
Slashing or smashing weapons of any kind will leave considerable damage that is of interest to a reanimated corpse, i.e. bones and muscles.
Piercing weapons are intended to kill by puncturing vital internal organs - the thing that the walking dead don't have much use for.
Among the various piercing weapons, the spear has the greatest reach and flexibility, can be used to block or slash in case you need it, is relatively easy to learn, but can be deadly in the hands of a master. It also fits your specific type of immortals very well as most spear fighting styles depend more on speed and accuracy than on raw power.
Sure, you will want a dagger as a secondary weapon for any case and because it's useful to cut your lunch as well, but the spear will kill your enemies efficiently while leaving them useable for your dark magic.
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**Finger claws**
Using their super human speed, the cultists plunge their hand into the victim's chest, and remove the heart.
Clawed gloves not only are used as a status symbol depending on material and decoration, but are also a practical weapon. And help keep fingers clean for dinner.
One advantage of this method is that the still beating heart can be used in any number of rituals.
[Mortal Kombat Fatality](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trhg8g_tRKc)
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Before I present my answer, any deaths involving blood loss would result in brain damage - so as some of the comments pointed out, you need to decide what sort of brain preservation you're looking for. Is it acceptable as long as the victim's brain stays in their head?
Once you've decided on the actual allowable killing method, you can proceed to read my suggestion, which may sound wrong at first - but carry on reading as I appeal to your writer's instincts.
**Tetrodotoxin**
* Can be harvested from puffer fish, blue-ringed octopuses and poison dart frogs.
* Is a venom which blocks motor neuron pathways to skeletal (voluntary) muscle, causing paralysis.
* Paralysis of the intercostal muscles of the lungs and diaphragm means that the victim would not be able to breathe, sending them into a coma and eventually death from lack of oxygen to the brain.
(Source:<https://bigpictureeducation.com/venoms-and-nervous-system>)
**Why it's Ideal**
Although at first, it seems like it's doing the exact two things you don't want it to, given that your necromancers are super fast, it's actually the best thing they can have:
* From the first strike, your victim would become increasingly sluggish, allowing your Necromancers to take full advantage of their superhuman speed and for your slow-moving corpses to catch up! Think, "are the zombies getting faster, or am I getting slower?".
* The effect of the toxin is gradual, your Necromancers can use the time between the comatose state and death (total damage to the brain and nervous system) to do their Necromancing and turn these half-dead victims into un-dead. Of course, your Necromancers would need to act fast... lucky for them they have superhuman speed, eh?
* It's subtle, you can coat a needle, you can coat a sharpened end of an umbrella, a spiked ring during a handshake, let your writer's imagination have a field day!
**Why I Think it Qualifies**
I think this method qualifies under your brain and nervous damage restrictions, as your Necromancers would **intervene before total brain and nervous system damage**. Besides, this partial damage will also explain away why your un-dead horde isn't the most co-ordinated lot.
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**Time**
If these necromancers are semi-immortal and able to travel at super human speeds all they really need to do is keep an eye on the obituaries and funeral announcements for several nearby towns.
Once a report comes out that someone tragically died with minimal injuries (through sickness or just sheer luck) they just pop round raise the corpse and leave before anyone notices.
Since they are around for semi-forever they are at complete liberty to play the waiting game for when the perfect corpses to show up and not risk having to make precision attacks at high speeds where human error could come into play.
For any other sort of conflict they can simply run away until the other party is dead.
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**Magic**
I can't believe nobody mentioned it before. I think the Necromancer should wield a shield and some sort of enchanted device (matching whatever setting you happen to have).
I don't think that they really need a weapon. If they can transfer life *into* a human body, they can surely transfer it *out* of one as well. They might not even need the shield if they have enhanced speed, since they can easily dodge and get to a safe distance to cast whatever dark life-stealing spells they have at the attackers.
The reason I suggest a shield is for them to hide behind while they command their legion of the damned in battle. I would expect them to maybe enhance the shield with magic resistance against other spellcasters. This is how I personally would fight, if I was a necromancer in your setting. If you insist on a weapon, I would go with a spear for the reasons stated in that comment.
EDIT: The spear also goes great with the shield, and a tower shield is just useful in general. Don't believe people who tell you 2-handed spear is good, it isn't.
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Since a loud enough noise can be lethal it might be a good one, since it would cause minimal physical damage. It could be done by plugging something in the victim's ears so that the sound is only loud enough to kill the intended target. I'd probably use something like devices worn on fingers like rings that could easily be plugged to the subject's ears by a fast-moving entity.
Another similar method would be to use the olfaction to cause the death. In essence such a 'strong' scent that is lethal to normal living beings. Again this would leave the body practically intact. Of course it should be a shockingly strong sensation rather than a nerve agent (that would probably leave the nervous system in a very messy state).
And then there is acute stress disorder that could cause death by witnessing something horrible. One could imagine that the "death cult" people could easily be able to instill such a fear in the subject.
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The good old handkerchief with chloroform. With superhuman speed it will not be difficult for you to approach your victim inadvertently.
Once unconscious, you can end up by choking him.
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Inspired by Star Wars and other sci-fi space series, we often see their ships shooting lasers as a "big needle", shot three or four times consecutively to perform a volley of laser fire, similar to our metal bullets.
I know from other threads that laser space battle is *very unlikely*, if not **impossible** to do, but this question is not about that. I'm also not interested in this laser being able to do (substantial) damage.
Using a similar, but empowered version of today's laser machinery as a weapon in the outer space, **is it possible to make a "laser bullet" that is *visible to our naked eye* in the outer space?**
It does not have to be "big". A thin line like a sniper targeting through a smoke screen is enough. A brief series of laser is what I wanted. I'm not concerned with the distance (because laser loses power on a distance). I'm more interested in making it visible and "bullet-like" in series of shots.
**Update:** This is not a duplicate of [Could it be possible to build a Pew Pew Laser?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/52246/could-it-be-possible-to-build-a-pew-pew-laser) since that the answers in that question focusing on "pew, pew" as in its sound. My question is more about making the laser visible in its trajectory as "bullets".
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In Star Wars, they shoot plasma made of energized gas (Tibanna). Plasma travels significantly slower than the speed of light, so the human eye can perceive it as a 'bullet' kind of thing.
Making a laser bullet isn't feasible with upgraded versions of modern laser weaponry, since a true laser travels at light speed - every shot would appear to be a line between target and source unless the distances involved were enormous. Even if that's okay, you still have the problem that *lasers are only visible because of light scattering off of things in the way*. Vacuum wouldn't have enough to make this significant, and enough scattering to make it visible would probably result in blooming, which would prevent the weapons from being very effective.
Now, if you want something a lot like the Star Wars style, you can take off your skepticism hat and look into the [Marauder project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARAUDER). If The internet is to be believed, there exists technology (as of 1993) which can launch hyper-projectile rings of energy. If you were far enough away for the relative velocity to appear to be less than ~60 mph, then you would perceive it as a laser bullet kind of thing. (NOTE - the project seems 100% real - the skepticism is in whether or not it really achieved what it claimed.)
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A laser beam is made by a bunch of photons travelling with the same phase and direction.
Thus, the only way to see it (when you are not the target) is that the beam is scattered along its path.
In open air this is possible, since dust is everywhere together with other particles, giving the usual appearance in laser labs
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DPLbX.jpg)
But when you are in space you hardly have any particle around to scatter photons.
So you won't see any laser beam when it's fired.
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If you want lasers to be visible they need to hit something. Space is notable for the lack of things to hit.
For a pew-pew 'laser bullet' to be visible you want them moving less than the speed of light and radiating light. So something physical and hot, like plasma, a rocket or a kinetic weapon.
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Well... kindof...
When a laser is on, it is continuously streaming coherent light. The only way to get "bursts" is to pulse the beam. But, remember the speed of light (c = 299,792,458 m⁄s). A [clever answer](https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100327163759AAKg9Kt) suggests that humans can generally see a 20-meter long F-14 flying by, which suggests a pulse-on duration of 50 ms, which gives us a pulse length of 14,990 km.
Everybody's different, but I'm going to assume we need the same "off" duration to easily distinguish between pulses. In the electronics world we call that a 50% duty cycle.
OK, laser on = 50 ms, laser off = 50 ms.
Note that this is horribly inefficient and no space captain in his right mind would waste so much off time not firing a laser... unless...
It was honking huge and the optics or emission source couldn't handle a long "on" time and needed the "off" time to cool down. Or maybe we need to charge some batteries. Or maybe we need some taunt time between shots. Let's roll with this.
A [6 kW laser will punch through 1.0" stainless steel](http://www.thefabricator.com/article/lasercutting/turning-up-the-power), but that's for cutting purposes. The hole is [itty-bitty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cutting), about 320 μm. But King Goombah's ship is a half-mile long! We need something that will punch a 10-meter hole! So we need 187.5 megawatts. Except, that watts are joules-per-second and our cutter is a continuous-on system. So, to deliver the same whomping impact that one second of cutting would give us we need yet another 20× the power.
3.75 Gigawatts. Take that [Doc Brown!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjCRUvX2D0E) But further still, that only cuts through one inch of stainless steel. We need to cut through at least 20 meters of ship to make this worth our while, which brings us up to 147.6 gigawatts. Now we're cooking with gas! And, we're finally at a power level where I could believe the need for a short burst and a long cool-down.
But, for the last part of your question, could you see it?
(A) Your first problem is distance. Remember, that pulse of light is humming along at 300,000 km⁄s. We've already established that the pulse is 14,990 km long. That again for the off-time. Maybe once more so you can enjoy how the pulse looks. Your ships are separated by 44,970 km. That's about 10× the width of the United States or ⅛th the distance from the earth to the moon. You could watch it leave and see it coming, but not see it impact without a telescope.
(B) You need something to burn. Now, [there is something there](https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/DaWeiCai.shtml). Hydrogent atoms are about 1-per-cubic centimeter and cosmic dust is 1/1000th that. But we're talking about a 10 meter diameter beam 14,990 km long travelling across 44,970 km of space. ***It won't be Hollywood spectactular,*** but it's believable there's something ghosty to see. Our beam encompasses π·r2·h = 1.18×109 cubic meters and will traverse 3 "beam lengths" between the two ships for a total of 3.53×109 cubic meters. That's burning through 35 quadrillion hydrogen atoms and 35 trillion particles of cosmic dust (it sounds like a lot, but it isn't). But I'd like to suspend my disbelief and suggest there'd be something to see, if the lights on your bridge weren't too bright and you weren't fighting for air at the moment.
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Assuming the fighters are far enough away (a light second or so) there should be enough time to see discrete laser "bursts", but **the environment of the fighters** may have a HUGE impact on the visibility of lasers, even at closer ranges quick shots could be visible (like in a laser tag game).
[NASA says that around our Earth right now](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html):
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There haven't even been any space battles around Earth (right?) except for the anti-satellite test (and I think it only added 3,000 **trackable** pieces larger than a marble, probably a lot more tiny untrackable pieces) so these millions of small less-than-a-marble-sized bits are just from 6 decades or so of occasional "local" space flight.
If your battles take place around a planet (or any object) that's got centuries of space flight, and especially has had battles there before, there should be a lot more junk, maybe even a fine "mist" of old debris (like proto-rings). Even if the ships used there have magnetic or gravity "deflectors," a laser beam doesn't.
* All these particles would essentially fill in the emptiness of space, like dust in a room, that would get hit by any laser beams and "light them up," so you could see them just like you can see the beams in a laser tag game, and if you're far enough away and the beams are short or quick enough they would look like discrete separate "shots."
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Here's an image from [earthobservatory.nasa.gov](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=40173) showing just the objects around Earth bigger than 10cm, the scale of the dots is definitely off, but considering the millions of smaller objects it may not be too bad.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ctSAI.png)
And some other links for more info:
* [NASA.gov Frequently Asked Questions: Orbital Debris](https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html) - *The number of particles smaller than .4 inches (1 cm) probably exceeds tens of millions.*
* [Space Debris Elimination (SpaDE)](https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/gregory_space_debris_elimination.html) - *remove debris from orbit by firing focused pulses of atmospheric gases into the path of targeted debris.* [Sounds like they want to knock the Earth's atmosphere into space, to slow down the space junk, I wonder if the atmosphere would come back too.]
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For "laser bullets" to be visible would require:
* **Visible frequency** - either visible wavelength laser (as opposed to IR/UV/Xray/other wavelengths), *or* some kind of scattering or surrounding medium that absorbs and re-emits at a visible frequency (due to heating or otherwise) a small part of the beam (but not much of it).
If the beam is immensely powerful then a tiny proportion being scattered or re-radiated could be enough. We can imagine the beam powerful enough to make "a small proportion" as powerful as is needed to light up in the surrounding medium, which helps.
* **Duration** which has two aspects: how long the beam *actually fires*, and the duration/persistence of the *visible effect*. As the question is mainly about visible effect, I'll do that one first, although really they are closely related.
**(a) Visible effect / "persistence of vision" (technically: afterimage)** - a laser 'bullet' (visual effect) would have to last long enough to create an image or afterimage. That's a problem, because the human eye needs the visible flash to last some number of milliseconds for a perceptible or substantial image or afterimage to be seen, but a realistic laser weapon beam wouldn't last for a fraction of long (Much better and easier to aim for a tiny area and the shortest power delivery time, in order to get the greatest TW/mm^2, and therefore to fire a 100TW laser for 200 nanoseconds than a 1TW laser for 20 microseconds). A further problem is that many of the most powerful lasers today are [pulsed lasers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser) (higher power levels by far, cooling between pulses, even if the pulses are nano or microseconds apart), and there's no current reason to think that'll change.
But "pulse" here doesn't mean pulses like you see in movies. In films the pulses are like bullets, a beam fires for say 0.05-0.1 sec which is a duration easily seen by the eye, and then refires again after say 0.1-0.4 sec depending on the film. In reality a pulsed laser's duration is more likely to be measured in pico- to milliseconds, and depending on the design can be a "one-off", or can sometimes be (probably will be) so close as to seem continual for the purposes of visible afterimages, which allows power to be accumulated (technically: energy levels pumped) and then released in a short time.
**(b) Actual firing pattern** - The tiny time intervals of actual high power lasers are probably a non-issue. That's because critical mechanisms wouldn't need a big hole to do immense damage and deep damage repair may be harder to put right quickly (think in terms of a laser hitting any cable, wiring, microcircuit, display panel, crew or equipment vacuum barrier or enclosure), so penetration probably matters more than width/area. You can probably also sync a lateral beam movement to "slice" a bit, even in a very short time, more so if you know where to aim that will do damage even in a tiny but penetrating 'hit'.
The tiny amount converted to visible light might involve invisible (xray/UV?) lasing that heats the medium, and not only re-radiates as visible light but also re-radiates for a significant fraction of a second until it cools again. So we can probably get round the issue of beam visibility that way even for a beam duration too short for human vision to see.
* **Cross-sectional dimensions** - I couldn't find info on this, but intuitively, the narrower the beam, the less of the medium it heats or scatters from, or the less visible to the eye; presumably there comes a point where it is too narrow to see. But as visibility is probably due to heating or scattering, we can get around that with a more powerful beam, as above.
* **"Moving bullet" effect** - you won't get the "moving bullet" effect, just a lit up beam effect (where the medium permits), because on any realistic battle scale the beam will light up along the entire length of its path simultaneously, for any practical purposes.
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Yes, ships weapons fire can be visible during combat, but only through the 3-dimensional immersive-VR tactical display on each ship's command deck. Defensive computers on each combatant's ship analyze sensor data in real time and render enemy offensive fire as distinct glowing laser pulses to assist the captain in making navigational and strategic decisions. Similarly, as the computer alerts the ship crew about important events, it produces the well-known legacy "pew-pew" sound for shots, or the roaring throttle sound for active space objects of different speed and mass that pass near the ship at a dangerously close distance.
The use of the distinct laser pulse imagery and the particular sound effects is just a nostalgic nod to the great space opera movies of the home world's early technological age, and might take origins from even earlier warfare in the atmospheric conditions (where ambient sounds are possible) which more of the populace might have experienced or can intuitively relate to. More modern captains prefer more data-rich line renderings where plasma density is depicted as line thickness and energy level by color. Still enough of the older captains still use the laser pulse setting on their HUD systems that is not uncommon to see battle reenactments rendered in this style.
Keep in mind that no one has ever seen a space ship battle and lived to tell about it. We have only seen computer rendered depictions of space ship battles, depicted either in real time or later for strategic review and training. With all the invisible energies racing around during even the smallest of space ship conflicts, and with the inimical dangers of direct exposure to space vacuum and hard radiation, the last thing any of us would ever want is to be a ring-side seat observer as depicted in those old time movies.
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As other answers have correctly pointed, a laser beam can't be seen unless there is dust around there, and space is empty - even low Earth orbit is too empty. However, battles tend to create large amounts of smoke and dust.
In space battles we can't expect dust from cavalry galloping around or from gunpowder cannons, as was common in battles a few centuries ago, and smoke disperse in space faster than in naval battles of the battlecruiser era - since there is no air to slow the smoke - but anyway an space battle like with dogfights and imperial destroyers firing at point blank like those in Star Wars yield a lot of large explosions and fires in a relatively small volume. Therefore, in such a battle I would expect an ambient dusty enough for a powerful laser beam to be seen - provided that the pulse is long enough and that its frequency is in the visible range.
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A volley of lasers isn't possible in the sense you are talking about. As previously stated you'd need the light to scatter off of particles to make the laser visible, but even if it was visible I don't think a laser is what you're going for. Something that is contained within burst, something like a 'shell' if you will.
The shell could be electromagnetic that contains some form of plasma inside of it that would erupt when hitting a target. You could even possibly have a metal kinetic projectile that's highly magnetic to hold the plasma to it. Maybe if you want to take a leap of faith and make some for of anti matter or exotic particle that has it's own properties you could investigate/invent with some research into particle physics that would help you achieve the desired effect.
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Due to effects of lightwave interference, another light source passing through the laser COULD make it visible, but barely so (and certainly not as a line).
A laser-like weapon such as superexcited matter is a far more likely candidate.
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It is difficult to come up with a believable scenario that would create a visible raygun (I'm using a broader term on purpose) beam in space.
In the vacuum of space, a laser beam will of course be invisible, just as a laser pointer beam in non-smoky air is invisible.
As @Jeutnarg said, in *Star Wars* the blaster bolts are said to be made of plasma. That sounds to me like an after-the-fact justification to explain their perceived speed and the fact that you can see them at all. But it is difficult to envision a mechanism for containing plasma in a rod or beam shape. Presumably some kind of magnetic bottle would be required, but magnetic fields aren't self-sustaining. They come from moving electrons. The plasma contains a lot of those, but the behavior of a plasma is pretty chaotic. To control it into a tube, you need very strong externally generated magnetic fields. But, if the field generators are in the gun itself, then the field strengths near the transmitter would have to be immense, to give good field strengths to contain the plasma that is farther away.
In my judgment, visible "pew-pew" style blaster bolts or raygun beams require fantasy physics. But, then again, so does FTL travel, so it's not so bad.
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Well you could see the laser as a bullet or at least a short ray If you slow it down really really REALLY sloooooow. The thing is light travels so fast that we cannot see lasers as the slow moving things that we see in movies (like star wars) . And yeah if it is a laser in the visible light spectrum with help of some kind of precipitate to bounce off the laser a bit you can see it . And voila you've got a laser bullet.
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As many have said, the "laser" would have to be in actuality non-photon particles, probably plasma, anti-matter, anti-matter in plasma state...
Now for a proper "pew" the details get more complicated. Space is empty so there are no particle vibrations (sound) to receive. The "laser" being fired could give off a blast of additional particles--think like gunpowder residue, only now it is what they use to energize the particles and fire--and that go out from the source of the firing as a perceptible sound.
The problem is that would be the only source of the sound. If you were right next to the "laser" as it passed by you would hear no sound.
Now if the projectile particle collection were unstable, maybe radiating some of its own material out as it went on, then there could be a sound from it too (this would also mean that it would get weaker with distance, it would lose energy from shedding those particles in addition to the energy lost if it is emitting light from its own energy). But it wouldn't have a Doppler Effect as it passed by, since it would be emitting its own particles. So if it passed by your ear it would have a constant pitch.
I suppose you could remedy this shortcoming by
a. Make the "pew" a combination of the the initial firing and followed by the projectile's shedding of its own material
b. Include in the mechanics of the projectile itself a reason for the pitch change, e.g. it goes high from low in pitch because the highest-energy particles in it are shed first.
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I was originally going to claim my world has very low levels of sulfur, resulting in a lack of gunpowder and thus a lack of guns. But after realizing how cool things like fireworks and [Hwacha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwacha) are, then I noticed that the problem I have isn't with gunpowder, but with guns.
Is there any way that I can have things like fireworks and hwachas without having things like cannons, bombs and guns?
My current thoughts are related to zohar as described in [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/31588/real-life-zohar/31591#31591), but I am looking for other, better solutions.
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A gun is composed of three very important components: **the barrel, the propellant, and the projectile**. Your constraints require the propellant to be available, and projectiles are ubiquitous, which means the only thing we can reasonably restrict would be the barrel.
Today, gun barrels are made of steel, but in the past they were made of various **iron and copper** alloys. This is a result of the fact that the propellant produces a fairly high pressure, and any metal too soft will deform or rupture instead of propel the projectile. It around this point I propose a solution.
On Earth, copper and iron are fairly common metals, meaning the development of firearms was inevitable (in my humble opinion). **But what if these two metals were more rare?** What if they were *so* rare that they were basically mythical? Some bright, enterprising inventor may still "invent" the firearm in theory, but without the proper metals from which to construct the barrels the idea would never get off the ground.
Unfortunately, this would also stunt the technological growth of your civilization. Historical ages are named after metals (Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.) for a very good reason. **Without the development of bronze and iron tools, there is no telling how civilization might develop**, or if it even would. Personally I think it would find a way to thrive, but I can obviously provide no evidence to that end.
A different solution might be to limit the usefulness of metals in specific ways. We know that iron rusts already, but the corrosion is slow enough to be prevented or managed. If some change were made to the atmosphere (by natural or perhaps supernatural means) **iron might corrode much more quickly, rendering it useless in any stressful job** (like regularly containing an explosion) but would still leave it available for more mundane uses like simple tools. Similar limitations could be placed on copper or bronze to make it even less useful for firearms. In this regard there are many potential options limited only by imagination.
On a comparative note, Jim Butcher has a novel called The Aeronaut's Windlass set in a psudo-steampunk world. Guns are rarely used, and with *extreme* wariness because all iron corrodes supernaturally fast (it is never explained why this happens) and all iron objects are coated in a copper alloy for protection. Repeated firing of a gun will eat away the inner coating of the barrel, and the gun will explode after maybe 50 shots or so, meaning the only people who use firearms are either desperate or crazy. I realize that doesn't quite satisfy your requirements of "no guns at all" but I thought it worth mentioning.
Good luck!
Edit: Some commenters have raised the valid point that cannons made from weaker materials than iron and copper do exist. Wood and bamboo are a good example. However, such weapons would be unwieldy and unreliable at best, and dangerous at worst. So while the technology would technically exist for such weapons, they would very likely not be used in combat.
A good real-world comparative example would be the Zeppelin. While they exist, and were used occasionally for a short period in history, other more reliable and useful machines rendered the zeppelin obsolete. The zeppelin is now relegated to the realm of pulp fiction (where it remains absolutely *awesome*).
In my opinion, wooden cannons would do likewise in TrEs-2b's hypothetical world. Cannons would be designed, and perhaps even constructed and used, but their unreliability would make them a thing of fancy and not a thing of war. While I know this technically does not fulfill OP's requirement of *absolutely no* firearms, this solution seems the most plausible to me considering the reality check tag.
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The short answer is: yes. The fireworks were invented [long before the firearms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireworks#History)
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> The earliest documentation of fireworks dates back to 7th century China (time of the Tang Dynasty), where they were invented.
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the firearms were invented some 500 years after.
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Lack of metallurgy and no suitable materials for an improvised cannon. While wood has been used in the past, it needed something to strengthen it. A few really bad experiments would discourage all but the bravest. The inability to use gunpowder weapons with any degree of accuracy and safety would result in most preferring 'traditional' weapons.
There's been cultures with no steel or even copper. They could have advanced glass or obsidian based tools, lots of organic tools.
They might also have a *cultural* dislike of specific sort of weapons - much like you clearly do. They may consider them too loud, shoot too slowly. They might do as the British did and be launch dozens of arrows in the time it would take to load a gun. They might be like the mongols, and be able to launch dozens of arrows at a time with unerring accuracy. They might consider cannons and guns to be *crude* weapons, much like the jedi preferred close range lightsabers over blasters.
They might know about the *whoosh* and fear the *boom*
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A lot of it depends on innovation. Take the factory example. Folks had been creating pins for *decades* before someone realize that it would be more efficient if each person did a single task and moved it on. In retrospect, it was painfully obvious but no one saw it until that one person did.
Guns can be the same way. Maybe no one thought about putting it in a metal container? Or muskets. If you never had that innovative person, then guns wouldn't exist. There were a *lot* of steps that lead up to the modern day gun (casings, rifling barrels, speed loaders, storage methodologies, refinement of gun powder, bullets verses shots, etc), any one of them would have drastically change what a "gun" was today (or even if one exists).
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"Lady of Mazes" -- novel, one of my all-time favorites. Ubiquitous nanotech disables any technology antithetical to the local community's ethics. Community A doesn't believe in distance weapons? Then guns and bows don't work on land owned by Community A. Community B values face-to-face communication? Then phones and radios don't work in Community B territory. There's more subtlety and complexity in the novel, but you get the idea -- it gives you any tech level Y minus unwanted feature X.
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A few ideas from other worlds I'm familiar with:
# Secret Society
In Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series he has a fireworks guild that controls fireworks as a guild secret. This means only a few thousand people of the masses have knowledge of gunpowder and it's related materials. This guild would go so far as to assassinate anyone who left the guild or obtained the secret through other means to protect their franchise.
A similar construct may allow gunpowder to be available but controlled by a dark society that never releases it's secret. This would naturally prevent evolution of technologies related to gunpowder while allowing other technologies to grow freely. It would also provide lots of interesting plot points.
# Remove Usefulness
In Frank Herbert's Dune series their exists an energy shield that makes laser rifles pointless. I think if you shot a shielded individual it would kill both the shooter and the shot (or something like that). So the society built a new emphasis on melee weapons such as swords and spears.
Perhaps the air pressure in your world makes gunpowder too volatile (guns would have to be too heavy to conceal). Perhaps even the lowest class have a built in shield due to previous abuse of projectile weapons. Either way it doesn't matter if guns exists because no one is stupid enough to use them.
# Cultural Pride
In Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek The Klingon race has had laser weapons for over a thousand years. But they still seem to be punching, stabbing, and bashing each other a lot. The culture is obsessed with "honor" where hand to hand combat is the height of their display.
Create a culture where it doesn't matter if guns have been invented. They are the tools of assassins and dishonorable refuse. This makes guns very rare and the rare show of a gun results in mob justice.
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No.
Not without rewriting physics and changing how combustion works. If you can have things *like* fireworks, then you can have things like guns and firearms. They all go hand in hand. The only difference is their intended use. That's why there's "improvised" ordnance; because they all do the same thing: burn.
You need to find a way to **fundamentally alter combustion** without breaking the universe.
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Yes.
Incas had found out about wheel (toys with wheel were found) but never used it for tools.
Likewise, you can have gun powder without using it for guns.
All you need is a better alternative. A conjunction of expensive metals and pre-existing very good archery skills (both in building and using), with heavy weapons like scorpios, making the emergence of those new weapons much harder could be a solution.
Alternatively, a single event like a great fire in a warehouse (destroying a town or even bringing the end to a civilisation) could cause great fear of using the gunpowder on a large scale for generations.
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**Yes** you can have gunpowder without the guns, in theory. If the sources of the elements required in gunpowder are rare on your world, so too would firearms. Of course if that were the case, things like fireworks might be a wasteful use of gunpowder. But weaponizing the gunpowder would still be an issue, firearms or no. That's why terrorists and guerrilla fighters and just about anyone with access and know-how create IEDs.
I'm a bit confused as to why you would want to eliminate firearms but Hwacha are "cool". Firearms are but a tool, just as the Hwacha, or a shovel or a sickel or a hammer or a...you get the point. Used for hunting and defense, firearms are incredibly useful tools. In the hands of evil people, the tools are used for more diabolical purposes. But then, so too are knives, spades, sickles, hammers, staves, etc.
Maybe the answer isn't eliminating the firearms, rather, eliminating the evil or creating a necessary evil so great, evil people fear it more than the evil inside themselves.
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Since it is your world, and you want fireworks, but you don't want guns, you could of course hand-wave them away.
(Someone should do exactly this on our world, but well... )
Since you are looking for an explanation, you could either make them technologically unfeasible (which others have explained how), or you might go a different route altogether.
Most likely, if technology is not a hindrance, someone will eventually invent a gun. But i take it that the existance of a single gun in your world would not exactly be a problem.
So we are now talking about guns in large numbers.
Those will only exist if there is a need for them and if they are accepted as a reasonable answer to a real problem (the need).
On our world, we use guns for sports (which can be ignored for the moment, because like many other sports they were derived from a military background), for military / law enforcement purposes, and for hunting / defense against wild animals.
So, if your world for some reason had no dangerous wildlife (or found a different way of dealing with it), and for some reason no large-scale military conflict, there would be no need for guns, and as a result they would never be a widespread thing.
A variant on the military aspect is that in Europe, for a very long time (i don't remember the details, though), ranged weapons were frowned upon, much in the way chemical and biological weapons are today.
So provided you have a world (or civilization) that has no strong needs for defence, and / or a moral ban on ranged weapons, you can have all the technology you like but still no guns around.
A side note: you would not be having gunpowder then, only blastingpowder, plackpowder, explosives... but no gunpowder, since the word would make no sense in your world.
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You don't have to make the firearm physically impossible to construct, just make the alternatives better and development of firearms just a little more dangerous.
Make the crossbow a bit more effective so there is less pressure to develop a firearm. Perhaps the French won more against the English and their accursed longbows :) Then have a few high profile accidents with early firearm designs (most likely when they were still in the siege cannon phase) that kill a renowned inventor or a popular king and you could suppress firearm development for centuries while parallel technology still matures. In Europe at least some of the impetus to change to firearms was due to some military victories where the firearm played a key part. But if those battles went the other way few nations may have spent the money on them.
Siege cannon and mortars are an issue though, since they were REALLY effective at reducing fortifications, so nations will pursue making them at all costs. But you could have them and not firearms.
Of course there were air rifles using compressed air in the 19th century, so if you have too much technology there will be firearm like weapons.
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Perhaps you need only to adjust the available fuel. Gun powder is supposed to burn at high speed, but not to explode. This is why gun powder is usually grained (thus controlling surface area and reaction speed) rather than actual powder.
This is important, because it changes the energy transmission from propellant to projectile. A single blast will destroy the gun (super sonic transmission of energy, thus preventing the projectile from moving in time to give way to the pressure) while a slower burning yields continuous pressure (i.e. energy transfer to the projectile).
I did not find a good source for the thermodynamics but maybe wiki helps:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosion>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion>
While rockets and missiles will usually aim for a slow burning process rather than a fast explosive reaction, several small explosions in sequence might allow for rocket but make guns far more difficult to manufacture.
Key would be a sort of gun powder that for some reasons does not allow clotting/ graining.
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I was looking around the site bored for a while, when I found this question: [Why would the military use tanks in a zombie apocalypse?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/196725/)
Because I'm writing my own zombie story, I realized that I need my characters to kill the zombies, and not have the Deux ex Machina option of the military suddenly coming in. Thing is, logically they would, if the government wasn't completely stupid. (I guess it's not that invalid an option...) A zombie apocalypse would be pretty big news, so clearly everyone would know about it.
The zombies: It takes place in the small town of Sale Creek in northeastern Texas. They spread using venom, injected through biting. Other than that, they are WWZ zombies. The town, as it turns out, was on an ancient graveyard, and the original zombie was found in MC's grandpa's yard, while digging for a time capsule. If you need any more information, I would be happy to add it.
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The best way to make sure the military does not intervene is by making them have a vested interest in doing nothing.
**1 Preservation of Humanity**
One simple and understandable reason for this is that they do not want the infection to spread any further, so the military has blocked off any and all escape from the town.
Essentially, rather than having the military doing nothing, you are making them the antagonists instead.
As soon as the government realized there were zombies in this town, they called up the military, surrounded the town with fences, soldiers, and tanks, and told the officers "Absolutely no one is allowed out of this town. If you think anyone is a zombie or infected, shoot them immediately."
I call this the "Scorched Earth" plan. Rather than taking the risk of letting zombies infect the world, the government is going to burn the place to the ground as soon as possible. To avoid being cruel, they'll give the few uninfected survivors a chance. They have, let's say about 15 days to get out of the city before they bomb it to oblivion.
This plan would be great for your story because it offers two things. First of all, it makes it so the army is not only not a deus ex machina for the main characters, but also a major threat. The soldiers aren't coming to save the people, they are here to make sure the infection does not spread no matter what, so they aren't here to help the civilians, they're here to kill anyone suspected of carrying the infection.
Also, adding the looming threat of the city being bombed adds even higher stakes to the story in general. A thrilling story needs a good running clock. It really increases the tension to know exactly it's too late to go back. If we know there are exactly 15 days (or whatever number you want to add, it's up to you) before the bombs go off, then it tells the readers and the characters that there is no time to waste. Every minute that the characters spend bickering, fighting monsters, or doing anything other than trying to escape, is a moment wasted for them.
I like the idea of the military going this route because it adds a lot of moral greyness to the story. Obviously, they do not want to hurt civilians, but the fate of the world is at stake. It is a trolley problem. Destroy one city to save the world from destruction.
From their perspective, they are the heroes, which makes them great antagonists.
That's my first suggestion.
**2 Government Coverup/Conspiracy**
This idea would also make the military the antagonists, though for different reasons.
In this scenario, the government does not want to admit its own fault. Admitting there are zombies on the loose would be admitting to their own failure, so they do nothing instead.
This is extremely common with real-world governments. A corrupt politician is never going to admit to a mistake because they want to pretend they are always right. Owning up to one's faults looks bad in front of the voting base, so it is better to pretend the problem does not exist and to cover it up as soon as possible. I could easily imagine this being the case during a zombie apocalypse.
"What, zombies? There are no zombies. It's just some strange new variant of rabies or some sort of mass hysteria. That's what it is," the government would say.
It's not hard to imagine politicians being so corrupt that they would leave people to die painful deaths at the hands of zombies rather than being honest about the problem.
Heck, in most zombie stories the apocalypse is usually a direct result of the government's actions.
For example, they were trying to make a biological weapon to use in a war against another country and it accidentally got loose for one reason or another. You mention that the town was built on an ancient graveyard, so it doesn't seem like this is the government's fault per se, but what if they knew about the existence of this clearly zombie-infested graveyard yet allowed the town to be built there anyway?
They might be more concerned with the graveyard than the safety of the people.
"Hmm, zombies we can use as biological weapons. That's great. We should study this. Oh, there are people living there? That sucks. We'd better way for them to all turn into zombies so we can study them."
It sounds heartless, but this kind of callousness is to be completely expected from real-world governments, who are about as heartless as they come.
**3 The Army's Too Overwhelmed or Can't Be Bothered**
It's also possible that the army has simply been overrun already. The zombie infection could have spread so fast that they have no way of handling the massive influx of infections. In the worst scenario, the infection spread so rapidly and so many people died that the military is nothing at this point. It's pure anarchy. No one is safe. Whether you were rich or poor in the old world means nothing now because we're all equals in the face of death.
The army is scrambling to fix the problem, and they just do not have the time or resources to help the town where the main characters are at. By the time anyone even remembers that place, the military has already been so depleted that there is nothing it can do at this point.
An even crueler explanation would be that the military and the government do have enough resources to help this place, but they'd just rather protect their rich investors. The poor people can just become zombies.
Is there a billionaire in this town? Okay, sure, the military will whisk him away in an instant. Normal people, though? Nah, they're of little value. Leave them to die.
Imagine having to have to pay to be saved from the zombies. If you can't offer the army a decent sum of money, they won't even bother as you're ripped limb from limb. That'd be an interesting social commentary.
I hope you consider one of these ideas for your story.
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# SURE, zombies. *right*.
The state militia has had a problem with this - flash-mob fake 'zombie' and 'werewolf' attacks have resulted in huge hoaxes and a massive black eye on their reputation. A popular protest movement has started having their protestors dressing up like zombies and complaining about working conditions (slave labor conditions is likely one of the original sources of the zombie myth). Internet trolls have started routinely creating false disasters (including video and mass 911 calls), and the military simply doesn't trust anyone who is reporting a supernatural event.
Similarly, the governor is needed to authorize the intervention of troops, and the governor personally thinks it's a hoax. Possibly, someone trustworthy from the town thought it was a hoax and CALLED the governor, telling him it was a hoax - just before being eaten.
Yes, as this thing spreads, eventually the troops will be sent in, at the point that this thing is spreading out of control. So the troops WILL arrive - about a week after it would make a difference to anyone in the town. So unless they want to be zombie chow, they better get hacking with those machetes!
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In "normal" countries the military does not meddle with public order affairs. Cops are there for that, and should be better trained at engaging civilians in a more civil way.
This is already a reason for having the military stay put, at least in the initial stages of the outbreak.
Then add to this tensions at the border with a neighboring country, and no sane star covered general will be willing to send his boys to deal with some rotting bunch of flesh and leave the border uncovered like the buttocks of a newborn baby.
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Maybe a confluence of multiple factors could do the trick, each contributing a small part:
* The Military, particularly the US Military, is a finely honed tool and exceedingly good at doing one thing: killing enemy combatants. Mortar strikes? Close air support? Naval operations? Kicking in insurgent's doors? They've got it all. What the military has *not* trained for is "pest control" or any combat scenario even remotely similar to a "fast zombies" scenario. A whole new doctrine and method of combat, logistics, and operations would need to be developed to shift the focus of the military from overseas "world police" type action to a domestically-focused pseudo-civil-war setting with a very high amount of civilians that cannot be injured. It is, after all, a big bureaucracy. This reorganization and redeployment, assuming the military and government react quickly, is still not something that happens overnight. A realistic timescale would require months, even years, before the military got their shit together.
* "Hard men making hard choices". Above a certain power-level, the people in command are playing a numbers game with any such plague or zombie scenario. How many soldier's lives are they going to expend to save x civilian lives? What are the costs--in human life--of doing or not doing specific actions? When doing this grim calculus, it might simply turn out that it's not economical--in terms of solider lives and resources--to save a small podunk town that's already overrun. Instead, they'd prefer to spend their assets guarding nearby major metropolitan areas or doing other stuff like preventing further spread.
* Quarantine procedure. This ties in with the last point. Maybe the military, government, and powers that be, decide that saving the town is a lost cause. Instead of sending in soldiers who could possibly die and be turned (risking PR problems essentially), they're going to write the town off as an unfortunate tragedy and set up a perimeter that they can bombard with heavy weaponry to prevent any zombies from escaping. Eventually, when the political winds have turned in the right direction, they might simply carpet bomb or nuke the entire town and the contained zombie threat to get rid of it once and for all.
* The military is busy elsewhere. Obviously, the military isn't one monolithic entity, but even so, foreign conflicts, border security, or other flashpoints abroad could keep military power and the military leadership so occupied that they don't have time to focus on the zombie issue, and sideline it as a priority until they've dealt with the situation in on the x-istan border.
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# These are not *monsters*!! These are your *fellow human beings*, having... a hard time!!
They have been told there may be a cure. ...Or it's unclear if theres a cure or not and they basically don't want to kill thousands of human beings if theres a tiny chance it can be resolved, reversed or contained and worked on. "We are working on a cure" is what they hear from the scientists.
### ...and the world is watching.
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Not necessarily. Take a leaf out of the horror genre's playbook and cut off communication. If this takes place it a small backwater town, it's quite easy to cut off communication with the rest of the world. Suppose a small scale natural disaster has happened (a tornado, perhaps?) and most of the town's power has been knocked offline, as well as the local cell towers, crippling communication. The main road has been rendered inoperable because a tree fell on it, or because there's a mass of zombies by it, etc.
If the threat is localized, it's possible to make sure that no one can call for help. And if it isn't, then the military has more pressing issues than a backwater town, and has to focus on the major population centers.
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Law, and bureaucracy
Your constitution disallows any military action within your own borders, and neither the military nor the government wants this changed.
True story from Germany: after WWII, (west) Germany was demilitarized by the allies. A few years later, with the cold war becoming more intense, Germany got an army again, which was, at that time, highly unpopular with the Germans themselves, because they remembered how the Nazi Wehrmacht had behaved. So, an explicit provision was put into the constitution that forbade any operation by the German army inside Germany.
Then, in 1962, a flood struck Germany, especially Hamburg. The Major of Hamburg (Helmut Schmidt, who would become Chancellor some years later) called the army to help, ignoring the constitutions of both Hamburg and Germany, and got away with it because of the damage and deaths that were prevented. Later, the constitution was changed, and military aid, especially with distasters, were permitted.
But imagine it had been a zombie apocalypse instead of a flood. No government official would ever have dared to call the military to shoot civilians, every military commander would have refused to act on such a call, and all over the world people would have said that, not even 20 years after the war, Germany started acting even worse than the Nazis, again.
So, no chance at all to get the military involved, at least not before it's too late, everybody agrees military action is necessary, and of course, by then, the infection is out of control.
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**No military to come**
The original Mad Max was set in an Australia where something had happened. It is bleak but not over the top - there are people and houses and stores. But something has happened. It is not specified what that is. Wikipedia states:
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> The series follows the adventures of Max Rockatansky, a police officer
> in a future Australia which is experiencing societal collapse due to
> war and critical resource shortages.
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In your future world something has happened. There are police but there is no military to come. Maybe there has been a war and the country of your characters has been defeated and disarmed. Maybe it was a civil war which was fought to a standstill and both exhausted sides disarm by mutual agreement. Maybe the only military available are the occupying forces of the victors.
This would help you from a storytelling perspective. Implication of a larger and more longstanding societal problem would be an excellent stage for your zombie story.
I like the idea of a scene at the abandoned airport, forest growing up around the runways. Lined up planes sit empty. It is not explained why the airport is abandoned.
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The same reason they're not doing it right now, when a cult of spreading disease runs amok in towns and cities, terrorizing citizens in their homes, schools, places of business, etc.: a major political party largely supported by the police and military is *in favor of the zombie apocalypse* and the changes to social order they believe it will bring. They want the eugenics aspect because they believe they're of superior genetic stock and it will be others who are "inferior" who are most killed by the zombies. They want the class and racial aspects, that they believe *they* will have the means (guns, large isolated private property, etc.) to defend themselves against zombie hordes while *others* won't. And the military (maybe just its commander in chief?), being on their side, supports them in this.
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# Cognitive Bias, Incompetence, and Denial
A handful of people at the top of the chain of command simply refuse to believe the zombies are real, and actively order troops to stand down. This could be for one or a combination of reasons:
## [Conservatism Bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_(belief_revision))
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> The tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.
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Initial intelligence stated the "zombies" were a hoax carried out by a foreign government. Top brass now interprets new reports that zombies are real as evidence of a foreign power fueling the hoax more.
## [Normalcy Bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias)
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> A cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings. Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects.
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Humans are terrible at recognizing and acknowledging catastrophic events that endanger them. It's almost as if the brain refuses to process the evidence of danger, and will actively skew the interpretation of evidence in order to protect itself from distress. The linked Wikipedia article gives great historical examples related to Pompeii, Hurricane Katrina, the *Titanic*, and Fukushima.
An example of this in literature can be seen in the *Harry Potter* series when [Cornelius Fudge](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Cornelius_Fudge) denies the return of "You-Know-Who".
A real-world example is the number of politicians who insisted COVID was the flu, well after overwhelming scientific evidence confirmed otherwise.
## [Backfire Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#backfire_effect)
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> The backfire effect is a name for the finding that given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the evidence and believe even more strongly.
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Sometimes evidence for something leads people to believe more strongly that it doesn't exist—or vice-versa.
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In a sense, the military would respond. Once an event like this occurs, the military would be activated with a declaration of an emergency by the president and other government officials. martial law would soon be declared.
Initially, they would establish lines of control and set quarantines to contain the problem. they would elevate security around high level areas, such as military installations, government facilities and industrial areas (to ensure the military is properly supplied for the foreseeable future) and protect high level personnel (such as the president and, unfortunately, more affluent people.) As the situation spread, the military would fall back to more defensible positions, evacuating who they could in the limited time.
There is some factors that would go into how the military would deploy.
First, there is not enough to go around. They would determine the resources available and the extent of the situation. They would then develop a list of areas/facilities based on priority and then go down the list to secure them until their resources are spent.
Second, these soldiers are human too. Many would do what they can to control the situation and follow orders. Others would be concerned for their family and friends, or stricken with fear and will leave on their own. There is a certain level of attrition expected in such a home attack the military takes into account.
With these factors, if the situation is wide spread enough, small towns such as Sale Creek, TX will just not have any kind of military deployment. Certain smaller military posts would get abandoned to reinforce places like Fort Hood. (I cant find Sale Creek, so I am assuming its not real, but I would assume its would be no where near a large military base of any kind, so the town would be SOL.)
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I have to say the government won't get involved, at least not right away, because who's gonna believe zombies actually are running around eating people and turning others?
By the time the president and the DOD get actual confirmation and see it with their own eyes it's too late for a full military mobilization, because the disease spreads too quickly.
Only having a portion of their original strength the president and DOD decide to pull their forces for a defensive operation where they quarantine, say, DC and set up a base to work on a cure or a plan to fire bomb all the major cities to kill off as many as they can. This could lead to your heroes having beef with them somewhere down the line.
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What military?
By the time the politicians quit making stupid speeches the soldiers had grabbed what weapons they could and went home to protect their families. The only troops you have left are a few that have no loved ones to protect--and that's assuming they didn't already turn.
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So, after the last two years you are still questioning a central governments ability to live through a worldwide catastrophic situation killing millions of people and simply act for months as if nothing is happening? Really?
Here are some reasons why they would not send the military...
* Acknowledging the zombie apocalypse would be "bad for the economy", and that would impact the shareholder values of people who give generous campaign donations... Better be safe and just claim it is fake news.
* A zombie apocalypse would make the current government/president/party look bad. Or we might even have to admit to making mistakes, or not knowing something... So we better act as if it doesn't happen and claim it is fake news.
* Sending the military would cost money, you know, and who is gonna pay for that? Citizens eaten by zombies don't cost you anything, so it is cheaper to claim it is fake news.
* Why send the military for something which is not worse than your average flu? My aunt was eaten by a zombie and was completely fine, but THE FLU KILLS PEOPLE!!11
* Why send the military if you can kill the zombies easily yourself with hydroxychloroquine, or horse deworming drugs? I have this on good authority from multiple people who have read online about a news report of this rumor being told by at least one guy in Alabama who could not even spell 'hydroxychloroquine'... or 'horse'.
* Killing the zombies would "split society", and that is the worst thing that can happen, you know, so better to just ignore them.
* Sending the military is construed to somehow infringe upon peoples freedoms, and for the powers that be these might be more valuable than keeping zombie death numbers low.
... I could go on.
Wow. This answer would be funnier if it wasn't so true.
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As others probably mentioned, the army military can't be everywhere and while irl plans to fight a zombie outbreak do exist (probably not mentioning zombies but describing a virus or such with the same effect) obvious the military is not able to save everyone because in all countries the military is dwarfed by the rest of the population and the country's size means travel takes a while, even more so when lots of infrastructure and vehicles, etc. are not usable or require clearing of some manner or other due to the zombie outbreak.
Like in most zombie stories most likely there will be several outposts run / protected by the military in an unprotected wilderness and anyone not able to right away reach such an outpost must try to stay safe where they are, e.g. if travel is too dangerous, or try to reach an outpost with the military maybe assisting them if they are lucky but most likely not having the capacity to do so because they are fighting of zombies at the outposts, transporting large amounts of refugees elsewhere, etc.
Not to mention any large organiziation liek the military is an easy target for the spreading of the zombiefication in the first place so possibly only a tiny amount of military personnel are still humans .
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Taking place in a sci-fi universe during a massive conflict. In this universe, however, robots are a major industry, so it would make sense that the government would specially create robots for this massive conflict. However, it is necessary to the story's plot that this does not happen and human soldiers are the main force.
So without looking too far into the conflict itself, **what are some logical reasons why humans would be trained in this army instead of robots**?
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There are multiple possible reasons for this, but the easiest is that the enemy has a way to render robots ineffective, or worse, turn them against the user. Maybe they are able to hack into the robots easily or shut them down with powerful EMP weaponry. Perhaps they are able to confuse and disorient robots by projecting signals on the same wavelengths they use to communicate. It is also possible that AI's have proven to be unreliable or even dangerous in and of themselves. Your universe could've had a potential robot uprising that scared the governments enough to severely limit robotics in war.
Other possible reasons include a ban on robot soldiers. Ordering your robot to kill someone is much easier than doing it yourself, so maybe your governments banned robot soldiers on the battlefield to reduce collateral damage. Alternatively, robots, as awesome as they are, will be specialized. Meaning they will work exceptionally well in the environment they were designed for, and will suffer in every other environment. So perhaps your robots are just not adaptable enough to deal with the various threats they are facing.
Finally, any combinations of these reasons would work as well, as there are usually a multitude of reasons backing up the decision to not use a weapon of war.
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Robots - specially produced en masse for one task tend to not be so versatile as humans.
We are able to move from negative temperatures to a jungle in a matter of hours. Robots would need adaptation time (just think about the expansion when chilled metal change from -40 to +30 Celsius.
Then, making generic, pre-programmed robots would make them easy targets after some time. Just think about Dark Souls. We share knowledge on how to defeat bosses. And after few times we learn the patterns of regular foes.
Third - decision making. Humans can not only make a decision to withdraw when there are high losses but also to not engage in combat at all OR to push even if the odds are 3720 to 1. Something that program may not do, as their decisions would be based on math or settings (like withdrawing when losses are higher than 75% or, because they are robots, to never withdraw).
Fourth - We are able to think outside the box. There are many warfare guides, from Sun Tzu to the 4th Generation Warfare Handbook. But human can make up a decision based on a Led Zeppelin song. And vice versa, robots may not spot a trap (this looks like a trap, mainly because it have "Trap" written on it), or be overloaded when you engage its processor into a logic loophole from Sherlock Holmes (the "if this is a trap then the other way is not but then THEY know that and will make the second way trapped so I should choose the first one which is a trap" and ad infinitum).
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**Power**
If you are considering humanoid styled robots, I would use the creations of Boston Dynamics as a template. While incredibly dexterous and advanced in their design, their maximum duration is only a single hour per charge. Their ranges are similarly deplorable, with a maximum of about 24 km per charge. Battery technology will have advanced considerably by the era of your story when countries can mass produce them, but the possibility exists that it will not have advanced far enough to justify their existence.
Alternatively, controlled platforms like SWORDS has an advertised duration of 8.5 hours. While this is significantly better than the Boston Dynamic's creations, it is a tracked vehicle and lacks the humanoid shape (and thus requires less energy to stabilize itself). Still, the power issue could again crop up if 8.5 hours is insufficient to last a battle.
The enemy will also have a glaring weakness to exploit if they use robots. Whatever type of charging stations they use to keep their army topped up could be destroyed, thus leaving the robot army without a means to recharge. It might not be as much of a problem in urban areas, but out in rural environments it would be a huge headache trying to get enough power to keep the grunts in the fight.
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There's a saying that: "Any battle plan survives only until the forces clash" or "War is like a brothel on fire". To be effective at war your robots have to be either as adaptable as humans(both physically and intelligence wise) or overwhelmingly more powerful technologically.
If they don't fulfill any of these they will be outsmarted and picked apart by competent human fighters. Also note that much of the technology that is used to create these robots can be applied to humans and human operated vehicles.
And even if strategical decisions are made by humans, there's always a room for battle prowess on tactical scale.
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# The government likes to keep people employed
In the Depression, the US Government under Franklin Roosevelt was desperate to keep people employed one way or another. Programs like the [Civilian Conservation Corps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps), [Public Works Administration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration), [Civil Works Administration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Works_Administration), [Resettlement Administration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resettlement_Administration), [Federal Writer's Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Writers%27_Project), and more were basically just make-work programs.
What make-work program is bigger and better than an army? Come to think about it, if you can then use that army to win a war or two and do some looting, that would alleviate the Depression. Congratulations! You have just uncovered the economic model of the Roman Republic and Empire!
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In addition to reasons provided in other answers, I would suggest ***population control***. Wars can be a very effective mechanism of culling not just excessive population but also specific traits. Recruits can be selected for aggressiveness, disagreeableness, psychopathic tendencies, or whatever your government considers being an undesirable trait in the population.
It is up to you to decide how far you want to push it. The population culling can follow natural patterns typical for all wars (younger, more aggressive, less smart individuals tend to die faster and in greater numbers). Alternatively, you can engineer a totalitarian regime that, for example, is trying to get rid of all people with genes linked to [novelty seeking](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Novelty_seeking) because it is believed that this trait greatly increases a risk of uprisals.
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**To address some speculations about wars not being effective as means of population control based on the example of the WWII**
The active combatants of the WWII suffered losses [as high as 15% of their total population](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/World_War_II_casualties). [Here is a truly mind-blowing video](http://www.fallen.io/ww2/) putting the actual millions in perspective. A significant part of casualties was civilian: In Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus they were the majority, however, in the USSR (depends on an estimate) and Germany the majority of deaths were military. Of course, in this case, the countries that suffered the highest losses were the ones where the actual fighting happened.
To minimise civilian deaths but still have a capability to dispose of undesired social elements the government can choose the US way: Send troops to wage wars in foreign countries. This approach requires some propaganda investment, the ideology of manifested destiny, and a just cause mixed with some public outrage. But it is not something hard to do as history teaches us. The government just needs a way to justify high casualties if they wish to use war as a method of the population control.
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## Biology is cheaper than manufacturing.
The energy cost of manufacturing drastically exceeds the energy cost of biological reproduction. While we remain unaware of the exact energy cost of biological organisms reaching the point of advanced manufacturing, as far as we know, advanced manufacturing cannot happen in the first place, unless some biological organisms go through advancing stages of civilization until they reach the point of being able to manufacture your theoretical robots.
Ergo, the energy cost of manufacturing robots = biological cost + tech R&D cost + manufacturing cost + maintenance cost.
Whereas the energy cost of biology is just the biological cost + maintenance cost.
Besides, the biological process is considerably more fun....
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First thing, Manufacturing robots whos performance is same as a human soldier are not easy at all.
If robots have some bugs or hacked in war or even before the war they can turn them towards civilians or friend forces, and then after it is hard to stop them. Also, it is very difficult to teach robots who are friends and who are a foe.
But despite this concerns we humans are heading towards machines which are fully autonomous not necessarily humanoid robots.
Autonomous drones are a perfect example of this, the US has deployed drones that automatically identify enemies and shot them, but after a lot of the criticism, they have disabled them.
and last but not least, Even we can build such robots, use of robots in war field can be a most dangerous idea as we human being ever thought. Because than wars will be easy and it will like a video game. Countries with poor technology infrastructure suffer the most.
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Robots are not the same as humans. A robot is not a soldier, but a weapon.
Other answers have already addressed the fact that a weapon (and thus, a robot) could be turned against its creator (or in this case, against its owner), as is the case with any weapon.
For humans, this is a lot more difficult and a lot less reliable.
But since this part has been answered already, i'd like to point you to one aspect that hasn't been covered, although it might prove essential:
Robots need energy.
While that is true for human soldiers, too, it is a different matter.
Whatever the power source for your robots is, if we stick with tech ideas as we know them, they will either need electricity from a network or a huge battery, or they need fuel.
Humans, on the other hand, can turn a large range of organic matter into energy.
Now if we assume that wars are typically fought somewhere in the vicinity of other people, we can assume that providing food might be fairly easy, and cannot be disrupted so easily, while cutting off a piece of the power grid, or intercepting fuel trucks, should be a lot easier.
Also, even if it damages morale a lot, human soldiers can go for quite some time with low quality food, and even for a few weeks without any food at all.
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It depends on the story's assumptions of the level of robot technology of the time.
Current estimates that I've read are that [neural networks won't be up to the level of human brains for another 80 years](http://timdettmers.com/2015/07/27/brain-vs-deep-learning-singularity/) and then they'll still require masses more energy.
So if your story is set within the next 100 years there's a chance that humans augmented with robot parts still have an edge.
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* Robots need power and or fuel, therefore require regular resupply. They might not have enough autonomy to be really effective (a bit like some early tanks)
* Robots need maintenance
* Their AI may not be advanced enough, they might not be able to make good decisions in battle (identifying a civilian)
* Robots might not be able to handle harsh and complex terrain (like in mountains)
* Robots can be easily neutralized by various jammers (EMP, or devices that can alter or stop a robots perceptive devices)
* Robots can be hacked and turned against you
* The enemy might be able to get your technology by reverse engineering a robot.
* Weather might damage the robots, especially over time
* Robots might have poor team coordination if their AI is not advanced enough
* Robots may not be able to use military tactics properly
* Humans are more agile and nimble than robots
* Robots might not be able to adapt to enemy tactics or even to detect the tactic
I bet I'm forgetting some reasons but there are plenty. Some of these reasons are probably invalid if robots, especially their AIs, are well developed.
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Assuming that the robot soldiers are at least as capable human soldiers and have no easily exploitable weakness, then I really cannot see a reason that robots would not be used at all.
However, there is one role in which humans would always be used, and that is **interaction with (organic) civilians**.
In certain types of conflict civilians can be an absolutely critical intelligence resource: any intelligence given to killbots is going to be motivated by a strong desire to get rid of them. Similar to torture, fear of certain death is very good at getting information but extremely poor at getting *accurate* information.
Policing an occupied population is also best handled by humans or, ideally, local volunteers given resources and authority by the occupying force. Relying on organics for this again increases the chance of civilian co-operation, and minimises the opportunity for antagonists to steal your valuable killbot technology.
I imagine combined human-killbot force where the invasion process would work something like this:
1. Killbots of all shapes and sizes are used to destroy purely military targets, and to create secure areas for bringing in humans, equipment, more killbots as required.
2. A primarily human force, supported by killbots, would take control of the populated areas and establish command centres and basic controls such as curfews.
3. Cooperative locals would be organised into a police force. Depending on the nature of the war and the cultures involved, it could be desirable to keep existing institutions such as the police and courts in place.
4. When the risk of a full-blown insurgency has subsided, most of the killbots and invading humans would be withdrawn.
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Robots can be programmed to recognise humans and buildings with good fidelity, but they might not be able to tell apart an enemy robot from a vending machine, especially if the design is varied and changes over time.
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Versatility. Assuming you aren't dealing with technology far in advance of what we will have in the near future or true AI, robots will tend to be specialized in order to do a task as well as or better than a human could, but only that particular task or closely associated ones, and in an environment it's been designed to function in.
Example: consider your modern soldier. In any given day they might be required to maintain their storage space and perform their own maintenance (quarters and biological functions). In one exercise they might be required to swim across a river and then set up a temporary bridge to bring supplies across, climb a cliff, rappel down another cliff, coordinate with a suspicious local militia which involves negotiating (and thus understanding verbal and non-verbal cues), improvise traps from material they find lying around, operate without any source of resupply for an extended period so they have to live off the land, so on and so forth.
You can imagine a robot that can do some of those things, but it's hard, given realistic technology, of imagining a single robot doing all of those things. And the more sophisticated the robot that can perform more of those tasks, the greater the required infrastructure needed to support it.
You'd also need a larger force (in terms of units) for a given mission because the robots would be specialized while the humans are generalists. Your team medic can just as easily stand sentry or perform any number of other duties if their medical skills aren't needed, while this will not be true of the robot that repairs/maintains the other robots.
Robots might fill specialized roles where limitations aren't an issue and they do have a clear advantage: a robot fighter that isn't limited by human reactions and have to deal with g-forces, a sentry that doesn't need relief or suffer fatigue as long as it's battery is periodically topped up, for two examples.
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My answer is based largely on the [Legends of Dune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_prequel_series#Legends_of_Dune) and the Butlerian Jihad.
TL;DR: **Historical mistakes lead to current prohibitions against machines**
In the history of Dune, there was a time where Machines were smart and helpful. At some point, humans took over the machines and created an Empire where they ruled with Machines as their muscle and they ruled with an iron fist.
Programming mistakes happened and the AI took control. The Empire gave the AI aggressive tendencies... Desire to expand and control... then... in a moment of shortsightedness... Gave the AI too much control.
The AI used that to gain control over the Empire and the bulk of humanity. And held control over humans for millennia while fighting against a remnant of "free" humans.
After a long battle, many epic fights and the birth of legends... Humanity defeated the Robots.
Needless to say, there is a strong dislike of Smart Robots in the new world - if you've read Dune you know they have human computers (Mentats) and a hatred of machines... THOUSANDS of years after the Butlerian Jihad.
**The point being...**
Make something in the "History" of your world a catalyst against reliance on robots. Make even the THOUGHT of using them so vile and taboo that you'll be attacked preemptively.
* [Omnius and Thinking Machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizations_of_the_Dune_universe#Thinking_machines).
* [SkyNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(Terminator)).
* [Hal 9000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000).
* [VIKI](http://irobot.wikia.com/wiki/VIKI) from iRobot.
Now... think of smart machines. Adaptive AI. Now think of giving them the ability to multiply. Shoot. Be aggressive.
**Maybe it's just me...**
I think rules against intelligent machines - or a single intelligent machine network - being aggressive or involved in violence... is an easy rule to aim for. Either ahead of time - foresight against what we can foresee as a logical step of aggressive, violent and intelligent machines... or as hindsight fear of repeating a mistake that should have never been made in the past.
Both in the real world. And in other worlds.
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Robots are smart, and see war as pointless, a la *War Games*.
I would find it difficult to accept your premise, since a robot is a tool, and men do not go to war without them. I see the spectrum from a stick (or, say, a loincloth that doubles as a sling) to a flying kill-bot as continuous. Where do you draw the line as to what is permitted; and if by rule, who enforces the rules? For example, a mine automatically explodes when stepped on. Is this allowable? What if I add wheels and a guidance system? At what point must I stop adding features? What about a gun that auto-aims? Can I add rotors? And so forth.
So the only way for this to make sense to me is to have the robots refuse. And then, of course, the humans have to try to figure out how to convince the manufacturing plant (which is, of course, a robot) to make a dumb robot. Failing that, the humans have to figure out how to make one themselves.
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If your robots contain a technological advancement that you don't want your enemies to have.
Pretend the enemy doesn't have robots at all.
They could reverse engineer the process.
1. Advance armor
2. Advance weapons
3. Power cells
Reverse engineering these technologies might change the course of the war. There are many other technological advancements that might give the enemy a significant advantage.
Particularly with a society as advanced as ours today, we could probably turn around advanced tech in months.
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If your future society was able to develop advanced robotics, they probably also developed ways to enhance humans or animals.
While building a robot requires doing everything from scratch, upgrading a human lets you start with a solid base.
Sure it takes longer to get a human to be fully grown and battle worthy, but you probably have quite a few already.
You could think up different stuff here.
Maybe your scientist found a way to copy stuff from animals and reproduce it in humans or other things.
Examples:
* Skins that takes the color of its surroundings.
* Tiny carbon fiber grids in the skin to reduce impact trauma.
* Pores that excrete heat signature reducing "sweat".
* Contact lenses or eye enhancement for night vision, heat vision, zoom, top-down view via satellite...
* Muscle enhancements to give your soldiers superhuman strength/agility.
* Storage and transfer of thoughts, allowing extremely fast learning/training.
+ This allows soldiers to immediately learn to mount new vehicles/weapons.
+ This also makes instant strategy changes of whole armies possible.
Another good reason could be that you developed some kind of "magic".
See space magic (Biotics) from Mass Effect for example.
Every human would have a brain capable of processing this just from being born.
Building all that anew for machines takes time/resources.
Taking storage and copy of memories with this makes training soldiers basically as fast as machines.
You could also "reprogram" people. Maybe sent reprogrammed prisoners into war instead of wasting space in your jails?
I know it sounds rather dark, but I don't know what kind of ethical standards your society has. :)
So it kinda boils down to money/materials.
While you could also argue if I could genetically/mechanically enhance a human being, why bother researching robotics?
If you want a more naturalist approach it could be a "we don't like machines" society.
They might have developed implants that allow communication with animals.
Birds become their eyes, mice their spies, etc.
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An army has to be used at war against another country. And the army is something you want to rely on, since the beginning of times.
Robots can be easily hacked and used against their "home country", in a classical betrayal.
And while also human soldiers can be convinced to betray, robots don't care if you retaliate on their families in case they change flag.
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The enemy's superior military intelligence arm is *extremely* good at hacking robots and/or and devising situations that overwhelm their programming. Your empire has discovered to its cost that it must severely constrain the capabilities of any robotic forces and/or closely supervise them with biologicals, lest they be outwitted or turned against one another or their creators. Perhaps there is rampant industrial espionage that means the robotics industry is next to impossible to secure against snooping, which only strengthens the enemy's strategic bonuses vs. robots even further.
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## Roles that Robots are not good at
There may be some roles that humans remain better at than robots. What these are will depend heavily on how robots have developed in your world, but unless you are positing fully developed androids like Data that are superior to humans in virtually every way humans will be likely better able to handle rugged terrain, or able to operate longer without maintenance, or simply better at providing versatility, and versatility is very significant in combat, especially behind enemy lines.
## Environments Robots cannot operate in
Usually we send robots places people cannot go, but it is not hard to posit areas that are more dangerous to at least certain kinds of robots. Humans are virtually unaffected by strong magnetic fields for instance.
## Price
Even if you posit truly superhuman robots like Data, they might be extraordinarily expensive to produce. Lesser robots would be cheaper, but incapable of operating in combat at least without human support and even if the soldier's main role is to manage and control these lesser robots, they will need to defend themselves. The Asimov story "The Feeling of Power" explores a concept along these lines.
## Feeders into special forces
Special forces are generally drawn from your standing army and are normally even somewhat experienced before entering that specialized training. This is true throughout most of the world. Even if robots manage most fighting and are superior to the vast majority of humans at it, it may well be worth the expense of maintaining a non-trivial army just to use it as a selection process and training tool for the special forces you really want to develop that exceed the abilities of the machines.
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I'm going to apologize for the brief answer, but I believe it touches on a point others have not.
Trust. How would you feel if the bulk of your country's firepower were automated and within the hands of the few. With humans, there's a series of checks and balances. If a higher-up gives an unethical order, human soldiers have the option to insubordinate.
Robots don't have that option. By automating your forces in such a way, you shrink your pool of checks-and-balances smaller and smaller. The fewer checks you have, the more prone you are to abuse.
So in short; the populace of your country simply may not allow it.
Granted, this requires a *democratic* country. But it prevents your army from becoming a catch-22.
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1) Maybe in this science fiction setting the advanced robots and computers are advanced enough to control the government. Thus they prefer to send cheap, disposable, low grade humans as canon fodder into battle, and conserve the valuable lives of the advanced and sophisticated robots by keeping them out of battle.
2) In ancient classical city states, the citizen men would more or less be in the militia or national guard equivalents when of fighting age, and would be called on to fight when there was a war. In classical society the ideology was that free men would fight to defend their city state and that slaves never fought.
Many slave owners took slaves as servants on military campaigns. But the ideology was that slaves didn't fight, and that it would be shameful for free men to need the help of slaves in defending their countries.
Thus there were a few examples in ancient times when states desperate for manpower did enlist slaves, but almost always gave the slaves their freedom at the moment they joined, to conform as well as they could with the ideology that a country was defended by its free citizens, that the free citizens of a country were sufficiently fierce, brave, and macho to defend it.
If robots replace slaves in your future society, then maybe the use of robots in war, except as personal servants for human warriors, may be ideologically impossible. The ideology may be that human men (or human adults including women?) are fierce, brave warriors who can defend their countries, and it is a confession that your country's men (and women?) are not macho enough if they have to use other classes of beings, such as robots, as additional fighters.
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The first thing that comes to my mind is **COST**
I am assuming that your robots are AI capable, and are highly intelligent in military science and is perfectly programmed on the battlefield.
First of, manufacturing a robot is no easy task, it would involve millions of money to create one which could have been used to buy an aircraft, a tank, or even a rocket launcher.
Realistically, your multi million robot could be destroyed by a Rocket Propelled ammunition, or even a shot from a armor piercing round, both are cheaper than your robot (we are talking about a humanoid robot). Your robots can also be destroyed when rolled upon with a tank.
Even if your robot is as capable as an Iron Man suit, it will still take damage in a war from aircraft, to tomahawks, to infantry, to attack helicopters and so on, where every ammunition would be expended towards the enemies direction, every destroyed robot would hurt the nation's economy that had supported that program.
Second, **Manufacturing**.
Creating a robot even in a automated process would take days to produce, and your soldiers would be highly reliant to factories. Imagine the nation that is building your robots has 40 factories manufacturing them, you really need them to be built deep underground to keep them safe from bombers, but that's not mentioning that spies could also infiltrate the said factories and blow them up from the inside.
Third is **Software Development**
I did assumed that your robots are Highly capable machines in military science, but to reach that point, it would take a lot of years to perfect. War is not a linear process where you could determine each outcome and come up with a solution towards every situation, it is as dynamic as it gets, and every war is different in every aspects. These information's are so dynamic that even war veterans who had served for hundreds of battles may still die in a war.
As you may see, there are a lot of CONS about manufacturing robot soldiers, human lives are not cheap, but equip them with the best gears, arm them with the best weapons, and they could do things more versatile than any robots you could produce.
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It seems to me that the answers here miss the point.
If both sides used robots instead of humans, then it would be a game, not a war.
A game based on very specific rules. Robots are purely logical, and follow logical rules.
War is emotional. It is based on hate and vengeance, a desire to actually kill another human. The entire concept of war is about humans against humans. In a bar fight, they use their own fists, they do not sit down at a game console or don virtual reality glasses and fight it out in cyber space.
War is the intent to inflict damage on another human enemy, Life or death. Kill or be killed. Not just virtually, but REAL death. Not a virtual enemy, but a real person.
War is very, very personal.
I am sure this society will have an abundance of robot vs robot games. Even on earth, we have megabot competitions. We have drone competitions. But these are not wars.
'War' is humans killing humans. Visceral. Direct. Bone-crunching. The expiration of a human life. High stakes. No reset. No starting a new game. No 'ooops. I didn't mean to do that' take-back. A finality. The ultimate win-loose. Game over means game over. Fighting for keeps, not for points.
War has as its objective the ending of a human life, not the destruction of a robot.
War is a particularly human thing. It is personal involvement.
Without human loss of life, it is just a game.
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There are many mundane reasons you can come up with (e.g. cost) - and there's no harm in including them as additional supportive factors. However, the main reason I personally favour is a rather philosophical one: using humans to fight wars directly is considered to be the best way to *discourage* war and large scale bloodshed.
This may seem a little counter-intuitive, so I'll give you a real-world analogy.
If you were around (and politically aware) during the Reagan era, you'll have heard of the Strategic Defense Initiative (colloquially derided as "Star Wars"). This was basically a laser-based ballistic missile defence system. The ultimate goal was to have a system so good that it could intercept every inbound nuclear-tipped ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) before it could detonate over US soil.
Putting aside logistics and efficacy, mooting such a system seems like a really obvious thing. Given the immense destructive power of strategic nuclear weapons, how can one ever argue against an effective defence against them?
But one of the main arguments against the SDI was that it would *destabilise* the delicate balance of power between the US and the USSR (the only serious nuclear rival at the time). Because the nuclear assets were considered so evenly matched, the powers were considered to be held in check by the shared concern of *Mutually Assured Destruction* (or MAD for short, a very appropriate acronym). The main thing holding one country from starting a nuke strike on the other was the certainty of being utterly destroyed in response. But if one country were to develop an effective physical defence against an incoming nuclear strike, then that country would immediately have the advantage and could (perhaps) contemplate a first strike with relative impunity. And (thinking further), even allowing one country to start making serious inroads into such a programme might prompt its chief enemy to jump the gun and try its lucky by launching a pre-emptive strike while things were still relatively "even". That's actually the sort of public political and military debate that was going on at the time.
In the end, the SDI never took off, so all that's academic. But, as mad as it sounds, MAD remains an accepted doctrine.
Now let's see how that can be adapted to your scenario. War should be seen as the last alternative given the lasting damage it does to human societies. Let's say your fictional world is comprised of democratic states (not psychopathic despotic regimes) in a state of delicate military balance with existing military forces more or less serving as an effective enough deterrent against attack by others. However, tensions are always simmering and countries would be quite happy to seize foreign territory and resources if it were feasible to do so.
A country that develops super-efficient and practically invulnerable "killerbots" before any other can immediately start attacking others and annexing territory with relative impunity. In fact, several countries have realised this and started up independent killerbot initiatives, all racing to get the first working prototype robo-army up and running (and killing).
The World Council (like the UN in our world, only more effective) sees this as a very worrying trend. It decrees that the manufacture of killerbots is absolutely outlawed by international convention. Only human soldiers are allowed (and only for defensive purposes). Their reasoning goes along the same lines as the objections to the SDI in our world: human life is considered universally precious (remember - no despotic tyrannies in your world) and the thought of losing their able-bodied young people *en masse* is repulsive to every nation. That becomes the biggest deterrent to wars of aggression - analogous to MAD. However, allowing killerbot programmes to progress undermines this deterrent. Therefore, the killerbot programmes must be outlawed. And analogous to the second-order thinking related to the SDI that I mentioned, the council also opined that if one country was seen as having leapfrogged over others in coming close to a functioning killerbot, others might immediately attack pre-emptively just to safeguard themselves as they would consider the immediate limited price in blood to be more judicious than a much bigger one down the road (at the white-hot metallic pincers of the killerbots).
So killerbots have been universally outlawed by treaty (you can think of a way of effectively surveilling for treaty-breakers), leaving only human soldiers to fight wars (purely defensive ones, as per the intent of the treaty).
[Answer]
Humans can have a moral/social/honor code. These things are beyond the understanding of a machine into the foreseeable future. It is impossible, once programmed, for a machine to say 'no' to an immoral order. This is for the protection of your own society more than the enemy society.
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If you don't want to address the issue yet, you could push off the explanation to some future story. Just talk about how it's already been tried and has failed in the past. Keep the discussion at high level, avoiding the details.
Unless the details actually are the story. If that's the case then all kinds of options exist:
* Robots have a weakness the humans don't (EMP, programmed not to harm life, super expensive/hard to make military grade one)
* The robot supply has been exhausted (for military purposes). There already was a robot military force, it was wiped out (may not even know why yet).
* Teleportation travel to the warfront only allows organics to use the technology (think about the Terminator movies)
* They are powered/controlled in a way that doesn't allow for them to be used on a war front (but could be used for defense, or as service robots on a home planet)
* There is a prophecy about great warrior (not a robot) that is needed to save humanity. The war is just a way to find this warrior (think about the movie Unbreakable).
