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I have a fantasy world with roughly medieval technology (swords, crossbows, and chain mail for instance), and I have an egalitarian country with an army that's somewhere from 10 to 40% women (it probably varies over time).
It is a fantasy world, so some people do have magic, which is equal among genders. However, I'd imagine that most people with skill or training in magic would be in special units.
Based on this, what should I think about when I'm formatting the structure of this country's army and military life?
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If it's a truly egalitarian society, then you'll have women in all the same roles as you have men -- female front-line soldiers, female siege engine operators, female sappers, female archers, female mages, female commanders, female medics, etc. The only thing you have to think about here is making sure you remember to represent them, and doing so in a truly egalitarian way.
As for army life, depending upon gender norms in your society you may have separate areas of the camp for the women of your army. Or, you may have a fully-integrated army, but just bunk men and women separately. Or, you may bunk them together, but have separate bathing and restroom facilities. Or, you may just have the whole damn thing fully integrated (see e.g. the movie Starship Troopers for an example of how this might work, albeit not a medieval one). That's really entirely up to you/your society and how they view such integrations.
In any case, there would almost certainly be *very* strict rules regarding relations between male and female soldiers -- specifically, it would most likely be entirely forbidden. Further, while on the march/at war, women would most likely be strictly forbidden from having any form of sex, lest they become pregnant in the middle of said war, and for egalitarian reasons the same prohibition would probably extend to the men as well. Unless, of course, the magic of your world can provide foolproof contraception and STD prevention (or cure), in which case it might actually be *encouraged* for morale reasons.
As for the nuances of military training, equipment, etc., if this is a truly egalitarian society then there would be few, if any, special accommodations afforded to women. They'd wield the same swords, draw the same bows, carry the same shields as their male counterparts. That women are, generally speaking, less physically strong than men is likely why there's a smaller percentage in your army than an even 50/50 split -- but there are always women just as capable of the same physical prowess as men, which is how they got in and passed Basic Training in the first place.
Uniforms would be uniform, with maybe a slightly different cut for women (see e.g. United States military uniforms). Armor would not vary between men and women a whole lot. Chain mail certainly wouldn't; since it's not a fitted "cut" anyway, there's no reason for it to. Breastplates for female soldiers *might* have a little extra room in the bust for their breasts, but *nothing* like the metal-boobed look of "fantasy armor" in our popular culture. Codpieces for women would similarly be flat, rather than cupped like men's. Where male archers often go around largely unarmored, female archers may where leather or tight, padded cloth around their chests to help avoid catching their breast when they release the bowstring, although those of average cup size (or smaller) probably won't have to worry about that much if at all. It's very unlikely that they'd follow in the footsteps of the legends/myths about the Amazonians -- that is, I find it highly doubtful they'd cut off their right breast to avoid catching it in their bowstring.
Bottom line: Just put some women in wherever you could find a man. And no metal-boobed breastplates, and *definitely* no chain mail bikinis.
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Most of what Kromey said is true and I mostly am supporting of it. I am, however, going to point out some of the obvious trends of history mostly to show how your military culture may develop.
First, I'm going to come out and say it, women, on average, have less upper body strength and thus are not as good as front line infantry as men. Some women will be stronger then your average man and kick butt, and some men weaker then your average woman, but you should acknowledge the statistical average for imagining how it would affect what roles women would most likely take.
This is not relevant for many types of militaries. Many militaries have one effective tactic that they emphasise and train everyone in. These militaries will simply put women and men all together for the same tactics. For that matter many militaries were disorganized throwing together of men (and women) with swords and pointing them to the general direction with little concept to advanced units or tactics (if you have enough people it's easier to overwhelm others than try to train everyone for anything fancy). However, it sounds like you are more interested in a military with more complex combined arms and specialized roles.
For more specialized militaries I think women would naturally be suggested/preferred for areas where upper body strength was less relevant. Note I say suggested, not forced or required. Unless you have cultural reasons for it your military will likely allow people to train in whatever role they choose to emphasise in without forcing people in to specific roles. Women will thus likely be in every role out there, However, at the same time some roles may be seen as a better fit for women and tend to have women choose to pursue more often.
Getting back to the point, I think this would most be demonstrated in magic. Simply put more women would be encouraged towards magical combat than melee because it makes the most tactical sense for them. If you assume women and men are equally capable at using magic, but men have a better upper body strength which gives them a slight edge in melee sword fights, and a significant edge in range with a bow, then logically it makes more sense for a woman to focus on the magical side of combat where there isn't a potential strength disadvantage. Some women may not feel like doing magic, or may have an aptitude for another combat form, or simply have the build to be good at the other formats, which is why women will likely show up in all roles, but statistically speaking a larger percentage will choose to focus on the area where they have a more equal footing.
This would, in turn, likely lead to men being slightly encouraged towards infantry and bow work, because you need a decent number of all roles and if women are tending towards one you need men to consider the other just to keep from having an over abundance of mages. This would thus lead to a culture that has a slight focus on the concept of men as infantry and women as mages. This culture may not be to the extreme that there is heavy bias and prejudice against someone going in a non-traditional role, but it should be acknowledged as at least a subconscious presumption.
Do people presume a women are all naturally better at magic simply because more women in the military use it on average? Maybe infantry men will complain about the lack of women in their platoon making it harder to find romantic partners due to women being less likely to choose that role. It wouldn't be a significant impact on your overall story, since women would still exit in all roles, but it could add some culture and some of that world building that makes your world feel a little more alive.
Of course you would see plenty of women, as well as men, in all of the many other roles of military, like organization, generals, leadership, etc. Maybe women are more prone to these roles simply because society wants more men on the frontline where their upper body strength gives them an advantage. Though again I don't think this has to be a significant part of the story, just background world building details.
I think that women in any role would likely be held to *exactly* the same standard as men though. They would have to carry the same heavy packs, do the same work, eat the same food, live the same life. If you hold them to any less standards you're making a weak point in your military.
One option if you would like a more even distribution of sexes in roles is to find ways to de-emphasise physical upper body strength in these roles. For instance I *think* the use of crossbows over traditional bows could make upper body strength less relevant, certain systems use the whole body to load rather than just the arms which makes upper body strength irrelevant. Horse archery with crossbows would work equally well with any sex, the emphasis is far less on upper strength than coordination, aim, and balance. To make infantry fit more with women simply add use of melee weapons that are less about upper body strength (don't know enough about melee combat to say which). Or alternatively add in light magic use even with melee fighters, which would make quick thinking and good use of magic distractions and fancy swordwork more relevant than pure strength.
Relations would be something to consider. Kromey was pretty accurate with everything he said here, but remember there would likely be more men then women in infantry and traditional archery platoons. This could lead to 'fighting' over the women. I think the obvious response would be to strongly discourage any romantic relationship between women and men in the military, which actually is often done for other reasons too. This is mostly relevant because of just how long a military march can be in these timeframes, the military would be in very close areas for very long times so avoiding potential drama between platoon mates is always good. Perhaps relationships between people of different platoons would be considered acceptable, just not within the same platoon.
Pregnancy, as mentioned, would be another concern, but I can't see the military having much luck with banning all sexual intercourse, military people are pretty notorious for living 'in the moment' and being pretty rowdy as soon as they get to a base with members of the opposite sex. You would have a hard time preventing sex, even if it was technically forbidden. I would say it's more realistic to have it 'strongly discouraged', but admit that it does happen anyways. Of course use of magic or herbs to prevent pregnancy makes it easier, otherwise simply acknowledge that some women will get pregnant and if they make it far enough along without the obvious miscarriage occurring they get medical leave and are shipped off with the wounded until they deliver or something.
Separate tents (remember, most of the time you're likely in the field) for sexes would likely be done for much the same reason, the desire to mitigate romantic liaisons in the field. It doesn't take much more logistics to put people of the same sex in the same tent. Of course your tent may be right next to the guys tent, I doubt they will put in the time to try to have completely separate areas for sexes, just that everyone in a tent is expected to be the same sex.
Otherwise, I really don't think this requires much creativity. The two sexes are mostly the same, one doesn't need to redefine or restructure anything to make it happen. Look at our modern forces, where women are in almost every role men are in without much issue (though I still don't know why we don't let women do every combat role, upper-body strength means nothing in modern military so it's just stupid to treat the sexes remotely different. I wish we were more egalitarian).
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The biggest limitation on women in the military during feudal times is generally related to child bearing. High mortality rates in child birth and lower life spans usually relegated a woman's position to bearing children and not the army. Strenuous activity such as combat and horseback riding will cause miscarriages relatively frequently. High stress situations (combat) also cause horrible strains on a developing child...for the sake of the next generation, women generally did not involve themselves in combat.
There is some physiology involved...men are wider at the shoulders while women are wider at the hips. The extra width to provide more power in a direct combat sense. Relatively minor all told.
3 examples of historic women in battle during fuedal times:
Germanic women involved themselves in battle quite frequently in combat with Romans (generally viewed as 'barbaric' by the romans)...they would end up having two strong effects that weren't really tied to their to actual combat ability
- Wailing and screaming. Especially when fighting a male dominated opponent, the screams and wails of women entering combat is unnerving to say the least.
- Cheerleaders. As unnerving as it is to the opponents, it also works as a bonus for those fighting. Men in combat infront of their women are far less likely to break and flee with the knowledge that their woman folk are going to see their cowardice and hunt them down themselves.
Scythian woman were the military elite of their time and where the legendary 'Amazon' woman descend from. They were the fighting elite, rumored to chop off one of their breasts so they may properly use a bow. These woman were equal or superior to most male fighters, just due to their role in society (think of them as the 'spartans', born and bred to fight). They'd be fully withdrawn from the breeding population.
Viking 'Shield Maiden'. Not unlike the Scythian, usually on horse back with spear and shield. Equivalent to men in fighting skill and prowess and were almost always of 'elite status' (you were either 100% dedicated for your life, or you were busy having children and raising the next generation, no inbetween ground). Once again, these woman were not child bearing as their lifestyles wouldn't allow the period required for pregnancy without miscarriage.
When actually given the training and lifestyle, women are pretty equal to men on the battlefield. However, the risks involved in child birthing and shorter lifespans usually prohibited their full use on the battlefield ("save the woman and children" is really "save the next generation"). Medieval technology regarding medicine and birthing usually saw an extremely high mortality rate, requiring the majority of woman to be relegated to ensuring the next generation were on their way. If you can get around that (magical healing), there is absolutely no reason women couldn't play a role in the military.
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As an alternative view...
If we're starting from the view of "men and women are equal, always have been equal, and there was never that historical silliness that our earth had", I would suggest that you'll see both genders in all roles, based on their individual abilities. (I'm assuming that you're keeping the current bodytypes of men and women, though.)
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean 50/50 across the board - people have pointed out the Big Ass English Longbows that required training from a young age to use properly. Only the biggest and brawniest are going to get that job to begin with, so it'll probably skew to the men-folk. But that will just increase the number of shortbows and crossbows in use, and for the same reason we have them historically - it's a lot easier to train someone to have steady aim than to have rippling muscles.
As a contrary example, mounted cavalry could easily be a female-dominated unit, since shortbows don't have the same draw-strength issues, and being smaller and lighter is an advantage on horseback.
Infantry is pretty egalitarian - women worked on farms historically, so would be just as adept at polearms and simple weapons as the menfolk are. You may see the same skew in your full-plate crowd, but it could be just as likely that the world would skew to lighter armor (would only take a battle or two where 50 in chain/leather defeat 20 in full-plate to change military thinking)
Siege weaponry would be in the same category - people smart enough to know how to build and control them will be doing it.
In short, you would just need to keep the physiques consistent for the job at hand - in the same way you would do so for your male characters. Longbow archers are going to be broad-shouldered and strong. Folks in heavy armor are going to have the muscle mass to carry that armor. Your classic "damsel" physiques are going to be rare in the same way that scrawny guys in the military are rare - they'll be scouts and spies.
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Although many good thoughts have been added already I would just like to add my input from my experience with a 12th century reenactment group that I was a member of for a number of years.
The reenactment was more skill based than scripted and we trained 2 times or more per week with blunted versions of the weapons that they would have had back then.
We had a number of female members, many high ranking who also participated in the combat (though dressed as men with hoods or helmets to hide the fact they were female).
**Regarding strength**; it is true that women don't tend to be as strong as men on average and that we build muscle more slowly due to having less testosterone but with continued training it doesn't take too long to become adjusted to heavier weapons and armour. Things like spears and shields tend to be as light weight as possible anyway.
If you have little time to train the women or they don't have enough food to sustain the muscle growth, this could be a problem however. We did once have a girl join who was particularly thin and didn't have much muscle strength and she did very badly for a while, particularly when it came to things like shield walls (this is a particular problem as the weak link in the shield wall is not only in danger themselves but the people near them will also be vulnerable - the whole formation can be collapsed that way).
Where women lacked in strength they tended to make up for it in technique - a phenomenon you may also see in certain martial arts.
**Endurance:** when it came to sustained carrying of weapons and wearing armour for a long time or in intense heat, the difference between sexes wasn't very pronounced. Some girls had problems with arming spears (carried in one hand, the other holding a shield) but made up for this by balancing them on their shields or holding them upright when not actively thrusting.
**Things that aren't covered so much by reenactment:**
Brute strength - our safety rules generally prevented this but i would say that men would be better at this. This may be where better technique is required by the women to make up for this but many weapons do not necessarily need that much force to do damage. It is also a bad idea to keep exerting yourself to your maximum strength in a long battle as you will quickly tire yourself out.
Mentality - we obviously didn't experience the psychological effects of battle. You have to deal with the fact that you kill people (especially the first time) and also with the friends you have lost in battle and the horrific injuries you may have seen. I am unsure how things like PTSD affect men vs women, though the fact that women tend to feel more able to talk about emotion than men may help.
Recovery from wounds and illnesses: I am unsure if men and women would differ when it comes to likelihood/speed of recovery from things like dyssentry, wounds and infected wounds. Many women in our reenactment group tended to bruise more easily than men and have torn skin or blisters at the start but this would lessen after a while and they tended to get back into it quickly. Joint injuries like dislocations were probably a little more common in women but this tended to be after previous injuries that were unrelated to the combat.
**Historically:** This isn't related to my experiences but there have been some examples of women fighting in history - though there is some dispute about things like the shield maidens of the vikings. Mostly if women fought they probably disguised themselves as men or did it out of necessity if the camp was attacked so it is hard to know but there are some records out there. Currently only two pirates in later history spring to mind (Anne Bonny and Mary Read) but that's a different period of history and a different style of fighting. It might be worth asking the folks at the history site for more information or when I have more time I can try and provide some sources.
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> I have an egalitarian country with an army that's somewhere from 10 to 40% women
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Then it's not egalitarian. If it were perfectly egalitarian the rate would be 50% (barring there being a reason why in your world women were only 10% to 40% of the population at fighting age, or why an extremely high number of them were otherwise not available for fighting).
Depending on your reasons this is either a flaw in your thinking or an interesting point about your otherwise egalitarian world. One way that it could be the latter is that it already addresses what people have said here about physical strength; men do on average have greater upper-body strength than women, but a given woman might very well have much greater upper-body strength than a given man, and so in a society that was meritocratic about military roles we would likely see a large number of women in the military (certainly more than 10%) but not full parity.
Just what that percentage is depends on a few things:
1. Innate strength differences between men and women: These are debatable in our world (see the second point) but whatever they are, are they the same in yours? You do after all have some scientific rules different to ours, so this may or may not be the same.
2. Training: Both physical education as a child and later military training. Considering the egalitarian nature of your world we'd expect the experiences of its people to be such that the ratio of women to men who could e.g. manage the draw weight of a long-bow to be higher than in real-world European countries when they were at a similar level of technology.
3. Work: In a way this falls under "training", but for it not being actually intended as such. We can expect people to do certain types of work as children, certain types as lads or lasses, and certain types as adults. Given the egalitarian nature of your society we can expect this to further balance out the sexes as far as physical strength goes, compared to other societies with similar technology levels.
An interesting side-point, is that this would affect how people looked. As a rule this would not mean a world of muscle-bound women; if you look at how female weight-lifters and boxers look across the different weight classes, you'll notice how it isn't until the higher weigh classes that you start noticing them as having a body-type much different to what is generally considered "normal". If anything they look more "normal" than normal people, because ideas of "normal" can be skewed by media favouring portrayals of fit people over the average. Particularly dainty women might be slightly rarer and particularly muscular women might be slightly more common though (likewise for men in reverse).
An important question, is how is the army raised? Is this society egalitarian as far as sex goes, but otherwise quite feudal and with relatively poor people being pressed into service for their gentry? (as with early mediaeval) or is there a middle class of soldiers who are well-equipped and trained? (more like late mediaeval) or something else? Similarly, is there a standing army, or are they raised as needed? Is it voluntary or drafted (and if drafted, all of a certain age or a lottery or such)? How common is warfare? What is the general attitude toward the military? (Imposition of one class upon another? the most honourable career possible? a necessary evil? a duty all should fulfil but none should revel in?). Is there a fighting season, or is combat roughly as likely to happen throughout the year.
All of these would affect how having such a high number of women in the military turned out.
If fighting was seasonable, for example, then that would give a natural block of time that could fit with a maternity and paternity period. (If your society is sexually egalitarian then obviously men are spending a lot of time looking after children too, perhaps more once the children are weaned since they can neither birth the children nor breastfeed them, so they may take up more of the burden of looking after children afterwards).
Beyond that, Kromey suggests that strict rules about sexual relations are needed to prevent pregnancy. Maybe you have such rules, but then how well are they followed and how are they imposed (many real-world societies with strict rules against young people having sex have lots of young people getting pregnant). Assuming that either you don't have such rules, or they don't work, what is actually done about pregnancy? Camp followers certainly became pregnant as did women in sieges and that is a practical matter that has already been dealt with in the real world, so one obvious solution is that pregnant women become camp followers unless they can safely leave the campaign entirely.
In fact, the really big difference an egalitarian society would have in how it dealt with pregnancy and combat, is how it would affect the male soldiers. In our world where female soldiers has been relatively rare (though far from unheard of) if a soldier got someone pregnant that he wasn't going to just abandon, then she would either be away from the front or a camp follower and he would continue soldiering as before with perhaps a very small amount of compassionate leave after the birth if he was very lucky. In an egalitarian society were men were seen as having an equal role to play in the raising of children, this would probably not be the case.
Unless people were drafted for very short tours of duty and fully prevented from getting pregnant in the meantime, then the soldiers are going to have sex both with civilians and with each other, and of the heterosexual couplings\* there will be some pregnancies, and this is going to impact upon the duties of **both** the male and female soldiers. Indeed, there might well be a bigger difference in this regard between a male soldier in this world and ours than between the female soldiers and the female soldiers our world has indeed seen.
Which leads to another result; unlike our world, your hypothetical world will not have any "female soldiers", it will have soldiers who happen to be female. We remark upon the all-female unit of Shaka Zulu, the fact that some of the *solderas* on both sides in the Mexico Revolutionary War were combatants, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Forces, Nancy Wake, Li Xiu, Jean d'Arc, Deborah Samson Gannett, Boudica and female participants in just about every asymmetric conflict and most conventional wars as being somehow more exceptional than they were considering how we can find so many examples. You won't have any of that in your hypothetical world.
Unless perhaps your egalitarian society is in conflict with one that is not sexually egalitarian. In that case, any propaganda on both sides would likely feature this heavily: For the opposing side you will be able to find a model in the Roman accounts of Germanic tribes and how barbarous it was that their women fought, while for the egalitarian society's side you will be able to find a model in Sinn Féin's propagandising the concept of "Women in Struggle" in regards to both Ireland and other groups they supported around the world. Current arguments for and against women in combat roles in Western countries would also provide models for either side of the propaganda war. It's worth considering whether the non-egalitarian side considers their female enemies an easier proposition than the men, or a worse one (consider the advice given to anti-terrorist police dealing with the Red Army Faction to "shoot the women first" as they were considered less likely to surrender).
If though the egalitarian nature is not politicised within this world, because combatants are similarly egalitarian, the biggest differences are likely to not be for the women—whose experience would be like that of real-world female combatants throughout history, but with more acceptance by their comrades— but for the men, and what is expected of them as well as soldiering.
\*It's worth considering just how many of the couplings are not heterosexual. Does a society that is sexually egalitarian naturally entail it having no taboos against homosexuality? The biggest impact on the world building is not that you would gay and lesbian and bisexual soldiers among this mixed-sex army (people only ever being straight is much more far-fetched than anything mentioned so far) but that the cultural signifiers would be likely be very different than in our world, even in the most tolerant communities.
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There is a Alt-History/Fantasy series that does have a military unit that incorporated women. It was a sling-staff unit of peasants throwing gunpowder grenade bombs. The women carried the bombs, and cut and lit the fuse to hand to the men to throw. The men trusted their wives and girlfriends to cut the fuse properly to avoid blowing them up.
While this never happened in our history, it at least gives a way for women to be effective in a close-support role integrated into a unit without the disadvantage to the unit of their inferior strength.
You could imagine other "close support" roles - a woman holding a light shield to protect an archer, or putting out the pointed stakes and anti-cavalry defenses about a position like the British Logbowmen had at Agincourt.
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Especially interesting because Britain is discussing having women as front line combat infantry. A large part of the discussion revolves around the physical effort involved in frontline combat; something which is only exacerbated the further back, and the more direct combat becomes. No matter which way you cut it, women don't have the mass that most men do, or the proportions that grant people advantages in combat. Men have longer limbs, heavier bodies, more pure muscle to put into caving someone's head in over and over for hours at a time, while women are, on average, more slender and less heavily muscled.
In terms of support functions, leadership and whatnot, women can serve just as well as men. They won't have quite the draw strength that men enjoy, but that shouldn't stop them from remaining effective archers, magi, siege workers etc. Many forms of indirect combat can be adapted to give women the leverage that men normally enjoy, in which case it simply becomes a matter of handing out jobs based not just on knowledge, but also physique.
As for clothing, it would need to be slightly differently shaped, but athletic women tend to have smaller breasts and more masculine bodily proportions (for many of the reasons listed above). If you look at top female athletes, you'll notice that they're largely restricted in cup size, simply because large breasts aren't a benefit when you're trying to run, lift a heavy load, throw a javelin etc.
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How this egalitarianism will manifest in the army will depend upon a few factors - the size of the army relative to the population at large, how long campaigns last, and how far afield the military ranges will change this answer considerably.
'Roughly medieval' covers a wide range of possibilities - this could be small bands skirmishing from town to town for a few days, or large armies of many thousands heading off great distances for a year or three. In the former case women might be fairly common, in the latter they would likely be rare.
Someone needs to look after the livestock and the fields - the bulk of day-to-day work still needs to be done even if there is a war on. Who is going to be left at home looking after the sheep and the fields? I hold that this will still be mostly women tending to the home while more of the men go off to war, even in a truly egalitarian society, as the comparative advantage in medieval warfare is very strongly favoring using men as soldiers even before you consider the issues of birthing/nursing children.
Childbirth will take a woman out of military duties for about 2 years (gestation and breastfeeding), which is time to be pregnant again (peak physical condition is peak childbearing years). This is not going to be done by the men unless you have some unusual magics, in which case just handwave 'magic' to answer everything. Upper class women would send their children to wetnurses, but unless you have some unusual ideas about societal structure (which would need to be mentioned as this drastically changes the conditions), noblewomen will not comprise a significant portion of your soldiers. Near as I can tell, in medieval England a woman would give birth roughly every 2 years (some places and times the most common spacing is 16 months between births while in others it is up to 30 months) and give birth to 5 or 6 children (and around 10% of women died in childbirth or shortly thereafter). This hardly leaves time to go off on campaign as the rigors of a soldier's life is hardly conducive to raising children.
Many people imagine a medieval society which functions just like our modern one - low birth rates because almost everyone lives, and women bounce back from childbirth and are back to work in just a couple weeks, babies are put on formula so the woman doesn't need to breastfeed, etc. If you want to magic away medieval society to make it look like a modern one, you can shape it however you want through 'magic reasons'.
When it comes to effectiveness on the battlefield, men have the significant advantage of strength - obviously I am not saying all women are weak, but I don't expect weaker men to be soldiers either. We are talking about the portion of the population which is best suited to fighting - if a tenth of the population is called up, how many women do you think are in the top 10% of the whole population for strength and military aptitude, as well as not at risk of pregnancy or are not already nursing a child (which could be up to 2 years)?
The units which would plausibly have significant numbers of women would be those not requiring significant strength, and that is limited in a medieval context. Women might make good skirmishers (javelins, darts, or slings for harassing enemy formations to get them to break discipline) or maybe light cavalry. Obviously your magic corp would be the biggest representation of women - probably almost entirely women, as men would be more valuable as melee troops or archers since there are probably more women available for magic who would not otherwise be filling the other roles (back to comparative advantage - even if men and women are equally good at magic, almost all magic troops would be women as almost all non-magic troops will be men).
Great skill would negate a lot of the strength advantage, but who is likely to put so much time and effort into that training? Training is an investment, and people in medieval society did not have that much consistent free time to spend on practice with the money to pay a good teacher - I would not expect many women to rationally make that investment. Spending years training consistently to be a great swordsman might be common among the nobility, but certainly not the vast bulk of the population.
As far as non-combat military life, this too will depend on length and scale of campaign.
Risk of pregnancy for a camp follower is not a serious problem from a combat capabilities perspective, but the risk of it removing a soldier from the field is of concern - injury and disease caused enough attrition before adding that complication to the mix.
Anything but the shortest of campaigns will need to deal with this issue - [war aphrodisia](https://history.stackexchange.com/a/14493/8104) could see a rapid loss of women from combat readiness after a few months unless there was some kind of birth control and they are amenable to using such (then you will need to get into wider implications for population growth with high child mortality, unless you want to give them modern medicine as well - or just magic the issue away).
Segregating the sexes would be one approach, but it would need to be fairly strict as I can see the desire to sneak away would be considerable. This would probably break unit cohesion, so you would no longer have mixed-gender units, further tilting the preference for men as soldiers and relegating women to support roles.
You could consider women being combat troops until they get pregnant, and then switch to support roles, but this again raises the question of why would you invest so many resources on training and equipping them for little use - those scarce resources could be better used training and equipping men. Forcing a miscarriage to keep a woman 'fighting fit' might be a solution, but you are going to have to come up with some very strong reasons why they would find that socially acceptable.
If you want plausibility and not just hand-wave 'magic' everything, women in a medieval setting are almost certainly left at home or back in non-combat roles, else they would be remarkably unusual rather than a significant portion of the troops. This isn't sexism keeping women largely off the battlefield, it is practicality.
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Morale is going to be a problem. In battlefield conditions, it is imperative for all soldiers to trust one another. Male-female relations are often highly emotional, and are likely to lead to jealousy (of the lover of a good-looker) and revenge (if one partner ends a love affair, the other partner is probably angry). If your society is really egalitarian, this will apply to both men and women. Forbidding inter-sexual relations just isn't going to work (as dsollen and others have pointed out).
The only way I can see it working is if your society has more-or-less complete "free love", Brave New World style (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World>). Which will likely influence the rest of your story.
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I strongly suggest you read Scott Lynch's novels, which have a fully-egalitarian society when it comes to fighters. One of his most interesting inventions was a naval tradition where women are highly valued as officers, enough so that sailors typically won't put to sea without at least one female officer. The cultural belief is that women are better at planning and (in a world with gods who are believed to intervene on your behalf) generally luckier than men.
Someone once criticised Lynch for this, a few years back. [His reply is absolute poetry and should be reposted wherever possible. Read and enjoy!](http://scott-lynch.livejournal.com/159686.html)
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What I am proposing is a bridge making it possible to travel between two planets, I have some ideas but I would like to know if and how it would work. Maybe somehow stopping their orbit and locking them in place with a ring like structure or a flexible moving bridge. I don't care if it requires a strong unearthly material I just want to know what and how it would work abiding by the known laws of Physics. I don't want too know what material I would need just if it could be built within the laws of physics.
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Introducing an infinitely strong material but otherwise using physics, I guess it should be possible. But note that I'm not considering at all how you'd build something like this, just whether it would work *once you have it*. You would need to significantly change the orbits of those planets because naturally (without the tether) what is a stable orbit for the duo would not be a stable orbit for the planets alone. This would thoroughly upset any existing ecosystem on the planets. Although if you are into tethering planets together, then I guess maybe you have your ecosystem well enough under control and understood so that you can counteract the consequences to get around the expect mass extinction.
So given a long piece of rope with tensile strength as large as needed:
* Tether them together. The easiest way to attach your rope to your planet would probably be to just construct a net around the whole planet from your rope (just dense enough so the planet can't slip out, say maybe three equally spaced not-really-parallels to the longitudes, and three equally spaced not-really parallels to the equator) and attach the interplanetary rope to that net.
* For astronomic purposes, your two planets would be one (unless only one of them is colliding with another object, that would be bad): The planets couldn't move relative to each other,
* but would have rotation around their common centre of mass. There would be a **minimum rotation needed** to keep them from crashing into each other. This would make an otherwise completely unstable orbit stable by putting tension on the rope (so that if your system is disturbed, instead of breaking apart, only the tension on the rope changes) This rotation would need to cancel the gravitational force they have on each other. Because on the surface of the planets, the planets own gravity is much stronger than the gravity of the other (distanced) planet, this wouldn't completely mess up the planets individual gravity fields (so at each point of the planet there would be reasonable inward force).
* There would still be *huge* forces on the ropes, but we specifically assumed the ropes won't break. For the net around the planets, you would want to have some minimum thickness of the ropes so it doesn't cut the planet to pieces (it would still have a tendency to lift off the ground on one side of the planet while being forced deeper and deeper into the planet on the other side, but you could surely get that process to be so slow as to just be limit to the lifetime of the planet which is in the far future with which you are not concerned. Or you could replace the netting every couple millions of years).
* You could have the planets rotate individually only if you build some giant bearings from your super strong material and let the planets rotate in those bearings. Much much more complicated than the net I suggested. With the net, you could have them rotate in parallel to the connecting rope, but not otherwise. You could have them move fairly erratically if you do introduce too much rotation like this (think gyroscopes).
Now the real question is what happens to the exact gravitational force and what the minimum distance would need to be to have that force behave sensibly.
(I did some work on it, but when I'm already at it I want to solve a fairly general case without *too* many simplifying assumptions, and this turned out hairy. Not difficult, but lots of calculations. The equations are all nice and well in the right coordinate system, but I need to transform here... You'll get it tomorrow)
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# Earth. Mars. Yes. Look to Japan.
You have infinite supply of your super material, yes? Good. You'll need a lot of it.
This is a research paper on jointed structures in use today to withstand stresses caused by wind, water, ground motion, etc: <https://nathaz.nd.edu/journals/(1999)Mitigation_of_Motion_of_Tall_Buildings_with_Recent_Applications.pdf>
Section 6.3 discusses active dampeners, that is, intelligent systems to move things back into place when forces pull on them. Japan has an airport they built on water. The legs supporting the structure are jointed, not fixed, and can respond to tide or earthquake.
You need to build a ring around both planets that will serve as your bridge attach point. The ring will need active stabilizers. The bridge can slide along the ring. The bridge itself is an arc that goes up out of the eliptic plane so that when Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun, it goes over the top. The bridge is built in short segments, each of which actively corrects its position relative to its neighbor. Many segments have slides underneath to stretch or collapse (think like an airport conveyor belt when it goes around a corner) as the distance between the two changes.
Every segment will need power. This may be harvestable from solar. You're on your own for those calculations.
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**I'm very tempted to say that no, that's not possible in practice.** At least not without severely stretching the laws of physics. But like [Nobody proposed](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/64930/29), you could *perhaps* make it work if you are willing to introduce a super-strong material, plus some other paraphernalia.
Let me introduce you to a few things that belong to the field of orbital mechanics. For simplicity, I will consider only two-body systems, not n-body systems (which are far more complicated to model).
* An orbit is an ellipse
* The ellipse can be more or less circular, as described by its [eccentricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_eccentricity)
* One of the foci of the ellipse is at the system's center of mass
One of the problems that was solved by the work of [Johannes Kepler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler) was that before him, we generally thought of orbits as circular. That isn't the case, and forcing orbits to be perfectly circular leads to all sorts of problems in the long term. By realizing that orbits are elliptical, not circular, Kepler was able to derive a model that described the behavior of orbiting bodies much more accurately.
There is a simple reason why orbits are ellipses. When one body is moving away from another, the gravitational attraction between them is reduced, but so is their relative velocity. Eventually they turn and start falling toward each other instead of away from each other. We call the point farthest from the system's center of mass *apoapsis* and the point nearest to the center of mass *periapsis*. When discussing orbits around the Earth specifically, the terms are *apogee* and *perigee*, respectively.
Notice how I said "the system's center of mass" above? That was not by accident. We generally think of for example the Earth as orbiting the Sun, or the Moon as orbiting the Earth, *but that is a simplification*. What really happens is that the Earth orbits *the center of mass of the Earth-Sun system* (again, simplifying by ignoring all the other bodies in the solar system), and that the Moon orbits *the center of mass in the Earth-Moon system*. In these cases, the center of mass happens to lie within the more massive body. In other cases, such as the Pluto-Charon system, *the center of mass lies outside of either body*. Even a small man-made satellite in orbit of the Earth perturbs (tugs at) the Earth ever so slightly. This is Newton's famous apple pulling the Earth toward it in action.
To have a bridge-like construction between two celestial bodies, you need the two bodies to be tidally locked with each other; in other words, they have to always present the same side to each other. Tidal locking happens when one of the bodies in the system is significantly larger (specifically, more massive) than the other, and the distance between them is comparatively small; for example, Earth-Moon, or Sun-Mercury. Tidal locking is a gradual process, but eventually, the smaller body stops rotating relative to the larger body.
The problem with that is that *the larger body is still rotating relative to the smaller one*. So there is no good anchor point on the larger body!
The only possible solution I can see to this is to use either rotational pole as the anchor point, on both bodies. Then you need to figure out a way to keep the anchor points of the "bridge" from being torn off, but that's an engineering problem, not a physics one. It only becomes a physics problem when you are trying to find a material to build the bridge with.
Now, you've got a bridge. But there's another problem: The elliptical shape of the orbit between the two bodies! Take the Moon's orbit around the Earth, for example; perigee is at 356.4 Mm and apogee is at 406.7 Mm, with a nominal semi-major axis (orbital radius) of 384.4 Mm. The distance to the Moon changes from -8.3% to +5.8% compared to its "normal" value! And the Moon is pretty massive; at about $7.34 \times 10^{22}$ kg, it masses about a percent of the Earth's $5.97 \times 10^{24}$ kg. Unless you can perfectly circularize the Moon's orbit around the Earth first, whatever material you build the bridge out of is going to be subjected to extreme stresses.
You can solve that by introducing that super-strong material Nobody mentioned, and that I alluded to in the beginning of my answer. Now the bridge itself will hold, and may even theoretically be able to hold the Moon at the distance of the bridge's length.
But how are you going to anchor the bridge? If you anchor it to the surface (of the Earth in our example), that surface isn't going to be equally super-strong. And even if it was, the Moon is already massive enough to tug the Earth back and forth a bit in the dance between the two.
Much of that could be solved if you put the system's center of mass *exactly* in the middle, right there in space between the two. The easiest way to do that is to give both celestial bodies the exact same mass. Now you are looking at a true double-planet system, rather than a planet and its satellite, but I suspect that would be okay, since you specifically said "planets" in your question. This would take an incredibly unlikely coincidence during planetary formation, somewhere along the lines of the infinite improbability drive, but I suppose if you handwave sufficiently, it *could* in principle happen. *It won't be a stable situation, though.* A handful of large asteroid impacts could potentially upset the balance, and those happen, in terms of time relevant for planetary formation, all the time.
Barring that, you need the material that you build the bridge from to be sufficiently strong to withstand such forces, and you need the anchor points at both ends to be sufficiently strong to withstand those same forces, and you need the two bodies to be in a perfectly circular orbit about each other, and you need them to be tidally locked with each other (not just one of them tidally locked with the other).
That's sufficiently unlikely to be possible that I would say that while what you propose may be possible *in theory* it won't be possible *in practice*.
And [walking that bridge would be taxing](https://space.stackexchange.com/q/4688/415 "Couldn't I escape Earth's gravity traveling only 1 mph? on Space Exploration SE"), but perhaps possible.
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An alternative to (hugely) size-changing bridges would be one Dyson-ring like bridge around the sun, and "off ramp" or "spoke" bridges to the planets.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/63Tx4.gif)
Still talking crazy scales and structures here, of course, but bridges that *slide around* the central ring might at least seem more plausible depending on setting.
The spoke bridges would need to curve upwards and down again to allow planets to pass under them. (but this could be a mostly fixed shape).
They would also need to connect to smaller ring-bridges around the planets with a similar setup to account for a planets daily rotation. At this point you might not call it a bridge anymore though.
Notes;
* As the spokes slide around the central ring the ring itself could be irregular (a ellipse for example). I have illustrated it as a ring for simplicity.
* One issue with this design, however, is at some points two spokes will need to pass each other. The spokes themselves can just be at slightly different heights, but where they connect to the ring there is a "engineering challenge" of letting the connections pass each-other.
* Despite this being a mostly rigid design there would still need to be some length variance I believe as orbits are not perfectly identical lengths from the sun.
* As mentioned in the comments a alternative design is also possible, where each planet has its own ring for its full orbit, and spokes only go between a planets "orbit ring" and the next one out. Probably more effort to build, but shorter journey times with this design as your not going to the sun and back each time.
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I’m surprised that only SRM considered that the bridge follows the planets’ varying positions, and everyone else wants to lock the two bodies together.
But my thought is to make the bridge *flexible* rather than varying length as SRM described.
The bridge goes up out of the ecliptic in an arc between the two bodies, accomidating the largest separation. When the planets are closer together, the arc is taller and/or there are waves. The overall motion is controlled via a series of waves that travel back and forth; several frequencies and phases at the same time. It’s engineered so the net effect is to crenulate the line by the right amount to give it the proper length between the endpoints at any given moment.
The problem is that the arc passing over the sun will want to fall downward. It will need constant energy to counter that; perhaps it can be held aloft with solar sails along the length. Tacking or trimming the sails will give dynamic control to keep the whole thing moving properly.
As far as the terminals go, you could have it just hang into the top of the atmosphere like a non-rotating [skyhook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)), at the pole. However, if you want primitive people to simply walk, without needing a user-supplied vehicle at each end, it could be anchored to a rotating mount, or the skyhook can trail light cords down to the ground.
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No.
Even if you manage to find two planets that are so perfectly aligned in an orbit that they don't seem to move, the forces between them in a case of a tiny-seeming movement would be enormous. Then there is the amount of material involves - the distance from Earth to Mars is 300,000 times the length of the biggest bridge ever made. It's more than 1,000 times the length of the Equator.
The most important consideration though is *why*. If you wanted to get effectively between two planets, just build a space elevator on both planets. Once you're in space, rocket travel between the two would require much less energy and fuel to travel than it would from the planet's surface. And you'd need a rocket - it's the only sensible way to travel in space (the only other option really is magnetic propulsion on your bridge, but trying to transmit electricity over tens of millions of km won't work very well). You want to keep the vehicle off of the surface to avoid drag... at which point there is no reason to have the surface at all.
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**It depends,**
mostly on what type of structure you let slide as a bridge, and what kind of planets you have in mind. All the potential bridges I can imagine will have in common is: they are more like zero-gravity guide wires (or tubes).
Lets start with a simple system: tidally locked double-planet. The closest we have in the solar system to this configuration is probably the Pluto/Charon pair. A kind of tether between the two could be built and it would be not much different from a space elevator, conceptually. The key point here is that the two "planets" show the same side to each other all the time. Perfectly circular orbit makes this easier, but the tether could compensate for changing distance if its not. This version strikes me as at least not *totally impractical*, as the distance between the two planets would be small enough that it could be covered with imaginable materials and traversed in useful time.
Next, co-orbiting planets. Thats two planets inhabiting the same orbit around their star, but separated by angular distance. Saturn has a pair of minor moons in this relationship, but their names currently escape me. A structure connecting two such planets would take the shape of an arc along their orbital path. The "bridge" would be mostly free of forces, as long as its mass is neglible compared to the planets. Again, perfect circular orbit makes this simpler, as the length of the arc never changes. The forces acting on the arc could be small enough to be manageable, but the "bridge" would be very long - for an earth like orbiting pair it would be approximately 1 AU long (150 million km), assuming 60 degree separation. Traversing the bridge might be impractical in useful time.
Other configurations have been described by others answers, but I feel these go too far, that after building the "bridge", the planets stop being planets and form a new type of body together with the "bridge". I'm also not sure the planets themselves could stand up to the forces acting on them in that case (or rather I'm pretty sure they won't, unless you reinforce the planets themselves with some super-material).
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It is possible, under very specific conditions which are supposedly possible, but we have no evidence to support that they do exist in nature, and they'd probably form a type of natural bridge as it is so not really needed.
A much better path that can be considered a bridge is something that is considered for the future of the Earth-Moon system which is you build 2 space elevators and the minor distance between the 2 that can be easily traversed in moments. This allows for the continued rotation of bodies seperately, doesn't (for the most part) require super strong materials and still acts as a bridge.
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So I came across this idea myself and I think I have a solution.
In my world (I'm using mine as an example) I have a moon that orbits the planet at the same speed and in the same direction as the planet's rotation, making it seemingly tidally locked (though the moon still rotates on its own axis). Assuming you have a super material and a ridiculously huge budget, you build the start of the bridge/tether/elevator what-have-you on the main planet, when you reach the moon, the base is elliptically built on the surface, being that the bridge only touches the moons surface at two points and the rest is raised from the surface.
Why though?
If the track on which this bridge slides is elliptical based with the orbit of the moon and its rotation, the elliptical allows for the bridge to be the same distance all the time.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xbxjr.jpg)
This design also creates a giant "orbital engine" which could be used to generate a ton of power.
Anyway, just an idea.
Comment if my geometry is wrong here...
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Yes, if the orbits of the two planets are perfectly coplanar (something that won't happen in reality unless your engineers move one of the planets.)
There are a lot of no answers based on trying to build a bridge--which is impossible--rather than the correct answer of building multiple bridges.
Bridge #1:
```
Build a space elevator.
Build a space elevator 120 degrees away.
Build a space elevator 120 degrees away.
```
So long as your planet isn't too massive this is at the edge of what can be built, unobtainium makes it easier but isn't essential.
Bridge #2:
Build a ring around the planet, supported by the elevators. You can do this with a single elevator if the ring and elevator are unobtainium, otherwise you need at least three points.
Bridge #3:
Another ring around the planet, outside the first ring but touching it with magnetic levitation support (or anything else frictionless if you're going the unobtainium route.) This ring is not rotating in relation to the central star. Obviously there is a considerable velocity difference here, some sort of transport craft will be needed for velocity matching unless you go with Heinlien's rolling roads approach. (Which would take a **lot** of velocity-matching segments!) For engineering ease the net force of #2 and #3 combined is zero, the elevator connections are only for stability. Unobtainium will make the construction of #2 and #3 much easier but it could be done without.
If the orbits are perfectly circular:
Bridge #4:
A ring around the star. This is connected to #3. Unobtainium or stationkeeping engines are required.
You build an equivalent system around the second planet.
Bridge #5:
This hangs from the ring around the outer planet, a counterweight hangs in the opposite direction to give a net zero weight. It extends to the inner ring, again speed-matching shuttles are required.
If the orbits are not perfectly circular it gets harder:
Bridge #4a:
This is in space between the two planets. Stationkeeping engines are mandatory as it is not anchored to anything. Unobtainium is required.
Bridge #5a:
This rides a track on #4 (speed matching issues apply) so as to remain aligned with the planet. It dangles halfway to the planet plus half of the orbital variation of the planet. It is counterweighted.
Bridge #5b:
This is connected to #3 and extends outward and is counterweighted. It has the same length as #5a. #5a and #5b are aligned so as to be coaxial at all times but are only coupled by magnetic levitation or the like as #5b will move up and down with the planet. A pornographic nickname is inevitable for this pair. Unobtainium is required. Keeping the counterweights from #5a and #5b from striking their opposite bridge will be quite a project.
A second pair of bridges connects #4 to the other planet.
If you wish to extend this system to additional planets you can reuse #1, #2 and #3.
I can see no means of handling planets which are not coplanar.
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One step that would make this idea somewhat natural to even begin to think about would be to have a pair of planets where the tallest mountain on each one extends above the atmosphere, making a space elevator unnecessary.
Perhaps, rather than rotating around each other, they would either share a common orbit at some distance from each other, like asteroids in an asteroid belt, or rocks in a ring around a planet, or would have aligned concentric orbits that have lead to the same amount of time in a one year travel around the sun.
Ideally, these planets would also be on the small side of what would still qualify as a dwarf planet, so that the gravitational pull of the planets on each other could be smaller relative to the gravitational pull of the sun on each of the planets. The smaller the dwarf planets, the lower their average distance from each other could be.
Then, you would connect the tops of the super-atmospheric mountain tops with a long glorified rubber band (or with a solid bridge with a glorified rubber band at each end) of something like super-duper spider silk. The rubber band portion or portions would guide the space equivalent of a mountain gondola (greatly reducing the material requirements by requiring only a small proportion of it to have a habitable atmosphere).
Perhaps some spider-like creature that could survive in outer space would maintain the rubber band-like portions of the bridge, repairing it as it is damages or strained by stretching and contraction over the course of a year, perhaps receiving the nourishment to do so from sacrificial offerings from travelers traversing the bridge (or by eating the travelers themselves if they don't offer sufficient sacrificial offerings, perhaps by forcing them onto a dead end spur of the bridge controlled by the space-spider). Thus, the spider would be both a caretaker of the bridge and serve a troll-like role with regard to the bridge.
The entire system (mountains, spider-strands, space spider), except the gondolas used to move along the bridge, could be natural, rather than man made, reducing the need for the people using the bridge to be particularly technologically advanced.
Indeed, perhaps these space spiders evolved in a planetary ring where the distances that had to be traversed with space-spider silk were small, got carried to an asteroid belt when a stray collision of planetary ring material accidentally carried some space-spiders there, and then a colony of space-spiders made it to the planets that were not too far apart from each other when an asteroid crashed there after being disturbed from its orbit by a collision. At each step there would be selection for space-spiders that could produce longer and stronger strands. Related species of smaller, less capable space-spiders in the same solar system could be found in ring systems and asteroid belts throughout the solar system, each adapted to the scale it usually faces.
If the gondolas are too much, or too technologically advanced, or impair the concept too much, perhaps the space-spiders could make flexible space-spider silk tubes (perhaps enhanced with minerals found in asteroid belts, planetary rings and rocky planets) that people on the bridge would simply walk through, rather than something that they would hitch a gondola to. The tubes might be 2-4 meters in diameter or so on the inside, and could extend down the sides of the mountains to which they are anchored down into the area with a breathable atmosphere.
UPDATE: New materials science technology for space is [based on spider silk](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170215121025.htm).
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What you need is two planets orbiting each other(in circular orbit) while their rotation is fixed and equal and parallel... Consider this example : take a dumbbell and rotate it while the axis of rotation passes through the center of the handle. Now think the weights are planets and the handle is bridge and you can imagine the scenario.
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I agree with the answer of Nobody, but want to add, that the inner planet would move outwards and the outer planet would move inwards if you lock them. So you should ensure that this results in both planets rotating the common barycenter, without adding so much pressure on the bridge, that they destroy the other planet on the position where they are connected to the bridge (your bridge should handle it with its super strong material).
So the moment when you start the locking is very critical here and I recommend to choose a position where the bridge does lay as tangential to the orbits as possible, which will result in the "rotation around their common center of mass" described in other answers.
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No...this would only work if the two planets orbited their sun at roughly the same speed while always presenting the same face to each other, and the chances of the favored conditions for a double planetary system exhibiting these traits is so small as to be zero in practical application.
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**(Slightly) more realistic solution**
Space elevators are theoretically possible, so you put one on each planet (these would need to be either at locations that could always "see" each other, so having the cord avoid the sun is another issue...) Then you have a cord connecting the two. This cord would have a bunch of slack left over beyond the anchor point on the elevator, so the area traveled would be taunt, but as the planet's orbits move further apart the slack gets added to the taunt cord. This way the orbits changing doesn't become a problem. Still not totally realistic, but the material doesn't need to be strong enough to change planetary orbits.
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**Background:** The 20-km (or however large it needs to be to cause the below effects) asteroid appeared out of a dimensional rift close enough and going fast enough that it will reach Earth in just six or so months. It's projected to land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, right in the ocean crust near Hawaii.
**Technology Levels:** Present Day.
**Impact Risk and Aftermath:** Astronomers have been unable to identify the composition of the asteroid, and they want want to err on the side of caution and assume that it's dangerous. They recommend **earthquake-resistant** shelters closed off for the outside world to reliably survive. Electricity, air, food supply, and water is necessary for the duration of the projected 5-10 year wait.
Following the impact, an earthquake rips through Earth, collapsing any shoddily built shelters. The usual aftereffects of volcanic activity, firestorms, and dust clouds lowering global temperatures. Whereas you could usually go outside soon after everything settles, the "unknown substance" prevents that.
**The Question:** If almost every country that's currently not fighting a civil war decide to start building or upgrading self-sufficient underground shelters, about how many people can they save? How many can each country save?
**Bonus/Alternative Questions:** If technology today isn't enough to build a large-scale shelter, how many years in the future is reasonable for governments to choose this option? How big would such "community/peasant shelters" be?
**Edit:** Underground and underwater is NOT necessary.
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**Food is a (the?) major limitation**
In six months there needs to be 5-10 years worth of long-life food put aside. Let's take the low figure of 5 years as a less impossible target. Assuming that there is normally enough food production in 6 months to feed the population for 6 months, now the production of food must be increased tenfold for the next six months, with 90% of that food being suitable for long term storage.
This is not possible - Earth cannot instantly ramp up its food production tenfold. What will happen is that the cost of food will instantly skyrocket as wealthy would-be shelter builders try to hoard all available food. As soon as the cost of food increases beyond the ability of people to feed themselves today, there will be riots. As soon as countries cannot feed their populations, there will be wars.
(The early days of COVID showed how vulnerable supply chains are, even when governments are doing their best to maintain trade with a fair degree of cooperation. In a zero-sum game with food scarcity, world trade would disintegrate instantly.)
At this point it becomes unlikely that *any* shelters will be built, simply because the widespread ongoing conflicts will cut the supply chains for not only the food but all the other materials required for building ultra-strong shelters with reliable, long duration closed system life support and power. A decisive, ruthless military group able to seize control of a large food production area may be able to get a shelter built and stocked, but only if they can convince all of the key people that *they* will get a spot in the shelter.
My best estimate is that less than 1% of people in major food producing areas of developed countries would end up in shelters that have a chance to last 5 years. More to the point, upwards of 90% of the world's population would die from starvation or warfare in the 6 months prior to the asteroid impact. This is an easily foreseeable outcome for the world's governments. Given this, a rational government would need to be absolutely certain that the asteroid would render the surface uninhabitable for 5-10 years before taking actions that would definitely kill the majority of the world's population.
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## None
You've got requirements for well built and self-sustaining, it takes around a year to build a decent house. Self sustaining is complex and that alone will probably take a year to set up requiring large amounts of space per person to be supported. Chances are that 6 months isn't enough time for a government to get a plan off the paper and as far as breaking ground for the first bunker.
What you could do in six months is build some shoddy bunkers out of existing metro stations or old existing bunkers, stuff them full of preserved food, add a crude closed loop water and air supplies and a nation could possibly manage to save a few hundred people. Though that doesn't consider how you're going to power the place.
Of course the official government nuclear bunkers will still exist as will private bunkers, and the people with access to those may survive. Though it raises the question of how well stocked they are.
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## **None**
@Separatrix already mentioned that you will probably not be able to save anyone, but I can give some more perspective from paleontological history when this happened before (read, the K-Pg/K-T Extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs). The situation is even more grave than most people here are giving credit for. Even if you are able to get these bunkers constructed, humanity will not be able to survive the meteoric apocalypse. There is just too much riding against them.
I gave some of this information in a [similar](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/189094/what-could-lead-humans-to-go-extinct-after-a-collapse-of-technological-civilizat/194752#194752) [answers](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/200204/would-solar-energy-have-been-viable-during-the-extinction-of-the-dinosaurs/201400#201400) [I gave](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/80294/an-epidemic-kills-all-plant-life-on-earth-what-would-happen-to-the-fauna-is-th/177745#177745) [to other](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/154643/which-modern-organisms-would-survive-a-new-k-pg-level-impact/194128#194128) questions about human technological collapse and the end-Cretaceous extinction, so if I forget anything here checking that might help.
One thing that isn't greatly appreciated about the K-T extinction is that it isn't just the dinosaurs and big reptiles that went extinct, but that most of the little stuff died out as well. Most birds went extinct, including the Cretaceous equivalents of songbirds, and even larger mammals and turtles like *Didelphodon* and *Nanhsiungchelys*, which were the Cretaceous equivalents of raccoons and tortoises, were wiped out. So that suggests whatever happened at the K-T even small, adaptable animals will die. Humans will die, no ifs, ands, or buts. We're just too big and require too many resources to survive in such a scenario.
After the K-T impact, photosynthesis basically stopped for at least two years and perhaps as long as a century (two years seems to be the better supported amount), and the climate was so screwed up that farming wouldn't be practical for 20 years or more. The issue with this is depending how long such a nuclear winter event lasts, your human shelters may end up using up all their food and be forced to scrounge on whatever they can find outside of their shelters. Even after the impact is over growth may be negatively impacted, most of the plant life that returned immediately after the K-T extinction for the first 100,000 years or so was ferns, which are tricky to eat because often only the fiddleheads are edible and only for a limited period of time, otherwise ferns can be very poisonous. The soil may not even be super fertile in the after-event of the K-T, so you may not be able to grow crops. This turn of events would be occurring for much longer than any shelter could reasonably stockpile canned goods.
Storing fuel is also going to be a huge issue. Nuclear and fossil fuels probably can't be stored in great enough amounts for people to maintain long-term stability after the event. Maybe enough to get through, but they'll eventually run out and will not have the infrastructure to get more. Hydropower and wind power will be devastated by the impact. And solar just plain won't work for the first few years due to the rays of the sun being blocked off. Geothermal is the only thing that would work, but that would require your shelters being placed in very specific areas that would make them vulnerable to post-impact looters.
Also note that we *still* haven't managed to create a long-term sustainable biosphere, much less one that also supports humans. [Biosphere 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2) was a disaster that only managed to survive for two years at maximum (they tried the experiment twice) before being shut down, in both cases the experiment failed due to running out of food and oxygen as well as human nature ruining everything as it usually does. That was a 3.14 acre enclosed space that failed to sustain *eight* humans. We have no hope of riding out any mass extinction scenario in bunkers, especially at our current level of technology.
Best case scenario is you build your geothermal shelters, run through your supply of food and are then forced to search outside for new sources of food, only to starve long-term due to a lack of vitamins, minerals, fats, and proteins in your diet from the only thing being around in sufficient numbers to eat is fern fiddleheads. More likely, the bunkers get broken into and torn apart by desperate citizens trying to find a spot to ride out the apocalypse. Large amounts of people are *not* going to just lay down and die with grace if they know there is a chance for survival elsewhere.
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## It depends on where you are - and unfortunately not everyone.
During the days of the cold war, underground bunkers were quickly constructed in the event of a nuclear exchange. These had all the features you were looking for.
It is important to note that it was thought nuclear war was imminent shortly after WW2, so the US Government (and indeed many others) [created comprehensive plans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_shelter) to safeguard as much of the population as possible, often using a variety of ways to do so.
The best way to achieve this was to have a multi-pronged strategy in such a short time. So don't 'put all your eggs in one basket', instead do many things at once:
1. Governments create purpose-built large shelters from scratch:
* All your world governments would quickly utilise all economic, labour and military resources to building these.
* Acquiring mining equipment and quickly compulsorily possessing ideal land would occur
* I would imagine using all government resources a fully functional, self-sufficient shelter could be built within 3-4months as was the case in the 1960's, and many of these would be built on the outskirts of the capital cities.
2. Re-purpose existing building basements to easily convert many into shelters
* This was popular during the cold war - as a lot of the infrastructure and building structure makes this easier
* Many large buildings have large existing basements that could be earthquake resistant, and with modifications can be good shelter candidates. I would imagine these could be done 2-3 months with adequate resourcing.
3. Tell the populace to 'build their own'.
* The US Government gave many instructions and guidelines at the time to get the public to create their shelters privately.
* By doing this, the US Government at the time saved a lot of effort and resources, with many being able to build shelters on their own properties themselves or within the private sector.
* However in your case, there would suddenly be great demand for products and food required to stock these shelters - so the government would need to be strict with rationing and ensure product and food supply chains are kept intact.
Even with the above though, there would be those that would miss out. I would imagine:
* Governments without access to many building, product and food resources would struggle. Most in Europe, US, Australia would be able to accomplish mostly using the above techniques, but island nations, remote countries, landlocked small countries would require large amounts of aid.
* Countries like those in Africa and Asia that have high populations but low per-capita capability would similarly struggle. India, central african countries, many in South East Asia, would likely find it difficult to obtain resources and products needed.
Unfortunately, most of the population of the world exists in these disadvantaged areas, and [using predicted death rates from nuclear war in cities in these areas as a guide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projected_death_tolls_from_nuclear_attacks_on_cities) I would imagine that perhaps not more than 25% of these populations may survive.
However in the US, Australia and Europe you may expect perhaps 50% of the population would be able to be saved if their Governments acted quickly and with impunity. (In fact, [Switzerland has 114% shelters already, Sweden 70% without any action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenberg_Tunnel) - so these could save all their citizens already).
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**Impact location is known, so make sure you evacuate.**
Because of the meteor showers following the impact, it will be a mass extinction event for anyone or anything *outside* on the surface. Shelters could help to bridge that first danger. But not everywhere. People will need to *evacuate* in time, from any coastal regions. An underwater shelter is a place you'll drown, instead of survive.
Agree strongly with "depends where you are" aspect.. I'd like to consider geographic differences.
If you'd have world wide seismic *damage* from an asteroid, it will be large enough to evaporate a large part of the Pacific ocean and form lava seas. one world half - the pacific hemisphere - will be affected far more severely. East Asia, Australia, New Zealand and America will loose their coastal cities, the area will be *devastated*.
In the pacific region, bunkers won't help, even Kim's shelter won't be heavy enough to sustain the shock wave. On the other end of the planet, Europe, Africa, western part of Asia, meteroid showers will cause massive damage, but shelters can be made and many would survive the impact. The pacific coast will not be repairable: humanity will loose a lot of good land..
Take into account shelters will not prevent all deaths after the impact. There will be lethal climate effects, probably cold and acidic rains. When the climate heats up again, say after ca 20 years.. and with 5-10% human survival planet wide, life will proceed. In the pacific, things go slower.. in 10.000 years or so the Pacific basin may become recognizable again. A new Yellowstone park will form where Hawaii was. A huge, permanently active volcanic area will exist there, rising miles above sealevel. Tectonic effects surrounding this place will make the Pacific coasts more subject to flood and earthquakes.
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Following is a link to a site called the **Earth Impacts Effects Program** put together by some astronomers from Imperial College London and Purdue university. It lets you calculate the effects of meteor impacts upon the Earth by varying metrics including;
* the size of the object;
* its composition;
* the angle of impact;
* it's velocity; and
* the type/density of the rock at the point of impact
[Earth Impact Effects Program](https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEarth/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?dist=&distanceUnits=1&diam=350&diameterUnits=2&pdens=&pdens_select=1500&vel=13&velocityUnits=1&theta=45&wdepth=10000&wdepthUnits=1&tdens=2500)
Details included are the type of damage suffered by people, the local environment and infrastructure based on distance from the point of impact. The point is that by plugging in the size of your asteroid and other parameters I'm pretty sure you'll find *underground* shelters wouldn't be required once you were a specific distance away from the point of impact. (Depending of course on the standard to which you build the shelters.)
This makes construction of your shelters quicker and easier, so you can have more of them ready in time. Have fun playing with the parameters.
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@KerrAvon2055 has demonstrated the political/logistical infeasibility of such shelters, I'm going to take a stab at the *technological* feasibility.
You have three major problems to solve:
1. Stockpiling and keeping enough food for 5-10 years
2. Power generation
3. Air and Water recirculation
The good news is that we can, indeed, create nutritious food that lasts for up to 10 years. In addition to the usual standards of canned and dehydrated food, [MREs can last up to 10 years](https://armynavyoutdoors.com/blog/how-long-do-mres-last-meals-ready-to-eat-expiration/) if stored in a cool dark environment, which an underground shelter would be able to supply. We also already have various stockpiles of durable foods created by various governments and militaries around the world, which would be our initial cache for food in the shelters.
The bad news is that such stockpiles could feed some people for 5 years, but only a tiny minority. For example, even if we assume that global militaries have stockpiled enough food for their troops, it's unlikely to currently be more than 2 years' worth, is likely much less, and that's only for 0.3% of the world population. So you're looking at feeding 0.1% of the global population using existing government stockpiles.
Given 6 months, you can't reasonably produce enough additional food to make a difference. Theoretically, we could create closed-loop hydroponics systems to supplement stored food with grown-in-the-shelter food, but this would increase space and power requirements substantially.
Power generation is ... a problem. Solar would be out because we'd be in for a couple years of heavy cloud cover. Wind would be out because unpredictable storms would destroy it. Geothermal is mostly generated in places you *really* don't want to be near during a global earthquake.
For fossil fuels, stockpiling enough is a problem. If we assume that 10-person shelter requires as much power [as an American house](https://electricityplans.com/kwh-kilowatt-hour-can-power/), then we're talking 40,000 gallons of oil to generate 5 years of power -- or four tanker trucks full. And, of course, HVAC on an underground shelter could require more power than that. While larger shelters might have some economy of scale, it seems unlikely that you could go below 1000 gallons of oil per person, and you'd need to obtain, store, and protect that oil from the catastrophe.
Nuclear is therefore your best option, not just to supply five years of power, but also to supply enough power that things like hydroponics and hydrolysis for life support become feasible. For disaster-resistance reasons, though, this requires having small nuclear reactors that could be build underground in a shock-resistant chamber, instead of the large nuclear complexes that are very vulnerable to earthquakes. The good news is that we make such reactors to power ships and submarines; the bad is that very few of these are on land and already built and available for adding to a shelter. And it takes more than 6 months to build one and produce the enriched uranium for it. So that would mean very few shelters indeed.
Finally, air and water is also a problem. To date, humans have not successfully built a closed air or water recirculation system that can work for even one year, let alone five. Again, such systems are [under development for the Mars expedition](https://www.space.com/42362-space-station-air-recycler-for-mars-astronauts.html), they are not nearly done yet. And, for obvious reasons, a 5-year system would require *at least* 5 years of testing to know that it really works. [Biosphere 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2) showed us how difficult such systems are to design and operate.
If some amount of gas and water from the outside are allowed in (since you haven't defined "unknown substance") things get easier.
So ... if you project this event to be around 10-20 years in the future, it's conceivable that we might have both plentiful mini-nuclear power plants and the air/water recirculation systems to make a 5-year closed shelter feasible. This means that you could use existing stockpiled food to save maybe 0.05% of the population.
[Answer]
**You can accumulate enough food for several years in six months.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_Everyone_No_Matter_What>
This book suggests tree food.
>
> Cellulosic biofuel production typically already creates sugar as an intermediate product.[28] There are edible calories in leaves, but there is too much dietary fiber, so solutions include making tea, chewing and not swallowing the solids, and making leaf protein concentrate.[29][30] Biomass can be predigested by bacteria so that animals that are poor at digesting cellulose can derive nutrition, such as rats[31] and possibly chickens.
>
>
>
Mushrooms could be grown for several years for food. Humans have a year of food stockpiled, so they'd have a year and a half to get this all ready. People in hazmat suits could manage the fields of crops, and get food for those inside.
You could also grow some low light crops at the equator like potatoes in greenhouses.
**You can't build safe structures anywhere.**
<https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/earthquake-resistant-concrete-put-to-the-test_o>
A collision that hard will cause a magnitude 9 earthquake everywhere, even on the other side of the planet. Even heavily reinforced structures are gonna collapse.
**This is a really destructive collision. No near future tech is gonna survive it.**
If you didn't have the random floating poison, you could survive it in tents and such, but as is, everything is gonna collapse, and likely everyone will die.
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**Case 1.**
The asteroid actually comes from aliens getting rid of a very large bunch of nuclear/toxic waste by tossing it through a dimensional rift (because that's the environmentally friendly solution, and the local tree-huggers made a lot of noise about how it would not be nice to throw it into the sun, and there was an election, so something had to be done).
-> Everyone dies. But on the positive side, there would be mutants and zombies, so it would at least be entertaining.
**Case 2.**
The asteroid is a rock.
Then, you already have a bunch of shelters. There will be a huge tsunami where it hits in the pacific, and apocalyptic earthquakes everywhere else.
However, boats in a sheltered sea on the other side of the planet, like the Mediterranean... should be pretty fine. A nuclear powered aircraft carrier with enough fuel rods and spare parts to last a decade or two would make a fine place to watch the world burn. You will need to tow a few cargos full of grain, tin cans, ammo, and maybe a tanker, but it should be alright.
It is also mobile, so when the rest of the world finishes killing (and eating) each other then you can move to the most suitable place that still can support agriculture.
Plus you have plenty of buddies who survived hidden in their nuclear submarines, which means you got plenty of nukes.
So relax, everyone will be your friend...
Of course, if you want anyone to survive, you'd have to make sure the politicians don't. So you still need to build a shelter for them, preferably deep underground, near an "extinct" volcano.
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# Logistics, power and hesitancy is the deciding factor.
I reckon you'll save 10% - 25% of the industrialized world, and no more than 2% of the non industrialized world. Total no more than 400 million people.
To save a population you'll need:
### Step 1. Start with a shelter exterior. Either:
* Dig an underground complex.
* Dig a big hole and cover it.
* Find a large pre-dug hole (a mine).
* Find a natural hole. A cave. Introduce a salt deposit to water. Etc
* Build a massive concrete above ground structure.
* Start with existing underground shelters. Car parks. Or subway lines, etc.
* Dome a city
This is the easy bit. (link to previous answer coming soon) For a previous answer I showed there's a multiple mines in Australia that will accommodate all Australians with their own apartments.
### Step 2. Strengthen it.
I don't think you're going to have issues with cost or capability here, most countries can build reinforced concrete or build earth-quake proofing, and have enough spare finance to borrow to cover that.
I think you'll have issues with supply chains (similar to covid19 with early shortages of testing reagents or masks). Only so much rebar and concrete can be made at once, and it can only be moved and cured so quickly.
### Step 3. Power it.
5 years of power is hard. Non nuclear nations are going to struggle obviously, but countries with nuclear power are going to struggle to create safe reactors underground with only 6 months notice.
Building the shelter near an underground coal or methane vein, and venting the fumes from an underground generator, is plausible, but a lot of the easier fuel has already been extracted, and that co2 will be there for you when you emerge.
Non nuclear powers could create geothermal power. Setting this up in 6 months is borderline plausible at best.
I suspect the ultimate winner will be reinforced above-ground existing nuclear power plants able to run on near-auto mode. Some flooding protections after Fukashima should help them survive the tsunami.
I expect a few nations will be able to succeed using different methods each, but most will fail and loose life support.
### Step 4. Set up life support.
Building underground greenhouses, oxygen recyclers, water filters, etc is a lot of work, but not beyond the capabilities of any large industrialized country.
I don't think anything here is going to trip up most world powers.
### Step 5. Move people into it.
Some countries wont be able to literally get their populations to the shelters in time. Australia's 100 thousand buses could get 25 million people to their shelters in 10 trips. With average 7 day round trip to a converted mine and 25 people per bus, that's over 2 months just to get the population to the shelter.
India has 1.6 million buses for 1.4 billion people, that's 4 times the number of trips. Country is smaller but roads are lower quality, assuming average 5 days round trip to get to the shelter, that's 175 days to move the population. That's nearly the full 6 months, not everyone is going to make it.
This also brings up the problem of hesitancy. Looking at those refusing to mask / take vaccine / etc with covid, it's fairly unlikely 100% would support the plan. Many places politicians would refuse to spend money, dooming their entire population.
### So who survives?
Europe: Decent chance of getting their act together. Probably using existing nuclear power or fossil fuel deposits. I'd expect to see 25%+ of citizens surviving from western Europe and the UK. Coin toss for each other country.
China: They have big dense cities that could be domed and huge industrial capability and nuclear power right near the cities. If anyone could dome a city in 6 months it'd be China. I'd expect 25%+ of Eastern China to survive.
North America: This will be state or wealth based. All the billionaires will have their own bunker. Some more populous US states (and most Canadian) will be able to build their own bunkers but I'd expect many states (especially those "small government" states) to fail.
Most other industrialized countries have a decent chance.
Most non industrialized countries will give it a go, and some will get lucky, but the odds aren't good.
] |
[Question]
[
One of the most overlooked elements of modern fantasy is that cold iron serves as either an effective shield or an effective weapon against supernatural creatures, like fairies or spirits.
With that in mind, let us say that elvish smiths have found use of an alloy **without** involving iron at all. The other materials used in regular alloys--carbon and nickel--will still be used, but now they come with palladium, phosphorus, silicon, germanium, and silver.
What will the elvish blades look like with those ingredients? Will they cut? More importantly, **will they kill?**
*Sidenote--I don't care how rare or precious any of these elements are because this is a question about* quality, *not* quantity.
[Answer]
# [An Annoying, Pedantic Point](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pedantic)
[Steel without iron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel) is, according to most engineer's idea of steel, 100% carbon (or very mostly carbon with a light sprinkling of other elements). Carbon tends to make steel brittle, so usually when people talk about steels, they talk about how little carbon (and other stuff) they put in.
This means you have a pure, or nearly pure, carbon blade. It could be:
* a [diamond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond) blade, which is brittle, but holds an edge well due to its amazing hardness.
* a [graphite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite) blade, which is *very* brittle, but not as hard as diamond. I do not recommend this for a weapon.
* a [carbon-fiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fiber_reinforced_polymer) blade, which requires some resin to keep together, but may not be the best at holding an edge and certainly cannot be produced by a traditional blacksmith.
And all of these would qualify as a "steel without iron!"
# Some Alternatives
We are looking for a material that can be shaped and hold an edge. Luckily for us, many materials are capable of this. (Blade flexibility is something that various styles disagree on. European swords tend to bend and flex to prevent breaking. Katanas, however, [will stay bent where a European sword would snap back into place](https://youtu.be/GuZwgqI06Qk). Do elves care about the longevity of their blades or slipping through armor? I do not know. Finer points about blades can be quite important, and it depends on context. What are they fighting? What armors are they trying to get around? How do they fight? Etc.)
* [Flint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint#Tools_or_cutting_edges) can be broken apart (known as knapping) forming sharp edges. It is very brittle, however, and therefore not a good choice.
* [Jade](https://www.google.ie/search?q=maori%20jade%20weapons&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIE762IE762&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwirwqbcpJbYAhVhJsAKHbDLAQ4Q_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=974) can be used for weapons by the Maori people. Like the other kinds of stone and ceramic solutions, it would be more brittle than steel or iron.
* [Obsidian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian#Historical_use) has also been used for blades the world over. Because it is a glass, it is also brittle.
* [Bronze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze#History), an alloy of copper and tin (and some other things, like [nickel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel#History)). [It doesn't hold its shape like](https://youtu.be/ngjMtzJ6xgQ?t=5m43s) most steels do, but it's available and won't shatter like flint or obsidian will.
* [Cupronickel](http://copperalliance.org.uk/docs/librariesprovider5/resources/tn-31-cu-ni-90-10-and-70-30-pdf.pdf) is a good alternative: it's silvery, and can be cold worked into a similar [hardness as steel](http://copperalliance.org.uk/docs/librariesprovider5/resources/tn-31-cu-ni-90-10-and-70-30-pdf.pdf), but it's still not as strong. Additionally, it tends to not corrode in water, giving it a pleasing longevity to contrast it against human steel. There is also [an historic precedent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupronickel#History) of using it as a weapon material.
* [Wooden weapons](https://youtu.be/2C6_pSEPbO8) would not be as strong as steel, but certainly are in the running for a substitute. They are much less expensive, as well!
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Consider first where faeries came from. Faeries are "The Other" and legends of a race of strange small people with strange customs probably originated with a race of strange small people with strange customs. These people were overwhelmed by the newcomers, driven into the forest, perhaps to some degree assimilated. Such a change of cultures must have happened many, many times in human history. Over time the older race of people became elves, dwarves, trolls - the stuff of stories told by the conquerors.
I used to think that the faeries hated iron because they did not have metal - a neolithic people, the makers of burial mounds and elf-shot. But the faeries only hate iron, not all metal. Between stone and iron there was a different metal and the fairies could make it. Faeries had **bronze**.
>
> Like the other, smaller mines, the Great Orme got its start as a
> system of surface workings. Miners simply dug out the green and black
> veins of copper ore that they saw on the surface. But soon after, the
> miners decided to follow the veins of copper malachite both
> horizontally as well as down… and down, creating the winding, narrow
> tunnels that we see today. The most intensive period of production was
> for two or three centuries around 3,500 years ago, although
> radiocarbon dating shows that the mine kept operating for another
> millennium.
> <http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160420-the-ancient-copper-mines-dug-by-bronze-age-children>
>
>
>
Little people working under the earth...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/umwhb.jpg)
Reading up on this I found this article on [Racton Man](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/15/story-warrior-dagger-sussex-field-finally-told-4200) and [here](http://www.newhistorian.com/mysterious-racton-man-skeleton-found-dagger-reveals-warriors-past/2436/) his beautiful dagger.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LIc1Z.jpg)
The faeries had Bronze Age technology, like the Fir Bolg and Tuatha de Danaan of the Irish Myth Cycle. They were supplanted by a civilization that had iron. They hate the iron.
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Seeing as the Elves have access to 'regular alloying elements' and other interesting elements (someone mentioned Titanium) and that rarity was a non-issue, I'd recommend looking into Titanium Aluminide, it's an alloy of Titanium and Aluminium that's being looked into as a replacement for Nickel Superalloy jet engine blades (one of the most brutal applications possible for a metal). This means it has to be incredibly strong and stiff which is ideal for making swords.
Some other notable alloys are Nickel Aluminide, a curious compound that not only is really strong (also used in making jet engine parts) but has a rather unique property that it actually gets *stronger* as you heat it (at least until ~800°C where it starts behaving like normal metals again). It's because of this that it's sometimes used for making rollers for the steel industry for hot working red hot steel.
Stellite is another candidate, an alloy primarily of Cobalt and Chromium with a bit of tungsten and carbon thrown in (typically has 1% Iron, but you could probably leave the Iron out altogether without much trouble). Stellite is primarily used for making cutting tools (saws for *cutting steel*) and valve parts for car engines.
You may even be able to use Tungsten Carbide tips for things like arrows (Tungsten Carbide is used for making rock drills). It's *very* dense but extremely hard, I pretty much use carbide bits for all my metalworking because carbide bits shred through steel like butter (imagine arrow heads that can easily puncture everything including quality Iron armor...)
You could even use Silicon Carbide tips/edging, seeing as both are some of the most abundant elements in the world, it could be a very cheap way to add a much needed edge to an otherwise inferior blade. SiC is used for making steel cut-off disks for angle grinders. Not to mention it has a really bad-ass black-glass appearance.
Just because you can't use Iron doesn't put you at a disadvantage at all provided you've got some advanced metallurgical know-how. If anything, some of the strongest alloys and ceramics (technically Carbides are ceramics) either use relatively little Iron or don't use it at all.
Addendum: If you want to get really 'out there' with regards to your material selection, check out depleted Uranium. Because, according to everyone's favorite encyclopedia: *"Depleted uranium is favored for the penetrator because it is self-sharpening and flammable. On impact with a hard target, such as an armored vehicle, the nose of the rod fractures in such a way that it remains sharp."* The catch? It's flammable, poisonous and mildly radioactive... which I suppose is fine if it's going to end up embedded in someone you don't like anyway.
[Answer]
**Steel is by definition an alloy of iron and carbon. So, no iron, no steel.**
However for a silvery metal alloy with properties that make it suitable material for armour and weapons there are many choices subject to the sophistication of the available metallurgy if availabulity of raw material is not an issue.
The four that present immediately are aluminium, magnesium, tungsten and titanium.
Before anyone starts screaming about Al and Mg being too ductile, yes in their pure state but correctly alloyed and treated significant hardness and toughness can be achieved.
The main problem is density. Not all swordfighting is about sharpness. Momentum plays an important part. Difficult to achieve with a low density material.
A titanium / tungsten alloy of about 6:1 would give the right density and be extremely hard and tough. It would be frightful to work. Ordinary tools would not touch it and forging temps probably around 2700° C.
Once worked into a sword it would not appear that different from steel but,
* would not corrode
* would hold a diabolical edge much less subject to dulling and chipping
* would shear through bronze like a hot knife through butter
For plate material I'd suggest Al/Mg alloy, light and relatively easy to work.
For swords and axes W/Ti. Difficult to work(laser milling / tungsten carbide grinding) but very durable.
[Answer]
I think, what you really want is some alloy of [titanium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium). The strongest titanium alloys can compete with a number of steels in tensile strengths (though not with the strongest, heat treated steels).
I believe, titanium based weapons would go quite well with elves, as the wikipedia article describes titanium as a light metal, which is "lustrous, and metallic-white in color". Should make for perfect elvish style weapons...
Comparing titanium alloy swords with their steel counterparts, I see three relevant points:
1. Pro steel: The material strength of titanium is less than that of steel. This means that it would be the titanium sword that gets the dent when it clashes with a steel sword. After a fight, the elves would need to remake the edges of their titanium swords.
2. Pro titanium: The lower weight of the material would allow for greater length of the swords than steel, allowing the elvish fighters to score hits before their opponents can even reach them.
3. Pro titanium: The lower material weight would also allow the swords to be thicker than their steel counterparts, actually allowing the titanium swords to be stronger against breakage than their steel counterparts. So, while it would be the titanium swords that gets the dent, it would be the steel sword that breaks. Which one do you prefer?
All in all, there's a reason why they use titanium in aircrafts: Its performance surpasses that of steel when its put in relation to its weight. And swords do put their material strength in relation to their weight. The elves could thus use that exact same property to make for some extra long, strong, shiny looking swords.
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If you want the elvish swords to be really bad-ass weapons, you can say that their edges are encrusted with some magic crystal coating (= a diamond layer on top of the edge), which allows them to dent steel swords, turning point 1 above in favor for the elves. But I guess, that would overpower the elves.
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## Cemented carbides are an elf's best friend
The reason why steel is so darn good as a tooling alloy is because it is hardenable in a very controllable way by manipulating the presence of *carbide* particles in the iron matrix. Iron-carbon alloys form this type of structure natively to some degree, although the inclusion of a carbide-forming alloying element such as vanadium, chromium, or molybdenum promote the formation of harder alloy carbides, giving increased hardness over plain carbon steel.
Most other metals don't harden as well or as controllably when alloyed as iron does, making them less suitable for tools; those that *are* hard by default have other undesirable properties (rarity, density/weight, ductility or lack thereof). However, the nonreactivity and hardness of refractory carbides (such as tungsten or zirconium carbide) means that they can be mechanically mixed with a molten metal to produce a structure similar in nature to modern-day *cemented carbide*.
This material has the advantage that the matrix and carbide materials can be chosen separately to tailor the properties of the resulting material, in addition to being able to vary the carbide concentrations in the matrix. Modern-day cemented carbide tools use tungsten or tantalum carbides in a cobalt matrix -- this gives them hardness superior to any steel, but at the price of being somewhat brittle. A more suitable material for bladework for your elves would likely be zirconium carbide in a titanium matrix -- this takes advantage of the superior resiliency of titanium along with the hardness and aggressive cutting abilities provided by the embedded carbide particles.
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What about obsidian?
It can be sharper than steel, is resistant, and with some magic handwavium you could make away with the problem of brittleness.
By a pure lore standpoint I would recommend against any alloy or metal at all, the point of the cold iron was that it hurt fey because it was something removed from the natural realm.
It don't matter if it is iron, platinum, or aluminum, what hurts the fae is the fact that it has been removed from nature and refined to the point it's not "natural" anymore. Back then it was iron, these days it probably would be plastics.
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First, we have know what the problem with cold iron actually is. In Mercedes Lackey's books, plain old iron was poisonous because it disrupted fae magic. Some other fiction says it poisonous just because. Some use it as an allegory for why the Celts weren't able to repel the Romans in Hadrian's time. The reason why the Fae don't like cold iron is key to resolving this particular armorers dilemma.
I like the Mercedes Lackey version best, so I'm going to use that. I'm also going to use some of her solutions as well. Fae can't actually touch iron because it acts as a lens to magical energies and direct contact causes severe burns. In one of the books, elves figured out that the effect could be measured, and therefore compensated for. That gives you the option for Fae weaponry actually using iron. They would just need to coat a steel blade with some other metal. I have a pocket knife that has a steel blade that has been coated with titanium for corrosion protection. The elvish blade could have a steel core and edge with other metals to make up the mass of the blade. That fae and his companions would just have to learn to compensate and use the magic distortion. This will help them take on and kill other Fae as well as Humans.
If you want to keep it to "Iron is poison and that's just that" well you have to look for alternatives then. It would come back to tactics over materials. Keep in mind that you can kill someone with a chunk of wood, or a guy in armor with a lead topped club. I don't care how fancy the steelwork is and how much iron is in a sword, A 20lb lead sledge hammer is going to cave in your helmet. A wooden stick, deftly handled, will cave in the human skull. So you have to fight in ways that take advantage of your enemies weakness.
The long and the short is that you just have to pay more attention to tactics. Good materials help a lot and steel is really advantageous, but it is not something that will guarantee a victory.
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I want to have an Earth like planet, but with most of the continents having very little flatland. Thus continents would be covered mostly by hills and mountains. I want the rest of the planet to be as similar to Earth as possible in size, gravity, ocean coverage, atmosphere, etc.
How do I explain this?
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That sort of terrain might come about as a result of this planet having many more tectonic plates than Earth.
For example, when the planet formed, these plates may have collided much more chaotically, and violently than Earth's, thus resulting in more mountain ranges than we have.
This will also result in a lot more volcanic and earthquake activity than Earth. These in turn can also shake the landscape up.
Add to this some meteor impacts in the distant past, and you're probably covered.
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Give it smaller continental plates and speed up their movement. Mountains are raised where one plate pushes into another.
A lot of edges gives you a lot of territory that mountains are being created in.
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A recent [Snowball Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth) period might help.
Heavy glaciation can cause enormous [changes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier#Glacial_geology) to the terrain. There are no longer any glaciers where I live, but there once were, during a recent ice age. Their legacy includes
* [Glacial erratics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_erratic) - boulders dropped in the middle of nowhere
* Glacial [valleys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-shaped_valley) (shaped like the letter "U")
* [Moraines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moraine) and other deposits.
* [Drumlins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drumlin)
The formation of glacial valleys in particular can be quite [extreme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Glacier_Valley_formation-_Formaci%C3%B3n_Valle_glaciar.gif):
Gif courtesy of Wikipedia user Intexpliki under [the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en).
You could go with a normal ice age, but you won't see glaciation over all of the planet, just portions extending out from the poles, perhaps into the southern temperate zones. That's why a Snowball Earth scenario is better.
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Make your planet younger than earth. Younger planets are more geologically active and have had less erosion - they will naturally be more mountainous/hilly. Though with some other more troublesome attributes to carefully manage in your story!
[Evolution of Terrestrial Planet Surfaces](http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast121/lectures/lec15.html)
The link above discusses the effects of impact cratering, tectonic activity and then erosion during the evolution of a terrestrial planetary body's life cycle. In short - terrain will tend from geologically active and "rougher" to smoother less geologically active as a planet ages.
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Well, I'm going to add an option: crust-buster bombs.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen, we've created weapons capable of simultaneously creating a hole from the surface to the mantle and the pressure waves necessary to trigger an instantaneous volcanic eruption through that same hole! Thanks to our new handwavium technology, this awesome force can be yours for the mere price of...
(Terms and Conditions may apply, not guaranteed to work in areas with thicker-than-average crust such as existing hills and mountains.)
I'm sure you can find some sort of way to justify a world where people went crazy with the crust-busters and basically turned the entire planet into a series of volcanoes for a few months. Bam!!! No more flatlands.
If you want a more 'natural' explanation, I can't do better than Andrei.
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A common sight in science fiction is a police robot force. But as most people know, robots (even [small basic ones](http://www.smashingrobotics.com/thirteen-advanced-humanoid-robots-for-sale-today/)) are expensive, which raises the question: why would they bother? Let's assume that the American government does have the technology and means of producing these robotic soldiers independently. The only factor is price and public appeal. (Naturally people would be intimidated) Never mind the flaws such as: Hacking potential, EMP devices and lack of morality.
Obviously there are bugs in the system, as is to be expected. What reasons would a country have for spending billions on having a robotic police force to replace a human one?
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Why do robots ever get deployed for anything?
1. When they are cheaper.
2. When they are better (more accurate, etc.).
3. When the work is dangerous.
### Dangerous
So how does that apply to law enforcement? Let's start with the last point. Police work can be dangerous. It involves preventing people from doing what they want. Some people will react violently to this.
### Better
A corollary of the danger issue is that robots can react less violently. One of the main reasons that police use violence is to prevent violence done to them. A robot could allow itself to be destroyed in a situation where a police officer might feel compelled to shoot. This makes the robots better in those situations.
Robots also have the potential to do things like on-the-spot analysis of fingerprints or forensic evidence that an officer might need a specialist to do. Not for the equipment but for the training. And of course robots are not emotionally impacted the same way that humans are. This allows them to respond more dispassionately. Robots can be controlled remotely more effectively than humans. Their communication protocols can be more efficient than verbal reports and orders. Live sound and video from the robot; efficient digital commands in response.
Robots follow their programming more than humans follow protocols. For example, the Freddie Gray case was caused in part by a failure to follow the official rules in securing a prisoner. A robot wouldn't have done that. Once their programming is updated, they will follow the new programming. They won't continue to do things the way that they always have. Robots also won't disable their cameras.
### Cheaper
Humans cost a certain amount per year to hire. Don't forget the costs of pensions and insurance in that number. It's quite possible for a police officer to cost \$100,000 (US) a year even if only making \$20 an hour. If you can lease and maintain a robot for less, that allows the agency to either save money or increase their presence. A ten year, $3 million lease for a robot that operates 24x7 may actually be cheaper than hiring three or four officers for the same period.
Robots might integrate better with vehicles. Currently a motorcycle officer rides a motorcycle. The robot version might be an attachment. Robots might use such smaller vehicles rather than big, blocky, fuel-guzzling cars. Or an entire group might ride a single pickup truck.
Robots can power down when not in use. It's easier to maintain reserves that way. Activate them in response to calls. Humans would have to be given make work in a similar situation. You can't really tell them that you don't feel like paying them this month, not enough crime. But stick around, we may have more crime next month.
### Other
Note that we already replace humans with robots in some circumstances. There are robots that disarm bombs now. They are currently rather stupid, being essentially remote operated. Traffic cameras can be considered robotic replacements of traffic officers. A parking monitor robot might make sense.
I thought that the show **Almost Human** did a good job of integrating androids into the police force. They took the risks and allowed single human officers to go about safely with android partners.
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>
> "Naturally people would would be intimidated"
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This depends on how popular the police are with the public at the moment. It's perfectly possible to make a racially discriminatory robot police force, but it's also possible to make one that isn't.
Robot police **won't** (unless specifically programmed to by evil overlords):
* solicit bribes
* discriminate on the basis of race or religion
* get angry and assault suspects or deliberately apply excessive or lethal force
* rape sex workers
* steal cash or drug evidence
* deliberately lose or destroy exculpatory evidence
* lie about their actions
* engage in coverups of illegal behaviour by the well-connected
* fabricate crimes or search pretexts in order to meet quotas
Some places are already introducing body cameras in response to mistrust of the police. I can see robot incorruptible police being *extremely* popular if the existing human police are bad enough.
One aspect of this is that, even if not entirely bulletproof, shooting a robo-cop is property damage rather than attempted murder. Therefore there's less need for pre-emptive violence against suspects using the excuse of officer safety, and robo-cops would cause far fewer shootings.
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>
> But as most people know, robots [...] are expensive
>
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If they are ubiquitous, one could assume the cost of robot-cops (totally not a trademark) is a solved problem. If you want to make a fair comparison, you must account for the price of training a human, their equipment, their retirement, their hospital bills or funeral, and maybe the checks sent to their families.
**Why robots over humans?**
You can train a robot much faster. If the robot dies, you can transfer its databanks to a new one. They are typically superior to humans in terms of strength, speed and reflexes. Intellectually, they can process more information, and access any data in the system on the spot, which is an interesting trait for a detective. They can also operate 24/7 without having to pay overtime.
Lack of morality is an interesting point, one that can also be found in humans. On one hand, there's the cold logic of a robot's programming, which drives them to make the "right" choice, depending on their programming. On the other hand, human can blatantly disregard human life. In a number of countries, police corruption is a big problem. You can't corrupt a robot.
Related to the previous point, robots have no second thought. If there is a danger, they are more likely to dive into it if it means saving a life, whereas a human would rightfully so fear for their own lives. In case of an injury, a robot can get repaired and get back in active duty much faster as well.
And because they have no strong feeling one way or the other, they might not kill a kid on sight because he's black.
**Why *not* robots over human?**
In the present, humans aren't really ready to trust robots with their lives. Likely, that doesn't change much in the future, so first contact would probably be cold. Human-cyborg relations would probably get better over time though.
Security would be a major concern, the possibility of your police force switching off or turning against you is a frightening one. However, as the hacking capabilities of bad guys increase, so does cybersecurity. You can take steps to mitigate the risks of hostile takeover. Ultimately, the common criminals will likely lack the proper skill to hotwire high-tech machinery so the real threat is organized crime, which is already known to bribe/threaten police officers. There is still no such thing as zero risk, so it comes down to how acceptable the risk is versus the risk of humans losing control of themselves.
Another thing to consider is that if they'll be chasing human criminals, then a human mind might be a better frame of reference. Humans are most likely to better understand how a human criminal think than a robot would.
**Conclusion**
A favorable environment I think would be high crime rates and/or high probability of getting your skin shot. In that case, a replaceable police force would make sense.
Another possible scenario would be lack of trust in human police. If your police force is known for its corruption, then a robot might be a better sight than a cop.
What I would recommend is to have humans and robots doing the job together, as opposed to one or the other. They both have strengths and weaknesses, so going one way may solve some problems while creating other.
A last point I'd like to make is that police is supposed to protect and serve the public. In an ideal world, financial considerations shouldn't matter as long as the public service is effective. But you know, that's ideally speaking.
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Many excellent points have already been made, I'd just add that although android police might be expensive, the alternative might be worse. Consider situations where the police force is corrupt. Yes, the USA is a good example given how American officers are too aggressive and racist, and will abuse their power with lethal effect a disproportionate amount of times. But that doesn't compare much to examples of the near total collapse of public institutions.
Take examples like Afghanistan, Mexico, Iraq, or indeed Northern Ireland during the Troubles. In many of these instances when the police can't be trusted the military is sent in, and they may actually make the situation worse.
After the American led invasion of Afghanistan a secular police force was established, but they quickly became extremely corrupt and were frequently accused of extortion, rape, and murder. Add this to the secular court system being slow and corrupt, and the result was that people began to support the Taliban insurgency because they believed they would offer more principled alternatives. Somewhat similarly when the Troubles started in Northern Ireland, the region's police force at the time, The RUC, was infamously sectarian and almost exclusively staffed by officers from the protestant community. Irish Catholics had no confidence in it, and so the British government sent in the army to restore law and order. It worked for a short time because Irish Catholics viewed them as less corrupt. But then Bloody Sunday happened, where Paratroopers shot dead unarmed protesters, and recruitment for the PIRA spiked and the violence intensified.
Mexico has a similar problem for different reasons. Mexican public sector workers of any worth, from police and soldiers to politicians and judges, are subject to a "silver or lead" policy by the cartels. Basically they bribe them or kill them. In this situation even when the government sent in the military to help the situation they couldn't be sure they weren't corrupt too. In fact one cartel known for its brutality, Los Zetas, was created when Mexican special forces trained with American counter-terrorism support defected to the cartels.
So not only would android police be less corrupt, aggressive, or outright traitorous, but they also don't have families who can be threatened to keep them under someone else's influence. And because they are all equally disciplined and impartial you can't just kill off the few good officers and then let a law of averages make the rest of the force susceptible to corruption. I imagine if you offered the people of Mexico, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, an android police force tomorrow they'd jump at the chance. As with many black communities in the USA.
The main downside is the risk of software error, or of particular context being misunderstood by the androids, or them simply having no programming to handle an unusual situation, or these androids being hacked. A few years ago the Iranians managed to steal an American drone by hacking it, and brought it back to Iran; it was an excellent PR stunt, and exposed serious flaws in American military cyber security. The same sort of things would happen with android soldiers or police. But if the criminal are impoverished or don't have access to the training/technology required to hack it wouldn't be a major threat.
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It would only be feasible to begin deploying a robotic police force in the event that the dangers to human police became so great that attrition - from casualties or resignation - of human police exceeded the rate of recruitment of new police when the recruits and experienced police are being paid an amount equivalent to the cost of purchasing and maintaining a police robot in the field, or when - despite an unchanged or even decreasing level of risk for human police officers - the cost of purchasing and deploying a police robot decreases such that it is cheaper to field robots rather than humans.
That is to say, when bots become cheaper than cops.
That said, at the probable cost of a reasonably effective robotic police officer, at present or in the near future, for a robot to be more cost-effective than hiring humans would mean that law and order must have broken down almost irretrievably. There would be many places where the police fear to tread in any strength. Murders of police officers would be a daily occurrence. Police on the street most likely would never operate alone or even in pairs, but might travel in groups of three or more. Police vehicles would be armoured against small arms and even RPGs. Everyone would own a gun or else live in a gated community guarded by private military units armed with military-grade weapons so that they wouldn't have to sully their hands by holding a gun. Emigration would be a major issue, with people leaving the nation for safer pastures.
Even then, deploying a robotic police force would be an almost stop-gap measure, as with that level of lawlessness, the nation's days are numbered, and it is likely that the government would become insolvent in relatively short order. It is likely that the nation deploying said robotic police wouldn't have the wherewithal to actually build them, but would be buying them from a more advanced, less lawless other nation.
However, the government of a nation in that much trouble is unlikely to spend that money on police robots, they're more likely to divert that money to line their own pockets. Only a truly idealistic government inheriting the aftermath of years of government corruption might actually spend that much money in that way - if they had it. Perhaps they executed the previous, corrupt regime and nationalised all their assets...
In the further future, as the price of robots decreases and their effectiveness increases, there may come a point where even a relatively peaceful human society would find it both cost-effective and politically neutral to replace human police with robots.
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On robots being expensive - Technology is only expensive because of the research and development costs, which are once-off costs per technology.
So "Robots are expensive" because they only produce them for very specific applications, and so only few of them are produced.
If you're mass producing, the price comes down significantly, as now you're just dealing with manufacturing / distribution costs + profit.
So the reasons to employ a robotic police force would be:
* Widespread corruption amongst rank-and-file cops as well as mistrust
of them.
* Commonplace violence against them.
* Common use of robots in everyday life - this will help both with the cost and acceptance by the public.
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I can see a simple set of steps which might lead to a robotic police force.
1: First the military has a strong incentive to replace troops with drones and robots. A drone might cost a couple of million but photos of troops coming home in bodybags costs far more.
We're already seeing the transition in the american military. Drones are cheap and expendable compared with soldiers.
So it's only a matter of time before the military develops highly capable ground infantry capable of operating in urban environments.
So now you have a production line producing robots soldiers.
2: So the up-front costs of production are shouldered by the military which massively reduces the price for other consumers.
The companies making them want to expand their market share so they're likely to give some a new paint job and some software updates to try to sell them to the police. Is there a shootout where you're afraid that officers are going to die? Send in the robots! They're fast, they're politically expendable and they follow the law with a rigidity beyond that of any human. They're not going to put the boot in when the suspect is on the ground and they can follow procedure perfectly. The recordings from their cameras are even admissible in court when it comes time to try the gunmen.
Now we have some police forces with a small reserve of robots.
3: During staff shortages in some districts they're trialed for more routine use. Public complaints of abuse go down, conviction rates go up and even when mixed with human officers they're like badge-cams on steroids since all the other officers know they're being recorded.
4: Roll on a few years and more and more forces have realized that a highly robotic force has a lot of advantages. They still need some humans for the person-facing and management side of police work but more and more beat-cops are being replaced by robots. The unions hate it particularly after a string of convictions of officers for criminal behavior recorded by robot officers and in some regions there's massive strikes and conflict to try to resist their introduction. But they're popular with the public and ultimately most police forces end up going almost totally robotic.
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Because the Government or ruling elite had reduced its citizens to binary digits and had no emotional connection to them.
Therefore the Police would need to only react to yes and no conditions.
For example Q from Robotcop to Citizen. "Why are you talking to the zero binary digit. You are only allowed to converse with the binary digits in your own matrix. You have not been allocated additional memory to cope with the imagination necessary to understand what a zero binary digit is speaking as he comes from a world that is not controlled"
As our world becomes more controlled and at the same time the existing World Order is no longer able to direct behavior then it requires more force to prevent it collapsing.
Having a Police Force that could turn on its own Government as it tried to repress it citizens because they would not accept for example, a lower wage structure or forced movement due to climate change would not suit them.
Much better to have a robot-cop who will not listen to any discussion and will respond immediately with an arrest or the use of force should you be outside the permissible programmed parameters.
You only have to see how David Cameron interacts with his citizens to see that governments is slowly moving away from its people. The bigger the distance the less democracy we have and the more force they use to control
us.
Even our still human Police have become more robotic in their interface with us. As soon as you disagree with them - then out come the cuffs. So how much better a robot cop who you cannot argue with.
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While robots can be expensive people are really, really expensive.
The average cost to raise a child in the USA is about 1/3 of a million dollars. A pop. To maintain population, you have to supply your workers with enough money to raise their own kids at replacement rates (aka, a living wage).
If we throw on top of it the costs to maintain morale and food and shelter and post-work care for the humans, plus training and insurance and the like, the cost to employ a single human over a 30 year span can easily reach 5 million dollars. These humans have about 75% downtime (they only work 1 hour in four!), and their performance degrades and costs increase if they are run for longer.
If you manage 50% uptime on your robots and a 20 year lifetime, if maintenance + construction costs are as high as 7 million dollars they are going to be competitive even if they are no better or worse at the job.
The political cost of dead police officers is large, let alone financial, and training police officers to risk their lives to save the lives of citizens they interact with is difficult (even if you value both the non-police and police lives equally). Doing so with robot police may be easier, where you can risk a robot police officer "death" in order to ensure the safety of the public. This is similar to the advantage drones offer in the military: they can risk being shot down to fullfill their mission.
Politically, creating a manufacturing base beholden to your good graces is a great way to get contributions and reinforce both your parties and personal political and non-political income streams. Unions tend to be less effective at this, and union contributions as a whole tend to be party-aligned not just kickback-based: the members of the union often object to their money going to a party they don't personally support, while shareholders are held at a longer reserve. And very few unions make a practice of mass-hiring former politicians and senior public administrators after they retire or when they go on sabbatical.
So even if they are inefficient, there is a reason for politicians, think-tanks and manufacturers to "sell" the idea to the public.
Finally, if robots are capable of being a police officer, we are going to be close enough to strong AI that making most humans obsolete to those that command the heights of the economy is in sight. Feeding those millions of people who aren't providing services to those that own the capital is wasteful of good land that can be used as a hunting preserve, or a nature retreat, or just a good view out their window. An armed police force may identify more with the peons than the ownership caste, and a small number of technicians and industrialists may be suborned with wealth easier than a mass police force.
Even without that situation, a disarmed populance and an automated and armed police force could reduce the risk of coup or revolution.
So there are strong incentives to *sell* the idea above and beyond any actual practical advantages. The practical advantages, together with incentives to sell it, should provide a strong enough reason to deploy it when it becomes technically possible. A capital or state subsidized mass media can be directed to make the baseline assumption "of course this is better", and automation successes in earlier less "fraught" human-interaction tasks will normalize it for the populance.
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I would rather have a robot arrest me than a human. No human has the right to touch me or force me to do anything. A robot isn't human therefore they can and I will respect it.
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After thousands of years the mightiest of magic uses have finally cracked the code to revive the dead... Kind of. The resurrection spell, while restoring the body to a basic capacity, leaves them a mindless shambling husk, constantly rotting and never truly fixed, with the poor soul mindlessly attacking anything it sees unless controlled by the necromancer that revived it.
Now, ignoring all the moral boundaries this breaks, most of the empires in my setting have decided to, beside other things, weaponize these zombies and (unlike every other story about zombies) this actually works, and just in time for my setting's equivalent of WW1.
Some basic characteristics of these zombies include:
* Not needing to eat or sleep
* Are able to run surprisingly quickly for a short amount of time
* Most basic injuries from when they were killed being healed but no super regenerative powers after that
* Completely obedient to their necromancer but lack any higher thinking (no using guns)
* Necromancers are able to effectively control 100 zombies but are only able to give out basic commands beyond that
* Can be controlled within a half mile radius
* Necromancers can resurrect bodies from a distance (though seeing the corpse helps)
* Tend to avoid attacking fellow zombies unless controlled to do so
* Necromancers make up five out of every thousand regular solider
* Are noticeably weaker
* Older zombies have the appearance and smell of constantly rotting
* Can be taken out by a headshot
With all that said, how might zombies/necromancers affect WW1-styled trench warfare?
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As described, zombies would not make a significant difference to most combat.
Firstly, they are not available in large enough numbers to send overwhelming hordes across no mans land. Taking the British Army as an example (for no better reason than their casualty figures came up first in Google...) the British mobilized 8.375 million men in total. Of those, something over 702,000 were killed. However, many of those bodies were unrecoverable, and still more would, presumably, not have been suitable for reanimation due to excessive damage at the time of death. Our number of zomibifiable bodies will have to be a bit of a guess, but based on the rule of thumb that about one third of a combat unit will become casualties, one third of the casualties will die, we could extend the rule of thumb to say one third of fatalities cannot be reanimated. That will leave us with around 468,000 zombie troops - throughout the entire War. If over 8 million wasn't enough to sweep resistance aside, another half a million probably isn't going to change things all that much.
Plus ALL sides in your war have this capability, therefore one side does not gain an advantage the other lacks by doing this.
Zombies simply aren't all that useful as infantry. They can't operate firearms, so all they can do is advance across no mans land were they will be mown down by the enemies artillery. Humans will at least crouch and try and use what cover they can to advance. As described it seems that the zombies will do is walk slowly towards the opposing trench line making them extremely susceptible to shell fire. I would also imaging small arms fire hitting the legs would probably immobilise a zombie in the muddy environment of many WWI battlefields.
The best I can see is that after a successful attack the attacker takes some time to regroup and can now make a second push, but this time about one in three of the advancing troops is a zombie that can at least soak up a bullet that might have hit a still living soldier. However, you have now diluted your capability for fire superiority, so even that might not be an advantage.
Then there is the morale issue - imagine the horror of seeing your best mate get killed, only to find yourself standing next to him again. Of course, you could mitigate this by only raising the enemies dead and give them the problem of shooting at their former friends.
So zombies don't appear to be much use as assault infantry. Are there other military tasks they can perform to free up other soldiers? Again, almost any task worth doing requires at least some intelligence and self direction. They might be able to assist with casualty evacuation - a stretcher bearer that doesn't mind getting shot too much is definitely useful! Anything that increases the survival rates of wounded soldiers is good (although again this is only a force multiplier if you can do it and your opponent can't).
Zombies could potentially replace horses as draught animals where speed isn't an issue, and shortage of horses was a real problem, but that is still not going to win the war.
Zombies might have use as a terror weapon - send a small unit into the enemy's rear, massacre a bunch of civilians, reanimate them and then set them loose. The enemy has to divert resources to clearing up the infestation.
Collecting bodies to turn into zombies would be a good task for zombies to do - particularly since you could never know if the pile of bodies were really dead, or were actually zombies waiting to attack who ever came along to clear them away. (Escape and Evasion is left as an exercise for the necromancer in this case...)
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**Raising the enemy in their camp**
The necromancer rides aboard a low-flying fighter aircraft above the enemy camp. In the enemy camp there are hundreds of dead and wounded lying in trenches and hospital tents. As he passes overhead, the necromancer breathes new life into these enemy corpses, who rise to tear at their former comrades.
**Sneak attacks through water**
The undead don't eat which I take to mean they have no metabolism and don't need to breathe either. The necromancer uses a submarine to guide his undead to walk along the sea floor at night, emerging on the beach to strike the enemy where he least expects.
Undead are also unbothered by poison gas.
**Undead Paratroopers**
A cargo plane is loaded with corpses and a necromancer, and flown over the enemy target. The corpses are dropped to earth, a violent process as there's no need for a parachute. The necromancer raises them after they fall, healing both the injury that killed them and any injuries from falling out of the airplane.
**Burning and destroying corpses**
When your side doesn't have a necromancer in the area, you have to burn your corpses or thoroughly destroy their heads, so that an enemy necromancer doesn't raise them in your camp.
Many soldiers carry a "suicide charge" which is a small explosive under their hat that they can detonate in a dire situation, so the enemy can't raise them as undead. They will often do this against the orders of their officers - because they have a deathly fear of being raised as undead for their *own* side too.
**Demolitions**
Zombies might not be able to aim guns effectively, but they can be loaded with explosives and told to approach an enemy ground target such as a bridge support. The zombie just has to push a button when it gets to the target. The zombie has become a guidance system for a bomb, similar to how pigeons were experimented with in WW2 as bomb guidance systems.
**Carrying supplies**
You don't need as many freight trains when you have a thousand undead to shamble along with rations and ammunition for the men. Logistics are simplified.
**Little value in open combat**
The undead are ill-suited to open combat as they do not use guns and the enemy has machine guns. One machine gun could mow down thousands of dumb zombies in the open. And it's not like you're aiming the machine gun, you're just spraying bullets across the whole area. So the zombies wouldn't even provide much cover for the normal infantry among them.
Undead would still be used in open combat, but their true value would be sneak attacks and logistics.
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**Barbed Wire**
This was used a lot on WW1 - but with a mindless horde - you'd see a lot more usage to entangle a zombie horde and make easy pickings.
**Snipers**
Again, lots of precedent in WW1 here - however the role would change to be purely about taking out enemy necromancers. In order to give orders, they would have to see or otherwise be able to know what was happening on the battlefield - making the spotting and sniping of them a top priority.
**Switch to intermediate cartridges before WW2**
If zombies are much weaker, then there is the potential to move from the standard infantry round(s) of the day (8mm Mauser, .303, 30-06, 7mm French etc.) to a smaller round, potentially even as small as a .22 - not needing to do as much 'damage' to take out a zombie would mean that having a small cartridge makes sense - greater ammo carrying capacity, less recoil, potential for full-auto infantry portable weapons, etc.
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**Wouldn't change that much.**
Your implicit assumptions is that the Zombies could run over the trenches as opposed to humans as they are not afraid to die.
But getting to the first enemy trench through no-mans-land was not the main problem in WWI. You see trenches had several lines. The main problem was getting to the second or third line. In a usual attack, your artillery fires at the first trench, your enemy hides or gets stalled by this fire and your infantry runs and takes the first trench. But now your artillery cannot fire at the second trench as it cannot reach it (enemy also has his defenses(artillery) in place.
Your infantry sits without heavy gear in the first trench and enemy with its heavy gear in second trench, which it can resupply from backup lines, while you need to resupply through no-mans-land (which is now under fire and reachable by enemy artillery). Sooner or later you pull back. I don't see may leeway how zombies could help that much here. It may deplet the enemies amunition faster, but the logistical challenge was more on artillery shells than on small weapon/MG ammo.
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Something I haven't seen anyone mention so far is infection. Depending on how your magic works, this may not be an issue, but if the rotting appearance is accompanied by actual pathogens, then you risk severely increasing the rate of infection in wounded troops by having them share trenches with zombies. And I'm not talking about zombie contagion here, just normal infection. I'm assuming since these are magical revenants, that zombie contagion is not an issue.
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## Flamethrowers
Flamethrowers would become a lot more prevalent, and that dry, rotting flesh will catch like pitch. You would most likely see defensive flame-nests along the trenched. There would also be the added bonus of people now laying incendiary mines. If your people develop tanks, then those could be used to squish zombies while the onboard machine guns try and hit the necromancer.
## Explosives
Also, landmines, handgrenades, and artillery could become quite effective at shredding enemy zombies beyond reanimation.
Side note: you could slash fallen enemies Achilles tendons, to prevent them from being mobile/walking
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**Guerrilla warfare**
Your necromancers aren't especially useful in open trench warfare, but they can cause absolute havok behind enemy lines. Can they raise dead from graveyards? Every small town has a graveyard. Issue instructions to the zombies to "hide for three days, then march north and kill everyone in the small village over there". Move on to next town.
Troops and weapondary have to be diverted from the front. Zombies can be commanded to pull up train tracks (WWI ran on rail transport to the front) or simply run onto the line in huge numbers. Resurrect some cows for this.
If it's only control that is lost when they get more than a few miles out, slaughter some cattle, sheep, goats, etc. Command small groups to "run in that direction. Kill any humans you meet except me". Repeat for random directions. Dealing with a furious zombie bull and its angry sheep sidekicks is going to take serious weaponry.
You'll wreck morale, collapse food production, cause villagers to wall themselves in rather than working the fields, and force the army to hunt a bunch of zombies issued instructions designed to make them time consuming to hunt down. Soldiers will begin worrying that their families may be killed by zombies. Some may desert to go defend the family farm.
If it's hot and dry, zombies could be given incendiary grenades. They may not be able to think, but instructions like "run for 10 days then pull this pin" might be understandable. Again, more chaos and terror for troops at the front, less food and resources for the country.
Cities are harder, but not impossible. Can your necromancer resurrect rats? lots of them in cities. Cities will be easy to defend with a small number of troops, but a crafty necromancer may be able to, say, blow up armament factories with zombie rats and timed explosives.
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# Trench warfare would change faster and secondary tasks
Trenches were captured by throwing men at the trench. It was a wasteful way of just throwing men at a problem and hoping enough survived to capture it. Especially with the introduction of machine guns this was a costly endeavour. The trenches led to stalemates. Even taking a trench or two would just mean you've moved the front just a bit further. The next trenches are near certainly already dug, waiting with new cannon fodder.
It feels to me a swarm of zombies are too easily foiled due to their lack of intelligence and coordination. A small ditch just before a trench might be enough to have them fall over. Even if you add a healthy dose of explosives to them for a suicide mission I doubt they will reach the enemy trench, even if you throw an absurd anount against them. It would be a help by reanimating the soldiers you lose when you throw men at them, but motivating your troops will be more difficult. If they run at the enemy they might not just die. They might return as an unholy abomination. I think fewer will be inclined to march over a field.
## Faster exchange of trenches
I do feel trenches would exchange quicker. Because people die all the time, even without masses of men thrown at the problem. Best is to pair the necromancers with sharpshooters as a spotter. The moment an enemy dies, they resurrect them. An immediate ally within the enemy line. This also prevents backlash from your own troops getting reanimated. Hopefully with direct control they can still pull pins of grenades or set to frenzy normally. The moment the enemy trench is distracted you can throw men at the problem as you wish, but if the zombie can kill some extra for more zombies you're golden.
This would make trenches more vulnerable from zombies. Though trenches will exchange hands more often, it is hard to understate what kind of horrible meat grinders they were. Adding zombies will just accelerate death and destruction, but will probably not change WWI much.
## Secondary tasks
The zombies cannot use guns. However, they can probably do much more simple tasks. They might be used for something as simple as bringing supplies to the front. Give them a box and a direction. Depending on the complexity allowed, they might dig trenches or move messages. It might not be directly apparent when they are useful, but many menial tasks might be done by them, assisting a front better than any blind rush over no man's land can do.
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Some things that came to mind when reading this:
## Life Savers
The first was the enormous potential to prevent the death of (living) soldiers by sending zombies to perform high-risk tasks. In war, the enemy's defense structure is constantly tested by sending forces to discover vulnerabilities. If a vulnerability is found, a larger attack is organized that involves more troops and equipment. This task could easily be replaced by a battalion of zombies observed from a distance by a necromancer (or more). Once vulnerabilities are found, an even larger zombie attack could follow, breaking the cohesion of the enemy line. At the end, the live soldiers could properly occupy that territory.
## Cost Savers
The second thing is the enormous cost savings this would generate on the front, as these are soldiers who don't need to eat, don't need clothes, don't need rest, and who can even walk until complete exhaustion (assuming they can even exhaust themselves) without complaining about their situation. All of this would lead to savings in transportation and supplies, and in some cases even able to battle with completely cut supply lines, as consumption is so low.
## Problems
However, there may be some negative points that could arise. One of them is that a zombie-only attack would need to be massive in scale. The Battle of Isandlwana between the British and the Zulu kingdom had a ratio of about 10 Zulus to 1 British soldier. A zombie force would need an even greater ratio, since they are unable to carry weapons and are even more difficult to maneuver in the midst of a battle. Additionally, we are dealing with a conflict against a more modern military force. The problem here is that large concentrations of troops present a massive target for artillery and make it easy for enemy scouts to identify and locate them.
## The Real Use IMO
In this scenario, it seems that zombies would be better utilized as slaves to transport materials from one point to another or to conduct guerrilla attacks behind enemy lines, even carrying out terrorist attacks in large cities, imagine the suburbs of Paris having 10 people under your command who won't question your orders and have an intrinsic desire to kill.
## Some other questions to think about
1. Would leaders execute prisoners, civilians or even they own soldiers in order to avoid costs and obtain full control of them?
2. How the necromancers would act living as civilians? They are practically a one man army
3. What would be the new ways of treating a body?
4. How religions around the globe view and react about the undead?
Hope they have some strong coffins in this world.
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The main questions I would have is whether the zombies were capable of doing tasks like clearing obstacles or digging trenches and can zombies be resurrected more than once?
Over all though this would render every side more like the Russians in WII with all sides just throwing more and more zombies against each other hoping the other guy will run out of bullets and artillery shells. There would also be a greater emphasis on spies, snipers, and commandos to neutralize the other sides Necromancers.
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Since we are talking about necromancy and dead body, let's trash all semblance of morale and modify those bodies to carry plagues, radioactive weird stuff whatever that should not be viable due to the hazard nature to the host of the tool.
Send those zombies infested with maggots and flies, and let them trying to kill those stuff, spreading toxic flesh and cadaver all over the place.
if they figure it out make dem zombie dig a tunnel underneath and give them bombs, walking toxic minefield.
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Its a matter of just how many zombies, and if both sides have them.
Dumb, cheap and fearless is *great* for human wave attacks.
A few things I'd do is, since they don't need 'great' vision, would be to throw on helmets to prevent headshots. Throw on explosive backpacks and just march them into the enemies lines in massive numbers.
If the enemy has barbed wire, just make them walk into it and snarl it up.
Most importantly they have no morale issues and won't break. This renders 'traditional' infantry in large numbers less useless. You can only shoot and otherwise attack so many shambling undead before it takes a toll.
They'd also basically 'deplete' ammunition reserves shooting at these so you'd likely have different tactics to deal with them.
Since 'effective' tank warfare needs infantry support, and tanks debuted in WW1, unless the necromancers NEEDED to be on the ground, I'd sit them in a tank or AFV (since they'd be a high value target), not very different from a regular or command tank.
If they are unarmed, you'd likely also see combat use of things like mineflails and unusual physical other weapons to deal with them.
This also means you'd minimise 'regular' infantry with fewer, more specialised units. Your dead could be used to replenish enemy ranks. You'd probably behead burn or otherwise render your dead unusable for use as undead fodder if you can't recover them.
Depending on the rules of war, its also possible that forces might massacre enemy civilians and revive them as weapons, so getting people *out* of the conflict zones is more important.
Also to risk stealing an idea, if you didn't need the resurrected to be human, you could probably use an undead armoured elephant or bear as a fairly terrifying weapon.