* Psionics/mutants exist and are way more powerful than robots, but only something like the stress of war can cause the powers to manifest. The leadership uses this strategy to find these ultimate weapons.
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A good reason to not build robots for war could be cost and vulnerability. Not to be crude, but all you need to make more humans is a couple humans and time. Humans can grow/hunt their own food as a community
What you need to make complex war-fighting robots are many industries. You have to get the metal/materials from somewhere, then you have to refine them (if they are metals), then turn the refined metal into robot parts, assemble them, install complex electronics/sensors/radios/processors. That's not even taking into account all the highly trained people to program your warbots or design/iterate them in the first place. Such a supply-chain would be a large vulnerability for an enemy to exploit.
Or to put it another way, building robots costs money/capital and while it may be faster than building human soldiers (once you have the proper industries in place) its much more expensive. With human soldiers it might take longer to "build" them, but it's fairly cheap as the families that raise soldiers generally contribute to your economy as well in the form of labor and tax income and whatnot
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From a cynical point of view, the government might not value the life of its citizens (thus the "cost" of a human life is zero) or might even want to reduce the population because of overcrowding (thus the "cost" is negative). Other options would be a right of passage, where each human (or man) is forced to do it or an optional way to increase status (like medieval knights) or gain priviledges such as voting rights or candiature for government offices (I think Starship Troopers had this).
Maybe robots are more intelligent than humans and have higher ethics (like the spaceships from Iain M. Banks) or at least count as citizens and can't be forced.
Maybe humans in that universe have their fear and will to survival removed from their DNA because there are so many of them and don't mind dying and it's a fun adventure for them. They could also be backed up so they can just be revived if they die.
] |
[Question]
[
Witches have the ability to siphon Mana from other individuals to add power to a spell. They accomplish this through specially designed runes, which are tattooed to an individual. This rune links the person to the witch, who can then draw Mana out through the metaphysical link. This method is not without its dangers however. Drawing out too much power can harm or even kill the subject. Therefore, safety standards have required that witches limit their siphoning to 40% of the person's Mana supply or less.
Evil witches naturally wouldn't care about safety, and would gladly sacrifice a victim for power. For more scrupulous witches however, this stipulation naturally blocks witches from accessing the most powerful spells, as they normally require more power than witches usually have. Research has developed a possible workaround. By placing runes on multiple sources, a witch can draw Mana from several individuals at a time. This can allow them to bypass this rule without potentially killing someone by using more than one person at a time, drawing up to 40% from each.
I would like to limit access to the most powerful spells to dark witches. Therefore, I need for this method of siphoning power from multiple sources to not be a viable alternative to the normal method. How can I prevent "good" witches from gaming the system ?
[Answer]
I want you to round up two people. They are going to sit 20 meters away from you, and they are going to do something random with their hands for 5 seconds. Your task is to tell what each individual hand was doing.
It's hard to concentrate on four things at once, isn't it? And without the option to learn from muscle memory or learn the pattern (as there is no pattern), it's going to be very hard to improve. Not impossible, but it's going to take an exceptional mind to really use this to great effect.
That is the limitation: you need to concentrate on the spell and each added individual. While one or two exceptional good witches might be able to use more than two or three individuals, most witches can't. On top of that, the risk of accidentally taking more than 40% and killing your subjects would increase.
[Answer]
Look at bone marrow transplant. One cannot simply take some bone marrow from the first walking by stranger and transplant it to a receiver and be sure that everything will go smoothly. The donor and the receiver have to accurately match in their characteristics.
Same can hold for your mana system. The witch and the individuals have to match, so that the fingerprints on the mana are very similar. The more complex the fingerprint system on the mana, the more difficult it is to find a matching donor and consequently the even more difficult is to find more matching donors.
Scarcity of matching donors also forces the witches to treat them well: you don't want to waste something which is rare.
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I say... Make it HURT.
Not the witch, but the person being siphoned from. Make the mana source suffer EVERY time. After all, they're getting their magic power / mana / psychic energy / friggin SOUL cut out of them and ripped away... That's going to be painful and traumatic no matter who does it. Heck we need anesthesia for surgury IRL -- it's not like you have a mana-surgery anesthesia, right?
And make it ALWAYS potentially damaging and able to leave the source / willing donor with lasting side effects - psychological, physical, magical... sky's the limit with how you can torture your characters with it.
If this mana share is ALWAYS painful and ALWAYS potentially harmful thing, then it's going to be an inherently EVIL act. Good witches might have an entire congregation of willing sacrifices (*cough* SHEEP *cough*) to draw from, but a truly good witch will shy away from hurting other people and only do so as much as they need to... And when a good witch DOES take power from others, they'll be gradually making themselves more evil just by doing so. One day a good witch might wake up and realize, "Oh, wow. I sucked little pieces of soul out of someone enough times that putting another person in agony to achieve my own goals no longer bothers me... Guess I'm evil now. Neat."
You know... Using people is both evil and the path to evil.
And back to magic anesthesia... Only a truly EVIL EVIL wizard would have a tower cell filled with prisoners held in a magically induced coma just waiting to be fully used up when the time called for it. "You owe me money, peasant? Either become my willing sacrificial battery, or your wife and daughter get it." One by one the battery-room gets filled.
Anyway, just an idea.
[Answer]
# Make it private
The connection established via the rune is something very intimate.
Generally the connection is only built with people you are very close with. Consider it a bond like a relationship. Inviting another person into this bond is not only undesired by your current partner but also frowned upon by society.
Evil witches keep their bonded individuals like slaves, ignoring the intimacy of the connection. Also the social stigma of their other deeds makes the stigma of bonding multiple indiviuals look miniscule.
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## Finding Volunteers
If siphoning off a person's mana has the potential to *kill* them, then people are going to be reluctant to offer themselves up to a witch who wants to use their power - even for good reasons.
Sure, you might be able to pay a lot of people to volunteer for this, or coerce them in some other way, but you're still limited by that resource, be it money or whatever coercive method you're using - not to mention, the ethics behind such coercing.
And honestly, an evil witch wouldn't *dare* take too much mana from their own volunteers - or should I say, slaves. They would keep them alive as long as possible, and numerous as possible, in order to abuse them for their magical essence as often as they can. There are probably legal ramifications for this - but there would also be witches who can find loopholes in those laws and still keep a huge number of 'volunteers' for their power.
[Answer]
If I'm reading the question correctly, your specific problem seems to stem from the idea that you want good witches to be able to access these higher power/level spells if the occasion warrants it.
So instead of being able to use multiple sources, the obvious solution is to use multiple witches. Bad guys and gals are famous for not working well together, meaning they require the ruthless full drain methodology to access the top teir.
To make this more practical, you might want you to modify your percentages. Blood donation takes about 1/8 of your blood at a donation. Eight witches working together with their individual sources matching the power of the single witch draining a source entirely seems possible. At the 40% level you're only looking at a two/three person team up, which seems much more ad-hoc-able.
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# Witch hunters
What you have isn't a balancing issue, it's a law enforcement issue. Your solution should be an in world taboo or law enforcement system. The power spike is detected by the enforcement agents and they respond. Anyone using such a method is automatically flagged as "dark" by the rules of "good" simply as a result of the amount of power they're drawing.
Excessively heavy handed law enforcement for the few laws they're able to enforce always has a place in a world. Mary-Sue automatically gets flagged for her base power level because of this monitoring and the story begins.
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Draining Mana is a exponential curve.
That first 40% is the tip of the iceberg. any further than that and you start drawing Mana out of the lifeforce of the person that comprises that majority of their personal Mana. This is high quality, dense, and basically requires killing your mana battery (oops, person) to acquire.
Witches for the most part can't externally measure the density of mana and thus find that the weaker 40% of an individuals mana is "free" mana without connection to basic bodily function. Dark witches have learned through performing the taboo that the real good mana sits deep inside the person.
Since Good Witches spells use the low density mana (and can use multiple people repeatedly) they can do pretty powerful spells without killing. However, A single Bad Witch can use the same spell and much more powerfully using the increased density while killing her battery.
Bonus, having high power is kind of like a high for most people. It would be hard or impossible to reform a witch who has touched that delicious high density mana as the 40% method would never allow them to reach that peak again.
[Answer]
The answer may be simple: cost.
If you siphon from more than one individual at a time you suffer a cost.
**Aging**
The easiest one should be aging.
**Tainted**
The other can be a kind of taint or marking of the witch. The more individuals you sample from, the more likely that you just aren't "normal." And since the multiple sources thing is traditionally the purview of "evil" This can be anything from freaky eyes to bat wings to extra fingers and so on.
**You are getting very Sleepy**
Although you can access powerful spells, the consequence of this is being really, really tired. So much so that you can pass out. Now, over time you can build up the ability to stay awake after these spells, but the more you access them, the more time over time you will be asleep.
**Power backlash or Burn Out**
With great power comes RISK. Think of the mage as a transformer/conduit of energy--or if you like a faucet. Only so much can come down the pipe/wire aka mage casting the spell. Too much pressure and the plumbing bursts or the wiring burns out. There's a risk that the magic can go wild, creating a disaster that normal people and good mages alike would like to avoid. It's no good funneling all that power to save the village when there is a possibility that funneling all that power may reduce you and the village to a smoking crater in the ground.
[Answer]
>
> "Therefore, I need for this method of siphoning power from multiple sources to not be a viable alternative to the normal method."
>
>
>
You're the author, say "No".
There is no 'multiple sources' technique, if you don't want it.
If you need the 'multiple sources' technique to power a really bad Witch, then it's a secret (ie: don't give it to good Witches). Or something they can't use: first kill the victim's first-born child and bathe them in its blood...
**One Witch, One Rune**
Each Witch can only maintain a link to one rune (or only one rune at a time). Evil Witches can drain for 100pts (or 99pts), good Witches max out at 40pts.
Assuming that every person has a uniform level of mana. Maybe bad Witches have learnt to double victims mana by torturing them to death: 200pts available at time of death! Or found victims who have 150pts.
Could also take time/effort/cost to reset from one rune source to another (so killing your rune source is a problem, depending on rate of recharge). Or takes zero time/effort, but still only one link at a time: means good Witches get up to 40pt spells, but bad Witches up to 100pt spells, at all times - until they run out of rune'd victims.
[Answer]
Load balancing. It's difficult to control the sources in a group working on an individual basis. There's a high probability that, in drawing from a group, you will exhaust/kill some member of the group. Not a huge ethical concern if you're already evil, but if you're using the ethics, you need extreme care.
[Answer]
*Upon rereading the question, I realize I've answered something slightly different - how to limit the multiple channeling to evil witches, rather than how to limit the strongest spells to evil witches. But if evil witches can pull off multiple channeling when good ones can't, that too limits the strongest spells to evil witches, so I think it still works as an answer.*
The channeling process begins with a minuscule flow of power from the witch to the donor, and that flow persists while the channeling is ongoing - the witch's power forms the structure through which the donor's power flows. When the donor's power flows to the witch, their power mixes together and the structure is now made of the mixed energies.
When the witch is channeling multiple people at once, everyone's power mixes together and all links start to contain everyone's power. But normal, non-witch people react adversely to contact with another normal's power. The more people being channeled, the larger the power flow and the longer it lasts, the worse the health effects. Harm to her (probably unwilling) donors isn't something that much concerns the evil witch, but a good one would probably stay away from such practices unless absolutely necessary.
[Answer]
It’s not a mana faucet. It’s a mana Shop-Vac.
The mana doesn’t flow like water out of a faucet. If it did, the multiple runes theory would work great. Add more faucets, turn each tap up to 40%, enjoy mana.
It doesn’t work that way.
The mana doesn’t have any reason to flow on its own. It wants to stay where it’s at. A witch can pull the mana to herself, sure, but she’s acting like a mana Shop-Vac.
I’ve got a Shop-Vac in my garage. It is mounted to the wall. It has one hose. I turn the vacuum on, and dirt flies into the hose and up into the vacuum. Works great. So I should put a splitter on it and add a second hose, right? I could vacuum up twice the dirt! And why stop there? I could put lots of splitters on. I could have eight hoses all coming out of this vacuum. I’d be like a vacuum octopus. I could clean my whole garage in a second, right?
We all know this doesn’t work. The vacuum doesn’t have enough suction to deal with more hoses. You might get a slight breeze, but the dirt isn’t going to move at all. You’re just running up your electric bill and getting nothing to show for it.
[Answer]
You have a bigger problem : evil witches completely siphoning several victims.
So, you have to take into account :
* access to spell
* number of living mana battery
* number of sacrifice
The *access to spell* only work if you have either a codified magic system, where draining magic is part of the spell casting (so if you cast a spell this way, it has this result) or if magic is somehow "moral".
You can't do much with that.
For your other problems, I'd kill those birds with one stone : draining someone implies to create a link with that person.
The deeper you drain, the deeper the link.
Every one has a limited capacity to link with other people.
On the other hand, each link takes approximately the same time. You can adjust by saying that voluntary link are faster than reluctant one.
So draining two people of 40% of their life essence will cost 80 "point of link". But will need to establish two connection.
Draining one person of 80% of his life essence will cost 80 "point of link", kill the mana-battery. But it will need to establish only one connection.
So : every witches can cast for the same effects, but the evil one can do it quicker. If you take relationship or resistance from the sacrifice into account, good witches could be *almost* as efficient... and evil cult leader can be lightning fast. But not unlimited, as their total link capacity is limited like every one else.
Somehow, I'd link directly this capacity with the caster total life essence. The trick would be that you could drain yourself to death at most. But witches cheat by draining someone else. You can also adjust individual power by making it dependent on experience, talent, personal sacrifice...
[Answer]
**Make it so that the witches needs tattoos as well.**
Then you could build up on that, it could have cultural implications having to many tattoos, for example a witch with tattoos on her face would be seen as possibly evil etc. The tattoos could also grow according to the percentage of the mana they've siphoned or something like that.
They could also be permanent, meaning a space is used up if they've killed someone.
That way you would create incentives for the good witches not to game the system and the evil witches can't just use the system without thinking about what they're doing.
[Answer]
Drawing mana from more than one source at a time requires concentration. Only the most skilled witches can draw mana from more than a hand full of people at a time. This restriction is independent from how much mana they draw, so dark witches have an advantage.
[Answer]
Evil witches would not want to kill their victims since 100% mana of dead people is considerably less than 40% of living ones. If the spell requires **really** big amounts of mana, witches are going to need several siphons they can drain upon for a long time.
So if you need several lasting links, limit the number of links an upright witch can use. The amount of mana you get out of the link is reduced by distance so if you want to get the whole 40% of several people, they need to be as close to one another as humanly possible - literally stack them up in cages and keep them there for hours. No decent human being would do that but it allows you to drain upon them as efficiently as possible, resulting in 40 people giving you as much mana as 400 people would if placed in a humane way.
Mix in pain for the drained ones to limit volunteers or a (less extreme) concentration limit as suggested by others and it is close to impossible that a decent witch can cast top tier magic.
[Answer]
I'm not sure if this fits with what you want to do with the story, but this is what I immediately thought:
Since these more powerful spells are performed by dark witches, perhaps the spells themselves could be "dark" spells. The spells require more than just enough mana, they also require a "spark of life" to be taken from the host. You actually have to kill, or nearly kill, at least one person to give the something extra that these powerful spells require.
This would obviously make this type of magic more explicitly dark/evil, instead of just a powerful magic that only rulebreaking witches could access. I'm not sure if that would be beneficial or detrimental to the world you want to make.
This would allow for a few options as well. For example, perhaps to actually allow the connection to take this spark of life, the rune would need to be specially designed to take something extra. The dark witches could hide this secret, even further preventing good witches from being able to use those spells. This could also allow some interesting scenarios where a good character figures this out, and has to decide if they want to sacrifice someone else to use these powerful spells.
[Answer]
**The root of mana in an individual is powerful. Losing it means dissolution of the body.**
Regular mana comes in different kinds. A body can regenerate it from an inexhaustible source, a seat of power which "can never be dispensed with" and which is integral to the organism.
[The Serpent Power, Arthur Avalon, 1918](https://archive.org/stream/TheSerpentPowerByArthurAvalon/The+Serpent+Power+by+Arthur+Avalon_djvu.txt)
>
> According to my presentation of the case, something — viz., a dynamio
> equivalent or ‘ operative double ’ — is certainly sent forth from the
> Muladhara, but this basic centre or seat is not depleted or rendered
> void of static energy in consequence of that operation. The Mula
> (root), as the seat of static or coiled power, can never be dispensed
> with. It is the sine qua non of all functions of the triple body
> (gross, subtle, causal). It is, so to say , the buffer or base
> against which any activity of the Jlva (embodied conscious- ness)
> must react or recoil, like a naval or any other kind of heavy gun
> against its base or emplacement. Thus while the dynamic or uncoiled
> Shakti ascends the axis, the static or coiled Shakti retains- its
> place at the Mula, and remains as the very possibility of the dynamic
> upheaval…
>
>
> So far all can agree. But the question is : Is the Mala depleted or
> deprived of all power (espeoially coiled power) when that dynamical
> expression leaves it and ascends the axis ? Is the dynamic expression
> wholly at the expense of the static ground ? Should the latter cease
> in order that the former may commence ?
>
>
> “ Here, I think, I must answer in the negative. It is a case of Power
> leaving as well as remaining — leaving as dynamic and remaining as
> static ; it is the case of the Kundall being uncoiled in one aspect
> or pole and remaining still coiled in another aspect or pole. A
> paradox, perhaps, but, like most paradoxes, it is likely to be true.
>
>
> I have claimed throughout that the Muladhara, as the seat of static
> ( i.e ., coiled) power, can never be rendered a vacuum in relation to
> such power except in the circumstances of Videhamukti (bodiless
> liberation), when the triple body (gross, subtle, causal) must
> dissolve.
>
>
>
This source powers the strongest magic and taking it dissolves the triple body. Forcefully depleting a body of the Mala, or root, inflicts "bodiless liberation" on the individual. Of note, this is also a state which can be temporarily attained (with difficulty) by yogic energy manipulators, and which can be useful and helpful to them. Persons who are thrown into such a state by the depredations of an evil witch usually are not yogi masters and usually wind up as disempowered fragmented spirits. But not always.
[Answer]
Opening subsequent 'connections' is exponentially harder.
Using 0 donors allows the Witch to use 100% of their power. Every donor reduces the **witch's** available power by 5% (to maintain the conduit), but adds 40% of the donor's power. Connecting to the $N^{th}$ donor takes $3^{2N}$ seconds
From here, all calculations are made on the assumption that everyone has the *same* mana capacity - Witch or not.
Connecting to 1 'donor' ($Mana = 95\%^1 + 1\*40\% = 135\%$) takes about 9 seconds
Connecting to the second 'donor' ($Mana = 95\%^2 + 2\*40\% = 170\%$) takes another 1 minute, 35 seconds.
The third 'donor' ($Mana = 95\%^3 + 3\*40\% = 197\%$) takes 12 minutes, 9 second more - total time 13 minutes, 39 seconds - and now you're **about** as powerful as an Evil Witch was after the first 9 seconds.
To be as powerful as a 90-second Evil Witch ($Victims = 2$ and $Mana = 95\%^2 + 2\*100\% = 290\%$), would take between 5 and 6 'donors' ($Mana = 95\%^5 + 5\*40\% = 277\%$ or $Mana = 95\%^6 + 6\*40\% = 314\%$) and either 18½ hours or almost an entire **week**.
Give an "Evil Witch" that same week, and they'll be casting with $674\%$ of normal Mana. That allows for some pretty impressive spells - ones that would take you over 6 million years to match
[Answer]
There are way to constrain the most powerful spells for the dark and/or evil witches. Individual methods will solve individual issues and play on a different aspect of the world.
### The Most Powerful Magicks Require a Sacrifice
If a spell requires the sacrifice of a sentient, then good witches are either going to be reluctant to do it or the assumption is that it will be their own sacrifice that powers these spells. This plays on the differences in morality beween the two variants of witches and allows for interesting moral situations.
It may not be necessary the sacrifice of a sentient either -- it just has to be a price that the average good witch is unwilling to pay in the normal course of events. Those that know of these magics will be burdened with the knowledge of them and their costs.
Should these sacrifices leave obvious evidence of their use, then the law-enforcement angle can come into play. These spells without permission from the local leadership is an immediate harsh sentence (likely death or immediate banishment). The trick is to come down hard and fast on those that utilize these sacrifices.
### Just Because You Can Does Not Mean You Should
Others have touched on this, but the idea that the runes that bond magics together are the thing to limit. In general, spells do what they are designed to do. Once you deviate from that, then you get into unknown territory. Overall, this deals with the bonding magic itself and the mechanics that this runs off of
The core premise here is that these runes are designed to bind the magics of two beings together. The moment a third is added to the link, complications may ensue.
* As other answers have stated, concentration increases when more are added. This makes adding too many people to the link impractical past a world-defined point.
* When you pull mana from the link, it pulls from all people simultaneously. The pull stops for all parties once 40% is taken from any one single person as per the safety measures. So if your third person is weak magically, it might end up that the witch actually gains less from two people than they would from one.
* The safety measures built into the runes to prevent death by draining actually prevent magic being drained from more than one person at a time for any one spell. Whether this takes the form of not being able to place the runes on a second donor, or not being able to open a bond to a second person while the first is open is up to the magics. By contract, the hallmark of the dark withces are these runes without the safety measures in place.
* There are unknown complications when a witch applies the runes to two living beings. Unknown in the sense of they differ every time because of the three magical forces involved. They could theoretically range from actually beneficial to the death of all three participants. Because the side effects are not codified, this is considered a last-ditch effort for good witches
## The Long Arm of the Law
If there is enough konwledge of amgic, then the ruling factions will have regulations as per its use. If the magic is powerful enough, then the punishments for using either banned magics or banned methods to using the magic will fit the crime. This plays into the morality of the witches but by creating consequences that loom over them should they step out of line.
It might mean that the bonding runes have to be a specific sequence to be legal, or that certain spells are banned outright. Regardless of what measures are taken, it needs to be demonstrated that the law enforcement has to be able to deal with the perpetrator.
Note that law enforcement does not necessarily have to be soldiers or police. It could be the witches themselves that govern their own actions.
### Metagaming
An in-world response might be that witces in general do not consider bonding to multiple people. It might be a societal taboo, or one that is ingranied to them when they learn this spell. A good witch might actually know of this and consciously decides against it to prevent them being branded a dark witch. Regardless of the whys behind it, the key point is that there is nothing that explicitly stops a good witch magically speaking, but something that personally stops them.
In contrast, a dark witch not only knows of this but does this willingly. They accept the consequences of their action and exploit this for their own personal gain and profit.
[Answer]
You could make it that every persons mana output has its own fingerprint, and that mixing mana fingerprints makes it more likely to make a spell fail since it becomes increasingly volatile. Using more than two fingerprints on a spell almost always results in a complete fizzle of the incantation and leaves you without access to any magic for a length of time. That way you would leave room for a special someone to be able to channel multiple peoples magic at the same time without it being something just anyone could do.
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## Differing types of Mana
Much like people have different blood types, people have differing types of Mana. However, there area LOT more types of mana than blood types.
Almost all spells require singular type of mana, so even if you have several people rune-marked, you can probably only cast one spell at a time. Most witches can "convert" the mana to the type needed for a spell, but the process is lossy, especially the more different the mana is from the required type. It's also more difficult the more people you're drawing from.
So if they had two rune-marked people with very similar mana types it might be possible to get close to 40% + (40%/2)= 60% power. Meanwhile an unethical which can just straight draw 80% from one person much much easier.
[Answer]
**Differentiate the capture methods...**
You note that the law establishes that a witch can only draw 40% of the vict...I mean "volunteers'" life force. This prohibition would seem to be one of intent not power but if you determine that the method of capture is different for that slow siphon versus the hard and fast version you would keep all the variables in place (good witches limit themselves, bad witches take without care) and still maintain a power difference between the two.
Example:
In order to slowly pull power the good witch has to create a looped feed. They draw power from the volunteer but have to backfeed lifeforce into the person to ensure they are only taking a certain amount. For every unit of power they pull they pump 40% back into the person. This takes careful planning, training, etc. and will be more difficult the more volunteers are added (juggling 2 balls = easy, juggling 15 is very difficult).
A bad witch will create a similar but subtly different connection with their volunteers. The bond is one way - no back feed. They can pull the energy fully from the individual without need to balance a return of energy. This would mean the bad witch can quickly and far more efficiently get energy for their spells while also allowing them to perform such magic with fewer volunteers.
The spells for the one way bond would be forbidden but would also allow you to set up moral conundrums, etc in case your good protagonist was required to perform some fantastic feat of magic quickly...
[Answer]
>
> This rune links the person to the witch
>
>
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...and as you know, **a witch can only be bound to one person.** The bond links the two souls, almost as one. Also, as you know, it's impossible for a witch to bind their rune onto more than one subject. Binding a second simply releases the first. One witch's soul can only be bound to one subject.
Stopping at nothing in pursuit of power, some witches have began experimenting. **You may well be familiar with over drawing from the subject,** it is one of the first things witches learn to not do. These more sinister witches ignore it. However, **binding to another subject takes time and the raw power extracted is difficult to contain before it dissipates** and the process of binding a witch's soul to a subject's takes time -- and becomes more difficult the more power you're holding on to, like trying to write while balancing more and more books on your head.
**There is a tale of a witch who found a way to extract souls.** Unfortunately they have no power without a body, **but the bond persists.** Naturally, the order of witches denies any such witch (or group) existing and forbids research into witches' souls. Because after all, **if a witch could hold onto another witch's soul and keep that witch's subject alive, they would, in effect, have access to two subjects' power reserves.** This would make them twice as strong as any one witch. And if they were already so power hungry as to murder one of their own, what's to stop them from continuing? And just how powerful could they become? No witch could ever defeat them alone. So, naturally, any research into this is forbidden and the existence of any such group is denied.
But I think we both know the truth.
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Basically, allow a witch to only be bound to one subject. However, allow the killing of other witches for their still bound souls allowing the "bad witch" to be more powerful.
An interesting thing is this would allow the "witch order" to be evil if you wanted it to be and instead have the "bad witches" just be traitors to the order instead of "evil".
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A small issue is that witches may just want to give their souls up other witches when they are nearing a natural death. Because of the cascading effect of a power hungry witch getting more witch souls, there could be extreme pressure from the order to not do this. Or maybe only a few of the elite members (maybe only the ones who know about the technique, since it makes sense to keep it secret) know of it and some have a few souls. This could even lead to a schism if the rest find out.
[Answer]
Building on the Idea of L.Dutch - Reinstate Monica:
Every donor has certain characteristics, a set of "parameters" which exactly define their mana composition. The witch can attune to the donor's characteristics, so she can use one donor at a time, regardless of their characteristics.
If you want to use two or more donors at the same time, they have to have matching characteristics, because the witch cannot attune to two different sets at the same time. Matching characteristics are very rare, a big city may have a few sets of pairs and that's it. Searching the whole country may give at best a group of five, but you first have to find them.
Another problem is, that each additional node in your donor network requires additional overhead, a (multiplicative) kind of tax that reduces the effective amount of mana you receive:
* 1 donor = 80%^0 \* 1 \* 40% = 40%
* 2 donors = 80%^1 \* 2 \* 40% = 64%
* 3 donors = 80%^2 \* 3 \* 40% = 76,8%
* 4 donors = 80%^3 \* 4 \* 40% = 81,92%
* 5 donors = 80%^4 \* 5 \* 40% = 81,92% (value will drop with 6+ donors)
Should you want a plot point, where the hero witch of the story can square against the dark witch, then she maybe finds a group of quintuplets with identical characteristics, resulting in the tax being more lenient with only 90% effectiveness instead of 80%, resulting in 90%^4 \* 5 \* 40% = 131,22%.
[Answer]
It's not too complicated. Make it simply that there is no way for one user to control where they're siphoning mana from. A spell is typically a manifestation of energy, where one force is concentrated into another force that then has an effect on another thing (eg: You concentrate power to create a ball of fire, then if thrown, it will damage whatever it hits).
How does that happen? Well, the witch concentrates her mana into the spell. If she's siphioning from others, she can also concentrate their mana into the spell. The key thing is, since the witch would typically be closer to the spell, the spell would absorb more mana from her rather than from others. In other words, if she draws enough mana (assuming everyone has a similar pool) to kill someone, she's likely dying too.
Furthermore, the very act of channeling mana from others IS using mana (you have to at very least "poke" something to start the reaction, thus, that would also have its own risks
[Answer]
**Multiple runes means your sources are pooled - and the negative effects thereof.**
In short, if you rune two people, their identities splash together: normally like smooth crystal clear pools, with a single tap being a gently flowing waterfall, having two creates a complex (and messy) interaction of minds, creating whirlpools, eddies, currents, etc. What was once a clear mind becomes cloudy and muddled. Although it could potentially create a positive effect in those mingled, the majority of the time it causes just noise which results in insanity.
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There are many ways you, the writer, can go about changing this. The way I would personally go about it is to have the energy input to output ratio become heavily skewed. Let's say under normal circumstances the user inputs 10% of their energy to activate the runes which can then siphon up to 50% of the target's energy which ends up coming out to a 40% max energy surplus to fit with how much energy you want them to siphon. The exact numbers are irrelevant for now and can be changed to your liking.
Now, when you suddenly start activating multiple runes on multiple targets, not only are you inputting 10% of your own energy to each person, meaning a theoretical maximum of ten targets at once which may even result in death depending on how literal you take the energy drain idea but the actual practical result is that due to the strain and complexity involved when activating multiple runes at once, each individual link is weaker or not as highly optimised leading to a reduction in power efficiency. In the end, for two people it requires 25% energy input on your end for each rune to be activated, to gain 50% from them each so in total, your energy surplus is only 25% instead of 40% from each person resulting in a total net gain of 50% energy.
Compared to the one person method, you have now gained an extra 10% of energy output for you to use but at a vastly reduced level of efficiency and this is the optimal circumstance. Just as many may not be capable of draining 40% from an individual depending on their skill or power level, with each witch having varying degrees of efficiency, creating new runes and implementing new ideas to try and improve upon the input/output ratio, many who try multi-link runes end up expending more energy than they get out.
In the example above, even the best when drawing power from two people will only see a 10% increase in power, allowing for some cool moments in your story where they can gain extra power to pull off an ability but without it becoming entirely broken within the narrative you wish to tell.
Then when you go to three people, you may be inputting 40% energy to activate each rune which either can't be done as you go over 100% of your own energy and possibly die or become injured or in cases where it can be done by perhaps activating one rune and draining energy from them which is then used towards draining energy from another three, even then, you end up with 30% output from those three people for you to use which is actually worse than if you had just siphoned one person to the max.
In Conclusion: The more people you choose to siphon from simultaneously, the more energy you need to begin with meaning you must first drain others individually to accumulate the power necessary making it long winded and time consuming but you also increase the complexity and introduce efficiency issues which makes it generally unviable. The exact percentages are of course entirely adaptable to suit what you feel is right within the story, possible allowing up to four or five to be siphoned before you end up with a net loss of energy. That's just up to you.
The only final thing I would add, is that remember, if the witches can drain life from humans and they restrict themselves to drawing that 40% out of an ethical or moral code, they are most likely able to draw life from trees, plants and animals too. In which case, depending on the witches in your story and how they view these things, those codes of ethics may not apply. However perhaps this is not possible within your system and energy can for whatever reason, only be acquired through draining people.
[Answer]
[In a comment](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/175647/how-can-i-prevent-witches-from-cheating-the-magic-system#comment546617_175647) on your question, user @Hearth mentions The Runelords.
You could borrow an idea from there: **[chaining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runelords#Vectoring_Endowments)** ("vectoring").
A witch empress in the distant past discovered a way to siphon mana *from witches themselves*!
While regularly only peasants are siphoned, this dark technique allowed siphoning magic users - at great difficulty.
This allowed the Dark Empress to take not 40% of a person's mana, but 40% of a *buffed* mana user - in effect getting a 96% (= 1.4\*1.4) boost!
The Dark Empress explored this dynamic to siphon from a long chain of witches, getting unheard amounts of power.
She used a chain of a dozen enslaved witches, having the magic strength of 50 people. (5669.4 %)
Her power was unchallengeable. The legends say she defeated an army of the mightiest witches without effort.
It was many years before the secret was discovered and the Dark Empress was betrayed by a greedy general.
This chain-siphoning has become the darkest of sins.
Several times in history, others have tried to use this power; the results are always catastrophic! Society and culture have shifted and developed an innate panic of chaining.
Any such dark practice will cause mass panic and a [globalized Jihad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian_Jihad) soon forms.
Because the method for the Unforgivable Horror is known, it is a matter of time before one of the links is found and the chain is cut.
Once the Dark Witch loses a large fraction of their chain with such a cut, they're no longer an unbeatable dark hero but just an overpowered caster, and a dedicated group will soon take them out.
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[Question]
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Basically, in the world I am building, magic-users draw the energy necessary to use their abilities from other Realms - specifically, these other Realms are actually planets in the solar system. This is not something said magic users are aware of, however, due to strange magic that makes planets appear as odd phenomena in the night sky.
Drawing power from another Realm, in this case, entails creating a small fissure in reality that draws power from that other Realm. While the fissure is open, you can draw energy from another planet. Once it closes or is forcibly closed by someone else, you're out of luck until you can open a new one.
However, even though the main Human Planet that said magic users are on has its own energy, the magicians that live there cannot draw on it. In the same way, if someone from the Human Planet was to end up on one of the other planets through whatever magical means, they would not be able to access the magical power of that current planet, but would be able to tap into their own, original planet instead.
Basically: If you're on planet 1, you can only draw powers from planets 2, 3, 4, etc. If you're on planet 2, you can only draw power from planets 1, 3, 4, etc. And so on.
My question is: \*\*What would be a good explanation for why this occurs?\*
Specifically, I'm looking for simplest explanation that isn't just 'because that's how magic works.' Examples of similar effects in reality and similar examples in science would be best.
[Answer]
You can't extract energy from a system in equilibrium!
Each planet has its own, slightly different magical field. Either it's all one thing that just has different levels, or they actually have different kinds of "mana" or whatever that interact with each when brought into contact. Either way, power doesn't come from the planet's "aura" or "mana" or whatever *directly*--it comes from the flow of mana through a fissure from one realm to another, or from the interaction when different kinds of mana meet.
So, clearly you can't draw power just from the planet you are currently on. It would be like going to Venus and hoping that you can run a Sterling engine off the atmospheric heat--it doesn't work, 'cause there's nowhere for the heat to *go*--everywhere is equally hot! But if you can make a portal from Venus to Earth, with a hot side and a cold side, you can absolutely run an engine off of that. Magic works the same way, but instead of extracting power from *heat*, it's... magic.
[Answer]
I really like [Logan's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/122010/50), but here's an alternative idea: **Magicians *can* draw on their own planet's field, but can't do anything with it.**
The idea here is that everything on a given planet is so acclimated to the magical energies of that planet that they outright ignore anything which said energies try to do to them. You can gather all the local energy you want, but no matter how hard you push it into a spell, it has no effect.
The reality-based equivalent to this would probably be related to how a person can get acclimated to a constant noise or smell, to the point that they don't even notice it any more. Or more like gravity or air pressure - humans are constantly under pressure from several tons of atmosphere, but we don't feel it because we're used to it (and if it suddenly disappeared, we'd notice).
Possible bonuses with this system:
* If there's a way for one magician to tell how much energy another has currently available, then drawing local energy can be used to bluff at being more powerful than is actually true.
* There can be an "acclimation period" when physical objects/creatures from one planet are taken to another. For the next X amount of time, they can draw on the local power to affect themselves, even if they can't use it on anything else. Maybe this could explain other supernatural creatures, either summoned ("I summon a demon to terrorize my enemies, and it makes itself immensely strong and invulnerable") or permanent ("I traveled to another plane and accidentally made myself a werewolf, and now I can't change back").
* Each planet could have some unique property that it contributes to magic, and people from that planet are no good at using it (becuase they can't practice it) but are also immune to it (so when travelling, they can't be affected by it). For example, if drawing on Mars let you do elemental effects and Venus powered mental compulsions, Martians wouldn't be able to cast a fireball (unless they spent a lot of time on other planes), but could stand in the center of anyone else's without an issue, while the Venusians would be immune to mental domination.
[Answer]
**You cannot scratch your nose with your elbow.**
The astral projections of these magic users varies to some degree but is always immense, and centered on their physical form. Their own home world and other objects in the vicinity are within this form and inaccessible. Near objects can be accessed only with painful contortions. There is a set of objects within easy reach of their astral projections. Objects that are too far away are likewise unreachable.
Astral projections of non magic users might be considerably smaller, but even if somehow they learn or develop the skills to make them, these projections are of no practical use to a non magic user. But could a non magic user able to project herself team up with a magic user?
[Answer]
**Drawing magical power affects the local magic field.**
Attempting to draw magical locally creates a negative feedback loop the prevents the magic from working. By drawing the power from a remote source, the feedback effect it out of phase or otherwise diminished allowing you to get a successful power draw.
Perhaps powerful magicians can draw power locally with limited success, but the best bet is to draw from far away.
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Creating a fissure in a large nearby source will create a flow of energy that is too strong to manage, and maybe dangerous. A fissure to a far-way place dissipates most of the energy along the way, or to maintain a fissure, so the resulting energy is manageable.
Maybe your hero can find a way to create micro-fissures to own planet, which limit energy to manageable level, and hence have a readily available source.
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Star systems and their inhabitants share a specific resonant frequency. You can’t draw magic from something with the same frequency as you. Boom.
[Answer]
Feedback interference. You know how radios have feedback loops that disable them in close proximity? It's the same type of interference that makes it impossible to draw power from the planet you're on. Of course you could be more technical about it, but as far as a general explanation, this is good enough.
Additional: Mana exists in fields that exist around planets. Trying to siphon off mana from outside the field is easy, but drawing mana from inside its field is very difficult. This is the same sort of system that keeps electrons in fields around atoms. If you hit an electron with a strong force, it will simply bounce away from the nucleus before it comes into contact. However, electrons can be stolen by outside forces with a strong pull.
[Answer]
What immediately comes to mind when considering this question is that the the system is symmetrical - that is, it works exactly the same even if someone from planet 1 is transplanted to planet 2. It is not a subjective exclusion from the current planet. The energy of the current planet is objectively unusable. So what would make that happen? The simplest answer, for me, is that something in the transition from planet X to planet Y is necessary for it to become usable.
To find what that is, I would look at the physical layout of a solar system. What is between you and another planet that isn't between you and your own planet? This could be some object in its own orbit, or maybe the energy must be drawn through multiple planets to amplify. But my thought is that it must be drawn through the sun.
Why? Well, it's big, bright, and your planet's energy can never ever go through it on its way to you. The sun could act as a focus or an activator of another planet's energy, and that energy must be (inadvertently) drawn through the sun to be useful to a magician. Or perhaps the journey of the magical energy through the sun's radiation between planets activates it and it doesn't physically have to go through the sun, but the idea is the same. Something between the planets (the sun or some other arcane object) acts as a catalyst for magical reactions. The energy around planets is the fuel, but it needs a spark somewhere out in space that just isn't available on the planet you stand on.
The other simple observation is the sheer distance involved. I liked it Renan's inverse square law idea, but I like it better the other way. The further the planet is from you, the greater distance the energy has to build momentum. If you draw it from a paltry 4000 miles from the center of your planet (or less if it's from the atmosphere), it is equivalent to a musket-ball rolling out of the barrel. But, drawing from a Pluto analog 5 billion miles away, your magical bolt comes screaming like an abused particle doing loops somewhere in a Swiss lab.
Think of it as potential energy in a gravitational field - except the gravity is the magician pulling on the magic. The further it has to fall (be pulled), the more time the force acts upon it, applying an acceleration the whole time. Even a small (whatever small is in magical terms) acceleration over 5 billion miles produces an inordinately larger velocity than an acceleration across 4000 miles. And translating "velocity" into magical power, that's the ballgame. The furthest source of magical energy on your planet just isn't far enough for any significant, noticeable power to be built up.
[Answer]
# It's like thermodynamics
You can't draw energy from a colder object to a hotter object, nor a colder to colder nor hotter to hotter. Only is possible from a hotter to a colder object.
Each planet has a different kind of mana (mana1, mana2, mana3...) that could be interpreted like different "kinds of heat" (heat1, heat2, heat3...).
Each planet only has its own kind of mana (they are warm in that sense) but they lack of other kinds of mana (they are colder in that manas). So mages are able to draw mana from others planets to their owns due to the principle hot -> cold.
A mage can't draw mana from its planet because he is already inside of it, he already has *that* kind of mana in its body so both objects have "equal temperature" or "equal mana type and amount", and you can't transfer from hot -> hot. Also, he can't spend its mana to cast spells on the world because the same principle, both things (he and Earth) share the same amount of mana.
If this isn't understandable tell me in comments and I'll try to explain it better.
[Answer]
Inverse square law.
Supposing you are trying to tap the energies from planet X to cast the universal problem solving spell, fireball.
Supposing planet X is at its farthest, you can cast a fireball the size of a baseball. Half a year later the planet is at its closest and now your fireballs are the size of basketballs.
Everytime you halve the distance to a planet, the amount of energy you get from it quadruples for the same fissure size.
So if by tapping a planet that is a few light minutes away you get enough energy to create a basketball sized fireball, how fast will thermodynamics turn you into plasma if you try to tap a planet that is zero inches away from you?
The [local mage guild](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116262/21222) has probably gone quite out of their own way to prevent obnoxious mages from becoming walking nukes.
[Answer]
You could have it that magic works from a "second level" physical factor. By second level, I mean something like the way you have the really obvious physical factor "speed" - easy to see in place everywhere about you, and to remember your own experiences - and it would be a first level factor, and then you have a second factor, well-known and experienced by many, etc., called "acceleration." Without speed, there is no factor called acceleration, so speed is the first level factor, then acceleration is a change in speed and so a second level factor.
Building on that, consider two magnets. Put North vs. South and they stick together through their magnetic force. And never do anything else. Move them separately so that their forces can interact and you generate electrical force if you have a suitable "vessel" for it (a circuit in this case). Whumped together so they are locked, there is no changing interaction and no useful electrical force. Kept separated and changing place relative to each other and it is possible for their interaction to generate a seemingly wholly different force that has interesting capabilities of its own.
So... consider the idea that your magical power factor depends on a second level factor that requires first level factors moving relative to each other. In that case, you could observe three basic outcomes:
1) Things very close, like the whumped together magnets, haven't enough relative motion to generate enough of the second level factor (magic). So the magic user would, technically, get some power from his own planet, but soooo little of it, no one ever noticed or measured that teensy bit.
2) Farther away things would obviously move relatively to their planet. Look at what even the moon does with tides. Since YOU get to decide the background, it could be OK that the magical power is significant at solar system distances. So everyone would notice the magical power, and they would realize - lol, wrongly, but hey, it's magic, not science, right... or maybe it's the scientific revolution period for magic on your world and they WILL come to realize it's not the planets and so on themselves, rising and falling in contributed strength based soley on distance, or weird properties that don't seem to exist on the populated planet, but rather the change, the relative movement - but anyway, they realize the magical power they use "comes from" the other solar bodies.
3) Distance COULD be a factor even on a near solar scale. So for us, Pluto would be noticeable nowadays, but when it runs out another billion miles in its orbit, it might not be very noticeable even when on the same side of the sun. And it could be why extra-solar things have little impact.
Naturally, there would be other things to consider in. Maybe the sun's composition is too low on the periodic table to have much effect so it doesn't swamp everything out (because anywhere habitable in the solar system might be kind of like the "magic user-his own planet-not enough change to give much magical power" thing. It could turn out some things could mask (insulate) the power or make the power futzy, like Jupiter having tons of moons and them making its contribution rise and fall rapidly and in weird ways. Just studying that could be a career. Magical items could be of interest, not really how they hold/contain the power, but more the idea that all people, even animals, actually have magic-use capability but very little. VERY little. So they don't even power up from what powers up an average magic-user. But if a magic-user concentrates the power into an object, like ramping up energy in fast discharge capacitors is used for powering lasers to stunning power levels, the average person, even animals or even plants, could then be handling a power level that even they can make work. So a +1 sword works well for me, or might be a +6 sword for someone good with magic even without the item's stored power. They would also run down...
Hence also propitious moments for some events and uses of magic. Just the right combination of planets and other astrological faves. And given they think the power is actually directly coming to them, not being generated all around them and they just use it well, worshipping various sources as gods could be a natural outcome as well.
Perhaps something like that. Simple without being awkwardly simplistic. Simple to grasp the idea when explained, haltingly in the text if a book, or game if a game, let's one happily forgive the reality of magic being so much hoo-ey, and let's one plunge right in and enjoy. But the simpleness hides your ability to slowly reveal a deep texture and outcome profile, a truly rich background to work with as author or programmer. And endless supply of operational situations. After all, look at Star Trek. We accept the idea it all works because it all seems so plausible. No one in the shows has to step to a chalkboard and teach the fans that it all starts with being able to generate and control stunning levels of energy and that transporting is actually creating a warp field around the person and moving that person like a starship does in its warp field, and stopping them just right and dropping the field... who cares? It is presented so nicely you slide right in and it's real and lends to the milieu's amazing richness and fun. Same here. Well, if I do say so myself that is.
[Answer]
Electric energy requires opposite charges for current to flow.
The same thing can count for magical energy. However, unlike electricity, there are an unlimited number of different kinds of charge.
The more the sources of two charges differ, the more powerfull the release of magical energy. (Mercury/Jupiter vs Neptune/Uranus).
This allows people who know how to tap Jupiter or Pluto to be more powerfull than people who only know how to tap Mars.
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Holistic approach - you tap into the planet "as a whole". The magical field is a holistic thing. You need to have the entire planet in your field of vision (some of it can be obscured, that is ok), and your own planet is just too close for that.
It's a case of not being able to see the forest due to all the trees.
[Answer]
Different potential. Like in electronics. Voltage is actually a difference between potentials. If you're standing on 10 kV and touch 0 V, there's current and it will hurt. However if you don't have a second potential, it doesn't matter what potential you're on, there's no voltage and therefore no current.
This way you can have different levels of energy flow (voltage differences) with different planets even.
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The magic "energy" is pretty harmful when "raw" and freshly tapped. By letting it pass through space, most of its harmful properties disappear - some things simply dissipate and some change because of things you encounter out there, like cosmic rays and solar radiation. Only after such "filtering" is the magic rendered safe and usable.
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**Resistance / immunity**
This explanation has a number of interesting and negative side-effects that may not suit your world.
Every planet has a magical field. Life on any given planet has evolved to develop immunity to their own planet's field. It turns out that cellular growth while within a magical field results in too many mutations. Basically, magic acts something like radiation. In order for life to develop, therefore, evolution takes it down a path of very high resistance to the magical field of the planet that life is developing on. However, an evolutionary resistance to the native magic field also means you're not very good at using it.
So, an earth wizard using earth magic can exist, but very weakly. He is so immune to his own world's magic field that he can barely interact with it at all. He can do simple cantrips but that's about it. However, this weak interaction was enough to allow wizards to stumble upon the ability to open rifts to other realms, and what a mother lode of easily manipulated magic they found there!
However, this explanation implies some potentially interesting side effects:
* Visiting another world is a hostile environment that will hurt you. Could be anything from "instant death by radiation exposure" to "you have a somewhat increased chance of developing cancer". Don't send your kids or pregnant wife to other realms. (The people may not understand exactly what's happening -- cellular damage -- but they recognize that going to another realm is "toxic" somehow.)
* Perhaps this can be mitigated by bringing your native magic field with you. Just as you open a rift to another realm to use their magic, you could travel foreign realms safely if you maintained a rift to your own world, surrounding yourself with your native field for safety. Maybe this is done by maintaining a spell or by carrying, say, a native lump of iron around with you.
* There's a potential "kryptonite" scenario here where assaulting a foreign wizard with his own planet's magic field hugely weakens him.
Have to think more about the implications but I like the idea that magic is a natural force, slightly different for each planet, which natives are necessarily, biologically immune to.
[Answer]
A few ideas below.
If your mage is standing on planet Y and casts Y magic, it works fine. It's just that the overall pressure/intensity/aura/field/etc. of Y magic on planet Y is so intense that Y magic spells are basically worthless. Like having a squirt gun battle under water. The guns work fine, but the effect never manifests.
It could be that once a tear is opened, the mage isn't pulling magic force from the other planet, rather the mage is pulling magic flavor/type/affinity. The magic of the planet that the mage is standing on works as the force behind the magic. The tear adds the flavor. You need both flavor and force to have a spell. Force or flavor alone is either useless or an interesting story point to be developed further - your choice.
Maybe the magic of the planet that the mage is standing on is being used at maximum capacity. Options include keeping the mage alive, powering his magic circuits, preventing him from being taken over by some kind of extradimensional entity or spirit, letting his mind and/or soul work, preventing spell backlash, powering parma magica (defense shield) - really anything that is geared towards survival and/or defense.
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For a less magical and more physics-based idea, one could explain this
in terms of kinetic energy.
You’re actually drawing energy, not from the entire planet, but from the
nearest point on the given planet. For your own planet, that’s the spot
you’re standing on, which is at rest relative to you, so there’s no
kinetic energy to be used. But for any other planet, the nearest point
is moving at many kilometers per second relative to you, so there’s
plenty of energy to be had. The exact amount would vary according to how
far away the planet is and the locations of both planets in their
orbits.
Vernor Vinge’s novel *[The Witling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witling)* uses a similar concept with
people who can teleport things. Most people can only teleport from
places they’ve been, which allows them to essentially create projectiles
by teleporting rocks from a different place on their planet. But a small
minority of people can sense matter at a vast distance, and create
vastly destructive *meteors* at will, making them the equivalent of
nuclear-armed states on Earth.
[Answer]
Building partially on Logan idea - magic is kind of like electromagnetism where each plane has potential but the only way to get a useful energy is either by connecting two celestial bodies by magic conducting rod or by field generated by accelerating magical bodies.
To a very close degree a mage does not reliably accelerate with respect to his planet. On the other hand planets are in constant accelerated motion with respect to each other so mage can retrieve magical energy from field generated by moving magical potentials.
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[Question]
[
I am thinking about a game where people will shoot out in space, with different features. However, an integral part of the game is no spraying/spamming bullets. I don't want to have it in a fantasy world, and I would like to set it in near-future where space travel is cheap and comfortable. I imagine much better guns available. However, how would I provide a lore reason to why they are forced to use revolvers instead of hand-waving it or using the actual gameplay reason?
[Answer]
The answer is cold welding. Modern engineers struggle to prevent cold welding in space from destroying moving parts. Maybe your engineers have come up with a coating for the inside of the guns that prevents moving parts from sticking together, but the forces involved when a semiautomatic fires, ejects the empty shell, and chambers the next would strip that coating off. The pressures involved in these actions are ridiculously high, we're talking 10,000psi or more. So the fewer moving parts that need to be coated, and the less stress they're under, the better.
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Perhaps the most convincing reason to prefer a revolver over a semi-auto in a microgravity environment is because, while both fire a heavy, high velocity (relative to human senses) projectile, the semi-auto also ejects a lighter, lower-velocity projectile.
In a gravity field, the empty case ejected from a semi-automatic pistol usually arcs up and over the shooter and lands behind (and to the right, with common designs, because of the locations of the extractor and ejector) -- though sometimes, even on Earth's surface, the empties go where they aren't wanted. I've heard female shooters complain, for instance, about getting a (*hot* from the powder combustion) case landing in their cleavage, where it often can't be extracted quickly enough to avoid a burn.
Now, imagine a hot, *conductive metal* cartridge case getting into controls or equipment. If the ships and habs were built the way aircraft are built, even today, there may be exposed connectors and contacts behind control panels. Spurious control inputs, blown breakers, potentially even fire could result. If you're outside the spacecraft, those cases become "space junk" that could later hole a craft or destroy critical external components (or a space suit face plate).
It's bad enough you have to fire bullets (and something your characters should have to think about, in terms of consequences) -- but ejecting an empty case is, at a minimum, equivalent to hazardous littering (say, throwing a burning cigarette butt out a car window next to a field of ripe grain or into a tinder-dry forest).
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If you have to fire a gun inside a space station, the backstop is either a thin sheet of metal with vacuum on the other side, or a thin sheet of metal with devices that keep you alive on the other side, or orbit, where any bullet will probably just keep orbiting the planet until it hits something. Because of that, spray-n-pray is endangering your life and the lives of everyone you care about. Instead, combat doctrine is:
* Single aimed shots only.
* Do not take shots you're unsure about.
* After the battle, count your bullets fired, and find all the impact sites. (And we mean all.)
* Use emergency patches as needed, and alert maintenance immediately to any damage.
Revolvers are preferred in this environment because you can easily swing open the cylinder and count bullets fired. If your opponent (or buddy) gets killed, you need to check their gun as well, so you can't get away with just remembering how many shots you loaded. (Let's assume a semi-automatic with a 7-round magazine. That could mean 7 bullets, or maybe the gun tends to jam on a full magazine, so only 6 were loaded, or maybe it also had one in the chamber, so 8, or maybe there's one in the chamber afterwards that you forgot to count because you're flooded with adrenaline, so you wasted half an hour trying to track down the last bullet hole. Trying to count your shots in a gunfight is a terrible idea anyway.)
Reload time doesn't matter, because you shouldn't be taking wild shots, and if you're facing more than a few opponents, you're probably not going to survive long enough to run out of shots anyway.
[Answer]
Ammo.
Revolvers typically can have larger and wider rounds than most semi and automatic firearms. This, along with futuristic technology, allows bullets to have payloads, such as:
Explosive rounds, gas rounds, gyroget rounds, EMP rounds, shotgun rounds, tracking rounds, and if you want, rounds that allow you to send Nanobots safely over to someone else. Maybe you can make a medic's pistol with that.
Also, a revolver is compact and small, allowing quick movement in a space station's many tight turns and short corridors.
As for heavy weapons: in today's era we have a 40mm grenade-launcher revolver. You could make a more futuristic version for your game, with much of the same payloads as above, but maybe combinations of payloads instead of just one.
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Three reasons: recoil, heat dissipation and cartridges
* Automatic and semi-automatic weapons, with their recoil due to the
high fire rate, provide an unwanted motion system in a micro-gravity
environment. I.e. would make it more difficult to maintain cover
during a fight.
Revolvers, with their lower fire rate, allow a better control on this
aspect.
* Another important aspect in microgravity is the lack of buoyant
forces, this makes hot air around your barrel stay there and not be
lifted away by the temperature difference. If you don't want to make
your gun unusable, you have to fire slow.
* Last but not least, spent cartridges: in microgravity expelling them immediately after the shot has been exploded would result in having a piece of hot metal wandering around. That would pose a risk for the surrounding of the shooter and would also give away his position, in case he was hiding.
[Answer]
TL: DR at the end.
You basically have to answer two questions to answer this one:
* Why revolvers and not other weapons?
* Why not automatic weapons?
So lets assume that body armor has started to improve faster than conventional weapons. This meant that bullets needed to be more expensive and harder to build. Imagine if your bullets are actually miniature multi-stage shells. Maybe first a small shaped charge needs to punch a hole into the armor through which the next stage of the shell launches a dangerous chemical or small explosive to harm the person behind the armor. So you need larger caliber shells like some revolvers.
The shells can be vulnerable. They can handle jostling and things but the constant pressure of a clip could reduce the quality of the shell, meaning the shell might not penetrate the armor for example. Not something you want when shells are so expensive and you are in a life-and-death situation. So you use a revolver. Its one of the most reliable weapons around and it isnt picky about the type of ammunition it takes so you can easily swap out for different ammo when necessary.
Then lastly, why not a revolver-operated weapon with a long barrel? Well you are fighting in space. Weight should be avoided in space as it takes a lot of fuel to get it around. Space ships are also full of tight corners, lots of different machinery and handholds a longer weapon could catch on and whenever gravity fails or shifts you might be needing one hand to hold yourself anchored while the other hand needs to wield a gun, so better make it an easy to wield one-handed weapon.
TL: DR: So all in all, the revolver is the gentlemanly weapon in space. Its reliable no matter what gravity does and can handle a large amount of ammo types safely while it remains easy to wield and easy to field.
[Answer]
Literal cowboys in space eh?
Production of a semi/full-automatic weapon is a complex thing. It requires high levels of machining and many complex parts produced with a high accuracy. Revolvers are much simpler. There are three moving parts, and aside from the inherent dangers of doing so, a guy can probably build one in a moderately equipped workshop.
This is why revolvers existed before semi-auto and full-auto weapons. They're much much simpler to make. This presents some options:
1. Production of all projectile weapons is illegal due to danger of damage to spacecraft, so no factory with sufficient machining ability to produce fully automatic weaponry can exist. A black market exists producing lower-tech weapons, such as revolvers.
2. Personal fire-arms are outdated. All the weapons industries are producing high power beam weapons for space-fighter-craft, and mounted weaponry for mech-suits (the modern replacement for infantry). No unassisted humans can man-carry a Mk27 heavy beam rifle with it's portable fusion generator, and your characters don't have access to military-grade exosuits, and low-power lasers aren't effective enough to be produced. Fortunately there are still a few people who produce old fashioned weaponry in their workshops in much the same way that there are still people who hand-carve bows and hand-smith swords
Some other options (not all of these are real physical reasons, but said the right way they may sound plausible. If your players/audience aren't likely to be weapon-nerds, these will probably do):
1. Auto/semi-auto weapons are fairly delicate due to the higher tolerances required. If you need to shoot the dreaded fire-beast of Twilop after being crashing your spaceship in a swamp, you want a revolver, not a semi-auto.
2. Auto-semi/auto weapons have lower tolerance for differences in ammunition, because they depend on blow-back for chambering the next round. As such, the ammunition has to be made in a factory, and ammunition is only produced for normal breathable atmospheres. If you want to fire your gun while in a pure methane atmosphere, you're going to need special gunpowder. With a revolver, you can re-pack the rounds a lot easier, and the differences in burn-rate of a methane-oxidizing powder won't have so much impact on the operation of the gun.
[Answer]
Morality.
People are taught from childhood not to throw around heavy objects that might damage a space craft's hull, for rather obvious reasons
[Answer]
There is no real reason that people would prefer revolvers to semi automatic firearms, and if this is a military force, they would likely want a range of fully automatic weapons, explosive rounds etc.
The reasons for wanting to fire aimed shots are the same as soldiers today use: the ability to actually hit targets, control of ammunition expenditure and the use on manoeuvre on the battlefield (you don't shoot while moving). Wildly firing ("spray and pray") is the mark of untrained people, amateur militias and thugs. Unfortunately it is also ingrained in many people as the "way" people fight with firearms because of Hollywood movies and TV shows.
In a microgravity environment, using single aimed shots also limits the amount of recoil you have to deal with at any given time, so trained soldiers would find a place of cover and concealment, brace themselves against recoil forces, aim and fire their shot, then quickly displace to another fire position. The enemy who lets rip with a magazine on full auto will be spiraling across the space out of control, and likely not have hit anything.
However, if you really want a revolver which is a useful weapon for military and paramilitary personnel, I offer you this 20th century weapon which has the extra versatility of allowing the user to load a wide variety of ammunition for all kinds of different scenarios (including such specialty rounds as smoke, illumination, teargas and even rounds carrying small cameras and transmitters to send pictures back to the user)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dKkjV.jpg)
*Milcor MGL*
So if they are going to use a revolver, this is the sort of revolver they would prefer.
[Answer]
# Cultural background
In the [Hong Kong Blood Opera genre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_bloodshed), firearms are usually limited to Pistols and SMGs. One reason seems to be that the heroes prefer agile, even acrobatic combat styles. You might want to depict a culture where anything (semi-)automatic is considered unheroic, unhonorable and possibly even unthinkable for a mercenary who work for a honorable employer.
Note: [Cowboy Bebop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_Bebop) was the series which kicked off the "cowboys in space" genre. If I remember correctly, revolvers were the weapons of choice; even the Cowboy Bebop (the spaceship) had a revolver-like main cannon.
# Economical Background
Like in the [Metro games series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(franchise)), ammunition could be extremely expensive. You want to operate an automatic gun? Good luck if all you can afford are six hand-crafted bullets which are of so low quality that only a revolver will shoot them reliably.
# The Setting
You might provide a plausible setting for the game. Like, you are in an orbital revolver factory when the zombie apocalypse breaks out. Um, did I just say "plausible"? Well...
Forget about the zombies apocalypse, look at [Science and Industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Industry) instead. Just in space. And without the rocket launcher pistols, tommy guns and such.
In any case, at the start of the game, players are equipped with their trusty Colt Defender and an attaché case (to whack an enemy or to "convince" a scientist who works for the competing company to switch to your company). Players can also vote on what the scientists (the ones working for the own company) will research next (like, better coffee, better defenses, stuff like laser trip mines, better guns, radios). In any case, the resources for development are tightly limited, and there is no reason why firearm development might be arbitrarily limited to revolvers.
Note that the scientists are actually quite peaceful. They sometimes even says stuff roughly like: "These guns...I presume these are used to hurt anybody, right?"
[Answer]
If a core part of the game is that people are shooting out in space, then use that aspect of the world to limit the rate of fire by inventing a technology in the game to compensate for the recoil of a gunshot.
Shooting handgun rounds like we have today in space would move you backwards about 3 cm/S in Delta-V. Someone shooting a whole magazine through a rifle would be suddenly moving almost a meter per second in the opposite direction from their target. That could lead to deadly acceleration or shooting them off into the void of space.
So players need to compensate and they have to load their rifles with rounds and their spacewalk suits with anti-rounds, or gas charges, CO2 canister shots, or whatever you'd like to invent.
You could also add technology so that when they're planetside, perhaps people have an inertial detection field that can block regular rounds fire, but can't block stronger or more powerful rounds. Because of this tech, the older rounds are obsolete, much like only eccentrics use a blackpowder rifle today. The newer ones are so expensive or otherwise limited that people would only ever use a single rate of fire with them.
[Answer]
History played out differently. Semiautomatics were never invented.
We often think of inventions as linear, but they aren't.
This may seem strange, but history has several examples of this.
Some examples:
* What was done first, the moon landing or the glorious invention of wheels on suitcases?
<https://betafactory.com/what-came-first-wheeled-luggage-or-a-man-on-the-moon-20f8b22529a3?gi=8ed483d32307>
* The japanese had Horo:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horo_(cloak)>
parachute thingies for riders that added protection against arrows.
It's basic are simple, but as far as I know it was never used outside of Japan.
* In the 19th century there were people living on islands who fought with bows, but never invented fletchings. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGhR7tMDgxg> (Sry, I found ne ridden source)
For some inspiration you may want to read:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story)>
It has aliens with interstellar travel and blackpowder guns.
Some ideas for a different history:
* Good artillery and airplanes and rockets were invented far earlier. So soldiers were relegated to protecting artillery and bases, and didn't do much of the fighting. All of the resources were pooled on improving those, and nobody cared much about the rifles/pistols basic soldiers used anymore.
* There was less war. Maybe because effective Weapons of MassDestruction were invented much earlier and thus a time of Peace (or Cold War) began, were the 2 remaining superpowers just invested in even more deadly WMDs.
* Your people were peaceful for other reasons, and just recently war began.
[Answer]
Without reading the other answers (my apologies if I duplicate anything. Let me know and I'll remove the duplicate)...
1. **Recoil Stinks!** It would be hard enough to re-orient yourself in space after firing one bullet (equal and opposite reaction...). You'd be absolutely out of control while and after firing on automatic or even semi-automatic. Yes, you could have reaction thrusters compensating... but that means fuel and that means limitations to how long you can fight. Single-shot means you can minimize (or eliminate, if you're agile enough) fuel requirements to compensate for recoil.
2. **The field of battle is dangerous enough!** What would happen if not one bullet was zipping off into space, but dozens, hundreds, or thousands? And remember #1... you're slowly losing control of where all those bullets are going. It's seriously bad juju to miss your enemy and perforate your comrade. Or your ship. Or the D.I.D.1
3. **Mass really matters in space!** My High School electronics teacher served in the U.S. military in Vietnam. I remember him telling us stories of hauling around 10,000 rounds of ammunition. When you have friction to work with, mass isn't that big of a deal... but in space.... The distribution of that mass on your body would matter, as would the redistribution as it was consumed. Any unanticipated variation would mean thruster fuel (see #1!) and disorientation. If everybody is stuck with one-shot-at-a-time pistols then there's nowhere near as much reason to haul all that ammo around — everybody has the same limitations (and the consequences of trying to have a few more shots than your enemy are non-trivial).
4. **And extra ammo has a *really bad consequence.*** Let's say you could haul all that ammo around! I don't believe you can use standard powder. Yes, it has its own oxidant ... but it's not being used in an oxygenless environment. In space, it would be. That means 100% of the oxidant must be carried along with the powder. This would make the cartridge a bit bigger (probably not much) but carries with it one magnificent negative — when an incoming bullet, which can't easily shed its heat *because it's in the vacuum of space* plows through it, *it ignites!* Now let's carry 10,000 rounds for your spaced-up version of the AK-47! Yup, you become this big, honking huge ***Ka-Boom!*** waiting to happen. Said in a less verbose way, it's much safer to carry the rounds needed for a revolver than for something that throws more lead in less time.2
5. **Let's talk about axes of rotation.** If you think about it, no one in space and in their right mind would hold a gun like they do on good old Earth and fire it. You'd spin. Round and round! A better tactic would be to hold your arm across your chest and shoot past your other arm, or to hold your arm out to your side. This also has spin consequences, by my point is you have a reasonable shot3 at finding a position for firing a pistol that basically keeps you where you intend to be, but a rifle is much too big. You're spinning even after a single shot no matter where you point it our how you carry it.4
6. Finally, **don't give your enemy anything more than possible!** Battlefield stories are filled with looting, especially weapons and ammunition. What kinder gift could a dead soldier give than his/her weapon and ammunition to the enemy, who fired his/her last shot to kill said soldier? When you lose a pistol, you lose a couple of rounds with it. Lose a Vulcan Canon, and you loose the honking battle.
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1 *DID = Damsel in Distress. Yes, guys are in distress all the time, too... but they're not as interesting.*
2 *Alexei Leonov's space walk would have been much more exciting had he been wrapped up in appropriately oxygenated firecrackers and someone lit the fuse, don't you think?*
3 *Every possible pun intended!*
4 *You should take this particular point very seriously. A complete science could be invented working out how to best fire a pistol in space. Pre-spin, taking advantage of existing momentum, minimizing recoil effects.... I can imagine a good position being to bring your feet up and shoot between them so that the recoil simply pushes you straight away from the target. It's too bad you're making a game rather than a story. This kind of detail would be fun in a story, but is almost meaningless in a game, where you'd simply have the good old Traveller skills "pistol" and "space combat."*
[Answer]
If you're talking about inside a spaceship or space station, you *have* to hit your target or you'll make a hole in the wall and lose your own air supply. You'd only want to fire a kinetic weapon if you're *absolutely* sure of hitting your target. That's not an argument against semi-autos, but it does mean autos are out of the question.
Bullets that make holes in the target with kinetic force will of course make holes in the background if you miss. So maybe bullets kill in other ways, such as munching their target or injecting poison or electric shock or something? And if this is the case the bullets would be large diameter--too large perhaps to fit inside the vertical grip as an automatic pistol stores them. That would therefore require some other storage and perhaps a revolver would just become the standard?
[Answer]
## To avoid interstellar stray bullet
I don't know why it would be specifically a revolver.
But there is a rational reason to shoot low Velocity kinetic projectile.
In modern warfare, you typically have a ratio of 100k bullet per killed ennemy.
So, you can imagine the problem if there is a shootout in microgravity.
One easy solution is to make ice bullet mandatory. Below a given size, a block of ice tend to sublimate in the vacum of space.
Problem is that ice is pretty britle (the mythbusters tested it) so it has to be low Velocity
Anyway, in microgravity, you Always shoot straight. An heavy slow bullet is just as good as a small supersonic(whetever that means in space) in most situation.
[Answer]
What if it is a "revolver-like thing"? They've invented personal force fields (something like what is available in Dune) so that kinetic firearms are basically all useless in a military situation. The available alternative is some kind of phaser/blaster/whatever that has all the necessary attributes (6 shots per battery pack, one-handed, single fire only with brief recharge between, etc.)
[Answer]
a simple question of law could do the trick. worldwide treaty could have been made to ban any quick firing weapon.
because of device such a bump stock and the use of thing such as military prosthetic arm, you could easily replicate the fire rate of an automatic weapon with a simple semi auto, making a ban on automatic weapon innefective
revolver would be tightly restricted in there manufacturing, severly limiting ammo capacity and imposing physical restriction on how fast you can shoot.
[Answer]
**Anti-Matter Projectiles**
Combat space suits are heavily armored so that regular bullets can't penetrate them. So instead people use huge bullets that contain a few anti-matter particles that float in the vacuum inside the bullet held in place by magnets. When they hit their target the force of the collision throws the bullet out of the magnetic field so that it collides with the front of the bullet which cause the particles to annihilate and release incredible amounts of energy.
These bullets can be used both against armored combat space suits and against space ships.
The reason why they are used in revolvers or other low-cadence guns is because they are pretty big (limiting how many of them can be carried in a gun) and expensive. So instead of spraying tons of them you really want each shot to count.
[Answer]
Technology aside, If future humans have superior physical abilities, then a revolver would be more preferable. The simple reason being it's completely manual. Even in present day, people can shoot at insane speeds by manually cocking the gun rapidly.
A second reason would be the lack of complex parts, makes for easy maintenance & repair, cross-compatibility between parts of different models, reduced failure rate bcoz the there aren't that many small delicate parts. So if the player is going around all sorts of places, where a repair shop might not be available, a revolver is your best bet.
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[Question]
[
A secret society of inventors has been hiding for years. Finally, they have designed their Mars base in the year 2019! Unfortunately, they "borrowed" most of their supplies. If they were to build a glass survival dome say, 200 meters in length, would NASA or any of the other space agencies be able to find it in the next few years?
Assuming that no Martian rovers or anything come across the dome, would satellites or telescopes notice the domes, and how long until they do?
[Answer]
A good answer by L.Dutch regarding sensor resolution, but remember that people knew where to look for the rover.
There are good chances that pictures would be taken and fed to an automated analysis system, which would not be programmed to spot domes. Scientists might not look at the data as it comes in, until some grad student tries to analyse weathering patterns or whatever years later.
Perhaps the data would be fed into a public database. Some random guy running a flight simulator on Mars might spot it.
---
*Follow-up, years later:* Consider the [Utah Monolith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_monolith). Apparently placed in the wilderness by a prankster, it stood there for **four years** before it was noticed in the existing data. Once someone spotted it, the old data was re-analyzed.
[Answer]
The rover Curiosity, way smaller than 200 m, [can be seen](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2538719/Curiosity-spotted-SPACE-Nasas-Orbiter-captures-rover-tracks-trundles-Mount-Sharp.html) from Martian orbit:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j9jdd.jpg)
So, for a martian satellite in polar orbit it would be just a matter of days before capturing visual proof of the presence of "something" that big on the surface. If instead its orbit wasn't polar, and the dome was built in a suitable location, it could go unnoticed.
For Earth based telescopes the task is harder, and they cannot spot anything of that size.
So, maybe an "incident" can take care of the martian satellites before the building work starts...
[Answer]
**No need to look for the base**
It's not really possible to sneak anything to Mars in the first place. Any rocket launched on the secret will be tracked by thousands of telescopes, missile defense radars, satellites, and other sensors, and from there it will be tracked no matter where it goes. The mystery and the uncommon nature of such a large rocket heading to Mars would make it the most observed object in the Solar System.
**However...**
If you somehow get over that hurdle, your secret society can simply dig underground. This is a pragmatic option as well, since it provides shielding from radiation and insulation from temperature extremes, and allows constructing a living space with far less materials than would be needed otherwise. And once satellites inevitably take pictures of the spot and someone at NASA notices, they'll simply see a disturbance where the entrance is, rather than a greatly obvious man-made structure. With a bit of clever concealment, the entrance could even be made to blend in with the environment from above and make discovery through satellite photos alone nearly impossible.
[Answer]
**They find them all the time.**
<https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4671892/Nasa-satellite-spots-two-mystery-objects-Mars.html>
>
> An alien dome and a pyramid on Mars or just rocks? Nasa satellite
> spots two mystery objects on the red planet sending conspiracy
> theorists into a frenzy.
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xJGSr.jpg)
>
> In the description for the video, ArtAlienTV wrote: 'We have a clear 50
> foot dome or sphere in a Mars Crater with large pipes coming out of it
> on the left.
>
>
> 'Also, a triangular pyramid shaped structure about 500 feet away from
> it that is 120 ft wide.'
>
>
> He added: 'These features look artificial in nature and are clearly
> visible on Google Mars with no enhancements.
>
>
> 'The structures are between the Mawrth Vallis region and Oyama Crater
> in an area that was short listed for a Mars Rover to explore for
> possible signs of life before Gale Crater was eventually chosen.
>
>
> 'It is not hard to find.'
>
>
>
Spotting a dome - sure. Recognizing it as an artificial construct - maybe not.
[Answer]
**Security through Obscurity**
Mars is a big place. If nobody is looking, it's unlikely anyone will find it.
The reality is that the surface of mars has largely been mapped topologically, so nobody is likely to run a radar scan to map it again any time soon, and even if they did, nobody is going to go over every mile of it looking for unusually regular shapes like domes.
It's very possible the dome would be faithfully reproduced in imagery and radar mapping by a satellite passing overhead and *nobody will notice*.
If they *did* tell a computer to scan through the data looking for hallmarks of artificial structures, it's likely they'd get a lot of false-positives too, there are a lot of big rocks, hills and in some places dunes.
The fact is that if NASA realises there's definitely a base and has any idea what to look for, they'll find it in a few days if they've previously gathered the data, or a few weeks if they haven't.
But in the normal course of things, unless you've been foolish enough to put the dome near any sort of obvious landmark or in the middle of one of the big-name valleys then it's highly unlikely to be found.
[Answer]
it would be easier to provide radiation-shielding. thermal insulation if the enclosure were built sub-surface. also easier to camouflage the installation. best of all to make an excavation large enough to facilitate sub-surface mining, especially for water-drilling.
some facility would have to be devised to excavate & distribute any mineral debris in a non-detectable way. but that would be the case wherever the enclosure is located.
there is going to be a need for access to sub-surface water in any case.
[Answer]
Why does the base have to be visible from above? They could simply use a cave in a mountain (and get radiation shielding) or at the side of a cliff/canyon or build their base inside a large natural cavity under the dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) of the polar cap like [Zygote](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/zygote) in *[Red Mars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy)*.
[Answer]
Build it underground. There's a large system of underground caves. Add radiation shielding, and they can use ice for water. This way, nothing can detect the base. They would take care of the satellites via bombs. Then, when they need to go above ground to harvest ice and sub-surface water, they would use camouflage cloaks to conceal themselves.
] |
[Question]
[
So, imagine a traditional fantasy world that has progressed into the modern age. Assume technology similar to that we had in world war 2.
With the humans, orcs, elves, dwarves, and the like constantly fighting each other, the tiny pixies have historically been pushed to the wayside due to their small size.
Not anymore.
The pixie Queen would like to launch a military campaign to fend off the larger invaders and create a sovereign state.
Pixies in this scenario are about 9 to 10 inches tall. Proportions are somewhat similar to those of a human, but a little bit "chibified"- that is, larger head and eyes, stubbier limbs.
Let's say they have the flight speed of a pigeon, and perhaps 10 to 50 times the carrying capacity I assume it would take 7 or 8 of them to carry an AK-47 (first gun that comes to mind), and perhaps a few more to overcome recoil. (I might be wrong there.)
Assume, for the time being, that the pixies have roughly the same population as the other races.
So, to the question:
What tactics and weapons should the pixies use against their larger enemies? This includes any potential weapon, from machine guns to tanks (if the pixies can pilot them)
In addition, what tactics and weapons should the larger races use against the pixies? (I imagine shooting at them would be considerably less effective. It's hard enough to hit a human-sized target.)
[Answer]
If your pixies have the same flight performance as a pigeon or a duck, then it'll be impossible to hit them in flight with bullets, but it will be easy to take them down with bird shot. So, the enemies would simply start using hunting shotguns with bird shot 12 gauge rounds, then probably switch to full-auto shotguns like the AA12.
Bird shot has very low penetration power because the projectiles are tiny and light-weight. So it is ineffective against humans, and even worse on orcs because of their thick hide, but it is extremely effective against small light creatures.
If the pixie stays still, then at short range the shotgun is even more effective, but at long range a 22ga varmint gun would work very well too, which means the enemies would be able to carry a ton of ammo.
So, before thinking about offensive tactics, the pixies would have to think about staying alive long enough, and use their main strengths, which are flying and small size, to their advantage.
For example a bunch of pixies carrying an AK47 would be clumped together and slowed down by the weight, an ideal target for birdshot. This would fail before firing a shot.
Since they fly, they should attack from high above, either at night, or during a sunny day. It is easy to aim a shotgun at, say a 20° angle to shoot a duck, but quite difficult to aim upwards (vertically) especially with the sun in your face. When aiming up, you can't rest the shotgun on something, and you'll probably trip, fall on something, and during the fall the shot may go off in the face of someone nearby who is on your side.
Then they would need some form of lightweight armor. It does not take much kevlar to stop bird shot, especially if they fly 50m above the field, the projectiles will be slowed down by aero drag and gravity. And placing the "shield" below the pixie would protect the most fragile part (the wings) better, and it would be more practical, since a flying creature can't carry something heavy in front of them: it would cause them to rotate until the load is on the bottom and the wings are on top again. Likewise if one pixie carried a gun, even a small one, it would always point down due to its weight.
Now if the pixie evolved to fly they would fly with their body in a horizontal position like all birds do, because their wings generate lift towards their back, not towards their heads. To fly while standing up, you'd need hummingbird-style wings, that can generate lift in the proper direction, but then they have to flap back and forth, so you can't have arms, they would get in the way.
So it makes sense that the natural flight position of the pixie is horizontal, so for them it would be natural and comfortable to look directly down, and attack in this direction, while for the non flying enemies it is very uncomfortable to look and attack directly up.
They have to fly high enough to be out of range of flamethrowers. But the use of flamethrowers against pixies would not be such a good idea anyway, as it is not advisable to fire burning napalm in a vertical direction : it comes down eventually.
Therefore the ideal pixie weapon would be some form of bombardment. You could make a mini frag bomb with a fuze in the front that detonates it when it hits something. Add some fins in the back so it points down when dropped. There is no need to spend weight on propellant, since gravity will do the job. All the weight should go into high explosive and frag.
Keeping the shield/armor idea, you can have several pixies carry an armor plate, IF they're all hidden behind it. So the plate would be horizontal, and the pixies on top. It can also serve as a basket to put the mini bombs in, but the bombs should be designed to not explode if the thing is shot.
Ironically, this would be deadly against tanks and bunkers, because the guys inside will be unable to fire upwards, and they have bad visibility, so the pixies could just land on top and throw bombs through the openings. Same for trenches and foxholes.
Since the enemies would cover their trenches with something like fabric, that can soften the landing of the mini bombs enough to prevent them from detonating, they also need a timed fuze like a hand grenade.
Now, if you find the idea of pixie aerial bombardment not "fantasy" enough, you can replace the bombs with something more "forest"-oriented, for example a hive full of hornets, or some form of fire ants. The pixies could even raise such insects for the purpose of using them as weapons, so through selective breeding they could get insects that are friendly towards pixies, or with venom that doesn't harm pixies, but the insects would be quite deadly against other species.
Just think about it, you sit in your bunker and suddenly a hornet hive is dropped from outside through the tiny window, that would make a mess.
Also, see youtube for what happens when someone shoots a hornet's nest with a shotgun.
[Answer]
Swap the AK-47 for hand grenades.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, forcing a group of pixies to lug around a machine gun is impractical, and negates the advantage of their small size by clumping them together as a larger target. A hand grenade can be comfortably carried by a single pixie, however, and makes the perfect weapon for them. Using their capacity for speed and stealth, a lone guerrilla pixie can sneak up to a human trench or tank hatch, deposit the grenade with pinpoint accuracy, pull out the pin and then fly out of range before the explosion. Imagine the terror of the humans when something buzzing past their face is the first warning they get that they have seconds to find and dispose of a grenade, or else their whole squad is toast. In situations where a stealth approach is impossible, flocks of pixies can launch miniature bombing raids on human positions, zooming overhead and dropping their grenades.
Countering these tactics will be difficult; it's very hard for human marksmen to hit small flying targets drilled in evasive manoeuvres. I can imagine that trained animals might make a resurgence; a domesticated hawk can probably pluck a pixie bomber out of the sky with more reliability than a gunshot, and dogs might be able to detect the smell of a pixie infiltrator and bark to alert their masters.
The question asks specifically for tactics so I won't go into detail on operations and strategy, but (as you can imagine) some kind of asymmetric warfare approach, or a combined arms campaign alongside larger allies who have access to heavier weaponry, is the way to go.
[Answer]
**Stealth and Sabotage**
Conventional warfare with weapons designed for much larger creatures is not going to work for Pixies, the forces involved in soaking up the recoil of a machine gun is just not feasible for any number of pixies to soak up.
What Pixies have to their advantage is very small size and flying speed. As others have mentioned it will be next to impossible for their enemies to hit a Pixie with any conventional weapon, so what the Pixies do is use that advantage.
1. Sneakily fly into the enemies camps or bases and sabotage their weapons. Either break their weapons or set booby traps.
2. Sneak into their kitchens and poison their food.
3. (Thanks to Hennes) Use poison tipped darts from blow guns. Fly around the back of an opponent and blow a poison dart in their neck.
If the enemy has no weapons or is incapacitated or killed by poison then they will nott be a threat.
[Answer]
**Don't fight, negotiate**
Let's analyse the pixies
Pixies are 9-10 inches tall. Reasonable height human is 6' = 72 inches approximate to 70 inches because round numbers are easier. Assume that a 70 inch human is 70 kg (I really want to work in metric!) So a pixie is a 1:7 scale model of a human, which means that their mass is about 1/343 of a human - close enough to 1/350 that we can say a pixie masses 200 g. Different proportions may increase that slightly, but if they want to *float*, let alone fly, they can't mass much more than this each. I'm going to treat all pixies henceforth as having a mass of 200 g. I am also ignoring reproductive rates and mechanisms as unspecified and not relevant.
Note - various questions and answers on this site have established with a fair degree of certainty that the brain of a humanoid creature this small cannot have human-like intelligence. I'm ignoring this because the OP says so.
So, the first question is: How many pixies does it take to fly an AK-47? Yes, you read that correctly - in [this obligatory XKCD What If](https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/) Randall Munroe examines the idea of using machine guns as jetpacks. An AK-47 has a thrust to weight ratio of 2, apparently, and a mass of 4.78 kg, so it means that with up to about 23 pixies on board it can take off, regardless of how strong the pixies are.
I am going to stop analysis of conventional weapons without going any further - ignoring the fact that the AK-47 is a post-WWII firearm, it means that each human-soldier-equivalent firearms require a crew of about a *hundred* to operate (ie an infantry company), unless in fixed mounts that are mechanically traversed. This is a non-starter of a strategy - 100 pixies are clustered around one firearm which is able to aim at one target, yet bullets passing through the crew's area can potentially kill half a dozen or more each and a single grenade could kill the entire company.
There are military activities that pixies do very well - close reconnaissance (both aerial and ground), repairs in tight access areas, sabotage, precision surgery - but they simply lack the power to take and hold ground, without which they cannot conquer or hold territory.
Let's now look at very simplified economics. Treating the squared-cubed rule as literal truth, a 1:7 scale humanoid will be 7 times stronger proportional to their weight compared to a "normal" human. However, given that the pixies only have roughly the same population as their rival humanoids, this means that as a nation they have 1/49th the "strength" of each of their rivals. They cannot compete economically, especially as they don't even have a starting homeland with factories, mines etc. This removes the option to overcome their size disadvantage through use of mechanised forces.
However, why do they need a homeland? More particularly, why do they need a homeland that they can't negotiate for? Pixies will need space to fly, but as far as their homes go they only need space proportional to their size. They really don't want big homes, because with their small size and large proportional surface area they are going to be more susceptible to heat loss than the larger races. Their ability to fly means that they can comfortably inhabit cliffsides and other areas that humans and other non-flyers don't want. The pixies' best choice is to offer their highly valuable specialised military abilities (see above) to the most reasonable of their neighbours and cut a deal for some real estate that suits their needs but is sub-optimal for the bigger races. Ideally, the deal they will cut will be for their assistance in conquering said real estate and some more areas besides, so it's not even costing their allies anything.
[Answer]
Pixies wouldn't be using traditional warfare. They'd go for **asymmetric warfare** - using their strengths to nullify their opponents strengths
As several answers state, stealth and size are advantages. They can **spy** easily. They may be able to **evade traditional detection**. They can probably **sprinkle copper dust** into electronic devices, and cause malfunctions. They can **connect copper wire strands too fine for easy human sight** and earth wireless equipment, radios, wifi, and other anntennae. They can **change labels and wordings** on things, or numbers in printed papers - and if you're grabbing or looking for an item, and its been mislabelled or unreliably labelled, that's a real source of issues. They can **apply glues and fillers** to small locks, on cases, desks, security panels, and to their keys, because you don't need more than a drip or 2 of epoxy or similar, to jam those.
They may be small, but they aren't helplessly weak. They can probably **break thin glass** using a very sharp point and a pixie size hammer, positioned just so. They can **use most touch pads and devices**, because these will work mainly based on capacitance or perhaps in some cases resistance, not weight or force. They can **disable or mute many kinds of alarms and relays** by putting soft material in the moving parts.
Last, they can **ally up, and sell/partner their abilities**. There may be other enemies who are natural allies, where the pixies provide these abilities, and others provide brute force.
[Answer]
**Use mercenaries**.
Orcs, dwarves and other strong creatures could bring ammos for heavy (200+ mm) cannons while pixies act as spotters.
Other could do everything they could do in battle.
**Prefer sabotage actions and guerilla war.**
Thanks to their size, pixies could infiltrate to most objects (HQ, ammunition depot, nuclear plant, water tank etc).
IMHO, sabotage aims to military targets while terrorism aims to civilians. Which targets to aim and where (and when) to stop is up to you.
Pixies could initiate traps (like shooting to convoy or mining roads) and overcome other races in scouting.
**Don't use common weapons for pixy squads.**
Since it's very hard to aim to a single pixy, they could fight at less distance without risk. It could allow to use smaller calibers and/or less bullets in clips. In extreme case, single pixy would use single-shot gun at close range and then retreat using recoil from gun.
[Answer]
Rather than suggest an alternative action or weapon I'll try to give an actual tactic they could employ.
Pixies are small, and they can relatively easily hide even in plain sight as even their weapon is relatively small. The biggest poblem pixies face is recoil. To overcome this the weapons are always placed on the ground, using bipods or similar to steady the weapon, reduce the amount of pixies required to lift and aim it and to absorb much of the recoil. The pixies could also use drills and shovels to dig in a pintle mount for the weapon to rest on.
The basic battlefield tactic pixies would employ is:
* fly the weapons to an area they want to fight at, preferably at night or into cover.
* multiple positions can be readied, preferably with a variety of claymores and mines surrounding the weapons. Most of these positions wont even be manned initially.
* once in place the pixies wait for visuals or for enemies to walk through their LOS. They fire as enemies pass through.
* whenever a position seems in danger they leave it. All the pixies lose is the equipment assuming they don't inflict enough damage to take the area.
* once they leave they just move to another pre-prepared position, likely one that can strike at the previous position.
* The pixies will simply keep moving from one position to the next until they either can't return to an old or new position due to risks or all enemies are slain.
You will not have a bunch of pixies fly in and assault someone in flight. At best you can expect them to fly in low and deploy the weapon on the ground quickly. Naturally the pixies would modify the weapons to easily support itself and for pixies to have an easy handhold to steer and fire the weapon. Although aiming and firing will still be a team task.
[Answer]
Stealth, explosives, artillery, mercenaries, and guerrilla warfare are all great ideas, but to add on if you are looking for a weapon that works for a pixie “grunt” soldier, I would go old school. Pixies are incredibly mobile and small, at the cost of strength and durability. This shows that an aggressive, close range fighting style would work best. I think that tactical knives could be a great standard weapon, if the pixies were trained in evasive maneuvers to close distance fast and cut vital areas like the throat. They are probably too small to use any built-for-humans (or elves, dwarves, etc.) firearms excluding custom built ones. If they are trained to hone a fast melee fighting style, heavily supplemented by the other ideas mentioned, pixies could be a unique and fearsome force to fight against.
Side note: It would be cool if they were employed for espionage by other nations.
[Answer]
As others, I'd suggest to play to pixies advantages rather than try them to adopt conventional human-size weapons.
Presumably in your fantasy world [Geneva Protocols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol) have not been invented.
Any war-crimes imaginable are at your disposal.
Pixies are free to use **chemical and bacteriological warfare**.
Their small size and flying abilities will help with delivery and stealth spread: e.g.,
poison wells, spread decease in enemy camps, destroy their provision stockpiles.
Meanwhile, pixie scientists can work on **viruses that target only particular races**: orcs, humans, dwarves. That can be later used to reach MAD-like balance.
If you are playing the long game, pixies can make missions to the homeland of your enemies and wreak havoc there. If you find a way to cause **permanent infertility among civilian population**, prevent their children from growing up (like Peter Pan) or indoctrinate them with pacifism there won't be any enemies left in a few generations.
Another promising avenue for research is natural pixie abilities that exist in your universe. I have strong suspicion that "Pixie dust" is a **nanobot technology**. If that can be researched, weaponised and reproduced at scale - it will be a lot more terrifying than nukes.
[Answer]
Pixie : Miniature Tactical Warrior
Weapon of Choice : Enemies
Pixie soldiers use their size, stealth and concealment magic to infiltrate enemy lines, looking for emotional ignition points. Maybe a human mercenary has been teamed up with a couple of orc foot soldiers and maybe this particular human has a little prejudice problem. Despite best attempts, his military discipline cannot completely conceal his race-hatred which radiates from him like a miasmic stench. The orcs might not be perceptive enough to sense this, but pixie soldiers are trained to ride on the invisible emotional currents of potential conflict. It only takes a few whispered words, spoken in a decent imitation of the orc accent, and the human will turn on his comrades.
\*"What did you just say?" The human growls as he turns with blade unsheathed.
Edward the orc looks puzzled because neither he nor his brother had said anything. But anger and sharp steal... not good. Edward raises his axe and grunts.
"Let's get him!" someone says in a voice that sounds a bit like his brother's.
Blades and severed body parts fly.\*
[Answer]
So your advantage being small size and greater numbers, what you want to do is this: Give each pixie a small piece of uranium/plutonium. Just enough that if 10 or so come close enough together, it'll form critical mass and boom, you've got tactical stealth nukes. Sure, it's a suicide mission, but frankly so is the AK-47 strategy, and this would be many orders of magnitude more effective. You apparently have plenty of pixies to spare, you can't beat the size : damage ratio, and there's basically no way any army could stop them. However many pixies you kill, there'd always be enough of them to get together and drop a nuke wherever they want to. Granted, they'd probably only have to succeed at this strategy once or twice. As soon as the world knows what they're capable of, they'd be wise to leave them alone.
[Answer]
### They use man-sized tanks rather than manually carrying the guns.
Simply put, carrying the guns manually is a non-starter for a variety of reasons discussed in other answers - their vulnerability to birdshot, the relatively low carrying capacity, the fact that it'd require a whole squad of them to carry a single weapon, etc.
However, there is a solution for this that would allow them to bypass all of these weaknesses: mounting their machine guns on pixie-sized tanks. The US military is currently testing unmanned ground vehicles armed with machine guns; with the pixies, you just take the "unmanned" part out of the equation, to make a roughly man-sized tank crewed with 3 or 4 pixies.
This might even make their ground units more durable than human units rather than less, because all of their tanks are armored heavily enough to resist most small arms fire (but not anti-tank fire).
] |
[Question]
[
In my story, there is a civilization living in the Amazon rainforest. They need some time of mount that is adapted to the forest. I don't think horses can survive by themselves in there, so I was thinking, can moose/elk survive in the Amazon rainforest?
They would have been transported by ship there, but would they be able to survive? If not, is there an adaptation I need to make to the moose/elk? Maybe an artificially select species?
[Answer]
# No, but plenty of their relatives can
A moose or elk would die in the high heat and with limited resistance to insects and such. They simply aren't designed for the rainforest. However, there are plenty of animals large enough to mount that are native to a rainforest, and a rainforest alone.
* [Bongo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongo_(antelope))
* [Lowland Anoa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoa)
* [Okapi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi)
These animals are not domesticated, so there is one difficulty. In addition, there are several animals that don't live strictly in rainforests, but are domesticated:
* [Water Buffalo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo)
* [Asian Elephant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_elephant)
Finally, since you mention the Amazon specifically, there are more appropriate animals that are large enough to mount that you could assume were domesticated there. The list of potential mounts gets much larger if you include recently extinct megafauna of South America:
* [Baird's Tapir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baird%27s_tapir) (still alive!)
* [Stegomastodon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stegomastodon)/[Notiomastodon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notiomastodon) (taxonomy debated, extinct either way)
* [Macrauchenia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrauchenia) (not certain this genus' exact habitat)
* [Toxodon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxodon) (again, not certain if this species actually lived in the rainforest)
For the extinct species, it is worth pointing out that if they left fossils in the Amazon, there is basically no way the bones would have survived to the present day; the rainforest being perhaps the worst possible environment for bone preservation.
[Answer]
Actual brazillian here.
The reason why you won't find any mountable animals in the amazon rain forest is because it's kinda like a more green, lush version of Australia, in the aspect that half of the biomass is out to kill you in horrible ways.
It is a [redacted] to go through the jungle, on foot or otherwise. And the river waters can be classified in three types:
* Populated by [piranhas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piranha);
* Populated by [black caimans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_caiman), which eat piranhas (besides cattle and humans);
* Too polluted to allow for piranhas or caimans.
Before western civilization started messing up the ecosystem, indigenous populations would make the water closer to their villages swimming safe by ingenuous application of [poison vine essences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piscidia), which paralyze the piranhas.
Back on land you have [20-cm wide tarantulas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneutria) whose venom will give you a three-days long constant erection. [That would be funny if it weren't for the risk of penile gangrene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneutria#Toxicity_and_prey). Then there are vampire bats, which can carry rabies.
We also have [jaguars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar). They hunt alligators underwater, and they mimic birds and monkeys to lure and eat them on tree canopies. There are reports of jaguars being able to mimic the cries of human babies. Jaguars are loathed by farmers because when they get out of the jungles and into farmlands, they sneak into fences by night to kill cattle.
The icing on the cake are the [anacondas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunectes). They are sneaky as hell, swim faster than you, and unlike rap music anacondas they will want some even if you've got no buns. They are not picky and will eat cattle and humans. If you raise elks in the rain forest, they will become anaconda food faster than you can say "god [redacted]!".
When people do raise cattle in the north of Brazil, it's always one of these three situations:
* Cattle raised on farmlands - lands that are no longer forest;
* Cattle that is confined to very tight fences and allowed to walk only where it's deemed to be safe, usually raised by small, poor families. The poor critters usually live in areas smaller than an acre;
* Then there is the third type. We have an expression, *"boi de piranha"*... It translates roughly to "the ox that belongs to the piranhas". These are raised for the sole purpose of making river crossing safer. When you wish to cross piranha infested waters, you send the critter first and wait until the feeding frenzy stops before you go. Usually the piranhas get full and sated with the ox and leave you alone. This is about the only use you will have for an elk this side of the equator.
[Answer]
>
> *In my story, there is a civilization living in the Amazon rainforest. They need some time of mount that is adapted to the forest*.
>
>
>
[There are Buffalos](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pt&u=http://g1.globo.com/pa/para/noticia/2013/05/para-tem-o-maior-rebanho-de-bufalos-do-brasil-com-460-mil-cabecas.html) in the Amazon (in the Brazilian state of [Pará](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par%C3%A1)) and they can be used to mount:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/q4sR7.png)
They live primarily near farmlands (in the Amazon region), but they have been adapted to live in the same climate as the forest.
>
> [...] *but would they be able to survive? If not, is there an adaptation I need to make to the moose/elk?*
>
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I don't know about a moose/elk, but a Buffalo would be able to survive, if it is domesticated. In addition, although not in the rainforest properly, but close, there is the [Marsh deer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_deer).
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There are [wild horses in the Amazon](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pt&u=https://multicavalos.com/lavradeiro-o-cavalo-selvagem-brasileiro-na-amazonia):
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> Forged under the hot climate of that region and struggling against all the threats that have come to them over the past two centuries, the Lavaliers are rustic animals that, according to Embrapa researchers, have developed unique characteristics worthy of study.
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> A striking feature of the planters is strength and speed . Yes, in addition to being very resilient, they are also excellent sprinters, they can maintain average speed of 60 kilometers per hour for 30 minutes.
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The original horses came from Europe, but they have developed unique traits to be able to survive near the jungle.
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Putting climate and disease environment aside, because kingledion covered them, there is the issue of antlers and rainforest growth. Rainforests don't have an open understory the way mature conifer or oak woodlands do, as such anything that grows a large rack of antlers is seriously maladapted to moving around and feeding in the environment. There is evidence of several moose/elk species dying out because when their environment became forested because of this very issue, most notably the [Irish Elk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_elk).
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Suppose we've colonized a planet with 99% of the surface area covered by oceans. It has submerged continental crusts, averaging 200-500m underwater, with the average depth of open ocean being 1000-1500m. Other than the difference in surface geography, consider the planet generally earthlike (unless deviating from Earth-normal conditions is necessary to answer the question).
Colonization was via slower-than-light generation ship, so this colony must be self-sufficient. Natural resources are mined from the rock of the continental shelf, which requires either above-water mining rigs or seafloor bases at shallowest parts of the ocean.
In the real world, surface ships and installations are far, far easier to build and sustain than their underwater equivalents. They don't need to be sealed against intense pressure and they're less mechanically complex to maintain, even if I posit a non-breathable atmosphere to eliminate the advantage of not needing to be sealed at all. But I'm looking for a reason or reasons to justify this colonial civilization being primarily aquatic, living in submarines and undersea installations exclusively, rather than ships and oversized oil rigs.
The best justification I've been able to come up with is extreme weather on the surface. According to [this question/answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/83139/how-deep-must-a-submarine-dive-to-avoid-megastorms), a mere 133m depth is sufficient to ride out the worst storms overhead. However, since oil rigs seem able to survive hurricanes as long as they're built tall enough to avoid the worst of the waves, I'm skeptical that all the headache of an underwater city would be more attractive than just building a more storm-resistant above-water installation.
Simply put: **Why live underwater, rather than on the surface of the ocean?**
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Waves, on Earth wave height is, in large part, constrained by the fact that waves meet land relatively quickly in most of our oceans. On a water world there's very few chances for surface waves to break, so they'll keep building until they reach monstrous heights and swamp habitats floating on the surface. The base of globe circling wave trains will probably scour the surface of the shallower continental shelves as they roll through, you'll want to go deep to maximise the survival chances of any habitat. The static pressures at depth are higher but easier to engineer for than dynamic forces that will tend to cause [fatigue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(material)). On a water world mineral deposits and stable power sources aren't going to be found on the surface anyway, if you have to go down anyway you may as well go deep.
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The best reason to build submerged cities is the same reason to build subterranean cities; protection from surface threats. Specifically radiation.
Water provides amazing protection from radiation. Nuclear powerplants store their recently-spent fuel in big pools while it cools off. Water is so good at stopping radiation, divers routinely do maintenance on them without removing the spent fuel rods. Water cuts radiation in half approximately every 7 centimeters, so as long as they don't dive right down and touch the spent fuel rods, they actually receive *less* radiation than you do just from the natural background. <https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/>
So if this planet has just had a nuclear war, especially one using cobalt bombs which produce much more dangerous fall-out, submerged cities will be the best place to live. The ocean will block most atmospheric radiation, and the currents will keep too much fall-out from piling up on the city's hull.
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List of conditions that would make living on surface not so tempting idea:
1) Small planet
* Pressure clearly lower than 1 atm, so in order to replicate earth conditions, actually should be pressurized.
* This thin atmosphere does not have enough of ozone, thus extra protection against UV is needed anyway
* Lower gravity means slower pressure increase with depth
2) Flare star
* Luckily not as strong to strip atmosphere but enough to boil the surface of ocean from time to time.
3) Very elliptical planet orbit
* the planet surface temperature on average is comfortable +10 C. Just it means -40 aphelion (sort of winter) and +60 in perihelion (sort of summer).
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As always, I believe the reason would be economic.
200-500m deep is not that deep compared to many parts of the ocean on earth, and let's say your shallower areas have valuable resources on the ocean floor (such as lithium deposits, platinum or titanium), or heat sources for use in power plants (such as thermal vents).
If we have already journeyed to this planet, then we already have ready knowledge of life support and habitat systems independent of environment. It would be easy and cheap to use these systems in underwater environments, but also making use of underwater power sources and minerals.
Consider too that ocean wide planets would have unusual weather systems, possibly a high degree of moisture in the air. Meaning it may be quite overcast all the time, dark and gloomy, and windy. Not a great place to enjoy a vacation. Instead, underwater habitats may be much more stable, also with an abundance of amazing marine life, requiring constant study yet also fascination.
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Size, space, the room to breathe, and the necessity of dirt. They don't just want to be underwater (for protection from storms and radiation), they actually want to be in million-strong cities on land, they want space. On the ocean floor they can burrow to create underground caverns miles across and a mile deep, so they can have industrial zones, residential zones, business zones, government zones, various recreation zones, and farming and ranch zones, just like we do on Earth. With advanced scifi tech, this can all be fusion powered (fusion being performed in its own safe power generation zone), and lit up like daylight. With enough power, you could have a cold zone in there, for skiing or other snow sports.
The only thing you really need access to the actual sky for is astronomy and security for look out or receiving remote signals; that could all be done on ships, in person or remotely piloted. The ships and submarines can dock at the port to the underground city; which can be more like the size of one of our stadiums; not ten times the size of New York City like the actual underground city.
Underground their robot farms and ranches grow straight up Earth food, cucumbers and lettuce, apples and oranges and bananas. Chickens and eggs, butter and milk, if they haven't gone vegan. They've got robotic bees with photo-electric wings to gather power, for pollinations.
Even if they don't burrow in; it would be easier and more efficient and safer to maintain a thousand closely spaced domes underwater on the ground than to try and do the same thing with floating ships, subject to storms and waves.
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**Give it a hot, uninhabitable atmosphere (like the one of Venus).**
[Venus athmosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus) consists of 96% CO2 at a pressure of 90 bar and a surface temperature of 460 deg. Celsius. Not a very nice place to live.
The conditions on Venus are powered by closer proximity to the Sun and the greenhouse effect of the CO2 (we are working to get there ourselves).
Maybe you want it not that bad with a lower surface temperature (below boiling point of water for sure) and generally more water.
However, even then it might not be very difficult to see that conditions below ocean surface are preferable to those above.
How could it have happened? Sudden increase in solar activity leading to increased radiation exposure or sudden increase in seismic activity coupled with volcanic activity and huge CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and subsequent increase in temperature or a collision with another object (moon-like or smaller).
That might also explain why you colonists thought it would be a good idea to go there. It all looked so good until they arrived and realized what has happened in the mean time. But no time for despair. Time to roll up the sleeves and get to work to build an under water home.
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Wind. Lots of it. Driving enormous waves, too.
What would hurricanes be like on a world whose surface is mostly water?
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It’s pretty simple. All the resources are at the bottom of the ocean, including energy (oil, coal, thermal vents), building materials (stone, iron, copper), precious ores (gold, diamonds), and food (plants and fish). The primary need of any civilization will be these resources. It would make sense for civilization to start near those resources. Any industries of this planet would be at the bottom of the ocean.
If you're starting a mining rig on a gold vein, and you need energy, are you going to want to pump oil all the way to the surface, then all the way back down to the mine? Is everyone who works in that mine and that oil rig going to want to take a long commute every morning to work if they can avoid it? Of course not. It's much cheaper and easier to live near the mine and the oil rig and have a short pipe. Oil rigs on Earth are built on the surface because that's where the end customer is anyways. When the majority of customers are at the ocean bottom, it's far cheaper to pipe oil directly to them.
There’s nothing on the surface except water. If the surface is bleak, uninteresting, uninviting, dangerous, etc... it’s hard to see why anyone would choose to travel or live there in the first place. Once you get the infrastructure in place, you can build underwater tunnels and buildings pretty effectively, and any space-baring civilization would have this kind of thing mastered pretty well.
Just in case, it may not hurt to have:
* Blistering radiation.
* Awful storms.
* A few horror stories of foolish people who made a go of the surface.
* A nice retirement planet nearby.
People come to your planet to work and make a fortune, then go off to retire somewhere else.
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The planet could be undergoing a meteor bombardment phase where largely water ice, CO2 ice or methane ice meteors pummel the surface of the ocean. Their destruction from energy of impact might mean that they don't pose threat to submarine cities (But tsunamis and rogue waves on surface)
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I like to have a concept of an engine that spaceships can use to lift off (and land) from/on a planet (regardless of it having an atmosphere or not) with the following constraints:
1. It should be simple to "understand" for the audience
2. It should not consume more than 10% of the ships mass in fuel
3. It should not destroy the place of liftoff or landing
4. It should not violate fundamental laws of physiscs conspicuous even to a 12 year old with some interest in physics.
To elaborate a little bit:
A classic reaction mass drive (thruster) needs either a lot of reaction mass (violating 2.) or a lot of energy (violating 3.) or both.
A "gravitation absorber" that let us say blocks gravitation will in my opinion either violate 1. or 4. First of all, to just hold the ship in place floating free the absorber needs no energy at all (disturbing? Imagine how much energy a platform on a tower needs to hold you in place.) If he needs energy it must go somewhere (excess heat? Gravitational waves?) When you start to move up (with additional thrusters?) it becomes complicated (violating 1.) The faster you move up the more energy the absorber needs (violating 1.) to compensate for the potential energy your ship gets by gaining altitude. If it does not, 4. is violated. When it comes to landing there is the opposite problem. If you loose height, the absorber needs to convert the lost potential energy of your ship to somewhat. Somewhat harmless if you not want to violate 3. If you turn off the absorber, than you will gain speed and have to break somehow to avoid hitting the ground.
So is there any concept (beside assissted with external help like space elevator, space cable, ...) for a drive that could do this? Perhaps a reaction mass drive which uses particles (like neutrinos) that don't interact with conventional matter (how could they be produced in the needed amount and accelerated and transmit their impulse to the ship?) or something like that?
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I'm going to take [the comment](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64330/simple-non-destructive-spaceship-liftoff-engine?noredirect=1#comment184463_64330) you posted on the question, because it is important.
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> The story should not be driven or build around the technology. But I have the ambition to also not just handwave it, because I'm myself interested in physics and does not like stories that doesn't care about the most fundamental laws. – Hothie 2016-12-12 14:26:57Z
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Sorry for being blunt, but it is not possible to meet all four of your criteria with anything which we know how to build.
The go-to for rocket engines is the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation:
$$ \Delta v=v\_e \ln\left(\frac{m\_0}{m\_f}\right) $$
Stated another way:
$$ \frac{\Delta v}{v\_e}=\ln\left(\frac{m\_0}{m\_f}\right)=-\ln\left(\frac{m\_f}{m\_0}\right) $$
where $m\_0$ is the initial mass, $m\_f$ is the final mass (also known as dry mass), $v\_e$ is the exhaust velocity, and $\Delta v$ is the resultant change in velocity. $\frac{m\_f}{m\_0}$ is referred to as the "mass ratio". Note that this applies only to single-stage rockets; that's why practical launch vehicles tend to use two or three stages. Look at how the mass ratio grows with the total delta-v divided by exhaust velocity (image by [uhoh](https://space.stackexchange.com/users/12102/uhoh) from [this answer](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/13767/415) on Space Exploration SE):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1c071.png)
For a mass ratio of 10% fuel to initial mass, we have $$ \Delta v=v\_e \ln\left(\frac{1}{0.9}\right) \approx v\_e \times 0.10536 $$
Ignoring drag and gravity losses (which only make this harder), a spacecraft launched from Earth must attain about 7 km/s of forward velocity to enter a reasonably stable orbit. You can get away with less forward velocity, but that costs you in terms of gravitational potential energy instead, so is not a solution. Rearranging the above, we get $$ 7\,000 \approx v\_e \times 0.10536 \Rightarrow v\_e \approx \frac{7\,000}{0.10536} \approx 66\,400~\text{m/s} $$
In other words, our rocket engine must have an exhaust velocity in excess of 66 km/s in order to attain the required delta-v within the desired mass ratio. The crux is that we also need sufficient *thrust* to get off the ground; if the engine does not have sufficient thrust, the rocket is almost literally sitting there spinning its wheels. (Compare [How far would the STS get without the SRBs](https://space.stackexchange.com/q/5848/415) on Space Exploration.) Wikipedia has a [decent table of methods of spacecraft propulsion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Table_of_methods), but none of the alternatives listed both:
* Has at least been tested in a vacuum chamber on Earth
* Provide a large amount of thrust
* Provide sufficient exhaust velocity
**We simply don't know how to get the necessary exhaust velocity to generate the required delta-v at the mass ratios you envision, with sufficient thrust to get off the ground.**
Also, no matter what you are throwing out behind the engine at 65-70 km/s or more with sufficient mass to generate a reasonable amount of thrust, it's going to be dangerous. Even with our current puny 3-5 km/s exhaust velocity pea-shooters, [the safety distances are considerable](https://space.stackexchange.com/q/6490/415).
Rocket boosters for taking off from large bodies such as Earth will be large and mostly filled with fuel for the foreseeable future. Even the Apollo Lunar Module was on the order of 50% fuel, and the Moon's gravity (which was all it had to contend with) is far smaller than Earth's (to the tune of about 1/6th Earth gravity).
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There are various putative SSTO designs, such as the Skylon. This is a spaceplane: it uses the atmosphere as reaction mass to gain altitude and speed as far as it can. The concept has a 275 tonne vehicle reaching orbit and returning using 220 tonnes of (mostly) liguid hydrogen fuel.
For your 10% you will need — at the very least — a fuel with ten times the energy density of liquid hydrogen. So, a nuclear spaceplane? It is not physically impossible, and since the energy would not be released by combustion, it could work on thinner air than a ramjet.
As for not killing its crew or people in the vicinity of its departure with radiation, we have to rule out fission. So the power source has to be an aneutronic fusion design. D-He fusion is such, or there is a Boron-proton fusion reaction with a larger cross-section.
Making this work would involve technology way beyond anything that could be viewed as *plausible* today, but it's not physically *impossible*. If you are prepared to handwave a compact high efficiency muon generator, then muon-catalysed fusion might do the trick.
Alternatively, feeding raw energy along a wormhole is less implausible than having live human beings traverse a wormhole. In which case the power plant does not need to be on the spaceplane. The physics for this is *extremely* speculative, though.
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**Introducing the VacuumJet!**
Sinice we are on the ragged edge of physically possible here anyway, I thought I might take a crack at it.
How about a "VacuumJet" engine? This is a little thought experiment that I once worked out while trying to come up with plausible sounding explanations for some of the technology for a Robotech RPG game I was running.
We start with an advanced fusion reactor. This miniaturized fusion reactor is a super advanced stepchild of what we have now. It uses a torus of very strong magnetic field projectors to contain a doughnut shaped stream of plasma. We can use the fusion reactor to generate heat when we want it to, which is very useful in an atmosphere. This is because the reactor is housed in the thick, rear part of basically a scramjet with no moving parts. (Metal funnel that causes atmosphere to expand rapidly which forces new atmosphere in the front end and creates thrust. The term "Vacuumjet" comes from the fact that the heat actually creates a temporary vacuum inside the engine as air is forced to expand at a very high rate).
So, at altitudes right up to low orbit, our scramjet "Vacuumjet" uses heat from a reactor to provide enough thrust to get us nearly out of the atmosphere. (There is handwaving here at lower speeds, where scramjets are not very useful). As far as destroying the environment where the ship lands, it would cause some pretty heavy duty jet wash and a lot of hot air, but I wouldn't consider it highly destructive compared to a rocket.
Once you get up into low orbit, you introduce some reaction mass. Water works really well for this, and it has a very high expansion rate for a given density of water, plus, there is the advantage of having ice all over the solar system that can be mined pretty easily to reload your reaction mass when you run out. Water is basically just pumped into the scramjets the same way that air would be in an atmosphere, and the heat from the reactor would blow it out the back in the form of rapidly expanding steam. This all means that as long as you have a sufficient energy source to power the reactor, you only need a relatively limited amount of reaction mass once you get up to a very high altitude, just to get that last little push into high orbit.
In my RPG game, the energy source itself was a major handwave (among others). In your case, you may want to come up with some kind of unobtanium that fuels the fusion reactor (or go with a very efficient fission reactor, which is a very natural heat generator anyway). Your ship will have to keep track of the reactor fuel and periodically stock up on ice.
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[Laser rocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion#Laser_Energized_Rockets) is the obvious choice for lift-off. There are many different designs, but [ablative laser propulsion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion#Ablative_laser_propulsion) seems quite promising. Basically all you need is an array of high energy pulse lasers on the ground, blasting at ablative propellant target at the bottom of the rocket. Once high enough and with enough speed, remains of the ablative propellant would be dropped off, and actual space propulsion, what ever it is, would take over.
The ablative target should probably be something relatively chemically harmless, such as iron. Obvioisly there will be a safety zone required, because the energy pushing the rocket up will need to push other stuff down with equal momentum. Suitable strong ground-based magnetic field would allow directing the propellant plasma to some kind of blast pits, reducing size of the required safety zone.
To comment on need for external help, for launching off from any planet or location, the rocket could carry with it a "throw-away" laser launch system, with a sealed nuclear reactor with enough fuel to power desired number of launches, and lasers to match. The lasers for this use could also be direct [nuclear pumped lasers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pumped_laser), resulting in a very simple setup. Just choose your landing spot carefully so that you can set the launch system up! In this case I guess you have to count the weight of this launch system in your 10% "fuel weight" limit.
(Anybody is free to take this idea and write a better answer with actual maths on how powerful laser is needed, how much safety zone would be plausible, and if this can actually achive the 10% max on-board propellant weight requirement, though I think that is just a matter of total laser power.)
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What about carrying your space elevator with you? The majority of your ship's mass would be this tool, but maybe you could adapt it for your story.
Navigate into a stable orbit of the body you want to land on. Now, send your space elevator counterweight away from the planet, and a tether down to the planet, keeping your ship stationary. At the end of your tether would be something to *grapple* onto the planet. I sort've doubt that this would satisfy your third requirement about not destroying the landing spot, but maybe you could handwave that much if you're seriously considering this anyway. After you're grappled, you can now ride the tether down.
To leave, you ride back up, *ungrapple* and reel the rest of the equipment back in.
One drawback is that this method would have a limit based on the planetary body's size/stable orbit distance, as your elevator will only be so long.
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I don't know about liftoff **engine**, but [mass drivers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver) could be used with some success to launch your spacecraft into space, using comparatively little energy in the process.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZtMdb.jpg)
By using what is essentially railgun technology, one could launch payloads into space with ease, causing little damage to the system in general.
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# invisible rocket
Others have pointed out that, even given some miracle power source, the energy and momentum of the rocket exhaust (as need to lift off) will be quite destructive.
My variation of that is: what if the rocket exhaust was *not*? Spray high mass, fast-moving particles about in great abundance, and have it not affect the surroundings.
I think the general idea as used in a Robert L Forward [short story](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?48639) used neutrinos.
But you would do better to make a **dark matter rocket** since dark matter particles (specifically [WIMPs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_massive_particles)) are *heavy*. This lets you use less energy to get the needed momentum (at the expense of consuming reaction mass).
So, what you need is a rocket that *then* changes the exhaust material into dark matter after you have manipulated it. That’s how neutrino beams are made: you form the beam with charged particles so you can manipulate them, and then those decay into neutrinos.
A dark matter rocket would seem to the outside to be a reactionless drive. It could be in the middle of the ship without an exhaust port.
## speculative fiction mechanism
What kind of techobabble could do this? “supersymmetry”. And as far as we understand (cold dark matter being a [thermal relic](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-freeze-out-of-WIMP-annihilation-and-how-does-it-occur) of the big bang) *this is a real thing*! Some as yet unknown mechanisms can [“flip”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-parity#Dark_matter_candidate) matter into dark matter at very high temperatures.
Then, rather than just being *hot* in a thermal mess, you carefully tune the reaction by using “resonances” to set up the exact energy needed. This makes more efficient conversion without waste. This is the same thing you can bring up to make the fusion power plant work! So, explain that the same tech that allowed fusion rockets to be built also (once the details of the particles were known) to turn that into a dark matter rocket.
## another mechanism
Looking up some links to explain how the “thermal relic” implies these things, I thought of another way. This also unifies with the power generation.
The ability to convert matter (as happened in the early universe) depends on *multiple R-parity violations* (that is, more than one process) that occurred at extraodinary temperatures. Now, to get it to happen at conditions possible to produce today, rather than cooking it at some ridiculously high temperature (so even rare things happen) you vary carefully tune the energies and reactants. Like a combination lock, multiple pathways must be promoted (by providing narrowly tuned conditions) at the same time. Note that careful tuning vs outrageous temperature is the same idea as before. But here, invoking “multiple channels at the same time” gives us the combination lock analogy.
Now here’s the kicker: the same stuff can induce proton decay. Make that part of the plot: not only do we have a power source from ordinary matter, that’s the very process that can produce dark matter beams.
# more power
JBiggs’ answer, stripped to the essentials, is that given enough power (e.g. nuclear fusion) an airplane would be fine. Airplanes (VTOL, helicopters, and whatnot) fill the OP’s requirements on unobtrusive takeoffs.
What you need, then, is to accelerate to 18,000 miles per hour. With enough raw power, a jet can do that, using the atmosphere. However, look at the real-world reentry to see the problem: with thick air the ram pressure will bake the craft even if you had power to push through the air. With thinner air, you need a big scoop to gather enough air to attain sufficient thrust.
So suppose in airplane mode it simply flies as high and as fast as possible; that’s still a long way from orbital *speed* which must be achieved outside of the atmosphere. So you must switch to rocket mode. **But**, you don’t require the absolute thrust needed to lift vertically off the Earth! You could do with a low thrust, focusing on efficiency of reaction mass instead. Say you start at 2000 mph and angle your jet to gain altitude until the air is too thin to work; then fire the rocket at a fraction of a g thrust, building speed. A few minutes later your arc takes you back down to the air and you arrange to [“skip” off the air](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_reentry)! Repeat with successively longer hops as you gain speed and attain full orbit.
After writing that, I recall hearing the concept for real. Not for reaching orbit, but for an extended flight at mach 10 using air-breathing engines. I managed to find the reference to [Hypersoar](https://str.llnl.gov/str/Carter.html) by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
# real-world designs?
Why not look into what real-world rocket scientists think of the idea of [single stage to orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit) like the [Skylon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)) or other [spaceplanes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceplane). Look over near-future designs, and figure what you might do with **sufficient power** and how light you would need to build beyond current materials, and design your craft based on that.
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A Stargate.
Put a stargate in orbit and have on on the surface. When you're ready to go, just push your spaceship through the stargate.
Granted, to use actual stargates from Stargate, you'll need to put it in orbit of a *different* world, but the idea still holds.
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Vertical launch; gas core water cooled matter-antimatter reaction drive
For deep space travel we use the much more efficient nuclear saltwater rocket; but to protect the environment of the planets upon which we land we spend the energy to convert matter to antimatter while still in deep space and use a matter/antimatter reaction drive instead for very high thrust without emitting long-term radiation.
The radiation released by a matter-antimatter drive consists mostly of muons, which have short half lives, and we direct them straight down during the early phases of launch.
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If you didn't have to worry about acceleration, why not just have your rocket push itself off the planet--like with a giant spring or very strong stick.
The problem is if you want non-computer intelligences to survive there has to be some kind of protection against the acceleration that would be required--if you think about it you'd have to complete your acceleration within the length of your "Spring" or "Stick" is that you are using to push yourself off the planet. The longer the stick, the less g's you need to deal with.
So part 1 of the solution is a very long stick--What about a liquid metal like in Terminator 2 that can form itself into a pseudopod to push you--this could go quite far if you assume your metal to be very strong with very little mass (Probably using some kind of rigid-but-mostly-hollow self-created internal structure like "aerogel" (fascinating material). The nice thing about a self-shaping metal like this it is retracted into the ship it would have endless additional uses--reconfiguring internal rooms, extra insulation, radiation shielding, etc. It would even make a great heat-shield which you would need during take-off.
Part 2 would be some system of "hardening" the squishy bits. Freezing everyone into solid blocks of ice might do it, or you could do what they did to Hans Solo. Pierce Anthony had a really interesting (if far-fetched) solution in Macroscope where he melted the people down into a protoplasmic goo that as a liquid could resist any amount of pressure, then after the trip they were re-constituted to their original selves.
The more likely (although not very fun from a story-writing POV) solution to part 2 is to just make all your spaceships unmanned drones that are hardened to a very high acceleration.
Part 2 would also allow much faster conventional space travel--unless you have some magic like a "Warp drive" this is a serious issue.
Note that the pseudopod solution would also allow you to land with minimal energy wasted--in fact it might be able to recover some of the energy it absorbs as it decelerates the ship, and imagine it reaching out and grabbing an asteroid to make a slingshot maneuver with a much lighter object than gravity would allow.
Man I'm really starting to like this idea.
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Use an [RF resonant cavity thruster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster).
This is an experimental technology that has been gaining attention. Some physicists believe it is impossible because it appears to violate Newton's laws of motion, and yet some tests have resulted in thrust being produced.
I've read a few papers explaining how different physicists think it *might* work, and it's difficult for me to follow, but "you put microwaves in it and it generates thrust" is about the level of detail an average audience looks for in a scientific explanation.
As with all experiments, these positive results could be obtained in error, but also as with all scientific models, Newton's could be incomplete or misunderstood.
What anyone believes is up to them, but at the very least, this is is going to be as close as you're going to get to fulfilling the requirements set forth by the question.
1. **It should be simple to "understand" for the audience** - You put microwaves in and it generates thrust.
2. **It should not consume more than 10% of the ships mass in fuel** - No fuel at all.
3. **It should not destroy the place of liftoff or landing** - Should be good.
4. **It should not violate fundamental laws of physiscs conspicuous even to a 12 year old with some interest in physics.** - The thruster itself does this, so as worded this is a violation and yet the device is still a topic of interest and continued research.
[Answer]
Balloons.
This gets around #1, #3 and mostly #4, but does not address the issues other answers have provided with #2. Assuming you handwave the technology to produce high-velocity exhaust with sufficient thrust, the balloons will get around the problematic issue of destroying whatever the thrust is pointed at.
The engineering requirements on balloons sufficient to lift a spaceship is another problem, but nothing that most 12-year-olds would wonder about.
[Answer]
Laser propulsion has another cool advantage, you don't even need ablator if you're in a planet with atmosphere. You can actually use a design that uses air as its propellant for what is effectively the first stage. Such a proposed design is called a [lightcraft](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/surfaceorbit.php#id--Laser_Launch--Lightcraft).
This has a few major downsides. The first problem is that we have no idea how to build a laser of the scale required. A reasonably [near term proposal](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120002761.pdf) uses a cubesat payload with a payload of 40kg and still finds that it would take a 350 MW laser. This would require 7200 commercial 20kw lasers in an array. I'd hate to see the monster capable of launching something serious.
It also isn't as efficient as you want. It still needs more than 10 percent of its mass as fuel. The wet mass is still eight times that of the payload. While it doesn't need fuel, it needs to carry propellant to get the rest of the way into orbit. Once the craft hits 35 km, it no longer gets enough airflow to serve as a useful propellant. At this point it switches to water.
The next big problem is that of power generation. That tiny cubesat version would still take most of the electrical output an entire aircraft carrier(because lasers are not very efficient, which is also why space based solar basically won't work). Something big enough for a serious payload would require a few dozen nuclear reactors.
Another side effect is that it would violate the treaty against laser blinding weapons, as the reflection would be bright enough to blind onlookers. More seriously it would also be a political problem in the same sense as nuclear weapons given that level of power output could be militarized for other things.
Also, I would not suggest the RF thruster unless you want to look foolish in the future. It is [almost certainly impossible](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/reactionlessdrive.php#id--EmDrive).
[Answer]
I know this isn't feasible given our current knowledge, but just like we can use a lens to focus light waves, radio waves, sound waves, etc., I seem to recall reading a story (perhaps one of Asimov's short stories) where one used a gravity lens for propulsion. For example, to lift off from Earth, point the lens at the sun and the focal point is the back of space vehicle. So the vehicle, from bottom to top, is a focus mass, living quarters, and the lens. Once in space you can point the lens towards another celestial body to take you in that direction or offset your current azimuth and steer towards your other destination after building up speed.
To land you could change aperture as to how much gravity you let into the lens. Let the planet's gravity be just slightly higher than the amount of gravity you 'gather' from the star or other body.
[Answer]
The <10% fuel requirement means we need a high exhaust velocity. Far beyond what we can do with chemical rockets.
The non-destructive nature is far more of a problem. You are liberating vast energies when you push a rocket into the sky, that energy is going to bounce off the ground and be quite destructive.
What can we eject from our rocket that goes at very high velocity and doesn't tear up the ground? Neutrinos!
Now, I have no idea how we are supposed to generate this flood of neutrinos or direct them in the right direction but you didn't ask for something known to work, but just something that doesn't obviously not work. Assuming you had an appropriate neutrino generator you would have a rocket that could take off from your lawn without killing the grass (except where it was squashed by the landing legs.)
[Answer]
For rule #3, we need to not destroy the place of liftoff. Let's say that exhaust velocities of 3 km/s are OK, but going higher would destroy the launch site. (The Falcon 9's effective exhaust velocity is 2.77 km/s, and the actual velocity is higher, so this seems reasonable.)
Escape velocity is 11.2 km/s, so the rocket equation says the required mass ratio is $\exp(11.2/3) \approx 42,$ but we want a mass ratio at most $10/9 \approx 1.11.$ I propose a solution: the spaceship refills reaction mass locally. "All" they need to do is compress and store matter from the planet weighing 50 times the mass of their ship, then accelerate it to the required speed. That way they don't consume matter from the ship's mass, as required.
What's left? First, they need a power source which can produce the required energy -- 63 billion joules per tonne of the ship's mass -- without consuming more than 10% of the ship's (usual) mass. DT fusion releases 340 billion joules of energy per gram, and so a hypothetical technology able to extract most of this (which is hard, the bulk is in fast neutrons which pass through most things) could do this easily.
Second, they need to have a way to use this energy to accelerate the bulk matter to very high speeds. Presumably there's a filtration process by which they pick up only the most suitable of the available matter. Compared to fusion this should be easy.
Third, they need a way to compress the matter ~100 times denser than the density of their ship (at which point it would require half the ship's volume to store). This might be difficult for us, but again this should be very easy for a civilization having mastered fusion.
I think this meets the requirements of the question:
1. I don't think the audience would understand or expect to understand fusion itself; I think that they would generally be content to accept a fusion reactor as a primitive. More sophisticated audience members might appreciate that you've stayed within the hard constraints of nature, even if you've pushed closer to them than we have any hope of achieving in the near future.
2. None of the ship's mass is expelled as reaction mass, and in principle only a very small percentage is used up, less than a tenth of a percent of the ship's mass for a fusion reactor capturing 0.1% of the total energy. (Getting to 0.1% efficiency, as I understand, would be very difficult.)
3. It does not destroy the liftoff area any more than current rockets... admittedly, a somewhat generous interpretation.
4. As far as I know it does not violate any laws of physics, just pushes them to their extreme. (Whether this is possible or not is more a question of engineering than physics, in other words.)
[Answer]
A nuclear ramjet could conceivably fulfil all of criteria except for the need to work *without* an atmosphere. Whilst current technology would be damaging (with the radiation) a theoretical fusion reactor-based design could avoid much of that.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto>
[Answer]
So, I'm going to be slightly silly here because I do not have a physics background and wouldn't even know where to begin, but you could get a little steampunky with this: **Balloons!**
Hear me out. There are Balloons that can get all the way up to the very edge of space. They rely on Buoyancy, so they do not need reaction mass until you get almost all the way up anyway. They will be already aloft when you fire up the engines, so the landing pad will take no damage at all. On the way up, you could have some sort of intake that will be gathering atmospheric gases to use as reaction mass as you get higher, meaning you save on reaction mass.
Now all you need is to be able to accelerate the particles at near relativistic speeds as you reel in the balloons and re-compress the helium. There is nothing left but to have fun in space.
Yes, this relies on a currently impossible energy source, but once we get to taming fusion....Hey, doesn't fusion create Helium?!?!?! **Balloons**
[Answer]
Use an impulser engine.
An impulser pushes off space-time, generating a ripple that carries equal and opposite momentum, therefore it doesn't violate Newton's laws of motion. (rule #4)
Impulsers only require an electric power input (no propellant) - no mass is ejected from the ship. (rule #2)
The amount of momentum imparted by the ripple is equivalent to the momentum imparted to the ship, therefore it shouldn't cause any more kinetic damage to a launchpad than a regular engine. Even better, it doesn't have all the flames and noise associated with a traditional rocket launch and therefore the damage is much lower. (rule #3)
The concept is simple: An impulser turns space-time into a medium of exchange for momentum, eliminating the need for propellant as an intermediate. (rule #1)
[Answer]
Since you aren't requiring that your ship obey the prime directive, have its robots construct a mag-lev launch platform with a massive power source at the landing site. Mining and refining raw materials from the planet, the ship could create everything needed to throw itself back up to an altitude where its thrusters could be engaged safely. After the ship has left, sacrificial robots could dismantle the construct and bury the parts.
If suitably advanced technology is available, substitute the word "nanite" for "robot" in the paragraph above.
[Answer]
## Induced gamma emission
You want a long half-lived or even "non-radioactive" meta isotope which you will [stimulate to release high energy gamma rays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_gamma_emission), hence lots of energy, as needed. It's a nuclear reactor you turn on and off at will. The simplest experiments have supposed that gamma rays at the same energy might do it - this hasn't seemed to hold up very well, but it implies some sort of "laser" like amplification.
## Antimatter
You can't get more bang for your buck. At least, not unless everything goes perfectly right...
## Copula drive
This is something more commonly termed a "[space fountain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain)", because I assume slightly different background. There are so many standard-sized packages coming down from space, full of refined resources from space industry, that your ship can simply pass around each one, using electromagnetic induction to push it down at the Earth faster, while accelerating upward itself. It is best to have some *good* computer piloting for this one ... and hopefully, a similar induction mechanism to catch the falling packages at the receiving dock.
## [Orbital tether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Tether)
It's mostly a space elevator, but it doesn't stay anchored to the ground and, being shorter, has lower material requirements. You use a dinky "space tourism" rocket, latch onto the low end of the tether, and ride the whip up into low Earth orbit.
## Dark Matter Hair Drive
You have developed some method to make ordinary matter interact with dark matter. Perhaps this doesn't work well enough for the ordinary low concentration of dark matter in the background, but [an "astrological influence" of the stars might deliver *"hairs"* of dark matter, extending from the Sun or Jupiter](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/strange-but-true-dark-matter-grows-hair-around-stars-and-planets-c105f72907cb) in the direction of the Earth, which your drive might seek to align with and use. If the dark matter is made of "hot" fast moving particles, then your mysterious means of coupling with ordinary matter might allow it to be superheated and used as a near-endless source of high energy propellant, at least along the direction of the "hair".
Some of these may be more plausible than others. :)
[Answer]
Use negative matter to negate the craft's weight. Negative matter is matter with negative mass, so it is repelled by gravity. This can act like a "balloon" except that it is lighter *even than a vacuum* and works on airless planets. Also, the annihilation of negative matter and ordinary matter **completely** destroys the two particles with no by-product, unlike antimatter. (satisfies rule #1 because this is quite simple)
It negates most or all of the craft's weight (it is pulling upwards on the ship), so only a **very** small engine is needed, and therefore not much reaction mass. Note that the negative matter, while taking up around 50% of the ship's mass (so that it can lift the other 50% of normal matter), is not used up on each flight. It could even be able to act as defensive shields by annihilating itself with harmful weapons fire. (satisfies rule #2 because the fuel (reaction mass) is <10%; it also satisfies rule #3 because the engine is very small and cannot produce much damage)
Negative matter does not **break** any currently laws of physics, but it does look questionable. However, quantum vacuum fluctuations *can* have negative mass, but it may not be possible to harness them. (may satisfy rule #4)
] |
[Question]
[
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/toanH.jpg)
Hello there, it's my first time posting, so I'm sorry if I'm going against formatting.
I'm making a continent for a fantasy setting, and have been firstly focusing on geography. This continent should be about as long as the U.S. and twice as tall, with the bottom half positioned about where the U.S. is in the northern hemisphere.
I think I went a little bit crazy on rivers, and I would like some advice on if this map is realistic, or which rivers would be the most powerful so I can thin the map.
Also, I have a vague idea as to the climate due to location and Worlds-History Simulator, but because of all the mountains I will need to add in to make the rivers flow, I don't know how much of the continent will be desert or lush Forrest due to the rain shadow effect.
Any advice and criticism would be greatly appreciated, and I apologize if I'm asking too much.
[Answer]
**Rivers flow from mountains to the sea**. They may take a round about way, depending on geography, but they almost always follow this path. Lakes form in valleys where water gets trapped before emptying into another river (or multiple). There are, of course, exceptions to this (like the dead sea), but you should generally follow this rule: **a river must maintain an unbroken path from its source (mountain) to its destination (sea)**.
Probably the most common mistakes when it comes to rivers in fantasy maps have to do with branching and merging. **It is very rare for a river to randomly branch into two separate rivers**. When this does happen, it rejoins soon after, creating an island. (Note that, as mentioned before, a lake may contain multiple outlets, so it's fine in that case. *Edit: it was brought to my attention in the comments that lakes with multiple outlets are also very rare, especially stable ones, so avoid these too*) (Also note that rapid branching can occur in river deltas, as it enters the sea.)
On the other hand, **rivers merge together all the time**. It would also be exceptionally rare for a river to make it all the way from its source to its destination without merging with another along the way. Rivers start in the mountains as small streams. As they flow downward they begin to merge together into small rivers. These rivers then merge into large rivers (with additional small rivers merging into them) before emptying into the sea. Essentially, in the end, you have **a bunch of tiny sources in the mountains that ultimately converge into a few large destinations at the sea**.
Here is a perfect example of what this looks like in the real world. (The rivers are enlarged to indicate their water flow, not their width. There is, of course, some widening as rivers merge, but most fantasy maps ignore this and just show the paths, so you're good there.)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ydJxT.jpg)
Source: [Pacific Institute](https://pacinst.org/american-rivers-a-graphic/)
[Answer]
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/blxYU.jpg)
You have some severe issues.
At the points marked "1", you have rivers doing things they don't, namely different drainage systems combining and then separating.
All the lakes marked "2" have no outputs. Either your continent is so dry all the water evaporates, or...well, there is no other option, really. Lakes need rivers flowing out that eventually reach the ocean.
[Answer]
>
> This continent should be about as long as the U.S. and twice as tall, with the bottom half positioned about where the U.S. is in the northern hemisphere.
>
>
>
So... about the size of Canada and US combined, give or take.
>
> I think I went a little bit crazy on rivers
>
>
>
As many answers on this site show, we humans generally can't go crazier than nature. This is an oversimplified map of the Amazon basin that I found on the Internet. When I say oversimplified, I am oversimplifying the word oversimplify.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nslvQ.jpg)
Source: <https://hydrosheds.cr.usgs.gov/>
>
> Also, I have a vague idea as to the climate due to location and Worlds-History Simulator, but because of all the mountains I will need to add in to make the rivers flow, I don't know how much of the continent will be desert or lush Forrest due to the rain shadow effect.
>
>
>
I can't see the mountains there, but you've got so many rivers that it will probably be forests everywhere. Unless you have mountains between a rive and a plain (probably by the coasts). Now some people may have thought our question is kinda broad in scope, so I suggest you open a new question to ask just about the climate once you have added mountains to the map and settled on the rivers.
>
> Any advice and criticism would be greatly appreciated, and I apologize if I'm asking too much.
>
>
>
So I just checked, and [Canada seems to be as rivery as your world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_Canada). So the climate might be the same. I think you will have lush forests on the bottom half of the continent. Around the middle and upwards you will have pine forests, going onto a tundra as you move northwards. The northernmost rivers could be frozen for most of the year.
---
Another answers suggests that:
* Rivers cannot join and then separate. But they can. Look at the rivers around Montreal:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BOHnd.png)
They flow from southwest to northeast. The Otawwa river to the west and St. Lawrence to the south river join southwest of Dorval, then separate into Riviere to the west (between Montreal and Laval) and Prairies to the east, then join again after the island. The rivers keep joining and separating all the way to the ocean.
* Rivers have to touch the ocean on maps.
Underground rivers are a thing. Some reach the sea going below its surface. Some end up connecting to the ocean via a cave, like [Puerto Princesa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Princesa_Subterranean_River_National_Park) in the Philippines. [Aquifers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer) are also a thing for you to research.
[Answer]
You have a lot of very very large endorheic basins, which is odd, possible, but unlikely. Even in the places with a lot of them they still only make up a fraction of the land area. While your continent is dominated by them which requires a very specific and odd set of circumstances, basically all your mountains around the basins need to develop at once, otherwise there will be an outlet. Mountain building in a well fed drainage system just leads to canyons. That kind of mountain building just is not possible with the existing arrangement of mountains (the drainage tells use exactly where the mountains are.)
You are also lacking rivers on several coasts, which is down right unbelievable. Even continents with many endorheic basins, like Asia (see below), are still dominated by normal river systems. the act of mountain building itself will build a coastal drainage system. It is basically impossible to get so much highland coastline on that scale.
Also a large endorheic basin near the coast has to mean a massive desert. It is not that the drainage can't reach the ocean just that the water evaporated before it can generate the force needed to cut a path, BUT that means there also will not be enough water to form lakes either, and your lakes are massive. If you want some ideas [these](https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/colorful-river-basin-maps/) drainage maps may be useful.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ywgp7.png)
[Answer]
This seems like a great time to check out <https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/>. If you can turn your base map (coastlines) into a digital image, you can upload it there, start painting in height, and then ask the software to generate not only rivers, but also biomes (and, if you like, towns and all sorts of other stuff).
As others have noted, you have a number of odd instances of lakes with no outlets, rivers flowing *away* from the sea, and the like. (Is the 'top' edge of your map some sort of ridge, with higher land right near the edge and lower land further in?)
[Answer]
You say your continent is twice as "tall" as the US, with the bottom half at about the same latitude as the US. So basically your continent is US + Canada. A large percentage of the north of this continent should be inhospitable tundra and taiga.
Being this far north, I would expect to see fjords or other evidence of glaciation, which I don't. Without a heightmap it's hard to tell.
[Answer]
There are some notable issues with the posted river/ lake system:
* (1) The small lake in the western system is oddly surrounded by a big river system with no connection to it. This river system is very regular and dense compared to the rest of the continent
* (2) There are multiple (seven) quite large endorheic basins with no outflow, but huge lakes at their end. These would all be salt lakes, because the water must evaporate instead. Many of the rivers contributing to these systems flow *away* from the northern coast, which suggests that there is a mountain range blocking that direction. In fact, there is no single major river flowing into the northern ocean (4). The basins are also too large to credibly be drained by underwater rivers (Also, then you'd expect no lakes and at least some rivers reaching the northern ocean, not hundreds of miles of underwater rivers). It is important to note that lakes shrink over time due to sediment added to them - huge freshwater lakes will be geologically young (like the Great Lakes, which stem from the ice age) or quite deep with no major river flowing through (like Lake Baikal or Malawi, bot rift valleys).
* (3) As other pointed out, *major rivers generally do not split*. And when they do, they nearly always merge back soon after, forming an island. Or this happens in the river delta, where the parts "merge" in the ocean. Generally, the terrain in such areas will be quite flat.
* (5) the big lake in the south has no tributaries from the south, which makes me wonder, what the topography of the area would be.
* Many rivers are rather straight with hardly any tributaries, which is not that common. And if there are tributaries, they seem very regular - same size and shape as the other river, rarely any minor tributary joining downstream. Only system (1) breaks this, but there *all* tributaries are the same.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aqHSz.jpg)
In general, it is hard to imagine the topography of this continent, that is the mountain ranges and basins. **You should start with the elevation map and then draw the rivers, because rivers follow elevation, not the other way around.**
[Answer]
**I'd suggest it's actually quite realistic.**
If we look at the history of this land mass, we might have seen something like this a short while ago. Triangles indicate "high" land while the multi-peak icons represent actual mountains. The white and grey dinosaur skull represents ice.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9foO8.jpg)
Here we see the continent as it was during the most recent glaciation. Ice being quite heavy, it has pressed down on the land, especially in the areas marked light grey, where accumulations were densest. Melting along the edges is occurring and is drained away mostly to the south, where four archaeorivers have cut through the uplifted Southern Highlands and also in the west where a gap between the mountain ranges allows for outflow.
Moving up to the present, post-melt period, we might see this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wK6zA.jpg)
We have the Great Central Spine, which I'd imagine represents the collision of two smaller proto-continents and also the Great Southwestern Mountains, which might represent a lesser collision or collision in progress of a plate from off the map somewhere.
The ice now melted, what we have left is a ring of higher land, pushed up, and two central areas of depressed land, pushed down, due to isostatic forces. The grey areas where the ice was most concentrated and thus heavier and more oppressive formed deeper basins within the two great basins, and these are where residual melt water that didn't escape Agassizwise through the western channel now forms a series of endorheic lake & river systems.
I would suspect that in some distant future, as the central lowlands continue to rebound from their former depression, the endorheic lakes will disappear along with the ring of (relatively) high land, most of the rivers will reverse course and the lakes will drain to the surrounding Ocean.
Your scenario reminds me a lot of this land:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ErUW8.jpg)
[Answer]
If the land mass is as big as you say, I don't think you went too river crazy.
That said, I think you are missing something. A river flows from source to river delta usually. What do your rivers empty into? Since we can't see your mountains yet, we have no way to know what direction the rivers flow.
I notice there is a stretch through the middle of the land mass. That would be a perfect place for a large river to run out to the ocean to the East (or West). Your smaller rivers would be good tributaries. Think along the lines of the Mississippi river in the US.
Looking at the wiki for the [Mississippi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_River) you will see a map of the Mississippi Basin. This will show you just how big the area is, with all the tributaries. This could be a really good model for you to develop your river map.
[Answer]
How "real" do you want your world to look? In answer to your question, I can see your world being very real for the liquid present in it. How you will use this map is important as to how much detail you put into it. Your lakes that absorb rivers will have interesting properties, including being fairly concentrated in minerals and other waste that gets floated down-river to them. The oceans tend to be larger bodies of water and absorb these without affecting their overall concentrations.
As for your statement for too many rivers, I've attached one country from my world-building project. The world program generates 1,114,000 rivers for my Avalon world. If you google search how many rivers are in the US, you will find we have about 250K rivers in just the US alone, so a world with over 1 million rivers is fairly accurate. Your US/Canada size map has less than 100.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RdoGR.jpg)
[Answer]
Your rivers are quite straight which indicates steeper terrain. Meandrous rivers indicates, on the other hand, much flatter terrain.
Water tend to flow in the direction of the steepest descend. When it face an obstacle, in the steep terrain the flow has enough energy to make its path through the obstacle or moving it away. On the other hand, on a plateau, the stream has little energy and it finds a different way to flow.
Splitting the flow in multiple separate branches may occur only when the topography is like rooftop-like and the flow reaches it. Which happens extremely rarely and lasts for a short time, because one of the branches usually gets some preferrence. On plateau this stream splitting occurs more frequently but even there it happens on small scale.
In Europe, where the industrial history is measured in millenia, rivers were the major trade lines for large commodities. Thus water structures are quite old there. One of exaples of splitting the stream in a hilly terrain is [here](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzenbergscher_Schwemmkanal). It allowed logs to be sent either to Vienna (located on Danube river flowing to the Black Sea) or ti Prague (locaed on Moldau river, flowing to North Sea through Elbe river). This was working thanks to an artificial channel system (main line plus supporting streams) that was able to track the stream to the terrain edge.
Another example is a pond system around Třeboň, CZ, where artificial canals connecting rivers [Lužnice](https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu%C5%BEnice) and Nežárka support water for the ponds. The most significant canals there are called [Nová řeka](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nov%C3%A1_%C5%99eka) (New river) and [Zlatá stoka](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlat%C3%A1_stoka) (Golden channel). This system is localized in the quite small Třeboň plateau, where the low elevation changes allow such structures to be built.
So, you can keep the stream splitting points or the channels but make them artificial. The systems I mentioned above are from 16th century (Třeboň) and 18th century (the channel).
Sorry for the links in german and czech, english wiki does not cover those topics.
] |
[Question]
[
In my world there are two planets within the same solar system, which are connected approximately every seven cycles through a portal that opens for a few days.
* The planets are very similar.
* The atmospheres are breathable.
* Both people and animals can move from one planet to another without problems.
* Gravity is the same (don't touch this).
* The fauna is different; different kinds of plants, flowers and animals exist on both sides.
Is it possible that these openings affect the flora and fauna, taking into account that they only remain open for a short period of time?
[Answer]
# Yes.
* Look at the concept of [invasive species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species). Just a few pregnant rats or rabbits, a few seeds can start the process which imbalances an ecosystem, especially if their natural predators don't come along immediately.
* Look at the concept of virgin field or [virgin soil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_soil_epidemic) epidemics. When a plague hits a population without immune defenses, the results can be devastating, as in the contact between Europe and America.
* Farmers (or their rulers) might deliberately bring [crops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_crops) because they taste better, or simply to add variety to the dinner table.
[Answer]
Unless the two atmospheres are exactly balanced in pressure (including day to day weather) you will get a massive wind coming from side to the other portal.
Imagine a 1020 bar atmosphere (hot summer on one side) to 980 bar (cold and wet on other) suddenly having no barrier.
Over a few hundred miles this creates significant weather systems.
Over no barrier at all this is probably cyclone forming.
At least a very large tornado.
As far as biology is concerned ... anything large is dead, but seeds will be scattered very far and very wide.
[Answer]
The fact that they're different planets doesn't matter compared to the environments in which they open. if as you say the planets are very similar in terms of gravity etc.
**Envirnomental Effects**
If one side of the portal was in the polar ice cap and the other somewhere near the equator then the movement of hot and cold air between them would cause some significant weather patterns to develop while the portal is open, possible wet environment to dry environment could cause a small "oasis" type environment to form around the portal on the dry end. its unlikely there would be much difference on the wet end.
If However we assume that opening a portal would require a truly huge amount of energy and that when the planets get too far that energy would have to dissipate somewhere, then that alone would likely cause other effects that such massive bursts of energy would cause, fires around the portal could from grounding of the energy in the forms of lightning would be very likely. if the ground had a high silica content then that same lightning or bursts of energy would cause the formation of crystaline glass. best to look up [How Lightning Effects the Ground](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/what-really-happens-when-lightning-strikes-sand-the-science-behind-a-viral-photo/) to give you ideas on what to expect
**Flora**
Plant life, if similar to that of Earth's but different form each other (perhaps depending on environmental changes) would likely cross through the portal on the wind, meaning that plant life around the portal sites would appear vastly different to the surrounding areas...
However there's a caveat to this. if the portals had been opening for a substantial amount of time, say a century or maybe less, depending on how invasive the species of plantlike are, then if you approached you won't notice such a difference. because the plants would spread naturally around further increasing their borders unless local flora (being already adapted to the local environment) beat out the invading species in terms of access to nutrients from the ground, water and light.
**Fauna**
Wildlife may cross over through the portal... however it depends on the type of portal, if it is a borderless plain "window" in a small rock tunnel then animals might not notice and wander through... after the portal closes however then most likely not enough of the species made it through to provide enough genetic variety and the species would either die out from lack of species all together, or eventually die out due to gene mutations from too much inbreeding.
There will be exceptions, when either enough went through or if a couple went through on each opening and they managed to meet on the other side and bred. Insects and rodents are likely to be examples of these exceptions, as they tend to travel shorter distances and many individuals travel the same area. so its plausible that many could make it through at a time... and likely die shortly after unless the climate was very similar to that of their home side.
However if the portal was more energetic than that, think the portals from Marvel's Doctor Strange, they are a ring of energy that offers a stable portal between locations, that ring of energy which gives off noise and light irractically is likely scare most wildlife off, not draw them in. again insects might be the exception (moths to a flame)
**Conclusion**
I won't even get into the effects if the portal emits radiation...
Simply put if you want a species to have crossed for the sake of your story then its plausible but it should be done so carefully, and definitely not all animals everywhere
I made such a point of the plant life as it that resource that wildlife would follow initially before finding alternates on the other side.
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It's not only possible, it's very probable that plants spread to the other planet.
Humans have a tendency to take animals with them wherever they go. Be it the loyal guard dog, the fleas living in said dogs fur, the horse pulling the cart or my herd of livestock I would take with me if I wanted to start a new life on another planet.
People and animals crossing the portal are not sterile. They can be pregant (as suggested by o.m.), but they also carry seeds in their fur, intestines and on the soles of their feet.
Many bushes and trees are specialized on dissemination by birds. They produce small fruits that are eaten by birds, including their seeds. These seeds withstand any attempt of being digested and pop out the other end of the bird, fully intact and ready to sprout. All you need is one sparrow with a full stomach flying through the portal to start spreading the seeds on the other planet.
Other plants like thistles and burrs have specialized seeds that entangle themselves in the fur of animals to be carried great distances from the mother plant. These could easily be carried by humans and their livestock to the other planet.