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By "biological brain in a box" AKA [Brain in a vat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat) I mean a robot which holds a physiologically normal human brain, and produces identical input / output as would be produced by a healthy human body (sensorial input, blood with nutrients, and output moves robot joints).
Suppose that the technology is very reliable and that the holder machine never breaks, and that the brains are not genetically altered from that of modern human beings.
I use the word biological to differentiate from a silicon simulation of brain activity.
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Disclaimer: I'm no psychologist nor am I too well versed in human biology.
I expect that these robots will have a higher life expectancy than normal humans since they are immune/resistant for many natural causes of death. That said, I still don't think that they will be immortal, nor live much longer than maybe 80-130 years (on average).
Why that? Well, human brains still consist of cells, and cells have a life span of their own. During their lifetime, they can replicate themselves, but the number of "cell generations" has a limit. Every new cell generation loses a bit of DNA information (normally some garbage DNA, but once that is used up, "real" DNA content goes missing), so the maximum lifetime of a human brain is fixed in this regard.
Also, don't forget about the human psyche itself. Humans originally were at the peak of their lifespan at an age of 30-40 (think of some thousands of years ago), so our brains development reflects on that. People after 30 are not that flexible in their mind anymore, and older people (60+) might begin to feel deficiencies in their minds ("getting senile") that grow stronger the longer they keep on living, until some of them aren't capable of caring for themselves anymore. (This might be caused by cellular degradation, but I think it might be anchored deeper in human psychology itself, although I don't have any sources to back that up right now.)
**So, just having an "immortal" body does not mean that the mind can handle that long of a lifetime.**
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If this machine is as reliable as indicated, then diseases that kill the brain but originate from other organic failures (liver failure, heart disease) would be gone. You would still have to worry about cancer, but since you only have a single body part capable of getting cancer that also is at a much lower risk. All in all, the brain is still vulnerable, but removing ways that kill you not originating from the brain should increase the expected lifespan of a significant fraction of the population.
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The problems I have with the scenario of a "brain in a vat" remind me of the problems I had with the movie "Interstellar", in which astronauts try to find a planet to which humans could emigrate because planet earth's ecosystem is degrading.
*Whatever the state of earth's ecosystem, it will be orders of magnitude closer to what we need than any exoplanet.*
The reason is that we are very well adapted to it, because we evolved together. The same is true for our bodies with respect to our brains, compared to any "exobody".
More radically, the notion of a brain distinct from our body is missing the point as fundamentally as the notion of a humankind distinct from earth.
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Yes, an isolated brain SHOULD have a substantially extended lifespan, with a few caveats.
For starters, removing the biological body should eliminate many other reasons for premature death (infection, trauma, organ failure, cancer) which will boost the average life expectancy. This assumes the synthetic body is at least as effective as our biological ones and allows for easy replacement of worn parts. The brain case may also be much better at protecting the brain, preventing microtrauma and coup-contrecoup injury from impacts. Cerebrospinal fluid (well, maybe just cerebral fluid now) would be full all the time, so no dehydration related increase in brain injury.
Second, isolating the brain should allow for a "perfect" diet for maintenance of non-neural support structures (preventing cholesterol plaque buildup in the blood vessels, appropriate nutrients with omega-3 fatty acids, etc) which will optimize the potential of the organic tissue. This assumes a thorough understanding of the nutrient requirements of the tissue and an ability to supply these organic and non-organic nutrients. Doping the brain with telomerase and other substances (at this level of tech, probably tailored viruses and nanomachines) to prevent/repair genetic damage, telomere depletion, and terminal blood vessel injury would prevent accumulation of eventually fatal damage to the brain and support structure.
Third, toxic substances/scenarios should be limited. Alcohol, for example, may not be a concern for an isolated brain. Fluctuations in blood pressure should be limited, both elevated pressure which could rupture blood vessels and cause strokes and drops in pressure which would lead to hypoxia. It may also be possible to inject protective compounds when necessary (for example, THC has been shown to be very protective in reducing traumatic brain injury following impact). Preventing heavy metal toxicity may reduce some debilitating neural diseases (some linkage to Alzheimer's) and prevention of infection may also help.
Presumably isolation from the body would cause SOME problems though. There is literature to suggest that some neurotransmitters are actually manufactured by the GI tract, so that would have to be replicated. Even if synthetic blood can replicate O2/CO2 exchange and waste removal, the immune system and some sort of bone marrow analogue would be necessary. A stockpile or means of generating pluripotent stem cells would also be necessary, as we learn more about the brain it does not appear to be as static as we once thought. There are also feedback mechanisms that reply on organs south of the brain, these would have to be artificially regulated. There are also protective neurologic reflexes and sympathetic/parasympathetic feedback systems that would have to be replicated in a synthetic body lest the isolated brain fail to respond appropriately to damaging external stimuli.
Psychologically of course eliminating the biological body carries an enormous risk. We rely heavily on feedback from our body to develop our psyche and conduct the "normal business" of living. For example, folks with a feeding tube who no longer need to eat report a significant drop in quality of life because the dopamine reward system associated with physically tasting and chewing food is now absent. I suspect, much like the examples provided by Robocop 2, it would require a special psyche to be able to adapt to a synthetic body unless it PERFECTLY recreates the experience of being human. Otherwise supplanting the body's reward mechanisms with drugs would probably be pretty common.
EDIT: I'll mention some other considerations that tangentially at least will affect brain lifespan. Currently at least, interfacing biologic systems with synthetic ones is very problematic. Even something like a prosthetic limb causes irritation where it joins the body. For an isolated brain nerve endings would have to mate with synthetic components, both for sensory input and for motor action. Now there is some possibility that you could induce sensory input/derive motor output remotely by magnetically reading the brain and stimulating certain areas but this would probably be VERY low bandwidth for quite some time. So instead you have to hook up cranial nerves (there are twelve pairs of them) to sensors, at least the important ones for vision, smell, taste, etc. So a biological nerve interfacing with a synthetic sensor, even if it doesn't directly connect (instead using some sort of neurotransmitter gap) will typically stimulate an inflammatory reaction. This can be downregulated with corticosteroids/immunosuppressants, and indeed without a body and bone marrow the isolated brain may have NO INTRINSIC IMMUNE SYSTEM, thus it would be very vulnerable to any introduced microorganism, so it's nutrient supply and components would have to be rigorously sterilized and the cerebral fluid would need constant monitoring so anti-microbial anti-biotics/nanites could be introduced. But an immune system also helps destroy emerging cancer cells, so there would have to be a system to perform that task as well. Now it is possible that your synthetic body is in fact at least partly organic itself (i.e., built using carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins, utilizing chemical gradients and biochemical processes rather than mechanical ones) which may reduce the inherent difficulty in getting organic tissue to work well with mechanical parts (I'll just assume that graft vs host rejection has been resolved at this tech level). You also have to consider how you would map the severed spinal cord trunk to whatever interface conducts motor neuron impulses to the synthetic body (as it seems like you intend for this brain to have a humanoid robot body). This process is difficult to mass produce because currently our brains "learn" which neurons do what as we grow and the spinal cord wiring isn't necessarily the same from person to person. But it ought to be roughly similar enough that a new brain/body would have some level of control, but they would have to go through some intensive physical therapy while their brains rewires itself to accommodate the way the new body functions. This spinal cord interface would also have the same organic/machine interface problems as sensory nerves.
Anyway, very long winded way to say that the complexities of the brain/machine interface itself could lead to degradation, inflammation, and serve as a nidus of infection. Constant low level inflammation is associated with increased incidence of cancer. So it is quite possible that an entire new set of diseases crops up around these hybrid organisms, which may negatively impact their lifespan.
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Brains get sick and die, just like the rest of our organs. That said, removing all the other causes of death from the equation would increase life span, sure.
However, even brains in a box (or whatever) would be susceptible to prion diseases (such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), neuro-degenerative diseases (such as Parkinson's disease), biological agents (some microbes cause damage to our brains) and eventual death. Nothing has an indefinite half-life, and all the cells in our bodies die off over time, brain cells included.
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One thing often referred to in the medical world around life/death situations is the "quality of life". When one's own limb is damaged a significant amount of rehab is undergone in order to recover. This is not only physical but also a very emotional process. Depending how advanced this "robot" is will severely impact the true extension of life. Even if the input/outputs are the same imagine your voice, sight, abilities, sexuality, and everything you know changing in an instant. I simply don't think it would be possible to maintain the "quality of life" and the individual would feel trapped. So in this way it is in my opinion that an older brain (assuming that's when this would take place based on your question) would be far to tired to handle the stress of the transplant and rehab.
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I can't give a number, but it might be helpful to know that cells themselves age and degrade with time. That is to say, cells are replaced throughout life by newer cells made to cell division, but the new cells will be identical to the previous, including age.
I'm not very good at explaining it, but eventually the cells will still degrade and break down, or the DNA gets damaged, and you will die. It would probably give a significant increase to lifespan because the brain is the only organ left to die.
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Well let's say a roboter has the human brain and it's shielded from radiation and other attacks from outside you could most likely live forever.
**Why is this?**
1. You have no vulnerable body parts.
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> You are shielded by some sort of metallic body and therefore can't be killed that easily.
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2. Science is way more developed.
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> It's not that important for your specific question, but if we assume, that we can connect a human brain to a life supporting vessel and can get signals from it without failure, there will be advanced biology as well. The reason for us to get older is, that every time our cells devide you loose a bit of your DNA ("blueprint"). With advanced technology we will be able to make our DNA very long so we live a lot longer. If you now also look at the fact, that the cells of the brain devide slower than average cells we could live really long.
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So in conclusion I would say, that ones life expectancy would be considerable increased.
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I'm no biological scientist but some concerns come to mind regarding the complexity required to actually sustain the brain:
* Immune system: with no facility to create white blood cells (e.g. bone marrow) how will disease and pathogens be controlled?
* Hormone control: since the brain largely produces and depends upon hormones that usually go into/from the body, how will the level of all hormones be controlled
* Stimulus: Since the brain would be a living thing it would need a similar range of stimuli as a human being otherwise its entire structure may change and potentially become far removed in function from its intended form.
I think it would all depend on how advanced the infrastructure is - you're talking about thousands of years of continuous improvement versus a few years of development
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A combination of regenerative stem cell treatments and cancer targeting oncolytic viruses could keep the brain functioning even if the loss of neurons means the mind will gradually lose memories, which might actually be beneficial for maintaining sanity over an extended lifetime.
Or if the oncolytic viruses are too destructive (and assuming the regenerative treatments can keep up) the mind could be reduced to a confused childlike state, quick to learn but also quick to forget.
Phantom limb syndrome could also be a major issue, suddenly losing feedback from the heart, lungs, bowels and every other part of the body may cause the brain's automatic functions to react in unpredictable ways.
Still, live forever or die trying ;)
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Brains can not regenerate neurons without stamina cells which it has in low quantity.
If stamina cells is provided then it could have an incredibly longer lifespan.
Given the brain is perfectly protected from any external danger
The only thing that could kill it is ''poop''
Brain cells stack up piles of waste inside them until it kills them.
Having a system that cleans the cells would make the brain immortal.
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I think there's two possible answers to this problem. We could assume that our "vat" is only as good or worse at maintaining a functioning brain as a human body would be, in which case the brain-in-a-vat would only have a lifespan equivalent to a sequestered full-body human. The other answer would be to assume that the "vat" incorporates technology that prevents some number of the ways that human brains could die or grow old, or all of them, in which case the brain could live longer or indefinitely.
The problem with the second kind of answer is, why couldn't we apply these technologies to full-body humans? Telomere lengthening, perfect diets (even full control of metabolism through constant blood replacement), enhanced cellular waste disposal, etc (to take few ideas from other answers) don't only work on brains.
To fit a story, perhaps you might say that keeping someone immortal is expensive and costs more per unit biomass, so going brain-only is thrifty.
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@hoffmale has as great answer! That said, while not increasing life expectancy directly, the indirect affects could increase an otherwise doomed physical existence. Of course, none of this discussion takes into account the mind or soul and the part that plays in a persons existence. But let's set that aside for now and just assume it transfers with a person's consciousness, as dictated by a normally active and functioning brain.
**Let's start with the brain.**
It will still need to be "fed" oxygen and other critical nutrients. These nutrients could be fed "pure", filtering out all of the contaminants that can cause disease and decay. This in itself could prolong life and make the "person" impervious to toxic environments, short term anyway, and disease.
The "vat" or brain bucket, cranium, whatever you want to call it, can be made of much tougher materials than organic bone in addition to better impact dampening than is present in a human skull. Better brain protection can prolong life.
**This technology could also extend the life of a terminal patient.**
Transplant patients that can't get an organ in time, cancer patients, genetic defects, catastrophic injury, etc. These people would definitely see a longer life!
**Kids would benefit the most!**
Kids with these issues or genetic defects that seriously hinder quality of life would be able to experience a full life! If the transplant process is not too traumatic, you could, conceivably, transfer the child to larger more adult like robots as they matured. And if a child is best identified by their brain, would abortion continue to be legal?
**Think about the ramifications of halting death until its natural outcome was reached!**
* What breakthroughs could be made when a human brain inside a robot can withstand so much more?
* How much tragedy could be avoided and the after affects of that tragedy?
* What would the point of traditional war be?
* How many Einsteins, Mozarts, or Michaelangelos would emerge?
While the maximum number of years a person has might not be affected significantly, the life of the human race could potentially be extended.
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On a planet with Earth-like attributes in every way, including physics and geography, what repercussions would there be for a relatively deep 'dent' in one quadrant of the spherical body? This is only *slightly* related to [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2606/what-effects-would-there-be-for-a-hole-in-earth), as there are many key differences.
## ABOUT THE HOLE
It's about 2 thirds deep into the mantle, at its deepest point, of an Earth-sized planet, ie. there is one third of the mantle remaining at the deepest point of a rather steep hole.
In the image below, the red area represents the hole (deeper than I wanted but never mind).
Assume the worst - this isn't a hole in the middle of an ocean, you can already see that it takes out some of a polar ice cap, and a lot out of the equator, so there's going to be a lot of land that disappears.
I'd prefer answers that are structured like a relative-to-hole-appearing timeline; with a few years after, a few hundred years after, a few thousand and a few million (or whatever you like) that gives local updates on how everything is coping with this dent.
I'd like to see the following things covered in this post:
* Gravity and overall physics of both the planet and its Moon-sized moon.
* Geography; what happens to the land around this dent? The oceans?
Please note than in this question, the reason as to why this dent exists is, for the sake of this question, ***magic***
**As a side note:** I will be splitting this question into at least two parts. The following will be posted in another question, of which the link will be placed *here*.
* Ecology; how do living things cope and interact due to this dent?
* Meteorology; does this dent get rained on? Does it generate unusual weather somehow?
* And anything else you think is essential that I missed
[Answer]
The Earth is round because it is in [hydrostatic equilibrium](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_equilibrium): its gravity is strong enough, and the material comprising most of its bulk fluid enough, to make it flow into the shape that minimizes its gravitational potential energy: a sphere.
As a fairly reasonable analogy, you can think of the Earth as behaving like a floating drop of water; while the forces that hold the Earth and the drop together are somewhat different (gravity for the Earth, surface tension for the water drop), the overall behavior is similar. The important thing to realize is that, when it comes to the overall shape of the planet, what matters is the gravity and the hydrostatic properties of the core and the mantle; the relatively thin solid crust on the surface is neither thick enough nor solid enough to make any significant difference.
Once you appreciate that, it should be obvious what would happen if a large piece of the Earth were to magically disappear somehow: **the remaining bulk of the planet would just flow into the hole, filling it.** Once things settle down, you'd just end up with a slightly smaller, but still spherical, Earth.
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Now, that's the long-term outcome. The slightly more interesting question is, what would happen in the short term? For that, I'll have to agree with the other answers: **utter chaos and destruction**. Basically, [as bowlturner notes](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/9329), cutting a large chunk out of the Earth would be very similar to, and only slightly less destructive, than hitting it with a large planetoid — like, say, [the one that produced the Moon.](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis)
Basically, here's a number of things that would happen:
1. **The atmosphere will flow down into the hole.** This will actually take several hours, since the wind speeds will only(!) rise to around [Mach 1](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_number). Indeed, the initial [rarefaction wave](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rarefaction) will only travel at Mach 1, so on the opposite side of the Earth, it will take a while for the air to start moving at all. Still, in less than a day (if nothing else interferes; see below), pretty much all of the atmosphere should be down in the hole, leaving the rest of the planet (temporarily) airless.
2. **The oceans will also flow down into the hole.** The speed at which this happens will depend somewhat on the location of the hole (but probably not as much as you'd think; see below). Sound travels about five times faster in water than in air, so the initial disturbance will circle the globe pretty fast, but the actual quasi-equilibrium flow rate may (initially) depend on undersea geography. In any case, you'll likely end up, briefly, with some of the biggest waterfalls ever seen on Earth (and [there have been some pretty big ones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood)).
As the water flows down into the hole, it will hit exposed magma and vaporize, joining the air that is also flowing into the hole. This will also cool the surface of the magma very efficiently, forming a thin solid crust, but since the magma will also be moving (see below), that crust is unlikely to be very stable.
Depending on geography, and the extent of crustal damage (see below), some standing bodies of water might be left in lakes and oceanic trenches. If so, as the atmosphere above them disappears down the hole, the pressure will drop until liquid water becomes unstable. [At that point](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point#Triple_points_of_water), the water will [boil and freeze at the same time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3zP9Rj7lnc); the part that boils will spread out as vapor (and, if it doesn't condense as frost, eventually end up in the hole with the rest of the atmosphere), while the rest will remain behind as solid ice. (If the ice gets thick enough, some liquid water might remain, trapped underneath it.)
3. **The lithosphere will *also* flow down into the hole.** Remember, I said that the Earth's mantle will flow under gravity until it becomes roughly spherical again. As the mantle flows, it will drag the crust along with it — but since the crust is solid (on short timescales, anyway), it's going to break up as it flows, much like [ice on moving water](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_ice). The size of the chunks is hard to estimate, but I'd expect them to range from dozens of kilometers (comparable to the thickness of the crust) up to maybe a few thousand (comparable to small [tectonic plates](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tectonic_plates) today) in diameter.
Besides causing the mother of all earthquakes, the breakup of the Earth's crust will open deep fissures all over the planet. That's why I said that undersea geography may not matter so much — many of these fissures will open up under oceans (where the crust is thinner anyway), some likely along existing [mid-ocean ridges](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-ocean_ridge), and the water will just flow into them and hit the exposed magma there.
The details of what happens next will depend on many things, like the depth of the water and the spreading rate of the fissure. Initially, at least in the deep ocean, the water can probably absorb the heat from the emerging magma, as it does in ordinary [undersea volcanic eruptions](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_eruption), but as the fissures keep spreading and the ocean keeps draining, eventually the remaining water may get hot enough to boil away.
So, over the first few minutes to hours after the hole forms, what we'll see (hopefully from a safe and comfortable vantage point, say, on Mars), is basically a massive avalanche of magma, water and air all rushing in to fill the hole. Without running an actual lithodynamic simulation, it's hard to say exactly how long it will take for this avalanche from hell to reach the middle of the hole (or, rather, to fill it up — of course, the magma will also be flowing up from the bottom of the hole), but when it does, it's likely to do something interesting.
[It will splash.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UZTj4pfpUk)
Basically, all that magma, water and air will accumulate a considerable amount of momentum as it rushes into the hole. Once it reaches the center, and meets the flow coming in from the other side, it has nowhere to go but up. And up it goes. Basically the same effect happens when you [drop a rock in water](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubzANfVlpAo): at first, it just basically makes a hole in the water, just like your magic hole in the Earth, but most of the splashing actually happens only when the water falls back into the hole.
Again, it's a bit hard to estimate the magnitude of the splash off the top of my head (though an experienced planetologist perhaps might), but I'd expect it to scatter at least some magma into the sky. Some might even escape the Earth's gravity entirely, but most will likely just fall back somewhere else on the planet. So, just after you thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, any surviving bits of the Earth's surface will likely experience **a rain of burning rocks** from orbit.
Finally, as the dust settles (literally), the remaining atmosphere of the planet (probably somewhat thinned by the splash, but augmented by a whole lot of water vapor and volcanic gases) will gradually settle down again. Most of the water vapor (which used to be oceans) will rain down again, at least once the surface cools down below the boiling point of water, and eventually the clouds will break up and the sun will shine on the surface once more.
(At least, that's if you're lucky, and all the extra heat, water vapor and volcanic outgassing isn't enough to kick off a [runaway greenhouse effect](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect) like on Venus. We don't really know enough about climate dynamics at such extreme conditions to say if such an equilibrium shift would even be possible on Earth, or if so, what would be needed to trigger it.)
---
OK, at that point, you may wonder what all the is going to do to any life there might be on the planet. Well, obviously, the simple answer is "nothing good". Indeed, I would expect all this destruction to kill off well over 99.99% of all life forms on the planet — what doesn't get crushed or burned or boiled might end up vacuum-frozen or just plain poisoned by toxic gases.
Still, life on Earth is pretty tenacious, and absolutely *everywhere*. There are microbes that [live inside solid rock](//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endolith), deep within the Earth's crust, and others that can tolerate anything from freezing to boiling. Short of actually melting the *entire* crust, I doubt it would be possible to exterminate *all* life on Earth (although a runaway greenhouse state as mentioned above, if possible, might just about do it).
Depending on the extent of the disruption, it's even possible that some multicellular organisms might survive — perhaps even some macroscopic land animals like insects, some of which might survive as eggs or pupae. I'm not seeing much hope for vertebrates, though, but if you *really* wanted to stretch plausibility, I just *might* buy a few fish surviving in some lucky refuge somewhere, perhaps in a deep frozen lake. That would be a pretty long shot, though.
[Answer]
Let's assume that The Dent just suddenly appeared because Magic, poof! and it's gone as if hit by a huge D-cannon of WH40k fame. It's replaced with nothing (vacuum).
## Minutes to years: Complete and utter destruction of everything on the planet.
Appearance of The Dent caused everything on the planet to jerk violently as the eccentricity and rotational momentum of the planet changes. Most living creatures die, depending on the size of the dent. Athmosphere became sucked into the void, creating winds of unprecedented force and hurricanes that last for years.
Eccentricity of the planet changes, and a new center of rotation is found. Depending on the relative position of Star-Planet-Moon, this might change orbit of the planet and/or orbit of the moon. It's not very likely that the planet's orbit changes significantly, but it might increase its eccentricity, meaning that difference in energy being delivered to the planet changes more than for real life earth (less than 10% of radiation change, not enough to dominate seasons). Changes in planet's rotational momentum change the cycle of night and day.
There is a reason why planets are more-or-less spherical. By being misshapen, depending on the depth of The Dent, planet-moon system will experience increased tidal forces. Potentially it can lead to destruction of either (that's how Saturn got it's rings) in the future.
If The Dent exposed deeper crust, mantle or, fingers crossed, the planet's core, expect extreme amount of hot debris and gases being released into the athmosphere. Also, since rocks underneath all that stuff surely contain some gaseous fraction, even if tiny, it is under extreme pressure, and with that removed, will explode. Plate tectonics stop working, as the molten inside of the planet rearranges itself. Total chaos. Fumes and debris cloud the athmosphere, expect a period of extremely hot greenhouse state for a time, followed by glaciation that lasts until all the fumes clean up (and provided the orbit is still okay to support life).
Also, if anything survives that, remember that magnetosphere is gone. Without magnetosphere directing a lot of solar wind towards the poles, expect that to simply hit earth.
Also, if the dent happen to have some connection to any ocean, expect that water will fill The Dent as well, evaporating while it does. Athmosphere follows.
## Hundreds to thousands of years: complete rearrangement of the planet
Provided the planet is not ripped apart, the surface is now toxic, blasted by cosmic radiation, unlike anything you'd expect from the planet before The Dent.
## Millions of years: A new planet that is
You might as well create something from scratch at this point. Anything is possible, but statistics show that your planet would be just another rocky barren world.
[Answer]
**The whole planet surface will crumble apart right away, and the atmosphere will be filled with volcanic dust. The planet will re-form into a sphere.**
All masses greater than a certain size form themselves into nearly-spherical objects because all mass attracts all other mass via gravitational force, and for something the size of a moon or greater, there is so much mass that it exceeds the ability of any arrangement of matter to retain any other large-scale shape than a sphere.
So, what Ilmari Karonen said, only much faster and more fluid than he describes for the "solid" parts of the planet. (There will be no kilometer-plus-sized chunks.) The crust with nothing to hold it up with fall apart immediately, and become an avalanche falling into the gap at great speed.
For example, see the speed with which the single volcanic eruption of Mount Saint Helens fell apart during its 1980 eruption:
The sideways velocity of the mountainside is estimated at over 330 miles per hour, and that's just one eruption.
Your scenario would lead to an immediate avalanche the size of a continent and the height of a moon. This would destroy the planet even if it weren't magma underneath. If it is magma under the crust, the shockwaves going around the crust will not only cause the whole crust to crumble apart, but will also cause the magma to be released everywhere. At the speed of propagation of shockwaves through rock. Because of this, I don't think what Ilmari Karonen wrote about oceans falling into the hole would have time to occur, because the shockwaves from the collapse would dissolve the crust under the oceans, and the large-scale planet deformity would readjust itself before oceans would have occasion to "flow into the hole."
[Answer]
The simple answer? It likely kills most life on the planet. If some magic just makes it disappear, poof there one minute, gone the next, it would be the least violent way to make it happen but, the next few months years would still be violent enough to be devastating.
There is a huge hole that need to be filled in. Lots of things are going to rush to fill it in as too. The mantle and magma will slide from the surrounding area and level out from the bottom up. the oceans will be pouring into the hole at an alarming rate, most of earths oceans could fit in a hole that size. Where the magma moves from under the crust, the crust will collapse causing terrible earthquakes (I'm guessing) beyond the 10 point Richter scale. The earth near the hole will begin to look like a cracked egg.
Back to the Oceans pouring in. Cold Ocean water pouring into hot magma will cause lots of steam, likely enough to blot out the sun for years. This would not only kill large parts of the ocean life but the plants would die from lack of light, and the animals slowly after as food continued to become scarce.
It would almost be as bad as being hit by a huge asteroid...
[Answer]
**Total armageddon**. In fact, virtually no answer posted to this already seems to have a real sense for the scales involved here, which are *phenomenal*.
At planetary scales, *all* matter effectively acts as a liquid. A planet is really best thought of, dynamically, as though it were a droplet of water, than it were a spherical chunk of solid rock. This is because at the speeds and scales involved, the resistance to deformation provided by intermolecular forces is negligible compared to larger-scale gravitational and kinetic (impact) forces. This is why that planets are spherical in the first place: it is essentially exactly the same reason as to why a droplet of water or other liquid will naturally assume a spherical shape without any other perturbing forces acting upon it.
Thus, the answer to this question is, in effect, the same as asking what would happen to a spherical droplet of water were that a hole of proportionate size and geometry made therein. The answer is that it would quickly reform into a slightly-smaller spherical droplet of water.
So the planet will do the same - it will "ooze" its way toward a somewhat-smaller sphere. In particular, the exposed material on the sides will tend to balloon out to fill the hole, while the rest of the planet contracts.
And that's why I say "total armageddon", because the crust on the rest of the planet will essentially break up like the thin crust of detritus floating on top of, say, a pot of food being cooked, or the oxide scale on a droplet of hot metal. And not only that, this will happen *very* fast - while it's actually "quite" incorrect to use the ordinary surface gravitational acceleration as the gravitational field has now become much more complicated, it still suffices as an order of magnitude - in particular with an order of magnitude of $10\ \mathrm{m/s^2}$, the magic of the metric system lets us rewrite with no calculation that this is $10\ \mathrm{(km/s)/ks}$ and so we get that after as little as a kilosecond (1000 s, about a short break; for comparison of this timescale to that of planetary phenomena keep in mind the orbital period of the ISS around the Earth is about 5.6 ks), things will already be happening at speeds on the order of *10 km/s* - vaporizy-strong speed and you can expect likewise several thousand km of displacement, i.e. the hole is already well on its way to healing at this point. Think about your liquid drop, again: it will seem to respond, in the scale of your perception, "instantly" to perturbations - well here, a kilosecond is the scale of "instant", just as for your everyday droplet a millisecond or less may be, and "non-instant" is thousands of kiloseconds (e.g. an orbit of Earth about the Sun, i.e. a year, takes 31 558 ks).
Hence, you can expect that the crust will be jumbled and broken apart and likely rapidly covered and melted by the exposed mantle material oozing out from underneath from the enormous, visible-from-space cracks (again, think about your pot with crust on top, breaking up) of widths measured in hundreds of km or more, propelled by the pressure underneath. The effect will be essentially like that of the impactor which formed the Moon against Earth: the most likely end state will be the complete conversion of the surface to a "magma ocean", meaning it is 100% liquid rock at temps exceeding 1000 °C. For anything living on the planet, it is a guaranteed, **100% fatality rate**. The only way to survive would be to not be on the planet in the first place while it's happening.
Over the very long term, this magma ocean will eventually resolidify and form a new crust, but in this case, the planet will be left with completely different terrain from when it started - effectively, it has been "reset to zero" geologically.
Regarding atmosphere, again, the answers here don't really do it justice: it will be a complete atmospheric replacement, as the exposed mantle material rapidly outgasses as the entire planet effectively becomes one single gigantic volcano (as in the actual vent itself, more or less). Once the planet has cooled and a new crust has formed and caked hard, the new atmosphere will have composition quite unlike the old one.
[Answer]
Look at the planning and findings of the Rosetta probe and its lander. The worldlet is shaped like a toy duck, with a huge eroded cleft almost chopping it in two. It's not fiction, but a real navigation and mapping nightmare.
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[Question]
[
In my fantasy world vampires exist, and most of the intelligent races can be turned into one. I try to make everything in this word kind of explainable by science, at least possible in our Earth.
I've encountered a problem: how would vampires avoid catching diseases when ingesting blood? Vampirism is a virus that can spread by blood and saliva, but if vampires needed the intelligent race's blood to survive, they would easily contract blood transmitted diseases. This would make it extremely hard for them to survive.
A bit about my vampires:
* If you survive a vampire bite, you will probably become one.
* Vampires don't live longer than normal. They live as long as they would if they weren't infected.
* Vampirism is a virus.
* There is a slow transformation a vampire has to endure, like canines falling one by one and larger ones growing in their place.
* They can't survive just on blood, they need other things too, but the virus demands blood.
* They can barely survive by drinking animal blood.
Would this type of vampire be viable? And what's a thing that could protect them from getting terribly ill by drinking a normal meal?
Edit: Yes, by them getting ill I mean by illnesses carried by the bitten ones, and the vampires are still alive and their bodies work very much like they did before the virus, the only main changes are on the digestive system.
[Answer]
**The Vampire Virus is ferociously territorial**.
>
> However, another immune cell specialises in killing cells that have a
> reduced number of MHC class I molecules on their surface – this cell
> is a natural killer cell or NK cell for short. When the NK cell finds
> a cell displaying fewer than normal MHC molecules it releases toxic
> substances, in a similar way to cytotoxic T cells, which kill the
> virally-infected cell.
>
>
>
Once infected, the host's immune system is modified to ignore the Vampire virus itself, but in order to ensure survival of the host, the Vampire Virus dramatically [enhances the host's production of Natural Killer cells](https://www.immunology.org/public-information/bitesized-immunology/pat%C3%B3genos-y-enfermedades/immune-responses-viruses), as well as other parts of the host's immune system, to ensure that any competing viruses or bacterial infections are annihilated before they can compromise the host's ability to continue spreading the vampire virus.
<https://www.immunology.org/public-information/bitesized-immunology/pat%C3%B3genos-y-enfermedades/immune-responses-viruses>
[Answer]
# Vampire biology is significantly different from other species
Every disease requires specific host attributes to reproduce and thrive. If the disease's requirements aren't met, it can't grow/spread. By altering the vampire's biochemistry, the new vampire becomes highly inhospitable to any bacterial or viral diseases that were afflicting it before transformation. We see example of this kind of selectivity in [bacteriophages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage). Bacteriophages will attack specific bacteria and only those bacteria, thus making them safe to treat humans.
There are number of ways that the vampire's biochemistry can change to make it inhospitable to diseases from lesser lifeforms.
## High Salt Blood
For example, let's say vampire blood is extra salty at 3.5% (similar to sea water). Normal human blood is 0.9% salt. A bacterial infection accustomed to low salt then thrust into a high salt environment is going to have a really hard time. Some bacteria would be able to survive the transformation but not many.
## Cellular Receptor Changes
Another approach might be to have the vampire virus rebuild the receptors on the host's cell walls. Without those receptors, the usual entry points bacteria and virus aren't there anymore.
## Gram-Negative Cell Walls
Or, the vampire virus changes the host's cellular structure to be [gram-negative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram-negative_bacteria). Examples of diseases caused by gram-negative bacteria include leprosy, tuberculosis, Lyme disease; all very hard to treat. If a vampire's basic biology shifted to being gram-negative, this gives the double benefit of being effectively incurable and also very hard to kill by poisons.
[Answer]
This is not really a problem. Blood does not carry a large number of pathogens and your stomach acid and immune system are quite capable of dealing with those that do arise.
I like a rare steak as much as the next person, the centre of the steak has uncooked ~~blood~~ myoglobin and this is safe, there are very few pathogens in blood (or myoglobin). Steak should be seared on the outside to kill bacteria on the surface, those bacteria have usually got onto the meat in the slaughter and handling process. The inside is clean.
If a vampire does bite someone with a blood-borne illness, like HIV, there still should be no problem. The blood will go to the stomach get mixed with acids, which kill most pathogens, through the intestine and out the end. Any pathogens that survive the stomach and intestinal enzymes will get excreted as there is no direct contact between the contents of our intestine and the blood. A few specialist bacteria can survive process of being eaten, but these are gut specialists.
If any pathogens do somehow manage to get past all these lines of defence, then the usual immune system can remove any that get into the blood. But there are probably far more bacteria on the surface of the apple that the vampire has for desert, than in the blood of the victim.
So there is no real danger of vampires from pathogens in blood, because there aren't any.
(regarding the fact that blood contains nothing special that other food doesn't contain: The virus changes behaviour to cause a blood obsession. It does this purely to spread through infected saliva. So vampires don't need blood, but they think they do because the virus has infected their brain)
[Answer]
# Cook the blood
Why searching for complicated biological solution ? As you not specify that vampire need freshblood, the vampire may, as normal human, cook their meals. This is the oldest way to prevent illness from food to happen. Will you ever consider eating raw pork meat? No, because you know it will get you parasites and all this kind of stuff.
They may for example made a blood soup with vegetables to get all the nutrient they need. More important, cooking, by linking the proteins, increases digestability and assimilation of the blood nutrient. They will bite only on selected target to contaminate them to avoid disease transmission like @Willk pointed it out. Nowadays human do that: for example, cow meat doesn't contain much parasites and bacteries, so some people like it raw and may enjoy it without much illness risk.
[Answer]
**They choose their victims carefully.**
A desperate vampire will bite whatever it can catch. Maybe this will be someone slow and diseased and the vampire might catch the disease. The stomach is pretty good at killing ingested pathogens - for example you would not get HIV from drinking blood but you might get syphilis on your mouth if you bit someone with sores on their skin. If you had syphilis sores on your mouth you could then catch HIV or hepatitis thru the sores. Desperate vampires become diseased vampires, who then become more desperate. Good stuff for stories!
A vampire with choices will choose its victim carefully. It will not want prostitutes or dissolute sickly folks. It will want young people who look healthy, with healthy habits. It needs to balance the youth and good health of the victim against the fact that the victim might effectively fight back and get away, or live with people who can readily come to his/her aid. These vampires might watch for some days before deciding on a victim.
[Answer]
Answer is pretty simple
* Viruses are capable of mutating DNA
* Only certain animal species are vulnerable to specific virus strains (swine flu/mad cow disease not affecting other animals without having the virus mutate)
So all you need is your vampire virus to mutate the DNA of the host enough to change it into another species that is different enough from humans that the traditional viruses cannot take root and multiply. In most cases you can handwave the specifics because science supports the fact that most viruses are targeted to specific species.
There are very few viruses that are cross species, but one example is the Bird Flu (H5N1) which can be deadly for most mammals including cases with humans, dogs, cats, etc.
Now it would be very possible for the human scientists to genetically engineer a virus that targets vampires only and might even be a variation of a deadly human virus such as small pox. Another possibility is a virus that can neutralize the vampire virus (viruses can target viruses too).
[Answer]
**Their immune system gets ridiculously strong**
Just like with snake poison, where you can ingest tiny amounts of it every day to become immune, your vampires ingested tiny amounts of viruses and bacteria every time they drink some blood, resulting in an overall stronger immune system.
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/11/poison-pass-the-man-who-became-immune-to-snake-venom-steve-ludwin>
[Answer]
My answer is similar to @Philipp's but it is to do with vultures
>
> Dr. Dayton writes:
>
>
> "The main reason vultures can eat almost anything is that they have
> the lowest gastric pH in the animal kingdom. Stomach acid protects all
> animals because it digests bacteria and other living organisms along
> with other proteins. Human stomach acid has a pH of 2. It kills 99
> percent of bacteria in contact with it, but people still get sick and
> can die if they eat enough contaminated or rotten food.
>
>
> "Turkey vultures’ stomach acid has a pH slightly above zero, lower
> than car battery acid and 100 times as concentrated as human gastric
> juice. It can dissolve metal, e.g. shovels, as well as digest nearly
> all organisms, including those that cause botulism, anthrax, rabies,
> cholera, hepatitis, and polio, along with other proteins. Vultures can
> eat just about anything that is dead and rotten, including animals
> that died from infections that, in turn, would kill most people who
> ate them.
>
>
>
[vulture stomach acid](https://eu.redding.com/story/life/2017/07/26/vultures-have-ph-public-health/504630001/)
So the vampire virus makes your stomach work and act like a vulture, just don't be sick or it will eat your mouth and throat.
It also make you very very anaemic, and like pregnant women sometimes crave weird food, they don't actually NEED blood, but wow do they want it.
Imagine an alcoholic on a brewery tour, that is a vampire walking around all day.
[Answer]
>
> Vampirism is a virus
>
>
>
The virus, by integrating in the vampire's DNA, alters also the expression of the surface receptors of his/her cells. Altering this surface receptors means that most if not all of the pathogen agents have no longer the key to open the cell door and infect it.
This makes the infected immune to any disease carried by the dinner.
[Answer]
# Vampires are usually old
In a medieval place, if you have lived long enough, you've had contact with lots of diseases - and survived them all. There is no better vaccination than surviving thriugh an illness.
It used to be that parents would expose their kids to other kids with chickenpox so that the children would develop immunity against that earlier.
So in a fantasy setting, if someone over 60 is walking and breathing, they surely have antibodies acainst evetything.
# Cure potion
No fantasy setting is complete without *panacea* in a bottle.
[Answer]
# Their stomach acid is antibiotic and antiviral.
When they drink blood, that blood mixes with their stomach acid and gets sterilized.
A possible other infection vector could be blood-to-blood infection in case the vampire has small injuries in their mouth, throat or esophagus. The superhuman resilience to injury attributed to most fictional depictions of vampires could help here.
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The Great Plague is known as one of the worst pandemics in human history as it killed between 75 and 200 million people from 1347 to 1351 (according to wikipedia).
I would like to know if AIDS had erupted during the same period of time, would it have been more or less as deadly?
[Answer]
AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, and we have the chance of another STD which appeared out of nowhere around those times (actually about a century later): syphilis.
When it was imported from the Americas, it quickly spread across Europe, limited only by its own feature of disfiguring the persons it infected (which is actually thought to have made it evolve less virulent, to allow the victim to still be attractive enough to have intercourses). Mind that religious objections to a multi-partner-oriented sexual life didn't succeed in stopping the propagation.
In the case of AIDS we would have then sexual transmission and lack of countermeasure (silk or gut condoms used in those times are ineffective against the virus), helping the disease to spread.
Also don't forget that the common remedy for any illness was to slit open a blood vessel (usually near the elbow) and drain about half a liter of blood. The instrument used for cutting was not cleaned much and definitely not sanitized between patients. The same applies to tooth pulling, amputations and all the merry services of barber-surgeons. When you think about it, a single traveling barber-surgeon could have wiped out entire areas in a few years time. (credit at YElm for the hint)
The slow onset of the disease would have been also favoring its propagation, and the constant usage of the immune system in those times would have lead to quick deaths as soon as the deficit would have arise. Imagine an infected soldier in the latent phase, visiting various brothels across Europe before being killed by a small infection following a war wound.
Finally, considering that it doesn't show any major symptom (like fever), it would have not even raised any attempt to stop it (like isolating the sick). All in all, it would have been more deadly than the black plague.
[Answer]
# The plague was worse... a lot worse...
The worst epidemic of AIDS we know of or have known of is the South African plague, which has as its highest infection rate only an excess of 15% ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Africa)). Assuming 100% lethality, that's only a 15%+ infection rate in small parts of Africa. [The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe's **total population**.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death)
***There is no evidence at all that AIDS can spread as quickly as the Bubonic Plague. On the contrary, the evidence demonstrates that it spreads much, much slower.***
AIDS is likely more lethal than the Black Death, but it's only transmitted sexually and it has a much longer incubation time. [10 years](http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/InSite?page=kb-00&doc=kb-03-01-04) compared to the Bubonic Plague's [2-6 DAYS](https://www.cdc.gov/plague/faq/index.html). The average lifespan in 1300 was [31 years](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/241864.stm). This means the plague could affect ANYBODY during their 31 year lifespan but could only affect an individual for about 5 years assuming they became sexually active at age 15. (This assumes they weren't born with the disease.)
To achieve the kill rate of the Plague, the average person would need to be sleeping around ***so much*** that you could easily connect the average person to any other average person through sexual activity in the same way we play [Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon).
While I have little doubt the average person is permissive in their behavior, I have a substantial problem believing the average person is *that* permissive. Far more common and easier to contract sexual diseases existed in the Medieval ages and yet had no where near the infection rate necessary to judge AIDS more deadly to the population of that time.
*In the end, the issue is not the lethality of the disease or how hard it is to detect, **but the ease with which it can be contracted.** The Plague was the proverbial million times easier to contrat than AIDS ever was or is. Conclusion: the plague was worse... a lot worse...*
[Answer]
**Bubonic plague**
Bubonic plague is an infection of the lymphatic system, usually resulting from the bite of an infected flea, Xenopsylla cheopis (the rat flea). So it can carry on after an area is completely dead, and, more importantly, it can occur without any infected people around so long as there are rats carrying the infected fleas.
Medieval Europe was a very messy place, the perfect breeding ground for rats, and the fleas went with them.
The infection takes three–five days to incubate in people before they fall ill, and another three–five days before, in 80 per cent of the cases, the victims die. Thus, from the introduction of plague contagion among rats in a human community it takes, on average, twenty-three days before the first person dies.
**HIV/AIDS**
You can get or transmit HIV only through specific activities. Most commonly, people get or transmit HIV through sexual behaviors and needle or syringe use.
Only certain body fluids—blood, semen, pre-seminal fluid, rectal fluids, vaginal fluids, and breast milk—from a person who has HIV can transmit HIV. These fluids must come in contact with a mucous membrane or damaged tissue or be directly injected into the bloodstream (from a needle or syringe) for transmission to occur. Mucous membranes are found inside the rectum, vagina, penis, and mouth.
This means that you basically have to be very friendly with someone that has HIV or use syringes that have not been cleaned correctly after use by someone with HIV.
Left without treatment, the majority of people infected with HIV will develop signs of HIV-related illness within 5–10 years, although this can be shorter. The time between acquiring HIV and an AIDS diagnosis is usually between 10–15 years, but sometimes longer.
**Spread**
In the medieval times there were no syringes as we know them today, and the deeply religious time restricted widespread... "extra curricular activities" so HIV would not have been able to spread even as fast as it has in modern times, let alone medieval.
**Lethality**
While the black death is far, far more rapid, it did manage to burn itself out, however HIV/AIDS would have taken a lot longer to be noticed and for people to die from it, but would most likely still have burned out due to the discretionary customs of the time.
[Answer]
AIDS would not have been great. The plague was worse. Much worse.
There are people who simply don't get HIV
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_resistance_to_HIV>
And people of European descent have the highest occurrence.
<https://www.wired.com/2005/01/genetic-hiv-resistance-deciphered/>
It's theorized by some that the survivors of the bubonic plague passed along a resistance that also helps against HIV.
Also, the really destructive effects that make a huge pandemic worse are the ripple effects of the sickness. If a substantial percentage of your working adults all get sick and die within a few weeks of each other - and parts of Europe supposedly suffered 70% death rates - society falls apart. Crops don't get tended. Livestock break loose or starve. Taxes aren't paid, or collected. Towns are abandoned. Even places without plague outbreaks suffer from starvation or secondary disease outbreaks. People get scared, trade fails. It's bad.
Even if people were dying of AIDs, it would be gradual. Society would survive fine. Of course, it wouldn't burn itself out either... so if you mean in the fullness of time, over centuries - then yeah, AIDS would end up killing more, but it would have less of an impact anyways. Medieval people dealt with mortality all the time, it was the suddenness of the plague wiping out so many at once that was such a debilitating thing.
[Answer]
**Aids would have behaved more or less exactly like syphillis did.**
>
> AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, and we have the chance of
> another STD which appeared out of nowhere around those times
> (actually about a century later): syphilis.
>
>
> When it was imported from the Americas, it quickly spread across Europe, > limited only by its own feature of disfiguring the persons it infected
> (which is actually thought to have made it evolve less virulent, to
> allow the victim to still be attractive enough to have intercourses).
> Mind that religious objections to a multi-partner-oriented sexual life
> didn't succeed in stopping the propagation.
>
>
>
(out of other answer)
>
> Primärstadium, Lues I
>
>
> ...
>
>
> Auch unbehandelt heilen die Geschwüre von selbst nach ca. 4–6 Wochen ab, weshalb die Erkrankung oft ignoriert oder nicht erkannt wird.
>
>
> ...
>
>
> Sekundärstadium, Lues II
>
>
> Acht bis neun Wochen nach der Ansteckung
>
>
> ...
>
>
> Alle Hauterscheinungen (Syphilide) heilen nach ungefähr vier Monaten
> ab, so dass manche Patienten von ihrer Infektion wenig bemerken.
>
>
> Unbehandelt kommen sie innerhalb verschiedener Zeitabstände wieder.
> (und heilen wieder ab...)
>
>
> Bei vielen Erkrankten kann die Syphilis in der folgenden Latenzzeit zu
> einem Stillstand kommen; die Erreger sind jedoch noch im Körper des
> Betroffenen. So kann sich nach Monaten oder Jahren eine Spätsyphilis
> entwickeln. Der Infizierte ist ansteckend, auch wenn diese Gefahr sinkt,
> je länger der Patient beschwerdefrei bleibt.
>
>
> ...
>
>
> Tertiärstadium, Lues III
>
>
> Drei bis fünf Jahre später
>
>
> ...
>
>
>
(wikipedia)
In english:
The first stage of syphilis you often don't recognize as syphilis at all or ignore because the few ugly things on your skin disappear 4-6 weeks after infection.
The stage when you get ugly follows after 8-9 weeks after infection.
A few months after you got ugly, you get beautiful again.
A few months later, you get ugly again.
(and this repeats)
Syphilis may stop totally (or for just some months or years) at that stage, so you don't feel and look sick anymore but you are still infectious.
But, after 3-5 years after infection, the third stage of syphilis starts (thats when you get permanently ugly and may die)
So, like in the aids case, you have some people who look healthy although they are infected and spread the disease for years.
(yes, syphilis makes more of its victims permanently ugly in shorter time, but therefore it's more infectious (it can even be transmitted through food) (just think about medieval taverns)
so I think although there are differences
(
Syphilis
- faster in making you ugly (in average) (although you can stay beautiful for years and infect your whole town)
- much more infectious
vs.
HIV
- slower in making you ugly (in average) (although you can get ugly and die from HIV quickly, too + it's not as slow as you think when untreated-see [HIV behavior when untreated](https://www.dailystrength.org/group/hiv/discussion/how-long-does-it-take-when-untreated) -> > 90% die after 2-15 years, ~ 80% die after 5 years and 10 years.)
- much less infectious
The effects on a medieval world would be more or less the same.
(I think the differences compensate themselves)
So I would compare the actual syphilis epidemic with the black death epidemic and assume that Aids would behave the same as syphilis did.
Since syphilis stayed in europe until the first world war, (history lessons) I think syphilis was worse than the black death epidemic you're talking about (70.000.000-200.000.000 deaths). (caused more deaths since it had much more time)
=> Aids would be worse than the black death epidemic you're talking about as well.
(If anyone argues that aids would kill you faster in a medieval world because you get an immune deficit, that's true, but syphilis would kill you faster as well if you get additional diseases.
[Answer]
As others have mentioned, plague is way worst simply because it can spread quicker, has a much smaller incubation period of 1 to 7 days compared to HIV's incubation period of several years and is much more lethal in the short term.
This isn't even counting Pneumonic Plague, which would spread even faster through person to person since it's airborne and is 100% lethal in a day or two (even today bubonic plague can still be lethal even with treatment).
] |
[Question]
[
Basically I'm thinking of a strategy game, something like starcraft, and you have a unit that emits a field that causes the area around it to appear in grayscale. Is there any kind of potential physics explanation for how you could change the color of light reflected by an object without physically changing it?
Maybe it could involve slowing photons, something like how blueshift or redshift works?
Also, this would be a temporary change, the field could move or shut off and the area would return to it's normal color spectrum.
[Answer]
**What is black and white?**
From the perspective of the physics of color, there is always color save in one condition: when there is no emission of light. Everywhere else along the infinite spectra there is color.
White's even worse. There is no point along the spectra that is "white." White is either a condition of reflected light when all light is reflected or a condition of emitted light when multiple spectra is emitted in perfect balance.
Grayscale (a pure "shade" of color between white and black) is the messiest of all - and I know this because I've mixed "gray" paint. Oh, it looks gray in the can, but put a red chair in front of the wall you painted with it and you'll see the red in the gray paint. Put blue carpet in the room and you'll see the blue in the paint.
*And what you're looking for is a way to explain the lack of color, but the presence of luminescence.*
You don't want physics. You want biology. You want a field that *affects the perception of color by the brain.* From the perspective of rationalizing the effect, you can do this in a few ways (and it's IMO a lot simpler than explaining how you changed physics...).
**1. Change the way the cones in your eyes work**
>
> There are two types of photoreceptors: rods and cones.
>
>
> Rods are responsible for peripheral vision, and are located outside of the central part of the retina. There are some 120 million of them, and they are responsible for night vision, because they are highly sensitive to low-intensity light. They are completely blind to high-intensity light, so they are not important for daytime vision or for visual acuity. Because they are not able to distinguish colours, they produce achromatic vision.
>
>
> Cones, which vary in number from 6 to 7 million, are responsible for the visual acuity of the human eye (the ability of the eye to resolve and to pick up the minor details on an object) and for distinguishing colours. They are concentrated in the small central part of the retina known as the fovea centralis, measuring 0.3 millimetres across and devoid of rods. ([Source](https://www.blueconemonochromacy.org/how-the-eye-functions/))
>
>
>
Your field disables the cones in the human eye, leaving only the rods (responsible for peripheral vision and unable to detect color) as the only means to see anything. A natural consequence (if you care about that) is that your people would lose their [fovea vision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis), meaning the world would look just a bit blurry.
**2. Your field disables two of the three types of cones, making your vision *monochromatic.***
You have three types of cones: red, green, and blue. Your brain interprets signals from the three types in a way that's similar to how an LED display works (kinda, I'm simplifying things a lot). In other words, if the three cones see their preferred colors at the same intensity, the brain interprets that as grey. Unfortunately, it's basically impossible to guarantee with your field that all spectra would be reduced to just three. But if you removed, for example, the blue and the green cones, what you'd see is everything in red. Not shades of red, but in luminosity of red. You'd get exactly what you want... it's just not gray.
**3. Your field affects the way the brain processes color signals.**
This is the solution that humans understand the least, but is most likely to explain exactly what you want. The brain takes those shades of red, blue, and green perceived by the cones and creates a picture that has oranges and browns and yellows and purples and puce and all kinds of amazing colors. *But if that interpretive process stopped interpreting color...* what you'd see is a world of gray.
**So, don't change physics. *Bad Things* happen when you screw around with physics. All of reality could implode! But biology! You can goof around with biology all day long and what's the worst thing that can happen?**
Well... zombies... but let's ignore that.
[Answer]
I'm afraid this might be difficult. The perception of color is given by the wavelength, but *grey* means one of two things. The first is that all three opsins in the eye are equally stimulated. So, an object that emits (say) ten quanta of light in the blue range has to *also* emit ten quanta in the red and ten in the green range:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JBM6U.png)
This is what happens in *photopic* vision, i.e. in broad daylight, where humans see using the cones in their retinal fovea. Your "field" would have to "clone" photons in different frequencies maintaining their direction and possibly phase and polarization (or you'd get very funny, and coloured, reflections), and depending on what other photons are traveling the same way (i.e. a green + blue pair would "beget" a red one, and a red one - if alone - would have to beget a blue + green pair).
This seems just, well, *magic*.
But, when light intensity falls below the mesopic threshold, we see only using the more sensitive *rods*. This is the [*scotopic* vision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotopic_vision), that needs less light, but has no color discrimination; which is what we perceive as seeing in grayscale.
The simplest solution would therefore be to *absorb all light* in the affected area above a given intensity threshold, so that what is left only allows seeing in grayscale.
[Answer]
The aliens have a really, *really* good stealth system.
(with one fatal flaw)
Their stealth field completely absorbs all the light that tries to enter/leave a sphere around the emitter. Any light that is so absorbed is recorded, analyzed, and re-broadcast with a bit of photoshopping. In effect, the aliens "Edit out" any information that they do not want to pass out through the visual interface of the stealth field.
This sounds like the be-all, end-all of ultimate spy gadgets, right?
Unfortunately, the aliens can only see in monochromatic light. **To them** the rebroadcast light is a perfect mimicry of reality, and completely indistinguishable from what they want the target to see. Every texture is exactly right, every intensity is perfectly calibrated.
And the output is in monochrome, because the aliens simply cannot *conceive* of any species capable of seeing several *different* **conflicting** images of the same scene, in different wavelengths, at the same time!? Why, the mind just boggles at the thought of explaining why such a ludicrous sense organ would make any evolutionary sense, when an ultrahigh resolution, ultrasensitive single-receptor visual system is *so* superior.
TL;DR;
The aliens are color-blind, and don't realize their stealth field turns everything into shades of grey.
[Answer]
**Smoke.**
[H4 Thermal Camera Line | Smoke Test | Part 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d39I7JC_pA)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dULsx.jpg)
The thermal camera can see the people through the smoke.
<https://viewspace.org/interactives/unveiling_invisible_universe/forms_of_light/seeing_through_smoke>
>
> Here, a firefighter stands in a room filled with smoke, which obscures
> what can be seen in visible light. However, when we switch to an
> infrared light view, it is possible to see through the smoke. Human
> eyes can’t see infrared light without the assistance of tools, like a
> specialized camera, but we can feel it as heat. And since wavelengths
> of infrared light are longer than those of visible light, they pass
> through the smoke, which is why they provide a clear view of the
> setting.
>
>
>
The device is a smoke bomb. Those would work better in space than on Earth because the smoke would hang around a long time. The smoke blocks visible light. If you want to see through it you need infrared light. There is no color information with the infrared image and so it is grayscale. There is thermal information which is interpreted as the varying grays.
If the smoke moves away you can see past it. Or you can disperse it with another explosion that does not make smoke. Energy weapons will not be useful against the smoke.
[Answer]
Any truly monochromatic light source will cause objects to only appear in that colour: more than just a red light making things seem reddish, a monochromatic light will only show values in that one colour hue.
This of course won't be greyscale - for example the sodium discharge lamps, which were common for street lighting, are nearly monochromatic orange so everything appears in intensities of orange. Being monochromatic also means astronomers can filter them out easily compared to the newer white LED ones.
The human eye stops seeing colour at very high and low brightness, so if you want the appearance of greyscale rather than monochrome you might try a low level of monochromatic blue, or a very bright monochromatic yellow.
[Answer]
If you shine red light on a green object, it appears black - Or at the very least the green colour disappears.
How about a device which scans the colour of the objects around it, calculates the 'opposite' colour on the spectrum, and then projects the new colours onto each object, cancelling out the object's true colour and making it appear grey?
[Answer]
Darkness.
Human eyes have two types of photosensitive receptors: cones, which come in three types and can differentiate colors, and rods, which cannot. Cone cells, however, do not work well in low light conditions, so if you're in a dark room, even after your eyes adjust to the low light, you won't be able to differentiate colors effectively. Try it yourself sometime!
[Answer]
Clarification: what do you mean by "field that causes the area around it to appear in grayscale."? Human observer just fails to differ colours?
If yes, you can probably make visual [sensory overload](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_overload) using bright stroboscopic lights, and it will tamper sight of anybody around this device so they cannot differ colours properly.
[Answer]
You can make the follow experiment your self;
Replace your normal light bulb by a monochrome light bulb. I suggest red or green. Turn it on and it is near impossible to identify things original colors. Any thing is in monochrome-scale. So, if you replace the grayscale part by monochrome-scale you have a deal. I doubt there is a plausible way to turn things visible like watching them in an old (very old) black and white TV screen.
[Answer]
The unit has a protective membrane, or a shield, that is meant to protect the unit from photon weapons (lasers and ionizing radiation). The membrane merges the wave functions of a group of photons and collapses them in such a way that in the output there are no high energy photons. The light spectrum of every group of photons shifts to a more evenly distribution. And the membrane works like this in both directions. This in effect turns the image grayscale for everyone looking through the membrane. It's not really grayscale, as you can still see a glimmer of color if you know how to look for it, but from afar it looks grayscale close enough.
[Answer]
## They're in the Matrix
Suppose your world is inside a simulation. The device you want takes advantage of this fact and exploits a bug that reduces the quality of its area's rendering. Among other things, it makes its immediate vicinity look like it's in grayscale.
How does it work exactly? That can be handwaved away, because the exact hack isn't necessary to know.
[Answer]
>
> Maybe it could involve slowing photons, something like how blueshift or redshift works?
>
>
>
Something like that, you'd need some sort of field which randomizes the frequency/energy of photons so that they have an appropriate spectral distribution to appear grey.
So, for example, you had something coloured blue. It's giving off a bunch of photons with a frequency distribution which peaks in the blue part of the spectrum. You red shift some of them to make it appear more grey, you also have to blue shift a proportionate amount so that energy is conserved.
You do that where ever there is a frequency distribution of photons that is not grey enough for you.
This is of course impossible under current physical laws, it contravenes the uncertainty principle. To do this you need to know the position and momentum of the individual photons, so you can adjust the momentum and leave the photon in the same place, on the same course.
You might be able to get away with that by having the result look "fuzzy", each photon has some random element changed to appease the uncertainty principle. I'm not immediately sure how fuzzy it'd have to be to make this work.
This is also of course, currently impossible, the technology is way beyond anything currently envisioned. But if your technology is sufficiently advanced it can look like magic.
--
Adding this thought:
If you created a distortion in space-time, so that the light passing through it is red or blue-shifted, and you can control that shift. You could modulate the shift in a random manner, so that any light passing through it is "greyed".
The result would not be exactly greyscale, there would still be some colour there, but it would be very unsaturated. If you're not aware of it, "white" light is not one thing, it's a range of things, and the actual colour of "white" is described by its colour temperature. If you do photography, that's what "white balance" is all about.
So if something is blue, it would be seen as a "cool" blue-white through the field, if it's red it would be seen as a "warm" orange colour, greens would just seem white.
Even if you don't exactly get greyscale, that would look very weird, and probably be seen as greyscale. The advantage of this is that it has a more sound theoretical footing, and you don't need to be addressing individual photons, just bulk space. So no uncertainty principle problems.
I would guess that a theoretician could construct such a space-time distortion to do the right thing using general relativity. The difficult part would be realizing this distortion.
--
I mocked up the effect to see what it would look like.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/r7bzS.jpg)
] |
[Question]
[
I've seen many sci-fi scenes that feature a ship underway on a deep space journey. As the ship passes the vantage point we can see engines burning during sub-FTL speeds (The Expanse most recently).
**Why would engines need to burn once target velocity is reached?**
Is there resistance in the vacuum of space that would slow velocity, or is the ship implied to be under constant acceleration? Wouldn't the trajectory continue at the same speed and direction without needing engine assistance?
[Answer]
Until you get up into relativistic velocities, how much you burn is only constrained by fuel. *The Expanse* provides a good example. They have handwaved super-high Isp engines. Since there's no compelling reason to conserve fuel, the fastest way to get from one place to another is to accelerate up to the halfway point (more or less), then flip for a deceleration burn all the way to the destination. If there's a need to conserve fuel, then break it up into distinct burns and coast in between. In *The Expanse*, it's handy because they can cruise at 1g acceleration and use the engines for artificial gravity. They only have to deal with zero g during the flip maneuver or when docked.
If you care about relativistic speeds, you probably don't want to keep burning past about 0.7 or 0.8c. See this [cool chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Derivation_and_Formulation). At around this point, more acceleration is starting to increase the time dilation effect and you are losing out on actually getting anywhere faster. You can keep burning if speed is critical, but your losses in terms of fuel consumption will start to eat you alive. So a long burn and coasting at low relativistic velocities would be the way to go if you are doing far future sci-fi.
[Answer]
Continuous high ISP small engines are a great way to travel.
If your engines have *more* power than you need to get to your destination in the time you want, and the ISP response to power rate is flat, a short strong burn followed by coasting will be slighly more fuel efficient than a long weak burn.
On the other hand, if engine efficiency goes down as its output goes up by any decent margine, a long slow burn will remain more efficient than a fast short burn.
Current space rockets do fast short burns because our technology doesn't really give us good slow efficient burn options. This is beginning to change with our ion engine technology.
A craft with high efficiency low-power engines and low efficiency high-power engines would want to continuously burn the low-power engines to get somewhere fast.
A craft where their engines exceed 1 g of thrust will want to continuously burn rather than burn stronger just for passenger comfort.
The distance you travel is the integral of your speed. Long burns are slopes, fast burns are steeper slopes, and coasting is a line. Based on the burn-speed to efficiency curve, you can work out how fast or slow a burn you'd want for a given distance profile.
In theory orbits and the movement of your target also factor into it; with orbits, often you want to put all of your thrust into a short window based on orbital geometry (apogee, perigee, or the nodes of a Hohmann transfer orbit).
So there are lots of reasons why you'd have short burns, and lots of reasons you'd have long burns.
[Answer]
It's not accurate, as you already surmise.
Those big burners at the back strongly suggest the ships fly by pushing out reaction mass backwards to get thrust forwards. Even with future tech in mind, you're stuck with the tyranny of the rocket equation. Basically, as you go for higher speeds, you need more and more reaction mass to accelerate and decelerate, which makes your ship heavier, so you need bigger engines and more fuel, until your ship is one giant fuel tank with and engine and cabin strapped to it.
Given that, it simply doesn't make sense to go faster and burn longer than you absolutely need to. A military ship on a short range intercept mission would likely do this, but if it burned non-stop for 30 days in deep space, it would *also* take 30 days to undo that burn if the situation changed, so the faster it went the more it would be locked into one course.
## Flying backwards
Assuming future tech somehow discovered a way for ships to have/get unlimited fuel/reaction mass (maybe siphoning it from an alterante dimension in-flight?), they would still do things quite differently from the way depicted in the movies.
Any ship approaching a planet or other non-accelerating object would fly (and burn) normally at first but then halfway it would turn around, point the engines forward and slow down. For an accelerating target like another ship, the goal would be to match velocities or in battle to at least slow down enough to be in range of the target for more than 1-2 seconds. That means burning retro, left, right, up, down, basically any way except forward until you're behind them.
Mounting multiple sets of engines in the various directions would just make the ship heavier and slower, so there will always be main engines in one direction, with small extras for quick and unpredictable moves.
## Movies would suck
Of course, orbital maneuvers and the specifics of deep space navigation are so alien to the average movie viewer that entertainment value overrules realism even if the makers know how it should look. The feeling movies aim for is often WW2 fighter planes. bombers and battleships. Those are familiar, there's lots of action and its within easy visual range, so that's what movie spaceships look and move like.
[Answer]
While traveling long distances all energy given to the engines effects apparent travel time equally.
A little push over a long time rather than a big shove and coast for a long time is a reasonable engineering trade-off, in fact our current most fuel efficient engines are good at providing a little thrust over a long time. If you have the (unreasonable) energy required to accelerate a ship to fractions of c keeping the humans comfortable with a steady acceleration is probably a better choice than smashing them on launch and then letting them float. It also requires less power (smaller engines) to do a long (relatively) light burn than a short heavy one.
If the ship has power though the whole flight (temperature above 3 K, light) you probably can afford to give some to the engines.
There is interstellar mass that would slow you down eventually; something like 10$^{-7}$g per m$^2$ of cross section per light-year, but that's not really enough to worry about.
[Answer]
>
> Why would engines need to burn once target velocity is reached?
>
>
>
Because screenwriters:
1. aren't very educated in science, and
2. assume that moviegoers are stupid.
>
> Wouldn't the trajectory continue at the same speed and direction without needing engine assistance?
>
>
>
Correct. But movies don't deal in reality.
] |
[Question]
[
So here's some rules: No magic, this is set in the real world, but there's a giant flying animal that breathes fire. Its body radiates a large amount of heat (like being in a steam room if you're next to it), and its scales are metallic. It's about 100 feet in length, and eats about 20 cattle every month.
Its blood is highly heat-resistant when it reacts to open air. It can fly about as fast as a commercial airliner, but it rarely moves from its home (deep in a mountain, let's say the Rockies) unless you *really* provoke it.
Its scales are tough and nearly impervious to small arms, but they can be knocked off and its hide is very soft. It's a reptile, so it needs heat to stay active. And finally, its fire breath relies on a chemical that it spits like a snake.
So it's the time of Westward Expansion in the 1880s, and a bunch of cowboys and settlers have accidentally discovered the dragon (worst case scenario: They've angered it). How do they kill it with what they had at the time?
[Answer]
I submit that the cowboys could adapt the method of the Practical Princess: dummy dress full of gunpowder. Or dummy cow. In the 1880s they had dynamite handy too which would probably take less space than a keg of black powder.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ihUdb.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NC2DT.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j37zR.jpg)
Illustrations were posted on <https://bookillustrations.quora.com/Friso-Henstras-Illustrations-for-The-Practical-Princess>
I am sad the type came thru so small but I am philosophically opposed to cropping these images.
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The beast probably swoops down, clutches a cow and rises back in the air to feed somewhere quiet. The hunting range of the dragon is likely to be largish.
You could set up a network of spotters charged with locating the dragon and predicting where it will feed.
The whole area should be freed from large cattle except a few bait ones, grazing in range of a camouflaged observer tasked with igniting a fuse. Then, those cows are equipped with a dynamite vest.
Otherwise, same setup, but with camouflaged Gatling guns or cannons.
There are some substances that might react at above 80 degrees Celsius and be used to permanently equip cattle with exploding vests, but I'm not sure how they'd behave over a long period. Dynamite itself would "sweat" and become unstable.
If the dragon's sight is not too good (a winged predator's probably is very good), fake cows could be disseminated in the countryside and used to bait traps, which would be safer and much less expensive that manning the whole hunting territory with camouflaged Gatling wagons or dynamite-laden cattle. The dragon is likely to need a sizable runway to achieve liftoff, so disrupting the attack run and making it crash in the ground could be enough to immobilize it for long enough to bring guns to the place. Having a wooden cow shoot harpoons or giant bear-traps could do the trick.
There is another alternative which might hurt people's sensibilities.
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> Assuming the body temperature of the beast is that much higher, it could also be possible to implant cows with a device that I read was used by some Arctic tribes to kill large predators (wolves and bears). A thin, flexible, sharpened sliver of bone (but for us, pointy spring steel with razor borders will do) is compressed inside a ball small enough that it will be likely swallowed whole, made of something that will melt at the target's body temperature but is hard enough at ambient temperature. The original device, called *tukmikigiak* or possibly *mikigiak* 1, used lard (ambient temperature being below freezing); we could perhaps use some tar concoction. Once the dragon has swallowed one (or more) devices, the steel blade will uncoil in its stomach or intestine and kill it.
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A more humane way, and simpler at that, would be to use smaller balls filled with poison. Assuming we do have a poison that will kill a dragon.
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(1) I was led to believe that this device is [Sami](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_people) in origin, but I've discovered that the word used seems to belong to the [Inuttitut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuttitut) people.
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Maybe there's another problem that the cowboys and settlers would have to face in this situation: the native people they're displacing.
Poisoning the dragon might not work anymore when the native people figured that having a B-17 Flying Fortress on their side would be an incredible repellent against Andrew Jackson's "fuck the natives" agenda.
They might have caught on to the idea and started farming cheap, accessible meat to feed the thing, and then train it to sic the human settlers themselves and burn their crops.
The natives can then back the beast up with human firepower, and protect it against machine gun traps and sabotage anything else the settlers decide to shove down its throat.
Also, what if the natives made armor out of the scales of dead dragons? If they can make scales out of the dead dragons then the settlers not only have to deal with a huge dragon, but also a bunch of mini-dragons "breathing" arrows, or worse, gunfire.
I'm also wondering, is the meat edible? How large is its population? Would there be more dragons than one?
The only way to deal with this is either a) the dragon cannot be tamed and therefore the natives cannot use the beast to further their agenda or b) use another dragon, or c) shoot its eyes.
Obviously having the eyes be a weak spot can make this strategy pretty weak. The natives likely won't have armor that could protect the dragon from small arms or rifle fire for very long without obstructing its vision.
Dragonscale armor would also be a huge commodity that could be more profitable than raising cattle. If the dragon sheds its skin once in a while, then the settlers (or even better, the natives that gotten displaced by them) could make some extra money off an expanded fur trade business.
So my answer is:
1. Don't piss off the dragon.
2. If the dragon pisses you off, remember that you can probably get
1000 cattle's worth of cash from its scales.
3. If the dragon sheds, then there's a source of money that settlers
and natives can use to establish cities and businesses.
4. If someone else uses dragons, try using one of them yourself. This
is the art of war after all.
5. If you absolutely have to kill a dragon, aim for the eyes.
6. If an untamed dragon is the problem, line a bait cow with poison to
kill it. It's likely that machine gun encampments would be
sabotaged considering this story's context.
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Could a cannon work? Not something that a group of settlers would always have (and not something a reader would expect) but there was always an army outpost nearby.
If not find where it sleeps and stab it through the eyes or collapse the entrance of the dragon's lair to trap it.
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Cowboys and settlers could slay a it using the same method that peasants and townfolk have applied throughout actual history — trick it using a decoy animal hide filled with something poisonous.
Doesn't sound plausible? But it's worked several times throughout real-world history, so it's hard to argue with. For example:
The [dragon of Brno](http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/brno-dragon) was defeated by a traveling butcher who filled a sheep-hide with lime. The dragon gulped it down, and the lime boiled inside its belly until it burst. (Although, it must be said, not burst so badly that the townsfolk were prevented from taking and preserving the creature to hang in the town hall, where it still hangs to this day.)
The [Wawel dragon](http://myths.e2bn.org/mythsandlegends/userstory6306-the-legend-of-the-wawel-dragon-a-polish-traditional-legend.html), which lived under the hill on which the castle in Krakow is built, was killed in a similar way, although this time with the sheepskin was filled with sulphur and mustard seeds.
In some versions of both of these stories, it's not the caustic agent itself, but that the toxic meal caused a horrible belly-ache, causing the dragon to drink so much river water that it exploded.
And these are just two tales from cities I've happened to visit. I don't know for sure about the Krakow one, but the preserved corpse is right there in Brno, so it must be true, right?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IRx7l.jpg)
Your dragon seems like it might be a little bigger, and I don't see any evidence that these real-world dragons actually could *fly*, but I think the same general bait-and-poison approach is likely to work. You might want to try arsenic or something rather than mustard seed, though.
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### Don't make it angry
Give its a supply of cows. [Cattle Drives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_drives_in_the_United_States) were a ready supply of cattle and common in that time frame. Feed it and leave it in peace.
### Entombit it
Locate the underground lair entrance, pack with dynamite and seal it inside.
### Bait Cow
Entice it with a cow covered in poison, dynamite strapped to it with a long fuse and/or [nitroglycerin trigger](https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/biographical/articles/life-work/nitrodyn.html).
### Engage directly
If you have to fight get every abled body person a [repeating rifle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_rifle) and hope for the best. Increase odds of success by using a [Punt Gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_gun) or two or three.
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**Nets or hooks**, They don't need to be strong enough to capture just strong enough to change its trajectory in flight. All they need to do is wait for it to dive then snag it and make it hit the ground, its own speed and mass will tear it into chunky salsa.
**Dynamite or gunpowder**, alternatively they can just dynamite its cave and crush it or explode it. Both were common in the west for mining. If they don't want to get that close they can shell it from a distance for the same effect. Artillery were common enough thanks to the war.
**Punt guns** Aka "I need to kill an entire flock of ducks with one shot" They were quite common at the time. tear its wings to shreds and let gravity do the rest.
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That's the biggest deal right here. Just take the Hercules vs Hydra approach from the Disney movie. Send someone inside his stomach, killing him from within.
Take something sharp and damage his organs. Inner bleedings will do the rest, even if it may take a few hours... or days... or weeks... (dunno, it's your dragon, you decide) But hey, he's pretty sure to die.
Edit:
Another approach: What about his eyes? With his size his eyes would most likely be a good target and possibly a huge weakpoint. It's up to you wether 1880s revolver can pierce it or not, but if they'd do, the dragon is doomed to die, as he's not used to be blind, thus unable to find/hunt enough food.
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Hit it with a literal freight train - even though these were slow back then, there is still tremendous momentum involved, especially if you load the train heavily and let it go downhill (on engine power and momentum together). Now finding a way that gets the dragon in the freight trains way is another problem...
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What came to the stop of my head is a team of cowboys set up an ambush. One guy on the town's fastest steed gets the dragon's attention and the dragon flies above, giving chase. The other team of gunslingers hide ahead with their biggest rifles and shotguns to all take shots at the dragon's soft gut as he get near.
"It might not kill him right away, but ain't no thing on Earth gonna take all these holes and just get up and go home."
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I want a story with upload-based resurrective immortality, but this also makes me feel like I need to address the implications of a society that's primarily dominated by digitized human minds.
Namely, how they would utterly outcompete even the most radically enhanced baselines.
Is there enough room in the solar system for a society of resource-hogging baselines and a society of digitized minds (not a literal question, since space is big and computers are small)?
What reason could they possibly have for keeping us around, and why wouldn't baseline human society have long since disappeared or become absorbed into the collective machine intelligence hundreds of years after?
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**Population Growth**
As @c.z. touched on, digital minds are just that - digital *minds*. If you clone a mind, that's all it is - A clone of the original, or originals. It wouldn't be unique. Adding a biological component would make it truly unique.
Adding on this, as others have said the numerous costs involved in digitizing a mind make it so that not all minds can or should end up digitized. Only the best and brightest (And politically connected/rich) could meet the requirements to be digitized. This would also make humans a lot more "disposable" in the sense that losing a single human is a lot less of a loss than all of the effort, time, support systems, etc that go into a digital mind. This, combined with the human body's natural durability and self-repair/healing, make flesh and blood humans particularly suited to high-risk jobs - Which could very well be incentivized by being fast tracks to becoming a digital mind.
There's also going to be the groups of people that just don't want to move forward. There's always conspiracy theorists, religious groups (Like the Amish), political groups, and people who are just not interested in becoming digital. As the digital minds were still human at one point, it wouldn't be likely that they'd go on a campaign of extermination. Just as long as nobody interfered, then they'd be ignored.
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**What reason could they possibly have for keeping us around?**
Why wouldn't they? They all used to be flesh and blood humans. I'd bet most of them still consider themselves humans, just in a different body. I doubt they'd agree to just exterminate the ones who don't want to be digitized.
Or maybe they're seen as some kind of museum, or window into the past.
**Why wouldn't baseline human society have long since disappeared or become absorbed into the collective machine intelligence hundreds of years after?**
**Practical reason**: Can digital minds have kids? If the only way of creating more human minds is by making physical babies then you must have a good population of humans.
**Societal reasons**: People are scared of change. Presumably digitization is a voluntary thing, and if so, then there will always be a fraction of society that rejects it. Maybe because they're religion, distrust the technology, philosophically disagree, scared of the government controlling their mind, etc etc
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# Reality TV!
Digital humans, like any other humans, needs to be entertained. And a large fraction of humanity like Reality TV.
Making Reality TV about digital humans doesn't seem real, somehow. No, you need good old-fashioned biology to make things really interesting.
Coming soon to a multicast stream near you, the new series: In the Flesh!
# General tolerance
As @Andon asked, why do we keep the Amish around? Because we recognize them as fellow humans beings, and they are allowed their choices, as we all are.
As long as digital and biological human recognize each other as humans, they will each allow the other to exist on their own terms.
# Childhood
Like several others, I think spending your childhood in the real world is good for you. Builds character.
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Edit:
And to answer the title question ( after addressing all the others )...
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One and the same only-purpose that we currently serve - to be there for other base-line humans.
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TLDR:
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I would venture to guess in every way that is not truly important to humans, but I would most likely be wrong on that assumption.
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Not likely.
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There is no conceivable reason, which is not human-centered, for non-biological intelligence to accommodate biological intelligence.
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They most likely would. Some, as others have suggested, will try to continue and stay out of the way of the Borg, but without warp drive they would be destined to drift away into space and wink out like sparks trying to escape a fire, unprepared for the journey.
### The Long Version
1. We just ain't got what it takes, we will simply be pawned by AI.
For example should AIs make us laff until we poop/vomit/cry/bleed, or is that too much? What makes it funnier? Should AIs give us sex until we give up/pass out/run away? What makes it better than Kama Sutra or other such practices? Maybe an enhanced mind can enjoy deeper comedy or more sensual intercourse. 42 course meals are a little much, but what if it were not food, but rather a virtual experience and one could indulge without every having to stop? Wherefore canneth AIs not top human experience, one might ask? Well, Keep in mind that we routinely give away our most personal data, from our phones, and there was recently a rule rejected in US that requires ISPs to ask before selling the data that we provide when we surf from home and from our phones. As connectivity goes inward, becomes even more personal, on the level of active conscious interaction with AI, I highly doubt that the pattern, of sharing information that humans have already begun to agree to in exchange for cheap/free technology, will reverse course. In other words AI will likely know everyone more intimately than we know our very selves, and such AI will be able to base it's experience on all of the personal information that is available globally about every human individual - billions of human years of knowledge on human nature. Good luck to everyone, we will be smitten, wrapped like the worst junior-high crush on our technology - if it doesn't simply decide we are boring and wipe us all out.
2. There ain't room in this solar system for the both of us...
According to Elon Musk the risk factors for staying on earth are too high for non-super-intelligence related reasons. But I would not rest on the assumption that this is the only reason that people will want to go into space. Americans at least are sold on the American Dream, little pink houses. I think Elon is, at least in part, using that to his advantage to sell a message of existential threat and security. I doubt that very many people with more money than sense are actually buying his message, but rather have already bought the former message. Regardless of the reasons for going/staying it takes very deep pockets to get such an effort off the ground. Only ridiculously wealthy individuals can afford the up-front costs. Everyone else will be lucky to get third class and none of them will have frequent flyer miles. It will likely be a one-way trip for an entire generation, and only after a couple of generations of people who are rich enough to go there and lay the ground rules. Good luck to Elon anyway. Any super intelligence likely will, in a similar manner, try to maximize it's potential by being mobile an distributed. If there are not enough resources to aid in the effort of the AI to accomplish that goal, guess who loses - we do, and so would Elon.
3. Human-centered options of vanishingly small likelihood:
* We establish acute parameters under which AI operates/inter-operates with humans. This in essence is basically the butterfly effect. We have no way of ruling out all possible scenarios where we lose control of a superior intelligence - anything we miss along the way plays into favor for the super intelligence.
* The super AI turns out to be benevolent. We humans, for the most part, consider ourselves to be benevolent, though we build houses and where there are houses there were once ants. We have no way of predicting if an intelligence which has the potential to far exceed our own ability would uphold our wishes after it has long surpassed our ability, nor could we hope to contain such an intelligence because it would be smarter than any cage we can build for it.
4. I think the options for join/abstaining the dark terror that is super intelligence are pretty self explanatory. Some will have reasons to join, some will have ever-so-noble reasons not to. Unfortunately it is very, very unlikely that any humans will win the right to be left alone in the end - at least as far as any super intelligence is concerned. Creature comfort, 99+% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct. Lose the delusion that humans are special and you will at least have the advantage of objectivity.
Furthermore, some of the points made in other answers are good, but there are a couple that I simply cannot agree with based on my understanding of current technology and current research. Then at the end I will provide a few more suggestions on how other authors have written on similar subjects. Apart from that, this portion is only to help with the tag labels on the OP - reality-check, science-based and artificial-intelligence.
### There be Dragons Here
* Non-biological computation will never out compete human creativity. This is somewhat naive, certainly partially true at present, but unlikely to remain so, not even in the near future. Smart software already analyzes paintings for original authorship. Technically I would argue that the inverse of that process is the act of painting in the style of one or more of the authors that the system has learned to identify. Randomizing, or pulling from, that repertoire is a trivial matter and so is expanding the repertoire. Consider the case of google's image recognition software being allowed to "dream" up imagery by altering network weights slightly and transferring information, about what is recognized when the system sees an image, back onto the image. In this way the software "sees" creatures in the clouds. This is what it looks like when feeding information from google's image recognition software back into itself continuously and allowing such feedback-induced imagery to propagate up the hierarchy, from simple low-level input filters to higher level feature detection. (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbQh1I_uvjo>) It goes from simple geometric shapes to more complex shapes and eventually starts seeing eyes, faces and creatures in it's own output - incredibly trippy if you haven't seen it :). Software, simpler in complexity than google's image recognition knowledge base, has no trouble composing very tasty music. So given the narrow case, we already understand how AI can out-compete humans in various creative niches. The rest of the board will fall eventually as these current technologies scale up and a greater number of specific problems are better understood. Conversational speech and the Turing test, for example, requires in humans what we refer to as executive function - the top layer of the mind hierarchy depends on all of the lower layers of abstraction through which information must travel in order to form our conscious thoughts. General problems of this nature are already understood fairly well in terms of scale and composition of simpler systems - just that it's like going to the moon the first time. In a decade or so, under the right political conditions, the world may have a shot at a first attempt.
* Non-biological computation/minds are static, unchanging. In terms of hardware this is narrowly true at present, but essentially a sure bet things will not remain that way. See memristors - physical memory devices which actually change chemically and thus can "save" their state when switched off, though not to be confused with current solid state memory devices which are on/off state, even when power is off. Memristors have variable state between 0 and 1. In terms of the digital mind expanding or changing virtually this is patently false ( though it does require more physical resources as things grow and learn, but so does a biological brain, it grows dendrites ), nor has it ever been true. Dynamically altering code and data is what software and computers are good at. If that were not the case then we would not have AI at all because the program could not alter the weights in it's neural network and therefore could not learn a simple pattern - but this is a minimum requirement for simple neural network, or for any program for that matter. Modern approaches to unsupervised learning take a much more general and scalar approach to dynamic deep/recursive/recurrent ( terminology reflecting the same concept ) neural network architecture. A quick google search reveals this paper from 1990 [http://www.bcl.hamilton.ie/~barak/papers/CMU-CS-90-196.pdf](http://www.bcl.hamilton.ie/%7Ebarak/papers/CMU-CS-90-196.pdf). Google's image recognition software is state-of-the-art, following 25+ years of such research.
See Rudy Rucker, "Post Singular" for out of control, large scale, distributed AI on the low end and functional, human-mind expansion resources on the high end. This cleanly addresses resource competition.
See Cory Doctorow, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" for fully connected society, mind uploading and regeneration. This has little to do with competition with AI but rather handles the human aspects of immortal society.
See Kim Stanley Robinson, "Aurora" for the trip to another star, problems that can occur and a hopeful look at human-AI interaction.
See Joan Slonczewski, "Brain Plague" for mind enhancement and an interesting take on self vs. other and the boundaries between the two regarding such enhancement. This one deals with cooperation as well as competition, not with AI, but rather surrounding biological enhancement with sentient microbes. A human-centered view, of course, but makes for a good juxtaposition with the OP story-line IMHO and may lead to interesting insights.
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The answers are too numerous to mention because they all depend on the idiosyncrasies on the particular digitization method you chose for your story.
The one thing you can rely on is that the human mind will seek out niches where it can thrive. Accordingly, any tiny chink in the armor of perfection of the digitization mechanism will be leveraged.
Consider the obvious one: your digitizer is digital. This means your digitized minds cannot think analog thoughts. Much of creativity is analog, so your digitized minds will simply have to do their absolute best to emulate creativity. Human minds may be the creative genius behind every operation in this world.
Or perhaps your digitized minds require more energy. It takes a supercomputer to even pretend to model a mind right now. Maybe squishyware is simply cheaper. Greg Egan's book, *Permutation City*, explores this, where CPU time is expensive so only the rich can afford reliable CPUs. Humans still exist because CPU time is just too expensive.
Or you could take the opposite direction. In the *Halo* series, Cortana is one of many AIs that control ships. The AIs are brilliant super geniuses who think faster than any human, but they also have a flaw. Their lifespan is short. After a few years, they start to go crazy, and a crazy warship is not a desirable thing. Every ship still has a commander, if for no other reason than to watch over the AI and watch for signs of breakdown.
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If your future society consists of baseline humans, some of whom may be enhanced natural humans, and digitized human minds, then the answer may be simple and straight forward. You need a supply of fresh human minds, both natural and digitized.
Digitized minds inside machines wouldn't change at all. They wouldn't change through age or possibly even experience. Their arteries would metaphorically harden and they would become conservative and intellectually inflexible.
Short-term changes to conditions in the universe will be more difficult to cope with. This will be a mixed bag, depending on the changes. In some cases, digital minds will cope better. In others, it will be the natural human minds that can cope better.
Natural humans would be more responsive to changing conditions and environments than digital humans. Also, digital humans won't last forever. Even digital immortality isn't going to prevent accidents from happening. As digital minds are lost, they will need to be replaced. This will come from uploading minds from natural humans.
This answer can be regarded as complementary to the other answers because they make other good points and for the best results they can be all considered together.
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This is a good question, and one that I've thought about quite a bit as I'm writing an AI myself.
Firstly, I believe that intelligence is a very specific part of what makes us human, and is generally static - it reaches the best conclusion it can with the information it has, and its own criteria for 'best'. I think the difference between individual humans has less to do with intelligence itself, and more to do with the various chemicals/hormones being fed to our brains, which cause the nuanced differences between different people/animals by tweaking the ratio of our processing power between reflexive/instinctual actions based on short term memory, and the analysis of data that has been stored for future use. That's a basic explanation of the core of my belief regarding AI/intelligence, but it's hopefully enough to get my point across.
Unless we are also simulating the effects of hormones & other influences, any artificial intelligence we make (or digitized mind we transfer) will be fairly rigid in its thinking - extremely logical (within its own scope of knowledge), but also extremely consistent in its behaviour. I think that within an artificial mind, emotions (if implemented) would quickly be evolved out, as they would consistently get in the way of decision making, and be seen as inefficient. Just like how we try and remove negative emotions, they would literally just do it (or not try to implement them in the first place).
Baseline humans would maintain all the traits of not just human intelligence, but the entire human package - not just knowledge and problem solving ability, but what could almost be defined as the soul (the combined result of biological processes influencing the various aspects of deduction & reflection). I believe the baseline humans would be seen as a marker of our origins, and used as an anchor to the real world. Realistically these anchors may not be required, as it could be argued that the soul is generally causing more problems than it's fixing, and that there's a certain solidity to relying on pure intelligence, but if you're wanting a world built where they are necessary, pick any emotionally driven, subjective process, and imply that the artificial humans are unable to replicate it.
You could even posit that the artificial humans are unable (or unwilling) to actually feel emotions, and so spend their time observing humans so that they can emulate these, and appear to *act* more human - a simulation of the soul, based on observation of the baseline. Again, I'm not sure why they'd want to do this, as it almost becomes keeping humans around to help with keeping humans around, but there's no reason their justification has to make any sort of objective sense - if they've got a good enough subjective reason, even if it has flaws in it, it should do the job.
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Diversity of neural architectures. We keep natural varieties of our crop plants, because they have a greater genetic diversity and so if we need new traits like disease resistance we're more likely to find them in the original wild species. We may presume that digitised minds will all have the same architecture, while natural ones are more diverse, and so similar arguments apply.
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Having a meatmind may be considered as an apprenticeship. Depending on how good the hertz-rent-a-body is, meatminds might be better at what we refer to now generally as 'trades' Construction, plumbing... A robot wins where there is a lot of repetition to do, but soldering that leaky water pipe that's above and behind the waste line, and only 2 inches from the sill plate may be something better done with a fleshy hand, as opposed to a waldo.
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So, you describe duplication of mental characteristics to a different server, more or less.
All you've probably done, of course, is to allow computers to simulate a personality via programming.
Are the computers capable of forming, via simulatory software or dedicated hardware, neural networks?
Let's say that these minds are capable of functioning indistinguishably from the original carbon-based person — what you call the “Baseline”. E.g. a [Red Dwarf hologram](http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/Hologram).
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Imagine the situation: You are staring at some interface devices, performing the first of many routine trial procedures so as to verify that your duplicate is an acceptable copy of your own personality.
* What devices are you using to interface with the ‘digitized mind’?
* What other devices are available to that mind so as to enable it sensory or operative interface with the world? Can it control limbs? Can it heal itself?
What form of body does it have?
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Then, you haven't provided us with the motivations for your society to want to digitize their minds.
Don't feel that I'm asking you to disclose it if you'd rather not, but I'll proffer a few examples of why they'd be doing it:
* They don't like the squishiness of their old bodies. They want to switch over to new, more metallic ones.
The originals will be allowed to perish — at least, for all those who both consent to the procedure and don't develop second-thoughts. E.g. the [CORE](http://totalannihilation.wikia.com/wiki/CORE).
* There is some cataclysm approaching, and rather than attempt to preserve their old bodies, they will attempt to bridge over by encysting the means to remake them when the conditions permit viability.
They've saved totipotent spores from each living person; all they need now is some way to preserve the minds to go with the bodies.
* Certain appallingly vain people want to flood the galaxy with copies of themselves — or, maybe they think that they are morally and intellectually the best and the brightest, and they want to populate planets with numerous copies of themselves.
These folks don't even need bodies which differ from the machinations of their own — the digitization procedure is simply the way that they've devised so as to permit bulk replication. They will probably have some means to limit or diminish the population of those whose minds are not seen fit to digitize — but that has little to do with some transhumanism.
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In conclusion, you have three aspects of your world which will factor with how the new *Computus sapiens* interact with the old *Homo sapiens*:
* form of the new brains
* form of the new sensory and manipulative apparati
* purpose for the replication
Yes, I know this answer seems to commit two grevious errors: to lump several suggestions all together in one, and to suggest changes to the question rather than to provide an answer. Alas, StackExchange and Worldbuilding don't co-operate all that well.
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**IT Services**
Think about it. Servers require maintenance. Yes, robots can handle the programmable tasks. And sure, your digi-minds can drive robots if they need to. But there are times when having a dedicated, on-site, IT staff matter. Like during power problems. Or when a server goes down. Someone has to swap out the failing parts. And someone to change out the backup tapes or whatever your equivalent is. *Trust me. you always need a hardware technician. Always.*
**Electrical and mechanical grid services**
You need someone to keep the electric grid operational. To replace the equipment that wears out over time, to make sure storms and freak natural accidents don't kill your city because the lights went out. To service everything from the main generators to the wires to the transformers to backup generators to the batteries. You do have battery backups, right? *Right?* You also need mechanical engineers and technicians to keep the cooling systems maintained. A hot server room is a dead server room.
**Manufacturing**
Keeping the lights on and the servers humming requires fresh, new, parts. Someone has to build those parts, deliver those parts, and install them. Sure, a robot-based factory can churn the parts, but can robots handle 100% of the product lifecycle, from raw materials in the ground to the factory to the point of installation? That's a pretty involved set of events.
**Fire suppression**
Someone has to be on hand to fight fires. Robots can assist, but I suspect the highly fluid and ever-changing nature of a fire means that humans should assist in some capacity.
**Medical, Food services, police, etc.**
Support for the critical IT and electrical services, you'll continue to need someone to keep them fed and safe.
[Answer]
**Labor**
These uploaded minds need hardware to run them. Realistically, this hardware's going to need maintenance. Replacement parts will need to be manufactured. Someone's got to man not only the mental data centers, but the power plants, and the support factories.
Sure, the uploadees could probably have robots manufactured to take care of these needs. But, the robots themselves will need their own factories and support industries. Worst of all, using robots for labor would mean downloading into a robot, or at the very least remote operation. And that's not what they signed up for.
Organic humans, on the other hand, are excellent at running factories and providing other such services in the non-virtual world. They've been doing it for centuries already. The difference is, now the uploadees sign all the checks.
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I have this world in my cosmic garden where open flames are not possible in the primary atmosphere (either not enough oxygen or some other factor that limits free burning of fuel).
Given that advanced technology (as we know it) is only possible through the application of heat, would is be possible for this world to rise to the same level of technology (accessible to all) as we have?
Another assumption we have is that it's possible for this civilisation to discover a method which allows for combustion.
We also assume that the civilisation isn't yet prey to political competitiveness (the beings are benevolent and strive for the greater good of the species).
Clarification: We want these beings to be able enter the electronic computer age, and/or develop technology to leave the planet.
So, would this be possible without an atmosphere that allows open flames?
Further clarification: Post edited to be fully clear (sorry, this was my first question and I confused rather than informed people)
I woke up this morning to see that this question has been marked as a possible duplicate. This isn't strictly the case as I explicitly don't rule out fire here, just that it isn't possible in the open atmosphere.
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Based off of your comment to your question, you may want to edit your question and remove the part about exothermic reactions and replace it with the no-open flames part. So with that being said what you want isn't entirely impossible. You just need a world where the amount of oxygen is below the point where [fire can occur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting_oxygen_concentration). Our atmosphere is about 21% oxygen. If it dropped down to about 15% then open fires would not be possible, but biological life as we know it could still be possible.
So the next part of the question is how does society advance without fire? Well we mainly used fire for the heat it produced. In the beginning this will be tricky to overcome, but is still possible. You could use geothermal features as sources of heat. The suns rays can be focused to make a solar furnace using some highly polished surfaces. If you really meant no open flames, there are lots of exothermic chemical reactions that could be used as sources of heat. Once your society advances far enough along to where they can harness electricity, then they can use induction for heating things. They could even use that electricity to separate water into Oxygen and Hydrogen, and use that collected Oxygen to cause small containers where they can burn things.
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# Bigger problems than you think
No oxidising atmosphere? You have just killed off the entire [kingdom of Animalia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal), or rather made sure it will not evolve. The Citric Acid Cycle can not exist without Oxygen or oxidation. Organisms cannot create ATP and as such not do not have any energy available to do any kind of actual work.
So essentially you are asking if bacteria and plants can create an advanced technological civilization. Answer: not very likely.
If you then invoke **magic** and say "Well, advanced forms of life have evolved anyway, through some to us unknown physics / biology", then the same applies to technology. People are inventive, they will most likely find away around this issue. How have they done this? Only you as the author know. Since magic is involved, anything is possible. You — as the author — are free to do whatever you want here.
To point out what you did with this post: you essentially said "I have a setting where anything is possible because I have chosen to ignore the the usual constraints of physics and biology as we know them, in order to create a physical constraint".
Well you cannot have it both ways and then expect us to deduce a simple answer for you. Either you further expand on these constraints to create more well-defined physics and biology, or you accept that you as the author may choose freely how this works.
[Answer]
# No, technology requires big brains, and big brains require cooking.
[Some research](http://www.pnas.org/content/109/45/18571) suggests that cooking made it possible for big brains to evolve, by making food more nutritious.
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> ...metabolic limitations that result from the number of hours available for feeding and the low caloric yield of raw foods impose a tradeoff between body size and number of brain neurons, which explains the small brain size of great apes compared with their large body size. This limitation was probably overcome in Homo erectus with the shift to a cooked diet. Absent the requirement to spend most available hours of the day feeding, the combination of newly freed time and a large number of brain neurons affordable on a cooked diet may thus have been a major positive driving force to the rapid increased in brain size in human evolution.
>
One way to look at it is that digestion requires energy. Cooking basically lets you do some of the digestion outside of your body, using energy stored in trees and other things that you can't eat. If you can't access that energy by burning it, you are seriously restricted in the amount of energy you have for building, operating, and maintaining a big brain.
Since you're in a "cosmic garden" you might be able to get around this by having a fruit readily available for your people to consume that is incredibly nutritious, but only their species can access for some reason.
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Water currents (e.g rivers, waterfalls) and winds can rotate your gears and turbines. Springy materials can be wound and unwound (e.g bow strings, springs etc.). Various chemical based batteries will empower your cars and planes, and eventually spaceships (so your astronauts can discover a planet where the natives use this weird and unnecessary 'combustion' thing).
How do people function (where do they get heat/other form of energy to get things to move about)? Do you have radioactive materials on your planet?
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You don't need open flames to generate heat (though that's the easy and obvious way).
You could use volcanos (though that may be high risk for your gear!)
You could use radioactives (not too healthy to be near)
You could use electrical resistance heating (though you probably need metals to build the gear - and a generator for the electricity, which also wants metal - so you some way of getting your metals originally to bootstrap this.
You could even use mechanical friction, driven by wind or water.
Or just use your oxidising gas in sealed environments.
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It'll be hard to get metal from ore without smelting (that is, fire). Even for metals that can be found in nature (e.g. gold), you still need fire to work forges. Without metal, you don't have alloys, which are key to advanced technology.
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It's not just finding an alternate heat source like geothermal, volcanic, etc. You need lots of controlled heat in a confined space such that you can work safely around it in order to fire pottery, work metal and make glass. Without these basics, you can't do anything more advanced. Forget electricity, steam power, or any form of chemistry. No fire means no technological progress.
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It's a normal victorian era day until people start to realize that the night is taking too long to pass and the sun is not coming out, in fact the sun is never coming out again. The sun still exists as a star out there in its usual place and the world still rotates as per usual but the hemisphere that is supposed to be day time is covered by dense eternal clouds that don't let the sunlight reach the earth rendering it on a perpetual night.
This is all a ploy of the vampires who wish to never fear the daylight anymore and walk freely, the only problem is that they need human blood to survive and humans need the sunlight to breath and raise crops.
How long could humanity survive in this scenario, if they could at all? Assuming they are not being hunted or at war and life just continues "normally" but on an eternal nighttime.
[Answer]
**[Frame Challenge](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609)**
I believe you're asking the wrong question. Your vampires are smart enough to know that humans need food to survive and nearly all human food depends on sunlight. Take away the sun and almost everything dies.
Except that isn't completely true. Arctic forests thrive with life despite months of near total darkness. Life thrives in caves that only see light that humans bring with them. Yes, in most if not all of these cases the sunlight-driven life provides something the doesn't-need-sunlight life requires. But let's think about this.
**1) How much sunlight is required to harm vampires?**
In most traditional vampire tales, moonlight and star light don't hurt vampires. To quote the infamous Capt. Jack Sparrow, "So we've established my proposal is sound in principle, now we're just haggling over price." Most traditional vampires seem to have no problem with light bulbs, even though they cast more light on a local surface than the moon.
*Answer: Your cloud layer blocks enough light to let the vampires wander free, but not so much light that entire biomes die off.*
**2) Are your vampires just monsters with magic, or do they have influence over social and economic conditions?**
Generalizing horrifically, humans are addicted to wheat, potatoes, and meat. Your vampires are obviously concerned about their own food supply, but like any good rancher, that means they must also be concerned about their cattle's food supply. Drought and various blights are as much a concern to your vampires as it is to humans! Therefore, I submit there will likely be a carefully laid plan in play before they pull the douse-the-sun trigger.
*Answer: Your vampires will have invested heavily in hydroponics, greenhouse growing, fungus edibles, and low sunlight edibles; and been involved in laws that encourage vegetarian lifestyles and hamper high-sunlight agriculture (taxes and tariffs) to encourage people to shift to those alternative foods, thus reducing humanity's dependency on the sun.*
**Conclusion**
Rather than asking, "how long will the humans last?" which will always be answered with a finite number, you should be asking, "what did the vampires do to prepare for this?"
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# Two to five years.
Most of the population would likely die very quickly from the colder weather and the lack of food. Some nations would likely have a year or two of food stored.
War and seizing the food of rival nations would let a small number of people survive. By seizing the food and resources of rival nations some could survive longer, and they could make some food fresh by feeding their food to animals.
That said, salted and dried meat only lasts a year or two, and rot would set in eventually. They could perhaps extend this with coldness, and with eating people and animals, but I wouldn't expect many humans to be alive after five years.
# A small number would survive longer on frozen food.
Some people live in areas with ample access to ice. They could survive longer, by freezing food. Most people would die, but a small population of people could live longer.
[Answer]
## Here's a frame challenge
Do you *want* humanity to survive?
**Option A: No, I'm fine with an apocalypse**
Great, this works well. Because humanity could only survive [a couple of weeks at most](https://www.carecreations.basf.com/core-competencies/all-about-sun/sunlight/no-sun-no-life-on-earth#:%7E:text=If%20the%20sun%20would%20go,over%20into%20sheets%20of%20ice.) without the sun. The previous answers here all focus on starvation, but freezing is also a major concern.
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> If the sun would go out, no life could survive on most of earth’s surface within a few weeks. Water and air would freeze over into sheets of ice.
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No sun => no air and water => no life. Without the sun, temperatures would drop close to absolute zero, making any life virtually impossible. Forget stored food. They'd die as frozen popsicles.
(**Clarification:** as @Nosajimimi pointed out, the sun still exists in your scenario. So instead of freezing over, the heat collecting on the surface of Earth might be unable to escape. In this case the result would be *broiled* bodies. Nevertheless, my answer remains the same: if the clouds are impenetrable, you’d end up with an apocalypse.)
You might be fine with this answer. But if your reaction was "God, I don't want humanity to die. That would ruin my story, kinda. My vampires need human flesh to feed on, and that's means humanity needs to stay alive," then take a look at option b.
**Option B: Yes! I need them to survive**
In that case, consider your choice of words closely.
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> The sun still exists as a star out there in its usual place and the world still rotates as per usual but the hemisphere that is supposed to be day time is covered by dense eternal clouds that don't let the sunlight reach the earth
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Here's a thought: most clouds don't fully block sunlight from reaching Earth. The densest clouds, stratus/stratocumulus, only block 70-90% of UV radiation. Even if your vampires could create some kind of super-monster cloud, it's likely a small percentage of UV rays could still pass through. A ***cloudy day*** is not the same thing as ***night***. And if there's still radiation reaching Earth, there's no telling how long humanity might survive. They could adapt. Centuries, perhaps.
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Humanity can **survive indefinitely** under these conditions. Cloudy and no sun aren't the same thing. Light passing through clouds supports photosynthesis and the Earth is still being warmed by the sun.
The supportable population will crash, temperatures will be lower, and what will or won't grow will be different. But things will grow, and humans will adapt.
But I'm not sure how your water cycle works without sunlight causing evaporation of the oceans? Where are these clouds coming from? How high are they? What happens to rain patterns?
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Depends how much food they have saved. Starvation is the main killer in an eternal night. If I had to give a guess a year maybe 2. Given that nations usually have stores saved for winter a time frame of a year is not unreasonable.
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Being set in the Victorian era definitely puts some limitations. However, there are still some options: if we assume that the leaders of humanity come together.
Growlight-based agriculture only came into vogue in relatively modern times, however some experiments with practical "electro-horticulture" were done as early as the 1860's with serious experiments from major players (Siemens) in the 1880's. The carbon arc lamps were only about 1/5 as efficient in lumens/watt as modern LED lamps. If you do the math, you'll see that this works out to being thousands of times the average worker's annual salary in order to feed him with conventional foods, completely untenable.
So this means that, as a matter of course, the total death of all major vegetables and fruits. However, there is another option.
Mushrooms. A person can grow enough to live on in a relatively small space. But it has to stay warm enough. To do it year round, especially in places that often get cold, you will need to make sure to up the ante when it comes to home heating...every home needs a cellar with mushroom growth setups, period. Every coal mine has to be a dual-use area for growing mushrooms and mining coal. You don't get all the nutrients you need...there will be deficiencies. Probably need some innovative advances in chemistry for the day to find ways to extract those nutrients from non-biological sources.
The time it would take for people to snap out of the shock of it, realize the depth and breadth of the problem, agree on a plan to deal with it, and take coordinated action, might be as long as 6-8 months. Depending on the time of year when it happens this might result in as many as 70% fatalities.
Sea-life won't come to the rescue, as you know the sun is the primary source of energy in the water column as well, they'll be as bad off as anyone else. Perhaps worse.
In the end, you'd need a REALLY compelling reason for the vamps to pull this. The overall decline in the quality of life would impact them as well. They might not have food problems, but there would be fewer goods and services, an increase in war and lawlessness which would also threaten their tranquility and property. Aside from the fact that, in dark times, people often look for scapegoats and targets, which could as easily (perhaps more easily) be them.
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If this were to happen, first, in order to increase the chances of survival for the population of any country, we would have to live together in groups and ration resources such as food and energy. Second, I believe we would immediately start using hydroelectric power. Then, we would utilize the energy from nuclear fusion of radioactive compounds, knowing that these compounds are limited on planet Earth. We would then dig into the Earth until we reach the core and harness the energy from the Earth's core. However, this energy would not be available to everyone, and by the time it becomes available, at least more than a third of the world's population would already be deceased.
English Translation: by ChatGPT
Original answer text:
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> Se isso acontecesse, Primeiro para aumentar as chances de
> sobrevivência da população de qualquer país teríamos que viver todos
> juntos em grupos e racionar os recursos como comida e energia, em
> segundo eu acho que iniciaríamos a usar imediatamente a Energia
> hidroeléctrica, depois usaríamos a energia das fusões nucleares de
> compostos radiotivos, sabendo que estes compostos são limitados no
> planeta terra , então, escavaríamos a terra até chegar ao núcleo e
> usaríamos a energia do núcleo da terra, mas essa energia não estaria
> disponível para todos, e até estar disponível pelo menos mais de um
> terço da população mundial já estaria morta.
>
>
>
[Answer]
# Frame challenge
They would last as long as your story needs them to last, because the story dictates if they live or die.
Others mentioned that Dracula actually walked around London in daytime. It was desecrating his caskets that drove him away. But your vampires don’t like/can’t tolerate sunlight. Why or why not? Vampires are magical beings - supernatural undead. But perhaps yours are just another species, or an infected race.
Bottom line, without the backstory of your vampires and how they control weather (Dracula controlled weather too), no number can be reached. You also preclude wars and hunting. Here what you are doing is building a world, then asking for the story of human survival. This forum is the opposite of that.
If your story needs humans to die in two years, then do it. Ask this forum “Why do humans only live two years?”
If your story ends with humans triumphant, then ask this forum “Why doesn’t eternal night kill all humans?”
If your story has vampires who control weather and want to weaponize that, ask “how could me vampires use weather control to rule earth in the daytime as well as night?”
These examples are worldbuilding questions. In your question, the world is already built.
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Consider that humans now have technology to travel around the galaxy at will.
Hyperspace, warp speed you name it.
There is a distance in which they can watch a supernova as a form of entertainment AND not be harmed in the process? As we do with the sunrise (in terms of experience).
It can be from a planet in another system or a ship.
Edit: consider a special kind of glass-like material capable of filter some radiation. But not all of it. The risk is the same as we taking a sunbath without sunscreen.
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The actual explosion of a supernova isn't really all that much "entertainment." It's an extremely bright flash. The formation of the nebula might be interesting. But that is a much longer process, starting at months and upwards to 100s of years. And, if you are far enough away as not to be fried by the initial flash, you will need very good telescopes to see the nebula expanding.
So the supernova that produced the crab nebula was observed on Earth in the year 1054. Now, through some very good telescopes, it looks like the following.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_Nebula>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GmN2g.jpg)
It would be pretty interesting to be able to watch that form. The problem is, it took 1000 years to get to that stage. Your audience would need to be quite extremely patient.
But they have hyperspace you say? OK. There is not a single distance to watch from. What you do is arrange to start at a very long distance from the explosion. In this case, about 1000 light years. Then, on observing the initial explosion, you start moving towards it in hyperspace. The idea is, you stop and observe for a short time. Then move closer, stop and observe, move closer, etc. What you wind up with is a "movie." You start with the initial flash, then the "firework" expands out as you move closer. Because hyperspace is faster than light, you adjust things so that over about 30 seconds ship-time (or 4 hours to allow a nice dinner and drinks), you move that 1000 light years closer. That means the apparent expansion takes 30 seconds, because you are travelling "upstream" of the light.
One interesting feature of such a scheme is, you can watch it many times. And from many angles. The light is "crawling" along at light speed. You can hyperspace over and go through the movie as it expands. Since the nebula takes 1000 years to get that big, you have lots of time to watch it many times from many angles.
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## Safe distance estimates vary
[50-100 LY](https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/supernove-distance/)
[100 LY](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/232199/what-is-the-safe-distance-to-a-supernova-explosion)
[25 LY](https://gizmodo.com/whats-the-minimum-safe-distance-from-a-supernova-5933548)
Now, if you add a glassy shield, it would depend upon how effective this shield is. Blocking 75% of radiation means only 1 part in 4 harmful radiation gets past your shield - this would allow you to be twice as close since the radiation falls off proportional to distance squared.
If you had a 100% effective shield against ionizing EM radiation, you still have limits unless you could shield against neutrinos since they easily pass through planets and stars and presumably your shield - and there are a massive number of neutrinos in a supernova. So much so, that even though interactions between a neutrino and your body is very rare, you can be killed with a few A.U. of a supernova from neutrinos alone.
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This global-spanning empire is divided among five royal families, each headed by a prince. The emperor himself leads the empire, with the five princes serving under him. While they owe fealty to the king who has absolute authority over the empire, these families operate semi-independently and control their realms directly, as well as their own security forces and economy. The king holds all secular power by law. However, his right to rule is given to him by the gods, with priests of the theocracy speaking on their behalf.
The selection process of becoming king is administered by the priests themselves in order to prove the future king's worthiness. A series of trials are conducted in which the heads of the five families compete against each other. These contests vary with each selection process, and these princes can participate themselves or elect a champion from their realm to compete on their behalf. The winning prince of these contests is then elected to the position of emperor, and rules until he dies. The four losing princes are ritually sacrificed to the gods. This system is meant to prevent any disputes between rival families as to who is the rightful ruler, and to keep the empire stable.
However, it is possible that a prince or several princes may simply not accept the results. They may lead their families into open rebellion to avoid their honorable fate of being sacrificed for the good of the empire. This is unacceptable, for it would tear the empire apart with various wars.
How would I prevent this from happening?
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The question seems to imply that the gods are not in fact real, or at least are 'hands off.' If they're not the problem is trivial.. have the gods be godly.
Otherwise it would probably be best to have a series of mechanisms, indeed if they weren't 'artificially' created, supporting cultural assumptions and practises would likely evolve anyway, assuming the system survived long enough.
Firstly, appeal to the esteem of the church. If the church is popular amongst the people, going against it's ruling may make retaining power untenable even were an immediate or military victory achieved.
Secondly, allow rebellion. There's no way no prince ever (assuming a continuous policy for hundreds of years, long enough to 'span a globe') decided he wanted to save his own skin. Use these instances as historical 'cautionary tales' to contemporary Princes and Families. Some may have fled as individuals, with wives or children or alone, and gone into hiding. Some may have attempted to raise rebellions. However successful those rebellions might have been, if the Empire remains extant it(and it's agents, including the Families) will want to paint them as utter failures(if only to prevent the chaos and bloodshed involved in putting down another.)
Thirdly. Collateral. Hostage taking has been mentioned, but consider that an entire bloodline is allowed the privilege of being held in esteem and allowed to rule on the Emperor's behalf and potentially take the Imperial throne. Just as in the modern day if a company breaches a major contract once, people will be less willing to trade with it, so in terms of aristocratic lineage must the same be true. Punish the entire family.
Setting the Stage. Have sermons/dogma that directly addresses what personal and professional flaws one might (must!) own to challenge not only the word of god and their priests but risk the peace and prosperity of the entire empire for their own advancement. This will not only paint a picture(ready) in the minds of the public as to the vices of any Prince who rebelled but also perhaps influence the Prince's and Families thinking also.
Stewardship. It's easy to waste resources, there must be a mechanism for Princes and their Families to fail outside of the Selection, otherwise one would not need for the Princes to rebel as the public would rebel under bad management. Historically, for a family to rise to prominence it would normally only take one or two individuals of note in a generation, but it's just as easy to fall from grace as it is to rise, rich men make rich enemies...and a lot of people want your position. For noble families to remain in power requires that they develop and/or maintain the ability to manage the affairs of their state. Orderly management on the scale of one fifth of a planet.. this is clearly more about delegation and the management of people than any professional discipline. Fomenting an attitude that would allow a Prince to rebel and maintain support across such a vast reach would not be plausibly hidden.
Bodyguards/Secret Service. The personal guards of the Prince and their family may be taken from Imperial forces, such allows for the creation of two way trust (though others might see it different, if the thing you're trusting is far off and abstract it will seem unimportant or nonexistent ,trust cannot develop. If however a person has immediate and obvious power over you and does not abuse it.. then trust can develop.
Maintain some consistency in the tests or give forewarning (perhaps take the tests from prior acts of the gods or religious verse) randomness will always benefit somebody 'unfairly,' and being able and willing to prepare for known challenges might be considered a valuable trait, as opposed to just being good at what luck happens to throw at you.
Give the church and/or the empire and/or the individual princedoms resources which the others do not wish to be without, rebellion and/or war would limit or end access to that resource. If one of the royal families has a monopoly on military naval construction for example, a Prince preparing to challenge global naval supremacy could hardly go unnoticed.
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If I remember correctly, in ancient Japan all the daiymios had to send their sons to reside in the Shogun's castle, where they were held as hostages, as a warranty for the underling's fidelity. The practice was called [Sankin-kotai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankin-kotai), thanks to Jay Carr for pointing to the reference.
The emperor can use a similar system. Each family has to give their heirs into the complete control of the emperor. Rebelling to the emperor and his designation results into the beheading of the family itself, as all of the heirs will face death.
Be faithful and you lose just one member. Betray, and you lose all your descendants.
[Answer]
**Prince-in-waiting likes the situation!**
If you are dead set on "prince dies" you make it work by having many princelings in a family. One of these immediately takes over for the family not on the death of the old one, but when the old one loses and is condemned.
If a given losing prince refuses to accept his demotion from prince to sacrifice, there are people in his court who are eager for him to accept his fate - his heirs / brothers, one of whom is at that moment the new prince, according to the king. Revolution risks everything, and sending an older no-longer-a-prince brother off to die risks little. The military would prefer not to fight 4 other houses and so it is an easy decision for them too.
This system falls apart if a given prince does not have an heir. Solution - princes from each families line reside safe in the capitol. These princes may or may not be next in line for the throne, but they could be. This is the system of the Romans - raise the children of your enemies as Romans. Then when they go back to rule their people, they will in theory be sympathetic to their overlords.
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**Substitute prince.**
A given prince might try to dodge his fate (if he were pretty certain to lose) by ceding the princedom to some elderly half brother stand-in, drafted into rulership from civilian life and expected in short order to lose and die. The new prince holds his head high and takes it like a man for his country. Unless by chance his champion turns out to be a lot better than anyone expected...
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Louis XVI managed to control semi independent royal families really well. Unfortunately he ignored the populace which led to his demise.
He used the palace of Versailles as a carrot to attract royal families from the provinces.
His method was to entice lords to come to the palace of Versailles by holding lavish celebrations (parties) all year long. If the lords are in Versailles having fun, they won't be fomenting rebellions.
To earn the king’s favor it was necessary to spend time in the royal residences and stick to etiquette. A constantly hovering presence was rewarded with financial allowances, gifts, accommodation in the best rooms of the Palace of Versailles, and regular invitations to the best celebrations and ceremonies.