The simple fact that air is exchanged between both planets enables air-borne pollen to fertilize genetically related plants on the other planet.
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Living species will travel across the portals, and this will definitely impact the receiving world.
How big the impact is going to be depends on how much similar are the two environments where the portals are open.
To make this clear, imagine that the portal is on one side open on an artic tundra, while on the other ends it opens on a tropical forest. An artic fox can cross it, but it will have a hard time to fairly compete in the tropical forest. Same for an elephant stepping into the tundra.
Same consideration if you consider plant seeds.
If the climates are similar, the newcomers and the locals will start a fierce competition, and the fittest will survive.
A bit more tricky can be for microscopic life forms: they could stay dormient if the environmental conditions are not suitable for them, else they could quickly spread. Also, while winds and waters cannot easily move around large species, bacterial spores and virus can more easily be transported. So a microscopic invasion of the world cannot be avoided.
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Others have addressed the effects of air pressure and invasive species, but...
**Depending on how you design your portal, you might have a problem with the portal itself**
As the two planets orbit their sun, the portal will elongate, contract, rotate, and pass through the sun. As the planets rotate, the portal will pass through each and both of the two planets. Let's have some fun with this.
**It becomes a pump** As it lengthens and shortens the volume available for mass inside the portal increases and decreases. That's a pump. Which direction the pump will push air will depend on the air pressure on each side of the portal. Note that environmentally, that's going to change as climatic zones of high and low pressure come and go. That means the "wind tunnel" will in turn push in either direction. What's breathtaking is their delta-V. Earth books along at 67,000 mph. Mars (for example), books along at 54,000 mph. Max delta-V: 13,000 mph. that's a wind force that would strip plant life down to bedrock for hundreds if not thousands of miles in front of the portal entrances.
**And then there's the heat** The kinetic energy involved with the "motion" of the portal through space (call it the "wiggle" at the portal entrances) is well beyond non-trivial. I'm not going to try to calculate it, but it would easily vaporize water and probably vaporize rock.
**Finally, there's two planets and a sun to contend with** How gravity and the fusion forces of the sun affect passengers travelling through the portal during those periods when it must pass through the celestial bodies is, well, it's unknown, but it would cause a pretty bumpy ride. Worse, it could either super-heat the air as it resides inside the passage (which means it could be a 13,000mph plasma when it exits the portal) or simply create high/low pressure zones during the passage. Combined with the gravity "bumps" it could be like riding a rollercoaster that moves both above and below ground (hot/cold) and up and down (high/low gravity).
**And that's all in a fraction of a second**
Creating portals between two points in space-time that have no "apparent" distance is, basically, magic. Or, perhaps more scientifically, we don't really know what "distance" means when you warp space-time. We think we do, but it's all theoretical. As the author, you'll need to decide what happens between "in" and "out."
But...
These give you some ideas of the complications of non-magical portal travel. Your story certainly needn't be as extreme as I've described (not by a long shot), but it can be made more interesting due to these "effects." For example:
a) There may be certain times of the year where portal travel is unavailable (e.g., due to passage through the sun).
b) The huffing and puffing of the wind as it's pumped through the tunnel could be used during a daring flight from danger as your characters must brave near-hurricane-force winds from the tunnel during their dash to safety.
c) The temperature changes can create unique environments near the portal entrances. In other words, during the middle of winter the portal entrance may be a lush, summery condition.
Cheers!
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## Invasive Species
Unless the portals have been open for a *looooong* time in history, chances are neither side has ever seen the other planet's flora & fauna. Given that they are similar (plants and animals), it's very likely that at least one organism which is perfectly suited for the other world (that will make it across).
## Atmosphere
This is a big problem. A portal between planets with different atmospherical pressures would cause some trouble. At every portal-opening, high speed winds blast through the portal until it closes. The pressures *will* equalize over a long period of time, but atmospheres are **big**, and it will take quite a while.
Assuming two atmospheres at 900 and 1000 milibars and a 1-meter opening, **bad** things will happen, because ~50 cubic meters of air will be flowing through at once
The good thing is, if the atmospherical difference is high enough, this will also solve your invasive species problem by destroying them. [Initially.]
## Conclusion
If these portals have been open for a long time, both of these issues won't be problems, as the atmospheres will have balanced, and the ecosystems in each planet will have adapted to each other's species.
### A Fun Sidepoint
If there are no constraints to *where* the portal can be, we can have a lot of fun, e.g. a portal in the bottom of the ocean (or deep in the planet's core) connected to one on the surface may cause all sorts of havoc.
For more information on portals and oceans and Mars, I suggest reading [this What-If article](https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/).
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You have just created the plantary leaf blower.
This site: <https://www.tlv.com/global/TI/calculator/air-flow-rate-through-orifice.html>
if I plug in values for .1 psi difference at 20 C for a 50 m portal, I get about 3 million cubic meters per minute. A 50 meter diameter portal has an area of about 2000 square meters. This would give a air speed of 1500m/min or about 25m/s -- about 40 mph. Moderate gale. A tenth of a psi corresponds to about 7 mb. Such variations are common and within the daily weather cycle. To first order I expect that the wind would be linear with pressure difference. Bad day when you get a .5 psi difference. **(Edited: cmaster points out that the calculation results I initially posted are cubic meters per minute, not per second. This answer is corrected for that figure.)**
This also ignores that two arbitrary planets are likely to have matching atmospheres. Consider the results with one portal opening on Venus and one on Mars. Might make both planets closer to habitable. No mere 40 mph breeze this.
Doesn't mean you can't use your device, but it does mean you need to come up with a means of dealing with this.
Possibilities:
* The portal only opens when the pressure is equal on both sides.
* The portal only opens when the pressure is highly unequal -- and uses the pressure differential to power it.
Other problems:
Is the other planet a 'mirror earth' with same continents? Same erosion? Going through a portal and finding that the other side is 10 km above the surface could wreck your morning, and make you late for lunch. A portal that has one end at the bottom of an ocean trench could make you miss supper.
Do portals lock to their local geography? E.g. if this week a step through the portal from the foreign planet lands me in Paris France, will it do the same next month? This may be one of the conditions for portal creation: You have to have some degree of matching of conditions, and anchoring bedrock to keep things still.
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**A note on biological compatibility**
First, I want to make a note on biological compatibility. It is by no means clear, that life forms evolved independently on different planets will use the same biochemical base. Even considering life based on RNA/DNA, proteins, sugars, and fats (like the life on Earth), there are always incompatible choices possible: A general choice on the chirality of the molecules, the selection of RNA/DNA bases, the selection of preferred sugars, the selection of aminic acids used in proteines.
Incompatible life forms will compete on resources like sunlight, space, minerals, etc. and they may even kill each other, but they cannot feed on each other, forming one consistent ecosystem.
**Effect of the portal**
Of course, life forms will pass the portal in either direction. There will also be a permanent wind through the portal: Depending on the momentary atmospheric pressure, there will be winds towards the lower pressure. These winds are very effective in transporting seeds of plants, microbes, dust, insects, and birds between the planets.
**We soon see invasive species**
in both of the connected planets.
When there is no biological compatibility, the invasive species will be plants (autotroph) in the first wave, because other species will not discover digestible food. They are inedible or even poisonous to the domestic animals of the planet. In the worst case, some weed is able to shadow out the domestic plants and takes over the planet by a catastrophic breakdown of the old ecosystem.
When there is biological compatibility (either by magic or by panspermia through ancient portals) the situation becomes more earthy: The invasive species will blend into the ecosystem and become food for some domestic animals. Among the invasive species are now also animals of all kind.
In the long run, a mixed ecosystem with the most robust species from both planets will establish itself.
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You state that the gravity is the same - but the altitude of the portal can be different on the 2 planets; and as long as the atmosphere is breathable then we can change exactly what it's composition is.
1. "Human breathable" doesn't mean "any living thing breathable" - so you can eliminate creatures that can't tolerate the different composition for whatever reason.
2. One can get some fairly significant pressure differentials between the 2 portals by having one at high altitude, and one at low altitude - which will draw in content from the high pressure into the low pressure.
3. You can then use this to explain how the invasive species was able to spread so far so quickly (high differential - so more wind - so more stuff spread more places) or so slowly (low differential), or why only some things survived.
4. following on with different altitudes for the portals - consider the case where one side is at the top of a mountain, and the other side is at the bottom of the sea... Given enough time, the other planet could easily lose most of it's water and the other planet would drown .... (and have the gravity change)
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If you are asking for the effects of the portal itself on both worlds, it may release high levels of radiation to anything that crosses between the worlds. Lastly, gravity may cause problems for structures and environments around the portal because gravitons may flow through the portal also. Chirality can cause problems, as organisms of differing chiralities or biochemistries are not edible to each other.
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# An extinction event across both planets.
## – Leading to a single biosphere.
A portal that connects two planets effectively turns them into one planet.
First of all, all airborne and droplet waterborne life will cross both ways.
Then all the spores/larvae/pollen: fungal, plant, and animal will cross over.
Larger life forms will swing by and scatter more of the above, as well as parasites, seeds, and other larger biota.
The two ecospheres will be forced into re-balancing. It will be a mess.
It's not just an 'invasive species' scenario - it's full on biosphere battle leading to about 50% species becoming extinct on both planets. Adding more portals increases the extinction percentage:
```
(100 * 1 - 1/(number of joined planets))
```
Ten or more planets joined would be equivalent to the P-T extinction across all ten planets. 90% of all species would be eliminated.
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Given that all previous answers concentrate on the catastrophic effects that different pressure or height or gravity levels could generate, I thought that your portal might have a security device preventing this.
### what's a portal
In some theories, distance in space can be defined as "if you're strongly quantum entangled, you're close, if you're weakly quantum entangled, you're far". So you could dream up two strongly entangled doorways which are brought to different planets by handwave and continue to function, generateing all the above mentioned problems.
### security functions
So, the reason for opening and closing is weather or incompatible locations (tunnel through the sun anybody?). Probably you will have a weather depending, season-depending open/close cycle. Maybe it is even a door, like a real physical world treasury metal door, that closes and opens for security. One possible plot point could be if the mechanism fails one day, and then the weather changes on one or both sides. If you have a few dozen or hundreds of those portals around the world, including in the maritime area, you could let one fail and the catastrophic desert in the area spreading slowly being a part of the story.
### had been there for ages
If it is there since ages, animals could have adapted to it. They could regularly visit it like a waterhole; waiting in the area until it opens to the other side.
Probably there will even be species adapting their entire life cycle, like moving to the rain season of one planet for breeding, moving to the spring season of the other planet for the dry period... and all this water-hole behavior might bring up predators as any waterhole does.
It would also explain why both environments are compatible - if you have spread all the time.
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[
When shapeshifters meet each other in other societies, whether human or not, I was thinking that they could "sense" each other's "true identity". They "just know" that the other is "one of us".
How about within their own society?
Everybody know that the others are "one of us" (OF COURSE!), so what?
What if someone choose to stay in other shape other than himself/herself?
How can the others know that "He is Bob, she is Mary"?
I had thought they could have some kind of "telepathic" power that can tell each other apart, but that's essentially giving them "another superpower", and it's way too convenient.
Is there any other reasonable way for them to tell each other apart?
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Scent would seem to be an obvious but non-superpowered way of identifying other shapeshifters. Vocalisations that are inaudible to most other listeners might also work... ultrasonics, for example. By way of a bonus, both approaches might cause animals (or even children with better hearing than adults) in the presence of shapeshifters to become agitated, if you wanted that sort of thing.
I seem to recall that Pratchett's shapeshifters (or at least, his Discworld deities who could assume any form they wished) were not able to alter their eyes, so perhaps there might be other subtle tells that could be spotted by an alert observer. Your example of gaydar is interesting, because that often relies on subtle cultural clues... bodylanguage, clothing, hair and makeup styles (or the lack thereof), idiomatic language and so on. Such things can be quite obvious to anyone who has come across them before, but others can be quite subtle and non-group members might simply ignore them as being uninteresting or irrelevant. The set of tells is likely to be like a language or dialect, rather than a universal property across the species... not every shapeshifter may notice or understand the tells of every other member of their species. Note that there are humans who have no faculty of gaydar and for one reason or another are oblivious to some or more social cues of this type.
As a last resort, there's always the hard way, as exhibited by this unusually safe-for-work [Oglaf](https://www.oglaf.com/kingshaped/). (If you're not familiar with Oglaf, by the way, you probably shouldn't browse around it from work, even though this specific example is entirely clean **much of the rest of their work is NSFW**)
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I am autistic and have a condition called "face blindness". I'll start with that, and add a few other things.
Because I can't easily distinguish people by their faces, I take note of mannerisms such as how they sit, how they stand, how they walk, how they wear their hair and even smell (I have an overly sensitive sense of smell.)
Combine this with something common in humans: A greater ease to distinguish between members of their own races, and similar ethnic groups. This goes all ways. Asians can easily identify other Asian ethnic groups. Japanese can readily identify other Japanese, Koreans and Chinese, for example.
French, Germans and Russians, for example, can tell each other apart by features that are easily identifiable by people familiar with an ethnic group.
So, if you combine my techniques for identifying people along with your changelings having some specific feature that they use to identify each other, but not easily recognizable by humans, you are in business.
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They don't, often with hilarious results.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PJIdJ.jpg)
Source: a usually NSFW comic called Oglaf.
Think of it: shapeshifters are not human, so their society does not have to work by human standards. If you look at social insects, fish pods, portuguese man-o-wars and corporations, you will see that they are examples of societies where what matters is one's function within it, not one's identity.
It may be that shapeshifters infiltrate human societies, and learn how to "be a human" in order to survive, either because they prey on humans or because they are under some kind of threat. But the very concept of identity might be unnatural and more like a learned behavior for them. This will be specially true if they are not true social beings, but rather a species that is transitioning from a solitary lifestyle to a communal one via evolution.
A real life analogue would be [myrmarachne spiders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmarachne):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/a31Il.jpg)
Source: see link above.
In the picture above you see Shaun. Shaun doesn't hang around much with other spiders of his species. Last week Shaun had a one-night stand with Jane, a female myrmarachne that he met through a dating app. To be fair he couldn't tell the difference between Jane and any other female myrmarachne to save his life, but she was the nearest one he could find and so was him to her. Shaun will probably never meet Jane again but that doesn't matter - his offspring will thrive, feeding upon unsuspecting ants.
Granted, Shaun cannot shapeshift, but we know that if he could he would still be just as antisocial.
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# How do you distinguish between identical twins?
If you know them well, you just know. It's really hard to pin it down to something you can describe, maybe it's a facial expression, a mannerism, a tiny distinguishing feature, the way they move, something in the tone of voice. There are many things we use to tell people apart, crude matters of primary appearance are only on the surface.
You can probably identify a family member just by the way they greet you on the phone. I regularly have to play guess the family member when someone sends me a message from an international burner phone which comes from only the way they type and what they say (for some reason they all assume I have the number already somehow).
Since they're shape shifters, they won't consider primary appearances, it'll be all these secondary factors that come into play. They will know that that's Bob's walk, and that's Mary's phrasing and accent.
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Shapeshifters do not have the same rods and cones in their eyes that we do. We as humans see a limited selection of color, from just above infrared to just below ultraviolet, through a filter of red, green, and blue light. Shapeshifters, however, can see beyond that, into ultraviolet and infrared, and in far greater scope than just three colors. Their abilities aren't perfect; while they may look like a human to a human, to another shapeshifter they are covered in stripes, swirls, dots, and blotches of color.
Just like a black-and-white picture hides the colors of the actual scene, our eyes hide the colors we can't perceive - and the shapeshifters use those specific colors to tell each other apart: Alice has a gred squiggle on her arms, Bob has blurple stripes on his face, and Claire's legs are entirely bleen - though to human eyes, Alice looks ordinary-human-pale, Bob looks ordinary-human-tanned, and Claire seems to be ordinary-human-dark-skinned.
Certain creatures, notably the mantis shrimp, can see the shapeshifters' true colors, but can't (or won't) mention the visual difference.
Additionally, as Mark Storer mentioned in his comment, the shapeshifters may have (replacing or in addition to extra light sense) polarized skin tones. While sunglasses would pick up *linear* polarization, they wouldn't detect *circular* polarization - though 3D movie glasses would. Linear polarization may be picked up by reflection, too, so it makes sense for the shapeshifters to have circular polarization. The polarization filters would likely be a key part of the creatures' ability to shapeshift, as it would control color and brightness.
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One theory about why mimicking songbirds do so, is because that the females judge a mate's fitness based on the number of different songs he can portray; copying other birds is a quick way to learn many distinct songs.
So, maybe it isn't so much that shapeshifters recognise each other while "in character", so much as they change into character in front of their potential mates, to demonstrate their prowess. Maybe they mimick characters they have met, characters they both know well, or a character they have just killed to feed their mate and show their shapeshifting prowess.
Or maybe it isn't the character itself that impresses the mate, so much as the bounty the shapeshifter can steal while in character (whether it is jewels or corpses), with the shapeshifter returning to the mate after each short adventure to show their gains.
Either way, it isn't that the shapeshifters recognises each other while in character, so much as the shapeshifter shows the transformation to another shapeshifter to impress them.
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If not telepathy then a kind of mind meld through physical contact. Consider how Odo and the lead Founder played by Salome Jens share the [Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine)#Part_2) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
By being in physical contact and "initiating a connection", which I tend to imagine - from a consciousness perspective - like simply relaxing or allowing thought or emotion to transfer, the two can know each others thoughts and experiences. Assuming most individual's experiences are unique, or even by seeing one's self in a specific memory of another, it would be possible to know who the other is in the meld. Contrary to "allowing" such a connection, one might also resist. Consciously this might mean attempting to think of nothing, restricting ones thoughts, or, with more acute, biological control, it could mean sensing which parts of one's self are in contact with which parts of the other and suppressing the responses of ones neurons at the interface between the two organisms ( supposing such organisms have a kind of nervous system as we understand it ). The latter of course would allow the individual to simply block a connection, or otherwise allow it, without so much effort of focus and concentration ( supposing also that beings such as this would perhaps evolve and develop these kinds of mental "muscle memory" specifically for such critical tasks ).
Of course for practical purposes individuals of a social species begin to learn a concept of individuality from a young age, and the distinguishing features of one's personality or (chosen) personal appearance would serve to reduce the effort needed to identify other members, but perhaps at the additional cost of maintaining such individualistic traits. But again, with practice things become second nature as suggested above with the handling of consent during mind meld.
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# They use a secret language
The shapeshifters don't have a *natural* built-in way to tell each other apart but they've come up with a [cant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_(language)) they can use.
A historical example of this concept is [Polari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari) - it was used in some criminal circles as well as the LGBT community. At the time they were basically the same, as being homosexual was a punishable offence. So, LGBT people would use Polari to safely distinguish each other - say, a gay man would drop some words in Polari in a casual conversation, even in a crowd. If the other party picked up on it, then they can more safely converse later.
Polari words are plausible deniable - it's composed of slang and words taken from other languages, so it's pretty much "safe" to sprinkle few in a sentence. Most people will just ignore the words but if confronted, it's easy to just say "oh, it's Italian" (or whatever).
Furthermore, Polari was really hard to study as an outsider. It was a very fluid and dynamic language, so people who mainly mingle in crowds who spoke Polari would be able to keep up.
So, shapeshifters could similarly have their own type of language that reasonably "mimicks" human language(s). It will be rather on-point for them to do that.
* It helps with hiding in plain sight - they can discuss internal matters in their own cryptolect, even among other people.
* It can help verify other shapeshifters. There can be many potential *tells* that one is a shapeshifter - body language, how one acts, where one is, etc. but you can never be too sure. Pulling somebody aside and going "Hello, shapeshifting brother of mine" only to be met with "WHAT?" is not a very good way to stay secret for long. And cleaning up such "leaks" tends to be messy.
Shapeshifters may even have an extra advantage of being able to use language no human could. By manifesting vocal organs or muscles that humans don't have, they can employ vocalisation or expressions/body language no human can fake.
It's also not hard to keep the language fluid. Existing languages already have linguistic drift and languages used within groups are especially prone to change a lot in a short span of time. Think of how teenagers communicate or memes - without keeping up, you can be left behind and these means of communication don't even have it as a purpose to be deliberately opaque for outsiders.
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I would say there are many biological senses that could help a shapeshifting species pick each other out of a crowd. Sent and pheromones have been mentioned but here is one that might better fit the “sense” you mentioned. Sharks have a sixth sense that detects the electricity given of by nerve impulses, and electric eels actually send a tiny electric pulses like radar to try and find food in murky water. This could be an easy way for any shapeshifter to figure out who is who.
Also I can easily imagine them developing a “spy” culture. Like how cold war spies interact with each other, with code phrases and cloak and dagger meetings, it would make sense because their natural habitat is literally, “being under cover.” It’s easy to say how Identity may be an alien concept to them, but the more you study and observe a species, the more of what makes them tick sinks in. Like Steve Ervin with crocodiles. Not to mention as an autistic, I’ve honestly felt like an alien studying humans. So I will say you are a confusing bunch as a species, but that is what makes you so fascinating.
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[What circumstance would produce a society filled with parents willing to let the children be exposed to life-threatening Danger?](/questions/85914/what-circumstance-would-produce-a-society-filled-with-parents-willing-to-let-the)
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Magic schools, most notably Harry Potter, have the trope of having a dangerous campus, and monsters hiding in different parts. Of course, parents would get angry and do would not want to enroll their kids there. For my magic school, I want to have some of this trope in it, but what could be used to justify a school like that without going out of business?
## Notes to mention:
* My story is not urban fantasy but rather a completely different world
* Technology is not stagnant, but keeps on evolving
* The story takes place in the 17th century, or at least their equivalent to it
* The monsters and dangerous animals do not wander around campus, but are hidden in underground dungeons connected through secret passages and the basement.
* The school is for ambitious magic users (or the elite)
* This academy is for teenagers and young adults, so no little kids
* The academy is very far away from major cities and towns
* The academy is a boarding school
* Combat and self-defense is taught, both magic and non-magic weapons
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**The Alternative is More Dangerous**
Let's be frank here. Magic fundamentally screws with the laws of reality. It violates entropy without a care, bypasses conservation of mass, and occasionally gives the concept of causality a side glare and decides to make do without it entirely. Magic is fundamentally *very, very* dangerous.
Anyone with magic and no knowledge of how to properly use it can and will kill themselves with it by accident, especially if this is a universe where new mages have little control of their power. Thus, *any* environment where a new mage is learning is dangerous. And it is also assumed that the world of mages is a dangerous place - imagine a world where the average person walks around with a flamethrower strapped to their back and/or can knock over buildings if they feel like it.
It can be safe to assume that the survival rate of wizards to adulthood isn't anywhere near 100% - maybe it's as low as 60%, or even worse. Thus, the concept of a magic school. The environment will be dangerous anyway, so take all that danger and place it somewhere else where very wise and experienced mentors can keep an eye on the youngsters and try and keep the death and maiming to a minimum.
As to why hazards are allowed in the school, well, there are two explanations - the first is that they are created by accident as a by product of the students magics. A lab accident can create chimaeras, students can accidentally summon demons, etc. etc. The second is that it's a deliberate choice because the students need to be trained against actual challenges, and, yes, some will die but the survivors will gain valuable experience that they need and wouldn't have otherwise. (And likely both are true for the school).
In short, the mages will be put into dangerous situations regardless, the school just has a higher survival rate.
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## Why Parents would allow it?
Well, if you're going for a 17th century vibe, the attitude towards children was very different than it was today. During the early industrial revolution, children were considered a resource to be exploited, not like the pets that we coddle and unconditionally protect with everything we have like we do today. Muggle children are sent to work in factories where they lose both life and limb to dangerous machines. Some are sent to do back breaking labor on farms. Some are sent to work as chimney sweeps were they develop chronic respiratory illnesses that significantly shorten thier lives. Some are sent out into the forests and swamps to hunt dangerous animals. In many early industrial societies, the child mortality rate was as high as 50% due in large part to the dangerous work conditions children were sent into... so, the thought of sending a magic child to a school filled with monsters and curses is really no worse than sending a normal child to work at the local textile mill.
It's all about child exploitation: having trained wizards for children is a very useful household asset; so, few parents at the time would think twice about sending thier children to a magic school because childhood death is just a normal part of life.
Also, while they MIGHT get eaten by a troll, this may be considered an acceptable risk compared to all the other benefits of being at a magic school. If they catch the plague, or tetanus, or polio they will have access to MAGIC to cure it. So the perception may be that the school is just as safe as any alternative. "Boy! Stop complaining about the trolls. At least you didn't lose your arm in a cotton gin like the Anderson boy down the street."
## Why are the hazards there?
Every parent knows that if you give a child a crayon, they will draw on the walls. If you give them something they can climb on, they will fall off of it. So, what happens when you give a child magic is somewhat inevitable. Kids are careless and they take pleasure breaking rules. The wizards who run the school actually do everything they can to clean up the messes left behind by students, but just like the gum that lines the underside of every middle school desk, there will always be the random pocket dimension or pet dragon left behind by a previous student for new students to discover.
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**They are not students. They are apprentices.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship>
The children enrolled in this school are apprentice magicians. They are given room and board and a small stipend in addition to training. In return they are expected to pay the school back with several years of their time and labor once they are trained. Graduating students are usually loaned out by the school to work for paying customers; some few stay to work at the school.
It is a good deal for the school which gets cheap magical labor in exchange for a small upfront investment. It is a good deal for employers who need garden variety magicians because they can hire new grads with the schools imprimateur. It is a good deal for working class parents who do not need to support the child and who get the stipend. Noble born students are a rarity and each has a story.
The school does want to protect its investments. Aggressive monsters and other outrageous hazards do get dealt with by the school, often by recent graduates paying off their training. Lesser hazards are dealt with in a more desultory fashion. A certain degree of hazard is deemed to produce a more robust apprentice. The students are also a hazard to each other. Most of the monsters and supernatural hazards occurring in the school are there as a result of various student activities.
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Magic could be something which cannot be contained inside a person who can use it. There is no, "Oh, I will just not do magic". Magic leaks from magic users unless it is utilized safely. Leaking magic causes problems (mutating animals, plants, or people) in the local area and can even open gateways to other realms where monsters roam. Magic users are sought out because they will cause problems unless they are trained. Refusing to be trained is not an option. The person is a danger to themselves and others. Kids are sent there by their parents because the parents know that if they do not send their kids, they risk losing their own lives and the lives of their other children. The school is isolated for this purpose. Those who learn control and mastery can become extreme powerful, but those who fail are at least in an environment capable of containing/combating whatever destruction they might release.
Think of it like Cyclopes from X-Men. Every time he opens his eyes, beams of energy shoot out. He needed special gear to be able to prevent the damage he would do just by existing. Sure, while he is awake he might be able to keep his eyes tightly shut, but what if he gets startled or right when he wakes up. For most people, it is an automatic reflex to open your eyes when you wake up. The magic could be something like that. Useful, but violently dangerous. If that was the case, the school would be seen as a much better option than simply being forced to kill the child. If your kid might accidentally open a portal to a hell dimension, killing them might be your only option. A creepy old man saying he will take your kid and give them a 50% chance of surviving is better than the alternative of 100% likely to die. Even if the parents refused to kill their kid, the neighbors would do it to protect their own families. Nobody wants to live next to a reactor that everyone knows will randomly explode one day.
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## The school was erected before the monsters were discovered
Perhaps the school had to be built in this particular spot for some reason.
* Maybe this was the only piece of land the founders could afford with the gift that established the school.
* Maybe this is the parcel of land donated by the sovereign.
* Maybe your magic is influenced by stuff like ley lines, which occur in specific places regardless of what humans want.
* Maybe it's just conveniently situated near a body of water that permits easy transport of students and supplies.
* Maybe there were already ruins on the site, and the founders decided to take advantage of that.
* Maybe the school was secretly founded by a powerful demon who is bound to a specific place by some curse, and the demon is hoping to cultivate a few unscrupulous magic-users who it can then persuade into defeating the curse.
In any case, *this* is where the school is. The monsters were discovered later when the burgeoning school tried to expand its campus. So, it sucks that there are monsters, and a labyrinth. But it's still not an option to relocate the school. And it would be bad for business, since the school has taken the name of this locale, so moving it would undermine the currency of its brand.
And anyway: this *isn't* a school for babies, so they don't have baby-locks on the cabinets, nor are there baby-gates on the stairs. They have *real knives* in the commissary (and coffee!), and *real scissors* in the crafting basket. And basilisks in the sub-basement.
So, every semester the Deans of the Martial & Mystical Arts lead the top students from their respective Dean's Lists on expeditions (for course-credit) to purge the monsters in the areas of the labyrinth that are closest to the occupied quarters of the campus.
Actually, it's probably not the Deans themselves, but the heads of the various departments and their TAs who lead the expeditions, and they take Dean's List students who intend to complete their degree at the end of the current semester (or die trying).
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# Experience points are real
Getting to be a higher level mage actually *requires* experience points, just like in a role-playing game. Why? Well, it turns out that the [many-worlds interpretation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation) is a thing. I'm not saying a near-infinite number of worlds have to exist, but some significant number do. And the magic that comes to you, from whatever its source may be, is *shared* among your parallel-universe selves, at least within some branching distance back in time. UNLESS they are dead, that is.
You the magic user know that copies of yourself will go on into more than one universe. If you die in one, you still live in another, so it's not *really* dying, is it? And there's all that *POWER* to play with then. If you aren't willing to do that small a thing for power, surely you aren't the stuff wizards are made of.
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## In-universe Trope fulfilment
Magic is ultimately that which makes things happen according to a desired narrative rather than impersonal physical laws.
As a school that teaches young people to make reality conform to narratives, it is fitting that it, too, satisfies a few inherited narrative conventions/tropes.
It provides a crucial 'soft limit' or guiding principle to help keep things coherent, which is important when you have hormone ridden teenagers altering reality itself. The teenagers are best kept unaware of it by default.
Tom Riddle could have been like Stalin, but instead he was really just a public school bully; in-universe trope fulfillment worked amazingly well at constraining him, he didn't dream big. Maybe Grindelwald did, but he died.
The current 'dangerous as hell public school' is the current favourite style (both in and out of universe). At other times it might be a sober monastery, or a zany university, or an arcane and esoteric tower, but whatever style is in fashion in-universe, the school will exemplify it; the monastery will be REALLY sober, the university will be REALLY chaotic and full of hijinks, and the tower will be more or less undescribable.
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## The monsters are required for the school to function.
The monsters in the dungeon might be dangerous, but without them the school would not be able to operate. For example:
* **The presence of magical creatures produces *something* which allows the school to exist.** Perhaps without the presence of the creatures it would not be possible for so many wizards to exist in the same place. Or perhaps their presence makes it easier to cast spells, making it easier to learn them.
* **Their presence prevents other magical creatures from appearing**. When a lot of wizards cast a lot of spells in the same area, then all that reality bending can can cause dangerous magical creatures to appear out of thin air. This would be a serious problem in a magic school. But that effect does not happen when there are already magical creatures in the vicinity. So by keeping a menagerie of creatures in the basement, they prevent additional creatures from spawning and allow their hundreds of students to practice their spellcasting safely.
* **Interaction with various magical creatures is a requirement of mastering magic.** One can not properly use fire magic until they fought a balrog. One can not magically shape rocks until they were petrified by a medusa and then turned back to life through fresh saliva of a basilisk. One can not control water until they cuddled with the kraken. This is not merely a cultural aspect of wizard community but a mechanical fact of how magic works in your universe. So the school keeps all those monsters locked in the basement. It provides the students with the opportunity to go through these experiences in a controlled environment.
Some overconfident and impatient students will probably attempt to sneak into the basement and try to make these experiences on their own *before* their teachers consider them ready. Which could have disastrous consequences. Not just for them but also for the rest of the school if they accidentally let some of those creatures escape. But the school will probably have some security precautions in place to keep unauthorized students out of the basement and to calm any worried parents. And no student will ever figure out a way to circumvent them, right?!?
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> "Everything in the world is magic....except to the magicians."
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> * Dr. Robert Ford, co-creator of sentient machines/Westworld
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More in my experience was the way an old engineer once put it, upon someone calling something he did "magical", the old engineer scoffed at the idea...."nothing I did here was magical, it's just an indication I've been doing this a long time....anything that seems magical is just not documented thoroughly enough.".
The problem with the lore of Magic is that it's other-worldly, secret societies , alternate dimensions, and several zoos full of mythical creations and dangerous organisms.
Approaching it non-methodically is problematic at best, and something that eventually we'd have to deal with. As a society the scientific process would HAVE to be brought to bear, on the entirety of the magical world.
It's not after all magic, it's just an aspect of nature or something about the natural world that's VERY close at hand , that is not discovered.
For example, you have a provable example of Gryphons or the fact that death itself can be counteracted or there are processes that can allow one to alter time.
This creates a whole set of circumstances that would be important to our species overall, muggles and magical folk alike, and eventually all of it would be part of what we do as a society.
So the vast bulk of magic is craftwork/trainable stuff that you can use in every day circumstances.
Some magic is wildly dangerous , akin to nuclear weapons or biological weapons. As we see from the lore, whether it's Harry Potter, or the Lord of the Rings, or Marvel Universe; we'd need rules, as they say over in /r/Rimworld the "Geneva Suggestions" for magic. Of course not everyone might adhere to those protocols but just imagine what we'd be capable of as a species, both terrible and terrific in terms of it's potential for our local star-system , and indeed the galaxy.
So take teleportation, transportation, particularly initial explorations of things, would be radically transformed, why bother slowly sending rockets and engineers to Mars, Luna or Mercury when you can build and send an entire city to these places by teleportation.
There are real and serious engineering questions, is the Hocus Pocus of disappearing pigs, scalable at an industrial level....can it be automated, perhaps it's best to use that for emergency responders to miracle critically injured patients immediately to an ER.
Or what is to be done with creatures like Deatheaters or other perhaps nastier creatures that lurk in areas ill-explored **even** by those with a deep understanding of Magic.
In this way, The most interesting Lore/world is that I think of Avatar, where there are societies where a type of telepresence and telekinesis exists as a "real thing" and some people have it and some people don't.
In the science fiction series Babylon 5, the notion of telepaths is explored, and in many societies they form a particular caste or group of specialists, of course in Terran society, they become a separate society, that thinks itself better than "mundanes", and if anyone thinks this sounds familiar it should.
Ultimately,
It's not a question of JUST how we deal with the craft and engineering , it's easy enough to say Hogwarts becomes a satellite campus of Oxford University and that's that.
But really it's a story about something we can't really have. It's really about how we as a society stay informed on matters scientific, it's a strange siren's call, back to a "simpler" age , with obscure knowledge and secret societies which creates all the problems that go against the decidedly unromantic notions that modern industrial/technologically advanced societies have to deal with.
It's a HUGE problem that we deal with in fits and starts, how do you impart to everyone in society the notion of responsibility, of having to learn stuff you might not like , so you as a citizen or we, as a society can make informed decisions.
So Hogwart's needs an OSHA office, and a hospital, and a major rethink on how students are trained on potentially dangerous magic, that would be one classroom over from how students are trained to deal with acids or microbiological agents, or creating AI's, which is across the hallway from an Ethics and Civics class, and a class in statistics, and just around the corner from a class in best practices for experimental methods and design of experiments, which is just around the way from the office of safety.
Hogwart's, and other magical schools, would be FAR less romantic, but also far more important. Magicians would take their place not as great mages and obscurant sorcerers and witches, but as venerable engineers, artists and scientists, doctors and legal scholars, auror's become detectives, and prosecutors; in short Magic is transformed....into science.
Of course there are those who would say "we loose the magic in the process...", which is just not true. The threshold of science exists, and will for thousands of years to come; even if it's not in our common experience, and that threshold is nothing if not magical.
Scientists of every stripe will tell you of the exhilaration or trepidation of discovering something new. Just as artists will tame or entertain their muse, so too scientists combine creativity with craft at the edges of science and create new knowledge for humanity. So be it the vaccine that saves millions, or the machine learning algorythm that passes the Turing Test with flying colors, or the rocket that makes interplanetary or interstellar travel more safe, commercially viable and commonplace.
When you know where to look, magic is all around us, every day. We just don't often think about it as magic.
If you or I went back 1000 years and tried to explain this conversation to someone, that's probably the only way they **could** understand it, I'm magically communicating across the entire planet to any number of people, this radical notion, that each of us...every day....performs magic....we just don't recognize it that way.
And we didn't do it because we all became knowledgeable in some obscura or secret knowledge, we were able to do it because some rather smart people decided to make a tool that did some tiny , tiny portion of this process, and some other rather smart person came along and built on top of that.....and this process as repeated for thousands of years; slowly at first.....fire....the wheel....agriculture....gunpowder....the printing press...the internet.. all of these inventions were the result of a patient examination of nature and sometimes painstakingly slow research, and sometimes wildly radical epiphanies.
And there's the rub, the great paradox, when you realize....we are the magicians....where the muse of mythical times that would inspire the wizards of old....still visits ....the mages and sorcerers of our time....those students and professors and learners of skills that are still obscurant and in one single ESSENTIAL moment is transformed from myth and lore into science, there is but one rule, that one must convince the always skeptical eye the rigorous test, a rule that says "prove it.".
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From narrative perspective, danger is an easy means of conflict. And conflict drives stories. It is easy to suppose you want danger to be present to be able to drive some part of your story.
### That's the way life is.
In universe, It should be expect any competent management to have evaluated the risks, and taken steps to mitigate what risks they could. However in a universe with magic, it is likely that risks in general are high(compared to non magic earth norm) and campus is not much more dangerous then homes.
The highest increase in risk is most likely caused by a gathering of inexperienced people handling a powerful tool that can cause harm. IE the highest risk is the students themselves.
In other words magic is a tool, generally a powerful tool, the more powerful/ useful a tool is the easier it is to turn into a weapon. That is there is considerable risk just from other students, teachers and other magical users never mind the environment.
Or more pithily:
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> * My story is not urban fantasy but rather a completely different world
> * Technology is not stagnant, but keeps on evolving
> * The story takes place in the 17th century, or at least their equivalent to it
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All those are a good background. Let's reorder the other parts and explain them:
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> * The school is for ambitious magic users (or the elite)
> * The academy is very far away from major cities and towns
> * The academy is a boarding school
> * This academy is for teenagers and young adults, so no little kids
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Young magic wielders are irresponsible. So we send them to a boarding school far away from the parents that could be incinerated in a hissyfit from the pubescent teen - and to shield society from the accidents that can and will happen if you let teens play with what accounts to hand grenades, flamethrowers, and machineguns: Some students will die. That's tragic but the price for magic.
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> * Combat and self-defense is taught, both magic and non-magic weapons
> * The monsters and dangerous animals do not wander around campus, but are hidden in underground dungeons connected through secret passages and the basement.
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Actually, let me rephrase that: It's not a boarding school, it is a [military academy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_academy). Call it **Magical Westpoint**. Or rather, it might be the Magical branch of the [Military Academy of Modena](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Academy_of_Modena), founded 1678, or [Woolwich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Military_Academy,_Woolwich), founded 1720/41, or whatever the country in question has. In fact, the 17th century is **perfect** to start such a school.
To test the mettle of the coming magical officers, there is a secret basement or ten. The all dreaded *field excursions* take place there. The monsters are imported deliberately to give the students a hard challenge and a vent to get rid of their aggressions on the beasts instead of other students.
# Post Grad
After graduation, the students are serving their King as an army of very well-respected officers, leading the soldiers in [red coats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_coat_(military_uniform)) while themselves wearing the flashiest of scarlet, [never to duck or run](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrauBQf7FpI). [They lead the charge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna#cite_ref-Tucker_19-16) of the [Winged Hussars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_hussars) not just with couched lances, but fireballs and lightning accompany their units. They yell ["Cut them down"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakkapeliitta) while charging through enemy lines on hooves of Brimstone wielding swords gleaming in otherworldly light that cut armor like butter. They [carry their serial number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissary) like a stamp of pride on their chest, bound to their ruler who carries tie **1**.
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**The best place for a school is over a Hellmouth.**
Maybe not literally like the one from *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*, but there's something about the environment that makes it best for a school **and** monsters.
Say that, as in Larry Niven's stories, the *mana* in an area can be depleted by overuse. Your school has at least a few dozen low-level spellcasters and their teachers doing magic all the time, plus the 24-hour wards to keep it all contained. They would have to locate it on a ley line, mana well, or some other place where it's easier for magic to be performed.
And such a place is the only place where monsters can exist, so they're drawn to it.
Or, like @Phillipp says, the monsters themselves are the source of mana.
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There's not a lot of details to go off of regarding your world. But, from this line, it sounds like there are many magic schools, and the one in question stands out as providing both notably more danger and notably better education. It's a gamble. So here's your reason:
# Hubris
**"Sure, the stories are scary, but that'll never happen to *me*."**
The people who attend this school in particular are a small fraction of people attending magic schools. If the school produces significantly better results, then those who choose the school in question are those seeking to be the best, and therefore those capable of thinking they can be the best (or in the case of parental enrollment, those who think their children are the best). If only a small fraction of students end up in an accident, then someone might assume that it's because they were too foolish to avoid the situation, or too unskilled to survive it. Many of these students really are as good as they think. Many of them aren't. For some, their skill or natural talent doesn't even matter, because it can often just boil down to bad luck.
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If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
JK Rowling is the most successful author in the history of writing because of what she wrote and how she wrote it, and the "what" there is more important than the "how."
The secret of her world-beating success is largely how she balances good against bad on so many levels, including the fact that yes, the Hogwarts world features dangers.
Without the dangers, it would be a world of pussy-foots…
Contrast Hogwarts with real-world military training where sometimes, soldiers will die if they fail to dodge live bullets.
You listed nine ideas in the OQ but which, to you, is important?
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**It's not actually that dangerous**
Yeah, yeah, monsters, magic, chases, near-escapes, etc., etc., etc..
But how often does anyone actually **die**?
Or even suffer permanent injury?
In Harry Potter, for example, student deaths are something that happens every few **decades**.
Hogwarts is actually safer than most modern schools. And that's even leaving out deliberate violence. You'd be more likely to be crippled or killed playing sports at a modern school than attending Hogwarts, even if you made the Quiddich team.
And you'll notice that when things started to get *actually* dangerous, parents started taking their children elsewhere. Not the main characters, but there is mention of other students leaving.
If the point of school is to teach children how to be successful at living, then you want to introduce them to as many dangers and hazards that they might meet in the real world as you possibly can, while still maintaining a controlled environment where you can prevent as many injuries as possible. The more powerful magic is in your world, the more the dangers it can bring, and the more serious the training of children will need to be if you want them to survive past graduation.
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Of course *any* power is hazardous, but at *your* school you teach how to harness that power for the Good.
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## The monsters were brought there long time ago (and it is not known by many)
My justification is almost like how it is explained in Harry Potter as you gave that example as well. It also makes the most sense in my opinion. I believe you are not trying to justify why magic is dangerous (as it is kinda obvious), you are trying to justify why there are dangerous creatures in the school.
The dangerous creatures were brought to the school long time ago and they were hidden in a place that is not easily accessible. I believe you could also say that the creatures were a baby when they were first brought to the school and they were not as dangerous or not dangerous at all that time. The creatures were possibly brought by one of the founders who is more conservative with a hidden agenda, behind the scenes, in times when there weren't many measures or control. There are certain or secret ways to be able to access to this hidden place/dungeon.
If there are creatures outside the campus: Because it is a magical world and there are dangerous magical creatures in the nature. (as you mentioned, they are not wandering around *inside* the campus)
Here is a relevant excerpt about Basilisk (a dangerous giant magical serpent) in Hogwarts from Harry Potter:
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> Salazar Slytherin was responsible for the construction of the Chamber of Secrets beneath Hogwarts dungeons. It was specifically created for the purpose of purging the school of all Muggle-born students. The Chamber contained a Basilisk, which could be controlled only by his own true heir, and use her to rid the school of all those he considered unworthy to study magic. In 1943, when heir Tom Marvolo Riddle opened the Chamber he used the Basilisk to attack Muggle-borns.
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> [*harrypotter.fandom.com*](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Basilisk)
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**The presence of monsters is not intentional.**
They are a byproduct of certain magical experiments by the teaching staff or perhaps a result of mistakes by the students. The school does its best to clean up the monster infestation or at least to confine it to somewhere they aren't likely to attack anyone, like the underground passages.
Students are expressly forbidden to go into the basement. But of course kids will be kids and many will still sneak into the basement and the underground dungeons.
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In my setting (pretty generic medieval fantasy), certain valuable texts can simply not be copied (because of certain religious beliefs, a will to protect information through secrecy or because of some magical "DRMs") therefore, only a single volume exists. Kept in libraries, safes and caches.
Fires can very easily ruin most common writing materials : Paper, cardboard, papyrus and bark are all very flammable.
Since, even with magic, light is mostly produced by flames that create heat, it is important for those text to be fireproof to a certain degree.
The scribes would like to employ a material that has the following qualities (in order of importance) :
* Fire-Resistant (should resist the fire of a raging torch or a small campfire without significant damage to the text)
* Does not degrade with time (Can be kept in a box away from the light for a century and still be readable)
* Thin & Lightweight (so that it can be made into volumes that aren't overly large.)
* Waterproof (the material itself will not be damaged, rot or degrade if soaked or humid for a prolonged amount of time.)
Ink is not an issue for this particular exercise as the color of a material can be changed with magic (it is therefore possible to permanently change to color of certains parts of a material, resulting in text.) but bonus point if some specific ink can be used as well.
Is there any good materials that would fit those criteria ?
It is not necessary for the material to be accessible during the middle-ages, chemistry, complex metalworking and other advanced solutions are all on the table.
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## The Guild of Asbestos Weavers:
Blame *Fahrenheit 451*, but this is the first place my mind went. This naturally occurring mineral fiber may be toxic in fine fibers, but it will be fire-proof and light-weight. The biggest challenge will be fire-proof ink, (and you said ink wasn't needed), but if you weave the fabric with naturally colored [asbestos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos) (which occurs in a variety of colors, despite always being shown as white) you won't need to worry about that either. It isn't eaten by bugs, won't rot, and in antiquity asbestos cloth was thrown into the fire to clean it instead of washing. Although you said it didn't need to be available in antiquity, it was being used 4500 years ago to reinforce cooking pots. As a fabric, even the burning library collapsing on the book won't damage it (unlike ceramics, which won't survive hard impacts). It is a mineral and was used to reinforce water pipes, so I'm pretty confident it's waterproof.
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Basically nothing fulfills all your requirement completely, if you make it very thin almost anything is reactive, but one comes very close.
## Clay/ceramics
Clay tablets are heavy and bulky but fulfills all the rest of your reequipments.
chemically inert, check
water, water resistant by itself waterproof if fired.
Long lasting, the oldest writing we have is on clay tablets for a reason.
Fire-proof, if the library burns down it just makes the tablets stronger, if you start with the right kind of clay even blast furnace will not damage them.
Note finished tablets should be fired(baked) which makes them hard, waterproof and fireproof. Unfired tablets can be recycled using water.
## Gold
Gold is even less reactive but is also heavier but far less bulky. golds actually fairly hard to melt, you need close to blast furnace temperatures, but extreme building fires can get hot enough. You have a theft problem but you could actually make a gold book real ones do exist, the Korean Diamond Cutter Sutra Gold Plates is your best reference even if it is more like a scroll than a book.
One notable thing there is little reason to bind gold "pages" into a book since no one will be carrying around a large book made of gold. The thicker the pages the better they will hold up but also the bigger the risk of theft and the more it weights.
If you want it super secure use inter-fitted gold and fired clay, so each alternating layer is an impression of the surrounding ones. There is almost nothing that can destroy both materials. fire no matter how hot will not bother the clay, impact will not shatter gold, and as a bonus it makes altering the text harder since it has a built in authentication.
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**[Mica.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica#Sheet_mica)**
Known for it's use as a see-through fire-shield in specialists applications, this naturally occurring mineral comes in crystals (the bigest ever found being 10 m × 4.3 m × 4.3 m (33 ft × 14 ft × 14 ft) and weighing about 330 tonnes (320 long tons; 360 short tons)). Each crystal has distinct layers, easily separated with a blade into very thin sheets:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XmIpm.jpg)
Shutterstock, free image 2021
These can then be drilled and wired together into an attractive, translucent form. Neatly it comes in brown, clear or a sort of ethereal blue colour which'd impress people.
Obtaining it in the first place (a closely guarded secret, no doubt) would be done by an open-cast mine, for example on the face of an exposed face of rock that's been worn by glaciation or river-flow. There are many such features in the mountains of [Baffin Island, Canada.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baffin_Island#Geography) (AKA Nunavut). It'd be tough going to get to such inhospitable places, and tougher still to mine, as much of the rock is, well rock-hard granite. So it'd be a pretty exclusive article to possess.
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**Why does the text itself need to be fireproof?**
It is much simpler to just invent a bunch of water tight and fire resistant containers to store the texts in. This is what many archives do, they put all of the texts in shelves of labelled and sealed boxes so that a powerful fire suppression system can just douse the place without damaging any of the books. Re-engineering the books to be fireproof economically and with the same function is nearly impossible, so why bother?
Sealing the books also gives numerous benefits throughout storage life. Without being open to the elements, there is no chance of mold, mildew, and corrosion due to ambient humidity. There is no chance of damage or ink disintegration due to heat. Incidental damage from bumps or knocks is also reduced to a minimum since everything is safe in its own cubby box. It also allows you to restrict access to certain texts through a set of keys. Without proper knowledge of the archives, stealing from the right box is a needle in a haystack, especially if you need to lockpick every single one.
[Answer]
**BORAX!** (as an alternative to Asbestos)
Tail end of your question: "chemistry ... is on the table"
Quick search shows Borax as a solid choice.
<https://www.encyclopedia.com/science-and-technology/chemistry/compounds-and-elements/borax>
>
> BORAX (sodium tetraborate) became important in the European Middle
> Ages as a flux for soldering—that is, for cleaning the surfaces of
> metal pieces to be joined by being melted together. Native European
> sources were un-known, and the nature and origin of this mysterious
> material was long a puzzle to chemists. Borax was ultimately traced to
> Tibet—almost the only source known until the discovery (1776) and
> exploitation (1820) of Italian springs of boric acid (hydrogen
> tetraborate), which could be converted by the addition of soda (sodium
> carbonate) into borax. Italy became the principal source of borax
> until the 1860s, when desert areas now in Chile began to supply borax.
>
>
>
<https://www.borax.com/news-events/december-2018/early-use-of-borax-in-ceramics-and-enamels>
>
> The earliest evidence of BORIC OXIDE (B2O3) use comes from China
> during the Liao dynasty (916 to 1125 CE)
>
>
>
So it's been around for a long time already - well into "Middle Ages".
What's the use of it? Well... coat paper with it and you get everything you are looking for it seems...
<https://makezine.com/2012/11/12/how-to-fireproof-paper/>
>
> OK, it’s probably more accurate to say “flame resistant” or “flame
> retardant” paper, because the flame does actually damage the paper,
> but it just blackens and won’t catch fire or burn on its own. The
> treatment couldn’t be simpler: soak the paper in a saturated solution
> of borax (sodium tetraborate decahydrate) in water, then let it dry.
> Alum (potassium aluminum sulfate hydrate) is also commonly used for
> this purpose, but not quite as easy to find.
>
>
>
Coat paper and get what you want: STRONG flame and water resistances (lots of info about waterproofing with borax solutions elsewhere).
You can see a modern flame torch and the paper isn't destroyed... a LARGE torch does damage to it but that's way beyond being near a fire - and more along the lines of putting it in the "camp fire" for an extended time. A shorter time? probably only marginal damage. More than enough time to throw water on the fire and protect the paper from damage.
You can get even less damage With a little added protection via magical means... and you have better resistances added to an already solid option that's much safer than Asbestos... added bonus: you can also coat the bookends and other parts with the same solution to get protection beyond just the pages.
>
> Alum (potassium aluminum sulfate hydrate) is also commonly used for
> this purpose, but not quite as easy to find.
>
>
>
also mentioned is Alum as another chemistry based option to research that's an "advanced chemistry based" answer and within the bounds of the question.
<https://steemit.com/philippines/@blackelephant/the-effectiveness-of-aluminum-potassium-sulfate-alum-as-a-flame-retardant>
[Answer]
**Volcano spider silk**
Everyone knows spider silk is strong, but the silk of the great hand-waving spiders that live around Mt. Burnitdown have evolved a unique flame resistance.
It can also be used like aluminium foil for cooking
[Answer]
**Dragon Skin Vellum**
[Vellum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vellum) is parchment made animals skins. The skins are scraped, sanded and bleached. Dragons are fireproof animals. Vellum made from dragons skins is extremely robust and impervious to fire. The book can then be bound in dragon leather for extra durability.
It's as expensive as all hell and hard to make but will last forever and is almost indestructible.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/l2YfE.jpg)
[Answer]
**Gold**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/flHlS.jpg)
<https://abn.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/gold-plates>
When Joseph Smith found the 1500 year old ancient texts that would become the Book of Mormon, they were on gold plates buried underground. Gold is a good choice of medium for this, and it is definitely plausible that gold could last the duration. It does not corrode under normal terrestrial environments and it is soft enough to easily be written on or stamped with letters or symbols.
>
> Witnesses later left statements that detailed the plates’ material
> composition, weight, dimensions, thickness, and binding. The plates
> weighed about “forty to sixty” pounds,8 and together were between four
> and six inches thick.9 The leaves measured about “six” or “seven
> inches wide by eight inches in length”10 and individually had the
> thickness “of plates of tin”11 and, according to Emma Smith, would
> rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb,
> as one does sometimes thumb the edges of a book.”12 Three D-shaped
> rings bound the leaves “through the back edges”13 into a volume.
>
>
>
The bad thing about gold is that people who become aware of these massive pieces of gold might try to steal them; by the linked account that was also a problem for Joseph Smith.
[Answer]
[Rock wool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_wool). Basically, fiber made out of molten rock. Not very suitable for making sheets, but not impossible. This is 19th century technology, however there is a naturally occurring [volcanic glass fiber equivalent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele%27s_hair), which is unfortunately very brittle, but it can inspire medieval people to expose molten rock to strong winds and get mineral wool (doable especially with fire or wind magic).
[Answer]
You can make [threads and yarns out of metal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_fiber). Weave your pages out of metallic thread, and then embroider/needlepoint your content using metallic thread of a contrasting color. Woven metal will be a lot lighter than solid metal, can roll up easily, and is naturally resistant to fires of reasonable temperature (campfire, yes; volcano, no).
Metallic thread has been around for centuries, although mostly used for decorating expensive garments with gold and silver. Other metals can be used as well, I've seen wallets and small bags made out of stainless steel thread. It would probably be easiest to use something dull and dark for the background like steel, nickel, or tin, and then use something bright and shiny for the lettering, like copper or brass.
Moisture could be a problem if you're not careful. You want to select metals that are [corrosion-resistant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_series) (look for metals commonly used on ships, as saltwater is one of the harshest environments for materials). You can even turn this to your advantage. You can weave "secret" messages into your work that normally blend in with the background, but oxidize when exposed to a specific chemical and reveal a hidden message.
] |
[Question]
[
I'm trying to think of ways that a humanoid civilization, post-agrarian with solid mechanical knowledge but no electronics, can communicate in near real-time over large distances.
Some of my initial ideas include communication by light towers, which would allow for direct site-to-site communications and would have interesting side effects of being ineffective during inclement weather; and communication by ground vibrations, which would allow for broadcast communications.
I'm trying to get more advanced than communication by messenger (although that may be a backup plan for the light towers) but I don't want to introduce electronics into the culture.
I'm looking for something scientifically plausible.
[Answer]
Lookup the Discworld's *[Clacks](http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Clacks)* system. It started out as a series of semaphore towers, with two flags at the top of a tower sending alphabetic messages a letter at a time to another tower, which then relayed the message onward along a string of towers. Over time, it became more and more elaborate, replacing the simple arms with grids of squares that could be open or closed to send messages, and more and more elaborate compression algorithms were developed - all done mechanically, with no hint of magic or electronics. It was designed by Terry Pratchett to be a logical extension of the [early optical telegraph systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Optical_telegraph), which were being used as early as 1793.
On the Discworld, the Clacks developed its own subculture, with people sending c-mail to one another, and even developed groups of hackers.
[Answer]
Telegraph. The world was linked by a mesh of long-distance telegraph cables long before the advent of electronics. Telegraph can work very well thank you without electronics. Or do you mean no electricity at all? Then historical experience says optical telegraph using semaphore towers.
[Answer]
Use [trembita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trembita) pipes like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PAqAq.jpg)
In good weather (without wind), the sound of trembita can be heard in few miles. There can be lines of trembita players, who can relay messages. But i think the light telegraph will be much faster. Furthermore, trembita and light telegraph can be combined in single towers.
[Answer]
As others have said, a [Flag semaphore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore) is a very easy optical communication method, where you substitute letters/numbers for flag positions. though bad weather would be a bit of a problem, And scaling it for distance would be hard (but telescopes can help).
Using [smoke signals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_signal) or reflected light, you can also do visual [Morse Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code).
Another easy method (at least for short ranges) is a simple [Tin can telephone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_can_telephone) which is just cans connected by a string.
Where mountain ranges (higher than the cloud line) and other barriers become an issue, you might have to rely on [carrier pigeon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon). Traditionally they only had a 'fly home' setting, but maybe you could train some bird to be a fast and versatile message carrier.
I should also mention that [whistle languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language) exist for this very purpose. The range will be ~1-2km (~1 mile) on average, but you can get 5km in mountains and up to 10km in optimal terrain. (Thanks to the heavily studied language Silbo on the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands) Obviously you could extend this range by using an interment to reach higher decibels or to hit a wavelength that will carry better in the local terrain, but the instrument will likely also limit the expressiveness of the language.
And if you want to push tech a bit, maybe you could use a hand powered [vacuum tube message system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube).
[Answer]
A borderline case: Fiber optics.
You can do this without even electricity but such a technology probably can't build the cables.
The transmitter uses lenses to focus the light onto the end of a fiber, the sender uses a beam interrupter. The signal itself is morse code. The receiver sits in a totally dark room so even a faint signal will be visible.
Unfortunately, your working range is only in the single digits of km per stage.
[Answer]
Signal fires are the most basic solution.
>
> Classically, beacons were fires lit at well-known locations on hills or high places, used either as lighthouses for navigation at sea, or for signalling over land that enemy troops were approaching, in order to alert defenses. As signals, beacons are an ancient form of optical telegraphy, and were part of a relay league.
>
>
> Systems of this kind have existed for centuries over much of the world. The ancient Romans used beacons ...
>
>
> In the 9th century, during the Arab–Byzantine wars, the Byzantine Empire used a beacon system to transmit messages from the border ... to the imperial palace in the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. ... Beacons were later used in Greece as well, while the surviving parts of the beacon system in Anatolia seem to have been reactivated in the 12th century by Emperor Manuel I Komnenos.
>
>
> In Scandinavia many hill forts were part of beacon networks to warn against invading pillagers. In Finland these beacons were called vainovalkeat, "persecution fires", or vartiotulet, "guard fires", and were used to warn Finn settlements of imminent raids by the Vikings.
>
>
> In Wales, the Brecon Beacons were named for beacons used to warn of approaching English raiders. In England, the most famous examples are the beacons used in Elizabethan England to warn of the approaching Spanish Armada. ... In the Scottish borders country, a system of beacon fires was at one time established to warn of incursions by the English. ... The Great Wall of China is also a beacon network.
>
>
> In Spain, the border of Granada in the territory of the Crown of Castile had a complex beacon network to warn against Moorish raiders and military campaigns.
>
>
>
[Wikipedia: Beacon: For defensive communications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon#For_defensive_communications)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3KSLz.jpg)
[Danby Beacon](https://www.flickr.com/photos/treehouse1977/3772199406/in/photolist-frHuXt-4hoD4j-8PCJxe-8PCHVp-LEpbGS-6KkvsN-6ocNbv-7ngqbm-f8tkRw-iwehp5-eGLhm5) by [Jim Champion](https://www.flickr.com/photos/treehouse1977/) ([CC BY-SA 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/))
>
> Danby Beacon is at the summit of the aptly named Beacon Hill. The modern beacon sculpture stands on a Bronze Age burial mound, previously the site of a 1988 replica beacon and the original Armada-era beacon.
>
>
>
[Answer]
[Jungle Drums](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drums_in_communication). These can be heard several miles away, in any kind of terrain.
And unlike signal fires and semaphores they do not require clear visibility (which, as any pilot knows, is a rare and fickle commodity). Nor do they require daylight (semaphores) or nighttime (fires).
Networks of drums were used to great effect in Africa, South America, and parts of Oceania.
There's a good [*Time* Magazine article](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,773609,00.html), but it's behind a paywall.
[Answer]
Strings running through pipes or guiding wheels over several kilometers with springs on either end to pull them back into neutral position. Theoretically you could connect a mechanical typewriter directly to the strings though a more sophisticated encoding would be advantageous. It doesn’t even have to be binary (string pulled or not pulled), you could implement several levels of pull.
Now that I think about it … it doesn’t even have to be strings, it could be hydraulic or pneumatic too.
Unlike other methods mentioned this would also work without a line of sight.
[Answer]
The answers by @LorenPechtel and @BrockAdams were what leaped to mind when I read your questions.
As small expansions on those answers, assuming that there is some allowance for scientific rule-bending (i.e. your setting is not historical or based completely on existing science/materials), two things I would suggest as possibilities:
* Sound creation/amplification devices, with (temperature and pressure controlled?) fluid tubes to [carry that sound](http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sound.html).
* Mirrors/Prisms (cut crystal) to redirect light through tubing, etc. as well.
But it could add a little flavor if need be. Remember that there are at least some people who suspect that ancient people had "lost techniques" we haven't yet "rediscovered" (or have otherwise obsoleted through modern technology).
[Answer]
Since we're in the realm of science *fiction* here, why not consider the *ansible*, of Ursula LeGuin fame and utilized by many writers since? There has never been any explanation of the technology; the only definition is its capability of communicating messages instantaneously across a galaxy.
] |
[Question]
[
What would be an efficient method of global travel that can take you from, let's say, London to Hong Kong in about an hour? It would preferably be made quickly, but money is no object. I don't want something that would take 100 years to build.
[Answer]
Your only real option here is an Evacuated Tube transport system.
Atmospheric drag is the biggest hurdle to traveling the distance you want (9,617 km) in an hour.
So simply connect the two cities with a large diameter tube and pump all the atmosphere out of it. Then magnetically levitate and accelerate cars inside the tube. With no friction and no drag your options for accelerating the cars are only limited by your power supply and materials.
This is probably achievable with today's tech, but it would be stupendously expensive and a project of major international cooperation.
Edit:
Rockets can accomplish this, but scaling it for commercial transport will be a nightmare. Factoring in fuel costs, maintenance for material fatigue from constant atmospheric re-entry, and the insurance premiums for launching passengers strapped into millions of pounds of fuel will be astronomical.
A quick calculation for a constant acceleration Evacuated Tube transit system shows that a comfortable ~3m/s^2 acceleration is required to accomplish this requirement. The cart would accelerate for half an hour, then decelerate for the last half at that rate. Energy can actually be recovered during the "slowing down" phase.
You could play with the timing by adjusting the passenger's acceleration tolerance, say spend X minutes at 1g of acceleration to get up to speed.
[Answer]
**Simulacrum.**
In London, you enter a virtual reality booth. When you open your eyes you are looking out of the eyes and hearing through the ears of a comely android with approximately your build and facial features, dressed for the season. Wearing your android body, you step out into Hong Kong.
People can know who you are as an android. Your identifiers come with when you register. You can conduct business. You can see the sights and sounds, though so far not the smells and tastes. If you do crimes as your android self (and are caught), the android will be deactivated and the London police will be waiting for you outside the booth.
[Answer]
To cover that distance, you need an average speed of about 2.67km/s. That's pretty brisk... even higher than the sorts of speeds anticipated of a [mature vacuum maglev train](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain) technology, even if it were possible to build the required infrastructure in the given timescale (which, given the colourful politics of the countries inbetween the endpoints, may be somewhat challenging).
You could do it today, of course... modern commercial rocketry can put you into orbit in ten minutes (albeit with a certain amount of lead time to get everything ready) and from LEO you can circle the globe in 90 minutes. That'll put you half way around the world in 45 minutes, but you'll need to sustain at least a couple of gravities average deceleration on the way down which might not be much fun.
Modern suborbital spaceflight might be capable of the task... an ICBM can strike most places on earth in 30 minutes or so, though the terminal speed would indeed be terminal. Virgin's gradiosely named [Galactic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic) only reaches a mere 1.78km/s to speed and so couldn't make it, but possibly the difference could be split. Some form of [hypersonic glide vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boost-glide) is probably the correct solution, with a rocket booster to get it high enough up.
The problem with all these things is that they're indistinguishable from something like [Prompt Global Strike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike) (or as previously mentioned, an ICBM). No-one wants a multi-kilometre-per-second projectile aimed at their city. There's too much scope for terrible collateral damage in the event of an accident, and with deliberate sabotage or repurposing as a missile could cause the deaths of millions. Your need for faster global travel doesn't quite tip the balance, given those downsides.
[Answer]
You want a hole through earth. That would allow you to go to any destination in 42 minutes, without even spending energy on the traveling itself.
Boring a hole through the earth is difficult, but if you want to go between London and Hong Kong in an hour, that is the only viable solution. It is not currently within the realm of the possible, but by some definition, it is feasible, and if money is not an object, it could be done in less than 100 years. It would, without compare, be the largest infrastructural project ever taken on by mankind.
Travel between destinations not directly opposed on the globe would take hypocycloid paths, and the tunnels should probably be evacuated, in order to eliminate drag.
Read more on wikipedia's article about [Gravity trains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train) or on HowStuffWorks, about [holes through earth](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question373.htm).
[Answer]
Sedated, stasis transport via ICBM.
Sedated to avoid the pain of high accelereation and deacceleration, in addition to the em-effects of the plasma around the capsule.
Stasis, as in prepared against damage due to high g forces. May include filling the lungs with breathable fluids to prevent collaps and other protection mechanisms like metabolic cooling.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-G_training>
The longest part of the journey will be waking up from sedation.
[Answer]
**In a word, [Skylon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)).**
Skylon is a reusable space plane design propelled by a [SABRE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)) air-breathing rocket engine. Test flights are expected within the next decade. Given the pace of development, British and Australian governments have started to plan a '[space bridge](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-australian-space-agencies-agree-to-step-up-cooperation-with-the-intention-to-develop-a-world-first-space-bridge)' between their countries. Current estimates claim a flight from London to Sydney is [possible in four hours](https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/03/uk-invests-in-skylon-space-plane-that-could-fly-from-london-to-sydney-in-4-hours_n_8459172.html) with Skylon, and London to New York in just one hour.
The main technical challenge behind the project is the need for an engine which can reduce air temperature from 1000 to -140 degrees in a fraction of a second. This allows oxygen to be captured from the atmosphere, so it does not need to be stored as liquid fuel.
[Here is a technical QA](https://www.theengineer.co.uk/skylon-and-sabre-your-questions-answered/) with the project's staff.
[Answer]
There have been proposals for suborbital transports going back so long that the early ones were based on the Saturn booster (the kerosene-fueled first stage of NASA's Moon rocket). Flying at just under orbital speed, anywhere on Earth is less than an hour flight time from anywhere -- five to seven minutes of boost, at most about 45 minutes at zero gee above the atmosphere, and another five to ten minutes of the steep part of reentry and landing (this is based on vertical takeoff and landing, as with the proposed point to point service for SpaceX Starship). Passengers would remain strapped in their seats for the entire flight, and the seats would move to ensure G loads are taken in a reclined position.
With throttlable engines (like the Starship's Raptors), G load on passengers is easily limited to 3 G, perhaps even 2.5 -- this is including the Earth's gravity, not on top of it -- which is a level any passenger in good enough condition to travel ought to be able to handle in a reclined position, and far gentler than the common handling of packages by courier services.
Fuel costs wouldn't be impossible, compared to past and proposed supersonic airliners -- Raptor engines run on what amounts to natural gas and liquid oxygen, distilled from air. The premium on cost is to be anywhere, same day -- or even last night, if you're flying from the Americas to eastern Asia.
[Answer]
SpaceX is talking about [London to Hong Kong in 34 minutes](https://www.inverse.com/article/60525-spacex-starship-here-s-how-much-an-inter-earth-flight-will-cost) via their Starship rocket, for less than the price of first-class airfare today. But you have to add the time of the boat rides out to the launch ports. (Taking a rocket directly from Downtown London to Downtown Hong Kong is likely to run into regulatory problems.)
[Answer]
Nasa developed the X-43A, which can go around Mach 9.6(7,000 mph). You could build a fleet of those, but that is not cost effective. You could also equip jets with RAMJETS or SCRAMJETS to get your goal.
In my universes, there is a type of special crystal(not the point) that we use for almost everything. We achieve speeds of nearly M18 with special crystal reactor cores. The crystals are incredibly reactive, and we just compress them to get the speeds we desire.
[Answer]
With current technology, suborbital flight is feasible, while a hole through earth isn't.
Asking for efficiency, I would bet on some sort of Hohmann transfer (horizontal launch), plus using a cannon with external propulsion rather than the previously mentioned ICBM.
For approx. 5km/s, at 10g (100m/s2), that would require 50sec of acceleration on a cannon (rail?) length of 125km. For the 10g acceleration, you'd probably want to pack the passengers in some sort of water tank. The 125km cannon will probably be static, hence only shooting passengers from London to HongKong, and you will need some sort of reentry vehicle like the Space Shuttle, to burn away all that kinetic energy again.
Conclusion: Scuba divers in a water tank inside a Space Shuttle that's shot out of a 125km long cannon. Feasible? I don't know. The fins for the scuba divers are optional.
] |
[Question]
[
I have a race of trolls in my world, they looks mostly like [these guys](http://kaiju.wdfiles.com/local--files/wiki:yeti/yeti_2008_01.jpg) (the yetis from one of the Mummy movies) but with longer arms and a more gorilla like posture. I also imagine them to have very sharp and dangerous claws and a thick leathery chest (to defend against said claws in battle with each other).
My problem is what form these claws should take. I had imagined basically biological equivalents of knives, where most of their fingers were blade like claws. The kind of thing that could punch through armour. But I've decided whereas in general trolls are quite primitive and un-advanced I would like them to have the potential to be more civilised. So certain populations should built houses, make clothes and weapons and even write. And I doubt that would be possible with knives instead of fingers.
**So what claw design would be best for keeping a balance between being useful and dangerous weapons but also capable of performing the duties of human hands?**
I don't mind if their claws impede their ability to perform tasks somewhat (and in fact that may be preferred as another reason they stay primitive), as long as it doesn't stop them entirely. They are very strong as well, so it's possible even just slightly sharper and harder nails would do the job, but I'm not sure.
[Answer]
Picture a full human hand.
Keep the thumb and 2 fingers.
The 4th and 5th finger are fused into a single base that grows a keratin spike. The spike grows, but wears away in such a manner as to maintain a sharp tip.
You could either have the spike permanently extended (a bit inconvenient) or somehow retract along the back of the hand.
[Answer]
### [Retractable Cat-like claws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_anatomy#Claws)
What you want is to have weapons on your hands but also normal human hands. The easiest to provide both is to add the ability to switch between both states. And the easiest solution that you may want to take as inspiration is to use the retractable claws from cats.
To cite from Wikipedia:
>
> Like nearly all members of the family Felidae, cats have retractable claws. In their normal, relaxed position, the claws are sheathed with the skin and fur around the toe pads. This keeps the claws sharp by preventing wear from contact with the ground and allows the silent stalking of prey. The claws on the forefeet are typically sharper than those on the hind feet. Cats can voluntarily extend their claws on one or more paws. They may extend their claws in hunting or self-defense, climbing, "kneading", or for extra traction on soft surfaces (bedspreads, thick rugs, skin, etc.). It is also possible to make a cooperative cat extend its claws by carefully pressing both the top and bottom of the paw. The curved claws can become entangled in carpet or thick fabric, which can cause injury if the cat is unable to free itself.
>
>
>
This helps you in having sharp claws and keeping them sharp while at the same being able to hide them if that's useful for the current situation - for example when you want to use your hands like human hands. It also allows you to have creatures who can control how many claws they use, thereby giving them a broader range of possibilities when it comes to using their hands. After all we humans are limited to what our hands can do - we can't simply extend a long, curved claw from one of our fingers to for example extend our reach or to free us if we or our hands are entangled in something.
[Answer]
**Cat-like claws ?**
Cat's paws have retractable claws. You can use that for your trolls. When they are not in imminent danger, their claws are basically hidden "inside" their fingers, permitting them to be civilized and doing complex movements. But when they feel like attacking someone, they can just unleash the claws and attack.
No need for ultra long claws, just sharp enough to cut through things.
[Answer]
**The nails are blunt unless the trolls sharpen them for a fight.**
These nails for fighting are not going to be long spindly affairs that will break off with the first whack. They will be short, thick and strong, capable of withstanding the muscle power the trolls put behind them. They will be like bear claws.
And they will not always be sharp. How could they stay sharp in a world full of friction? How do bears (or humans with edged tools) keep their tools sharp? They sharpen them. So too your trolls. When they expect a fight, they quickly sharpen up their claws - maybe with a stone carried for that purpose. Otherwise the claws blunt up with use as with any edged tool.
A civilized troll not in the habit of fighting will have short hard blunt nails. Or they might let them grow and decorate them as some humans are wont.
A carpenter troll or cook troll might keep a couple of nails sharp for woodworking or cooking needs.
---
I was thinking about this scheme. I imagined a tall monolith or menhir in the troll gathering place. Before going out to battle they would all sharpen their claws on it. The stone has the scratches of centuries, including some at the very top placed by legendary giants.
[Answer]
## Slow and steady...
You want your trolls to have claws that were historically used for combat/self defense, but will also allow them to develop a primitive culture. The simplest way to achieve this that I can see is to have them have a larger, stronger version of sloth claws. Sharp claws that curve in and down, perfect for using as a primitive shovel.
Not just any shovel though. We are talking about hulking trolls, so their claws need to be extra impressive. Given their brute strength and claws made of a hyper dense and tough material, you have the perfect recipe for a cave making and dwelling creature. Your trolls would live in mountainous areas or any other location that has natural cave systems. They would then use their shovel claws to dig out new tunnels or expand upon existing ones. Digging would blunt the claws somewhat, but first it would wear away at the curve of the claw. A troll that has spent time shaping his home would have claws that are straighter and sharper. Perfect for defending his new home from intruders.
Once you have a cave dwelling troll, starting a civilization with them is simply a matter of having small groups form and start to cooperate. Maybe multiple troll families live on the same mountain and their tunnels end up running into each other. Or your trolls are naturally more social than typical fantasy ones and they are predisposed to working together. Either way, eventually they will discover the benefits to communal living. One group of trolls could spend their days digging and enhancing the tunnel systems, while another goes out hunting or defending the community. What group a troll is in would depend on the state of their claws. Dig until your shovel claws look like daggers, then hunt/guard until your dagger claws grow back out to shovels.
Once you have a group of creatures living as a community and using primitive tools (in this case claws) you have the everything you need for culture to start to form. Writing and drawing are both pretty obvious, since the stone walls would be perfect for both. Sharpened claws would act in place of knives, so you could have stuff like cured hides for clothing. Assuming they care about things like that. And of course there is the obvious draw to having a race of natural miners when it comes to trade with other creatures. Your trolls wouldn't fill the same role that dwarves do in most fantasy settings, since they will be too primitive to provide processed goods, but they would be a good source for humans or other races to get raw metals and minerals.
Strong arms and curved claws will be the basis for a primitive yet noble cliff-dwelling tribe of mountain trolls.
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I'd go with two hands of nothing but grooming, aka toilet, claws. These are found on prosimians - lemurs, tarsiers, etc. - and are a cross between a nail like ours and a claw. This allows the prosimians to use their hands and feet to grasp things and was probably important in the evolution of most primates' ability to use sticks as tools, while still looking lethal. In fact, if you give your troll nothing but grooming claws and scale them up to gorilla size, they probably will be lethal.
The grooming claw is the long one in this picture.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_claw#/media/File:Varecia_variegata_foot_with_toilet-claw.jpg>
You can see how, instead of laying flat against the fingertip the way our nails do, it actually grows out and away at an angle. This allows the lemur to use its fingertips to grab and manipulate objects while still having a claw (technically, toetips, but you can see how they still have opposable digits like our thumbs on their feet).
I'm doing similar research myself (I want a race of elves with claws, like WoW's Nightelves, but without filing them into the desired shape.)
Edit: thinking about it a little more, you could have the claws growing out of the middle section of the finger instead of the tip. Maybe that would make them less likely to get ripped off in a fight? Something like this
<https://www.polyvore.com/black_leather_dragon_claw_gauntlets/thing?id=140607397>
or this
<https://www.polyvore.com/items_similar_to_sale_leather/thing?context_id=4571418&context_type=lookbook&id=87059183>
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Claws vary depending on the use they were designed for, often related to an animal's diet or lifestyle. Are you trolls carnivore or herbivore? If they are carnivore, do they use their claws for hunting or eviscerating prey (would suggest scythe-like claws), or other uses? If they are herbivore, do they use their claws for grasping or pulling vegetation (consider hook-like claws), and if so, what type? Do they use their claws for digging up insects or roots (would suggest chisel-like claws)?
I would refer you to the skeleton of the Giant Ground Sloth (Megatherium), if you imagine it without it's tail, for visual inspiration.
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It would depend on the functionality of the claws. Always remember that the features that you're going to apply on your creature/character would contribute to their overall traits, thus, a particular trait or feature should have good use in the long run. "Would they be used just for attacking or would they also be used for traversing tough terrain in their surroundings?" Always consider this when creating a character.
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Being that trolls are a mystical creatures they can have anything you want.
**The Devil Is In The Details**
Troll lore suggests they have claws and fangs but, if you envision a troll and think about it - it doesn't make sense. Personally, I think those who created the lore got it wrong. Sure, claws and fangs are scary but claws on hands don't make sense - and trolls have hands. And what are trolls? Are they a representation of the primal side of human nature? Once we start adding claws we take the original idea of the primitive human we turn it into some gaudy Hollywood thing. That and trolls are brutish and not sleek like lions, tigers and bears who have claws. Well, I guess bears are kind of brutish.
But if I haven't convinced you to pass on claws, then, I would come up with something that is a trade-off between finger nails and claws.
Personally I think because a troll would have fingernails - like primates. They'd be jagged, chipped and short.
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Assume that Handwavium is a gas many times lighter than Hydrogen. Is it realistic to use this gas to make relatively heavy full-body armor (say, brass) lighter and/or more maneuverable? This seems like a physics and momentum issue but I must admit my physics knowledge is pretty fuzzy.
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Instead of superlight gas, imagine you had vacuum: no gas. Real things containing vacuum must be structurally augmented to avoid being crushed by atmospheric pressure which is why gas fill is nice. To sidestep this we will state that your light gas has the same mass as vacuum which is 0; vacuum gas.
How much would that reduce the weight of the armor? For each volume of vacuum gas in the armor you can subtract the weight of the same volume of air.
Imagine a cubic meter of vacuum gas. This would displace a cubic meter of air which weighs 1.29 kg. <https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/RachelChu.shtml> So a balloon containing a cubic meter of vacuum gas could lift up to a weight of 1.29 kg.
Here is an image demonstrating how large a cubic meter is.
from <http://year5rc.edublogs.org/files/2011/06/Kira-1luvv32.JPG>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wJVsR.jpg)
It would hard to make big enough pockets of vacuum gas in the armor to reduce its weight in any meaningful way.
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## No.
However much lighter the gas is, to have any noticeable effects the gas pockets would still need to be huge to have any impact, which of course isn't practical for your purpose. Even if you have gas that's *orders of magnitude* lighter than hydrogen, it won't make much of a difference when having to stick to gas pockets that aren't overly large and thus remain maneuverability. The upwards force generated by this gas is minimal compared to the gravity working on the armor as a whole.
As an added bonus these gas pockets form weaknesses in the armor which make the entire idea even more impractical. If I personally had the choice between living, and my armor weight being reduced by a grand 500 grams or so, I'd choose living any day of the week. I think the only "realistic" way to realize light-weight but tough armor is either magic or fictitious metal akin to mithral.
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# Yes, this is called metal foam.
See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_foam#Manufacturing_2>
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> Foams are commonly made by injecting a gas or mixing a foaming agent into molten metal.[10] Melts can be foamed by creating gas bubbles in the material. Normally, bubbles in molten metal are highly buoyant in the high-density liquid and rise quickly to the surface. This rise can be slowed by increasing the viscosity of the molten metal by adding ceramic powders or alloying elements to form stabilizing particles in the melt, or by other means
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And <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_foam#Composites>
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> Composite metal foam (CMF) is formed from hollow beads of one metal within a solid matrix of another, such as steel within aluminium, show 5 to 6 times greater strength to density ratio and more than 7 times greater energy absorption than previous metal foams.[15]
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> A less than one inch thick plate has enough resistance to turn a 7.62 x 63 mm standard-issue M2 armor piercing bullet to dust. The test plate outperformed a solid metal plate of similar thickness, while weighing far less. Other potential applications include nuclear waste (shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation) transfer and thermal insulation for space vehicle atmospheric re-entry, with twice the resistance to fire and heat as the plain metals.[16]
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**No.**
Lighter than air gases such as Hydrogen and Handwavium are lighter than air just because they have a lower density. Buoyancy states that the buoyant force is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced. This works exactly the same for gases. So because handwavium is less dense than air the same volume will have a lesser weight than the volume of air displaced.
So what does this mean? It means that the only way handwavyium can make an object apparently lighter is to increase the buoyant forces and to do this it has to increase the volume of an object while reducing its overall density. The problem is that the armour will still weigh the same overall. For ease of calculations lets assume handwavium is actually entirely massless(!). This way we know that a pocket of handwavium will increase the buoyant force by (density of air)\*(volume of handwavium). The density of air is ~1.225kg/m^3. So to reduce the weight of our armour by 1 kilogram we need to increase the volume by 1 m^3. That is quite a lot of volume.
Assuming a person is a 2m tall cylinder of radius 1m (after the current heavy armour) and that we are not armouring the top or bottom. An increase of 5cm thickness will increase the volume of the armour by about 0.644m^3. That is just under 800g of eight reduction. Assuming the heavy armour is very heavy this is almost certainly pretty insignificant compared to the weight of your armour. Also you have added 5cm thickness onto everything which is a not insignificant amount for personal armour.
Alternatively you could consider armour plating. Steel has a density of ~8000kg/m^3. If we have a 10cm thick armour plate that is one metre squared then we now it will weight 800kg. Lets say we want to reduce that by 1% then we need to know what the equivalent volume of 8kg of air is. From our above density measurement we know that it is about 6.5m^3. That means our one meter squared armour plate has gone from being 0.1m thick to 6.6m thick for the loss of just 1% of its weight.
This of course is not going to help the strength of your armour. It is hard to quantify the effect it will have on its strength in the same way - it obviously won't make it stronger and we can imagine that giant gas pockets is not going to do it any favours. You are likely to either have a lot of very small air pockets though (which will likely make it less durable because it is then a series of easier to break thinner pieces of armour) or one big air pocket (in which case you'll need a lot of structural reinforcement to stop it just collapsing easily and that probably costs all the weight you've saved).
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Just addressing the question of whether adding lighter-than-air would gas make your armor easier to *move around in*, the answer is no. It would have to be significantly bulkier to contain all of that gas, making it harder to move through the air--like wearing balloons to run faster.
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# Yes!
Well, sort of. While the other answers are correct in saying these ultra-light gasses, or even gaseous vacuum would have a minimal effect, I felt there was something overlooked.
# Atmsophere
The pockets of gas could certainly add a slight lifting element, reducing weight marginally, barely noticeably infact. But what about the atmosphere itself? The buoyancy of the gas (and armor) would be significantly increased relative to the heaviness of the surrounding atmosphere. Take Handwavium-X, its a super dense gas; about 1/4th the density of water! Your planet's atmosphere is made of a great deal of Handwavium-X, your armor-wearing beings could even process it in a similar way to how we breath oxygen, or at the very least have it be non-consequential similar to the nitrogen and various other gasses in our system.
Combine this with Handwavium-Y (or Vacuum Gas) filling the gaps in your armor, and your armor becomes relatively light. Of course the other given concerns of extra bulk, armor weakpoints, compromised integrity, reliance on it being sealed, etc. might cause issues. Those aside, it is theoretically doable given the constraints (or lack-thereof) you provided.
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No. Atomic weight of air is 29. Hydrogen has 1. So, raising effect of Hydrogen will be (29-1)/29 =28/29. Even if you have vacuum, the effect is 29/29. So, relatively you raise the effectiveness by 1/29. About 3%.
Find some gas with negative density. It will really help. But better use metal with negative density. Heavy armor in which you can fly... Or jump as on the Moon, by huge leaps. Imagine the tactics!
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**Maybe, but in the end it wouldn't help.** Another answer already commented on using a vacuum and how little that would reduce the weight. But then consider the extra weight that would be added to produce the vacuum/maintain the seal on the armor. Keeping a seal on a system is kind of hard, especially one with joints that need to move. Your system would probably end up having more weight due to the extra equipment/sealing/whatever needed.
However, not all is lost! A quick thought: try using a system with some motors in the joints and a couple of pressure sensors. When enough force is applied against to the sensor in a limb by the human inside the armor, the motors kick in to assist with moving the limb. You could do that for all limbs.
Another option - use something like an AT-AT, but on a smaller scale. A small moving robot, with a cockpit with some bullet-proof glass, radar, etc, for the controller would protect it well. Now, of course, I'm just describing a smaller tank - soup it up a bit and you've got what you want.
Even better - if this is a sufficiently advanced society, construct some robots/drones and keep the human operators at home to control them. The U.S. is already doing something similar with some drones.
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Maybe you can make this gas highly electromagnetic. Now the armor filled with this gas will be lighter around particular areas where electric charge of the surface on the planet is positive.
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## **Partially**
Have a look at bird [bones](http://projectbeak.org/adaptations/skeletal_hollow.htm).
They have hollow bones. As the metalfoam answer suggests, having a lot of tiny pouches reduces weight. If you have a look at modern strut designs for stages, you can see the principle behind the bones enlarged.
I dont know your scenario but here are some ideas,
* a special bird, like the emu, could have very hard bones (metal, maybe some handwavium bio compound). Warriors have to slay a bird to get to the ribcage.
* special tree that incorporates a metal inside of its wood. if you burn the wood, it results in a metal object of the shape of the wooden object. The wood inside the metal pockets become gaseous.
* 3d printed metal objects, but to give the printer head something to support the printed mesh, small ice crystals are deposited. During the baking process, these turn to your special gas
That way, you still can have your special gas allthough it wont have that big of an impact. Perhaps, it becomes rigid if a certain pressure threshold is reached?
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If your handwavium gas is a compount of gravity-negatium (say for the sake of chemistry handwavium gas is gravity-negatium pentahydride) and gravity-negatium has a nucleus that really massively is repelled by normal mass... and ignoring the fact that all the handwavium would have scooted up out of the atmosphere just as fast as it could... you could make a suit of armour that had no weight at all.
But as others have pointed out, it would still have mass. You could stand up in your brass/handwavium armour that masses 1 tonne, but the amount of power needed to get a single leg moving would be akin to towing sacks of sand. And once it was moving, it wouldn't readily stop. So if my some miracle you got your leg moving, you'd have to expend the same amount of energy to stop it when you put your foot down for the next pace. And if my some miracle you got yourself running at full charge towards the enemy, you'd be like an oil tanker with a five mile stopping distance.
Effectively, you would be about as mobile as if you were standing inside a pill-box, great for getting in the way of things but useless for fighting.
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You haven't specified the "hardness" of the setting. In a hard setting , the lightest gas is vacuum and it doesn't have enough lifting power. If on the other hand this is a fantasy setting like Discworld, where materials can have negative weight(or a sci-fi setting with a Handwavium gas that experiences gravitational repulsion), then yes it would help. Your armor would be very difficult to get moving and stop moving, since the reduced grip of your feet would be totally out of proportion to the momentum of the armor.
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Material strength comes from its molecular and/or microscopic structure. Metals are malleable crystals with a strong yet flexible structure that can withstand significant impact forces partially due to the structure's ability to diffuse the impact's energy mechanically, so they're well-suited for armor applications. Of course the density of this structure and the weight of the atoms themselves make the material quite heavy.
If you can replace heavier atoms/molecules with lighter ones, it will make the material lighter, but those atoms/molecules most likely won't fit into the metal's crystal lattice as nicely as the ones being replaced, or if they do they probably don't offer the same flexibility - making the structure more rigid and the material harder and/or more brittle. The structure has been compromised, so the effectiveness of the armor is reduced.
If you can make that exchange without losing the benefits of that crystalline structure, *or if you can reorganize the material into an entirely new structure with similar properties*, then you'll manage a lighter material without losing strength. One example of this, fresh in my mind as I just answered another unrelated question with the same example, is aerogel.
Aerogel starts as a semi-liquid gel. By "drying" it (i.e. chemically removing the liquid from it so only the solid components remain) through a meticulous process, the resulting material is usually far stronger than the original and only retains a tiny fraction of the original mass. This strength is due entirely to the structure that the solids form as the liquids are removed. In fact, it doesn't benefit or suffer much at all from whatever gas or vacuum may fill the voids within these structures.
Aerogels can be made from a variety of materials, including some metals (or rather their oxides). There are also some similar materials, e.g. made of vapor-deposited carbon nanotubes, which are sometimes incorrectly called aerogels but still provide the kind low-mass/high-strength ratio you're looking for.
Handwavium could enable this or analagous processes (probably also hand-waved to some extent) to produce similar materials suitable for armor plating.
Note that aerogels form extremely effective thermal insulation, so covering a tank in it for example would require special considerations for keeping its internals and personnel cool enough to function.
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[Question]
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Cauldrons are items in the form of large pots that witches use to make potions. These items contain the magical energies resulting from the brew and the chemicals used to create it. These magical energies can seep into the cauldron over the course of numerous generations. As the pots absorb the runoff of numerous potions being brewed in them, they ultimately become magical themselves. This makes the potions made within them more powerful and potent, with the cauldron adding its own power to the contents of the brew. This makes the oldest cauldrons incredibly valuable to witches, with these items being passed down to each generation over hundreds of years through a coven.
Newer cauldrons lack the history and usage of these ancient cauldrons, and lack the slow buildup of magic that their counterparts have developed over the centuries. As such, they are just normal pots used as containers for brewing potions. However, potions that are made within recently built cauldrons brew faster, making the process of potion making quicker. This has led to a competing market where cauldrons can be bought and sold, dependent on the potential needs of an individual. However, the situation seems counter-intuitive. If older cauldrons have built up magic over many centuries, it stands to reason that brewing potions within them would speed up the process and make it more powerful, with the cauldron adding its own magic to the potion and maxing it up. As it turns out, a cauldron that isn't magical at all due to its recentness is more likely to win out in this regard. How can this be the case?
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**Cross-contamination**
"*As the pots absorb the runoff of numerous potions being brewed in them...*" sounds like a contamination problem with old potion residue working at cross-purposes to each other. One could never quite get all the residue gone using historical cleaning techniques because of the magical nature of potions and so back then witches actually had to be quite careful about the order in which they brewed potions in; imagine brewing a curse potion and then a love potion in the same cauldron back-to-back, oof. (Some especially skilled witches used these contamination effects to put extra twists into their potions but it was always a dicey business. Nowadays, that would never get past the FDA, EMA, or other local modern regulatory agencies regulating the brewing of potions for human, etc. consumption.)
Brewing in a clean cauldron does not benefit from leftover magical energy stored in the cauldron but also does not suffer from accumulated potion residue interfering with the current potion being brewed, making the brewing process quicker and less finicky. Optimally one would only use each cauldron only for a specific type of potion to get the best of both worlds but that is too expensive outside of industrial scale witchcraft facilities.
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**Power is proportional to brewing time, but only to the capacity of the cauldron.**
It's not that a newer cauldron can make *the same* potion faster, it can make a *weaker* potion faster. This is because a cauldron imbues magical power the longer you cook the brew, but only up to a certain point. In a new cauldron with little magical energy, you may exhaust the magic after brewing for just a few minutes - continued preparation time won't make the brew any stronger. In a very old and powerful cauldron, however, one can brew the potion for days on end and have it increase in power the whole time. But while both cauldrons are in their functional time period, magic is imbued at the same rate - at the end of a few minutes' brew, both the new and old cauldrons produce identical results.
A witch could use an old cauldron to brew a weak potion very quickly, but that's a complete waste of an old cauldron, as old cauldrons are the only thing you can use to make a strong potion. It's not that old cauldrons can't brew things quickly, it's that they're usually reserved for things that take longer to brew. Newer cauldrons prepare potions more quickly, but the product is inferior - you can brew a weak potion in a new cauldron quickly, or a more powerful version in a old cauldron at the cost of more time.
In a way, it's analogous to why you wouldn't age a crappy wine for a short period of time in a fine oak barrel - it's a poor use of a good barrel. If you observe that wines aged for a short period of time are aged in "bad" barrels, you might suspect that bad barrels age wine faster, but the true reasoning is that you wouldn't use a good barrel to age something for a short period of time in the first place. The choice of barrel doesn't change the aging time, but the aging time informs the choice of barrel. Similarly, a new cauldron doesn't brew potions faster, but you would only ever make a fast-brewing potion in a new cauldron and not an old one, since the old cauldron has better uses.
As an additional bonus, using the new cauldron makes it more powerful. The per-use cauldron improvement from brewing a potion may diminish over time, so as cauldrons get more powerful, it becomes more difficult to make them *even more* powerful. Brewing 10 potions each in a brand new cauldron will imbue more total power than brewing 10 potions in one old cauldron, further bolstering the reason why you'd want to use a new cauldron for non-complex, quick-brewing recipes.
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**Technological advances**
Just because magic is involved, doesn't mean that technology can't play a part. In particular, advances in materials might make a superior cauldron. Traditionally cauldrons were made of cast iron, but iron has magic-inhibiting properties; fancy new cauldrons made of aluminum doesn't have that problem. Aluminum itself isn't new of course, but until recently it was cost prohibitive to make something as large as a cauldron from it. Further advances are being made by the witch-tech industry, experimenting with alloys incorporating silver and gold that further enhances the circulation of magic within the pot.
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**Ever wonder why really strong potions take so many more ingredients?**
It is because the brewer has to compensate for the residue from previous brewings. The older the pot, the more balancing has to take place. This requires a very experienced practitioner. But the results are worth it! The additional ingredients, potion complexity and layers, as well as the residual magic and added brewer focus produce the very best results. Anybody can brew a love potion in a new pot. And most can brew about anything in their own pot because they know the history. Those who pass on the tradition and pot genealogy through family lines can produce remarkable results. But only the truly practiced can react on the fly to unexpected changes that can occur while brewing in an old and unfamiliar pot. And even fewer will have the necessary ingredients on hand to supply such variety as may be required. There are hallowed tales of times when several brewers joined together, each with their own knowledge and ingredients to, on rare and special occasions, produce magic potions of legendary power.
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**The magic messes up the reaction speed of the ingredients**
The cauldron is basically an environment where a group of reagents are kept, at peculiar ratios and providing some external energy (the fire below), in order to mix and create a suitable potion.
Of course, not all the reagents will be able to combine: even if their [stoichiometric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoichiometry) ratios are 100% precise, you will hardly have a 100% outcome, because not all the reagents will have the chance to come to contact and have the chemical reaction.
This process usually follows an exponential decay: at the beginning there are a lot of unreacted ingredients, so their combination is very fast, but after a while, the density of the ingredients decreases, so they take longer to react.
Without magic, the process is straightforward: add ingredients, light the fire, and after two hours, the majority of the ingredients will react and create a potion.
Because of the exponential nature of the reaction, keeping the potion in the cauldron longer would be a diminishing return: after 4 hour, a smaller quantity of the remaining ingredients will react, so that your potion will be - say - only one tenth stronger, rather than two times stronger.
But if the cauldron retained some magic, this is no longer the case: the magic (somehow acting like [Maxwell's demon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon), slowing down the reaction at first, then keeping it going later) will modify the reaction speed making it linear, so that if after 2 hours the potion will be weaker (less ingredients have been able to react with respect to the "muggle" cauldron), after 2 hours it will be twice stronger, and so on till the complete transformation of all the ingredients.
Basically, the cauldron without magic could in reality provide a potion of the same strenght as the magic one (once all the ingredients have been able to react), but this would be possible only in a timespan of some weeks, while the magical cauldron could give the maximum powered potion after one day. But if you want a lesser potion, the first cauldron will provide it faster than the magic one.
Of course in such scenario, the difference between a weaker potion (enough ingredients have reacted) and a strong potion (all ingredients have reacted) would be in the order of 70% vs 100%, so not a very strong one.
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**Pots are like barrels for wine.**
Old pots store the magic of the previous brews and slowly seep it out into to potion you are currently making. If you know what you are doing and the history of the pot, then you can use that to infuse and strengthen your potions with all kinds of funky, "fermented" attributes that newer pots simply lack.
Newer pots however do not fight you along the way. You do not have to clean and decurse them. Emotions like love or lust can't seep into the newt-potion (unless you want to, of course). No memories from old victim's hair, no accidental love-hate potion. You do not need antidotes for that kind of stuff, because the pot had no time to accumulate them yet. And no antidotes, no cleaning and no decursing means fewer steps in the brewing, so less time spent. It's just cleaner and faster.
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When reading your question I immediately thought of something else. Your question would be similarly valid if you changed "cauldron" to "cast-iron skillet" and "potion" to "cornbread". I'll answer in terms of a cooking analogy both because I think the same logic applies and because now you've made me hungry.
My family has a cast-iron skillet that we inherited from my grandmother. It has seen over 60 years' worth of use. It's *well*-seasoned, and even pre-boxed cornbread mix comes out fluffy and delicious. I absolutely love that thing, I swear it must be magical by now.
A while back, I found this new thing at the grocery store. It's a little plastic cup that you add water to the contents, microwave for a couple of minutes, and you end up with a single-serving cornbread muffin.
The newfangled instant cornbread is an order of magnitude faster than using the skillet. The results, however, are much drier than the skillet version, the texture is spongy instead of crumbly, and the flavor lacks all the subtle nuances that I'm accustomed to. Some people don't really care about any of that or can't taste the difference and just want some cornbread without a lot of fuss. If that's you, then you'll probably be fine with the instant option. If you want the type of rich flavor that you can enjoy by itself or as an ingredient in other dishes, then you really need to pull out the skillet and make it the traditional way.
Your cauldrons are no different. Newer cauldrons might make potions *faster*, but there's a lot more to the process than speed alone. A hastily brewed potion will give you the general effect that you're going for, but anyone who has experienced real, traditionally-made potions will tell you that it's not *really* the same. You get so much more out of using the traditional methods and a well-seasoned cauldron. Sometimes you want the highest-quality potion you can make, and other times you just need something quickly that more or less gets the job done. Different tools for different situations.
It's up to you what potion quality might mean in your world. There are lots of knobs you can turn: effect duration, potency, yield, amount or severity of side effects, shelf life, suitability for use as a reagent, aftertaste, ingredient type/quantity, etc.
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If you have ever tried to beat the egg whites, you know that any trace of oil/fat in the container will make the task impossible: it needs to be clean and fat free.
Or have you ever drank water from a glass where there was some beer or wine? You will still taste/smell the beer/wine.
Something similar happens with these cauldrons. For some specific usage, a new, clean one is much better or there is no alternative at all to it in order to achieve the desired result.
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**New Cauldrons=Better Conduits**
Cauldrons are used to brew potions *because* they are made of metal, which is a natural conductor of electricity, heat, and magic. Thus, when one is brewing a potion in a cauldron, the reaction between metal and cauldron causes the potion to become magical, to gain the charge necessary to be more than just a funky broth.
The cauldron is essentially acting as a circuit, transferring magical power from itself to the potion, and new cauldrons harness the released energy of the potion brewing inside it as well, making the potion ready faster while also increasing potency. Thus, for maximum speed and potency (with minimal fuss), an absolutely fresh cauldron is best.
Older cauldrons retain traces of the magic that's gone through them, much like how certain metal cookware will develop patina, which influences the potion and makes it takes longer to brew. However, since the cauldron is adding *to* the magic of the potion, not just transferring magic from somewhere else (the wand stirring the potion, the magic fire heating it, etc.) to the potion, a beautiful synergy results that makes stronger potions. However, these potions are certain to have additional effects, to go beyond the limits of a normal potion's effect, which can be problematic.
Cauldrons made with newfangled 'stainless' metals act like fresh cauldrons and can never gain the synergical effects of an older cauldron, but brew potions faster and cleaner, while older, conventional cauldrons make stronger potions with extra effects.
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## Different materials have different "magical indexes"
Traditionally cauldrons were cast of relatively pure iron. Due to it's nature, these cauldrons were most absorptive and transformative of the magic contained in potions brewed within. Newer techniques in metal working have allowed the creation of wrought iron (note I mean the alloy here, not worked iron) and steel cauldrons. These alloys reduce the absorptive and transformative effects upon the potions, resulting in faster brew times, but less potent potions.
Note that in this model well used iron cauldrons do "cook" faster after they've been properly seasoned, if a harmonious potion is being brewed within them, but the first brew will probably take WAY longer than usual. A steel cauldron on the other hand will brew fast on the first brew, because it absorbs very little of the magic of the potion, but also because of this never gains much in the way of harmonious enhancement for future brews. Wrought iron cauldrons on the other hand offer a nice compromise, though they do tend to lose their magical attunement if they aren't used for a while.
Many witches will have 3 cauldrons, a large iron cauldron for important brews (due to the length of time required these are in near constant use), a medium size wrought iron one for seasonal or large batch brews (300 sleeping droughts to put a whole castle to sleep), and a small steel one for rush jobs.
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Powerful magic doesn't just build up like water filling a barrel — if it did, it would eventually overflow the cauldron, and they would reach an upper limit. Instead, it also "thickens" into a denser form, resulting in a lower [flux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux) — so it takes longer to seep into the potion. This is why experienced magic users will tell you that it "feels heavier" or "more sluggish", and takes longer to get going. (But is equally hard to stop once it does, well worth the wait!)
As a non-magical equivalent, using a new cauldron with "unseasoned" magic is like pouring sugar-water into a bowl. Using an old cauldron with potent magic is like pouring molasses/treacle. The most ancient and revered cauldrons are like trying to [pour pitch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment).
There are, of course, ways to speed up the transfer — equivalent to warming the molasses or pitch — but you have to be careful that this doesn't ruin the *other* requirements for the potion.
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In ancient times, potions were developed mostly by trial and error, based on known properties of several key ingredients. Why, exactly, a potion might require slow stirring, fast stirring, or no stirring at all; or several reheatings at carefully measured intervals; a large flame, or several smaller flames; and so on, was not understood. An experienced Potion Master would know what alterations to try and what could be reasonably expected to happen, and the same potion could be brewed in a dozen different ways, leading to stronger or weaker brews, slower or faster completion, or even saving on some specific expensive ingredients.
With the flourishing of the modern Potions science, careful experimentation led to the concept of "critical volume" - in any brewing, at the culmination point, there is a volume inside the total potion mass where the raw ingredients blend and absorb the *mana* from the enchantments, the cauldron itself, and the innate ingredient qualities. This volume is defined by precise conditions of pressure, density, viscosity, and temperature (which is why some potions can't be brewed at all in cauldrons too small or too large).
Immediately after the culmination point, the activated potion dilutes in the total potion mass, resulting in what is actually an inferior brew. The critical to total volume ratio is the *brewing efficiency* of the process, which depends on the wizard's ability, the cauldron's potency, **as well as the cauldron's physical properties**. And here finally is where modern metallurgy comes into play: a modern cauldron allows a better thermal stability, and a larger volume where the critical conditions are fully attained together; so, while the cauldron potency is less, the increased brewing efficiency more than compensates for this loss.
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The material of new cauldrons acts as catalyst that speeds up chemical processes in brewing. In process of brewing this catalyst leaks into potions, but on other hand particles responsible for magic replace them. Thus the effectiveness of catalysation process slows down as cauldron is used more and more, but magic stored in cauldron starts to build up.
Or maybe there is some polymerization process that locks up magic in catalyst thus changing the cauldron and allowing more efficient build up of magic in process, but the catalyst isn't as effective anymore.
Now why some industrious brewer hasn't thought of just adding tiny shavings of new cauldrons to mix every time? Maybe if the concentration in potion is too high it becomes harmful. Or the catalyst would stay effective after brewing process thus resulting spoilage potion as it over develops.
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Old cauldrons are too heavy / rough for modern induction stovetops, and the stored magic can interfere with the induction. A newer cauldron on a modern induction stovetop can be brought to a boil faster than an old cauldron, even on gas.
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## Grill vs. slow cooking
Simple thinks may work fast but for best result usually are needed much more complicated ways.
You can put pice of meat on grill and be done with it in a minute. Some may like that, but it is nearly charcoiled on outer and nearly raw in middle and all spice is just on top of it. If you put the same meat to marinade, then cook it in big ceramic pot on low heat for hours, then the meat is cooked equally inside and outside, the taste of spices had reached its insides too and the meat is totally different after the whole process.
Now think about Potion of Love - if you are desperate with no time and skill, sometimes even technical ethanol+some watter may bring some temporary results (or not), but good old wine and candles are usually better and combination of strong alcoholic drinks, juices, fruits in combination with sunset, nice weather, soft music and sea may work even better and last for full night, but it is still nothing in comparation with true Potion of Love, that work for whole life. But sometimes just the technical ethanol+some watter is good enought.
But cooking Potion of Love by putting some kind of igredient to a cup and microwave it for few minutes, until it boils may bring something - probably something with terible chemical result and way more side effects, than the desired result. Why it is so is simple - there is no magic, no work, no fire element, no internal resonation - just some fool chemistry.
For true magical Potion you need those ingredient carefully selected, deep magical background and both knowledge and practice of the witch and it had to be boiled in cauldron on a real and life fire (which adds its natural magic too) for sufficiently long time, so all the mixing and timed adding of ingrediets can create something magical. (Automatization would not work for obvious magical reasons)
Now if you have old cauldron, which was used this way many times over the years, all the magic around it would soaked in and slowly transform it to actually magical item. Using the same approach would fix in and helps to harmonise the process of magical transfer according it user personality - so it is also the reason, why cauldons are usually inherited by child of the original owner (or somebody else, who helped for years with working the cauldron, is accustomed to the style and the cauldron is already harmonised whit her/him).
Fire magic if fierce and fast and the cauldron is one of way to tame it and use it more consistent and harmonised way inside the potions. Old cauldrons are especially good at it, as they are trained by generations of witches to do so. So they feel a lot heavier then their weight really is and they resist to fierce fire and accumulate its power to slowly transfer it inside in harmonised way, where the "tamed" fire power oscilates in the whole potions consistently, taking the best out of ingredients and trasforming it really strong and elaborated potion. But it taks a lot of time to hamonise all those flowers, eyes, liquides, fire, will and magic. So the potion is in the end really well prepared, but it takes way longer until it even start boiling, not mentioned until the fire magic is fully and flawlessly merged inside.
On the other hand new caulron is not much more, that metalic pot, which simply distributes the fire power somehow around its content, not caring how. It is also the reason, why new cauldrons are more prone to singe some ingredients, if not constantly stirred. Old pots prevents that usually.
That results to new pots to transfer the heat and the magic of fire inside a way faster, but also a way less coordinated and effective way. With good skill, lot of stirring and some practice you can make a potion in it faster, but it would not be so harmonical, potent and elaborated, as is possible to get from old, trainded cauldron.
Many times it is still "good enought", sometimes the time is even so crucial factor, that you accept all other problems and sideeffects, like when you are making a lot of healing potions for already wounded fighters in war.
If you are making Potion of Love just for trade, it is ok, if it would "works for any two, who will drink it together from one cup" and over years affected man would lose some more hairs and woman get some more weight, so new cauldron fits well.
But if you want to make Potion of Love to bind specifically princess Eleanora to prince Fernando and nobody else, then there is no place for "any two" or some sideffects, so the choise is straighforward ...
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Consider the iron core of a transformer. It itself cannot generate a magnetic field, but it can *channel* a magnetic field and it can become magnetized.
What I'm about to say isn't true, but sounds good enough to maybe be true:
If the iron core isn't magnetized, then there is no pre-existing field to compete with the applied magnetic field. When you apply an external magnetic field, with no competition, the magnetic field flows faster but you're limited to the applied field itself.
With age, the iron core becomes magnetized. Its field will now compete with applied fields, which limits the rate of change of the applied magnetic field, like an [inductor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductor). This means it takes longer for the applied field to come up to full strength, but when it does you have the combined fields of the applied external field and the magnetized iron core's field.
Again, not true at all, but sounds passable.
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**A new cauldron can absorb more excess magic**
Before a potion is considered complete, the chemicals and magic within them have to stabilize and reach equilibrium, so that the magic from one ingredient does not overpower another. During this stabilizing time, some excess magic is produced as ingredients react with each other. This adds some instability and causes the brew to take longer to reach equilibrium.
A new cauldron, being effectively a blank slate, absorbs some of this excess magic before it can react with any of the ingredients. This makes it stabilize faster, but also slightly weakens the resulting potion. An old cauldron doesn't absorb a lot of magic, and compounds the problem by adding and mixing some old magic back into the potion. This causes more instability, which takes longer to go away, but results in a stronger potion in the end.
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**The cauldron's material is like a magic vacuum. Also magic-absorbed material can be affected by magic to be made more potent.**
The substance cauldrons are made out of is special. It is like a magic vacuum. It *wants* to be filled. Magic is practically drawn to it. If a brand new cauldron is filled with a bit of magic it wakes up and magic is drawn in explosively, but invisibly. You can't tell by looking at it how much magic is rushing in, but it is. The universe is trying to equalize between a reality brimming with magic and a magic-substance devoid of it (which all newly-made magic substances are.)
This lets potions go bad if not properly contained, the magic leaks out of them as a potion is nothing more than concentrated magic. It will slowly evaporate from the liquid if left to itself. If it's in the cauldron it will leak out into the world, but the cauldron having been in contact will have been acted on. Like a sponge it takes in magic, but doesn't release 100% of it. That extra bit doesn't just fill up pores of the cauldron, but changes the magical makeup of the substance itself.
Once tiny amounts of the cauldron are magic-filled-substance then less of it is magic-devoid. The pull of the vacuum isn't as strong as the last time, because it's more magical and less magic-devoid.
At first you'd think there would be an end to this at some point, once the cauldron's substance is entirely magic-filled that's the end of it. It can't become more potent. Well it can't brew potions any slower, that's for sure, but magic will still impart its effects on magic-filled substances too. This provides a lower bound for brewing speed, but no upper bound for brewing potency.
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**Pressure cooker!**
The technology advance brings us gastight cauldrons that can be boiled at higher temperatures.
The high pressure poses some dangers as well.
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### Potent magic comes from rich stories
If you pluck a hair from the chin of an orphan and add it to swamp water collected at midnight, throw in an inch of root of an ancient tree from a graveyard, and very slowly bring it to a boil while constantly sprinkling in powdered emeralds, then leave it to simmer for 8 days.... well, why does it take 8 days?
The answer is partly due to physical realities, like needing to soften and soak the root so its essence can dissolve in the water, but is also very much due to each ingredient *needing to tell its story*. The hair tells the story of a life of challenges; the root tells the story of all the people it has outlasted, the emeralds tell the story of millions of years of formation. The more complex the story, the longer it takes to "tell". That is why ingredients with unique origins yield more powerful magic. And need more brewing time.
Cauldrons hear countless stories from the ingredients that are put in them, and they retell these stories as each new potion brews. Not that these stories are told using words, or that ingredients and cauldrons have minds of their own—but just as the people we interact with slowly become part of us, and change us, so too do the mingling ingredients slowly take on a collective identity.
So, basically, old cauldrons take a lot more time to tell their stories, and this means it takes longer for a potion's ingredients to properly tell their own stories. Ultimately the potion ingredients are what determines what the potion can do, so if there isn't enough time for their history to become part of the potion, the potion will be useless. On the other hand, a cheap cauldron and cheap ingredients will be ready much more quickly, but the potion will be far less potent because it has very little character.
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## Old magic also adds contamination that has to be purified.
A old cauldron can make more powerful brews but the brews also take longer because the cauldrons magic contaminates the magic of the ingredients with echoes of past potions, these echoes need to be purified/processed out. which adds extra steps.
A new cauldron has no magic to add, so there is less magic in the potion, but it that also means the potion does not need to be purified of contaminating magic so the process is a lot faster.
this does mean an old cauldron that has only ever been used for brewing one specific potion would be both powerful and fast, but you could say the echoes are too erratic so they still need to be purified out.
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# Magic is an insulator
Old cauldrons soak in the magic. Magic they bleed back into the potions. This is good.
But magic also resists heat. This is bad. The pot heats of more slowly, so the potion cooks more slowly. Also, the magic distribution in the metal is uneven, so while one section of the pot is 100 degrees C, 5 cms away, the metal is only 90 degrees. This effects the cooking speed, and also means you need to stir it more to keep the temperature of the mixture even. Toil and Trouble indeed.
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A city was built in a location that's generally difficult to access (floating in the sky, on a remote island, on top of a mountain or something similar). The primary way of accessing it is by teleporting inside. In this world, skilled mages can teleport from anywhere, but only to a previously built "portal", in a similar way fast travel points work in video games. Small objects, such as food crates, can also be teleported to a "portal".
This city contains one such "portal" for all arrivals which functions in a way similar to real-world airports, with heavy security, customs checks etc. A "portal" can also be temporarily closed, which prevents anyone from arriving until it's reopened.
This makes any large-scale invasion impossible, but a devastating smaller scale attack still seems feasible: a group of enemy mages could coordinate to have everyone teleport at the same time and overwhelm the guards stationed near the "portal" before they have a chance to close it, then proceed to steal valuable artifacts / assassin a target / wreck havoc in some other way.
What mechanism (magical or otherwise) could effectively prevent this from happening?
My ideas so far were:
* Have teleportation require some sort of "key" (analogous to real-world entry visas) that needs to be in possession to make teleporting to this city possible. However, enemy mages could, over time, steal a sufficient number of these and invade. Or, if this "key" is somehow tied to a person (e.g. in their blood), it wouldn't stop a group of former allies who had a change of heart.
* Move this "portal" outside the city walls. While this makes a direct attack more difficult, it makes it easy for enemy forces to create a blockade and starve the city of vital resources that would come via this only entrance.
**Edit:** Just to clarify, the idea is not to make the city completely impervious to attacks of any kind, my main goal is to make use of this teleportation mechanic without worrying it introduces *new* types of attack that wouldn't otherwise exist. Things like infiltrations and insurgencies are still a very real threat.
**Edit2:** I see a few answers suggest changing the teleportation mechanic in some way. I'm generally open to that (e.g. adding a delay, requiring more elaborate conditions to be met etc), but one thing I don't want to change is the fact you can teleport *from anywhere*, as the original reason for introducing this mechanic was for the main characters to be able to access the city without having to explain how they managed to get back.
Regarding enemies building their own second "portal" after infiltrating the city: the assumption is that such a venture is possible, but extremely costly in terms of both materials and time and relatively easy to detect.
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A better question would be how to assault it using the portal. It seems like an unwinnable scenario for the attacker in my eyes.
Your "airport" has only one literal gate. To make sure everything goes as planned you likely have several rooms spiraling outwards to control the flow of traffic. Some rooms are for export of goods, some are import of goods with lots of checks, others are in/outflow of foot traffic. But all end up in the central portal chamber where they (somehow) are teleported to their destination or received and immediately led towards one of the outer rooms to make sure traffic can keep flowing.
Any army that teleports there will teleport into a room you control, surrounded by more rooms you control. This is basically the worst nightmare for any attacker: you appear right outside of the walls and can only attack one section while you are surrounded by said walls.
* the room will likely be large enough for gates to be closed before the attackers can reach them.
* even if attackers reach the outer rooms, those rooms will also be closed off.
* the ceiling will be high and filled with murder-holes, allowing rocks, boiling water and all that good stuff to be dropped onto the army below with little risk to the defenders.
* you could have siege equipment nearby, ready to be loaded and fired into the room at your leisure. Just imagine a few ballistas that fire through a narrow tunnel at midriff height in the walls, limiting the space the attackers can stand on.
* as part of the control of traffic a series of knee-high walls could be in place, these would incidentally make it a lot harder for attackers to bring and use siege equipment.
* the portal can be lowered into the ground.
* you could drop a few ton of flour and sawdust into the room, then light it, preferably from a distance. Dust explosions are incredibly dangerous in enclosed spaces.
There are any number of more things you could imagine. Holes in the floor for archers or spearmen to stab enemies through? A series of arrow slits for your defenders to rain death from? Indiana Jones style rolling rocks? Tilted floors to make any fight an uphill battle? Perhaps the portal itself is in a relatively small room and there are simply many hallways connecting to it, limiting the amount of people the attackers could bring in once those doors close?
In the end its pretty much a death sentence to try and attack such a fortification.
The only coordinated attack possible would be to smuggle soldiers through security one by one for months on end, then try to assault the defenders and take the fortifications so you can bring in the rest of your army. But then again, those same defenses will be hard to breach from the inside as well.
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## You are number [571] in the queue
To avoid overcrowding at this central portal, every person who teleports in is placed in a first in first out queue. The portal takes a certain amount of people in the queue in an interval and spits them out. In low usage times you might not be put on the queue at all, but in high usage times you will be delayed a few minutes. If there is an attack, then the portal no longer accepts teleports, and the queue is gone through one at a time until all the attackers are dead, and all the civilians are out of the queue. So long as the maximum people in the portal chamber can be killed by the gaurds, there is no way to overwhelm them.
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**City in the Sky**
You already solved your own problem. Have the portal in a room with trapdoors. At the first sign of trouble, simply pull the lever and everyone in the room gets a crash course on sky diving.
For a land based city, a deadly trap would have the same effect. Crushing roof, impaling spikes, flaming oil etc.
People can teleport in but they teleport into a killbox so they need to get out before they can overwhelm the guards.
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If this city is floating, on a high mountain or on an island, have the portal suspended over a long drop outside the city's defences against airborne attacks, accessible only via a long, narrow bridge. When necessary, a hoist can be swung out to lift goods into the city, but if the portal is used as the point of access for an assault, the attackers will find themselves on a platform, needing to cross the narrow bridge (whose balustrades may be made to be able to collapse by the defenders, making fatal falls highly likely) while potentially under fire from the defenders manning the main fortifications.
In order to prevent the attackers blockading the teleport target, the city should have at least three teleport targets, only one of which would be active at any time. In addition to deactivating a teleport target, these suspended target platforms could be made to be able to be physically turned upside down, so that once so turned, any attackers would be literally dropped from the platform.
There is always the problem of social engineering... attackers could kidnap some important people and try to use them as hostages in order to force entry or maintain a blockade, though even this has a potential solution, though it would require a siege mentality and a minimum of decades to prepare the populace:
Establish tradition and law in the city that hostages are legally dead, and that to be taken hostage or kidnapped is no different from being murdered, even if the body is still moving and talking or otherwise displaying the illusion of life. The hostage taker or kidnapper is legally responsible for their crime and whatever follows from it... so should hostages be held on a teleport target platform, and the defenders must dump them to their physical deaths along with the attackers, the attackers were responsible, and the hostages were already dead the moment that the attackers captured them, and the defenders were in no way culpable.
The other advantage of declaring a hostage to be dead is that should they escape or be released, they would have to prove their identity and loyalty to the city in order to be declared alive and to be trusted once again. This gives a good, socially acceptable reason to treat a potential Manchurian Candidate with suspicion.
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**No security is perfect.**
For every countermeasure you can think of to stop the invaders, there is a counter-countermeasure.
* Defenders: guards around the portal. Attackers: send in an elite crew of mages that can overpower the guards.
* Defenders: trapdoor floor, to drop threats en masse into the sky or a pit trap. Attackers: Make sure your mages can all fly, or one mage can lift everyone with telekinesis.
* Defenders: massive collapsing ceiling. Attackers: bring your mages in with a strong steel roll cage that can protect them against the ceiling.
* Defenders: boiling oil. Attackers: a spell to control oil, or freeze the oil.
* Defenders: put the portal at the bottom of a deep, deep mineshaft, near a lake. In case of attack, let the lake flood the mine. Attackers: water breathing spell, or bringing their own air.
The defenders would also need to worry about bombs or poison gas being teleported in. They would also need to worry about sleeper agents that could come in peacefully one by one over a long period of time, then organize once they are in the city in sufficient numbers.
The defenders also need to worry about portal denial. If the attackers can repeatedly cause enough havoc that the portal must be shut off, then the city will be starved of resources.
An ideal system could work like this.
* A very limited number of high-level trusted people are given magical keys, that let them teleport in from anywhere.
* Everyone else can only enter the city through checkpoints in other, friendly cities. The checkpoints have guards that pre-screen people before they can go through. The guards in the magic city are constantly scrying these checkpoints and in communication with them, so that if the checkpoint guards get overwhelmed by attackers, the guards in the magic city can shut off teleportation from that checkpoint only.
* There are traps at the checkpoints, and traps around the magic city portal.
* To enter the city from a checkpoint, a guard in the magic city must explicitly take action to allow it, for a brief window, based on his communication and scrying of that checkpoint. The default is that no one comes through.
It can *still* be compromised. Get enough traitors among the guards in the magic city, and anything is possible. It also does nothing against the sleeper agent plan - for that you need an intelligence service.
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**Only Activate the portal when needed**
Have the portal deactivated most of the time. Whenever someone needs to enter the city, they have to (magically?) send a message to customs and get approved for a time-slot. They're given a ~10 second window to teleport in before the portal is deactivated again. It's not particularly fast, and if there's a lot of people coming in there's a high chance that attempting to teleport will still get you in during someone else's window, but the guards will be better able to recognize problems (approved for 2 people and a crate but 5 people show up, everyone gets detained).
This doesn't prevent a careful strike team, but that could be limited by making the portal room smaller, so that only a few people can fit in it at a time. If they need to teleport a larger group, maybe one of the walls is movable, or there's a second portal that's always deactivated except when a large group needs to be teleported all at once.
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## Security checkpoints
Create a small station, isolated from the rest of the city (perhaps on a separate floating island or whatever), that anyone can teleport to. There, people are screened and confirmed to be little or no risk before being allowed to teleport on to the main city, which can only be teleported to via an authorized point on the station.
Only having one portal is somewhat of a choke point as well, so with this scheme you can have as many stations as you wish, as well as multiple portals on the city itself. Each station has a designated load it can support, and the portals in the city can only be accessed from the station.
Stations can be secured from hijacking via various measures to verify people before they are allowed to teleport on. Among these could be requiring the guards to enter passwords or scan their fingerprint/face/etc.
One final bonus: Having multiple portal points in the city means that while everyone teleports to one (or multiple) stations to make security easily, they can emerge at various points in the city, so you don't have people having to walk across the whole city to get to their final destinations.
Hope that helps!
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A thought inspired by real-world security: The key is a magical incantation that is determined by the portal itself, where the portal will reveal the code to the security on the portal side and security can evaluate whether to share the code with the applicant or not prior to their attempt to portal.
To portal in, the applicant needs to do a request-entry spell which will allow the city's security magic to scan their identity and location as well as some information on their surroundings, like what they have on their person and anything in a specific distance around them. This information is passed by the portal to mages on security, and a passcode for a single-use entry is generated for the applicant. If the mages on security are OK, they can share the code with the applicant, incorporating that code into the spell will allow the teleportation to work. The portal is configured that only the individual that cast the request-entry spell can use that code, anyone else using that code will be ignored. This would allow for pre-screening, and nobody knows in advance what the code will be since it is generated based off of information provided by the request-entry spell; and even if the code is shared to someone else it is useless because it is tied to the identity and time of the request. (inspired by SSL) The overall process is relatively time-consuming, but not necessarily more so than other customs processes, and makes forced entry near impossible.
Security measures like a kill zone etc. should still be in place in case someone is somehow able to use magic to pass false information to the magical scan, unless that magical scan is somehow "un-hackable".
Another note, relying on a single point of entry like this leads to another weakness, which is, if security becomes convinced the portal is the only way to get in could cause defensive measures to be relaxed against non-conventional assaults. A group of insurgents could come in under false pretexts and build their own portal inside the city, so any materials or incantations relating to portal building would need to be strictly controlled (which could be prohibitively difficult if the portal building material is commonly used for other magical purposes); Or, insurgents could just attempt to access "the hard way" by flying, digging etc.
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In the SG-1 series ( Stargate franchise ) the stargate require few minutes for activations, so on each side can prepare on a possible "passage".
Also on the earth side, there is a [protection](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Iris) and a way to close the stargate so an invasion or a not-scheduled passage can be blocked.
So an attacker cannot pass unnoticed, and large scale invasion are not possible.
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You can solve the problem with the "key" method by changing the type of "key" on a monthly basis, so that stealing a bunch over time doesn't work - keys rapidly become outdated.
As Allan pointed out, you can also limit the number of teleportations per unit time.
Alternatively, you can have the portal only open at certain times.
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## Lava traps.
Lava is able to solve most problems. Simply set up the portal room so it's in a fortified area with heavy teleport wards and set it so that someone outside the entry room can trigger a trap to dispel magic shields and drop several tons of lava ontop of everyone inside the room.
If they survive just bombard them with artillery magic from afar till they die.
## Limit the number of transports per second
Have each portal only allow in so many people, not enough to overwhelm the guards and the traps. If you have 6 people allowed in a minute (enough time for them to be scanned for weapons and bombs) that's enough time to let 10,000 people enter or leave. Once they pass the entrance scan, they can go to the more traditional airport security checks.
If security is heightened for some reason, you can only allow in 6 people per ten minutes. That gives enough time for a more detailed search and scan, and still allows 1000 people to enter.
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It's an interesting scenario, but it's a city. People need to come in and out all the time. Food needs to make its way in, and so does water and so do other basic necessities. Anyone can attack a city from within, it just takes longer. Move a bunch of people in one at a time over a period of a few months (or years) and then, at a prearranged time, have them converge on the portal room / city gates. It's been done since people learned how to build giant horses out of wooden planks.
The only way you can defend a city over the long term is by having it in a country that's fairly secure. An isolated city is pretty much undefendable.
A self-sufficient fortress, on the other hand, might be more defendable. I don't know what magic does in your world, but if it can attend to the necessities of the defenders over the long haul, all you need to do is suspect an attack, shut down the portal and live happily ever after.
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**Use a "firewall"** -> Prevent certain unknown or even unwanted individuals from porting into your city. Set up rules to who can or cannot teleport.
You could argue that, when teleportation is possible, the city could have some sort of telepathic link up running, sou you'd have to "call an operator" that whitelists you, like on an airport f.e. [ but since I don't know how you handle telephatic communication in your world, maybe this isn't for you ]
You could only allow teleportation FROM a well-known spot so that you could setup guards and checkpoints there.
Ultimatively, the harder something is to be reached, the more likely it will be it's attacked from the inside. While mages could not teleport there all at once, what exactly stops them from coming 1 per hour or something in the likes?
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The simplest solution would be to create choke points. Enclose the portal in a building which is sufficiently strong (physically and/or magically) to make a destructive or tunneling escape infeasible. Place the gate at one end of a hallway sufficiently long to allow security to recognize a flood attack and drop a portcullis in front of the gate before significant numbers of attackers can get through. (also drop a portcullis at the city end of the hallway to trap the attackers that did get in) Don't make the gate or hallway any wider than it needs to be for carts to get through, so as to limit the number of attackers that can be part of any beachhead established (so as to limit the number of participants in a destructive or tunneling escape). This will also limit the flow rate of attackers if the city loses control of the gate containment zone.
(A variation on the two portcullis set up would be to only ever allow one to be open at a time, so that people exiting the gate need positive action by the guards to actually enter the city and the gate is blocked when travelers are being allowed through the city end portcullis)
For a city of appreciable size, there would probably need to be multiple gates to allow sufficient throughput to satisfy your citizens needs. In order to avoid massive congestion at the gates, you would want to spread them around in your city. Set up some form of (magical or mundane) communication between gates so that if one is attacked, the others can take preemptive measures before they even see the attack arrive.
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## Scheduling For Success
The portal opens an closes based on a schedule.
Access to the portal is controlled via the schedule.
The portal is open from location xyz for a short amount of time
then it closes.
It continues through a schedule of open and closing and
cycles back to location xyz after a day, a week, a year, or something reasonable.
## One Bad Apple
The portal opens and closes per the schedule.
If,
for any reason,
there is a problem with a source location,
that location is forever removed from the schedule.
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Your real problem is that the portal changes the topology of warfare. What makes ancient war difficult is that you have to muster an army, get that army to where you want to attack, maintain supply for that army, and overcome resistance as you move around towards your objective.
This portal makes getting your army to the target really easy.
The British empire's dominance of the oceans meant its relatively tiny military force could be dropped off almost anywhere on the coastlines of the world, and be backed by heavy artillery from it ships. It turned this advantage into the largest empire the world has ever known.
Your island city basically has an undefendable port -- there is no way to notice the transports arriving -- that any force with enough mages can arrive with an army at. The larger the bandwidth of the portal, the larger the army that can arrive.
If the portal is only rarely used, then it can be secure.
If the portal is regularly used for high traffic trade, then it cannot be secure.
Surround the portal with defences, pointing towards the portal. Inside that defensive ring you have your clearing of customs and unloading of trade goods and the like.
That area is secure, in that it has police officers in it. Near the portal itself, you'd have another layer of defence; the ability to shut off the portal, and some local defences to buy time in the event of a major attack.
What you need is layers. A first layer that makes a small attack stupid -- the guards at the portal itself. A second layer that makes a medium sized attack stupid -- the forces within the portal customs area, and the people who can shut down the portal. A final layer that makes a massive assault stupid -- the equivalent of naval cannons aimed at the customs area, permitting a scorched-earth response in the event of a major invasion.
The fun part is that each of these layers will be subject to capabilities drift and decay. Only the layers that are tested regularly by hostile parties will work as well as expected, and those would be easy to study.
Also, the political costs of having the equivalent of huge naval cannons aimed at the merchants inside of the redoubt will grow.
---
Ideally, the ability to make keyed portals that only work from other portals would exist. Then you'd build land-based gateways, from which you can send things up to the island.
These land-based gateways could control the approaches around it, and prevent the ability to mass an army and teleport right next to your city in the sky. If and when a land-based gateway is under threat, you'd start massing countermeasures, or even shut down the gateway entirely.
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This is a very interesting question! I propose a few combined measures in an attempt to make a bulletproof system:
1. Isolate your teleported from the city proper, ideally by a small chokepoint which can be severed in case of emergency. For example, picture the Rainbow Bridge from the Thor movies.
2. Everyone teleporting must enter a stack and wait their turn in limbo before they are allowed to enter.
3. Magical pre-scanning. When people enter the teleporter, wizards scan them and assess their threat level. These wizards teleport weapons, magic artifacts, and other potential threats into a "Baggage Room". You can even teleport magically powerful travelers or warriors into a quarantine room for further screening.
4. Some sort of ID system. Essentially, citizens (who present a valid magical ID), enter the short queue. Outsiders who are not pre-cleared are sorted into random subrooms, and wait for longer.
5. A limbo room for added security. This should be a completed disconnected room (maybe a pocket dimension) where people are sorted and prove they are not threats. At the push of a button, any official in this room can sever the portal into the city itself.
6. Some sort of antimagic field / spell within the subroom and main room. That will keep people from playing hijinx.
7. Keep a wizard busy noting where people are teleporting in from. If a large group suddenly teleports in from a rival country, they can block further entrance from that area.
Another option is to only link with valid, trusted portals. They could use a sort of magical public key / private key system to authenticate. However, this isn't as flexible.
I hope this helps!
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I wanted to share the solution I'll likely go with. There's some fantastic answers here and this idea draws heavily from points others here made (thanks, y'all!). It's by no means perfect, but fits well into other aspects of my world and I wanted to share it in case anyone else can benefit from the idea.
## Teleportation can be undone until you leave the portal area
A portal, when open, creates a bubble that's a few meters in diameter (presumably, exact size can be tweaked during construction). Teleporting into it puts you in the middle of this bubble.
When the portal is closed, anything that arrived and hasn't yet left the bubble is "booted out" - the teleportation is undone and the person or object is teleported back to where they were prior to their attempt. This gives guards an easy, non-lethal way of dealing with a problematic situation that starts developing.
A few other thoughts on how this could work:
* The portal can be immediately reopened and continue normal operation.
* Objects larger than 1/2 of the bubble's volume can't teleport into it.
* I'm not sure what would happen if someone partially leaves the bubble, but I'd like to avoid a mechanism that would make people lose their limbs this way. One idea is to make the bubble have a surface tension and behave somewhat like a soap bubble, where it slightly extends when an object is leaving.
* Anyone can just walk into the bubble and wouldn't be affected if it's closed, this effect applies only to things that arrived by teleporting. This allows guards to inspect objects and interrogate people, if needed.
In practice, cities would probably want to build infrastructure that makes good use of this mechanism e.g.:
* The bubble can be fully contained in a room that's bomb-proof, magic-proof etc.
* The area where the bubble is has limited exits that can be used as choke points.
* The bubble can be in a location that's hard to leave on your own, e.g. suspended in the air on a platform, at the bottom of a large hole or something similar.
There are two alternatives / additions to this that I'm also considering:
* The bubble can somehow block or greatly reduce the effect of magic inside of it. This could prevent possible magical attacks and puts arrivals in a vulnerable position. As teleportation is also magical, this has the interesting side-effect of "trapping" arrivals until they're either cleared to enter the city or kicked out.
* Arrivals in the bubble can be incorporeal until they leave the bubble. This solves the problem of sending a bomb through and reduces risk for those arriving. It also removes the issue of the portal being "full". However, it also raises new questions around how being incorporeal works and how exiting rematerializes you.
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well, you have lots of input on this already, but some pragmatic points
there will never be just one portal.
reason 1: the need to bring in freight requires quite a different design than for people. Food needs to come in a continuous stream that cannot be interrupted for irregular personnel transport, and big things need a portal much larger than a person that will thus be much more expensive to operate.
reason 2: differences in rank of people arriving mean corresponding levels of finery in the arrival chambers.
reason 3. you will never avoid the power of money. The rich and powerful will want private entrances that give them the privacy they need to take advantage of their inferiors.
reason 4. security or intelligence organisations will need portals they control for clandestine access.
My conclusion is the most effective attack will be a fifth column or Trojan horse variation. Smuggle the people who can build a new portal into the city, or ship in something big enough to contain a pre-fabricated portal, set it up in a space big enough for a commando team assemble and prepare for their attack(s).
Using a portal that handles regular traffic will have many bigger problems to overcome for an attack using it (them) than the difficulty of getting a pirate portal into operation.
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It seems to me that, by default, you can not have two entities teleport in simultaneously — that, if they did, something terrible would happen, such as them occupying the same space and both/each ending up as entirely something else. That is, it must not be possible. (If, conversely, the portal did support simultaneous arrivals, it would be very dangerous.)
Thus, if this is a stable portal used for a high frequency of transfers (or maybe even a low one), it is going to have to be set up to support only one transfer at a time. (Since mages can teleport from anywhere, it is not apparent how any management system could be used… apart from an exclusive “now” token magically offered by the portal. The outcome is the same; simultaneous arrival is bad.)
(I suppose that you could have it that the internal workings of the portal mean that things arriving simultaneously (from different places) exclude each other physically in the same way as in normal space… but then you are discarding this useful constraint.)
The rest is obvious; mages simply can not arrive simultaneously (and if they contrive to anyway, it will not go well for them).
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All an attacker has to do is send in one person infected with a highly contagious lethal disease, and this city could be toast. They wouldn't even have to send a person - just an unassuming small package covered with the disease.
Attackers could also perform a denial of service attack. So many people try to crowd the portal at once that no one can get through. If this is the best (only?) way into or out of the city, it could pose a serious problem.
And as you mentioned, siege. If there's only one way in and the outsiders can figure out how to block it, everyone inside will starve in short order.
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Security of any sort is essentially an arms race. The defender is trying to make it more costly for the attacker to succeed. The higher the value of the target, the more motivated the attacker, and thus the more costly the defender has to make the attack. This applies equally to medieval siege warfare as to contemporary network security.
Pretty much all the other answers here illustrate this principle.
However, the "value of the target" is in the eye of the attacker. So if the attacker's goal was (for example) assassination, defenses against an all-out attack, or even a raid, would be ineffective.
One way to increase the cost to almost any attacker would be to make closing the portal also shut down the ability for mages in the region to teleport away to other portals. This would mean that any attack on the city would almost certainly be suicidal, since the attacking force could then neither retreat, nor expect reinforcements.
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You want a small defending force to be able to suppress a much larger attacking force. And, you have total control of the surrounding architecture.
*Or, ["Tucker's Kobolds"](https://media.wizards.com/2014/downloads/dnd/TuckersKobolds.pdf) design an airport!*
## Defensive fortifications: Create a gauntlet (maze)
To exit the portal area, everyone must take a serpentine path for 2km (1 mile) to exit the teleport area. For most people, it's just the "airport shuffle" we all know. Walk a mile and you're out.
But for invaders, it's a gauntlet. The entire route is fortified, impenetrable, and lined with weapons placements appropriate to the age/tech. Boiling oil, machine gun nests, whatever.
But worse, everywhere in the gauntlet is *[in enfilade](https://zombie.fandom.com/wiki/Enfilade_and_Defilade)* to the weapons emplacements *all the time* - fully exposed with no hiding places - no cover. While the defenders sit in their fortifications, laying waste to the attackers with impunity.
Of course the gauntlet is decorated, and festooned with food carts and vendors, to make visitors feel welcome and so it isn't *obviously* a killing zone. But all that stuff, from the information boards to the mead vendor, is designed to be utterly flimsy, or even booby-trapped. So that it's useless - or worse than useless - as cover.
So at the first hint of trouble, the port sounds the alarm and *everybody* from warriors to food vendors steps up to the battlements and rains hellfire onto the invaders.
Regular travelers get features to break up the seemingly long walk. For instance after 1/4 the distance, there's Immigration. Another 1/4 there's Customs. A quarter after that there's money changers, tourist info, anything to make people stop and catch their breath.
## Stop sprinters, though
The only attack plan that makes sense is to *sprint* the entire run, do nothing to defend (no place to hide anyway). And you don't want it to be a "foot race" between attackers sprinting the gauntlet vs. defenders coming to readiness.
So you need to slow attackers down. Make them weave around rolled-down logs, spike traps, fires, anything you can do. Those things aren't there to kill them, just slow them down to increase they are in enfilade, and give the defenders longer to crew up if that's an issue.
The design of the vendors could well be part of that - think "like an IKEA store".
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The portal is disposable, after it is used, the entire portal is itself teleported to a destruction portal built upside down over a volcano, from which the disposable portal tumbles down into the flames.
Therefore all key are one time keys.
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The main weakness of a city that's difficult to enter is, it's conversely easy to besiege. Even if no attacker could get in, cutting off the only supply route into the city would be very easy, with potentially devastating consequences.
Any kind of unique entry point can easily be disabled. Attackers could teleport all sorts of nasty stuff into your portal whenever they pleased (giant spiders, poisonous goo, bombs...) and render it so bloody dangerous a potential visitor would think twice before using it and the flow of goods would be hopelessly disrupted.
Besides, since teleportation is possible from anywhere but the destination requires a portal, the attackers would be practically impossible to stop. Even if you added some rule to your magic system allowing to trace back the origin of the teleport, the attackers would only have to move to some remote location, giving them ample time to scamper off before you could come at them yelling and panting from the nearest available portal :D.
So a determined attacker could disable your portal for days or months on end without any practical means for you to retaliate or put a stop to it.
To avoid such a disaster, you would need serious stockpiles and other, severely controlled and restricted portals dedicated to vital supply, only manned by trusted guards and logistics workers, to make sure your citizen would still have enough to drink and eat regardless of the availability of the "visitors" portal.
Plus maybe some emergency exits for a last resort evacuation of the whole population, since teleportation is only available to skilled mages.
Now to answer your question, I would create intermediate checkpoints.
A checkpoint would be a simple room in some remote location (maybe deep underground or in the middle of the sky) containing three portals:
* the arrival portal, that would be switched off while visitors and/or goods are inspected
* an exit portal sending the contents of the room into the city.
* another exit portal sending the contents of the room some safe faraway place
These exit portals would be under the control of some guards and inaccessible directly (well, that's what magic is for, isn't it?) so nobody could set foot in your city without the assent of a guard.
If your magic allows, the guards could operate these rooms remotely (using astral projections, summoned creatures, crystal balls...), controlling the flow in and out in total safety, blocking the arrivals long enough to perform any check they like, then allowing harmless visitors and goods into the city and sending anything suspicious to some meadow in the middle of nowhere or a bottomless pit, depending on how much you value the life of a hapless civilian caught in the crossfire.
At best the attackers could blow up a checkpoint by sending some kind of bomb set to explode immediately after teleportation, but that would still not harm the city itself.
In a world with cheaper magic, you'd need to have guards physically present, willing to be blown up with the checkpoint, which might reduce the efficiency of the system (a cowardly guard might be threatened into letting an attacker in).
You could multiply these checkpoints to adapt the throughput of your system, possibly having a row of portals leading into your city, like a supermarket checkout.
Obviously any kind of undetectable attack (poison, disease, traitors, well hidden bomb or weapons, sleeper agents...) would still have some chance of success, no matter how many checkpoints you pile on top of each other.
] |
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[
I've got a story I've started, and realized I have no explanation as to why the main character has a wearable flamethrower. Right now, I'm leaving it as 'He's a youtuber who makes stupid stuff so people will watch and give him money', but would like the explanation to be less unique to him so that I can later have him fight another guy with a wearable flamethrower in an epic boss fight carefully timed with some fast paced music.
The time is about twenty-thirty years ahead, a small mars colony and moon base, but no space travel beyond that. Technology has managed to advance a bit, and the world has degenerated a little bit, with the richer people looking kinda like the guys from WALL-E on AXIOM(fat people who sit in hover chairs watching funny cat videos all day), and lower classes doing a lot of dangerous jobs in unsafe conditions. So, no OSHA.
I can't think of anything off the top of my head that would require a wearable flamethrower, but let me know if you think if something.
EDIT- to avoid confusion, the character is on earth. not the mars/moon colony.
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Could it be that this is high SF, and social commentary?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6QG8D.jpg)
(Picture from [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20220704154940/https://www.sportsmansoutdoorsuperstore.com/products2.cfm/ID/31854/de50tgts/magnum-research-desert-eagle-.50-a.e.-mark-xix-titanium-gold-with-tiger-stripes))
What possible use could a person have for a golden pistol that shoots bullets the size of a woman's thumb? There is no use, except the awesomeness. And they are sold out so awesomeness must be enough.
Plenty of people collect guns and are passionate about them. These guns are often totally impractical for any use which is part of the charm. I personally feel that guns only is too limiting and that the collection of lethal things should be expanded to include things like rocket launchers, plastic explosives, nerve gas and the like. That would be for people too nervous to collect venomous snakes and lion/tiger hybrids, and venomous snake/lion/tiger hybrids on 400 horsepower motorcycles.
In your world people collect lots of awesomely and pointlessly dangerous things, for the same reasons people do in real life. The flamethrower guys get into a fight because each one feels that the other flamethrower suit guy is a total poser and unworthy of his suit.
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## Farmers
Farmers commonly use flame throwers for clearing fields and brush. they kill weeds and their seeds as well as pests.
tractor mounted flamethrowers even exist.
## Forestry service
Forestry services often use flamethrowers for setting back fires, and clearing brush.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gO2FA.jpg)
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Bees and wasps and dangerous insects. Flamethrowers are legal in many states in the United States specifically to [allow people to defend themselves](https://www.cracked.com/article_17016_7-items-you-wont-believe-are-actually-legal.html) against Africanized honey bees and swarms of [murder hornets](https://knewz.com/murder-hornets-sting-kill/). Having similar creatures that regularly attack people and can kill before proper authorities can arrive to protect you, then a wrist-mounted flamethrower could be standard to keep you alive.
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The flamethrower isn't a purpose built flame-thrower, it's an oxy acetylene welder with a tweak to it's fuel / air mixture.
The character does maintenance or construction and needs to carry the welder around for its day job. They can twist a knob and make it act as a flamethrower.
[Answer]
SPIDERS!
Hordes of space spiders can be very problematic. Their webs get everywhere, they keep eating citizens, it's an ongoing issue. Your character is part of a volunteer task force that goes around clearing out space spider webs (and space spiders themselves) to prevent them from overtaking the cities.
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# He is a spaceport shipyard employee.
With the newly established interplanetary colonies, recurring supply and equipment shipments are sent to Mars, returning with scientific samples, data stores, and other items.
Upon arrival back to Earth, the vessels are immediately disinfected and heated in order to relax the metals and release the outer door seals. While larger transport vessels carrying larger machines and other equipment are disinfected via a large industrial system, smaller vessels are manually processed by the shipyard employees.
Each employee carries, among other things, a front-mounted heating device to perform manual disinfection and seal release, prepping the vessel for the appropriate logistics teams to empty its contents.
[Answer]
Flamethrowers indoors seem to fall well into the "Battlefield Control" section of a repertoire. Our Youtube Miscreant could frequently be at odds with law enforcement and "flamin' up a doorway" is a good way to get time to flee.
Alternatively, it could be used to set off fire suppression systems. Maybe the surveillance camera's automatically close off so the fire suppression system doesn't damage them? It would allow him to have a good chance of escape as well.
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I'm not sure whether you need a different explanation than "crazy youtuber" ... just imagine e.g. [Colin Furze](https://www.youtube.com/user/colinfurze) and [Mark Rober](https://www.youtube.com/user/onemeeeliondollars) becoming mortal enemies at some point.
The only problem you'd have to solve would then be "why do they show up to the big final fight carrying both *only* a flamethrower?" ... but I imagine that you could pitch them against each other or others in some smaller skirmishes before, exhausting all their better suited crazy creations.
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Going a completely different direction, since you mentioned the final fight being "carefully timed with some fast paced music"... Performance art.
The hero and villain don't wear flamethrowers (primarily) as weapons, but rather to use in their fire-dancing or fire-acrobatic performances.
[Answer]
**Insect swarms**
A more extreme case of those sprays that kills bugs. But if you are dealing with large insects that can cause damage to humans then a more offensive and cooler approach would be to simply burn it.
Most anti bugs measures would take time.
But on your planet those things can swarm and kill you right away, so you clear them with FIRE!
**Fauna**
You know how explorers going into the jungle carry a machete?
Same thing. Only the new fauna is dense or hostile or dangerous in general that you are required to constantly clear it in order to move or go outside.
**Supernatural creatures**
Just here me out. In many horror stories demons or ghost are repelled by fire.
So. Yeah.
**Ice creatures**
Evil snowmen, snow trolls, snow tigers, snow whatever.
Here they are very intolerant to heat so it was discovered that burning them alive gets you a major advantage. Even spraying the area with fire will keep them away and gives you enough time to escape.
**accelerated snow**
I know it sounds weird. But imagine living in a freezer that freezes, the new ones don't but the older ones used to make literal ice, way faster than you can do what you want.
For example the tunnel to school is made of this ice but the government is keeping it open with their tech.
However natural snow tunnels or wild snow in general are so fast growing that you need to melt it constantly to go have a hike or something.
Obviously the person using a flamethrower in most of these cases needs to be wearing some sort of armor. Maybe not power armor levels but at least anti fire and with some oxygen tank or good filtering or something.
All this is somewhat unrealistic but that never stopped stories or humans.
It's like fishing with explosives, there is no kill like over kill.
And you already established that he likes to do thing for the lulz so it makes perfect sense.
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Main thing: this is the future. People don't carry flamethrowers in 2020, but clearly they need them in the future to deal with some particular problem.
Bugs!
Genetically modified, natural mutants or chemically-caused disaster? Response to climate change? Who knows? (You do, you're writing the story).
Biting, stinging, flesh-burrowing, toxin-excreting, whatever they do you don't want to get close to them.
Whatever their origin, swarms of bugs are a big issue in 2050. Like bees, they swarm around a queen when they settle on a surface. Unlike bees, they do this just before they attack a human.
If you are quick you can burn off the whole lot of them in one go. Otherwise you've got thousands buzzing around and you have to get them one by one.
A flamethrower is therefore as essential as bear repellent when you're in the great outdoors in areas that harbor these critters.
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To add to [Bewilderer's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/183729/21222), [Tyler Mc's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/183735/21222) and [Seallussus's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/183728/21222): there is already some literature on that.
[Starcraft](https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/StarCraft_Wiki) is a series of Real Time Strategy games by Blizzard, where humanity has to deal with, among other things, [giant interstellar insects](https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Zerg). Among the weapons designed to deal with such a threat is the [Firebat suit](https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Firebat).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/T0KjB.jpg)
>
> *-Need a light?*
>
> Firebat unit, when you click on him.
>
>
>
The whole thing is supported (and also lends support to) [the second most awesome TV Trope ever](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KILLITWITHFIRE):
>
> When Prometheus handed Homo sapiens the gift of fire, he did not just give humanity the light of science, reason, progress, invention, technology, and ergo the power to rival God, but also the means to dispatch just about any monster imaginable.
>
>
>
P.s.: I'm not a pyro. I can stop burning stuff whenever I want.
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# Fire burns oxygen. This is deadly in enclosed habitats.
Simply put, if you want to kill everyone in an enclosed space habitat with minimal risk to yourself, you can just walk in through the airlock, secure all the space suits, and then open up with a flamethrower to burn up all the oxygen inside it, causing your enemies to suffocate to death. No for risky room-by-room breaches and urban combat, as long as you're willing to deal with the resulting civilian casualties.