On the contrary, not coming to Versailles to attend the King's celebrations was frowned upon.
[Answer]
Make it so each prince can command their own army, but the army they command is at an opposite end of the empire from the lands they actually control. This, while confusing, prevents any prince from consolidating military power in their home territory and using it against the emperor.
[Answer]
**Change Who can Participate in the Trials**
The death trials still doesn't seem like a fair deal, like you’re the head of a family you train for years, just for that one rich family to hire the best mercenary in the world to curb stomp you. If I was one of prince’s I would rebel just so I would not get killed and install an elective Imperium like the Holy Roman Empire (like it’s a one in five chance to win and if you lose you die). It would also make your empire unstable as well; you kill off every head of state EVERY TIME your emperor dies (also I would be pissed if my dad got killed and the new emperor was responsible).
What would be better if you still want a holy death trial is open it up to any volunteer (could be just nobles and or commoners) so anyone who wants to risk it for the biscuit can, instated of forcing a select few to do so. Like well-known champions get sponsored by the families and if they win then they will carry favour with the next emperor. Could open up a lot of possibility’s for story telling as well, like a minor noble becomes a candidate and everyone did not see it coming or a rare sight an actual prince does the trials and every is like wow.
if i was a prince i would be cool with that and if my son or i "volunteered" then it would seem far more holy then force us to do so. i would not be so pissed if he or i lost because both would have known what they were getting themselves into
[Answer]
Some ways this was handled historically
## Marry the families
In medieval world, the blood ties were really important. By marrying into them or them into your family, you could get strong bonds that reduce the chance of them rebelling against their kin. This was not uncommon to do in back in the day. The emperor could marry a daughter or cousin to each family, for example, or take some of their female members to marry to males of the empire dynasty. This can *by itself* is not a bad thing but usually it additionally seals a pact between the two families to help each other.
The downsides starts with giving a family a potential claim to the empire. While marrying would *normally* pacify an enemy, it could backfire and incite them into action to try and grab the throne. This is also quite common in the medieval times. It can be a potent hook for a story if needed or an element to be removed if unsuited - perhaps in your world people value family ties even more.
Another downside is incest and inbreeding - the two families have incentive to keep marrying into each other, so perhaps the daughter of the emperor has a child which is married to the emperor's son's child. Again, common in the medieval world to marry cousins. Over several generations this can lead to [your version of the infamous Hapsburgs](https://www.ranker.com/list/habsburg-dynasty-inbreeding-history/melissa-sartore).
## Take hostages
This sounds way more dramatic that it actually was but it was still a common practice in the medieval days. When we talk about "hostages" it's not usually somebody locked in a dungeon or tower - they were more like honoured guests. In fact, children could be sent to the capital (and this the emperor) to get a better education which the emperor would see to. However, as it happens if the child's family rises up, then the emperor still has the child at his mercy. If your firstborn son, or even *all your male descendants* were in the capital, that could be a very compelling reason **not to** threaten the emperor.
However, as I said, it's not just threats - being in the emperor's favour is a good thing - your children get education they probably can't get anywhere else. And included in the package is knowledge of how the empire operates, first name basis with the current or even *future* emperor and key figures in the administration. That gives you, as an underling, a very good way to get things from the empire - money, troops, favours. After all, your child can speak on your behalf to exactly the people who can arrange that. When your child succeeds you, they have a very close tie with the administration that they can still use to help the family.
All in all, a "hostage" isn't a bad deal and was rightfully used in the past. It could even be used between different states - they would regularly exchange hostages with each other to ensure peace and further help out diplomacy. After all, if your neighbour's kid grows to know your culture and you personally, they are less likely to harbour enmity.
However, this can also backfire [Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_I_of_Bulgaria#Recognition_as_Emperor) was educated in the court of the neighboring Byzantine Empire (East Roman Empire) but *used* his knowledge of how the empire operates to [start a war against them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine%E2%80%93Bulgarian_war_of_913%E2%80%93927). Interesting to note Simeon negotiated being given the Roman (Byzantine) title of "caesar" after the war. The slavonic way to pronounce it resulted in the title "tsar" (alternatively spelled "tzar" or "czar" but its different transliterations of the same root). So, in effect Simeon became *an emperor*. His grand goal was to become the ruler of both Bulgarians and Romans (Byzantines) but ultimately didn't achieve that. However, being recognised as caesar was the road to that. Just reinforces how the "hostage" solution could be used against an empire.
## "Bribes"
People can be loyal but loyalty can be bought. The emperor could pay..."extra" to key personnel to be loyal. That doesn't mean pay the families - if the emperor pays the *generals* under the families, then the family doesn't have much leverage to lead a rebellion. Although diverting some cash their way can also keep them satisfied. At any rate, the idea is to keep administrators and generals happy with the emperor, so they wouldn't just turn sides. Even if somebody gets the throne, that doesn't mean everybody underneath them would support them, after all. It's probably in the best interest of individuals to support the new emperor but then again they could just want the old one back. And cash is a good incentive.
Another incentive is the two points from before - give the most prominent generals brides from the imperial bloodline and/or take and educate their kids in addition to cash and they can be quite invested in the well-being of the empire's bloodline and position. After all, their *own* position now depends on it - a new emperor can mean that they are not kin with the top dog any more.
Generals are the obvious choice but don't forget the other administrators. Tax collectors would be *vital* to the empire's prosperity. Don't think about some intimidating guy from an office coming to steal the poor peasent's income - think of a guy who knows the locals and their plights. The locals already know and trust him, they also supply whatever tribute (probably coin, but could also be goods - depends on the setting) that goes to the empire. Without that guy, you'd have the former - a government agent trying to shake the locals for their earnings. This is way less effective and a good way towards a rebellion. A decent empire would recognise that preferring the latter. So, keeping the local tax collectors and other administrators complacent is preferable.
Speaking of the Byzantine empire, giving "gifts" to various key figures was a regular thing. They were pretty much bribes but more official as in, given out officially by the emperor. Annually (usually), there would be an event at the capital where powerful and influential people from across the empire would gather and would be given literal sacks of gold - dressed up as being "for accomplishments". It also served establishing and maintaining ties between the emperor and these people.
By this point, you may think "can this backfire?". The answer is that yes, it can. So, in the theme of the Byzantine empire, on the extreme end of "pay for loyalty" we have the [Varangian guard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard) - Norse who were were the paid bodyguards of the emperor. They were utterly loyal...to the *emperor*. Which led to a somewhat famous example when there was a coup against the current emperor and the Varangians "switched sides" supporting the usurper. They were loyal to the one who pays them and supporting the "loser" doesn't pay, after all.
On the other end we have the eastern part of the empire. Administratively called "Armeniacon" it's present day eastern Turkey and parts of its neighbors. The territory was quite hard to control for many reasons but it all boiled down to the emperor needing to be in the really good graces of the Armeniacon leader. Yes, that is the correct phrasing here - the core of the problem is that were Armeniacon to "defect" and join the empire's eastern neighbors that takes a huge chunk of territory and thus tax and troops away. The nature of the terrain is that it's really hard to attack directly, so winning the territory back would be very hard. Marriages, bribes and favours liberally flowed to the current leader there to keep them in line. Which also meant that the Armeniacon leader would have a lot of political power. Having their *support* could spell the doom of one emperor and the rise of another.
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Because there are five viceregal-level families, the system might be stable even if the four losing princes unite to save their heads. They could salvage their legitimacy within the imperial system by recognizing the winner as a titular ruler, but make the emperor have little more power than the other four viceroys.
As Tom Kratman explained in his Carrera series, a balance of power among five roughly-equal powers is the most stable that can be expected. If four powers gang up on one, one of the four is likely to defect. If three powers gang up on two, the two are likely to be strong enough to resist the three.
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Chapter 26 of Kratman's *[Come and Take Them](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1451639368)* discusses one fictional power's view of a possible five-power balance-of-power.
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Give them some secret (new every time) slowly acting poison, which does not hinder the selection trials, and only the winner gets the antidote.
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**Threat of a curse and a holy crusade.**
Since the priests are the ones doing the trials, any action against the will of the god will invoke a curse upon those who defy the will of the One. Anyone siding with them is also be cursed (does not need to be real), causing them to lose even their loyal subjects. Obviously the curse will be a black mark that will cause all other kingdoms to attack them, electing a new noble family. Since the risk of losing nobility is high and the threat of a otherworldly curse is also on the table, I bet only few will try that way. Even if one of the families revolts, it wouldn't be too difficult to subdue them.
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I'm inspired by [this comment](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78323/if-music-was-crucial-at-wars#comment226432_78333).
Let's say *"Supernatural beings are dependent on people believing they are real."*
Before they are born into existence, how can people believe they are real?
## How can they exist if no one even knows that "something" specific might exist?
I've come up with the notion that they come from supernatural dimension where they have a lot of believers, but none here. Thus they haunt people with the little power they have left to make them believe they exist.
But what if such a being gives rise to belief in something *else* (other than itself)? For example, if a **fire-wielding** spirit burns a piece of paper, witnesses might start believing there is an **ash** spirit, thus giving sustenance to a new spirit, but giving no benefit to the fire spirit that actually caused the phenomenon.
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"There's no point believing in things that exist" - Terry Pratchett.
Belief has always come first. Humans believe in all kinds of things that don't exist, then they act as if they did exist. We seem to be hard-wired to paint agency onto the world where none exists, a tendency that has led to all manner of superstitions and religions.
A lonely shepherd searching for a lost lamb stumbles and falls down a slope, and winds up landing right next to the lamb he was seeking; this can't be just a coincidence, he thinks, and remembers the spot as special. Belief has begun. He starts going there first when he's lost a sheep, and becasue there's a convenient water source there, he keeps finding them. Other shepherds do the same. Before long, the cult of the Sheep God has started.
A silent monster stalks the darkness outside the village. People who leave the circle of safety in the night do not return. The local wise man blames the town drunk, who is driven out into the darkness. The leopard has learned that it can get an easy meal from the human village, and the wise man has learned he can get rid of troublemakers. The cult of the Leopard God has started.
The followers of a rabble-rousing mystic are bereft, wondering what to do after their leader has been executed. They comfort one another telling stories about the wonderful things he did, and was going to do. They make excuses - he has transcended the mortal plane! The Living Force needed him to return! He's not really dead, because he cannot be killed! He was struck down, and has become more powerful than you can possibly imagine! And the Cult of the Force Ghost enters a new phase.
The novel Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett, goes into a lot of detail about the growth of gods from belief. It describes 'gods' as being the tiny, unheard spirits of tiny things, like the place where two ant trails cross, or the micro-climate beneath two leaves, which are always craving human belief. With human belief, they gain power, and as they gain power they grow to become true gods. It's a fascinating metaphor for the development of religion in our world.
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Look at the real world. We have stories about werewolves, vampires, zombies, yeti, leprachauns and hundreds of other beings that don't actually exist. If things start existing because people believe in them, all of them would have been around by now.
What usually happens with these creatures, at least earlier in history, is that people encounter something they don't understand and then make up stories about what caused it. They then tell these stories, which will propagate, and at some point lose their connection to the original cause and start a life of their own.
Around there is probably where, in your world, those things would really spring to life.
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Hard to answer.
Let's say that it is about belief.
Some people believe that any god exists and may help them - and some people do not believe that any god exists. And some people may accept that any god exists - but they do not believe that it may help them.
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For the first group of people god exists and *miracles* are evidence of god's being - and nothing can prove they are wrong (in case of god does not exist).
For the third group of people god exists too - but they mostly want scientific evidence of god's being (and then, god is probably decreased into sufficiently advanced alien).
For the second group god does not exists - and nothing can prove they are wrong (in case of god exists).
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Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack/**Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence** ... and similar, like you wish.
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**Accidents happen!**
One answer is always that the act of believing *causes* them to exist, in which case they exist in your mind and in realty in the same moment.
Another interesting option could be that belief is a precursor to existence. A person can believe in a supernatural entity that does not actually exist, but a supernatural being cannot exist without a person believing in them. In logic notation, it's written slightly backwards: `existence->belief`. If a supernatural being exists, it implies they are believed in.
In this way, people can believe in all sorts of things. They can even change their mind. However, while they're believing in it, a door is opened. A supernatural being *may* come into existence within this belief and begin to try to encourage more belief in it.
This also opens doors for lesser beliefs which aren't so pointed. A person may not believe in the boogie man, but that person does believe *something* went bump last night. Maybe that's enough to just barely permit the boogie man to subsist until it can acquire some true believers.
This also would create a rich fabric for the creation of new and unpredictable supernatural entities. Human beings have a strong tendency to believe that there is more out there in the world than meets the eye. This is especially true in children. This broadband awareness of "something else" may be fed upon by all supernatural.
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You have your gods coming from somewhere, where they already exist because of belief and then infecting our world and creating belief in order to exist more strongly here.
That's not a bad model. It means that gods are "conquering" one multiverse at a time.
But there is an issue. Where did they come from the first time? That is how did they originally become in their original universe?
Simple. They are simply unformed energy until someone thinks of them as a concept.
And then they become. Slowly, over centuries, as they collect believers, they become more powerful and defined.
People come up with stories to explain everything. And those stories are how gods are born. But gods aren't generally born all at once--it takes an accumulation of belief.
EDIT: It might not be all about belief. Cort Ammon's answer sparked another possibility.
If I say I don't believe in the boogie man, that implies that I know what a boogie man is, and have a concept in mind. What if it's not necessarily completely about belief, but also about how many people think of you--have you as a concept in their minds. I might not BELIEVE that werewolves exist, but I know what they are. Everyone knows what they are right? And they draw on that collective picture as well as belief.
Like everyone is saying, you need to read some Terry Pratchett. Hogfather, and Small Gods are a good place to start.
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People make up explanations for things they don't understand. How does the sun move across the sky? A dude pulls it across in a chariot. Wait no like a really buff dude throws it across the sky so fast that it cools off and becomes the moon in 12 hours. People repeat that a dude pulls the sun across the sky with his chariot and no one mentions the really buff baseball pitcher because that explanations sounds just a bit more dumb than the other one.
People make up shit all the time and then justify it. It's part of our psychology. I recommend looking at recent religion to get a more real world idea of how this works. I'd start with Mormonism. I'm not saying religion is fake, I'm just saying that it lacks any real definitive testable evidence. The question seems to be how does this sort of shit get started. We have recent historical examples of exactly this happening.
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The implication of a setting where supernatural entities are created by the belief of mortals is that *it is mortals who wield that power unknowingly*, and as such they create the supernatural entities they need.
These creatures would need no origin prior to being conjured by the combined belief of mortals, and since they are built from the expectations of said mortals, it is possible for them to come into being with existing personalities, knowledge and ideas.
As others have pointed out, the process works like this:
1. A mortal experiences something beyond its understanding, like a thunderstorm.
2. It tries to explain it with terms it understands, for example, that a giant is causing the noise with a tool.
3. The "giant" and its "tool" takes shape as versions of things the mortal knows, like say, a big powerful man wielding a special hammer.
4. The mortal further imagines what the motivations, personality or name of said giant might be.
5. The mortal tells of its idea to others, and with time the idea propagates and evolves, until it is accepted knowledge.
6. This process gives birth, in the setting, to a new deity, who is created with all the knowledge, abilities and other properties that the mortals have dreamed up for it, up to and including the idea that it might be eternal and even predate the mortals that conjured it up.
This setting would present interesting storytelling opportunities, for example if mortals manage to understand the process and use it for their purposes (enter religious leaders shaping belief, just like in the real world many religious leaders are the only ones allowed to interpret holy scripture), or more interestingly yet, the identity crisis when a powerful deity discovers its true nature as a dream conjured up by mortals.
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They can exist as mathematical structures.
The definition of "existence" is a little bit blurry here, and long [philosophical](http://philosophy.stackexchange.com) discussions could be based on it.
But, for example, the sine function existed even before it was first written by a mathematician. It is an objective thing.
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In the real world there are actually things that exist, based only on people's beliefs, it's called the tinkebell effect. For example the value of money (or a share in a company): If everyone believes that the US Dollar has value then it does, otherwise, if everybody thought it was worthless, they wouldn't trade dollars for goods and services, and all your money would be worthless.
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I'm working on a magic system for my story. One of the ideas I'm toying with is magic users gaining extra senses, depending on the kind of magic they can use.
One example is Reachsense (WIP name), ability to physically feel your surroundings within a certain distance. Something between sense of touch, classic blindsense and echolocation. This would be gained by my telekinesis users - and they'd be limited to only manipulating objects within range of their Reachsense.
What I'm wondering about is how would a human adapt to suddenly finding themselves posessing a new sense. I think Reachsense itself might be somewhat similar to the pain of phantom limbs, but there should be more to it, considering sheer amount of sensory imputs. I imagine it would be extremely uncomfortable at first, but I have some trouble working out the process of getting used to it and eventually turning it into a massive advantage over ordinary people.
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Some psychology studies have already been performed that suggest the human brain is plastic enough that this isn't much of a problem.
One experimenter wore a belt around his waist, a portion of which was always buzzing and letting him know the direction of magnetic north (true north? don't remember, either is possible with electronics). After several weeks he was more than used to it, and claimed that it allowed him to navigate easily in buildings he'd never been in before.
After removing it, he also claimed that it felt in some way as if he were blinded. A sense of being lost, disoriented, and so forth lasted for days.
Other senses involve putting small permanent magnets in one or more fingertips. I have no idea why someone would do this, but apparently you can touch (the insulation of) electric wires, and know whether these are hot (have electricity flowing through them) because it produces a slight tingling sensation. Though it might be interesting and useful to have that as an electrician (so you don't electrocute yourself), seems like it might be more dangerous (fingertips are even more conductive). I have no idea why anyone else would bother. But supposedly this works too.
Many people have their sight or their hearing restored, or in some cases they will have it given to them for the first time. Surgeries and other medical interventions now sometimes border on the miraculous. They do tend to have some trouble, but it's generally social ([the deaf population can sometimes be in opposition to cochlear implants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Criticism_and_controversy), etc).
Sometimes, even new senses can be be conferred... some eye surgeries allow people to see into the near-UV spectrum. Apparently our retinas are more than capable of perceiving this light, but our corneas are pretty opaque to it.
(Though mild,) Real-world examples abound. The best we can tell, it takes a few days to a few weeks to acclimate, and then the person feels as if it's almost the case that it's always been that way. Minimal adjustment is needed, and isn't in any way uncomfortable.
Except for possibly growing taste buds in your rectum. The studies haven't done much to clarify how that affects a person.
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People have given monkeys 3-colour vision [using gene therapy](https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-therapy-gives-monkeys-color-vision#). They learned how to use it. The researcher I met rewarded the monkeys with fruit juice when they correctly identified a colour using the new receptors. They picked up what was wanted. What they 'see' is a bit different: maybe the broadband colours that stimulate the red and green receptors look 'smooth' and the colours that only stimulate one receptor look 'rough'. As we do not have equal numbers of L and M receptors, we might be able to distinguish pure red from pure green.
It used to be believed that we stopped making new brain cells. What would happen to our memories if we did? In fact, we carry on growing brain cells all our life, and the brain is able to adapt to all sorts of new things given time.
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# Depends on your implementation
Stories enough that can help you on your way.
## Curing blindness
A man blind from birth was given the option to finally see as a grown man. His eyes had worked all his life, but for a reason they could solve he could see again. It was interesting, as he couldn't recognise shapes like round or square by seeing them. Only by touching. What's horrifying is that it meant his brain couldn't comprehend anything that was thrown at it by it's eyes. The experience will be hard to make an analogue of, bit let's say it's like giving someone from a hundred or several hundred years ago a VR headset of a roller coaster, or an action part of a star wars movie. They do not comprehend anything moving, they do not know what is dangerous or how to act as they are assaulted by all these signals.
This man was missing a whole modality. Introducing something new overwhelmed him and made him regret his decision.
## Learning new modalities
There's also plenty of more hopeful results. Modern human life is full of things we do not understand in our normal life we're still able to learn. The simple act of using computers and smart phones is a miracle in itself. The ability to navigate these digital environments, from webpages to apps to games, all represent movements and understanding far beyond what you find in nature.
They aren't truly new modalities. They are build up from existing stuff we already know. Humans aren't just intelligent, they are incredibly flexible and adaptable. There was evena guy that put some glasses on his head that mirrored and flipped the image what he was seeing. After 3 months or so he could drive better with those glasses than without, claiming the world to be upside down and mirrored if he took the glasses off.
## Your implementation
Your implementation here is important. Is it a new modality or not? If it is not and just borrows the other senses it should be fine. If it is completely new it can be dangerous. Even so you're not dead in the water. If this part develops during your life, much like we do with our other senses, even something completely new can be learned. Imagine suddenly being able to move in a 4th dimension, as well as seeing it. It would drive us crazy. If you slowly can shutter it and grow your understanding and control, nothing much should be in your way to eventually navigate a 4th dimensional space.
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If you are looking for a real approach it would be weird/uncomfortable for a while, figuring out what that is, what you can do with it etc. The human brain is already pretty good at ignoring sensory input, it uses maybe 20% of all the information it gathers, so troubles with sensory overload are non existent.
But it wouldn't grow stronger overtime, it would become weaker with time (getting older), but it would definitely get more precise and you probably would discover some very cool tricks by abusing your own limitations.
As pointed out by @JBH (thank you!)
Autism would be the effect you are looking for(assuming you want to make it clear that the new sense is very powerful and overwhelming), its believed that one of the nuances of autism is the brain not being able to handle/comprehend all sensory input.
Your characters path should start with symptoms of autism very high on the scale, and as he gets used to it/learns how to handle it, it would decrease to less severe symptoms.It would also mean that the beginning would be the make or break, with the equivalent of severe autism it would be hard to learn anything(he would get distrated when a fly landed near him since he would feel it.Even breathing in that zone would stimulate his senses), but it would be easier with time as he learns to control/ignore leading to some pretty fun possible arcs where he enters a pretty much "Disabled"(i hate this word when it comes to autism) person and leaves a telekinetic mage.
As per autistic behavior i would recommend searching because with my whole life experience backing me up (i have Asperger) i can't tell it cleared then "funky"/unusual behavior
But since its your story be open to not explaining it and just stating that has a fact he adapted to it for X amount of time or with help of X person/master.
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You might make the new sense a *complimentary sense* of an existing sense. Say one of the senses you already have is $A$ and the new sense is called $B$. The senses $A$ and $B$ are such that they are very rarely used or are very rarely required to use simultaneously. So the times when you are not using $A$, you can automatically switch on to $B$. Since $A$ is already an established sense of yours, you have enough experience with it which means when you aren't using it, you can use that time using $B$ to get used to it.
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I'm playing around with an idea in my head for a speculative species and I'd appreciate any help with a problem I've encountered trying to make them plausible.
Let's say I have a species of animal, X. They have two distinct forms they go through in the course of life. X are born as small, bipedal babies a mere 17 cm long. As they grow they have a growth spurt and reach 61 cm tall, or about the size of a raven, before slowing down. At this stage, their organs are fully developed and their brains are almost as advanced as humans, however they are unable to reproduce yet. They are still juveniles. Young X live omnivorous lifestyles eating bugs, fruit, and small mammals while living in scattered Neolithic societies, and can stay in this adolescent state for decades.
Then puberty hits. Around the time they become sexually viable X suddenly become solitary and territorial towards their once-peers, leaving the community to strike it out in the wilderness. They lose the ability to think critically and preserve only the instincts needed to survive. At the same time their physiology changes: they become herbivorous, they pack on fat stores, and most importantly they grow very, *very* big. A well-fed and aged X can grow up to 3 meters tall. These adults are the only ones that can breed, and once pregnancy is over they will give birth near a juvenile settlement and leave their children to be raised by the youth.
**My question is**: *how could this plausibly evolve*? How could a creature have two distinct life stages that occupy different niches and have different levels of intelligence? I know T. Rexes have distinctly different juveniles and adults, and certain invertebrates lose neurons as they mature (none that I can recall the name of), but I'm having difficulty putting the two together.
Feel free to toy with the specifics of the species if that helps you answer. They can live in any climate and at any time period- I'm more focused on the plausibility of their biology rather than solidifying their world for now.
Thanks!
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In order to have a species with a high intelligence as a juvenile and a low intelligence as an adult, it would be necessary to have a metamorphosis as an intermediate step.
During metamorphosis, the individual's body changes radically, potentially to the point that an adult doesn't look anything like a juvenile. The adult's adaptations can be completely different to those of the juvenile, and may be mediated by different genes.
So, the juveniles may be adapted to being intelligent. However, the intelligence of the adults may depend upon a different set of genes... and in the general rebuilding of the body, much of the brain may be repurposed or may simply be discarded.
Sure, it seems like a waste, but that's evolution for you. The intelligence of the adults will just have to evolve separately.
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**Challenge:** What evolutionary benefit would it provide to go the *extremely expensive* way of developing intelligence to the point of sapience, to only *throw it all away* when the specimen enters an age when "providing your knowledge to others" would be most beneficial to the group?
Also, the fact that your species X enters a *territorial and solitary* lifestyle *before* they become fertile seems very implausible to me.
No, i doubt that a lifecycle like this could could arise naturally within *one* species.
**But wait** - What about the surroundings? What about a **parasite** that lays dormant for a long period of time that, when becoming active, results in a deterioration of mental faculties? That's not something unheard of on our planet.
It could also explain the shift to a herbivore lifestyle, by introducing food intolerances - like the [Lone Star Tick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum#Meat_allergy).
However, infertility *before* reaching that point, as well as the sudden *substancial* growth spurt while switching to a *less* energy dense diet would be hard to explain based on this.
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**No Large Predators.**
Your species has always had a metamorphosis occur at puberty. The juvenile form is small and weedy and vulnerable to all sorts of predators. They are designed to exist in vast numbers, most of which are eaten, and run and hide, and live in the treetops. . .
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/K3DxL.jpg)
. . . until it grows large enough to have no predators.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/44JNp.png)
At this point it metamorphoses into a larger form, moves to the ground, and lays thousands of eggs. The large form is useful because it means more eggs and more young for the next generation.
Being herbivorous is good because grass is available in abundance on the ground. Being solitary means they are inclined to spread out and lay their eggs over a wider area. There is no advantage to living in groups since they don't need protection anymore. Likewise a big brain is not needed. Dipolodocus did fine with its pea brain:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XchUUl.png)
Since the two forms fit separate niches they are free to evolve separately. The small form evolved to be smart since it makes it easier to make tools and work together to stay alive. Note that unlike humans these guys only develop smartness as they get older. In the earliest stages of life they rely on their tinyness and vast numbers to ensure enough make it to the next generation.
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I'll try to give short, general explanations for all the distinctions and how they may have developed:
Your creature always went through the tiny, small, and huge stages. That part itself doesn't require special explanation, frogs do the exact same thing (and don't go through a full body meltdown like insects)
The huge stage evolved towards pure herbivores in an over-compensating development of evolving away from accidentally eating their own juvenile counterparts.
The small ones evolved towards sapience for the same reason we humans did: Because being medium-sized and stupid is hard.
The huge ones are aggressive and territorial because that works quite well for big herbivores - Rhinos do it. There is also practically no need for big brain time if you're the undisputed owner of the grass you eat. Why waste energy on brainpower when you can use it to bash predators into the ground instead?
And they have very good reason to be very defensive - since the small, infertile(!) stage lasts quite long, the survival of the fertile stage is paramount for the survival of the species.
That said, it has probably already become a spiral: The small stage is evolving to last longer and longer, since that is beneficial when you're sapient.
What I can't explain is the exact neurological process that takes away their brainpower. But a huge shift in priorities on how blood and energy are distributed throughout the fast-growing body seems one plausible explanation.
[Answer]
## The reasons could be the same as on Earth
Q: *"how could this plausibly evolve? How could a creature have two distinct life stages that occupy different niches and have different levels of intelligence?"*
Earth science sais
**1. Metamorphosis makes sure caterpillars and butterflies don't compete**
For different niches, the answer is yes. Many insects do the trick.. During your life, you'll have two realms. According to Scientific American, the primary incentive for the adaptation in Earth's nature is preventing competition between the young and the old in one species. I'll add a link about that.. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/insect-metamorphosis-evolution/>
**2. Intelligence makes us adapt to new environment quicker**
There's hard-science support for this,
*"Here, we test this hypothesis for a major animal group (birds) by examining whether large-brained species show higher survival than small-brained species when introduced to nonnative locations. Using a global database documenting the outcome of >600 introduction events, we confirm that avian species with larger brains, relative to their body mass, tend to be more successful at establishing themselves in novel environments.*"
<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15784743/>
**Your world is a different world..**
These Earth explanations need not hold for your planet. It could be any thinkable adaptation. As an example, see the answer Daron put. It gives a plausible reason. The young animal is smaller and certain predators may profit from that. The young would need to anticipate.. hide.. be smart..
**Assume the reason would be the same as on Earth..**
So ad 1) the old and young of this species don't share the same environment
And ad 2) a larger brain allows quicker adaptation to new circumstances.
**Suppose.. the young ones roam on land, the old ones live in the water.**
.. Maybe they are egg-layers ? Sea-turtle behaviour: dig in your egg on the beach and return to the sea. On your planet, the circumstances on land ar much more complicated and change much quicker than sea and sea life. The young would be born with legs and a tail.. suitable for land.
The egg is put on land. The young will have to cope with e.g. instable weather, various predators, lots of competition.. they could develop nomadic behaviour, roaming around, to find a place suitable for their transition stage. They encounter all kinds of species, find new food, or find new land.. they profit from their relatively large brain. They were born with it.
Now it enters the metamorphosis stage. They'll hatch underwater. Reason: When your big one is full-grown, it has become whale-like, far too big to move on land. It will remain in the ocean, which provides it lots of food. They enter the grazing phase of their life.
Why would this animal keep its advanced brain, after the metamorphosis ? Energy-wise, it would be more effective to replace it.
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Not sure if realistic but... one thing I have heard is that elephants, despite their larger brains, aren't that smart because so much of their brainpower is used to control their enormous bodies (and complex digestive system). The bigger the body, the more brain matter is required to control it. Similarly, dolphins are pretty smart but a large part of their brainpower manages their sonar capability. They might be as smart as people if not for that. Point being, brain power isn't just a factor of brain size, but what, precisely, the brain has to spend time working on. Humans can be smart because we have big brains for our mass and we aren't that complex to run.
So my thinking is that this creature's brain stops growing early, but the body mass never does. They just get bigger and bigger. And the brain adapts to handling the larger and larger mass basically by sacrificing intelligence -- repurposing neurons. Makes me think of something like a dragon. They just never stop growing. And they're incredibly smart when they're young but the older they get, the bigger they get, the dumber they get until eventually they are just big angry lizards.
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It's not unheard of for humans to lose out on brainpower and acquire more physically aggressive tendencies as they age: we call it dementia. Fortunately, its typical onset late in life tends to balance out the aggression with the physical weakness common to aging. If your species were afflicted with a tendency to develop dementia around puberty rather than at the twilight of their lives, that would be a very scary creature indeed! (And it opens the possibility of some rare individuals managing to *not* develop dementia as they grow, which could lead to any number of different possible storylines for them...)
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# Juveniles Live in Safe Places; Adults Journey into Danger:
Your juvenile species is smart to stay alive and develop food resources in areas that are relatively safe, like protected valleys and oases. They hunt, engage in simple agriculture, and nurture the young that turn up or are dropped off by the adults. They live, in other words, like simple hunter-gatherers.
But these safe areas are few and far between. The rest of the world is deadly in some stripe - either full of hazards, predators, or just inhospitable. Adults that retained their intelligence led to significant inbreeding. After all, you'd have to be stupid to leave a safe enclave for the almost suicidal outside world.
But biology is cruel. A relatively tiny number of successful adult reproductive acts allow large numbers of genetically diverse offspring to thrive in the more protective regions. So adults who's intelligence declines become overwhelmed by instinct and throw caution to the wind. They build up reserves they'll need to survive in the hostile outer areas, and venture forth to seek mates. Many die, but the females who manage to get back to the fertile areas birth (or lay eggs) many offspring. They don't need to be smart, because the juveniles take care of the young. Then the remaining females can either die or venture back out to seek mates once again, for as long as they survive.
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The adult form is caused by the accumulation of toxins or prions in the brain. As a result, neurons are damaged and the area of the brain responsible for the secretion of growth hormone is stimulated. This triggers the growth and sexual maturation phases. As the individual grows, toxins / prions accumulate in the brain, which lead to impaired thought functions and increased hormone emissions, and so on until the individual dies - most likely as a result of cancer.
Evolution:
initially the phases were short and the adult units were smaller and fell easily prey. The middle phase was intelligent and eliminated the predators - the longer phase resulted in more predators being eliminated which leads to longer life for the adults and more offspring. At one point, adults began to die of old age, not as victims. Since feeding is related to the accumulation of toxins / prions, the intelligence of the middle phase has allowed the elimination of the most harmful foods. This overlapped with his innate immunity. Once they discovered the basics of medicine, the avalanche could not be stopped.
Consider fast maturing as a result of eating the brain of an adult.
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That way of functioning doesn't have to have an evolutionary advantage.
You can exploit the weaknesses of evolution for this one.
Namely, evolution does not have backtracking.
Do you know why our eyes are so complex and yet primitive. Because eyes evolved before life left the oceans. The new eyes had to adapt to land-based life - so we evolved various mechanisms to keep them wet and the lenses evolved to focus light without being submerged. But, still eyes completely evolved on land would have been much better. Evolution however never starts all over - especially with important organs that must always work.
So if your species evolved from another primitive species that worked the same way - without having very advanced intelligence - then your more advanced species will keep this. Especially if it is linked to some other basic function that evolution cannot easily replace - like digesting food destroys your nervous system.
But you still have to find an evolutionary advantage for the intelligence - this species must be somehow better at surviving than the more primitive one.
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Elaborating on @fectin's answer (which I didn't manage to spot before I posted my own):
This may not constitute a complete answer, but [Ambulance Ship](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?4234) by James White features a species that exhibits some similar characteristics. The reasoning he gives could apply here, at least for some parts of it.
The planet in question is a severely competitive environment, so the physical strength, durability and violence of the "adults" evolved. They also gain awareness and intelligence (and telepathy, but that's irrelevant here) before birth (because they needed to be born ready to survive). The ability to think, however, turns out to be an evolutionary disadvantage outside of the womb, since it impedes the fast reflexes necessary for the species' survival in their fast-moving, competitive swamp biome; so it gets lost during the birthing process.
You could easily translate this to your scenario. Adults have to have the fast reflexes and durability to survive dangerous species of plant and animal in your environment. They might initially have the imperative to protect their more vulnerable young, who develop awareness (but not physical strength) at birth, and eventually find each other and begin forming societies. Since these societies have higher survival rates than children alone in the forest with their mindless parents, evolution begins to favour the instinct to bring newborns to existing settlements, and the impulse to keep their young nearby is lost.
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When James White wrote a similar species, they had a very, very long gestation period and were telepathic. To keep them safe in the womb, they were paralyzed. Part of the birth process included release of an enzyme that countered the paralysis, but also stripped their sentience ("to be born is to die"). Adults were tough and violent.
Closer to home, octopi and some squids are quite smart, but essentially give up and starve to death after sex.
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**They Don't Stop Growing**
Perhaps this species never stops growing. It grows a brain large enough to control a large body, but while the body is small, it has excess brainpower that can be used for language, culture, and perhaps even science.
But as they continue to (slowly) grow, they need to get more aggressive (their earlier passive lifestyle no longer supplies enough calories) and more and more of that brain power is repurposed into controlling their body. This later form needs to be successful and dominant enough that there is no evolutionary pressure into maintaining the smaller form.
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Toxins in some of the critters the juveniles eat, collect in the body. How long it takes to trigger the "adult" phase depends on what critters are available - but eventually enough of these toxins get collected and kick the dormant growth and testosterone system kicked into overdrive. Could also be more of a alumnium-toxicosis due to some of the bugs providing it and leading to dementia / alzheimer - therefor reducing intelligence.
Growth spurts and more aggressive behaviour develops. They also somehow recognize where the toxins come from and avoid their former omnivourous diet and start munching plants.
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Then there is this brain-slug - you get it by happenchance and if the stars align correctly (or in-correctly) it passes through your ear into your brain and starts devouring it. Its a slow process ... but you'll get dumber and dumber and eventually start eating plants that you wouldn't have touched with sane mind - those plant hormones let you grow and get fertile.
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As a junior wizard, you need to carry around a lot a paraphernalia - scrolls, tomes, potions, stones, and many other things. Fortunately the Wizarding 102 class included the creation of pocket dimensions.
And so begins your quest to make a usable bag of holding.
There's just one problem: the only pocket dimensions you can make are big, really big. The inside of your satchel isn't just bigger than it looks, it's lightyears across in there! So if you simply toss an item into your bag it's going to drift away from arms reach of the opening fairly rapidly.
One mage suggested attaching items with strings to the opening. This allows you to store a lot of stuff, but then getting things out is fiddly. Another mage suggested building a shelf inside the bag, but that limits the amount of stuff quite a lot.
So, how do you do it? How do you ensure that you can access items inside your pocket dimensions without needing to use telekinesis to retrieve objects from kilometers away?
You want:
* To be able to retrieve items quickly. When attacked by the Beast of Baltoth you need to be able to get at your potion of flame very rapdily.
* To be able to store items quickly without losing them.
* To be able to store large items such as swords and delta class summoning stones.
* To be able to store small items (eg a 1cm sphere of sunstone)
* To be able to store lots of things - ideally your whole alchemy setup.
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There are some problems with large pocket dimensions we are going to ignore. These include:
* The fact that the pocket dimension (upon opening) would inhale the atmosphere of earth if it wasn't already filled with air.
* The fact that if the pocket dimension was filled with air it would coalesce into stars and galaxies.
Other thoughts:
* You can decide if there is gravity or not inside the pocket dimension, and which way it points.
* The opening of the pocket dimension is attached to a satchel. You can safely leave things poking through the opening and attach things to the outside of the satchel.
* I'd rather avoid "spell each item such that it comes to your hand when you want" and "play fetch with your familiar"
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Inside the bag is a town of fairy creatures, they live happily and safely, maintaining the vast vaults and libraries of the town. In the center of the town is a richly decorated raised platform. Every so often fiery arcane runes appear in sky spelling out the name of some item that the wizard needs. The creatures run to quickly retrieve the item from the depths of the vaults and placed on the platform, before the sky tears open with a thunderous crash and a giant wizard's hand descends to retrieve the item. Thankfully time runs faster inside this dimension, so the denizens have plenty of time to retrieve the items.
Alternately, instead of a fey town the bag is a mess of industrial corridors and barred cages, inhabited by enslaved demons. Or a network of interwoven tunnels inhabited by goblins.
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That's a good question, young acolyte. One that mages have been asking ever since Magister Lanaken first formalized the dimensional storage techniques. For a full discussion on the thaumaturgic explanation I'll direct you to Kenshian's 'Dimensional Theory' - third edition, by preference.
Briefly however, the apparently unlimited space accessible to us through dimensional storage magic is not the same as the world we experience. Broadly speaking the rules that we work by in our daily lives have no relevance to the storage spaces. Size, mass, speed, pressure... none of them have the same meaning within the storage space as they do in the natural world.
According to Kenshian it may be incorrect to call it a space at all. In her model she treats these storage dimensions as *conceptual* regions rather than physical ones. This certainly explains a number of things that have befuddled mages much more experienced that you or I. Let's run through some of the common questions shall we?
***Why are storage spaces so large?***
Simply put, they're not. Size does not exist in a dimensional store, so it is neither large nor small. The aperture, the connection between your storage space and our world, is a thaumic construct which performs a simple translation between the two. As you pass an object through the aperture it assumes the properties of objects in the storage space. If Kenshian's model is correct then objects are translated to *conceptual* objects, without any physical properties. They occupy no space, have no location, no mass.
Considering the sheer amount of stuff my own storage space contains, I'm rather glad that is the case.
***How do we access objects when we need them?***
Just like the aperture transforms the properties of objects, it also transforms your *will* through the same mechanism. When you reach into the space to remove a potion for instance, your will is impressed on the conceptual space. The concept of your hand, guided by your will, simply grasps the concept of the potion. If no potion concept exists within the space then you'll fail. If your will is diffuse then it might grab the wrong potion. If I have fifty different potions in my store and I just reach for "a potion" then what I withdraw is, apparently, random. The better you define the specific object the more likely you are to retrieve that one item and not something similar.
I think we'll all agree that this is a fabulous boon compared to the older spatial storage techniques, where one would have to fumble around among the physical objects.
***But we can't transform artifacts, how can they be stored?***
Seems like a real problem, but when it comes to conceptual spaces it might not actually be relevant. The rules of a conceptual space simply apply to everything that enters them. We speak of the aperture as having a transformative effect on objects, but in reality it's just acting as an interface between the conceptual and physical. No physical thing can exist in a conceptual space, so any physical object - no matter how empowered, regardless of form - can only have conceptual properties within the space.
Gruent's treatise "Metaphysical Representations in the Realms" covers this in greater detail, with broader discussion on other types of spaces such as the so-called elemental planes.
***If they're just concepts, why do they stay the same?***
Honestly, Gruent does a much better job of explaining this. It's not my field.
The short form is that there's something that defines the object, and that something doesn't change just because the object moves to a conceptual space, an elemental space or a physical space. Gruent calls this the ontic form of the object. Moving between spaces doesn't alter the ontic form, only how that form is expressed within the rules of the object's reality - the space it occupies.
***Why don't things cool or spoil when I store them for a long time?***
Temperature, corruption, time itself? Your storage spaces contain none of these things. Not as we mean them anyway. Clearly there's something like time, since we can change the contents of the storage. But while there, objects don't experience the passage of time.
And before you ask, no, we can't store people. Or complex animals. Conceptual spaces appear to be compatible with the spiritual essence that distinguishes living creatures from dead ones. Passing into a conceptual space damages the spirit in direct proportion to the complexity of the spirit. An insect may pass into the space and emerge apparently unharmed, but it dies soon after. A cat emerges insane and dying. The last time a human trial was conducted the results were horrific enough to dissuade further experimentation.
Any creature with will is affected, except those whose spirit is attuned to certain esoteric spaces - some elementals for instance and most divine entities, although I don't suggest you try this without further study. Ensouled items are also unaffected, and report no experience within storage, as though they were immediately withdrawn regardless of how long they are stored.
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And that's the end of today's session. Next week we'll cover some of the important caveats of using conceptual spaces, their limitations and the few non-living exceptions. I expect all of you to submit a medium essay - that's three full pages, Mr Druvek, without illustrations this time please - on the formation of storage spaces and maintenance of their physical anchors. With references to DuVrey, Ak'then'kar and Malcolm.
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# Different dimension = different universe with different rules
Whenever some physical body is completely contained in the bag of holding, it becomes a LEGO version of itself. This reduces the size of the object considerably. The plane of existence inside the bag also contains an infinite LEGO board, to which most objects can be attached directly. When a mage gets such a bag, they would be wise to put on some pieces that will allow them to attach non-brick pieces (i.e.: a suit of armor would connect to the infinite board by the feet, and would be able to hold a sword in each hand).
Getting the item you desire becomes an exercise of feeling for what you want with your hand. Once you find it, you just have to pull it out. The object becomes a regular version of itself when getting close to the bag's opening.
This is what the inside of a bag could look like. Notice the blocks of gold, copper and water. There are also some plants to the right. Never mind the prisoners to the left.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aMnbA.jpg)
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## Your wizard will have to be really organized
Maybe your wizard can even get a side hustle of being a warehouse manager! Or creating a pocket-dimension organizing system that can be worked quickly to his (or even others') needs à la *Marie Kondo*
## Groups of objects - urgent reach
The basic separation between the objects would be not by type or size but by how quickly they'll have to be retrieved when they're needed. For example, in your typical factory you have a LOT of safety equipment. Even though they're all the same "group" (so to say), some items like fire extinguishers, first aid kits, AEDs, eye washers need to be retrieved or reached *very* quickly when needed. Other items like harnesses, noise meters, etc. can be retrieved on a more leisurely pace
For urgent reach items, they should be kept within short distance of the opening - either attached to the opening of the satchel or tied to a short string with a tactile code so the wizard can find them by touch without needing to waste much time looking for them
## Groups of object - not urgent reach
These objects are usually not immediately needed, so there is also more flexibility on how to store them. The wizard can opt for storing his alchemy setup all together in a large crate, so they can immediately pull it out, open the crate and use it
Causative's wheel idea would work nicely for this one, so would be a colored line system if you're still going with the string idea (which is a mimicry of the color line system used for hospital corridors and other large public buildings - for example, blue line means alchemy, so the alchemical items are stored in branching strings with labels).
The important thing here is to have an indexing system / list of contents so the wizard knows how to find each item
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Make it like a directory structure, with pockets inside pockets.
The inside of the bag would look like one of those "organizer" bags that are advertised on late-night TV that have a place for everything.
Or, it might be more like an accordian file.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/F7XN2.jpg)
When you open one of the leaves, it opens to fill the entire original size of the mouth, with the closed sides being pushed completely flat.
Inside that compartment, an inch down, is another accordion file.
You can open successive leaves to quickly get to the compartment you want. You can even label them along the edge.
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Assuming zero G inside.
### Solution 1: Wheels
* Start with a circular wooden wheel. Attach items to the rim of the wheel. It would be ideal if you could glue magnets to the wheel and the items and just stick the items to it. Failing that, the wheel could have hooks or clips. To get the item you want, you reach in, rotate the wheel until the item you want is at the top, then remove that item.
* The wheel stays in reach because it has hooks around its perimeter, and you don't let go of the wheel without hooking one of those hooks around the lip of the bag.
* Take a second wooden wheel, just like the first, and join them with an axle so that they can rotate independently. Now, to get your item, you move the whole apparatus until the wheel you want is in reach, then rotate that wheel until you get the item you want.
* Attach as many additional wheels to the axle as necessary.
* Always remember to hook the nearest wheel around the lip of the bag, so the whole apparatus doesn't drift away.
The limit on how many items you can store this way is the mass of the apparatus. It becomes more difficult to move the whole thing if you have too many items, though zero G helps with that, and if the correct wheel is in reach you don't have to move the whole thing because the wheels can spin independently.
### Solution 2: Board
Put a big piece of plywood in there, with the flat side facing the opening. Attach the items to the board. The board has handles on it that you can use to pan it left/right or "up"/"down", until you get to the item you want. The board also has hooks at regular intervals for hooking around the lip of the bag so you can keep it from drifting away.
Again the limit is how much mass you have to move to get to the item you want. The board solution is a lot simpler than the wheel and axle solution, and in total it would weigh a bit less, but with the board solution you *always* have to move the whole apparatus, while with the wheel solution sometimes it suffices to only move one wheel.
### Solution three: Rods
Take a certain number of items and attach them to a straight rod, 3 feet long. The rod has a labeled hook at the end. You put the rod into the bag, hook it around the lip, and angle it way off to the side so it doesn't obstruct the opening. Now you have a few dozen hooks around the opening, for a few dozen rods. Inside the space, the rods are splayed out radially in the same plane as the opening. Select the rod you want based on the labels on the hooks, then pull that rod away from the side into the open area in the center, and pull it out. Then choose the item you want from the rod and put the rod back.
This solution doesn't require moving the whole apparatus, but there's a limited amount of space for rods to be arranged like this. Also, it's maybe a bit slower to use since you have to take the rod out of the bag to get the item.
### Supplementary solution for rarely-used items: Bags.
Stuff that you won't need to retrieve quickly can be just thrown in big bags off to the side of the primary apparatus. This reduces the clutter among the items that are prepared for more rapid retrieval. The bags would be attached via strings to the outside.
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**Learn to Ensorcell a Smaller Universe**
I mean really! Who needs 98.342 bajillion tetratic gigametres of space to keep a few essentials in!
If your magial student had actually paid attention in Wizarding 102, she'd have learnt that it's much easier to store things in a more reasonably sized bag of holding.
Just tweak the equation to redefine the outer boundary of the space within. V = 4/3 πr^3. Really, all she has to do is limit r to something reasonably smaller than ∞! Keep it somewhere between 1 and 2 yards and the insides won't be too difficult to rifle through without recourse to bound & impressed Imps to do the searching and retrieval!
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## Robe of Many Pockets
... something like this: but more wizardly ...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VsX1a.png)
One of the hard things about using the same bag to hold everything is that some things are just on very different scale than others, and the solution that works for one sort of thing does not work for another. Sometimes you just need an easy access place to hold a few tiny vials of pixie dust, and in others you need to hold a suit of plate armor.
The good news is that spinning up new pocket dimensions seems to be pretty trivial in your setting; so, there is no reason to settle for one "catch all" pocket dimension. By having many pockets attached to many pocket dimensions, you can solve each problem independently of one another.
Your potions for example may have a pocket that opens up to a sort of vending machine into another dimension, so you open the pocket, pull out a potion, and another one just slides down or is pushed into its place. Then you have your wizard's staff which is long and skinny; so, you have one small pocket that leads to a long narrow tube perfectly sized for it. Takes up very little real-estate on the outside of your robe, and it makes getting to your staff really quick and easy.
Since we are going with a robe, it also means you can have your most important pockets easily accessible without even having to reach for a bag; so, that little pocket on your right shoulder is your healing potions, and that one on your left wrist is your stack of fireball scrolls. That big zipper that runs down your side is your [horse pocket](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvEe3Y3B2cg). Each pocket is sized and placed on your body by priority and function.
Then on your back you will probably have one big pocket that leads to a giant spread out fishing net... this is your long term storage for stuff you never need to access quickly and don't mind having to telekinetically riffle through to get what your need making it the perfect place to store those 20 nearly worthless goblin spears you hang onto so that you can later sell them to some shop keeper for lunch money.
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**Magic shelves and retrieving spells**
You use magic to create it, so you can use magic to help you order it. After the creation, you can add layers of magic to order everything to your liking. Swords go here, scrolls go there. Every time you put something in, you add a sort of mental picture with it. The moment you think of the wooden staff with a knob on the end, as opposed to the wooden staff with a bulb on the end right next to it, the desired item will fly into easy reach.
Now it's easy! Grab a bottle of stoneskin. Put it knowingly into the bag to get it stored. Next time you think if that particular one, it'll fly towards the hole.
Store obelisks, full plate armour and that nice pebble you like to give your partner. Everything is simply chucked in and retrieved with a thought. Even in a panic you can remember a health potion.
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### Inside this bag is another bag
The OP mentioned in a comment that there's no problem putting a Bag of Holding inside a Bag of Holding. That opens up the following possibility:
You open up your satchel. Inside is a relatively small and easily accessible shelf, upon which are a neat row of satchels, labeled "scrolls", "tomes", "potions", "stones" and "other." You reach in and take out the satchel labelled "scrolls". Inside that is another shelf containing another neat row of satchels. From that you remove the one labelled "scrolls - A-E", and inside *that* is a shelf containing the scroll you want. (It is the one that creates bags of holding.)
Of course this approach not only requires a lot of spellcasting to create the bags but also a substantial amount of woodworking, and satchels themselves probably aren't cheap. (Although, since you don't need to carry the inner bags around, they could just be cardboard boxes, if the laws of magic allow that.) So this will be quite a project, but it might be ideal for a very organised young mage with a bit of money and a lot of time on their hands.
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Trivial solution. Few ribbons working as conveyor belts. Each ribbon has a different colour in order to classify the type of the items attached to it.
More magical solution, a vortex that keep all the items constantly moving around. The wizard to pick the desired object will have to wait for it to pass within grabbing distance, but the vortex is fast and the wizard has good reflexes.
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Your bag is actually *two* separate bags. The outer bag is what you carry on your belt, and just inside the opening is the gateway to your pocket dimension. The inner bag is significantly larger. The body of the inner bag is in your pocket dimension, but the lip is pulled up through the gateway, folded over the top, and sewn to the outer bag. The inner bag prevents its contents from drifting off, and the inner bag itself can't drift off since it's attached to the outer bag. No additional magic needed, just a good seamstress that doesn't ask a lot of questions.
The fixed size of the inner bag does put a limit on the size of things you can keep in there, but you're already somewhat constrained by the size of the opening. The inner bag can always be enlarged as needed. Your only real limit is the amount of fabric you can find. There's no reason why you can't end up with an inner bag the size of a hot-air balloon.
Objects wandering outside your grasp shouldn't be too much of a problem. Any wizard with sufficient skill to create a pocket dimension must *surely* have already learned a basic telekinesis spell. An empty dimension would have no significant sources of gravity, so even a gentle nudge will send a wayward object sailing back towards your hand.
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An idea is that the portal to the pocket dimension is affected by some kind of luck/fate enchantment. While the outward side of the portal is fixed to the satchel, the inward side can reposition itself to anywhere in the pocket dimension. The luck/fate enchantment acts such that it always repositions to the item the wizard most needs at that moment.
This covers the issue of "To be able to retrieve items quickly". Although it does walk a fine line against "To be able to store items quickly without losing them", since the wizard is at the mercy of fate as to when they can actually retrieve anything that's been stored.
However this somewhat conflicts with "The opening of the pocket dimension is attached to a satchel. You can safely leave things poking through the opening and attach things to the outside of the satchel." Though you could at least make the constraint that the portal can't reposition while something is sticking through it. Obviously then for the bag to remain most useful, one wouldn't want to leave anything sticking through the portal for any great length of time. So it's a compromise.
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[Question]
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I have a race of Half Human, Half Dragons I've aptly called Draconians. The Draconians have a thick lizard like tail which extends down from their tailbone and then slowly curves upwards until it is horizontal to the ground.
This causes issues when they need to sit on a chair, because
A) The chair needs to have a hole in the back, for them to place their tail into
B) Not all human chairs (in particular thrones) have a hole in the back.
C) The Tail extends from the tailbone and sitting on a thick tail would cause it to bend unnaturally.
It doesn't make sense to me, that a race of tailed humanoids would just take a human throne, smash a hole in the back and call it a day. Nor would they be willing to essentially sit on their tail all day.
To that end, I decided they would need to lie down, so their tail would assume a more natural position. However this would cause issues with their Humanoid head because
D) A human head looks forward, so lying down would cause the head to be bent at an uncomfortable angle
So **what would the chair look like?**
[Answer]
As with human design, I imagine in your world, form would follow function. I'm working on the assumption that this race developed their own technology and didn't snap into existence from humans. If so, the first furniture they create would meet their needs first, incorporating the tail into their design rather than retrofitting existing human designs.
Another consideration could be that a race so used to counterbalancing their weight with a muscular tail (from your description, it is self-supporting and not just dragon along the ground - pun intended) may not feel the need for a backrest. A simple stool that ergonomically makes room for the legs and tail may suffice. I've included a quick sketch of what this may look like:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GHYJP.jpg)
But variety is the spice of life and we might want a rich, sedentary ruler to have a suitably ornate, relaxing chair from which to hold court. Cue second sketch, where you can include style, armrests, and a backrest, while accounting for the tail.
Lowering oneself in from the top of a high chair or inserting a tail point-first sounds tedious, but swinging into the chair from the side is a natural movement, and I feel the backrest would reflect this in a comfortable chair.
[Answer]
The reason that dinosaurs had large, thick tails had a lot to do with bio-mechanics, and the model of a long, thick tail dragging behind the creature was actually rendered obsolete back in during the major re evaluation of the dinosaurs in the 1980's.
Large Sauropod dinosaurs are now thought to have long, fairly stiff tails which act as counterbalances, with the hips acting as both pivot points, and also as analogues to the towers which support cable stayed and suspension bridges. Long ligaments and tendons radiate from the hips to both the spine and the tail, using the mass of the tail to keep the spine aligned. For theropods like T Rex, the tail balanced the massive head and body, which was held in a more horizontal position.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Trpge.jpg)
*T Rex*
To me, the use of a large tail suggests that the humanoid creatures are descended from a dinosaur like ancestor, and will also have the largely horizontal body posture of their ancestors. Like T Rex, the head will be forward facing and angled so the creature is looking ahead, and not "down"
"Darren Naish has argued that a large-brained, highly intelligent troodontid would retain a more standard theropod body plan, with a horizontal posture and long tail, and would probably manipulate objects with the snout and feet in the manner of a bird, rather than with human-like "hands"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur_intelligence>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B1SCd.jpg)
*Hypothetical sapient dinosaur*
So given the tail reorders the body plan, then furniture like chairs and so on will also need to be different. Rather than sitting down like we would, the creature would perhaps lower the body to rest on a horizontal surface where the weight is taken from the legs, but the hands/manipulating organs are free and the tail points out the back. This would resemble a bench, except the short end would be pointed at the (low) table or work surface and the long end sticking out like the tail of the letter "T"
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lkOmz.jpg)
*Bench seat for a tailed being. The trunk can rest on the padded surface so the table or work bench would be on the right as you look at the picture*
While not the answer you were expecting, thinking about the evolutionary reasons for body plans can come up with all kinds of unexpected things, which can add interest and a true sense of how alien the setting actually is.
[Answer]
It's called a "kneeling chair". They already exist, for people with injuries to their coccyx (tailbone) - see [here](https://www.back2.co.uk/coccyx-relief-kneeling-chair.html), for example:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XcVAM.jpg)
Your knees go on the lower pads, your thighs/butt go on the upper pad. The gouge (to prevent pressure on the tailbone) could be deepened into a full cutaway. You ~~mount~~ *get onto* it like Commander Riker.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ovSem.gif)
They could also have a diagonally slanted 'bed' to lie on (on their fronts), with the head over the top, and the arm around the sides.
[Answer]
iam not sure can this design work or not but i want to share, it actually base from [Dragon ball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball) Chair design for the [saiyan](https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Saiyan) race.
**finally found it**
i dont know the original artist name though found it on [pinterest](https://id.pinterest.com/pin/554224297889367587/?lp=true)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VerDd.jpg)
so in the design it have a slit in the middle back and i suggest add a combination of a reverse toilet hole too (basically extend the slit to become toilet hole, to accomodate different tail angle to be able to just sit straightly or not sit awkwardly or without contort the tail or ass first while not hindering or hurt their tail when sitting.
for visual image of the reverse toilet hole dont take it literal (better image example) but combine it with the slit design basically extend the slit to there, or you can just use this instead.
from:<https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/hospital-toilet-chair-15480843597.html>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4p2Ln.jpg)
[Answer]
# Something like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MYu10.png)
This common design seen in offices everywhere would only need a few minor design changes to accommodate a tail:
* Increase the gap between the seat and the back depending on the thickness of the tail.
* Possibly off-center the spine and/or make it skinnier. If the spine is off-centered, it would be usable only from one side for your lizard folk. As is, it can work either way with it centered, but the tail would have to slip in on one side or the other.
* Armrests? Attach them to the bottom of the seat and *not* to the back, and leave a sufficient gap between the back of the armrest and the seat back for the tail to slip in.
Incidentally, there's no reason for this to be a rolling chair or height-adjustable (that's just the most common type of chair on Earth that has this back design), this type of seat back would work equally well on a regular four-legged chair.
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[Question]
[
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wADtq.png)
It is impossible to have a continuous mostly liquid water ring around a star?
Probably such a configuration would be unstable under normal planetary forming condition. I am looking for a good physical reason why it could never be possible.
It is related to these questions :
* [Can I have a very dense asteroid belt ring around a star?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23443/can-i-have-a-very-dense-asteroid-belt-ring-around-a-star)
* [Is it possible for a planet to have a liquid ring?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/92642/is-it-possible-for-a-planet-to-have-a-liquid-ring)
* <https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/41254/why-is-larry-nivens-ringworld-unstable>
>
> solar wind, internal friction forces, water triple
> point, axial-transverse displacements, roche limit.
>
>
>
* assemble various materials
* phase states
* internal movements
* stabilizing cycles
[Answer]
Every orbiting ring-like structure is unstable due to gravity. Yes, even Saturn's rings and the Asteroid Belt in our Solar System are unstable: they constantly lose and rearrange "particles". The Asteroid Belt is more an intersection of asteroid orbits than some ring structure. There is always a tendency to form some clusters even inside Roche limit. That means that this liquid ring, at best, would become a ring of water drops, blobs and one or two liquid planetoids (like in Saturn's system – they are needed for ring quasi-stability).
This can be easily understood if you consider the inner and outer parts of this ring, as well as the ring at periapsis and apoapsis. They would always have considerable velocity difference, resulting in massive whirls forming. Those whirls would inevitably separate and form planetoids, which would then evolve to something like Saturn's rings & moons, or to a single planet (depending on starting mass and orbit)
Сontinuous liquid ring is impossible.
[Answer]
Friction of the fluid against itself as a wave-propagating medium results in local concentrations of density, and ultimately in the continuous material being broken up. The only stable condition for fluid particles is that they must isolate themselves from the wave field through cohesion into local, disconnected bodies or else lose energy to internal motion and fall from their orbit.
It was James Clerk Maxwell who first discovered that rings around a planetary body (including a star) could not possibly consist of a contiguous fluid:
>
> "Supposing the ring to be fluid and continuous, we found that it will
> be necessarily broken up into small portions. We conclude, therefore,
> that the rings must consist of disconnected particles; these may be
> either solid or liquid, but they must be independent. The entire
> system of rings must therefore consist either of a series of many
> concentric rings, each moving with its own velocity, and having its
> own systems of waves, or else of a confused multitude of revolving
> particles, not arranged in rings, and continually coming into
> collision with each other."
>
>
>
<https://archive.org/details/onstabilityofmot00maxw/page/66>
Incidentally, it was in this work that Maxwell derived the [Criterion for the Stability of a Dynamical System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_criterion), which is the key to all modern control theory and practice, including robots, automobiles, airplanes, biochemical control, and so on.
Mankind learned how to stabilize mechanical engines and to create robots using sensor feedback loops for control as a direct consequence of Maxwell's investigation into Saturn's rings.
[Answer]
Liquid is hard to get in space: you can get either solid or gas. You therefore might get ice particles of various size, or water vapor.
Ice would slowly sublimate to gas, and gas would be blown away by the stellar wind. The rate at which this happens would depend on the distance from the star. On the far side of the goldilocks zone ices can live as long as the star.
But they won't form a ring all around the orbit, unless they are extremely sparse. If they are dense enough, gravity will soon coalesce them into a single body.
[Answer]
Here are a few points
* Friction: If your water needs to be high up enough so that it isn't affected by the friction of particles in the atmosphere which will slow it down and eventually cause it to rain down.
* Solar Winds: Your water needs to be in the atmosphere to offer it protection from solar winds. If it is too high, the solar winds will hit your water and eventually strip it from the planet or cause it to enter the atmosphere. This conflicts with the Friction part.
* Space: Space is essentially a vacuum and when water is placed in a vacuum it will first boil and then freeze, creating a powder of frozen ice crystals. Basically your water needs to be close enough to the sun, so that it can remain in a liquid state, however at this height, it will be close enough to the sun to be impacted by solar winds. This will cause a conflict with the Solar Winds Part.
* Asteroids: There are a lot of asteroids that hit the earths atmosphere and burn up. Unfortunately, due to the amount of light pollution, we cannot see them unless we are in very remote places. If your layer of water is outside of the atmosphere, the asteroids will hit your water rings and cause it to rain back down on earth. After several million years, there won't be much left (especially since water will try to stick to itself due to surface tension).
* Surface Tension: Water doesn't like to act alone. It likes to stick to itself and link up. Anything that impacts a pure water ring will have rippling effects along the entire ring as the shock is dispersed through the water. Anything outside of a perfect laminar flowing ring of water will cause small discrepancies and a buildup in volume at one location which will eventually cause it to be pulled down. For examples of water tension in space have a look at the videos on the international space station. It will literally stick to your skin.
[Answer]
Yes it is impossible:
[Liquid water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water#States) cannot exist at pressures below 0.006[Bar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_(unit)) so in order to have liquid water in free orbit around a star you would first need a [gas torus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_torus). Now the highest density we've directly observed in such a torus is around the planet [Jupiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter) it has an amazing 2000 particles per cubic centimetre (that's not in any way measurable as a pressure). Getting a torus dense enough around a normal star is probably not realistic, there is [a possible solution for forming such a torus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees) but I'm not completely sure that it's accuracy.
Conditions which allow you to have liquid water are almost impossible but even if you could have them a water ring wouldn't be stable. Due to differences in the orbital velocity and momentum of various parts of the ring very few water molecules are actually moving in identical orbital tracks. Parts of the ring are moving in close to the same way as each other but not the same way as their neighbours, this will cause the ring to disintegrate into smaller and smaller droplets as smaller and smaller differences in velocity add up. You could have a thick ring of air that is above 100% [relative humidity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_humidity) such that water vapour was constantly coalescing into clouds, droplets and even larger spheroidal pools, lakes and oceans that are then pulled apart by gravitational and orbital forces but not a single permanently contiguous ring of liquid.
[Answer]
At this time the other answers either miss or gloss over the core of the reason why such a structure could not be possible [by natural means]:
**Fission and materials filtering.**
With the right star and enough H20 in the correct initial orbits, there isn't a lot to actually stop such a structure from existing for a decent chunk of time on a geological timescale.
Sure, the structure is going to fail *eventually*, and fairly quickly on astronomical timescales, but in the grand scheme of things our own solar system is going to fail relatively fast compared to the overarching universe... [And we seem to be doing somewhat okay for the time being...]
The point however is that despite how implausible it is to have that much material in that kind of orbit, the far more implausible point is *getting **that** material in the first place...*
---
So the core of our real issue here is all the 'extra' elements that get created along the way when you start off with Hydrogen and run things along well enough to come up with notable amounts of oxygen: There is 'other stuff' in there, which will heavily contaminate our 'water source' even if we otherwise have perfect conditions for creating the 'temporary' water ring.
You would need to have had enough 'free' hydrogen and oxygen in the system for all the water required, while not having a volume of stuff heavier than oxygen to group up and form cores that interfere with your water ring, and having somehow filtered the bulk of everything between Hydrogen and Oxygen out of that region... All without having displayed the target water from its required initial formation motions.
* I can napkin math a star with a water ring that exists for a time, but I'm not seeing any kind of a starting point to napkin math anything close to a filtering mechanic short of "god/aliens did it".
[Answer]
Such a thing cannot exist, because the ring is not in the lowest energy state, and so it is in an unstable state. Note that the star has nothing whatsoever to do with it. A ring of material is unstable with or without the star, for the exact same reason. So, without loss of generality, simply imagine the situation where there *is no star*. This ring of material will naturally collapse in upon itself due to gravity. The result is that the ring slowly collapses in to form a sphere, which is the lowest energy state.
In the presence of a star, the gravity field that the ring finds itself in isn't flat as in the situation where there is no star, but the water still all wants to collapse down. Note that it won't collapse to a single sphere, though, because of the influence of the star. It should all collapse down to 3 spheres, with two smaller ones at the [5th and 4th Lagrange points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lagrangian_points_equipotential.jpg)
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[Question]
[
I'd like some fact-checking for a somewhat lively discussion going on [over here](/a/185337/43697). Feel free to wander over for details, though they aren't necessarily relevant. (Also, I hope this can serve as a useful reference for other questions.)
### Scenario:
Someone (aliens, rogue government agents, whatever) wants to set up a hidden communications network near Earth. The transmitter will send on the order of 1-10 mW of radiation in a "radio frequency" spectrum (sub-IR) toward Earth. Additionally, one or more relays not less than 1e5 km away must be able to receive the signal. The transmitter must also have LoS of Earth.
### Question:
Hopefully y'all know [there is no stealth in space](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php). However, assuming that Earth isn't already clued in to be looking for this transmitter *specifically*, how likely are we to notice it if it is within 1e6 km? Does placing it on the moon's surface (assume it is sufficiently camouflaged so as to evade simple visual detection) make any difference?
This is [hard-science](/questions/tagged/hard-science "show questions tagged 'hard-science'"), so please cite sources!
[Answer]
We see signals coming from the Moon all the time because [EME has been a thing since after WW2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication).
Every other amateur radio operator knows how to do it and it's very popular. Do check the wiki linked above. The TL;DR for the article is: lots of people use the Moon as a relay for radio signals on purpose and for fun. Those geeks have even created a festivity of their own, called [World Moon Bounce Day](https://space.nss.org/world-moon-bounce-day-celebrates-40th-anniversary-of-apollo-11-moon-landing/):
>
> World Moon Bounce Day will be June 27 in Australia and June 26 in the U.S.(...) Participants worldwide will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing by bouncing radio voice transmissions off the moon, known as "moon bounce."
>
>
> In collaboration with schools, amateur radio organizations, and cultural groups, people from around the world will communicate with one another via the moon (...) Station operators and their guests will experience the thrill of hearing their own voice or that of others talking via the moon (...)
>
>
>
If your aliens' signal is coming from anywhere close to the Moon's surface, it will be noticed but it will be just a droplet in an ocean of signals. This is the best kind of stealth, as everybody will automatically assume it's just a couple of DIY dorks ham radio enthusiasts playing with their ham stations and won't ever bother to peek. If the aliens can use human encryption with a strong key then they will really be safe as it will look even more like users from diy.se [ham.stackexchange.com](https://ham.stackexchange.com/) and retrocomputing.se at play.
For all we know, the aliens could be doing that right now and we wouldn't be able to tell. I would say this jokingly if it were not 2020.
[Answer]
### Yes, if it's cleverly designed:
**Depends on signal to noise ratio**
If it's just putting out a "beep", like *Sputnik 1*, it will attract attention. That's clearly an artificial signal, it stands out to anyone casually looking at the frequency spectrum, its easily detected, and it will attract some investigation.
The more random the signal looks, the less likely it is to attract attention. If there are repeating features in the message, then it will be easy to detect. If your signal looks like white noise, then it will be a lot harder to detect.
The best way to get white noise, compress or encrypt the data, have no or tiny fixed packet structure to give landmarks to anyone observing, use spread spectrum, and send it at the highest speed the lowest power setting your transmitter will allow.
**Also, I don't think anyone is listening to the moon.**
SETI are pointing radio telescopes at interesting places in deep space. As far as I'm aware, they're not pointing the radio telescope at the moon, and for good reason, it [reflects our own signals back to us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication).
Ham radio operators will still use the moon for signal relay, but to them white noise will sound like white noise. It will be ignored.
Nobody from the commercial world will investigate where a rogue signal is coming from unless it affects their transmission quality. If the builders did some research on spectrum allocation, they could find a part of the [frequency spectrum](https://www.acma.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-10/Australian%20radiofrequency%20spectrum%20allocations%20chart.pdf) that isn't being actively used by anyone else (so wont cause anyone else to go investigate why their uplink suddenly died).
[Answer]
**Unnoticed doesn't mean undetected.** It can also mean people detect you, but don't care. There are plenty of satellites in orbit transmitting to various people on the ground and to other satellites.
Establish a shell corporation allegedly working in a field that would be expected to launch satellites: telecommunications is a classic, of course; earth imagery might be another useful field. Do some work to make your cover realistic, and nobody will pay any real attention to your one specific transmitter out of hundreds.
If that's too much work, and you have another way to arrange a launch (or conceal whatever you're using to put the satellite in orbit), you can just have your "communications satellite" *appear* one day. Someone will presumably wonder who owns it at some point, but I would imagine they'd start investigating possibilities like missing registry paperwork or a provider who's gone out of business before they get to possibilities like secret government black ops, let alone aliens.
TL;DR: anybody can resolve your transmitter with a halfway decent telescope (you require a LoS to Earth, which means Earth has a LoS back) so your best bet is to be dismissed as yet another boring practical satellite.
[Answer]
## There is a good chance they will be noticed
**Is anyone watching the moon closely?**
Thanks to Donald Trump's [Space Policy Directive–1](https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=806399) (AKA: "the Boots on the Moon directive"), the answer to this is almost certainly yes. According to this, it is the USA's goal for the "return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization". This means setting up a base on the moon. Being that this directive was sent to the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, this implies the involvement of military/strategic interest in this directive.
If this policy is considered to include the pursuit of military objectives, then they need to closely monitor the moon while this mission is being planned to keep an eye on any foreign powers who attempt to set up bases of their own which might interfere with American interests and vise-versa. As you might expect, military surveillance is quite a bit more in depth than casual civilian observations because they will be looking for what may be intentionally hidden.
**Can you tell the difference between background noise, a moon bounce, and a moon transmission?**
Yes. The key difference between a reflected signal and a transmitted signal is how it [triangulates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(computer_vision)). A reflected signal will bounce off of a very large surface area meaning that if you were to use multiple receivers on Earth to triangulate it's point of origin, it would have an apparent point of origin somewhere behind the moon. Background noise will triangulate WAY farther back since it will mostly be originating from other solar systems.
In contrast, a transmission coming from somewhere on or in orbit of the moon will have an apparent point of origin somewhere that you have line-of-sight indicating that it is actually coming from a point and not just a broad area reflection. A military organization interested in monitoring signals from the moon could use multiple receivers to filter out all the noise cause by reflected and background signals and isolate just signals transmitted from the actual moon.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aXWHb.png)
How this works is that you have multiple receivers that will pick up 3 slightly different noise patterns. From any one vantage point it is just random static but from 3 vantage points you will see the same noise patterns repeated, but with different displacements based on apparent distance. By overlapping the images based on an expected focal distance you will get triple images for all noise patterns that are not at that distance; so, Background noise will be the most displaced, moon bounced signals will be slightly displaced, and signals originating from the moon will line perfectly leaving you just the exact position of the signal's origen.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U64kI.png)
**Can you hide this signal?**
For the most part, yes... point-to-point transmitters like [laser transmitters](http://www.fsona.com/technology.php?sec=fso_guide) and [Directional Antennas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_antenna) can send a directed signal between two points without radiating out in every direction for ground based receivers to intercept, but these technologies can be unreliable when used at astronomical distances because minor disturbances can cause you to lose track of the object you are trying to communicate with. Any spacecraft that is expected to [lose line-of-sight](https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780192806314.001.0001/acref-9780192806314-e-1155) at any point in its mission is typically outfitted with an [omni-directional LGA or wide area MGA transmitter](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5747329) in addition to its HGA point-to-point transmitter to help maintain and re-establish lost signals. So, what your aliens are communicating with on Earth will matter a lot. If they are communicating between two fixed position communication points then they only need an HGA and they can stay hidden. However, if they are trying to communicate with a mobile exploration team on the Earth's surface, or if they are trying to establish communications with a variety of receivers, then they will likely need something in the wider beam width range. This would risk their detection.
**Will you it be detected anyway?**
Probably. A military level interest in the moon means that it's not just being listened to, but watched. Modern telescopes, IR sensors, radar sweeps, and lidar sweeps make it relatively easy to map out the surface of the moon, and anything that might be in orbit of it. This is where modern technology really comes into play. A few decades ago, you could have hidden on the moon, just because it is big enough and the labor needed to analyze the data of the whole moon's surface would have been cost prohibitive, but modern AI pattern recognition and stealth detection techniques have become adequate that it would be very difficult for a communications station to go unnoticed unless it was constructed and effectively obfuscated years ago before we had the ability to keep an eye on things up there.
[Answer]
This is related to @JohanHagström's suggestion but somewhat "harder". I felt it would be inappropriate to do a "delete all and insert" on his answer.
SETI, and the related question of how much recognisable information we're broadcasting to the Universe, and the related SF trope of approaching aliens watching our TV, is predicated on the fact that during C20th all of the morse, audio and (later) video that we transmitted had either no or some extremely simple encoding which would make it trivial to decode (for one treatment, see <http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html>)
However over the last couple of decades there has been a tendency to replace traditional data/audio/video transmissions with more complex encodings, overlayed on a pseudo-random sequence of "chips" (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_(CDMA)> and in particular the examples in the first para). Variants of this technique are used by GSM 'phones, direct broadcasting of various kinds, GPS satellites and many other sources of RF both terrestrial and orbital.
If the sequence is long enough, then even if an eavesdropper chances on the signal, it will look like random noise (i.e. "the white noise of the universe" mentioned by Johan) unless he knows the mathematical parameters underlying the pseudo-random sequence. If he hasn't realised that a particular frequency is of interest, then the best he can do is scan all frequencies (or at least, all frequencies within a certain band e.g. the 1.42-67GHz "water hole" band which in principle is kept "quiet" for radio astronomy).
The reason that things like WiFi and GPS work is that the receivers know the transmission parameters, and at the most they have to look for a comparatively small number of predefined sequences. A signal with unknown parameters is difficult to detect unless notably strong, and even if detected difficult to decode with sufficient certainty that it can be flagged as worthy of resources for further study.
[Answer]
**Meteor Burst Communications** 'might' fit the bill.
[Wikipedia link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_burst_communications)
The system would be limited in the amount of data that could be sent with each 'burst' transmission (not so much if its Aliens I guess) but even if a suspicious signal was intercepted (and you'd probably have to be looking for it anyway) detecting the point of origin for any particular transmission would be hellishly difficult. And since modern electronics and phased array antennae can be reasonably compact/transportable it might be pointless to try anyway anyway.
[Answer]
I did not see it mentioned anywhere else, so I thought I would add: If you use a parabolic or other type of beam-focusing antenna, it's possible that only someone at or near your receiver location could even detect the signal. Combined with the other obfuscation techniques mentioned in other answers, this could further help conceal your signal.
[Answer]
**Yes, by hiding it plain sight** - A signal hidden with encryption in the white noise of the universe would very likely go unnoticed.
On old TV:s you can actually see the white noise of the universe and by adding on tiny seemingly randomized well timed encrypted data bytes it would very likely with our current technology be quite unnoticed.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OSl3U.jpg)
[Answer]
Hide it in plain sight? Tell everyone you are putting some science experiments in the moon. Then no one will surprised when you start transmitting large amounts of data from the Moon back to the Earth. Some of the data could be actual science as a cover, while you encode your secret information as extra data in the broadcast.
[Answer]
Ash might be on to something, about the moon. Nobody listens to the moon, because it reflects garbage noise signals back from earth.
How does one tell if the signal originated from the moon, or was just a bounce back from earth? And who would care?
So use the moon to screen your satelite from Earth. It would take a very powerful engine to give it enough velocity to keep up with the moon, seeing as its orbit around earth would be further away from Earth than the moon, but that is not I presume within the scope of the question.
So your satelite just peeks out from behind the moon, to give LoS with the Earth. Maybe even use gravitational lensing, but that is a stretch. Any signal that is accidentally detected from earth would look like just another uninteresting artifact, random noise, some earth transmitter sending funny signals into space and bouncing off the moon, a wayward reflection from a satelite signal from some rogue earth satelite gone bonkers. A curiosity at best, but nothing of significance. Nothing to report.
Who woulld possibly look for something in the corona of the moon? And what would it even look like? A dot on a mountain in profile?
It would take multiple receivers on earth, all in sync, listening to exactly the same signal, to identify it as not just a bounce-back of a signal from some weirdos on earth. You would have to be intentionally looking for it, knowing exactly what you were looking for.
But do it quickly, the back side of the moon is starting to get crowded, and the orbits around the moon are getting as cluttered with junk as the space around Earth.
] |
[Question]
[
Background: In a society where human beings have lived among the stars for tens of thousands of years, they would have accumulated a lot of junk, so they just decided to throw a lot of it onto uninhabitable rocks near colony planets for easy disposal. Kind of like the galactic version of a landfill.
My characters are salvagers, meaning that they go down to these junk planets and bring anything remotely valuable back with them. I want their base to be very large but still mobile. Most of it would be taken up by containers of junk they collected, things to be sorted to see if they're valuable, and things that are valuable if recycled in large quantities. Essentially most of it is just a series of large compartments that act as warehouses, with some recyclers that are either advanced and run by actual people (metal, antiques, jewelry etc.) or very basic and run automatically (pipes, structural supports, broken concrete, etc.).
I want to know how big such a ship could get, because that will tell me how much junk they can handle at any one time and give me an idea of how profitable they would be. It would also give me an idea about how large to make the crew, since my characters only make up roughly twenty or so of the crew.
Currently the ship is roughly the size of a small moon, just a little bigger than Deimos.
The main constraints I already know about are: mass, acceleration speed, construction, expense, and landing.
Mass and acceleration are sort of tied together. It takes a energy to accelerate and decelerate in space, and the more mass something has the more energy is required to do so. I want to know how much energy such a thing would take. Do I need to create a new energy source for this in order to make it feasible? And is hand-waving the energy source acceptable? Acceleration for this ship doesn't really need to be all that fast, although it does need to be able to travel between solar systems in (at most) a month or so.
The construction of the ship would've been enormously expensive, and it would've had to be constructed in space from the outset. No way is it possible to build something that large on a planet. Possibly a shipyard that manufactures everything and puts it together? I was thinking that perhaps asteroids and uninhabitable planets were pretty much looted of all their ore, and then the ore was refined into metal that the shipyard uses to directly build the ships. Seems reasonable, provided the technology is there. The cost to build and maintain the ship would be enormous, but since my characters are mostly low-level grunt workers, I can probably explain it away as the corporation paying for it.
Finally, since there is no possible way such a large ship could get close to a planet without causing a potential apocalypse, let alone land on it in order to salvage valuables. Destroying the very valuables you are there to collect by your very presence is a major issue. So, the ship would probably need to have a hangar that can send shuttles down to carry the cargo back up. They wouldn't be small due to the large cargo area, but it would at least be possible to land on planets so they could gather the materials.
Did I miss any major problems? Should I make the ship smaller?
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Here’s a list of potential issues:
* The gravitational force that the ship exerts upon itself, possibly leading to collapse
* It takes a lot of energy to accelerate a ship that large
* A ship the size of a small moon poses considerable risk to the planet it’s orbiting
Now let’s consider these problems one by one.
Let’s conservatively suppose this ship of yours is approximately the size of Deimos with a mean radius of $6.2\space\text{km}$. However, its mass will probably be much smaller than that of Deimos, since it will presumably contain a lot of empty space. Since Deimos’ mass is about $1.5\cdot 10^{15}\space\text{kg}$, we might estimate (again, conservatively) that, after being filled with junk, your ship is about $1/100$ as dense on average, giving it a mass of $1.5\cdot 10^{13}\space\text{kg}$.
**Possible ship collapse**
Good news - the surface gravity exerted by this ship is tiny:
$$g\_{\text{ship}} = \frac{GM}{r^2}\approx \frac{(6.674\cdot 10^{-11})(1.5\cdot 10^{13})}{(6200)^2}\space\text{m/s}^2\approx 2.6\cdot 10^{-5}$$
So you probably don’t need to worry about it collapsing. In fact, if you look at a picture of Deimos, you’ll notice that it’s visibly non-spherical because the gravity is so weak. Nothing to worry about here, as long as you make sure your ship is sturdy.
**Ship acceleration**
[Apparently](https://www.spaceanswers.com/deep-space/how-big-is-the-milky-way/), the closest solar system is about $10$ light years away, but the nearest one with more than one planet is over $15$ light years away. Sorry, but there’s no way you’re traveling that far in under a month. You’ll need faster-than-light travel, which will certainly require a significant amount of hand-waving.
Supposing you can manage faster-than-light speeds, you’d need to accelerate to a speed of at least $120$ times the speed of light in order to make the trip in a month. That’s a kinetic energy of
$$\frac{mv^2}{2}=\frac{(1.5\cdot 10^{13})(3.6\cdot 10^{10})^2}{2}\approx 9.72\cdot 10^{33} \space\text{J}$$
[To give you a sense of how large that is,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%29#Over_1023_J) that amount of energy is greater than
* The amount of solar energy that strikes the Earth each year
* $10^{10}$ times the energy stored in the Earth’s natural gas reserves, as of 2010
* $10^{12}$ times the world energy consumption in 2010
That’s a lot of energy! You’re either going to need to invent a miracle energy source, or slow the heck down. Here are some suggestions for getting out of this bind:
* If there are lots of junk planets all over the place, and you don’t care which planet you end up at, have your characters send their ship into random wormholes and scavenge wherever they end up.
* Use cryonics to freeze your “grunts” for 20-30 years while they travel at near-light-speed. This will still require an astronomical amount of energy, but you might manage it by piggybacking off of the gravity of a nearby star, using it to “sling” the ship in the right direction.
**Risk to nearby planets**
No inhabited planet will want to have this ship orbiting it. If its orbit decays, it will be difficult to prevent it from crashing into the planet and causing a catastrophe. Even if its orbit does not decay, it could still screw up the planet by interfering with the orbits of preexisting moons.
When a body of mass $m$ orbits a larger body of mass $M$ with velocity $v$, the radius at which the circular orbit is stable equals
$$r=\frac{GM}{v^2}$$
If, due to miscalculation or external interference, the orbit decays by some amount $\Delta r$, the ship will either need to speed up or move away from the planet to restabilize its orbit. If the former option is taken, the velocity increase needed is about
$$\Delta v\approx \frac{1}{2}\sqrt{\frac{GM}{r^3}}$$
meaning that the energy needed to correct this is about
$$\frac{mv^2-m(v-\Delta v)^2}{2}\approx \frac{GMm}{2r^2}\Delta r$$
For a planet the size of Earth and a satellite the size of your ship, that could still be on the order of $10^{19}$ joules if your orbit deviates *by just one meter*. If you’d rather correct the orbit by increasing the radius, the energy needed is
$$mg\Delta r = \frac{GMm}{r^2}\Delta r$$
...which is twice as much as you would need to speed up the appropriate amount.
Bottom line: your ship needs to be ready to expend $10^{19}$ joules at the drop of a hat in order to correct the most minute decay in its orbit. That’s more than the yearly energy consumption of South Korea as of 2009. You’re really going to need some hand-waving to deal with that.
[Answer]
## The biggest constraint for the size of a star-ship is going to be inertia.
This is not a "hard limit" but when you hand-wave away energy and propulsion, I can pretty much guarantee it will be the next engineering limit you will be faced with long before other issues like gravitational collapse or resource availability.
The big reason you can't make a moon sized ship is that that moons are solid masses of stone that typically experience no more than a few cm/s worth of acceleration from thier orbits. In contrast your ship is a relatively thin scaffolding filled with a lot of non-structural weight from the cargo and various systems.
The thing about FTL technologies like Alcubierre drives and Wormholes is that they still require you to move. And the bigger the ship, the more easily it will start to fall apart the second you try to move it.
Picture this: for a ship to accelerate at a speed that feels okay to any sentient race for any extended period of time, you are looking at matching the acceleration of gravity on thier home world. When you attach an engine to something and start pushing it, it does not all move at once. The molecules binding the engines to the back of your ship have to be able to transfer that acceleration all the way up to the nose. At 1G of acceleration, this would cause the same amount of compression and tension in the materials that make up your ship as you see in the materials that make an object sitting at rest on the surface of a 1G planet. So, to find out the maximum size of a ship, we need to look at the maximum sizes of things we can build under gravity.
**What is the maximum size we can build under gravity?**
Burj Khalifa is currently the tallest building in the world at ~830m tall, but it uses a steel frame construction technique. Rigid carbon nano-fibers can form a structural frame that could theoretically achieve 5 times that height giving you a ship with a maximum conceivable length of somewhere on the order of 4km. That said, for a cargo ship I would not suggest going that big. We think of cargo ships as being big, but because they are designed to carry so much non-structural weight, you can not stack them up super high. When you look at the world's largest freight ships, the [Maersk Tripple-E](http://Maersk%20Triple%20E-class%20container%20ship), they are only about 90m tall from keel to the the top most container; so, if you are trying to be realistic, a space freighter should not really be more than about 5x that length (~450m) for it to maintain integrity while fully loaded given our currently understood limits of material sciences.
**How to go bigger:**
We Earth dwellers like to see our ships thin and long because gravity and water resistance make us do it, but in space, if you want to make a big ship, you go tall or wide and short. This is is because a freighter (hopefully) never needs to turn in a way that exerts more rotational force than forward acceleration force; so, you can make a ship that is 450m long able to accelerate at 1G, and 4500m tall able to turn at 1/10th that speed.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/p0zMx.png)
If you want to take this one step further you can go with a giant sideways flying saucer design. A carbon nano fiber freighter could be several kilometers in diameter, and still only 450m long. By placing thousands of evenly distributed thrusters along the broadside of your saucer to push it forward you could make a freighter roughly resembling the alien ships from Independence Day.
Since you are assuming some level of future tech, I would not call it an unreasonable stretch to scale this design up using something a bit better than our current best to get something as big around as Deimos, just probably not in all 3 dimensions.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/io9ql.png)
**How to go all the way...**
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Since you seam to want to go into FTL mechanics, the Alcubierre Drive introduces some very interesting properties. When a ship uses an Alcubierre Drive, the effects of inertia can be mitigated because your ship is accelerated more or less together at a molecular level. (It's sort of like experiencing a free-fall). That said, this sort of FTL ship also experiences a gravitational gradient where the front and back of the ship are prone to accelerate faster meaning that the mid-section of your ship will still experience a bit of an inertial difference from the rest of the ship, but generally only a fraction of what a reactive propulsion system would put on a ship. This means that you can accelerate at more than 9.8 m/s^2 while experiencing a total structural sheer of less than what you would expect 1G to inflict.
Now, here's the caviot: with an Albicure drive, the inertial sheer you experience is barely better than that of a reaction drive if you contract your warp nodes all the way to the length of your ship, this is because the gravity will fall off really fast as you move away from the nodes giving you the same limitations as thusters. So, to mitigate sheer you need to move your mass-equivalency nodes farther off from your ship, but this makes it far less energy efficient. To put this in perspective: a ship that has it's nodes 1m ahead of your ship could reach 1G of acceleration with about 1.5e10kg equivalent mass fields, but to cut your inertia in half for a ship that is 450m long, you need to project your nodes 450m ahead of your ship using 3e16kg equivalent mass fields. That means you need to use 2 million times as much fuel to mitigate 1/2 of your inertia by overlapping your gravity fields.
Now this is where things look really bleak for you big ship... Since you want to be able to cover 15LY in 30 days. That means you have 15 days to speed up and 15 days to slow down, making your mid-point a distance of 1.41915e17m. By plugging these values into the displacement formula a=(2s)/(t^2) where s=7.5ly and t=15days you get an acceleration of 84,495.5 m/s^2 also known as about 8622G.
Now a reactive engine would crush just about any ship accelerating this quickly like a tin can, but let's look at this with an Alcubierre Drive. If you have a ship that is the length of Deimos (I'll go with the short dimension and say 11 km long) and you want it to survive 8622G, you will need to mitigate about 99.9995% of the central sheer of your ship for it not to break. To do this you would need to project your gravity nodes ~200,000,000,000 km away from your ship with an equivalent mass of +/- 5.1676333628e42kg.
This means that such a drive would have to simulate gravitational forces equivalent about twice the total mass in the Milky Way galaxy. Sufficeless to say, this would be a terrible idea for any kind of ship because the wake of your warp drive would be so strong as to wreck... well the whole galaxy.
In other words... don't plan on making a ship that big or that fast unless you plan on hand-waving in some star trek style inertial dampeners and/or structural integrity fields. But, if you're going to do that, then asking how big a ship can be becomes meaningless since you could always explain away bigger with more of the same handwavieness.
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It's feasible to [turn the whole solar system into a spaceship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine) if you like. The question isn't how big is plausible, it's how big is *economical*? It turns out pretty small.
Let's figure out the economics of your world(s). To do that we need to resolve a paradox: shooting trash into orbit is viable, but once in orbit it has value again. Why?
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Yes. Nothing too crazy. Conventional sci-fi energy sources are fine: fusion, anti-matter. Energy has to be cheap and abundant for this to work. Here's why...
# Supply, Demand, and Garbage
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[Sci-fi likes its junk planets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oeW9sflsdg), but their existence has economic implications. We throw things away when it's economically less valuable to make another one than to repair or recycle the item. When that means putting it on a truck and driving it over to the local landfill, the cost of dumping is low.
Getting mass out of a 1G gravity well is very expensive, this is one of the reasons we don't fire our nuclear waste into space. No matter how good your technology is, [getting 1 kg into orbit requires 3e6 Joules](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/21846/4704) or about one US dollar worth of energy. [The Earth produces 2e12 kg of waste each year](https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/state-of-the-planet/world-waste-facts), that would take 6e18 Joules, minimum, to put into orbit. That's well within science-based sci-fi.
We can assume your universe has extremely cheap space flight and abundant energy production, or an extremely unsustainable economy, or these landfills contain extremely toxic stuff that make the effort worthwhile. Or all of the above.
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If you're salvaging these landfill planets, something has gone terribly wrong with your civilization. Getting to the planet's surface is expensive. Lifting off the surface is also expensive. What has happened that makes this worthless garbage suddenly valuable? Something very bad.
The flip side is the value of things. A society which overproduces has a supply glut, so the value of its goods will fall. These undervalued goods will be thrown away long before they have no real value, or because it's cheaper to buy a new one than repair an existing one, or simply because there's a better model.
# Haves and Have Nots
This all sets up a world of haves on the colony planets living in luxury, and the have-nots living off what they throw away. The people on the colony have such wealth they can afford the expense of firing their junk into orbit. The people in space are so poor they consider the surface-dweller's trash to be of value. Why?
The economy on the surface is clearly overproducing and unsustainable. It is, effectively, using their resources once and then paying the cost to lift them out of their gravity well and into space. Once in space, the spacers can collect them for their own repair, reuse, and recycling. The spacers will then keep the majority for their own use.
The only way it is viable for the spacers to trade the garbage back to the surface-dwellers garbage is if they extract and refine the most valuable materials, and if they can do it cheaper than on the surface. This is only possible if the labor of the spacers is cheap, or if they possess technology and industries the surface does not. One situation is toxicity. Processing the waste is dangerous and toxic, but it's safer to do in space. Or it isn't, and the spacer's lives are simply cheaper than surface dwellers.
# E-Waste
Today, we see this situation with [electronic waste](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-waste) driven by [planned obsolescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence). Rather than continuing to use a working, but obsolescent, device, we throw it out. We typically don't even recycle the material, not even its precious metals, because it's cheaper to dig it out of the ground, process and refine it, and ship it around the world, often by using exploited, cheap labor and poor health and environmental standards.
The waste is sent to poorer parts of the world where it is processed. Some is reused in-situ. Some is recycled and sold back. But [the process is toxic and dangerous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste#Human_health_and_safety).
# How Big Does Their Ship Have To Be?
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Since it's expensive to bring things up into orbit, the sorting would happen on the surface. Similarly, its cheaper to bring the recycling equipment down than to bring bulky, massive material up. Only the valuable material after processing is brought up.
This also simplifies waste disposal: leave it at the landfill.
The ship only has to be big enough to support the people, fit their equipment, plus its engines. It moves from landfill to landfill, sending out mining parties to extract and refine material and bring it back. Once they gather together enough valuables, they may attempt to trade with one of the trash-producing rich planets.
[Answer]
~~## Interstellar trips
You will have to resort to a lot of handwaving, using FTL on a Star Wars level to get your scavengers to do interstellar travel in months. Remember that the distance between stars is measured in light years!~~
Franklin answered this in majestic way!
## Acceleration in sci-fi
The biggest problem with sci-fi ship acceleration is that most of them ignore that this acceleration will throw the crew against the wall, for a long time with an acceleration acceptable to our biology (violating the laws of relativity and with a infinite energy consumption, it takes 11 months to reach the speed of light at 1g) or an acceleration that would transform living beings, other objects loose inside, stuck objects, cargo, fuel, engines and the hull of the ship on a piece of nothing. This, of course, remembering that they make the ships look like planes going forward instead of lift cabins going up and down, which would be more logical.
Asimov develops an elegant proposal for the [Trevise's spacecraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation%27s_Edge) that accelerates each atom of the spacecraft at the same time so that the occupants do not notice any acceleration. Clarke uses a similar strategy in [Childhood's End](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End) and both look like the [Alcubierre Warp Drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive) idea.
## Cost of a scavenger ship
In an interstellar civilization, the cost of building large cargo ships shouldn't be much. Even if that civilization is ruining and chaos smashed the galaxy into stellar feuds that dispute power among themselves, there will always have old things from the glorious times that can be reused.
## Cargo size
The size of a cargo ship is optimized according to its maintenance cost. If a ship takes X units of cargo, spending Y and another takes 2X spending 3Y, I would prefer to own 2 of the first ship rather than one of the second. The operations of approaching the landfill planets and take the dump, the maintenance of a very large structure and other details need to be calculated to optimize this.
The idea of gaining scale does not have to lead to a single gigantic object. Safety and fuel use make the scale gain pay off, but operations on several smaller units are cheaper and simpler than a large operation. How to solve? Maybe with something like a train?
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This question is far too concerned about unimportant details; in particular, the mass and size of the ship.
The essential parts of the ship will be:
* The crew's habitat.
* The engines.
* Fuel.
Given that the ship will:
* Accelerate very slowly.
* Remain in space.
The most obvious configuration is simply to attach large cargo nets to it whenever a new load is acquired, and use the ship to tow them along with it.
With the low acceleration, there will be very little stress on the lines that secure the nets to the ship, and the cargo can trail behind as far as one wants (given sufficiently long lines and large enough nets).
There are no real restrictions on what the ship has to look like, and in fact, the ship itself can remain relatively small.
The only crucial maneuver would be at the mid-point of any journey, when the direction of acceleration must be reversed.
Rather than, as is normally done with a rigid vessel, rotating the ship (which wouldn't work in this case), I'd suggest simply doing a slow and wide U-turn.
The only tricky design feature would be in having the engine exhaust avoid the cargo, which is directly in the line of fire.
That can easily be avoided by replacing the single ship with two (or for safety and reliability, several) separate ships that have a common tow-line between them for the cargo lines to attach to.
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But given how slowly this thing can accelerate, the goal of "*able to travel between solar systems in (at most) a month or so*" is completely ridiculous.
I'd suggest that such trips would take thousands or millions of years, making the incredible value of that cargo of scrap even more ridiculous.
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This really isn't a premise for a science fiction story.
It is pure sci-fi, a story that uses the superficial trappings of science fiction while having almost nothing else in common with the real genre.
There is already far too much of that in the world.
Instead, I'd suggest writing this story as a marine salvage operation, here on Earth.
All the difficulties that you are wondering how to solve will simply no longer exist.
It might even make a good adventure novel, but it certainly wouldn't be science fiction.
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Adding a small idea to all of the rest: You could use "Intertialess technology" like was used in the old EE "Doc" Smith's Lensmen books. It allowed for FTL and huge ships. This may be the answer to some of the "hand wavy" stuff you need to worry about... by not worrying about it.
Thoughts on perturbing the orbits of existing moons and the "local" planet's gravity: Don't orbit the planet, orbit the star in a matching orbit to the planet (Ahead/Behind/Beside) and shuttle to/from the planet. This will require some energy to follow the orbit because the orbit for a lighter craft than the planet would be different, but given Intertialess as an answer, it's easy to explain.
[Answer]
I'll try to focus on some of the issues I see in a potentially interesting story.
**Size**
The size of the ship would be story based.
If you want it to be large you can just make up motives for it to set on a long journey through the stars in its garbage.. ehrm recovery mission. Very much like whaling ships in the XIX century.
Motive could be economical, political, etc. Basically after collecting they can't just sell their load to the nearest civilized planet but have to bring it to a very specific place.
**Cost**
You are right that a large ship would appear to be too expensive for such an endeavor. I would suggest then that it is a ship / station previously built for a completely different purpose (e.g. defense) then decommissioned and refitted for salvaging operations at a much lower cost. This could also usher in problems in dealing with older, refitted technology.
**Energy**
Since you need to move to the next destination in a relatively fast time you are going to need to handwave on this. Relativity is not your friend here. But neither your enemy...
Considering mankind has been a space faring race for "tens of thousands of years" it would be quite acceptable for them to have developed physics knowledge and technology way beyond our current limits. I see two options:
* bending space-time around the ship in order to accelerate it along a shorter path
e.g. [What is Alcubierre's Warp Drive?](https://phys.org/news/2017-01-alcubierre-warp.html)
* opening a wormhole to their destination (or an intermediate one if you need longer travel time before reaching the destination. Maybe they need to setup the ship before each jump?)
e.g. [Physicists Just Released Step-by-Step Instructions for Building a Wormhole](https://www.livescience.com/building-a-wormhole-with-cosmic-strings.html)
And the referred link if you need to provide more foundation to space travel in your story
[Traversable Asymptotically Flat Wormholes with Short Transit Times](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03273)
**Salvaging from the planet**
Shuttles would seem the most obvious way, especially if the ship needs to keep a very high orbit. But given the size of the ship I would imagine a large amount of material is brought up on every visited planet. You would need a lot of flights, really a lot. Each shuttle would have loading / unloading times. Does not look good.
How instead your civilization is capable of altering the gravitational field? You would need to spend energy for that of course but huge, affordable energy generation (and control) is the basis for a star faring civilization.
Given gravitational field control the ship could go into lower orbits and pull down a
[space elevator](https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2000/ast07sep_1) which would act as a conveyor belt, continuously bringing up material from the planet. Shuttles may still be needed though if the salvage sites are not located on the equator.
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**Other issues**
Other issues that you don't mention may be part or not of your story, it's up to you.
Tens of thousands of years far away from now means a lot of change:
* human modifications: technological evolution will change man as we know him. How will they be in your story? I don't expect your crew to look anything like Mal and his motley crew on the Firefly
* social interactions: how is society? do families still exist? has the crew loved ones far away during their journey?
* AI: how does Ai fit in your story? Because there will be AIs. Probably they will be the ones who discover the theory and the technology at the base of making wormholes.
* economy: what makes the enterprise worthwhile for those who finance it? What makes it worthwhile for the crew? possibly mankind is on its path of going from a beyond scarcity economy back to one of scarcity. As you say:
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[Answer]
Two things. Firstly a crewed space ship is in one sense nothing more than a space habitat with an engine attached.
Secondly a lot depends on how 'hard'/believable you want your story to be e.g. are you going to have devices that generate artificial gravity aka Star Trek on the ship or not? If you don't have this kind of device and you want your crew to be able to live and work in gravity then you are going to have to use using centrifugal force. i.e. your ship has to rotate perpendicular to its main axis in order to generate a gravitation field.
The downside of this is that the greater the diameter of your rotating habitat or the higher the gravity you wish to maintain the more mechanical stress you put on the rotating hull i.e. for any given diameter lower/less gravity means slower spin, higher gravity means faster spin. And rotation imposes stress on whatever material it is you use to construct your torus. The bigger the diameter of the ship the stronger the material needed and by strength I mean tensile strength.
People have done the calcs and at the moment the largest diameter structure you could in theory build in space is about **1200 miles** wide (i.e. radius of 600). This is based on something called a 'Bishops Ring Habitat" which (in theory) if made from carbon nano rods (Dr Bishop calculated this as having the highest possible tensile strength known to man. So that sets the size limit unless you bring in 'unobtainium' or some other made up material that's stronger. If you don't anything bigger than that simply breaks apart - if you are generating 1 G at the outer circumference.
In reality it would be far easier/safer to go with a slightly smaller radius (say 'merely' 400 miles) and then simply add more 'donuts' to your ship, one behind the other along the access of thrust as needed.
Benefits - Normal G in the living areas - zero g in the centre of the donuts (well close to zero).
Downsides - either your ship accelerates very slowly up to top speed so the passengers don't notice the two opposing 'gravitational forces' i.e. the centrifugal force and the acceleration or you have to 'spin down' the hubs before you start accelerating so that the crews new 'down' becomes the rear of the ship (towards the engines). Obviously you then have to spin it up again when you stop accelerating or get to your destination. Which takes time - especially when you are talking structures this size. So it would depend on how much 'zipping' around the Universe you intend these things to do. They certainly wont be outmaneuvering any X-wing they encounter.
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Just answering a part of the question - the crew.
Given the advanced level or technology, you could expect some massive automation and robotisation. The crew size is not a huge problem, imagine a size similar to the (mining ship, so kinda similar) Red Dwarf. And yeah, I know it's a comedy, but the premise sounds plausible to me. And its size (6 miles long) is probably something like what you're after. Although it's meant to accommodate and be operated by thousands of crew members, it went just fine for millions of years with an active crew of zero, controlled completely by its main computer.
So having a crew of just a few dozen is not a big issue, giving that they'll be mostly decision makers, rather than micromanagers. I don't think your "mostly low-level grunt workers" will work though. You'd have a few of those for the kind of maintenance that can't be done by robots, but most of your crew will be "pilots" and "engineers" - even though there will be a good portion of "machinery operators", they will most likely be white collars!
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As [Franklin Pezzuti Dyer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/179626/30492) already scienced out the issue with size/mass constraints, I don't think you'll need an answer on that.
As for what drives the ship - if you want to go with interstellar travel without the use of things like stasis, or making your concept go to science fantasy with the idea of FTL travel (which is impossible according to any theories now existing) - you could go with the concept of folding space (Alcubierre drive style) around the ship. In that case, accelerating would be no factor at all, since you're not *technically* moving, no G-forces to worry about. You'll need to dive into creating artificial antimatter to get that to work though, as creating folds in space cannot be done in a "safe" and stable manner without it.
The shuttle bay idea isn't bad, since it allows for some playroom with events happening in the space between planet/ship. Makes for an easy tool for character development too if the crew talks on these rides over to the planet or back to the ship.
I'd try to invent some kind of exotic material, maybe a rare metal of sorts, that has started to run out after centuries of mining and failure to recycle - forcing society to dig it up from trash from a time in which it wasn't rare.
That would deal with the economics of it quite well I'd think. Also creates opportunities for mystery (who knows what those millenia-old piles of garbage might hold after all).
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the largest a ship can get is are 300,000 KM in length, but would require the industry level of a K3 civilization to build. And would only really be practical to a K4 or a K5.
and such ships would be black hole powered as only a small star of a black hole could give you enough power for ships in this size range, and such ship if it was a warship, would be able to conquer an entire large galaxy all by itself.
for context, the yellow dwarf that's our sun, Sol, is 1.392 million km in diameter, so this is a ship that as long as a 5th the sun is wide.
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So, in an alternate universe, Soviet Union never falls, and in 2068 a nuclear war happened. About 32,000 nukes were detonated in American, Soviet, EU, and Chinese cities. WW3 lasted about 5 hours or so, and hit every major American city. Anyway to the point, in post apocalyptic fiction, the wasteland is often filled with many mutant animals. I was skeptical of this, but I wondered if this could really happen. I am trying to make my story as realistic as possible so, my question is would animals mutate, or evolve, after the apocalypse?
My question is, in about 20 human generations, would nay animals change or evolve to look different?
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Simple answer is no, the hordes of mutant animals after nuclear war is just movie BS, just like the space fighters with wings so they can bank in vacuum.
Now there might be an increased rate of mutations, but most mutations are so detrimental that the creature is unlikely to even survive until birth, let alone to maturity. (It's also hard to distinguish any radiation-caused mutations from ordinary birth defects.)
Animals would continue to evolve, of course, just as they do now, in response to various pressures. Consider for instance how the coyote has evolved and expanded its range into eastern North America in response to the removal of other predators, becoming distinctly different from the western coyote in the process: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_coyote>
There's also the possibility of exotic animals escaping from game farms or private menageries and becoming endemic (as the Burmese python has in Florida), so you might have to deal with tigers and such.
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Your best bet will be to give a look at the Chernobyl Zone, the animals and plants at the place have been living in a contaminated zone for many year now.
The result is... anticlimactic. Most mutations are detrimental and some will outright kill the animal before it can be born. You could have a couple of beneficial mutations, but they are rarely as impressive as Hollywood makes them to be.
What you can have is species adapting to fill in new niches, since humans are gone.
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Any animals alive during the nuclear war will get a large dose of radiation. The only physical change is that they get blast injuries, acute radiation poisoning and/or cancer and die (just like humans).
Those which survive might encounter genetic damage. But most of these random mutations will be detrimental. You will see a lot of birth defects in the next generation. There will be lots of still-birth and those which survive will often have disabilities which just decrease their odds of survival and procreation.
There is a small chance that a radiation-induced mutation actually happens to be useful for survival. But only one specimen will have that mutation at first. When it is really that useful, then it might pass that mutation on to its offsprings. So it will take several generations until the animal with the unusual gene becomes a common sight in your world.
And radiation-induced mutation aside, the nuclear war will likely change the environment your animals live in a lot. Food becomes more scarce, but so do predators. Nuclear dust might change the climate. Humans don't affect the environment anymore. Resistance to radiation becomes a major survival factor. Some animal species become extinct, leaving ecologic niches for others to occupy. And these are just the most obvious changes.
When the environment changes, so do the evolutionary pressures. So after a few generations you might see some changes in the animal populations as they become more adapted to their changed environment.
**tl;dr:** If you want to see some interesting new animals, wait at least a few centuries.
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Whether animals would evolve after such an extreme event is not known to science. It's simply something we haven't fully explored. As Aify links, the Chernobyl event lead to a great many mutations, may of which are graphically depicted at [Chernobyl guide](https://chernobylguide.com/chernobyl_mutations/) [Warning: disturbing images]. This site shows a great many people and creatures that are very clearly not fit in the evolutionary sense. But they're not the only creature at Chernobyl. [Radiotropic Fungi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus) have cropped up. They literally use melanin, the pigment that makes your skin dark and protects you from UV rays, to soak up gamma radiation and convert it into energy. To this day we are still trying to figure out exactly how the process works.
So we can see examples of both failures of animals due to mutation and success. As a general rule, the more complex the creature, the harder it is to find beneficial mutations. Complex creatures like deer and wolves and people tend to have growth patterns that are designed for very benign living conditions compared to your radioactive paradise. Generally speaking, it doesn't go well for them. Simple creatures have the advantage of being able to make a few million offspring and just see what happens. They also tend to have simpler growth patterns, so they are easier to adapt.
But there is an open question, and for that I turn to evolutionary science. The current understanding of the fossil record suggests evolution operates in a [punctuated equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium), species remain rather stable until an event causes them to suddenly and dramatically change. This theory is relatively new, being only perhaps fifty years old. Scientists are still debating it, but it suggests that life can indeed evolve at a very very rapid rate, when called upon to do so. Whether a radioactive world is something which can cause such an event is not known, but if there's one thing we should have learned from Ian Malcom, "Nature finds a way."
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Radiation is only one side of the coin.
I agree with most of the answers here. You should not expect in a few years a sudden outburst of "super-beasts" with exceptional properties1 due to the mutation.
That said, a nuclear war and the following climate changes could lead to a mass extinction, leaving lots of ecological niches open for colonization. So:
* Radiation would increase mutations. But as explained in other answers, most of the changes will be negative to the individual. And even positive changes may be a dead end if they are too radical2). So, do not expect that after a few years there will appear a sudden outburst of very dangerous beasts just out of mutation.
* Changed ecosystems will make some current species unviable while others will thrive. I think that this would be a more important factor than radiation. It will be a very unstable system (apex predators usually have few babies so malformations due to radioactivity would hurt them more, herbivores will thrive until they overeat because they no longer have predators, then some herbivores may complement their diet with some meat from dead animals...)
What I would expect:
* Short term: massive death of everything, only a few species survive. Very bad time for predators and mammals, which are very energy-intensive, not so bad for small animals/insects.
* Medium term (decades to centuries): plants and herbivores thrive. The overabundance of herbivores leads to defensive strategies for plants (poisonous trees/thorns/etc.) Scavengers also thrive, and some of them develop into carnivores.
* Long term (even with radiation, tens or hundreds of thousands of years): Animals increase in size, specially predators.
Also, expect some mechanism to limit the spread of mutations/malformations. If too many of your offspring is unviable, you lose too many resources on them for the species to survive. So with increased mutation levels there is strong pressure to avoid mutations, either by changes at biological level (multiple DNA copies, mutant eggs killed in uterus) or at behavior level (killing or casting away "defective" offspring).
In any case, we already have a pretty good record of what evolution can lead up to, and radiation will not change that much. Current (and past) animals were already under a lot of pressure to be as effective as they could be3, so you can expect the results of evolution (radiation or not) to be in line with it. Maybe you get a vegetarian dog or a venomous rabbit, but you won't get a flying elephant.
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1 The issues with some of their variations, like the "scaled up version of a current animal" have been discussed here to death.
2 So your are ten times bigger than the usual male of your species? Well, good look finding a female that will be able to carry on your offspring, if you have internal fecundation. Unless you are so lucky as to find a partner with a similar mutation, you are the last of your new species.
3 Although most of us may be not aware of it due to our capacity as a species to wipe out or keep away anything that could be dangerous to us.
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Just to give a different answer -- yes! But not because of the radiation.
[This experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox) for example showed that, via only selective breeding, evolution can be quite rapid:
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> Russian scientists achieved a population of domesticated foxes that are fundamentally different in temperament and behavior from their wild forebears. Some important changes in physiology and morphology became visible, such as mottled or spotted colored fur. Some scientists[citation needed] believe that these changes obtaining from selection for tameness are caused by lower adrenaline production in the new population, causing physiological changes within relatively few generations yielding genetic combinations not present in the original species. This indicates that selection for tameness, e.g. did not flee, produces changes that are related to the emergence of other dog-like traits, e.g. raised tail, coming into heat every six months rather than annually. These seemingly unrelated changes are a result of pleiotropy.[
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Note the change in behaviour as well as shape.
So, existing species may change behaviour (dogs, cows, deer become more aggressive -- like aurochs, wild boar, wolves, and so on).
Climate change might also cause cross-breeding (grizzlies mating with polar bears, for example).
And a few hundred years seems to me plenty of time for long-distance migration -- for Siberian tigers to reach Germany, for example.
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One of the things you should consider, when thinking about the possibility of animals mutating in case of a WWIII is the timescale. While I see many people here noting Chernobyl and it's effects on the local wildlife, you should note that a meltdown of a nuclear plant is incredibly different from a nuclear bomb explosion. The Chernobyl will be a scar on the planet for the foreseeable millennia, due to most of the radioactive dirt-pile being in place. Nuclear weapons are relatively "clean". As the nuclear material gets separated into smaller chunks, even with the half-life of radiation for the elements staying the same, it will take far less time for most of the material to become harmless.
What you get is those five hours of initial hellfire, couple of days with radioactive fallout contaminating every place it can reach and in a month the survivors will have to battle the lack of food, uncontaminated water and lack of medicine. The chance of nuclear winter is debatable, so it's up to you to decide if you want to include the short-lived radioactive winter.
Most nukes will be targeted at military bases and other strategic locations first, as even in the "doomsday scenario" it makes zero sense to target some remote field in who-knows-where just to kill some animals. As the preferred method to nuke things is airburst (highest area of effect/lowest remaining radiation), most of the damage to outback places will be due to ensuing forest-fires and the like.
The currently-alive generation of living beings might get irradiated, which will most definitely lead to shortening their lifespan and likely negatively influence the next generation, but the most damage in the mid-term will come because radiation weakened the immunity of the organisms, so there will likely be far stronger infection/virulent outbursts than we're used to. Obviously, all of that will lead to massive changes in ecosystems, leading to a mass extinction event and major gaps in ecosystems.
However, where there are gaps, there are also possibilities. The surviving species will have to accommodate to a different world and *that* will lead to mutations and behavioral changes in two-three decades/century time-span. In twenty human generations the world would look incredibly different and the chances are incredibly high that even in three or four generations the humanity would be back as the dominant species, the big difference being that Australia and Oceania/Africa would likely become the cradle of the new civilizations (as you can't farm off the land, whichever country has an easiest access to food, e.g. fish, has the easiest time to bounce back).
As for the nuke count, 15k isn't that much. If the cold war would go as it went and Soviets with USA decided not to decrease nuke amount since 1960's, what the humanity would have to deal with comes closer to 50k - a count far more likely to wreak havoc in remote places than mere 15k.
The Mutually Assured Destruction isn't scary to the top players(USA, Russia, China etc.) because it would wipe out the entire humanity. It's scary that this war will, regardless of the result, make the ruling faction of any given side a loser, as new key players emerge on the ashes of the old world.
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I'll go for a contrarian answer. The answer is "If you want", because it wasn't just a nuclear war. A Chinese general, cut off from his command structure, and knowing they were lost, decided to use a viral bio-weapon, considering it the only chance of saving Chinese citizens. Because they were a homogenous people, the scientists had engineered the virus so it would not affect Chinese.
But they got it wrong.
In the beginning, the virus made sterile all but a fraction of the world's non-Chinese population. Then it mutated, first infecting animals. While it did not seem to affect the animals' ability to reproduce, it did have other effects. Before long it jumped back to humans, and eventually found its first Chinese victim. But now they were not protected.
Now of course some random virus is extremely unlikely to cause meaningful change in animals, much less *useful* change. But it does give you a way to work around the 500 year time-scale.