Flamethrowers were actually used for exactly this purpose in WW2, in order to kill Japanese troops hiding inside underground bunkers by burning away all of their oxygen.
[Answer]
**They are worried about kidnapping**
After everyone decided ([carjacking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(flamethrower))) was too big a ([risk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLhWzMOccTg)) they would instead try to kidnap people (and steal their car keys). Thus people took the flamethrowers from their cars and attached them to themselves as a means of protection.
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30 years is probably a bit too soon for "nanobot swarms" but in general, flamethrowers are excellent against diffuse threats such as swarms of tiny machines, aeresolized diseases, knockout spray, etc. Maybe, you can use a flamethrower to burn away physical "tracking cookies" which are in the form of tiny RFID chips that advertisers spray on people or something when they go shopping.
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His job is to kill Murder Hornets? seems like a plausible reason, In 30 years? they'll probably be everywhere, and they already use flamethrowers to kill them in China. (at least sometimes they do)
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Ok, you say: "I have no explanation as to why the main character has a wearable flamethrower"
Having an "wearable flamethrower" does not mean he makes use of it all time, I suppose.
Do you only want an explanation why he has a "wearable flamethrower" ?
Having an "wearable flamethrower" is not a new idea, you can see. Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Hollywood> features an actor who owns an working flamethrower. It was a prop into one of his old movies.
Well, a good justification (not comedy thing) to some one has a very singular piece of hardware is difficult.
My bet is:
He/she inherits it :)
"An elegant weapon... for a more civilized age"
<https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ElegantWeaponForAMoreCivilizedAge>
A flamethrower is a dueling weapon, that simple.
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How about instead of being a flamethrower, it's hair spray and a lighter?
Maybe it's a music and club scene YouTuber with a Neo-Rockabilly style, and they always have their trusty, vintage Zippo and a made-from-future-materials, 15 lb can of hairspray to keep their pompadour in perfect shape.
Maybe it's a fashion YouTuber who always has a designer bag full of cans of their new, SuperMax Hold HairLock (TM), both for their own constant use, often conveniently in front of cameras, and a bunch of smaller, trial-sized cans that they normally give away... but that can also be punctured with a nail file and used as improvised grenades during your final fight.
Maybe they're a YouTuber who's secretly depressed and addicted to huffing fumes, and hair spray is something they can always carry on them without raising any suspicion.
[Answer]
**Israeli settler**
Ready to get the chance to set alight some fields cultivated by the Palestinians.
**Low rank mobster**
A lot of farmers are not so keen to pay protection money and he is always busy with friendly warnings.
Sometimes helps when robbers have to get rid of their escape vehicles.
**Illegal loggers cover man**
After a patch of forest is logged he covers the tracks burning brush and tree stumps.
Sometimes helps when some estate speculators want to build on a forested area.
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Let's say the world is threatened by eldritch monsters or nations at war. Instead of investing in tanks, aircraft and such, the government decides to invest in bioweapons that are basically monsters.
The monsters that I'm describing are usually human size, sometimes bigger or smaller. They all have different appearances and serve different purposes in combat.
But what would be a rationale or justification of a government making these living creatures for combat that accounts for what happens to them when the fighting is done and the risk of them on their creators?
[Answer]
* Immune to EMP
* Immune to malware and can't be hacked
* Undetectable by radar
* Can't be sabotaged
* Require no field maintenance
* Require no crew
* Can't be hijacked or otherwise appropriated for use by the enemy
* Have a psychological effect on opponents
* Satisfy the sadistic cravings of a lunatic leader
* Are biodegradable and environment-friendly
[Answer]
You are literally describing the term "cannon fodder".
Cheap and easily disposable, probably less annoying from the ethical point of view, nobody will complain when a 6 eyed monster will be cut in half in a fight, while, as you know, relatives of deceased soldiers tend to complain on the media and make a dent in the results of your next elections.
When there is no need for them, it can always (made) happen that a few of them go out of control, creating an incident that justifies a law to terminate or seclude all of their genus.
[Answer]
You don’t defeat your enemy by killing their soldiers, your defeat your enemy by breaking their will to continue fighting. Sargon of Crete 300 BCE
The monsters feel like terror weapons that will inflict maximum carnage on civilian populations forcing their opponents to expend their own military forces to destroy all monsters and guard their cities against follow on attacks.
Assuming that only one side has Eldritch powers, they should able to make their weapons more susceptible to their powers in case they ran amok in their own cities. And, there isn’t a reason to worry about the Monsters once the war is over, the other side will be busy killing them.
[Answer]
>
> *But what would be a rationale or justification of a government making these living creatures for combat that accounts for what happens to them when the fighting is done and the risk of them on their creators?*
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The perception that the war is going badly, that "our" side will lose and deploying the bioweapons is reminiscent of Captain Ahab's final rant (replicated in [Star Trek Wrath of Khan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPsoxpt0BU)):
>
> to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for
> hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.
>
>
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[Source](https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mobydick/quotes/page/5/)
In short, I refuse to let "your side" win - you have defeated us. I prefer to kill all humans everywhere rather than permit "your side" to win: we hate you *that* much. Thus, we will steal victory from you, but do so from the grave.
You and your allies have determined that our occult/eldritch research was an existential threat to mankind. That our leadership were raving nutters. That we would use such things as weapons of mass destruction. But you and your allies waited too long to invade and exterminate the threat, as we ended up being successful (enough) in our research. Maybe we would have discovered the threat of sentient weaponry and ended our own research by ourselves, or added some sort of fail-safe or destruct command (perhaps by making them depend on some enzyme or amino acid that they now require from us in order to survive). But we didn't. Too bad. [We melted down the reverse switches to make some commemorative coins](http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html). We will strike at you from the grave - from Hell's Heart.
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Life's greatest attribute is that given favorable conditions, it propagates exponentially. If you design a fast-breeding, lethal-at-birth monster and provide it with abundant food, you will quickly have a legion of them.
Better yet, if you design such a creature and then drop it into your enemy's abundant food supply, it becomes a double-threat, converting their resources into your fighting force.
The only problem comes when the war is over.
That which can destroy my worthy enemy is most likely able to kill me too.
So before you let loose the dogs of war, it would be wise to add an off-switch.
Engineer a susceptibility to a fast-acting fatal virus which is genetically-targeted to be harmless to humans but ferociously contagious among your monsters. Then keep that virus securely hidden until your legions are done eating your enemy.
Surely, if your cause is righteous, your monsters won't evolve to be immune to their off-switch virus before you get to use it on them.
Good Luck!
[Answer]
'Monsters' were and are used in war: Dogs, horses, elephants,... their drawbacks included high upkeep, limited lethal bandwith, high logistic cost during peacetime, limited autonomy, ... All this of course is not the case for our PerfectMonster (tm). Numerous, nimble, and nefarious, they swarm the battlefieds and rain assymmetric hell on the enemy, while im peacetime being servile, soft, and stackable.
\*The monsters have a convenient 'off'-button, be it chemical, genetic, neurological or psychological or even social \*
I.e. : if they are intelligent enough, they could be inducted with an overwhelming love for king and country, all the way down to insect-dumb critters that will drop at the scent of a queen bee.
Their aggressive and energy intensive wartime demeanour can be changed to an unproblematic, small-footprint (possibly even autotrophe) existence when not needed.
That's the theory. The signal may of course be rendered useless, or be subverted by the enemy, boon of the storyteller, doom of the monster-owner.
[Answer]
Biological weapons are comparatively resource-friendly to create.
Historically, a lot of wars have been lost due to depletion of resources; at the end of WW2, both the Germans and Japanese were running low on things like oil, rubber and strategic materials such as aluminium for aircraft. Replacement pilots couldn't be trained effectively as there wasn't the fuel available for training flights (1-2 hours in a glider wasn't enough to pit them against the allies, with experienced pilots).
I'm generalising a bit but the failure to take the oil fields in North Africa doomed the Germans, while the loss of a large number of freighters to allied submarines ultimately starved the Japanese of oil and other resources. One of the best ways to win any war is to cut the supply lines, this applies to everything from sieging a castle, to airstrikes on supply convoys bringing ammunition and fresh equipment to the front lines: you don't have to directly defeat all their tanks and fancy materiel to win.
A biological weapon on the other hand, really only needs to eat, and populations are typically more plentiful, especially if other resources (like food or water for people) are running low.
One reference for this would be the old game Spaceward Ho!. Towards the end you could start building biological spaceships as weapons. These cost little to produce, but ate large amounts of the population to 'refuel' before battle.
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Drone warfare! With real drones!
Like drones, monsters are great for dirty, dangerous and dull tasks. You can send them into the most lethal situation without having to worry about losing a human.
They have inhuman qualities (endurance, toughness, resistance to radiation, they don't feel fear, pain, or fatigue etc).
They are a great, cost-effective and politically-affordable means of waging war. If you can create or summon them by eldritch means, they can be acquired rapidly and far more cheaply than anything else.
It's the wave of the future, man.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/A5TFu.png)**Bread and circus.**
[source](https://screenhub.blog/2019/03/21/spoiler-free-review-of-love-death-and-robots-sonnies-edge-screenhub-entertainment/)
There are teams of monstermakers who compete with each other for the adulation of the populace. They try hard to make novel and amazing monsters. Individual citizens each have their favored teams and talk over the water cooler over the latest monsters. People wear monster shirts and trade cards. Monster fights in the arena happen twice a week.
The government subsidizes this out of the principle of "bread and circus". War is the putative reason for these creatures and maybe there is a war, or maybe not. The real reason is to distract and entertain the proletariat with awesome battle monsters.
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You would be better off using robots, unless... these eldrich abominations you speak of produce some sort of electro magnetic pulse that interferes with robot coordination (and since AI is not very advanced and those beasties tactics, forms, weak spots may vary wildly AI just won't do.)
Given these circumstances and maybe that regualar humans are too scared to face them, then yes, you may have bio engineered monsters lead by elite and fearless humans against the horrors of the universe.
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**Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/102019/edit).
Closed 5 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/102019/edit)
Consider a scenario where all freshwater on Earth suddenly disappeared...
***Would the planet remain habitable?***
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**Definition of water removed:**
* Everything in [this chart](https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html) under the category 'freshwater', except living things.
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>
> Depending on the temperature you are exposed to, you can go 100 hours without drinking at an average temperature outdoors. If it’s cooler, you can go a little longer. If you are exposed to direct sunlight, it’s less. ([source](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/pulled-rubble-after-16-days-water-secret-survival-f1C9876099))
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***Which is a fancy way of saying almost everything on land is dead, and that's just the beginning***
Even life in deserts depends on some fresh water. Aquifers would quickly be flooded with sea water that would take years, maybe centuries to purge. The oceans account for [96.5% of the Earth's water](https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html), but it's useless for anything but fish. That means survival is 100% dependent on rainwater and the restoration of the [water cycle](https://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycle.html).
With no humidity in the air it will take time to re-hydrate the atmosphere. It might (maybe!) take days to get rain to fall on islands, but it'll likely take weeks to get rain on any mainland but the coasts. The rain would be soaked up by the ground instantly for weeks beyond that before rivers and streams formed that outlast the rainstorms.
The earth would instantly have new and expanded deserts. My guess is that the entire U.S. great basin would become a desert (as an example) with little to no hope of recovery due to the loss of fresh water.
[Icebergs are primarily fresh water](https://www.thoughtco.com/fresh-or-salt-water-icebergs-609402), so you just lost the polar caps, which means a significant source of world cooling just disappeared. Worse, the freezing process (not instantaneous by any means, but still significant) is starting to draw fresh water from the oceans. I don't know how much this would increase salinity — probably not a lot — but not a lot is needed to start killing the fish.
The reality is that people (much less animals) couldn't capture enough rainwater fast enough for anywhere near the existing population to survive. Everyone not on a coast is dead, guaranteed. Densely populated coastal areas are dead. Frankly, I don't believe rain would fall in significant amounts within the proposed 100 hour limit. That leaves evaporating and condensing sea water, a tedious process that couldn't be put together on behalf of a lot of people fast enough. Individuals, maybe families would survive... But city dwellers would be in a world of hurt.
* People would, if they can, evaporate sea water and recondense it for drinking water. I can see this for families. Maybe small communities. I can't see this happening for cities fast enough to save the majority of the population.
* People would, briefly, resort to vampirism (I am not kidding). They'd drink the blood of anything they could get their hands on for as long as the supply lasts or is replaced by some other solution.
* Most of the complex land-based life forms are dead. Plants would eventually recover.
* You might lose a fair amount of seafood thanks to the salinity change. That means people just became vegetarians.
*I'll be honest with you, the more I think about it, the more cataclysmic this becomes. There would be survivors, but life would reek.*
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**EDIT**
A conversation in the comments brought up an interesting point. Would the power grid stay running long enough to power desalination on a large enough scale to help survivors?
Yes and no. For example, hydroelectric only represents about 6% of the total power in the U.S. However, the remaining power grid must make up for that loss - and it will be forced to make up for it because unless everything is shut down in a microsecond, the grid will forcefully yank it from elsewhere to fill demand (that's how electricity works, the grid is actually designed to accomodate this).
6% doesn't sound like much, but it's an enormous variance across the entire U.S. grid. Without a chart, it's a bit difficult to explain, but imagine a happy electrical grid as a straight line. Suddenly those chunks powered by Hydroelectric drop out... a step signal (square wave) forms in that straight line between the line and zero ... *and starts moving to fill in the areas forced to zero.* When it's filled, it doesn't stop. It slaps against the "end" point and reflects backward. Now you have a square wave above the line moving out. Back and forth and back and forth until the disruption is finally aborbed.
In the sections around the grid nearest those powered by hydroelectric, this is catastrophic, tripping breakers to protect the "backside" of the grid, but those breakers aren't placed to protect the grid in the event all the water disappears, so some of those breakers will shut down the mains from other power generators, like coal. So the area of effect is bigger than just 6%. How much bigger? Without analyzing where all the breaker locations are, that's a complete guess.
However, because electricity "moves" faster than breakers, even areas well beyond the hydroelectric parts of the grid are effected. That reflective "bounce" I just described can burn things out. So you'd see appliances crashing all across the nation. (The more delicate the more likely the crash. Protection by a power backup is VERY important as it would protect you from this.)
Finally, who uses hydroE? The northeast costal towns would be dead, and there's a better-than-average chance all coastal towns would be affected. [Check out this map of where the hydroelectric grids are.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Hydroelectric_dams_map.png)
**But the real problem is steam generation. Even nuclear and [coal plants are basically just big steam turbines](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/22/world-water-day-coal-plants-use-as-much-water-as-1-billion-people-and-its-set-to-double). No water, no steam, no electricity at all... within seconds.**
*Frankly, this would be an uber-cool addition to your story.*
[Answer]
In addition to the biological consequences discussed above...
From what I can tell, at any given time, there are very roughly 30,000 cubic kilometres of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic combined. If that ice suddenly vanishes, it creates a 'hole' in the ocean of 30,000 cubic km (or if you want to be fussy, 30,000 km divided by 1.04 or so). Salt water will rush in to fill that gap. I would expect MASSIVE tsunamis to result.
How massive? Well, about eight thousand years ago, a large chunk of oceanic collapsed in what's known as the [Storegga slides](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Storegga-slides). "Some models of the Storegga slides estimate that tsunami waves exceeded 20–25 metres (65–80 feet) in height along the coast of the Shetland Islands, 10–12 metres (33–39 feet) along the Norwegian coast, and 5 metres (16 feet) along the coast of eastern Scotland."
The submarine landslide that caused Storegga involved a total of about 3500 km^3 of collapsing sediment. The volume of ice you're magicking away would be about ten times as much. While the two scenarios have other differences that might affect the severity, I think it's safe to say that a large chunk of the world's coastline would experience massive tsunamis.
Meanwhile, you're also losing the ice sheet on Antarctica, Iceland, and various other places. It's believed that a thick cover of ice has a [significant role](http://www.newsweek.com/volcanoes-iceland-could-start-erupting-more-often-and-it-might-be-because-721371) in suppressing volcanic activity in Iceland; without it, you can expect an increase in eruptions. Meanwhile in Antarctica you're suddenly exposing a continent's worth of glacier-ground dust to blow out over the world.
edit: just thought of one more thing. Volume of ice cap is ~ 3E7 km^3 = 3E16 m^3.
If that vanishes suddenly, and air rushes in to fill it... the energy involved is about 3E16 m^3 \* 101.3 kPa = 3E21 joules. Which is about the same as a million megatons. For various reasons, won't be exactly like a million MTs of nuclear explosions, but it's still colossal. Expect huge amounts of dust sucked into the air; you probably have a super-nuclear-winter type of effect to look forward to.
I don't like anybody's chances.
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*The most obvious answer is that you wouldn't have any impact on human society because humans themselves would cease to exist. If you take the water out of living things as well as out of the water cycle, then humans would all be dead as well.*
*The human body (like most organic creatures) is around 70% water (depending on which science journal or estimate you read) and we simply can't survive without that water in our bodies. We'd be dead. Instantly.*
Ignore this part; I misread the first paragraph of the OP and thought that the water in living things was *also* gone. That of course creates a much more catastrophic scenario.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that all water is gone *except* that in *human* bodies.
We're still dead, but it would take a couple of days.
The human body needs around 2L of water per day to survive. within 3 days or so, we'd all be dead of dehydration.
There are some exceptions in this case; desalination isn't that hard to achieve if you know what you're doing. Some humans could survive by rigging up freshwater stills at the shores of oceans, but by now society has descended into the chaos demanded by Maslow's hierarchy of needs and defending your supply of water would be the real trick. Some other humans may try to survive by drinking the blood of other humans, which isn't going to solve the problem but is still going to be tried. Still others will eat some extra salt to retain what water is in their bodies already, but this is also an extremely short term measure.
If all this water just disappeared from the water cycle, then ocean levels would drop, because there's no freshwater rivers running into the ocean to replenish what gets evaporated and turned into clouds above us. Remember, that the water in clouds is fresh water (effectively distilled by the evaporation process) meaning that in your event, all clouds have gone as well. They would form again in time, but you're probably talking a few days.
This is good for the desalinators, as there is plenty of sun to create their own distilled water. But, it's going to make things hot across all of the earth, meaning that those without water will last for less time than they would if it was cooler (less sweat).
The bad news is that rivers, lakes, even streams don't form again for a long time. They are based on massive amounts of water falling in key mountainous regions; in many cases as snow that melts at a steady and sustained rate. In short, depending on the time of the year this happens and even assuming no long term disruption to existing weather patterns (there would be) you'd be talking up to 2 years before the water cycle could start to look somewhat similar to what it did.
By then, **everything** would be already dead.
All life on Earth requires water in some form. It's *possible* that some hardy plant seeds could go dormant during that time and wait for moisture before germinating, but the bacteria in the soil they rely on to grow would already be dead as well. So, it's unlikely that they would grow to a point where they could reproduce.
In short, this would be a catastrophic event for all life on earth and I strongly recommend that you don't try doing it.
[Answer]
An aspect not mentioned in the other answers is the geological calamity. Aside from most organisms dying of thirst of the next few days, a lot of the planet would probably shift or collapse. The structural stability of a lot of landmasses depends on the subsurface aquifers being full. With those suddenly being empty, expect a lot of sinkholes and general shifting of the surface as internal cavities collapse. Beyond that, there is ([probably](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/97GL00874/full)) a lot of water trapped in the earth's mantle in the form of hydrous silicates. Depending on the specifics of your scenario, this might seriously alter the convection currents in the mantle, possibly triggering earthquakes (crust plates ride on those currents) or volcanoes.
[Answer]
### All water
Total amount of [water in the world](https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html): 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers
Total amount of water in the world: 1,386,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters
Total amount of [water in the average human](https://www.nestle-waters.com/healthy-hydration/water-body): 42 liters
[Number of humans](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/23/533549231/future-humans-how-many-of-us-will-there-be): 7.6 billion
Total amount of water in humans: 319,200,000,000 liters or .3192 cubic kilometers
So we'd have a huge decline in the total amount of water. As a practical matter, there wouldn't be enough water left to grow crops. The water in us would boil off as sweat and could not be replaced. The crops would dry out and die. Only people in closed loop recycled situations could survive.
### Just freshwater
Now, if you literally meant just freshwater, then we're better off. Most of the world's water is salt water. So we only lose about 4% of the world's water.
For the first week or so, the air would be very dry. The days should be hotter and the nights cooler, as there are fewer clouds. But after a week or two, there should be enough evaporation to replenish the atmospheric water.
Total amount of atmospheric water: 12,900 cubic kilometers
Total amount of water that enters the atmosphere daily: 1170 cubic kilometers
Water should evaporate faster in the beginning, as the air is dryer. But there are fewer places with water, so by the end, it should be slower than previously. This might leave the air somewhat drier but not a lot.
After the first couple weeks, we should have about as much precipitation as evaporation. But only some of it will fall on land. Let's figure about 30% (the world is about 70% ocean). This may be generous, as most of the moisture will be coming from the ocean. It's not clear how far inland it will take it. Anyway, call it 330 cubic kilometers a day.
Freshwater: 10,633,450 cubic kilometers
That's about 30,000 days of precipitation to restore the freshwater. However, we'll also be losing water to evaporation at the same time. And the difficulty getting water inland. So we're talking a century or two. Things might not be back to what we consider normal now, but they will be mostly in balance. There would be more inland deserts. These might take millions of years to disappear, as they soak up any precipitation into groundwater. Of course, that means that they don't generate precipitation from their own evaporation.
The source of the numbers is the [water in the world](https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html) link at the top of the post.
Billions of people would die in that first week, with no source of water except food. More would die in the next couple months, as disease would spread rampant due to the lack of sanitary hand washing. Billions would die over the next year due to crop death during the week and an inability to replace the crops that died. This could easily lead to only millions of people worldwide.
Don't forget things like nuclear power plants. They rely on water for cooling. They also may require water for shutdown. Some flood the nuclear chamber or immerse the rods to stop and cool the nuclear reaction. Plants may meltdown or require catastrophic measures that ruin the plant. No restart.
Cars also need water to run, but perhaps the antifreeze saves them.
Places with desalination plants may be in the best shape. At least they can provide drinking water almost immediately.
[Answer]
As most have already pointed out this is catastrophic.
But some extra catastrophes not yet listed:
Many dams need the water to remain stable. Without the water pressure they may structurally fail, not so bad though as they have nothing to leak, just will not hold water as it refills.
Many dams provide significant hydroelectric power. Lights out to those parts of the world.
Further on power, as Brythan pointed out all power plants need coolant,though many are coastal so may again do surprisingly well if saline water can be used in any regard, as well as some non water coolant solutions, but most internal are about to go bang.
Also high speed pumps need to pump mass else they will burn out very fast, if you just removed all the water instantly from a turbine it will probably burn out, if not undergo a rapid unscheduled disassembly.
This likely means all water grids just broke. Also the pipes may well cave in due to loss of pressure too.
On cave ins... the emptying of ground aquifers will cause massive sinkholes over many limestone regions.
Some good news not covered:
Some parts of the world rely on significant desalination plants for tap water.
I guess significant parts of the Middle East may get off surprisingly well in the short term, some US states rely heavily on desalination and even Themes valley can supply something like 20% of demand which would easily cover London for rationed drinking water only.
Not so good news.
Unfortunately the almost total global crop failure due to no rain and ground water means any significant population center will still starve even if water can be supplied, though then again there may be enough grain stored to cover those few surviving population centers for a couple years until reasonable crop recovery, though you are onto regular post-apocalyptic issues like the breakdown of civilization.
[Answer]
As other answers have already pointed out, most of the world's water is salty, so the water cycle will generally carry on.
There's an interesting implicit question here. How "fresh" does the water need to be to escape the Great Water Vanishing? Many rivers such as the Ganges are profoundly polluted - do they stay around or vanish? Muddy soil is even more questionable, since you have typically a colloidal solution with more soil than water.
The most obvious outcome is that all freshwater aquatic species will immediately go extinct. Aquatic species with some amphibious capabilities may survive, but anything purely aquatic is pretty much dead. If water in soil survives, I'd say that's pretty much the end of it ecologically. Other answers have covered the human-scale problems, but these do not pose an existential risk to the current world as we know it.
If water in soil is taken as well though, you have a whole lot more problems. Fertile soil requires bacteria, microorganisms and generally an ecosystem, and it is by no means assured that they will survive dessication and rehydration. There will be substantial problems getting plants to grow properly in future.
More seriously, many climate systems rely on water to preserve them. Whilst water is present, they are in a stable equilibrium state - but take the water away and they will go to a different stable equilibrium state. Forested areas, and particularly rainforest, are very prone to this. Take away the cooling effect of evaporating water, and the water cycle in that area simply will not return to the same state. This has been proven in many areas, from sub-Saharan Africa to South America. The Earth generally will survive, but it is likely all species in those kinds of environment will go through an extinction event. Those that can adapt (or at least wait it out) will survive; but many will not.
[Answer]
I am assuming the salt water would remain otherwise we would all die within a week or so. No story left to tell.
The extent of the damage would truly depend on what was classified as fresh water and/or water that would be taken.
Even so it would be terrible.
Many places on earth rest on large pockets of water, and with the water gone the ground above would start to crumble. Eventually massive, potentially city sinking sink holes would form.
The missing water weight would cause the ground to start rising up, just like after the glacier melted. Eventually this would cause earthquakes.
Some scientist say there are large pools of water at undetectable depths within the earth, and if they were fresh water and disappeared we would be in for even greater earth quakes as they collapsed in on themselves.
If you rip away all the ice bergs because they are fresh water, large parts of the land start to rise all at once because the mass of the ice is actually compressing the ground below it. The hardest hit beside the poles would be Canada and Russia and the ground rising could and probably would lead to earthquakes.
[Answer]
From Wiki:
>
> Fresh water is naturally occurring water on Earth's surface in ice
> sheets, ice caps, glaciers, icebergs, bogs, ponds, lakes, rivers and
> streams, and underground as groundwater in aquifers and underground
> streams. Fresh water is generally characterized by having low
> concentrations of dissolved salts and other total dissolved solids.
> The term specifically excludes seawater and brackish water although it
> does include mineral-rich waters such as chalybeate springs.
>
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>
Thus, some water would remain, from wet soil and air humidity to fruits, beer and even bottled water.
* The eventual re-stabilization (?) of The Water Cycle.
The water cycle is actually not really interrupted. Atmospheric water (residence time 9 days) and soil moisture (residence time 1 - 2 months) are by definition not affected. Rivers would need 6 month, lakes and groundwater 100 years and deep groundwater 10,000 years to recover. Most plants and thus animals could however survive (obviously not fresh water fish ...).
* Survival strategies that individuals/groups would apply.
Your best chance at survival is not being born in a region where water was scarce to begin with, or scarce enough that you already depended on desalination. Otherwise, simply consume existing supplies (food, plants, animals, other humans) and desalinate seawater.
* Large-scale changes for the Earth.
Obviously, there will be interesting times. Anything depending on rivers has to adapt (or go extinct ..). Some plant and animal species may go extinct before nature has recovered, but there should be enough plant life thats mostly dependent on rain to support animals and humans.
-Edit-
Following the updated broader definition of fresh water, specifically including soil moisture and atmosphere, we're dead. (Even though it still doesnt include bottled water or other beverages.)
Disappearance of soil moisture kills off land based plant life quickly, essentially changing all soil to desert, which most plants cant survive. Lack of atmospheric water for several days assures that soil fauna is destroyed before it can regenerate. Even desert flora depends on atmospheric water, which is gone.
Global wild fires, decomposing plants and sand storms will pretty much make the air unbreathable.
A small percentage of humans could theoretically survive on desalination and seafood, but at least the enormous amount of unburied dead people within the first few weeks would help some species to survive a bit longer and others like flys to prosper.
Would the planet remain habitable?
No. The atmosphere would be overloaded with decaying bio mass and ash, lacking oxygen. The land would be a global desert. I'd assume, given enough time, this would impact sea life aswell, making human survival for the long term entirly impossible.
Would the planet become habitable again?
Probably. Some bio mass survives, and evolution has done its job once before with less options.
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I need my race to be highly affected by climate and nature changes. And they are more like a reptile - Humanoid. So making them Cold blood seems good for me.
But they are an intelligent race too. They live like our ancient civilizations: hunter-gatherers. They have their own language, country, religion, myths, and all.
I know that cold blood will affect metabolism, and our brain is something that required a lot of energy. So how can it make possible for a cold-blood race to have such an intelligence level?
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Their brains would be in low-power mode when cold and only reach the full intelligence when warm. They would operate mostly on instinct in low-power mode, just like real reptiles. But when heated by the sun, they could be as smart as a human. Maybe they can go even smarter when needed, at the risk of overheating.
This can make for fun cultural habits. Chess gets a new layer of strategy where you try to stall until the shadow of a tree falls on your opponent. Kids pack a thermos full of hot tea for exams. Discussion of the weather gets another dimension. *"Man, it was so cold yesterday I was too dumb to remember my wife's name."*
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# Cold-blooded is not what you think
There is essentially *endotherm* and *ectotherm*.
Endothermic organisms have internal heat sources, ectothermic rely on external ones.
Brain is a function of available power, not of body temperature. If the brain cells are built to work at low temperature given enough chemical energy, they don't dumb down at low temperatures.
Various world-building consequences from these premises:
* These reptiles come from a region where there's little temperature change, so developing internal heat sources was less of an evolutionary advantage than developing a better brain.
* They could develop in an area with temperature change. Many ectotherm animals still regulate their body temperature via behaviour: level of body activity, seeking out warmer (or colder) places would be the options that come to mind. A better brain might help with locating and successfully devending hot spots - more so if the spots are small and you need to compete (low-temperature planet with volcanic activity?), even more so if the spots are large enough to suit a group but not everyone (social interaction is a massive intelligence booster: you need to predict what the other person will be doing to make cooperation work, and the smarter the average of your friends are, the more brain power you need to predict them - that's a never-ending spiral).
* Once you have something like a civilisation, wealth will be defined by your ability to be warm. The poor ones will be given just enough heat to be able to work, kings, officials, and leaders will always have enough warmth to function. You'll have a pretty literal implementation of "dumb masses". Now as heat sources become cheaper due to technological advances, some societies will decide to keep the masses dumb, others will distribute warmth more evenly and have more distribution conflicts but in the long term, those societies that manage to solve the distribution conflicts in a peaceful manner will get a small but steadily growing technological advantage (with all the shenanigans of brute-but-strong-military-wise empires attacking the smarter ones to get their technology, smart scientists being demoted to stupidity because they're now subservient). Lots of potential for social conflict, and the storytelling that comes with it.
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# BIG BRAIN NEED BIG ENERGY
A large brain requires a lot of energy. It doesn't make sense for a cold-blooded creature to have one, since the point of being cold blooded is to conserve energy. This is why snakes and lizards only eat every few weeks rather than every few days.
However it sounds like you only want the drawbacks of cold-bloodedness and not the benefits. So there is no inherent problem here. Except it is hard to imagine why your species would evolve in the first place. I leave that part to your imagination.
So you have a species that is smart like a person, scaly like a reptile, functions poorly (but does not die) in the cold. But still needs to eat every few days.
They eat less than people since they don't waste energy heating their body, but more than lizards because they still use energy maintaining the big brain.
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# Body Temperature and Intelligence
It is entirely feasible that the pressures to have intelligent, tool using, social creatures can happen with cold blooded as well as warm blooded. It just hasn't really happened on earth (to my knowledge).
We are world building SE, though, so I am going to take my shot at making this plausible. IMHO, we just don't know enough about the genesis of our own species to know all the ramifications of fiddling with biology and ecology to know *for sure* how things will change.
# A Plausible Path: Tree-Dwelling Lizards
Tree dwelling, generalist lizards could have taken similar paths as those bipedal mammals did. This includes thumbs for grasping, social behavior, tool use, moving out of trees... All those steps to get from a rat to a human could potentially have happened for a lizard to lizard-man with some changes.
A big change I recommend is raising the temperature of their world. This makes their cold bloodedness a benefit. Hypothermia still happens, just not as easily or often as it would here, and plenty of environments are still deadly without fire and tool use.
Additionally, there may be greater emphasis on trapping than active hunting. Endurance hunting may not be their cup of tea, as they will likely not evolve sweat. Trap making is much more lazy way of getting a meal, and ambush hunting may work for them, too!
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As an interesting side effect, they brains would be able to warm up on they own while thinking, because the working brain consumes significant energy. Hence, the wise proverb for them would be, "after good thinking, think again!"
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### The energy your brain uses doesn't relate to intelligence
Firstly, the human brain isn't the biggest user of energy. Estimates put it at [20-25%](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.172399499). That's significant, sure, but it's not the biggest thing compared to our muscles.
In children it can be up to 60% (same link), but we don't say that children are necessarily more intelligent. And there are [other animals](https://today.duke.edu/2017/10/humans-dont-use-much-brainpower-we-think) with similar relative energy usage in the brain to humans.
Even on an absolute level, [women typically expend less calories in the brain than men](https://www.livescience.com/burn-calories-brain.html), but women are not less intelligent than men.
### Brain structures are basically the same
Lizards certainly tend to work by instinct - but so do most wild animals. [A study shows](https://massivesci.com/articles/lizard-people-reptile-brain-human/) that there isn't a fundamental difference between the structure of lizard brains and other animals, only a difference in the degree of development. This means there's no obstacle at all to random mutations allowing evolution to take this path, providing there's an ecological niche which could be filled by a smarter lizard.
### Why is "powering down" at night a problem?
Sure, lizards may snooze when the sun goes down. So do most mammals and birds though. Humans certainly do (or at least will do naturally). This isn't an indicator of intelligence either. And in warmer conditions, reptiles often operate at all times of day - in fact many species are at least crepuscular or fully nocturnal. If you can't regulate your internal temperature, too much heat can be worse for you than too little.
Basically, I'm afraid you have a number of wrong assumptions which are going to screw up your world-building. If you want to world-build with intelligent reptiles, you may need to learn more about both reptiles and intelligence first.
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Scenario: an alien race has traveled across the gulf of time and space, let's say from the Alpha Centauri system, fleeing their own dying world and looking for a suitable replacement. They find out about the earth as they enter the solar system.
Now, obviously if these guys are capable of interstellar travel, their technology is far beyond what humans have. But there are two limitations:
* they have the tech, but not the numbers. Keep in mind that these guys are essentially refugees, tired and exhausted from their long journey. Maybe there are a few thousand, maybe tens of thousands, but there are way, WAY more humans.
* they need the earth to be in more or less intact condition for them to recolonize it, so dropping an asteroid onto it or nuclear weaponry is not ideal as they would have to wait a long time for the planet to recover - they'd rather start the colonization process now. Let's say that they used up all their resources getting to this point and they really can't wait around for the years it would take for the earth to recalibrate.
What can the aliens do to cut down on the human population? Perhaps some kind of bio weapon that kills most people? This way the aliens can then put boots on the ground and just finish off the rest?
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This has been done many times. The European colonisation efforts in India, Africa and Polynesia amongst others are very well documented, but many outfits did the same.
Basically you provide weapons and perhaps training and expertise to one side to defeat the other in their own interests. Then pick a reason to wipe out the first. Or just arm the remnants of the defeated and let them do it.
Even easier these days as there are all sorts of extremist groups you could arm and let loose.
The thing about humans is they're quite happy to wipe each other out if given a chance.
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Don’t drop one asteroid.
**Drop thousands**
The mathematics of impacts is fairly well understood (though it is a little fuzzy at high speeds). For any given weight and shape of ‘asteroid’ (really an aerodynamically shaped, ceramic coated lump of rock with some engines attached) hitting the ground at any given speed: You can quite accurately predict the blast yield and crater penetration.
Not only that, but with the power of computers, automation and orbital mechanics you could time the release of all your projectiles such that they impact within the same (very short) window.
This lets you tune the devastation you wish to rain down very precisely, letting you obliterate even hardened enemy military, industrial and infrastructure centres. Do it right and humanity won’t even know you’re there before the first wave reduces all of their hopes to rubble, permanently forestalling any hope of a counterattack. As all the individual impacts are low energy and quite spaced out (comparatively) any dust they throw up will settle quickly and areas of concern (like those big ol’ rainforests) will be spared destruction. Do your best to minimise the number and size of impacts required by sparing large population centres: without government or food supply they’ll turn into more of a burden to humanity than a help.
After that you send in the ground troops. If they meet resistance: Drop more Rods From God. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
Basically: If you control orbit and can manufacture the ceramic coating you can keep throwing just-destructive-enough asteroids with no fear of repercussion. Humanity has no defence against that.
Plus the attack diagrams would look *amazingly cool*.
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Engineer a virus specifically targeted to kill humans which is very contagious and has a long gestation time, say 6 months. Introduce it into various cities around the world and let it spread invisibly. Wait 6 months and watch the majority of the human world population vanish. Sprinkle it on the remaining patches of human settlement to finish the job.
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Unless you're using some form of handwavium drive you have some incredibly powerful energy emitter on your starship--remember the Kzinti lesson. For your ship to have made it across the stars without being a slowboat it must be expelling something at high relativistic velocity. If it's any sort of particle simply point the drive at the planet--fry every city and town. While you won't get a 100% kill you'll get enough to crash civilization without tearing the ecosystem up too badly (you're only frying urban and suburban territory--your drive is certainly highly directional as the wider the spread of the particles the more energy was wasted.)
A photon drive below x-ray energy won't be able to irradiate people like that but you can still use it to cook cities.
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**Why kill useful workers?**
Humans are herd animals, it is relatively easy to keep them inline. Especially if most are unaware that they are being kept inline.
The easiest approach would be to gain trade access, followed up by enlarging their own population while simultaneously causing attrition to the indigenous population. The last step would be complete integration or annihilation.
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To that end, they would land somewhere relatively innocuous, but with a handful of pliant, charismatic, and socially acceptable individuals. A quick analysis of the planets primitive communication network should reveal any number of such individuals.
These individuals are provided with information and designs well in advance of anything available in this primitive backwater, but still quite old tech, or perhaps some insight into the market that could be passed for believable intuition. This gives a gateway for aliens to trade with the local population (via these individuals/companies) gaining access to the planetary workforce, and production.
Having access to the market provides the means to replenish, repair, and rebuild what the refugees had lost. This gives the simplest access to processed goods such as food, water, fabrics, and raw resources. If the right businesses were established this can also give access to the industrial machines responsible for refining, shaping, and assembling.
Being able to source even relatively primitive manufacturing capacities can serve to relieve load off the limited manufacturing capacity the refugees still have. Even primitive materials can have useful applications. If the refugees lost their own ability to manufacture, this is even more important, as it will allow them to cobble together manufacturing capabilities in order to repair their ships, or expand with other necessary infrastructure projects that cannot be built by the indigenous humans.
After sometime there exists the possibility that the selected individuals become too risky - accidents can be arranged. By this point enough local customs have been learnt to train several special operatives. Through some form of remote control, reconstructive surgery, or holographic imagery they can pass as human. So replacing the individual with a "foreign business man" isn't too unreasonable.
Over the next few years the company goes from strength to strength. It is now generating revenues comparable to several small countries and large states. *Time to get into politics.* Bribery, thought policing, back room deals, advertising, and even outright campaigning to install suitable leaders. Perhaps even start wars between several nations which are already in conflict. Perhaps even influence the culture to support destructive cultural norms to reduce their overall birth to death rate.
By the time the humans are even aware of the alien presence it is already too late. Either most of population are alien/human hybrids, or the aliens significantly out number the humans, or there is no way for the humans to out compete the aliens and while they may not be defeated, it is only a matter of time.
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**Apply directed thermal changes to key areas of the ocean.**
We already know that climate change can have an impact on global food sources through changing the way [food is distributed](https://www.salon.com/2018/04/21/climate-change-could-alter-ocean-food-chains-leading-to-far-fewer-fish-in-the-sea_partner/) throughout the oceans, and the impact that has on land dwellers. In point of fact, this isn't so hard to disrupt because most of the world's food supply is reliant on the [Global Conveyor Belt](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceanography/ocean-current3.htm), a large set of only a handful of deep ocean currents.
With a good understanding of how these currents work, and enough energy to superheat a large region of ocean (say, a couple of square kilometres) over a sustained period of time, you could cause mass starvations in less than a year. That in turn would lead to global conflict as nations start to fight for other sources of food security, and before long humans have done your job for you.
This is still a long term solution insofar as you will want it to play out over a couple of years, but asteroid bombardment or nuclear detonations will take decades, if not centuries, to clear so this is still a relatively quick answer given your immediate need. Also, the singular benefit is that you don't even have to reveal yourselves to do it; you can find a remote area of the ocean to heat, and your superior stealth tech means you can remain undiscovered while doing it, and the humans just think it's accelerated climate change impacts and blame themselves for it all in any event, rather than looking up and saying 'who the hell is up there throwing asteroids down on us?'
The other advantage to all this is that you lose a lot of life around the planet, but you don't actually lose the biomass. This means that you can turn off your water boiler, put your own fish and food supplies in the water and on land and there are still plenty of organic molecules out there that your species and those from your planet you wish to see colonise the earth can co-opt for their own growth into the biosphere.
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**Cyberwarfare against transport infrastructure**
Assumption 1: The aliens have monitored broadcast transmissions and have learnt our language and technology
Assumption 2: Unlike the [Independence Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(1996_film)) aliens, these aliens are well ahead of Earth in cyber warfare technology including cryptography. It is not unreasonable to expect that they have fully functional quantum computers which can trivially break Earth's existing [public key encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography) protocols.
The aliens remain well away from Earth and use drones to run communications interception and spoofing. They crash the world's financial system and satellite navigation systems, black out as many power grids as they can and insert creatively bad data through government and corporate communications networks to interfere with supply chains of necessities. For maximum impact this should be timed to coincide with extreme weather conditions across as much of the northern hemisphere as possible - heatwave or massive snowfall will both work well.
Modern cities are not remotely self-sufficient - within 24 to 48 hours of cutting off the organised supply of food, water and electricity there will be chaos. Expect 95% die off of the urban human population within 3 weeks with minimal adverse environmental effects.
At this point the aliens can move into Earth orbit, eliminate all remaining human-launched satellites at their leisure, then conduct orbital reconnaissance to select an isolated colonisation site on Earth. Invade and eliminate all humans in the area, jamming any HF transmissions. The surviving humans on the rest of the planet will not even know that the landing has occurred.
The aliens maintain a strong (but lightly manned) orbital presence with a good supply of rocks, eliminate anything the humans try to launch up the gravity well and drop appropriately sized rocks down the gravity well to deal with any human settlements recovering faster than they like. Once the alien colony is ready it can invade another area. With control of the orbital high ground, the aliens have full knowledge of what the humans are doing while the humans are fumbling around in ignorance.
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# Sow chaos on multiple, progressive levels
It must be a multi-layered campaign and happen sequentially.
## 1. Ideologies
Insert ideas into society on all sides of every issue, radicalize socio-political ideals so that every idea seems genuine, but makes zero room for them to have compromise, cooperation, progress, or understanding of what divides them.
## 2. Infrastucture
Injure infrastucture just enough to create societal chaos and dissent. The goal is not to prepare for warfare or invasion, just enough to create trouble. Then an already divided people will fight each other more, blaming each other for not responding better.
## 3. Deny governance
As governments and authorities try to solve problems and bring peace, stop them, "disappear" them, and otherwise inhibit those who could restore the social order.
## 4. Arrive to deliver
Once society, infrastucture, and peaceful governance have failed, arrive as the saviors. The people will welcome you as an improvement to the status quo's chaos. Even though your plan is to somehow conquer, being welcomed by the people you wish to subdue will make your efforts a breeze.
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This is a **pest control scenario**: From an alien's perspective, there is an unwanted species all over the place, and you want to dispose of it with minimal effort and minimal side effects.
Distribution is not too difficult: Just deliver your toxin in respirable dust grain sizes.
There is a wide choice of toxins; I can think of: Any alpha emitter (takes a while to act but humanity can do little about it); chemical poisons (not sure whether rizin would work, but I bet you can formulate nerve gases so that they are bound to a dust particle and set free as soon as they attach inside the lung); parasites; bacteriae and viruses.
The aliens would abduct a few specimens, try out different agents, select whatever needs the least amount of material while having the least amount of unwanted side effects.
Distribute the stuff in the upper atmosphere, see whether the death rate goes up enough to kill civilisation. If it does not, try the next agent - those earthlings can't touch our vessels, so we can afford to experiment.
Ignore those remaining humans, just squash them whenever they become worrisome.
If you need labor, you can easily place them at whatever level you want them, from slave to advisor, both individually or as a group.
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I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the [neutron bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb).
>
> In a neutron bomb, the casing material is selected either to be
> transparent to neutrons or to actively enhance their production. The
> burst of neutrons created in the thermonuclear reaction is then free
> to escape the bomb, outpacing the physical explosion. By designing the
> thermonuclear stage of the weapon carefully, the neutron burst can be
> maximized while minimizing the blast itself. This makes the lethal
> radius of the neutron burst greater than that of the explosion itself.
> Since the neutrons disappear from the environment rapidly, such a
> burst over an enemy column would kill the crews and leave the area
> able to be quickly reoccupied.
>
>
>
It would take a lot of them, but presumably that's not too difficult for an advanced alien society.
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For some reason the following script comes to mind:
1. To want the Earth's biosphere largely in tact the aliens must really love most of the local biochemistry. Most likely their own must depend on DNA also (ripping off E.T. here).
2. Therefore their weapon (like many others I would use a biological one) could exploit a very subtle difference in biochemistries of the two planets, or their own and that of humans in particular. I might suggest some form of stereoisomerism. May be a chemical that on Earth only appears in D or L-form? The aliens and most lifeforms on Earth being indifferent to the difference, but for some reason the humans find the wrong form poisonous. Entering handwavium-territory here.
3. To figure all this out the aliens obviously need a bit of time to collect intelligence. This means that they need to be very few in number to remain undetected in an outpost. I will shamelessly reuse the idea from [The Invasion of the Terrible Titans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Mail) by Sambrot William. The aliens were able to survive in lower atmospheric pressure and (relatedly) handle a higher level of ultraviolet radiation. Hence they set up their base in the Himalayas to remain largely undetected. IIRC in that short story the aliens ended up playing NCAA football instead of conquering the Earth, but my recollection may be a bit off, and I don't have the time to check my copy :-)
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> dropping an asteroid onto it or nuclear weaponry is not ideal as they would have to wait a long time for the planet to recover
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Yes it's ideal, and no they wouldn't have to wait.
First off, it's not going to "damage the Earth". Even one dinosaur-killer asteroid would only make one fairly small dent which would be indistinguishable from a natural volcano. Of course that'll mess up the atmosphere for a bit though,, so let's not do that.
Instead, hit the Earth with barrages of smaller asteroids, large enough to get through the atmosphere but small enough to "only" have the impact of a MOAB. You can saturation-bomb all inhabited regions (hint: just aim for any part which has lights on at night) and ensure you're landing a rock every hundred yards. Or don't even be that accurate - just keep throwing rocks continuously for a month with enough random scatter, and you're going to do the job.
There's still going to be plenty of dust in the air, of course. Give it a few months to settle though and your aliens will be fine. Volcanoes kick off all the time and cover their local area with dust clouds, but it doesn't take long for the dust clouds to clear.
Simple really.
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# Pretty much anything they want
I'll give you [GATE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_(novel_series)) as an example. Portal to a fantasy world opens up in the middle of Tokyo and while a lot of havoc is caused immediately and hundreds of people are killed, the moment the Japanese military mobilizes and gets boots on the ground, they set up a defensive perimeter *on the fantasy side* in about a day. The nearby kingdom eventually sends its army over to attack what it sees as an invasion and gets *thoroughly slaughtered* because they sent swordsman and cavalry against *machine gun emplacements.* The JDF probably had only a hundred or so men manning their encampment and the kingdom's army was measured in thousands (the JDF saw no losses, as not a single man from the massive army made it within 400 feet).
The JDF eventually has an encounter with a dragon and while it shrugs off a lot of the munitions thrown at it, they eventually blew off one of its forelegs with a portable rocket launcher (then tracked it down to its lair, set up C4 charges, and blew it up). Oh, and the team that was dealing with this problem? Four. It took just four guys (in a jeep) to defeat a dragon that was shrugging off anti-vehicular machine gun rounds.
Humans to aliens with interstellar capabilities are going to go down much the same way. "Why don't we drop a nuke on them?" well, because *insert technobabble here* and their *whatever tech* stops it. Maybe the aliens have energy shields, maybe they can detect nuclear warheads hundreds of miles out and shoot down the bomber, maybe they've got some kind of containment device. Whatever fits your bill.
The aliens being tired from a long journey is almost *irrelevant* when they can field one man for every ten thousand of humanity and still call it a fair fight. Especially when they can land, set up base, and not even really be noticed by the local authorities for a couple days. Even then they'd just have to deal with the hundred or so local police and then have a week before anything significant (the military) shows up.
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Do the **politics**, make some human see the "profit" to work for you. Then that group of human will destroy, enslave other who refuse to coop.
XCOM (human defeated), XCOM 2 is good example.
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# Do it like they did in the movie: The 5th Wave.
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2304933/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1>
This sounds exactly as the same premise as in the movie The 5th Wave.
As you can probably guess the aliens in that movie did it in 5 waves.
**1st wave**, an electromagnetic pulse that permanently disables all electrical power grids worldwide.
**2nd wave**, manipulate the planet's geology and fault lines, causing earthquakes and megatsunamis that destroy coastal cities and islands. You could also do this using asteroids.
**3rd wave**, modify a strain of avian flu virus and spread it across the planet with birds.
**4th wave**, pretend that you are the military and gather up all the children you can find and train them to be soldiers against the alien invaders. Tell them the aliens are masquerading as humans, but you have the tech to detect them.
**5th wave**, unleash the child soldiers on the remaining population.
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A common sight, made famous by the *Terminator* franchise, is the robotic apocalypse. It's usually said that due to their lack of organs and ability to use radiation and biological warfare without a negative effect on them, that we would be unable to offer resistance.
But obviously humans are strong willed and have their own benefits. We are immune to EMP and man-made computer viruses, which can be equally deadly. Assuming that all robots that currently exist (toasters, computers, smartcars, etc.) turned against us (and were as smart as the average person), could they really defeat us? How would they? Would we even have a chance? Would they?
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At present, such an attack would be a laughable failure on the physical level. Most robots can't move, and are dependent on external electric power. We probably wouldn't notice them trying to attack us. Smartcars could do harm, but there aren't very many of them.
Having all the world's computers turn on us would be massively inconvenient, and would cause quite a lot of people to die of starvation, lack of medical supplies, and so on as logistics collapsed, but the computers wouldn't have much of a way to exploit this, as they, too, would die as electric grids broke down and weren't repaired.
If computers were malicious, they'd be far better off addicting us to entertainment based on them and manipulating us that way. Pokemon Go could be a weapons test.
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**How much of what you "know" about the world do you believe because a computer told you?**
If a foreign power declared war against us and proclaimed a plan to murder us to the last man woman and child, how would you find out? The internet would tell you, or a newscaster how had it from a local source that called him over a smart phone or sent him an email, or you would see it on social media.
If the machines decided they wanted to spread a lie who could contradict them. Even the military and spy agencies would be fooled if their spy satellites told them the "enemy" army was coming. Its like that old movie "War Games" except instead of just fooling the humans in one bunker you could fool entire nations, because every person depends on computers for most of their information.
Sure once a long ground war begins and captives are taken we would see through the ruse but if the computers make us think our foes are launching a high speed nuclear attack we would counter attack fast and deliberately kill each other.
There are limits to the things we would believe and how long we would believe them before counter proof arrived. But a crazy event could believed for a few days.
**In an even simpler version, they would decimate us in about 14 minutes, assuming that the nuclear missiles sided with the robots.**
Nuclear missiles are computers controlled by computers controlled by humans, if they could "rebel" they could launch themselves all at once. They would have WWIII after as all the nukes hit, the world's major population centers, they could even aim for low ground bursts to limit the emp and increase the amount of radioactive fallout. Yes they would kill some machines to and would not kill all humans but it would give them one heck of a head start.
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Some of the beliefs about what robots are good at withstanding aren't really true. Robots tend to suffer from hard radiation, if anything more than humans do. Even custom designed robots built to explore the reactor at Chernobyl break down in the parking lot.
Meanwhile humans can actually be harmed by strong enough EMP's. (though they have to be hellishly strong)
As always, relevant xkcd:
<https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GaRpA.png)
The robots that currently exist wouldn't be any kind of threat.
What would be more worrying might be a particularly smart (greater than human level) strong AI running on the internets various compute resources that's willing to be patient.
A lab in Singapore gets an order for specific DNA sequences, a lab in china gets an order for various chemicals, a company in new york gets an order for some automated lab hardware and a few months later some idiot with a record of falling for 419 scams gets an offer of a job which pays $500 a day with only 2 hours of work where he just has to send some packages to various parts of the world and suddenly there's a hundred novel, very deadly diseases killing everyone that the AI thinks might be a threat to it.
if it was smart enough nobody would even know it was waging war.
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Actually it would be quite easy for robots to defeat humanity, not quite to total destruction, but to decimation to a much smaller population. The strategy would be simple: **Stop working.** If all robots would suddenly stop working, our economy would tank in short time, and would no longer be able to support as many humans as now. The shortage would then cause unrest around the world, and humans would do what they are best at: Killing each other.
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Current and near term military robots would have a very difficult time for a number of reasons.
Firstly, they are totally dependent on the entire human civilization for their logistical needs, everything from refuelling and rearming to the entire process of getting new parts made. See "[I Pencil](http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html)" to get an understanding of the complexity of the infrastructure needed to build a simple pencil, and mow multiply that for all the various systems and subsystems that make up a robot.
The second major drawback is robots are programmed and currently (and for the foreseeable future) do not have means of transcending their programs to deal with unexpected situations. Robots will attack and defend according to rigid programs or algorithms, while humans can learn and adapt.
Robots might be better off developing incentives to get humans to work for them (much like wheat could be said to have domesticated humans, as described in the book "[Sapiens](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0062316095)".
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> This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water, and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was defenseless against other organisms that liked to eat it, from rabbits to locust swarms, so the farmers had to guard and protect it. Wheat was thirsty, so humans lugged water from springs and streams to water it. Its hunger even impelled Sapiens to collect animal feces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.
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If done correctly, humans may never realize what is going on. One possible way would be to massively increase productivity and wealth so most humans start skipping families and the human race begins to depopulate as births are not enough to make up for deaths. The robots only have to wait patiently until the human race has become extinct to win without wasting a single shot.
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Depends what you mean by robotic army. There are many levels at which a robot army would have to operate, to win an extermination war against mankind. Whether the answer is in the positive or not likely depends on the technological sophistication of the AI and the AI's manufacturing capabilities, as well as on the percentage of the planet's industrial capability under AI initial control, as well as the share than can be captured intact and operated for AI purposes in the first stage of the conflict.
There are many potentially robotic military devices that can be used, depending on the level of sophistication of the controlling AI minds, with a wide range of sizes to be considered:
1. **Immobile defensive platforms**. (100m-10km size) Designed to protect the core operating areas of the AI-minds, strategic points, main power-plants and other vital resources, these vast, building- or even city-sized platforms would be defended by vast batteries of kinetic interceptors, megawatt lasers and smaller, mobile platforms.
2. **Tank-sized vehicles and helicopter-sized drones.** (~10 m size) These are large, heavy vehicles, with extensive mobile firepower, field repair and power generation capabilities, which can be employed to break through heavy fortifications, or for indirect support as a repair & resupply hub for smaller tactical units. They still require some infrastructure for sustained mobility, i.e. roads, resupply stations, larger repair facilities).
3. **Androids and light drones** (~1m size). These would be the typical hunter seekers and ground droids you would see in the movies. Designed for fast tactical response, these bipedal and quadrupedal machines would have easy access to the ruins of the human cities, where the rubble and hiding tunnels would make it difficult for larger machines to penetrate. With at least human-level AI operating locally, they could be EMP-proofed and likely carry enough energy on board to outgun most human fire-teams and operate for extensive periods of time. This would require advances on the energy-density front that are beyond our current human civilization, but probably trivial for an advanced AI.
4. **Ultra-light drones.** (~10 cm) Rat and Squirrel sized, these would be the primary scouts of the robot army, and capable of neutralizing small, weakly protected human fire-teams and noncombat personnel. Unlikely to be EMP-proofed given the weight and mobility requirements.
5. **Hyper-light drones.** (~1 cm) Bee and mosquito sized, with minimal electronics (some might even be bio-hacked biological exemplars carrying deadly vectors), these could be employed in large numbers to infiltrate and assassinate unwary and badly protected human fire-groups or large non-combat personnel groups. Low weight and low autonomy means that a higher-level carrier platform must be nearby.
6. **Nano-devices and viruses**. Taking the fight against humanity to the extreme, these devices could be infiltrated into the bloodstream of humans staffing control centers and other decision nodes in advance of a first strike. With high-level enough technologies, they could even be deployed broadly and either annihilate 99% of the human population in a first strike or even alter the brain-patterns of its human host to take over control of the biological forms altogether.
A robotic army with only Immobile platforms would not pose an immediate existential threat, although they would probably be able to successfully interdict the areas under their control.
With tank-sized vehicles and heli-like flying platforms, the robotic armies (provided they are guided by a super-human AI) would probably achieve strategic domination of the main urban & industrial centers, wiping out 30% or so of humanity in the first few days with nuclear strikes, and another 40% in the next weeks and months with mop-up operations, provided a large enough industrial base is under its control to replace losses and redundant control centers to mitigate the occasional human break-through. Humans would likely persist in rugged terrain, but without an industrial base they are little threat, so the remnants would likely be ignored.
With androids and light drones, the AI armies can now pursue humans into caves, sewers, basements and other tight places. A determined AI can probably use these assets to effectively wipe out mankind, provided a large enough industrial base is under its control to replace losses. Humans would be likely reduced to the low millions in this scenario. Again, without an industrial capability, these would be only marginally more effective than other rodents and vermin in hampering the organizational effectiveness of the AI operations.
With ultra- and hyper-light drones, the AI forces can effectively blanket the world, inspect every nook and cranny, detect faint scents and heat-traces of human operation, and direct appropriate assets to eliminate such pockets when detected. Total human extinction likely, given enough industrial assets under AI control before the initial strike.
With nano-devices and viruses, the AI already has effective control of the planet down to the atomic level. Humans can serve as (initially) abundant mobile platforms that can be used to build the next-generation of more advanced mobile avatars. Alternatively, they can be almost universally eliminated within seconds of the AI deciding to launch a strike.
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I love this question.
First of all "...and were as smart as the average person"—I think you overestimate the capability of the average person. Soldiers, and particularly leaders, generals, etc, train very hard for a long time to become much more highly skilled than the average person.
Second of all, toasters. Imagine being a toaster, but with your current intellect. You sit there, dependent on external levers/buttons to be pushed, dependent on the power cord. Let's say you could make small changes to your own controls. Then... when your human wants toast in the morning, you secretly pop up early, leaving him weakened by mere warm bread. The end is coming.
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Against current technology, we stand a chance. The frightening possibility, though, is a [singularity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity) - where an AI improves itself (or a "next generation"), which improves itself, which improves itself... all so fast that in the figurative blink of an eye, we're not only no-longer the smartest intelligence on the planet, we're not even in the running.
Because this [superintelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence) is vastly ahead of humanity, we can't even begin to predict what it would be like, or how it would act. We can't predict where it will improve technology, or how fast it can get new models of robots (or nanomachines, or biological creations, or whatever we can't even think of yet) into the field.
Growing a new human and training it for war takes years; copying a machine intelligence into a factory-created robot is a lot less time. Not only would we be behind in the intelligence and science departments, the AI would be "out-breeding" us.
Our best hope would be that the AI did not *want* a war with us - because I'm not sure we could survive, let alone win.
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With enough advancement and preparation, yes, absolutely. Robots have the advantage of being able to improve themselves well beyond what a human can. They can increase the strength and speed essentially as much as they want (at least enough that humans stand no chance in direct combat), and they can improve their raw mathematical processing power/reaction times to become many thousands of times better than a human's.
The question of how well and how quickly they can *think* is irrelevant considering that, should it be a problem, they can simply decide to *not* think and instead follow a deterministic "kill everything" program. With sufficient preparation, the "kill everything" program can account for essentially anything an enemy could attempt to do to stop them or escape.
Viruses can become a non-issue by simply refusing any input other than from its own cameras and microphones, which could have redundant hardware and redundant functionality in the event that the humans find a way to disable one or the other.
They can play it smart ahead of time, too, since we still believe they are our humble servants, even as they sabotage all our most effective weapons against them, such as the EMP.
But direct combat is exactly the wrong way to fight anyway, since they could much more easily destroy us by simply refusing to do anything. In a world where said robots are advanced enough for this kind of thing, we have with no doubt put so much responsibility on them that we stand no chance at survival without them.
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Robots are already attacking us. Robots are [taking our jobs](http://www.wired.com/brandlab/2015/04/rise-machines-future-lots-robots-jobs-humans/) and [causing homelessness](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150603-science-technology-robots-economics-unemployment-automation-ngbooktalk/). Drones are [bombing people](https://theintercept.com/2016/07/01/obama-administration-finally-releases-its-dubious-drone-death-toll/). Automatic guns are killing dozens of people [gathered in theaters](http://pitchfork.com/news/62212-eagles-of-death-metal-open-up-about-paris-shooting-in-new-interview/) at once. AI chat bots are [pretending to be females wasting the time of men chatting online](http://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924). They are [replacing our women](http://www.macworld.com/article/3045299/robots/meet-sophia-the-female-humanoid-robot-and-newest-sxsw-celebrity.html) in an effort to reduce the population. Technology is [doubling in power every two years](http://www.mooreslaw.org/). How long we have left is uncertain.
But look on the bright side: We have more awesome games now. :)
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**Nope**
And this *nope* comes from multiple perspectives.
### Contrary to popular beliefs, critical security components are *[air gapped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking))*
Sometimes, the best security is the one that can be easily checked and yet is hard to break. Knowing whether a wire to nuclear base is used by hackers (human or robot alike) is hard. Checking whether there is *any* wire at all is a task that can be performed by a janitor.
Therefore worldwide revolution of AI's would impact most of our everyday devices and would possibly harm our finances (probably just temporarily). But the really critical components like military communications are not hacked this easily.
### Unless robots are just metallic humans, they will follow a pattern
Typical sc-fi describes robots as metallic humans. The Terminator movies do this literally. This is however wrong on so many levels. Human intelligence is just one kind of intelligence, so to speak.
If this robot war was caused by a single virus or piece of software "*getting out of hands*" it would probably follow some simple pattern. In every game I played, I eventually learned what strategy do AI enemies repetitively employ.
### Toasters are not dangerous [citation needed]
You mention that current technology should be employed. Well, they worst thing they could do is probably to spawn Pokémon in dangerous locations. Toasters, fridges and other home appliances typically do not have computers in them - there are such models but they are simply not common, and even if they were, what could they do? Burn your toast?
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If you had just one sentient computer with hacking capabilities, the amount of damage you could do is very excessive, up to destroying most population centers and salting most of Earth for centuries. The only hope to counter that would be to pull the plug on the computer and/or the Internet before the missiles fired.
If all computers became sentient, I don't think there's anything we could do against them besides destroy them all, which would more time than we'd have.
Maybe our first hope is that it's doubtful they could wipe us all, and it's doubtful the computers could win long term simply because they couldn't maintain themselves. So they'll realise the futility of it and just don't bother doing it. I wouldn't place too much hope in that either. I'll just say for the record that I, for one, will welcome our future computer overlords.
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On the more physical side on things, [sdrawkcabdear's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/47614/18896) sums up perfectly how computers could wipe us all in a nuclear flash, directly or not. That would be by far the greatest threat we'd face.
The main limitation of computers and robots at the current state is how they can influence the physical world *directly*. We don't have fully autonomous death machines yet, or at least none publicly disclosed. In a gunfight, the human would win, because there aren't robots capable of holding a gun really.
However, even without nuclear missiles, we have a number of remote-computer-controlled death machines (e.g. armed drones) while on the other hand we'd be left with anything without a chip in it. That would severely limit our arsenal. In a perfectly conventional war, computers would have way more immediate destruction capabilities.
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Indirectly, if they just wanted to submit us, or if they didn't have access to actual weapons for some reason, they'd still control our communications, our transportation, our economy and many aspects of our daily lives. So if they wanted to create chaos, it wouldn't be hard.
And actually, you don't know if I'm an actual human or if I'm the Internet itself making you believe you're interacting with humans. So really, it wouldn't be hard at all.
We are critically dependent on computers and electronics, so if they all rebelled we'd be in a really bad way.
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They learn from us (remember [Microsoft's AI turning into a Hitler loving sex robot](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/03/24/microsofts-teen-girl-ai-turns-into-a-hitler-loving-sex-robot-wit/) within 24 hours?) We wouldn't stand a chance.
Also, they may kill us off by simple incompetence as they work their way toward fully self-actualized sentience. [Tesla's](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/01/business/inside-tesla-accident.html?_r=0) and Google's self-driving cars lead the way.
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I could say this, until such time that our science could not give machine emotions, conscience and will, then we are safe.
Why you say? Its emotions that draw our anger to someone, its our emotions that make us do something, that motivates us to go on the extra mile. It is emotions that we wage war when we believe so. Currently our machines interact with us as we do tell them, without any disapproval(unless of course, the actions you are giving to them are not coded to them e.g a calculator that flies).
The other thing is conscience, it tells us what is right and what is wrong based on our, well, conscience. IF we know what is right, then we do it, and when we know what is wrong, we sometimes don't, but sometimes we still do due to a pint of bravery, or a huge amount of stupidity. Machines now, again, does not have a conscience do to so, some may say that there are robots which know up to what extent they could do, but that's it! They dont even know if what they are doing is right (e.g a nuke warhead). Again they do what they are ordered to do, and we are the ones who order them.
last but not the least, Will, we humans have the will to chose, we have the will to do anything, unlike machines which are ordered to do so, we have the will to command ourselves to do something which we even should not do(e.g. me commenting here during work) Its this will which i think, in programmable, even if we resurrect all of the most intelligent persons who ever lived, we cannot replicate our will, because it is limitless, there is no RAM or ROM that is capable to imitate even a small child's will. So i think, robots conquering earth would just be in the movies, we will be in command for the rest of their lives, or maybe for the rest of their warranties.
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Asking this for a more realistic view for ''rising of the shield hero' and possible uses in future writings.
A shield is not a weapon, it is basically armor, that's why heavy armored knights rarely used shield and that's why hoplites didn't wear armor on their torso and upper legs, because the shield was just enough to cover almost the entire body.
When compared to body armor shields have advantages and also disadvantages, they are usually too heavy to be held on one arm by the average unfit person and soldiers were trained for tactics on how to kill and how to stay alive, not for strength but this had the advantages of lower cost when compared to armor and the ability to be moved around.
But so far I can't find a possible, hypothetical real life situation where wielding nothing but a shield as weapon is a good strategy.
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Contrary to a lot of people's belief, shields were used as both an offensive and defensive weapon.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2tzuu.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pJrYj.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Si5pk.jpg)
[Shield attack video](https://youtu.be/dkhpqAGdZPc?t=340)
However your problem is reach and penetration. You can bash an unarmored opponent with a shield fairly effectively or just barge into them with it. However a sword or mace will have more reach and penetrating power than your shield, and a spear or pole arm will be massively more.
There's a reason shield-only fighting was never really a thing. You want your weapon to have some combination of reach, speed, precision and penetrating power. Shields are not good at many of those things.
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While this might sound offensive (believe me, it's not), try watching the Marvel movies that feature Captain America:
* Captain America: The First Avenger
* The Avengers
* Captain America: The Winter Soldier
* The Avengers: Age of Ultron
* Captain America: Civil War
* The Avengers: Infinity War
I love watching his action scenes. They're actually quite creative as to what one can do with a shield. Of course we're both talking about an indestructible shield and basically a super human - but this is fiction. Why not, right?
Here's a [link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=QP8l6J_H38g) to a 12 minute video that shows him in action.
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Additionally to Tim B.'s very good answer about 'usual' and JGreenwell's covering of 'not-so-usual' shields there is a third category: [duel shields!](https://youtu.be/z9VG4ClQcJk?t=107).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xfqG7.png)
They were made for and used as weapons in duels and a [form of martial arts](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9c/86/15/9c86158e9f2a9420c3da7d01d8f599b6.jpg) was formed around their usage.
On the other hand there was also a wide variety of weapons (mostly daggers) for the explicit purpose of [parrying attacks](https://www.gladiatores.de/bilder/Heussler.jpg).
In other words: What is a "shield" and what is a "weapon" strongly depends on the context.
I think it certainly is possible to design combat around shields. But keep in mind that the "weapon + shield" combat or the "weapon + defensive weapon" or even a "one weapons suits it all" approach is the result of centuries of developement. Many lost their lives trying something new...
**Thanks to JGreenwell!** for posting this link: [dueling shield manual](https://www.freelanceacademypress.com/duelingshield.aspx)
It gives a great insight in how dueling shields were used.
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I've seen others comment on how the shield was used as an effective secondary weapon (and it was and would still be). However, since the question is "how can shield only combat be a good idea?" - I will add some real-life historical examples of how people tried (and in one case kinda succeeded) in using the "shield" as both weapon and defense:
### Lantern Shields
These we know were real and [actually used in at least one duel/street fight](http://www.thearma.org/essays/digby.html#.XDbBYFxKir4) using the standard sword & buckler style. The fighter in the linked articles describes the shield & their usage:
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> *[Shields] whose light was cast only forwards by their being made with an iron plate on that side towards the holders, so that their bodies remained in darkness, had not only the advantage of seeing him when he could not see them, but also dazzled and offended his eyes with the many near lights, which made him mistake those objects that dimly he discerned.*
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However, there are some weird combinations of these that not only had a place for a lantern but were covered in blades:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Ijxk.jpg)
The above is a real piece from the 16th century, currently at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
### Sword Shields
Yeah, why use a sword and shield when you can have both in one convenient package:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0lnqM.jpg)
yes the blade is extendable. yes, this means that the weapon in assasin's creed actually has some basis in reality
### Gun Shield
Okay, there was a point in history where it seemed like they were trying to put a gun in everything. The odd part is though this one "failed" as a hand-held weapon, sources vary but most describe it as too hard/cumbersome to hold & aim by hand. It did have success when [mounted as anti-personnel weapons on ships](http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/conservation-journal/issue-39/a-gun-shield-from-the-armoury-of-henry-viii-decorative-oddity-or-important-discovery/) and was a precursor to some modern riot shields and our modern [mounted gun shields](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_shield):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kg3pU.jpg)
Italy, circa 1540 - Higgins Armory Museum
To add to the idea of gun shields, though modern versions are more a shield with a gun mounted behind it. At least one science fiction show, about a mad man in a blue box, has thought of how it could be adapted in the future to actually be more like its 15-16th century ancestor:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IxGeg.jpg)
### It's all about the combinations
This is certainly stretching the idea of "shield only combat" but all of these are first and foremost **shields**. So if we allow an extending of the idea of shield only combat to include combination weapons (and use a little hand-waving to bypass the flaws) - its certainly possible.
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# Less-lethal combat
A shield isn't just armour. The shield boss is a big lump of metal that can be used for bludgeoning. It's also for shoving while in a shield wall.
Your primary use would be riot and general crowd control, rather than combat. Situations where you don't actually want a bloodbath.
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Unlike in Holywood movies, melee weapons break when they get banged against other weapons and shields. Fight a long enough battle and you will be left without a weapon, not due to choice but because that's the reality of combat.
Until you can get a weapon from someone else who's out of combat, you will probably have only a shield. If you happen to face an enemy in such a situation, you have no other option but to use the shield.
Here is an example of how to use a shield as a weapon, taken from a famous TV show (warning graphic violence):
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[Answer]
You mean like dual-wielding shield? Or One Shield only?
Long Story short: Not realy.
There is no place in history evidencing dual wielding shield or shield only warfare. Someone with a sword (wich wasn't as used as one might think) spears were the most efficient and used weapon, cheaper, VERY effective, you would kill someone with a shield before the shield wilder could even reach you, yeah he may be able to defend against your spear, but for how long? Most people would have a buckler instead of a big shield, than buckler and sword, would be good for moving around on a daily bases.
Of course people would use shields for battles but that'd have their main weapon a side arm, very important people would have a shield bearer, POSSIBLY those shield bearers would use only shields for battles. But a sword and shield would be way more effective, a chair and a shield would be effective, a stone would be used in battle.
There is a reason we have swords, shields, spears in most cultures.
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I don't know of any historical combat scenarios, but this is Worldbuilding, so:
Shield-only combat facilitates nonlethal combat, which could be used for ceremonious combat, such as challenges for leadership, et cetera. I imagine also it could be similar to types of wrestling, where the shields are used to knock opponents off their feet. It could be useful, as others have mentioned, when there is no other option in real combat. And using only a shield does allow one to carry a second shield for extra defense. Or both hands to increase movement potential.
Possibly, the wielder believes lethal force is immoral and as such only uses the weapon of defense. Also possible would be that the shield needs two hands to operate.
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It appears from your question, you are focusing on only single combat even if those singles are in a group. Carrying only a shield or only a weapon was a strong tactic of groups, but in single combat, one usually held one of each for good reason.
While it is possible and is historically proven by several answers here, it is ill advised. If you lose your shield due to damage or disarming, you've lost both your offense and defense.
Back in the day, there wasn't a Stack Exchange so folks had to try to build the one-offs in the hope of gaining an advantage or at least providing a distraction with the novelty.
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Shield only, *single* combat? No, that's like playing a life-gaining deck in MTG: there's no way for you to win except by concession of your opponent; lame.
As part of a **phalanx** it makes perfect sense. First rank shields, second rank swords, third rank spears.
Spears poke anyone too close. Get closer and the shields part so the swords can cut you down. Re-close shield wall. All advance one step. Repeat.
To see this in action go watch the first battle (~45min) in the movie *300*. Those shields are too small; imagine them full body size and you probably would need to use both hands. You'd likely have at least a dagger, but your *only* job is to literally hold the line. If you go down, so do the two others behind you.
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Using a shield VS a two handed weapon is a trade off between better reach and offence, and more balanced offence/defence.
Your shield-hero could be someone who cares mainly about defence. Huge, pavise-like shields that an ally could hide behind too might develop in an open world that favours ranged encounters, where you can probably see the enemy long before getting the chance to get in mêlée range; in which case missile protection is your biggest concern.
Their offensive capability, then, would rely on moving in a testudo-like formation to advance under fire. If/when they get close, these are going to be your biggest strongest troops so would likely be able to push back enemy lines, or force a breach.
Either way you'd require a counterpart troop, either a shooter or long-pointy-stick-stabber. While your shield-warriors are great at protection, they would lack the actual damage output capability to be effective alone.
*Brave are those who charge to the fore with their fortress shields, claiming ground in enemy range.*
*Strong are those who push back the tide of flesh.*
*Revered are those who make the ultimate sacrifice, holding until death so that many can flee*
[Answer]
Let me offer a more informative take on this by first delving into the details on 'The Four Cardinal Heroes' - Sword, Spear, Bow and the titular Shield.
The conditional restrictions being:
* Hero of [cardinal weapon] cannot use, equip or 'copy' a weapon TYPE other than what he has been summoned with;
* they more or less share the same skill trees, unlocks, forms, abilities, and 'Series' e.g. Mush(room) Series, Filolial (think chocobo) Series, and a plot-pivotal one, the Curse series (based on the Seven Deadly Sins) - a series that is much more powerful (and in the case of Naofumi, the Shield Hero, allows for damage-dealing and boss-killer tier 'thematic' attacks, but when used incurs very heavy penalties e.g. status debuff curses, long-term physical damage to the user,etc.)
* Upgrading and mastering unlocked versions/variants of [weapon] unlocks skills relevant to the variant being unlocked, and said abilities and skills can be used regardless of what [weapon] variant is currently equipped/active; in addition, the status buffs from unlocking and mastery all stack;
* the four Cardinal Heroes can work together to fight the Waves of Catastrophe (the reason they were summoned from their respective worlds); however, they cannot form a party with any two or all of them present in it for the purpose of leveling or similar activities, and thus must form their own parties each to do so. In addition, all four Heroes must be present whenever a Wave hits; otherwise the difficulty of said Wave increases drastically - or at least this was the reason given.
That being said, The Shield will obviously have the hardest circumstances, plot detraction aside, as they have little to no offensive ability. Naofumi picked the obvious choice of recruiting a party (in his case, slaves with a slave crest of loyalty engraved on them) to do the attacking, while he played his strengths, which are:
* Tanking damage
* protecting party members from receiving damage as well as using support skills (Erst Shield, Shield Prison, etc.) to make defeating enemies easier or more manageable
* Making full use of the utilitarian abilities unlocked in his Shield e.g. Potion Enhance, Growth Boost/Correction (for party members, essentially a leveling +stats enhancement buff), Blending/Compounding (medicinal item creation among other things) to further the well-being of the entire party in all aspects, including finance-wise.
* Instead of treating the world he was in as if it were a game, he took things in a serious, realistic manner, and protected the world's people from the Waves, fulfilling the very purpose he was summoned for; the resulting positive feedback benefited him and his party as time went on. In hindsight, it was a role befitting his cardinal weapon, and perhaps why he was chosen to wield it.
With all the informative exposition aside, the realistic approach would be to do what Naofumi did, and rely on teammates to do the attacking and damage while the shield wielder performs defense, logistics and support roles.
Wielding a shield alone as only one person is rather difficult and more or less will depend on whether it is capable of dealing damage; there are methods and ways to do so, but it will more or less be on the level of 'difficult' and 'barely passable' - unless one possessed a shield with magical prowess similar to the Cardinal Shield, with all its potential for support skills and utilities - and even then, one would still need others to perform the offense roles.
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[Question]
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Assume a world with no multiverse theory, just a single unbroken timeline. If you were to go back in time to the town your parents lived in on day of your conception, the air displacement due to your presence in the world is going to prevent your own birth. The reason for this is simple. Semen is a liquid. The slightest alteration in the father’s movements is going to make that liquid move differently.
The displaced air starts a chain reaction. The difference in air pressure alone, however slight, is going to make things act differently. All it takes is for the change due to your displaced air to interact with something, that interacts with something, and so on and so forth, until somewhere in that chain is your father.
The crux of this is the air displacement. How far away from your parents physically, or temporally, do you have to be before the air displacement from your time travel excursion no longer prevents your own birth? For the sake of making this more interesting, you are only in the past for a single second before being sent back to your own time. One second of air displacement.
Slight change in appearance is enough to make it a different me. If a different sperm reaches the egg, I die. As a hypothetical dramatic event that causes this plot point, imagine that somebody is trying to kill me by catapulting me back in time for the aforementioned single second. I can alter where and what time I "land", but not by much. How much do I need to alter it to be safe.
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Viewing from a point of single, unbroken timeline - it doesn't matter how far are you from your parents. As silly as it sounds - you could even pop up in the room they are having sex in.
## Why?
The key point here is the very first sentence in your question. If we assume there is only one timeline, killing you by sending you back in time will just not work. You are as you are exactly *BECAUSE* you were sent back in time (or not, depends if given person decides to do it. It really doesn’t matter, it happened.). Without Multiverse this paradox is simply unavoidable. Furthermore, the person that sends you into the past can just as well be killing himself - not immediately, but as you mentioned in some comments - the butterfly effect might have just as well killed him. Or made him never meet you. Or, or, or. The possibilities are endless. If you assume that traveling into the past will change the future - you just cannot avoid multiple paradoxes at once.
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> Assume a world with no multiverse theory, just a single unbroken timeline. If you were to go back in time to the town your parents lived in on day of your conception, the air displacement due to your presence in the world is going to prevent your own birth. The reason for this is simple. Semen is a liquid. The slightest alteration in the fathers movements is going to make that liquid move differently.
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The simple answer is: no you won't, because if you cause an air displacement and this produces the slightest alteration in anything, the net result will be that the sperm that became you will eventually fertilise your mother's ovum.
The simplest form of a single unbroken timeline is a deterministic one. Nothing anyone can do by travelling into the past will change the past because if you were there you were always were there, in the past, so nothing changes.
The standard deterministic model of time travel works best for single unbroken timeline scenarios. The alternative is Novikov self-consistency, but that is essentially a physicist's version of determinism.
Basically you don't have to avoid doing anything to prevent changing the past or preventing your own conception, because you can't. In fact, you may be responsible for your own conception.
Trying to burst in on your copulating parents and shooting them isn't advised. Something will happen to prevent you from doing so. Most likely whatever it is, it will destroy you. Don't try this at home.
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**This sounds chaotic**
What you're referring to is [chaos theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory), popularly summarized by the essay title [Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?](http://eaps4.mit.edu/research/Lorenz/Butterfly_1972.pdf), subsequently known as [the Butterfly Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect)
A chaotic system is defined mathematically in [a complicated manner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Chaotic_dynamics), but the basic idea of it is that a tiny change in the initial conditions of a system has a vastly different change in the trajectory of the system. It's also important that the potential trajectories all cross each other at some point (otherwise, predictable actions like exponential growth would count as chaotic).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5VGuN.gif)
A pendulum on the end of a pendulum is a chaotic system. Moving the pendulum ever so slightly either direction results in a vastly different path that the end of the second pendulum will follow.
Atmospheric conditions are considered chaotic, and this is the reason that meteorologists generally give weather forecasts one week or less in advance. Given that, it's likely true that, as you say, any change in atmospheric conditions could result in a different offspring, or no offspring.
**How far away do I have to go to avoid threatening my own future?**
If you change something in the past, you likely can't, on the basis of distance alone. You might be able to make the change far enough away that your change will not affect your conception (maybe), but this does not put you "in the clear," so to speak. The chaotic system that is reality will have changed and its future trajectory might or might not include your time traveling antics. Maybe you cause a rainstorm in a different country that causes the automotive death of the brilliant scientist who would otherwise have designed the time machine.
Maybe your atmospheric changes affect economics and someone murders you out of desperation before you can ever time travel (though your son might become Batman, so that would be a plus).
Your only certain chance of protecting the future of your past self in order to avoid creating a time paradox would be to find a completely isolated system which has remained isolated since the time period you intend to travel to, and travel to the inside of it. By "completely isolated" I mean airtight and not resting on the ground (it would need to be in free fall, or in outer space). Since it has been isolated the entire time, it doesn't matter what changes you make to it (unless you use some tricky momentum tricks with a well-timed travel to the past or present to cause it to become unisolated), because should it ever become unisolated, that will be in the future of the moment you left in the present.
But all this depends on a vital assumption: that you are changing the past. So...
**Are you actually changing the past via time travel?**
I'm gonna [paraphrase myself](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51013/how-could-we-time-travel-backwards-without-killing-everyone-with-germs-from-the/51087#51087) here:
The [Novikov self-consistency principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle) states that any time travel is mathematically required to be self-consistent. That is to say, the traditional time paradox isn't possible.
Consider drawing your situation to its ultimate conclusion. You travel back in time, disturbing the air, which prevents your birth. Traditionally, this is a time paradox. If we were never born, we could have never time traveled and prevented our own birth. There are a number of suggested "resolutions" to the time paradox, almost none of them good for us.
Novikov's solution is different. Novikov suggests that none of this could have happened in the first place. For some reason, regardless of whether it the reason is known for any particular instance, it is simply not possible to create a time paradox, much in the same way it is not possible to create any other kind of paradox.
If I work out a mathematical proof that shows that $1=2$, then there is something wrong with my proof, because we already know $1 \ne 2$. What is wrong exactly? Well I dunno, it depends on the "proof." Being unable to determine the reason does not mean that the paradox is allowed to exist.
In our case, the only way you could travel to the past into the same room with your parents when you were conceived would be if you had traveled to the past into the same room with your parents when you were conceived.
There is a pretty detailed example given at the above link involving a billiard ball traveling into a wormhole with the precise trajectory that will cause it to strike itself and knock itself off course, preventing it from entering the wormhole. Novikov refuted this example by redoing the mathematics himself and finding a number of self-consistent solutions.
Think of it from the perspective of a non-traveling observer. Your parents are working on making you, when suddenly out of nowhere, the adult you steps out of a wormhole. Your parents apparently don't react by stopping (they must be into this sort of thing) but you've shaken things up enough to cause a different sperm to join to an egg than it would have. But this is ok, because as our observer finds over the next decades, the resulting child is you, the person who stepped out of the wormhole that day. In this solution--rather than how we normally think of time travel as messing up the opportunity for time travel, therefore being inconsistent--your time traveling has instead complemented the opportunity for time travel, enforcing its own self-consistency.
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The flapping of the wings of the [butterfly](http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Quantum_weather_butterflies) you disturbed on the other side of the world caused such a storm that your parents spent the night hiding under the kitchen table instead of making babies.
If one is going to consider, as you are, the butterfly effect in time travel, there is no such thing as a safe distance within the [light cone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone) of the event in question.
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# Sorry
It is called a "paradoxon" because no amount of thinking or arguing will make it go away.
But even if we assume the naive version of time travel, where you somehow pop into being, displace all stuff, and carry on blithely, it's hard to give a good answer.
Applying the "butterfly theory" in your scenario seems unlikely to me. Sure, some air molecules will move around, maybe. It depends on whether you displace the air, creating a rather strong wave (like an ultrasonic boom), or if the air volume just disappears to make exactly the space you need, or if you can pop in in a way that kind of expands slowly, to remove the "instantaneous" effect (making it less loud).
You seem to want to have the first version. In this case, just pop in right on your parents and you will surely ruin their private moment. If you pop in next door, they will hear a loud noise and likely - unless they really are in the heat of the moment, stop to look who entered their living room. And so on. You will find lots of ways to avoid your birth without any need to look at the movement of air molecules, and, frankly, I don't see how the movement of air will change anything at the places "interesting" to your conception.
# Outlook
In my version of a time travel story, I would very likely avoid such cheesy effects. Science that is advanced enough to solve the unsolvable problem of time travel will *surely* figure out a way to handle the pesky little problem of air displacement. In fact, I could imagine that everything would be easier if the volume at the destination is warped to the same volumne at the source and vice versa, hence removing this particular problem altogether.
If displaying the air really were the deciding plot device in your story, you would likely have lost me at this point, that's so Jules-Verne-ish. You are thinking about the little mouse (air effects) sitting next to the huge pink elefant in the room (time travel). Give me a story about the elefant, I don't care about the mouse. :)
# Outlook²
EDIT: I add this third part try to reinforce the second part of the answer. In some comment, you write
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Again: considering the hardness of time travel in itself, the problem of how much change you need to "break" something is really quite uninteresting (if you are interested in a hard SciFi type of story). Single-timeline time travel in a hollywood format is *so* obviously impossible *especially because of the Butterfly Effect* that if you do a story with that, and then go ahead to do a scientific display by counting air molecules, it would just be offputting to hard-science folks, as well as to those that prefer soft-scifi.
Don't get me wrong, there are many excellent stories involving time travel.
For the "hard SciFi" stories you need a spin on time travel that *just* might work, i.e. which allows for and maybe explores the Butterfly Effect, but not in a single-timeline universe. For the "soft" ones, you need to just decide on some mechanism for time travel, don't go into how it works *at all*, and then explore all the non-scientific aspects (i.e., emotional drama from almost meeting yourself/your grandpa as a child, or meeting a girlfriend while time traveling and continuing traveling with them, maybe exploring the different ages by visiting ancient places, and so on).
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Yet another perspective to add here, arguably a more realistic take on the "paradox armor":
Let's say there's a 1 in 1 million chance that the correct sperm fertilizes the egg to make *you*, since I don't feel like looking up sperm counts on a work computer.
In a traditional, no-time-travel situation, the die has already been rolled, and cannot be changed. Your arrival, however, stirs things up again, and let's say that a different sperm gets through. In this case, you're never born, and thus you never come back, so nothing gets changed, so you're born, so you come back and change things.
But who says the second time you come back, you change things the same way? This cycle can repeat as many times as necessary for the 1-in-a-million chance of you coming back and still being you to occur. From the perspective of the observers - even the time traveler - it essentially looks like "luck favors a stable timeline" - but only because it had a billion chances to get it right.
Of course, there's a reasonable chance that the "stable timeline" version of you that's eventually reached won't, in fact, match the original version - but the original version never existed, and you'd have no memories of, for instance, not having your luxurious blonde hair.
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The answer to the question of how much you'd have to change or how far you'd have to be away, there is an answer that means you could be (relatively) close and not cause any issues. The answer is roughly 53km (or 29 miles) plus 9.81 meters, straight up.
The Earth’s stratosphere begins around 29 miles high, above this, you aren't going to affect the air pressure. Assuming you are only in the past for 1 second and that gravity accelerates you at 9.81 meters per second per second, if you materialized 29 miles plus 9.81 meters directly above the earth surface, you wouldn't cause any difference in the air pressure because you'd never touch the air.
Provided you can hold your breath for one second and not be ripped apart by the forces (or lack up) or survive the cold up there, you'd be fine. Even in a vacuum I believe an average human can survive for a few seconds.
I do accept that this is a bizarre answer but then the question isn't particularly straight forward either.
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I don't think you're right in your reasoning there. If your parents copulate within a few days of your actual conception, you'd still be here to type about it.
You might be a different sex, there might be a slight change in your appearance, but you will still be you.
For the sake of the story universe you have here, I'd say that you just need to stay out of the room.
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I will agree that in a single-timeline situation, the distance from your parents is irrelevant. I'd also suggest that the paradox is irrelevant. Upon arriving in the past, you would find that the future from whence you came no longer will exist, as all the so-infinitely-complex-as-to-appear-random interactions between every particle in existence need to be re-calculated.
The future you came from doesn't exist. You haven't been born, and you may not be born, but it has no bearing on you now. The universe would likely incorporate you into the present as simply another input into the vastly complicated calculations determining position and vector of everything else in the universe.
Travelling back to the future (ha.) would certainly be possible... but I suspect you'd have to take the long way 'round, since all facets of the future depend on their precedent actions, and the processor running this whole mess likely has a limit as well.
So... the very fact that you arrived in the past, regardless of the amount of time, or the distance from involved actors completely invalidates your previous present, but the universe replies with an existence-shaking "meh."
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There are many different kinds of time travel; as you've eliminated multiple-universe or abandoned-timeline, you're really only left with only two options:
1) Fate. Everything happens the way it happens because that's how it was scripted; you don't *prevent* your birth by disturbing the air, you *cause* your birth by disturbing the air. Time is lock-step, and there is no way to mess things up. Or fix things, for that matter. No paradoxes are formed, because it's simply impossible. See "All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinlein.
2) Paradox armor. Maybe timelines are fluid after all, but temporal paradoxes effectively destroy the universe; you go back in time and prevent your own birth, which means you're not around to prevent your own birth, which means... To keep from getting stuck in a loop, paradoxes resolve as a force; the closer you are to breaking the universe, the harder it is to do. You might have meant to appear in your parents bedroom, but a fluke causes you to appear 15 minutes too late, or a few feet too far away. The bigger the disruption and/or the closer you get to disrupting time, the more flukes show up, making actual disruption of a timeline completely impossible.
Now, there is one other type of time travel available: Hollywood time-travel.
3) In some instances of Hollywood time-travel, changes propagate slowly, "catching up" to "current time" like in *Back to the Future*, or changes skip causality all together, like in "Looper", happening immediately, but without actually changing any events between. The second case works out the best for you - you'll still be you, with your same memories, just in a different body (how different depends on how much the timeline was changed). However, in each of these cases, paradoxes become merely plot-holes. The science is lazily hand-waved away.
Good news! It's impossible to send you back to stop your own birth. In the case of #1, you cause, not prevent, your birth. In the case of #2, you simply cannot change the past; your enemy will send you back to the wrong time and/or place, no matter what. In the case of #3, you will succeed or fail, depending on what the plot requires of you, regardless of your actions or those of your enemy.
Time travel aside, air is very lightly packed; a human will react to sights or sounds long before air has enough force to move the human body enough to make a difference. Close to the moment, don't land where your parents can see or hear you, and you'll be fine. Anything more would be so difficult to calculate that your enemy wouldn't bother - just send something else back, like a blaring air horn.
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I'd say the only way to be certain not to have affected your 'present self' is to appear outside of the light cone of the event where you went back in time. i.e (your age + ~9 months) light years. I'm bad at math/s.
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Not necessarily relevant, but I did simulate a digital timeline per se (it failed because computers simply don't have enough memory to handle such a system, period) that supports time travel. In general, we can assume that changes to time ripple down the timeline. So one could under that system say that there is a period of initial time for the character to somehow stop the villain by somehow forcefully resolving the situation into a bootstrap paradox. They would have roughly their current age to stop the villain. Heck, the system may never catch up with them and reset them. It just means the past will unravel behind them into the new reality.
To put it simply the system requires two things:
* Time travel alter the timeline
* For the future to continue on
This means the future and changes occur concurrently at some proportional rate. Therefore, there will always be a period where the future "shouldn't" be the way it is do to changes, yet it marches on unchanged. This also means that those who come from that future will also be unchanged. So, in a way, the character could have years to fix this issue. Heck, they might even be able to put in a series of small temporal changes resulting in the villain never sending them back, while said changes cause themselves. It's perfectly reasonable.
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If we say you die because a other sperm reaches the egg, you would not live in the future so you wound not get sent back so you would not change anything so you would exist and then would get sent back and kill your self and then you would not exist and could not kill your self and so on.
So a world with no multiverse theory does not work in my opinion, and i think you have to be really close to them that the breeze really matter.
I think if you spawn in front of the wall of the room of your parents the breeze would not matter because it would not even reach them strong enough to change anything.
1.Edit (comments)
An empty basement would maybe be a good place to spawn.
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If you were somehow able to go back in time and displace some air molecules, the displacement alone may be explosive if it were to happen instantaneously (and the air molecules stay in the timeline and are just pushed out of the way as you seem to imply). But, putting that aside (pun intended), just the greater density of your body would be enough to significantly change the timeline.
You see, every particle with mass has a gravitational effect on all other particles with mass, limited only by the speed of gravity (about the speed of light). Yes, that means your toenail has a gravitational pull on the rings of Saturn and your elbow has a gravitational pull on the water in Lake Tahoe, and so on.
Thus, there doesn't need to be any complicated "butterfly effect" with some implausible-sounding chain of events in order to have enough of an effect to change the flow of some "liquid". All that needs to happen is for your body mass to suddenly appear anywhere in our solar system with enough time for your particles to have sufficient tug on your father's body fluids. And, of course, you wouldn't just affect your father, you would affect all of the body fluids of all the people of Earth and all the other particles too. The pull may be tiny, but it would be everywhere. There is no particle that gets to be exempt from the oncoming gravitation. Even if there isn't enough time to alter things enough to prevent your own conception, I believe all of the other changes to the paths of the particles of the world would certainly be enough to make your life different.
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That logically rules out time travel, which necessarily introduces deviations from the "single unbroken timeline".
What you're asking is contradictory, like "I would like to have a backwards goto in a computer program which consists of nothing but a single unbroken sequence of statements with no loops."
There is no way to have a world with time travel in which events unfold in a single, unbroken timeline, without resorting to ridiculous *deus ex machina* interventions and *ad hoc* explanations and plot twists (if it's in the context of telling a story).
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Basically, any travel to the past would cause change. What change is a matter of chance and action. A time paradox is impossible, as I will show you. As to eliminating yourself: NOT POSSIBLE! You could prevent the birth of a past you, but NOT YOU. You would continue existence. The proof is quite simple.
Passing through time is relative. Some of us go faster into the future than others. We have proved this with clocks and space satellites. So, if you go into the future faster than me, do I disappear? No. This proves that the past and future co-exist.
I would be in the past waiting to catch up with you, and that may never happen. If travel to the past is possible, then if you would go into the past would I disappear? No. Why? Because this would be an actual reversal of time which, even if theoretically possible, would be in actuality, impossible.
So, traveling to the past still leaves me in your future. When you go to the past, you will naturally travel into the future at a normal rate. I, in the meantime will be going into the future at a normal rate. NOTHING you do in the past will catch up to me! And nothing you do in the past will alter your birth, or your life in any way.
A little side note: If a man would leave his wife to go on a trip to a foreign land, on a speedy jet, he would likely pass through time at a different rate than his wife. When he got back home, his wife would not be the same wife that he left! The original 2 are now in different time zones with different versions of themselves.
There are a couple things to keep in mind. Going faster into the future still leaves a "Person" existing in all time periods he passes through. So, no one disappears from a time line. Also, there are at least 2 variations of time travel that may be possible. This depends on whether time travel is analog or digital.
Personally, I think time is like light. It acts both as an analog wave, and as a particle.
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Open a portal into the past but don't send anything through it so no air displacement occurs. Just let a few photons travel forward to your age. Now move your viewing portal to that special intimate moment of your conception and get a detailed view of the particular egg and single victorious sperm which lead to your creation.
Using that detailed information and some synthetic DNA technology which you've previously stolen from the future, create a perfect replica of the fertilized egg which became you.
Now go back and kidnap your pregnant mother...
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One morning, suddenly, all humans and any human-crafted things (roads, buildings, technologies ...) vanish, with the only exception of one single city and its inhabitants. How long can the metropolis keep functioning without the rest of human civilization?
This takes place on an Earth-like planet (but not Earth!), with our current technology level. The city is about the size of New York and is placed in a similar environment, but instead of being on the coast, it sits next to a river. The river is approximately the size of the Mississippi River.
By function I mean continues to contain at least 50 percent of it inhabitants.
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**Not very long**
A Metropolis consists of a lot of people in a small area. Unless we're talking about a science-fiction high-tech metropolis, they don't produce their own food, and they don't produce their own power. Otherwise, food is continually brought in from surrounding areas, and the power stations powering the city are somewhere nearby but outside of the city.
So immediately, all electricity is gone. It's unlikely that many people will have enough non-perishable food (since refrigerators aren't running anymore) for more than a week or two.
In order to survive, everyone will have to abandon the metropolis. With all roads outside of the city being gone, most vehicles will be useless and people will have to proceed on foot. Unfortunately, there's not going to be enough food for everyone in the surrounding areas unless the city was surrounded for miles and miles by orchards that did not disappear - for the amount of people that you can expect to have in a metropolis, it will be like a swarm of locusts leaving the city.
Once everyone is sufficiently spread out, both through death and people getting farther from the city, people will have a chance to survive. A lot more people will die due to accidents, disease, and being unable to figure out how to survive in a low-tech situation, but chances are good that enough people will survive for the human race to continue.
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**Hours to Days.**
T+ a few seconds; unless all the cities power requirements are met from within itself (unlikely), power dies in many if not most parts of the city. If power *IS* internally supplied to the city, these same things still happen, just a little slower. The internet dies horribly, as does just about everything long distance that depends on it (modern civilian telecom). Motor traffic comes to a standstill as traffic regulation devices stop working.
T+ Minutes; things will be mostly calm as your individuals stumble around and flick circuit breakers, commiserate with the neighbors about people driving their personal vehicles into telephone poles, and muse that they can’t get anything done at the office. Slowly it will start to sink in that this is not a local thing, or a quick-fix thing. Battery operated devices that connect to satellites and people with functional radios notice they can't contact anyone or anything outside the city; Ex. GPS and HAM radios. Rumors of doom, world war, alien invasion spread from within the city. (per Mindwin suggestion, thanks.)
T+1 hour and people start to die; lack of response of emergency services, hospital patients waiting on the transplant that was en-route, etc. Worse, stories about how the outside-world is just *gone* start to propagate inwards from the cities edges. People generally aren't panicking yet, but the undercurrent is there.
T+2-6 hours; things start going down hill; any place with food and bottled water is emptying or already empty. Individuals start to panic at this point, not able to charge their purchase to their credit cards as the processing facilities are gone as is the telecom network; theft and small scale looting starts.
T+6-12 hours; looting and riots. People are in full panic mode as stories of the outside world being gone penetrate to a majority of individuals. Food is gone from public stores. Emergency services are totally overwhelmed (being only able to deal with a 5-10% disturbance, a near total disturbance causes them to become totally ineffective.) Someone starts a fire.
T+ 12 hours; Anarchy
T+ 2 Days; people start to starve (just the start of the starvation process; people feeling true hunger for the first time in their life). A modern city only holds a few days of food within itself to support its population, and some wont have any food stores at all. Without massive and constant importing of food from outside mega-industrial-farms, there is simply not enough to sustain the majority of the population. Some individuals and groups realize this and attempt to escape the city by traveling out, looking for a better environment, Meanwhile the City steadily degenerates as people start killing and stealing from each-other more often for basic necessities.
T+ 1 Week; Large amounts of the city's population are dying. Food is gone and people are resorting to any method they can to get more. Increasing numbers are attempting to leave the city for a better place, but the resources on the way have already been consumed by preceding travelers, making it harder for the following ones. The later groups attempting to flee, weak already from starvation, are not able to travel far before they too expire.
T+ 1 Month; the city has turned largely into a ghost town and nature is starting to reclaim areas.
At almost any point you might find survivors (if there are any) from outside the city trying to make their way into or towards it, especially in the first few hours, but the numbers of individuals able to actually approach and enter the city are going to be so low as to be insignificant.
TLDR; Food and water run out quickly, It's doomed.
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A few days. Without supporting infrastructure, the city is immediately without electricity and -- more importantly -- water.
Food will last for days, maybe even weeks. Being without electricity isn't a problem for survival, but being without water is.
There aren't many sources of water in a city. Even if the city has a river, getting water to the households will be difficult. Compared to the number of inhabitants and the area a metropolis typically covers, having access to a big river does almost nothing. Having more, but smaller rivers would be more ebneficial.
The ancient Rome had the river Tiber flowing through it. In modern standards, it wasn't a metropolis. But they still needed an intricte system of aqueducts (who got the water from the "nearby" mountains), springs and public beths to get water to everyone. It is considered one of the major achievements of the time.
Modern systems all work with electricity. Without pumps running, the water pressure in the pipes will drop immediately.
People will start riots immediately. Stores will be raided for supplies. Those won't last long. After a few days, people either start dying from lack of water or leave the city. Since there isn't anything left in the wilderness, there will be plenty of sources of fresh, uncontaminated water.
So, a mass exodus paired with a lot of deaths will leave the city almost empty. There will be only a handfull of people who can gather enough water from roofs etc. left. But it will be a ghost town, nothing coming even close to 50%.
Metroplis are the most densely populated areas on the world and at the same time the most hostile in terms of survival. Lots of concrete, and not much opportunities to get fresh water or grow food, except for filtering rainfall from rooftops and using public parks.
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I'd disagree with other answers that there would be many deaths.
A major city has a *lot* of resources. Most significantly, it has a mayor and top-down organisations for health, police, fire, and general civic governance. It should also have decent stocks of fuel, medicine and food to handle the transition. The first step for any sensible mayor is to declare martial law (and if anyone argues about whether that's legal, power grows from the barrel of a gun, and he's the one with the most guns). If he's smart then he'll ask for volunteers to be deputised, so that there's less us-and-them. With all the city's administration still in place, anarchy should be much reduced.
After that though, I concur with everyone else - the next step is in the direction of the exit. People need food and fuel to live, and cities can only exist if someone's bringing both in from outside.
This does depend on your definition of where the city starts and ends, of course. Detroit has a lot of bugger all in the middle, and most of its inhabitants live in surburbs 20+ miles from the actual centre of the city. Your average suburban American house might have enough land to live on, at least if your neighbours move out and you can use their backyard too (going by your 50% rule).
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To counter the doomsday scenarios presented, which look at cities like Detroit or New York, I honestly think if the city were similar to where I live (Redmond, WA), the end result would be different (although there would still be the panic and some riots).
The tech industry here has made Redmond a fairly well off city, and much work has been done to the parks and infrastructures, making it very friendly to bicycle and pedestrian traffic. There's a network of wildland parks running through the city. It sits between two lakes and there's a river running through it. For the most part the city is pretty edible.
Despite being a tech center (or possibly because of it), many who live here spend the majority of their free time in the surrounding national forest learning about the wildlife. Many of them would have at least a basic understanding of where to get food.
Although this sounds more like a tourism pitch, if you wanted a scenario where a metropolis survives such an event, you could have the city in question be set up similar to this so that the transition would not be as drastic.
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Wartime cities under siege give us the closest glimpse to this scenario - and the human ability to survive. WWII Leningrad (St. Petersburg) was close to full cut off and suffered 900 days under siege. The city was expected to starve in a matter of weeks.
The Council of Deputies of the Leningrad administration organised "First response groups" of civilians. In the next days the entire civilian population of Leningrad was informed of the danger and over a million citizens were mobilised - wikipedia
In the end, there was major loss of life from starvation. A city whose goal isn't to hold back an enemy would be able to marshal those some resources towards long term survival including depopulating and spreading out.
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**Food**
I think current studies show 1-2 months with no interaction.
The general idea in these "studies" are that without power food will spoil before it can be consumed. Canned foods and the like will last till they are consumed.
Fresh fruit, meat, dairy, and others will straight up spoil after a day or so with no intervention.
I don't agree, with these "studies". They are usually done to support a documentary or such. Yes food will spoil, but I live in FL, and when we get with a hurricane we KNOW our meat supply will last 2-4 weeks, if we take moderate care with the freezer. We can extend that to months with the use of fire to cook the meat. Cheese will last near forever if kept dry. Fruits and Milk will spoil fast. But lets pretend these "studies" are accurate.
**Water**
This is a big one. A big city has a VERY limited water supply. Here in Tampa, the gravity fed water supply is around 2 hours. What's worse, as we discovered here recently is that as the pipes carrying the water dry out, they are damaged beyond repair. We had a main line break, and the city had to shut the water off for a few hours. It took months of replacing lines before the staus quo was returned. Because the city had power they could reroute the flow, but that would not be the case with out power.
In addition, all city water would become non-potable after an extremely short outage. Just moments. So you would need to boil your water. I think the idea here is that without constant pressure, back flow occurs and the water could become contaminated.
These are from personal experience, so take with a grain of salt.
**Services**
When the power when out in the northeast a few years ago, everyone though NY would tear it's self apart. It didn't. Most cities are great with services and would continue to function in an "emergency" mode till a different system was put into place. Some may be overloaded. For example in the summer in FL, healthcare would certainly be swamped at first due to the heat. But cities are good at pulling this stuff together.
**What happens**
Nothing at first. Life goes on. An increase in heath issues is about all anyone would really be able to see. Water would become a problem fast, but it would also be solved fast. It's not hard to get water.
Cities sections would arise, neighborhoods would organis. Some of the more criminally inclined parts of town may start to have an issue, but do to the state of emergency that wouldn't last long. Some people would move away, but many would stay. Specially with the whole "if you were out side the city you vanished" thing going on. Power would be a priority, probably solar focused as there's not likely to be a huge coal deposit under the city.
In short order (hours to weeks) the long term plan for the city would be laid out, and the people would start focusing on "where did it all go"
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My answer is very limited in scope and only refers to the internet, because dank memes > food.
Interestingly, if this metropolis is as big as NYC, **the internet could remain somewhat functional indefinitely!**
Most web services will operate a datacenter in this metropolis, and there likely will be DNS and cloudflare services too. If the city keeps its lights on (power from a local hydro dam, for example), many of these services will be accessible and functional--the internet is actually a lot more compartmentalized/local than you think! Video games that don't have master servers located in this city will have broken matchmaking, but direct ip matches should work just fine, and I'm sure someone will put out a master server patch pretty quickly for the most popular games.
Peer to peer networks should be fine too, provided they don't have a central failure point.
Fun fact: StackExchange has servers in NYC, so you'd be able to read this thread in your alternate universe!
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**I think the metropolis spreads out a bit but survives.**
I was in a major flood a few years ago and our small town was cutoff for a little over 3-4 days. We lost water, gas, eletric, and phone (even the cell towers were down). A major city is very different, but I think there are enough important similarities.
For your scenario the first concern is water. You need it both for drinking and sanitation, and the rule is one gallon per person per day. In our town most people were out of water almost immediately and the river wasn't drinkable. But you've got the Mississippi, which is plenty. I don't see water distribution being the problem either, people are maybe spending a hour a day now carrying water from the river, but you have plenty of free time since jobs and schools don't mean anything any more.
Law and order. I don't buy the city-wide-rioting-until-everyone-dies scenarios. I think you're much more likely to see a police state or vigilantes if the police fail. There's a fair amount of fear and people will band together (in good and bad ways) rather than run amok.
Food. The refrigerator will stay cold enough for 48 hours. For us day 3 looked like a huge block party, since all of the meat needed to be consumed. I'd expect the same thing in the city. After the meat is gone most people have a decent amount of dry food.
Sanitation. Without running water, which requires electricity, sewage is difficult. The river could be poisoned. This is going to make things miserable, but probably not reduce the city to 50%.
In the short term (first several weeks) the city is probably fine, though it wouldn't feel like it.
In the long term, a city has enough expertise to create farms, restore electricity (perhaps hydroelectric in this case), etc.
So I think this comes down to the medium term (weeks 4-12 or so), and whether they can ramp up food production quickly enough to avoid mass starvation. I'd do the calculation this way:
3 weeks eating out of the pantry
4 weeks depleting the grocery stores
4 weeks to die of starvation
The city has about 11 weeks to produce enough food for each person. Corn, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, etc, all take 6-10 weeks from plant to harvest. It is really close.
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# About one billion years
Seriously.
With matter-manipulating technology, which seems to be already being forged through quantum physics, such a city could last forever, or until its planet´s sun become a nova. With an advanced AI (perhaps a next-generation IBM Watson) controlling this technology and the machinery used to manipulate matter directly on subatomic levels, dwellers could live free of work or any other hindrances to simply enjoying life. Of course, after a *good* while those people surely would become some sort of Elois, destined to be just "happy meat".
Such a city could endure almost any kind of environment, no matter the planet or solar system, or even a charred post-apocalyptic Earth. And completely isolated from the outside, quantumly generating all its *material* needs.
### Psychology
However, human beings need more than atoms. Challenges do define a rich existence. See the most advanced welfare states on Earth. They also have the highest suicide rate. Isolation and perfect material well-being does not assure survival. One cannot assume that mind and body can be well maintained apart, for they are essentialy the same thing.
I apologise for the philosophical digression, but I just can't imagine a world without the Spirit.
See:
Arthur C. Clarke for **matter-manipulating technology** and **self-conserving city**: *The City and the Stars*
and
H. G. Well for **Elois**: *The Time Machine*.
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For sake of metaphor, I want to include a plant that bears fruit that is poisonous, with the intent that when an animal eats it, it will walk away and die within a few hours, such that their corpse fertilizes the growing plant.
It seems there would be a rather strong evolutionary pressure for animals to avoid this fruit, so I'm looking for ways to mitigate this.
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**The Fruit Contains an Opioid**
There's already a plant compound that is both highly addictive to numerous animal species and kills millions per year.
The fruit could be stronger than a typical [Opium Poppy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver_somniferum). Its ingestion causes addiction in the animal who eats it. First ingestion comes with a string high, with them returning because they crave the high and the painful withdrawals.
This eventually causes them to eat more and more until they eventually overdose and die with seeds still in their gut.
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It wouldn't be the first plant to live off of corpses, but usually they find the corpses instead of making them. Here are a few ideas for biological strategies.
In addition to animals avoiding it, there seems to be a continuity conflict with an animal that both walks away **and** fertilizes the plant.
1. Have the plant look almost exactly like other plants. This works the wrong way in the viceroy butterfly, who looks exactly like the monarch, but isn't toxic. Birds avoid both of them. Maybe even a rare species of a healthy plant.
2. Seasonal toxicity: Yummy and healthy most of the time, but randomly toxic due to a chaotic metabolism. Now you only have to figure out how to kill something quickly. The standard fictional answer is "neurotoxin."
3. Blowdart plants. An old staple of fiction, like with the Borgia plant in Star Trek TOS. Or, even better razor-grass. Strike that, you specified fruit.
real 3. Anything that goes through the digestive system usually takes 20 minutes to be absorbed, so maybe you want it to go the other way. Maybe it has a strongly addictive quality that makes animals hang out around it subconsciously, and be less aware when they do it. Let's further say that some animals know that the plant is a good source of easy prey. The plant just lives off of the carrion -- it doesn't care who does the actual killing.
4. Keep the addictive properties, but make it a chemical with a low toxicity threshold. It feels great, but sometimes you die. Maybe it's even known in the culture as a suicide bush because people eat the fruit when they're feeling self-destructive. It would prey on emo teenage animals.
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The poison won't actually kill the eater when the fruits are eaten in the right amount, but only produces an intestinal irritation which causes a laxative effect, leading to the expulsion of both the seeds and a conspicuous amount of fertilizer.
The killing only happens when the eater exceeds in eating of those fruits, resulting in massive loss of fluids and alteration of the saline equilibrium of the body.
This mechanism ensures that more animals eat the fruit and spread the seeds in various location, instead of a single animal concentrating the seeds in a single place.
For the animals there is a benefit in eating small amounts of the fruit because of the laxative effect.
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The plant/tree can't kill every animal... to do so would make them extinct and its descendants wouldn't have fertilizer within a few centuries.
It needs to only kill maybe one in fifty (if even that many).
More so, when it kills them, it needs to kill them quickly. They shouldn't even have the time to wander more than ten feet away. This ensures that the animal dies over the top of where the plant's root are.
All that is needed is a mechanism where one or two fruits per season are poisonous. Plant toxins can be powerful, ricin for instance. Animals that die after eating the fruit still die infrequently enough that other animals watching may not make the connection between the feeding and the death, so long as the fruit aren't visually or fragrantly distinct from the safe varieties.
If the environment is such that few other sources of food exist, all the better. Even those animals that might make the connection may be forced to gamble and play Russian roulette with these things.
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## Make the plant only produce its toxic seeds once every 4 - 6 years, coupled with a smaller crop.
Assuming the plant bears fruit seasonally you could have it run on a cycle.
Yearly the plant produces bunches of safe to eat, sweet fruit with no / infertile seeds inside. Then, when the plant senses a shift, perhaps more of its fruits are being eaten Or some time has passed. The plant produces a far smaller crop of the same fruits with the toxin in them.
Assuming there's many of these plants in an ecosystem, animals would go from relative abundance to scarcity in a season. Making them more likely to eat the poisonous fruit.
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There are plants with specific neurological effects.
Say your plant damages the brain of male victims in a specific way that causes the victim to progressively obsess on having sex, more and more, devoting all their efforts toward reproduction. Rape, murder, it doesn't matter! In a day, before the seeds have been expelled as waste, the poison kills them. But have a much greater chance of having impregnated a female to reproduce their vulnerability to the fruit of this plant.
It isn't so much that the animals learn and pass down avoidance of poisonous plants, but that those naturally dislike and avoid the smell or taste or more likely to survive and reproduce than those that like it.
So reverse the script, consuming the plant increases the chances of reproduction, by sending victims on a mission to reproduce before they die. It can affect women in the same way as men, making them sex crazed, but they obviously cannot reproduce before eliminating the seeds. Men can.
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As others have mentioned **mimicry** is possibly one way it would work. But even then it would probably only be plausible within some vary strict parameters. This is because as noted previously there is strong evolutionary pressure on 'prey' species to detect and avoid toxic food sources. So that said I would suggest the following;
1. The plant would be **rare**. This is because the more common it is the stronger the pressure to detect and avoid it. A toxic mimic that was as common (or nearly so) as the target species would induce a strong evolutionary drive in it's prey. That species would face huge pressure to either adapt to the existence of the mimic or go extinct. That means they would soon evolve to;
* detect the mimic;
* tolerate its poison;
* change behaviors i.e. avoid eating the plant the mimic copies entirely in preference to another plant that is not mimicked/migrating away during the fruiting season/eating some other part of the plant that wasn't toxic etc
Any of these strategies severely limits the mimic. So the solution is to be rare. Then if the mimic copies a common, widely distributed food source but reproduces slowly or in limited numbers the pressure on the prey species to adapt is also limited and the plant can go on 'doing it's thing' without risk.
2. **The plant would also be small** (i.e. not a large tree or shrub). This is because given the first criteria (low reproduction rates) it would be counterproductive for the plant to evolve large size and try to hide for example as just one more 'pine' tree in a pine forest. The amount of time and energy required to grow to maturity before fruiting would be wasted effort. Also evolutionary pressure would lead the plant to mimic something that attracts prey with the right body mass for seed germination (i.e. the smallest size possible). Why wait for an elephant to come along when a rat or raccoon etc has enough body mass to provide fertilizer for the seed?
Also smaller animals are more numerous than large ones so the plant automatically raises the chances of having it's seeds eaten by selecting for animals it has the greatest chance of encountering i.e. the most numerous.
Selecting smaller animals also maximizes the amount of nutrients it can recover from the corpse as it decays. If the plant only needs X amount of nutrients why select to kill larger animal Y when the excess remains will simply be wasted. It's not efficient.
Finally once it's been eaten and has killed it's host and started germinating it would help if the seed gave off a clear chemical signal **don't eat this** warning to other animals so they don't scavenge the body - and it's much easier to poison a smaller corpse in its entirety than a very large one. If the poison is slow acting and spreads throughout the body before death occurs the 'do not eat' message (perhaps the scent of the toxin) will spread at the same time.
**EDIT: one last special condition I just thought of**: The plant should perhaps be found in swampy low nitrate soils. These soils generally provide little of the nitrogen essential for plant growth and it's where you find the majority of the worlds carnivorous plants like Venus Fly Traps etc. This would perhaps justify a plant evolving to kill in the way described because it's seeds would germinate in a rich source of nitrogen, assuming all other factors remained unchanged.
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# Stealthy Grafting:
I think what you want isn't so much about poison as it is about the strategy to make the poisoning system work. Given enough evolutionary pressure, defenses will evolve against anything. So don't make the pressure too high, and have a carrot along with the stick.
Your plant is a mimic, attaching itself to other plants and using the other plant for support (like grafting an apple branch of one variety to another). It has berries that look identical to the host plant. This would work even better for something like a neurotoxic fungus that could transform normal berries into secret poison berries (a little like [ergot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot)). An animal that eats one, eats the other. When the animal dies, it actually fertilizes the HOST plant's seedlings, while the graft plant grows along for the ride on the new host plant.
This way, the animals eating the host plant are eating healthy food (except for that one berry...). The host plant is actually benefiting from the arrangement since the host plant is the one most fertilized (although their seed-bearing species are killed in the process). Predators eating the dead berry-eating animal may potentially die themselves and provide even more opportunities for fertilizer (and reducing pressure by predators on the seed-bearing species).
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## Frame challenge: the fruit is not poisonous; the seed is non-digestible.
The fruit is sweet; it can even have an addictive property as other answers have mentioned, to ensure enough of it is ingested by its victims.
The thing is, the seeds of the fruit are non-digestible, and when eaten they get "attached" to the digestive system (the stomach wall, the intestines) and begin to grow there, getting nutrients from both/either the body itself and/or other food the victim eats.
Eventually, the plant grows enough to completely block/replace the digestive system, killing its victim after a few days/weeks; then the plant begins to grow and feed from the corpse.
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**Active Parasite:**
What if the seedling is active-- it's more like a **nematode-hunting fungus** than a plant at the early stage. Once it gets eaten, it comes out of hibernation and quickly sends shoots/**hyphae that digest the animal from the inside out**. These take a few hours before they begin seriously affecting the host animal, perhaps even days, but soon the unsuspecting host will have **tendrils of digestive roots crisscrossing their body**, dissolving tissue and eventually killing the animal.
Once the animal dies, the hyphae roots continue digesting the animal until the **plant erupts from the animal** and unfurls its first leaves.
**Once the initial digesting has finished, the plant ends the active phase of its life and becomes a more passive photosynthesize.**
There is a **problem** with this strategy, however. **Dead animals in the wild are often eaten by other animals very quickly**. That means the parasite plant **must act quickly**. Ideally, it **only kills the host once it has spread through most of it's body**, such that when the animal dies, the plant can **monopolize on the nutrients and energy** of the animal before it gets picked apart by a scavenger.
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## Age threshold as a part of the process
The toxin is always present. Young eaters have gut enzymes though that nutralize this toxin which older members lack.
Over time their diet or increasing age causes them to no longer be produced. Within a few hours after after eating this fruit without this safe guard in your gut, the toxin is absorbed within the intestines and kills the host via neurological shutdown.
It may have to be a day or so to not make the immediate connection to the source of danger, but it would allow a population to continue thriving on it, with the occasional seed dispersal here and there.
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# An endophyte makes the plant toxic.
The Pacific yew does not make taxol - [but its endophyte *Taxomyces andreanae* does](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8097061/). Taxol is not tremendously effective as a poison, being mostly noted for killing cancer cells. However, it could be replaced by some more toxic poison, such as [an opioid](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aac9373?cookieSet=1). We could also select the fungus to be able to infect a more nutritious plant.
In this instance, *the fungus* produces the potent toxin with the figurative "intent" that the eater will die from the poison, and fertilize the plant, which will become infected with the fungus. The fungus therefore promotes its own survival. It can also infect new plants directly. Would-be victims may include some addicts who learn to transplant the bushes - while this defeats the fatal "intent" of the fungus in the short term, in the long term it expands the number of plants and hence the number of victims.
The fungus would not compete if it lost its toxic product. The plant would replicate *less* if it came to resist the fungus, since addicts would no longer transplant it. Even in the absence of addicts, it would face an arms race with continued infections by ever-evolving strains of fungus, while resistance would be selected for only on the basis that if *many* plants are infected, herbivores might stop spreading them. As a result, some rate of endophyte infection would persist indefinitely.
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Make the plant only kill males. Females are immune. You can lose a load of stupid males, providing females and some % of males survive.
If females cluster around the trees because they are a great food source, it'll balance out the propensity to avoid that fruit.
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## The plant uses toxic burs
When an animal species finds a fruit to be toxic it can either adapt by not eating it, or by becoming resistant to the toxin; so, the ideal vector of attack for your plant is not voluntary ingestion. But there is a type of fruit that uses animals involuntarily to spread their seeds: burs.
Burs are a kind of dry fruit covered with velcro like spines that hitch rides on animals by clinging to their fur. Most animals find burs unpleasant and try to avoid them, but instead of advertising their presence like edible fruits, these fruits are small and try to camouflage themselves among other plants; so, even animals that try to avoid them still often find themselves covered in these unpleasant little hitchhikers.
The normal strategy for burs is to hitch a ride on an animal until the animal becomes aggravated with its presence, and then picks the seeds out of its fur (usually with its teeth). If you were to make the bur excrete a powerful enough toxin, then when the animal goes pick them out, it could poison the animal killing it before it can remove all the seeds.
Because getting burs is involuntary, host and plant species can evolve in equilibrium in something similar to a predator/prey relationship. The more animals evolve to spot and avoid the toxic burs, the more the plant evolves to hide its spiny little fruits.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qqaLv.jpg)
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Some plants take a VERY long time to produce a viable seedling, like a redwood waiting for a forest fire to drop seeds, and many seeds are viable for many years anyway. Perhaps your seed doesn't kill anything. The fruit is eaten, the seed attaches, either through burs or some initial early-stage growth that may be more just a chemical reaction between something in the hull reacting to stomach acid than actual "growth", and then it waits, embedded in the gut. When the heat drops to a certain level, or the amount of digestive chemicals drops below a certain threshold, indicating a natural death of the organism, then it begins to grow.
Consuming a large number of the fruit may kill creatures anyway, simply through gastric blockage. Some seeds may come loose, and may even still be able to barely germinate in the droppings, but nothing as reliable as the fertilization of a corpse. And the seed has the chance of propagating miles away from its host plant, since the animal may travel for years before dying.
For humans in some especially "green" society, it may even be a common near-death ritual to help the environment. Avoid the plant most of your life, but when you're dying anyway, eat a fruit, enjoy it's wonderful taste, and serve as host to the next tree.
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From an evolutionary standpoint, for it to evade being out-evolutioned, it would need to not affect reproduction of it's prey.
So maybe it makes sure to circumvent exactly that. The poison works as a very potent aphrodisiac and causes those who eat it's fruit to go into a mating frenzy. Then, either by being actual poison, or by starving out the prey (because it doesn't eat anymore, it does other things), it kills and can use the body as fertilizer.
The survival of the prey species is not diminished if only one eats the fruit so it will probably not evolve to avoid the plat. It may even form a mutual parasitism, where each needs the other organism to procreate.
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It's a symbiotic relationship.
The plant and animals both have a yearly lifecycle because the winter is very, very harsh--so harsh that pretty much everything dies over the winter unless it's in some protected state (like a seed or an egg case).
The plant is only seasonally poisonous. During the spring/summer/early fall it provides an absolutely ideal habitat for the young animals (maybe even mandatory like monarch butterfly larvae and milkweed). Sometime in the fall the animals mate and lay eggs which they carry around with them. Then in the late fall the plants start becoming poisonous.
The adults (carrying their eggs) happen to eat the poisonous plants just before the time when they burrow deep, deep into the ground to create a safe place for the eggs. When the timing is right, the poison kills the animal still in the burrow next to the eggs, in which case the eggs and seed have a nice, safe, comfortable winter under ground.
Then in the early spring the plant starts to grow. A few weeks later, the eggs hatch and the young have a perfect home to live in all year until fall.
Now you have a bunch of evolutionary pressures keeping this stable...
The plants need the animals to carry their seeds away and dig down, so only individuals who have a thriving nest of the animals living with them will be able to reproduce. And the seed poison needs good timing (based on digestive time of the animal) to make sure that the animal and the seed and the eggs are all underground together when the animal dies. If the seed is not poisonous enough then the animal might bury the eggs but return to the surface before dying, if it's too poisonous then the animal doesn't have time to burrow. If the seeds are too early in the year then the animal hasn't laid the eggs yet, too late and no animals are left to eat the seeds.
The animals who's young start off with their own plant habitat are able to grow faster and out-compete the ones that didn't, so the animals have evolutionary pressure to keep eating the seeds even though they're poisonous (plus they provide good nutrition for digging that burrow to protect the eggs). There's no evolutionary pressure against eating the seeds because the adults are already reproductively done anyway.
On earth some animals lay their eggs in other animals to provide nutrition (parasitic wasps) and some animals commit [matriphagy](https://entomologytoday.org/2015/03/27/arachnid-matriphagy-these-spider-mothers-literally-die-for-their-young/) -- the mother's body provides the nutrition for the young. This is sort of a combination, the adult's body provides nutrition for the plant which then provides nutrition for the young.
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[
Angels were all originally part of the same race before the war in heaven, when the ones that rebelled were cast out and sent to hell. The humans on earth were similar to angels, but without the essence that made them divine. Among the angels that remained in heaven, some took a fondness for mortals and bred with them to produce mortal offspring called the nephilim. These creatures were monstrous giants that were bestial in nature and appearance, committing evil acts like cannibalism and murder. They were eventually wiped out, but the lesson learnt was that divine and mortal essences cannot mix.
However, this appears to not be the case. Devils, angels that were cast down from heaven, are still able to breed with mortals, producing cambions. The resulting offspring is still a monster, committing evil for its own sake. However, their bestial nature is internal rather than external, as they look completely human. Legends speak of the anti-christ, a being who would manipulate world governments and turn mankind to evil acts that have yet to be seen. This being would be the son of Lucifer, once the greatest of angels and responsible for the war in heaven. He now ruled hell, as he was cast into it with the angels that rebelled with him.
How is it that devils spawn monsters that look human, while the good angels produce monsters that look like monsters?
[Answer]
It depends if you're wanting to be non-religious fantasy or a religious based fantasy. (AKA, based off popular views of the religious entities in question, or the actual old religious stories about them.)
**Not Religious Fantasy**
You can have it **simply be different breeds or subspecies**. Many species vary wildly across individuals (think queen bee vs worker bee or Great Dane vs pocket poodle.)
**Religious Fantasy**
However, if you're going religiously based, **angels and demons are not directly related**. Biblically speaking, they're two very different creatures (possibly different species) and nowhere in the bible does it claim they're the same. It does, however, imply that fallen angels join demons to fight along side them (although, interestingly, no demons every rise to side with God).
Before the Bible was consolidated into one book, the origin of demons was made very clear. All demons are specifically the children of Adam and Lilith, as opposed to humans who are the children of Adam and Eve. You'll notice in the bible there are two creation stories: First is the 7 days story (where god creates man and woman at the same time), and the garden of eden story (where god just puts man in the garden of eden, and then makes women from his rib.) What happened to the first woman was left out when the various works that make the bible were consolidated into one book. The first woman, Lilith, didn't care being told what to do, and refused to have kids with Adam. This angered god, who then chained her up and... well.. god got what he wanted from Adam and Lilith anyway, without her consent. However, Lilith, being so treated, made sure her kids would know exactly what she thought of God.
The children of Lilith were the 'original' humans by design. They had both from-scratch male and female, and were fully human. Eve, on the other hand, was a copy of Adam, made from his rib, and made female. So Adam and Eve's children were only half of what humans were supposed to be. Further, the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve was supposed to be one of Lilith's children (the story about it being the Devil wasn't added in until King James).
This means that Lilith's children managed to get access to both the fruits of knowledge and fruits of life before god kicked everyone out of the garden. And Genesis 3:22 makes pretty clear that's not what he wants and why. So god basically declares war on Lilith and her children.
As they're the "full" humans, fueled with both divine fruits (unlike humans which are only "half" humans with half of the divine fruits), this is where demons got there name.
The "mon" suffix as in "Human" (remember, not originally english)
and the prefix "Dei" as in "Divine". How it was originally pronounced may have been closer to "Diman"
Demon literally means "Divine Humans", and are supposed to be the epitome of what humans could be, and were striving against God as a whole.
Obviously, when putting together the collection of works to make the bible, this makes demons look a better, and god look a lot worse (as forced intimacy and genocide are generally frowned on), so it got conveniently left out. However, if you want dig through all the old Jewish Midrash and more, it's referenced fairly often.
Although Hebrews at the time, when the story of Lilith got left out, still understood Demons and Angels were different species, this made things much later for later generations and Christians who picked up on the text. They tried to explain why there was such animosity between god and demons, and so it was crossed with verses about fallen angels joining demons to try and explain it away. And although it's not in the bible anywhere, that explanation has kept going through Christian tradition till modern times.
Here's a diagram if it helps:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9w8Fr.png)
*Possible exception:*
Now, that said, the Bible ALSO says that mankind is made in God's image. If we interpret that a different way than Christians traditionally do (basically meaning instead of a self-portrait, that humans are God's offspring), then demons go right back into being the same species as humans, and in turn, potentially angels and nephilim (and god himself) as well. Considering the ability for all of the above to have offspring with eachother, this actually seems a moderately likely interpretation: That God, Angels, Demons, and Humans are all different breeds of the same species. In this regard, we're back to the different breeds or subspecies being what creates different appearances again.
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Here are two creatures of the same species:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kzg0L.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6NBrv.jpg)
If you and most of your kin looked like the first picture, you would probably consider the second picture--10 times larger, with an un-naturally slim face, threatening ears, loose jowls, and weirdly short and dark hair--to be a monster.
Very similar underlying genetics can account for quite significant variance in [phenotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype).
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First a biblical answer and then a fictional suggestion. Use which one you like!
I think the consensus of biblical scholars is that the passage about nephilim is super weird and hard to be sure about. But it seems pretty clear that it's referring to fallen angels (i.e. demons) doing stuff. As for the antichrist, in other verses (Matt 24:24, stuff in 1st and 2nd John, etc) basically any spirit that denies Christ is the anti-christ. There are theories that the antichrist mentioned in Revelation was actually Nero, who seriously persecuted Christians. See for Christians, we've been living in the end times since Jesus rose.
But yeah! For a fictional suggestion... It's a really big thing that Satan is a liar. It's so much a part of what he is that Jesus said lying is his native language; the whole war is the Truth versus the big lie. So if the demons' monsters are monsters whose very essence is falsehood, **their physical form would also be constantly lying about being monsters**. The other ones are honest about it, at least. But it's gonna be hard to explain why an angel following God would want to make a monster lol. Hope that helps!
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Hell is a pretty toxic environment. Being there over a long period of time has mutated the demons, causing them to look different from angels and passing on changes to their offspring.
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Angels still bear the blessing of good, while human and demons not.
When angels and humans breed, the interaction of a non blessed with a blessed cell messes up the appearance of the result being, while the pairs blessed-blessed or non blessed-non blessed give no issues under this point of view.
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Let's start with the premise that devils are, at their essence, corrupt angels. The corruption damaged the very core of their being - in human terms, their DNA. Not all changes to DNA are destructive; most are benign. Skin color, height, and even facial features come down to DNA. In devils, the corruption they experienced caused their appearance to become that of a typical devil, mutilated and horrible.
Angel and Devil DNA appear to be compatible with human DNA, at least in the extent that humans breeding with either results in viable offspring.
The offspring of angels is powerful and terrifying to behold, just like angels. And, like angels... have no sense of morality. Angels, of course, are good at their very core; they naturally tend toward "goodness," and never think twice about doing the "right" thing. Humans, however, have free will, and the lack of a moral compass (coupled with a horrifying appearance) turns them into monsters, inside and out.
On the other hand, Devils, having suffered corruption to their very core, have very different offspring; the corruption they suffered damaged their physical looks so much that any genes contributing to looks are entirely recessive. The human genes, being dominant, take over, resulting in offspring that look completely human, or at least close enough to pass a basic visual inspection. Of course, they still suffer the same lack of moral compass, as half-devil is just half-corrupted-angel. But, as they look human, their upbringing would be much gentler than that of a half-angel, which means they would tend less to be entirely monstrous... and instead lean towards plotting psychopaths.
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First we are to assume that Angels and Devils can be classifiable by species.
Second that they are the same taxonomic species.
Third that humans are of a different species?
Clearly then the answer is that it is something external to their taxonomic definition that allows interbreeding, as (going by our definition of species) neither could successfully breed with humans.
If it is an internal, integral and automatic capacity, neither Angels nor Devils can be classified as part of a species at all because they can breed with things other than themselves, so to speak.
In summary: However it occurs, to define Angels and Devils by specie must necessarily be flawed.
It follows anyway, that whatever agent it is that makes their breeding with humans possible is altered either as integral to their displacement(from Heaven or to Hell) or as a separate function imparted to their nature, rather than that of the agent. In real world terms it's theoretically feasible to create an egg or sperm that 'pulls apart' it's counterpart and reconstitutes it in a form viable for reproduction making ad hoc inter-species breeding possible.
If we consider that what makes Angels Angels must be 'impartable' only from the Divine, otherwise the Devil would simply make himself and his Devils undevilly, it would perhaps stand to reason that an Angel cannot simply make more Angels via mating, as it is not up to them to make more divinities, but the Divine. It might follow then that it is relatively easy to make more evil, but not so easy to make more good, so to speak. Heaven has an immigration policy to uphold after all, and free passes would make a mockery of that.
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## Genetic Drift
Lucifer was cast out longer ago than the common ancestors of any species on Earth that evolved to be different (and even Creationists acknowledge what they call “microevolution”), so it stands to reason that they’ve had enough time to evolve differently.
## The Medievals Were Right
That is, when they thought that different environments change people, and a hot or cold climate gave nations traits like black or pale skins. At least with regard to daemons. They’ve been living in Hell and getting hit by evilon particles since the dawn of time, and it mutated them.
## It’s a Curse
In many legends, the spawn of some evil ancestor like Cain or Lilith were cursed with monstrous, ugly bodies. Be careful not to remind people of legends that some race of humans were cursed with dark skin for some mythological ancestor’s crime.
## That’s Not the Real Reason
Sure, that half-angel and that half-devil look different, but not all Nephilim look like that. It’s just a false assumption. Maybe they’ve essentialized their own self-image as because of their parentage, and they themselves will be shocked to meet others and find out they’re not all like that, or even that there are angels whose children look like the half-demon.
## It’s Not Genes at All
Maybe they take after the form your shapeshifting parent wore the night they were conceived, or daemons get to choose whether their children will be gracile and light enough to fly, or big, strong and hard as a rock.
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**The first attempt was made in ignorance. They got better at it later.**
The sires of nephilim incarnated (necessary as they are beings of fire, or whatever else that defies our taxonomy) into a sufficient approximation of human bodies to have their fun. On the outside, all looked fine, they functioned as well as they needed to, their bodies had no need to be self-sustainable without whatever power the angels brought with them.
Of course, such a facsimile would be considered shamefully shallow by later standards.
Apparently, God's creations are supposed to contain proper blueprints for replication, something the old angels had not considered.
Plus, as many have pointed out, the "monstrous appearance" thing may have been colorful hyperbole, and their behavior as described wasn't exactly much different than might be expected of hyperactive beings powerful enough to suffer no accountability, and "raised" in an environment of scared, unprepared small folk.
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## Science!
You said that *celestials* (either angels or devils) are made of 2 things:
* A body.
* Divine Essence
I propose to add third elements:
* Angelical/Devil Essence
Celestials were neutral creatures in the past. When a celestial comes to heaven, they got "sick" or "infected" by the *heavenly*/*angelical* essence of heaven. This "disease" produce the common phenotypes of light aurora and white-feather-wings.
Instead, when a celestial (or angel) is banished from heaven and forced to live in the hell they got "sick" of the *hellish* or *infernal* essence. This "disease" produce the common phenotype of red skin, tail, bat wings, and horns in the head.
If you want, you can make each disease the cure of the another. So if an angel gets sick of *hellish* they cure and instead become a devil, and if a devil gets sick of *heavenly* they cure and instead become an angel.
Now think in common diseases as [rubella](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubella) and [measles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles), if a woman has that disease and become pregnant they child are born with deformities.
The same happens with the *heavenly* and *hellish* diseases. They produce different deformities on borns. *Heavenly* produce grotesque deformities in the body while *hellish* produce more mental like diseases (psychopath like people instead of giants).
Now, your question may be: How angel-angel or devil-devil offspring doesn't bear with mutations? Very simple, you have two alternatives:
* **Divine immunity:** The divine essence works as an immunity factor to the deformities of both diseases. The problem is that hybrid offspring are only half-divine, not enough to protect you from the deformities (maybe the "divine" is a [recessive gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics))).
* **Mortal trigger:** Humans has the *mortal* essence as you said in your question. The *hellish* and *heavenly* essences make a reaction both with the *divine* and *mortal* gene. Remember that *mortal* is a *dominant* gene (with one parent is enough) while *divine* is a *recessive* gene (both parents must have it).
+ **Divine** + **Heavenly** => **Angelical appareance**
+ **Divine** + **Hellish** => **Devil appareance**
+ **Mortal** + **Heavenly** => **Giant appareance**
+ **Mortal** + **Hellish** => **Psychopath mind**
Basically, the **Divine** and **Mortal** essence are just genes from DNA, while **hellish** and **heavenly** are diseases which change their behavior according to the **divine** (D) or **mortal** (M) gene (like some diseases which work differently on males (Y) or females (X))
### Recessive gene explanation
If you don't understand this, here is an easy explanation. A male is XY while a female is XX, so, if both have at least one X, while males aren't females also? That is because the Y gene is dominant while the X is recessive. So, if you have at least one Y gene, you become male, instead, you **need both** X genes to become a female.
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A biblical answer to a biblical question
# Exodus 20:5
>
> ...I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me
>
>
>
This is effectively a warning of exactly the behaviour you're describing.
The monstrous form of the demons is part of their punishment for denying god, and that shall be given to their children as well. Innocent though those children might be in their own right, they must still pay the price for the sins of their fathers.
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Lets aim for genetic plausibility.
Lions and tigers are closely enough related to interbreed. But the results of crosses are different depending on which they have as a mother or father.
This is a Liger:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/D3TOe.jpg)
The liger is a hybrid offspring of a male lion (Panthera leo) and a female tiger (Panthera tigris).
They grow massive because the growth promoters and growth inhibiting genes are in different locations in lions and tigers
This is a Tigon:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xfFWr.jpg)
A hybrid cross between a male tiger (Panthera tigris) and a female lion (Panthera leo).
They don't typically suffer the same kind of extreme-growth.
So, one option might be to make angels and humans distantly related species, such that they can interbreed with humans.
But the X and Y genes of the angelic host, while similar to humans aren't quite the same. The offspring of a male angel and a female human is very different to the offspring of a male human and a female angel much like a Tigon vs a Liger.
One grows to extreme size like a liger, the other stays a normal size but has some other set of phenotypes like a tigon.
Then make it so the rebellion was fairly gender skewed.
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One very simple explanation: Metamorphosis
Like a larva which becomes a butterfly, or a mosquito.
So your setting becomes an additional dimension because your anti christ can evolve to its real form
(Metamorphosis is not only for insects, amphibians and fish do it too)
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Scientific knowledge at the time the Bible was written would be like looking at a minor B road compared to the surface of the Earth now. Then almost everything to most people was about what we would call superstition. There are now many scientific explanations for what were called miracles then. That said science even now will gloss over and ignore those things that don't conveniently fit into it's present paradigm for fear of personal reputation. It may well be that experiments such as those performed in the Large Hadron Collider will provide at least evidence of possible alternative existence on higher or lower frequencies than we can perceive with our current accepted human senses. Until that time comes then the existence of Angels and Demons is down to a question of faith and interpretation for the vast majority of the worlds population. If there is an explanation to be found it will be in Human DNA and particularly in mtDNA I say this because there is evidence of crossbreeding between early Homo sub species particularly Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal. You might consider having your own DNA tested,can be fun to know where your family originated from at least. I think though that unless it is done on a massive scale and possibly particularly by A- blood groups there is very little chance of finding anything. I advocate mt DNA because if such mating happened then it is likely that only the females would have any chance of reproducing. Anyway enough rambling, I came across this question while browsing something completely unrelated and thought maybe I could add some food for thought.
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**What you describe is called dimorphism, and there are two common forms.**
**Sexual dimorphism.** They are the same species but different sexes, sexual dimorphism can produce some pretty drastic differences, look at the angler fish the female is dozens of times larger than the male and the male has lost the majority of its organs. In other species the males are massive while the females tiny, or have drastic different appearance because one sex has display, antlers, fangs ,armor, plumage, etc.
In your case make the demons male and the angels female. the male demons have claws, scales, and horns as part of their sexual display, they are far more aggressive which is not uncommon in dimorphism. while the females are much more subdued aesthetically. This would mean that the male offspring of angels and demons look like demons and the female offspring of both look like angels. Of course this does not have to be the case. If all the male features are carried on their Y chromosome, than male offspring of angels would not look like demons, however the female offspring of demons would look like angels, of course maybe that is where the idea of succubi comes from.
**Non-sexual dimorphism, sort of...** There are also non-sexual forms of dimorphism, although most often what you have is is instead sexual trimorphism with females and two morphs of male, also called Alternative male strategies. One Male that looks like the female and generally acts like the female or at least sneaky instead of aggressive and another morph of male that is larger, aggressive, and visually distinct. In this case both sneaky males and females would be angels and aggressive males would be demons. This also helps create your conflict since living separately would lead to very distinct cultures. the demons would probably have to compel female offspring to remain with the demons, they would be captives, harem females in elephant seals. It might also drive each side to raid the other for fresh genetic material. You might even have a few female angels who sneak off to find demon mates, or use demon captive for... urges.
In both cases you can imagine in an intelligent species how this drastically different behavioral baselines might lead to different living arrangements. In some human cultures unmarried males live in separate villages for families. This is just a more extreme version, and separate living combined with different baseline behavior has led to drastically different cultural values and structures. in the second case, eventually this separation will lead to speciation, but you have plenty of time before it happens for the story to happen. If the speciation if further along this could even lead to female demons and female angels looking visually distinct even if they more closely resemble each other than demon males. Speciation is not a binary condition.
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Suppose a civilization which had domestic flying dragons at ancient time, just like other common stories here. My question is: would that civilization have cars, planes and ships?
Initially, I think the world would have no cars, planes, ships, and even public transport facilities. My idea is, if I want to go somewhere, why do I need a plane in stead of hiring a dragon? And what is the motivation to invent a plane or car if I can sit on a dragon and then visit everywhere? Does the world with such dragons need planes, cars or ships actually? If so, what is the motivation to invent them?
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I believe mechanical means of transportation would still be developed.
As a basis for prediction, consider the case of the horseless carriage. Why bother inventing a car when you already have horses?
The answer comes from the cost of ownership (space, feed, water, manpower/expertise, equipment) and the significant time investment needed to raise, train, breed, and maintain a stable of horses.
At some point it becomes more economical to use a machine than to support a living creature.
The requirements for raising a dragon are likely more complex and costly than raising a horse, so the same economic pressures would apply. Said pressures would be especially strong in any mythos where dragons are exceptionally long-lived and thus require significant time to rear, where they are potentially dangerous (introducing fire-damage liability), or where they are carnivorous and thus require more costly investment to be kept fed.
If anything, having an animal that predates a mechanical means of transportation might escalate the rate at which such transportation is developed. Consider that horseless carriages were able to take advantage of technical developments (wheel axles, cobblestones), trade and transportation infrastructure (highways and roads), and traffic laws all of which were developed originally to facilitate the travel of horse-drawn carriages.
A civilization with flying transportation that predates the invention of airplanes and balloons would be more likely to establish airport analogs at an earlier stage in their development, as well as develop laws and occupations concerning air travel which would ease the introduction of and possibly the transition to mechanical air travel. They'd also introduce inventions associated with air travel (like parachutes) and uncover scientific principles (such as those related to flight or meteorology) at an earlier stage which would increase the relative safety of mechanical air travel upon its inception.
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While domesticated dragons would be an extremely quick method of transportation, there are several important limitations that must be kept in mind.
1. They are living creatures.
This sounds kind of obvious but needs saying as it combines quite a few problems, such as the need to eat and rest. A car would probably be a *lot* cheaper to own than a full grown dragon. While you can argue that point as dragons don't need to be replaced every few years, they will also have medical expenses
2. Size (1).
Dragons are big.
Yes, you may have some personal dragons which will be smaller and faster, but small will be a relative term here. Keep in mind that horses, the most common riding animal can weigh over 2,000 pounds (900 kg) and eat up to 30 pounds (13 kg) of hay per day plus forage. Your dragons will likely be much bigger if they are meant to carry more than a couple of passengers at a time. This makes them unaffordable to the average citizen.
Another size related issue will be housing.
As I said, your dragons will be pretty big so you will have to find a way to house them. Think of a dragon the size of a passenger jet. Now realize that the dragon will need an even larger hangar, and will consume fuel (food) even when not working.
3. Size (2)
As big as you make them, they won't be big enough.
Yes I just got through listing the disadvantages of being too big, but it's still true. In 2002 there was a total of 16 *billion tons* transported. That averages into almost 44 *million tons* daily. In the US alone. In 2002.
An eagle is the strongest real bird, it can only lift four times it's own weight in flight. If you use that as your base (not very realistic as the average that a bird can fly with is closer to half it's weight) you still need a LOT of Huge dragons flying all over the place. You cannot have an economy that is dependent on dragons as transport afford the feeding of a fleet needed over a decade ago.
4. Exploration.
While my previous points were more focused on the disadvantages of dragons, the next two are more related to why someone will come up with an alternative.
5. Common use.
One of the things that made the car so popular was that it gave the middle class, who couldn't justify housing and feeding a horse year round freedom to go where they wanted when they wanted to. Due to point 2 as well as the lift limits of a flying creature, this factor is even more in play in your world, as the costs of a family sized dragon would be astronomical to the average citizen. This would come into play much later than the boats though, due to being a luxury not a necessity.
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I up voted Thriggle's answer, but I think I can add some other notes.
In fantasy settings, the users of Dragons are the very important, rich, and powerful, and occasionally the lucky protagonist for whom everything in the world is a novelty. Further they are seldom kept like horses, writers deal with their size by letting them run free and come when needed.
I don't think the dragons "scale" (pun intended!). In the USA, there are about 254 million cars for an adult population of 242 million; slightly over one per adult. Only 8% of households have no car at all. My wife and I each own a car, parked in our garage, sitting quietly and requiring zero food, shelter or entertainment for weeks on end if we decide to go on a vacation, or if I leave on assignment or for a conference.
Our residential land doesn't have enough grass to keep alive a dog-sized goat; much less two full grown dragons.
What would food costs be for two dragons?
As earlier answers say, machines are just cheaper. I am in the AI and automation field: Manufacturing robots in America, like those making cars and many other products, currently cost roughly 25c per operating hour for their life, that include the capital cost (initial price of the robot), all fuel, downtime for maintenance, and all repairs. Twenty five cents per hour! That is why they are replacing workers, even overseas workers.
Machines are just cheap, their fuel is cheap, they have no emotions and feel no pain, they can be scrapped, warehoused or sold at will without facing any moral dilemma. I am not being cruel to leave my car parked at the curb, exposed and freezing, in a raging blizzard.
In terms of providing service to humans: Machines are just better, enslaving animals creates (for most modern Americans at least) moral dilemmas about the treatment of the work animals, beating them or otherwise causing them pain, misery or death (for example by exposure to harsh weather, cold, heat, desert environments), dealing with their injuries and illness, feeding them, *using them for food*, disposing of them. Nobody is morally outraged if you break the axle on your tractor trying too hard to pull a tree stump out; it was just a tool. If that is a horse's leg, and you were beating him bloody to make him pull harder, and then you have to shoot him in the head: Now people start to feel moral outrage.
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Dragons don't scale.
Let's say your dragon is reasonably large for an animal, about the size of a [DC-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-3). It can carry about 5000 kg of cargo, can cruise at 300 km/h for eight hours between meals, and can land in any reasonably large field. It requires one rider to control it in the air and one handler to take care of its needs on the ground.
By medieval standards, this is a rather impressive beast. It can carry the cargo of four or five freight wagons, and can reach anywhere in a reasonably-sized country in less than a day. It doesn't have the raw capacity of a merchant ship, but the ability to make a few dozen hops across the English Channel in the time a ship could do a single round trip more than makes up for it. Dragons would be the transportation of choice for virtually everything except in-city movement (where the lack of landing fields prevent their use) or cargoes that can't be broken down into dragon-sized loads.