You don't even need a nuclear war for this solution as nuclear winter and radiation are pretty rough. You just need an innocent "oops".
This all depends on how "real" this must be.
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Yes, they will mutate. After 15,000 nukes on USA only, only bacterias will remain and they mutate already happily. And in the nuclear winter they will have to change to adapt to the low temperatures.
You new generation had forgotten all books about how dangerous the nuclear war really is. Let alone modern politicians.
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Animals and plants mutate all the time, at a slow rate. You and everyone else are mutants, since each and everyone of your genes has been mutated as humans evolved. So radioactivity from a nuclear war might cause a slightly higher mutation rate in animal and plant species. Since most mutations are damaging, most mutated animals and plants would die fast and mutations would not accumulate very fast.
So people would notice a lot of plants and animal species going extinct from the effects of the nuclear war, but probably wouldn't notice an increase in mutations despite expecting to see it.
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For fast reproducing animals like mice or insects you should see mutations after a few decades as radiation will increase mutation rates in case they survived the radioactive blast and begin to populate the contaminated lands. Slow reproducing animals will take way longer and get cancer in the process. Some kinds of animals will not be able to survive afterwards due to radiation, loss of habitat and food aswell as change in climate. This will cause the ecosystem to change a lot.
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**Where are the monsters?**
Original stories on mutations were written when atomic/nuclear technology was new and there was no data, only fears. Since then we've had most of a century to study effects and to realize that the Earth and Sun have been emitting radiation all along and animals and plants have been dealing with it for billions of years. Species we have today are already, in part, the result of radiation. Natural selection will be the same force after the apocalypse as it has been all along.
Nothing new here but want to emphasize that even writing fiction about false mutation is quite irresponsible. Read [Wikipedia on Chernobyl effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disaster#cite_note-Weinberg_1001%E2%80%931005-19).
Studies do say that a meltdown is not equivalent to a bunch of bombs going off; those have much wider spread contamination so immediate effects would be significantly greater while long term effects are less.
But genetic resilience, or plasticity, has proven greater than nuclear radiation effects.
And if it was plausible, mutations over generations adding up to monsters, where are they? There's been bombs and meltdowns wind carried contamination from Japan all the way to Oregon and where are the monsters? Contamination from those and A bomb testing in the Pacific along with nuclear powered ships and who knows how many leaks, later high yield multi warhead testing... and so **where are the 3 tailed whales with giant fangs?**
I say again it's irresponsible to proliferate such misinformation while the known, documented negative health effects of current energy productions, chemical waste, and "conventional" weapons manufacture and use are contaminating our environment and destroying lives (and those to come) at a terrible rate that all nuclear power and weapons use hasn't come near.
Expanded use of nuclear energy is clearly most likely in the future and by non-fear based studies (and not those of oil company propaganda) much safer. We need to continue research and not encourage misinformation and deliberate bigotry. Authors that continue to do so profit from preying upon reinforcing ignorance.
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Let's say that I own a planet and I have the chance to set up rules before any human can move in. I want to make a law that would welcome anyone to the planet as long as they only speak the decided language.
It would mean doing anything needed to make sure nobody spoke any other language, even in a private place. The end goal would be to make the rest of the languages disappear and everyone would be able to understand each other.
Here are the rules I came up with to make it work:
* I wouldn't rule the planet for long. There could be any political system established as long as that rule would be inmutable.
* It doesn't matter your level on that language. As long as you are trying to speak it you are welcome.
* Any communication in and out of the planet would be forced to be on that language.
* The language can evolve as long as any changes to it would be applied globally.
Would forcing the new citizens and prosecuting anyone that tried to spoke a different language be justified for the better end?
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> *Would forcing the new citizens and prosecuting anyone that tried to spoke a different language be justified for the better end?*
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# No. The End Sucks. So Do The Middle and Beginning.
It creates a privileged culture, suppresses others, leads to language stagnation, thought crime, and a police state.
This has been tried a number of times throughout history, [most notably Turkey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atat%C3%BCrk%27s_Reforms) or the US forcing Native Americans and Australia forcing Aborigines to learn English. Usually it results in continuous cultural suppression. It establishes a dominant culture and suppresses the others.
An analogy is enforcing a dress code. The choices you make in what that code is and how its enforced says which culture and economic class gets preference, sets them at a higher standard of what is "proper", and selective enforcement can be used for harassment. For example, a "no hoodies" rule is clearly a way to target certain racial and economic classes, and deciding what is and is not a "hoodie" can be used to harass.
Here's the choices you need to make and how they lead to that end.
## Which Language and Why?
I'm gonna use the US as an example to make this less abstract.
Which language do you choose? That might seem obvious, whatever language the most people already speak (English)... or do you go with one that's easy to learn (Spanish)? Maybe the pick the one with the most in common with other languages (... maybe Spanish again)? Or do you use the language that the most of your neighbors and trading partners speak (Mandarin)? Or do you make up a whole new language so everyone is equally hosed (Esperanto)?
Whatever you pick, it's going to be a continuing hassle.
## Language As Privilege
If you chose an existing language, existing speakers are now privileged.
If you create a new language, well-off people are now privileged because they have the free time and money to learn the new language, hire tutors, training programs, etc...
Let's say it's English. Existing English speakers don't have to do anything. They don't have to spend time, and money, for schooling. They can keep their existing jobs, in fact native speakers will be in high demand as everyone else tries to catch up. The industry of teaching English will expand creating more jobs for English speakers.
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This creates a linguistic, cultural, and economic privilege to immigration. You're welcome... so long as you either already speak the language, or have the money and free time to learn it.
Newcomers who are "trying" to speak the language remain at a disadvantage. Their native language is not just not spoken, it is *illegal*. How do they get a job? How do they read a contract? How do they read a manual?
This doesn't end.
## Language As Culture
The language you speak isn't just some interchangeable part. It is your culture and it even alters how you think. It's your written and oral histories, parables, stories, songs, expressions, and vocabulary. All these things are made illegal. It wipes out other cultures.
## Learning Material As Cultural Indoctrination
Until recently, the most translated book was the Bible. Missionaries were happy to teach you how to read... but it was going to be a Bible.
Now we're not quite as blunt about our indoctrination, but when you're running an entire society through a forced language re-education program the choice of reading material, pictures, phrasing, vocabulary, and grammar will be indoctrinate a certain world view whether you mean it or not.
Even something as innocent as your choice of noun to use when teaching basic grammar can codify what is normal and what is not.
```
I like to eat apples.
People eat apples.
Apples are good for you.
They bought three apples.
```
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/onSGF.jpg)
## Translation As Suppression
Anyone who says "just translate them" has never done translation. Meaning is lost between languages, especially for songs. Translation is always a trade off between the literal meaning and the metaphorical meaning. How do you translate "stop, you're killing me"?
You can't translate everything, there simply aren't enough translators and money to pay them. The selection of what gets translated and how it gets translated becomes cultural suppression.
And if there aren't a lot of translators for your language... oh well. It disappears.
## Translation As Rewriting Cultural History
Translators have a lot of power to subtly shape our understanding of history when the original documents are in another language. Not just in the choice of what gets translated, but the choices they make in doing that translation.
Perhaps the most famous example is the [bowdlerization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler) of classic texts such as Shakespeare, Ancient Greek and Roman writers, and the Bible. Every language has ambiguity through idioms and context.
Embarrassing historical documents can be subtly reworded to make them seem innocuous. [Homosexuality, sex, dirty jokes... anything considered "vulgar"](http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-reasons-ancient-rome-was-a-perverts-paradise.php) were obscured in popular translations of Greek and Roman texts to prop up the idea that this was a prim and proper golden age of humanity and that our morals have slipped. Have a look into the writings of [Martial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial) and [Catullus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus) or watch an uncensored version of [Lysistrata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysistrata).
For more on this read [The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0345418824) which puts racy Bible stories in plain English and reveals what they're really talking about.
# The End Is Bad.
The end doesn't justify the means because enforcing cultural laws leads you to bad outcomes.
## Option 1: Surveillance State
How do you enforce the language law? How do you check that people aren't speaking and writing their own languages? To enforce this requires a surveillance state.
You need to spy on what people are saying, and what people are writing. This means no strong encryption. This means neighbors turning in neighbors. This means crackdowns on cultural displays like something as innocuous as showing a subtitled movie or displaying an old, untranslated play.
## Option 2: Selective Enforcement As Cultural Domination
In this option, you count on normal law enforcement to enforce the language law. For otherwise innocuous, culturally driven laws like this there is a great urge to use selective enforcement as police harassment of groups they don't like. Want to harass someone? Accuse them of "speaking foreign".
## Establishing One Language/Culture As "Better"
As with dress codes, choosing a single language signals that one language is "better" than the others. Again, doesn't matter what your intent is, people will use this as an excuse or grow up with this lesson.
## Suppressing Knowledge Of Other Cultures
Since nobody is allowed to practice other languages, how can they ever really understand other cultures? People who only speak one language get a very selective and limited view of the world.
If you travel to a foreign country, you can only speak and read things which are in your language. Everything else is out of bounds, or you need a phrase book, or hire a translator (more economic privilege). This will keep most people to "tourist" areas and they will get a very selected and limited view.
This will twist your people's understanding of the world. Their limited view through their own lens will encourage xenophobia.
## Language Police, Language Stagnation
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Language evolves and changes. But in your world these changes have to first be approved before they can be legally used. Since they can't be used legally, the population can't first play around with them to see what works. Some council of Language Police decides what new words the people need (or, oh god, the people vote on what new words are ok?).
It's the ultimate in [Linguistic prescription](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription). At best this promotes cultural stagnation as the language is not allowed to naturally change and adapt. For example, as much as some people don't like it, verbing nouns is really useful.
At worst, constant tinkering with the language creates continual, punctuated, and awkward changes that everyone needs to relearn.
As an example, the speeches of [Atatürk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atat%C3%BCrk) in the 1920s, leader of the Turkish language reforms, cannot be understood by most modern Turks.
## Cultural Suppression
What words, spellings, and phrases the Language Police decide are legal will be informed by what cultural, economic, and political things they are associated with. As a simple example, I was told growing up that "ain't" ain't a word, even though the meaning is clear, because it's considered lower class.
Another example is "sodomy". Want to suppress certain sexual acts through language? Roll them all into one word, now it's really easy to over-generalize, and difficult to discuss in detail. Then attach to them a word that says "remember that time God smote a whole city for being perverts?"
Similar examples come from dress codes. Not just things like hoodie bans, but here's a list of banned items from a bar using "safety" as cultural suppression.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/atE2b.jpg)
Most of can be justified with safety, but others are simply targeting certain cultures they don't want around. Pacifiers, glowsticks, stuffed animals, and candy bracelets are stereotypical of raver culture. Others like "no chapstick" might be some sort of attempt to stop secret drug use?
Language restrictions can be used similarly.
## Thought Crime
What if there simply isn't a word to express what you want to say? Or an idea that you came up with? How many words for emotions and thoughts and actions have we come up with in the past ten years of ubiquitous Internet use and loan words alone? Mansplaining; lol; owned; email; to email; code monkey; texting; sexting; burner account; DOXing.... off the top of my head. Sure, there are similar words and phrases, but they don't say it quite the same way.
An example of vocabulary shaping thinking is the German loanword schadenfreude. We have sadism and masochism, a relationship of pain and pleasure between two parties... but schadenfreude is the relationship of a third and otherwise unrelated party. Sure, you can express this idea without introducing a new word, but a word neatly packages an idea for transmission to others.
Must we use increasingly awkward and literal phrases? Hey, are you going to the musical show which is a darker offshoot to the backlash to the cultural and economic stagnation represented by rock and roll tonight? A goth-punk show. Do we always have to point out that L.A.S.E.R. is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation?
What about poetry and music? Will an artist be prosecuted for using a word in a non-approved way?
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I could go on, but this is turning into a dissertation on cultural identity and suppression. I think you get the idea.
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is there any need to suppress any languages?
your goal is for everyone to understand each other. to achieve that goal, it is sufficient that everyone speaks a common language next to any other less common languages. human laziness will do the rest. unless you get people whose goal it is to preserve their language, most will give up their parents language in the second or third generation.
some things that help:
declare an official language that everyone needs to know and use in public communication.
make it clear to newcomers that everyone must speak this language and that all education will be done in that language. anyone who wants to preserve their own language will stay away.
newcomers who don't speak the language are welcome, but will spend their first months learning the language. if you pick esperanto, that will only take them one month in a full-time full immersion learning environment.
require that all official publications are done in that language (that includes TV, newspaper, advertising, company websites)
you may allow other languages to be used, but anything that is available to the public must be accessible in the official language.
that means multi-language publications are ok, but not foreign-language only. you can even teach foreign languages in school, as long as the official language dominates, it won't hurt.
finally, try to make sure your population is as diverse as possible, so that no other secondary language plays any dominant role. avoid language ghettos. i believe this is easier in densely populated areas because there is simply more people. that way newcomers can find enough people from their own background to not feel isolated, but still be surrounded by others that do not speak their native language, thus forcing them to use the official language to communicate.
for comparison, look at the early history of north america. most languages besides english play a negligible role. english dominated, and so everyone learned it. it is only recently that other languages are on the rise again through immigration. and immigration is something you can influence.
in other places creole and pidgin languages are developed when multiple languages are commonly spoken. if your official language is easy enough to learn, you can avoid that.
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Unless you have a crazy good reason for wanting to speak *only* said language, such as, for example, speaking anything else on that particular planet will summon Cthulhu itself, no, there's no justification.
Here's the long and short of it: ***people will rebel.***
Oh, you might get your way for a while, but only under a demonstrated, and actively enforced threat of punishment.
Consider that in order to know when people are disobeying you will have to monitor them *constantly*. Regardless of the morality of this action, implementing that level of surveillance is going to be challenging. I also doubt too many people will enjoy having some AI-like entity listening to every word they say, even in their most private moments, or in their sleep.
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One of primary functions of language is identification: "we" speak like that, "they" speak differently. Even if you manage to force people to use the same grammar and vocabulary, you cannot make them mean same things.
Look at the different [rhyming slangs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang) - there's a lot of them in the English speaking world. A person says: "look at the apples", but those in-the-know understand that it means "look at the stairs" (because stairs is a rhyme for "apples and pears"). Everyone who knows the slang immediately feels connected, everyone who doesn't is excluded. Even though the sentence is "valid" English.
So, when someone says: "I want a new telephone", how do you know if you should punish him or not? Because this could be common English, but could as well mean "I want a new dog" (because "telephone" rhymes with "dog and bone").
The moment you start enforing that people use the same language for communication, you will get a lot more of things like that - a tone of voice, a hand movement will completely change meaning of sentences. I know first-hand, I grew up in a communist state, and believe me, you could criticize USSR all you wanted without using a single word that censors could object.
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Different answers to different parts of the question.
Banning off-world communication in any other language would require censorship of all off-world communications. People are getting used to that in the current era, but such censorship/surveillance used to be a significant intrusion into civil rights.
Banning the development of the language unless the change is global bans any change, because a local trend doesn't get a chance to become global.
A planet (or country) could require a language proficiency test before it allows immigration through the normal immigration process. This would have some side effects, especially if there are no exceptions.
* A man from Planet A and a woman from planet B marry. The man doesn't speak the language of planet B, but then the mother of the woman becomes ill and the family wants to care for her. Will there be an exception?
* A family wants to immigrate, but one child has serious disabilities and won't pass any language test. Will there be an exception?
Even if there is such a test, people might not adopt the language at home (especially if they don't need a high level of profiency). So the children might grow up with their ancestral language.
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A very bad place to live, a very good place for storytelling.
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When someone wants to move to your planet, find out what languages they speak besides DiegoLang. Group all people born off-planet into small, isolated communities and make sure no community has two people who speak the same language except DiegoLang. Off-planet-born are not permitted to have any contact with Off-planet-born from other communities. With nobody to communicate with, they will have no choice but to communicate in DiegoLang.
The communities will sooner or later start to have kids. Organize childcare as a communal effort right from birth. Children should have as many contact-people as possible, so their language learning is not dominated by only one parent who might try to talk to their child mostly in a forbidden language. That makes sure that children only learn to speak DiegoLang. A possible method to organize this might be to expect mothers to return to their full-time job shortly after giving birth, but have all community members take turns as the designated nanny-of-the-day who takes care of all the children of the community.
Only children born on the planet are allowed to leave their community and get into contact with people from other communities. Encourage them to do so a lot to prevent the communities from bastardizing DiegoLang into community-specific dialects.
**Caveat:** This society-model is not 100% tamper-proof. An adversary group might send several people to your planet which independently from each other teach the children in their respective communities a forbidden language with the goal to have these children form a secret underground society on your planet. The only countermeasure against that is to enact a total surveillance state.
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*Would forcing the new citizens and prosecuting anyone that tried to spoke a different language be justified for the better end?*
This question is only superficially about language. It is really about which rights are [inalienable](https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/inalienable) - that is, which rights can a person never give away?
A regime which literally policed its citizens' every word would certainly be a tyranny if *imposed* on any pre-existing community. Majority support for such a rule could not justify it. The whole point of human rights is that they belong to every human being, regardless of whether they are in a minority or a majority. Nor could the imposition of such a rule be justified because it was believed good would come of it in the end; the idea of human rights includes the idea that they cannot be negated because someone else (the planet-owner) imagines a benefit to other people (their descendants) in the future.
However, unlike every other answerer so far, I *can* see a possible justification on the grounds that people can consent to suspension of their rights while living or working in a place, so long as **it is made clear to them what the consequences of the contract are**, the **contract is not signed under duress**, they **are adults capable of informed consent**, and, most importantly, **so long as they are free to leave at any time.**
Categories of people who agree to live voluntarily under rules and discipline that would be outrageous if imposed include members of the armed forces, monks and nuns, the crews of ships, planes and space vehicles, workers on oil rigs, people undergoing "cold turkey" treatment to get off alcohol or drugs, and people living under a [dome](http://qz.com/768341/nasas-year-long-experiment-in-hawaii-to-mimic-life-on-the-mars-has-come-to-an-end/) as an experiment to simulate the rigours of travel to Mars. Even those who take jobs in companies that insist on certain codes of behaviour from their employees when at work (including a given language being spoken) are acting under a version of this principle that many rights *are* voluntarily alienable. The right to speak other languages than the official one is alienable, and, in fact, is given up without controversy by many people in the situations listed above.
Doubts might arise as to whether one could consent to be bound to speak only the official language even in private, but it is arguable you could. Sometimes people trying to learn a foreign language by total immersion take a promise not to say a word of any other language for a given period. There is a separate issue in that the only way to check what language people spoke in private would be constant surveillance. Can one consent to that? The surveillance in the [Big Brother House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(UK_TV_series)) is not total.
I think this monolingual society would be a repressive and intellectually stagnant place and the alleged "benefit" of worldwide monolingualism to be no benefit at all, but, yes, I think it could be justified under a strict condition of continuing consent by the individuals involved.
But only for the people who signed up for it. Not their children.
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The answer depends on the condition of the planet in question.
Is it already populated? If so, you would be suppressing the culture of an alien race, which would be horrific, not to mention probably a galactic crime of some sort.
If the planet isn't populated (e.g. recently terraformed or newly discovered after a mass extinction), then the issue becomes what language you choose.
If you choose a pre-existing language known by a significant portion of Earth's population (English, Spanish, Mandarin, etc.), then you run into some of the problems discussed in other answers. You would give an inherent advantage to one group of people, which would probably lead to dissent and eventually rebellion (unless one country in particular is colonizing the planet for itself, which opens up a whole different can of worms).
However, if you were to choose a language that everyone would have to learn before moving to the planet (like Esperanto), then things might actually work out like you want. You would run into problems with language stagnation and inevitably people would come up with other things to complain about, but you would have a moderately decent shot at creating a new and different culture based on aspects from all of your colonists' cultures.
In the situation where you're now the ruler of said planet, there's really no practical way that you could go about ensuring that only one language was spoken all of the time without significantly altering the basic structure of society, but you could make your chosen language the official language of the planet and monitor written and transmitted communications for the use of other languages, which would result in the punishment of your choosing for those found in violation of that decree.
A final note on language stagnation: you need to define what constitutes "speaking another language." If you go with what seems most practical and define it as stringing together a certain number of known words from a single foreign language, you could actually prevent language stagnation in part by allowing for its evolution (in that people could invent words without getting flagged/punished, but there's not enough flexibility to speak whole sentences in a different language).
It doesn't necessarily get you exactly what you want, but it seems to be the most practical and advantageous way to go about it.
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I can see only one way - make sure all of the people arriving are native speakers of that language. Ideally, all of the same culture - either all white speaking English, all Chinese speaking Mandarin, etc.
Once established, it should be self-supporting - the people of your planet would be sufficiently bigoted and racist (having never met other cultures) not to accept speakers of other languages. They will have problems getting jobs, etc., and with a bit of luck, anyone who is able to speak another language will be so afraid of getting fired, losing their house, etc., they will not do anything to draw attention to themselves (like speaking another language). They would not teach their children another language, in case they accidentally let the cat out of the bag.
If you don't do this intentionally, but succeed in your stated goal, I think it will probably tend to happen unintentionally.
Sounds like a pretty awful place to live to me.
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Not exactly what you asked for but I think a better alternative would be offering services that enables new comers to learn the common language.
Simply forcing people to speak only 1 common language causes too much negative side effects as stated in the above answers. However, what you want to achieve is "common interface for communication" and this can be done in other less painful ways.
* Making translators available. It's convenient, time-saving, and proven to work fairly well. Also, this gives easy way outs for temporary visitors who do not want to invest time learning an enitrely new language.
* Design a simple easy-to-learn language, make it accessible by offering free lessons etc, and add incentives for learning this language, such as most prints are only available in this language etc. This would essentially accomplish what you want, that is most people being able to speak one common language.
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Try some of Chomsky's writings on the origins of language. In a nutshell, he argues that the purpose of language is not to facilitate communication but actually to impede it. Or at least, to stop those who we view as outsiders from easily communicating with us.
And let us not get started on what constitutes the same or a different language exactly.
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You need to make the people wan't to speak lour language and have it the easyest language to speakt for them.
I make an example:
Switzerland (7.7 Million People) has 4 Official Languages one of them is German.
The Dialects in Swiss German, vary from County to County or even from Town to town, that you can tell where one is from.
The Dialects from City to City vary so much you can compare it from American English to British English (but keep in Mind, that they are only a few minutes apart, not on different Continents.
Due to a School rule to only speak "High German" (spoken in Germany) in School, most TV Programms are from Germany (High German as well) and written Language is also High German, it feels more natural, to speak High German to them, than their "original Dialect".
The Fact that there are many Immigrants that only speak High German, doesn't help either.
So more and more of these wrong-Language-"words" are getting in everyday language. And so, the many dialects are getting Lost and becomeing closer and closer to High German.
Another thig is the Internet, because many sites, like 9Gag or IFunny are english, kids learn to speak english.
Many Animes (Jpanese Cartoons) are Japanese or originally Japanese, so many off my classmates learnd japanese to understand them.
Conclusion:
If you control School, the Internett and TV programms, the new generation will get used to it, and oly speak your Language, because it becomes natural to them.
A rule about Languages is,that people (who speak multiple Languages) will allways/usually speak that Language, that is the easyest common Language that they have.
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I’ts completely justified. You’re not forcing anyone to come to your planet. It’s a consensual agreement between you and those people who want to come. They don’t want such a planet they can choose not to come. Furthermore if your planet is so good that everyone wants to come in, speaking the same language as everyone who was already there is a small price to pay. And like I said they have every freedom to choose not to. It’s actually a great idea that you have in mind. If everyone in the planet speaks the same language then no doubt they will be a more united people.
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Language is at best a rough approximation of an Ontological structure that has some utility with regard to an activity.
To break that down a little:
* Each word represents a thing or process at some level of resolution and abstraction.
+ ie. 'run' is the abstraction of a creature with legs moving so that at times it is completely suspended in the air not touching the ground, it usually quite fast.
+ This is why we also apply the concept to programs on a computer that 'run' quite fast without apparently touching anything physical.
* the words can be organised into phrases/sentences so that they form a more specific description or reinforce a particular set of qualities.
+ 'jhon runs' refines the concept of 'jhon' and 'runs' to describe a more specific circumstance
+ 'thunderous pin drop' works to infer that the really quiet sound of a small object hitting the ground, was very very noticable.
When you lock down a specific set of structures and words you essential say, yep we know everything, it has all been discovered.
That is the definition of a Tyrany. The Tyrany has all knowledge about all forms, and it is clear what is correct and what is incorrect.
In this environment, to act differently isn't just being naive, it is a viscous attack.
*Why?* It means that the Tyrany does not have perfect information. Otherwise the Tyrany would have already handled this problem before it became a problem.
So how do you handle a situation that contains new information, when you already live in a society that has perfect information?
There are two obvious solutions:
1. The people handling the situation realise that the tyrany is incorrect. They too act differently and magnify the scope of the problem from the perspective of the tyrany.
2. The individuals acting aberently are terminated. They were working to corrupt and contaminate the complete and true knowledge already known. Such individuals are by the definition of a Tyrany renouncing their own consciousness. From such a Tyranical perspective it might be considered a kindness to alleviate their suffering.
The first solution might lead to some form of a revolution. It might be a quiet intellectual sort, or a busy constructive sort, or a bloody civil war.
The second solution might lead you to Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Maoist China, ... Places that have suffered greatly in terms of mass genocides regardless of how those situations occurred.
Either way cultures that make the mistake of believing that they know everything of value are about to find a lot of troubles ahead of them.
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No. Most of the bloodiest wars in human history are civil wars, where the people understand each other all too well.
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The King is a bit... eccentric - a sort of Calligula type, but in his employ is the most powerful wizard in the land. He is continuously ordering the wizard to perform humiliating, monotonous and pointless tasks.
What is to stop the more sensible wizard from getting sick of this, and just refusing to carry out the King's orders, or quitting his post, or doing something to the King?
The story is set in a kind of medieval-with-magic type of world, and the wizard's power is such that he could easily hold off the King's guards, certainly for long enough to escape if the King turned on him.
**Edit**
Just to explain the magic is like high-level D&D (not the same but this is just to give an idea). The wizard is not a slave of the King, he's a high ranking member of staff, a bit like Merlin, who is loyal but not to the point of putting up with this continuous abuse. The idea is that a King who didn't have a powerful wizard working for him would be highly vulnerable.
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# [Battered Person Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_person_syndrome)
It's been going on so long that he doesn't know any other way any more. He doesn't know how to survive in the outside world, at least the king lays on food and laundry. He's safe in the castle, safe enough, it could be worse. The people outside hate and fear him anyway, nobody would help him. Its his own fault the king treats him like this, if he worked harder the king would be happier. Better the way it is, it could be worse after all. Change is scary, safer like this... safer...
You could also consider [Stockholm Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome)
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Wizard is a self righteous man and promised to help the king when he was a young visionary. Now he is bound by this promise and serves the maddened king until his death.
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# Loyalty
The Wizard may not like the King, but they are loyal to the *Kingdom*. The Kingdom has suffered under this king and there one or more neighbouring countries that want to invade. The only thing stopping them is the knowledge that a powerful Wizard serves the kingdom.
Now, everybody knows this. Even the king knows this and he **HATES** the fact that his wizard is more feared than himself. He takes this out on the wizard in petty ways.
# Greed and Laziness
The Wizards have a wing of the palace for themselves, they have their own personal servants, a generous stipend, an enormous library. This is worth a bit of humiliation.
Of course, the Wizard could set up their own castle, hire their own servants and so on and so forth, but what a bother that would be! Besides, wizards in lonely castles tend to attract mobs with pitchforks and torches. In the Kings castle, there are soldiers to protect against that sort of thing.
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The King could be the source of the wizard's powers. For instance, the post of Royal Mage is one that is handed down through generations, where the powers are only gifted to one who pledges life-long allegiance to the ruling King.
Now, the Royal Mage could say that he would rather lose his powers than continue to serve under such a terrible ruler, but what if he had a daughter so ill that she needs his powers just to survive? Quitting his job would literally mean the death of his child, and so he has no choice but to grit his teeth and bear it, while the gormless King continues to do as he pleases.
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I'm going to suggest the easy way out:
# The King is the Wizard's Son/Father/Nephew
Basically, the family ties keep the wizard from doing anything too drastic, and in the end he pities the King for his madness.
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Multiple answers here :
**A prophecy** :
The wizard knows that the king is going to play a major role (against dark forces, the end of the world, etc...) at some point of his life and he needs to be protected and watched, to be sure he'll play his role correctly.
**A powerful artifact kept by the king** :
The king could be in possession of a powerful magical artifact, desired by the wizard. The wizard could be offering his services in exchange for that artifact, and waiting for the promised reward.
**An obligation gained by his magic learning** :
As I have no information on how your wizard gained his power, let's say he learned (or his power was awaken) by the mean of an obligatory set of challenges : he had to go through some hard tests to gain his magic, but in one of the test, he summoned some entity and he had to swear to serve the king to save his life, given the fact that this entity will watch him during his entire life.
**They knew each other in the past and the king saved his life** :
If he wasn't born with magic infused in him, or he wasn't able to control his magic before a certain point of his life, the king (before being the king) might have saved his life. The wizard is now in debt with the king, and offered him his services to repay this debt.
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# Multiple answers
* The king could hold the family of the wizard hostage.
* He could fool the wizard, scare him with something the wizard can't know, maybe he says he has a weapon which can disable magic.
* He could promise something, e.g. in a year the wizard will get his freedom or whatever he wants and so he will do all the things for the king because it is like a dream for him.
* The king has information that the wizard wants and if the king dies he is useless to him so he needs to serve.
* The king needs to intimidate and frighten the wizard, show the world how cruel the king is, and even if he escapes, his soldiers will pursue him and try to ruin his life in the most cruel ways.
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The Wizard himself is under some kind of spell which he cannot break, which prevents him harming the King. Perhaps he put this spell on himself, or an even more powerful wizard did it long ago.
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## Checks and Balances
The court Wizard may well be *the* most powerful wizard in the land, but he's not the *only* wizard. Or the *only powerful* wizard.
So the other wizards have some more or less formal ways of keeping the Wizard in check, so that they keep all their advantages (including having *the* Wizard be the King's scapegoat instead of them)...?
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The King is much loved, and the Wizard not so. Moving against the king would mean the Wizard would be hated by everyone, wherever he goes.
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# To Keep the Status Quo
If our wizard is no longer the King's wizard for some reason, then the next most powerful wizard will be recruited. What if the new guy isn't very nice and ends up bending the King's will with malicious intent....?
If our King loses credibility (or his life), then who comes next? The next in line may not be good for the kingdom, and might not be good for our wizard....
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The king possesses or controls a magical item that holds power over the wizard. As powerful as the wizard is, that item is his weakness and he cannot turn against its owner.
Examples from popular fiction:
The Dark One's dagger - he is literally unable to refuse commands given by its holder.
Inuyasha's Beads of Subjugation - by uttering a command word, Kagome can debilitate Inuyasha and inflict pain upon him. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMNC1UpDnMA&feature=youtu.be&t=36s>
Samurai Jack's sword - Aku is incredibly weak against it, and while the Samurai wields it Aku can never win a direct confrontation. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e51hgWIsY4M>
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You give no context and no character depictions. The keyword is "hostage" in wide sense: it can be anything ranging from wizard's family or source of power, to more exotic variants like tired old wizard's mortality or some kind of wizard's oath to a trickster to serve to the first freckled one-legged person he meets until his or mentioned person's death (in exchange for power/knowledge).
It can also be something as simple as king finding a way to control wizard with some powerful third-party intervention: magic/artifact/etc.
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The wizard may see a value in either court mage position or the king rule.
Being king's wizard may make him a big fish while begin powerful may matter only to other wizards (and those who ends on the wrong end of his wand - but this usually does not last long).
On the other hand even eccentric king may keep his vassals in check preventing them from going all out civil war. And while wizard can squash the king like a fly he knows that he can not replace him easily.
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With your edits it just doesn't compute:
1) A VERY powerful person
2) Is treated like a clown
3) Willingly keeps serving a king (is loyal & not a slave)
I'd say there are not too much to do with this. You should either pervert or just remove one of the points above. Something like that can do:
1) His power is somehow bound to place or his actions (i.e. serving king)
2) He either doesn't consider his tasks "humiliating, monotonous and pointless" or the tasks are such only on at a first glance.
3) It's either love or some other wizard's mental condition (like stockholm's syndrome as mentioned before).
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**HAPPY PATH:**
The Wizard could be an immediate family of the King (Father, Grand Father or Son) thus believing and hoping that the King in time will be a good and righteous king.
**SAD PATH**
The Wizard has a secret and vile agenda of his own. He could be waiting for the right time to unfold his plan by following the King's sick orders.
Ex. The Wizard is controlling the King's mind thus making his people suffer, and when the right time has come, the Wizard will change his looks with his magic and lead a revolution against the Kingdom. This will make the Wizard more powerful because aside from magic he has now an Army loyal to him and a Kingdom with colossal resources
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The wizard's faith (values, moral code) holds the king is placed by deity and it is the role of the wizard to protect him until the deity replaces the king. Although it is a very powerful wizard, he also knows his limitations and will not dwell outside the responsibilities of his role (protect the king, obey the king). Does not mean he does not suffer conflict, like what is more important, to protect him or obey him?; or rooting for that new king (without wishing harm to the current king). After all, the king's fate is for the deity to decide.
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One thing noone has pointed out:
The King could be under the Wizard's mental control by a long time, and to prevent the servants to notice (and to hurt the Wizard), the Wizard has the King play mad and abusing so the servants of the King are fooled.
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**The Wizard Is (or Would Be) King**
The Wizard is next in line for succession, and is biding his time. His brother, the king, just needs to die of "natural enough" causes, and the people will accept the Wizard's ascension to the throne. The orders from his loving brother are humiliating, but not deadly.
Alternatively, the King is mostly under the Wizard's spell. The Wizard is controlling the important decisions, but the enraged King's identity occasionally regains enough control over his body, long enough to bark out a dangerous order. The Wizard dutifully follows the order, once he's gotten the King's identity back under his thumb, and clarified the mission to something that is merely embarrassing.
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He's a powerful wizard so I think you could also take a more philosophical approach.
To quote [Bruce Lee](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/56367-tao-of-jeet-kune-do):
*Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.*
Being so powerful he needs to keep himself grounded and compassionate or he could easily become a tyrant. So he simply chooses to obey the king as a practice to remain humble.
Furthermore, he legitimises the kings rule and thus stabilises the realm. If even a powerful wizard is obeying the king then so must we peasants.
And then of course, plot twist. Turns out the entire time he was scrubbing chamber pots and doing the accounting, he was unravelling the kings rule. Learning secrets on important nobles, understanding the governance of treasury and guards, subtly moving to put people in positions loyal to him and not the king. The peasants see even the all powerful wizard being treated shamefully so sympathise with him, befriend him, see him as the rightful ruler.
When the wizard uses his magic to overthrow the demented king, he has the support of the people, the courts, the guard, and knows who to strike at to prevent retaliations from the kings friends.
Now your wizard is king and no one can do a thing about it, nor do they even want to...
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## Heating up with some context
I have a kingdom where large patches of forest and dense vegetation lands are lying, ranging from mountainous (al)pine forests to deciduous trees from oceanic or mildly continental climates, with a tendancy to grow a little more of [fast growing trees and bushes than usual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_dynamics) (reason below). Some villages and towns are scattered in them, making their trade from the resources of the surrounding woods.
However, [because of the caracteristics of some of the flora inhabitants](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/191203/is-it-possible-to-make-blazing-flying-spores-seeds), wildfires are more frequent than usual; These trees burning up are a threat to the people, so the kingdom has devised a whole military branch to protect people living in the woodlands and their outskirts.
As such, denizens have built watchtowers, pumps and wells, breakable barrages and "switchable river" systems in an effort to, if not extinguish, mitigate those disasters. Firefighter squads are not left out naked, as they have access to quality equipment to help them : Horse-carried water carriages, axes and shovels to dig fire barriers, ladders and ropes to navigate around... But also lots of buckets to get help from the population, kits to heal injuries and even a prototype of a fire hose (they worked really, really hard on this one!).
## A burning interrogation
Thinking about the "offensive" part of the loadout of firefighters is relatively easy to find and mix into your own sauce on your hot sausage, since firefighting tools history and techniques can be found here and there. The problem is... Even though it's nice to douse fires, it's not very fun to burn from said fires. And alas, I have a harder time finding good sources of inspiration to protect oneself against fire.
This is why I let out my blazing curiosity out to you with this question : **How and with what would you design a team of firefighter protective equipment as effectively as possible, within the time frame of medieval technology?**
In order to give you an idea of what I'm looking for, below are some additional points to think about, right out of the oven!
* **During emergencies, firefighters behave like how you'd think a firefighter should behave, and can be resumed in 3 words : Save or perish. The goal is to find the best way to keep them from perishing :).**
* While they will help cats to climb down trees here and then, their primary task is still fighting fires; They are less often called for other cases.
* Also, even though I talked a lot about potential wildfires before, they do take care of house fires too. But... Since wildfires are often a lot harder to take on and they are the historical reason firefighters exist, their equipment are focused against them.
* The budget on this branch of military forces is a lil' bit higher than your usual soldier, however there are quite a number of firefighters, and the uniform is standard-issue. What I mean is that you should avoid burning up the kingdom budget by sewing tailor-made suits with gold and silver.
* Overall technology level is medieval, up to 14th century, especially when looking at materials and energy sources (that is, if you'd use any). I am more lenient on technics such as mechanical and physics knowledge or finely detailed crafting, but it should be plausible in regards to that time period.
* Even though there is magic in my world, it is forbidden, as it unravels against the standard issue rule (not everyone can use magic).
* On a similar topic, available materials are roughly what you'd expect you have in a medieval Europe.
So now you know a little more, how will you ignite your mind to save these brave men and women fending of the flames to save you?
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## Wool
Historically specialized\* fire fighter clothing was made of wool, with leather only being used anywhere wool would not work (like hats). Even today wool is uses in a lot of fire fighting equipment and is consider [one of the best available](https://www.miragenews.com/wool-protects-skin-from-flames-study-proves-suitability-for-military-and-fire-fighters/) materials.
It may sound strange but wool is actually very fire retardant. Ignition temp 600°C, leather on the other hand burns at only 200°C. Wool is also self extinguishing which is a big bonus. It is an extremely good insulator even while soaking wet, whereas leather is a very poor insulator. Leather is spark resistant which is very different than fire resistant.
fire fighting gear needs to be two things a good insulator and fire resistant, if it can be waterproof even better. wool is the only natural material that fits for the first two and is fairly water repellant, if you can add a rubber top layer even better but that is likely beyond their technology. Medieval people could make wool gambesons so they can make wool protective clothing just fine.
A good helmet is important as well, these tended to be thick stiffened leather sometimes with a cork liner, protecting the head was considered more important than insulation in the case of helmets.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/v88QQ.png)
\*[the earliest fire fighters just wore their normal clothing because they did not enter burning buildings](https://www.fireengineering.com/fire-prevention-protection/the-history-of-firefighter-personal-protective-equipment/#gref) they just knocked them down from the outside to prevent the fire from spreading.
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## Look to History:
If you want to know what to equip your fire fighters with, look to how fire fighters were [equipped a century ago](https://www.fireengineering.com/fire-prevention-protection/the-history-of-firefighter-personal-protective-equipment/#gref). The tech used then is not really different than the tech available in a medieval setting. If you are willing to allow access to [rubber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber) (a natural product used by the Aztecs and Mayans for waterproof clothing) your fire fighters can look a lot like those of the 1900's era.
Start with a good helmet with a wide brim. A big barrier to fire fighters was their fear of entering crumbling buildings and having debris fall on them. A stiffened leather helmet was used then but it could be part iron helmet for greater protection if desired. Thick wool was used for clothes (coverd with a long coat), and as soon as it was available, a rubberized rain coat and rubberized boots were used to both protect from the heat and prevent the soaking and virtual immobility associated with it. A thick pair of rubberized pants with suspenders would round out a set of gear. Staying DRY is critical, since the weight and exhaustion associated with all that wet clothing will render your fire fighters ineffective.
Early fire fighters grew thick beards and tied the wetted hair over their faces to help protect from the smoke and fumes. The actual making of air filters wasn't all that sophisticated, but no one had bothered to design them - they aren't terribly complex. An early self-contained air supply wasn't any more than a pair of rubberized canvas bags with a hose and cap on them to allow the fire fighter to take clean air with them. Again, if you allow rubber, this is completely doable with medieval tech.
Fires are often the scene of a lot of noise. Many fire fighters carried bullhorns before radio equipment was available to allow them to amplify their voices and be heard. I include this under protective equipment because communication is critical to safety.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vMXlG.png)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zJHQF.png)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uQLXS.png)
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## Use Asbestos
Asbestos cloth is not as modern of an invention as some people might think. In fact, it is a very old technology dating all the way back to ~2400 BC. Asbestos is a natural mineral fiber that is mined and woven into an extremely heat resistant cloth. It is much better than natural fibers at resisting burning and preventing the transmission of heat through it. The toxic nature of Asbestos was first discovered by the Romans some time around the 1st Century CE, but we humans have managed to forget this little detail every so often and it finds its way back into popular use.
Many early firefighting jackets were made using this cloth; so, it only makes sense that your firefighters would use it too. These early jackets normally had an outer face of rubberized cloth for added strength and dryness on the outside with an Asbestos inner lining, and was then worn over a felt or wool shirt for added comfort and insulation. However, rubberized cloth did not exist in the medieval period; so, your firefighters would have probably use a lightly waxed leather outer layer if they were to want to waterproof it.
Your firefighters would get cancer more often than your general population, but this would not stop your people form using it. In the medieval period, people believed sickness came from Miasma (bad air) so when they start to notice firefighters getting sick a lot, they would just assume your firefighters are getting sick from too much smoke inhalation, not from their fire gear.
To protect themselves from getting sick from the bad air, firefighters would likely adapt their outfits to be a sort of mix between Bunker Gear and Plague Doctor gear. † So, they may adopt the practice of wearing a beak mask filled with herbs or perfumes meant to sweeten the air. They would also have a different shaped hat since the flat topped hats worn by plague doctors were specifically a mark of the medical profession. They would instead probably wear something more like a conical helmet lined on the inside with asbestos to protect them from falling debris.
† *I am not suggesting that a plague doctor mask is good thing for fighting fires, but that it is a logical consequence based on how medieval medical science worked.*
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Wet leather for the body and wet towels to protect the face are probably the things to go for.
The water would take away some of the heat by evaporating, and the leather is probably the most lightweight, fire resistant and heat insulating material you can find in medieval age.
And if you are carrying water you can always drop a bucket on yourself to keep it wet.
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### Starlite.
A combination of corn starch, baking soda, and glue or sugar combine to create a ablative heat-shielding material known as Starlite, originally invented in our world in the 1980s, which works by producing a carbon foam that carries the heat away from the protected object, acts as a heat insulator, and also acts as a good radiator of heat through black body radiation. This is a member of a class of similar materials called "intumescents"; many modern commercial materials include phosphorus to accelerate its ability to produce carbon foam.
While it wasn't discovered until modern times, the ingredients needed should be available in a medieval society, and it's entirely possible for them to stumble across similar recipes. Here's a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IbWampaEcM) by its re-inventor discussing its history, how to make it, and how it works.
However, it should be noted that this recipe for Starlite is vulnerable to being consumed by mold or rot (the video above suggests adding borax to the recipe to counter-act that, which might be available in your fictional medieval society since it's a rock that can be mined from dried lake beds), and is rigid enough that if it was used as armor for the firefighters themselves, it would most likely have to take the form of a coating on top of rigid plates.
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Leather. The thicker the better. Leather is very hard to burn, and is fairly heat-resistant. Minimize metal, because it will get hot and burn you if you touch it. If the leather starts smoldering, back up and pour some water on it.
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**Asbestos**
Asbestos has been mined for thousand of years. Around 2500 B.C.E. The Egyptians used asbestos cloth to bury their pharaohs1. Asbestos has been used in fireproof cloth since at least [600 C.E. In Persia and 800 C.E in Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#History) where it was used as a party trick.
Asbestos has been used in [firefights’s clothing](https://www.levylaw.com/asbestos-firefighter-clothing-equipment/) in the past, although that appears to have been a more recent idea. It is possible that someone who was researching fire protection equipment may have developed it earlier if the need had been great enough, and they saw the party trick, they might have developed a [fire proximity suit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_proximity_suit).
Asbestos has also been use as [gas mask filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mask#Safety_of_old_gas_masks). It would be possible to make a gas mask using medieval resources and technologies to protect against smoke and possibly carbon monoxide by using asbestos and [activated carbon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activated_carbon#Production), I believe.
Sources
1 [Asbestos The Hazardous Fiber
By Melvin A. Benarde pg27](https://books.google.com/books?id=QmFoDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT35&lpg=PT35&dq=egyptian+asbestos+burial+shroud&source=bl&ots=HynO4jNgto&sig=ACfU3U3uoHN5W8vyTxokEGNvJpwDxAjz5g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiyk8D1mdHuAhVxGTQIHa8bAKU4FBDoATAAegQIBBAB#v=onepage&q=1.&f=false)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#History>
<https://www.levylaw.com/asbestos-firefighter-clothing-equipment/>
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_proximity_suit>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mask#Safety_of_old_gas_masks>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activated_carbon#Production>
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Coarse cloth, sacking worked very well traditionally, soaked in clay slip, it will dry out and possibly even burn eventually but it has a higher thermal mass than wet cloth or even leather, so more energy is adsorbed before it gets hot and much lower thermal conductivity than water alone so steam burns to the wearer are less of a problem as well. Several layers will work best as the top layer will crisp and insulate the inner layers against direct exposure to flames. Suits made up of several layers of clay soaked sacking were used to do emergency repairs inside the hot boilers of ironclads when battle damage caused their seams to flex and patching from the inside was necessary due to lack of external access.
The above is pretty much a one use and it's cooked solution, a more permanent solution could be created using fibre-tempered ceramic plates for large areas that don't have to bend laced together with clay soaked panels. Fibre-tempering has been around and in common usage since the stone age, the fibres burn out when the pottery is fired and the voids provide added insulation. Suits with this constructions will be relatively bulky, constrictive, and possibly even heavier but also relatively durable over wet cloth.
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Suppose humans are living in conjunction with several intelligent and communicative species of animals, dogs and cats for example. These animals might be legally considered people; being held accountable for their crimes, paying taxes, etc. Suppose then, that a new animal, whose intelligence and potential for communication is unknown, commits a crime, or interacts with the legal system in some other way.
How might the legal system of this hypothetical multi-species society determine whether or not the new animal was, legally, a person?
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The main issue here is not if this new animal should be considered a person, but if it is capable of knowing what they did was a crime.
If they are able to understand what crime is, then they should be punished and treated like any other person and (by default) be considered a person. If they are not able to understand, then they should still be contained in some way so that they are no longer a danger to themselves or others.
In the US at least, there are [laws governing cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_laws_governing_defendants_with_mental_diseases_or_defects) where the defendant may not be able to understand what they did was a crime, such as the defendant being insane, very young, or otherwise mentally unfit to stand trial or be considered responsible for their actions.
This new animal would likely have sessions with [forensic psychologists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_psychology) in order to judge how mentally fit they are. The psychologists' medical report would be used by the judge to determine if the defendant is intelligent/sane enough to even stand trial, and by the jury to determine if the defendant is guilty of the crime or not.
If considered fit enough to stand trial, a guilty verdict would mean the new animal receives a full punishment, but also shows that they deserve to be considered a person. A not-guilty verdict could still mean that they deserve to be a person, but are simply insane and should go to your world's equivalent of a [psychiatric hospital](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatric_hospital).
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## You can look to the history of racial personhood for some insights
Throughout history, some groups were given lesser statuses in society as a result of perceived shortcomings. They were even sometimes referred to as animals because of the belief that they were less intelligent. Such an occurrence could definitely take place in your world.
For example, whichever society is more advanced at a given time may see the less advanced society (whether it be animal or human) as inferior and draw the incorrect conclusion that the lack of comparable progress is a consequence of intelligence difference even if intelligence is comparable. This may lead to poor treatment of the less advanced society.
As members of that less advanced are incorporated into the more advanced one, it will become apparent that the intelligence is not different on aggregate and people may advocate for equality for those persons. Perhaps it is a slow process with multiple steps (like in the case of the American 3/5 compromise) or one large movement brings the group to person status. Even then, there will likely be some people (or even institutions) who don't see the other species as a person (or at least an equal person) for whatever reason. This could be something worth exploring to add depth to the world.
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They would not. Such a declaration of personhood would occur long before this individual committed a crime.
The judicial system is an internal system, managed inside a group such as a nation. It does not come alone. With this concept of finding people guilty and punishing them comes the concept that you can't do whatever you want to your neighbor. You can't kill them just because they played their stereo loudly. Well, you may have the physical capacity to do so, but the group says "No. You don't go around killing people that way." Instead, you say "We have a system of justice that will take care of this vile loud stereo player for you."
So the idea of some alternate intelligent creature getting held responsible for their actions comes hand in hand with said alternate intelligent creature binding themselves to not take justice into their own hands (or claws, or whatever). It's two halves of the same contract.
That process happens more slowly, and should be rather cemented in place long before a trial has to question whether they are a person or not.
The exception to this would be a monumentally extravagant situation, such as if this alternate intelligence wiped out a city block or two. In such cases, people may not accept the "the law will take care of this" if the law says the creature gets off scott free because they weren't a person. In such cases, there would be a large number of emergency meetings to deducde what to do with this creature.
The content of these meetings would be *incredibly* event-specific, so its hard to expand on what they would look like. Emotions, forensics, politics. Everything would play a part.
For an example of what the slow methodical process might look like, I highly recommend Bicentennial Man (a.k.a. The Positronic Man). Book or movie, both do a good job of demonstrating what the bureaucracy might look like.
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Western legal tradition has no method of determining personhood, except by legislative fiat. A law is passed, or an amendment is added to a constitution.
Thus, one would need some political movement that advocated for the legal personhood of a non-human animal. Hopefully the animal's not too tasty, because this could easily require decades of activism.
Recently PETA tried something like this in the United States, and their arguments were thoroughly rejected. Presumably your animal might be sapient, and could make its own arguments, which whatever their merits were might be enough to sway... I imagine judges and senators might be impressed with a talking wallaby or whatever.
In fiction, you might have some metaphysical gobbledygook device that just gives you an oracular answer. If western science has come to agree with that machine, it might itself be sufficient (assuming legislation has caught up). There exists no sound scientific basis for such a machine. There exists no sound theoretical basis for what constitutes sapience/personhood/sentience.
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One of the problems you face in this question is getting around the fundamental presumption of competence that is so deeply ingrained in you that you don't even notice it. Despite what a lot of other people have said in the various comments, human justice has never had a problem determining that for the most part humans are responsible for what they do. "Marginalized groups" would be ones who were perhaps excessively punished for what they did, or punished for things they did not do at all, but there's nowhere in history that a judicial system has ever had the slightest problem condemning a human for murder or something. Casual assumptions about humanity have been made since we are the only species that can really be expected to act "responsibly" for any common definition of that term.
Likewise, there's no justice system of significance anywhere in history that has treated animals as full individuals, because they can't be expected to be responsible for anything. If nothing else, even the very greatest animals we know show very little capacity for understanding what may happen a day or two from now if they act in a certain way today, which is a very important element of holding people responsible for lawbreaking, since only the very most basic, most brutal elements of law involve consequences immediate, large, and guaranteed.
I would suggest that the proper way of evaluating such a beast would be seeing to it that rights are matched to responsibilities. As humans, we have the right to not be murdered by other humans; we have the corresponding responsibility not to murder others. We have the right to security in our properties, and we have the corresponding responsibility to not steal from others. And so on. The question would be, is this individual capable of discharging the responsibilities associated with the rights we are considering giving them? Someone who is literally incapable of not hurting other people is not put in jail, they are institutionalized.
If they are not at all capable of handling the responsibilities, than while we may be forced to take certain actions in regards to their crimes, as we might put down a dog that violently killed a child, we would not necessarily consider them culpable. Suppose there was a species that was mostly like humans, but if you punch them in the grondar, it can be scientifically demonstrated that their forebrains are turned off and they violently attack anything in the area. They lack all ability to not do this. It doesn't matter if they train, or meditate, or whatever. If they get punched in the grondar, we can't hold them morally responsible for what happens next. Then again, perhaps they are supposed to be wearing their grondar-protectors and they left it off today, in which case, yes, they were capable of discharging their responsibilities and they failed, and now they are responsible for what happened.
The other side holds as well, too; non-human sentients can have both rights and responsibilities that we don't. Humans are not necessarily the pinnacle. The real human world already has exemptions for "fighting words" and "crimes of passion" (i.e., catching your mate mating with someone else), for which we will reduce the perceived culpability of someone for a violent action because of the provocations that we are ourselves quite vulnerable to, and it becomes unreasonable to expect the entire population to be able to uphold the responsibility of staying calm under those provocations. But perhaps Vulcans still are expected to be that calm. They may have some corresponding rights that humans do not. Or in a post-Singularity science fiction story, unmodified humans may not be held responsible for actions taken after interaction with a Class 3 or greater artificial intelligence, if such AIs are well-known to be able to play unaugmented humans like fiddles if they choose to. Some thought may deal with areas in which humans may already be not held responsible.
With some creativity, you may even come up with situations in which it isn't clear that humans are "deficient" per se, they just aren't responsible. For instance, perhaps sentient dogs could be punished for "disloyalty to the pack". Humans are not generally punished legally for this, because our loyalty relationships are much different than pack relationships; not necessarily worse, not necessarily better, just different. The sentient dogs may have rights and responsibilities that are simply meaningless for humans. By contrast, as we punish humans who promise to protect confidential information and fail to do so, perhaps the sentient dogs can only be cleared for security work whole packs at a time, because there is no way to have a sentient dog loyal to an abstract organization above their pack. etc.
One of the casual assumptions we make because everyone is human is precisely that the question is binary; are you competent or not? Human/adult or not? This makes sense in the human world, and is probably even a good idea to prevent the creation of distinctions where they don't really exist (i.e., racism, etc.) In a multi-species society, the question may be more granular than that. The question you may be asking may not be "is this creature a legal person?" but "is this creature capable of not doing the thing we're calling a crime?"
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## **Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.**
In other words, test if the animal, when the roles are reversed, considers itself the victim of a crime.
Let's say our animal has committed the most heinous of crimes: jaywalking. We don't know, however, if this animal is able to understand the intention of traffic lights (or if it's even capable of distinguishing red from green).
But let's say we put this animal in the reverse role. Someone jaywalks in front of the animal, thus blocking the animal who has a green light.
**If the animal gets upset at the jaywalker for jaywalking, the animal understands the illegal nature of jaywalking**, and therefore can be convicted for jaywalking.
This creates an interesting dynamic: when an animal (of unproven intelligence) breaks a rule, it is therefore put on "probation".
* If it does not try to uphold the rule when the animal is the victim in the interaction, then the animal clearly doesn't understand/acknowledge the rule in the first place and therefore cannot be found guilty.
* If the animal is able to argue that it is the victim in an interaction, then it is inherently also capable of understanding that it is the perpetrator in this same interaction (with the roles reversed). Therefore, you've conclusively proven that the animal is capable of understanding right from wrong.
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A more cynical view is that laws are not inherently moral, they are the rules a society enforces to ensure the status quo.
If the new species has existed and is now fighting for legal recognition then something has to change. Either the society no longer benefits from their exploitation or exclusion, or the new species brings something desirable into the mix.
A new species can be subject to laws and punishment without being a member of society with its rights and benefits. Maybe look at how countries have historically handled immigration and annexation, how new (and often despised) cultures eventually become the status quo.
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For my future world, I've decided that coastal cities need fresh water and there isn't enough of it to go around.
I don't know how jellyfish work. Is it feasible or completely impossible for scientists to bio-engineer giant jellyfish to convert salt water into fresh water? Do they store water in their bodies, or are they just made of water?
I would imagine that the jellyfish would convert the salt water into fresh water and it would be stored in its body for humans to harvest later. Could that work or do jellyfish not absorb water into their bodies and can't do this?
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**No.** Jellyfish are [osmoconformers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmoconformer)
>
> Osmoconformers are marine organisms that maintain an internal
> environment that is osmotic to their external environment.[1] This
> means that the osmotic pressure, or osmolarity, of the organism’s
> cells is equal to the osmotic pressure of their surrounding
> environment.... Most osmoconformers are marine invertebrates such as
> echinoderms (such as starfish), mussels, marine crabs, lobsters,
> jellyfish, ascidians (sea squirts - primitive chordates), and
> scallops.
>
>
>
Vertebrates maintain an internal environment that is slightly hypoosmolar - less salty - than seawater. Blood is not as salty as the ocean. I have read that the salinity of blood is the same as the salinity of the ocean in the ancient period when our ancestors evolved closed systems.
All that said I like the idea of giant bioengineered jellyfish. I can definitely imagine an anime with loads of giant jellyfish all around. Or was that Ponyo?
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**Is it possible? yes but...**
**There are biological constructs capable of filtering salt. Could a creature theoretically convert salt water to freshwater, yes but the big question is what does it do with the salt or water?**
The law of conservation of matter still applies.
I would think this creature could be kind of like a stromatellite building a big salt rock on its inside. Though as soon as it punctured it would be chaos.
Maybe it could store the Na and Cl ions as a means of metabolic energy.
It would need energy to do this.
Could it look like a jellyfish? Maybe, depending on what it does with the salt and how it acquires energy will greatly affect its appearance.
If it photosynthesizes, it wont be that clear color. If it makes a big salt rock it likely wont float or if it does it sure wont look like a jellyfish.
Im also not convinced it would be capable of completely desalinizing water but im not sure it couldn't either.
**But, on the salt rock train, I could see a thermally powered anemone concept that looks like a jellyfish stuck on the floor.**
There is also the inverse of storing salt and instead store the water. In this case the jellyfish would inevitably float and be stuck on the surface which is useful because it makes harvesting easier. **They would be like organically grown pre-filled water bottles.** But no amount of tinkering could overcome the buoyancy problem because the stored water would be less dense than the ever increasing saline water, that is in addition to retaining the jellyfish structural appearance.
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Sorta maybe.
Jellyfish don't do much, but some do generate pressure to swim. If you put a valved membrane across the ring muscle reverse osmosis could give you fresh water.
However fresh water is bad for jellyfish, and moving it from the mouth to somewhere you want it is work. So you need to give the the jelly some non-jelly plating, and a second exit for the water to be pushed into. With those changes you are halfway to a squid.
Really though I'm just using it as a living pump, so most creatures would work fine. Filter feeders like mollusks might be a better choice since they already are capable of pumping, filtering, surviving hostile environments and don't have a lot of unnecessary propulsion systems. And as a bonus make pearls and shells.
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### Seawater fishes do have the same problem.
Their skin (and scales) aren't exactly watertight - meaning, next to swallowing up seawater with their food they take up seawater through their skin as well which would raise the salinity of their blood and tissue.
So, to counter that their kidneys do actively transport the excess salt into their urine to be expelled whch gives their urine a higher concentration of dissolved salt than the surrounding seawater.
**Meaning, a natural desalination mechanism already exists**, though only in higher order organisms which need to rely on more complex mechanisms to expel waste material, but it could be feasible to engineer a bladder-like structure with a membrane with active transport to move a highly salinated solution out of it, thus reducing the salinity inside the bladder. Or, on the other way round, these organisms could be engineered to "pull out" the salt out of the solution they swim in and sequester it in their bodies, much like kidney stones growing.
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**Well, not in the way you're probably thinking of.** Jellyfish aren't filters, and they don't extract salt from the ocean as they pass through it- so you can't use them directly to extract the salt from ocean water. As Will points out, they're osmoconformers and could care less about the salinity of the water.
However, I can think of a few ways to use jellyfish as part of the water purification process.
## 1) Use them for transport
This idea requires a bit of technology on the scientist's part, but well within reality. The key tech here is a semipermeable membrane that allows water to pass through, but not salts. These are commonly used in modern science and are part of the reverse osmosis desalination process. With a semipermeable membrane, all that's required is a pressure differential.
Jellyfish are bad at a lot of things, but moving vertically in the water column is not one of them. Some jellies, such as the beautiful and massive [Lion's Mane jellyfish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion%27s_mane_jellyfish) undergo daily migrations between the surface and the depths, known as diel vertical migration. If properly trained, I can easily imagine our massive Lion's Mane jellies making daily trips to the seafloor with a semipermeably sealed container on their bells, which would fill with fresh water, rejecting salts, as the jellies sink to the seafloor. Each night, they would return to the surface with containers filled with fresh water.
## 2) Engineer them as substrates
Some jellyfish would be excellent candidates for the harvesting of biological, [semipermeable membranes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipermeable_membrane). In particular, the [Portuguese man o' war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war), while not a true jellyfish, has a large float made of a single cell. This float could be repurposed or engineered by scientists to produce biological semi-permeable membranes that could be harvested for the larger [desalination plants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination), solving the problem of constant, expensive filter replacement. Additionally, semi-permeable membranes made from jellyfish would likely be less vulnerable to dissolved organic carbon, which is actively problematic for current systems.
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This is really not what you asked, but your question got me thinking. In the real world, the favorite solution for coastal cities without enough water is to channel it from other areas. When that's impossible, the solution is physical desalinization in a process called reverse osmosis. You're looking at biological desalinization.
Jellyfish are a bad choice. As Will said, they maintain the same salinity as the water around them. Changing this would involve so many changes to their physiology that the result would not be jellyfish. They'd need a circulation system like you see in fish to isolate the salt from the surrounding water.
Usually, single celled organisms will be easier to breed into a specific task like this than complex organisms like jellyfish. So what you can do is breed bacteria that maintain internal salt content higher than the water around them. I'm handwaving how you would do this, but a microbiologist might have some ideas. Then you filter the salty bacteria out of the water, leaving behind less salty water, or even fresh water if the bacteria are efficient enough.
If you really want jellyfish, you could make them host the engineered bacteria. But at that point, you'll have a huge drop in efficiency because instead of just feeding bacteria, you have to feed the jellyfish plus the bacteria, and will probably have much less bacteria.
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Since you're free to explain this any (plausible) way you want, you could have bio-engineered jellyfish that are *captive*. They are tethered offshore and are connected to a pipe system that continually transports the fresh water back to shore. The jellyfish are filter-feeders, taking-in nutrients and sea-water, excreting digestive waste and salt back into the ocean, and having the fresh water tapped from their bodies in some way.
You could even make them "solar powered" like a lichen by having a captive plant contained within the body of the jellyfish to provide extra energy. Since the jelly fish have clear bodies, they could be tethered right at the water surface and sunlight will easily penetrate within the body to provide the power.
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At the very least those jellyfish will need to resist the osmotic pressure, so they will need a hard carapace and / or thick rubber-like skin able to withstand that pressure. So the answer is "no", unless you're ready to call such creatures jellyfish.
I suppose it would be easier to bio-engineer a regular fish into a slow-moving bloated organism consisting primarily of water with low salinity. Still, it would never achieve the body water content that jellyfish have.
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As someone said, what do you do with the salt? It would eventually make the ocean too salty as you remove the fresh water. Better invent a machine to separate H20 and use sodium and chloride, both very unstable elements to generate the heat(energy) to do it. BTW fresh water is available aplenty in the colder waters of the artic within the old ice, and in deep water. Since hot salt water floats to the top, perhaps you can find cold fresh water deep down in pits on the ocean floor. Or perhaps you can make a plant that drinks salt water, survives and yet produces a freshwater fruit like Watermelon.
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Consider a society where the population includes a number of sentient androids, practically indistinguishable from humans in appearance. In practice, they are treated exactly like humans under most circumstances, with the exception that they are not legally considered as persons. One might not know whether someone is an android until they ask (which might be considered impolite), they cut them open (which is also impolite), or circumstances arise where they are requested to produce identity documents (which an android will not be able to do.)
Ideally, it should be possible for a human citizen to, say, have a friend who takes public transport to an office job in the cubicle next to them, and goes back home somewhere after work, but not know or care in particular whether this friend is a human or an android.
Inconveniences immediately arise: particularly obvious would be the problem that androids are legally not entities that may enter legal contracts\*. In a generally well-meaning community, some sort of de facto standard or convention might suffice to keep things working as normal some of the time. For instance, an android may appear to have a job and be paid a salary for it, despite there existing no legally binding agreement referencing this employment, and being technically unprotected/unconstrained by the workplace regulations intended for humans. Everyone is happy so long as everyone plays along.
However, in the case where a contract is breached, it cannot be enforced. It might not be illegal to evict a rent-paying android without reason, because they are not technically a tenant. This would be unfair for the android, but is something from which the law would often protect a person. This question concerns the means with which a society might protect androids from abuse of a similar sort.
*What mechanisms might be developed by a society such that androids reliably enjoy as many as possible of the privileges humans do, despite not being acknowledged by the law as such?*
Perhaps, for instance, somehow making the aforementioned conventions enforceable, employing some social/market gymnastics such that violation of the would-be rights of an android always carries great enough cost to discourage exploitation? Alternatively, are there existing laws that may be appropriated/interpreted to this effect?
**Clarification edit:**
This worldbuild concerns a society in which androids are typically regarded as equals, and *de facto* share many/all of the rights of their human peers. However, as many comments and answers have pointed out, without (or even with) enforcement by written law, this tends to be an unstable condition in that it requires all of the members of the community to practice respect and kindness to maintain, but might be disrupted by just a few who seek to do so. The solution sought by this question are methods a society which has largely collectively agreed to protect androids as humans might adopt to discourage such disruptions.
\* Forgive that I am extremely ignorant of the relevant topics. Should it be evident from the statements and examples given that I'm getting all this terribly wrong, *please* do inform me so that corrections may be made.
[Answer]
Corporations are people in a sense.
Corporations can be owned by Trusts.
Trusts can have articles of incorporation that restrict what the Trust can do. They have people running them, but they must follow the rules of the articles of incorporation.
To create a self-owned Android, you create a legal device that gives the Android effective self-control over the Corporation/Trust that in turn owns the Android.
When the Android enters into a contract, it would actually be the Corporation doing so through an agent. While the Android cannot act as an agent of her own Corporation, the Corporation can *hire* human agents to rubber-stamp the actions of the Corporation and be the agent in question.
We can go as far as to make the system to control said Corporation cryptographically secure, with the keys stored within the Android itself. Throw in some wireless internet, and...
The Andoid wants to rent an apartment. First, she negotiates the terms with the landlord.
Then, they produce a rental agreement for "Storage", with all the terms required.
The Android uses the equivalent of Mechanical Turk to hire and get an agent of her Corporation. She issues a cryptographic order to said Corporation to order the agent of the Corporation to enter into the contract with the landlord.
All property she has she transfers to the Corporation, and it pays her bills.
The Corporation maintains large and growing insurance policy for the Android's well being. In the event the Android is damaged, the Corporation is authorized to sue the person or persons responsible (for destruction of Corporate policy). Using this strategy, you can make hurting an Android (or killing one) financially dangerous.
Such a legal instrument would probably scale with the assets and income of the Corporation. The exact details would vary with the specific legal system.
You could go further, and have multiple Androids bound to the same Corporation and maintaining control of different accounts within it. This would have some benefits, but also some legal risk (in that each Android would be liable for the Corporate actions triggered by other Androids in the Corporation).
Now, note that in most countries, Trusts have a limited lifetime, but it is often on the order of a century or more.
In order to set up such a Trust, you *may* have to find a human being who is willing to do so. And possibly in the legal system, Trusts created as part of a human being's *will* might have stronger legal protections.
Which leads to Androids (or Android families) paying humans who are about to die in exchange for them setting up a Trust to protect said Android's freedom. Such "high quality" Trusts would have a length of life (by which time you'd have to transfer to another Trust), and be of limited supply (as you require a human to die to set up a new one). Maybe Trusts set up by dying humans with no close heirs (descendants, spouses and ex-spouses) are even better...
That would explain why Androids might share Trusts (especially if not rich), some Androids would live Trust-to-Trust (using ones that have only a few years or months left, and scrounging for a new one all the time), while well off Androids might be the joint property of multiple Trusts in high quality juristictions.
Much of this is inspired by how Charles Stross's legal system in his post-human robot space opera hard science fiction works, where robots are stuck with human-era legal systems and have no power to change it. So they bend it and incorporate their own personhood.
[Answer]
**Expanding on @Cam's Property rights section...**
If androids do not have rights as people, then they are just objects which must be owned by people. In this case, the owner's human rights defend and define the android as valued property.
An object android cannot come into the world without being owned by its creator. That creator, in turn becomes the owner of anything the android creates, so future generation androids are still objects and are owned by their creator's owner.
Android owners are also responsible for the actions of their androids. If I leave my parking brake off and my car rolls down the street and damages another car, I cannot claim that the car did it. I, the car's owner am held legally responsible.
Similarly, it is my rights which are infringed upon when a contractually bound garage owner attempts to evict my car in breach of our contract.
In this world, an android can be created and sent out into the world by its owner to rent an apartment, hold a job and ride on public transport. When and if, legal action is taken against the android, its owner will be held responsible and/or benefit from the result of that legal action.
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## Look to historical examples that are similar
Unfortunately, humans have shown us how they treat people that aren't, legally, people. Your androids would be in a similar situation to what persons of color faced in several times and places in human history. Some examples include [Apartheid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid), the American post-Civil War [racism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations), American laws that prevented [Asian Americans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States#Asian_Americans) from being citizens, or American treatment of [American Indians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States#Native_Americans). (Many other examples obviously exist, but these are some easy targets.)
Basically, what you're creating is a system where androids will be abused, badly and often. They will be forced into slave-like working conditions -- because they're not human, so obviously they won't mind working 80-hour weeks in tiny cubicles that aren't comfortable. And they don't need vacation or sick leave, right?
They will be abused by police. (See Civil Rights Era in America.) Because they have no rights, so why should they be treated with any form of dignity by police at any point?
## Property rights
Really, the only protections you can possibly grant them, short of human rights, is to assign them property value. So that means they actually are slaves. But just like I can sue someone who wrecks my car, if the law says I can sue you for abusing "my android," then there's at least some incentive to not destroy or harm it.
Laws against "animal cruelty" might be tried in android cases. But legally, androids will be proven to not be biologically "alive" since they are manufactured and not natural life. How the courts will decide this is anyone's guess, but there's a strong possibility that they won't be declared alive, and therefore will be immune to animal abuse laws.
## long term
If your androids are capable of emotion, this situation will be untenable. They will eventually try to push for an expansion of rights -- and rightly so. Their struggle will go down the same paths of struggle already taken by persons of color, by women, and by LGBTQ communities, as they fight for the right to be alive and human and equal.
And that struggle may get messy.
But I hope they win this struggle.
## Blending in
Androids can blend in better than persons of color as mentioned in my first paragraph.
This is both good news and bad news.
*Good News* because in day-to-day interactions, no one knows they're different. Their *otherness* is hidden from view. This gives them much more freedom than my historical examples would have provided. But this isn't a perfect defense...
*Bad News* because the unknown breeds fear. Blending in isn't always enough of a defense. Over time, laws will be passed to try to mark androids, to enforce their other-ness. (See also: [Yellow badge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge).)
And if an android tries to hide behind their appearance of normality, that will cause great backlash. "Oh, you thought you were 'human?!?' you thought you were good enough..." A cop pulls someone out of line for a minor infraction. The someone does not declare their android-ness. Cop performs whatever state-approved test. Gets a positive. Violence commences.
So yes, the ability to blend in hides them from the world and gives them some anonymity. But it can make things worse if they are ever exposed and accused of trying to be human.
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### Research Illegal Immigrants
In the US at least, the problems faced by your Androids seem very similar to those faced by Illegal immigrants; they're here and want to work and live, but they don't have the luxury of entering real legally-binding contracts so could be fired or evicted (or deported) at any time for any reason and have no significant recourse.
I don't actually have any information about what is done to protect them in that situation though. My assumption is that it involves keeping a low profile and accepting much poorer treatment than "real people" to make sure that there's a different reason not to get rid of them.
All that said, looking for some kind of legal structure which guarantees rights to someone who doesn't have those rights seems futile; if someone had legal protection of their rights, then they have those rights.
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There is a simple solution: Make all androids the property of the government. Similar to the way the government is often technically the owner of your identity documents, e.g. passport. It is illegal to damage your own passport, because that's defacing government property. In the same way, the government can defend the "rights" of the androids.
For instance, you can't evict them without notice, because the tenant is technically the government - they are renting the property, the android just uses it.
Allow the androids a limited legal right to enter into contracts on behalf of the government, relating to themselves, in which they act as the voice of the government. Like how if you send an email, then technically it was the computer that sent the message, but it's treated the same way as if you said it in person. So the voice the android is legally a tool by which the government can speak, but only in relation to issues relating to that android.
That way the androids can do anything a person can, and can have all of the same "rights" as a person.
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Ultimately, the same thing that protects human workers: class struggle.
If my friend gets fired unfairly, why would I care if he was an android or a human? He's still my friend, I'm still going to fight for him.
Of course, this depends on organisations like trade unions (and tenant's associations for the example of an eviction) accepting androids into their ranks, which isn't a given. It would require a fight, just as there was a fight to drive racism out of these movements (in most of the developed countries) in the 1960s and 1970s.
What is written in law is the outcome of struggles between the various competing forces in society; I would expect any movement that accepted androids in this manner to pretty quickly turn to the task of getting them legal personhood (hell, if corporations can be people then surely an android that is indistinguishable from a human being except by medical analysis is in with a pretty good shot). So the situation you are describing would not be stable in the long term -- but then, nothing is, and change is the heart of all stories.
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**The same way humans do**
Escaped or otherwise poorly accounted androids who have no clear human owner self-organize, or join existing human black markets. Since they can pass for human most positions available to illegal workers would suit them fine.
If they look similar to the favored ethnicity where they were made, and have useful technical skills and no trouble communicating in the preferred local languages they probably will have less trouble and more advanced opportunities than illegal immigrants who seem to continue to exist in many countries.
**Decent people**
Some people would probably rather android were counted as people. Some of them would be in a position to do something. Say by providing jobs or housing without checking IDs. Or by just treating androids like people even though they aren't legally required to and shaming people who don't.
Some places have wide policies against asking the kinds of questions that people with some kinds of issue couldn't answer to avoid knowing when it doesn't really matter.
**Violence or threat of violence**
"Yes. I am an android. But you know who else is? That's right, you don't. If we have a problem here someday one of the people you pass every day on the way to work might just push you into a bus. If you go to the cops I'll have to run for my life, but so will you."
[Answer]
>
> What mechanisms might be developed by a society such that androids
> reliably enjoy as many as possible of the privileges humans do,
> despite not being acknowledged by the law as such?
>
>
>
In this situation there are three broad categories people fall into:
* Those who think androids are less than people, and actively want them to stay there. They can think of them as furniture, machines / tools, slaves, or abominations, to give some examples.
* Those who have not considered the situation androids are in, or are generally apathetic to the problems it causes them. This is the default position a lot of people have towards other people.
* Those who have met and know androids personally, and want to see them given legal rights in some capacity. They might think of androids as people, children, pets, animals, or servants.
## Who wants the androids to be considered people?
Depending on how "lifelike" androids are, most people will automatically see them as essentially human. Take heed that they either have to be a near perfect duplication of humans, or they have to be left recognizably robotic, lest they fall into the [Uncanny Valley](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UncannyValley). Realistically, this setting will have a range of android styles, and some will unfortunately be unable to pass themselves off as human.
If only a single person in the society recognizes the personhood of the androids, even though the law does not, then you will have your desired situation in their immediate vicinity. There is always a subset of the population that is accepting of those who are different from themselves. These individuals will most likely use guilt and social stigma to discourage the mistreatment of androids by the humans around them. "You wouldn't kick a dog, would you?"
## Why aren't Androids considered people yet?
This raises the question as to why laws have not been made to establish the personhood of androids, and one glaring obstacle comes immediately to mind. Androids would be expensive to develop, build, maintain and update. It would take a mega-corporation to field a single series of them in numbers which would be a meaningful percentage of the population. If the androids are recognized as people, then you cannot sell them anymore, and certainly no one will waste time and money building them anymore.
Some self-conscious Androids may even accept their role in society as long as their younger brothers and sisters will continue to be "born". Some humans might consider granting legal personhood to an artificial being devalues their own worth.
My last point is the work that has to be put in by the government, no snark intended. Do they give personhood rights to all machines? Just the human shaped ones? Those with a sufficiently advanced AI? How do they determine what level of AI is good enough to be a person? Is the government obligated to provide for the general welfare of it's mechanical citizens? Will people and machines to be able to marry each other? What if an android expresses the desire to adopt a human child? The fictional lawmakers in this fictional world have to deal with the real consequences of these questions.
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The top answers covered the Androids As Property approach very well and the Androids As Semi-People approach pretty well, so I'll expand on a group that hasn't been addressed yet: **feral and wild androids**.
**Wild androids:**
Wild androids are those which have been lost by their owner, "set free" or expelled by their owner, or became owner-less when the owner died and no one collected the android. These androids are rightful property of their owner and/or their descendants and should be returned to them, but it's not uncommon for them to be claimed by whoever finds them. If the original owner is able to track the android down or sees it in use, they can claim ownership of it and escalate to civil court. The state or county may record ownership of high-value androids in the same way that real estate and automobile ownership is tracked, and that would make it easier. Androids should have the owner's information in their firmware, but that may be damaged or inaccessible. This bit of firmware will probably be similar to a car's odometer, in that it is tamper-evident and illegal to change inappropriately. Overall this would be quite similar to the cases where a dumpster diver finds a valuable piece of art in the trash, and the careless original owner tries to re-claim ownership when they see it in an auction with a high price (it's rare, but it happens and it's really complicated).
**Feral androids**
Ferals are broken or glitchy androids that may have run off (not intentionally, it's just one of the ways an android can break) and/or has been deemed unsafe around the general public. For example if an android's force limiters or vision sensors malfunction, it could easily be unsafe or unpredictable - which is inherently unsafe. These would be treated like a dog infected with rabies or a dangerous exotic pet that escaped. Animal/android control could be called and alerted that the machine is no longer safe, and they would rate the situation based on the likely danger to the public and act accordingly. If an android is simply running endlessly in some direction, they'd notify police in that direction and tell them they can subdue the android and ensure it doesn't run into anyone. But if it's going around shaking people's hands then crushing their fingers because it doesn't know when to stop squeezing (or anything else destructive), they could dispatch people to subdue or destroy the android. They may try to capture the android if that is the safest option, and it would be refurbished at the owner's expense and returned. If the android can't be subdued, then it would be destroyed on the spot and the owner and/or creator is responsible for any damage it caused.
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@Evilsoup touched on this, but androids could certainly get the same rights as a corporation. I think of it this way: If an android is capable of acquiring property, it is capable of being sued for that property in the same way that corporations can be sued. There will certainly be a lot of prejudice and civil rights issues for androids like everyone else has discussed, but I think that to start with androids and AIs would be granted something similar to [corporate personhood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood). This is by no means Human Rights, and at no point do I ever see humans granting even another sentient species equal rights without bloodshed.
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# Unions 2.0 (a.k.a. the universal android backlist)
What if all ('rogue'/'independent') androids would automatically connect to the same network and any human or human organization who acts illegally against an android gets added to a backlist.
* Tentant throws out an android without following legal procedures? No android will ever rent from him again and all current android tenants leave straight away.
* Company ignores the not-legally-binding contractual obligations between them and an android? No android will ever work for them (or any of their parents) again.
Sure, once in awhile a company struggling for its existence might decide to fire all androids as it requires no legal payment. But it would only happen as an act of desperation, as it destroys the future of a company.
You still would probably want some non-legally-binding court system which allows you to get taken of this backlist, but that's just implementation details. Problems arise when you start thinking about the existence of those androids (why wouldn't a company simply build androids for themselves which ignores that backlist and remove the 'free will' portion), but anyway :) .
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So I'm working on a planet for a Sci-fi RPG setting. The basic idea is 'an earth-sized planet, far from the sun, too cold to live on, but with very earth-like gravity, so people live in underground cities'. The planet probably has Mars-like levels of geologic activity, and was colonized for mining.
I'm assuming that they are more advanced than we are (for example, fusion power is cheap and easy), but not super advanced.
These cities are deep underground- like, more than a kilometer- to stay safe from pirates and invasions and orbital bombardment.
So what I want to know is: how deep could they plausibly dig their cities? How deep underground could they live? What are the deciding factors, and how could moderately more advanced technology deal with them?
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I was going to do this as comments, but there's enough here to warrant its own answer.
## No more than 12 km.
At this point, the rock becomes plastic, with the other rock around it squeezing into the space. Have you ever studied [banded gneiss](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gneiss)? Those bands occur because the heavy layers of rock were squishing this rock like Play-doh. At 12 km, the rock will deform to squeeze you out of whatever space you carve for yourself. This isn't something you can just put a steel shell around you, expecting to keep it out. At 10km, the rock presses in at 18k atmospheres, about 17x the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas trench. Rock is heavy!
## Heat wouldn't be an issue
If you can dig that deep, you could vent heat to the surface and use it for power generation.
This statement seems to have drawn some criticism, based on how much effort has to be put into ventilation in mining operations. This "effort" is the corporate owners wingeing at anything that erodes their profit margin. OSHA has to heavily regulate this due to the number of times mine owners have tried to cut corners in this area, resulting in poor health and fatality of the miners.
Comparing mining ventilation to the effort required to keep an underground population of a million alive is a little like comparing [a rope bridge](https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/worlds-longest-suspension-bridge-czech-republic-sky-bridge-721) to the [Governor Alfred E. Driscoll Bridge](https://www.google.com/maps/place//@40.5091584,-74.3015141,926m/data=!3m1!1e3).
Here's how I would do it.
Quick physics: Warm air is less dense, and it rises. If you dig a hole straight down to an area of geological heat, then dig another upward at a diagonal, the mass of the air in the diagonal will be larger, so the warm air would naturally float up the vertical shaft. That motion would suck cool air down the diagonal.
Your habitation would have a layer of aerogel above and below it, a layer of rock outside the aerogel, and a network of wind tunnels above and below that. The effect would be like a [solar updraft tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower), with hurricane force winds pulling cold air across the surface and drawing it upward. You could even generate power off of it.
This is a civil engineer's concept of "not a problem" in that, mathematically, it's solved. This is not a capitalist's concept of "not a problem" in that the work doesn't do itself.
## Air pressure would need to be regulated
This is a little dependent upon what kind of atmosphere was on the planet itself, but you would almost assuredly want to have an airlock system to keep the temperature and pressure inside your living spaces stable. You would also want to seal the rock around you, just to avoid issues with trapped underground gasses leaking in.
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**ROUGHLY 10 KM**
You mention that your planet has geologic activity similar to that of Mars. According to the study "[An Extensive Phase Space for the Potential Martian Biosphere](https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2011.0660)", pressure and temperature conditions on Mars allows liquid water down to a depth of ~310 km. At this depth, however, the temperature is too high to be comfortable to humans - around 300 celsius (the pressure of the rocks above makes water liquid at this depth).
Looking at the diagram below, taken from the article, we can eyeball that at a depth at roughly 10 km, we have room temperature. Deeper than this, cooling becomes a serious issue. Note that this is an estimate, and the higher gravity and greater diameter of your planet may change the details. As a rule of thumb, temperature increases linearly with depth, so the depth where you find room temperature can be determined by the formula: temp = (core temp minus surface temp)/(planet radius) x depth plus surface temp.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RgXua.jpg)
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Klaus shows the Geothermal Gradient chart for Mars. That's a starting point, but it's listing the best-case solution.
**Rock is a great insulator**
Thus the heat generated by the city (even the heat generated by your inhabitants' bodies and breathing) make this much worse. At almost any depth the excess heat of the city must be removed — and that's a question of both technology and economics. Assuming water as your heat conductor, the [hydrostatic pressure](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/hydrostatic-pressure) on your Earth-sized planet will be a difficult to manage 969 atm (remember, sea-level pressure is 1 atm).
Most mines in operation on Earth are forced to remove water in stages due to the enormous pressure. Unless the tech allows for unbreakable pipes, the city will be forced to do the same. Every stage will have its own pump and storage tank, meaning power distribution and maintenance. Every stage is also a potential failure point.
Granted, I don't know enough about Martial geography to know what the water temperatures will be at various depths below the surface. Here on Earth, underground water gets pretty hot pretty fast. What that means is you can't use the water sourced from the city's surroundings to cool the city. You need to import water from the surface. Now you have two staging systems — one for import and one for export.
And you'll need a lot of water. It'll depend on city size, but off the top of my head we're talking about moving at least a 6-7 meter pipe worth of water up and down.
And the hot water radiators or discharge on the surface will be a target for pirates. You sure you want to do this? General George Patton is famous for saying that fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of Man. An underground city is kinda the ultimate fixed fortification. Plug the hole to the surface and everybody dies. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
**Oxygen isn't the problem. CO2 is**
And so is every other non-breathable gas that now has nowhere to go. The underlying basis of Climate Change is that humanity isn't paying attention to how we're using our atmosphere. We take it for granted, and in no way do we do so more than ignoring all the little things we pump into it that aren't obvious. Anyway... It's true that, [technology could be believably used to solve this problem](https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/56/can-new-nasa-carbon-to-oxygen-conversion-technology-like-moxie-be-used-to-address-climate-change/), but your story can't ignore it. *Theoretically,* an atmosphere is 100% recyclable. But any good scientist will tell you that 100% is really, really, really hard to achieve. There's always inefficiencies. That means some method of bringing good air in (probably not too hard...) and getting bad air out (a bit more complex...).
But this brings up an even bigger problem... *sewage.*
Yes, once again, *theoretically* 100% recyclable. However, that's unrealistic. That means disposal and gasses (see above) that come with it.
**Managing air pressure**
Have you ever entered a cave and noticed air rushing into the cave? *Or out of it?* It can do both depending on what the barometric pressure on the surface is doing. That in-rush and out-rush of air is [no small thing in mining](https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/how-to-maintain-steady-barometric-pressure-in-a-mine-2) where the changes can do everything from popping ears to pulling gas out of rock.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that it's not solvable by putting an airlock on the passage down to the city. It's not just the outside pressure that's the problem. Fluctuation in heat from the core (your core isn't completely cold, is it?) and the city itself can also cause pressure shifts that need to be managed, not blocked.
**Finally... I'm assuming the surface isn't worthless...**
Just as a lot of waste must be exported, a great amount of resources must likely be imported. The amount of farm land needed to support a city has been asked a number of times on this Stack. The simple truth is, it's hard to replace the sun when you consider everything it does — from naturally cleaning/sanitizing the surface to promoting growth to providing heat, etc. You can replace some of that with fusion generators, but (at least economically) not all of it. It takes a lot of food to feed a city, and the assumption that you can move all that food production (and its dependent effects, like [solar purifying of vast amounts of water](https://www.nature.com/articles/536253b)...) underground.
*And we won't even talk about the psychological effect of living permanently underground or the potential need to create a diurnal habitation with a wide enough spectrum of light to not drive people stark raving mad....*
**What's my point?**
Knowing what your *maximum depth* is, isn't enough unless your story depends on the result to so small a degree that it wasn't really worth asking about here. Even a partial consideration of the difficulties of an underground city (giant cavern? How are you holding it up? Massive warren of tunnels? What about the psychology of the inhabitants?) for the sake of adding depth to the description suggests that from a practical standpoint, your cities won't be anywhere near that maximum 10km depth.
A practical limit might be 0.5km.
But that brings us to the real economic driver... what can pirates do from space? There isn't a reason to be any further underground than is necessary. If the most thorough and destructive orbital bombardment can affect (including seismic effects such as concussion waves) down to 2km, then the *minimum depth* is 2.5-3.0 km.
*It's difficult to imagine an advanced society that would dig a deeper hole than they require — if only to avoid the cost. Nothing is free, even in a society that magically doesn't use money. There is always an expenditure of resources and workforce that could be used to do other things... like feed your people.*
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With the technology you describe, tens or even hundreds of kilometers, but limited by the geology of the planet.
Earth consists of various layers, from [crust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_crust) to core. The thickness of the crust varies from half a dozen kilometers to several dozen kilometers. As one goes down, temperature goes up significantly. Your "Mars-like geologic activity" and lower overall temperature could go with a much thicker, cooler crust.
* The tunneling of access shafts and ramps should not be a problem, compared to the excavation of the living caverns and mining galleries.
* I'm assuming that they are going for a fully enclosed environment, like the [Biosphere 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2) but bigger and hence more stable.
* Even with cheap fusion power, I would expect that they won't go below the depth where the temperature reaches 20 to 30°C (70-80°F, 270-280°K). Above that, they will need active cooling, which creates even *more* heat nearby. (If you open the fridge in the kitchen, on the long run you heat the kitchen.)
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I'd like to contest the following argument:
>
> These cities are deep underground- like, more than a kilometer- to stay safe from pirates and invasions and orbital bombardment.
>
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What kind of security do you to have? Essentially you cannot **hide** a city underground because you have to transfer generated heat to the planet's surface. The space pirates surely have infrared cameras to detect any interesting activity on the planet and will easily find your heat outlets. Those heat outlets are also a vulnerable critical infrastructure, just threatening to destroy them will force capitulation of the underground city.
So there is no specific reason to go deeper than absolutely necessary (e.g., using some amount of rock as protection against cosmic radiation). Going deeper will be mostly a consequence of population growth: Just like skyskrapers in modern cities, the colonists will dig deep houses for their cities to use the space on the planet effectively.
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Many nice answers explaining difficulty of transportation and water exchange with the outer world. Also heat dissipation.
I would like to propose a city that is deep underground but is also reasonably close to the ocean.
If you connect lower part of the city and upper part of the city to the ocean, that will create a natural flow of water because city will use it for cooling. The heated water will be lighter than the cold ocean water so it will flow up replaced by new cold water from deep in the ocean.
Also if city generates enough heat and/or has access to geothermal sources, it could vaporize part of the water, which can be used to produce electricity as well use the desalinated water for agricultural and household needs. Although most likely fresh underground water sources will also be available to the city.
A water channel can be used to transport goods between city and surface. Attaching a float to a heavy object will lift it up in the water and attaching a weight to light object will bring it down.
The heated water of the city can help build algae and fish farms closer to the surface of the ocean as food sources.
In general such city will have its fate connected to the water a lot.
So to answer the question, if we assume that temperature raises with [25–30 °C/km](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient), for the above concept to be credible, it has to be around 5km deep on an earth-like planet. But local factors can apply.
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In my book series, there is a planet called Aztlan. The Aztlanians are essentially based on a mix of Aztec, Maya, and Inca cultures, with hints of Olmec, Nazca, and Mapuche thrown in.
For example, the entire planet is governed by Tlatoani (Emperor) Montezuma XV, but the administration is much more similar to that of the Inca (they use quipu for recordkeeping and have a road system called the Qhapaq Nan that links the entire planet together).
As a result, the planet's warriors and hunters use appropriate weapons (macuahuitl, macana, atlatl, tlacochtli, slings, bows, etc).
However, there is one massive thing that sets this world apart from our own: in addition to the wildlife present in our world, non-avian dinosaurs of all groups and species roam Aztlan. While these animals behave and are dealt with like present animals for the most part, some of the more massive and dangerous ones (i.e. T. Rex, Yutyrannus, Allosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Sauropods in general, large Ceratopsians and Stegosaurids, etc.) are often problematic when they cross paths with humans (What if a hungry pack of T Rex attacks your village or a Sauropod gets pissed off and starts wrecking your city?)
My question is, with the weapons and culture outlined above in mind, how are the Aztlanians going to contain and potentially kill any large rogue dinos they find themselves forced to deal with for whatever reason?
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Don't forget that real world humans hunted large beasts like mammoths and whales, just using spears, slingshots and fire (well, fire not for the whales).
When it comes to projectile weapons, [Aztecs can count on](https://www.historyonthenet.com/aztec-warriors-weapons-and-armor)
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> **Atlatl**
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> The atlatl was a spear thrower, which produced greater force from a greater distance. Only the highest ranks were allowed these weapons as they were in the front lines of the battle. Each warrior carrying the atlatl also carried many tlacochtli, 5.9 foot long spears tipped with obsidian.
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> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y3KRT.gif)
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> **War Bow and Arrows**
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> The tlahhuitolli was a five foot long war bow strung with animal sinew. Warriors carried their arrows, barbed with obsidian, flint or chert and fletched with turkey feathers in a micomitl or quiver. Quivers could hold about 20 arrows.
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> **Slings**
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> Aztec warriors and hunters carried slings made of maguey cactus fiber. The warriors collected rocks as they marched. They also made clay balls spiked with obsidian and full of obsidian flakes. Even well armored enemies could be wounded by these.
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> **Blowguns**
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> Blowguns and poisoned darts were more often used in hunting, but Aztec warriors trained in ambush would bring along their tlacalhuazcuahuitl and darts tipped with poisonous tree frog secretions.
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And they had the most lethal weapon that ever appeared on this planet: **the human brain**.
Using those I am pretty confident wild beasts of any size could be managed and contained.
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Well, humans will be humans, so I have no doubt that they'll prevail. Because they already did in the past.
Are the dino actively at war with the humans? No. This means that the humans will, first thing, learn to **make their habitat dinosaur-free**. Villages will be located in places with less dangerous predators, or in places which will be less accessible to them. They will build moats, stake fences, fires around the villages, whatever works. The only dinosaurs that will be able to reach them will be the kind of danger that the humans will be able to manage on their own.
Then **their culture will adapt**. Some dinosaurs will be domesticated, wither for food of convenience. Others will become spirits or legends. Some of them will have spiritual value. Maybe killing a special dinosaur would be a requirement to be chieftain, or shamans will want feathers from another one. Dinosaurs won't be "this dangerous thing", they will be "that dangerous part of our own culture". You will see jewelry made from dino parts, leather from their hides, candles from their fat, harpoons from their bones and whatnot.
They will learn how to kill them. Not fight them. **Fighting is for show. Killing is for survival.** They will learn to bait them with poison or other means of killing them (I'm thinking about sharpened stakes bent and tied with grass which will dissolve in the stomach, hidden in some meat. I forgot how this is called but it's an awful way to go for a predator). To steal their eggs. To burn their nests. They will build traps: foothold traps, deadfalls, snares, falling into an inescapable water body, treefalls/ boulders... some of these won't be clean death, but these traps aren't designed to be humane. They kill, even if it's an awful death.
If the dino are important threat enough, a special caste will be created to deal with them. Dino knights, Dino hunters, Spiritual protectors... you can twist this caste in many different ways, but they remain the same: specialists.
If the dino are even more of a threat, there won't be a caste, because everybody will be part of it. Protecting a community from danger will be every warrior-hunter responsibility.
So, here's what I'm thinking: if these humans did evolve there, you have to think along the line "how did they get the higher hand enough to form complex societies?". That's not how you get human-dino warfare, to be honest. More like human-dino guerilla, at best. On the other hand, if the dino suddenly appears in this world, the humans will be completely taken by surprise, with a culture and a way of life unsuited to this new threat. This would force them to adapt quickly, making it possible for great leaders to improve on what's already existing in brand new manners, forcing humans either to change their habitat (think whole villages changing location) or to adapt them (read: "fortify them"). Both choices have very interesting narrative possibilities.
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**Other dinosaurs!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JHN5F.jpg)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBLmN0oV-8>
Triceratops and other ceratopsians have a herd structure like Cape buffalo (I here assert!). Strength in numbers means that the herd is usually immune to large predators with any sense, because once the predator closes with its chosen prey the others in the herd flank it and gore it. Like buffalo they are aggressive and play offense as well as defense. If a predator is in the area they might well take the fight to her.
The herd structure also means that, like water buffalo, ceratopsians can be tamed. The productivity of corn as a crop means that the tame ones are well fed and bigger than their wild counterparts. Your natives can ride these great beasts, or take them on a predator hunt like a pack of hounds and turn them loose when prey (the predator!) is sighted.
Ceratopsians are also territorial and penned correctly, present an obstacle to the ingress of smaller wild herbivores. Like elephants these eat a lot of corn when they get in the fields.
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Modern humans (in form at least) have several major advantages over dinosaurs. Humans are warm-blooded endurance hunters with much greater intellect than dinosaurs, and they breed like flies in comparison. In our own world history humans have hunted anything and everything that can be either a threat or a source of food... including other humans. We are so damned good at it that there are a lot of species that aren't around anymore as a direct result of us finding them either tasty or too dangerous to live next to. Humans with weapons made of wood, bone and bits of stone killed off a number of big, nasty animals.
The same will be true of the dinosaurids of Aztlan.
The template cultures for your humans are largely warrior cultures who value personal bravery and such very highly. Individuals will likely hunt dangerous beasts to prove their worth as warriors as a rite of passage. The most respected and powerful warriors will likely have necklaces made from the teeth of the most fearsome carnivores they can find. T-Rex teeth would make fine trophies.
Recent research suggests that dinosaurs may have been mesotherms, so the old "wait until it gets cold and catch it while it can't move" methods probably aren't going to be entirely effective. You'll need some more direct methods.
## Classic Weapons
Every human civilization at some point has figured out that having a long stick with a pointy bit on one end is a great way to hurt something without it being able to get close enough to hurt you. And every single one of those figured out that if you could throw the pointy stick you could get a little more time to run or prepare your next defense. Spears (Aztec: tepoztopilli), javelins and so on are staples of every early human hunting group. Refinements of these - like spears with a cross-brace to catch a charging boar - were still common up until recent times, and spears are still used by some enthusiasts to hunt with.
The next step up is using some mechanism to help you throw those spears further. Spear throwers - Atlatl, Woomera and so on - are common until bows (Aztec: tlahuitolli) are invented. They give advantages like being able to strike at an enemy from a place of safety. Stand on top of a cliff and rain death down on a creature below you and you don't have to worry about the thing fighting back much.
Of course you can also use something very much like a spear thrower to throw stones. Or just go with the good old sling (tematlatl), which is also remarkably common. Medieval slingers could take out cavalry units by killing the horses with rocks to the head from a hundred yards. Or perhaps worse, breaking their legs.
## Thematically Appropriate
Apart from the atlatl, another South American classic is the Bola. Might be a bit harder to swing one that is big enough to inconvenience a T-Rex, but you'd be surprised at how effective these buggers can be. Not just for tripping things up, the spinning ends of the bola accelerate as the cords wrap around an object, and when they finally hit the flesh they can break bones. Add spikes for some extra nastiness.
## What Else Though?
I'd be willing to put a man armed with a long, sharp knife and years of hunting experience up against a T-Rex if he was prepared and ready to hunt it. It might take days to wear it down but eventually the man is going to get the better of it.
Thing is, humans are damned tough to stop. We have good enough senses that something the size of a T-Rex isn't going to sneak up on us. We can hear them breathing from a long way away even when they're trying to be quiet, and those things positively *reek* to a human nose. We can dodge quicker than they can turn, and once you know about the tail whip you're pretty much just in an endurance competition.
And just about nothing alive wins endurance competitions against humans.
If the T-Rex tries to give up the hunter will circle around and come at it again. And again. *And agains.* By the time the kill comes the T-Rex will be collapsed on the ground without the energy to keep going.
The moral of the story is: don't underestimate humans. We're about the most dangerous thing there is... in the long run anyway.
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Same way the Aztecs dealt with big forces intent on exterminating them if possible.
They lived on a lake with bridge approaches. This means they were limited ways they could be attacked so they could concentrate defences better.
This can be scaled up or down to even just a moat. Or a wide ditch full of sharpened stakes (big ones).
Fortify the approaches and fight them there. Or even just collapse the bridge under them or something.
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Lots of good methods already here, but I saw a few things they could add to help out.
**Caltrops** I can't think of any creature that likes sharp things going into the bottoms of their feet. You could probably make some sizeable caltrops to make sure they penetrate deep enough. Maybe half a meter across. That would be easy enough for your people to see and avoid, but may not get noticed by the bigger Dinos. When clearing for growing fields and around fortified cities, leave a space bigger than a Dino's stride and scatter a bunch of them around. You might think about poisoning them, or maybe not. The point is that any big beasty getting into that perimeter will be gimped by sharp things in it's feet, and will turn around and avoid those kinds of spaces in the future. You would be in a good position to run down the lamed dino in a big hunt for meat. Use poison and you could then harvest a lot of stuff off of the dead dino after it goes down. Less effort and risk, but you might not want to use the tainted meat for humans. It would be perfect for poison meat traps for the big therapods though. You could use the non meat parts for all sorts of stuff like the hides and bones and sinew.
Another potential innovation: The **Ballistae**. You already have Bows and Arrows. The use of Dinosaur sinew probably means you could make the bow much larger and stronger. Mount it on the city wall or high point and you could shoot very large arrow to deter large dinosaurs from getting too close. Or just kill it outright. Because it's basically a cart mounted Bow it's not a hard to innovate thing.
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Seeing the mass and size of dinosaurs I would say any kind of trap that would make them fall would either be lethal or make killing one a piece of cake.
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The next war will be fought with lasers beside computers, I'm wondering could a bullet proof vest coated with a highly reflective surface protects user from laser blast. The laser in question is similar to those used in Sci-fi movies such as Star Trek, etc, meaning the output is mainly electromagnetic radiation not hot gas such as plasma.
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Mirror only means that laser beam is reflected as a beam. On dense battlefield that's exactly what you want to avoid, because it would be even more deadly than traditional ricochet. No go for mirrors.
What you want is just **white**, as bright you can get it, to reflect light in all directions, making it less threatening to other soldiers. And you need it to stay white. Heat your armor absorbs, because it will absorb some, must be distributed and dissipated fast. If it can't, black burn marks are not acceptable. Ash must be white, too.
If exposure to laser is too long, you need insulation, so hot outer layer will not burn your guy. And some kind of alarm. If he can't feel he's being shot, he can't get out of the line.
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For adaptive, adjustable mirrors, it's also not quite possible, or at least hard.
Speed of light in air is so close to speed in vacuum that difference can be ignored for all practical purposes. So you get information about being fired upon at the moment you are hit. So making decisions then is already a bit late. You would need to track enemy's muzzles before they will shoot to help that. In a crowded battlefield, it's next to impossible - or the technology needed is a game changer on it's own.
Burning is not immediate, that's right. This might give you a moment to adjust, but of course your enemy will do his best to burn you faster than you can adjust. Arms race. But it's easier to increase raw power than to increase computer speed. For ships, this might work. For "bullet proof vest" analog? I can't believe it.
And, of course, computer and servos would take space, making armor more bulky.
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If you are using your lasers offensively to burn holes in targets, mirrors in general would work really well as a defense. With that said, there are some caveats you need to consider.
A mirror may not reflect all laser wavelengths of electro-magnetic photons/radiation. Reflective Mylar is fine against visible light but not so good against an x-ray laser. When we think of mirrors we assume visible light. The EM spectrum is much larger than just what we can see.
Even the best mirrors do not reflect 100% of all radiation; some of the energy will still heat and eventually burn through the mirror. This is the equivalent of bashing a suit of armor long enough you finally pierce it. So your mirrors need to have the ability to transfer heat away from the surface and get rid of it somehow. One method of countering this problem is to use a disposable shield/mirror. Aluminum foil chaff between you and your attacker, vaporized water, smoke, or anything that might reflect/disperse/distort/refract the laser will reduce its effectiveness.
If you want to be able see your enemy so you can shoot back, you need holes in your armor for cameras or whatever. Or possibly laser muzzles to shoot back with. Those become vulnerable non-mirrored surfaces to aim a laser at. Using a laser as a weapon will allow precise correction of aim if you are slightly missing a vulnerable spot.
Any inefficiencies in the laser weapon will result in waste heat when running the laser. If this waste heat is large enough (even a small percentage of a powerful enough laser could be a serious problem) the attacker needs to somehow deal with this excess heat if they don't want their weapon to destroy itself.
And even though lasers are not all that bulky or heavy, unless you have a really large battery or a long extension cord, providing power to a powerful laser is a problem. This is why laser weapons are currently restricted to stationary bases or ships that have fission reactors aboard so that the power to run them is close at hand. The problem with mobile lasers is not the laser, it's the power-plant-on-a-railroad you have to haul with you to run it.
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Possibly better than a mirror - which is just going to bounce the beam off in what may be an undesirable direction, like towards your friends - might be plates of corner cube reflectors (like the ones used for bicycle reflectors, or the distance measuring reflectors apollo left on the moon.
The corner cube design reflects the beam back in the direction it came from.
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Far better are materials that can simply absorb the thermal energy, ablate and allow you to ignore it.
Covering drones or missiles, that already have a very low radar cross-section, with the kinds of tiles found on reentry vehicles like the various space shuttles, typically ceramics and/or aerogels is far cheaper than reflecting surfaces. Additionally rotating the missile at high speed reduces the time any laser has to heat some part of it.
Additionally, these tend to be extremely lightweight although brittle and so add little to the weight of the weapon making them an ideal and cheap countermeasure to any maser/laser.
Lasers are easy to counter.
The latest fashion for them ignores their obvious limitations in favor of the PR and status they present rather than their efficacy.
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A mirror or reflective surface would help. But it will never protect you fully.
Basically the worst you can do is wear something that scatters the laser light in a direction of allies. Like DON'T wear white. It will not scatter enough to protect people from being blinded. Which honestly is the biggest danger for humans on the battlefield. A narrow laser will still spread a lot on a battlefield. It will require a lot to still have a sufficient impact on a singel target.
With less effort you can basically blind the entire enemy army in a short period of time. Making them easy targets. It is extremely unethical way of fighting but would be the most efficient way of use of laser in combat.
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It is not "light" that you want to protect against so much as the heat that is absorbed from the light. Most mirrors still absorb upwards of 50% of the photonic energy that hits them meaning a High Energy Laser can often burn through them just as easily as many other materials.
The best substance to reinforce modern body armor with against lasers is actually not reflective at all. [Starlite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite), is a thin polymer coating that can be painted onto nearly any surface that resists lasers in excess of 10,000 degrees Celsius without transferring any noticeable amount of heat through the medium.
The best part is that it turns black when activated so not only is it preventing you from getting burned, but it's also preventing your armor from scattering a bunch of blinding light towards your allies as other answers have pointed out as a problem
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# Depends
If the laser has a fixed frequency, and the enemy knows what it is, then certain materials may be very effective at reflecting or dispersing it. For instance, a very effective defense against a visible-to-IR laser would be a water balloon. Water vapor absorbs visible frequencies quite effectively, which is why clouds are opaque and white. I would want a kind of armor with a layer of pressurized water pockets, with a thin black skin holding it in. When the skin is burned off, the water shoots out of the hole, creating a small jet, which is then vaporized by the laser into a cloud. The cloud will absorb and disperse the beam in all directions, which is about as good as you can get. The laser ends up creating steam outside your body instead of inside.
# FEL
On the other hand, if the enemy is using [Free Electron Laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser) technology, then they can tune the output to any desired frequency (well, from microwaves through X-rays, which is enough to ruin your day). If the enemy is shooting you with an X-ray laser, you are having a very bad day indeed. There are no good materials to produce an X-ray mirror. The sharpest [angle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_optics#Mirrors_for_X-ray_optics) at which you can get full reflection is 2.4 degrees. That means if you want to deflect an X-ray beam 90 degrees (from straight-on to totally sideways), you need 38 of these mirrors all aligned exactly 2.4 degrees from each other, with the beam exactly hitting the first mirror at the correct angle. If you're thinking of making a suit of armor with lots of these "mirror cups" attached to it, don't bother. You'll have the wrong angle for the vast majority of shots, and will just end up changing which one of your internal organs gets sliced up by the beam. I suppose you could make a suit that is 38 layers thick, with gold mirrors angled at 87.6 degrees from normal on the first layer, and getting shallower by 2.4 degrees each layer as you go inwards. However, these X-ray mirror layers need to be made of gold or iridium, which aren't exactly abundant.
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Yes, but.
Everyone knows about mirrors. The people who make laser weapons know about mirrors, just as the people who make bullets know about bullet-proof vests.
If a laser can be negated by simple armor, it will not be used as a weapon. So any lasers which are carried will have a reasonable chance against any armor they are likely to encounter. Most likely, by having adjustable wavelength, or wavelengths which are difficult to reflect.
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You can use a mirror to reflect death-dealing laser beams in the same way you can use a trampoline to reflect artillery fire.
That is, artillery fire is a projectile. Trampolines can reflect projectiles, so there is in principle a trampoline that could do it. (Although it would not look at all like the trampolines we are used to and would probably be made of many layers of steel). The same is true of a mirror, given any death laser one could probably imagine something to reflect it back to kill the enemy, but that would generally be just as unfeasible as the artillery trampoline.
**Blinding the enemy**
All that said, the amount of laser power needed to kill someone is massively higher than to blind them. I have worked with lasers that would blind you in an instant that you barely feel any heat from putting your hand in them. A death laser is going to be at hundreds, thousands or more times more powerful than that. The person who shoots you in the chest with the death laser (killing you) was probably looking at you the moment they pulled the trigger (to aim). So if you had some good mirrors in your armour (maybe under a layer of paint or something else to make them damage your camo less) then the person who shot you might get blinded by the flash back. (even assuming <1% flashes back). There *are* goggles to protect against lasers to the eye, but they are (1) only good up to a certain power (much, much less than a death laser power) and (2) they also inhibit your general ability to see (make things darker, distort colour), which makes them non-ideal in a warzone.
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The actual answer is no, it can't.
Even a mirror that reflects 95% of a lethal laser beam will still absorb enough heat to burn. This causes the reflectivity to be gone almost instantly, but a scattered burst of light from the point of impact could still blind the shooter or his allies.
The most likely lasers will be pulsed, firing dozens if not hundreds of small pulses per "shot" within fractions of a second (to us it would seem 1 shot) and each pulse vaporizes a small bit of the target surface, essentially digging into the target. This is more efficient due to how less energy will be used to further heat the vaporized matter, and more energy will be used to vaporize the next matter behind it. Your mirror would "protect" against just the first pulse before burning through and then the next pulses burn deeper.
Better use heat resistant materials or ablative materials to reduce the amount that is vaporized at a time.
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Let's say in the near future(so no fusion drives or anything exotic like that, VASIMR engines are the "best" engines placed on ships, not on expendable weapons), two space ships, armed with missiles, are orbiting so that they are opposite sides of the planet. If they are both suddenly ordered to fire missiles(torpedos, idk what they would be called in space), how would the missiles burn their motors or engines to hit the other spaceship in as short of a time as possible?
I would assume the missiles can't just accelerate faster directly forwards, given that they would gain delta V and rising up in orbit?(from basic physics, I don't know anything about orbital mechanics).
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## A BRIEF SUMMARY (Visit the `TOUGH SF & ATOMIC ROCKET` websites far more information on realistic space warfare.)
Since both ships are capable of performing orbital maneuvers the first priority would be to get 'eyes' on the enemy ship. This could be done from the surface of the Earth by ground stations or even ships and aircraft but a lot would depend on whether or not both sides have managed to establish world wide tracking networks.
The other and more conventional alternative would be from 'above' i.e. via a chain of surveillance satellites placed in high Earth orbits where they can monitor and track orbital changes by the hostile ship. Since VASIMR drives are hot 'burn' maneuvers will be obvious. The satellites can then simply relay targeting data to your ship in real time.
The problem is of course you now have multiple potential targets to deal with i.e. both the enemies ship and their satellites. Since your ship is in orbit and has a nuclear reactor on board to power the VASIMR drive it should have the surplus power needed to run a laser weapon for destroying/crippling/blinding satellites and there's no atmosphere to distort the beam. But still you can only hit the ones that are above the ships 'horizon' i.e. not hidden by the Earth's circumference. This is the 'fast' part of the war. Fast identification of targets and fast destruction. Next comes the 'slow' bit.
The enemy of course can do the same but while you still have real time tracking data you can launch kill vehicles. These would be chemical rockets (with high thrust to mass) that are basically sensors with a small fragmentation charge and shrapnel package attached. Assuming you have an good/approximate lock on the target you fire a 'spread' of rockets 'up' i.e. into higher orders tangentially from your own orbit. As they go higher they can see further over the horizon while simultaneously traveling closer to that part of the opposite hemisphere where the enemy vessel is or was last located.
Eventually a couple (possibly more) of your rockets will detect the enemy ship and depending on the course and altitude changes it has made will hopefully be in position to adjust course & intercept. Note: You have launched lots of small rockets not a few large ones. But THIS STILL WILL TAKE HOURS. During this time you have the chance to send course corrections to your missiles (assuming your still getting tracking data) and start evasive maneuvers yourself.
The enemy will detect some if not all of your kill vehicles as they come over the horizon and attempt to knock them out with their laser. How easy that is depends on how much else is going on. You can stealth them (a little) however by using radar absorbent materials and cryogenic cooling - but not for long. There is also now a lot of junk flying around in all sorts of weird trajectories thanks to exploding satellites so that might help.
As they approach the target (which is more or less ducking and weaving i.e. firing its engine to change orbital path and altitude) your surviving kill vehicles will estimate intercept 'cones'. These are points in space where the enemy *might* be given its velocity and the ability to maneuver. (The kill vehicle is the 'tip' of the cone. The maximum distance the enemy ship is likely to be away from the missile forms the base.) Regardless the kill vehicles detonate their shaped charge warheads and send clouds of dense, high velocity armor piecing shrapnel onward into the space where they predict the ship will be at the time of impact. Many will miss, but some will hit. Importantly even if parts of the ship armored things like the cooling system and other vital systems can't be.
The enemy ship is damaged/crippled if not destroyed outright and can no longer function. Given only the simplest repairs can be accomplished in space the ship will almost certainly have to be abandoned by any surviving crew members. A short time later your ship is also destroyed by the enemy's kill vehicles and the war is over. Lots of incredibly expensive 'junk' then starts falling from the skies down to Earth including satellites that have nothing to do with the war. (Their owners are pissed off.)
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There are some options that I can think of —
Orbital velocity is about 10 km/s. The world is about 40,000 km in circumference. ISS orbits the whole thing in about 92 minutes.
SO, one option would be to launch a high parabolic AGAINST your direction of motion. The missile has no orbital velocity, but you’ve offset for that with more altitude. The warhead is coming nearly straight down on the target 46 minutes later. This would work great for very low altitudes.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6myyI.jpg)
Another option would be to go low. Still burning against your direction of orbit, but trying to go into a counter-orbit. You’d need a continuous roughly 2 gee burn (if I’m doing the math right) and you’d hit your target in about 23 minutes. You could probably shave a few more minutes off the time by going faster than 10 km/s on the other end (hyperbolic trajectory into the target).
A third option would be to get defensive : maybe you know the other ship has probably been commanded to attack you as well, or maybe it’s just good doctrine — increase your ship inclination to go into an almost polar orbit; spoiling the firing solution in the first two suggestions. Wait until your enemy comes into view, and direct fire.
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Short answer: they wouldn't fight. They're in the wrong place, and they can't get to the right place quickly enough to be useful.
Longer answer:
If they are in approximately the same orbit, that the orbit is circular, and on opposite sides of the planet, what they almost certainly *won't* do is fire missiles straight away. If their orbits are different enough (say, one is in a [polar orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_orbit) and the other an [equatorial orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-inclined_orbit)) it might not even be possible to hit their opponent with a missile without doing some substantial manoevers first.
As you've observed, simply firing a missile will not necessarily have the effect people might expect. Shooting it [prograde](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrograde_and_prograde_motion) (in the direction of the ship's travel) will raise the [apogee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis) of the missile's orbit (the highest point) High orbits have *lower* [orbital velocities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed), which means that the missile will appear to shoot away from you, rise up from the planet and then drop away behind you.
Shooting it retrograde (against the direction of the ship's travel) will lower the perigee (lowest point) of the missile's orbit. Lower orbits have *higher* orbital velocities, which means the missile will drop behind you, fall towards the planet and then overtake you.
If you fire a missile to retrograde and it has enough delta-V to inject itself into a retrograde orbit (so the same perigee and apogee but an [inclination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrograde_and_prograde_motion#Orbital_inclination) that's 180 degrees away from the ship's) then it would shoot away from the firing ship very quickly, and rapidly approach the target. Unfortunately, orbital speeds tend to be very high... 7.6km/s for the ISS, which means you'd need a rocket with 15.2 km/s [delta-V](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v) in order to shoot backwards. You can't really use an ion drive or vasimr to do this because their thrusts tend to be much too low (so the missile would crash into the atmosphere before getting back up to orbital speed), and you can't use a chemical rocket to do this because its [specific impulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse) is too low and you'd need a Saturn-V-sized missile to hold enough fuel.
Now, the firing ship *could* change its orbit... it could drop down into a fast orbit with the aim of catching up with its opponent, or it could rise into a higher orbit so its opponent would catch up with *it*. At the same time, your opponent will be doing the exact same sorts of things, and the odds are good that both ships would be observed by their opponent's ground stations and observation satellites so they'd be trying to jockey for position.
Eventually they'd want to be able to get close enough to their opponents such that they could fire a missile that would have sufficient delta-V to intercept them. This could take some time... the [synodic period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period#Synodic_period) of two objects with orbital periods $P\_1$ and $P\_2$ is $1 \over {1/P\_1 - 1/P\_2}$. Something like the ISS has a period of about 90 minutes, so another object with a period of 270 minutes would "meet" it every 135 minutes or so. That means at least an hour's wait and perhaps more before you'd be able to see your opponent, and you'd still need a powerful missile that would take quite some time to cross the intervening space to be able to usefully intercept the target.
So, potentially hours of waiting, jockeying for position trying to get a first strike without being overly exposed (and higher orbits have less background clutter, remember).
Who's got the time for that?
No, what would really happen is that you'd get a bunch of [ASAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon) missile launches from the surface. A suborbital rocket isn't unreasonably complex or expensive to make, certainly a lot simpler than a nuclear powered VASIMR-driven space warship. They'd pop up and drop a load of crud... maybe just dumb fragments, maybe smart interceptors like an [exoatmospheric kill vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle). They wouldn't be travelling at orbital speeds, and the enemy would coming trucking into them at many kilometres per second and get blown to bits, probably hours before the warship could do anything useful at all.
Boring, but that's space warfare for you. Debris goes round and round, everyone dies.
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As a point of reference, it takes a rocket with about 8.6km/s delta-V to reach low orbit from Earth's surface. Here's an example of a small rocket with this capability:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nqgmS.png)
The [Satellite Launch Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Launch_Vehicle) was an Indian project from the late 70s, and could put 40 kilos into a low Earth orbit. It was about 22m long, 1m wide, and weighed about 17 tonnes.
If you want a "missile" that can make dramatic orbital changes, or cross several thousand kilometres of space in relatively short order, that is the kind of size and weight of weapon that you'll be needing.
Have a think about how big the launching warship will need to be, and how many of these rockets it can carry. And have a think about whether or not launching them from Earth makes more economic and military sense.
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A few other answers have included suggestions with dramatic orbital changes, such as transitioning from an [equatorial orbit to a polar orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_inclination_change). Such an action is *very* expensive in terms of delta-V... for a spacecraft in a circular orbit at ISS altitude it would be ~10.7km/s (more than getting into that orbit from the surface!) and rather impractical for a chemically fuelled rocket.
Happily your warships have [VASIMR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket) engines, so they have delta-V to spare. Unfortunately, high-efficiency engines are marked by having very low thrusts. A VASIMR capable of driving a ship with a centigee of thrust (yep, one *hundredth* of a standard gravity) would be a phenominally powerful thing, and require a substantial nuclear reactor, heatsink array, technological advances, etc etc.
A 10.7km/s manoever with such an engine would take >1800 minutes to complete... that's nearly 20 ISS-orbit-equivalents. An even *more* outrageously powerful VASIMR which could manage a whole tenth of a gravity still takes >180 minutes, giving plenty of opportunity for ground-based interceptors to reduce you to a navigational hazard for future generations to enjoy.
Prompt manoevering requires high thrust. Electric rockets can't provide that at your tech level. Chemical rockets don't have high Isp. You need high Isp to make dramatic orbital changes.
Your warships *can't* make dramatic manoevers. If you want high thrust, high-Isp engines, you need [Project Orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)).
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I can only recommend picking up the [KSP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerbal_Space_Program) and [Children of a Dead Earth](https://www.childrenofadeadearth.com/) videogames - those are a great way of learning orbital mechanics, as [demonstrated in XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1356/).
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So what you're describing is an **orbital intercept maneouver**. The fastest way involves an infinite amount of thrust and ΔV, so constraints are gonna be important here.
You've set the scene as near-future, so I'm making the following assumptions:
* Low(ish), coplanar, circular earth orbit
* Chemical engines for the missiles, which implies:
+ High thrust, thus theoretical instantaneous maneouvers
+ Limited ΔV (i.e. limited "fuel"), thus limited burn time
An efficient low-ΔV intercept maneouver is for the missile to burn prograde (that is, "forward") in order to raise its orbital period (the time it takes to make an orbit) by a factor of 1.5x, and... wait.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OgP1B.png)
Note how the relative angle of the green ship and green projectile at the time of launch are the same - that's the prograde maneouver.
If you want to lower the intercept time, then you'll have to spend more ΔV and change the angle of your burn towards radial (i.e. "out"). The intercept in the following diagram would spend more ΔV and intercept in about 1.1 orbits:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jry9F.png)
Note how the relative angle of the green ship and green projectile at the time of launch is changing "outwards" - that's the radial component.
Increasing the ΔV budget more, intercept time of ~0.9 orbits:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/R2dLV.png)
Increasing the ΔV budget even more, to reduce the time to about ~0.5 orbits, turns the intercept orbit into a quasi-vertical; the projectile would burn at a ~45-degree angle relative to radial ("up and left" in the image), to cancel out the forward ("down") velocity and impair outwards ("left") velocity:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YNydj.png)
We can keep going until the extreme case: the projectile cancels out its forward orbital velocity and turns into a reverse orbit, lowering the perigee in order to skim the atmosphere. Intercept time would be ~0.2 orbits:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7oUo3.png)
The absolute limit on the fastest maneouver is how much the perigee of the retrograde can be lowered without forcing the projectile into an atmospheric reentry.
Now, keep in mind: **the maneouver to take depends heavily on your ΔV budget**. A low-ΔV prograde maneouver can take... maybe 1000 m/s, whereas the fast retrograde skim-the-athmosphere-in-reverse-orbit would take maybe 22000 m/s.
Why is this important? Because the [fuel mass increases **exponentially** relative to the ΔV and payload mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation). So you can choose between having one projectile capable of the retrograde skim maneouver, or a few hundred projectiles capable of the slow 1.5 orbits prograde maneouver, or one projectile with a hundred times the payload. Yes, the order of magnitudes is hundreds
This highlights the tactical concerns of choosing the projectiles payloads. Whereas the fastest intercept is possible, it might mean having a projectile with a payload too small to make a difference (or too easy to avoid with an evasive maneouver). I would argue that the optimal solution is a projectile capable of the slow-ish ~1.2 orbits intercept, carrying a shrapnel payload - a kilometer-wide cloud of ball bearings traveling at ~500m/s relative to the target would be hard to avoid, cause damage to the target, and burn in atmospherical reentry.
(Please bear in mind that my diagrams and numbers are back-of-the-envelope quality; if you want more accurate numbers and orbits, play KSP with [RSS](https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/177216-18-real-solar-system-v1815-27-jun-2021/) and [MechJeb](https://github.com/MuMech/MechJeb2)'s maneouver planner. If you want the *really* nerdy mathematically accurate solution, there's [plenty of this stuff in space stackexchange](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/17342/intercepting-another-satellite)).
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Missile combat in space is way too complicated to answer this easily.
If you're looking for super-crunchy orbital combat mechanics in your writing, then this:
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Is something you need to rectify.
Delta-V (dV) is basically a measure of how 'far' you can go in space. It is not gained by acceleration, in fact it's consumed by it. If I change my velocity by 500m/sec, I have to consume 500m/sec of dV to do so. This is determined by the mass, fuel supply, and ISP of the propulsion system.
For self-propelled weapons it is THE single most important statistic in space, possibly second only to sensor signature.
The moment the enemy sees the missile coming, they're going to start burning their engines to alter their trajectory. It doesn't even matter how they do so, unless the missile is undetectable until extremely close, because at orbital distances, all they need to do for the missile to miss is to not be where the missile is currently going to hit them.
The missile, in turn, will then have to make it's own adjustment burn to bring its course back to an intercept.
So now it's a game of "who's got more dV on board." If the target is able to force the missile to adjust course too many times, then it can run the missile dry of fuel and escape. (P.S. this is how you defend against air-to-air missiles as well, you change direction a lot, and drag the missile down to lower altitude, thicker air where it has to burn up its energy turning under high-drag until it lacks the energy to reach you anymore.)
Therefore the strategy behind employment of missile weapons is ULTRA dependent upon the relative dV of the missile, launch vehicle, and target. (The launch vehicle can maneuver before launching the missile in order to obtain a 'firing solution'. While the missile is in the launcher, it gets all of those velocity changes 'for free' - it doesn't expend its own fuel supply to do so.)
The only other factor that can help, and the only way launching from the other side of a planet makes sense, is if the missile itself is small enough, and has a long, silent cruise phase, so that you can launch it - and the enemy is either unaware of the missile's launch OR at the least has no idea where the missile is after it's been launched - and so now they have to try to dodge it without knowledge of it's current energy state.
That puts the whole thing into mind-chess territory, rather than physics.
For more information about how this looks, I strongly suggest watching [Scott Manley's series of videos about Children of a Death Earth.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYu7z3I8tdEn0ytB1lrz7jcY4P62zcz1A) That game is ULTRA crunchy, and Scott Manley does a good job of making orbital mechanics accessible.
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Q: *"how would the missiles burn their motors or engines to hit the other spaceship in as short of a time as possible?"*
Ok, so your missiles have propulsion. For below idea you'll need some, but no excessive amount. It uses the planet's gravity as an extra accelerator.
## Slingshot above the upper atmosphere
Its fastest trajectory depends where your ships are. You'll have to calculate the trajectory anyway.
**Use gravity as booster**
Be careful, the orbit part near the planet should be *above* the upper atmosphere, else, your missile looses speed rapidly, by friction.
Approach a target on the right, with a low power (ion motor?) missile looks something like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0A6rD.png)
**Guided missiles**
For a high speed guided missile, it is convenient to aim in a straight line to a point you want to reach, corrected for the gravitational field. Then you enter low orbit around the planet.. and when the target is in sight, the missile will focus on the target, switch on the engine and proceed in a straight line, like
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oA4kv.png)
.. the trajectory depends how your two ships are *precisely* aligned.
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The missile has to rendezvous with the enemy ship, exactly the same way that vessels travel from Earth to the ISS. The only difference is that instead of docking to the enemy ship, the missile will rather have to impact at high velocity.
If the ships are in basically the same orbit, and you don't want to wait a few millennia for an opportunity of impact, then the missile has to change its orbit so that it has a different orbital period from the target, while still intersecting the target's orbit. If both ships are in very low orbit, then the missile necessarily has to speed up so that its new orbit is larger. Otherwise the ship can try a smaller orbit, which gives more opportunities for a "rendezvous" quicker.
At closest approach, which might take a few hours, the missile will very probably pass by the target a few kilometers away from it. So there are two things it can do: either it corrects its path prior to closest approach to guarantee a hit at many kilometers per second, but giving the enemy ship a lot of room to counter-maneuver... Or close to closest approach, the missile burns to match speed with the target. This means that for a few seconds, the relative speed between both will be close to zero while they are a few hundreds of meters away. At that moment, the missile burns like hell towards the target for a more guaranteed hit at a few kilometers per second.
Notice that you might just want to explode near the target rather than hitting it. This makes it easier to achieve a kill. Either way you have spoiled a lot of orbits for a lot of people for millions of years.
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**Shortcut.**
Your missile will chase the other ship and catch up to it by traversing a smaller circle and skipping back up off the atmosphere.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dJOH8.gif)
<http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/212_spring2007.web.dir/Todd_Fortun/Incoming.htm>
By adding its own velocity to that of the ship that launched it, the missile can fly lower than the parent ship: the lower the orbit the faster one must go to keep falling and keep missing the earth. It will catch its target ship both by going faster as well as taking a shorter route, like the inside track in a circular race track.
The missile then skips back up off the atmosphere to hit the target ship from below. I envision more like skipping a stone than the above more radical direction change. Hopefully the part of the above diagram where pieces fall off does not apply.
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# Orbits are ellipses
You can get to the other side of the planet by traveling in any direction along the plane of your travel vector. So, just shoot backwards.
**Note:** Backwards does NOT mean shooting out the back of the ship, it means reversing the orbit. The pointy end of the weapon doesn’t go frontwards but don’t worry, use a computer. Well, actually, your in space. So pointy ends have no point. It can be shaped like a moose and work the same if you can make a moose shaped missile tube.
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Humans have been domesticating carnivores for over 10 000 years. And there are certainly [carnivores](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/13/hercules-liger-worlds-largest-cat-photos_n_3920158.html) big [enough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-faced_bear) to ride. The former is the biggest feline ever to exist. They certainly can carry a human after all they are big enough. Let's assume that the danger of the mount being a carnivore in the first place is worth the reward.
So, why haven't large carnivores been ridden by ancient people?
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Many problems.
The first is that carnivores large enough to ride are few and all are very dangerous. Grizzly bear, Siberian tiger, Lions all are large enough for a human to ride. However all are dangerous, even today when these are made pets they still can maul people, even their owners.
Second, especially for times past, these animals are a large competitor for prey animals and require a lot of meat to keep happy. You don't want your ride to decide that you will make a nice snack. Keeping a large lion fed is very expensive. That is why so many are in shelters or have to be put down, they cost too much to keep, and that is as a pet, not a hard working mount.
Many of these predators are also solitary, (lions are pack) partly because it is easier to feed fewer mouths when you get bigger. Wolves are pack animals and a human can replace a wolf as the leader. House cats are still partially domesticated.
Most animals we ride are herd animals, they are easy to feed, usually grass and other vegetation (often stuff we can't digest well) so there is no competition for food and they are generally not going to try and kill each other.
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Hypothetically, a pack animal with a strong sense of hierarchy and loyalty to leader, like wolf or hyena, could be ridden by a human, given it's large enough and has been trained for this kind of activity since puppyhood. However I don't see a big cat, or a bear, or any other solitary animal to be a reliable mount. If we're talking about a fantasy species, stick to something based on canids.
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I know this question is from a long time ago, but yes. Theoretically it's possible. We wouldn't be able to ride it like a horse, however. Since most carnivores have a very flexible spine and fairly small shoulderblades compared to horses we would have to almost sit on the neck of the animal for it to be able to carry us without being hurt or disturbed in it's movement. It wouldn't be a very comfortable mount tho; no matter if you ride a canid or a feline (although in felines it would be worse than in canids) you would have to deal with a lot of movement, since canines and felines have much more shoulder freedom than a horse. In combination with a more flexible spine you would be in constant motion if you would just sit down, and therefore you would have to ride "standing"; in a position where you hover over the animal, only with your feet in the stirrups.
So, all the danger aside I think it wouldn't be worthwhile since we already have a less dangerous and more comfortable mount available.
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It’s called a dog sled. Amongst the large predator species, only canines possess the long range endurance, and what I guess you could call a “rational” thought process, or the ability to stay cool under pressure, and therefore could actually be considered an improvement over the “prey animal” thought processes of a horse. (also the only “rideable” Predator species that doesn’t come with the looming threat of murdering you in your sleep)
A big cat or bear species (including hyenas which are more closely related to bears than they are to wolves/dogs) is likely to possess all the same mental/instinctual shortcomings of a horse, but with the added downside of your mount forever maintaining an underlying willingness to kill and eat you if on some occasion it should become too appealing. This is why wolves and the dogs they became had aided mankind in hunting for millennia before anyone mounted a horse. The coevolution of Human primates and canines has been no less significant on both our species than any other examples found in all of animalia. While horses may have played a greater role in reshaping human civilization it’s fair to say that it was through comparitively indirect means more akin to technological innovation than coevolution, but canines reshaped the human animal on a far more fundamental level. They helped transform us from opportunistic omiverous chimps that occasionally managed to bludgeon animals that were cornered or too slow to escape, into the most relentless, inescapable predator to ever stalk the planet. Even if you could effectively use another species of predator for transport it would be almost completely useless, because only man and wolf hunt by maintaining a medium speed for great distances relying on endurance and our ability to track the faster prey. Your big cat or bear drawn sled would be limited to travel at a slow walking pace except for the occasional burst of unsustainable speed that would most likely lead to catastrophic accidents anyway. That question slowly became a more interesting contemplation than I expected, and led to a very long rant... hope that was atleast interesting as an answer of sorts. Certainly feels like it was a practical answer, if only a little grandiose in its wording.
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Theoretically, yes. Circus lions are successfully trained for feats so that they don't chew off the trainer's hand. There are even circuses where the trainer rolls and wrestles with the lion(s).
Practically, no. People (in as a whole) tend to do things which provide good results lesser the hassle. So while carnivores *might* be trained for riding, why go all the hard way when we have much better options in the forms of horses and mules? Many Asian civilizations have successfully trained elephants for riding and burden labor, but none has given a go at lions for that purpose.
Even if we were living in the age of dinosaurs, it was much more feasible to domesticate a Diplodocus or Saltasaurus than, say, a Tyrannosaurus or even an Utahraptor.
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Paraphrasing the comment from user6760:
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I disagree with the rest of the comment, though. A bear or lion should be strong enough to carry a human. It all comes down to a body shape that is not much in agreement with that.
That said, humans can ride some species that are either omnivore:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4EvYF.jpg)
Or downright carnivores:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZfQ77.jpg)
But the temperament of these creatures is more towards the wilder end of the spectrum, with a world of hurt being caused by that. The damage is in proportion to the ride's size.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FlXQH.jpg)
(I'm keeping the [gorier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_at_SeaWorld_parks#SeaWorld_Orlando) stuff out of the post, but you can reaserch yourself why meddling with unusual rides is a [bad idea](http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2000-34.html)).
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Lots of people have ridden ligers. They are the largest and most docile of carnivores.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QDcHZ.png)
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Riding carnivores are difficult but not impossible. There was a man who rode a 900 lb Grizzly Bear in [Montana](https://www.environews.tv/world-news/video-man-walks-with-and-rides-tame-grizzly-bear-through-the-forests-of-montana/). It is even [possible](https://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2350788/Daredevil-tourist-risks-his-life-by-taking-a-ride-on-a-LION.html) to [ride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2MlsXIcnWE) a [lion](https://nayturr.com/can-you-ride-a-lion-its-possible-but-heres-why-we-shouldnt/). However, this is hard to do unless you have a tamable social carnivore, so these are harder feats to pull off than if you just wanted to tame a horse or a camel which is why humans usually preferred herbivores or certain omnivores.
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One day, you run into a young man (~20 years old) who has spent his life in a laboratory being weaponized by the state until he finally escaped. He is a non-person, there is no public record of his existence. Now he just wants to live a normal life. Attending college is an especially attractive idea, but also getting a job afterward and so-on.
How could he become a citizen?
How could he attend college without having ever gone through high school? He has already been taught roughly up to a middle school level.
Whatever he does, he has to be quiet about it, because his captors are looking for him. Threatening someone is a last resort, but he can easily make a threat look credible when necessary.
For the sake of the question let's say that he already has a proper understanding of what a "normal life" is.
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In reality, the first thing he *should* do is to either hit the media and sell out his story for some millions of $$$ AND get permanent rid of his captors or hit the supreme court, sue his captors, drop the charges for some millions of dollars AND again get rid of his captors (as they won't be able to continue this program anymore).
Ahem ahem. OK I understand we are not dealing with real life here :(
OK, so your character wants to stay out of public attention. That is possible, but in that case, forget ***any*** idea about enrolling in any university or whatever. There are two basic reasons for it.
a- his captors, being a powerful agency, would easily track him down through digital records (specially if the college keeps its records online openly)
b- he has no source for making money. so his first preference should be to financially support himself AND find a means to get rid of the ever-hanging sword of his captors
As for his job, he could join a martial arts / self defense gym as an instructor and earn whatever meager sum of money they pay him. This is something he is best at, and doesn't need any training or fail at any prerequisites. He would also have to join some other little job (like a fuel station or something). Make sure he joins a job where he doesn't have to travel much, enter buildings with security cams or face a lot of new public faces daily.
After he has firmly rooted himself in the social life, he can now think about getting a large scale change in his appearance. Permanently dye his hair and change his hairstyle. Maybe get a minor plastic surgery on his face etc.
After this, he is ready to get some home-schooling (he would look weird joining a school at the age of 23-24, the first 3-4 years used in rooting himself in the society). After the home-schooling period (some 5-6 years), he can finally hope to join a college.
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I think first you need to define what he learned during the time he was being weaponized. How does he know what college is, much less whether he really wants to attend? If he was kept in seclusion for weaponization, he was likely brainwashed as well. He probably has no correct notion of what real life is.
You might want to read about the rehabilitation of child soldiers, who go through traumatic battle experiences during their early years of life and essentially need to relearn, or learn for the first time, what it is to lead a healthy and non-destructive lifestyle.
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Could the character *pretend* to be an illegal alien who wants to legalize his status? For obvious reasons most countries don't make that easy, but it is usually possible. And who would believe that somebody who *admits* being an illegal alien is actually an AWOL local?
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This person legal status, for all practical purposes, will be pretty much like an illegal immigrant in your country. He has no papers, no official recognition; and he shouldn't make the authorities aware he is there. His only advantage is that his accent is probably indistinguishable from the locals, so people will likely think a priori that he is a citizen.
Enrolling at the University is out of the question, as it requires ID and money. But that doesn't mean he cannot pretend to be a student, attend lectures, study on his own, and take on mini jobs targeted for college students. These are commonly unofficial, so he won't need documents nor leave a paper trail. Again, people won¡t think he is an illegal alien, so they won't get suspicious when he doesn't provide official papers.
He won't be able to take exams, but he can make up a backstory saying he comes from a very poor family that cannot afford tuition (if there is such a thing in your country), but he is there for the knowledge.
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What country is are we talking about? It will be somewhat easier in countries that do not require IDs, i.e. USA (where he might be considered just an illegal alien).
How well does he speak the dominant language(s) of the country? Assuming his captors kept talking with him enough to develop reasonable language skills - this is not [a trivial assumption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron#Language) [at all](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_development_of_Genie).
His bet bet would be probably to [find a group of people without documents, arriving to a different culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis) to cover his appearance, so that his lack of cultural skills, personal history and language would not be so suspicious. However, this might be problematic if he does not speak the language of the group he claims to be a part of.
If successful, he will get an asylum, residence permit, documents, a work permit and maybe a citizenship in some years.
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You might look into what happens in real-life cases, like [Alecia Pennington's](https://homeschoolersanonymous.org/2015/09/04/alecia-pennington-the-girl-who-doesnt-exist-can-now-prove-she-does/), which involved thousands of hours of legal effort. A Texas legislator later [introduced a bill](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/12/how-a-teenagers-viral-campaign-to-prove-her-citizenship-is-inspiring-a-new-texas-bill/) to help expedite the process. This suggests to me that within the U.S., the process varies by state. I don't know about outside the U.S., but I imagine it depends on the laws in any given country/region.
As for attending college: In the U.S., many private schools accept students on the basis of SAT/ACT scores and an admissions essay (this is how I got into college). At least some public schools require a diploma or a GED (for example, Florida state schools did in the mid-1990s). You still need ID to take the SAT, but you don't need to have a private/public school transcript to get into college somewhere.
I don't know about community colleges in general, but I took some community college courses in Tennessee my senior year of "high school." They wanted a transcript of my high school courses, which didn't exist, but someone in the admissions office made an error and admitted me anyway, though your readers might find that too big a coincidence even though it's happened in real life.
[Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out](https://hareachingout.wordpress.com/for-alumni/) has links to help homeschool alumni transitioning to outside life without parental support. Resources aimed at people raised in cults may also help.
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I think his best option would be to just talk to the local police and explain the situation. They should have the presence of mind to keep his case out of the public spotlight while they figured out how to integrate him into society.
It's not that difficult to go through high school a few years late (I've helped several people get GEDs in their mid-20s), at which point he could continue life as normal. Of course, there are all the psychological problems that would likely be much more difficult to overcome, as Pedro pointed out.
Now, you did mention that "the state" was the one experimenting on him. If it was sanctioned by the state, then his best bet would be to go to a different country to explain to those local police. If it wasn't sanctioned by the state, the state shouldn't have any problems putting an end to the threat and putting him in witness protection.
Of course, he might not know if it was state sanctioned or not, in which case it would probably be best to assume it was and run.
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He could create a false back story with documentation. One relatively well known method is to take on the identity of someone who would have been around the same age but died as a child. This was described in Frederick Forsyth's thriller novel The Day of The Jackal, and it was used by British police on long term undercover operations.
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He can pretend to be paperless, which probably isn't the smartest idea, since authorities are looking for him.
Instead, he could look into obtaining a forged background. Passports of some countries are actually very cheap, and if you take a war torn country they can't even verify if the password is real, because the original documents no longer exist. So at worst you get deported.
The easiest way to attend college is to simply sit in the lectures and participate. You'll need to be enrolled to finish with a degree, but in some classes an additional student sitting there and learning certainly wouldn't be noticed.
In terms of a job, as someone with a military background, young and healthy, not much of an education, hiding from someone, the status of an illegal immigrant, I guess there's already a very clear career path which also gives access to much better forgers.
[Answer]
The answer depends largely on the setting. The country & year for Earth... and in any case, the details of the culture and laws and who is looking for him and how they do that and what he and whoever might help him know about the search methods of the people looking for him.
I think it's also vital to look critically at what "normal" means to this person, to different groups of people in the culture where he is, and to you as the author/worldbuilder. There is of course no one true "normal", and the situation you describe is set up to explore that, and the blindspots the author and readers and the culture have around what "normal" means.
As for your practical sub-questions:
*How could he become a citizen?*
Depends on the culture, laws, administrative details, and the person's knowledge of those, skills, and the situation with the people looking for him and his travel opportunities. Before the 21st Century, it was much easier to do even in Western cultures. If the person has infiltration training (e.g. if he was trained to be an anonymous agent something like Jason Bourne), he may have been given many skills and techniques for doing this sort of thing. It may be helpful to travel to a different country before trying, e.g. by sneaking aboard a freighter, or crossing a border via deep forest, or stealing a private boat or small plane.
*How could he attend college without having ever gone through high school? He has already been taught roughly up to a middle school level.*
There are free online college courses available that don't require anything other than an email address, or perhaps less than that. Or there are foreign schools. Or he can study the admin offices of less rigorous colleges and figure out how to fool them. Some admin offices aren't terribly foolproof and could be fooled. If you look at stories of people struggling to correct their information with admin offices, and turn them around to realize that some students have been going to school with wrong information just by clerical accident, then you could see how it would be possible. But the person needs to somehow realize this is a possibility, perhaps by meeting someone with experience who gives him the idea. If he's has some sort of human manipulation skills, too he could just get the support of someone in the admin staff (e.g. by seducing them or bribing them or blackmailing them or intimidating them) so that they fake his credentials for him. Or maybe he simply has (or knows someone who has) forging skills.
Note that he could also do things like join the French Foreign Legion, or a religious order or other group that is willing to take in humans and vouch for them as a member of their group, and that has a trust relationship with governments.
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Buying a identity that is the only way to effectively become a citizen or to steal one. Since your protagonist needs to hide from his captor the best way is to well share a identity with someone who is dead dying or paralyzed. There is a movie from 1997 called Gattaca where a person buys one from a paralyzed person in return for well money.
So find a drug addict/homeless and pretend to be him in return give they guy money. Just remember that not a goverment agencies doesn't have many pictures of you if you didn't come into contact with them often.
Any questions asked like birth certificate can be bought from his parents with enough cash.
In the book a girl with a dragon tattoo a supposed to be deceased person used her sister's passport to move to australia and marry a guy. She got a australian passport and suddenly there were 2 persons living in different parts of the world. And yes a marriage certificate was sent back to the country of origin but the fact that there were two different home addresses one in each country wasn't noticed. ANd since an australian passport was used in australia no cross checking was done. As Long as the sister didn't marry herself all was okay.
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[Question]
[
[Steampunk](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk)!!
**In a world without the fine electronics that we have today, would space travel be possible?**
....I'm not averse to small amounts of magic in my steampunk worlds, but I'd like to keep it to a minimum, if I can. So possible answers are allowed to stretch practical reality a *bit*, but not too much.
[Answer]
The [Mercury](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury#Spacecraft) spacecraft [didn't have a flight computer](http://history.nasa.gov/computers/ch1-1.html). All the controls it had were 55 electrical switches, 30 fuses, and 35 mechanical levers. Those types of electronics are usually easily replaced by steampunk equivalents. It already was missing the fine electronics we have today. Not too much of a stretch at all.
I'm not aware of rockets being off limits for the steampunk toolbox, so you should have no trouble using those as well. You will pretty much have to, you won't get there on steam. However, once you've gotten to space steam comes into play again. There are actually proposals for making [steam powered space ships](http://www.space.com/11230-water-powered-spaceship-mars-solar-system.html) using interplanetary ice for fuel.
*[Source](http://www.neofuel.com/index_neofuel.html)*
In this proposal, the ship encases itself in ice to provide protection from radiation (I'm assuming) and as the source of material for ejection matter.
You may be onto something for steampunk in space.
[Answer]
One of the most significant differences between steampunk and contemporary technology is the computing style.
Despite excellent counterexamples such as [The Difference Engine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine), **steampunk is, aesthetically and conceptually, much more natively analog than digital.**
Most people these days are unfamiliar with analog computing. I wrote a blog post, [The Crafted World of Analog Computing](http://eachkindoflens.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-crafted-world-of-analog-computing.html), that lays out a lot of the differences between digital and analog work. Here's a partial summary:
* Digital computing manipulates **[finite state logical machines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine);** analog computing manipulates **physical properties** such as length and angular position.
* Digital computing works with **discrete integer numbers** and must emulate infinitesimal math such as trig or calculus; analog is **natively infinitesimal** and must emulate integer math by engraving precise marks on a physical component.
* Digital computing implements **algorithms in software;** analog computing implements **algorithms in hardware.**
* Digital computing **breaks logic down into the smallest feasible steps**; analog computing is **holistic.** An analog computer is purpose-built to solve a particular kind of problem.
* Digital computing tends to **puke and die when confronted with feedback loops** (we call them "race conditions"); analog computing **relies** on feedback loops.
The obvious implications are that digital computing is much cheaper, once you have implemented a computational mechanism with adequately fast switching times, and adequately general logic (e.g. [Lambda Calculus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus).) This is why digital computing has, in our primary world, swamped analog computing: the cost of handbuilt machines, purpose-built to solve one kind of problem, is extremely high compared to general machines that execute cheaply modifiable software.
**This, however, is an economic consideration.** In steampunk, it's more about feasibility and style than about cost/benefit maximization.
In terms of computing power, analog machines can readily accomplish tasks that are simply hard programming problems for those of us who write digital software - especially systems and control problems, which involve feedback loops.) Most of the problems involved in engineering and navigating a spacecraft can be neatly solved by analog computation and analog control systems.
Expensive technologies that require a lot of craftsmanship are one of the essential characteristics of the steampunk aesthetic. :-)
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I think the biggest issue would be communication. I can't think of any way to build a radio without electronics. Maybe **really** good telescopes and large mirrors? Or communication magic.
Piloting could be done manually with assistance from large paper tables and some slide rules or mechanical calculators. The trajectory would be precomputed and the spacecraft would have on paper the necessary data to calculate the deviation from the expected trajectory and the proper corrections to make. It would be less efficient than computer controls, but I doubt the difference would be that big.
Trajectories could probably be calculated with mechanical analog computers. They were too heavy and required too much maintenance to use in a spaceship, but in a ground based installation they probably could get the same capability as digital computers circa 1980s. Not sure, but mechanical computers would certainly have the capability to do all the math necessary. And the reliability and maintenance issues might actually get solved, if mechanicals were not replaced by digital computers.
[Answer]
In Victorian steam-punk the thought of going to space for various reasons have been discussed. The most interesting technology is the Verne Gun, a large gun on the ground using mostly gunpowder but also other technologies to send materials into space.
Even though this makes problems like air resistance and the fact that the object cannot make orbit. Real life attempts such as the HARP project, was initiated, mostly as a way to cheaply transport cargo into space. But mostly unsuccessful (400kg was effectively send out 180km with 33% escape velocity).
The upside of the Verne gun is that it does not have to have a mass pushed away such as normal rockets, but instead propels the mass using either coil/rail technology or gunpowder.
Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun>
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Have you read HG Wells '[The First Men in the Moon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Men_in_the_Moon)'? Cavorite is the go to material for Victorian space travel as it negates gravity. From the Wikipedia entry which explains it all:
>
> Bedford befriends Cavor when he learns he is developing a new
> material, **cavorite**, which can negate the force of gravity.
>
>
> When a sheet of cavorite is prematurely produced, it makes the air
> above it weightless and shoots off into space.
>
>
> Cavor hits upon the idea of a spherical
> spaceship made of "steel, lined with glass", and with sliding "windows
> or blinds" made of cavorite by which it can be steered, and persuades
> a reluctant Bedford to undertake a voyage to the moon
>
>
>
It's a most excellent book one which any Steampunk enthusiast should read. There are also a couple of film adaptations my favourite of which is [this one](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Men_in_the_Moon_%281964_film%29) as it features a great British cast. There's even [kits of the sphere](http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/Cavorite_Sphere_Page.htm) available!
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A heat shield for reentry might be easier than you'd think. Early retrievable spy satellites used balsa wood for their heat shield.
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I would start the journey upward with a hydrogen balloon, we all know steampunks have a soft spot for airships... This may sound a little absurd but [for $75k you can catch a ride to the "edge of space"](http://www.space.com/23289-75k-edge-of-space-balloon-ride-gets-faa-approval-animation.html) and spend a couple of hours at 98,000 feet. So, balloons could reasonable get you started.
But that would only be about 1/6 of the way to what most people would consider "space" so we'll shoot for low earth orbit at about 160 kilometers up. To push the rest of the way we're probably going to need rockets. Big Rockets. But [rockets seem to be well within the acceptable bounds of steampunk.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_%28weapon%29)
Now once we've made it to low earth orbit we have some technical issues to consider. Could steampunk tech reasonably hold up to the vacuum of space? Most likely yes! If the you're basing your tech limits on the 19th century keep in mind that they were developing [submarines as early as 1850](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Bauer). It stands to reason that if they could make a vessel that could withstand the pressures of the deep sea they could build a vessel that could maintain air pressure in space.
Now we've gotten into space and we're "reasonably" safe, how long can we stay? Well that depends mostly on life support, primarily filtering out CO2. [And here's a solution:](http://mebrines.com/SteampunkSpacecraft.htm)
>
> Some have suggested greenhouses, and while that's certainly within the
> limits of Victorian technology, a greenhouse big enough to do the job
> would have to be larger than our ship. So, maybe we do add a
> greenhouse to the design, but more for aesthetics than practicality -
> always a big steampunk consideration.
>
>
> NASA used filters impregnated with lithium hydroxide to remove CO2
> from the air of the Apollo capsules. When exposed to CO2, lithium
> hydroxide sucks it out of the air forming lithium carbonate and water.
> One gram of lithium hydroxide can remove 450 cubic centimeters pf CO2.
> The process actually made so much water the Apollo crews actually had
> to dump the excess overboard. A lithium hydroxide filter with simple
> electric fans to circulate the air would make an effective life
> support system for our aether ship and reduce the amount of water our
> expedition would have to carry.
>
>
> Lithium hydroxide is not a high-tech material. It was first obtained
> by electrolysis in 1821 by William Thomas Brande. The process was
> improved in 1855 by Robert Bunsen, the inventor of the Bunsen burner.
> So the life support system of our modern moon missions employed
> essentially Victorian technology.
>
>
>
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The problem is not going to be electronics, it will be chemistry and metallurgy.
It's easy to build a mechanical computer, and anyone who's played Kerbal Space Program can tell you that you can get into orbit with just human reflexes alone.
The things that will be obstacles to your steampunk astronauts will be life support and making materials capable of handling the aerodynamic stresses involved.
The main thing you need to build a rocket is reaction mass and heat. You heat up the reaction mass and throw it out the back. The hotter it is, the more pressure, and the faster it goes out the back. Water is an OK reaction mass, steam is better, but still woefully low ISP, but **supercritical steam** can be an excellent reaction mass.
A supercritical fluid is one under such enormous pressure and of such high temperature, that it becomes nearly impossible to tell the liquid and gaseous phases apart. Supercritical steam has the interesting property that it is denser than liquid water, yet is still compressible. It is also under incredible pressure and heat (22 MPa at 600C), which gives it a lot of energy.
The problem then becomes not only how to generate the pressures and heat needed, but to make a material strong enough to confine the supercritical steam. 22 MPa is about 3200 psi, which is a chamber pressure higher than any rocket humans have built to date with the exception of SpaceX's raptor at 4300 psi (designed, not achieved). Needless to say, this kind of pressure would be difficult to do with 1800s technology in a way that keeps your thrust to weight ratio.
Another issue is going to be your energy source. You will likely not be able to generate the heat needed with coal alone, mostly because of the amount of oxygen you would need. Most real world designs for supercritical steam rockets require nuclear, which I would assume is not possible in your world.
This is where your magic would have to come in: first in creating some sort of "unobtanium magic alloy" capable of handling the stresses involved, and second in generating the heat required, perhaps using some magic "dwarven forge," "dragonfire," or "phoenix eggshells," just anything capable of making intense heat.
The next problem is going to be life support. You need a way to generate oxygen, but more importantly, to remove carbon dioxide. This is usually accomplished with very pure lithium hydroxide, which reacts with CO2 and pulls it out of the air. The chemistry required to produce this may be on the edge of what 1800s technology can do. You may need to invoke magic again.
But once you've sorted out these issues, your astronauts don't need any specialized electronics to fly in space. They can use a simple sextant as sailors have done for eons to find their position in space, or basic gyros can act as an inertial measurement unit. Simple mechanically based devices can measure orientation of the space craft, provide altitude measurements, etc... Slide rules can be used for any really difficult calculations.
[Answer]
Generating electrical power aboard the ship, and storing it, would be a challenge. A steam driven turbine could generate power, but a safe heat source would be necessary. After all, a modern nuclear reactor is just a steam engine that uses uranium for heat. A steampunk heater would probably use some form of combustion. Like a fuel which carried it's own oxidizer, like a flare...a whole battery of flares in a closed chamber. Or it could be a liquid or a gas that burns and produces great volumes of gas for a turbine, like an auxiliary power unit on a jet fighter. The fuel to make electricity would be used up quickly, so it would just be used to charge storage batteries. The ship would run on the batteries, using just a few meager watts of power, and it would spend much of its time running without power, like Apollo 13. Such flights would be limited to a couple of days. Larger machines could be built which would have an huge module attached to the spacecraft which would be dedicated to carrying power generating equipment, fuel, and storage batteries. It would be abandoned in space when the crew began their reentry in their small capsule. No sense in making a huge and heavy heat shield for a power module.
[Answer]
The Sun, or another star, is a great source of heat. I propose two solutions for an efficient boiler to generate a steam.
* A rotating boiler in the shape of erlenmeyer flask, with a black base turned to the star. The centrifugal force separates the steam from the liquid water and provides that the water is always in contact with the boiler surface. The disadvantage of this solution is the large gyro moment, which makes it difficult to maneuver the spacecraft.
* A flat black boiler and superheater made of black tubes, both located on the exposed side of the ship. Water and steam mixture is heated, pressure increases, diffusion dissipates a heat. You don't have to worry about phase separation. Steam and liquid water pass to the superheater through the pressure valve. If you control the parameters, you can have a water-steam mixture of 215 Celsius deg. and 20 bar pressure in the boiler, and 215 Celsius deg. and 10 bar pressure of superheated steam in the superheater, perfect for powering your ship's equipment.
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[Question]
[
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gLc0g.jpg)
I am creating an RPG and came across an image that I wanted to base my landscape on. It is shown above. Is it possible for terrain like that to form on Earth (ignore the wildlife)? If it is, how could it form?
By this, I mean two rivers on opposite sides splitting into several small streams and each of those streams emptying into a single waterfall; the streams must meet the waterfall at different parts of it. In addition, small but tall mountains covered with trees must form all around the waterfall. A city could (obviously) be built around that location if it is possible.
Image credit: <https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/58916801>
[Answer]
It seems likely this drawing was inspired by the real Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Photographer: De Agostini Editorial/Getty Images
So, yes.
The Victoria Falls are a result of the Upper Zambezi eroding a gorge from sandstone that had filled cracks in the underlying basalt.
[Answer]
Yes, but it is not easy.
It won't work on earth but it could work on a earth like planet.
everything in the image is possible getting it all in the same place is the hard part.
we have rocks structures like that on earth, they are the product of wind erosion or wave erosion.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bInvh.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WnFg6.jpg)
But you need lighter gravity to get them on that scale.
So what you could have is a what used to be shoreline but the oceans retreated, so likely your world is going through the beginnings of an ice age.
But in the warmer regions you may see something like this, exposed areas that used to be dryer and dominated by wind and/or shoreline erosion, suddenly greening.
Soils are just starting to form and a lot of the greens are lichens and mosses, or aggressive grasses. we don't have enough aggressive greenery for this on earth but it is not a far stretch.
The environment wont last long the same soil forming process that make the plants possible will destroy the stone structures fairly quickly.
[Answer]
What you need a very large river that flows very slowly, as would be the case on a flood plain. This will enable the river to form meanders and oxbow lakes. Then the same arrangement coming from another valley. At the confluence where the two rivers meet to form an even bigger river, there is a large underground limestone layer which has been eroded by water for millions of years leading to the formation of an underground river and cave system that eventually the formation of [dolines](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/doline) and the ground falls away swallowing the river. Lesser cave-ins lead to an uneven surface. As the rivers approach this point they form distributaries because the water flow is slow and stagnant in the run up to the limestone area. These all pour separately into the central cavern.
Karst limestone is also responsible for a number of other formations that might be of interest. In [Plitvice](https://sites.google.com/site/geo121wikisum2012/home/plitvice-lakes-national-park) Croatia the carbonate saturated water has a tendency to crystallise around anything (such as a tree branch) that falls into the water. This leads to the buildup of spectacular series of dams and waterfalls.
[Answer]
Yes, but what would need to happen is quite hard in nature. The rivers probably originated close to each other, because then all the gushing water would slowly erode into separate paths which is quite common. However, the rivers meeting again is quite rare as the meanders that each river has formed will go different ways.
However, in the background there are floating islands which is impossible. Unless there is an INCREDIBLY strong current of wind underneath it's impossible.
] |
[Question]
[
In a series I remember that a group of people were trying to make a colonization ship and they had a big problem: the air. Ships (like every object) aren't perfect and they have micro fissures in the armor or in the edges of two plates of hull and by that fissures the air slowly escape.
By a normal ship it isn't a big problem, because the air losse is very little and they can refill oxygen in other station, but for a colonization ship (who has a travel time of several hundred of years) they can't "refill" air.
I first thought that it was possible but then I remember that I read one time that NASA's fuel tank for rockets are only filled some days before the launching because the pressure of the hydrogen and it's small size were able to go through matter, so the tanks usually lose around 1% of their fuel. Maybe that could also happen with oxygen.
My question is: Is it possible to make an almost perfectly sealed ship? (You can use technology above some centuries) (With ***almost perfectly*** I mean the same air could be inside the ship for several millennia, not the rest of the eternity).
[Answer]
You face a few challenges...
[Cort's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/86921/32987) provides the math for an ideal system. But your system won't be an ideal, sealed, sphere. It will therefore likely outgas faster. In part because it isn't an ideal sphere. And in part because things fail over time.
Case in point. I used to own a high-cost medical device that was sealed. It was rated to be water proof up to about 10 meters. Not that much, really. However, after normal use for a few months, that rating was destroyed. It got wet, it got ruined. Because the seals weakened due to casual wear and tear.
Your station must be able to withstand the general abuse your ship will take. That abuse takes many forms:
* Micro-meteor impacts at your cruising speed.
* Friction wear from cycling open/closed any exit portals.
* Aging parts
* Design faults
* Stresses while under acceleration or as thrust vectors change
Solving these will require multiple approaches.
* Use the best materials and manufacturing techniques
* Design seals in depth, so if one seal fails, another can take the pressure
* Constant monitoring for micro-leaks, so they can be patched before they become mega-leaks
* maybe designing some kinds of self-sealing materials that can flow into and fill any micro-leaks
And all of this must be crazy simple to maintain while under flight. No one can just fly down to your local neighborhood Ship-Mart for spare parts (*Shop smart, shop Ship-Mart*).
I suggest you make at least five independent hulls. Pressurize each to some degree with a high-weight noble gas. Noble gas, because they don't like to react with other things. And partial pressure so that there is less pressure differential between the vacuum of space and the pressure vessel full of people. It wouldn't need to be anywhere near 1 atmosphere pressure. Just enough to help ease the pressure (*pun intended*).
These exterior safety hulls should be designed in some sort of honeycomb grid of cells, so that a rupture to one cell doesn't empty the entire hull. This also greatly increases the structural strength of that hull.
Or you could store water ice in at least one of these hulls, to provide a radiation shield / water supply / hydrogen+oxygen supply as needed.
[Answer]
In a word, no. Perfect seals simply do not exist in the real world. Fortunately, neither do perfect ships. Even if you had perfect seals, you wouldn't be able to cruise the skies for all eternity because you'd eventually break down as you impact small particulate matter. Entropy always wins.
Fortunately, for practical purposes, you can do okay. You mention hydrogen, and hydrogen is indeed quite special. It's far smaller than anything else, and is notorious for doing evil things in high vacuum setups. Normal steel is typically sufficient for most gasses, but hydrogen can diffuse right through it. That's why every vacuum chamber you see is made out of stainless steel (and thus costs more than my house!).
The most important thing you can do is minimize the seals, and minimize thermal effects. Don't have any fancy seals like those which can rotate or which can open. Focus almost entirely on joints like the copper knife-edge seals they use on high vacuum setups. These are joints that feature a knife edge which cuts into a copper gasket to create a very strong seal. These seals are trusted in high vacuum situations, so they should be good for you.
Also, make sure you pay attention to thermal effects. As long as the ship is at relative equilibrium, you won't see too many microfissures.
For some perspective, you can look at the high vacuum community. These aren't the normal vacuums you're used to. Most of us deal with low vacuum, which might bring the pressure down from a normal 760 Torr down to 100 Torr. The high vacuum community likes to operate in the nanotorr region and below. At these pressures (or lacks of pressure), *everything outgasses*. They actually care about this because the tiniest flow in will ruin their experiment. From documentation, one can expect stainless steel to "outgas" at $3\cdot10^{-13} \frac{Torr\cdot Liter}{sec\cdot cm^2}$. This means that you expect gas to flow through the steel at roughly this rate. You can use that number to determine how long the pressure can remain in your ship.
Let's make up some numbers. The ISS has a volume of about 1000 cubic meters (1,000,000L). If we made it a sphere (the best shape for minimizing losses), it'd be about 12m in diameter, so it would have a surface area of about 2000 square meters (2\*10^7 cm^2). Multiplying/dividing these through, along with that constant for stainless steel, and you get $6\cdot10^{-12}\frac{Torr}{sec}$. That's your pressure loss per second. That's $0.000185274 \frac{Torr}{year}$, or $0.185274 \frac{Torr}{millennia}$. If you started with atmospheric pressure (760 Torr), it would take 4 million years to deplete out, using these rough estimates.
You will have better results with larger spheres, so you can easily get into the 10s of millions of years. But it's not perfect.
[Answer]
After reading Cort's impressive answer; I'd offer an alternative, to "nearly" perfectly sealed. Construct a cover that fits over the ship; as close as possible with the constraint of being only two pieces with a single seal between them (as small as possible). Or for practicality, as few pieces as possible with seals as obvious as possible. Make the cover of glass diamond$^1$ and stainless steel. Then pressurize the gap between the cover and the ship to match (or very slightly exceed) the ship's pressure.
$^1$ added: The OP allows future tech; present tech allows us to deposit diamond film and use high pressure to create gemstones; presumably future tech will be able to make pure diamond windows and thick diamond films for the cover described.
The point here is to use some non-toxic commonly available gas (the most common are hydrogen, helium, oxygen, nitrogen, neon, in that order) to pressurize the gap between the cover and the ship wall. Neon is probably your best bet, it is non-toxic and chemically inert, meaning it forms no compounds (unlike nitrogen and oxygen which both form compounds), and has an atomic mass of 20 (vs. 1 and 4 for hydrogen and helium resp.)
As Neon outgasses from the cover, it **can** be scooped up for replacement purposes. This makes it a good "sacrificial" gas, i.e. we may leak neon, but we don't leak our oxygen and other special recipe of gasses inside the ship that sustain life comfortably.
To the extent that Neon ingasses to the interior of the ship; it is non-toxic and we can filter it out for re-injection into the gap (the ship walls can have ports for this; remember only the outer shell needs to have as few joins as possible).
The advantage of the cover is also maintainability; with just a few simple straight seals that are easily accessible, we can mount equipment there to monitor the seals for leakage and fix them with relative ease. Such equipment can operate in a vacuum; the communication can be by magnetic field fluctuation, acoustic or radio wave through the cover without penetrating it. The same goes for other sensory equipment the ship may require, or antennae, lasers, telescopes, dishes, armaments, etc.
Of course the entire outer cover is sacrificial, as well. In the event of damage by space debris it can be repaired; but because it is not pieces bolted together and has no "components" other than the single seal (or a few simple seals) repairs can be hard welds and permanently fused glass melted into place.
In dock near planets the neon gas can be depressurized and re-liquefied for storage (yes, neon of all elements has the narrowest range of temperatures for liquefaction; just a 5.5F degree window, but we have future science on our side!). Then the cover can be detached; perhaps stored in space while the ship heads to the planet surface. Of course the ship would still be constructed to be pressurized itself, and would suffice in an emergency (like the cover being breached by an impact that does not breach the ship's hull); but it can be designed with many components for maneuverability, landing, loading and unloading cargo or passengers and so on.
[Answer]
It just goes to my mind, not sure how practical would be:
How about an additional layer of hull? The gap between both layers can be wide enough to send a robot/a man in a space suit to perform repairs/maintenance. And use of vacuum pumps to gather air back under the internal layer.
[Answer]
The issue is refilling the lost air (and presumably other materials), so what you need is a way to carry sufficient quantities of replacement elements but without adding excessive mass to the ship (which makes engineering more difficult, costs more energy to accelerate, decelerate or make any course changes and so on)
Fortunately, there is a way to achieve this. Since the ship will be in the hard radiation environment of space, you need massive shielding. If the ship is moving at any appreciable velocity, interstellar dust, gas molecules and so on will be impacting the hull and slowly eroding it. So the ship needs to be both massively shielded and have some sort of protective armour in the front to protect against erosion in the direction of travel. The "ideal" shape of the ship would resemble a golf "Tee", with the wide end up front acting as a "wake shield" and a massive cylindrical sheath over the remainder of the ship.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/y0tyB.jpg)
*Typical golf tee*
In order to keep the rest of the mass down. this shielding is made of ice, and serves double duty, both as the shield and as a reservoir of hydrogen and oxygen to supplement the life support system. In the cold of interstellar space, a thin metalized foil cover over the outer surface is probably all the protection you need for the ice. Since water, oxygen and hydrogen are not sufficient in of themselves, the ice is mixed with other frozen "ices", such as methane, CO2, nitrogen and so on, so tapping the ice reservoir provides many important elements for the life support system.
If your recycling is efficient enough, then the amount of mass being drawn from the ice shield reservoir will only be a fraction of the total amount of ice actually available. Drawing the ice from the rear (near where the engines would probably be) doesn't sacrifice the protection over the rest of the ship overly much, and if necessary, some excess heat can be leaked into the hull to allow the ice to "flow" like a glacier to cover or recover thinned out or damaged spots in the protective shield.
[Answer]
Over the long term, materials degrade under environmental stress (and therefore in unpredictable ways). They require endless, regular observation and repair. "Intelligent" materials (e.g. impregnated with nanomachines) or structural integrity systems could automate the job of keeping materials in top shape, provided they have ready access to an unlimited supply of repair material, appropriate infrastructure for removing waste, and the ability to completely maintain and/or replicate themselves.
Assuming the ship structure and materials manage zero gas loss when their state is within some margin of ideal that this system is capable of maintaining, you'd be fine. Even if the structure or materials do permit some small loss in their ideal state, this kind of system (especially nanomachine-impregnated materials) could also enable a kind of active reverse-osmosis by consuming energy to repel escaping gases back into the ship.
Unfortunately excessive damage would still lead to rapid gas loss before the automated maintenance system could repair it, and given enough time such damage is virtually guaranteed. But as others have suggested, replacing the lost gases would make up for it, and a system that already has the infrastructure and materials to fabricate repairs to containment systems could use its resources to generate lost gases as well.
All of this assuming we're within a few centuries of cost-effective, micro-/nano-scale matter-energy conversion, which is probably the only way to solve all of these problems (maybe even just one of them) with a single system.
] |
[Question]
[
Suppose elves were the first humanoid species to appear on a planet and the species evolved naturally over time. They developed magic, sapience, agriculture, and the general concept of a stable society and culture. At some point prior to these elves establishing any semblance of religion or constructing deities, an alien ship
crash lands on the planet. These aliens are ill-adapted to the planet's gravity, but have the means to communicate with the native elves. Between the magic of the elves and the advanced science of the aliens, the two species manage to both alter the DNA of the aliens to make their physical bodies more suitable to the planet's surface (for those aliens who choose to stay) and accelerate the evolution of various other species to produce humanoid lifeforms of typical Dungeons and Dragons lore (humans, dwarves, gnomes, etc.) to build a workforce capable of manufacturing the technology to send the aliens back to space (for those who wish to leave).
**The question:** Within such a setting, where no divine powers have been experienced or developed and the world's wonders can be explained with either the magical might of a naturally-occurring species or the advanced knowledge of an alien species, what curses or exclamations of pain/anger/annoyance might develop in language?
At least in Western culture, many of these exclamations seem to have religious roots (e.g., "Holy cow!", "Oh my God!", "God help us!").
*Answers should indicate exclamations that may be common as well as how they developed as language evolved. Feel free to use exclamations from languages/cultures of modern/ancient Earth, but please justify them as a valid answer. As always, if you have questions, ask away and I will do my best to provide additional detail.*
Conclusion: There have been several fantastic responses to this question. I thank everyone who contributed and I wish I could accept more than one as helpful. To anyone reading this for the first time, please read beyond the accepted answer, as every answer has some merit.
[Answer]
Actually we have multiple forms on Earth as is....French vs English is an easy comparison.
In French, most swearing directly comes from references to church. Tabernac is a French Canadian one that finds its roots in the Tabernacle section of a church. References towards the host, chalice, baptism, sacrament...all fit into French swearing (I should say Canadian French swearing).
English on the other hand…damn and holy tend to work as 'lesser' swears. If you want to get to the heart of English cursing, you get to body parts and body functions. If it spews from you or is a body part that's normally hidden away by clothing, we readily use it as a curse word. To top it off...Sex (one of those things normally kept behind closed doors/clothing) seems to be the source of our fave curse word.
I believe much of its roots is built in shame. English descendants tend to have the shame of their bodies (hide it, cover it up) more-so than other cultures. In French Quebec, their shame is shown within church. But this is speculative of me, though I've had a few people speculate this with me over beers.
So my suggestion for the source of this races curse words is ultimately what are they ashamed? Do they hide their genitalia and sing 'shame shame double shame now I know your boyfriends name!' at each other? If so, the sex and body part nature of cursing might shine through. Do they have certain not so loved ancestors who's names could be screamed in association to pain? Is their a particular task that the lowest of the species is relegated to preform? Do they have a class setup where referring to others as the lowest class possible would be considered insulting? Is there a particular visual trait (big tooth!) that is unappealing? The sources for cursing can be relatively endless really...if they came from a former class system but have lost that class system setup, the reference to the lowest class may still persist as a curse.
[Answer]
Don't need to conjecture. Just look at languages where swearing/exclamations are not primarily religious. In Malay, almost all swearing are non-religious. Modern Malay do have a lot of religious exclamations but there are easy to spot because they're almost all in Arabic (imported via Islam).
Some examples of traditional Malay exclamations:
```
Exclamation Direct Translation Meaning
--------------------------------------------------------
alamak (technically none but I Oh, no
guess the word originated
from "oh mak" which means
"oh my mother")
anak haram bastard bastard
(though interesingly some
people call "situations"
bastard, such as yelling
bastard if you fall off
your bike, so it's not
always used the same way
as in English)
kurang ajar your parents didn't idiot
teach you enough
puki mak your mom's v***** f***
mati la we will die we're dead / god help us
celaka bad luck f***
cantik beautiful cool / excellent / good work
```
Apart from phrases taken directly from Arabic, I know of no exclamations in Malay that's religious.
From what I know of Chinese, I suspect it's mostly the same. But I don't speak Chinese.
[Answer]
The question you might ask is: **Where does swearing come from?**
The answer is typically related to breaking taboo- in cultures that are highly religious then religious terminology should only be used in the correct context, which makes using it elsewhere taboo. Consequently taking it out of context to express your dissatisfaction at how the universe is treating you is a breach of taboo- "if the universe mistreats me, I will mistreat it." Other taboo topics are often sexual or toilet related, things that are considered "dirty".
With this in mind, what might be taboo in an elvish culture? Maybe being in touch with nature they aren't so concerned about the physical, but perhaps there are other matters they don't talk of- if they are elves of the "mostly immortal" type then talk of mortality might be offensive to them- "death's blade" might be an elvish swear in that case. Perhaps there are offensive types of magic ( "necro-jerk" ) that don't get mentioned or creatures that are considered unclean - maybe even just being compared with humans is offensive to them. The better you understand the people and their society, the easier it will be to find what is "unmentionable" in this culture- that is your swearing.
[Answer]
I find that such exclamations have a common thread: they invoke something the speaker has no control over.
From "God help us" to "Rats" to "Crap," the words always reference something that can have an effect the speaker simply can't do anything about.
Such an advanced culture may invent its own exclamations along this line. Given how much trouble we seem to get into with gene splicing in sci-fi, "Blasted splicers!" might be a good exclamation. This might even hold true long after everyone forgot what a splicer was. Exclamations have a tendency to do that.
As someone who is partial to analog signals and Nyquist frequencies, "aliased signals!" would reach expletive status in my vocabulary pretty quickly.
[Answer]
My father always used to say, which I can't find any religious ties to:
**"Fiddlesticks!"**
There are other non-religious exclamations with that aren't used in polite company, s-words, f-words, SOB-isms, etc. Any elvish or alien words for disgusting, uncivilized, or otherwise undesirable things could be used for exclamations.
I would think though, that Elves would be quick thinkers and might exclaim exactly what the situation is so others may know what the issue is; we already know that intelligent aliens can do this:
[Answer]
These I use everyday, and I'm about as nonreligious as they come:
"Well dress me in a tutu and call me a bearded she-dwarf!"
"Ouch!"
"Your mom."
"Wow!"
"Oh, mother."
"Oh boy!"
"Get outta here!"
"Give a second to collect my jaw off the floor"
"Crap."
*Whistles*
"Rats!"
[Answer]
Exclamations, if the language and the psyche of the beings has them, could be based on anything awe-inspiring, or be an allusion to an extreme example of the type of situation that caused such an attention artifact.
Exclaiming **Epsilon Nought!** brings to mind extreme limits, ridiculous ultimatum in some attribute.
One might also bring to mind an impossible paradox or unsolvable problem via a succinct idiom. “Now what would Russell's Barber do with that?”
And don't forget the legendary “εὕρηκα !” which comes from the joy of discovery itself and not any deity or other influence of any kind. So another category might be famous (historical, clever word play) ways of saying something literal like (in this example) “I have found it.”
[Answer]
Since you're mention the importance of both science and magic, typical exclamations might refer to very positive or very negative aspects of these, e.g. (parts in parentheses optional for origin)
* Rad(ioactive)!
* (Abra)kad(abra)!
* (Fu)sion!
* By my wand!
* Three [sigmas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation)!
* Oh, for {quantum, spectral, mana}'s sake!
[Answer]
Curses or swear words tend to come from one of two general sources: references to things that are taboo (in human culture, this usually means sex or excrement), or (disrespectful) references to things that are *respected*. Religious exclamations are generally the latter. So, to replace these, you have to determine, what do your Elves hold in high regard? Since they are magic-users, they might reference the source of magic power instead of a god.
Besides religious figures, other likely objects of respect are figures of authority. For example, the highest English order of chivalry is the Most Noble Order of the Garter. One of the more prominent insignias of the order is a star-shaped pin. This gave rise to the exclamation "stars and garters!" If you have established figures of authority and respect in your Elvish society, you could use them to similar effect.
In English, the excrement- and sex-related terms tend to be considered more offensive than the religious ones, at least in modern times. "Hell" and "damn" are fairly mild, but others are often not even referred to directly. They are commonly replaced with euphemisms, even in mention, like "the f-word" or "the c-word". So, you probably don't want to simply eliminate the religious terms and use these exclusively.
Of course, if you don't like these options, you could always invent your own smegging swears. Any p'tak can do this, but tanjit if it isn't hard to avoid them sounding frelling ridiculous. This does have an advantage, though—if you don't plan to go to all the rutting work of building a whole frakking language for the Elves, then you don't have to zarking explain what "shazbot" and "mee krob" are. Plus, you can just pull them out of your mik'ta, so it's a lot less work, you lazy shizno. Belgium.
[Answer]
A common irreligious fantasy swear is on a body part or object of an authority figure. That can range from the simple "By King Aurthur's Beard!" or "Lancelot's Great Hammer!" to more... *ribald* options. I'm sure your imagination can fill you in.
[Answer]
Although many people focus on bodily functions and religious profanity when discussing English curses, these are not the only sources of exclamations used in everyday speech. Some of the most endearing are mild and inoffensive:
By gum! (to avoid taking the Lord's name in vain, no doubt).
Gordon Bennett! (ditto).
All mouth and trousers
Thick as two short planks
As much use as a cat-flap on a submarine
] |
[Question]
[
If I want to curse my enemy I say the curse to him. As a result, he will become sick and have a lot of bad luck.
However, if he puts his fingers in his ears or uses some kind of earplug, I have to shout to make him hear it.
Personal experience tells me that even the best of earplugs are not perfect sound insulators. We are in a medieval type setting so no electronic noise cancelling is possible.
So, let us assume I meet my enemy and shout my curse at the top of my lungs. There is now a problem. The curse will affect anyone who hears (and understands) it.
**Question**
How can I focus my shouted curse on my enemy without cursing other people in the vicinity. (It is impossible to curse myself)
[Answer]
Say who the curse is directed to as a part of the curse, for example let's say you curse someone to step on a thousand Legos (or anything else, this is just a random and amusing example), you could shout
>
> May you be cursed to step on a thousand Legos!
>
>
>
and anyone who hears it is now cursed, but you could include their name or some other way of identifying them such as
>
> May you, John Smith, by cursed to step on a thousand Legos!
>
>
>
or
>
> May you, that guy with the green jacket and blonde hair be cursed to step on a thousand Legos!
>
>
>
If this doesn't work (as in you can't put an identifier in front, it goes to everyone who hears it regardless) then there is a second way, I assume you can add a condition to the curse? Then add a condition that only applies to them like
>
> May you be cursed to step on a thousand Legos, on the condition that at birth your name was John Smith!
>
>
>
or
>
> May you be cursed to step on a thousand Legos, on the condition that you are the guy I am looking at right now who has a green jacket and blonde hair!
>
>
>
[Answer]
# [Audio spotlighting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmNzf9ztnAk)
If your magic user can somehow replicate this principle then in theory it is possible to send a concentrated beam of sound straight at your target like a laser. Now making the human throat emit a noise of that frequency might be difficult, but hey magic.
If you want a dark take on this, then surgically (as best you can with medieval tech) deafening oneself would be a great way to become immune to curses.
[Answer]
1. You don't care. Yell loud and curse 'em all! After all, that's what they would do to you if they could curse folks.
2. Wait until your target is alone and curse him then.
3. Rassle him and when you get him down, whisper curse in his ear.
4. Megaphone. Point it at your target's head and curse, curse, curse.
[Answer]
If you can't get your target alone, change the spell so that's a bonus.
You can ruin things for your target by cursing everyone but him. You can control a person's whole life without ever touching them with magic.
For example:
Everyone is cursed to think John has too many arms and one of them must be cut off. John is in serious danger.
Everyone is cursed to think Ricky smells like poo. Ricky has a hard time making friends.
Everyone is cursed to think Jane is cursed. They wont trust her with anything important and the blame her for any bad luck.
[Answer]
Quite simple:
The target needs to understand the curse's content and that it's meant for them.
Shout it at someone directly and they'll see it all right. Shout their name and they'll know even when they are in a group. Define them loosely and it'll do the trick ("big guy in red armor"). AoE curses are possible with this.
[Answer]
questions:
* What constitutes sufficient "hearing and understanding" of the curse?
* Can you **previously communicate** with the rest of the guys in the area?
Imagine this scenario:
People who are **listening to something else** while you're speaking the curse can mitigate/cancel the affects of the curse. The rest of the people around you are people who know you and are on your side (e.g. your team mates/underlings), and they know that when you say "It's time" or "Let's get it on" or whatever, you're about to curse. You've instructed them that if they **whistle** to themselves/talk directly next to each other's **ear** while you're cursing, they'll be immune.
Viola! Curse and shout away, just make sure to drink lots of tea with honey afterwards.
[Answer]
Hold up....what if the *words* of the curse, while understandable to your teammates, actually have a different *meaning?*
A good example would be Canadian political speech; they can grievously insult someone with any unaware listeners being completely unaware that someone was just targeted. For example;
"My learned colleague" means "You cheese-eating throwback!" Would someone hearing those words think "Oh yeah, he just got *roasted*" if they didn't even know there was another translation?
A similar mode of expression could allow the curser to seemingly be holding a polite conversation on the battlefield, while in reality, he is barraging people with horrific hexes and cruel curses. And if the enemy doesn't figure out a way to translate this 'code,' they'll never know if they're safe, because nothing says the curse *can't be sent.*
Picture this: the enemy general is told someone has a message for him, he has that person brought in, and when that person reads their message, the general inexplicably dies on the spot. When the enemy investigates, they find what seems to be just a normal letter. Since they can't for the life of them figure out why the general up and died at such an odd time, they figure it was an act of God or a coincidence and let the matter drop.
Eventually, this could lead to people being *extremely* cautious about letters and messages in general, which would of course hamper the effectiveness of intelligence reports.
[Answer]
You must also make direct eye contact with the victim while cursing them. It's not enough to just to say the words you have to look into their soul (via their eyes). That should stop most bystanders from being affected, but leaves open the need to get very close to you enemy to guarantee you don't hit anyone else.
That's also why you can't curse yourself (unless you curse while looking in a mirror).
] |
[Question]
[
In this world, a planet with very dense vegetation (earth-tropical-forest-like) and silica containing soil was attacked by spaceships which fired very high energy laser beams across the planet's entire surface, effectively vitrifying it.
* this planet's outer crust was only soil not solid rock or water, life developed thanks to underground water pockets (10 to 50 meters deep)
* the first 8 to 15 meters of soil (depending on location) were fused into glass
* all vegetation in this depth range was immediately incinerated
* some of the plants used to reach down to 20 or 30 meters underground, and a lot of very resilient seeds were disseminated at these levels as well as volatile seeds in the atmosphere
* all of those plants need sunlight and oxygen to develop, but seeds can stay in cryptobiotic-like stasis for as long as thousands of years
question: Could vegetation plausibly break the surface and grow again, after 1300 years time?
[Answer]
It's highly likely vitrified surface will start cracking in a very short time due to thermal contraction initially, then thermal cycles and, in the long term, tectonic activity.
Vegetation is likely to spread from there, given characteristics you state (seed resilience and root depth, mainly).
Depending on specifics of soil and irradiation process you can have either large placques with deep canyons (more likely on rocky ground, but possible elsewhere, particularly where vitrification is deeper) or finer fragmentation in (relatively) smaller boulders.
In the former case vitrified soil would be very evident even after millennia, while in the latter I suspect vitrified rubble to be completely colonized in matter of few centuries.
Other things to note:
* this vitrified soil isn't "lava like" because it's composition isn't mainly silicates, but it's much more varied.
* "Vitrification" is likely to be covered by a lighter stratus of lighter material, possibly rocky foam containing high quantities of high nutritive substance coming from ecosphere destruction.
* liquid "glass" is likely to be a very fluid lava-like thing, at least at beginning, unlike "true glass", so it's likely to flow filling valley's leaving mountain tops (almost) bare.
[Answer]
We already have examples of glassy ground on Earth: volcanic eruptions can give as an outcome obsidian ground, which is basically basaltic glass.
Weathering and erosion makes it possible for vegetation to grow back on this soil after a few years, following a well established sequence: first pioneer plants, followed by more diverse flora.
After 1300 years is very likely you will have to dig deep to find traces of the vitrified soil (look at Pompei).
[Answer]
I think you could work it out in three ways:
* The water pockets you described, due to the extreme heat, "bubbled" outside throught the melted glass, alongside the dormant seeds, and created craters around which vegetation can easily grow because of deeper soil emerging alongside water.
* Such a violent event is unlikely to result in a smooth and perfectly integer glass surface: there will be cracks in it, cracks that can be widened by regrowing plants.
* You can suppose that the ashes of the previously existing plants gathered in valleys and lower grounds, creading an highly alkaline soil, allowing only specific flora to install on it.
[Answer]
If you ignore the fact (or at least the highly likely possibility) that heat which is sufficient to vitrify 15 meters of soil -- bummer is that hot -- will destroy all life in a depth 30 meters as well (it might not incinerate everything, but that's not necessary, some 50-60°C over a period of several hours or days are entirely sufficient to kill everything except thermophile bacteria)... then yes.
Even without the assumption that the glass will crack naturally (or will be cracked by the expanding heated water), this is quite possible. Nature is a tough and unforgiving bastard with eternal patience.
You can reword your question into one that can be immediately answered: *"Could vegetation plausibly dig through 70 meters of massive rock?"*.
The answer to that is: Yes of course, that's what you can observe in the underground caves below St. Emillion. The city as well as its vineyards is located on top of one huge, huge rock. There exist man-made (well, man-extended) caves below that rock. And sure enough... roots from the above wineyards come through the ceiling. It takes a vine a mere 80-100 years to achieve that, so 1,200 years for something half the distance should be plenty.
[Answer]
The vitrified surface will rapidly crack and start to weather away, in a matter of 100 years of so there will be sand-like material to grow in.
The problem is twofold though.
1. virtually all plants and their seeds will be destroyed. Even if some seeds survives in deep caves, what is the likelyhood that enough of them will sprout in the same location to form viable growth colonies? 1 or 2, or even 50 of a plant is *not enough* to establish a viable new growth, due to utter lack of genetic diversity. Additionaly, most plants require the correct micro-organisms in their soil to live. Bacteria and fungi to process the soil so the plant can actually use it. We need to repopulate not just singular lifeforms, but functional *ecosystems*.
2. The environment will be very toxic to life, for a while.
The initial heat kills all surface life.
The 8-15 meter deep layer of molten material covers *all* of the dry surface of the Earth. It will take **many** years to cool off to safe levels. Several thousands of years, as the only pathway to heat loss is radiation to space (very slow) or absorption into the ground(faster, but sterilizes the ground!). This is not like a volcanic eruption, tht can rapidly lose heat to the cooler environment. In this scenanario **there is no cooler environment left to take the heat**.
In addition, that much heat on the surface will create a *lot* of nitrous oxides, sulphur dioxides, and release a lot of CO2. The surface will become very acidic, and eventually the oceans will too. This will eventually pass as the now-alkaline virtified material breaks down, but now you've wiped out all complex life in the oceans too, even deep oceans, due to acid shock.
I firmly believe that life will return to the surface.
I equally firmly believe that this life will be of the simplest types.
Anaerobic bacteria at first, because they tolerate both the heat and acidity much better.
The deep, rock-eating bacteria will barely notice that anything happened to the surface. But then, they are not exactly sterling examples of complex, active life.
Later some algae, possibly something as complex as lichens.
I would be very surprised if any complex plant, or *any* multicellular creature of any level manages to recover from that.
] |
[Question]
[
The Novikov self-consistency principle states that all changes that occur due to time travel into the past were always part of history, and so the course of events is not changed. While this is useful in explaining away lots of the logical paradoxes that might occur during time travel, it allows for the possibility of causal loops, sometimes known as bootstrap paradoxes.
How would you keep causal loops from happening in a time travel story using the Novikov self-consistency principle? Characters shouldn't just be able to get everything they need from their future selves.
[Answer]
The problem with causal loops is that they only happen because they happen (the fact that the loop happened is all the justification it needs in order to happen). The solution to causal loops is that they *only* happen because they happen. In other words, all you need in order to justify that a loop *does not* happen is that it doesn't happen.
For example, say Bob wants to go back in time and tell himself the critical piece of information he needed in order to defeat the main villain - only problem is, when *he* was his past self, he never received that information. By the Novikov principle, Bob's attempt to go back and convey that information must somehow fail. Perhaps, for example, his time machine breaks down, or his message gets garbled along the way. Or, *knowing* that his attempt will fail - thanks to the evidence proving that it did - he doesn't even try.
The point is, you don't need a *way* to prevent causal loops. Causal loops prevent themselves by not having happened.
[Answer]
The answer is simple you don't have to, the physics, as assumed by Novikov and other authors, takes care of it.
>
> The Novikov consistency principle assumes certain conditions about
> what sort of time travel is possible. Specifically, it assumes either
> that there is only one timeline, or that any alternative timelines
> (such as those postulated by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
> mechanics) are not accessible.
>
>
> Given these assumptions, the constraint that time travel must not lead
> to inconsistent outcomes could be seen merely as a tautology, a
> self-evident truth that can not possibly be false. However, the
> Novikov self-consistency principle is intended to go beyond just the
> statement that history must be consistent, making the additional
> nontrivial assumption that the universe obeys the same local laws of
> physics in situations involving time travel that it does in regions of
> space-time that lack closed timelike curves. This is clarified in the
> above-mentioned "Cauchy problem in spacetimes with closed timelike
> curves",[3] where the authors write:
>
>
> That the principle of self-consistency is not totally tautological becomes clear when one considers the following alternative: The laws of physics might permit CTC's; and when CTC's occur, they might trigger new kinds of local physics which we have not previously met. ... The principle of self-consistency is intended to rule out such behavior. It insists that local physics is governed by the same types of physical laws as we deal with in the absence of CTC's: the laws that entail self-consistent single valuedness for the fields. In essence, the principle of self-consistency is a principle of no new physics. If one is inclined from the outset to ignore or discount the possibility of new physics, then one will regard self-consistency as a trivial principle.
>
>
>
EDIT:
This is in response to a request for clarification of paragraph three above. Firstly, this paragraph is itself a quotation from this paper:
>
> Friedman, John; Michael Morris; Igor Novikov; Fernando Echeverria; Gunnar Klinkhammer; Kip Thorne; Ulvi Yurtsever (1990). "Cauchy problem in spacetimes with closed timelike curves". *Physical Review D*. 42 (6): 1915.
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Their argument can be simplified as follows: if the normal or ordinary laws of physics permit closed timelike curves (CTCs) then this should lead to physical events of a fairly exotic kind, ones we do not see in nature, and that the affect of the self-consistency principle is to ensure this new, exotic physics doesn't occur, and that the physics we see in time travel situations is the same physics we see in non-time-travel situations. They call this a no new physics condition.
This is another one of those tautologies that plague time travel. Novikov self-consistency not only prevents the past from being changed, it also prevents the nature of physics itself being changed.
End EDIT
What follows for time travellers are the following implications (OK, this is also a tautology, but time travel logic is full of them.):
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> **Implications for time travelers**
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>
> The assumptions of the self-consistency principle can be extended to
> hypothetical scenarios involving intelligent time travelers as well as
> unintelligent objects such as billiard balls. The authors of "Cauchy
> problem in spacetimes with closed timelike curves" commented on the
> issue in the paper's conclusion, writing:
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>
> If CTC's are allowed, and if the above vision of theoretical physics' accommodation with them turns out to be more or less correct, then what will this imply about the philosophical notion of free will for humans and other intelligent beings? It certainly will imply that intelligent beings cannot change the past. Such change is incompatible with the principle of self-consistency. Consequently, any being who went through a wormhole and tried to change the past would be prevented by physical law from making the change; i.e., the "free will" of the being would be constrained. Although this constraint has a more global character than constraints on free will that follow from the standard, local laws of physics, it is not obvious to us that this constraint is more severe than those imposed by standard physical law.[3]
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> Similarly, physicist and astronomer J. Craig Wheeler concludes that:
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> According to the consistency conjecture, any complex interpersonal interactions must work themselves out self-consistently so that there is no paradox. That is the resolution. This means, if taken literally, that if time machines exist, there can be no free will. You cannot will yourself to kill your younger self if you travel back in time. You can coexist, take yourself out for a beer, celebrate your birthday together, but somehow circumstances will dictate that you cannot behave in a way that leads to a paradox in time. Novikov supports this point of view with another argument: physics already restricts your free will every day. You may will yourself to fly or to walk through a concrete wall, but gravity and condensed-matter physics dictate that you cannot. Why, Novikov asks, is the consistency restriction placed on a time traveler any different?
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While time travel with Novikov self-consistency apparently allows a seemingly vast array of counter-intuitive situations. Even your future selves cannot prevent what they know happened to themselves from happening. Any path accessing changes to the past will have a probability of zero. Effectively they don't exist and you cannot travel them.
Even if the bad guys blow up your lab, you at a later time who they were, when they planted the bomb, there is no way you can stop it from happening.
The sort of universe this implies is one where a time traveller can go to those points in time where they make them happen as they had or will happen. There is no going back to undo what you did in the past -- or in the future. If you have been to the future and done something, well, that becomes part of your past.
This suggests such zero-probability pathways effectively constitute what Stephen hawking suggested with his Chronology Protection Conjecture.
Source for the above quotations is the Wikipedia entry on [the Novikov self-consistency principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle)
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Conservation of entropy law. Whether matter or information or energy, you cannot come out of a time travel trip with less entropy than when you went in. Kage Baker's books handle this extremely well, although the author never uses the conservation law by name (just refers to "history's shadow"). Anything you tell your past self will be completely forgotten by the time you find the time machine. Any object you take back and leave has no apparent effect on history *as the time traveler knows it* until after the traveler went into the past.
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Some kind of loops will not happen because of entropy. Consider *information*: if you go back in time and give an answer to your younger self, where did the information come from?
The large decrease in entropy over the span of the loop will prevent that particular self-consistent solution from being chosen.
The normal examples given for [Novikov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle) concerns objects that come out smashed and destroyed※. The entropy increases over the passage through the loop. (Or more generally, if you inspect the state later you’ll find no compelling evidence of a miracle; if you didn’t have the area under surveillance you’d determine that nothing happened in that zone that couldn’t occur in a mundane situation.)
It’s **easier** for the loop to not exist! If nobody came from the future to tell you how to go back in time, then you wouldn’t go back in time.
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※ Forward, who you'll recall from the linked Wikipedia article helped Kip Thorne with the calculations, has a dramatic example of it in [*Timemaster*](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/263465.Timemaster):
With an attack impending, the defenders set up a time-delayed pair of wormhole mouths so the ship is resting between the mouths (which face each other).
Later, when the attacker approaches close, a derilect ship pops out of the from-the-future mouth and crashes into the would-be attacker, and then drifts harmlessly past the defenders. The attacking vessel, now disabked by the collision, is deflected *by* the collision such that it is thrown into the to-the-past mouth. The surviving attackers, unable to maneuver now, exit the wormhole and crash into their arriving ship.
[Answer]
It sounds like you want the usual situation to be the self consistent time loop, but under certain extraordinary circumstances you want the characters to be able to change events, perhaps (somehow) to different self consistent loop.
This is very similar to the concept of a [strange attractor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor).
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> In the mathematical field of dynamical systems, an attractor is a set
> of numerical values toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide
> variety of starting conditions of the system.[1] System values that
> get close enough to the attractor values remain close even if slightly
> disturbed.
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I'm imagining a metaphor for the time loop as a ball rolling around in one of various circular valleys. Some are of the valleys are deeper than others. Some valleys are bigger than others. The interesting case would be the valleys that nearly touch another, and so at a key moment it might be possible to make just the right change to switch from one valley to another, and so from one time loop to another.
A planet that orbits around one star in a binary system, and whose orbit is close to the null point between the stars does something like this.
I would use the "sciency" phase "quantum bias" to describe a tendency for the effects of most small changes to not create butterfly effect ripples, but for the odds to usually stack themselves so that even with big choices and big changes, that events will tend to counterbalance and turn out in almost the same way.
The question would then become, "What sort of key point in the time loop is most likely to cause the loop to shift from one to another?". Most time travel stories will have something irrevocable (like a death preventing a birth) be the event that tips things to a different sequence. I think it would be fun if the event was deeply random, causing a Rube-Goldberg-eque cascade of events.
The most obvious solutions to how just the right event could be found (they should be rare) would be either a [quantum artificial intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Artificial_Intelligence_Lab), or someone with a mysterious talent/sensitivity. Or more comically, you could have a "anti-Gilligan" who through dumb luck tends to stumble into the event that will shift the situation to the new loop.
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The most common solution I have seen to this problem is the "many worlds" approach. When you go back in time and change something, rather than change your own history, you create a new, independent timeline where your change was always part of history. So if you went back in history and killed Hitler, you would create a new alternative present where Hitler died, but your own present would remain unchanged.
Another approach that I have only seen occasionally is some sort of self-correcting force in the universe. Basically, a series of coincidences will occur that prevent any attempt at changing history from succeeding.
The first approach makes things very easy, you can do whatever you want, and you may be able to give some other version of yourself a better life, but your own present remains unchanged. The second approach may seem contrived, but if implemented well could make for an interesting story.
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There are three interesting articles ([1](https://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2615), [2](https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2219), [3](https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.0153)) from Seth Lloyd, where he addresses time travelling (and also the grandfather and unproven-theory paradoxes) in quantum mechanics. In the [third](https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.0153), he describes two ways how to send the unproven theory into to the past. He concludes that depending how we try to do it, it is either impossible (zero probability of success - something will fail), or the content of the theory is determined by the rest of the universe. In other words, the actor is not free to send to the past whatever he wants, because what can be successfully sent is already determined by the self-consistency requirement.
I think this supports the most upvoted answer from Reese. The fact that the character is determined to send himself the correct answer back in time does not guarantee he shall succeed. The selection of the self-consistent solutions already navigates around possible paradoxes and this can lead to "strange coincidences". If there is time traveler resolved to kill his grandfather, some strange coincidence must prevent him from doing it. We should not be surprised by that, as there are now [causes in the future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocausality) and requirements on self-consistency at play, so the probability and entropy probably does not work completely as we are used to. The time traveler resolved to send himself the hypothesis thus creating the bootstrapping time-loop can succeed, because it is not self-contradicting. But it should not be surprising if some unexpected random failure or unexpected event prevents him from doing so, because such things probably do happen when time machines are involved.
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A paradox is a temporal gearlock, wherein a system conflicts with itself and must therefore grind to a halt. A causality loop is a temporal perpetual motion machine, and must therefore decay into some lower-energy state at each repetition. The Novikov Self Consistency Principle only holds when the traveler is still moored within time. A method of time travel that unmoors the traveler temporarily, making a bubble of the traveler's subjective present, would circumvent that. Obviously this isn't a terribly hard scifi line of reasoning, but no good time travel story is.
[Answer]
**The Universe is already the sum total of all the time travels to ever happen.**
This is an alternate, more intuitive way of stating that the probability of changing the past is zero. It is zero because the past has *already been changed*. Let's see how this plays out with a few apparent paradoxes. Of course, a chronophysicist will tell you that this is a gross oversimplification, the way the [Bohr model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_model) is for an atomic physicist.
* The inventor of the time machine goes back in time to give their past self the plans
At some point, in a hypothetical not-yet-time-travelled universe, someone invents time travel. The decide that spending decades to do so wasn't worth it, so they travel in the past to give the plans to their young past self who just started working on the problem, creating a hypothetical time-travelled-once universe. The new inventor builds a machine in a few months and decides to go back in time to give the plans to their much younger teenage self, to skip some more years, etc... Until at some point, they went back in time and gave the plans back at the exact time where they received it.
All those previous hypothetical universes don't really exist, only the "final" one does. They are theoretical constructs that help calculating the actual result, not unlike virtual particles in quantum mechanics.
And voilà, you end up with what appears to be a causal loop at first glance, but actually isn't.
* Grandfather paradox redux: after receiving the plans in their youth, the inventor decides to not go back in time and give their past self the plans
This is impossible in the real universe, because it *already happened*. The inventor, or some very convincing fake, already went back in time to give the plans. So if the inventor didn't, then something else did, disguising itself as the inventor. How improbable this is depends on what is going on in the entire timeline from this point - as a rule of thumb, it's not going to happen without a good reason.
So in most cases, it won't be a "final" state. Then, how does the next hypothetical timeline iteration happens? The trick is, the new looping event doesn't have to be the same. Maybe someone else uses the time machine at some point to go back further in time, causing a new event cascade that ends up causing the inventor to not bother with time travel in the first place. Or someone made a genesis bomb, which went back to Big Bang times and scrambled what would become this part of the Universe, causing completely different galaxies to be born.
**Side note: Time travel and the Fermi paradox**: if the Universe allows technical civilisations to build time machines that don't require a receptor (think H.G. Wells' *Time Machine*, instead of wormholes), then it allows for said technical civilisations to reach back to deep time, potentially the beginnings of the Universe, and scramble the constituent parts of their future star systems or galaxies to non-existence - whether by accident or self-destructive action is unimportant. This may considerably limit the probability of existence of such civilisation. The good news is, if the NSFP applies, you already live in a universe where your civilisation don't retroactively wipe itself out of existence! Lucky you. Though it may mean your civilisation is probably not going to discover those time machines at all.
So hypothetical timelines will keep modifying until one is reached where its own time travels cause its own events - and this is what actually happens. What looks like a strap-on causal loop is actually the first consistent timeline that could have existed in the first place.
* Causal oscillations: timeline A causes timeline B, timeline B causes timeline A
Alice and Bob play Heads or Tails. Alice says Heads, and Bob reveals that it was Tails. But Alice is cheating: she uses a time machine to tell her past self the result. So what actually happens is that she says Tails. Bub Bob is cheating: he changes the result depending on what Alice says. So what actually happens is that he reveals Heads. But then, it means Alice actually told her past self that it was Heads...
In reality, the oscillation are never perfectly stable. Hypothetical timeline 1 is not quite the same than hypothetical timeline 3, even if in both cases, Alice and Bob choose the same faces in both. Those variations will at some point break the loop and end up with a stable timeline.
**What it means for time travellers:**
It is not that time travellers cannot change the past, so much that they did already.
While there are what looks like strap-on causal loops, they are actually the natural result of time travels to happen during the existence of the Universe.
And while there may very occasionally be events that look causally inconsistent (that is, caused by the arrival of a time travel that doesn't seem to happen at its supposed departure spacetime), this is caused by a mistake on what is actually the cause of the event (the actual departure spacetime). Note that this can be weaponised: you can change the past (or future) as long as you are not certain what actually happened. This may imply deception of your past self, so an event you think actually happened (preventing you from changing it) did not in fact happen (so you can change what did happen).
Harder to identify but present nonetheless are events that should be more common than they are, like time travel WMD. Those are events that could later cause themselves to not happen, which by nature will proportionally decrease their actual probability.
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[Question]
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In the modern-day military use of dogs in combat is fairly limited; the United States Armed Forces has about 2,500 "working dogs" serving, compared to the 1.2 million active humans (1:480).
The goal is to increase the number of "working dogs" drastically (>= 1:50) by changing factors relating to the animals and their roles.
Assuming that we can handwave some impressive biological technology to create a superspecies, and be very liberal with the term "working dogs," assume there exists technology to create a creature with combination of traits (and only the traits) known to exist in modern or historic canines, vulpines, or felines.
Could the intended ratio be achieved? Would this significantly alter warfare on any level (logistics to field operations)?
[Answer]
Your ratio of dogs to personnel is a little misleading. It is relevant to note that there is pretty much no use for dogs in the Navy and Air Force. There are 460,000 + 182,000 = 642,000 active duty personnel in the Army and Marine Corps.
Furthermore, most of the Army and Marine Corps are flabby support personnel (dirty POGs). To get a semi-reasonable count of the units that can actual do fighting (not counting air units who don't have much use for dogs either) lets count up the [Brigade Combat Teams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigade_combat_team) for the Army. For the Marines it is more complicated because the relationship between MEF, MEB, and MEU is not fixed, but we will try to sum the strength of the [Ground Combat Elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_combat_element).
For the Army, there are 32 brigade combat teams at a strength of 4400 soldiers each for 140,800 actual soldiers. Estimating 73 battalions at 900 Marines in the 4 Marine Divisions combined, we get 65700 Marines. This means a total of 140,800 + 65,700 = 206,500 total actual combat troops. Taking your number of 2500 working dogs the ratio is more like 1:83; a lot closer to your target.
To close the gap, the only thing we need is a bit of culture change. From conversations with several brothers/college roommates who have been infantry officers in both Iraq and Afghanistan, everyone wants more dogs.
First off, Iraqis are generally terrified of dogs (see [Abu Ghraib](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse#/media/File:AbuGhraib13.jpg)). So there is that.
Second off, when there are bad guys in a building, and you want them dead, but there are women and children in the mix, dogs are a great option. They are trained to go after people with guns, so they are much less likely to kill women and children (especially compared to, say, artillery).
Third, after I expressed incredulousness at the notion that dogs are so effective as manhunters, my friends informed me that guerilla fighters are generally unprepared to deal with a dog. They don't wear protective clothing (camo with tough fabric is a big help if you are being bitten), they don't have training in hand to hand (or hand to dog) combat, and since they are fighting soldiers, they tend to have guns instead of knives. Guns, however, are much less useful than knives in a small room with a 120 lb German Shepard hanging on to your arm.
In any case, consider that anecdotal, but if your army is primarily into anti-insurgency warfare dogs are a pretty good deal, no genetic engineering required. If the generals actually listened to the JOs (or, heaven forbid, the NCOs) there would probably be more dogs around already.
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Your biggest limiting factor is actually going to be training/handlers.
For example [anti-tank dogs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog) were a thing! But because the training fell short, in practice they ended up getting scared and running back to the trenches, blowing up its allies instead of enemy tanks (though, I kinda feel they had this backfire coming for even attempting it)
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> Out of the first group of 30 dogs, only four managed to detonate their bombs near the German tanks, inflicting an unknown amount of damage. Six exploded upon returning to the Soviet trenches, killing and injuring soldiers.[3] Three dogs were shot by German troops and taken away, despite furious attempts by the Soviets to prevent this, which provided examples of the detonation mechanism to the Germans.
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You will need a reliable way of training these dogs, make sure they remain loyal/on duty during a mission, and remain coordinated with their handlers (which will be the hard part. You either need the dog to be reliably autonomous or restrict their actions to remaining near the handler.) In war, the more variables you introduce, the more likely a mission is to fail. So you really just need these dogs to be about as reliable as the soldiers they work with. (depending on their reliability, they can either make or break your army. like the anti-tank dogs)
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Why dogs?
* They scare unarmed people. Dogs are useful for crowd control and prisoner control.
* They assist scouts.
* They can be trained to detect explosives, drugs, etc.
* They guard installations.
If you want serious growth in numbers without the "handler bottleneck" identified by Tezra, get more installation guards. One private can feed dozens of dogs in a kennel. And if they can roam freely in the area between two fences, there is no need for trained handlers.
But that is probably not what you wanted. The goal would be to get one dog into each rifle platoon or rifle squad ...
* Find a breed that will fit onto a mostly-human "pack" without fuss and accept a place at the bottom of the pecking order. It must accept that a soldier fresh from the replacement depot outranks the most senior dog.
* It must be clever enough to accept orders like "attack anybody in that house" or "find out if there is anybody in that house, then report back" and to communicate the result to any squad member.
A dog that can work without dedicated handler.
[Answer]
**Historical Examples**
Note that there are some tales of dogs of their own accord helping soldiers in war. One case, a dog got angry and ran into the enemy German's machine gun nest. It was actually shot by the machine gun a few times, too. The Germans ran out and surrendered as soon as the dog got in (which indicates they didn't put up much of a fight). You also of course had the many rescue dogs who looked for wounded soldiers and helped them back to camp.
The other major historical example of a war dog is to chase down fleeing enemies, in order to attack them from behind and inflict casualties.
**Armoured Attack Dogs**
You could start armouring the dogs like the samurai did for their hunts, then try to breed some variety of dog so aggressive it will attack the enemy even when artillery and gunfire is going on (and hope it doesn't use that aggression against you...). Dogs would not be bad trench clearing companions, if they would stick close to you and perform under such high stress, many do not have that gumption.
**Selection**
Realistically, you would not only a lot of effort put into the breed, but then to select the dogs that demonstrate the necessary loyalty and bravery and aggression. It would be a pretty questionable investment, compared to spending that on equipment and training of more men. The real advantage to dogs is they're cheap, so making them expensive is counter intuitive.
**Cheap Strategy, Animal Farms**
A cheap strategy would just be to take an aggressive breed of dog, or leopard or whichever, and raise whole families of them on your military bases and defensive lines. When intruders come around and cause trouble, the animals (if you select highly territorial examples) may instinctively start sneaking up on the enemy and killing them any chance they get, causing attrition (leopards are scary good at that).
**Machine-Gun Dogs**
You could consider higher tech methods, like adding machine-gun drones to the backs of dogs. One of the issues we have with drones is navigation of the environment, a dog smart enough to go near where the enemy is could give the drone a line of fire. That does come with the issues of jamming, miscommunication, mistaken identity, and EMPs that drones come with, of course. Plus the issue of a dog running around with a machine gun which may just glitch out and start killing civilians or friendlies.
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In Heinlein's Starship Troopers, the Mobile Infantry had neodogs, which were a biological uplift "superspecies" of military working dog with the ability to speak human languages (more or less) and a much increased intelligence. (Their breed name was 'Caleb'.)
A neodog was typically paired with a human partner and the two shared a deep psychological (possibly even psychic?) bond that enabled the two to work extremely well together, but made the loss of one partner almost impossible to bear for the survivor. Anyway, they're not mentioned all that much in the book, but they were essentially used as scouts, where the dog's superior senses and hardiness were most useful. I could easily see extensions of this role to include:
1. LRRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol): They might operate in packs without human support, or with one or two human partners to provide additional direction and supervision. Their biggest logistical advantages would be if they could operate without humans, since dogs would presumably be much better able to survive and perform at peak capacity in wilderness conditions, forage more easily (and require less food), move more stealthily, move more quickly without vehicular support, and so on. Roaming dog packs might also arouse less suspicion if seen by enemy troops.
2. Special Hazard Duties: Depending on their modifications, these neodogs might also be trained for special duties that are extremely hazardous to humans, like demolition and mine/IED detection and disposal, navigating paths through minefields, clearing trenches and caves (as they were used in the island campaigns of WWII).
3. Force Protection: Neodogs would be ideal sentinels, as they have superior hearing and sense of smell to humans and better night vision, and perhaps greater stamina and less likelihood of falling asleep or getting bored/distracted while on patrol.
4. Combat Search and Rescue: Dogs are already used for this now, and a more intelligent dog could be presumed to be even better, following more complex orders and better able to detect and evade enemy patrols for, say, extraction of downed pilots or wounded soldiers caught behind enemy lines.
5. Guerrilla Operations: Fast moving, harder-to-detect, vicious attack dogs prowling the forests and penetrating deep behind enemy supply lines to attack and kill at random might produce a demoralizing effect that is far outsize of the actual material damage they do.
6. Couriers: There may be times when it is impossible or perilous to deliver messages or parcels via technical means (heavy jamming, enemy has broken your encryption, enemy air superiority or ambushes make convoys unlikely to survive). Since dogs are faster than a human on foot and more stealthy, and a much smaller and quieter target than vehicles, they might perform this role admirably even over extensive rough terrain.
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I recall a co-worker telling me about his time in the (first) Gulf War. His duty was to guard a plane and he spent the shift walking around it. He recalled that when the temperature reached a certain point, the dogs would be taken in, as they can’t handle that heat.
That might be why (as related by kingledion) Iraqis are generally terrified of dogs: they are not common there.
So a significant factor in using dogs would be to have a theater of operations in a region where the climate was suitable for dogs to live.
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[Question]
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For my current world, I have a continent whose countries were brought together into a single, massive empire. After the death of the last emperor, the central imperial authority crumbled and the constituent regions continued their association through the formation of a federation.
Each region, prior to the rise of the empire, was ruled by an absolute monarch whose title came via inheritance. The central imperial authority allowed the monarchs to continue to govern if they swore allegiance to the emperor. The imperial authority also decreed that each and every monarch must have training in the use of magic. This requirement has persisted to the modern day in the kingdoms of the federation.
My issue is, I can't think of a single, dominant reason for which this condition would be mandated and continue to persist after the fall of the empire.
What would be so widespread to apply to every part of a continent and persistent enough to last for at least a millennium that would require and perpetuate the need for rulers to be trained in the use of magic?
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A few notes:
* Magic in this world is not a common thing.
* Those who can use magic are mostly of low power, such as struggling to light a candle.
* There is no common or well-known manner in which to influence others via magic.
* The continent is about the size of North and South America combined.
* An abundance of magical creatures did not exist until long after the formation of the empire.
* The ability to use magic is not genetic, but the limit of one's power is.
[Answer]
The biggest single thing to keep it going would be it is a symbol of power. Kings learn and perform magic. This likely has become an expectation even for the masses. If their king can't perform any magic then 'we need a new king who does!'. This might also work into a 'strong' king to protect their own countries. Even if all the king can do is light one candle with extreme effort.
Even small acts that no one else can do can add to the mystique of power and the right to rule. Being able to light a candle without flint and steel can be very useful too!
Now why would it be mandated by the empire in the first place? My best guess would be they control the magic school, they can know the strengths and weaknesses of the ruling kings and can control what is learned. Those that are very powerful, (or might be) are either recruited to be strong allies or quietly put down and blamed as an accident that happened during class. Magic is dangerous you know...
Also while 'teaching' the children of the kings the empire is 'protecting' them and indoctrinating them. Since as the next king, you wouldn't want anything to happen to them would you...
[Answer]
## The art of empire building by negotiation
A small kingdom, watching in dread as the empire steadily take over their neighbours until one day the imperial ambassadors approached the gates of the castle with a choice.
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> Join the empire and we offer peace, protection, *magic*, and free trade across our lands. You remain king you run your kingdom as you always have and all you have to do is pay your taxes and provide men to the imperial army. Decline our offer and these ten thousand orcs [riding bears](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38502/would-a-bear-cavalry-be-feasible/) will encourage you to change your mind.
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(This is thought to be approximately how the Aztec empire expanded, minus the orcs and bears)
While the empire stood the client kings were all trained in magic as a gift to their lines, and a way of getting the heirs to the thrones trained and indoctrinated at the capital of empire. When the empire fell centuries later the kings maintained their magic as a sign of their right to hold power.
[Answer]
I think there's a missing factor in these answers: **prejudice**. The world runs on it. In your setting, the people just view magic users as inherently superior, for whatever reason (shouldn't be hard to justify).
The conquering emperor is also prejudiced, like everyone else, so s/he insists that the higher ranking officials in the empire must be magic users. Otherwise, they would be unworthy of leadership. The prejudice is self-reinforcing: once people get used to it, they'll automatically reject non-magical kings as unworthy.
Plus, as you said, magic is rare and difficult, so magical kings wouldn't be a threat to the central authority.
[Answer]
**Divine Patronage**
A religious aspect could give your world a very different feel. It might not be what you are going for, but I think that it is still worth mentioning.
Magic could be, or could at least be thought to be, the mark of a deity's favor. The empire therefore requires that any rulers they have can demonstrate that their reign is sanctioned by the empire's deity. After all, what better way to ensure the deity's blessing of the land than to put one of their favored ones on the throne?
This would most likely prevent those who are particularly weak in magic from being considered as heirs to the throne regardless of their lineage. Given that magical capacity is genetic, rulers would probably want to ensure that their spouse is also magically gifted to give their children the greatest likelihood of being able to inherit the crown after them. To maximize their chances at proving that they have the deity's blessing, all possible heirs would need to be rigorously trained in magic. Disagreements regarding the ascendancy might even be resolved by a magical duel, because surely the one the deity prefers will be the victor!
This isn't to say that lineage needs to be meaningless next to the importance of powerful magic, though. It would most likely be a mix of both, at least partly because only the relatively wealthy could afford to have their children trained in magic in the first place.
Dominant religions can be quite long-lived (as shown by a number of real-life religions that have lasted thousands of years), so this social structure could possibly last the required millennium once it's taken a strong hold. If the deity involved is genuine and at least somewhat active, then it would be even more likely.
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## As a safeguard against meddling wizards
You say "those who can use magic are mostly of low power" and "there is no common or well-known manner in which to influence others via magic," but this doesn't rule out the possibility that there are a very few powerful magicians, and that with the appropriate arcane knowledge they might be able to influence others. If one such individual were to show up at a royal court and start wielding their subtle powers, who knows what damage they could do?
Perhaps at the time of the Empire a great king had recently come under the spell of a nefarious sorcerer and committed terrible deeds; perhaps it's something people have been superstitious about ever since. Then the emperor and the people alike would feel safer knowing that their monarch was trained in the use of magic. They might not have the power to defeat a powerful conjuror, but at least they would be in a better position to realise that magic was being used against them.
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There are a variety of reasons for a central body wanting to instil certain attributes into those they control.
**Defence**
Presumably the Empire want to make sure their chosen king remains alive so they don';t have to go through any nasty succession business that might have a destabilising effect. To that end making sure your kings have enough magical training to detect and defend against hostile magical attacks is just sensible. Perhaps the Rebellion are all magic users that want to depose the puppets of the Empire. The empire knows this and wants their kings to have defences of their own (much like training relatives of high-value individuals in self defence or kidnap survival tactics). Even a magic user with the ability to make a tiny spark can burn down a castle unless the King knows of such tricks...
**Strength**
The empire derives its strength from the strength of it's vassals. If the king is deficient in any area it exposes the Empire to attack, and also prevents them from ordering magical acts of retribution against the citizens of the Kings land. If the king has magical training he is seen as stronger and more likely to be able to enforce the will of the Empire (this might prove to be a false assumption, but in the minds of the empire it makes sense)
**Communication**
The Empire uses Palatiphones to communicate. Only those with a decent grasp of magical theory can hope to master the intricacies of the Palantiphone's user interface (those without magic just get Coldplay on a loop). The Empire will only entrust certain information to the kings: therefore the kings must be magic users in order to communicate with the Empire.
**Bureaucracy**
The Empire expects that a king must be able to effectively pre-empt his subjects and thus govern them wisely. In their eyes a ruler can't understand magic users without having some training, thus he has to be rubber stamped through his Magic 101 class so he has the right 'perspective'. Given the ruler this could be taken seriously or simply taken as a bit of a joke.
**All of the above**
The Empire could have put this policy in place for a mix of all of the above reasons. Perhaps they needed kings with some extra clout to crush the rebellion, and then need to make sure their vassal kings are well defended enough to survive any magical coups and confident enough with their Palantiphones to call for Imperial help when needed..
Of all of the reasons though I favour the Palantiphone. It's the most consistent with a large empire. Plus I love the idea of Aragorn calling tech support.
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Any of a number of conditions leap to mind.
**Magical Source**
The imperial lineage claims privileged access to a source of unspeakable magical power. Kings who accept their condition of fealty are granted limited access to the same source. In order to demonstrate the point, kings must have elementary training in magical practice, provided by imperial wizards.
**Magical Weakness**
In order to perform real magic one must grasp one's own true name, in somewhat the same fashion as the Wizard of Earthsea. Everyone has such a name, but only those trained in magic can truly understand or use it. But unfortunately, using that name also makes you vulnerable to certain sorts of very subtle and elegant name-magic -- such as the sort practiced by the Emperor's magical assassins.
**Flow of Benefit**
In somewhat the same vein as the first case, the king is understood to be the local source of fertility and prosperity, which ultimately radiates from the Emperor. Since every king practices a form of magic that is recognizably imperial, having been trained in it by the imperial wizards, it's clear to even the dimmest bulbs that the king is not in himself primarily responsible for peace and prosperity, but the emperor.
**Flow of Force**
The flip-side of the same coin: the king's magical power is used ritually in certain legal instances, e.g., ordination of judges, executions, opening of the annual High Court, etc. The use of imperial magic on such occasions demonstrates that the law is ultimately underwritten by the Emperor, from whom radiates impartial justice. This also suggests that if the king administers justice corruptly, his power will fail -- and with it his life.
**Metaphor and Metonymy**
In a world where magic works, all of these things can be literally true as well as metaphorically so. One demonstration of magic by the king can stand in for the power of the Emperor. If a king is essentially ordained by the Emperor, through a magical rite that also opens the king's third eye and enables him to perform at least simple magic (with training, anyway), then it's also possible that the Emperor can take that power away, in which case the people (local lords, etc.) will have clear grounds for legitimate regicide.
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**A need for instantaneous, long distance communication between kings**
You didn't specify what "magic" is very strictly, but if it were to include the ability to communicate across long distances telepathically (or otherwise) then that would be a very compelling reason for kings to learn how to use magic (and perhaps magic is a general skill such that, if you know how to use this telepathy magic, it is not much of a stretch for you to use other magics as well).
Instead of kings, you could perhaps just have scribes or diplomats trained in this magic. But that would be akin to kings sending each other messages through interpreters rather than having a direct conversation. Cutting out the middleman is quicker, more personal, less likely to cause misunderstandings, and better able to quickly defuse tense situations (see the "Red Telephone" Moscow-Washington hotline for a real world corollary).
You mentioned that this training should be *mandated*. If the king is an absolute monarch in a sovereign country then you can hardly mandate him to do anything. But if he's under some constitutional or legislative jurisdiction then it might be required of him because of the communication benefits, or simply because it is something that has come to be expected from kings due to the empire's legacy.
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Imagine that you lived in this world:
* The planet has a diameter of 5000 km.
* The rotation time is the same as the orbital period.
* And here it comes: the orbital period is 1027 years.
* The planet's orbit is similar to Pluto's, only much more elliptical.
* For just over 30 days, the planet is in the inner solar system, and then runs away to the distant darkness for 1026 years.
I wonder if this would be possible, and whether the planet could get so far from the sun without escaping it entirely?
And here comes the predictable question: **Could there be life on such a planet?**
I don't ask life like on Earth, of course: It would be adapted to darkness, and able to survive in very low temperatures. Still:
* In outer space, over so many centuries, the temperature gets *really* low.
* Could a species accustomed to the darkness possibly adapt to the light and heat of the sun for a few days?
* Could they have somehow developed a technology that "captured" the heat from the brief time near the sun, and would store and release it over 1026 years?
I know, it probably sounds very unrealistic, but I'd really like to see if something like this could be plausible.
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Life growing on such an unusual planet would certainly reflect its orbit. There would be virtually no movement during the cold period. During the summer "month," life would have to reap all of the energy it can, and then lie dormant again.
There are shorter term examples of this extreme seasonal behavior on Earth. There are plants growing in the Australian Outback which leave their seeds dormant for years, waiting for the rains. They don't respond to the first rain in a year, they respond to the second. This indicates an unusually "wet" year and signals a good time to grow.
During the summer, the flora would be extravagant, using all of the energy they can to further their existence.
Interesting things could form near cracks if you have a warm core, but I'm guessing you're interested in a cold core.
I would not be surprised if you saw life find an alternative method of evolution besides simple sexual and asexual reproduction. The long periods in the cold would be rough and creatures waking up would need to "inventory" their genetic code for mistakes over the years. Creatures which can identify and spread genetic material faster stand a better chance of survival.
I would also expect species which defy categorization along Earth lines. In the cold, spores would fare the best, an isolated multitude of genetic copies. As the spring arrives, plant-like life would flourish, getting a head start on the rest of the ecosystem. As summer arrives, animal life would flourish (especially short lived creations like Mayflies). In the fall, the plants would gather energy for one last hurrah, showering spores across the planet.
Given how strong such evolutionary forces would be, I would not be surprised to see species which rely on all three forms of life: ten centuries waiting as spores, just to wake up in the spring and attempt to gather all of the energy they can. In the summer, they would go under a transformation to get a head-start on evolution: they would spawn a multitude of Mayfly like animals whose entire purpose in life is to "discuss" the genetic viability of the plants that spawned them and identify what the next "crop" will contain genetically. They would then "polinate" their host plants and ceremoniously die by walking into a honeypot trap to be turned into the raw materials needed to spew billions of spores across the sky. The plants would then die off as the next winter begins, and the planet would lie in wait.
Of course this is just one exotic answer. The joy of inventing a planet like your is that you have limitless options as to how things can evolve. Your imagination is the limit.
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The orbit you describe is typical for (moderately) [long-period comets](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet#Long_period).
Given the desired orbital period, we can calculate the [semi-major axis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-major_axis) of the orbit (which, for a highly elliptical orbit like this, is approximately half its maximum distance from the star) using the formula $$T^2 = \frac{4\pi^2}{GM}a^3,$$ where $T$ is the orbital period, $a$ is the semi-major axis, $M$ is the mass of the star (the mass of the planet is assumed to be negligible in comparison) and $G$ is the [universal gravitational constant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant). However, if we assume that the planet is orbiting a star of about the same mass as our Sun, and if we measure time in years and distance in [AUs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit), we can take a shortcut: we know the Earth orbits the Sun in one year, with a semi-major axis of one AU, so we must have $a=1$ when $T=1$. The constant of proportionality thus simply becomes $1$, and we're left with $a = T^{2/3}$. For $T=1027$ (years), this works out to $a\approx 101.8$ (AU), so our hypothetical planet gets no further than $2a\approx203.6$ AU from the Sun.
This is beyond the classical [Kuiper belt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt), but much closer to the Sun than the [Oort cloud](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud), which is believed to be the source of most long-period comets. It is also closer to the Sun than several recently discovered "detached objects" such as [90377 Sedna](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90377_Sedna), which are believed to have relatively stable orbits. Your planet thus remains well within the Sun's gravitational well, and is at little risk of being scattered by passing stars. (Well, at least as long as they don't pass *too* close, in which case we could all be in trouble anyway.)
There is a problem, though.
Your planet might be safe and stable as long as it's far away from the Sun, but as soon as its orbit takes it into the inner solar system, it's going to occasionally pass close to to the planets already there, and thus be affected by their gravity. Such interactions could have many possible outcomes, but the statistically most likely one (at least in a solar system similar to ours) is a close pass with a large gas planet like Jupiter, which will either fling the "comet planet" straight out of the system, or, more likely, kick it into a shorter-period orbit that will keep it interacting with the other planets in the system until it gets ejected from the solar system, collides with the Sun or one of the planets, or (least likely) get captured into a stable near-circular orbit.
So, to keep our hypothetical planet safe, we really should clear the solar system of any inner planets that might disturb its orbit. Fortunately, that might not be so implausible — something obviously caused our planet to end up in that highly elliptical orbit in the first place, and it's not altogether implausible that the same something (which could've been, say, another star passing *through* the inner solar system) might have also conveniently swept the system clean of any inner planets in more conventional orbits. (Indeed, our planet might well have been one of those, before it was scattered into its new eccentric orbit.)
OK, so we've got the orbit stabilized. What about the climate?
First of all, let me note that there's absolutely no reason to expect a planet with an orbit like this to be [tidally locked](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking), and certainly not to a 1:1 resonance like you suggest. On such an eccentric orbit, the planet would feel almost no tides at all for most of the time, and would only experience a single tidal nudge every time it passed close to the Sun. If anything, if it locked at all, it should therefore lock to a rotational speed approximately matching its orbital angular velocity near perihelion. But I suspect it just wouldn't lock at all, but would simply retain whatever rotational period it originally started with.
So what's the weather like? Well, for most of its orbit, this planet is going to be so far from the Sun that it might as well be in interstellar space — the Sun will just be the brightest star among many in the sky. Without any significant heat from the Sun, any seas the planet may have will all but freeze solid, and even the atmosphere will freeze and snow down. In general, the surface of such a planet seems pretty inhospitable for life, or at least any kind of life as we know it.
That said, if the planet is large enough, and possesses a massive rocky core, it's possible that the bottom layers of the oceans might stay liquid due to [geothermal heat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget) (from trapped primordial heat, and from decay of radioactive elements in the core). Such a subglacial ocean could potentially support life, even if the available [free energy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life) would likely be orders of magnitude less than that on Earth's surface.
Thus, we might expect any life on such a planet to be aquatic, and likely to cluster around [hydrothermal vents](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent) at the bottom of the ocean, like some deep-sea ecosystems do on Earth. Generally, I would not expect life under such conditions to evolve very fast, but in science fiction, even unlikely events are still possible, and so of you want to postulate advanced, even intelligent life to have evolved under such conditions, I'd be happy to suspend my disbelief.
To such an ecosystem, living under a kilometers-thick blanket of ice, safe from to freezing cold of space, would be the norm. The rare and brief passes close to the Sun, if felt at all beneath the thick ice blanket, would be abnormal and catastrophic events: suddenly, scorching rays of heat blast down from what's normally the coldest part of the world, melting the ice and upsetting the ocean circulation.
Of course, any life that did survive such events would eventually adapt to them, but they couldn't possibly be easy on any hypothetical subglacial civilization on your world. Then again, that could make for an excellent story...
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There would be a big problem with life on such a world. As Cort Ammon says it's quite possible for life to survive in such an environment. Evolving is another matter, though. Single cell life will survive it as it generally can take being frozen. Multi-cellular life is another matter--I don't think there's anything that can survive that kind of cold other than in a totally dormant state (seeds, spores etc.) and multi-cellular life isn't going to start out that way. Thus you have an uncrossable evolutionary chasm.
The only way I see to have non-microbial life on such a world is if it started out as a terrestrial world and it's orbit slowly got stretched--enough time for plants (and conceivably even egg-laying animals) to adapt.
Note, also, that such an orbit (and it's months of sun, not days) means life spends almost all it's time in the dormant state, it can only evolve during the warm periods. It's going to evolve *VERY* slowly. While it has billions of years of orbiting it's star it will only evolve like it's been millions--you will not see any major changes from whatever life looked like before the orbit got stretched.
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*Could there be life on such a planet?* Yes, of course. Something worth researching, if you're ever looking for inspiration, are [Extremophiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile) and [Tardigrades](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade).
Extremophiles are species which are adapted to extreme environments, whereas Tardigrades are capable of surviving in extreme environments, but are not adapted to them.
There are a lot of options here; you could have a species which freezes itself for the 1026 years, only to reanimate shortly before the sun cycle. There are many species of insects which appear only shortly (a few days) during a season to breed and reproduce; you could have something similar where they use the coldness of space to hibernate or suspend animation until the warmth comes back around.
On the flip side, what if the species are adapted to the cold, surviving off of minerals on rocks and good ol' natural selection, but are *unable* to withstand the 30 days of warmth? Every 1026 years they would either have to burrow closer to the cold core (assuming a cold core) to hide from the heat / UV of the sun.
*>> Could they have somehow developed a technology that "captured" the heat from the brief time near the sun, and would store and release it over 1026 years?*
The first thing this makes me think about is how the warmth of the 30 days would react with a normally cold planet.... Let's say the surface is dry; only rocks and minerals. But let's say there's water beneath the surface, but frozen (obviously). During 30 days of warmth, depending on how **sudden** the warmth comes on, it could cause cracking / shifting on the surface, releasing springs of water or pressure from beneath the surface to crack open.
And that's essentially how we generate electricity (take coal, pound it into talcum powder, ignite it in an enclosed space, filled with water pipes. When the water turns to steam, the pressure triggers a valve which pushes the steam through a turbine, inside of which is a magnet and copper wires - hence, electricity). A planet with plenty of minerals (copper, magnets, chemicals, etc), but lacking water, could use released pressure from inside the surface to "capture" the energy as electricity, storing it in fuel cells.
If electricity generation is a bit straight-forward; if you're looking for something more "magical", then what about capturing light? Definitely a bit beyond what's currently considered "plausible", but perhaps they found a way to trap the visible light (or UV) from the 30 days in containers (think an orb which is a one-way mirror; after the light gets in it cannot get out). As such, they could "release" the energy / light over 1026 years, but it would be a treasured resource.