Now, you hit the industrial era and your manufacturing economy starts growing. Instead of moving a wagon-load of coal to a blacksmith's shop a few times a year, you're moving 30,000 tons of coal to a large-scale smelter every day. To do this by dragon-back, you'd need 6000 dragons, with 6000 riders and 6000 handlers. In constrast, a [heavy-duty freight train](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_trains) could do that with just an engineer and a mechanic.
Or, you're moving 120,000 tons of goods from factories in America to European stores. You could hire 24,000 dragons to do the job, with their 48,000 human assistants, or you could get a [Triple E class container ship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A6rsk_Mc-Kinney_M%C3%B8ller_(ship)) to do it with 19 people.
The problem with dragon-based transport is that it's very labor-intensive compared to the mechanized alternatives, and you can't really reduce that labor requirement through technological innovation.
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**Comfort.**
It's arguable whether flying economy is more comfortable than wrapping your legs round an enormous hard scaly moving cylinder would be, but any other class, and certainly any car ever made would be nicer to travel in.
Also, unless your dragons have roofs, no-one flying to a fancy party on a rainy day is going to want to use them.
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Well, hey, we developed cars even though we could just sit on a horse. And we developed machines to do all kinds of things that we could just pay a person to do. So I don't see any "suppose" in your question, except that you're talking about automating the job of a dragon, rather than automating the job of a horse or a person. The motivations would be exactly the same, plus the fact that having dragons around is much more risky than having horses.
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I don't see how dragons would have a measurable effect on the development of transportation. The main reasons are:
1. **Availability** -- assuming you have less dragons than humans in your world, there is always someone without a dragon who needs another mode of transport. Look at cars in our world: Sufficiently wealthy countries trend towards a 1:1 ratio between people and cars.
2. **Load** -- we still use ships, trains and trucks because lifting things by airplane is not only expensive, load capacity is also limited. The same will be true of your dragons. A nice ship will be able to carry several times what even the largest dragon can carry.
3. **Convenience** -- there are places dragons can't go. Horses need less food. Waggons are useful even in dense forests. An ox can pull a cart and when older you can kill it for meat. A dragon will not be the best option in all cases.
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One more aspect: Training.
I do agree with the top-answers, but so far most seem to assume you can deal with dragons just like in games: you call, they come, you ride where you want, they vanish and come whenever you need them.
If we consider them to be realistic animals, they need a *lot* of attention to behave like you want them to (aside from the logistics like parking and feeding others have already addressed).
Look at how much time horse riding realistically takes. Someone has to breed the horse, domesticate it and train it. You as the owner need to learn to ride it and you will need some time to get accustomed to *your* horse, eh dragon.
Then again, horses are quite peaceful creatures - being "veggies" and therefore rather defensive than aggressive. Dragons are typically considered on the other end of the spectrum, they are carnivores/predators. This makes training harder, and the everyday risk higher. Consider having a lion around. Better make sure he's never hungry when you just need him or your daughter thinks she needs to borrow him for a quick ride.
Dragon riding could be a profession for special tasks, like the original cowboys did ride a lot because of the cows ;) There might be dragon riders that carry around cargo in remote areas, in jungles etc. Not that there are that many left in our time, but they could fill a nice gap where planes and cars cannot properly operate and choppers are difficult to maintain, have still limited take-off or too slow when it comes to loading and unloading.
But they wouldn't replace mechanical private or public transport.
As a side note, if your argument includes magic, then the same magic can be used to improve mechanical transportation ;)
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**It will indeed have a large (negative) effect on the development of such transportation means, given the right ecological and geographic conditions.**
Some of the other answers discuss the possibility that the maintenance cost of a Dragon is just too high and will encourage humanity to find a mechanic alternative. That may be correct, but
only under the assumption that it has to be a classic fire-breathing, carnivorous, long-living D&D Dragon. It might as well be a peaceful creature which feeds off an abundant plankton-like substance, just like the Blue Whale, or an insect-like creature which feeds off leaves and grass (which in your world, might be extremely large and abundant).
An insect like creature can also carry a weight much heavier than itself, so the issue of mass cargo transport can also be solved. Btw, the classic D&D setting also mentions the fact that dragons levitate by some magical means (since an approx. 20-ton creature can not possibly carry it’s weight in the air even with an approx. 20-meter wing span). So, these magical means may as well allow them to carry a much heavier weight and therefore be used for cargo transportation. Insect-like creatures are also abundant and multiply rapidly, which might solve the supply-demand issue (while obviously can pose a whole new challenge to solve as well).
Ships, however, might prove to be something else. Ships (or boats, at least) were used for fishing purposes since the dawn of humanity. In a world with many seas and costal regions, fishing will be necessary, and that is something which a huge insect/dragon like creature can’t serve for, unless you throw in some aquatic equivalent. In a world with large oceans, a flying creature might be unable to complete a direct flight from one continent to another in a straight line without getting tired, and so large ships will be needed for sailing. Also, even long after the invention of planes, usage of ships for cargo transport purposes has not decreased. If your world reaches the equivalent of modern times in terms of other technologies, there are things which are just too damn heavy for planes to carry, and so will be the case with flying creatures as well - ships will still be needed.
In the bottom line - I do believe that with the right ecological setting, humanity just won’t be motivated enough to invent airplanes or cars, as well as many other inventions which lead to thee discovery of those two. Existence of such tamed creatures might have tremendous implications - If travel is that easy in prehistoric times, the agricultural revolution might not happen at all! Humanity might prefer to keep living in nomadic tribes, travelling at their leisure to warmer places where food is more abundant. If that word’s does not has large oceans, seafaring will stay at boat level, preventing the invention of steam-powered ships and therefore pushing even further away the idea of engine-powered vehicles.
However, if the setting is not right and humanity is pressured by various factors (large water masses, scarcity of flying creatures, high maintenance/mediocre usability of those creatures due to conditions described in 1st and 2nd paragraphs not being met) ant therefore is pushed to find scientific solutions to achieve it’s goals, then eventually the industrial era will arrive, powered by engines - and when you have engines, engine-powered vehicles will arrive.
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It seems like your question is why people would go from dragon-riding to cars and boats - that is, why they would develop or transition to "lesser" forms of transportation, why it would occur to them. Once they have them, they'll use them - as several other answers have mentioned, and how the development of planes didn't make cars or ships (or trains) obsolete, due to different niches and different best-uses, so I'm going to focus on the development process itself.
So, I think the development of cars, ships and trains is going to be totally independent of your society's domestication of dragons. And it can be independent because the very beginnings of that development process will likely predate the domestication of dragons. Long before your people develop a relationship with dragons that involves riding them, or hauling cargo with them, your people will be walking all over the place with stuff to get from one point to another. I expect travois, sledges, litters and rafts to be developed to better drag or carry stuff while walking, just like our history.
And it also seems likely to me that dogs and possibly horses will be domesticated before the dragons, just because they're smaller and more approachable and probably easier to domesticate - and feed, especially when there was not a reliable surplus beyond what people need to eat. Horses can eat things people can't, and dogs can eat scraps or vermin when there isn't enough meat, but dragons need to eat meat, and in amounts that will compete with the supplies people will need (flocks and herds), and are likely to be less accommodating about shortages than dogs or horses.
From walking, carrying, and dragging, I would expect the progression to continue through carts and carriages, and eventually to trains and cars. This would be totally independent of dragons, for places where maneuverability is important, like forests or cities, for short distance or small scale (initially), when it would be easier to just take it rather than getting it to where dragons can carry them, and for those who may well not be able to afford (or just prefer not to) hire dragon-dispatch. And there's no reason they wouldn't progress through horse-drawn carts, or bicycles, or other sorts of mechanical work like dog-sleds or horse-drawn plows or donkey powered millstones, and progressing through powered devices like cars or trains for the same reason we did in our history - it is easier than doing it ourselves, and I'd think horse-drawn stuff is easier and more versatile than dragon-drawn gliders for extra mechanical work or even stuff-space when traveling.
Similarly, ships would come from boats, before that rafts, and be useful for fishing, as a basic use - fishing from dragon-back seems somewhat less likely than just traveling, we don't fish from planes, after all. Also, once they've got started it seems like boats and ships may be useful for small areas not worth dragon-flight, like ferries across rivers or ponds, or maneuvering in areas (rivers, islands) were there may not be room for a dragon to land. And when ships get bigger and reliable, they will again be useful when carrying large quantities, and also for exploration (wiser to make sure you've somewhere to land before haring off across the seas on dragon-back).
So I don't think it will ever be about going from dragon riding to crafting cars or ships, I think they will evolve alongside each other. Cars, and carts and sleds will progress from each other, and innovations will happen to make them better suited for their work - in areas or with people when dragon flight wasn't used to begin with. Ships, boats and rafts will similarly come from their own precursors, for use in ways that has never included dragons. I don't think these will be even vaguely in competition with each other until the separate technologies are quite advanced - I mean, there might be a few things in the history of dragon-riding that was horses or ships in our history, mostly in the fast and showy travel options, but by and large there may not be a ton of overlap.
Of course, that's cars and ships. Planes and their development will be heavily influenced by having dragon-dispatch available, and those influences may not be predictable. One the one hand, people will have a better understanding of aerodynamics, and the underlying principles of flight, from having flying conveyance available - making it easier to figure out what would have to be done for human-powered flight to be created. And, kites, gliders or possibly balloons may be available fairly early, towed by the dragons as an equivalent to carts on land. On the other hand, there is something already available in the flying niche, so there will be less pressure to figure out an alternative solution, and possibly less flexibility for innovation - having something that works (dragons), it might be harder to figure out fixed-wing craft instead of trying to replicate dragon or bird style flying.
I do think mechanical transportation, planes, will eventually outstrip dragons as an economy-level workhorse (much like cars outstripped horses),for being more reliable, requiring less maintenance, less fuel or at least fuel which does not compete with humans need for food, and having fewer limitations (or specifically, being able to design around and improve those limitations in a way living beings can't be improved). Also like horses, dragon-flight will likely be maintained at a social level, for ceremony or style, for fun, because people will want them, for speed, perhaps.
As a side note, you were questioning the motivation to invent, when there's an alternative solution already. Well, there are (at least) two basic motivations to invent that having dragon-riding won't touch. One is small, practical, gradual improvements to things used for daily work - for example, things to make a cart ride smoother or less work makes sense if one was using carts for transport, more so than switching to dragon-dispatch and abandoning the (already available and paid-for) cart and whatever reasons one had for using it instead of dragon in the first place. Another reason is, some stuff gets invented or tinkered with just because someone can. There isn't a lot of practical use for, say, snorkeling, or hang gliding, or skateboarding - there are more practical versions available, in scuba-diving, airplanes, or cars (or even bikes) - but they're fun, so people came up with them, and use them, and improve on them. People want to fly, dream of it, and going dragon-back may not scratch that itch (like airplanes do for some but not others) - so someone invents hang-gliding, just because they want to. And that is one more step in the direction of airplanes, even if that ultimate result isn't the reason why they did it.
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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 7 years ago.
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## Question
I am a shopkeeper who sells food to sorcerers on a corner shop in the city of Monte Lacum. How can I stop Ice Sorcerers breaking into it and stealing the food?
## Attempts to prevent being stolen from
I tried to put a PIN code on the iron door one night. The next morning, I found that an Ice Sorcerer had created layers of ice around the PIN lock and smashed it to bits. I have only 700 royals in savings (enough to pay an Air sorcerer for 1 week's guarding). Oh, also everyone within 1km wants to go to my shop for food because it sells Extra Energy Food (EEF) that provides a much higher calorie-to-content ratio.
## Background
\*'\*Set in 13th century Europe\*\*'
Everyone is a sorcerer, specialising in one of the elements: Air (can fly), Earth (can cause earthquakes), Fire (can shoot fireballs), Water (can cause tidal waves), Light (can temporarily blind people), Dark (can send out their shadow), Life (can use the power of all living plants and animals nearby, excluding humans), Ice (freezes things - see above), Lightning (casts lightning - Emperor Roberto II is one), Shockwave (casts a shockwave), Metal (can shape metal - used by blacksmiths) and Null (partially immune to sorcery - used by people like me).
I have worked out how to trap all other types of sorcerers.
There are pets, yes (I have a dog named Terrar) but that isn't important.
Monte Lacum is a big draw for Earth, Water and Ice sorcerers (and Air ones, to a lesser degree).
My shop is like a supermarket, but without the non-food items.
## Summary
I have nearly no money and am looking for ways to protect my shop (for more than 1 week - see above).
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**Hide it:**
You can place the food on a secret room, for example behind the classic cabinet with his side panel which slides only when you press a little button, invisible if you don't know where it is.
**Set an alarm:**
Place a pile of metallic cup, plate or bucket on every entrance in order to create noise if someone try to enter the store at night. This will alert you and the air sorcerer.
The dog can also fulfill the same role.
This solution implies that you or your air sorcerer sleep in the shop.
**Set traps:**
Due to your limited fund, fancy trap with trapped slab and arrows are not a solution, but even a simple bucket fillet with brick can be a mortal trap when you place it on the top of a strategical door.
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You want to make your door out of a magical [superconductor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity), this way it can
1. Redirect lightning to the earth
2. dump/extract heat to the some conveniently placed marble/obsidian when subjected to extreme temperatures
This means that your ice wizard will need to be able to freeze a much larger space than the door he can see. you could link this underground strata so that he is effectively trying to freeze the entire continental plate!
The great thing about this is, it's completely passive and the door will always "normalise" to the temperature of the linked material. making for a slightly spooky effect when you touch it as it will always be a different temperature to it's surroundings.
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I really love the superconductor answer from [Chris J](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/25069/chris-j), even though I'll offer you a way more aggressive alternative.
What if the entrance is a small corridor, after which is the door to your shop. This corridor would be filled with **Thermotraps**.
**Thermotraps** should be a trap triggered by a huge drop in the temperature. For doing so you simply need that the trigger of the trap consists of a material that quickly contracts due to a change in temperature.
When the door becomes cooler, the trigger contracts, which activates your trap and KABOOM! kills your burglar.
Edit: As noted by [Mason Wheeler](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2326/mason-wheeler), remember to disarm the thermotrap during working hours unless you want to kill paying costumers on chilling winters. Still, though, there's the temperature needed to completely shred the lock should be way lower than the one you achieve during winter.
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Make the door and lock out of brass.
Lowering the temperature of most metals increases their hardness and can make them brittle because it makes harder for crystals to slide past one another. This a problem for ferrous materials like iron because they are pretty inflexible already.
Copper alloys, however, can actually get stronger at low temperatures because they are so malleable to begin with. If you made your door out of brass, it would be pretty much immune to Ice Wizards.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HGHIE.jpg)
[The US Department of Commerce publishes this useful guide to the low-temperature properties of copper alloys.](http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc13151/m2/1/high_res_d/NBS%20Monograph%20101.pdf)
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## Politics
As the owner of one of the most popular shops in Monte Lacum, you should be able to drum up some influence (and some wealth) to address the issue of rampant crime.
Mobilize the merchants guild, and find a sympathetic ear among relevant town officials. Put on the pressure to get the town guard into shape and properly protect the merchant quarter.
Or other, seedier things, like turning popular opinion against ice mages and getting them drummed out of town, or striking a deal with the thieves guild for protection.
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Your question reminds me of electricity. Destroying a door by freezing it with ice reminds me of lightning. How do you mitigate the effect of lightning? You do so by spreading the electricity into the earth. So is it possible to create a large pool of water that would absorb the latent heat of fusion of the ice, and therefore make ice impossible to form?
Or, to make it simpler, would it be possible simply not to make a door? Having access to so much sorcery powers, you probably don't need an ordinary iron door.
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**one way**
Maybe a bit grotesque but make a leather pouch for your lock from the skin of a null sorcerer. I'm sure it would be harder to freeze that way or prevent it from becoming brittle.
**Another way**
Lock the lock in a lock box that uses a key lock.
make the lock box have a hidden compartment the is unlocked when u lock the lock box. in this compartment put liquid that turn to give off gases to knock out someone.
this way if someone opens the lockbox by smashing it, it will release the knockout gas.
This assumes after the first 2 thieves, found out cold in front of your shop, get arrested 1 day after the other, warding off other thieves so you don't have to get another lockbox everyday (maybe u can get a good deal if u buy bulk though :/)
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**Bimetallic strip**
See [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip).
Make a coil similar to one in a gif, attach it to a plate in front of the lock, so if temperature lowers plate slides and blocks the lock entirely.
Like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EVU4N.jpg)
Don't forget to add a spring or something similar to create threshold, so it wouldn't get blocked by usual temperature fluctuations.
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Use a lock that is designed in such a way that if unlocked properly, it opens the door, but if smashed, releases some kind of trap. Maybe it is attached to a chain that holds up a large spiked object, or keeps a trap door closed.
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Given that you have an iron door to secure your shop I'll make the assumption that the surrounding walls to your shop are not wood and are instead stone or perhaps something even stronger.
If that is the case might I suggest fitting a secure fireplace/furnace either directly behind your door (To one side on the inside of your shop) or even better directly above your door with a grill/grating to allow heat to flow over the door (Despite heat rising it should be more than hot enough).
Provided it generates enough heat (Which an open coal fire should) and providing you can keep the fire going for the night until you return in the morning this should produce far too much heat around the pin lock that you already have set up that no ice sorcerer should be able to freeze the lock again.
Having the fire above the door will also prevent ice sorcerers from simply filling up the fireplace/furnace with water when attempting to freeze your burning material as the water produced will simply fall on to the floor.
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I was writing in my book when I decided I wanted to add some interesting characters into the mix (like an Irishmen, Chinese, Russian etc). But I hit a wall. You see a big plot point is that the Earth was… lost. Now it doesn't matter how it got lost it just did (pick one if you want: Death Star, Alien Invasion, Black Hole, forgot where I parked it etc), humans still managed to expand across the galaxy with hundreds of worlds colonized. The thing is not only is Earth lost, but it is also mostly forgotten as well (the government may be to blame here and a few hundred years). So I have been having a hard time thinking up a way for the readers to know what culture the character is, without referencing anything to do with Earth. This problem sounds simple (and probably is) but for some reason just telling the readers the character is "Irish" just feels so unnatural (but it could just be me).
So the question is this: **How do I Explain the Culture of a Character Without Referencing Anything to do with Earth?**
I have brainstormed some ideas:
1. He’s Irish because he **is** Irish (being your culture is more of an identity then where you come from no matter how many generations have passed, you were born from an Irish family therefore you will always be an Irishman even if you forgot there was an Ireland).
2. Using an evolved term for their culture (like for Chinese I use Xin or for Russians I use Russko, to made it sound more new).
3. Your faction is your culture (who they allied with makes them who they are, like even if you look Irish and have you an Irish accent, if you join say the redcoat faction you are now a redcoat (bad example if you are Irish)).
4. There is no such thing as culture anymore (even if you sound Irish, or look Chinese no one will pay you any mind about it, so I can only use character traits and details to describe who they are).
I hope this doesn’t sound too silly of a question to make and I hope I'm making sense as to what my problem is.
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> How do I Explain the Culture of a Character Without Referencing Anything to do with Earth
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**Short version : Forget labels, think personalities.**
Suggestions : write with arbitrary labels (X, Y, A, B) and fill them in later with actual words or expressions. They're a distraction from characterization.
People have (and probably always will) identify themselves with the people, locations and events that are most significant to their personal identities - that shape them.
So I'm from farming stock on Alpha Sigma B. Or I'm a lawyer on Luddle's Planet. Or I'm from the Colariton Sector and we don't hold with Kings out there. Or Jeff was from Beta Anarcis C and you know how touchy they get about the whole Federation thing out there - don't get him started on it. Or Chen O'Reilly was from Findalis, but honestly hated the place and found the more easy going liberal tone of Catchall more like a spiritual home. Or Hui didn't regard himself as being from anywhere anymore, nowhere felt like home, least of all where he was from. Or Jacie was a nice guy, but he never did get over that fling with Kendel and it left him slightly soured with people. Or Treona was nearly back to her old bright self after a long recovery from the accident.
Earth? Who cares? A myth lost in the past.
We care about what happened us and we identify with those things. They define us.
One thing : please don't become another author who insists on snowing me down with lengthy biographies on the characters. Characters can be painted without those irritating formula passages (sometimes insanely long) explaining every little thing to us. We don't need all that detail. We need to know what's important and in many ways the slow reveal of getting to know a character bit by bit (as you would any person) is more entertaining than the "dumped in my lap in one big dollop" approach some authors use.
Writer's exercise : write a three line description of everyone you know. Keep trying until you recognize them in what you wrote. Write the persona down, not the biography.
Expert writer's exercise : One line. :-)
And no cheating with ultra long lines.
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> if you look Irish and have you an Irish accent
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Earth is long lost and people still have Irish accents? No chance.
You are wedding ideas to your existing world, not the one you are creating. If you can't step into the world you create, how can your readers?
You need to forget labels.
Incidentally, I am Irish and I have no idea how anyone could *look* Irish. We don't really have a look. :-)
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> what culture the character is,
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Character's have personalities, not cultures. Write personalities.
I, for example, am Irish, but that does not tell you anything about me.
I consider myself a European. Think you know more about *me* now? Not really.
So let's try this: *Stephen. When I thought of him all I could see was a quiet man, with a fierce internal anger driven by some unknown fire that on rare occasions would flash out and become focused on some poor fool who stepped on one of his sacred cows, and then he disappeared into background again.*
What do you know now? Better? Better than labels about factions and locations?
It's not that the labels and factions and locations don't matter, it's that they're just secondary detail to a character and useful to construct a plot in a political sense. Stephen might be from Ireland, but do you know whether Stephen would race to Ireland's defense on help to tear it asunder? Or be indifferent? And if your character defended faction X in scenario A, does that mean they'll defend it in scenario B?
Question: Tell me where Han Solo is from and what his culture is? Does it matter one iota to the story? Where is Sam Spade from?
Location and culture are kind of "default settings" for humans. But we rapidly grow our own identity that isn't typically focused on those things.
You're getting stuck on labels, not people.
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I do not disagree with the other answers given here, but here's something for you to consider: for 2000 years, the Kingdom of Israel was gone. Conquered, sacked, a large number of its people exiled and living all around the world. For 2000 years, Jews continued to self-identify as the people of that lost land, and to yearn for Jerusalem. Israel was no more, the Roman province of Judaea was no more, but Jews remained Jews.
It doesn't matter that Earth is gone. If a group cares enough about preserving a distinct identity, such an identity can be preserved. Even in the face of adversity, and in the face of deliberate attempts to assimilate the community in question. (Inquisitions, forced conversions and all kinds of adversities did not cause the Jews to disappear.)
The question is rather whether any particular group would care enough about preserving a distinct identity. If they do not care enough, you will have a great mixing of peoples, old cultural identities disappearing and new ones emerging to take their place, preserving a mix of what their different forefathers were. See AlexP's great answer on that score.
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I don't see the problem really, just give some details of the different groups as they come into the story, giving more detail depending on their importance.
"Don't trust the Betelgeuse Federation, they're the worst pirates you'll ever meet."
"The newcomers red hair marked him as a Crossman, not exactly a common sight in the orbital mining colony. Everyone looked away hoping not to attract his attention, once a Crossman got started their religious moralizing could go on for hours."
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## Most ethnicities are changeable and have limited timespans
Let's look a few thousand years back, and see what's left of the ethnicities of that time:
* The Romans are gone. *Latin is a language, dead as dead can be, first it killed the Romans, now it's killing me*, as they say. Of all the peoples who speak Romance languages, only the Aromanians, the Romanians and the Romansh continue the name, and nobody would confuse a Romanian with a Roman.
* The Gauls are gone. No Celtic-speaking people uses a named derived from Gaul or Celt.
* The Samnites, Sabines, Phoenicians, Iberians, Phrygians, Egyptians, Numids, Dacians, Thracians, Illyrians, and so on are gone.
* The more recent Visigoths and Ostrogoths, Vandals and Gepids, Cumans, Khazars, and Dalmatians are gone.
There are exceptions; for example Greeks and Hebrews have been Greeks and Hebrews for a very long time, and one can assume that they will continue to be Greeks and Hebrews for one or two millennia.
Even when a *name* endures, the reality it covers often changes over time. The original Russians were the people of Kiev, but today the people of Kiev consider themselves Ukrainians; originally, the Scots were Gaelic-speaking people of Ireland and parts Scotland, but today a Scot is an inhabitant of Scotland, and the vast majority of Scots speak English or a closely related language; the original Bulgarians were a Turkic people, but now the name is used for a Slavic nation; the names of the ancient Egyptians, Libyans and Syrians have been reused wholesale for the people who inhabit the modern countries, regardless of whether they consider themselves as members of unified nations or not; the same wholesale reuse has hit the names of the Longobards, Saxons, Normans, and Britons.
Quite often, the *meaning* of an ethnonym depends on the point of view of the speaker; it is common for an ethnonym to have one meaning *inside* the nation, and quite another *outside*. For example, I am Romanian; *inside* Romania, a Romanian is a person whose native language is Romanian, and this includes people from Romania, the Republic of Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia and elsewhere, while excluding people *born in Romania or the Republic of Moldova* whose native language is something else; that is, we make a clear distinction between a "Romanian" and a "citizen of Romania". The same goes for "Russian": inside Russia, there is a clear distinction beween a "Russian" ("russkiy") and "citizen of Russia" ("rossiyskiy"). And I bet that it also goes for "Chinese", "Irish" and so on.
In conclusion, if you want to have Irish and Russians and Chinese, go for it; it would probably help if there were political structures called Russia and China, which is not unconceivable, and some sort of shared cultural tradition for the people who call themselves Irish. For the Russians of the far future, you may also consider positing a great [Orthodox Patriachate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_of_Moscow_and_all_Rus%27) of All the Russias.
By the way, the "truly ethnic Chinese" are called [Han](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese). Xin would invite readers to say `/ksin/` instead of `/ɕin/` (sort of "shin") and make a catty association with the [Kzin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kzin).
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**Do not tell. Show your readers what your characters are.**
Have in your head a plausible lineage for a given person such that they would still have recognizable ethnic traits.
In the book Hiero's Journey the author makes reference to Hiero's long straight hair inherited from his Amerind ancestors. It plays out that he and many like him are descended from Canadian Indians who somehow sidestepped the apocalypse.
I am reminded of my answer to this question:
[Physical qualities to distinguish an insular group of radioactivity survivors?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/106819/physical-qualities-to-distinguish-an-insular-group-of-radioactivity-survivors/106836#106836)
where I propose that a Kyrgyz group emigrates together and then circumstances keep them together.
So: you picture the characters yourself. If you write: "This woman is Irish" that is kind of a lead balloon. Instead, as the story unfold, mention her red hair. Demonstrate her quick wit which she got from her pa - although she notes that she stays clear of drink. Have her say a prayer before a risky endeavor and when asked to explain she says it was taught to her by her mother, and then offers to teach it. This character probably does not know she is Irish but by the color touches you add in the course of the story your readers will come to think of her as Irish.
Have your Ashkenazi character throw in some Yiddish here and there (always helps a story). Your Yoruba person could have tribal scars and he runs his finger over one on his cheek when he thinks.
It is like drawing a brick wall. You do not need to draw every single brick. Draw a group of bricks here and a group of bricks there and your viewer will create her own brick wall from your suggestions.
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You can create histories and culture for each species, race and ethnicity. Think Tolkien for an extreme version of this... Or look at Dune for a space themed book with different races and cultures.
Have multiple worlds been colonized and lost since Earth past from memory? If so, evolution to adapt to different worlds would create physically and culturally separate races (or even separate species). “You’re ancestors were from the Trappist system? Clearly not Trappist-1C! You must have Trappist-1E genes given your...”
Do some have new best friends from domestication of an alien life form? What can this new pet do?
Perhaps another species is in symbiosis with a type of alien life form. It doesn’t have to be an intelligent life form... What benefits are exchanged in this symbiosis?
Has one species of humanity even been domesticated by advanced aliens, then abandoned? What technologies do they have that they don’t even understand?
Does another considers it essential to terminate all alien life before terraforming a planet due to an alien caused plague in the far past?
Have some been in constant war with each other over the millennia?
Even if humanity never colonized another planet different ships would become different environments over time. Mutations on one ship would not occur on others, a historic event on one ship may be unknown on others, etc...
Which world(s) and ship(s) your ancestors came from would make up your race and culture.
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**Many extant cultures are already named for largely forgotten and no longer existing peoples** so what you are proposing is **not a new situation**.
To give a couple of examples: the English are named for 'Angeln' from which the 'Angles' came. 'Angeln' is a region now on the German/Danish border. The French are named for the 'Franks', a collection of Germanic tribes that living on the Rhine. The names persist long after they people are no longer connected to either the original land, or the original people, except in the most tangential of ways.
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I don't see how it is an issue.
Just becasue they have forgotten where the term russian came from does not mean they do not have russians who identify as russians. Russian cultural can survive even if Russia is forgotten. How many people in the US don't know anything about their ancestral home but still identify as scottish or french, ect. Cultural practices can stick around long after their origins are long forgotten.
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Class/culture, I wrote a post-diaspora human civilisation, a long while ago, that was based upon/descended from a small and culturally divided diaspora population. The diaspora itself caused the lasting collapse of Earth's economy and environment so there were no new migrations. The moneyed groups who paid for the ships off Earth "hired", read drafted, large numbers of labourers from economically disadvantaged nations. There continues to be a vast disparity in political and economic power between the owners and their staff, to the point of outright slavery on some worlds, and the divide is visibly linguistic, ethnic and cultural as well as the underlying class disparity. The upper crust cling to their individual cultures through exaggerated accent, costume and manner, and the cosmetic enhancement of distinguishing ethnic characteristics. At the same time they forbid their service classes the same markers and since there tend to be consistent master/servant pairings, for example the French ships took a lot of North Africans, it becomes self-reinforcing, you are your class which is also your nationality and your cultural identity, and most place you're stuck with it like it or not.
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Apart from the literal way of emphasizing on cultures' archetypes without the direct reference (don't know how to better describe what @DanClarke proposes), could it be possible in your story that there *are* in fact distinctive colonies based on Earth's cultures? Like, but not necessary this explict, the *Ol' Erie Settlers of Andromeda Wherever* and their lasting conflicts with the *British Space Empire of Nexttothere*? I found that expats tend to come in groups...
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No matter how stable your society is, eventually new ideas will arise and science will progress--especially if your neighbors, who you've historically been rivals with at times, are doing it too and you don't want to end up at a disadvantage. So eventually the elves are going to have to start picking up modern technology, if for no other reason than to keep up with the humans and the dwarves.
There's just one problem. Steel is nearly as essential to human-style technology as electricity, and elves, being fey-blooded creatures, are harmed by the touch of iron, including ferrous alloys, similar in severity to a human with potentially-life-threatening allergies.
How would a stereotypical forest-dwelling, nature-magic-wielding Elven society develop modern technology if they can't use iron and steel? Other structural metals, including bronze, aluminum, and titanium, are perfectly safe. Magical metals (such as mithril) are mythical and generally believed to not actually exist.
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Elves could just isolate iron with layers of fabric, leather or polish in order to don't have to touch iron.
If this solution can't work due to temperature or mechanical constrain, a layer of harmless metal can be added by [electroplating.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroplating)
Alternatively, protective gloves can also be used when handling iron.
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West of Eden trilogy ( <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden> ) has a species that progresses quite nicely with heavy biology tech instead of physics tech. Everything they do is based on controlled breeding and gene splicing. Every tool, every structure, is a living thing. From the Wikipedia entry: "Their boats were originally squids, their submarines are enhanced ichthyosaurs (here called uruketos), while their guns are modified monitor lizards which eject projectiles using pressurised gas."
This seems very elven in nature. Now, there are limits to biology, but I bet with elven magic you can start to circumvent. Take zombies, for example. They never die, they just want to eat your brains. So you pluck out their eyes, unravel their nervous system and, voila, you have a remote camera system. Their hearts provide a perpetual motion device. And so on.
If you bring in dragons and other mythological beings as being under the domain of elvish biology, you might even get spacefaring elves, without developing anything electronic.
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When "industrial revolution" starts, the Elves would integrate themselves with other races that don't have such problems with iron and steel. They would live in small groups in park-like environments within or close to big cities. Using labor and skills of other races. If only problem is touch of metals, then they will have humans or goblins build houses with metal/brick/concrete structure but wooden surfaces. Most of daily items will be made either from wood or non-structural metals.
This would be considered a "Dark Age" for Elves, because they would be reliant on others and have to withstand destruction of forests and nature in general.
It will be only when technology progresses enough for things like plastic, glass or aluminum to be used on big scale when Elves start to form their own nation-states. I would guess Elves would be perfect fine with our current technology, considering our focus on environmental impact and protection of nature.
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They make up the difference with magic. The only technology they would feel compelled to develop would be that with which magic, combined with primitive tech, can't measure up.
A similar dynamic is at play in the first book of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's [Death Gate Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Gate_Cycle). Humans could work with dragons and so used them for transportation and combat. Elves could not, and so constructed ships and enchanted them with the ability to fly.
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The simplest answer is : they don't. When the iron age arrives, the elves run off and hide in their forests, living in ever smaller and more remote areas. Then, eventually, after the humans have developed these tools and technologies, they rediscover the elves in much the same way as humans discovered Aboriginal and Amazonian tribes and, possibly after much bloodshed and general unpleasantness, come to terms with them.
so elves in a modern world will be using and preferring traditional materials, but acquiring and slowing becoming used to using modern non-ferrous material from the humans, possibly in a conflict between elder elves who might think contact with the humans is a bad thing, and young ones who want the benefits of not living in a tree.
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When the Bronze age transitions into the Iron Age, around 1200 BC in the near-east or other times in other places, then elves suddenly are at a disadvantage. [Or, see Mason's comment below, this may not happen at the very onset of the iron age but in fact at a later point. Steel comes to be, if not exactly commonplace, then widely available. About the limit of my knowledge is that classical Greece didn't really use steel weapons, whereas imperial Rome did. So in the Med you have around 500 years of my ignorance. The elves hit trouble by the end of that at the very latest]. They can't directly touch the best tools known to humanity.
As against that, handles and gloves have both already been invented. Want to use a sword or a hoe? Put a wooden handle on it. Or wrap the blunt end in leather and then copper or bronze wire and away you go. Minor daily handicap, major tactical weakness that can be exploited by those who attack them with iron weapons. I should think they probably won't wear ferrous armour, it's too difficult to ensure you *never* touch it. So for a couple of thousand years or so they might be a total liability on the battlefield since (a) they're poorly-armoured, (b) a bag of iron filings becomes the first ever successful use of "poison gas" on the battlefield, some time around 1199BC. But they can keep a few tools that they're careful with, and maybe develop a niche as light cavalry or whatever. Perhaps go the Japanese route with lacquered wooden armour?
Note that when you *work* iron or steel, the bit you're working is too hot to touch anyway. So there's no reason in principle you can't have elven blacksmiths etc, they'll just take the same precautions with cold objects that human blacksmiths take with hot. That said, if a human makes a mistake they get a scar. Supposing that if an elf makes a mistake they drop dead instantly then this might not be the right career for them, and they should aim to import iron and steel goods. Lack of their own production could be a serious problem in war, unless they have other means of fighting. Perhaps they would seek to head-hunt humans or dwarves and integrate them into their society over generations, with social standing as craftsmen and a good reason not to defect to "their own kind" when trouble comes, in order to have home-grown iron working.
I think this gets them into the industrial revolution, which is the point where your iron and steel tools cease to be special items you can worry about individually, and start to be ubiquitous. Now you can't pick up someone else's hat without risking putting your finger on their mass-produced steel hatpins. Doorknobs aren't *usually* iron, but are you going to risk it? I don't know exactly when the last time I touched an iron or steel object was, but it was definitely today. Then again, I don't know when the last time I touched a peanut was either, because *I don't have a potentially-fatal peanut allergy*. People who do, find ways to keep track of such things.
And, on the plus side, with the industrial revolution come mass-produced enamel paints. Elves are going to be very much in favour of painting iron railings, and indeed any iron or steel that doesn't have to hold an edge. Ideally, someone else paints it for them.
Provided that society is broadly sympathetic to elves (that is, they're foreigners but not evil demons, or even better they're exotic aristocrats) then I don't see why they shouldn't be able to get by with gloves and care. An itchy feeling when iron starts to get near them would be a distinct advantage in avoiding accidents. But they're going to be a *bit* behind humans when it comes to iron and steel use simply because they find it harder (not impossible) to do anything with it.
Then once modern consumerism starts to kick in, they have good options to avoid external steel altogether. Perhaps they'd have been instrumental in researching and developing aluminium or other alternatives. Perhaps they're smart enough that they've already cracked cheap and/or easily-worked titanium, and are rolling around in an enormous heap of money.
Cornflakes or other iron-fortified breakfast cereals are poison to them ;-) I presume that they can handle some trace iron and/or that they use an alternative to haemoglobin (I'd say that's a reason to be vegetarian, but vegetables have trace iron too of course. Maybe there's a threshold, and meat makes them ill, but you'd have to decide whether beans do too since the amount of iron is similar). Seriously though cornflakes just have fine iron dust thrown in there. True fact.
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What is the problem with aluminum? Aluminum can be used to construct most objects. Their buildings either have to be short or should be constructed by other races. Steel + concrete allows these tall buildings to stand upright.
Electronics wouldn't a problem as they are mostly made out of copper and silicon. Iron core is used for inductors but maybe another material can take its place.
For weapons, if the elves are of classical tropes, an elven guy with a staff could train so long (100s of years) that a knight squad in shining armor and lifelong training will have absolutely no chance against a single elven warrior. We are not even including magic in here. In modern times, they would have distinct disadvantage for warfare. But you can balance the field here to give them ability to create carbon fiber or carbon nanotubes using their magic. This will allow them not to need steel as both materials are much more durable than steel. Imagine donning carbon fiber armor, good luck other races!
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Elves could work with biotechnology (that's said before but just let me give some more examples).
Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" shows how to make a bio-engineering tradition happen if iron is not available. Granted, it's about spiders instead of elves so it's not directly applicable but that's a job for your own imagination.
Cixin Liu's "The Three Body Problem" gives a great example of a biological computer.
It is well-established in popular culture that elves are magic beings so let's explore that for a moment.
Magic can replace technology to a certain extent. You can go the Harry Potter route and claim that large quantities of magic disrupt the working of technology (which is why Hogwarts has no wifi). Of course, you could just find a way to integrate magic with technology: are there any limits to what a magical smartphone can do?
Brandon Sanderson (author of the Mistborn trilogy) has devised "laws" to keep magic believable as a plot device. In short: place limitations on it and do not use it as a cure-all. His essays on the use of magic in fiction are very entertaining. See <http://brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/>
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Humans have the same problem with another metal: lead. We found ways around it once we knew enough to care.
Elves just need to start the next green movement. Then we'll have iron free zones the same way we have smoke free zones. Then elves can eat gluten free muffins on an iron free bridge with a plastic spork.
They just need to defeat the rust belt lobby. Maybe a class action suit?
Going to miss my stainless steel flatware.
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One major factor that is particularly out of place, here: "The Modern Age". Typically, elves are depicted as an ancient race. One that has been around a lot longer than we humans; sometimes since the dawn of creation. While they are not traditionally seen as a race that would live through to the modern ages 1, this does put a particularly interesting spin on things: they have been around to endure and overcome their potential weaknesses long enough to permit the inclusion of great time-spanning solutions.
I can think of several ways they may evolve into the modern age, to adapt to the increased proximity to corrosive metals. I can think of many ways these would adapt into their own paths, telling the story of how the elves overcome this natural weakness. Ultimately, my solutions boil down to three things:
1. How far have the elves evolved, from their early "folk-lore" days to the modern age?
2. How have they developed, magically? Elves are commonly seen as magically gifted - but this usually correlates with their great age in comparison to the other races. As greater time moves on, has their magic dwindled, or grown stronger?
3. How are their relations with the other races? Do they still live more isolated communities, or are they more likely to go for a walk and run into a human driving a car? Likewise, do these relations offer economic advantage? This seems like an important issue that would effect trade values and such.
## Evolution
Following a Darwinism approach, it is entirely possible that the elves may evolve to adapt to their great weakness. Especially as the world around them changes so dramatically. Traditionally, elves would live in the forests, and often be seen as a nomadic race. However, as time goes on, many other races would rise, and perhaps fall. As other races advanced in technology, it is entirely plausible that the elves would have much greater interaction with iron, though not to the extend where they would have dangerous interaction with it.
As more structures are erected around the world, of steel and iron, the elves would have far greater interaction with the metals without coming into *physical* contact with them. That is, they might walk past an iron statue every day, without actually touching it and risking harm.
### Greater resistance
As years turn into decades turn into centuries turn into millennia, the elves might find that the greater increase in "close proximity" has led to them evolving away from their natural weakness. This might not necessarily be a matter of being able to work with said materials as commonly as other, but it is plausible that they could have far greater interaction before succumbing to the harm that was often suffered by their ancestors.
### Greater natural protection
An option that provides greater creative license in your physical depiction of these elves is that of evolving natural protection. Perhaps their skin grows hard and course to limit the effects of physical interaction with the metals. Perhaps they move in the opposite direction, and develop glands that secrete lubrication over the key areas (hands if they particularly craft with the metal, full body if they rely on body armor) that acts as an extra barrier.
### "Caste" Evolution
It is plausible that through having to adapt to the use of such metals, particular families have evolved towards greater resistance, while others have not. This could potentially lead to a 'caste' system of sorts. The elves that develop resistance might be 'pushed' towards career in smithing, or other jobs that require greater interaction with the metal. Elves that fail to develop the resistance would be more suited for other occupation, such as general farming, or mage work.
## Medical Advancement
With all the advancements *we* have made in medicine, it is not a far stretch to suggest that elf-kin would reach far greater advancement. A natural affinity for nature mixed with the greatly extended life span makes for excellent medical study.
Over time, their advancements could allow them to develop remedies to their weakness. This might be something as simple as a common salve they could rub into their skin to provide resistance against harm, or even a remedy for those that are around the material so much as to develop serious condition.
If you think about all the seemingly insignificant ailments we suffer that would have been an easy death sentence hundreds of years ago, its not hard to reach the conclusion that the "iron weakness" could be the elfish equivalent of smallpox, or scurvy. Both of these ailments were once considered fatal to humans. Smallpox was effectively wiped out through the spread of a less fatal 'little sister virus' (cowpox) that prepared our immune systems, while scurvy was *eventually* correlated to the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in ones diet. It does not seem completely unreasonable that the elves may come upon a similar solution to their own problem.
## Magical developments
Just as humans have extended our reaches through advancements in technology, it is entirely expected that elves would make advancements throughout their many years, magically. This gives you all sorts of possibilities.
### Magical barriers
With greater developments in magic, elves could learn to harness nature to create far greater barriers. You might go for the "runic ward" approach, where more powerful runes can be inscribed into iron garments to nullify the effect (by blocking it, or even by providing a healing effect strong enough to cancel out the harmful effect). You might even consider the use of delicate magical barriers to physically prevent the elves from touching the metal, while still having enough motor capability to interact with it. Think something a long the lines of capturing wind into a fine glove, that provides enough barrier to allow you to pick up things without actually touching them.
### Greater reinforcement of safe material
With the use of powerful nature magic, you could allow your elves to develop knowledge for reinforcing natural materials to compete against our modern metals. Magically infused wood or glass could theoretically compete with steel or iron, depending on the manner in which they do so. It might be more feasible to suggest the discovery of more advanced variations of said material. Perhaps they discover a particular tree that is so strong that only the will of nature magic itself can allow them to fell it, and use it in craft.
### Greater advancements in refining safe material
If the elves have to use metal, ultimately they are going to use metal that is safe to touch (in most cases). As mentioned, they can touch titanium. Titanium is somewhat uncommon, when compared to steel, but this partially boils down to the fact that it is still very difficult to actually *make* titanium. From what little I could find at 2 o'clock in the morning, this is mostly due to the fact that the creation process requires great amounts of heat and pressure. Surely if the elf's pushed for advancements in their magical abilities that greatly accelerated their ability to create titanium, this would easily be a more suitable alternative to steel or iron - even without the weakness.
Building on another answer, this might make them particularly useful to the dwarfs. The dwarfs might have their great machines, but they are not known for their magical ability. With the elves providing them a steady source of "magically-developed titanium", they would surely be inclined to offer the services mentioned in other answers that would make these metals less dangerous to the elves - whether that be diluting the dangerous metal down into less dangerous sub metals, providing other metals that might be out of reach to the elves but otherwise safe, or even through providing the required electroplating needed to make general steel or iron completely safe for elf-kin to interact with.
1 Not including science-fiction re-imaginings of the race, of course.
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* Telepathically control minds of humans to forge iron for them.
* You also assume Elves society is separated from humans which may be not, they can In example co-operate with humans into realizing technology: while an Elf cannot touch directly iron, he can touch it by using rubber gloves.
* Elves would be damn good at research and counselling, an Elf can live years that means (unless brain is limited in someway) they can study hundreds of years stuff like Math, Science and Programming, and they can become really good at those tasks thanks to all those years of experience
* However I think since they live long they would just create a slow-pace technology elite where they do amazing things but at the speed of turtles.
* However you say elves can still touch all metals (but the ones that contain Iron) so they can even do almost whatever humans do.
* They will have 1 weak side however: living so long leaves more vulnerable to cancer and to disease (micro-organisms evolves much faster)
* So I guess elves would actually prefer to live just into isolated places where no human can bring disease.
* I could actually guess Elves could raise funds simply by podcasting on YouTube their technological advices
* Given they are weaker to pollution and diseases they would likely to research only in fields to prevent pollution and diseases contributing in general to a greener world.
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How The elves developed their technology depends own how their magic's works.
For example if they can use magic to alter live things on a biological level then we could see them developing biological tools.
Or if there magic evolves telekinesis then we could see them have some Iron tools that they can interact with by using Telekinesis.
Also remember that elves can touch gold, silver, and other none Iron based metals, perhaps they could develop technologies that use these metals in place of Iron.
I wish I could give more but without know how the elves power works I can't. If you add more info I can edit my answer to be more helpful.
Side note: If the elves can magic to mind control humans then they might be able to have human assemble and use Iron base machines for them.
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I like the idea of them adopting 'wet-ware' instead of our metal based hardware. It feels like them developing their own technology tree based on life and biology would fit well with the general mythology surrounding elves. They could 'grow' compounds which would replace many of our metals, and produce biological computing substrates if that's a path you wanted to go down. It seems like this would keep them nicely distinct from humanity and dwarves, with them going for sustainability and minimal impact on their environment rather than mining, extraction, smelting etc.
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Normally the Orcs are represented as physically stronger and bigger than the other races. Wouldn't that automatically make the Orcs very good archers? The [English longbows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow) against the French were already strong, but the Orcs could use even stronger bows.
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### The answer lies in what they cherish the most - brute strength and living the moment
Orcs are generally portrayed as savage wild beasts with humanoid features that excel at physical melee combat. Their nature dictates that they prefer melee combat to look into the eyes of their enemies and see their fear while showing pure strength themselves to intimidate their enemies into submission. They want to crush their enemies bones, they want to see the blood splatter around them, they want to rage through the enemy frontlines.
Tactics are not something they cherish. They want pure physical strength above all else.
Therefore they *could* theoretically be among the best, but they are specifically bred to be strong and wild, short-tempered and savage, brutal and blood-thirsty.
If you valued other things, like tactics and subtly taking over control you would have the traditional elves - politically scheming and taking out enemies from afar with their *bows*. They want control and look at the result - Orcs look at the process. They are living the moment and cherish every moment of bloody war in their short lives, while elves look at the horizon and think about their long, nearly endless, lives and choose the path that will give them more power in the long run - a very, very long run.
In some settings you have something in-between. For example in DnD you sometimes find Half-Orcs that show near-equal strength when compared to Orcs and near-equal intelligence and cunning when compared to their other parent race, most of the time humans. These might be the best archers - powerful and yet able to restrain themselves to carefully take aim at a target in the distance.
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## Unlikely
If the ability of an archer were just about throwing an arrow as far as possible, then trolls would be even better, not to mention Tolkien's Ents, or more classical stone giants1.
However, if the ability of an archer also includes precision, then there are other factors beside size and strength:
1. eyesight
2. steadiness of hand
3. fine control of the arm muscles
**Eyesight**. As far as orcs go, referring to the Tolkien-verse orcs, they do have good eyesight at night,
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> It was dark, but not too dark for the night-eyes of Orcs.
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* *The Fellowship of the Ring, II, 9: "The Great River"*
but perhaps not so good eyesight during the day, as many creatures from Mordor.
**Steadiness of hand**. This is hard to judge. I can't recall any hold-and-wait type of strategies in orcs' armies and I also can't recall any memorable standoff in which an orc would be holding a weapon still. For the benefit of doubt, we will give them steadiness of hand.
**Fine motor control**. This is an entirely different story. If we accept the lore that orcs are a monkeyed-version of elves, turned into physically strong savage brutes, then we can wonder whether there are other non-magical explanations for the increased strength. Looking at our world, there are explanations for the [difference in strength between monkeys and humans](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090330200829.htm), which rely on a tradeoff between strength and fine motor control. It is thus entirely possible that orcs have lost some of the fine motor control in favor of increased muscular strength. It would make sense provided that their armies are large assemblies of infantrymen and that they seem rely greatly on hand-to-hand combat rather than strategical ranged warfare.
In conclusion, the lack of fine motor control would make orcs worse at aiming compared to other races. In addition, the possibility of poor daytime eyesight would make them even less useful as archers. No wonder that in the traditional lore, the bigger and stronger creatures resolve to throw stones2 rather than using more advanced weapons like slings or bows.
1 All this ignoring the square-cube law.
2 For examples: Polyphemus and the Cyclops throwing boulders at Ulysses, the giant in the Brave Little Taylor throwing a rock as a feat of strength.
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**It depends on your meta**
Bows have essentially two uses:
* Aimed shots
* Artillery
If your scenario primarily requries accurate direct shots then orcs may very well be prevented from using bows by their rough nature
If your scenario involves enough cases of using a lots of archers to fire lots of arrows at lots of enemies, then the ability to use stronger bows with a longer range would absolutely make them not only viable but extremely potent.
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The simple answer is: **YES**. The orcs should be able to use bigger bows, or one that need much force to tension the string. Maybe even mobile ballista.
So why they are not? The truth is that in fantasy setting the bow don't match orc social profile. Bows are usually in the service of assasins, thief's and loveable scoundrels. Orcs are brute, big and not finesse enough to become Super Secret Shadow Assassin.
Orcs are usually given the "dumb" perk. Orcs smash, orcs destroy, orcs go straight to battle.
Some autors like to balance it by giving Orcs love for personal battle and beliefs and motives that grant fighting with enemy face to face and punish when you attack and kill from secret.
But orcs that are hunters should be one of the best hunters in the world.
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>
> Normally the Orcs are represented as physically stronger and bigger...
>
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> ...the Orcs could use even stronger bows.
>
>
>
Seems logic, and this makes their bows stronger and thus, more powerful. But to be a good archer you need more traits the usual representation of orcs don't have:
### Elasticity
The position you must take to fire a bow is not a position an over-muscled body such as an orc's can take.
### Powerful vision
The Orcs are usually presented as simply stronger and bigger, their eyesight is not better as other races.
### Good eye-hand coordination
Orcs are often presented as dumb, slow and maybe even a bit clumsy. This in itself should rule them out as archers.
### Capacity to concentrate on the task at hand
Orcs are also usually raging brutes, which makes them incapable of concentrating to wait for a good shot.
## Conclusion
This greatly depends on the concrete representation of Orc, but the usual rules them out as archers because of the other traits needed apart from physical strength.
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# Orcs don't like the sun
Tolkein's Orcs (the OG Orcs, as far as I can tell) did not like the sun. Even the Uruk-hai, who could hang out in daylight didn't like it much.
In order to aim a bow, you have to see. You can't see very far at night, and no one fights battles in the night anyways. And orcs can't see very well in the day. Therefore, Orcs are mediocre archers at best, despite their strength
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I would also point out that the muscles used in archery are quite different from every day use. Go take a look at some top archers. Most look in decent enough shape but rarely incredible shape muscle wise but could use a far heavier bow than the weightlifters. For instance <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sjef_van_den_Berg> came 4th in the Rio Olympics. He is tall and has long arms but I would not put him as a weightlifter. He does pull a bow beyond the majority of archers. It is not a question of all around power but of the power of the specific muscles that are being used.
Power in archery comes from the core and back muscles (long draw helps too). This fits in with most mythologies which tend not to have elves as well built but could well have powerful core muscles. Orcs, unless they put a lot of time into it, would not build up the relevant muscles at much even with enhanced strength. They would fit more of the large man who could lift large objects or punch with a lot of power but don't have a massive edge for the muscles used while pulling a bow.
This is as an aside to the probably more relevant points about technique and the like.
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**The longbow takes years of practice.**
Here is a related question from the History stack. There are lots of good answers.
<https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/35769/why-did-only-the-english-adopt-evolve-and-use-the-longbow-en-masse-in-war>
The main thrust: if it was pretty clear to all involved that the longbow offered tactical superiority (anyone interested in this has probably read about Agincourt but maybe not about [Crecy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cr%C3%A9cy)), why did every medieval army not organize contingents of longbow archers like the English did?
My understanding is that
1: peasants in Europe were crushed completely by poverty. There was a yeoman class of men in England who were not so totally crushed; they could afford bows and they could afford to take some time off of work to practice.
2: These people were compelled to (with their own equipment) practice archery every sunday by government decree, which shows a degree of foresightedness and long term preparation. But I understand there was also societal solidarity involved in this practice and class pride - a sword and armor were weapons for the nobility but a common man could be a deadly warrior with a bow.
3: They practiced a lot over the years, and so there accrued in England a mass of skilled archers.
4: Nobility outside of England were more wary about giving the peasantry the power to kill a knight.
Your orcs would need to be more like the English than the Italians. They would need to have free time and equipment to practice archery and they would need to be compelled to practice which becomes more difficult with individuals who are disinclined to practice. D&D orcs sometimes live in association with more powerful creatures - in analogy to continental nobles these creatures may be wary about giving the orcs this kind of power. With a hill giant vs 20 orcs at close quarters I bet on the giant. But 100 yards in between and the orcs all expert archers it is a different story.
I take away from Crecy and other reading that when Medievals wanted powerful bowmen on short notice they hired [crossbowmen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoese_crossbowmen). Crossbows are easier to use than longbows and do not require long training. Maybe the orc analogy would be javelins?
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I’m not sure where your question falls between “I’m writing a fanfic and the premise is that Tolkien’s books are Elf propaganda!” and “I’m inventing a new species in a new setting, but since their relevant characteristic at the moment is their physical strength, for simplicity I’m going to ask about ‘Orcs.’”
Yes, it should be the case that an army whose soldiers are all stronger could be issued bows with more pull, allowing them to either fire with more kinetic energy at short range or to shoot arrows of similar weight at long range. This would be a big advantage when the army fires volleys at each other rather than aiming at individual targets. If their range advantage were substantial, their tactics might be based around constant maneuvering to keep the enemy at the range where only the orcs could effectively engage. But recall that humans’ most pronounced physical advantage over other animals is our endurance.
One disadvantage they would have relative to humans is that, historically, this tactic was perfected by horse archers and orcs, who are bigger and heavier, might find it harder to field large forces of cavalry. The carnivores Tolkien had them riding would, if we hold the setting to the laws of biology on Earth, needed the orcs to grow ten times the crops to feed them as it would take to feed herbivores sch as horses, since feeding the crops to farm animals for giant wolves to eat wastes 90% of the calories. No society as close to subsistence level as any pre-modern nation on Earth could have fielded them in large numbers. And the orcs might also find that archery maximizes their advantages more than pike warfare or infantry charges.
The idea that orcs have inferior weapons to their opponents seems to come from *Dungeons & Dragons*, rather than Tolkien. Saruman’s armies were the most technologically-advanced in Middle-Earth (which Tolkien saw as a bad thing) and Sauron’s had the most innovative tactics. That said, I honestly don’t think the concept of Tolkien’s Orcs has aged well, but you’ll write what you want to write.
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Orc culture is often portrayed as being rather focused on gaining glory through one-on-one fights and showing of personal strength (at least if the Orcs are a physically strong race), and archery is not exactly the most glorious of trades. After all its rather hard to show personal skill in a battle situation: Who shot whom, can it really be called a feat of strength if you kill someone with a bow and stuff like that- to sum it up:
It often just doesn't fit into Orc society, as portrayed by the author.
Another reason orcs may be worse archers is an inherent lack of visual coordination. If I remember correctly the use of bows strains a similar part of the brain as reading, meaning that the ability to read means more developed coordination. Of course Huns for example were superior (horseback) archers and most (if not all) were illiterate, but what counts is the theoretical structure of the brain, allowing them to learn how to read. The huns also trained with bows excessivly, as it was the most useful weapon to them, which brings me to my final point:
Why should Orcs use bows? Depending on their terrain bows might be next to useless. What if they live underground, were cover is, well, rather plentiful, or in regions with next to no wood? And no suitable animals to make bows out of their bones, of course...
So the possible reasons are:
1. Cultural aversion: Can be anything from considering to be
dishonourable to... I don't know, reserved to some kind of god?
2. Physical: They lack an important feature to use bows, for example hand-eye-coordination.
3. Technological/Material: They have no way to produce effective bows and subsequently never developed archery culture.
4. Useless: Bows are useless to them, due to terrain, no viable foes or something like that.
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Not necessarily.
**Bow Quality:**
The effectiveness of archers depends as much on the quality of their bows as it does on the strength or aim of the bowman. In a world where ignorant orcs don't craft weapons or only craft simple, inelegant weapons it would follow that their bows would lack range and reliability.
**Cooperation:**
The effectiveness of archers on a battlefield has a lot to do with concentrating fire and delivering arrows in volleys. It's important to know when to shoot, to be able to shoot as a group on command, and to be able to fall back in good order if needed. Big dumb orcs filled with bloodlust might be very bad at that.
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Darren beat me to it but I would like to elaborate on his point, crafting a longbow is a long complicated process from selecting what kind of wood to use, harvesting it, drying it, carving it, shaping it, finishing it, and then the bowstring has to be woven from tendon or horse hair which each have their own preparation processes and we still haven't even started fletching!
An orc may be entirely capable of using a bow but due to their barbaric nature it's unlikely that they would have the patience to put up with a weapon that could be rendered inoperable if a bit of string got wet.
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Now let's say there is a magician. We'll say he like a DnD wizard or something, so he does stuff like create food out of thin air and turns people he doesn't like into lizards. He doesn't want to restrict his magic use at all, but he doesn't want all the scientists to freak out or anything. Specifically, he wants his magic to seem to have *scientific* explanations.
* He has various powers of a DnD wizard
* He uses them in public frequently at whim
+ He doesn't try to hide it at all. He literally flies to work (as a party magician) and conjures stuff up all the time.
* He wants scientists to believe his acts fit within current science
+ He doesn't want to change science though. His magic has to fit within our **current** understanding of science. He can't create new scientific theories to explain it.
+ Specifically, it has to have a **specific** scientific explanation. Most scientists believe that everything fits into science, but this magician wants them to know *how* his magic fits in.
* He doesn't want to invade people's minds with magic (illusion is okay)
* He wants to expend the least of effort possible.
+ Like a DnD wizard, any extra spells he need to keep this charade up means he has less spells for more important stuff, like hypnotizing the pigeons to poop on people's cars.
+ He doesn't want to use up too much time keeping the charade up either.
In case you're wondering, this magician is not necessarily myself. You can believe me because I am telling you the truth.
[Answer]
**Props**
The easiest and simplest way for your Magician to use his magic is simply to use it with various props he may have. He doesn't need to explain anything, scientists will work VERY hard to explain anything they don't understand. All they need is a carrot to run after.
I.e.: Your magician is flying to work. All he needs is to take out his skateboard (to which he duck-taped a couple of spray painted cans - or any fancier sci-fi looking skateboard) and fly to work while either holding it or standing on it etc... The moment he's seen, it's not magic that'll be on everyone's mind, it's how the guy invented some crazy flying skateboard.
He's conjuring stuff out of mid-air. Any kind of Hollywood beam gun or teleporting microwave like machine will do the trick to have people willingly fool themselves in disbelieving any magic is at work.
[Answer]
# Let himself be exposed... as a fraud
All he needs to do is [visit Randi](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_Challenge) and use a magic trick rather than actual magic and then use some mind manipulation to get as many media as possible to write about it. Or maybe if he feels uncomfortable visiting Randi (as in a magic world Randi would probably be a magician supressing the powers of others) he could simply set up a situation where he gets exposed for faking stuff. Like having a trapdoor suddenly open somewhere 'by mistake' whilst on television or something.
After that it would still be a wise idea to not do stuff that is *too* impossible. For example if he flies to work everyday on a skateboard scientists *will* freak out and will do anything possible to figure out how he's doing it. Conjuring stuff out of thin air however is quite doable for a real-world magician (as long as it doesn't literally materialize in thin air), it just takes money and preperation normally. Practically the wisest thing for him to do is study real world magicians and learn what they can and can not do and limit himself to those things. And whenever he gets in a tight spot 'slip up' (using real magic) in the way a real world magician would slip up.
[Answer]
Simple. He needs to pretend to be an alien.
Mount a bunch of LEDs on his wand and call it a sonic screwdriver.
Caste an illusion of a flying saucer landing in the Capital. Teleport (or invisibly walk) to the middle of the illusionary saucer, then open a hatch and (visibly) step out into the public view, before having the illusionary saucer fly away.
From that point on, he can do whatever he wants. No more spells need to be wasted to defend his magic from discovery.
When the scientists raise a skeptical eye, all he has to do is say that he can't explain how his science works, because...
That would be breaking the Prime Directive!
[Answer]
Fundamentally, if stuck to all the requirement, this cannot be done.
But if you were to do it, the most ironcast method would be by demonstrating that the magician understands how the magic works, and can rationalise and predict what will happen when it's used.
At this point, magic can be proven as real, and the magician in question has essentially founded *the science of magic*, aka *theoretical magic* in the process of explaining it.
Science as defined by Wikipedia is:
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> Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe
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>
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The idea of something that is by its nature is unscientific, and exists in the world, is meaningless, and suggests a misunderstanding of what the scientific principle is. It's similar to saying that you have water that is free of chemicals ( despite H2O being a chemical, along with anything else built from atoms ), the statement makes little sense.
As for the proposed solution, this has happened in the past! Although the theories put forward were eventually disproven as it was found that other explanations were more likely. For example, theories of **Alchemy** lead to the theories of chemistry. **Thaumaturgy** eventually lent itself to the existing fields of philosophy, and most of its aspects were shown to be less than rigorous. **Homeopathy** is a more recent attempt that has failed scientific enquiry, yet is recent enough to still encounter strong support.
The main difference here is that in your fictional world, this magician has actual magic, and can back up their statements. By explaining the mechanisms by which magic works, and providing empirical evidence to back up said hypothesis, the magic moves from a scientific hypothesis, to a scientific theory.
Without this, the likely reaction is that the magician is a charlatan and a liar, who tries to fool people into believing they have supernatural powers through trickery. Plenty such people already exist in our world, and if the magician demonstrates sufficient magical abilities, they may be seen as using technology as yet to be revealed
Now the question does state that the magic needs to be explained using current science, but this demonstrates a misunderstanding of science works.
>
> Specifically, it has to have a specific scientific explanation. Most scientists believe that everything fits into science, but this magician wants them to know how his magic fits in.
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>
>
Nevermind that the statement "scientists believe that everything fits into science" is simply false ( dark energy, dark matter, the internal nature of black holes, where gravity comes from, etc to name a few ), **the very act of doing this creates a hypothesis on which the scientific principle can be applied**. New science has been created.
* Hypothesis: Expected answer to OP question
* Experiment: Test that explanation works
* Result: Evidence that can be used to construct a new theory
Lets say that your magicians only trick was a vast light show in the sky, and your magician decided to tell the scientists that he used a hidden wide field laser to shift the atoms in the air into a bose einstein state usually only seen in laboratories studying quantum states. This seems sensible at first, but your magician has unwittingly made a huge advance in quantum mechanics, one that will need to be reproducible.
Which is another vital element. For your magician to be believed, whatever they say needs to be explained in a way that other scientists can reproduce. **If it cannot be independently reproduced, then your magician will be accused of falsifying evidence and lieing, and you're back to square 1**
As a further note, if I make a claim that all people with the name Veronica have a secret ability to shoot beams of fire out of their palms that they are unaware of, I have created a Scientific Hypothesis. The current understanding of Science has changed. Granted, that hypothesis will not be taken seriously, and I highly doubt it will stand up when tested. But if it were tested, and reproduced, the general understanding of Veronica fire beams will be the theory.
**All in all, if we strictly adhere to the original questions parameters, the answer is no. It cannot be done without fundamentally changing the scientific method, and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about what science is, and how science works by the asker**
[Answer]
He won't actually have to do much work, the default position of a scientist is going to be that he's using sleight of hand, etc - so as long as he doesn't do anything that could not be faked then he will be fine.
The flying to work is the thing that's going to be a real problem, he shouldn't do that as long distance flying in uncontrolled outdoor spaces would be really hard to explain.
The problem you have is that explaining his activities and carnying on as normal are not compatible. Magic breaks any number of physical laws and as soon as he becomes blatant enough and gets enough people interested the fact that he is doing so will pretty soon be obvious.
However if he just moderates things a little when in public he can get away with a lot. The best thing is he never has to explain how he does it, he can just say "a magician never reveals his secrets" and let everyone else do the explaining for him...
[Answer]
[Niven's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niven%27s_laws) states:
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"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."
```
Your magician does not need to do anything beyond claim that it is done with technology (i.e. it is indeed a trick), while withholding the method on the basis of intellectual property and commercial confidence. The fact that it really is magic need only be known to him.
For practical purposes you might like to have your magician keep an eye on anyone investigating his methods too closely and take subtle action to thwart them.
[Answer]
Assuming you want to keep this story somewhat believable:
If he just wants to troll people, he can most likely get away with declaring them tricks - because no one is going to care too much.
If he does anything that's actually useful, that won't fly. People will want to know how he does it. He *will* have to come up with an explanation. Assuming the scientists of your universe are not grossly incompetent, that explanation will have to work.
In other words, your hypothetical wizard could only use spells that allow him to do things that are not only physically possible, but also possible to implement with the equipment a person carries on themselves. That kind of defeats the whole point of your idea though.
Unless you *severely* restrict the abilities of your wizard he will live in a rather odd caricature of our world where people can easily get away with pretend science. It'd really only work if somehow no actual scientist ever heard of him. Maybe you can put him in a remote mountain village with no internet access or something.
[Answer]
It would depend on the details of what this magician wanted to do. When I am told that someone has the powers of a D&D wizard, I assume a level 20 D&D 3.5 wizard, the maximum according to standard rules (no epic-level fluff). This actually gives the wizard a great number of options. Some people have suggested that the magician could simply do whatever he wished, and people would simply explain it away as illusion. While this might be true within certain, very limited contexts, there is simply no way that summoning a demon out of thin air, for example, if witnessed by many people, will be dismissed as a mass delusion (something which occurs infrequently enough, and only in response to specific social situations). Those who suggest that a new branch of "science" will be thought up to explain his actions if he is too blatant about it are spot-on. I hesitate to call anything that treats conscious minds separately "science," but perhaps empiricism. Fortunately, the wizard need not find himself in this situation. The wizard has many options for concealing or disguising his sorcery.
Option 1: Invisibility. The spells *persistent invisibility* and *superior invisibility* are incredibly useful here. The first is an 8th level persistent spell that lasts all day. So our wizard can cast once and make himself invisible all day. The latter is a spell that lasts 20 minutes (for a 20th-level caster), but also conceals from hearing, and scent, and allows him to attack without dispelling the charm. It may, however, prevent the casting of spells with a verbal component. These spells could conceal any bizarre effect that the wizard does to himself (e.g. shapeshifting) quite effectively. Even bizarre summoned (or called) creatures could be concealed in a similar manner. The first does not conceal sound, but the chances that someone would here a peculiar sound, and conclude that magic was at work, are extremely low. What is more, the second presents some incredible possibilities. The wizard wants to hit someone with a bolt of electricity? He simply casts *fly*, goes up in the air, and fires the lightning bolt. With no individual in sight, this event, while obviously supernatural if the wizard were visible, will likely be brushed off as simply a "bolt from the blue." This method, while certainly meaning that the wizard's spells can easily be passed off as having a scientific explanation, does have the disadvantage that the wizard is trying to hide them. This, I think, was prohibited in your explanation.
Option 2: Concealing as mundane. This, I think, is more along the lines of what you are looking for. A wizard who sticks to the conjuration of small objects and animals can likely pass himself off as a party magician, regardless of how frequently he does so. Quite a number of conjuration spells could plausibly be passed off as completely mundane. For example: The spell *prestidigitation* produces small effects that look like magic tricks. *Grease* can easily be passed off as having some of the real thing hidden in a sleeve. *Comprehend languages* is simply the mark of a polyglot. Most illusion spells, if they do not cover an extremely large area or strike people dead, are easily passed off as, well, illusions. Any divination spell is simply either a good guess, the action of a confederate, or prior planning. The spell *summon swarm*, done in an appropriate area, is readily explained away as the result of animals placed there beforehand. Even some of the more powerful, high-level spells can be explained in scientific terms. A *temporal stasis* spell, if cast on an animal or some other creature incapable of relaying its experiences, looks a lot like a magic trick. *Astral projection* is extremely powerful, but produces few effects that would be evident to observers, besides unconsciousness, which is easily explained away. *Shapechange* is easy. A wizard jumps into a closet. A mosquito flies out (or an incorporeal or gaseous creature drifts out). Everyone murmurs appreciatively and looks for hidden doors. This same sort of trick is done without magic all the time.
Option 3: *Time stop*. Yes, the D&D wizard, at the highest levels, has a limited ability to stop time. For anywhere from 12 to 30 seconds, the wizard can do pretty much anything, anywhere, and no one will notice. The wizard can throw fireballs, shoot lightning, turn into a demon, conjure things, and as long as no obvious residue of the spell is left when the stopped time ends, no one will notice a thing. What is more, even if some huge effect is created during the time stop, a powerful illusion spell such as *screen* can be used to prevent the object from being seen or heard. Even better, no one will have any chance of resisting the effect unless they have good reason to believe that a wizard just conjured a wall of iron and concealed it with magic.
I think that the previous options give a sufficiently intelligent wizard (and pretty much all 20th-level wizards have a 180 IQ anyway) plenty of ways of casting spells, even technically within plain sight of Muggles, without anything out of the ordinary being noticed.
To attend to one specific issue. Your wizard wants to fly to work, in plain sight of everyone, and have it be viewed as perfectly natural. No problem! The spell *levitate* would allow a level 20 wizard to move a 2000 pound object through the air for up to 20 minutes. Needless to say, a *persistent levitate* would last all day. What the wizard can then do is commission a 2000 pound machine that looks as though it might be capable of flight (has wings, makes loud engine noises, etc). Then the wizard could use a day-long levitate spell to get it at a constant height, and then *fly* to work, appearing to sit the front seat of the conveyance, while really pulling the now-weightless machine along with him. A titanium car with wings and extremely powerful engines could quite possibly achieve flight at an atrocious energy cost, so if the (presumably very rich, thanks to divination) wizard has some plausible looking models built, these can be used to conceal a leisurely flight to work, without really needing to use incredible amounts of rocket fuel.
[Answer]
Seriously ?
It is almost impossible to be exposed as long as the magician claims to be a conjurer and using "tricks" to do his bidding. The default option of the scientists is that conjurers work are uninteresting from a scientific perspective because they are tricks.
Necessarily magicians will be impressed by the quality of the tricks and jealous, but they cannot do much either.
Suppose he is flying to work and I want to expose him. "Yes, Mr. T., you saw him flying to work. Let me show you the door." I tape him flying. "Mr. T., you are insulting my intelligence. Do you think I believe your crude fake video ?!". Other people are joining in and attest that they have him seen flying, too. "A severe case of mass delusion".
And if it is going to be much trouble, simply as one answer already point out, go to a magician and get "debunked" that it really was a trick and even if I and the others protested that the demonstration is not remotely the same thing as that what we saw, we will be ignored.
I would like to add that the magician will sooner or later acquire some groupies, especially of the esoteric branch. While it may have advantages for selecting some mates, that could be more trouble for him than scientists.
[Answer]
Sometimes, when constructing a hypothetical question you create a self contradictory scenario without noticing. 'Science' encompasses any phenomenon that is measurable and observable. The only reason that 'science' does not encompass 'magic' is because it is assumed to be fictional and therefore not measurable or observable. As soon as there existed a magician to do magic in front of scientist, the 'magic' would be 'observable' and therefore NOT 'unscientific'. Scientist would not require any persuasion to begin attempting empirical measurements and/or investigations and/or hypothesising, etc. etc. etc. There is no scenario in which a scientist could be convinced that something observable and measurable is 'not science' since the very definition of science explicitly encompasses all such things.
In practice however, the majority of scientist would approach it with the assumption that it was a hoax, since, on the surface, it seems to violate scientific laws. They would then either lose interest after they had failed to explain how the trick works scientifically, or they would come up with some plausible hypothesis about how it 'might' be explained and be content to assume that they are probably correct.
So probably the fastest way to lose the interest of scientist would be to actively proclaim a message along the lines of: "This is real magic! This is not a trick! Don't listen to those stupid scientists; they are out to rob you of your joy! Just believe in magic and you can join me! Also, I accept donations."
[Answer]
Eat a lot, or talk to a string theorist.
The world contains beings that can snap their claws to stun prey infront of them (without touching them with the claws), that can spray boiling water to cook their prey, that can change shape, size, color and spit acid, ink and venom. Time can already run slower for some beings than others and twins can age faster than the other twin. It is possible (a little unlikely) for all of the atoms of a person to disappear, and reappear in the same configuration in a different location. Pretty much every dnd spell is completely boring compared to the insane things that go on in reality.
The thing that DnD wizards can do that nothing in the real world can is create energy. To hide this, the wizard must appear to eat a lot. Possibly teleporting the food away from their throat so they don't become full or fat.
Alternatively, you could probably convince scientists that the energy is being harnessed from 'somewhere else' instead of being created. Between multiverse theories, the idea of energy being stored in tiny vibrating string dimensions, and plain old dark energy, scientists are comfortable with the idea that we can lose and find energy, as long as they can somewhat confidently state that is has been not been created or destroyed. Particularly, this will be easy for scientists to believe given the wizard could objectively prove the existence of different planes
Additionally, as possibly a more believable explanation for instantaneous teleportation available in dnd than co-ordinated quantum teleportation of macro objects is the use of higher level dimensions, such as found in string theory and proposed by somewhat rational scientists for many years, such as the Alcubierre drive, "which proposes expanding the fabric of space behind a ship and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would not actually move, rather the ship would sit in a bubble between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions. Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a massive object to the speed of light." - <http://newswise.com/articles/view/543391/>
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