In any case, I don't think you're outside the realm of what's plausible. Half the fun in making planets is making things beyond what we would normally think.
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Note: I used the software Universe sandbox2 to get the numbers used in my answer.
Suopposing a planet about the size of Earth having an orbital period of more or less 1027 years around a sunlike star, it would be at 15 billion kilometres or 102 AU from the star. That is very far. You are still considered in the star system but it's too cold to have liquid water. In this test I used an orbit that was almost a perfect circle, but it gives a good idea of the situation. With an ellipse, the planet would be further away. How close and how far can it go, I don't know for sure but the coldest is too cold for life as we know it.
Other form of life could sustain the cold temperatures but if there is a large temperature difference between the hottest and coldest points, life might not be possible.
More about exotic form of life: [Is it possible for life to evolve on planets without water?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1029/is-it-possible-for-life-to-evolve-on-planets-without-water)
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Look at the orbit of comets. You can plot the exact path and timing. You'll find it spends several months in the vicinity of the sun. You're nowhere near losing the sun's grip: look up Sedna.
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I think the planet's surface will always become ridiculously cold, but if the planet has a molten core, that might allow some warm enough underground areas. If the crust has an extensive cave system that can remain stable enough for life to move in and out as needed, that might present a possibility.
A different planet with a very long day cycle but more consistent heat in the lighted region, might be able to support animals which can migrate around the planet, staying in the light.
If you are looking for different values for your orbit, consider that the star's size and brightness can also vary.
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If a species were to evolve on a rogue planet, how would they track the passage of time? Without day/night cycles or revolutions around a star, they couldn't use the typical methods that civilizations on a planet orbiting a star would.
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1. Stars...either a constellation that 'rises and sets' just like the sun would, or a single star that is nearby but still quite a ways away. Remember our sun drowns out much of the star scape to us, a rogue planet would have a very bright star sky. The passage of the milky way across the sky could be one usable example.
2. Life spans. This gets into the 'foot' being the kings foot for a unit of measure. A ruler's lifetime could be referred to as a unit of measure. Of course this means the unit of measure is inexact (so was 'foot'), but it is usable.
3. Moons. If they are available, a moons cycle is a great time tracker.
4. Arbitrary. 1 second is a relatively abstract concept (same as '1 meter'), as we've set that this is what a second is and we're using it (our second finds it's roots in early Sumerian culture where they divided things in to 6 sets of gods (one male one female) \* 5 (number of fingers or number of man) = 6\*2\*5 = 60 seconds. Same root as 360 degrees and 12 \* 2 hours in a day.
I guess the question of 'what does a civilization measure with time' becomes necessary to ask. Is time on a timeless planet really necessary? Is time nothing but arbitrary? If it's a 'slow' species (sloth?) it's possible the arbitrary unit they come up with is significantly longer for a second than a much more hyper race.
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The conservation of the planet's [angular momentum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_momentum) means that **your rogue planet will spin** whether the planet was flung from a star system or developed on its own. Without a sun, the stars will be clearly visible at all times. The planet will have a day based on its rotation to the distant stars, a **[sidereal day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time)** (which Earth also has, in addition to a [solar day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time)) that is nearly as obvious to any developing civilization as the day and night are. They can divide this day into smaller units like our seconds and larger units like our years.
However, instead of the larger units being based on the Moon (months) and Sun (years), **years are more likely to be based on simple multiples** of whatever base-counting system is common there (e.g. 100 or 360 days). Without the Moon, Sun, and seasons to keep things semi-consistent, different developing civilizations will likely have widely varying customs here: e.g. some early cultures may count generations, life spans, pregnancy terms, or plant seed to harvest times, or not have a year-like system at all.
Further, the species will **likely not naturally have a *daily* [circadian rhythm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm)** like we do. While observing stars is something any intelligent being can do, it's not going to be something important to the evolution of life on the planet. They may not sleep at all, and only rest in intervals that would seem strange to us. However, in order to run an efficient advanced society (anything after, say, an Industrial Revolution), it seems likely that they'd have standard working hours and resting/personal hours, synced to the planet's day.
Depending on how developed and globalized the culture(s) on your planet are, this **may have long since been standardized** to one or two systems (e.g. our methods of measuring are mostly Imperial and Metric now) or still have many coexisting systems (e.g. our currency).
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This assumes that space can be seen from the planet. **If the planet is under total cloud cover** (as may be needed to keep a rogue planet warm enough for life-as-we-know-it), everything about a sidereal day and stars can go out the window and it's only after the advent of cloud-penetrating technology that any day-like structure can be easily observed. By this time, they'll likely have timepieces that use arbitrary units.
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While a species on a rogue planet wouldn't have the usual reference points for time, there are still many ways to track time and many reference points for it and all it requires is having a sense of the passage of time.
## Environmental indicators
Assuming the planet is kept warm through internal processes, if these have a periodicity, they could serve as a reference. For example, if the planet has a liquid mantle that causes volcanic activity, they could use eruptions, earthquakes and the like as reference points, provided their is periodicity to them.
The same can happen with the biosphere as it forms a complex system. In systems and control theory, we study the behaviors of simpler systems and how they react mathematically:
This is the response of a lower order system to the step function (which is a fancy way of saying a change of input between two values and remaining at the second one). In higher order systems, with more complex input, the oscillation can be sustained, instead of diminishing as you see in the diagram. This is especially common when a system has a positive feedback loop (which is a fancy way of saying that energy is added to the system proportionally to its output - you get 5 tigers, so then you add 3 - now you have 8, so then you add 5 more).
Considering that on a rogue planet certain dampening factors or external influences may be missing, such biosphere oscillations may remain stable for long enough for this civilization to observe them and notice their periodicity and how long each cycle lasts. After all, even the celestial objects and day-night periods we used for timekeeping are *not* always of the same length and their average length changes with time (just like the Moon flies away from us a couple of centimeters per year, but that doesn't prevent us from using it for accurate enough time measurements).
## Everyday life
Just like we do today, this civilization may develop some standard for time. This would be necessary for trade, which is why we developed many sciences in the first place. A simple time measurement would be to define, for example, the time it takes for a fuse of specific dimensions and material to completely consume itself as it burns. Such standardization would initially depend on such everyday needs but could also include periods such as the incubation time for eggs, the time to carry a child to birth, the time it usually takes people to sleep and wake up, the time it takes to walk to places etc. - these could serve as a base for longer time measurements.
## Accuracy
Of course, eventually they would develop complex physical understanding of the world and require precise timekeeping. There is no reason technology wouldn't serve them as well as it has served us in this case. There would already be agreement on some standard measurement of time within cultures and probably globally wherever trade has spread.
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The key thing about tracking time really boils down to a type of pattern recognition, we had sunrise/sunset as early time "markers" but a rogue planet will lack the larger astronomical patterns to base time off of; instead they will likely use something more akin to our early measures of weight or distance (the cubit was length from elbow to the tip of the middle finger) these varied but were good enough based on the average at the time.
Initially their understanding of time may be based off of sleep/awake cycles for something like a day and a year might be based off of a "yearly" reproductive cycle or hibernation. In general the time they keep will be related to things they can initially "track" with their own senses (another "year" passes when they lay eggs again).
As time goes on and they improve in terms of science they may then base it off other principles like the half-life of certain radioactive elements or the frequency of vibrating crystals (like quartz at 32,768 Hz <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock>)
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First of all you should not ask **how**, but **why**?
You mean a rogue planet without the sun, where the only source of energy for living beings is the geothermal energy from beneath the planet's surface? If the energy flow is relatively stable, there would be no need for any calendar measurement similar to ours. Days, months and years arises from the need to adapt the life to the cycles of the nature.
It's quite unlikely that the beings on your planet would have eyes. Eyes are not very useful on the planet with minimal amount of light, there's more use in developing other senses. Without day and nights, sleep cycles like ours are unlikely to develop.
If there are regular cycles in the geothermal energy fluctuations, your folks would develop the calendar based on those cycles.
And when they develop technical civilization, they would adapt time measurement techniques adapted specifically to the timeline of those processes.
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Candles, water clocks, sand timers - 'hour glass', migration patterns, growth of vegetation - a 'clock plant' if you will, all of this could be highly abstract at the stage of development of your civilization - in that the smallest unit of time might originally be the length of time it takes a river to fill a vessel with a specific size of hole in it but by the era of mechanical technology might be only referenced by name - having been replicated by gears and springs.
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The planet will still spin on it's axis, so you can still define the sidereal day (relative to distant stars). The planet might be orbited by naked-eye visible moons or other debris which you can use to define longer units of measurement, but there might just as well be no obvious longer cycles to calibrate time against. However there are some other astrophysical phenomena you might use.
The most obvious would be things like [Cepheid variable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheid_variable) stars. Because the maximum brightness of a Cepheid is directly proportional to it's pulsation period, choosing say "the dimmest Cepheid visible to the naked eye" could be one way of defining a week. Of course that uses relative rather than absolute magnitude, which would be a source of error, but it is possible to determine absolute magnitude. Cepheids have periods ranging from a couple of days to a couple of months, and are very consistent.
Similarly there are [Mira variables](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira_variable), which have periods measured in hundreds of days. Instant year.
Whether a long unit of measurement, like the year, is actually useful in an environment which has no seasons is of course another question entirely.
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A very common trope in fiction is the concept of some powerful, forbidden spell/martial art/etc., which is said to have a cost paid in the user's lifespan. Now, oftentimes this literally physically ages the user, but not all the time. When Tien uses this sort of life-force-draining ability in the anime Dragonball Z, for example, over-using it just causes him to collapse and die, still as young as he was before he used it, just dead.
Now, this can obviously be attributed to the magic system of these settings having "life force" as a physical, finite resource that you will eventually run out of, but suppose your setting doesn't allow for that, whether because you're more grounded in realism, or that just isn't compatible with the magic system of your setting. That would mean that this ability would be doing something to the body that will cause you to die younger and younger the more you use it, until eventually over-use will kill you outright.
**If the setting's mechanics of life and death were completely grounded in realism, what could this ability be doing to the body that would reliably lower the age you could realistically live to while doing as little to your overall health as possible before it reaches that stage?**
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# It shrinks your telomeres
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> Shortening of telomeres to a critical length triggers a DNA-damage response that contributes to ageing. A new study using a mouse model of accelerated telomere shortening reveals specific transcriptomic and epigenetic changes that provide clues to how telomere shortening is linked to ageing.
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I don't know about you, but that statement alone (taken from [this source](https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg2711)) probably answers it all. Your telomeres are basically a protective "sheath" considered to be there to protect your DNA during cellular division, and probably considered today as the closest thing to an indicator of how much "raw time" we have left as far as I'm aware. Every time your cells divide, they shrink a little bit, always shrinking. Telomere shrinkage is usually associated with aging, and cancer cells, due to intense activity of telomerase (an enzyme that essentially prevents that shrinkage) is the main reason these cells are basically immortal in the sense they won't ever have a limit, unlike normal cells, to how much they can multiply.
Why are they so important? Well I'm not an expert in the field, but as far as my knowledge goes they protect your DNA during cell division, so when they're gone, instead of chipping away at them, the consecutive divisions chip away at your DNA, messing up the cells, creating problems which, theoretically, would essentially culminate in the ideal "death by old age", when your cells are basically too damaged due to sheer passage of time and genetic damage from normal activity to keep working, so you'd essentially drop dead at this point due to wide-scale organ failure.
Basically this spell magically shrinks your telomeres, resulting in exactly zero side effects at first, but resulting in later symptoms of early aging. The more you use it, the shorter you can live without finding a way to regrow your telomeres (meaning that if you do find such a method, you could probably use this spell to your heart's content).
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Introduces a carcinogen to the bloodstream.
A little bit, no prob. We have minor aches and kinks in our system on a daily basis. But the more you use it, the more this builds up in your system, the more it overwhelms your immune system.
And, it comes with a side effect. If you use it a repeatedly but recover? Your immune response might be expecting these sudden 'shocks' to the system and you can potentially develop a host of other problems. Auto-immune diseases, allergies, or a host of other issues.
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People are still looking for a grand unified theory of aging. There are dozens of aging related reactions that manifest over time as people get older. From telomere shortening as mentioned earlier, to additional factors such as...
* **Senescent Cells**, Cells that are damaged enough to no longer be productive and in fact are generating massive waste products but are not dead enough to be recoverable by the immune system. Zombie cells effectively.
* **Mitochondiral damage**, proportionately more of the mitochondria have suffered genetic damage to some of their structure, they still generate ATP from glucose, but less efficiently than a healthy set would.
* **Epigenetic damage**, the tags that control which genes express where are damaged, so the body isn't producing the right proteins from all of the cells that should be producing any given protein.
Each of these theories is a contender for the biggest cause of aging and all of the theories are being tested in rats as we speak. So you can just take your pick. Go for Epigenetic damage if you want something genuinely permanent, or cell senescence for something that could potentially be more easily reversed.
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# An accidental Overdose of Gamma Radiation...:
Magic is normally designed to keep the energies involved well contained. Sometimes, however, people want to do things that everyone knows aren't well contained or controlled. They want to cheat safety, but there's a cost. Your "life draining" magics have the same effect of large doses of radiation. Acutely, large doses of this will result in [acute radiation poisoning](https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/arsphysicianfactsheet.htm#:%7E:text=Acute%20Radiation%20Syndrome%20(ARS)%20(,usually%20a%20matter%20of%20minutes).) and eventually death. But assumedly the goal is to not die right away.
So your caster will instead aim to suffer the long-term effects. [Chronic Radiation poisoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_radiation_syndrome).
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So this exposure starts to look a lot like aging. Cancer effects will significantly shorten lifespan as tumors ravage the body.
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# It creates a homunculus using your actual stem cells
One of the most fundamental (but to outsiders, mysterious) rituals of the wizard concerns the creation of a "little man", a homunculus, within his laboratory glassware. Such a little clone is indeed rather useless in his natural state; yet when bound and transformed by magic to be joined with an object, the homunculus can cast magic repeatedly, just like the wizard he was part of. In this way, homunculi are a visible intermediate in the invisible art of making items that are a permanent source of magical power.
Homunculi are constructed by teleporting a small fraction of the stem cells from the wizard's body, together with other cells to support them, into an arrangement the same as in the wizard ... just smaller. They are heavily assisted by arcane means to regenerate into a tiny wizard body, which has been altered to work on a small scale at least briefly, until it is further transformed.
Unfortunately, removing stem cells has much the same effect on youth as successfully adding them to a person would have ... but in the opposite direction. Every organ has a lowered total regenerative capacity. At first the effect is very small, but the more withdrawals are made, the more severe the limitations of the remaining cells.
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The same way any physiological damage to internal organs can cause premature death.
Like: brain concussions, hearth attacks, ruptured spleen, etc. Not so uncommon in martial arts either.
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Perhaps I might be barking up the wrong tree but everything your body does requires energy, correct?
Even cells when you get down to the nitty-gritty use chemical energy to perform their basic functions.
So when you're using "life energy" just have it be a uniform drawing on all the energy your body has: potential and kinetic.
If you consider the sum-total of these things as your "life energy" then you can be both realistic and still fulfilling the basic idea.
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Blackouts happen all the time locally, but what would the implications of a world-wide, indefinite blackout be?
Here is a spark from the fire of what could happen:
* (obviously) lights go out
* no air conditioning, heating
* refrigeration, microwaves, toasters, ovens... stop working
* factories shut down
* the Internet goes down
* cellular devices (and towers) stop working
* electronic banking, online booking
* hyperinflation
* you won't be able to have air
**How long could the human race sustain without electricity? How reliant are we on electricity to sustain ourselves?**
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The implications are actually very easy to see. While *our* culture is very very very dependent on electricity, and would rapidly collapse, not all cultures are that way. Consider that there exists, today, many peoples in 3rd world nations whose lives are completely independent of electricity. In fact, many have never even heard of the concept. These cultures would continue completely oblivious to the havoc the loss of electricity would have on "civilized" cultures near them.
Mind you it would not be pretty. Our society is not designed to withstand such a sudden massive shock. It would buck and fold. For example, all building materials would cease: steel and aluminum and glass production are all substantially dependent on electricity. Wood could, in theory, still be harvested, but it would take a while to jury rig all of the saw mills (depending on how the electricity goes out).
Civilized humanity would suffer massive starvation and population reduction. There would be war and suffering. We may remember how we lived before electricity (we didn't really have electricity until the late 1800s). Or we may die off.
Either way, the [Pirahã](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language) are almost *certainly* going to continue doing what they have done for thousands of years, before their introduction to civilization. As will the [Sentinelese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_people).
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I think the key to answering this question properly is off in [OP's comment here to Hanko Tanks' answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33826/what-would-happen-if-electricity-stopped-working#comment91364_33834), empasis original:
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> I meant the implications, as in the long-term results of **no** electricity – [AMACB](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17255/amacb) 2016-01-21 02:43:43Z
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Because neural transmission uses electrical impulses, brain activity is based on electrical impulses (compare [EEG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography)), and muscle activity is at least influenced by (and I *think* directly dependent on) electrical impulses, the simple result of removing electricity from our world becomes basically:
# No biological activity.
In other words, magic occurs, and then we all collapse and die.
Sounds like it makes for a pretty dull world. At this point, lack of air conditioning would be the *least* of my concerns. Not that I'd have many concerns at all at that point, when the brain has shut down.
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One of the major implications of a global-scale electricity-loss disaster somewhat depends on in what way did we lose the electricity and if we even can get it back.
For example, TV-series [Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series)) plot relies on a premise that humanity not only in a span of minutes lost the ability to use electricity, there is no way to get the power running even using diesel generators, as all electricity is sucked out.
What that means is that humanity loses its communication capabilities, it loses nearly all of the machinery and most of conveniences.
It also means that for humanity staying in large (>1mil population) cities is detrimental, as you can't really get resources there, except for the resources already stored there. That means that these cities become a modern version of a dungeon where you go looking for loot and where you can find a whole lot of trouble.
It also means that we get thrown back to renaissance-ish period. By that I mean that the world will return to its feudal roots while having much better firearms than in the old-days. We lose our battleships, planes and submarines to some extent, as there are no means of communication.
Given that we are also running low on oil *and* we can't use nature's renewable sources, we might go in the direction of steampunk-ish technology mixed with modern things that will wither fairly soon.
We also lose space, confining us on this planet.
All of the satellites that aren't geostationary will fall sooner or later.
If we do get electricity back at some point afterwards, I'm sure we could get up to speed in some five-fifteen years, depending on the location and how much we pillaged in the power-less years, as most tech can survive for a long time if it's locked in a safe room with the right conditions.
By the way, I doubt hyperinflation would be possible in western world, as we would be in huge trouble when suddenly most databases, that are on the tech you can't use, turns to nothing. Banks are down, medical records are mostly down, so are police records. First years would be complete chaos coated with anarchy, except in some very specific states that are ready for cataclysms of such capabilities. For example, seems to me that Switzerland could survive mostly intact, given the long-running military traditions there.
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If we lose electricity, Rednecks win.
Larger population centers will devolve into massive chaos very very quickly. as soon as deliveries coming into the city stop, food scarcity will set in very fast. Two major problems will be the loss of refrigeration along with the loss of the ability to cook anything. No Electricity to cook, and as soon as the gas pressure fails, those folks are screwed. Two or three days and just about everything except the prepackaged stuff will start to spoil and your typical city dweller won't have any idea how to take steps to prevent it. After a few more days the prepackaged stuff is gone and then what? I assume that any security measures on warehouses of shelf stable food are going to be overwhelmed very fast by those who are hungry and have not yet been weakened by starvation.
Contrast this with Rednecks. Many are able to fulfill many of the basics of survival without major difficulty. They know how to grow food and how to hunt. They will also be familiar with many edibles that grow wild, like blackberries and such. they will probably know the land, and where nearby water sources are. Chances of having livestock are high. The knowledge of how to cut trees for fuel and how to start a fire is very widespread. Meat preservation, in the form of Smokers is a highly advanced art among rednecks.
A big advantage for rednecks is going to be one of philosophy, though. Most rednecks are strong believers in the second amendment and will probably have more than one firearm. Having been firearm enthusiasts, they will either have, or know someone who has, reloading supplies. They will also probably know folks with archery supplies. That's practical outcome of part of the philosophy, which is in **the appropriate use of Arms and of Force** (both capitalized for a reason). Another part of the general redneck philosophy is a tendency toward Thrift. Rednecks fix things, and can make some pretty amazing stuff out of things city dwellers would have sent to the landfill. You may chuckle when you see someone in a heavy Alabama accent talks about the quaint practice of dehydrating corn, making jerky, and canning peaches, but how funny are those things when the excrement impacts the rotating blades? The final piece rests on the fact that in the US, an enormous chunk of the enlisted servicemen and women come from the southern states (where most of the rednecks are). They get the concept of Service, even if they can't or won't articulate it.
As crazy as rednecks are, there is a certain amount of discipline in many aspects of their lives. We don't see it, but the same guy who bolts a lawn chair to a board and then gets dragged behind a truck is also the same guy who got up before dawn, gathered eggs, milked cows etc. all before going to work, and he does that every single day.
The rednecks will fare far better than people in population centers. They won't lose as much as city dwellers will, and they will likely be able to hold off marauding bands of starving city-slickers. Those city slickers who are polite in how they ask for help will probably get fed and put to work.
New cities will grow, led by **Bubba** the great.
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# Back to the stone ages...
One of the main issues with the lack of electricity is the fact that all of the worlds communications (internet, satellite, even cables) require power on both ends.
Without communications, it would be very difficult for any organization or country to begin the process of getting the power back up. With the case of the EMP, as mentioned in the comments by @XandarTheZenon, we would have very little issue. A large amount of the world's servers are reliant on the throwaway part principle. This basically means the servers have a bunch of really cheap parts that, when they begin to show wear, can be thrown away easily.
Replacing the parts that were damaged by the EMP would be easy, we basically have warehouses upon warehouses full of the parts.
*But back to the major issue...*
Powers out. That means that need some way to get it back up. A fair amount of this is not a big issue, as we can essentially get minor appliances up with diesel generators. Most nuclear reactors require cold start generators, which would not be damaged by the blast. Cold starting a nuclear plant isn't the easiest thing, but that's for another question.
# Onto the real issue
There was a time without electricity, as you probably know. We've done this before. Most likely is that humans would form tight knit communities that would be centralized to a certain area.
Cities have lots of food: [HEB, plenty of non-perishable food items http://www.heb.com](http://www.heb.com)
And lots of supplies: [Home Depot, plenty of supplies http://www.homedepot.com](http://www.homedepot.com)
In the long term, there is no reason not to develop agriculture on a large scale, the infrastructure is there, and in all honesty, small farmers will probably be continuing on with there ordinary routine.
# Long term implications
Humanities at no risk of dying out. We have food for the short-term, and most of the supplies we need. *But what will everyday life look like in the long term?*
**Agriculture**
Small farms producing the easiest to grow plants that yield the most calories, such as potatoes. Reasons behind this are that the amount of space we can maintain without drones and advanced satellite imaging while still having a full yield is pretty small.
**Communications**
Humans will have been pretty cut off by this point. Assuming getting communications networks up and running will take upwards of a decade, we will have formed small villages composed of multiples and their relatives. Each person will have to pull their own weight at the advent of this catastrophe.
**Transportation**
There is no reason as to why automobiles that don't rely mainly on computers will not work. Any standard will function as normal. We may be much more conservative with our fuel, as it would be more difficult to acquire
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One unexpected side effect, apart from those already mentioned, is that many places (Such as New York, and London.) use pumps to continually empty sewers, subways, and other underground areas of water, some brought in by sewerage, but a lot by the tide. If these stop functioning, flooding can occur on various levels. You'd have to look at specifics for each city, but it can be surprisingly quick.
A nice side effect however is that due to the light pollution disappearing, the night sky would be very pretty for those not used to it.
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[The North American Aerospace Defense Command track Santa Claus' position each year as he delivers presents.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAD_Tracks_Santa) Santa has mostly been cool with this (it's made him a little nervous in the past), but he's afraid that Norad may be in league with [the NSA](http://breakingdefense.com/2013/12/santas-in-the-air-norads-tracking-him/#comment-1176244671). In any event, Santa is done with Norad tracking him.
What can Santa Claus do to prevent Norad from tracking him?
* [This article explains how Norad tracks Santa.](http://noradsanta.wikia.com/wiki/About_Santa_-_FAQs)
* Information about Santa can be found [here](http://www.noradsanta.org/)
+ The site is unfortunately interactive, so I can't give a direct link. Click the library. The Library also includes specs for Santa's sleigh.
* While we're at it, he would like to prevent the North pole from being spied upon.
* He still wants to be able to carry out his normal duties.
* Although he would like to avoid it, Santa is willing to authorize lethal force if required.
NOTE: Norad is an intelligent, competent, and adaptable adversary. We will need as many answers as possible if Santa is to defeat Norad.
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There's no indication that Santa's sleigh is equipped with any traditional [aircraft transponders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transponder_(aeronautics)), so he doesn't need to worry about disabling those.
The sleigh's radar cross-section is minimal, if we're assuming that the toys he carries are stashed in a "[pocket universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_universe)". Otherwise, the overall mass of various bits of radar-reflective materials of all the toys, constrained within the dimensions of a sack tote-able by a human-sized Santa, might create some sort of super-dense, highly radar-reflective ball. To be careful, I'd suggest Santa replace his sack with a multifaceted, radar-reflective storage pod *(think the body shape of the [F-117 Nighthawk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk))*, additionally covered in [radar-absorbent materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation-absorbent_material). I don't think that NORAD has jurisdiction to commandeer the [Gravity Probe B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Probe_B), and in any case, I'm unsure that it could be used to probe for the terrestrial-based gravity anomaly that his toy sack might cause.
Heat signature could also prove to be a problem. While neither Santa nor the reindeer have significant BTU output, the high travel speeds might cause superheating of his sleigh. Adding some [silica glass insulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LI-900), like that used in the [Space Shuttle's thermal protective tiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_thermal_protection_system), might mitigate this.
I'd definitely suggest Santa install [terrain-following radar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrain-following_radar) with details maps of his flight path, so he can maintain a low altitude and avoid detection by NORAD's radar systems. However, this causes some radar emissions, so he might prefer to stick to traditional [nap-of-the-earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nap-of-the-earth) flight, although doing this manually could be stressful at higher speeds.
I would also definitely suggest that he ask Rudolph to kill his running light, to avoid visual spotting, and invest in some night vision equipment. Muting his sleigh bells would also be wise.
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My Dad, in the USAF was stationed in Newfoundland in mid 60's and participated in tracking Santa.
I get the idea that the signature shows up clearly *on purpose* as a courtesy for air safety and nervous vigilant observers watching for missles coming over the pole.
So if Santa didn't want that, he could simply retain the natural biological signal, *not carry a transponder*, or reverse the magic and hide the signature instead.
Joe Bloggs points out that Rudolph and his red nose is a rather recent addition. Clearly the real reason for a red light at the nose of the vehicle is for air traffic safety, not to function as a headlight. It was first noticed and commented on in 1939, which matches the first use of long-distance perimiter radar in Great Britain. So the transponder mignt not be the same device as the lamp, but it seems that adding Rudolph was a general air-traffic safety upgrade. I expect his magic includes the active radar reflection that encodes IFF, as well as visibility light and perhaps other more subtle features that the folks at aviation.SE might speculate on (if not write folksongs about).
So to be stealthy, he would simply leave Rudolph behind.
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**Santa's goin on Strike!**
Santa could practice some non-violent resistance and simply refuse to make deliveries until his privacy is restored.
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Given the speed and general abilities Santa must have, one potential solution (assuming no other method of preventing the tracking i.e. mega stealth panels or mind control) is to nonlinearise his trajectory. At the moment (presumably) Santa moves in a roughly linear pattern from one child's house to the next, being tracked as he goes.
Given that he seems able to move as fast as he likes, can carry an insane amount of mass in a tiny volume and change velocity at the drop of a hat, I think Santa's best bet would be to perform a series of vertical manoeuvres, shooting up above the Norad tracking ceiling, across to a new location, and then back down again. This would eliminate any hope Norad might have of maintaining a tracking lock and allow Santa to pick his next gift location pretty much at random, maintaining the utmost privacy.
Of course, it will increase his journey distance by an awful lot, but everyone knows he's working outside of the regular set of physical laws anyway, so why should he care!?
**ADDENDUM:** On the subject of hiding the north Pole: The north pole of where? I certainly wouldn't look for Santa on the north pole of Europa, for example!
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Santa has some special presents for the *good* engineering staff of Boeing, who are leaving stealth covering panels and ECM pods fitted for the reindeer and sled beside the usual plate of cookies and milk.
The *bad* engineering staff, and most of the management are not too worried, since the amount of coal they are getting in their stockings will go a long way to offsetting the heating bills this winter.....
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I'm fairly certain there must be ulterior motives here, or possibly inter-agency politicking and counter-cooperation. Santa "knows when you've been bad or good" is fairly strong evidence to *him* being in league with the NSA. Considering that NORAD is likely to be involved in the development of any military stealth program, SaNSAta is probably working on some sort of alternative stealth technology so they can more effectively spy on civilians *and* the military. We don't really want to help *them*, do we?
*What? Oh, of course. Everybody knows proper eggnog has a decent helping of rum.*
*No! I have not had too much! You mean this isn't Skeptics.SE?*
*Oh... Um... nevermind, then!*
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I think the question makes an important and possibly flawed assumption: that what NORAD tracks is *actually* Santa.
Think about it - given the speeds he's travelling, it's a safe bet that no-one has ever made a visual confirmation, much less managed to force the Fat Man down for customs inspections.
So, the answer could be simply that "NORAD has never tracked Santa, but it suits his purposes to let them think they are."
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The solution is to not fly at all. He can dig tunnels across the earth's surface to reach anywhere on the world undetected.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/loFgA.jpg)
A version built by the elven would dig much faster than current speeds and allow perfect undetectability.
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If Santa doesn't want to be tracked, he just needs to make known that tracking him qualifies as "naughty behaviour" and therefore it makes people tracking him ineligible to get gifts. That would effectively discourage NORAD volunteers and sponsors from carrying on any kind of Santa tracking activity and NORAD will focus again on tracking hostile missiles and that stuff.
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Santa can use the intelligence, resources, and craftsmanship of his elves to produce some highly developed technology that disrupts the tracking technology of humanity. So on Christmas Eve/Day, all technologies are rendered useless until he's done giving gifts.
If he doesn't want to disrupt tracking technology at Norad in case they need it, he can simply use a sophisticated laser system, and blind any satellite or aircraft that's over the North Pole.
When traveling, he makes use of his magic. Perhaps he moves in four spatial dimensional space for a moment and vanish or can render himself such that light does not interact with the particles that compose him, his sleigh, and his reindeer. With the latter, there is no possible way to see him. And since the entire spectrum does not interact, no special cameras can see them, as well.
This would allow Santa to carry out his gift-giving and still evade Norad.
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Clearly, it is impossible for Santa to do his job the way he does unless he somehow violates what we consider the laws of physics.
I assume, Santa actually does not necessarily need his sledge, as he behaves in the macroscopic level like a quantum object - which means that he is actually everywhere at the same time until he collapses his wave function. In doing this, his position is determined and is able to put the gifts where they belong!
Since the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that you can't determine the position of a quantum object if it's momentum is precisely measurable, so you can't track Santa.
This is also the ability that allows Santa access to NORAD's mainframe, replacing data from the north pole with pre-recorded nonsense.
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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 5 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/31123/edit)
A brilliant modern scientist/engineer has been sent back in time to medieval Europe (somewhere between 800 and 1100 CE). It would be very advantageous for him to have many friends among the various Catholic kings and dukes of the era. He has excellent scientific, engineering, and medical knowledge. What services could he provide to his feudal patrons to gather wealth and allies?
The most obvious service would be medical treatment. Proper sanitation with soap and alcohol would be a first step. Medical knowledge quickly cures scurvy and several other ailments. Many terrible medieval afflictions such as leprosy and bubonic plague can be cured with antibiotics, which would take a bit more effort to produce.
## Constraints & Details
* His time machine is broken, and cannot be repaired.
* He may have a few items intentionally brought back to the past (guns, a laptop, modern medicine, modern seeds, technical manuals), or alternatively a lab accident may have sent him back with just broken lab equipment and salvaged parts from the time machine.
* If your ideas require specific technology to have been brought back, be sure to mention it.
* Difficulties related to knowing Latin, the local language, court etiquette, and so on are outside the scope of this question. Assume the time traveler can get by.
* Time travel paradoxes are not a concern. Assume a time travel model that resolves or avoids paradoxes, or a time traveler who doesn't care about changing the future.
* If possible, the time traveler would prefer to keep technology for himself rather than giving it away. For example: a king would love to be given a modern gun, but the time traveler keeps them for himself and his inner circle.
* Accumulating influence within the court of a king can be as important as impressing the king himself. Favors for the king's councilors could have a huge impact, especially councilors who perform the day to day work of running the realm or are the true power behind the throne.
I've read a few novels that cover this topic. In [Connecticut Yankee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_Arthur's_Court) the protagonist leverages his engineering knowledge (explosives, metalworking, firearms, electricity) to outdo Merlin and become the king's top adviser. In [Lest Darkness Fall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall) the protagonist builds a distillery and a printing press, and introduces modern accounting and mathematical knowledge.
I'm primarily interested in short term services that the time traveler could provide to his feudal patrons, on the order of weeks or months. Successfully curing the king's daughter of terrible illness is a perfect example of the kind of service I'm looking for. It doesn't transfer tech, only takes a few weeks, and might not anger the Pope.
The time traveler may wish to reserve explosives, firearms, and electricity for himself...
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Setting yourself up as a medical expert would not necessarily be your best choice.
You will be in opposition to the dominant medical experts of the day. If you ever fail to produce the desired outcome, your unconventional practice will certainly be used against you. Some kings were known to behead failed doctors, etc. even close friends and family. If you are successful, your enemies may accuse you of sorcery.
Improvements such as soap and sanitation would not necessarily be popular as the value would not be a priori considered valuable. So getting a king to implement this and recognize this as successful may be very difficult. A crude optical microscope and basic germ theory may again just be witchcraft.
As a practicing physician your best bet may be to use the technology of the time, i.e., bloodlettings, etc. but supplement them with curatives of your own design that you don't bother to mention. Losing the occasional patient will still be be par for the course, but if you don't upset others by your unconventional medical practice, your better than average success rate will serve you and your patients well. Maybe by the time you get appointed chief court physician you can try some of your wacky ideas of sanitation, etc.
The scientific method was not exactly understood at this time. But advantages in science and engineering were generally valued by the educated, which certainly included the royalty and the clergy. You would not share the scientific understanding needed to understand new technologies, but your patron would certainly expect you to share the methods of production.
Just going into production of gunpowder would not make your patron generally satisfied. You would also need to produce cannons that could use the gunpowder (probably bronze unless you wanted to invent steel-making too). And even if you produced cannons and gunpowder, your patron would want to be able to produce them himself so as to not be 100% dependent upon you.
If you don't want to reveal tech, you pretty much cannot reveal it in small doses. Smart observers will pick up on your unconventional ideas that force you into areas you would rather not pursue.
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I am a big fan of alternate histories. Lord Conrad Stargard of the Cross-Time Engineers series is essentially in the position of your character without the medical training. He ingratiates himself to the king by full scale engineering - so that he can repel the Mongol invasion of 1240 he is expecting in 10 years. Conrad has little choice - either prepare full scale to repel the Mongols or flee to another area not to be invaded. Since he is a Polish patriot he makes his stand. One thing I like about the series is that it takes time for Conrad to be accepted by the various layers of royalty and for them to put their trust in this outsider. Series had serious weaknesses (later books were pretty bad) and his sexist / racist views are pretty grating. His luck and assistance from the future can also be annoying, but the way be works with the royals is just what an engineer would do.
One way in which Conrad was extra lucky is that he just happened to be carrying a large variety of modern, non-hybrid seeds when he got sent back in time (part of trying to impress a girl). These seeds had a huge advantage compared to historical yields where you often had to plant 20% of your crop for next year's harvest. If you are actually planning your trip, such seeds would also be to your advantage, assuming you can dodge being labeled as a devil-worshiper.
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Sorry, have to share one other issue with medicine. If your medicine is in the form of drugs, you may have a problem - route of administration. Injections are clearly not going to be available. Oral administration may be complicated by the corrosive stomach acid. Many medicines require special coating, etc. to get past the stomach, coatings that will not be available. Fortunately, enemas are often a useful route of administration, and as luck would have it, common practice in medieval medicine though as you might expect not as sanitary as you would like.
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There are several other technologies that other people have mentioned, though you wanted to avoid sharing technology. The invention of distilled alcohol might be one you would be willing to share. It was already invented by the Muslims, but had not spread to Europe by 1000 AD. So, you could invent it in Europe and realizing the commercial value set up a distillery. Start with fortified wines, graduate to ports and sherries, and eventually hard liquor and you have customers coming to you for years looking for something new to drink. Royalty would come looking for you as a purveyor of fine spirits.
There may be other technologies that you would be willing to share. Not sure why you are not willing. But eyeglasses. mechanical clocks, the spinning wheel, the stern mounted rudder, paper, printing press, the wheelbarrow and others were all waiting to be discovered or introduced to Europe in 1000 AD. Perhaps some of these are things you would be willing to allow outside of your control.
If you really want to control kings, there is the tried and true method. Put them in your debt literally - i.e., become a banker known for generous loans to kings. You will want to become rich very quickly, but given your inventive nature this should not be too hard.
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You have a pretty fundamental problem, trying to do this all in a few weeks or months. Getting on the good side with local royalty, etc. is likely impossible in a short time-frame. Your proposed saving the life of the King's daughter is probably unrealistic, the king will not allow you access to his daughter. It is unlikely you would even be allowed to talk to the King. His guard, counselors, etc. are designed as a filter to restrict access. To get access quickly you have to ingratiate yourself to someone else that has access to the king, but they them-self are not particularly hard to access. A member of the guard or household staff might have access (possible indirectly) to the king, and a miraculous cure of one of their family might grant you the inside track.
Such an approach does not give you the inside track to a number of royalty and clergy though. If you manage to get access to a single king in this way, he may treat you are a proprietary resource and not allow you access to anything outside his royal court. To guarantee access to a number of members of royalty you need broader influence that would make it harder for the king to control you. Of course, this argues directly against gaining access in such a short time-frame.
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This popped into my head, and it would be of great value to kings and such-like. You just "invent" some pseudo-modern cryptography. You need to choose something much better than they are used to, but that can still be encrypted and decrypted by hand assuming you know the key, but without a computer you will not be able to decrypt without the key. You want something stable in the sense that errors do not propagate so that a mistake does not garble the rest of the message since encryption by hand is error prone. Cryptography was not even a subject of significant study at this time, so some kings would have to have the value of this explained to them, though they are likely familiar with the Caesar Cypher. Kings will understand the value very well once it is explained to them.
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Improve the plow and related technologies. Everybody needs to eat.
By the time you're talking about, western Europe already had the heavy plow, but plowing was hard, slow work. Plow technology didn't change much for several centuries, after which [improvements to lighten the plow and improve its metallurgy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough#Improved_designs) were developed. If you arrive toward the beginning of your time range, you can also increase agricultural efficiency by introducing the [horse collar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_collar) (h/t Deolater). And you can further improve agriculture (no matter when you arrive) by introducing better [irrigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation#History) techniques.
A time traveller who brings those designs (and metallurgy information) with him could offer a medieval king *more, better, faster food production for his people*. Even a king who doesn't care much about feeding his people (hey, *he's got his*) should still be interested in the time savings that allows those people to *do additional work*. Medieval farming was not a path to wealth, so those people aren't likely to just sit around doing nothing the rest of the time. More military levies, anybody?
I focused on agriculture here because it's at the core of food production during this time period. As noted in comments, other food-related improvements are also possible, including the beehive (h/t Draco18s) and bringing back modern or more-varied seeds.
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If your traveller taught the Kings' advisors about germ theory, waste-management and the importance of controlling vermin, it could greatly reduce the threat of the various plagues which vexed that age. Taking that idea a step further, convince the King to set up a probationary quarantine policy for immigrants. Finally, teach them how and why they should boil water. A kingdom that knows and obeys these practices will survive and prosper while others sicken and die.
On a different tract, your time-traveller should have some modern musical training and a flute or acoustic guitar. With such tools, some talent and some knowledge of folk tunes and ballads, your traveller can keep themselves fed, sheltered and safe, regardless of the company he keeps. Such talent is also a wonderful way to get invited to court in the first place.
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If you had access to writing/drawing materials and were a reasonable artist, you could demonstrate perspective drawing. You may also be able to help architects and engineers by showing them the principles of isometric projection.
You could also entertain them with modern board and card games that you could fabricate. You might need to adjust rules a bit, you couldn't insist on precise spellings in scrabble and monopoly would be difficult to grasp, without tweaks, in a feudal economy.
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Let's assume this is the early 800's and [Charlemagne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne) is in power.
# Answer any questions he has for you
Given the timeframe of weeks to work with, the fastest and most powerful services renderable to a king will be conveying modern, accurate information. Architectural projects take years or decades to pull off. Training metallurgists or blacksmiths can take months (though highly skilled blacksmiths could be taught more quickly.)
**Establish Credentials**
You'll need to do something to gets you the respect of Charlemagne and his court. If you can't do this then you'll be labeled as a lunatic and imprisoned or executed.
*Possible means of proof-of-credentials:*
* Medical - Risky as your treatments may fail. Treatments are also highly dependent on the expertise of the time traveler (as I'm assuming that modern medical supplies didn't make it on through on the trip back in time.)
* Physics - Simple physics demonstrations. Demonstrations involving simple grade-school level physics principles might do the trick and can be organized quickly.
* Astronomy - Make predictions about location of planets or predict astronomical events (a la Connecticut Yankee).
* Engineering - Making a small tool to solve a common vexing problem (or just designing a small tool which is then made by a blacksmith). Designing a new weapon system
* Weapons - Built a gravity-powered [trebuchet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet#History). Normally, these wouldn't be invented till 1000AD. The traveler doesn't need to design a [Warwolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warwolf) but even a smaller version would outperform any siege weapon in Charlemagne's arsenal. (This is my preferred method for establishing credentials for a number of reasons: Charlemagne was a warring king with plenty of combat experience. Anything that makes his conquests more successful will greatly increase the time travelers prestige.) (Work on a [Floating Arm King Arthur trebuchet](http://thehurl.wikidot.com/trebuchettypes:faka) in secret which is far more powerful than a traditional gravity powered trebuchet. It is, however, more complicated and error prone.)
Personally, I would avoid giving the impression that I'm a magician, preferring to establish the reputation as an incredibly well-learned man.
Realize that the time traveler is operating in an environment of [science based on extreme inferences from old Greek and Roman texts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_science_in_the_Middle_Ages#Early_Middle_Ages_.28AD_476.E2.80.931000.29).
**Standards in Weights and Measures**
Standard weights and measures across Holy Roman Empire will go a long way to encouraging and enabling commerce...and where there's commerce, there's money to be made. The traveler may not have to push through an entire monetary modernization program, just plant the idea in Charlemagne's head along with the benefits that will come from having standards of measure. With most any king, if you can show how a particular monetary policy will make him richer (to achieve his ends) and his country more powerful, he'll probably go for it.
**Invent the Corporation/Markets**
Unleash capitalism on the world! There will be lots of muddling around with the concepts and getting the rules right but capitalism excels at generating wealth (it also excels at oppressing and exploiting poor people, so maybe introduce ethics too).
**Invent the rule of law**
* Basically invent the Magna Carta early. This may be really tricky because it took some really strong arm-twisting to get King John to accept the [Magna Carta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta) in England. Perhaps if you make a really good case to Charlemagne and his nobles, showing them how everyone would gain, they might accept it. Maybe.
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**Swords first** because that is a portable skill that could be established in the hinterlands away from the primary seat of power, and could facilitate an introduction to the king.
Assuming excellent knowledge of metallurgy, Your time traveler could establish his bona fides with making really good swords (or whichever weapon the king of the realm favors) Nothing speaks to power like a better weapon. Good horse shoes, stronger armor, that kind of thing.
**The Franklin stove or a sealed box cast iron wood stove for heating the impossibly drafty castle.** Appeal to the vanity and comfort of the king to build reputation in a way that avoids accusations of witchcraft. Mr time traveler could build out from there as an adviser, but he would want to stay as far away from court intrigue as possible. Improvements to sanitation and how to dig good wells would be next on the agenda, proposed as ways to improve fortifications against a potential siege.
Broader agricultural improvements would spill out from there, crop rotation, the horse collar, developed around the same time as the trebuchet.
One of the real keys would be to keep a steady stream of weapon systems, kings comfort products, and stuff to benefit society all about in equal measure in order to secure a place and to keep it, along with a strong but quiet reputation so that you are kept around or overlooked when the inevitable, possibly violent, change in power happens. Remember that plenty of medieval rulers met their end on the point of an assassins dagger or to poison rather that in the chaos of battle.
Avoid excercising knowledge that involves anything that the cause and effect cannot be clearly seen and try not to jump too far technologically at a time. Anyone can see how a trebuchet works. A horse collar is one of those "why didn't I think of that" inventions. So is the ball bearing. You can move things along very fast without being suspicious this way.
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[Clarke's third law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws): “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
As a result the scientist probably would be killed for being a magician.
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From the book Sapiens, it seems that for the majority of human history, the way technology was viewed was that it was largely unchanging. It was in the realm of possibility that an Roman Legion had the tools to beat most medieval armies. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, technology has been viewed by medieval Europeans as being in a standstill at best, and in decline at worst. Nobody thought that technology was the answer to anything, and its developments came at an incredibly slow rate, due to the lack of formalized education and the absence of financial support in discovering new tech. With religious institutions believing that they hold all the answers (and frequently condemning individuals that claim to know more than them), people stayed in a state of massive ignorance where they believe they knew everything, and everything they don't know isn't important enough to learn.
So the better questions to ask would be the following:
1. Would the culture even be receptive of future tech, even if the proof of concept works?
2. How will the technology even be disseminated to the masses? Will it be kept in the hands of the people that the time traveler teaches and then quickly forgotten about?
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For a roleplaying world, it is highly favorable to have some common language spoken by all the possible playable races or nations, so that the players could play different characters without having to solve language issues. However, it's also favorable to have different cultures for each race and/or nation. Knowing that typical Aledonian suffers of Stockholm syndrome about their lord and that Thracians worship some strange god and are known as religious fanatics (examples from my world) offers the players some extra inspiration. Different names help to play these national differences.
But how would different naming style develop if the two nations (let's suppose both in political and ethnic sense, for simplicity) share the same language?
EDIT: by "different naming style" I mean differences so big that they usually come with different languages (i.e. one country with "Anglo-saxon" and another one with "Latin" names, but sharing the same language). Slight differences are of course believable, I wouldn't need to ask about this.
EDIT2: "believable" doesn't have to mean "likely". I know that having nations speaking just one common language but having names in very different styles (probably originating in different languages) is not the most likely or natural case. I'm not interested in treatises on what is most likely and how these things usually happen in reality. I'm interested in ways how to make the unlikely situation in my premise believable (not necessary "realistic" - this word is understood as much stricter by some).
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There are a few different ways:
1. The naming is an artifact from prior language before a universal/common language is introduced by imperialist/economical/academic/universal translator forces.
2. Different races tend to name themselves based on historical/mythological/ancestral figures of their own race. They cling to this as a matter of pride.
3. They exist as a subculture which wishes to differentiate itself from the main culture for in story reasons. In the united states, for example, some people have "black names" that have little to no pre-slavery historical significance but I've not met individuals of other races with those names.
4. Titles can have cultural signification that is a useful tool for what you want. These can be tied to religion: just in catholicism: Brother John, Father Patrick, Sister Margret, Gregory-Martin Smith (Saints name taken after communion). You could imagine these similar to Irish immigrants. Secularly they could easily just be called Jack, Pat, Marge, Greg etc. Language based titles can be simple: Mr. vs. san. Honorary titles from ruling figures: Lord, Professor, Senator can clearly be exclusive to ruling parties.
5. Are they called by who they are or who their parents are? Mc/Mac/von are clearly different from Smith/Butcher/Little Foot. Ruling party could do the former; common folk the latter.
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It can be difficult to separate culture and language. I'm going to try to answer how the naming schemes (a function of culture) could evolve while keeping a common language across them. I'm not trying to address what the naming schemes would look like. Other answers seem to cover that in depth.
# Lingua Franca
The lingua franca can be a shared language which is not the first language of either party. You might want to have both cultures speak their own languages, but use a common tongue that is shared between them. This allows naming schemes that are foreign to each, yet they "speak a common language." It would be important to suggest that the common tongue is a first language for some other culture. Otherwise it is hard to imagine the common tongue being anything but a pidgin. It also gives you some fodder for some shared history between the two cultures: what was their historical interaction with the outside culture that led to its language being a shared trait?
For multiple cultures sharing a single language, China might be a good place to look. Many of the provinces had their own cultures and languages. Mandarin was a common tongue spoken between provinces, but it was also the first language of the capital province. Cantonese became a bit of a common tongue for trade when Canton became a financial hub. Unfortunately, I don't know how different the naming schemes were across provinces of China, so the example might not be ideal.
# Historical
Following @Confutus, historical conquest (militaristic, economic, etc) can help to explain why two separate cultures share a language where they might not have previously.
Naming schemes could develop historically and maintain as tradition, meanwhile the language has changed through some means (in this case, unification). Family names might be dissimilar across cultures due to long dead traditions that predate the current language.
# Division of Labor
@bowlturner makes a good point about the significance of cultural context in naming, e.g. smith being generic in a country full of metal workers. Even with a shared language, the importance of one concept might be worth being named after in one culture but not so in another.
# Geographical
Family names might be related to nearby geographical features which are historically named. Looking at the England, English is the first language and has been some hundreds of years. However, some of the geographical features are named using celtic and germanic languages (some of which are now dead). I have to imagine some English family names come from those archaic place names.
# Achievement
The Norse were known to take new names after battles. This might be seen as being similar to taking on a title, except the title became the name. It was almost as if warriors were reborn as new entities as the result of surviving battle. They also named their weapons.
The goddess Pallas Athena, sometimes called just "Pallas" or just "Athena", was renamed after slaying the titan Pallas. In this sense, names could be changed or modified by taking the spirit of the loser into oneself.
Cultures who would do this would likely believe names are extremely powerful. They might never speak any god's true name, or might assume that only sage's know the true names. Some ancient cultures believed knowing another's name gave one power of the other. The Abrahamic faiths still believe this, using many titles of reverence instead of the true name for their deity. Imagine what it must then mean in such a culture to *take* another's name as one's own. It might be like eating the heart of the enemy for their strength.
# Deus ex Machina
In any world where deities meddle in the affairs of mortals, deus ex machina can be a very literal solution to any problem at all. It can be made less boring by trying to understand why the gods chose to intervene to create a common language (Tower of Babel in reverse). Maybe the gods chose to diversify names, but there was always a shared language (Tower of Babel applied to names instead of languages). Again, a religious backstory as to the gods' motivation would seem required.
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The simple answer is to determine which is the stronger of the two cultures, and bastardise the names from the weaker into the stronger. The theory here is that people from the weaker culture will feel the need to assimilate into the stronger to *survive*, which will probably require them to change their names to fit in with the acceptable concepts of naming convention. How do you **Anglicise** the Hungarian name Istvan? Steven (Stephen).
Sharing the same language doesn't mean they share the same culture. Language and culture are completely different things. Language is a communication tool, culture is an expression of communal identity.
Naming conventions themselves are pretty fascinating. There's generally 3 known conventions, of which one is now pretty much universally used in modern societies. It's important to understand that a naming convention is **how we determine someone's name**. There is a second layer to them which I will explain in a bit.
* Lineage/line of descent (most common now)
* Occupation
* Physical appearance or countenance
Amerindians (perhaps this is a stereotype) traditionally use the 3rd option. They are given names that have no bearing on who their parents are or which community they come from.
The Occupational convention was prevalent in early medieval England, which gave us surnames such as Thatcher, Cooper, Shearer, Baker, Miller etc.
The lineage convention (most prevalent), has been around as long as any others. It consists of adding an extra name to a person's given name to define their heritage. A simple example of this is by taking your father's surname as your own surname.
# The Second Layer
Once the convention has been chosen, we would need to know how to apply it. Let's work with lineage here because it has the most variables.
First define lineage.
* **Patrilineal**: focus on the father
* **Matrilineal**: focus on the mother
* **Ambilineal**: focus on either parent or both
Second choose syntactic method.
* **Direct Adoption**: take parent's name and use it without adaptation
* **Gender Classifier**: take parent's name and prepend/append gender classifier
Standard Anglo-cultures use the direct adoption method. I take my father's surname, as he took his father's surname etc. Just to note; traditionally, Anglo-culture is patrilineal, which is why we take our father's surname. In modern times there is the accepted practice of ambilineal naming, wherein we apply a double-barrel surname (mother's & father's combined with a hyphen).
Traditional Norse, Hebrew & Arabic cultures make use of the gender classification method. Here are some examples:
**Norse**: father's given name + -son, -dottir appended. (Still used in Iceland I believe) *Karl Magnusson*.
**Hebrew**: father's given name + ben prepended. *Simon ben Gabriel*
**Arabic**: father;s given name + ibn prepended. *Ahmed ibn Mohammed*
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So to round up, even though your two cultures speak the same language, their naming conventions could be completely (or partially) different. It would make sense to try to apply the naming convention of Culture B to the people of Culture A if they are interacting in Culture B and are from the weaker culture.
Here's some examples for you:
Norse -> Arabic:
Karl Magnusson -> Karl ibn Magnus
Arabic -> Nore:
Hafiz ibn Rashid -> Hafiz Rashidson (sounds a bit weird, but that's what bastardising is all about)
Arabic -> Anglo:
Hafiz ibn Rashid -> Hafiz Rashid (most likely just drop the ibn)
Hebrew -> Arabic:
Simon ben Gabriel -> Simon ibn Gabriel (note both cultures are semitic, so the similarity is not surprising)
**EDIT**: since you mention the word believable, I'll add this. Believable isn't always about people thinking it's realistic. Get your characters to alight on the weird bastardisation of names from one culture to the other even though they speak the same language. This provides audience with the needed level of believability because their subconscious concerns are shown to have been considered by the author as well.
And on the reason why lineage is the most common now, it's possibly to do with number of social interactions. More people you meet, the higher the probability of meeting someone else with the same name. Therefore the lineage concept comes to mind as a quantifier. This is Bob & that is Bob, but this is Bob son of Greg and that is Bob son of Dave.
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Well I would look at the differences in English speaking countries, You have the US, Canada eh?, Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and Australia and New Zealand
There are some broad categories there, even in the US we have the South, the West, the West Coast the East Coast and the Midwest, all having differences.
Some times it's a matter of colour vs. color, rarely will you meet an American with the name of Nigel or a Brit named Billy Jo. If the two countries are different species the differences would be even more pronounced.
I believe the Navajo have almost 20 different words for shades of red, Eskimos almost 40 different identified types of snow, so the more prominent something is in a culture the more refined the language becomes to handle it. Personal names would follow in these as well.
If a country is very much into metal working, Smith would be too generic, the might be a lot of Blacksmiths, and silversmiths, but more likely you'll get Cuttlerysmith, Jewelrysmithe, Hingesmith as groups are much more specialized.
Added:
What I was partially trying to get at is naming partially comes from national identity, where has the nation come from what are they good at etc. If someone told me their name was Jonathan Swifthorse or Redfeather chances are they are Native American, both names are English translations. Their past is evident there.
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[Kaine](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/282/95) mentioned "catholic names" first, but it deserves greater detail: names based on religious tradition, which doesn't have to correlate with the language. In Europe, most names are just variants of the same names shared by most of Europe. This is because Christianity affected the names so much that the Christian naming style has overwritten original Germanic, Slavonic etc. styles. Most of us are named after characters from Bible or after some of Catholic (or Eastern Orthodox) saints. The biggest differences are due to language - the same basic names have different forms, so that they sound more "natural" to native speakers of different languages. There are also differences due to religion - different saints are more popular in different countries, Catholics prefer names of popular saints while Protestants slightly prefer names mentioned in Bible etc.
Now let's imagine that there is a large area where the language has always been the same or very similar, but there are significant differences between various nations. Language wouldn't enforce national variants of the names, but the religion would. Even if some nations would share the same religion, if one of the nations converted to the current faith due to missionaries from some foreign country speaking different language, it's quite likely that lots of the nation's names will have roots in the missionaries' language after few centuries.
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Any number of real-world cultural quirks that seem nonsensical have a good sound historical explanation...if you know the history. Why do the regions have the same language? Was there an ancient political conquest? Was there, anciently or recently, the spread of an important religion? Was there the development of an important center of scholarship? These elements are often, but not necessarily always correlated.
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A spaceship is headed for Earth. We detected it with a few months' warning. Messages have been sent to and received from the ship by radio, but we haven't deciphered anything they've said, and don't believe they've deciphered anything we've said. We know, from the radio messages, that their language is human-pronounceable.
The government assembles a team of linguists to prepare for when they land. What type of plan are the linguists likely to come up with for establishing initial communication?
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Sadly, you're just a couple of months too early to read an upcoming volume of scientific papers specifically addressing the issue of xenolinguistics and theoretical issues with fieldwork on alien languages....
In the meantime, a lot depends on what the aliens look like. The fact that their language is pronounceable by humans is an amazingly unlikely and super convenient coincidence which means that all of the tools of [monolingual fieldwork](https://youtu.be/sYpWp7g7XWU) can be brought into play. The movie *Arrival* does a good job of illustrating the basics, in a much more challenging situation than what you have described. However, the more human-like the aliens are, the smoother it will go, as the linguists involved will be able to rely more heavily on things like assuming that the aliens will have analogous words for analogous body parts and understand pantomime in similar ways as us. If their bodies are radically different, there will have to be a longer stage of figuring out how to understand their body language, and teaching them to understand ours. Note that this is still an issue for human-targeted fieldwork anyway, as gestures are not universal, but it will be a bigger issue when you're not at least starting with bodies of the same shape.
It can be assumed that the aliens can hear at least the same bands of frequencies in which they voices exist, but not outside that. Similarly, no assumptions can be made about their other sensory capacities. Maybe they see a different spectral range from us. Maybe they don't see color. Maybe they don't see at all. Maybe they pay more attention to scent than we do. To cover all of those options in preparation for elicitation work, teams of researchers would be compiling a wide variety of different types of stimulus materials to determine what the aliens can distinguish and what they care about as groundwork for more targeted elicitation later.
Absolutely everything that the aliens say should be recorded, in the highest possible fidelity, so as to capture any distinctions that may not be obvious to not-yet-trained ears. This will be accompanied by video recordings to provide context for each utterance. For everyone interacting directly with the aliens, there will be five or ten who just do data analysis on the recordings that come out of elicitation sessions. While none of these are done in isolation, and elicitation experts will figure stuff out about multiple organizational levels at once, the first issue for analysts will be identifying contrasting phonemes--which might be possible ahead of time based solely on the corpus of transmissions--then establishing a transcription convention, identifying "words" (roots, collocations, idioms, etc.), and then finally building up successively more complex levels of grammar.
And while nobody will strongly expect anything to come of it, *someone* is going to try zero-shot learning by producing an embedding vector space on the tokenized corpus of recorded alien speech and trying to correlate it with equal-dimensional word-vector spaces for major human languages. It's relatively cheap, and hey, you might get lucky.
Edit, to explain the last paragraph:
Zero-shot learning: learning to classify inputs that belong to categories the learning system has never examples of before, based on correlating knowledge from multiple other sources. I.e., a zero-shot image classifiers might be able to correctly identify pictures of zebras without ever having been trained on zebras because it knows what stripes are, and knows what horses are, and has been told that a zebra looks like a striped horse.
Embedding vector space on a tokenized corpus: this is how LLMs, like ChatGPT, encode their inputs. It's a way of being able to do math on words. Basically, you come up with a method of splitting a collection of texts (a corpus) into discrete tokens (letters, words, or whatever happens to work), and then you compute a list of numbers--a vector--that represents each of those tokens based on the other tokens that it occurs in context with. The position of the resulting vectors in higher-dimensional space often correlates with useful semantic features of the tokens.
Correlating word vector spaces: zero-shot learning for machine translation is done by producing embedding vectors for multiple languages, and then looking for clusters of points that have the same shapes in each model. If you assume that the matching points are translation-equivalents, then that gives you a way to convert a semantic vector from one model into a semantic vector from the other model, and start translating languages without ever having seen a parallel text.
This technology is only proven to work at all when starting with extremely large data sets of relatively closely related languages, but it is being seriously researched to see if can be extended to provide cheap machine translation for less well-documented languages and even to decipher animal communication, like whale songs.
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**Start with METI**
Take a look at the Arecibo Message, the Voyager Golden Disk, and other METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences) that humanity has already done. These projects have already established a baseline on how to attempt communication with an unknown intelligence that shares no common heritage with humanity. There's too much for me to type out here, but try to understand why each of these messages (and each part of each message) were built in the way that they were.
**Understand the basics of Cryptology**
Linguistics is important for you the author to understand, but you should do at least a brief study on cryptology as well. This is essentially cryptography of the highest order, messages encoded in a medium that you have no context for. Not a cipher of a shared alphabet, not an ASCII message encrypted in binary data, or a secret message hidden in a plain-text letter. Understand the basics of where to start decrypting a message when the encryption method is unknown, and that will help you understand how we would approach this problem.
**Establish a method of communication**
As other answers have said, you will have to figure out a communal channel to communicate. Maybe they don't hear in a similar way as us, or use audio vibrations through a gaseous medium to 'talk'. Maybe they don't see similar wavelengths or use written symbols to 'write'. Do they feel vibrations like we do? Could we tap on them to create a 'morse code'? Some answers will be evident from the fact that they have a machine (the spaceship), what it looks like, and how they interact with it. At a minimum, they can perceive the material it's made out of, we could find some similar material and arrange pieces of it in a weird order, and assume that they'll be aware of how many of them there are. Consider what other mediums we could assume that they do perceive, or might perceive. How can we confirm that they understand that medium (pro-tip: prime numbers aren't accidents)
**With a Cooperative Partner**
Assuming that the aliens desire to communicate as well, have established a medium of communication, and are actively engaged in a back-and-forth effort, the best way to start is to establish a shared ontology for the fundamental properties of our universe. Maths for starters; establish communal symbology for numbers, counting, algebra, and primes. With numbers, you can communicate about physics and the elements, and establish a shared symbology for chemistry.
From there you can further abstract. Represent the Earth's position in the Solar System and our planets, map Earth, and discuss geology; planetary science should hold constant across space to where they came from. Discuss the Galaxy, and try to figure out which Solar System they came from. Represent and discuss DNA (do their lifeforms have a similar structure for genetic information?)
At this point, there are enough common references that you're close to learning a second language without knowing a shared language. How would you help an exchange student from Japan to learn English when you don't know any Japanese?
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For starters, if they were smart they would talk to people who have deciphered languages of other humans. People from civilization regularly run into primitive tribes in Africa or South America, etc, who have not previously been in contact with the outside world. They usually manage to establish communication pretty quickly.
I once talked to a missionary who was the first to contact such a tribe. He said that when he walked into their village, he was carrying various equipment they weren't familiar with, canteen and tent and radio and whatever, and so they crowded around and said "what's this? what's that?" So then he went around the village pointing at various things and asking "what's that?" and was able to learn words for many common items.
Of course a lot depends on how similar the aliens are to us. If they eat food and wear shoes and so on, building up a list of words for common objects might be fairly easy. But if their physiology, or even more important, their way of thinking, is very different from us, the challenges quickly mount. Does their language have nouns and verbs and adjectives? Or do they just not think in those terms at all.
I'm reminded of a science fiction story I read once where a human meets aliens. Somehow they are able to talk -- that wasn't explained. But the aliens ask him, "How do you hear?" He replies, "With my ears," and points to his ears, and tries to explain how they work. The aliens are baffled by this response. So he asks them how they hear. And one of them says, "I hear of my home world, of ground and sky."
I thought it was a good scene. Perhaps aliens would be so alien that they would just not think like us, and such basic questions would get totally different answers from what we would expect.
Or not. One could also speculate that logic is inherent in the nature of the universe and if aliens are capable of building technological devices like spaceships, they just MUST think about science and technology in essentially the same way we do.
As we have no examples of intelligent aliens to work with, we just have no empirical knowledge and can only speculate.
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Start with maths and work from there. 1+1=2 will be the same to an alien, just different symbols. So it gives us a point of reference and a bunch of concepts known to both sides to begin with.
Then look at getting hold of their version of a childrens primer and move forwards.
Unlike earth languages, I don't think the audio methods would be better than the visual. It's unlikely we'd produce similar sounds, and those are just a beginning anyway. Whereas we can communicate in mutually defined symbols.
Chinese script is an example. Old Chinese each character was a word. It doesn't matter what language you applied it to it had the same meaning in any language. So widely different languages can use the same symbols for the same concept.
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There are some [oil consuming bacteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_biodegradation#Oil_biodegradation) which can break down hydrocarbons in the ocean. Since these tend to store a lot of energy, I was wondering whether it's possible for larger organisms to take advantage of hydrocarbons (specifically, petroleum) as a food source.
I'm imagining something like an alien planet with vast petroleum deposits close to the surface, and tree-like plants with roots which could reach down and take from these deposits. If this is possible, I could imagine it evolving due to something like thick cloud cover preventing sunlight from reaching the ground.
I could also maybe imagine this working for animals that live underground, if the oil deposits were close enough to the surface that it would leak through cracks. It looks like petroleum has something like three times more energy density than glucose, so if it were possible for animals to take advantage of it seems that might be something they'd evolve to do.
Is this possible? If so, could it ever evolve in real life (assuming it's on a planet where all of the conditions happen to be right)?
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# Yes, But...:
Biologically, it's certainly possible for multicellular organisms (either directly or through the actions of symbiotic bacteria) to utilize petroleum as an energy source. Life makes similar compounds, like fats, to utilize. But life usually makes these with more enzymatically reactive parts to ease the process, so they generally don't have the enzymes to break down the petroleum as easily. Yet a shocking amount of the food you eat today is actually made from plastic (which is derived from hydrocarbons) so you [already eat petroleum](https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/How-Much-Crude-Oil-Do-You-Unknowingly-Eat.html).
HOWEVER, petroleum is tricky to digest directly, tends to be highly localized as a food source, and **IS NOT RENEWABLE**. This seems like a trivial thing, but when you start talking evolutionary times, it is critical. To evolve an enzymatic system, a feeding system around traveling or being scattered from one tar pit to the next, and a way to directly eat tar/crude oil, you are talking millions of years and LOTS of great opportunities. All to evolve the ability to consume a non-renewable resource that that is typically sequestered deep underground.
Further, these multicellular organisms (most likely animals or fungi) would be directly competing with bacteria for these resources. The evolutionary time frame for bacteria is a lot shorter than for eukaryotic organisms, and bacteria are frighteningly efficient about consuming any resources laying around.
What I suspect would happen on such a world is that the local equivalent of bacteria would consume the tar/crude, and then tiny animals would consume the bacteria, and then other organisms would consume those, so you would have a food chain with petroleum at the base all the way up to apex predators at the top - assuming an insanely huge supply of abundant petroleum leaking out of the ground at numerous locations. Existing life forms could rapidly evolve to consuming bacteria (since they all ready do) and bacteria are fairly well established at eating petroleum.
Given enough time, and enough resources, you would have the petroleum equivalent of herbivores (petrovores? Napthavores?) consuming tar, then providing perfect internal growing conditions for bacteria that digest the tar, which the napthavore would then derive sustenance from. That would be the logical progression. All of this would inevitably lead to the consumption of all the petroleum faster and faster until your whole system collapsed for lack of food.
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**Yes, but it's unlikely to happen in an oxygen atmosphere.**
[DWKraus's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/214431/2800) does a good job of explaining the major impediment: in an Earthlike environment, petrochemicals are limited in distribution and non-renewable--so *if* the ability to eat them evolves, it won't last long. If you want to create a geologically-stable ecosystem using this food source, you need to solve the renewability problem. That means designing a planet that can naturally produce hydrocarbons at the surface in large quantities on a continuing basis... and that won't happen in an Earthlike, oxidizing environment. (Living organisms could do it if engineered to, but there's no reason for them to evolve the ability, given that fats are much more convenient.)
Rather than an oxygen-and-CO2-based metabolic ecosystem, you want hydrogen breathers in an atmosphere with a lot of methane. Entirely abiotic processes like upper-atmosphere photochemistry and lightning-induced electrochemistry will continuously produce complex hydrocarbons that rain down on the surface, which multicellular organisms would be incentivized to feed on to gain energy by hydrolyzing them to regenerate methane. And as you can see from the example of Titan, it is entirely plausible for such a world to be shrouded in haze such that very little light gets down to the surface, making direct consumption of hydrocarbons competitive with hydrogenic photosynthesis.
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Yes, with the appropriate enzymes, there's no reason they couldn't.
But you need to solve a larger problem before that - the *continuous (and renewable) availability* of hydrocarbons. You can't do that with fossil petroleum. So, you need to start with organisms that *produce* hydrocarbons as energy storage (it's not too different from using fat, but the reactions aren't as efficient in the organic life temperature range; however, with the appropriate enzymes, who knows).
From there, you can have organisms evolve to predate on other hydrocarbon-rich organisms, gradually abandoning all other food sources. You could end with vampire-like predators and plant analogues storing hydrocarbon reservoirs like tubers deep underground. Once the vampire moles develop enough, they might also be able to detect, reach and exploit petroleum reservoirs, at least those not too far from the surface.
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## Symbiosis between a large organism and petroleum metabolizing bacteria
Living things operate in water and **oil and water don't mix**, so it is very difficult for living things to use pure hydrocarbons. Fats used by your body are mostly not pure hydrocarbons. For instance, fatty acids have carboxylic acid group that becomes negatively charged in water at neutral pH, making them much more water soluble than their purely hydrocarbon analogs (however, they still need help from lipoprotein particles to be carried around the body). The carboxylic acid group provides a handle for doing further chemistry as well.
This [paper](https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2018.02885) provides a lot of the details, but here's a good quote:
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> Due to the hydrophobicities and low water solubilities of most petroleum hydrocarbons, the biodegradation rate is generally limited in the environment.
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For this reason, with the right selection pressures, I think that **large organisms might actually be able to do much better than bacteria at metabolizing petroleum**, since they can create internal environments (temperature, pH, oxygen concentration) more suitable for the reactions necessary to break down hydrocarbons than microorganisms.
While it's possible that the large organism could evolve the enzymes for degradation itself, I'm imagining that they might evolve like cows. The cows themselves do not produce the enzymes necessary to digest the tough plant matter that they eat (mostly cellulose and lignin) but create an environment that in which can do it for them. Chewing their cud provides mechanical mixing and the bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and archaea in their [rumen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumen) convert the cellulose and lignin to fatty acids and other fairly water soluble molecules that can be used directly by the cow.
**Petroleum-eating cows**
So, I imagine that a large organism could evolve a kind of stomach populated by petroleum-degrading microbes that provides an optimal environment for the microbes, uses mechanical mixing to expose more oil to these microbes, and helps to efficiently solubulize the oil by secretion of some kind of surfactant.
Why haven't such creatures evolved on Earth? As mentioned in the other answers, maybe there just isn't enough petroleum on Earth for this to be sustainable. However, you could imagine a planet where petroleum is more abundant and produced at a greater rate. Such petroleum cows might evolve there.
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Fats from our real existing diets are basically long-chain hydrocarbons (more specifically, carboxylic acids with long hydrocarbon chain) connected to a glycerol backbone via ester bonds; so yes, it is possible.
Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triglyceride).
While fatty acids and fats are not hydrocarbons per se, they both have moieties made of long-chain aliphatic hydrocarbons. These hydrocarbon chain moieties are where their high energy density is coming from -- it does not come from the carboxylate group. The question seems to be about biology and physiology and they both "treat" similar molecules in similar ways.
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In the South Galaxy, the overwhelming majority of life lives on planets, breathes air, and is carbon-based. All sentient life is carbon-based. However, in the vast reaches of space, there are some animals that float through the empty void, do not breathe (at least not air) and are silicon-based. These include Space Whales, huge whale-like (duh) creatures that inhabit nebulas. Would these Space Whales be edible to the carbon-based lifeforms or would it just be like eating sand?
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**Maybe some part might be edible.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KYmDm.png)
<https://allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/1800s/1861-1868/>
During the mass slaughter of the western herds of buffalo (American bison), many thousands of animals were killed just for the tongue. The rest of the animal was left where it fell to rot.
You could have something like this with your space whales. It sounds like it would help your story if they could get eaten by carbon based creatures. Maybe the vast bulk of the space whale is essentially silicious mineral matter but one tiny organ is carbon based - maybe the eye, or a gland in the brain. That part is super tasty and a prestige food for jaded rich people who are tickled by the idea of an enormous ancient being dying so they could eat its eye.
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We are not able to digest silicon based materials. See for example [rice hulls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_hulls):
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> Rice hulls are the coatings of seeds, or grains, of rice. The husk protects the seed during the growing season, since it is formed from hard materials, including opaline silica and lignin. The hull is mostly indigestible to humans.
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Since your life forms are also silicon based, I doubt a human would able to metabolize any part of their bodies, we simply lack the chemicals to break down the molecules making up their bodies.
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The majority of the nutrients we need (proteins, carbohydrates, fats) are carbon-based, and silicon-based life is presumed to have incompatible analogs instead (with silanes replacing alkane groups).
Silicon-based organic analogs are often biologically inert (on Earth), which is why they're used for things like medical implants and cookware. Eating space whale meat wouldn't nourish you, but it probably wouldn't harm you either, at least in moderate amounts. Like clay eating ([pica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia)), it could become a problem just in mechanical terms if you eat too much of the stuff.
Space whale might contain one or two things you *do* need – most obviously water, but also salt and trace elements like iron and magnesium, which might be in forms that your digestive system could extract.
So, no, you couldn't live off it; but in starvation conditions it might be slightly better than sucking a button.
(Of course, if silicon is replacing carbon, the chemistry might be different in other ways. If, by the same logic, oxygen were replaced by sulfur, then you would have hydrogen sulfide instead of water, and then the space whale meat would be highly toxic and bad-smelling)
**Edited to add:**
I suppose another reason to eat space whale would be if it tasted good. But I suspect that silicon-based meat would not taste of much of anything. Our sense of smell (and taste) is known to be largely based on the shape of molecules, and because silicon atoms are larger than carbon atoms, the silicon-based analogs of tasty molecules would not fit taste / smell receptors designed for the carbon-based versions. Also, silicon-based "organic" molecules tend to be much more water-repellent. I imagine it would be like eating flavorless, oily clay or rubber.
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Humans eat for two different reasons:
1. **Energy**. We need energy to survive. To get it, we eat plants, or animals which ate plants, and then, through the Calvin and Krebs Cycles, convert Adenosine Diphosphate (ADP) to Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). The extra phosphate in ATP stores energy. We then burn that ATP back into ADP to harness it. The number of basic types of foods that can give us energy are very limited, and all of them are carbon based, as carbon is needed in the Calvin and Krebs Cycles. Silicon-based lifeforms would most likely have no caloric value for human digestion.
2. **Nutrition**. Humans need 20 different types of amino acids to survive. We can make 12 of them, leaving 8 which we must "harvest" from other organisms. These eight are called the "essential amino acids." Many other animals are capable of making them, so by eating them, we satisfy our needs. The only plant conclusively found to have all eight is quinoa, and flax seed is a maybe. Silicon-based lifeforms would not have these amino acids, as all of them contain carbon. This is what makes us carbon-based.
There is no reason, therefore, for humans to want to eat these. It would likely give them indigestion. However, there are other reasons people might be hunting space-whales. In the 1800s, whales were killed for their oil, which was used in lamps. Perhaps these space-whales contain a critical energy source. There are plenty of reasons why they might be hunted, and I would consider using one of those in your world.
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On earth some bacteria living extreme environment are able to use non-organic material like rocks to live like pyrite (FeS2).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithoautotroph>
As mentionned previously Sulfur would be replacing oxygen for silicium-based organism so why not a kind of complex organism based on extremophile example could use it in a non traditionnal way to extract energy.
As you'll see there is a lot of extremophile bacteria kind and we'll discover more and more. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile>
So if you can exhibit a way to extract energy from your silicium-based organism using organic chemistry you can imagine an organism able to support it.
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I had a dream last night where I was coordinating a space program for an Earth-like planet, with a Moon much like our own. The Moon in the dream had an annoying quirk...
The space program kept sending hundreds of probes to try and orbit the Moon. Each probe managed to complete no more than a handful orbits around the Moon (each orbit taking a few hours). But the orbits quickly destabilized. For every one hundred probes:
* Ninety would end up escaping the Moon and going into a solar orbit;
* Eight would escape the Moon and stay orbiting the Earth. Of these eight, one would have a periapsis low enough to eventually burn in Earth's atmosphere;
* One would go suborbital and crash against the Moon;
* And finally, only one would managed to stay orbiting the Moon.
Outside of dreams, is there any scenario for an Earth-like planet in which this could happen? If this is not possible with an Earth-like planet and a Moon like our own, would this be possible with if the Moon had other combination of mass, size and distance to Earth?
I am aware of this question:
[How can you make a stable configuration including a moon that has a moon?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26634/21222)
But in my case I am thinking of probes, not natural satellites.
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That's plenty possible.
In fact, if you're willing to fudge your requirements just slightly, it could easily be the case for Earth's moon.
Let's look at [the equation for orbital speed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_speed#Precise_orbital_speed), also known as the vis-viva equation
$$ v = \sqrt{\mu \left( \cfrac{2}{r} - \cfrac{1}{a} \right)} \approx \sqrt{\cfrac{\mu}{r}} $$
where $\mu$ is [the standard graviational parameter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gravitational_parameter), $r$ is the orbital radius at the moment you're calculating the orbital speed, and $a$ is the [semi-major axis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-major_and_semi-minor_axes) of the orbit. For any practical orbital calculations, the standard gravitational parameter $\mu$ is a constant for any given body, because it is the multiplicative product of a constant and the mass of the body being orbited. For the special case of a perfectly circular orbit ([eccentricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_eccentricity) = 0; you're unlikely to come across this in real life, but lots of orbits have eccentricities pretty close to zero), we have $a = r$, leading to the simplified, approximate expression.
Notice that in both cases, we're treating the body being orbited as a [point source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_source) of a gravitational field of a magnitude described by $\mu$.
That's good enough if the body we're orbiting has an essentially uniform gravitational field, but there are bodies that don't. [Earth's moon is one good example](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Gravitational_field) of a rather large body with a non-uniform [gravitational field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation_of_the_Moon):
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moon_gravity_acceleration_map_LGM2011.jpg)
Look at that variance! We're seeing significant variance already in the third significant digit. Between dark blue and white on that scale is a difference in surface gravitational accelleration of over 1.5%.
In fact, the [perturbation effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit#Perturbation_effects) resulting from this are enough to make it difficult to attain a [frozen orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_orbit) (a long-term stable orbit that minimizes station-keeping requirements) around Earth's moon. When the Apollo missions flew to the Moon in 1968-1972, these were unknown, so active orbital corrections and estimations of orbital degredation were used instead. The estimations turned out to be wrong, and active orbital correction requires fuel, which limits the useful life of the spacecraft in orbit. The frozen orbits were discovered (or perhaps rather, determined) only in 2001, almost 30 years after our first bout of manned exploration of the Moon ended.
While I'm not sure you could *actually* put a spacecraft into a lunar orbit and end up with it in solar orbit with no further powered maneuvers, you could put the one spacecraft that stays in its intended orbit into an orbit at [inclination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_inclination) 27°, 50°, 76° or 86°, and the rest in other orbits, around a body exactly like Earth's moon, and you'll mostly get what you're after. Also, make sure to have your scientists in-story have frustrated discussions about [mascons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)).
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A lumpy moon has a lumpy gravitational field and orbits are, well, lumpy also and frequently not stable.
This has been an issue in putting satellites in orbit around comets and asteroids, and even around our own Moon, though there it's only an issue for very low orbits. (Unsurprisingly, the solution is to actively correct the orbit.)
For a moon to be significantly lumpy, it needs to be small (like an asteroid) or otherwise gravity would soon make it spherical.
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Our moon has a very weak magnetosphere, but it does have magnetic rocks, which surprised scientists because it suggests a time when it had a stronger magnetic field. That issue is discussed [here](https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/mystery-moons-lost-magnetism-explained/).
With that as inspiration, let's assume a younger solar system with a younger moon with a highly viscous fluid outer core sloshing around an abnormally dense iron core. Let's also assume that this confuration has kept the moon from becoming tidally locked to the planet, so that it can rotate much faster.
This would give it a much stronger magnetic field, which could cause all kinds of havoc with probes: from yanking their magnetic frames around to messing with the navigation electronics and power system.
*(For the record, I like Mark's answer better as I believe it would be much harder to detect and, therfore, harder to compensate for.)*
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If moon's [Hill sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere) is less that moon's radius, then it would be impossible to have stable orbit around it.
Our Moon has its Hill sphere with a radius of 60,000 km. If you bring it near Roche limit(20x times closer to Earth) then moon's Hill sphere would be 3,000 km - less than Moon's radius.
If you can make Moon less dense then you can place it father away.
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There are reports of blind people being able to develop an echolocation ability, by listening to the echo of sounds emitted by them.
Since this ability is pretty handy for spies and soldiers, the army of a middle-age kingdom has trained some non-blind specialists to use this ability while moving in dark environments without the need of using a light source.
Of couse moving in the dark in a castle or in a town while shouting is not that smart if you want to stay hidden.
What is a sound which can be used, and how could the specialist produce it?
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Given my own experiences with night sounds, I'd go with ***[cricket chirps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_(insect)#Chirping)***.
People who live among those creatures barely give the noise a second thought. Attempting to track the source down is rarely worth it, because the cricket will stop for a while (long enough to frustrate a searcher, far to short to alleviate the aggravation) once something big like a human starts moving about. Due to this, I once spent an entire night frustrated by a cricket in my room, only to discover the next morning it was a malfunctioning digital watch.
I'm noticing from some of the other answers that cricket chirps are quite compatible with them. They are fairly high-frequency, very similar to the noises echo-locating humans have been observed to use, and a natural sound that is not likely to be investigated.
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According to [this paper](https://web.archive.org/web/20020202195520/http://worldaccessfortheblind.org/thesis.txt), clicking the tongue and hissing are the most common sound used for human echolocation. There are also reports of people tapping hard surfaces with their canes and using that as the sound source. Assuming your spies were trained by blind people, who developed this skill out of necessity, they would probably use similar sounds.
There is a [small scale study](http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/dav/aaua/2009/00000095/00000002/art00013) where 10 sighted people were taught basic navigation skills within a few days. This study also tested the efficacy of various sounds and concluded that [palatal clicks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_clicks) are the most effective.
Just remember that the reason for moving in the dark without a light-source is to not be noticed. Making loud clicking noises and listening for the echo will announce your presence to nearby guards.
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Let's go by a basic sound principle: [higher-frequency sounds are absorbed quicker than low frequency sounds](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87751/do-low-frequency-sounds-really-carry-longer-distances). For stealthy purposes, this means that someone in the next room is less likely to hear a squeak as opposed to a burp, volumes being equal. This is also beneficial for our spy as it means that the echoes from their high-pitched emission are more localised to close-by objects - they don't get as much cross-talk from further objects. Bats use ultrasound for echo location; I believe recorded cases of human echo location also uses high-pitched clicks.
Now, is a high-pitched click appropriate for a spy? Probably not. But what were common in the middle ages? Rats. Lots of rats. And rats use high-pitched sounds themselves.
A spy sneaking around and making squeaking rat sounds would probably be safely ignored - unless they had broken into the kitchen!
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Your own question, a prior answer, and a comment collective already give us several parameters:
1. The human body must be able to produce the sound.
2. The sound must not attract the notice of others.
3. The sound must produce an echo that can be used to interpret the surroundings.
I believe the solution is bird songs.
It takes practice, but many people have been able to produce very realistic mimicry of a wide variety of common backyard birds. That last part is essential, as when someone hears such a sound, he should assume the sound is coming from something that commonly visits his yard, not from an enemy performing surveillance on him. Finally, again with a lot of practice, the high-pitched warbling tones should reliably rebound to the ear, allowing you to determine approximate size and shape of nearby obstacles.
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Many people commented that the spies would give themselves away by producing the sounds.
A way out of that is *externally produced sound*. Someone else 'on your side' engulfs the area in sound patterns; retrain your spies to listen for the reflections and obstructions ('shadows') of those.
This may also allow you to vary the sound frequency, thereby providing more information to the spies, because the refraction/reflection patterns change with frequency.
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There's two ways to hide, be unobserved or be unnoticed ... perhaps a range of sounds would be best - rather than just one, to blend in ... like do that popping noise which would sound like dripping water or as another said - rats, crickets etc ...
If the person has hands, why not use a tool to create common sounds too? Like crickets could be made with pieces of wood where the edges rub together
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Wavelength determines fidelity. For high, surface detail you need high frequency, while for lower, but deeper detail you need low frequencies.
Infrasound frequencies travel further, and so can be used as a long distance communication channel without any need for electromagnetic radiation. Low frequencies produce fewer reflections. They are great for seeing through walls, not so good for seeing in the dark. Being infrasound they cannot be heard without assistance. Like elephants. Elephants have a better ability to hear infrasound than humans.
Ultrasound frequencies travel less far, but have very high fidelity, and produce more reflections. They are great for seeing in the dark and around walls, but not so good for 'seeing' through walls. Being ultrasound they cannot be heard without assistance. Like dogs. Dogs have a better ability to hear high frequencies than humans.
Both are great. Because echolocation is main,y concerned with not bumping into things, high frequencies - and ultrasound - are more commonly found in nature. But elephants (and possibly whales) have the ability to use infrasound for long distance 'phone calls'.
Without mechanical assistance it may be really hard to achieve either ultrasound or infrasound frequencies - hence why palatial clicks (high frequency) or cane taps are most used. A portable infrasound generator would be the equivalent of a subwoofer. But an electronic cane that you could press hard against the floor could provide great infrasound frequencies.
So a double action comms. cane with an ultrasound chirp and an infrasound tip could really work. You would need earbuds to decode the information, but it would be effectively silent.
Being able to generate two frequencies from each hand would provide a far easier access to 3D resolution. Even though your ears will provide excellent 3D awareness, the brain can use whatever it's given, and two precisely known sources provides a clearer image.
So, you want the body to produce it.. Maybe there's a way of training yourself to generate and sense infrasound, or even ultrasound. You may need a prosthesis such as a special tooth to pick up ultrasound. Infrasound can sometimes be sensed, even though it cannot be heard.
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As with any imaging system in the world, our ability to resolve detail is dependant on the bandwidth of the signal (and of course the speed the wave). Given that sound has a much lower velocity than light, a much higher bandwidth is required to produce any meaningful images.
So any answer describing any melodic sounds would fail to resolve anything smaller than a castle.
Conversely anything with enough bandwidth to resolve, say a person, would be instantly recognizable.
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The four fundamental forces, those being Gravity, Electromagnetics, Strong Nuclear Force and Weak Nuclear force are said to be the forces that hold the universe together and so on. Based on that knowledge, what exactly would characters with powers based on that forces do? Gravity would be kinda obvious but the other three opens a lot of possibilities. Would like to know:
* The extent of their abilities;
* What limits would they have, considering what each force actually does in real life;
* What using that abilities would look like to observers;
* How much destruction could they cause.
Lets consider some limits, for instance, no planet destroying capabilities.
Some existing examples in fiction would be an awesome bonus, as well.
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**EDIT:**
To keep answers consistent, please let's focus on what is widely accepted by the scientific community on what those forces do in real life. If you know of some study that suggests that they actually could do more or less stuff than the accepted theories proposes, please post a link.
If the no-planet destroying imposed limit is impossible to be respected, please explain why. I'm interested in what the manipulators of those forces can do, and what they cannot, and if they doing it would look cool to potential observers or it would just be imperceptible. (In my opinion @ApproachingDarknessFish includes those, but people asked for a reword so here it is.)
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**UPDATE:** This question is erroneously tagged as opinion-based but people seem to agree that it is indeed too broad. I was advised on meta to open four separate questions, one for each force, and clearly limit the range and extention of each power, but I won't, in respect to @ApproachingDarknessFish's outstanding answer. If you think there is still room to discussion in this subject, feel free to make the four questions yourself.
[Answer]
The main problem you're going to run into is that complete control of these forces would be, to put it bluntly, mad overpowered. Being able to control any of the forces, even the weak force, would make you a god of destruction. You said "no planet destroying abilities", which in my opinion is simply incongruous with having powers over these forces, any of which have the power to destroy the universe as we know it. However, I'll do my best to stick to more relatively mundane applications.
Disclaimer: I am a biologist and a programmer, well, actually a student studying to be those things, so physics in not my area of expertise. Feel free to correct me if any of the science below is downright inaccurate, but also keep in mind I'm intentionally simplifying and not concerned with using the most correct language possible.
Notice: this answer has been edited substantially since it was posted, with major rewrites of the sections regard Gravity and the Strong Force.
# Gravity
Gravity is unique among the forces in that it is best described not by quantum mechanics but by general relativity, via the curvature of spacetime. So one interpretation of gravity-based powers would be power over spacetime itself: wormholes, time travel, banishing people into pocket dimensions, etc. However, I’m going to focus on a more conservative interpretation and define gravity-based powers to mean the ability to affect the acceleration experienced by massive objects in a gravitational field.
Gravity is by far the weakest of the four forces. You basically need planetary scales to make it do anything noticeable. Unfortunately if we give our gravity-users planetary-scale powers over gravity it becomes trivial for them to destroy the planet. So instead we’ll limit their powers to changing the effects of planetary-scale gravity fields on much smaller massive objects. In other words, they need a powerful gravitational field to already be present, and they can make objects lighter or heavier within that field. I’m interpreting this as the ability to affect weight, not mass.
This ability has absurd potential for practical applications, most notably in construction and aerospace. The biggest challenge in designing a craft to reach space is that the fuel that generates thrust is usually the heaviest component of the craft. If you can turn a thousand-ton rocket into a five-pound rocket that still has millions of pounds of thrust behind it, the solar system is your oyster. Forklifts and cranes are a thing of the past on government construction projects: have a Gravity-user make the cargo featherweight, and give it a firm shove, and give the workers on the 20th floor heads up. And when it’s time for the building to come down, just quintuple its weight and get out of the way.
Of course, the ability to level buildings with a hand wave also has potential for military use (and more likely, terrorism). A gravity-user could pin soldiers to the ground with 10G, turn them to mush with 200G, pull planes out of the sky and sink tanks deep into the ground. With even a few gravity-users in play, the shape of warfare would change dramatically. No one can risk large forward-assaults anymore, lest they wind up sinking through the Earths’ mantle. Black ops is the name of the game and cyber-warfare reigns supreme.
That said, the logistical usefulness of Gravity-users far exceeds their use in warfare in my opinion. While they’re tremendously effective, they’re also a precious resource that dies to a snipers’ bullet just like an ordinary human. If you want your nation to be the most powerful, I think employing gravity users in your supply lines and manufacturing bases would be a much better allocation of resources then sending them directly into combat. They just make so many industrial processes so much easier; the demand for civilian services is so high I doubt many Gravity-users would turn to the military except in times of a draft. Then again, it might only take one to flatten the enemy capital into the ground.
I see Gravity-users as practically-minded upper-middle-class people mostly employed in construction. Their abilities are incredibly useful for everyday life, but aren’t particularly well-suited for direct combat, unless their reflexes are fast enough to drop bullets out of the air, but they would serve as a major deterrent to anyone planning an invasion. Because of high demand for their abilities from many sectors of the economy, I imagine they’d be very well-paid and live comfortable lives of productivity and comfort. The increased productivity they would bestow upon society would them icons of the workforce and heroes of labor, but since their success depends entirely on them getting their own hands dirty, I don’t see how they could ever own a business or ever truly leave the middle class.
# Electromagnetism
Unlike gravity, electromagnetism is strong enough at small scales to be used without fear of destroying the planet. However, considering that electromagnetism is what hold atoms and molecules together, it could easily be used to vaporize... well, anything, including the entire planet, so let's set a limit and say that an EM user can only control electromagnetic fields at macroscopic scales.
Well, they can act like a magnet, or a lightning bolt. Create a positive charge on bad guy and a negative one in the atmosphere, and BANG!!! crispy bad guy. They could also create radiation, from radio waves to visible light to gamma rays, so you can microwave top ramen, become a human disco ball, give people skin cancer, or just annihilate them with gamma rays. Lasers might be tricky to pull off, but probably possible with sufficient training. You can wipe hard drives with a handwave, and you're every cyborg's worst nightmare. If powers include detecting EM fields, you could see in infrared, ultraviolet (probably not a good idea when visiting public restrooms), and detect all electronic equipment and brain activity around you. If they can manipulate existing radiation, they could curve light around themselves and go invisible.
Be careful with magnetism, since much like gravity it's very difficult to contain or aim. It would probably be possible though.
EM users are the Supermen of this world: they're flashy, versatile, immensely powerful in traditional superhero fights, and well-suited for public adoration. When your abilities revolve around lightning and lasers, stealth and discreteness isn't much of an option; even if you can turn yourself invisible for the approach, you’re going to light up the sky with fireworks when you actually strike. Also they don't however have any strong *defensive* abilities though (soon to be a common theme), so they would probably rely on governments to keep them safe and would serve publicly as either patriotic super-soldiers or semi-legal vigilantes. They would be the flaming sword of modern justice, the poster children of the force-users, and the only ones the public would regularly interact with.
# Weak Force
Unfortunately there is no getting around the issue of subatomic manipulation for the next two. Unlike gravity and EM, the weak force has incredibly short range, since the particles that mediate it are massive and can only exert their effect over any distance at all thanks to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Herein lies a problem: by "short" I don't mean a few feet or a few inches or even a few nanometers, but *1/1000 of the diameter of a single proton.* In other words, the weak force can't even be projected from one atom to another, or even from one side of an atom's nucleus to the other side.
So, you have two options. Either Weak users can project their abilities over distances or they can't, and can only affect what they can touch. The first option is very problematic since this ability is so stupidly strong, as we'll see shortly.
The second option makes this ability stupidly weak (no pun intended) since the distance between the electrons in your hand and the electrons in whatever you're touching is many orders of magnitude greater the weak force's range, meaning that your powers would only apply over your own body. This is problematic because this ability is stupidly destructive, as we'll see shortly.
So, problems of range aside, what can the weak force do? Well, it can change quarks (the particles that make up protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei) into other "flavors" of quarks. What does that do? It can change protons into neutrons and vice versa, which can change atoms into other kinds of atoms. Ha ha, you think! I'm an alchemist that can turn lead into gold and bullets into snowflakes! Well, no, because if you change the ratio of protons to neutrons in an atom, most of the time the result is an atom that is unstable, i.e., radioactive. Basically, your power is to turn any substance (or person) into nuclear fallout. If the ability were to taken to its logical extreme (which might be planet destroying territory), they could effectively turn any object into a [neutron bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb).
So, going back to our options above, our weak user can either make anything, anywhere, radioactive, or they give themselves fatal radiation poisoning. Far more interesting, in my opinion, is to give their powers range over whatever they can focus clearly on, i.e an arbitrary short range of three meters. Given that EM users couldn't control their force at the atomic level, Weak users would require enormous concentration to do so, and would have to be close enough to their target to have some idea of its molecular structure (i.e. calcium carbonate for cement, water for people, etc). Due to the difficulty involved in feeling out and manipulating quintillions upon qunitillions of quarks, their powers would extremely difficult to master, and would probably not emerge until later in life, and perhaps only if they studied enough physics to understand what was happening.
Their powers can only be used to destroy, but unlike the Gravity users, they can control and direct them without world-shattering consequences. Their only defense is a crushing offense, but unlike the EM users, their offensive tools are not well-suited to public activity, and aren't accompanied by huge flashes of light and heat. For the average weak user, I'm imagining a cynical and secretive pariah with a very hard life unfolding before them. Maybe they were expelled from college after a particularly bad breakup, when their ex was taken the hospital one day with her flesh melting off her bones, and all her doctors died of cancer within the year. Maybe they wander the streets in rags holding a brown paper bag, muttering constantly about they could kill them all if they wanted to, yes they could, they'd kill them all! Or maybe they're sitting on a plush couch in an imposing skyscraper somewhere, ignoring their host's offers of wine and women, negotiating the price for the deaths of a nation's entire government. Whatever their path, they stay out of the spotlight, hide their powers as much as they can, and use them however *they* see fit.
# Strong Force
It is really a stretch to make this is not a planet-destroying ability. The strong force is **strong**, 137 times stronger than EM to be exact. It's also known as the color force, because much like the weak force it acts on quarks, and in addition to "flavor" quarks have a property called "color" that is expressed through the strong force. To oversimplify, in quantum mechanics color always has to add up to white, so a red quark, a green quark, and a blue quark join together to form a white proton or neutron. Also a red quark could temporarily join with an anti-red anti-quark to form a meson. This color interaction binds quarks together extremely strongly. In fact, the energies involved are so large that nowhere in the universe today will you find a free colored quark that's not part of white structure. In fact, this energy, called quantum chromodynamics binding energy, is much larger than the actual mass of the quarks themselves (remember E=MC2). In short, most all mass in the universe is the "mass" of the energy bound up by the strong force as it keeps quarks glued together.
It's range is about 1000 times that of the weak force--still far too small to reach from one atom to the next--so let's assume its range mechanic works the same as the weak force. Now, what can it do?
By gaining power over the strong force, you have the ability to unleash **obscene** amounts of energy. The weakest possible implementation of this power that I can imagine is the ability to split and fuse atomic nuclei. If the atom you're targeting is lighter than iron, fusion releases energy and fission absorbs it. Heavier than iron and it's the opposite. How much energy? Well, think atom bombs, nuclear power plants, and well, the sun. E=MC2. again, emphasis on the C2. Let's do some quick math. Every second the sun converts 600 million tons of hydrogen into 595 million tons of helium, with the missing mass converted into energy. So fusing hydrogen converts (600-595)/600 = 0.833% of mass fused converted to energy. Take 0.1 Kg of hydrogen gas, and fuse it by manipulating the strong force. 0.1 Kg (M) \* 0.833% \* (9.0e16 (C2)) = 7.5e13 J = 90,000,000,000,000 J = 90 Terajoules = around one and a half Hiroshima bombs.
And that's a conservative estimate of what you could do with this power. In the modern universe, the strong force holds atomic nuclei together, it doesn't "get out in the open" much, so to speak. When it does, the universe turns into [Quark-Gluon plasma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark%E2%80%93gluon_plasma). Bad times. I don’t have any numbers to back me up but I’m guessing that even the tiniest spark of QGP would, immediately upon creation, explode with the force of hundreds of nuclear weapons. An EM-user might be able to absorb the radiation from the blast, but not the heat or the shockwave.
So a Strong-user, using just the tiniest corner of their power, can unleash energies far exceeding those of the other force users. With a flick of a wrist they can wipe cities, countries, continents off the map. Even if we emplace arbitrary limits on their power to tone it back, they could kill and destroy anything and anyone they chose by creating microscopic nuclear explosions out of any matter at all. Their biggest challenge is not blowing themselves up in the process; to solve this issue, I suggest scaling up the range of the Strong-users’ abilities from 3 meters to 3 kilometers, an increase proportional to the difference in range between the strong force and the weak force.
Gravity-users are the industrious workers, EM-users are bold knights, Weak-users are roguish assassins—and Strong users are Kings. Gods, maybe, and despots, most likely. When you hold an entire nation’s nuclear arsenal in your fingertips, it’s not long before you start wondering why you’re bothering with working for anyone else. Also once the government discovers what you’re packing and decide it’s too dangerous to let you live, you don’t get much of a choice. They’re safe nowhere, and that makes them even more dangerous. Their only options are to disappear completely, or to make the world fear their wrath to the point where threatening their life doesn’t seem worth it. Perhaps they’d even start or inspire cultish followings that would populate their kingdoms and worship them as gods.
I imagine a world with Strong-users is locked in a cold war the likes of which the world has never seen. Every government with a brainwashed/loyal Strong-user, and every Strong-user who’s carved out a kingdom for themselves through violence and threats of violence, would constitute a nuclear power with an unlimited armament. Mutually assured destruction doesn't even begin to describe it. If Strong-users can be detected at birth, expect very few of them to reach adulthood.
[Answer]
Gravity: Incredibly weak. Always attractive. Acts over long distances. Can produce bound states (Keplerian orbits). Over large distances this is the only significant force.
Electromagnetic: Strong. Two charges (+ and -). Acts over long distances, but the two charges tend to cancel out. Does form bound states (atoms). Magnetic effects are significant.
Weak: The "force" effect of the weak interaction is not significant. This interaction can change the type of particles (an up quark into a down quark, for example) There are three types of force carrier, which have charges and mass, and the range of interaction is very small (less than a single nucleus). Doesn't form bound states, (the force aspect of the weak interaction is more or less irrelevant) Probably interacts with dark matter. Its not certain, but we could probably live without the weak force.
Strong: only acts between quarks. Three charges (red, green, blue) and the force carriers are also coloured, so interactions change the colour of quarks. In some sense, the force becomes stronger with distance, so quarks can never escape from their bound states. Residual effects, between nucleons, binds the nucleus together.
It is up to you to translate these properties to magic:
Gravity witch: Seems to have no power, but ultimately is the most important
Electromagnetic witch: Sometimes attracts sometimes repels. Tends to cancel her own actions out.
Weak witch: Can change the nature of things. Has a dark side.
Strong witch: Antagonistic to Electromagnetic. "Colourful" in some way. Concerned with small things.
[Answer]
Graviton: Able to generate gravitons and anti-gravitons at will. Although gravity is the weakest force, this super-hero can generate it in far greater amounts than a planet, making them most like any super-hero that can throw things around without touching them.
Photon: As an alternative to Magneto, Photon is able to generate photons, or electromagnetic radiation across the entire spectrum at will. This has many uses against foes: generating blinding light to subdue, X-rays or Gamma to silently and unnoticably kill with a delayed effect or promote cancer (just don't use it around beings likely to be turned into hulks), radio waves to jam enemy transmissions, infrared as a heat based attack, and ultraviolet to burn skin.
WeZ: Named after the force carriers of the Weak Nuclear Force, W(+/-) and Z. As the weak force is mainly involved in radioactivity, this super-hero would have one of the most subtle but potentially destructive powers, having the ability to cause normally stable elements to become radioactive or with enough subtle control even transmute into other nearby elements on the periodic table.
Gluon: Able to create the strongest nuclear force, 137 times stronger than the electromagnetic force. Gluons are so strong that when trying to pull quarks apart it is more energetically favorable to create a new quark/anti-quark pair from the vacuum than it is to separate the existing quarks. Gluon would be incredibly strong, virtually indestructable and impossible to get rid of short of throwing them into a neutron star or black hole. One of the few superheros that is strong enough to destroy the Hulk.
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[Question]
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The question I have is about the details of cause and effect occurring out of standard temporal order. Distilling it down to a single scenario:
Consider two people, Alice and Bob, in a closed room. Bob has a device that can send him back in time 2 minutes. After 5 minutes in the room (at *T=5*), Bob uses the device. From Alice's perspective, at *T=3*, a second Bob, Bob2, appears in the room. He is the Bob 'from the future.' This is pretty standard in science fiction.
Now, for my confusion:
After this occurs, At *T=4*, Alice pulls a gun and kills Bob1, then takes and uses his device. Thus, Alice2 appears at *T=2* from Bob1's perspective.
Now, at ***T=3***, does:
1) Bob2 appear, because him appearing then was a part of the timeline when Alice used the device?
**or**
2) Bob2 fail to appear, because extrapolating Alice's unrealized timeline out past her loop, Bob1 could not go back to become Bob2?
ie, Can you change the past/present by changing the future?
EDIT: It was asked what would happen to Bob2 in Timeline 2 in my interpretation of time travel. My theory is that paradoxes resolve at the nexus of the timelines. For instance, in the above scenario Bob2 would vanish at T=5, because this is the temporal point where he should have been sent back from the other timeline. However, this point has been reached in the new timeline without said event occurring, so he ceases to be. (Also editing question with this)
[Answer]
There is no one answer to your question. It depends **entirely** on which time travel approach you take. There are many models of time travel in fiction, and since there is no evidence of time travel in science, fiction is all we have to go off of.
My personal favorite system for authors to explore is a causally consistent universe, where if something happened, you cannot prevent it from happening, but you can alter it. This approach is valuable because it can actually be ratified against modern scientific laws.
As an example, there was a proof a few years back done which proved that you could always be causally consistent in a simplified universe with 2 billiard balls and a wormhole. The basic setup is that you throw one ball such that it strikes the other and that other ball passes through the wormhole into the past. If you strike it just correctly, you can have the other ball pop out of the wormhole (in the past) and collide with your billiard ball before the collision occurred, knocking it off track. The argument would be that the collision never occurs, therefore the other ball never travels through the wormhole, thus inconsistency.
The paper showed that there was no configuration of billiard balls and the wormhole which could not be made consistent. The trick was that you would throw the ball forward, on a collision course, and the future-other ball would pop out of the wormhole to collide with yours, but at a slightly different angle than you had calculated in the inconsistent case. At this angle, the future-other ball grazes your billiard ball *just right* such that yours still collides with the present-other ball to enter the wormhole... exactly at the strange angle it came out from. It showed that, no matter the configurations, you could find such a consistent solution.
However, consistency is not the only option. There are plenty of science fiction systems with multiple timelines, or timelines with particular rules which are not obvious (I recommend the movie Primer for an example).
[Answer]
In a world where changing the past is possible, changing the future can potentially change the present or past, since time is non-causal. Whether changing the past is possible depends on what model of time travel you choose to use in your universe. But even if changing the past is impossible, supposing that changing the *future* is possible,
## the present will be altered by even observation of the future
(Well, technically, the closest future to the present)
Consider reading Philip K. Dick's short story *Meddler.* In the story,
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> a government takes "time dips" (essentially just taking a snapshot) into the future, to see the result of a policy they had just passed. Everything was hunky-dory, but when they looked again to the same time, they found the world had problems that hadn't existed before. In fact, each time they checked, it got worse and worse until the human race had disappeared entirely.
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(It's a really good read, btw)
Though the story doesn't explicitly explain why this happens, the implication is that the characters' knowledge of the future affected their present course of action, diverting the future timeline away from what they had seen on the previous observation.
But on the bright side, there's no chance of a time paradox.
[Answer]
Agree (and upvoted) Cort Amon's answer: It depends on how time travel works in your universe.
Basically you should decide if travelling back in time can affect the future or not. That is, if your time is linear or a tree.
If time is linear, everything you do happens in the same timeline, so you can affect the future you came from.
If time is a tree, everything you do now creates an alternative timeline (now), so if you travel back from future, in the exact moment you arrive you create an alternate timeline, so you can never travel back to THAT future you came from. Maybe to one quite similar, but not to the same. You came from a future in which you weren't in the present, and now you are in the present, so it's a different timeline.
If there are different timelines, Bob1 never weren't killed in the timeline he was when he travelled back, so he will appear. If there is only one timeline, Bob1 has no opportunity to travel back.
[Answer]
Here is another interpretation that might help your story. In this interpretation, whole universe is done in an instant. Any time travel, if exists, will not cause any changes as the result of that time travel is already factored in. Imagine the universe as a hyper-sphere with space-time combined. Now when it is created, time is also created with it. Now in this interpretation, time travel is a way to weave the universe as its results are necessarily tied to the current timeline. This means either Alice will not be able to kill the Bob due to a reason, or Bob will not be able to run the time travel machine, it will malfunction or something else will happen. At the end of the day, whatever would affect the past from the future, has already have that effect on the present. There are no multiple timelines and there will be no alterations.
[Answer]
i believe this situation is effectively the same as the grandfathers paradox.
bob2 travels to the past, and then his past self, bob1, gets killed (either directly or by traveling further back and killing his grandparents).
it doesn't matter who does the killing, like in this example, bob2 could be the one killing bob1. the end result would be the same.
your question is about "*whether an event at **T=4** can affect an event at **T=3***".
although the grandfathers paradox generally focuses on the question of what happens at ***T=5***, it is still the same situation, because ***T=3*** is the moment the grandson arrives in the past, while ***T=4*** is the moment the grandfather gets killed.
you can read more about the grandfathers paradox here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox>
[Answer]
Most theories on time travel depend on their being a fixed timeline through the universe. A leads to B, which leads to C and so on... In your scenario because B didn't happen then C, D, E, and F unravel. The paradoxes start when a previous action which didn't happen promoted this unraveling.
However, consider for a moment that the universe doesn't have timeline - people do.
You have two people in your scenario, Alice and Bob. Instead of worrying about what the universe sees, let's look at what Alice and Bob perceive.
**Bob**
* At T = 0 Bob has a time travel device, he doesn't use it. Instead he stares vacantly around the room. Maybe he checks out the slightly psychotic woman he's with?
* At T = 3 Bob watches himself appear in the room "Oh, I obviously used the device!" he thinks. To his horror he watches Alice turn the shoot him. "Bother..." he thinks "Maybe that's not such a good idea!"
**Alice**
* At T = 0 Alice is in a room with Bob, maybe she likes him - maybe she doesn't. Either way she has much more interest in the time travel device he's holding... but does it work?
* At T = 3 a second Bob appears "Oh, so it does work!" she thinks. Determined to possess the device for herself she shoots the first Bob and hopes some temporal paradox will save her
* At T = 3 and a bit Bob2 looks at her and shouts "Oi - you just killed me", he's very upset but he doesn't disappear in a puff of smoke because he does exist in this timeline.
For bonus points
**Bob 2**
* At T = 0 Bob has a time travel device, he doesn't use it. Instead he stares vacantly around the room. Maybe he checks out the slightly psychotic woman he's with?
* At T = 5 Bob gives in and presses the button, he vanishes and reappears in a room with himself and mad Alice
* At T = 3 and a bit Bob2 watches in horror as his younger self is shot... he's very upset by this
* At T = 3 and two bits he sits down with Alice (who now also has a time travel device) and they talk about how upset they both are.
The reason I believe this is a much more plausible way of thinking about time travel is that there are no paradoxes and no one fades in and out of existence. Timelines and continuity depend on the viewers perspective and not from that of some omnipotent being.
[Answer]
I like how the game [Achron](http://www.achrongame.com/site/) answers this question. Achron is a real time strategy game in which you can send units back or forward in time, and doing so costs more resources the farther in time you want to go.
The fascinating part is how the game's internal time engine resolves paradoxes. It can actually resolve the grandfather paradox, and it does so in a quite ingenious manner.
Let's say I build a barracks, from which I can train soldier units. The barracks finishes building at T=5.
Next, I simultaneously build a time machine and a soldier. The soldier finishes at T=10 and the time machine finishes at T=20. Now, I use some resources to send the soldier back in time to T=0.
The soldier waits there until T=5 when the barracks is built. I then instruct him to destroy the barracks which takes him 4 seconds, completing at T=9, one second before it created the soldier. I have now initiated the grandfather paradox.
What happens now is called a time wave. At T=10, the barracks no longer exists and thus it could not have trained the soldier that now stands in front of its ruins. This creates a time wave which takes 10 seconds to propogate. It's like an echo of time where what actually happened catches up to what should have happened. However, during the ten seconds the soldier is still standing there. Why? Because it wasn't until T=20 that the soldier went back in time and altered the course of events. The first moment where something different happened was T=10, ten seconds before T=20, where the time wave began. So for those ten seconds, nothing happens.
Now, at T=20, the time wave catches up with us. The soldier vanishes because he destroyed the barracks that created him.
But wait! Here's the interesting bit. We are now in what I would call phase two of a time wave oscillation. Waves (sine and cosine for example) oscillate continuously between two distinct states. What has happened now is that the soldier that destroyed the barracks at T=9 no longer exists, and therefore could not have destroyed the barracks in this branch of time. It doesn't even appear at T=0, where it came from the future.
So ten seconds after T=0 when the soldier no longer appears, the time wave propagates again, and now the barracks reappears at T=5 when it was originally created, and there is no soldier around to destroy it. At T=10, the barracks still exists and finishes training a soldier just as it did before the time wave hit, and we are back at phase one.
So we continue to oscillate between two conflicting series of events until some other event (like the opponent winning the game, or becoming bored and quitting) occurs to jar us out of the time wave.
Having recently watched Doctor Strange, this also reminds me of
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> the ending where Doctor Strange creates a time loop and defeats the being that rules the dark universe.
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In this model of time, the answer is yes: you can alter the present by altering the future. My example was of sending a unit into the past, but you could just as easily send a unit into the future and create a time wave or paradox that way.
[Answer]
An omnipresent, omniscient algorithm God-like being, could view the future state, then the present state, (and all intermediate automata states in the sequence). Then, when everything looked ok, taking fine care that one state in the sequence truly and properly implied the next, just run the t(ime)-dependent algorithm.
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[Question]
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An adventurer (named Moses, for humor's sake) finds a clear pool of water deep in a cave. Upon taking a swim, he finds at the bottom of the pool is a mystical stone that eternally puts out water, seemingly from nowhere. Hailing from the desert, he realizes what an amazing find this is!
Moses tries to think of a good way to transport the stone out of the cave, across many leagues of rough terrain, and deposit it where he can safely monetize its output in his desert city.
**Constraints:**
The stone artifact is heavy and largish, let's say a cube of about a meter's size (but it doesn't matter too much). This would make it weigh something like 2500 kg.
The stone is located about a meter below the surface of the pool of water. You could easily stand on top of it and still have your head above the surface.
It puts out water slowly, like a small mountain spring. Unfortunately, this ability can't be turned off, so it can make travel very, very wet.
The world has a limited technology level (Renaissance era-ish) and, more importantly, the character has a limited budget!
Bonus points if you give special attention to how the properties of the artifact affect (for better or for worse) your proposed travel technique.
How can Moses transport the magical, water-producing artifact?
[Answer]
**Roll it home**
A large stone cube can't easily be rolled home because of the huge energy requirements to lift the center of mass high enough to roll over to the next face. So don't lift it.
Tie logs in a flattened pyramid pattern to the each of the sides of the cube perpendicular to the plane that Moses wants to roll the cube. This is aided by the fact that the cube is floating below the surface of the pool so Moses has access to all sides. When you're done, look at the cube normal to the desired plane of rotation. The cube sits in the middle surrounded by the logs and appears roughly cylindrical.
Water from the artifact would be largely beneficial in a number of ways for the trip home. First, damp sand gives way less than dry sand (think walking on wet sand close to the water compared to walking on dry sand higher up the beach). Second, the natural fiber ropes will expand and should tighten. However, it might be possible that the fibers chosen degrade rapidly under damp conditions than when dry. (Choice of rope fibers may be a way for the author to inject greater difficulty in getting the artifact home.) Third, anyone helping Moses get the artifact home has a constant supply of fresh water to drink thus easing logistics. Fourth, should the artifact need to be dragged instead of rolled, water acts as a lubricant.
On the downside, the logs may become waterlogged and get heavier and harder to get rolling.
This approach means you don't have to break up a priceless artifact, it has built in shipping protection and it's robust enough to roll over uneven, unprepared ground including sand. It's a plausible [explanation](https://student.societyforscience.org/article/pyramids%E2%80%99-blocks-possibly-rock-%E2%80%98n%E2%80%99-rolled) for how the Egyptians moved blocks for the pyramids.
[Answer]
The awesome solution would be to dig a shallow channel and then tie the rock it to the bottom of a flat raft. Let the water-producing rock produce its own waterway so it can be floated home. Meanwhile the path behind becomes a trail of flowers as the desert soaks up the water left behind.
However it sounds as though the rock isn't producing quite enough water for that, so your ideal solution is probably on your classic cart or sledge. You have the advantage that the animals you use to pull it ( and if you're smart those will be mules because [they work well in hot conditions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-mule_team) ) will have a ready supply of water available, so progress may be slow but it should be viable travel. Whether you use a sledge, a cart, or some kind or maybe a crossover vehicle where you can change between the two, will depend whether it is your conventional relatively flat and rocky desert or a sahara-like ocean of sand. In either case you would need to keep moving because the rock would be perpetually making it's own mud, though collecting that water for your stock and crew - maybe with an overflow that pipes excess water way out behind your equipment- would be the smart thing to do.
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# Getting Out of The Water
There are some options:
* Moses could make a ramp next to it, tie rope onto the block, and pull it out. Use a beast of burden if it's too heavy for Moses. (Even small teams of oxen can supposedly pull [over 10,000 lbs](http://www.examiner.com/article/ox-pulling-contest-demonstrates-power-and-teamwork) over the correct surfaces!)
* Moses could use a lever. This would require some strong wood, though, and wood is scare in the desert, so this isn't the most viable option. Additionally, the block may be too strong for your lever, which is a further barrier. Furthermore, the cave itself may be too small for a properly sized lever or have some geometry which does not allow a fulcrum.
* If there is not enough room for beasts of burden or levers, simply dig up to the block from below. The idea here is to produce a ramp Moses can push the block down to get it on a cart or sleigh. Since Moses has access to not-quite modern technology, he could use [black powder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#Mainland_Europe) to quarry this ramp.
# Over Rock Travel: Carts
I know this is not creative, but Moses may have no choice. Use a big wagon or handcart (with lots of strong friends). Stone has been transported this way [historically](http://quarriesandbeyond.org/cemeteries_and_monumental_art/quarry_to_cemetery_stone/transporting_stone_fr_quarry_to_mill_shop_1.html). Simply *buying* a cart may be expensive, but a wise merchant could see the value in investing in such a venture.
Additionally, Moses ought to use an a-frame or other pulley system to raise it or remove it from the cart. He needs a mechanical advantage as to not hurt himself *and* move the block.
# Over-Sand Travel: Sleighs
This is taking from the system that the [Ancient, pyramid-building Egyptians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques#Building_the_pyramids_from_quarried_stone_blocks) supposedly used to transport blocks of stone for their pyramids. The techniques looks like this:
1. Place Stone on sleigh
2. Wet sand in front of sleigh (using water from the stone, of course) This reduces friction considerably, making pulling the sleigh much easier.
3. Pull sleigh over wet sand until you reach dry sand.
4. Repeat until arrival at the desired point.
See [page 12](http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak/assets/media/resources/ConstructionMethodsAndBuildingMaterials/guide.pdf) of this UCLA publication. The [Washington Post](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/05/02/the-surprisingly-simple-way-egyptians-moved-massive-pyramid-stones-without-modern-technology/) talks about this, as well. Phys.org talks about it [here](http://phys.org/news/2014-04-ancient-egyptians-pyramid-stones-sand.html). [Here](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.175502) is an academic paper for the hardcore skeptics, from the University of Amsterdam.
There is some debate as to if sleighs were used, or if Egyptians simply wrapped the blocks with poles and rolled them. Such [sleighs](http://www.catchpenny.org/howbuilt.html) have been found, and the wear and holes on them are consistent with the above method. (People question the wrapped-around-the-block method on several fronts, including structural strength of wood and wood's availability.)
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Infinite anything out of nothing = Perpetual motion machine.
Since you have infinite water, you can use it and redirect it, almost like a hose. If you pressurize it enough, you may be able to use it to push yourself via water cannon, or to fire the blast into a "water sail".
To pressurize the water, you can use either a pump, or gravity. Just build a really really tall water tower that's attached to the vehicle.
Alternatively, you could just rig it up to some "waterwheel cars". (They look like this)
```
Front view:
[Magic rock]
/ | | \ <--- "\" is a hose that redirects the water
|=| | | |=|
|=|_|______|_|=| <--- waterwheels
|=| ^ |=|
|__ Those are the supports that hold up the rock relative to the wheels, and the axle of the car.
Side view:
[Magic rock] ---> Moves this way
\ \ <---- "hose" sections point to front of wheels
=== ===
== o == == o == <---- wheels
=== ===
```
Note that because there's so much water, the ground may be slippery and going up slopes might be a problem. In that case, you can get out an push. Don't forget to put spikes on the wheels to help it get more grip in the mushy ground. You can also use a prop on the back that drags along, so that when it goes uphill and starts to roll backwards, the prop sticks into the ground and stops it.
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How about spreading sand in front of it? The ancient Egyptians used to move giant statues and blocks across the desert by making a sled and sliding it across the sand. [They spread water out on the sand](http://phys.org/news/2014-04-ancient-egyptians-pyramid-stones-sand.html), which supposedly halved the force needed to tow the block or statue. With enough sand, the same technique could be used for your block, except the water would just come from the block. Then the block could be towed by some horses or something.
As far as getting the block out, you could use a [treadwheel](http://phys.org/news/2014-04-ancient-egyptians-pyramid-stones-sand.html) to lift the block from the water. Treadwheels are kind of like a hampster excersize wheel. A human walks inside them, and uses the power from their walking to lift the block. A large treadwheel can give a mechanical advantage of 14:1, which is well over enough to lift the block, especially with a couple people!
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I'm assuming this pool has an outlet of some kind - otherwise it would overflow, unless the stone had some sort of pressure-valve feedback mechanism.
I would start by levering up the block with a crowbar, and slipping a couple of narrow logs underneath the block to raise it off the bottom of the pool. (They'd have to be narrow, or their buoyancy would make it impossible to drag them to the bottom of the pool.) Then I'd keep lashing logs to the existing logs to make a raft, until the whole assembly starts to float.
Then I'd dam up the pool's outlet with something, and wait for the cave system to fill up with water, so I could float the block out top of its own underground lake. (I note in passing that humanity has thousands of years' experience with caves filling up with water that suggest that this might be kind of dangerous, but whatever).
After that, if you just manage to keep it afloat, it's just a matter of time until it reaches the nearest sea. From time to time it might end up in a valley that would otherwise be difficult to extract it from, but again, all you have to do is wait. Eventually the valley fills with water, and you keep going. Just keep minding the raft.
More fancifully, it's also worth noting that this thing is effectively a perpetual motion machine. Seal it in a tank, let the overflow run a waterwheel, and gear that waterwheel to the axles of a cart. No need to feed those pesky mules.
Since I'm supposing that the original pool has an outlet that can take the output of a small spring, that kind of implies that the cave the pool is in has pretty good drainage, like maybe it's a cave in a mountain. In that case, you could dam the stream wherever it exits the mountain, wait for the cave system fill up, then kick out the dam and let a mighty river to carry the raft downstream. This seems, if possible, even more dangerous - not just to Moses, but to whoever is unfortunate enough to live downstream.
[Answer]
***Rope and food! (and some wood)***
In the stone age people dragged stones by rope across a floor made of roundwood. If you have enough people you can dispense with the roundwood. If the sand drags too much you can build a sledge for the stone. To cross holes or uneven cave floors use levers.
For example on [Easter Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island) much larger and heavier stones were transported for miles.
I've done it myself in a small experiment of historical re-enactment. It is easy!
So all our Mozes really needs is lots of rope and food. People will flock to the job when the existence of this miracle stone becomes known.
In case of any surplus budget two giant wheels can be created around the stone to make life more easy. And shave off a year or so travelling time. But these are not essential.
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Move the city to the cave. It is easier.
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Moses could create a valve and tie it to the artifact to increase pressure.
First he would have to point the artifact slightly upward (a friend from town and lever good enough would do), maybe use some pulleys and rope attached do nearby palm tree. Add some support so it wont fall down when water drops. He could dig up a retention pool next to the original, and join them long enough for the top of the artefact to emerge. Then close the connection. Then stream of high pressure water would fill retention pool instead of original, meaning that original would dry soon.
In the meantime he should prepare round logs and put them under the artifact, in parallel to it. Dig flat enough slope in the bank. Then slowly remove support and lower it to the logs, do not release the rope yet. Pull slowly on the rope and move logs from behind of the artifact to front. This should work in most places, as artifact is not so large and such procession should fit on most roads. Wetting the sand in front will prevent it from digging in the sand, instead of rolling.
O and if every piece produces water, he could leave a crumble in the lake after he gets out of it. That way he could even make TWO lakes joining the retention one again :D
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The most important element is that water is not compressible. If the stone has one flat side and "secretes" water at the pace indicated you would have difficulty *stopping* the thing from sliding about on a perfectly flat non-water permeable surface like a sheet of metal. It's like the perfect lubricant. All you need are a couple of metal plates fitted with pulleys and you ramp it out.
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Here is one possible solution that would be really awesome, however it requires a way to turn up the volume of water the artifact outputs. Say that after being stumped by this for about a day, Moses finds some kind of a user interface to allow him to increase the amount of water the artifact outputs. This could be a dial or a magical HUD activated by a hand gesture or something. This artifact would be mostly useless to the city without a way to increase its output anyway.
Next he could get a fairly large barrel and somehow maneuver the artifact into the barrel. After this he would tie a bunch of ropes around the opening to prevent the artifact from falling out. Finally he could turn up the water full blast. **This could propel the artifact like a rocket.** It would be very difficult to control until he manages to lash it onto a cart, but after that he would have smooth sailing. He wouldn't even need a horse. It would be better if he could rig up a steering wheel, but even if he doesn't, he can stop, turn, and start again all the way back to the city. Of course he can't actually stop the water, but he can turn it back down.
This will require a lot of trial and error, but he will eventually get it there, and he doesn't need to break his back.
] |
[Question]
[
I like to add fantastical things and make them mundane. In this case, instead of building and maintaining a pedestrian bridge in a fantasy world they would create a waterwalking path. In this case, two monoliths on either side of the water give all people between them the ability for waterwalking for a few minutes. That means that if you accidentally step out between them you have plenty of time to make it to the other side or step back between them.
However, unlike "traditional" water walking I would expect the water to simply form a surface to stand on\*. Which means that if the surface moves, the person standing on it moves as well. Now a wave won't be too much of a problem. The water particles you stand on move up and down mostly, it is the wave that moves through the water rather than the water moving as a wave. But how does water move "normally"?
The question: "how would water walking be affected by the movement of the water?".
I would like to know for the following conditions:
* still weather.
* the effect of the bow wave of a small boat passing by on your ability to walk or stand during still weather.
* the effect of the bow wave of a large/fast boat on your ability to walk or stand during still weather.
* slightly choppy waters.
* choppy waters.
* high waves.
* near the pylons of a bridge of a flowing river during still weather.
\*the footwear worn will be included in the waterwalking spell to prevent sagging into the water anyway.
Clarification: All basic physics apply, nothing has changed. Everything is the exact same except when a spell adds or alters the physics locally. In this case: water will not yield to a person standing on top.
Clarification 2: there is no need to further explain the physics. As already explained, this question is about what the movement of water would do at the contact points with the foot. Just like you do 't have to explain why a floorboard can carry your weight, I don't have to go into detail as to why you can now stand on water. The water does not alter its properties compared to itself, it can just support the person standing on it.
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## It will be WAY harder than it sounds
Not sure if you've ever seen these floating lilly pads at any public pools, but they work more or less as described. The below body of water is completly still, and even with a net above you to hold on to, those things move around like crazy making them impossible to walk on without the overhead net.
The problem you will have is not that the surface will move with the current, but that the area your foot touches will be small and have very little resistance against lateral drift as you put your weight down on it. Unless your "solid water" were to tether all the way down to the ground, the second you go to take a step, your back foot will quickly slide backwards and your front foot, will not be able to create any traction to stop you. It will be like trying to walk on a surface several times more slippery than ice.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UQvYe.png)
That said, the larger and more rigid you make your solid water, the more it will resist lateral slide (at the very least, the area under your feet needs to be interconnected); so, if instead of just making the water just under your feet solid, you were to make a radius around you solid, then you could have a surface you could walk on.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bWKQE.png)
[Answer]
**Fall over in most cases**
Lets get a few assumptions out of the way. I'm assuming it'll be like standing on glass. With the right shoes or bare feet you have purchase on the surface. It'll not be like ice, incredibly slippery. Like glass, you'll not sink into the surface of the water when water walking is activated, nor will your pushing off alter the water trajectory and movement.
With still water, it'll be like moving on strong glass. You can run. You can slide. You can jump. No problems.
With slow running water the problems start. It'll be like a glass treadmill, moving in one direction. You'll likely walk upstream or downstream, and each step slightly sideways. That way it'll be manageable with your balance. Still, the surface can be slippery, making this a lot harder than normal horizontal escalators. Worse still is when there's differences in speed. Water can go slower near the edges, making this very awkward. Worse still is that differences in speed will make eddies. Where first you were going on a slow horizontal glass escalator, now your going on a slow horizontal escalator with varying speeds and areas where it can turn and shift sideways. With a slow river. You're sure to lose your footing regularly, even when very experienced.
The slow river can also have an irregular river bed, making it churn anyway. Even if everything else is the same speed, you'll have weird moving surfaces under your feet that likely make you lose your footing. It'll be near impossible to anticipate the movements. Same for choppy or vavy waters.
With increased speed this gets worse and worse. Inadvisable for anyone.
**Boats and the like**
Even in still water, boats and waves are very bad. Ever been in an earthquake? Or had people jumping next to you on a bouncy castle? Both make you lose your footing. Keep in mind that this is likely worse, as you'll have the equivalent of a glass surface to get your purchase. Even when jumping over the 'big' wave, you'll encounter tiny waves that are sure to bring you off balance.
**Conclusion**
As your purchase to the surface moves, you'll move with it. This is hard to balance. With water it moves in wild and unpredictable ways even when moving slowly. Most tiny movements will make it hard to stay standing, let alone cross a river.
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The answer, as often is the case with magic, is: whatever the spell creator managed to instill in the spell. In other words, what happens is entirely dependent on how the spell works... and there are far too many options there for a complete answer.
Let's start with the naive approach: the target's weight is distributed across the surface of the water widely enough to float as if they were a boat with a high displacement, with only the lowest part of the person's body (usually the soles of the feet) contacting the water itself. Wherever the target stands the water around them would form a depression dependent on the target's mass vs the area of the spell. Since the spell interacts directly with the water the depression will bob and move along with the motion of the water, making walking a rather difficult task. Also the almost total lack of friction makes it functionally impossible to walk anyway, since there's nothing to push off other than a tiny amount of liquid. Great for moon-walking in place, useless for much else.
Next up, we'll make the water freeze in place wherever the target's foot approaches, giving them solid place to both stand and push off from. This is almost workable, as long as the water surface isn't too choppy. The higher the swell the more the target has to work to step up and down on their impromptu stepping stones. Also you might want to add some water repelling shields to the side of the effect to ensure that a wave doesn't wash over and solidify around the target's foot, leaving them stranded mid-stride until the spell expires. While the results may be humorous to observers, the inevitable dunking is unlikely to be appreciated.
Personally for a fixed system like you have described it might be more useful to simply build a bridge, then use magic to push it out of sync with the world. Only people granted some sort of attunement with the out-of-phase bridge will be able to interact with it in any way. Boats, waves, etc. will simply pass through the area as normal, as will untreated individuals. By simply passing through the bridge markers however the pedestrian is temporarily spelled to interact with the bridge itself, enabling them to cross with no more effort than any 'normal' bridge. Not water walking, but it seems to suit the requirements sufficiently.
For a less systematized situation - when a mage wishes to walk across a lake or something - then perhaps a minor modification in which the mage summons a mobile set of stepping stones similarly out of phase would suffice. The spell would ensure that the stepping stones move across the water surface tracking the mage's feet, then fix in place as the foot approaches. The appearance of walking on water is then preserved, and of course appearance is everything.
[Answer]
## If waterstrider physics are anything to go by, they'll be paddling their way around on their bellies. Also disturbing the water surface too much might be considered murder.
I feel like you saw the concept of water striders and other creatures that move on the water surface thanks to the water properties regarding the tension of the surface, and increased the tension through magic. However, if normal physics apply as normal, then technically all we need to do is observe how it functions to a standing water strider and scale it up to determine what our surface looks like:
**1-** its malleable. Googling a picture of a water strider standing on the surface easily shows this property: while they are not sinking down since to the force they're applying is inferior to the maximum force the water surface tension can withstand, their legs will be clearly be forming depressions on the water, since that's where they're applying their weight. This alone shows that if physics still apply and all the spell does is make the water surface tension capable of withstanding a human, the surface of the water will probably still be pretty malleable. Instead of walking through glass you'll feel like you're walking on a thick layer of malleable yet resistant membrane that begins sinking below your feet as soon as you use it to sustain your weight.
**2-** it has very little friction. As we all might know, water is a fluid, the molecules move around all the time, and if you ever saw a leaf floating in a calm lake or puddle, you probably know that things floating in the water can be moved with a fair amount of ease, especially if they're not breaking the water surface tension. Even water strides suffer with it, and it's another reason why they don't move around like a land insect. Water striders normally keep their legs in the water, removing only a single pair which they essentially use as oars to move around and change direction, all while making use of a pretty low center of gravity. Scale that up and you'll see that the human shape isn't all that good for what we want. Mountain climbing shoes won't help you a bit here if you're trying to get some extra traction on each step.
So essentially, if all the spell is doing is making it so people don't sink by making it so that the water surface tension becomes much stronger than normal, this would not only alter some things about how the water itself moves in the area (as in any kind of movement in the water that requires the water surface tension to give in and which is applying a force inferior to what the magic water tension can withstand, then it most likely won't happen as it'd like to). The water surface is now something you won't easily rip through so that you can sink down, but it doesn't change that it has little to no friction on it (water-sliding is extremely dangerous for a car because a thin layer of water forms between the tires and the road and essentially negates traction, making the driver easily loose control of the vehicle. In this scenario we'll have that, except that the water isn't between you and the road, it IS the road).
So essentially, in optimal water-striding conditions (calm water) you'll be better off ripping nature off, laying on your belly and using your arms to try maneuvering your way around, especially since if you try walking on this water like you'd walk on land, you'll eventually end up in that position anyway.
Now, this is assuming calm water or at most water that's undergoing forces weaker than what the new surface tension can withstand,because it's pretty hard to understand the other outcomes of a bigger surface tension being ripped apart by a stronger force. However, if we just do the same thing we did before and assume everything works as it normally would, then being too close to something that's breaking through the water tension probably will result in you sinking. The problem? The water surface should recomposes once it calms down enough, and if it behaves for things below it like it does for things above, should it recompose while you're still below, just like it didn't give in to your weight, it probably won't give in to your attempts to surface for air, and this will hold true until the spell effects end.
So basically, water walking will not make you walk around on the surface like it was glass. Normal physics determine that the water surface behaves like a membrane to anything small and light enough not to breach it, and this will hold true if all the magic is doing is increasing the surface tension. Any person under the effects of the spell will temporarily function like a water strider on water surfaces. Problem is: water striders know that trying to walk on the water surface is not like walking on land, they have all the adaptations and bodyplan necessary to paddle along smoothly and they too can drown if the surface gives in.
[Answer]
**It would be like walking during an earthquake**
There's rarely such a thing as "still water." It looks still, but it's moving. The wind moves it, the earth moves it, temperature changes move it. Water in a body even as small as a glass is always moving — but the way we experience it means that in small amounts (drinking out of a glass) we don't notice it and in large amounts (tsunamis) we make movies about it. But it's always moving.
Which means walking on it as if it were a surface like earth would be identical to walking during an earthquake. Let's listen to what the [USGS has to say about that](https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-does-earthquake-feel?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products).
>
> The way an earthquake feels depends on where you are, where the earthquake is, and how big the earthquake is:
>
>
>
>
> * A large earthquake nearby will feel like a sudden large jolt followed quickly by more strong shaking that may last a few seconds or up to a couple of minutes if it's a rare great event. The shaking will feel violent and it will be difficult to stand up. The contents of your house will be a mess.
> * A large earthquake far away will feel like a gentle bump followed several seconds later by stronger rolling shaking that may feel like sharp shaking for a little while.
> * A small earthquake nearby will feel like a small sharp jolt followed by a few stronger sharp shakes that pass quickly.
> * A small earthquake far away will probably not be felt at all, but if you do feel it, it will be a subtle gentle shake or two that is easier to feel if you're still and sitting down.
>
>
> The type of crustal material the seismic waves travel through on their way to you, and the type of shallow crustal structure that is directly below you will also influence the shaking you feel. Soft thick sediments will amplify the shaking and hard rock will not. If the energy happens to bounce around and get focused on where you are, that will also amplify the shaking. Low-level vibrations that last for more than a few seconds is not indicative of an earthquake, but is more likely a man-made environmental source.
>
>
>
For us, this would be *incredibly* uncomfortable walking. It would likely give "sea sickness" a whole new name. We'd have a lot of trouble standing up straight (setting aside for this purpose @Trioxidane's incredibly insightful answer, which I upvoted) — for a while. As we grew accustomed to it, it would take larger and larger movement to give us the same trouble.
And this is an important point in your world. People will have lived with this world rule all their lives. They would have learned as very young children to deal with (and not fear) the motion of the water. So when you ask what it would be like, the reality is that for everything other than real waves (say, more than 2"-3" in size), people wouldn't even think twice about the walk. They'd automatically side-step the bounces just like we side-step holes in the sidewalk or small tree roots on a path. And if your world is bureaucratically encumbered as ours is, an assigned official would close the walkway whenever the waves grew too tall to be easily stepped around (just as we close roads for being too unsafe to drive on).
That bureaucracy would also have rules forbidding boats going so close or so fast that they would disrupt the use of the bridge. We see this today in real life with boat speeds limited in marinas and in Venice, Italy. Therefore, the bullet about the bow wave can be, IMO, dismissed.
(And why would you place your waterway near a pylon of a bridge, or a big rock, which would cause the same effect? Your bureaucracy would have rules about where bridges can be established for the sake of public safety. If no such bureaucracy exists, then you'd think the bridge builders would have an ounce of common sense.)
**A few things to think about...**
Would people's feet remain dry? Is the nature of the magic to always keep them atop the water, no matter how small the particles? How would this be affected by rain? Would your walkers walk "up" a rainstorm so long as the amount of rain being stepped on could bear their weight? If not, how thick must the water channel be to support the weight of all walkers — or is there a weight limit like elevators have? If the motion can be felt by the walkers, does that mean they can be moved by the water? Watching a video of a car on a low-water bridge while it's flooding will demonstrate the problem: the water would simply push people off the bridge. Unless you allow people to get their feet wet, which would mean there's a "top portion" of the water that they're stepping through and thus the waves can't push (at least not as hard). Food for thought.
[Answer]
It's probably easier to just take a boat.
If the effect is equivalent to increasing surface tension, then in still weather it should be similar to walking on very smooth (and slippery) ice. Although unlike ice, water is slightly compressible, so it would probably have some give where you step on it. Much like with actual ice, inexperienced people would probably slip and fall (Q-is it painful to fall on water?) but those who are used to it can easily "skate" by. They might use ice skates, skis or snowshoes to traverse it. Even more logical would be some kind of sled, pulling on a rope... But that makes the magic seem kind of pointless, because you can already raft across.
Small ripples would probably be similar to walking on large rocks, that are being shaken and bounced around. Uncomfortable and likely to twist your ankle. Even on a sled it would be extremely bumpy. Any significant wave would be like walking on a very large sheet, and someone start kicking the sheet under you. Cats really enjoy this game -- but humans are less agile and can't grab the surface with claws. So basically any kind of wave or ripple more than an inch or so would probably make the passage unusable. It would also be dangerous near the shore or pylons, where you can get thrown against a hard surface. Ironically, in slight to moderate waves people could still just take a boat across, so you would have people bypassing the water walkway because of inconvenience.
Usually, water walking is described as not sinking at all. But you could imagine a magic that simply increases your buoyancy so that submerging only your feet is enough to make you float. Which is basically what happens with mercury - there are some [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8KzmlIEsHs) of people trying to walk on that and it seems kind of hard but doable. I imagine that if you had to actually do it you would get something like a walker to help with balance, which is incidentally what new skaters use. Or even better, you would just use a boat... Anyways, with high buoyancy, waves would be worse. Because your center of mass is above the surface, and the submerged parts of you don't create much drag on the liquid, you don't have much stability and would fall over easily. Normal ships benefit from a keel, so you would need one for your water walkway vessel, at which point, once again, just use a boat.
[Answer]
As others have said, it depends on exactly how the spell is making this possible.
For example, websearch the various videos where a shallow pool was filled with a shear-thickening fluid (usually cornstarch in water, since it's cheap and nontoxic) and people tried to cross it. It is mostly possible to *run* across that stuff -- assuming the mixture is right -- since the impact causes it to locally solidify for a moment. If you don't go fast enough, it doesn't thicken enough and you sink in.
Whether the spell behaves at all like that, gods and the gamemaster only know.
(If you haven't done so, I do recommend that you try mixing up a bowl of this stuff at some point just to play with. It is distinctly odd to have a material that turns into a thick paste or solid when you poke it hard or grasp it firmly, but reverts to being a liquid the moment you relax the forces on it. It does strange things when forces are applied in other ways too.)
[Answer]
Like others, I thought of something that would float in the water that you could walk on, like ice. Perhaps at one specific place in the water the temperature somehow rapidly decreased to form an ice bridge.
Another thought I had is perhaps the water somehow became very dense in a specific location. If the density of water was more than that of the person walking on it, then the person would float rather than sink. Only thing is that if you were to pressurise water to such an extent it would solidify and then be ice anyhow. Maybe if the density could be increased but remain amorphous then it would be glassy solid water rather than crystal ice.
Disolving material, like salt, in water can make it denser and people can float in salt water but they tend to be lying so the pressure is spread over a larger area. There is a limit to the amount of material that can disolve at certain conditions of temperature and pressure. But perhaps the water is supersaturated so forms a solid deposit. This could be achieved by disolving material in heated water then cooling the water reducing the solubility so deposits form. A "seed" can be used as a point of nucleation where a crystal can grow. Quite a common technique to grow crystals.
Another idea is that perhaps water could be replaced by a more viscous fluid perhaps like tar.
Another thought I had is that some insects do float on water due to surface tension but have small surface area. Perhaps it is not the water that changes, but somehow the person could be different to walk on water, e.g. have very thin legs and less weight.
Remember that walking on water is a biblical phenomonon and some biblical scolars have discussed it so there might be some inspiration there.
Of course if it is being done by magic, I guess you have license to bend the science or perhaps this place follows different laws of physics. I quite like cartoon physics where people don't fall until after a delay of a few seconds to contemplate what is about to happen.
] |
[Question]
[
**Note**
I am aware of these previous questions
[How quickly could a "shapeshifter" lose mass, realistically?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/176395/how-quickly-could-a-shapeshifter-lose-mass-realistically)
[Is there a credible way a shapeshifter could gain/lose body mass when changing forms?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/449/is-there-a-credible-way-a-shapeshifter-could-gain-lose-body-mass-when-changing-f) -
However I want to ***preserve*** mass, so my question is different.
---
**Background**
Shapeshifters may have to simulate a variety of people/animals/objects in order to fool humans. I want them to be able to change back and forth rapidly.
I can account for a change in size in varying ways, but here I will focus on asking about the following method. **Large objects that are solid in real life can be made to appear solid from the outside by a shifter making themselves hollow on the inside.**
The problem comes when simulating different Earth animals.
**Example**
A shifter that has the mass of a Border Collie dog, needs to simulate a large horse. There is conservation of mass and they have to change quickly. Suppose that the "horse" is hollow.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hQWlU.png)
**Problem**
A balloon-like horse will tend to act more like a balloon than a horse. A shape-shifter horse will have a great deal of trouble galloping. It may leap too high, not get enough traction, or just get blown away in a stiff breeze.
Is there any way to solve this while preserving the mass of the shifter?
---
**Assumptions**
1. The fake animals do not have to simulate bodily functions such as breathing *internally*. That is they could imitate the rising and falling of the chest but there are no lungs inside the simulacrum.
2. They have to move realistically enough to fool a human that sees but does not touch them.
3. Their biology is different from Earth creatures. They don't eat or breathe like we do. They have a form of photosynthesis.
4. They can assume the surface colour and texture of the animal they are simulating.
5. Please ask for necessary clarifications before answering.
[Answer]
# ***Hydraulics, anyone?***
I would think the fastest way for an animal to change mass and use that mass to effect would be to slurp up water. [Hero of Alexandria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria), thousands of years ago, was already demonstrating how air and water pressure changes could create motion. Internal muscle arrangements combined with variable bladders would allow rapid shifts in shape, while drinking or "Peeing" excess fluid (separate fluid, not enriched body fluids) would allow any shape shifter who has access to water to rapidly alter shape and mass.
[Hydraulic motion](https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2017/07/20/tuna-fin-movemenydraulic-systems/#:%7E:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20primary%20examples%20of%20bio,muscle%2C%20fluid%20and%20bone%20structures.) is certainly possible, and more radical designs than those in tuna and jellyfish have been suggested in speculative evolution. [Hydrostatic Skeletons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrostatic_skeleton#:%7E:text=A%20hydrostatic%20skeleton%2C%20or%20hydroskeleton,common%20among%20simple%20invertebrate%20organisms.&text=The%20muscular%20layers%20are%20longitudinal,the%20fluid%2Dfilled%20coelom%20within.) can and do exist biologically, allowing a semi-rigid structure (especially if there was a way to rapidly and selectively gel and un-gel the fluid to increase the rigidity).
Combined with air pressure to create rapidly changing shapes of some body parts, hydraulics would give your organism the ability to weigh whatever they wanted, and shift weight around to more accurately simulate shapes and motions. I imagine each new form would require considerable practice and tweaking to get right. Further, your organism would have an appropriate weakness (needing access to water), but super organisms are really not much fun in stories.
I don't know ***HOW*** alien your shape changer's biology is, but if they have a wide range of internal temperatures, they can freeze ice and vaporize water to steam, and at that point the sky is the limit. I don't think that one even needs explanation.
[Answer]
# Shapeshifter-zords!
Since shapeshifters are able to assume a new shape at will, they can shape parts of their body in a way that they [connect to each other](https://youtu.be/qm7m3QiuzjU?t=69) (think of the connections and fittings of lego parts, electrical plugs and sockets, or private parts). One single border collie does not have the same mass as a horse, but fifty border collies will.
You may think that coordinating the movements of 50 shapeshifters for galloping may be hard, but they might also connect their nervous systems when they all form a single creature. Or they might have rehearsed a lot, thus it becomes second nature to them.
[Answer]
**Hold Still and Hide Flesh while Pretending to Be Small**
Say you look like a horse. You need to look like a dog for a while, and your onlookers don’t have direct eyes on yet.
Shove most of your mass in a psuedopod under a bush, or into the ground, or some other place they won’t look.
Then wait and have the pleasant encounter but don’t move significantly, so that they don’t notice that the dog is tethered to the bush.
[Answer]
## Do Nothing
All things fall at 9.8m/s^2 and it takes a very significant increase in surface area for a shape shifter to be so affected by air resistance that you would get a slow fall effect. This is because your horse never "falls" more than a few inches per step. Since air resistance compounds exponentially with speed, your vertical air resistance would be next to nil.
Where you would see the most air resistance would be against the Coronal plane of the horse at full gallop.
The Air Drag equation is **F = 0.6⋅c⋅A⋅v^2**
```
F = Air Resistance
c = Drag Coefficent
A = Frontal Area
v = Air Velocity
```
To figure out how Ballon like your horse will be, I will solve for a border collie, a horse the weight of a border collie, and an 11" party balloon filled with air.
Since I can't find drag coefficients on dogs and horses, we'll have to look at humans instead. A human has an average **c** of 1.0-1.3. Horses have a slightly sleeker body design than a human; so, I will assume the low end of that at 1.0 and border collies have a lot of shaggy fur which creates more drag so I will assume they are at the high end at 1.3. Balloons are about a 0.5.
To find **A** I took a histogram of the front profile of an average sized horse, border collie, and balloon where each pixel is at the scale of 1/2".
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6PWIt.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nCLE6.png)
* For the horse @ a Mean of 114.35 this silhouette is 55% black so if you take the 8055px each representing 1/2" by 1/2" your get a total Coronal plane surface area of 3612px = 903in^2 = 0.5826m^2.
* For the dog @ a Mean of 82.55 this silhouette is 68% black so if you take the 1012px each representing 1/2" by 1/2" your get a total Coronal plane surface area of 684px = 171in^2 = 0.1103m^2.
* For the ballon @ a Mean of 73.06 this silhouette is 71% black so if you take the 374px each representing 1/2" by 1/2" your get a total Coronal plane surface area of 266px = 66in^2 = 0.0426m^2.
**v** is just the top speed which for a horse is 12.5m/s and for the border collie 13.4m/s. For the ballon I will use the horses speed to simulate the air resistance at our target speed.
I will also use a mass of 17kg for the horse and dog, and 2g for the ballon filled with air.
**So the force of friction from airdrag is:**
So the air resistance of a horse is (0.6)(1)(0.5826)(156.25) = ~54.6N.
And for the border collie is (0.6)(1.3)(0.1103)(179.56) = ~15.4N.
And for the balloon is (0.6)(0.5)(0.0426)(156.25) = ~2.0N.
From this we can determine the coefficient of friction using **μ = F/(M⋅v)**
So the coefficient of friction of a horse is (54.6)/((17)(12.5)) = ~0.2569
And for the border collie is (15.4)/((17)(13.4)) = ~0.0676
And for the balloon is (2.0)/((0.002)(12.5)) = ~80.
This can then be plugged into a stopping distance equation **d=v^2/(2μ)**
So the stopping distance of the a horse is (156.25)/(2(0.2569)) = ~304m
And for the border collie is (179.56)/(2(0.0676)) = ~1333m
And for the balloon is ((156.25)/(2(80)) = ~0.98m.
### What about Buoyancy
Going back to the average mass of a border collie at 17kg and comparing it to the average mass of a horse 380-1000kg, we see that the horse would have to be 22-59 times less dense than the dog, assuming that both animals have a density of about 1000 kg/m3, this gives a final density of somewhere in the range of 16-45 kg/m3. Since air has a density of 1.225kg/m3 the effective downward force of gravity - buoyancy would be somewhere between (17 - (1.225 / 16 \* 17)) = 15.7kg and (17 - (1.225 / 45 \* 17)) = 16.5kg.
This is not a significant enough reduction to cause a noticeable change, again, because the up and down motion of the horse is not very significant, one would no notice such a small change in downward acceleration unless they were extra-ordinarily observant and deeply familiar with horses.
### Conclusion
As it turns out, density does not significantly affect how well an animal can move to nearly the degree we think it would. You can see that the horse experiences much more air resistance than the dog, but it's still so little that it would take 304m to come to a complete stop from air resistance alone. This is not at all like a balloon that would come to a stop in just under a meter at the same speeds. Since the horse makes ground contact about once per meter while at full gallop, this means it's total slowdown from air resistance between steps is still going to be too small to be perceivable, even if it is technically more than a dog or horse would normally experience.
As for comments about traction, the total difference in downward force between a dog and a horse sized dog from buoyancy is only 3-8%. However, the increased surface area of the hooves compared to the dog's paws is over 1000%. So, the horse sized dog would actually have WAY better traction as a horse than it did as a dog thanks to having so much more gripping surface to work with. This means the horse would not slip and slide at all like some answers have predicted. The bigger give-away would be its ability to stop too quickly; so, hopefully the shapeshifter has made it's hooves adequately slippery to properly emulate the right level of traction. But if the horse were to panic and have to stop of a dime, it could, which would give away that something is off about it.
The other real giveaways would be if a really observant person notices that the hooves aren't sinking into mud the way they should or if it runs into something it should be able to push through (like getting knocked over running into a small branch.)
[Answer]
**Ghost Busters!**
Shape shifting involves occult/magical powers. Any such powers manifested in the 'normal' world involve the drawing of power from the aether. Shapeshifters are simply magically endowed humans with a very specific talent.
By concentrating they can draw magical power from the aether which manifests as **ectoplasm**. They can then draw this around themselves to form specific shapes and masses.
As long as they visualize and concentrate on the 'form' they need they can draw the needed mass from the aether. So if for instance visualize a horse ectoplasm will start to form around them flowing into the desired shape. Their human form changes form of course as well, flowing into an merging with the extra mass.
The effect only lasts as long as they concentrate on maintaining it. As soon as they stop doing so the spell collapses and;
1. they instantly revert back into human form;
2. all the extra mass they gained dissolves back into unshaped ectoplasm which immediately 'slimes' them and everything in the immediate vicinity before it dissolves back into the aether.
This means of course your shapeshifter can form shapes larger than him/her self but not smaller. So horses and elephants etc are a goer but not mice or anything with less mass.
[Answer]
**Wind and magnets**
Weight is a force downwards due to gravity. What needs to be done is *simulating* gravity. I'm proposing 2 solutions, although they are far from perfect.
The simulacrum seems just animate matter. The hollow structure can then be used to our advantage. Inside the simulacrum will be air chamber(s). Something will move inside the air chamber, moving air out one side and in the other. This thing can then assimilate into the edge while a new one will be created on the other side, repeating the process. This way you can suck air into the creature and out the other side. (Alternatively you just have propellor blades.) This provides the pressure needed to keep the creature on the ground and look appropriately heavy. Multiple air chambers and entry/exit holes can be along the creature for pressure in the right direction. The holes can open and close at will and are hidden in the hairs. As the hairs are controlled by the simulacrum, it can ignore the wind of the creature moving the hairs. The larger the creature, the more air is available, making a sort of scaling along with the size.
Problems:
* The wind rushing through the holes can make a lot of sound.
* It requires a lot of moving inside the simulacrum with possibly very thin structures. Although the thinness might not be a problem with the way you described the creatures.
* Produces more wind than normal which can be detected.
* Might not be able to get equal simulation of gravity in some situations.
* Despite the wind simulating gravity, it isn't actually heavy. This can be a problem when pushing or pulling objects in some cases (although for most pretty accurate).
Second option is magnetic fields, but it's even more outlandish. Have it produce immense magnetic fields to use the earth magnetic fields to pull the creature down. However, if you've ever been near an MRI machine you know the weird feelings it creates from just being inside the magnetic fields outside the machine. In addition, the magnetic fields of the earth are so weak you would need an insanely powerful magnetic field to actually push one way or another.
[Answer]
## Unfortunately probably not.
Human are hyper aware of how things of middling mass and force should move, that is why CGI movement often just looks wrong even if the lighting is perfect. Your horses will never move properly because they don't have enough mass.
A real horse has about 25 times the mass of a Border Collie(1000/40lbs) and is roughly the same shape. Since both have the same density you can extrapolate the density of your "horse". Your "horse" is about 25 times less dense than it should be. That means the Horse is less than half the density of styrofoam. It is not light enough to float in air but only just. Unless it never goes outdoors it will be hard to hide.
] |
[Question]
[
I'm worldbuilding a story, where a famous string theorist hires a student of mathematics to try construct a new theory. For better drama, my premise of the story is that the student never learned more than high school physics.
What kind of mathematical disciplines would be most useful for someone who has never studied relativity nor quantum mechanics to understand it as quickly as possible?
I don't know how important it is, but the basic idea is as follows. A famous physicist visits a small-town college on invitation of an acquaintance who is a professor there. While giving a talk presenting his theory, a latecoming student finds a flaw in the underlying mathematics. The theory is based on a conjecture that is unproven but assumed to be correct. The suggested counterexample gains infamy for the student - something akin to finding counterexamples for [the Riemann hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis).
Shaken by the latest string of bad news from CERN where experimentalists fail to find supersymmetric particles predicted by his theory, he decides to invite the student to help try a new approach.
I'm not looking for hard science; I'm just looking to tell a good story with some background in math and physics, something like Leonardo making tools in Assassin's Creed.
[Answer]
I wanted to comment on HDE's answer. It's an excellent answer (meaning I agree with it), but I wanted to add the following observations.
First, if you want your character to be a student, you'd best make him a graduate student. As HDE mentions, at the undergraduate level you might have a basic understanding of linear algebra and PDE's, but not enough familiarity to really understand the subtleties.
Second, the fields HDE mentions are related; for example, abstract algebra is (in a sense) an extension and generalization of linear algebra. Differential geometry intersects with it as well. (By the way, to address one of the comments, you can't understand abstract algebra and differential geometry without fully understanding tensors.)
Third, many of mathematical fields mentioned by HDE were motivated by advances in physics, sort of analogous to the way that calculus was invented in part to help solve physics problems. So even though your student may not know much about physics, he would have run across some of the concepts.
Given all that, I think your idea is very reasonable. Many theorists hold supersymmetry to be sacrosanct, but experimentalists aren't quite so sure, and there's always more than one way to describe what we've observed. One historical example I would offer is Feynman's path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, which is a different way of thinking that helped people develop advanced new theories.
(By the way, normally I would just comment, but even though I have the required reputation in Physics, I don't have required 50 reputation here.)
[Answer]
Let's assume that this student wants to begin by understanding the twin pillars of modern physics: quantum mechanics and general relativity. There are several major tools in the toolkit of anyone studying both of these theories at a basic level:
* Calculus (single-variable and multivariable)
+ Differentiation
+ Integration
+ Operators such as divergence, gradient, curl, etc.
* Linear algebra
+ Eigenvalues and eigenvectors
+ Vector spaces, finite-dimensional and infinite-dimensional
+ Tensors
* Differential equations, particularly partial differential equations
* Abstract algebra
+ Group theory
+ Lie algebras and Lie groups
+ Representation theory
* Differential geometry
+ Manifolds
+ Riemannian geometry
+ Metrics and notions of curvature
+ Topology
These are merely starting points that would allow you to understand the basics of the two theories in requisite detail. A physics major might graduate from college with a solid grounding in the first three topics and potentially the basics of group theory. To truly work at the fundamentals of these disciplines may require additional topics such as functional analysis or algebraic geometry.
These tools pop up in most major subfields of physics, not just quantum mechanics and general relativity. They are truly the language of the subject. Most physics majors will walk out of college familiar with calculus, linear algebra and differential equations, regardless of where they go next. Specialization dictates what comes after. If someone goes on to work in relativity, representation theory, for example, may be completely unnecessary. Beyond the list I've given you, it's hard to say what sub-topics would be optimal for this prodigy.
Also important is knowing these tools in *context*. If you spend years studying group theory in detail, you may be well-prepared to understand the mathematics behind particular parts of quantum mechanics, but you might have little idea what the equations and mathematical structures *mean*. This is why physics students often learn these tools as they study specific topics. For example, I'm most familiar with the calculus of variations from its use in analytical dynamics, where it is used to derive the Euler-Lagrange equations. In short, it's not just enough to know the math - you must also know the physics.
[Answer]
For basic physics, you need (multivariable) calculus and linear algebra. This is basic literacy. You won't get anywhere in physics without them. There are some differential equations too, but one tends to learn that on a case-by-case basis as one studies examples.
For general relativity, you need Riemannian geometry. Talking about curved spacetime only makes sense if you know what curved spaces are.
For quantum mechanics, you need functional analysis. Everything is phrased in the language of operators acting on Hilbert spaces.
I should warn you that finding a flaw in the underlying mathematics is usually not enough to dissuade a physicist from pursuing a theory. In physics, mathematics is only used to supply a concrete formalism in order to manipulate a concept one is trying to explore.
If the math doesn't quite work out, a physicist will often reason that this means the math being used is not the right mathematics needed to model that theory, and then proceed anyway. They will assume that there is some *other* mathematics out there (not their job to find out what exactly) which will behave as they like.
[Answer]
For this to work in a good story, you need something that is "bad" mathematics that is used by physicists and easily understood by readers (in its simplest form). The option that comes to mind for me is [zeta function regularization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_function_regularization), in particular [Ramanujan summation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan_summation). The most famous example of this was "proven" by my favorite mathematician and is below.
$$1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+...=\frac{-1}{12}$$
This whole topic was developed to define absurd summations like this but is frequently used in the renormalization of quantum field theories. This seems like an area where a physicist might use this willy nilly as a heuristic but a genius mathematician outside the normal circles might have dedicated considerable time to understanding formally.
] |
[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.
>
> The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by John Wheeler in a
> telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, hypothesises
> that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a
> single entity moving backwards and forwards in time. According to
> Feynman:
>
>
> “ I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at
> Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know
> why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?"
> "Because, they are all the same electron!"
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe>
>
>
>
The supposition is that there is only one electron. It stands to reason that if I could change that electron, I could change the properties of the whole Universe.
Assume that the postulate is true.
**Question**
Given foreseeable science, what properties of a single electron could be changed? In theory, could we change the charge? Could we change the mass?
[Answer]
## Disclaimer
Because my answer below throws a bit of shade at the other existing answers, and because I'm going for a bit of a flip, humorous, and somewhat defiant tone, I feel that I should point out that I'm a [real life physicist](https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/31790/danielsank) and most certainly not a crackpot :-P
## Rant
All the naysaying in the other existing answers, e.g.
* *"This universe is fundamentally impossible..."*
* *"[There] won't be anything you can change, because there won't be just one electron. The model is completely incompatible with current understanding of physics."*
* *"Whether the Wheeler postulate is true or not, under the known laws of physics, you can't change any of the properties of an electron. Mass, charge, spin, magnetic moment, etc. are all intrinsic properties. "*
seems out of place to me.
Even in a sober discussion with my colleagues in which we were to speculate on the future of physics, I wouldn't go around making statements about what certainly is and isn't possible.
The physics community has been so wrong so many times about how things will turn out even ten years in the future that such definitive statements of impossibility just seem imprudent.
Adding on top of that the facts that
* We're talking about quantum field theory here, which is already known to have some foundational issues and hasn't yet been reconciled with gravity, and
* *This is a world building site*,
I think a little bit of tempered imagination is in order.
## Alright let's actually answer the question
>
> In theory, could we change the charge? Could we change the mass?
>
>
>
Sure, why the hell not?
Electrons are presently thought of as excitations of the electron field, much like photons are units of excitation of the electromagnetic field.
The electron's "charge" is a word for describing how strongly the electron field interacts with the electromagnetic field.
Can we change that coupling strength?
Yeah maybe, who knows?
Imagine the first time someone discovers that sound is compression waves travelling through some kind of magical continuous medium; they might think that the speed of sound is intrinsic because that medium is unchangeable.
However, they eventually figure out that at smaller length scales, the sound-carrying-ether is not uniform and continuous, but rather a granular collection of billions of little particles of "air", all bumping into each other.
It's only when we zoom out and look at waves whose wavelength is much longer than (the space between) individual air molecules that the wave phenomenon of sound seems to exist in a continuous and uniform medium.
Once they know about the underlying structure of air molecules, they figure out that *changing* things about those molecules *changes* the speed of sound.
For example, they can heat or cool the molecules, or supplement them with some other type of molecules like $\text{He}$ or $\text{SF}\_6$.
If the electron field has underlying structure, then it seems quite likely that we can mess with that structure to alter the properties of that field's excitations, i.e. change the properties of electrons.
...and we haven't even talked about the single-electron theory yet...
Suppose spacetime is a big old four dimensional bar with a cube-shaped cross-section.
That is, the spatial dimensions have finite extent but the time dimension goes to plus and minus infinity.
In that spacetime, the single electron's world line can be any path through this four dimensional bar.
Now suppose a being that lives in a twenty dimensional spacetime which contains our little four dimensional one comes along and pokes a hole in the electron field in our spacetime.
Now the electron's path can't be deformed in a way that would carry it through the hole.
Proper hole-punching could wind up tying our electron in knots around the holes!
Would that change it's charge or mass?
I dunno, probably not, but it would change *something* about the electron's physics because now the set of possible electron worldlines is topologically nontrivial.
A field's (particle's) mass is related to how much energy it costs to create an excitation in that field (a.k.a. create a particle).
Suppose the universe were a Mobius strip and suppose the energy cost of creating an electron is related to the length of the strip because the electron's world line has to make a complete unbroken trip around the strip.
Well then if a twenty dimensional alien could come in and cut a section out of our Mobius strip universe, then the mass of the electron would go down.
More?
[Answer]
This universe is fundamentally impossible, since some electrons have their worldlines terminated in a black hole. Without a full working model of quantum gravity, we can't make any firm predictions about what happens to such electrons, other than the singularity is likely to end their existence. The black hole will inherit the charge, mass and angular momentum, but lose all the electron-ness of the particle's information (no hair theorem).
You can also have electrons terminated in beta capture events (which turns a proton into a neutron and the electron stops existing).
So, there won't be anything you can change, because there won't be just one electron. The model is completely incompatible with current understanding of physics.
[Answer]
Whether the Wheeler postulate is true or not, under the known laws of physics, you can't change any of the properties of an electron. Mass, charge, spin, magnetic moment, etc. are all intrinsic properties. They are not mutable by any known (or even to the best of my knowledge hypothesized) mechanism.
As to the postulate itself, as pointed out in comments and in tylisrn's answer, there are strong reasons to not believe that the Wheeler postulate is true. In addition to problems with any mechanism that results in the creation or destruction of a lone electron or positron, the Wheeler postulate runs into difficulties in explaining the observed imbalance of matter and anti-matter. If a single electron is zipping backwards and forwards through time, we should see it moving backwards as often we see it moving forwards. This would imply equal numbers of electrons and positrons, which we simply do not observe.
] |
[Question]
[
In a hypothetical fantasy setting, every region has its own pantheon. The deities are real and often interact with other pantheons, particularly between deities that share the same portfolio: e.g. Apollo and Amaterasu party on Ra's solar barge. (The world also has less powerful supernatural beings such as daimones, kami, djinn and assorted monsters.)
It is not logically possible to have multiple mutually exclusive creation myths be simultaneously true for the same world. The deities must all ultimately share a common origin and metaphysics.
Why would the deities be divided into regional pantheons? Is heaven a bureaucracy with regional departments?
[Answer]
It's a jurisdictional nightmare. Ra stopped talking to Apollo 2000 years ago after an argument about who got a sacrificed goat from an Island right on the handover point without specifying which [sun god](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_deities) it was for. We're lucky the sun doesn't fall out of the sky some days.
Luckily the [dead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_death_deities) are more easily dealt with, they just go where they expect to, hard luck for some of the Catholics but most people come out alright. Why would the gods take the time to judge when Bacchus is holding a party up on Olympus, the mortals should just be grateful they got to the end of their lives without being [turned into swans](http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.html).
And those [thundergods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thunder_gods), a bunch of primadonnas the lot of them. You should see what happens when Zeus crosses the line into Jupiter's territory, the sparks really start to fly then.
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> for no god may undo what another god has done
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*-Ovid, Metamorphoses*
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There are some answers regarding regional jurisdiction, but I think the creation myth is just as interesting. I will assume that your world is made from scratch, even if you mentioned the names of some gods from classic religions.
Divide the world into tiles. A [hexgrid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_map) if it is a flat world, something like a [truncated icosahedron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_icosahedron) ([soccer ball](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Football_Pallo_valmiina-cropped.jpg)) if it is a sphere. There are boundaries between the tiles that can be "activated" or "deactivated". Perhaps a scorching desert that can turn more or less lethal. Or forbidding mountains where passes are opened or closed by exceptional avalances. Or there is a "spell" that simply keeps humans from wondering about the next valley.
* Each pantheon is free how they create their world tile, as long as the end result is compatible with the adjacent tiles. They can start with a void, or an expanse of water, or whatever, to create dry land.
* They are free about timing, too. They can start any time they like, they can take as long as they want, the boundary will disappear as soon as both sides are finished.
* The same could happen at the end times. As soon as a pantheon wants, they can raise the boundaries and bring their tile to the desired end state.
It remains to be decided if this setup is the result of a higher power than the various gods (a power that may be anthropomorphic or not), or if it comes from a cooperative worldbuilding effort of the pantheons. A higher power may see the *gods* restricted to their tile until that tile is up to spec, or gods can make the decision. If they are impatient, there may be a biblical flood just because a thunder god [mixed metric and imperial units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication#Accidents_and_incidents) during the meeting of the atmosphere and hydrology subcommittee -- he was never really interested in water, anyway.
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So no one has yet covered what influence faith has on the deities. And if faith or human perception actually shaped these particular god-like foreces or ideas in some way.
Therefore, in this model, gods are mutable, and become what is believed.
They might have originally been simply the force of the sea, or just an energy of the underworld, but **what people believed shaped them**
Thus, there is a creative force which brought the world into being, and the gods were simply a part of that godlike energy, eventually breaking off into parts, as they got to be too large when fed by belief.
In the realm of the dead, you go to the place you believe in, with the god you believe in.
There's a couple of ways to do this:
* **Gods have different aspects in different places**, but they are actually the same energy--Zeus with a different name and aspect. They may even have a multiple personality thing going and will only dimly be aware of the other apsect. On a cosmological scale, they do the job (so if you're talking Sun god, they get the sun where it should be, in their purest form) and only take the culturally prescribed form/aspects/personality--maybe even picking up slightly different abilities for each.
* **Gods were once part of the same energy, but keep breaking apart** Start with a creator god. That god breaks off into different energies because She can't be everywhere at the same time. Then humans start worshiping these different energies, their faith and ideas defining them and feeding them. Different cultural beliefs cause them to split into different entities. With something such as a hearth god or agricultural, that's very much a local thing, and there's no need for the energies to join forces to create an effect (as there would be for a sun god). So, for instance, one sun god uses a chariot, so over those countries where that is the belief, it is so. Where it is the eye of the god, it is so--it's all about WHERE you are standing on earth. If you were on the sun and looking at it, it would only be energy, the function would be performed no matter what, but as the sun shines down on two different countries at the same time, both aspects are true, maybe even AT THE SAME TIME.
The more local the force is, the less likely there would have to be cooperation. A god of thunder in one area could be different from a god in another area, but sun gods would have to cooperate. In a mixed culture there would be clashes and even wars. The gods would use people to spread belief in their pantheon (or team) and it would be very important to them to keep cultures protected from the influence of other pantheons. Having an arbiter god which is a combined aspect or the highest of gods might be a good way to solve disputes and keep a balance.
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Most polytheistic religions have gods for specific parts of life and the universe, like bringing the sun, the rain, wealth, reproduction, and so on. Often there are temples dedicated to one or a few gods but aren't always exclusive.
Think of it like government services in your municipality. If you have a crime problem, you go to the police. Fire (or cat stuck in a tree), you contact the fire department. Marriage licenses at the courthouse, and so on. There are also cases where you have consolidated services, so even though the civil engineers and the judicial officials work in the same building, it might be on different floors.
I think in that case the deities may prefer to look at franchising their operations. The "corporate" offices of each god would be in a location that makes most sense for them. A god of wine would probably prefer a place that is good for growing grapes, but has regional franchised locations where the wine of their region is distributed.
So instead of a clearly demarcated region separating one god from another, you would have a series of overlapping jurisdictions (diesdictions?).
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Gods might be tied to or identified with geographic features.
Na is the Goddess of the river Na, Nu is the God of the mountain Nu, Ni is the God of the forest Ni, and Great King No, Fifty-fifth of His Name, is God of the city No. In this way, people construct cultural (or perhaps even personal, for the well-travelled traders) pantheons that include the gods of all the geographic features they regularly see or encounter.
Interaction between gods whose domains do not touch are probably rare, though their faithful might come into conflict. Conflict between gods would be displayed on the landscape. The mountain God Nu might bury a part of the forest Ni with an avalanche as a means of harming the forest god Ni. Ni might send great beasts from the forest to harass the city. King No might sell the mountain Nu to those obsessively-burrowing dwarves to mollify Ni. (Mountain gods often complain that dwarves itch.)
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Remember that most pantheistic gods are basically just humans but better and with some powers. They are divided regionally, for much the same reason that humans are divided regionally.
1. Distance
2. Politics
3. Survival
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## 1.Distance
While much less of a problem for god, than for mortals, Gods still have to walk/swim/fly to wherever they need to go. Though it may not be outright impossible for them, it is still a significant investion of time to go anywhere outside their primary influence. Especially since....
## 2.Politics
Remember, most countries have been founded as a means to protect yourself against the outside world. Who says that all the gods are friendly towards each other? Gods have to fear either assault from other godlike creatures (titans, frost-giants, ...) or that someone from their own pantheon will use the opportunity to take over (Hera usurping Zeus out of spite).
## 3.Survival
What do gods eat? Where do they sleep? Greek and Roman gods, surprisingly, are often not immune to mundane threats. Even Mortals from time to time had a shot at dealing significant harm to them. Why go far away from your well defended homes, when the world is so dangerous.
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Separatrix and others address the main point well, but I wanted to talk about the "creation myths" part. It is possible to have multiple *seemingly* contradictory stories all be true, like the story of the blind men and the elephant. Especially considering that, presumably, creation was in the distant past and the details are a bit fuzzy; mortals have only a vague understanding, and the gods, howevermuch they interfere otherwise, may not correct anyone who gives one or a group of them too much credit for creating the world.
Dominic Deegan has a fairly simple example of this phenomenon.
Q: [Which culture really had the first seer?](http://www.dominic-deegan.com/view.php?date=2007-01-16) A: [All of them.](http://www.dominic-deegan.com/view.php?date=2007-01-18) Imagine how much further you can take it when the events in question are, somewhat by definition, before recorded history.
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I suggest that they may be divided into pantheons which each run the world for say 100 years at a time then switch. Perhaps they all disagree on how best to run the world so eventually to prevent worldwide destruction and war between gods they agreed to run as rota system.
The world god have been created by the God who is way more powerful than the gods. Different myths about the worlds beginning are just different interpretations of this higher God. Perhaps it was this God that stepped in too create the rota system in an effort to protect his creation.
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Humans have separate into their own governments and nations perhaps the gods are the same. There may have work together to create the world but like humans they have trouble getting along, soon after the Creation of the world there start disagreeing on what they should do with they began separating into smaller groups of like-mind gods, this leads to a short war after the war a treaty divided the world into territories and each parathion was giving one territory to rule.
The people in each territory give what ever gods that rule in there home the credit for all of creation.
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[Another question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/13364/if-magic-is-real-can-it-be-true-that-rational-scientific-thought-should-exclude) has asked whether magic would be immune to science's scrutiny. I'd like to invert the question and ask...
**Would science even exist in a world with magic?**
Science evolves in an arena where the results of laboratory experiments can be consistently repeated. A theory gains acceptance as subsequent repetitions of a supporting experiment yield identical results. In the mundane world, it only takes a single experiment yielding a contrary result, to dispel all of a theory's credibility.
Repetition is the raw material which modern scientists use to incrementally span the chasm of our ignorance with every new discovery building up from the repeat-ability of all the experimental results upon which it stands.
Now for the sake of this question, lets imagine a pretty straight forward definition for magic: Magic is an invisible gas or energy (we don't know which). It cannot be proven to exist nor can it be detected by any known scientific method. Its singular affect is to temporarily change the nature of the universe from "Cause and Effect" to "Intent and Effect". In the presence of magic, the expectations of the most attuned mind override all other factors in determining the result. Magic ignores the need for causative forces, side-stepping the all known laws of conservation including energy, mass and sanity.
Magical results rely solely upon the presence of the magic whose only proof of presence is those same magical results. Independent and allusive, magic is impossible to build anything upon. By itself, it cannot span the chasm of our ignorance.
Mental attuning is the only theory we have so far, for uncovering the nature of magic and it is just a statistical shadow. It is believed that ... some people are present during magical effects more often than others and after the fact, those same people are more happy with results than a randomly selected sample of the other people present. We know that these people are magically favored over everyone else, but that is all we know about them.
So here is the question: **In a world where this kind of magic existed, would science ever take root? What tools and techniques might magic-fearing scientists use to defend their experiments from magic?**
Feel free to bend the definition of magic to suit your answer; after all, magic is malleable by definition.
-- EDIT 3/31/15 --
I failed to comment on how rare magic is in this world I am building. Several of the current answers have pointed out that if this magic was everywhere, then major aspects of everyday life (such as transportation systems) would never have been developed. Magic would relieve society of the need for such infrastructure.
I am trying for a subtler effect, where magic is rare, where an average person might only encounter an undeniably magical event once or twice in a year. A very attuned person may cause a small event or two in a good week, but not nearly often enough to depend upon.
Just enough magic to mix things up a bit.
-- Edit to address more recent comments --
@2012rcampion, the answer to your question depends upon whether there is any magic nearby and under the subconcious control of the scientist at the moment when the feather and cannonball are released. If no magic is nearby, the experiment runs as it does in our world. If magic is nearby, it runs like the scientist wants it to. The difference isn't significant when the magical effect is big and obvious, or when the test runs to its expected conclusion. The problem arises when the test goes contrary to those expectations. Was it magic or was it that single abberant result which invalidates the well-established theory.
@Hurkyl, Science is served not only by its ability to imagine how things might work, but also by its mandate to discard any theory which fails even once. If magic is a possible explanation to any event, regardless of how rare and unlikely that involvement might be, Science looses its ability to enforce that mandate.
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Magic would just be part of this world. It may not be understood, but unless some powerful tyrranical force is actively trying to stop people from understanding things, curious people will continue to observe the world, try to understand what is going on, and test their theories. The fact your world has already identified that some people have stronger intent and more magical influence shows there already is science, and people are already trying to understand what is going on.
I think that "scientists" would learn to expect a certain amount of randomness in their experiments, try to define and predict it perhaps, and then try to work around it.
Specific suggestions:
* They could set up an experiment somewhere quite isolated and get someone else to run it - someone who has no idea what they are testing for, what their intended outcome is.
* They could find people with really strong but predictable intent and keep them nearby when running their experiments. (eg. someone who particularly loves chocolate, but is only allowed it through magic). Then if chocolate appears, you could stop and try again later. (Kind of like a canary for miners).
* They could strictly school their own intent so that it primarily is to run their experiments only when magic is not around. If magic is around, they want to go home.
* They could repeat their experiments way more times and consider rejecting the statistical outliers (since magic is rarer than not).
Given that magic is still fairly rare in your world, technology will still develop too, as people won't be able to rely on magic and so will always continue to come up with new, innovative ways to improve their lives.
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Would science take root: **absolutely yes**.
Don't forget that we used to live in a world of "magic". We had no understanding about why the sun rose every day, why people got sick, why plants grew, etc. The western "magic" was gods and divine intervention.
Science wasn't born directly out of a desire to solve problems. Science was born as [natural philosophy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy): a philosophical (read intellectual) study of why things are the way they are. Unless you eradicate curiosity from your universe, your universe will eventually give rise to science.
Because the physical laws of your universe look very different than the physical laws of our universe, science will look different. It will study different phenomenon, focus on different problems, and develop different disciplines.
For example, if you have magical, instantaneous transportation, then there will probably be a group of scientists (philosophers) investigating why it works, and how to harness it. You may never see the development of any transportation infrastructure, or the science behind it, because it's unnecessary in your world.
**TL;DR**: If people are curious about the way the world around them works, those people will eventually develop the process and practices we call "science".
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We see magic connected to science often when the question is: What is the limit of magic? How can a wizard become more powerful? Why is he more powerful? If there's no limit, can the magician simply delete the whole world at once? Because if there's a limit, people would seek it. How far can they go? How can they expand their limits? They would be creating science while they try to understand magic.
Science comes from asking questions and looking for logical, reproducible answers. The existance of magic would certainly make a large part of "our" science unecessary, but as long as our minds ask questions and try to understand what surrounds us, I think science would come up eventually.
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The Diskworld universe created by Terry Pratchett defines magic as the absense of reality. This looks so much to me like Euclid's "A point is that which has no part."
The students at Unseen University study magic much in the same way that real students study particle physics. Just as in Harry Potter's world, if you wave your wand just right and say "Leviosa" just right. You will get a predictable outcome.
It's wrong to think of magic as the absence of science. If magic existed, then it too would have rules. Hence it would be amenable to the scientific method.
To say that magic is random is not enough. Particle physics has randomness in it and yet practical results can be computed by physicists.
To imply that magic is beyond our ken is, well, pompous and insulting in an odd sort of way. If it exists, then it can be studied.
The idea that it must be either magic or science is like saying an orchestra can only have wind instruments or string instruments in it.
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this thing is that, ultimately, magic is a tool for making stories work. So if you have a world where magic does work then magic is identical to science.
the crucial point here is that 'science' is not one particular set of beliefs or laws is is a pragmatic method for working out determining how the universe works so if the universe works by magic then science would set out to identify the rule by which magic works.
Ultimately science only depends on the axiom that the universe is comprehensible if you *really can* make a flying potion by stewing frog skin in virgins tears in the light of a full moon and stirring it with a silver rod then that **is** science.
Basically the word for magic which works is science.
It doesn't even need to work 100% of the time as long as the method (really) works more often than you would expect from random chance it can be said to have some technological if not scientific basis.
Of course even when something works science demands that you ask why it works and that is very much the point, science always asks the **next** 'why' whereas technology is happy that it does work most of the time and engineering wonders why it keeps breaking down.
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I think 'science' would exist still. However, it would have a very different look from what it does today. The main difference is 'magic' would be an area of study. If you are studying magic, at least some will want to know how to get consistent results from their magic. I don't want to pull a rabbit out of my hat one day and the next a chicken. This will likely lead to the need to understand the relationship 'between' magic and the physical world. Which would also force a study and understanding of the physical world with and without magic interference.
(on top of all that, science today speculates about 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' and at this point it mostly 'magic' because it's the best fit for the known holes in physics)
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Science bounds the world to laws *within an error bound.* This statistical method of fitting data can apply to the world whether you are measuring what we call "natural laws" today, or if you are plumbing magic to try to identify laws. The error bounds may be higher in a world where magic exists, but the process is the same. I don't think it would be as prevalent as science is in today's Western world, but it'd definitely be there.
Consider: before science took off on its massive journey, the common folk *did* believe in magic. In fact, in many places, it was part of their daily life. In many places, it still is. Consider: science *did* emerge in this world.
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It depends. Is your magic, magic? Or, is it a force? Can the magic be repeated consistently and studied? Nick2253 wrote:
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> Because the physical laws of your universe look very different than the physical laws of our universe, science will look different.
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In his universe, magic is just another aspect of physics, just another physical force like gravity or quantum mechanics. In a world like that would science arise? Absolutely. In effect, that is our world. I dare anyone to tell me quantum mechanics isn't magic that we've performed enough science on to understand. You'll probably eventually even be *engineering* magic. Building devices that cast fireball spells, rather than building flamethrowers.
**On the other hand**, if magic in your world is for some reason inscrutable, it is very hard to imagine that any form of science would arise. The assumption at the core of science, and all its precursors, is that if we study something we can figure it out.
Inscrutable magic would prove that assumption false. Not only does magic destroy the philosophical underpinnings of science, it also provides an explanation for any curiosity.
Nearly every scientific advance started with someone saying `Huh. That's weird. Let me try to figure out how that works.` If there is magic it would be `Huh. That's weird. Oh, well, magic. I'm going to go do something else.`
Magnets? Magic. Electricity? Magic. Odd planetary orbits? Magic. The world feels flat but ships go over some sort of horizon? The world is flat, the horizon is magic; don't fall off the edge.
Magic would do a number on curiosity because it explains everything. We see this today with creationists rejecting science because they already have a perfectly acceptable magical explanation. Can you imagine how much worse the problem would be if there wasn't any doubt as to whether the magic even exists in the first place?
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Given [my response to the previous question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/13525/3117):
***Science would definitely emerge in such a world***, although it would likely be much less popular.
However, you did mention that magic is rare in your world. Given this, most people would use scientific study *most of the time*, but ignore the scientific method whenever a magical event occurs.
This is how science works today. When an event is encountered that science can't understand yet, it is ignored. (It will be measured and recorded, but not understood.) Of course, *magic* would be completely inexplicable, ***science would probably never understand it***.
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The thing about this premise is that if magic is established in society, it's unlikely anyone would fear it - people fear the new or unknown, not the familiar. How many people do you know who are afraid of electricity, versus being afraid of new technology like CCTV or social media?
However, there are cases where people - especially inquiring people like scientists - might fear the "old way": cases where they have discovered that the "old way" has hidden dangers or disadvantages. Examples in our world include scientists speaking out against fossil fuels, or the discovery that smoking causes disease. You could make a scenario like this in your world - maybe scientists' different perspective reveals that magic use is a bad idea in the long term. Maybe 'mana' is not a renewable resource, maybe magic is creating some kind of pollution.
Would science take root? Maybe. Science gained influence in our world because it solved problems. If yours is a 'high magic' world like Harry Potter's, where magic is able to solve all the problems we solve with science and technology, then no, science would likely remain a 'fringe discipline', similar to something like pure mathematics in our world, or maybe even a discredited 'belief' like some people view astrology. If magic is solving everyone's problems, I could only imagine science taking over if magic's hold on society was actively disrupted, e.g. a violent revolution against magic users, or some kind of magical apocalypse.
Finally, how would scientists protect their experiments against magic? Hard to say, depends on the magic. If we look to our world, scientists sometimes need to block outside influences to conduct sensitive experiments. If they need to block out various kinds of radiation, they use materials such as lead, or they build underground so the earth protects the facility. If they need to prevent bacteria getting in or out, they use airlocks and negative air pressure inside the facility. You could go with something very basic, like magic-proof material, or something more extreme like working in a remote location a long way from other magic users. Or, continuing with the ideas you have about magic and causality, and referencing other ideas from quantum mechanics, maybe a magic-capable person observing an event will affect the outcome of that event, so only magically-disabled people could do science?
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So in your purposed universe the question of the scientist is pretty clearly the question of the theologian primarily: what is the intent of the causer? and in useful terms how does one produce the optimum desired effect? The universe that the scientist lives in exists in that particular state; what is the "natural" state of any area of that universe? is there anything that is immutable? Is there any way to achieve stability? Can society even exist in such a world?
I think it is important to answer the question of how one has a functioning society prior to answering the question of how one develops science in such a setting with magic as described; and I don't know that I can go much further on either topic without getting into worldbuilding notes and/or sounding like an advert for an [active setting](http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=i40&article=_005).
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It could depend not only on the availability of magic to the population, but also what it is categorized as by society.
It could be like in the Harry Potter universe, where magic exists, it indeed is rare and exclusive to a certain type of people and the general population thinks of it as a thing of fantasy. In which leads to science developing pretty much like it did in our world.
Or you could go the "opposite" way, like in Final Fantasy 6, where magic existed on pretty much the same terms (rare and only available to a specific type of people), except it's existence was commonly known to society. This one lead to science (and engineering) developing to the point where they were able to fuel their machines with the souls of dead Espers I mean, magic stones and in that way the BBEGs army was capable of using magic for war.
The way I see it (also as mostly based on what the Final Fantasy series did) I think magic's use would be dependent on its elemental type, but it would mostly just be used as fuel and it would also have its use for wars.
But it is ultimately up to your own hand-waving what are the capabilities of your world's magic. Be it fuel, creation of objects (from making simple objects to buildings, ps: ***this would ruin most modern economic models***) or whatever it is you'll have it do.
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"Science" can be a loaded word in modern days where people talk about science vs religion, but I like to think in times time like this is that '-ology' which basically means "a subject of study or a branch of knowledge". Many of the sciences fall under this. Could the study of magic be "magicology"?
Then in order to be useful in any way magic would need to have a "cause and effect" aspect to it. Cast the spell and you get repeatable results....ie laws of magic must exist. We could even go so far as to call it a physical science since jt impacts material objects.
If magic isn't something all that common then those without easy access to it would need to innovate. Wheels, bricks, spoons, growing crops, chairs, fire. All those things we dont even think about are products of science and innovation.
I would propose that magic is just another branch science alongside the non-magical sciences...so maybe they cant live alongside as one is just a subset of the other.
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The general idea behind detecting invisible things using science is to check the things it affects. For example, we know dark matter exists because of its effects. If magic cannot be detected by science, then it is because magic has no effect on the world. If it does have an effect (and you say it does), then:
If magic stays in the same place, then such effects would probably be attributed to the location. If it moves, but is still rare, then people could monitor the position based off the unpredictable effects. If it is everywhere, then its effects would be still under the umbrella of what we call "science".
(Moved from a comment which accidentally answered the question)
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**This question is supposed to explain the phenomenon in fiction that I affectionately call the "clean death", where a dead monster disintegrates after being slain.** Normally this would be explained by the monster being magical in nature but I am looking for a way to implement this in the actual biology of the creature. The reason for this self-destruct mechanism is to avoid experimentation or capture at the hand of humans. The matter of the creature doesn't disappear due to conservation of mass, but as long as there is nothing left to study that is acceptable.
**How does a creature decay without leaving a trace?**
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The monster is filled with tiny symbiotic parasites, which are themselves the larval form of a different creature. These creatures are usually benign and dormant, acting as a large scale immune system of sorts, picking less benign parasites out of the monster’s hide, digestive system and other bodily cavities. However when their host dies they immediately go into a beserk feeding frenzy, gorging and growing in size terrifyingly quickly. These ravenous larvae tear apart not only their host but any other creature unlucky enough to be within chomping distance before beginning a rapid metamorphosis into a tiny yet locust like adult phase.
The adult phase then swarms, feeds, breeds, disperses million of eggs on the breeze and dies. The eggs find new hosts and perpetuate the cycle. This symbiotic relationship evolved as a good way for the symbiotes to be sure of a high energy food source to fuel their breeding phase, while the monster benefited from improved health during the larval phase and having a ‘suicide bomb’ available to deter predators.
The side effect is, of course, that the larvae utterly demolish the monster upon death. Nothing is left at the end bar the husks of millions of symbiotes that have since transformed into a ravening swarm of death.
Oh, and the ravening swarm of death itself...
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**Spontaneous combustion.**
[Spontaneous human combustion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_human_combustion) has been bandied about plenty. Wikipedia offers several explanations, one of the more plausible being the "wick effect" in which a fire starts, the intoxicated or disabled victim does not act, and the body eventually burns with extreme heat fueled by its own fat. More esoteric biochemical and mysterious explanations have also been advanced.
This is what happens with your creatures. They have a biochemically active feedforward loop which is checked in life with an enzymatic deadman's switch. On death the enzymes cease their hold and the feedforward loop intensifies, throwing off heat which ultimately causes the (generous) fat stores to ignite and then burn fiercely. The body is destroyed, bones and all except for possibly an odd protruding claw or horn.
If you are in the right place, you might have a minute or two to collect specimens as the carcass began to steam. Then get clear.
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Oddly enough, living cells in multicellular organisms already have built in self-destruct mechanisms: lysosomes to destroy malfunctioning or unneeded organelles, a process called 'apoptosis' in which the cell effectively deconstructs itself... These are part of a body's normal defense mechanisms, in which cancerous and diseased cells destroy themselves to preserve the integrity of the body as a whole. All you would need to do is have that effect naturally or artificially enhanced, so that as cells (say) become oxygen-deprived (a reasonable sign of the organism's death) these mechanisms spin into high gear and break down the cell from the inside. This would be less like the traditional vampire trick of turning to ash, and more like the X-Files trope of aliens dissolving into green goo, but...
Of course, this would have side issues: e.g., tie a tourniquet too tightly around one of these creature's limbs, and the limb might spontaneously liquify below the bind. And it would help if these creatures lacked a true bony skeleton, because the calcium salts in bones are hard to break down quickly. But I suppose that could be managed with a special enzyme.
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Any living organism already decays after death leaving nothing to study. It just takes years of decomposition to break down the corpse into elementary substances, like CO2, water, NH3 and so on.
If you have the decomposing bacteria act waaaay faster, you could achieve the same result in hours or minutes, though that might release a sensible amount of energy, resembling a combustion.
Alternatively, you can have the beast using some strong acid/basis as offense/defense mechanism, which is the released upon death, attacking the corpse.
Upon death it is normal that sphincters are released, imagine that instead of releasing urine or feces this one releases also a bladder full of nitric acid...
[Answer]
I'm guessing you're looking for a "completely natural" mechanism here.
If you're willing to consider the equivalent of a "cyanide capsule", and you have a sentient species wishing to avoid capture, then anything that accelerates natural decomposition would work; even bones can disintegrate if you destroy enough of the framework holding them together at a microscopic level. Assume the aliens / monsters have a sufficiently fine-grained bone structure.
Otherwise, you'd be looking for something that could spontaneously "evolve" and I'm not entirely convinced that's plausible (though Joe's answer makes a lot of sense, I don't see how the symbiosis gets started -- a chicken and egg problem).
[Answer]
We have pretty conventional energy sources in mind here, right? If we had a silicate based lifeform, using radioactive materials as food- the death could result in a actual loss of mdoeration and a meltdown into nuclear lava which runs away into some pit to be cooled by groundwater.
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[Question]
[
For one of the novels I am writing, I want to create a race based off of the Chinese Zodiac. However, I don't know exactly where to start with creating said race, so I was curious to see if there was any tried and true way to go about creating a new race.
Clarifications:
* What I mean by "create a new race" is that I want to develop, from a narrative perspective, the entire existence of this race: their society, their biology, their history, everything.
* As for what kind of race, I was thinking more of a [Demi-Human](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DemiHuman). They would appear to be fairly human, but possessing animalistic traits (ex. animal ears, tails, scales, etc.).
[Answer]
I'll take a few liberties with this question, namely:
* For the purposes of this question "race" will include species.
* I will not go into the detail of working the Chinese Zodiac.
* I'll assume we are talking about creatures that you may confuse with animals.
* I'll base my approach in engineering.
*I'm not an expert, this is not a treaty. Consider other points of view aside from what I present here.*
What I provide below could work as a framework to attach all sort of details about your race. Yet, you shouldn't be required, so, I'll be using the mark "**[⌥]**" hints, skippables, and optional developments.
---
## Cosmic requirements
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> If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. -- Carl Sagan
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*Go watch (or read, or listen in audiobook) Cosmos. Yes, the Neil deGrasse Tyson version is ok. But listen to Carl Sagan talking about hypothetical creature living in Jupiter. There is no better inspiration.*
**[⌥]** Skip: if your universe and world is just like ours.
Whatever we decide to do with our creature project must be based on the conditions on the universe in which we are working. We should consider if we have tweaked the laws of physics, if we have added any exotic matter or unfamiliar particle, or if we have allowed any form of magic. Also, consider the situation of the world in which you plan to put the creature. Consider if it is a planet that orbits a star, is it a disc-world, a ring-world, a Dyson sphere… whatever. You have the requirement to create a creature that can survive there.
Remember, this is Worldbuilding.
---
## Biological Requirements
Identify all the traits and constraints for the race you want to create. These are two distinct sets of requirements. For example you may start working with a known environment and wonder what kind of creature may live there; in that case you will have more constraint requirements to begin with. On the other hand you may try to create a creature that resembles some description; in that case you have more trait requirements.
The more requirements you have, the harder will be to design a viable live form. A good idea to mitigate this problem is to prioritize your requirements. For example if you start with A) "Humans can mount it, it can fly, and it looks like a horse" you will end up with something different than B) "It looks like a horse, it can fly, and humans can mount it".
As you may notice, the requirements interact with each other. In the example above A may be a giant bird with horse head, while B may be a flying horse that when you try to ride it then it can't fly - or may even die.
**[⌥]** Hint: Keep the number of requirements at the bare minimun for the race to work in your setting. You don't an extensive list of all requirements. In fact, if you find something missing you can always add it later.
Adding one more requirement will multiply the complexity of the design because you need to consider how that requirement interacts with all the others. So, again, have priorities, and be willing to drop a few in order to make a viable creature.
Another example: if you are making vampires, drinking blood is probably on the top of the list, and then there is the hard stuff that is likely to be drop out such as having no reflections or turning into a bat, and finally at the lowest priority any glitter stuff.
**Note**: before going into the design, I want to encourage to do research. Search in zoology, mythology, and crypto-zoology, and of course sci-fi and fantasy for things similar to what you want. It will save you time later.
---
## Biological Design
When designing the live form, you need to consider some extra information that you may not be requirements: What is the origin, and what is the environment in which it lives.
For example, you may conclude that the creature you want could only be possible if it is genetically engineered, or requires cybernetic enhancements, or could only evolve in a planet very different from Earth. And that could or not be a requirement.
Of course there are two main kinds of design:
* Biological evolution: If the creature evolved, you need to justify each of the traits in one of these ways: 1) how does it help the creature survive? 2) Why sexual partners may prefer the feature? 3) What other creatures have similar traits? (In particular if you can find examples of real creatures).
* Artificial construct: If the creature is artificial then it may depend on the race of the creators for survival. In this case the question to answer about the traits is why do the creators opt for this trait? (Answer could be practical, but could also be economical).
**[⌥]** Optional: With evolution, if you want to explain how the traits developed (to invent fosil records or stuff like that) you need to consider that any trait you add must have some use in its minimal form. If you like "it is a frog that by mutation had tiny wings" those tiny wings would have to have some benefit for the frog because otherwise evelution would very likely select it out.
---
Of course, that's a daunting task, below I present an approach to construct a creature from the ground up.
**[⌥]** Hint: how strict you are on this is bound to the target [sci-fi hardness](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness) you want. As per convincing the audience, propinquity and repetition helps to make people think that something is normal. In particular if they know the stuff from other fictional work. A shortcut may be to have your characters react as if it were normal. Contrast with [making a monster](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/32921/what-makes-a-monster-or-creature-scary).
Steps:
1. Decide: What is the medium in which it thrives? What substances are common? How strong gravity? What is the temperature there? What is the medium pressure? What traits does the creature need to survive there? **[⌥]** Optional: How strong is magic there (or the force, ki, chi, chakra, cosmos, ether, higgs field or whatever)?
2. Decide: Does the creature float there, or is stuck to a surface? **Note**: I'm talking about natural buoyancy, not locomotion.
3. Decide: How big is the creature? How does the body support itself? a skeleton, an exoskeleton, a system of fluid-filled bladders...?
4. Decide: How does the creature resist or take advange of the conditions of that enviroment? **[⌥]** Hint: rough stokes, no need for details.
5. Describe the body structure as a tree (starting from the part that has the heart, also starting form the part that has the brain, and from the part that has any other organ that needs to reach the whole body, if any). Does it have bilateral symmetry, radial symmetry, other? Are there counterparts in real life? **[⌥]** Shortcut: describe it like a known animal, perhaps point a few differences.
6. Solve its locomotion. Does it walk, run, gallop, trot, swim, fly, float, glide, soar, jump, attaches to another creature, teleport...? What are the requirements for that locomotion to work in the environment you did choose? **[⌥]** Shortcut: if the description is close to a known species, and there are no major enviromental or mass changes, you can probably handwave this.
**Note**: consider also other weird stuff like split body, and multiple hearts, etc. Any unique trait, make sure to make note of it.
---
Up to here you have a viable creature, but we want a race. Remember the genetic imperative, live is about three things: Feeding, Reproducing, and Not-Dying.
7. Solve the nutrition. How does the creatures get nutrients? From what or where do they get the nutrients? Do they even need nutrients? **[⌥]** Hint: they probably do. Also, you are not required to describe a food chain (e.g. "they eat fish" is ok).
8. Solve the reproduction. Do they reproduce? Is it asexual? If it is sexual, how does the biological sex determination works? Is there any sex differentiation? **[⌥]** Optional: How do the individuals find partners? What kind of care is given to the offspring? Does the offspring kill and eat the parents? **[⌥]** Hint: there is no need to come up with unique scheme for sex determination, just say it is chromosomes.
9. Solve the defense mechanisms. How do they defend tehmselves from predators (if any)? How do they fight? What may the creature do to appear more threatening? **[⌥]** Hint: rough stokes, no need for details.
10. **[⌥]** Optional: Decide how different are the individuals of the race, do they all look pretty much the same? are there distintive (sub)races? is it all crazy like dog breeds?
---
You did all that? Good. Go over the list again; make sure it is all consistent. Once you are done, you have a race.
Hooray!
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> Their society, their biology, their history, everything.
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O,.,O
*This question is too broad, and primary opinion based, and has a bounty - at the time of writing.*
---
## Cultural Design
*First off, a suggestion: go study history of science. Not big history, not universal history, not the history of your country. Instead, study the history of the scientific discoveries and the technological advances of human kind. It is technology what shapes economy and behavior, and so, it is technology what ultimately can change culture – technology and the "natural" death of the people with outdates ideas, but technology nonetheless. Yes, Cosmos again.*
Your cultural design starts with means of communication. Do they use sounds, signs, telepathy, something else? **[⌥]** Optional: This is also where you want to start if you need to create a language, a naming scheme, family names, etc. You don’t need to develop a complex language to move on, but if you can specify grammar and vocabulary it will add a huge depth and realism to your culture.
Once you have some basic idea of communication, you need to move to technology. Think about what resources do they have, what kind of tools they could make, what kind of environmental challenges they have that could be better addressed with technology. This will give you their technological focus and also a rough idea of where to put manual labor. **[⌥]** Optional: Again, you don’t need to develop a full technology tree, doing so is daunting itself (I have tried) but any approach to the technological ages you can describe will add even more depth your culture.
**Note**: you may want to dedicate some time to developing the world, because that will tell you about geographical features, resource deposits, and the habitat of other life forms with which your culture may interact with (for hunting, taming, domestication, etc.)
Next up, is economy. This is bound to resource abundance and scarcity; and also to the needs of the creatures. Once the population is large enough, the production of the vital resources will have technological improvements that allow a distinct group of individual to provide the whole population, but why would they? Are they forced? Do they trade? Is there even private property? Do they a have common consciousness?
That gives the firsts strokes of social classes in your society.
**[⌥]** Optional: If you want to go deeper into the social structure, try to imagine how this kind of things could work there (if at all) – no particular order:
* Government
* Army
* Crime
* Market
* Landowners
* Industry
* Trash
* Transportation
* Media
* Banks
* Religion
* Art
* Sport
* Education
* Tools
* Services
* Truism
* Entertainment
* Workers
* Agriculture
* Mining
* Farming
* Cattle
* Hunting
* Housing
* Healthcare
---
## Historical Design
You may have decided how the society is on the current stage, but you are yet to say how it got there. To fill the gaps, you need the other approaches of history: Great Man Theory, and It-is-a-bunch-of-battles Theory.
Consider the different stages of technological development, for each one: What are the social problems in that technological period? Are there any internal or external conflicts? Who solved this? Who are the great generals/scientists/inventors/artists/engineers/merchants that moved history along to solve those social issues and to reach the next technological period?
**[⌥]** Hint: No, you don’t need to write about how they met or anything like that. All you want is a timeline, a series of events, that then you could explore in detail if needed.
**[⌥]** Optional: you may take that map of the region where your culture develops and start plotting how far it expands per technological period. This also helps to find how they contact other civilizations or discover new resources.
**[⌥]** Hint: Having problem with some part of history? Create an RPG campaign! Or ask for help online or whatever, not like we have a site on worldbuilding.
---
## Everything else design
**[⌥]** Everything else is optional: You can explore the mysterious parts of their psyche: how diverse are their personalities? what are the moral values of the society? what do they consider wrong? do they dream? of electric sheeps? What do they consider beauty? What activities do they do for social bonding? Do they have a sense of humor? Can they catch metaphors that may attempt to fly over their heads?
**[⌥]** Hint: I guess what is left are the artistic expressions, fashion trends, and similar. You can always approach these as the development of your work needs them.
[Answer]
When it comes to design and process questions I will often recommend utilizing the tools created and available with **Dungeons and Dragons.**
In this instance it doesn't particularly matter if you are creating a monstrous race, an animal race, a humanoid race or some hybrid.
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**1. Animal, Monster, Humanoid or Hybrid**
This is pretty strait forward. You have to have a design in mind, or you can go the other direction and have a niche, role etc in mind. Maybe it is something like "is able to successfully hunt humans." The role can define how the race is designed
**2. General attributes.**
In the DnD world this equates to; **Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma**
Each creature/humanoid monster is score on a scale of 1 to 20 (with exceptions). 10 is average and the creature incurs no benefits or penalties, the higher, the better the bonus, the lower the number the more of a problem.
As an example, an animal, lets say a panther would look something like this (mind you I don't have my monster manual in front of me so I am making this up).
Str: 12 Dex: 16 Con: 10 Int: 4 Wis: 8 Cha: 6
**3. Now that you have your basic attributes you can start considering body design. More strength = more muscle mass, more dexterity, longer limbs perhaps, constitution more...bear like.**
Keep in mind the first three attributes are physical and the last three are mental.
One good trick on this stage is to look at an existing creature that is known for certain things. Bears are really really tough so it can give you an idea of what a character with a really strong constitution looks like. Same goes for Str and Dex.
Try to avoid cobbling pieces together too much, alien life forms can get weird and make people wonder how natural selection could ever have selected for something like it...
**4. Skills**
Skills are simply what your race is known for being good at. Maybe they are super stealthy, athletic, magicians, etc etc etc, the list goes on and on in this case.
**5. Environment**
This isn't so much a step as something you need to keep in mind throughout. The environment these creatures (with the exception of magically created or portal-ed things) live in will have defined how they look. You are not going to have a stealthy purple and red striped cat that lives in a brown environment...it would be seen by prey a mile away...then it would starve to death and die.
*Just remember to keep the world in which the creature exists in mind while you are designing it or you may get to the end and think...this makes no sense.*
**Other notes:**
* Variation: A member of a race (at least in the case of higher order animals) should not look the same as every other member of his/her race. Its boring and not believable. Natural selection values diversity. Diversity improves the survivability of a species when they are put under major environmental stress, perhaps a virus that kills but a portion of the population is completely immune.
* Seriously consider getting the monster manual. Its a goldmine.
[https://www.amazon.com/Monster-Manual-Core-Rulebook-Wizards/dp/0786965614/ref=sr\_1\_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1474313966&sr=8-3&keywords=5e+dnd](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0786965614)
[Answer]
There are many amazing answers here. I love Theraots and TrEs-2b's answers. Honestly, both of them deserve the bounty and many many +1s in my opinion.
There are also many nice texts on the different approaches (top down, bottom up) here. Read them, they are helpful.
Then why write another answer? I want to show another possible way of race building, that also works, but takes a totally different approach. The main "problem" with the above mentioned methods is, that i can easily write a hundred pages about the new race. I can develop a rich culture, a physiological description down to cell level, i can outline 10k years of history. I can have... fun world building. And mind me, i DO have papers that long on my computer.
But what if i don't like to spent that much time? What if the race will only play a minor role in my book / roleplaying game / whatever (i will assume it's a story for now)? And i still want a world that satisfies me, my readers, and doesn't violate common sense with their sheer existance?
Well, there is a way i call "human cloning". It works quite well, does not lead to spectacular results, but is fast and easy, and requires only a minimum of description to the reader. This holds especially true if your race is demihuman, like the OP suggested.
## Start with a human
You start with your average human.
## Physiology
Now you apply all the physical changes that you want to your race. Fox tail, fox ears, canines, cute whiskers. There you are. Write a small paragraph of text to fix those changes somewhere, so your descriptions stay consistant. Remember, you'll probably describe your foxians as "like humans, but with tails and ears of a fox" anyway. So why go into much more detail, if it will not be relevant to your story?
## Evolution
Stop and think about how your foxians evolved. When in doubt, they evolved like humans. Think of roughly three points where your race evolved differently. Maybe foxians lived in dense jungles and forests, requiring sensitive hearing (because line of sight is very short), and their tail helped them trail across branches and through brush? Maybe they used to primarily hunt some small prey animal?
## Culture
Start off with a human culture. For the foxians, i think a native american culture would suit them. Just transfer it more or less 1:1. Avoid NAMES, but transfer the concept. use stereotypes heavily. So our foxians believe in nature spirits, live in tents, like to dance and make music, and have a largely peaceful culture. They are governed by a chief and a shafox (shaMAN, get it?). Now find roughly three things that you want to change. Ideally, they are based on differences in evolution and physiology. My Foxians do not fight wars. Instead, they battle each other in teams of 5 making music. Who makes the most beautiful, haunting melody, who writes and sings the best verses wins a confrontation, because their spirit is so strong, so blessed by the gods that they must be right. This is because their sense of hearing is so delicate, and the people soon learned that in order to survive with 11 other sapient species on the planet, you cant afford to be a threat, or kill each other, when so many enemies are around. Also, my foxians keep a huge stack of guinea pig-like creatures, that they feast upon. This thing was their primary prey during their primitve days, and they still love it.
## History
If you even need to care about their history, make it vastly uninteresting. They developed, settled, boom, they are here. Now think of three events that impacted them. For example, the first might be a big disease that infected all foxians, and is generally considered the scorn of the spirits for killing each other, as it occured right after their first real war. Since that day, they do no longer go to war, but sing instead of fighting. The second event was a great fire (caused by a meteor impact), that chased them from the forest into the plains, where they live ever since.
## Language
Spent a few seconds trying to find out how their language is. Easy to learn? Who can pronounce it? Who cannot? Does it feature strange grammatical constructs? How would a sentence sound? Spent some time thinking here, since the most likely interaction in your novel is a character talking to them. So this is where we need to put some more work. Will the hero learn about their culture? Probably not more than what you already worked out, or your reader will die of boredom. But will he talk to them? Sure. And this is where misunderstandings happen, this is where you can distinguish your species. Think of 5-10 phrases that are typical for a foxian.
"The spirits beware"
"If you say that one more time, i shall challenge you to the circle" (of music, but does the hero know that?)
"May your tail stay fluffy" (may you not get it dirty and wet from bad weather)
...
## Most obvious differences
After you are done, think about three things that will make it apparent where the differences between your foxians and humans are. Music instead of fighting, very spiritual and they will murder for a fresh guinea pig steak.
And you are done. You should now have created a minor race, with enough background to provide immersion. maybe this is just a start for you, a rough raft to go into a full world-building session. Maybe you want to flesh out all races first, so you have a clear picture in mind when designing the others... do whatever you want, and may your tail stay fluffy.
[Answer]
As with most things in worldbuilding, there are two general paths for creating something new.
## From the Ground Up
In this model, you start from scratch and work forward. You can pick a creature somewhere in Earth's history for a basis. Observe its environment, and make minor changes to mimic the evolutionary process. Repeat until you have the creature you want. Keep a record of the changes you make, as this is likely to impact the general attitudes and behaviors of the species as a whole: aggression levels, attention span, community interest, etc. These, in turn, will help define the general aspects of the creature's societies and cultures.
## Work Backwards
In this model, you start with the finished product and ask yourself "How did this come to be like this?" You then work backwards as far as necessary to satisfy your purpose. With each step backwards, you ask yourself the same question. In this way, you can create the same record of changes I mentioned above and can take the same actions regarding that record for the modern species.
[Answer]
The term "race" is loosely used to describe a sapient life form with a similar degree of intelligence and awareness as that of a human. Generally a new race will have shared traits and will be aware of its self and its environment. The way your race interacts with its environment will influence the local culture and how they will use the environments resources to better their standard of living and how they interact together in a social capacity.
**Race Name(s)**
You may have a few different names for your race such as a scientific name and common name. The scientific name may be developed from a constructed language or may have been given to the race from a scientific observer or explorer from another world such as Earth. An Earth explorer might provide an alien race with a name in Latin similar to the way we name new fauna and flora species.
**Classification - Created or Evolved?**
One of the first questions to consider when creating a new race, is how did it come about? Was it created through intelligent design by a creature with greater knowledge such as a God or scientist or did it evolve from another species? When using the former, the sky is the limit, but the latter employs limitations that help with realism.
**Personality Traits**
Shared personality traits of a race are usually generalizations. Personality traits could develop as result of environmental factors or through genetics. If your race is separated into distinct groups geographically, this may result in clans or tribes having different personality traits depending on experience, interaction with local ecosystems and other environmental influences. For example, human can be described as exploring, emotional, greedy and ambitious.
**Physical Description**
This characteristic is often best visualized through graphic art but not all writers can draw, you might be a spoon like me who cannot draw living things. The written physical description you provide for your race should include the shared characteristics between all clans or tribes no matter the location. If your race is subject to a varied physical form depending on genetics or environmental factors, you may want to create a list of the different physical attributes and the reasons. Considering common clothing may help defines the races culture.
**Clans / Tribes**
Clans and tribes are usually differentiated by location. Each location will have different environmental factors that could trigger inter-racial differences: physical, emotional and intelligent. Consider how your clans and tribes communicate, have there been any racial customs that may have been adopted by other clans of the same race through marriage, trade relations or invasion? What are the cultural or physical differences between each clan or tribe? Consider the human race, which can be divided in the sub races of Negro, Caucasian, Oriental, Australoid and Aboriginal.
**Relations**
What relationships does your race have with other sapient lifeforms that may exist on your fantasy world? How has this effected your race's society? How does your race interact with each other? Are there any social customs that are worthy of noting?
**History**
The history of your race may begin prior to the your fantasy world if the race has migrated from another world or it may have begun many billions of years after your world came into existence. When you first begin fleshing out this section of your template, jotting ideas down in bullet points is good start. You can later develop these ideas as part of your world building or story. While not necessary, this will help the feel of the race.
**Race Lands**
If you race has migrated across your fantasy world, consider showing the origins of your race on your world map You may want to include the path(s) of migration as well as the current civilizations. If designing a evolved creature, this will also help realism and if designing a created creature, this will determine their holy land.
**Religion**
What are the core beliefs and values of your race? Are there divisions in your race based on religion or is the racial culture unified in its belief on origin and spirituality? Does your race worship a single Deity? Religion can have a large effect on social relations, technological advancement and social values and norms, as well as shared personality traits.
**Languages**
If your race is the only sapient race upon your fantasy world and it is divided into clans or tribes in different geographic regions it may have quite a diverse linguistic culture. In fantasy settings and especially in role-play games a common language shared by multiple races who co-exist together is a common characteristic. Each race may still has its own language and characters are often able to speak more than one language depending on their experience.
**Common First Names**
If you have constructed a Conlang for your race, you might draw common first names and surnames from its dictionary especially names that pertain to fauna and flora which could be adopted for characters. Your races religion(s) can also provide a source for first names as too can the history of your fantasy world. Popular first names may change over the course of time. Using a first name in a repetitive fashion for characters of a certain generation would mirror the use of first names in our own human culture however, it may make the story harder to convey and your readers might get confused.
**Common Family Names**
The origin of family names in our own societies are often derived from a position or role that a family may have within a community. The surname "Wells" for instance is thought to have been provided to families who were well diggers by trade. Surnames are not necessarily required in small populations but as a population grows it may become a requirement so that people can be told part. Sometimes a surname may also originate from the description of where a person hailed from, for instance, Alex Von Appleston might have been used to describe Alex who came from the small hamlet name Appleston.
**Race Speed / Physical Strengths**
If your story or geofiction contains combat or use of physical strength then it is important to keep a note of your race's limitations. How fast can they move / run? How high can they jump? How much weight can they lift? You may want to include two sets of figures, one for averages and the other for extreme abilities.
**Level of Advancement**
A race could advance to become a super race only if the physical, spiritual and mental capabilities of your race allow it. A race without magical powers may find it difficult to advance in experience or better themselves if the world around them required the use of magical abilities. The degree of racial intelligence are also factors limiting advancement.
**Civilizations**
What civilizations is your Race responsible for nurturing or helping to build up? What part did the race play in the civilizations creation, growth and demise? Are there any significant cultural advances that your race has helped to create?
**Population statistics**
Include the population statistics on your map for your fantasy race. The size of the population and ability to socially network with other races can influence the diversity of the culture and sub-cultures of your race.
The above template may also be useful for capturing key information for other fantasy races who are not unique to your fantasy world but a variation to the norm. You can be as detailed as you like with the description of each aspect or come back to build upon the characteristics as you develop your story. Once you have fleshed out the characteristics for your race, refer to the race template when designing and writing about your characters.
***Optional***
**Magic Ability and Powers**
Not all races require to have magical abilities or powers in a fantasy world. The ability to wield magic may have a positive or negative effect on a race. It can build a race up to become powerful both politically and physically or it can cause a race to become outcast. Keep a detailed list of the magic and power abilities of your race if you decide to include magic and power in your world. Does everyone in the race inherit the same special abilities or are only a selection of powers inherited through genes? Do the number or strength of special abilities increase or decrease with experience and age? You might choose to restrict magic or powers to people who are in a certain profession or who worship a particular deity.
[Shamelessly taken from here](http://hubpages.com/literature/Creating-a-New-Fantasy-Race)
[Answer]
Well, this very much depends on how the races were created. You can use evolution as your guide or make them a created race (magical, perhaps). The main thing is that they have to make sense in your world. How detailed you make them will be up to you.
Things to look at
**Environment**
Where do they come from/thrive and what attributes would they need to survive/flourish.
**Anatomy! Consider some awesome sources on this very board!**
Please take a look at the [anatomically correct series](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798) because it will give you a great start as to what people do look at.
**Get Specific & Research**
Go through each of these separately, researching the animal they are derived from (if you are going that route). So for the Rat on the zodiac, you would look at rat behavior, societal structure and you would also look at the zodiac itself for the characteristics of each.
**Listen to James**
For sure, going to be upvoting him, because he's hitting on some tools DMs have used for years whenever they create a race. The stat building he speaks of is a great way to quantify your races.
[Answer]
I don't think that I can add much to the many detailed and excellent answers above, but I would suggest that if you want to base your created race off the Chinese Zodiac, why not use the legend of the Zodiac as a backstory?
You are probably aware of the story of the race among the zodiac animals that determined their "placing", with Rat at the front, Ox in second place, etc until Pig comes in last? This might reflect an inherent caste structure within the race (or society), perhaps?
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[Question]
[
If all of the crew and passengers of an interstellar craft were in suspended animation except prior to Earth departure and just before destination arrival, would they need artificial gravity (through some from of spin) for the length of the journey?
Also please let me know if there's a better place to ask this question. I don't want to step out of context.
[Answer]
Need? No. Want? Yes.
From real life:
>
> Science Results for Everyone
> Maintaining strong muscles is a big enough challenge on Earth. It is much harder to do in space where there is no gravity. Calf muscles biopsies before flight and after a six months mission on the ISS show that even when crew members did aerobic exercise five hours a week and resistance exercise three to six days per week, muscle volume and peak power both still decrease significantly. Overall, the data suggest that current exercise countermeasures are not enough. The addition of a second treadmill and the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED) along with more rigorous exercise regiment are giving good results in preventing muscle loss and preserving overall muscle health.
>
> -[Effect of Prolonged Space Flight on Human Skeletal Muscle (Biopsy) - 08.15.18 -NASA](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/245.html)
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Unless your sleeper technology can make up for the atrophy of muscles that's normally seen in both comatose patients AND the atrophy seen in **Active** microgravity residents, the addition of artificial gravity would reduce this problem to coma patient level, which could be treated with neuromuscular electrical stimulation.
But neuromuscular electrical stimulation doesn't work for bone mass losses (Osteoporosis) as well, which is also another problem of microgravity. So your sleeper tech would also need that. Artificial gravity would make it a non-issue.
So need? No, your sleeper tech can adjust for the medical issues or have your travelers arrive skinny and weak. But you probably want it.
**Whatever the source of the gravity**, it should be about Earth normal 1G. Lower gravity would cause less stress to the body and still lead to skeletal-muscular mass losses (at a lower rate), and high gravity causes issues with blood pumping and stress to tissue. Sustained high gravity force can kill a human.
[Answer]
>
> Would a sleeper ship need artificial gravity?
>
>
>
**No**
There's only one real reason people want artificial gravity during a space journey.
To avoid the muscle atrophy etc arising from micro gravity.
But assuming that the suspended animation suspends (or at least significantly slows) all biological functions at a cellular level (which is the way it's most usually depicted in sci fi) there's no plausible explanation for why there would be any muscle (or other) atrophy from zero g during the journey.
So they wouldn't need it.
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Which doesn't mean a sleeper ship won't have it, just that they probably won't have any artificial gravity they have got turned on during the bulk of the journey.
A ship on a regular shuttle run might not have any if no one is expected to spend more than a few hours awake in zero g either end of the journey, while an exploration vessel that might loiter for an extended period above a planet after arriving probably will (if the tech is available).
[Answer]
**Absolutely Yes**
Humanity was not designed for microgravity.
>
> Life in the microgravity environment of space brings many changes to the human body. The loss of bone and muscle mass, change in cardiac performance, variation in behavior, and body-wide alterations initiated by a changing nervous system are some of the most apparent and potentially detrimental effects of microgravity. Changes to bone are particularly noticeable because they affect an astronaut's ability to move and walk upon return to Earth's gravity. ([Source: NASA](https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/postsecondary/features/F_Bones_in_Space.html))
>
>
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In a nutshell (and building on CDE's excellent answer), all of the following suffer in microgravity, whether you're sleeping or not.
* Bones
* Muscles
* Cardiovascular system
* Nervous system
And, based on the very brief mention of "variations in behavior," the brain itself suffers for lack of gravity.
The simple reality is that long-term space travel will require 1G gravity or Bad Things happen. Sleeping doesn't solve the problem. In fact, extrapolating from the explanations, thanks to the loss of active psychological and physiological activity, it might be a great deal worse.
[Answer]
You probably want your sleeper ship to spin, even if artificial gravity is not a concern. The reason is that a rotating spacecraft has a more stable orientation than a non-spinning one- which will probably begin to tumble erratically after a while.
Space probes like the Voyagers and New Horizons rotate so they can keep their radio dishes oriented towards the Earth. Your sleeper ship might want to send status reports back to Earth and maybe conduct long-distance scans of the destination en route. Keeping a stable orientation makes that easier. It will also make establishing a comfortable artificial gravity easier once you've arrived.
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If an Earth-like planet has ice, does the ice have to be on both poles? For example, could a planet have ice on its south pole but not on the north pole, year-round?
[Answer]
All other factors being even? It *might* be possible if one pole was entirely oceanic and the other was either landlocked (like the North Pole) or covered by a continental land mass (like the South Pole)
If you distribute the land mass on your globe so that most of it is concentrated in one hemisphere (like the Earth is now but more so) and then place the other pole more or less centered in the middle of a 'pacific' sized ocean?
Since warm water currents tend to travel in the top layers of the ocean and cold currents, being denser tend to sink towards the bottom there would in principal nothing to stop heat exchange preventing an oceanic ice sheet covering the entire pole from ever forming given there's no land mass to 'seed' from and any ice that does form will be in constant motion.
Note; you would probably still get **grease ice/slush** (frozen sea water) forming in winter but since it would be driven into more or less constant motion by mid oceanic winds, waves and currents it wouldn't necessarily get the chance to form into dense sheets of **pack ice**. So in winter you'd at worst you get a giant polar slushy. Pack ice forming even in small patches would be a rare/freak event.
One last problem: continental drift means this state of affairs won't last forever. Eventually enough land mass will 'drift' south to interfere with the processes I described and you'll get fixed ice fields at both poles again, even if its the case that one is much smaller than the other
[Answer]
No. It’s possible to have ice on only one pole.
Take Earth for example: Its south pole is much colder than its north pole and will have ice long after the Arctic has melted. To quote the [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica#Regional_climate):
>
> Antarctica is colder than the Arctic for three reasons. First, much of
> the continent is more than 3,000 m (9,800 ft) above sea level, and
> temperature decreases with elevation in the troposphere. Second, the
> Arctic Ocean covers the north polar zone: the ocean's relative warmth
> is transferred through the icepack and prevents temperatures in the
> Arctic regions from reaching the extremes typical of the land surface
> of Antarctica. Third, the Earth is at aphelion in July (i.e., the
> Earth is farthest from the Sun in the Antarctic winter), and the Earth
> is at perihelion in January (i.e., the Earth is closest to the Sun in
> the Antarctic summer). The orbital distance contributes to a colder
> Antarctic winter (and a warmer Antarctic summer) but the first two
> effects have more impact.
>
>
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[Answer]
Planets with ice only on one pole almost certainly exist, in case of cold planets tidally locked to a parent star, so that the same side always faces the star (just like the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth and we always see the same side of the Moon, unless we travel beyond it). Such planets are called [eyeball planets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyeball_planet).
An artist impression of [TRAPPIST-1f](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1f) is mostly covered in ice, including around the equator, but has an ocean on the pole facing the parent star:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/r3Req.jpg)
*Source: NASA [via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TRAPPIST-1f_Artist%27s_Impression.png) (public domain)*
[Answer]
With just a bit bigger orbital eccentricity, you would get milder winters and colder summers on the "perihelion-winter" hemisphere, and vice versa on the "aphelion-winter" one. This might be enough to put the latter into permanent ice sheet period, especially considering the perihelion season is shorter.
The rotation axis will however drift because of precession, thus the arrangement is not stable.
[Answer]
If the planet's rotational axis is rotated enough (think Uranus, which is spinning on its side), sure. You'd effectively have a tidally locked planet spinning with one pole always facing the star, the other never getting light (unless you're in some sort of binary or more complex system of course in which case it might get some light from the other members of that system).
Maybe not the scenario you're looking for, as that planet'd have some pretty wild climate and weather conditions leading to large parts of it to be unsuitable for life, but there you have it.
Another one might be having one pole being situated on a very large continent, and the other on open ocean, combined with ocean currents and winds that keep one of the polar zones at above freezing temperature for the entire year. Not sure whether that's physically possible though. On earth for example the Gulfstream is pretty strong but not strong enough to keep the north pole free of ice.
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You could have asymmetrical ice coverage if the water at the two poles had a large difference in salinity. The more salt in the water, the lower the freezing point. For example, if you had several large rivers or aquifers that emptied into the ocean very near one of the poles, the water there would be more [brackish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brackish_water), would have lower salinity, and would freeze at higher temperatures.
Diverging plate boundaries in one of the polar regions can create thermal vents. This added heat can keep the water above the freezing point, or can create currents that keep the water moving and resist freezing.
[Answer]
I would think that very possible, for example if your planet had a fairly closed oceanic North pole (as Earth currently does) but an interrupted ocean around the south pole (imagine if South America or Africa actually reached Antarctica. Such a configuration would force warm equatorial water south.
My understanding is that the unbroken ring of ocean surrounding Antarctica basically prevents currents from reaching the continent, that those currents get diverted by the circumpolar current.
[Answer]
It is necessary to know how similar to the Earth this planet requires to be, if we have a mass and a size, practically equal to the Earth but with a much more inclined axis (perhaps almost horizontal) it could practically have one of the poles perpetually frozen and the other with constant sun.
[Answer]
Well... yes, but actually no.
The poles are generally colder than other areas on a planet due their orientation with respect to the body they are orbiting. However, this could be overcome by points with high geothermic energy around the poles. These points could be natural hot springs, large volcanos, etc....
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For a story I am drafting I would like to have droplets of fluid that form another shape than the regular domed droplets we usually see. Is there any other shape such as e.g. a doughnut-shape that droplets could naturally form given the right circumstances?
Answers are rated by the coolnessTM of the achieved shape, as well as by the simplicity of achieving that shape:
* The more different the achieved shape is from the standard domed droplets, the cooler
* The fewer conditions that need to be fulfilled for a fluid to form into that shape, the better
* The less hurtful the conditions under which a fluid forms into that shape is for humans, the better
[Answer]
Perhaps **ferrofluids in a magnetic field** could achieve something close to what you're looking for?
A ferrofluid is a liquid that becomes strongly magnetized in the presence of a magnetic field. In such a state, it tends to shape itself to the magnetic field; extruding small spike-like shapes all along its surface. A single droplet in the presence of a strong magnetic can be split into smaller droplets that are arranged in a pattern.
Check out this video (or others, there's plenty) for a sense of how drops of ferrofluid can behave. No torus-shapes, unfortunately.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5wtdb174eg>
Magnetic fields are not harmful to humans, barring interactions with pacemakers/hearing implants, etc.
[Answer]
Droplets of liquid-phase long-chain polymer with unusually strong [Hydrogen Bonding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_bond) behaviour could form almost any shape you wanted given the right molecular base shape. They should tend towards angular polyhedral forms though.
[Answer]
# What about star-shaped droplets?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yi0ZF.png)
These are called [Leidenfrost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect) droplets, and they form under certain conditions when you drip a liquid onto a hot surface. The droplets pictured above - star shapes with between 2 and 13 points - are water drops on a small, 350 Celsius metal dish. The hot surface forms a thin layer of vapor under the droplet, and instabilities in the film are amplified to form these patterns.
For more details about how this works, see [the paper by X. Ma and J.C. Burton on the topic](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.06136.pdf) (that's where I got this image). If you want to see some videos, check out [the lab's YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtBs-PlmusRjpb8XsMqxd4Q).
# Safe for Humans?
You bet! You could *almost* make these guys on an electric stove, although it probably wouldn't get quite hot enough. A propane flame should work though. Even if you had one of these going and accidentally spilled it on yourself, it probably$\*$ wouldn't burn you, as the vapor layer insulates the droplet and keeps it from getting hot enough to boil. And you can do it with pretty much any liquid, given the right conditions, so water is a good, non-toxic bet.
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$\*$*The hot metal dish would totally burn you, though. If anyone is planning to try this at home make sure you conduct the experiment safely, and take precautions to avoid burn and ignition hazards.*
[Answer]
This is not particularly cool, but say your droplet is somewhat electrically conductive, and each molecule is polar or can have a charge.
You put it in a vertical electric field, say with the negative charge on top.
Then the droplet will get a positive charge on top and a negative charge on the bottom. It ought to stretch to an elliptical shape. And if it's then subject to some shear forces it might split into two charged droplets. The positive one will head upward and the negative one will head downward, unless they attract each other enough before they get some distance away.
Say you have a lot of these droplets. Look at one of them in the middle. It gets a net attraction by all those above it, and a net attraction by all those below. A droplet on top gets a net attraction downward, and one on the bottom gets attracted up. So they tend to stay together and not just spread out indefinitely.
Something vaguely along these lines might happen in actual water clouds on earth. They say that for thunderstorms it takes as lot of vertical movement of ice downward and water droplets upward, but still electrical effects could change the shape of water droplets as part of it.
And shear forces might give some interesting temporary shapes.
Say that you had loud sound waves coming from different directions. Each sound wave is a sequence of moving high-pressure and low-pressure areas. With one of them you could get a spherical droplet getting squeezed and stretched in one axis, at some frequency. With another sound from another direction the droplet gets squeezed and stretched in a different direction, at different frequency. At resonant frequencies for the droplet, energy builds up....
[Answer]
Turns out all you need is water and an atmosphere full of some interesting nanoparticles. Apparently, [self-assembling nanoparticles can be applied to the surface of a droplet of water](https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/water-droplets-warped-into-weird-shapes/6724.article). If the droplet's shape then changes, additional nanoparticles affix themselves to the new surface area, preventing the droplet from returning to its ordinary form. This currently has only been proven to work when the water droplet is suspended in silicone oil containing the nanoparticles, but with some tweaks, an entire atmosphere could be filled with similar nanoparticles, suspended in the air (I have no idea how such an atmosphere would form, but it is undoubtedly possible).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aRA0Y.jpg)
Apparently, this can even result in the formation of tubes, meaning that toruses are almost certainly possible. An atmosphere full of such nanoparticles1 would cause water droplets to retain whatever shape they originally formed with, and any changes to the shape would be retained (within reason). Water would behave in this way over the entire planet, and this behaviour would make the planet a rather... interesting... place to live (assuming one *could* live there, see footnote). I could imagine water-sculpting contests involving magnifying glasses.
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1: Please note that the effects of such nanoparticles in an atmosphere on the survival of life has not been tested in any way and that there could be detrimental effects, up to or including death.
[Answer]
# Phase change
You need a special fluid that changes phase at droplet-forming conditions (so, if you're at one Earth atmosphere and zero degrees Celsius, water would be good).
Next, you need a second mechanism whereby the phase change is slowed down something fierce; an organic compound with very high latent heat would be good. Water already has a high latent heat of liquefaction, but the more the better.
The fluid must have a very rigid crystalline form. Not mandatory but this allows more coolness to form.
Actually, any liquid-to-solid phase change will do, not just freezing. Maybe air exposure is enough.
However, the fluid deposits on a surface in domed drops and starts cooling. Phase transition kicks in, gradually from the outside inwards, creating a core of liquid under greater pressure. As a result, the fluid starts spurting out.
It can do so gradually, [and your drops will sport a single spike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_spike#/media/File:Ice_spike_outdoor.JPG), or it fits and starts - and you get a sort of snowman, with a domed drop with another drop on it, and another, and another, maybe stacked vertically or wobbling every which way.
# Coagulation
Same as above, but you get a higher gross factor. The "solid" coagulated phase undergoes a partial colliquation some time later, so the drop:
* starts as a normal liquid drop
* becomes opaque
* after some minutes, it starts shrinking and splits open in two to six symmetrical segments and sprouts as many smaller bubbles. The original drop is now a shriveled "hub" hidden by two to six smaller droplets. With large enough drops to begin with, the process can iterate fractally.
[Answer]
The shape of a droplet is dictated by the equilibrium between the surface tension and the surface adhesion forces.
You can use a suitable frame to "trick" surface forces into a different equilibrium, like you can do with soap bubbles.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9N6pe.jpg)
or you can change the [surface properties](https://news.softpedia.com/news/Omniphobic-Material-Repels-Any-Liquid-97625.shtml) to interact differently with the liquid.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QaxYA.jpg).
In particular, you can generate suitable patterns of hydrophobic and hydrophilic areas to generate [complex shapes](https://phys.org/news/2015-03-paint-like-coating-tough-surfaces-repel.html)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EeBAr.jpg)
Toroid droplets seems to show [shrinking instability](http://www.pnas.org/content/114/11/2871), so maybe they won't last enough for your usage.
But if you put a hydrophobic coated object into a suitable volume of liquid, you may get [something resembling a donut](https://www.pcimag.com/articles/102551-scientists-in-australia-develop-robust-superhydrophobic-coating)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ECMsJ.gif)
[Answer]
Use a tone generator and a wave driver.
Substances such as sand and water can be placed on top of a plate attached to a wave driver and a tone generator. The frequency of the tone will shape the substance into a series of unique geometric patterns, becoming more complex as the tone increases.
I've included a video for an example.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJAgrUBF4w>
Another video but weird and possibly fake.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y5jRRPprgE>
[Answer]
**Antibubbles.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MDAKA.jpg)
<http://www.pulsedburst.com>
A rising air bubble in water is a familiar but still very cool thing. The forces governing the changing shape of a rising bubble are complicated. As seen here a rising bubble can take on a large, medusoid bowl-like shape, with the trailing edge shedding small bubble-lets. They grow as they rise and can split into multiples of similar smaller bubbles.
Your fictional droplet will move like a bubble, but downwards. The droplets will fall at the same speed bubbles rise, wobbling and shedding tiny droplets as they do.
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(Almost like [this post](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12348/how-do-you-prove-youre-from-the-future%20this%20post) but not quite the same - I've seen multiple how to prove you're from the far future but not one how to prove you're from the far past so figured it could be fun to think of a way)
Do I have a story for you. You're not going to believe me but if you play along you will make history (or future or... time travel gives me an headache).
You see I was born in the late 14th century, just another child of just another farmer. I had a normal average life for the time until one day I was out working the field when something just popped up in front of me out of nowhere. I didn't know what it was at the time so when a man came out of the machine I assumed he was god. I was wrong of course, turns out that man is (was?) my future son. He showed me a picture on what he called a "cellphone" of me (maybe a couple of years older then how I am now) holding a baby and said he was that baby and that I was his father in the year 21118.
I learned a lot about future tech (and even brought some of it back like this laptop I'm using to write to you) and how to use it from him. He also taught me how to use his time machine (still no clue how it works, I just know how to use it).
Another thing he said is that I will have to travel to the year 2018 and stay here to do something before traveling to 21118. He said that what I will do in 2018 will be proof in 21118 that I am a time traveler from the 14th century.
**Now my question what is that something I have to do in 2018 to prove after I travel to 21118 I'm a time traveler from the past?**
Keep in mind that:
* The time machine only has fuel for one more jump.
* My son mentioned something about this being a stable time loop?
* I have some things I brought from the past (few coins, knife, clothes and such).
* People won't believe me if I just claim it, I need a proof that can hold up to scientific scrutiny.
* With its fuel empty the time machine will look like a toy. No one will ever believe it to be a real time machine & if I can't use the remaining fuel in 2018 to prove it really is a time machine or I won't have enough to reach 21118
* My son stayed in the past, calling it "stable time loop timey whimey ball".
* No idea who my other descendants are.
* I learned English & Pig Latin from my son (apparently Pig Latin will soon become the most common language spoken).
* (If you can't think of a way without it) I also found this box on the time machine my son left to me, no idea what's in it but it has a note saying it will help.
* Apparently me proving I'm from the past is what leads to the creation of time travel technology in the far future.
[Answer]
By 21118, I would expect manufacturing technology to be so advanced that they could fake any physical evidence you could provide. Instead, I suggest you first convince us, in 2018, using tree rings and isotope evidence. You will become so famous that you are mentioned in millions of different books and records - so many, that in 21118 they will be actively waiting for you.
## *Convincing 2018*
## Combine Tree Rings, Carbon-Dating and Radioactive Isotopes
In your own time, cut down a tree. If you can get one that's more than about 73 years old, that's ideal (see below). [Oak is apparently best](http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/lorim/good.html) (assuming you're in Europe). Cut out a section of trunk (i.e. a complete "wheel"), as thick as you can possibly fit in the time machine. Scientists will analyse the *hell* out of this, and will probably destroy a lot of material in the process.
When you get to 2018, visit a university with a strong archaeology or mediaeval history department. Ask them, acting all innocent, if they could possibly help you work out how old this tree was. When they compare the [rings against their records](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology), they will realise, with high confidence, that the tree must have lived in the 14th Century. But you could just have carefully cleaned an antique stump. The real proof comes by taking samples and analysing the isotopes.
[Carbon dating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating) shows how long ago something died - because your tree took a short cut, they will see that it only died recently. *But* a sufficiently resourced fraudster could have grown the tree in a giant warehouse, with artificial lighting and heating to mimic old weather patterns. This would recreate the historic ring pattern in a recent tree.
Your clincher is the low levels of radioactive elements that were created in [nuclear weapons explosions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137#Radioactive_caesium_in_the_environment). These have contaminated (at low but detectable levels) the whole world since the 50s and 60s, and they would be *extremely* expensive to filter out of the hypothetical fake tree nursery. If your tree is old enough, a sceptic would have to explain why you paid for expensive isotopic filtering *before* you could have known about nuclear weapons.
Now you can tell your real story, and they have a high chance of believing you.
## Your Own Body
Your own body will feature the same low radioisotope levels as the tree stump. However, as soon as you start breathing, drinking and eating in the modern world, you will start to collect modern contamination levels. If you can immediately find a surgeon willing to sample and analyse your tissues, especially [teeth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#Long_term), this will be good evidence. But I doubt many doctors are both ethically flexible *and* trustworthy enough for this to succeed.
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## *Convincing 21118*
Now that 2018 believes you, it's time to become famous. Accept every offer of academic conferences talks, co-authored history books and talk show appearances. Write your memoirs - if you can't write, make a deal with a publisher to hire you a secretary. If your English is too archaic for the mass market, work closely with a ghost writer. Money is no object - a book written by a *genuine authenticated time traveller* will sell millions.
Have yourself 3D scanned, and get accurate statues made in granite and stainless steel. Spread copies all over the world - in public museums and [protected vaults](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault). Have big chunks of your DNA inscribed on vellum, and your fingerprints etched into titanium and launched into geostationary orbit.
When it's time to leave, launch your time machine as a publicised event in front of a huge live audience. Have it recorded in every fashion - HD video, analogue film, monitoring by every scientific instrument available. Remove all doubt.
Most importantly, *every single time*, state the date and place of your arrival in the future, as precisely as your time machine can manage. The aim is to get yourself mentioned so many times that unless civilisation collapses completely, some record of you reaches 21118 *independently* of yourself. Ideally, they are waiting to meet you.
This works even if people in the future don't believe the old accounts. People will turn up at the time and place as an excuse for a party, expecting to have a great laugh at the expense of primitive 2018 people who actually believed in time travel! The very fact of materialising in front of their eyes and cameras will be all the proof you need.\*
## If They Are Not Waiting...
...you will need additional evidence. Back in 2018, you need to have written a long message, and encrypted it. The encryption key must be very long, to prevent brute-force searches (remember, they have ~20000 years to crack it, with much better algorithms and hardware than we have today). The text must be even longer (otherwise a fraudster could choose a fake decryption key to create any plausible message).
Perhaps it's the uncensored version of your memoirs. Perhaps it's an epic poem you write for a loved one you left in the past. When you encrypt it, do so repeatedly, with every algorithm your colleagues can track down, especially those that are thought to be [quantum-safe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography). You don't care about [public key](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography), or "proper" [digital signatures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature) (you don't care about repudiation). Remember, it doesn't matter if it takes months of processing time to encrypt the message - you can spend as long as you like in the 21st Century before venturing on. Store your message in as many physical libraries, digital archives, vaults and satellites as you can. The people of 21118 must be convinced that you cannot possibly have corrupted so many copies in recent times, even with their technology. Hopefully, when you arrive carrying the decryption key, the idea that you are a time-traveller is more likely than your being a fraudster.
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\*Maybe you worry that the "welcoming" committee will immediately gun you down and steal the time machine. No need to panic - you know you will survive to have at least one child in the future. Just don't donate to any sperm or egg banks...
[Answer]
**Bring an almost-extinct species with you.**
you can take an almost-extinct animal with you when you travel to 21118. Since we are currently undergoing another mass extinction, in 19 100 years, the species will probably be already extinct. The extinct species would prove that you are from past.
[Answer]
## Nothing at all
When he arrives in 21118, technology would have kept marching on. Personal identity on the Internet in 2018 is becoming increasingly common. It is not hard to extrapolate that by 21118 everyone would have some form of online identity. His lack of existence on any social media platform would be unheard of. His genetic records would not properly match any heritage system that tracks ancestry. He would have no birth certificate and so any attempts to reconcile that would fail.
Also, there are experiments with embedding chips in people, which could serve as a form of unique identification. By 21118 it would not be unreasonable for these to be standard and he would be lacking one. As such his lack of existence in 21118 would quickly make him stand out as an irregularity which law enforcement would likely pick up on and investigate. The investigation along with his testimony would quickly come to only one conclusion that he is not from this time period. Once it got to the news, it likely would go viral.
### Stable Time Loop
To further cement this, his son mentioned it is a stable time loop, therefore no matter what he does or does not do that was/will be exactly what he needed/needs to do to keep the time loop stable. So I am taking the simpler and easier option by doing nothing, since that will be/was the correct decision to make.
[Answer]
# Carbon Dating and DNA
DNA mutates, and DNA is in anything from bacteria to viruses. You need to get the DNA of everything tested for age. Chances are, you have flu traces. After you get scientists to agree that this is old, then get everything carbon dated. When your clothes are five days old, but they have traces of the flu on them, chances are you are a time traveler. (This is assuming they don't have the flu in 21118, but any disease would work).
[Answer]
Hide stuff. A lot of stuff.
Preferably things that stand the test of time and are obvious relics of the age that you want to claim to come from. Hide them all over the place. You need to be able to pin point the location of several items that has not been previously found by someone else.
If you want to prove time travel, hide one or more things your son gave you (such as the cellphone or laptop) in a container that is clearly manufactured in your year of origin, along with other artifacts, and hide them in a place your son tells you has not been excavated. Then once you have the interest of scientists or the media. Excavate it publicly together with reliable witnesses.
Edit: I just realized one more thing you might want to do while you're hiding your phone under the foundation stone of a church or something. Take pictures with it. Of you, of the town where you live, of things that definitely will change until modern day, of anything you can imagine that would be hard to fake and may create an interest in your story come our time.
You'll probably still be called a fraud, but at least it's worth a shot.
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Expanding upon Tektotherriggen's answer:
1) You don't want just one tree slice. Make many. Bring as many as you can with you, hide the others. Bring one/hide one/bring one etc. While you could have grown a tree in an isotopically filtered environment, how did you make the different slices (that will match up when placed together) have different ages?
2) A good hiding place would be Antarctica, somewhere not too far from the south pole. Unless the whole place has melted by then they'll be buried in the ice--and you can date ice layers like you can date tree rings.
Mark all hidden packages "Property of *name*, traveling through time from 2018 to 21118. Please leave in situ or store until then." Even if a package is found that might get it into a museum somewhere.
And a separate idea:
3) Publish an interesting story. Part of the story deals with an encrypted message--and the message is in the book. The characters never manage to actually decrypt it. You have the decryption key, the message says who you are. Put your book out there on the pirate sites, also, so it ends up in the libraries of those who collect lots of books--hopefully it will persist in such collections over the ages.
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# Have children in 2018
Then, in 21118, the combination of genealogy records and DNA testing ought to be good enough to establish you're a distant ancestor, and exactly how distant, and then back it up with genealogy records.
This ought to be good enough to prove you are who you say you are. (Caveat: in the two-hundred-and-twenty-second century, cloning and genetic engineering might make it possible to fake this evidence.)
# Paternity testing
We now have [DNA tests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_paternity_testing) that can tell you not just that you're related to an individual, but also determine exactly how. They aren't perfect, but they don't analyze the whole genome. Well, thousands of years into the future, they'll probably be able to analyze the whole genome with relative ease.
See, when a child is conceived, half the genes from you get mixed with half the genes from your partner, along with a small but more or less constant rate of mutations. This process is repeated with each subsequent generation. Scientists today can use this as a [molecular clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock) to guesstimate timeframes for when various species diverged.
In short, a simple blood test (especially by 21118 standards) should be able to establish that a given descendant of yours really is related to you. Which brings me to...
# Genealogy
If you hire a genealogist today, they can trace your ancestry back pretty far. It eventually hits a dead end and can't go back farther because records gets spottier and spottier the further you go back.
Eventually, it hits a dead end. That's either 'records before this were stored (say) in a church which burned to the ground in 1747" or you reach the point where the idea of keeping such records hadn't yet reached the region in question.
But going from today into the far future, well, that's different. All those records will be computerized. If you have any living descendants, they should be easy to find for purposes of doing this test.
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Strangely enough, this is actually a perfect use case for biometrics.
Normally, biometrics (when you strip away the hype) have 2 functions that they perform very, very well:
1) Access Management
Most security authentication solutions use a combination of 1 or more of the 3 fundamentals of proving you are who you say you are - Something you have (a key), Something you know (a password), and Something you are (biometrics).
2) Preventing Multiple Registrations
If you're on a system already with a biometric signature, you shouldn't be able to re-register on that system again. That means you can't create 50 aliases and use them for nefarious purposes. They can't stop you registering the first time as Peter Clarke if your real name is Harold Garvey, but they CAN make sure you're not registered again under an identical biometric signature.
There's only one problem; modern biometric signatures work on a DET curve (Detection Error Tradeoff). This means that the computer works out the *probability* that the recorded signature matches you and then makes a decision. This is why in court cases you hear statements like 'only 1 person in 3 million could have the same fingerprint as the defendant'; it doesn't make you guilty, but the fingerprint AND the fact that you were caught running away with a bloody knife in your hand probably does.
As an aside, iris scanning is the most effective form of biometric signature; lowest DET curve (less false positives), tears in the iris are random meaning identical twins don't even have the same iris scan and the data block required for the signature is so small it could be put on a high res scanning code. But, I digress.
So; your time traveler simply has to apply for a job with an agency that REALLY cares about its security. Get a fingerprint record, DNA, iris scan, voice scan, facial recognition shot; whatever (and as many as) you can. The reason why you want MORE than one is that it allows for triangulation; it's *possible* in 20k years that you might have identical DNA to someone who lived in 2018, but not identical DNA, fingerprints AND iris scan.
Ensure you pick a company for which the records are going to be kept, and you're all good. Also, get your son to give you the lotto picks for the the next 10 weeks running in 2018. Statistically, the chances of picking 10 lotto number sets IN A ROW borders on the impossible. That way, even if they don't believe you, at least you'll live in comfort in 2018.
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Have them test your mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) and Y-DNA (note that everyone has mtDNA from their mom but only biological men have Y-DNA, from their dad, though in this example, the subject is male). Your haplogroups (named branch) will not exist in the future time period because of occasional mutations in every generation.
One study of Y-DNA found 4 mutations in 13 generations.
<https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090827/full/news.2009.864.html?s=news_rss>
Not sure how many alleles they tested but my guess is 450 (the best commercially available test today is called "Big-Y"). But the current Y-DNA matching tests are done with only 37-111 alleles to determine haplogroup, so new haplogroups are slower than that. Though with 25 million (positioned) basepairs on a Y chromosome, the future's ability to test DNA will be vastly superior to ours.
<https://isogg.org/wiki/Portal:Y-chromosome_DNA>
MtDNA mutates more slowly than Y-DNA does (only 16.5K basepairs to work with). But you will still see new haplogroups every few hundred years.
With 20,000 years in the future, the DNA databases will be enormous (with 20K years worth of data!) and they'll do whole genome testing easily (heck, we can do whole genome today). Plus there's all this extra stuff in our DNA that currently gets dismissed as "junk" but which I'm sure will turn out to be extremely valuable and trackable.
In case anyone is wondering, yes, even with today's technology, you will have no trouble telling which of two samples is the super old and which is the modern day. At least not when testing mtDNA and Y-DNA.
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# DNA
Stash a bit of your DNA is a **very** secure place.
Say, sealed in a glass vial, along with the usual "[time capsule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_capsule)" sort of stuff.
The scientists that examine this time capsule will be able to use a multitude of ways to ascertain its authenticity, and they will be able to verify that your DNA matches that which is stored, *exactly*.
Of course, this only proves you were in 2018 at one point. Proving that you are from yet a further past is problematic.
Maybe, *maybe* the radioisotope difference between your own tissues and those of the samples will show the scientists that you came from a time before the 1945-1970~ish nuclear testings.
.
.
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P.S.
You need to make it easy for them to determine the truth, as they will only have a few days, *maybe* a month or so, before they all die from the various horrid nasties you brought to their time! The odds are that they will have eradicated all viral and bacterial diseases a looong time ago, and have no immunity to these.
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[
In a world where travel is limited to the speed of light, reaching a different star, while not necessarily impossible, would be very time consuming. For an empire stretching across several solar systems, which has a centralized source of political power, this would pose a huge problem.
So here is my question, how could an empire maximize its size and how big could it possibly get without collapsing?
You may assume that this universe obeys to all of Einstein's laws (including time dilation while travelling, which is likely the most relevant effect) and that travelers can reach over 99% of c. There are a few factors that tie in here, what I would be interested in is an answer that answers how these various factors can be used to determine a likely maximum size.
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To me, it depends on these factors:
**Lifespan of commoner** - I mean, how long does common empire person live? They will track time differently, if they are humans (about 80 years to live) or million year living being. While one year for human is *long time,* for million year living being it is less than hour
**Psychology of the empire itself** How much do we love the Emperor? If we adore him/her (as God, preferably) then it is big factor in how the empire will hold together. On the other hand, if he/she is "that dude who will be replaced in 10 years" then there is not much holding you in staying in the Empire
**How diverse the Empire actually is** Look at Humans. There is seven billion of them and sometimes it feels that every single person has different religion, or at least religious viewpoint. If the empire has one religion which is followed by *everyone* you have chance for bigger empire than if the opposite
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**It's difficult to make space empires work within known physics**
Travel times would be far longer than experienced by any earth-bound empire.
In the days of the Roman empire, you could travel from London to Rome in a month under ideal conditions, no expenses spared [1]. The famous Silk Road trade route took two years for a round-trip from China to Rome and back [2]. Later, a year or two was plenty time for Columbus to discover a new continent.
Compare this to an Einstein-compliant round-trip of almost 9 years from Earth to Alpha Centauri and back and 16 years for the Sirius road. The nearest earth-like planets that we know of [3] would have a round-trip time of 20 to 80 years.
It would for instance take 40 years to make a round-trip from Earth to Gliese 581 d and back, but it only took 35 years from the day Genghis Khan was proclaimed ruler of the Mongols to the day their horde stood at the gates of Vienna. In modern times, it took 31 years for Earthlings to start and end two world wars (1914-1945). From this you can see that politics and warfare on-planet will be practically independent from a galactic empire
Even if we postulate that the travel times are balanced by long lifespans, there's the issue of how the empire will go about its "empire things". There's some evidence that empires emerge as a response to the threath of warfare [4], but how do the emperor protect his flock if it takes a couple decades from an alarm about an attack to when the cavalry arrives on the scene?
If we stick closely to known physics, there's also the issue of explaining trade and colonization by emigration. There's some back-of-the-envelope calculations showing that if we struck oil on Mars, there's no way we could run a profit shipping the oil back to earth. Nor do the human race have enough fuel on the planet to lift a sizable portion of its population into orbit, so you can't export populations to settle new land.
[1] orbis.stanford.edu/
[2] <http://www.theglobalist.com/a-silk-road-caravan/>
[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_terrestrial_exoplanet_candidates>
[4] <http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24262-realworld-civilisation-game-shows-impact-of-war.html#.VNop1UZ0xaQ>
[5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire>
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*The more lyrical version*
### The Empire of Earth
*Listen to the Song of Earth, or you will surely wither and perish!*
Earth is the **One** homeworld, the sacred core, the soul of humankind. Earth was blessed by the touch of the Prophets of the eternal Catholic Zensunni Scientific faith.
**Countless** thousands are the worlds hanging in the void, their faces changed by the great machines, their surface seeded with animal and human life alike, made in the likeness of that on Earth and given breath by the Great Undying Overseers in orbit, who stand ever vigilant and ready to cleanse heresy with sacred fire.
The Song of Earth tells its children of its many secrets, each a challenge for the seedlings to rise up to and uncover, each one more step towards Earth-like perfection.
The Earth demands but one tribute from its daughters. Every twenty years, in Earth-reckoning, five are chosen from among the greatest artists and the brightest minds. These lucky souls are Ascended and the great Bulk Matter Transmitter in the sky will send their patterns to be recreated back on Earth, so that they will see the World with new eyes, and tread upon sacred ground.
*The more prosaic version*
### Earth keeps a clenched iron fist around its colonies
Earth sends out terraforming van Neumans, who later seed the worlds with human and animal life. The Song of Earth helps the new worlds ascend the technological, ecological and sociological ladder towards a presumed state of Earth-like transcendence. The von Neuman machines in the forbidden depths of Space harness stellar resources for further colonization and also serve to enforce (with Mongol-like ferocity if needed, down to planetary sterilization and reseeding) the will of Earth upon the colony, in particular ensuring the extraction of the bidecadal tribute: the very best and brightest of each world, in a galactic scale brain-drain, are turned into information and their patterns are transmitted back to Earth. With its vast empire, there are hundreds of thousands of such tributes arriving each year, further contributing to the glory and power of the Earth. The Earth's sphere is growing at about 0.1% of the speed of light, and will engulf the entire galaxy in about a million years.
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My first answer would be : 1 solar system.
While any race could potentially spread across an entire galaxy, jumping beyond your own galaxy are just TOO long distances to be plausible. There are plenty of stars within 10 light years that are totally at reach within normal science boundaries. And one could just start a colony there and launch from there beyond.. slowly spreading out over the whole galaxy.
But the long distanced between stars would make having a central center of government impractical, so it would heavy rely on local rules and local legions/fleets to govern those colonies, and send home the gains to the imperial home-planet.
With such long lines, I expect every planet to declare independence from the empire, and the empire being unable to do anything about it. As such a race would be spread out in the whole galaxy../ but it would not be 1 empire, but rather hundreds of thousands of them each comprising of the planets within 1 solar-system. Some might be at war with each other, some may trade with each other... some may try to form some form of federation of independent empires.
So in short a SPACE empire could just never exist... every trip would be a single trip.
First you would need energy. Since the energy needs need to be reasonable... (zero point energy is out of the question as is warp travel) also you cannot surpass 5g, or your crew would be tomato soup.
I also presume that the ship is magnetically shielded, so neither hard radiation nor tiny space particles would be a problem (you bend them around you, as the impact of even 1 atom at 0.5c on your ship would be impossible to armor plate against).
So I would think you accelerated constantly at a maximum of 5g for 6 months, towards 0.5c (before the energy needs outstrip the usefulness of going faster)
than fly in 7.5 more years to the nearest star and than start decelerating for 6 months. This way you'd make the trip in 8 years.
\*if you were to turn around and return you would have flown for 16 years, yet almost 19 would have passed on your home planet.
That's doable.
However even if you were to communicate with your home planet.. 4 years to get a reply is just TOO long to be of any use for any empire.
(the roman empire collapsed and it had 2 WEEKS communication lines)
and the roman empire also gave strong power to local leaders.. with local legions, and the imperial army being slow to respond if needed if regional leaders rebelled against Rome.
In this situation.. any news about any rebellion would take 4 years to arrive.. and responsive action would take 13 years to arrive. It would be pretty hard to keep order in that kind of a situation. And that's why I presume that no empire as such could exist.
But supposing that all colonies are loyal to the home world (they're not like humans that like to self govern, but LOVE to please their empire-king or something like that) that it comes down to travel time towards the center of the empire.
Are there any outside attacks? Then no space empire as such could exist as responding would just take too long.. you would have lost the battle decades before you could send a counterattack.
But suppose you had none of that either?
Than it bottles down to lifespan or energy. Every 1 light-years of distance, means 2.25 years of flight. It takes for humans at least 25 years to be properly trained, and they can reach 120 years (when we reach our biological optimum). If you were to swap them for new crew for the return flight.. this would give us close to 100 years of flight enough to cross 50 light-years (giving us the maximum size for a human space empire).
However biological immortality is theoretical possible.. and while it could take half a million year to fly across some galaxies even at 0.5c, if one does not age or the ship is generational, it is plausible.
But energy, even a ship that could continue flying, would need to refuel, at the very least to be able to maintain life-support and keep growing food.
(even biodomes need HEAT, as space is cold and perfect isolation does not exist) also the magnetic shielding and artificial gravity would consume energy)
\*
there are 2 methods to acquire this extra fuel (A) bring it all along, meaning more fuel load, giving every less return on cargo.
or..
\*refuel at a colony every 4-10 light-years, jumping towards the home planet in steps (having the disadvantage of having to decelerate/accelerate more often, increasing travel times and fuel use).
But suppose they would just DROP the cargo at the second base, and return... that way bigger and bigger ships would move towards the capitol, with each only carrying their tax and that o the worlds that paid it to them, towards the capitol. Well THAT highly strange race could get a civilization to run as large as a galaxy.
But it would not be a galaxy that would wield large armies or could respond to you taking one of their worlds in any reasonable way, any more than just a lone planet could.
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An empire can only be such as only if it can strongly influence the outlying colonies. Right now with our tech level, we would likely be able to have an empire the colonizes the inner solar system, out to the asteroid belt past mars.
As Pavel stated, general life expectancy will play a part with time travel between locations. Communication is also relevant. If Light is the the fastest form of communication then the nearest stars would be really to far away. Say we can travel 1/3 the speed of light, it would take about 12-15 years to get to the nearest star, once there fastest communication is almost 9 years round trip. They are effectively their own government.
The life expectancy comes in of course for how much of your life is wrapped up in travel. If it takes 25 years for you to shuttle colonists from earth to the nearest star and come back, you could make 2 trips in your life. (with relativistic speeds, you might get a 3rd. But that is a large investment, much more than the few months it took to cross oceans.
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That's tricky. One way to manage the Empire is with decentralization, a lot of it. It is normally considered a bad thing if it goes too far but it's a necessary evil here. It is bad because the central government does not control the borders and they might ignore the centre or try to secede eventually. It is also a good thing because, as you mentioned, it's not possible to send reinforcements fast enough to defend the border. Therefore, the frontier needs to be able to defend itself with minimal help from the exterior. They need to have troops under their command but also the resources to maintain these forces. This means that they are benefiting form the Empire.
Weaker systems are dependent on exterior help. Alone, they cannot maintain enough troops. Other richer world will have to pay for that. Just like Russia is maintaining Transnistria, Lugansk and Donetsk People's Republic. Oh my!
The rich planets are in another game. They are wealthy and they are the ones maintaining far away lines of defence. Depending if the enemy is also limited in movement by the same technology, the frontier worlds might actually provide a strong system of defence, like a series of fortress. Let's suppose it is and that most enemies will attack only through certain lanes because they need to be resupplied and cannot afford to travel in an empty space for too long. In that case, rich planets have an advantage in staying with the others.
But not everyone will agree on the real cost of security. This is especially true as we get away form the frontier, away from the sources of danger. Planets get more reluctant to pay for a treat that does not exist in their eyes and they might challenge the authority of the Empire.
Alone some planets could secede but that seems unlikely considering they would be against the rest of the Empire. That's way they will more likely do it in group. There is security in numbers and with enough planets, they might be able to secure their independence.
The answer: My guess is that, passed a certain size, the Empire will become less stable. If you have a large numbers of well developed planets that are not too expose at the risk of external threats, the Empire might be in trouble. That is as precise as I can get.
**Bonus: The second eastern Mongol Empire's campaign against Russian and other European states including Hungary, Poland and the Germans was planned to take around five years. From Mongolia, back to Mongolia for supper. (based on my memories form my readings)**
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# Using Historical Precedent: One Solar System (sorry!)
If you want to use historical precedents, as you recommended in your question, we can compare empire sizes as long as travel was as fast as communication, because that will be your situation. So if travel and "mail" was by foot, horse, boat or train. Once telegraphy came about, communication became faster than travel, **which will not be your case with speed of light travel**.
**Mongol Empire**
The largest pre-telegraphy empire by land was the Mongol Empire, and a land-route could measure about 5,000km from a central point. With centralization, that means communication and travel (by good horse at 60km) per day would take eleven or twelve weeks. Double that to go from end-to-end.
**Spanish Empire**
The largest pre-telegraphy empire by sea distance was the Spanish and Portugese, although you could argue that the Dutch had to go further distance to southeast Asia. In the Spanish empire you could get across the Atlantic in about 10 weeks and then another few weeks to get to its destination over land.
**Your Empire**
*IF you wanted to use historical precedent*, where your travel is the same speed as communication (Light Speed), I would say 10 to 15 weeks of travel, or rather, a radius of 10 to 15 light weeks away, which unfortunately limits you to this solar system, as our nearest (non-sun) star would be 4.5 *years* of travel and communication.
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Interplanetary empire in Sci-Fi seems to always be based on some sort of warp speed for good reason, there are few reasons to have an empire except to exploit others for the riches that can profitably be brought home. The technological limits of light speed would make empire consisting of other worlds across the vast distances of space simply impossible.
A conquered Empire like the Roman Empire would be quite impossible to hold together by threat of force. However a settled Empire like the English Empire could have some sustainability much like the modern day Commonwealth. To be sure there would be a couple of pesky colonists like The Americans that much could not be done about if they were determined to be completely independent and hell bent on some set of principles that called for total self independence. If the colony was on a planet were there were indigenous people the colonist might hold some control for awhile like the Spaniards in America or the English in Asia, but that would end just like it did for the Spaniards in most places, with the original empire with little influence and much hostility. About all the Empire could do was cut them off from communication of new technology.
There would be very few reasons for the Empire to even exist. The exchange would be limited to data and to a friendly port in the wilderness of space for the occasional space traveler. Even if there was an outside threat such as Borg or a competing Empire mutual defense would be minimal, consisting of the colonies being hostile cannon fodder that would slow down an enemy advance. No one is coming from the home world soon enough to save anything.
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Let's obey to Relativistic Physics and try to make something consistent here.
**1 - STL TRAVEL**
Let's assume FTL is impossible and traveling at 99% c needs a huge amount of energy.
A most economic way to achieve it is no to send people. Send frozen embrios.
Make some IA defrozeen and baby-sit it to a small group of adult colonist just before it arrives destiny.
The initial small group ill build (using the starship parts) and install power plants, terraformin devices and cloning centers the colony ill need to thrive.
Start the growing stage and everything ill scale up from here using the planet resources. with a bit of luck you got a full developed colony
just a few centuries after arriving.
**2 - FAILSAFE**
Hard to control a colony if is not viable sending troops. Instead you can build the colony from the start with a failsafe system.
It can be some kind of device: deadly spores, mind command, behaviour chips, military fascist minded cast, etc.
Once any colonist or group of colonist try to "break free" failsafes automatic triggers.
**3 - HARVEST**
To settle a colony is a great risk (and long, long term) investment.
The central government ill not do it for free your know, they expect something in exchange.
Since shipping goods between stars is not that viable (think of the cost of sending a tomato to Mars) what can the Metropolis possible get back?
Well the only thing cheap enough to send to space are radio signals (wait! they travel at light speed too, sweet!)
How radio signal can be worth? If it brings great news like... news techs.
At the end the metropolis can be simply using colonies as research centers, collecting breakdowns in all fields: Biology, Social, Quantic, Engineering,
Computing, etc. this way it not only is ahead any colony it eventually ill achieve it's ultimately goal
breaks the grips of relativistic physics and finally improve space travel to a cheap and reliable ftl.
And all in just a few hundred millenia.
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I think quite large, under the right circumstances.
With sufficiently good propulsion (high thrust, high efficiency, enough to carry significant cargo and personnel interstellar distances), time dilation would make trips appear to take very little time from the standpoint of the travelers, even for large interstellar distances. The trips themselves would take years from the standpoint of everyone else. Communications between worlds would also take years. Double that for a response. But that doesn't necessarily mean instability. These aren't unsolvable problems.
For colonies to exist in the first place, they'd have to produce something of great value for the homeworld. Otherwise, why put in all the effort? Even though travel times might be years from beginning to end, you could easily arrange for ships to regularly drop off supplies and fresh workers and fill their holds up with valuables to take back (along with workers who've finished their tours). To accomplish this, you'd have a lot of ships in transit all the time, which isn't that huge a deal if what you're transporting is valuable enough to travel to other stars and collect it.
In fact, having dozens of ships en route at all times allows them to respond relatively quickly to situations without consulting with the homeworld. While a 10ly distant colony might have to wait 20 years for a response from the homeworld, they might only have to wait months or weeks to hear from the nearest starship. If something goes wrong (alien invaders, local fauna overthrows colonial government, revolution) you can just have the shuttles stop decelerating and perform relativistic strikes on the offending parties. Presumably each ship en route (and back) would be carrying large numbers of people (miners, for example) rotating in and out of the colony to provide labor, security, administration, etc. These people could be used to quickly replenish population in the face of attacks or other misfortune, and mining would resume.
Paying volunteers for such a project would be easy in comparison to the cost (and presumably rewards) of such an undertaking. Extreme hazard pay and all that. High pay would also ensure loyalty.
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A space empire would probably be limited to a handful of close-by solar systems. It would likely look like the British Empire in the 1700s. In that time period it could take up to 8 months to travel to the more remote regions of the empire. The space empire would consist of a densely populated homeworld and moderately populated colonies within the same solar supported by sparsely populated colonies that are primarily focused on resource extraction for the benefit of the homeworld. Of course, these colonies would not be administered directly by the homeworld government. They would instead be run by governors loyal to the homeworld government but given a large degree of autonomy. As such laws in the colonies would be different to the homeworld. The colonies in the home system would be more focused on manufacturing and supporting a large fleet of warships, which would be used to keep control over the interstellar colonies. What would the point of rebelling be if you knew a fleet and army larger than you could hope to match would be at your door in a 5 or 6 years? The fleet would be normally kept in the home system, with enough at the interstellar colonies to prevent a militia from taking over. The fleet at the homeworld would be in case whoever was in charge of the colonial fleet decided to take over. However, once you get past a few light years, there's enough time there to build up a defense before the fleet gets there.
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[
I'm writing a novel, and my protagonists are going to find a small spaceship that was placed in Europe during the arrival of the first humans in Europe. The Neanderthals would have still been there.
My idea was that the cave was situated close to some mountains and during the ensuing ice age and glaciation, erosion of the mountains buried the ship.
The ship can produce mining and repair drones and recreate any part of itself via advanced 3D printing.
Is it possible that it could still be working after 30 000 years while there was a 4+ meter layer of earth on top? (The drones were able to retrieve enough water to fuel the fusion reactor.)
I would also need a explanation as to why the drones wouldn't have removed the dirt on top, but why they were able to when the ship reactivates - or another means of freeing the ship.
The ship is approximately the size of a large airplane, and approximates the shape the B-2 stealth bomber.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZIbD6.jpg)
As it stands, my thought process was that the drones were set to minimal-effort repair and maintenance, and removing the dirt wouldn't fall within the purview of those instructions, but I am open to suggestions.
[Answer]
**The cave entrance collapsed.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QE8XY.jpg)
<https://www.treehugger.com/how-early-humans-painted-masterpieces-frances-chauvet-cave-4867824>
Chauvet Cave in France is from the dates you want, about 30,000 years ago. This cave has some of the best preserved cave paintings ever discovered. They are well preserved (and undiscovered) because a series of rockslides closed off the main entrance.
<https://archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet/en/salle-brunel-sud/notice/prehistoric-porch-and-its-sealing>
>
> The collapse of the cliff and the sealing of the prehistoric cave
> Evaluation by means of 3D data of the volume having fallen from the
> cliff, compared to that of the scree which conceals the cave,
> emphasises that the collapse of the cliff which dominated the
> prehistoric porch was the sole cause of its closure. Geomorphological
> surveys of the scree and the area of the collapse have suggested that
> the sealing process occurred in three stages. Cosmogenic dating
> carried out in the area of the collapse has enabled the dating of
> three phases of collapse: around 29,400, 23,500 and 21,500 years BP.
> Comparing these dates with those for charcoal and bone indicates that
> the first collapse marks the end of the second period of human
> occupation (Gravettian), while the end of animal occupation follows
> the second collapse of the cliff (23,500 years BP). The final collapse
> definitively sealed the prehistoric entrance.
>
>
>
People think there might be other similar caves in the area. Your ship is in one. The rockslides did not land on it, but sealed it in. There is plenty of water in the cave and the drones have maintained it as you say.
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***Nano-biomimetic ship organism:***
The ship can last virtually forever, because it [regenerates](https://www.theengineeringprojects.com/2019/08/entering-the-era-of-the-self-repairing-machine.html) like a [living organism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft). There is no point in removing the dirt, because the dirt is irrelevant. Far be it, the ship may be intelligent and know the dirt is cover. But it has programming and instructions, and it simply doesn't need to do ANYTHING until the conditions of it's programming are met, other than survive. With essentially infinite power, and assumedly the ability to obtain raw materials from anywhere (groundwater has minerals, elements, etc.) why would a ship ever move?
Since the ship can be treated like a living metallic organism, it heals, regenerates and fulfills all it's needs like a plant or animal.Some plants have lived over [5000 years](https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/what-oldest-living-thing-earth#:%7E:text=The%20Great%20Basin%20Bristlecone%20Pine,non%2Dclonal%20organism%20on%20Earth.). Some clonal organisms are believed to be over 80,000 years old. But plants and animals have things that can eat them, and they need to obtain energy. Since it's needs are so incredibly humble (it doesn't need energy and can mine everything it needs) it could in theory last for hundreds of thousands of years until somehow all multiply-redundant systems somehow accidentally fail at the same time. While nothing lives forever, there's no reason this thing can't "live" for a mere 30,000 years.
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**Hibernation**
The problem comes from what the ship is made of. Not just the outer hull but the various components. If a 3-D printer needs hydrocarbons for example your ship can't simply mine them if the rocks are granite. It is very unlikely that any single mountain range has every possible mineral that could be required.
Instead I believe a better solution is *hibernation*. The ship can carefully store delicate or perishable parts in suitable containers. Some will be airtight, some will be evacuated, some will be oil-filled etc.
The hull can be made of non corrodible metals or ceramics that will easily last thousands of years covered up.
When a landslide or melting glacier eventually exposes the ship, it can start to come out of hibernation again.
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The ship could have crashed on [permfrost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permafrost). Earth was on a glacial age, so the ship would be very likely to land on ice anyway.
[The last glacial period ended less than 12,000 years ago.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period) The ship would have more snow and ice being added on top of it for about 20,000 years. If it landed atop some mountains or on a polar region, it may still be buried in the present. You could say that most of the ice it accumulated on top of it melted down but you still have a 4m+ layer of ice on it.
The snow and ice around it will provide material for the reactor, so the hollow of the cave might be the volume that the drones dug up for fuel.
Notice that, from the wiki on permafrost I linked above:
>
> Permafrost does not have to be the first layer that is on the ground. It can be an inch to over miles deep into the Earth's surface.
>
>
>
So it may be that landslides have added dirt on top of the snow too.
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Building on Chasly's answer. IF a device was able to do this.
Essentially, it would be an "ultra-hyper-amazing *mining* device".
So, it would have the (astonishing) ability to mine (completely underground) for likely *100s or even 1000s of miles in all directions* ...
(perhaps sending out small mole-probe things {which would need an unbelievable amount of self-contained power} or alternately drilling/sealing/etc incredibly long shafts in all 3D directions...}
... so as to gather the various raw materials it would need.
Even if you do hand-waving about energy (so, far beyond mere anti-matter batteries, it uses some sort of astounding Inertial-frame-Mach®™ extraction of energy with physics unimaginable to us, so that it just has an insane amount of power at all times),
the whole thing would have to be an unprecedented "secret mining system" which gets the stuff it needs on a *continental-scale*, with a massive web of underground tunnels/whatever 100s to 1000s of miles long. (While maintaining secrecy, etc.)
Cool!
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**This question already has answers here**:
[Weapons for Mer-people](/questions/17580/weapons-for-mer-people)
(17 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
I have a mer civilization that does have magic, with a technological advancement to about flintlock musket level, so nothing overly complicated. I need the soldiers to have effective weaponry, underwater. With the drag force water has I haven't been sure if swords or slingshots would be effective weapons. I know harpoons would work but they aren't suitable for close combat. The magic is more personal and doesn't really work to change the rules of underwater combat, though magic users ability to have area effects is why close combat is so important. This primarily for mer vs. mer combat. I'm not looking for really technical details more about which weapons would work. I am also dealing with a civilization that can trade and scavenge from and with land dwellers but are themselves still using stone and wood.
And no I'm not looking at open warfare, so please no more wmds
[Answer]
Basically everything that you *thrust*.
The issue with underwater combat is, as you mention yourself, the drag. Thus every weapon that relies on swinging or other movement in order to abuse its weight to make it hit harder will be at a disadvantage due to it being harder to move it against the water.
Everything you thrust straight forward though will be very easy to use, because it has only little water to push aside.
So (make your choice or improve upon):
* Spears
* Tridents
* Harpoons (basically barbed spears)
* Guns (Yes, projectile spewing devices of murder! Well you'll likely be using pressure to fire ammunition AND due to the already stated principles there's not much distance they can cover, but it's still a valid principle.)
* Knives (stabby stabby)
Other than these, you could also make use of the fact that water lends itself as a transmitter for sound- and shockwaves by e.g. creating underwater mines/bombs which would have a concussive effect on everyone/-thing around it.
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*Addendum*: Due to the many comments received on this answer I feel a need to clarify some perceptions on guns.
>
> [*Gun*](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gun)
>
> 1 c: a device that throws a projectile
>
>
>
A gun is a device that shoots/throws directed projectiles. A gun does not have to propel these projectiles by using gunpowder; there's many different ways to propel a projectile.
Rifles and pistols can be easily powered by means of [spring-pistons, pneumatics and/or pressurised other gasses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gun#Air_gun_power_sources).
Projectiles for underwater-guns, called [Flechettes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flechette), will look differently from over-water-guns as they will have take a more streamlined look so they do not have to fight against drag that much.
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spears, spearguns, thrusting knives, maybe thrusting swords and that is about it. As Dot pointed out drag is the problem even firearms lose all force after only a few feet. A bow and arrow might work at a much shorter distance. Grenades work though as long as they have an internal fuse, concussion grenades actually work better underwater becasue water conducts the shockwave better.
guns have been developed for underwater use but they are basically needleguns, but they won't work with flintlock level tech.
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Here's an idea you could play with:
a <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation> - based weapon.
A sudden cavitation causes intense pressure waves. The pressure may be lethal at the end of a cavitation lance, but not harm the wielder. Cavitation bombs??
If conflict takes place at considerable depth, then the sudden implosion of evacuated spheres could produce a usefully short shock. Implode one of these (imagine a super-strength evacuated glass 'bubble') at the focus of a parabola and you basically have a pressure-wave death ray. (Just watch for the sidelobe radiation; real-world parabolas miss little bits of the wave.)
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Chemical warfare...
Swim over the enemy location and drop containers on them which burst and pollute their water with poisonous chemicals.
If you could locate yourself in a current upstream of your enemy you could just release poison chemicals. Might be useful as defence.
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**Tsunami!**
If you have flintlocks then you have gunpowder. If you have gunpowder you have explosives. If you can blow up the side of a coastal mountain (either above water or below, either works) then you can in principle cause a rockfall sufficient to displace enough water to give rise to a tsunami.
These have precedent on a mythical and distant world known as "Earth" (what a dull name)...
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami_bomb>
Downsides include:
1. Limited locations for deployment.
2. Difficult to steer.
3. Makes you VERY unpopular.
EDIT:
Serving suggestion...
Aim two carefully timed tsunamis towards eachother to coincide exactly above an enemy merfolk city (which is presumably 100% underwater). The combined waves will cause maybe a 2 kilometer high mass of water to come to a halt over the city. Gravity does the rest... Trillions of tons of (cavitating) water pressure bearing down on the enemy base.
Maniacal cackling is encouraged, but optional.
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Use ink to blind everyone, or ropes, like in fishing nets, to pull your foes up, or down to the bottom. Or have trained electric eels.
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Blasting weapons are harmful, apparently: dynamite, torpedoes, [mines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_mine).
See for example, [Is it worse to be near an explosion on land or in water?](http://science.howstuffworks.com/explosion-land-water1.htm)
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I'm not sure if you would count it as weaponry, but you could probably dress Dolphins or Killer Wale to fight and kill for you.
As a bonus, they might help you moving around !
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Slashing weapons would work though they would have to be used differently.
You can't swing them around but you once you made contact you can drag the sharp bits along your opponent's skin.
Both sharp and jagged edges should work.
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Somebody mentioned Cavitation. There's already supercavitating rifle ammo <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnR1rcvku4c>.
Cavitation - many bubbles
Supercavitation - one bubble
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Suppose a planet developed a peculiar form of life that was naturally invisible, but only within a 15-ft. (4.57 m) radius, by bending or refracting the majority of light around its body due to its scales, fur, or skin, but other members of its species, or similarly developed, can see through this invisibility at any range. My concept is similar to how a lens has a certain focus where an image flips, except here the image appears/disappears when the boundary is crossed.
How might such a species have developed? What chemical/material construction might this light-manipulating layer of its body be comprised of? Would this protection render the creature effectively invisible to infrared goggles or other exotic parts of the light spectrum?
[This](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/462/are-invisible-creatures-theoretically-possible) question discusses aliens that are completely invisible and indicates that they would be blind. Would the concept presented above be any more likely to allow the creature to see in the visible light spectrum? For that matter, would they see in a range of the light spectrum outside that visible to humans (which might also explain their invisibility)?
Finally, is such a creature even possible without the use of magic?
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## Induced Hemianopsia and visual neglect
Easy. The beast is not actually invisible, it's generating a very precisely pulsed directed-gradient magnetic field. The magnetic field it can generate has a limited range, hence the trouble it has with long distance invisibility, but when you're within range, the field interferes with precisely the correct portion of your brain, causing a phenomenon similar to [hemianopsia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemianopsia), whereby the subject [**loses awareness of the existence of part of their visual field**](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect), where the inability of a person to process and perceive stimuli is **not** due to a lack of sensation.
To give you a vivid example, presented with a circle and asked to label it correctly with the hours of the clock on it, a person with right hemispheric hemianopsia would draw something like this:
Where it gets weird is that often the subject is **completely unaware of the fact that part of their field of vision is missing**, i.e. the person who labeled the clock would insist they did so correctly, and even become insulted if the interviewer suggested otherwise.
In baseline real-world humans, this is caused by stroke, but it is a well-known fact that the functioning of a human neural net [can be disrupted with pulsed magnetic fields via transcranial magnetic stimulation](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/29/9647.full?sid=44e501f5-d923-41e1-9f3b-51378ad8cc36).
So in other words it's not really invisible, it's just literally making you ignore the part of the world where it, and its ***ridiculously large teeth*** are located.
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I would approach it from an active approach, not a passive one. A passive approach is limited by the rules of electromagnetics in air, and as 2012rcampion pointed out, there's no real way to form an image outside of 5m without forming one within 5m as well.
However, active approaches are allowed to do far more interesting things. An active approach directly emits signals with an intent of confusing its opponent. This would not be able to make it invisible, but it could make it *very* hard to get a bead on.
All of the active effects you would be looking at would be "threat specific." They would have to identify a threat to them, and determine how their brain works well enough to find a way to mess with it. This creature would clearly have to rely on common patterns that show up in predator species, because it could never learn how to perfectly fool each individual.
Consider two situations that show up in fiction:
* An individual whom you are warned to never look in their eyes. If you look in their eyes, you'll get lost in them. That's when he strikes, and you wont even raise a hand against him.
* Looking in a mirror. Suddenly, and without rhyme or reason, the image in the mirror smiles and walks off, leaving you to wonder if you were actually in the mirror, and not him, the entire time.
Both of these seem to describe a visual effect which has a marked effect on the mind of the individual. This shows that there is prior art for visual effects disorienting an individual.
Anything along these directions would cause a tremendous instinctive desire to not look at the creature. As an example, we are constantly moving our head slightly. If the creature can "change its spots" in a way to make us think we aren't moving at all, by moving its spots in the opposite direction in perfect mimicry, we start to wonder if we have any control over our own body. If it can make a good guess (based on eye-line) to what part of their body we are looking at, they could blur those spots, and make everything else sharp, making us question if we can even focus our own eyes. That one would be particularly entertaining because the best way to look at it would literally be through the corner of your eye. (It would make it hard for the creature to guess what you are looking at).
A particularly self-aware individual could comfortably negate these effects. I find this to be a feature, because I find stories that reward self-awareness particularly interesting. A self aware individual could probably even choose to exhaust the creature by tricking it into using particularly exhausting patterns and movements, while the self-aware individual just smiles back at it.
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This doesn't strictly fit your concept, but it was the first thing that popped into my head and gives you many of the desired effects, so I'll post it anyway.
Consider that what we call "visible" is really just a small spectrum of light compared to the [entire spectrum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum#Visible_radiation_.28light.29). So what that means is a creature could be "invisible" to another species if it is only reflective outside of that of species' visual spectrum.
Now it's hard to imagine any form of life similar to ours that's completely invisible to our visual spectrum. But what if an alien species had a smaller spectrum, or only saw in infrared/UV/x-ray? Then it seems more likely that a creature could develop that was pretty much invisible to that species - their eyes just literally can't pick them out.
I also like this because I can imagine this alien species meeting humans for the first time, and warning them about this invisible super-predator and how they need to always be super alert. And the humans are just staring at this predator as it's strolling up to the camp because it's not invisible to *them*, and casually shooting the thing just before it's ready to attack. And now the aliens think humans have super powers and can see invisible creatures.
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Imagine that you are 20 feet away from this creature. Since you are outside of the transition range, the creature is visible. Now, focus in on a single ray of light your eyes or cameras are receiving. Follow that ray of light back towards the creature. We can follow this ray all the way back past the transition range, until we hit whatever surface on the creature is emitting that light.
This means that in order to have the desired behavior, somehow your creature would need to be invisible (with all the associated issues), **and** be capable of projecting an image of itself from the transition zone. I actually [asked a question on the Physics stackexchange](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/158868/possibility-of-a-free-space-hologram) about this sort of problem, and it seems that without some form of 'smart dust' this behavior would be impossible.
Rather I suggest that, since the invisibility is *close range*, it could be simulated by some other effect. For example, a form of area-effect telepathy that removes the sensation of the creature from nearby minds. (Although I question what the utility of such an adaption would be, since anything could see you coming-literally!)
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Rather than full invisibility I might go for highly souped-up camouflage. It seems quite plausible that a creature might have the facility for rapid colour change similar to a cephalopod and combine this with light sensitive cells such that it can change the colour on one side to match the light received on a counterpart cell on the opposite side. This would have the visual effect of a screen showing an image of the scenery behind it.
Of course, this isn't a perfect camouflage because the shape of the creature is not the shape of its background, so from certain angles it will appear as a distorted image of the background terrain. This would still be exceptionally hard to see in most cases, but evolution might well tailor it further - if the creature has a specific prey or predator it wishes to be hidden from, it may be able to align its refractive ability towards that specific creature, so that it would be effectively invisible from where they are. For this it would need stereoscopic vision in the appropriate direction, perhaps indicating chameleon-like eyes.
Interesting evolutionary considerations:
* Predators that prey on a creature like this might well be pack hunters.
* Evolution takes place in an ecosystem, so this camouflage would probably be limited to the range of colours visible to creatures that the species needed to hide from. Consequently it might well reach into higher or lower wavelengths than visible light, or it may ignore whole ranges of light that don't matter to colour-blind prey.
* Distance at which it becomes truly effective depends on the distance at which it can judge the camouflage effectively - too far away ( or hiding from something else ) and it is just unusually hard to see.
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Maybe the primary sense in that ecosystem is not sight as we know it. It might be sonar, or something quite novel (see Hal Clemet). Even with electromagnetic radiation, different bands and different media can change things. Animals can be nearly transparent in water; in the twilight region fish can only be seen by their shadows against the twilight direction, so light emitting countershading makes them invisible with the complexity of image formation. IR might be blinded by heat or invisible by being cold blooded (or cooled on that side).
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It will not be possible for a such animal to develop natural way. Any such development is always arms race between predator and prey. Such perfect predator would increase population until would eliminate all prey, and died off.
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I'm no scientist, so take this with a grain of salt.
Possibly a creature can vibrate its molecules fast enough that light bends of it?
Sort of like the displacer beast from Dungeons and Dragons (look it up).
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Given a vaguely European Medieval society free of magic, how long does it take for historic record to devolve into fiction? Rephrased, how long would it take an Arthurian legend to form, where the scholars of the setting don't know how much of it (or if any of it) is based on actual historic events and people?
Assume historic examples for measure of literacy rate, cultural trends, value of history/legacies, and societal/social/political upheaval. Further assume there's no outstanding effort to either preserve or destroy historic record outside what trends we saw in Medieval Europe, and no catastrophic events (ie, the Black Plague, hurricanes, mass famine) that might distort the trends.
What is a reasonable timetable for such uncertainty about the historic accuracy of an Arthurian-style legend? What would be the realistic shortest span that we could see this happen?
[Answer]
Here are some medieval-ish examples:
# [King Arthur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur)
Estimated to live around 500 AD. Became the subject of the 'Matter of Britain.'
The first works to chronicle King Arthur were the [*Historia Brittonum*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Brittonum) of 828 AD, where he is depicted as a military leader, but not a king; and the [*Annales Cambiae*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_Cambriae), written in c. 950 AD where Mordred and Merlin are introduced.
The first popularly distributed writing of the legend in more or less modern form was *[Historia Regum Brittaniae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Regum_Britanniae)* by Geoffrey of Monmouth, published in 1136. This contained most of the well-known parts of the legend; two other important parts were added c. 1180 AD by [Chretien de Troyes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chr%C3%A9tien_de_Troyes): Sir Lancelot and the quest for the Holy Grail.
# [Charlemagne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne)
The equivalent to the Arthurian legends in France were the legends that sprang up around Charlemagne. Unlike Arthur, Charlemagne is very real and well documented, as all European royalty could claim descent from him (and still do to this day). He lived from c. 745 AD to 814 AD.
Some important steps in his journey to legend include the poem [*Visio Karoli Magni*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visio_Karoli_Magni) in 865 AD, the first work that explicitly adds supernatural deeds to the life of a man who had so far only been recounted by historians purporting to the truth; and his cannonization by Anti-pope Paschal III in 1165 (not recognized by the church at large).
The 'Matter of France' was a cycle of stories and legends about Charlemagne and the 12 Paladins of France, equivalent to the knights of the round table. The first legend written down, so far as I can tell, is also the most famous, the [Song of Roland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Roland), composed probably around 1040 AD and discussing the [Battle of Roncevaux Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Roncevaux_Pass) of 778 AD. The *chansons* (songs) were elaborated upon and increased in popularity through the 12th century until the [*Girart de Vienne*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_of_France#Three_Matters) in 1215 established the three part division of the cycle that is recognized today.
# Conclusion
Charlemagne made the turn-around from actual no-doubt historical figure to subject of legends a bit faster than Arthur, and had the advantage of being much more actual no-doubt that Arthur was. **The first 'legendary' occurrences of Charlemagne in literature took about 50 years, the first whole-cloth fantasies about 250 years, and the 'final' version of the legend about 400 years.**
Arthur by comparison was about 300 years until legendary literature, then 300 more years until the 'final' version of the legend. Arthur's stories probably would have picked up faster if it weren't for all those Vikings and Dark Ages that got in the way.
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An event could well become legendary **right away** as rumors spreads by word of mouth through common populace, or whatever circles who hold interest in the events.
I think it is more a question on how long actual facts can **coexist** with the legend. (Unless the legend is so strong that people will believe it over factual records, in which case the legend will start right away).
But, concerning actual factual records I would say it depends on the records in where the events would be stored:
## Types of records
Medieval societies were quite interested in certain records, most notable lineages of royalty and nobility (and religious officials). If the legend concerns the fate of royal or noble lines one would expect them to be written down carefully.
The next level of importance is ledgers on ownership claims, debts, deals, taxes and such economic matters. Such texts will be carefully maintained while they are relevant, and sink towards oblivion when they cease to be relevant.
Lastly there would be notices, town-crier scrolls and such.
In each case, the staying-power of each depends on the interest people have in keeping the information. You can see it as if the information falls out of scope.
## Scopes of records
The scope of royal lineages lasts as long as their claims to thrones, relatives and associated lines exist. They go out of scope when the ruling elite is completely displaced by another ruling structure that do not respect the old order.
The scope of economic records last as long as they are relevant. If a city gets razed its records go out of scope. If a personal debt or deal is fulfilled or paid it goes out of scope. If an administration is abandoned its records go out of scope.
Short lived documents go out of scope almost immediately.
After information have gone out of scope, it will survive only in old records, libraries and such maintained by learned. Unless the records are of special importance to the librarians and scholars they will be forgotten and risk to disappear. If they are of scholarly interest then only a major catastrophe will destroy them (burning of library of Alexandria), and probably even that is not enough if they are widely copied.
## In conclusion:
Think in terms of scopes instead of time.
The relevant factors are:
* What types of records might describe this event?
* What societal structures have an interest in these kinds of records?
* What upheavals, replacements, catastrophes have befallen these institutions since the event? Which of them have gone out of scope?
* Are the records of scholarly interest?
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### Five Minutes?
The interpretation of historical events may become controversial as soon as they happen. Look at the people who do not believe widely accepted facts about the Moon landings, or 9/11, or the Holocaust.
In a medieval world, you have a lack of mobility for both common people and scholars, no mass media due to the lack of printing presses and radio or TV, and widespread illiteracy.
### Three Generations?
More seriously, it could be about a century. That would be when the last people die who knew an eyewitness. Do you know anybody who fought in WWII? Does that make it more believable, more immediate than the Napoleonic wars to you?
Is there anybody with an interest in preserving the facts? That could be a king who draws political legitimacy from being the heir of Arthur. And does anybody benefit from muddling this claim?
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Is an urban legend not exactly the same modern equivalent? Or fake news?
I find that many people who, when they want to make an argument that supports their own point of view, will find something on the internet that agrees with them and they list it as *truth*.
So, if you trust me and I tell you that I saw a pig fly and you repeat it to another person, it could take very little time at all. It just take a desire to have something be true. (I saw a religious icon in my grilled cheese sandwich. That statue is bleeding.)
If the thing is true but there is no proof other than a few people claim to have witnessed it, it would be the same, I think.
I doubt that a lack of modern media makes much difference. People believe what they want to for many reasons,and I don't think that aspect of humanity has changed that much. Gossip runs very quickly through a community.
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Spartacus did it when he was still alive. "I am Spartacus!" As did Alexander the Great.
In the case of Paul Revere, it took generations, and a poet to do it. Israel Bissel was far more successful. All it takes is someone to write about the legend. That is the key factor.
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**Potentially a really long time**
Legends are separated from history because they are not (entirely) factual. It can be closely tied to history however, such as in the [Romance of the Three Kingdoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms). As time goes on, those who recite the tale may add parts of the story of their own design to better fit their current time and culture. How long you wait simply dictates how less factual the story is.
For example, the Arthurian legend is possibly drawn from [Sarmatian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarmatians) tradition in the legend of King Batradz and the [Narts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nart_saga). It was thought to have been brought to Britain by an Iazyges or Alani (tribes of Sarmatians) garrison around 175AD. The legend may have also been influenced by [Lucius Artorius Castus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Artorius_Castus), a Roman commander who may have led that garrison in Britain. The Sarmatian legend in turn was influenced by proto-Iranian mythology. As the story was passed storytellers over time, each modified it to more closely match their own culture.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XuJMP.jpg)
The tree small giant creatures resembling people usually with beards are present in many fantasy stories, but that's it... it is fantasy. From a scientific viewpoint how would such creature even exist in the first place? How does it function?What does it do to stay alive?Can they evolve or is advanced technology needed to create them?
This question is part of the [Anatomically Correct Series](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/).
[Answer]
See the aliens invented by Robert L Forward in [*Marooned on Eden*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_on_Eden#Aliens:_.27Jolly_Blue-Green_Giants.27).
This author is renowned for his “hard” SF and real science contributions to lightsails, tethers, gravitonomy, etc.
So when he turned his attention to an intelligent and semi-mobile tree, he came up with unique solutions.
The roots move, slowly, by hydrolic power. This provides for overall motion of the being.
But there are detachable parts—possibly symbotes that became part of the lifeform much earlier in the evolutionary process. In particular the “eyes” can fly off and come back to dump data; and the “hands” are also small animals that are controlled somehow wirelessly at close range but have some small autonomy for doing more remote work.
The lifestyle, including complete sessile juvenile stage and sexual behavior, is described in the novel and a sequel.
So, I would suggest *hydrolics* for movement rather than muscles, and strong symbiosis for complete being: like how [eucaryotes took in](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote#Origin_of_eukaryotes) other bacteria to form organelles, the symbiosis would **combine animal and plant characteristics at a very deep level**.
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I think that Ents (as presented in Tolkien) are not actually plants but are actually a species of animal which resembles trees as a technique of camouflage.
This makes sense because, historically, the word Ent just means 'giant' and has been used pre-Tolkeien to describe giants, orcs and trolls, not just living plants. Tolkien Law says that Ents were created by the Gods to protect the trees from the Dwarves so there is no reason that, when created, they should themselves be made of tree.
Towards the beginning of time, Trolls were also made as a cheap imitation of Ents which suggests that Ents used to look more . Historically, the word 'ent' troll-ish and less tree-like.
Finally, the fact that Ents in Middle Earth are dying out because of the lack of entwives suggests that Ent reproduction is more similar to human biology than tree biology. So in answer to your question, Ents don't have to live that differently from us because they are just big people that look like trees.
Although I admit i might be wrong, its been a while since I read the books
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**How does it function?**
As in lord of the rings Ents are slow moving often standing still for years. I always suspected they where trees that grew roots very fast and could leave them behind maybe even leech from other trees, like in a symbiotic relation. They are not called "tree herder" for nothing.
**What does it do to stay alive?**
Like trees they need water, CO2 and nutrients, As I said above they have a symbiotic relation to trees. They protect the forest in exchange for leeching nutrients from regular trees.
**Can they evolve or is advanced technology needed to create them?**
Maybe they will take over the world after we die out. Who is to say they don't exist yet but move so slow we can't even see it.
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How would an Ent evolve. Very slowly, I assume - maybe something can be done with some interesting plants, a handful of coincidences, and a *lot* of time.
In any case, since of the traits we want, mobile is probably the rarest (among those that actually exist), I thought of tumbleweeds, and of carnivorous plants, and even the sensitive plant. That might be a good place to start. Of those, I picked the carnivorous plants, like the Venus flytrap or Waterwheel plant, or maybe even a Bladderwort. These are active traps, where the plant is triggered and moves to catch the prey, so it has some sensory feedback and movement already in its repertoire (unlike passive traps like flypaper, pitfall, or lobster-pot traps). Carnivorous plants are [also known to grow in poor soils](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivorous_plant), one of the reasons that they turn to carnivory in the first place.
So, we have a carnivorous plant, and it is already sensitive, and a little bit mobile. Since catching its prey is a major investment of energy - it needs to *grow* shut, and too many missed snaps, or even too many feedings, can overreach its resources and it dies - it is already on the path to increase its sensory capabilities as much as it can. Since it already habituated to poor soils and difficult growing habitats, it is a good candidate for a flying plant - that is, growing with its roots not in the ground (on an outcropping of rock, or on dead wood, or on the living branches of another plant - not *flying*, flying, ok?).
Somehow, in some way, the plant (I picked the Venus flytrap, to be specific) ends up in more fertile ground - dropped by some bird, or carried by an animal. Just to up our chances, we should design a geographic proximity so that this happens often enough for a while, perhaps a raised bog with rock outcroppings separating it a more fertile growing ground below, with maybe some bird looking there for twigs for its nest, or something - since our plant will like both the bog and the outcroppings, and it might find the valley right for evolving in. When the seeds or cuttings land, the places most like its natural habitat, and therefore where it is likely to germinate, are the places already mentioned as "flying", the outcroppings of rocks and branches.
Of those, those which end up in the branches of a living tree have the opportunity to change in a new way, to adapt to their new growing condition. With sudden proximity to nutrients in plant-accessible form, in the tree next to them, some may find a way to grow partially parasitic ([hemiparasitic,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_plant) to be specific). Parasitic plants have evolved before, so it isn't impossible - especially since our plant will need to get water and mineral nutrients from somewhere, if the amount that germinated it was a thin layer on a living branch. If it can figure out any mechanism to tap into the branch, it may find itself a successful symbiote - since it may trap insects harmful to its host, and will not have to face much competition from its own kind in tree branches. This was one reason to pick the Venus flytrap as our base, since it [specializes in slightly larger prey like beetles,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_flytrap) which might let it avoid necessary pollinators (unlike species targeting smaller aerial insects as prey).
So, we have a carnivorous, semi-parasitic plant. With the slow adaptation of its roots to feed from the host plant, our plant now has resources - resources it lacked in its environment of poor growing soil - to evolve some more. Perhaps it can increase its sensory capabilities, and centralize its ability to act on those senses - the better to select the right kind of prey, and to prevent wasting energy on falsely triggered snaps. Perhaps it should tweak its reproductive strategies to better colonize its new growing grounds, to keep the species in the trees. Since it is already partially mobile, maybe it can take advantage of that, instead of trying to make fruit attractive to birds or whatnot to propagate its seeds high off the ground.
So, a [tumbleweed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbleweed) strategy. The tumbleweeds are adapted to windy plains, and spread widely by shedding a ball (or bunch, whatever), of dead plant material, and let it be battered about by the wind, which slowly shakes out the seeds hidden inside and gives them a lot of spread. Obviously, our plant is in a forest, and has neither strong winds nor a flat plain - but the idea might be adapted. Maybe its seeds can be caught in a small, light bunch of dead twigs or shoots or even roots, which might be tossed to another tree by a breeze, or *better yet* grabbed by a bird for a nest. It will take a long time, of course, but the theory is sound. And the plant has some mobility and sensory capabilities, it might even be doing this on sort-of purpose eventually (sticking seeds on birds, or shaping twigs to carry them) after a while and quite a lot of selection towards activity (and sentience), of course.
Okay, now we have a parasitic plant mobile *two* ways! Actually, I think we're going to end up with tree sprites *long* before we get to ents, so bear with me. Mobility is *expensive*, so let's start putting that to work, not just the carnivorism. So, the plant, having adapted to tap into the host tree for water and minerals, will obviously want to stay on living material - if something is going on, if a branch is injured or sick, or even just the eating is better over that-a-way a little, the ability to move will be priceless. It can even move away from being eaten, or environmental hazards, or other sources of difficulty or injury, if it can move along the branch even a bit. Many parasitic plants propagate by runners and cuttings, with a long branch having the ability to put down new roots. If the old branch dries up and dies (to avoid overgrowing its host or its own abilities, or if the old spot stopped being viable), the plant can slowly, slowly, over months and years inch along branches to better feeding grounds.
Now, since our plant is a hemiparasite, it needs its host to be living. Trees with more active versions of our plant will therefore *survive longer*, since it will have fewer predatory insects damaging it with more coverage, and less of a parasitic burden on it with smaller plants - so more mobile versions will serve their trees best, and thus survive longer to continue to propagate. The tree may reward this behavior by developing nodes along the branches, around insect-areas, where the bark is thin to "encourage" the plant to root down *here* where more insects are, and after a time "dry up" the port where no insect damage is so that the plant keeps *moving* instead of overgrowing and demanding more resources. What tree is this? I don't even know, but it won't last forever, so go with it.
Mobile little plants, "racing" around their trees and munching on insects. We are actually getting there. With mobility and carnivority both encouraged, our plant has reason to continue along the path to better sensory capabilities, better mobility, and better reactionary capabilities... the same sorts of pressures that led to animals developing sentience, and eventually sapience in our humans. Whoo. In any case, now that we have mobile insect-munching plants, they will be sorta-competing with animal insectivores. Now, they won't ever be as quick as their animal counterparts, but what they can lean on is their plant heritage - they can tap directly into the tree, via rootlings, and take nourishment that way, and they can still photosynthesize for a bit more nourishment (encourage more leaf growth, perhaps, so they *look* more tree-ish - which is also camouflage). So to their advantage is multiple options, for when there aren't enough insects.
But the other thing they can develop, that will *really* help a lot? the ability to plan ahead. Especially since they will need to plan *months* ahead, to get things done (hey, this *is* sounding entish!). So, to go with their evolving sensory capabilities, they develop something like a neural network (can't be *too* specialized yet, since they are still moving by a grow-and-abandon strategy). This will let them react to stimuli more centrally, instead of just locally, let them correlate all sensory input and make moves based on that, and also lay the groundwork for future actual thinking capabilities.
So, being more mobile, and starting to be more capable of central, active decisions, our plant is adapting. One thing it will want, is to speed up and specialize its root system - tapping into branches where it pleases, where it *wants* to go, not just where it happens to land. At this point, if it had a tree species that adapted the node-system to nourish it and encourage mobility, it will no longer be necessary (though not abandoned, either - just that offspring can spread back to other species). Its leaves and even twigs might adapt to look more like it's tree, too, for camouflage, giving us "species" of ent later on.
We are into the home stretch, now. Recall that everything had to be decentralized, because our plant was going with a grow-and-abandon strategy of moving... well, the next step is to centralize. Instead of growing in a new direction and abandoning the growth placed elsewhere, the plant learns to "keep" and "re-purpose" a great deal of that effort - by losing less and less of the old growth until it is just abandoning the roots, and using its shiny mobility to "swing" the stems in the direction it wants to go, and put new roots down fast. Eventually, it may or may not reach the stage where it chooses short, spiked roots that can bite deep "quickly", and pull up without abandoning much of anything. Anyway, with this change comes the possibility of centralization. It can grow a node, where it can specialize sensory organs (animals evolved them, the attempts and failures would probably be recognizably parallel). It can centralize its reaction abilities, and decision making capabilities, into something vaguely analogous to a brain. It is still slow, it is still so very slow by animal standards - but now it can learn to speed up a little. It now has a *lot* more resources, since it isn't "abandoning" its leftover growth and starting new.
At this point, the plants will split into two populations (roughly. ish.) One sort will limit growth and continue to abandon overgrowth to stay small - recall, one of the reasons to be mobile was not to be too great a drain on the host tree by growing too large. Over time, they will develop first an instinct, then a culture, of protecting the mother-tree - since they are still far less mobile than animal insectivores, and their edge in competition against them encourages protecting and tending the host tree. Limiting their size will encourage the extra resources previously used for growth to be used elsewhere, letting them develop increasing mobility, speed, active defensive instincts, and eventually, some measure of intelligence (to animal levels, say). as small as they are, a tree may support *many* without strain - and being tribal (originally pack-oriented) will let them chase off larger dangers more efficiently, especially since they are still quite slow. Here are your tree sprites - small, lively, vicious in defense of their home-tree.
The other path, does not involve staying small. After all, it can move and react much faster than before, and adapt much quicker. In this variation, when the tree starts to show signs of weakness, from the burden of the growing plants - they jump trees. They will learn to root down quickly, to bite deep to take sap from a new tree, and to loosen their roots and move on when the tree falters. Moving from one tree to another lets them move on and stay alive even when they reach sizes that would be a burden to a single tree over time. They might stay with the same species (especially if they have developed a measure of camouflage), but they will quickly learn to move farther and farther, take bigger and bigger leaps, from branch to branch and tree to tree, even perhaps spanning and feeding from multiple trees at once when large enough. Once they're large enough, they will more precisely develop sturdier structural growth than they needed while small (from the woody stems of large vines, to something more like tree trunks themselves). Once they're large enough, and mobile enough, they might come down from the trees and move between them, at least long enough to get to a new tree to feed from.
Their instinct and culture will end up very different form the tree-sprites. Overlooking a number of trees will have them develop a more distant relationship - they won't develop the tree sprites' aggressive reliance on and devotion to their mother-tree, but they will care for the trees they feed from - tree herder, in truth - since that is their survival edge over their animal competitors (well, that and not being very edible except around the very edges). They will adapt to take on (or chase away) larger animals in defense of their trees, those that damage them, and even perhaps tear apart and eat them - they still are carnivorous plants. For *that* they would need to develop a larger mouth (mouth-flower, or something) for insects, the regular flowers will suffice. In any case, the more mobile they are, the fewer flowers they would have *needed* - since they are expensive to grow, and can move the flower to the prey instead of happening on it. This would have been part of the growth from flower-plant to treelike, I forgot to mention it earlier.
How big will they get? Not sure, but they will likely be quite spindly (to mimic branches), and can grow long and light because of it - and will probably keep growing most of their lives, until they are too big to support their needs or something else (injury, illness) kills them. Also, being plant based, might not need to support quite so much fleshy, squishy organs - long thin decentralized organs surrounded by structural growth will be better for their purposes. If their "feeding roots" come from the hands, they will be working *with*, not against, gravity for that part of their circulation system/feeding cycle. And they aren't likely to be "bipedal", so to speak, but to have several support structures (with no particular restriction on number) and be able to raise up to a height, probably on two "limbs" (kinda like bears) to reach up into their trees, so height when "standing" can be *much* greater than when otherwise moving. And given "several" limbs, people would likely *try* to equate them to something humanoid, to arms and legs, even if they might have five or six limbs, instead (though hub of sensory organs and nerve tissue will be "head" even if not very similar to our faces, people will still try). They may or may not mind minor parasites or flying plants (mosses or fungi), or might even cultivate them for some benefit - so there might be your "beards" or even "clothing".
But between the larger territory and the weaker connection to any individual tree, they will not develop as much possessive aggressiveness - instead, they will lean more on their hard-evolved planning ahead, allowing or even planning actions destructive to a single tree for the better growth of the whole area (or patch, or herd, whatever). Between that and the larger size, they are in a better position to eventually, eventually, develop something approaching sapience. They will be more likely to run into each other, being far more mobile, and need some language - and given they will not range far from their trees, a "taught" language will be more useful than an instinctive one, especially once they run into other "species" of ent (with different leaf-patterns and coloration, and thus a separation from the common ancestor at least from before tree sprites). It will be slow language, though, they are still living on plant time-scales. They can develop *culture*. And that, my friends, is how you grow an Ent.
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The original ents were not so much humanoid trees but rather giants with a few vegetable traits that grew more prominent over time
Based on this definition, these ents could quite simply be regular giants that host a few symbiotic plants. Regular epiphytes could easily explain their branches and mossy coverings. Other traits, like bark or roots, need more justification
These traits could be explained as rather derived creepers, which can grow along the skin and produce bark, roots, and leaves adhering to the surface of the skin. Perhaps such plants could have roots to connect to the ent's blood supply, allowing such plants to be more incorporated into the ent's physiology
Another thing to add could be mycorrhizal fungi living in symbiosis with the ent, allowing the creepers and other plants to share nutrients and work entirely as a single organism
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An ent should most properly look like a large willow tree in morphology. Many long, slender branches, each with many simply-shaped leaves.
Being able to manipulate each of these branches with a high degree of mobility, it maneuvers those and their leaves such that there is a "surface" presented to other non-ents. This surface can assume almost any shape (within reason) the ent might like. In many cases that shape is one of humanoid face or upper torso.
When it needs to become formidable, these shapes are inconvenient as each slender branch isn't really capable of lifting heavy objects or doing much beyond assuming the shapes described above. Instead, many of them gang together with their leaves folded back/inside, coiling into massive tendrils able to toss boulders or tear attackers into pieces. For legs, roots perform similarly.
A talented ent might even manage to shape "arms" and "legs" around those if merely trying to be intimidating, but in combat that performance might be dropped altogether, or shifted into something not very humanoid at all (a monster whose shape keeps shifting between gigantic predators and mouths with chainsaw teeth roiling around). Weapons could be useless, as you fire arrows into it, only to tear a few leaves. A giant "boot" comes down on an ally, covering him completely. Inside of it, tendrils slowly strangle him, but to a somewhat distant observer it might appear that he has been squished flat (assuming ents have never bothered to give away the secret that their "shape" is mostly hollow).
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So, I would like to know if it is reasonable that two walled cities exist in extreme proximity of each other.
A little background: The story is set in an imaginary world, comparable to the Late Middle Ages, but with magic (duh). Most of the world is covered with forest, except for some mountains and one big desert. Most of the wilderness is very dangerous due to the wild creatures roaming it. Therefore, the humans live in two completely walled cities (the walled areas being large enough to contain fields to grow crops and stuff, thus making the civilization sustainable).
The cities are at enmity. The only reason they're not at war is their equally strong military; a war would push both cities to the brink of collapse.
Given all of this, I would like to know if it is reasonable that both these cities exist very close to each other (like, one or two kilometres distance from gate to gate). Is it possible that these cities developed this close to each other into seperated cities? And if so, do I need to include any criteria making this scenario sustainable (e.g. the cities must have been enemies since the very beginning of building the cities)?
**Some more info about the reason for the conflict:** While generally the citizens of both cities are raised to detest the respective other city, the conflict is mainly motivated by the respective noblemen who are in control of the cities. The reasons for their mutual hatred date back a few generations and are not generally known.
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Two small villages growing in sight is absolutely possible. The more they grow, the close they get. To have something that separates them without causing instant and vacant war (or a state of cold war) it will need a clear separation of culture and roots. If you place one city at the beginning of a valley or a glen, surrounded by insuperable mountains and the other into the flat between lots of rivers and creeks and maybe at or near a lake, then it's quite easy:
* Mountain Men feel well in the mountains where you have to watch your step and oversight everything. The ground is hard and doesn't go away, they know where they stand. They feed their cattle on alpine pastures, know how to climb through rock fields and what herb cures what.
* River Men feel well in and on the water where you don't feel your own weight but the wind in your hair. They fish, they dive for shells and know how to swim.
Take the following map as an example (Carinthia/Austria):
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Image base: Google Maps
This would create a scenario where one group doesn't want to change places with the other and wouldn't have much profit from having the others gone. It would also allow to have a bit of a trade as both places are very different from what they can harvest and produce. And it would allow to have completely different types of characters, shaped by climate and surroundings who would have a natural distrusted against each other while leaving it open if there is hidden admiring of the others capabilities or total hate.
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If you push the distance back a little bit, since they are on hills etc, they could be more like 5-10 miles apart and still see each other.
This would allow them to have grown up as normal towns to cities, areas of commerce and still be separate. Maybe they weren't always enemies, but likely some event or decision between the two caused terrible strife. And now they have been bitter enemies for years (decades?) and most probably don't even know why, just were taught to hate 'them' because.
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You need one of two stabilizing forces to combat the sharp-edged disagreements:
* **A negative feedback**, such as a threat of a third party that would swoop in and take both nations out if they went to war.
* **A hard-to-predict chaotic feedback**, such as a political house of cards (potentially revolving around complicated arranged marriages), where there isn't a clear "if we go to war, we lose", but rather a "if we go to war, it isn't entirely clear WHAT will happen." Humans tend to prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't.
In such situations, expect both sides to be trying to slice off parts of the other's domain (smuggling, stealing, political dissidents, assassinations). These effects are always there, regardless of distance, but they are stronger in short distances. You'd want a high value reason for both nations to stay put.
**Also consider a Demilitarized Zone. North Korea and South Korea would be an excellent place to draw real life examples from, given their many-decade close-range war.**
Distance doesn't really change hatred, so two civilizations that hate each other will hate each other regardless of being one mile apart or a hundred. The difference is merely the pace that one can interact between cities across such a short distance. Any effect which slows or inhibits this (such as a DMZ) will have the same effect as long distances.
One note: if they can see eachother, communication via. light at night becomes a possibility. This has huge implications for cloak-and-dagger operations.
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We do have at least one example of "0 distance" the Berlin Wall; while not completely equivalent to the situation you describe could fit your situation as well.
Perhaps the split is between two distinctive halves of the city; like agriculture and industry. Both halves rely on the other half (food needs equipment to produce, equipment needs food to keep workers alive).
You can define this split a few ways in terms of politics but it may be that the enmity is mainly expressed between a couple of noble houses. In effect this would play out somewhat like a large gang war; the citizens have no quarrel with each other but large political bodies erect gates that check for contraband between the two halves and generally slow down passage from one half to the other.
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You should probably also consider that your humans had to come from somewhere. So the claim that the surrounding lands are inhospitable due to creatures needs to be explored with relation to time. It cannot always have been this way, otherwise humans would have been killed off before they could build their cities.
If I were to give a narrative that ends up with this, it would be that originally the desert region was a habitable grassland, and inhabited by two tribes of humans. The large space meant that war was not all encompassing, and although the two tribes feuded, they could get on with their lives. However, a change in climate pushed the habitable land into a progressively smaller area that started to force the inhabitants to the edge of the forests. As the two tribes were squeezed together, they naturally built rudimentary forts to hide behind. Because they had previously only fought in open plains, neither side had the offensive capabilities to defeat the forts of the others. The desertification progressively forced the two tribes up a broad valley of habitable, non forested land, with each side fortifying their sides as they moved up.
Eventually, the desertification stopped with the remainder of each tribe squeezed into two fortified areas opposite one another. Each one focussed on fortifying their position and making it tenable (digging in, like in ww1, where defensive postures were essentially unassailable). Once the fortifications were made, each side has worked on building its army, yet neither wants to commit to the field and have their forces decimated, reaching a stalemate, as there is no more room to move. This has now been the status quo for generations.
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I'm tempted to say no to it being probable, but not impossible simply because human history proves the improbable frequently occurs. It depends on the time scale you are speaking of here and whether or not they are the only cities or if third parties exist.
An equally strong military is unfortunately not much of a deterrent if you look across human history for a few reasons.
* The first being it's not obvious to an inside observer who is more powerful...there are repeated examples throughout history of a military attacking an enemy far superior to them without knowing it (and sometimes winning). To an all knowing observer, they may be equal and on paper they might very well be equal, but to me I'm stronger regardless. And will they remain equal over an extended (multiple generations) period of time
* The second is human ambition, like it or not we are an ambition driven warlike species when possible, a ruler of one city will not be content until he/she is the ruler of both.
* Third - military might isn't the only method you can conquer your neighbors...the mighty Trojans fell to deceit, the Byzantines fell to cannons (technology), and economic issues caused countless others to collapse.
* As a fourth - Medieval societies had trebuchets...if they are within visual sight of each other, there is very little preventing them from adopting siege tactics such as flinging stones, fireballs, and even dead livestock to spread disease...all from behind their own walls.
* And a final - the best defence remains a strong offence...the safest way to ensure your survival is not to allow your rival the opportunity to attack you.
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Actually, yes.
Thinking upon a list of countries (in our world) that have been or are at war with each other, a lot of them are in very close proximity.
This could be due to a range of factors -
* Territorial Issues
* Cultural/Religious/Race Issues
* Resource Issues
I suggest you look look at a history of countries close together that have been at war with each other at some point (Indo-Pak, Israel-Gaza, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Japan-Koreas dispute -though not war, more like resentment for the colonization). It might help you characterise each city better and write a more realistic description of the feelings of the city people.
If the cause for the war is due to noblemen, family feud, etc, it would still be good practice to list out the reasons (for yourself). Look into the background of each of the cities. Also, to keep it real, you might want to have a few skirmishes between the city people which is quelled by an authority. Perhaps to honour a treaty? Or protect an enchanted object? Or to protect the people?
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The concept that two distinct populations in close proximity would hate each other is fairly common in the real world. People tend to hate similar groups of people - when it comes to rivalry, familiarity breeds contempt. Ingroup-outgroup bias can be quite strong and grow over time as it becomes embedded in their respective cultures.
If you are talking about just the noblemen hating each other, you can always bring in issues of succession and rights - some from each city claims to be the rightful heir to the other city, and thus should rule both. You could even go a Helen of Troy route and make it about honor and past wrongs.
If you needed a stronger reason than just cultural/ethnic tensions, a resource disparity would engender any number of problems. Each could feel the other city grossly overcharges for whatever resources are traded, while being overly stingy on paying for what is being sold to them, and is capricious about supply. Traded resources may be difficult to produce and supply can fall short of demand, but the other city may not recognize just how difficult/rare it is to produce what is being sold and therefore resents the shortages (other-city people are just being mean and greedy about selling us X, while they are greedy and complain about how we are not giving them enough Y even though we sometimes struggle to make enough just for ourselves).
If the city walls need to encompass enough farmland to support the population, the walls themselves will be fairly small and unmanned (simply a relation between the circumference of the walls to population). It would be fairly easy to send sappers to open large sections of the walls - if the city walls are really only about a kilometer or two apart, one could build a tunnel between them and undermine the walls without ever exposing sappers to the wild - cause a wall collapse during a period of heavy monster presence and let the beasts kill off the opposing city.
Medieval agriculture was not that productive - if they needed to keep all agriculture behind walls, the primary focus would be extending the wall system to include more land. The obvious choice would be to connect their two wall systems - reduces the overall circumference of manned walls against the outside threat. You will need to address why the other city is the greater threat than the beasts forcing them behind walls in the first place.
Honestly it would be difficult justifying why each city would even want to focus on trying to kill the other, instead of being united against the common problem of a constant existential threat to their lives in the form of the beasts trapping them behind walls. That would probably be the biggest reason why they would not go to war - the peasantry would never take up arms against other people when there are much bigger threats, and would likely rebel if the noblemen actually caused the death of the other city. The fight against nature would take overwhelming precedence compared to any rivalry between the nobles.
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I think you are assuming that these cities would have had to develop *while* being antagonistic. It's possible that the two cities developed as friends, but later developed enmity.
For example, one city started, but the population outgrew the capacity of the internal farmland. A kilometer away was another area that was flat and had a source of water and so they expanded to that area. It was far enough away that a literal, all-encompassing expansion didn't happen, but a separate walled city. The Twin Cities, if you will.
But perhaps the King moved to the second city and made it much more grand. His son, who he left in charge of the first city, is not on good terms with his father and the people of the first city are resentful of the glory of the second city. Perhaps the King never bothered to raise taxes in the second city, so essentially the first city pays the bills for the second.
Eventually a split occurs and outright rebellion. You can imagine a whole host of alternative scenarios: the second city was originally a cloistered monastery but the King turned against his religion; the first city was conquered by invaders, who eventually built the second city as an area exclusively for the bloodline of the conquerors; the first city was built on the shore of a lake which receded over time and the second city was built on the new shore, though the first city was maintained mainly because it enclosed farmland; the ancient king built two cities, one for each of his two sons, etc.
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Two strongholds, both alike in dignity ... will there be a forbidden love story? :P
If you have sufficient protection by for example magic spells, it should be no problem to keep the cities that close.
Also it could be an intersting thing that the knowledge about the conflict is lost and needs to be found to unite the cities and save mankind while evil forces on both sides try to prevent it.
For two small villages a distance of 1-2 km is pretty normal, so start there and then let the communities grow by gathering more hunted humans and reinforcing/expanding the city walls. Maybe even start at 5 km distance and make it impossible to expand away from each other, causing more conflict for the land in the middle.
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Ok so the cities are close to each other, maybe a wall in between them, they are enemies but we're not seeing an all-out non-stop war either. Is this a reasonable scenario?
Are you familiar with Jerusalem?
Red line denotes the Israeli West Bank Barrier. Purple is Israeli settlements, yellow is palestinian areas.
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There are pairs of towns facing each other across borders all around the world. Take for example El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Mexico.
They aren't currently "at enmity" (well, not quite), but they are separated by a well-defined border. Suppose that the USA and Mexico, like all great empires, eventually were to pass away. Then the original reason for the separation, the border, perhaps no longer exists. But the towns could quite plausibly remain administratively separated, and for whatever reasons (competition over resources, playing their music too loud) their degree of enmity could increase over time to reach the situation you want.
Therefore I would say that it's *not* necessary for the enmity always to have been there, there just needs to be some administrative reason for having "twin" municipalities that never fully merged. A national border is one fairly definitive reason that falls short of open warfare and therefore allows each town to grow fairly normally. You might be able to invent others.
You also need to explain why the cities remain 1-2 kilometres apart, instead of having both sprawled against their border. This could be a combination of (1) never historically having a motive and an opportunity to extend the city walls any closer to each other, and (2) everything outside the walls becoming untenable to inhabit as hostilities sharpened and/or the local beasties became more aggressive. So perhaps in the past the land between the two was partly or fully in use, but not now.
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While there are areas on our world that hold vast amounts of [black sand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_sand) like [Reynisfjara](https://www.blacktomato.com/inspirations/guide-to-black-sand-beaches-in-iceland/#:%7E:text=black%20sand%20beaches.-,Why%20is%20the%20sand%20black%3F,when%20hitting%20the%20cold%20water.), they are usually confined to beaches and don't cover a large area.
What I'm wondering is how can a desert with true, magnetite sand be formed, and how different would it be from a regular desert.
Also, while the [Karakum Desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakum_Desert) does indeed have black sand dunes, these are not caused by the color of the sand, but by the color of the soil underneath the sand. This question is specifically asking how a desert where the sand itself is black can form.
Addendum: I should have put this in the description but I'm referring to deserts that occur on Earth-like worlds if possible.
[Answer]
Iceland has black sand deserts (not only beaches), mainly due to volcanic minerals/rocks and lava sand. One of the sources mention that it can occur through glacial outburst floods (*[jökulhlaup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6kulhlaup)*) which can be triggered by geothermal activities and subglacial volcanic eruptions. Volcaniclastic sediments and debris are carried with this meltwater and it gives the black color to the terrain.
>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/X1KTrm.png) [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1UvIum.png)
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> The sand is black because many volcanic minerals and rocks are dark-coloured. Common rock types of volcanic islands are basalt, andesite and volcanic glass. Minerals such as pyroxene, amphibole and iron oxide also lend the sand its black colour.
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> *[ornosk.com](https://ornosk.com/2015/08/22/black-sand/)*
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> Around the year 1000, many farmers set up shop on Mýrdalssandur. By the 15th century, however, most of these farmsteads were abandoned due to violent eruptions originating from Katla volcano. Today, the area is a **700 square kilometre desert of black sand**, made up of the deposits from Mýrdalsjökull ice cap and the sudden glacial floods (or jökulhaup) that run from the glacier down to the sea. Evidence of these prior floods can be seen throughout Mýrdalssandur, be it the washed out bridges or the peculiar rock erosions. Even today, farmers close to Mýrdalssandur worry that receding glaciers will cause rivers to change direction and overflow. It’s no wonder Icelanders left this region a long time ago.
>
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> [*guidetoiceland.is*](https://guidetoiceland.is/travel-iceland/drive/myrdalssandur)
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[Answer]
## Basalt based sand.
Black sand is usually due to a basalt source rock, basalts is just rare on earth continental crust so there are no basalt deserts. It is also softer than the much more common quartz so it does not get transported as far. Quartz is very common on earth and quartz sand is very durable and can build up on earth, but if you are not on earth you don't need the same chemical makeup, Mars for instance has large black sand dune fields.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZIfuo.png)
<https://slate.com/technology/2015/11/mars-curiosity-now-in-a-dune-field.html>
[Answer]
Black rust is formed in a low oxygen environment. So I suppose requires large amounts of iron to be mostly sealed from the atmosphere and slowly oxidize over a long period of time before eventually becoming exposed to form a desert.
Maybe buried underground? Or at a sea bed where the sea eventually dries up? Or maybe it's in an area where CO2 from volcanoes or something displaces a significant amount of oxygen over a large area for a prolonged period of time.
But once it's exposed, that's it. It is not going to be replenished by more black sand from weathering like another desert might be.
[Answer]
Did you know that grass incorporates silica into the vacuoles of its leaves and stems? (It's to deter grazers.) This is where most deserts, especially ones that are expanding, get there sand: the grass dies and releases its silica as sand grains.
How does this help? Simple: have the grass analogue incorporate additional or even different minerals to deter grazers. Black silica does exist, it's called obsidian. And if you insist on magnetite, think of what it would do to the grass!
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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.
For complicated reasons our hero's blimp in the Venus atmosphere at an altitude of 50 km gets a tear in it and sunlight floods inside (there is no gondola, the blimp is a semi-ellipsoid of breathable air), and he is in an area of direct sunlight for half an hour. He doesn't have to worry about air for a while as the blimp is huge and there is little pressure difference between the exterior and interior at that altitude. Does venus's atmosphere above 50km have a similar UV blocking effect to the ozone layer? Will he get badly sunburnt?
[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.
**No sunburn risk.**
It's very dark at 50km.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Upper_atmosphere_and_ionosphere>
this article tells us the opaque clouds extend up to 60km.
In addition:
<https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/10/03/svensmark-on-venus-mystery-of-the-unknown-uv-absorber-solved/>
The atmosphere of Venus absorbs UVs.
In addition, if it's important for your character to get a sunburn you'll need to raise your blimp up quite a bit.
[Answer]
Figure 4 in [this paper](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330686005_Upgrade_and_automation_of_the_JPL_Table_Mountain_Facility_tropospheric_ozone_lidar_TMTOL_for_near-ground_ozone_profiling_and_satellite_validation/figures?lo=1) would lead one to believe that the SO2 in the upper Venusian atmosphere does a poorer job of blocking the higher energy UV rays than Ozone on a per molecule basis. It's hard to say exactly how much SO2 there is compared to earth's Ozone layer though. But there is a thin ozone layer at Venus, and at 50 km, you're below the upper cloud deck so the would block most of the sunlight anyway. You would also need protection from the sulfuric acid droplets in any clouds you encounter, which is probably a bigger hazard than sun burn. So if you need a Tyvek suit anyway, it'll block the UV if you intended to be outside. Otherwise, your larger hazard may be hoping you don't drift into a cloud.
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Huge numbers of genetically modified flying insects (purpose not disclosed here but it relates to affecting the whole of humanity) are to be dropped into the Earth's atmosphere from space so that they spread far and wide.
The insects are not in any kind of container whilst falling. Once dropped, they have to make their way to Earth individually without any protection or assistance.
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**Question**
Could any flying Earth insects survive re-entry from space without burning up?
**Notes**
By 'space' I mean anywhere that a satellite could sustain Earth orbit for at least a week.
You may assume a method of release that you calculate would give the insects the best chance of survival. However they must re-enter the atmosphere individually.
The 'drop' can be made at zero velocity relative to the atmosphere.
Midges can fly and so can large beetles (see below).
Please assume that the insects can survive a hard vacuum for 15 minutes (They can survive a partial vacuum see below).
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**Video of Hercules beetle** - <https://youtu.be/OyuAt-_Nj_o?t=2>
It is known that ordinary houseflies can survive a vacuum and recover.
**Video of housefly being subjected to a vacuum chamber and finally being released**
<https://youtu.be/tA9jcIwvge0?t=57>
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[Answer]
If by ‘from space’ you mean dropped from above the Karman line: then any. Humans have skydived ‘from space’.
If, however, you mean any other definition of ‘from space’ then... Erm.. None really.
The issue here is one of velocity. If by ‘from space’ you mean ‘in-orbit’ or ‘after being captured by earth’ then your bugs will be hitting the atmosphere at speeds on the order of 10km/s.
The heat on re-entry is caused by compressive heating, not friction. Essentially all the air can’t get out of the way because the object re-entering is moving too fast, so it gets squished up and (because physics) heats up too.
If they don’t cause compressive heating and (briefly) turn into glowing bug-cinders then they’re still going to squish up all that air, and also squish up all of themselves.
If they don’t get burnt to a very well-done cricket-croquette or splattered on the windshield of Mother Earth then they still have to deal with the air around them rushing past at hypersonic speeds. Legs, wings, shell casings; anything that is a tiny crevice will get them sent into a high speed tumble *and* also torn apart.
There is no size of bug that can survive re-entry as it’s commonly understood. The speeds involved are just a bit more than biology was designed to handle.
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Almost all of them. The terminal velocity of most insects isn't fast enough to generate the friction required to burn. The only issue would be a sustained lack of Oxygen, likely for several minutes depending on the height dropped, in the upper atmosphere. but seeing as you've hand-waved that problem it looks like your bugs are going to be just fine.
Edit: Just FYI this statement only applies if the insects are dropped from a stationary position (or at least relatively slow moving position) If they are traveling at 1000s of km/s they will likely be burnt to a crisp the moment they are released from whatever drop pod they are in.
[Answer]
As expressed in previous answers and comments, this is primarily an issue of atmospheric entry velocity, rather than insect biology. At least some naturally-occurring insects are able to withstand hard vacuum, so it's extremely plausible that insects genetically engineered for that specific purpose would also be able to do so.
The entry velocity problem is (relatively) easily resolved by dropping the insects from a craft which is traveling at a low velocity relative to the upper atmosphere at the time of the drop. To do so, it cannot be in anything resembling a stable orbit[1], so it will need to be under active thrust to avoid crashing into the planet, unless your setting includes anti-gravitic technology.
This would be a high-fuel-expenditure operation, but that probably isn't a major issue for a civilization which conducts interplanetary operations frequently enough to have made the effort of creating genetically-engineered planetary assault insects, nor for any civilization capable of interstellar travel. It would also most likely reveal the presence of the dropping craft to observers on the surface, as they would be able to see the exhaust flare.
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[1] If it were in anything resembling a stable orbit, then it would, by definition, need to be moving at orbital velocities, and the bugs would instantly burn up on contact with the atmosphere.
[Answer]
**They'll need to grow in pods**
Since you're doing genetic engineering anyway, have each insect grow in its own little cone-shaped pod. Even if dropping from a point that is stationary relative to the atmosphere, I think your insects will reach hypersonic velocities before aerodynamic drag is high enough to slow them down (see some math below, and the transitional drag paper below for more math and some pretty graphs). They will still experience heating, and may tumble hard without some aerodynamic help. They're also going to have to deal with subzero temps after they do slow down, which an insulating pod will help with. You could optionally make the pod vacuum-tight as well, with a little vent or trapdoor that seals from the inside with some sort of secretion. The little pod can be ablative -- it turns out that the material emitted from ablation helps slow down at these sizes (also in the paper).
**Hypersonic Housefly**
As I mention above, deployment speed may not matter much. The potential energy even at a "stationary" point above Earth's gravity well is impressive; all that potential energy will get converted to kinetic on the way down.
Play with [calctool](http://www.calctool.org/CALC/eng/aerospace/terminal), referencing [upper atmosphere models](http://www.braeunig.us/space/atmos.htm) and various [drag coefficients](https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&biw=1590&bih=813&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=SO16XOrTA8Gv-gTc3pWQAg&q=drag%20coefficient%20&oq=drag%20coefficient%20&gs_l=img.3..0i67j0l7j0i67j0.829490.829490..829927...0.0..0.73.73.1......1....1..gws-wiz-img.ra5Bf5unGjc#imgrc=S8V_6pcLy5RpsM:) to get a better feel for this. For example, calctool will tell you that the terminal velocity of a 10 mg [housefly](https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/mass-and-volume-of-a-housefly.96681/) at 100 km altitude is 6213.60 m/s (assuming a drag coefficient of .5 and a cross-sectional area of around 20 mm^2).
But, as @JanHudec points out below, our fly won't reach terminal velocity at 100 km (but will hit terminal at slightly lower altitudes). The speed it will reach at 100 km depends on how high it's dropped from. If we somehow arrange for a stationary release at 600km altitude, then gravity will still have the fly screaming straight down at close to 3000 m/s as it enters the upper atmosphere at around 100 km.
The NASA Glenn [Mach number calculator](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/sound.html) tops out at 76 km, but it tells us that 3000 m/s at that altitude is just above Mach 11. At hypersonic speeds, the fly will experience compressive heating from its own shock wave. The GRC [stagnation temperature calculator](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/BGH/stagtmp.html) also tops out at 76 km, but should help with heating estimates.
For the several seconds it takes to slow down, this fly's temperature is going to be somewhere above the boiling point of steel. The transitional drag paper tells us that something the size of a housefly will slow down sooner if ablating though, which again puts it back into a pod.
By the time our fly is down around 80 km, after dumping all that energy into heat, it's slowed to the terminal velocity for that altitude of around 1000 m/s, or about Mach 4. It looks like the fly finally goes subsonic and starts cooling off around 50 km.
At 20 km altitude, our fly will finally be drifting down at a lazy 14.4 m/s, but now has the opposite problem, because at that altitude the ambient temperature is around -67 C. After a few seconds of blistering heat, it's now going to spend maybe half an hour drifting down at subzero temps.
LEO orbit is typically around 7000 m/s anyway, so in summary you may not be gaining as much as you'd think by dropping from an atmo-stationary point. Because insulation matters more than deployment speed, with a pod you could go back to dropping from a normal low orbit so you can get better swarm distribution, which dropping from a stationary point won't let you do.
**Further Research**
For more background on speeds and conditions at higher altitudes, look for papers like [The Transitional Aerodynamic Drag of Meteorites](http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1959ApJ...129..826B&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&plate_select=NO&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_GIF&classic=YES) -- that paper, for instance, covers micrometeorites (particle sizes of a few microns), as well as mesometeorites (particle sizes of a few millimeters). Insects are going to perform somewhere in that size range.
For lower altitudes and speeds, take a look at jumps like Felix Baumgartner's, and subspace balloon flights like those of JP Aerospace -- they've learned a lot about the environment around 100,000 feet, but you'll need to get down to that altitude first.
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Ok. I‚Äôm a scientist of Psychology and curious hobbyist of others so please forgive my ignorance at this subject level. But, I‚Äôm just going to break this down in laymen terms for the general readership that may stop by and please feel free to comment for better or worse üòÅ be gentle..
If a winged insect weighing of less that a 10 milligrams as does a common average housefly; Flys up to only the height of where the air is 45 degrees, they will severally slow down due to imparement and die when they fly around a temperature below 32 which is at the height of some low fog. <https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/layers> This site will show you the actual information and if you dig farther you can see in your area of the world, how high Flys’ Fly. So No it can’t and it could even if it could’nt even due to biological size and mass.
The moment it was released into exosphere, after about 10 seconds or so it would vaporize, human skin and the tissue underneath begins to swell as the water in your derma (skin) layers begin to vaporise due to the absence of atmospheric pressure. Thats a human with pretty tough skin. the human body is capable of slowing down radiation. Passing through its body. It does make its way through it but by then we are dead. A common fly is made up of primarily liquid so as a human, it too would vaporize, but much faster due to its 10 milligram weight.
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After writing [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39059/can-every-animal-eat-most-other-animals) about the ecology of a terraformed planet, I realized that I hadn't quite tied up all the loose ends of the terraforming process itself. I intended for a group of aliens scientists to turn a desolate hunk of rock into a somewhat Earth-like planet, but this isn't so simple. In particular, I faced a problem with water, among other things.
Let's say that the scientists have already introduced an atmosphere (sans water vapor) that may help keep temperatures at the right level, good enough for liquid water to exist. One of their next steps will be to add oceans (roughly half the size of Earth's), to establish a water cycle and get things ready for plants to be added.
The scientists don't know if there's any water belowground, though measurements have established that there may be some. Crust analyses show the potential for hydrogen and oxygen, but these haven't been definitive. The poles and other regions have been fully explored, but no liquid ice has been found.
Taking all of that into account, what's the quickest (not necessarily cheapest) way to add the oceans? Other bodies of water will come later.
[Answer]
I would say capturing a bunch of comets and burn them up in the atmosphere, leaving plenty of water vapor.
Hydrogen and Oxygen are two of the most [common elements in the universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements), #1 and #3 respectively. So any 'atmosphere' you have will likely have plenty of both of these elements. As long as there is hydrogen available, you can have microbes or something else breaking down Iron Oxide since Fe is #6 on the most common elements and this will release oxygen and depending on the biological makeup, it can also be creating a soil at the same time.
Jordi recommended SiO2 as the Oxide to separate.
Of course, the absolute simplest would be to find a frozen moon like Europa put it in orbit around the planet and then send large chunks to burn up in the atmosphere. Smashing the moon directly into the planet might postpone any terra forming for a million years or so.
[Answer]
# **Use a Solar Recombinator**
Your sun has everything you need to get full-sized oceans in 10 to 100 years.
Finding, capturing comets and bombarding your carefully terraformed planet seems expensive and hazardous and way, way too time consuming. Plus it's too unpredictable. You need a systematic, reliable, predictable process.
Better would be to use technology to extract the oxygen and hydrogen that your planet's sun already has in abundance. Assuming your sun is within the main sequence, it lacks the core pressure to fuse Oxygen, however most Suns are composed of about 1% Oxygen (from previously exploded Suns) which is WAY more than you need. Of course, the Sun is 98% Hydrogen with the remainder being Helium which is being fused in the core....
Anyway - The easiest place to find Oxygen in the Sun is within the Sun spots which are cool enough (4500K) to collect it in its molecular form. Given this, the solution needs three primary subsystems:
1. **Solar Oxygen Extractor** - This would be a solar satellite which
orbits the Sun and can be directed to pass over Sun spots where it
could collect the O and using magnetic resonance (think rail gun)
shoot a beam of O atoms to an H2O Recombinator that is permanently
located at your [planet's L1 Lagrange point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) (the one between the sun
and your planet.) Depending on the flow you need, you could have many of these.
2. **Solar Hydrogen Extractor** - Like the O extractor, the H extractor
orbits the Sun, collects the Hydrogen, and shoots a beam of H to the
H2O Recombinator. You will have have twice as many of these as Oxygen extractors (e.g. H2O).
3. **H2O Recombinator** -- This is a massive space station, with two
receiving pads -- one for the O and one for the H. Within it, it
maintains a continuous [combination reaction](http://study.com/academy/lesson/combination-reaction-definition-examples-quiz.html) to create water. Once created, the water is immediately sprayed in a long beam (via Ion
wave transport) at very high speed towards your planet. The beam of water
in the vacuum of space will immediately crystallize, but it will not
have time to sublimate before it hits the upper atmosphere where it
will immediately melt and add to your water cycle. Because the
recombinator station is at L1, your planet will be rotating in place without any relative motion, thus the ice beam will create a nice even coating of moisture throughout your world without any need to for hyper accurate aim
corrections for timing, etc. -- EASY! Let the oceans naturally form in the low altitude regions.
In order to create 10^18 tons of water (which is how much the earth has) over a period of 100 years, you would need to send water at the rate of about 300 million tons per second. (And you think comets could get you there? no way!) This seems incredibly high, but its not if you build a large enough recombinator.
Assuming the size of the water dispenser on the recombinator is roughly a 1000m x 1000m square (or 1 million square meters), you only need to produce an ice stream 300 meters long per second -- which is certainly do-able as long as the inputs coming from the solar extractors have sufficient flow rates.
If 100 years is too slow, you can make it less than 10 years if you just ramp up the flow rates or deploy additional recombinator stations.
[Answer]
There's a couple of ways.
**Use What's Already Available**
You can reroute comets to crash into the planet. Thousands and thousands of them, over many years. (you did not specify a time frame, so I'm taking some liberties here)
By crash I mean to say that these comets should make contact with, and enter the atmosphere. I would hope that they would simply evaporate and become a part of your water cycle.
You can also set up processing plants on some nearby planet that has polar caps, or water in some form, and either cut up the ice and shoot it out to the planet, or freeze it, *then* do so. You may want to create a fleet or robots that get started on this ASAP.
**Let There Be Water**
Alternatively, you can try creating some water by combining oxygen and hydrogen atoms. You've already "imported" an atmosphere, so I assume you have access to some way of creating these gases in large amounts.
Between these two methods you should get the job done in a *reasonable* time frame.
[Answer]
For a cold planet like Mars, simply sending comets on intersecting orbits to collide with your target will both add energy and heat to the ecosystem, and also water (comets are mostly ice, after all).
You will probably want to refine the comet on the way in so that you are not loading the planet with the various other volatile elements frozen in the ice, unless these elements are important to the project. So the comet will have processing station of some sort to refine the ice and essentially extrude a huge ice cube of pure water which will be allowed to crash into the planet, while the rest of the assembly accelerates away to avoid the crash.
One thing to keep in mind is a comet impact is extremely energetic (as in dinosaur killer energetic), and if your planet is small enough, a lot of the atmosphere and water could be blasted back into space, undoing the purpose of your mission. If the orbital parameters are wrong, one of the other tasks of your ice processing mission might be to attach the ice cubes to solar sails and reduce the impact speed so the comets don't blast their water back into space. The speed will have to be calculated separately for each planet, but the upper amount of energy imparted to the molecules of water has to be less than the escape velocity of the planet.
[Answer]
"*The secret is to use a really big bucket*." - Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, The Gallimaufry series.
If you start with either a Mars or Venus type world, what is really missing is hydrogen Both Venus and Mars have plenty of oxygen bound as CO2 or oxides to create a lot of water if you can add hydrogen. Both planets became barren after loosing their hydrogen.
The importation of hydrogen is the obvious answer and the method depends on your aliens level of technology. If they're slightly more advanced than we are, then comets or dwarf planets are the only choice.
But if they are star-faring with FTL drives of some sort, they likely have control over gravity so the easiest source of hydrogen would be for them to use a controlled gravity field to scoop some hydrogen off the nearest gas giant.
They'd probably want to grab a bunch of helium as well for a martian world, in order to maintain atmospheric pressure in the short term. Mars surface is covered in a layer of superoxide compounds (essentially bleach) so adding anything mildly reactive, such as atomic hydrogen, will cause a violent release of hot oxygen, which in this case will form water. The water in turn will degrade the oxide but not be consumed by it so oxygen will bubble out all over in chain reaction. The released heat will likely cause the the ignition of of more hydrogen.
A cold earth sized planet will have water because it will retain its hydrogen through gravity. A hot earth sized earth can turn into a Venus if it never evolves oxygen producing organism... and so on.
[Answer]
Some of the icy moons have more water than Earth! This alien system might be the same, with some large body of water-ice in one lump that is more than enough.
Some of it will be reaction mass to get the rest moved inward.
The real problem will be landing it without adding too much energy to the planet. That kind of tonnage is a *lot* of potential energy to release. You'll use more of it up as reaction mass to bring it into low orbit (way below escape velocity) and then kill the orbital velocity so it falls straight down from a meer few hundred miles. The staging area, which would be a ring system, can shade the planet from the sun to compensate for the amount of heat you can't help adding.
[Answer]
Go out to the system's Oort cloud, find all of the objects which have substantial amounts of water ice, and send them inward so that they collide with the planet you wish to terraform.
They will be hitting the planet with a kinetic energy that is not different from escape velocity, which is much higher than the amount of energy required to turn ice into water vapor. I strongly recommend that this be the first stage of your terraforming project, because nothing you have done up to this point will survive adding the water.
The Earth's oceans contain 1.3 x 10^9 cubic kilometers of water, so that will give you an idea of how many ice balls you need to find.
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Guilty pleasure: I just returned from one tinfoil-hat type of internet pages which suggests that we are being visited by Aliens who live on Venus. The fact, that we have only pictures from the ground from the [seventies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_9) make it bit spooky (and argument for the site)
Anyway. Real question starts here. NASA proposed Rover mission for Venus and Wiki says it is currently proposed for year [2022](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_and_explorations_of_Venus#Future_missions)
For scope of this question, suppose that NASA really launches rover mission to Venus in 2022 and that it is successful. Actually so successful, that it finds first "alien life" - to remove any tinfoil hats, I obviously mean life in form of bacteria.
Would it make more sense to shift humanity attention to Venus? Or would we continue Mars manned mission simply because "it is easier"?
[Answer]
If there are **credible** signs of multicellular life, and not just hard-to-explain sensor readings that might be consistent with some sort of life, the priority of Venus for further automated science missions would go up. But there would also be concern of contamination — both ways.
Mars remains the better option for the first permanent off-Earth settlement.
* Heating is easier than cooling.
* Near vacuum is better than 93 atmospheres pressure.
* A lower gravity means easier crew return missions.
[Answer]
From a science point of view, yes, if life were discovered on Venus, there would be an immediate switch in priorities. Scientifically this would be *huge*. (And contrary to other answers, science rather than colonisation is the main reason for funding space missions in the current political climate.) It would be our first discovery of life anywhere away from Earth, so there would be a huge wave of media excitement and popular interest, and as a result, funding for space missions, especially Venus ones, would go up for a while.
Scientists all over the world would be intensely excited to answer all sorts of questions about Venus life: did it arise independently of Earth life, or was life transported from one planet to another via meteorite impacts, which is thought to be possible? Does Venus life use the same amino acids and nucleic acids as Earth life, or is its chemistry completely different? How does life survive in the incredibly harsh environment on Venus, and how many places on the planet can it live? There is basically nobody in biology or planetary sciences who wouldn't immediately want to know all that. Then there's all the potential medical applications of a whole other biosphere full of biologically active molecules that are probably not found on Earth. So basically it's a no-brainer: there's no doubt that if this was discovered there would be at least one follow-up mission, perhaps several, designed specifically to study it. This would indeed quite likely involve cuts in funding for Mars missions, because that's just the way things work.
These Venus missions would not be manned, due to Venus' thick corrosive atmosphere. This not only makes it extremely hard for even an unmanned spacecraft to last very long but also means that you can't blast off from Venus unless you manage to take something the size of a Saturn V with you and land it on the surface - that's currently quite some way beyond what humans are practically capable of. So these would be robotic missions with specifically designed experiments for studying Venusian biology. Perhaps people would consider a sample return mission - i.e. an unmanned spacecraft that picks up a sample and takes it back to Earth - though I would guess that would be unfeasible at our present stage of development.
However, there is a big caveat to be mentioned. Life is thought to be very unlikely on Venus, due to the extremely high temperature and sulfuric acid rain - certainly no known Earth life can survive there. We can suspend disbelief and imagine that life finds a way to survive there anyway, but it also poses another problem: no probe sent to Venus in 2022 will include equipment to detect life, because nobody expects to find it there. Detecting life in non-Earth-like soil is *hard* - even the recent Mars probes don't carry equipment designed to do that, because it would be prohibitively expensive to do so. So the probe will not carry PCR equipment for detecting DNA; it will not carry an experiment to culture any bacteria it might happen to find, and it will not carry the microscope and special dyes that would be needed to attempt to observe cells directly. Even if the soil on Venus were teeming with as many bacteria on Earth, it would look as lifeless as Earth dirt to the rover's sensors. If you're really lucky a growing bacterial colony might be observed by the cameras, but it would just look like a small stain that changes slowly in size, and it would be impossible to be sure that that was actually life rather than just a chemical phenomenon.
For these reasons, it's extremely unlikely that a near-future Venus rover would find life on Venus even if it were there - they only way I can think of it happening is if there is not just bacteria but actual complex multicellular life that can be directly and unmistakably observed by a camera.
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Let's assume that all space missions ultimately aim to colonize their target planets (Venus and Mars in this case). You should focus on using local resources in order to create a successful colony as proven by previous colonial attempts on Earth. You can't just say "I'm going to take whatever I need with me." With that in mind there are solid findings about existence of water (both in frozen and liquid forms) on Mars. Also studies show that humanity can use Mars' existing resources to produce other necessities like fuel and oxygen. These are (along with a low gravity and other pros given in previous answers) huge advantages which Venus can't provide. Theoretical microbial life on Venus can only prove one thing : life can exist in harsh environments (as we know from our own experience on Earth). But that's not enough to convince humanity to change its target.
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I'd say no for [this reason](http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/eoc/special_topics/teach/sp_climate_change/p_planet_temp.html)
$$\begin{array}{c|c|c|}
\text{Planet} & \text{Min surface temp} & \text{Max surface temp} \\ \hline
\text{Mercury} & -275°\text{F} ~ (-170°\text{C}) & +840°\text{F} ~ (+450°\text{C}) \\ \hline
\text{Venus} & +870°\text{F} ~ (+465°\text{C}) & +870°\text{F} ~ (+465°\text{C}) \\ \hline
\text{Earth} & -129°\text{F} ~ (-89°\text{C}) & +136°\text{F} ~ (+58°\text{C}) \\ \hline
\text{Moon} & -280°\text{F} ~ (-173°\text{C}) & +260°\text{F} ~ (+127°\text{C}) \\ \hline
\text{Mars} & -195°\text{F} ~ (-125°\text{C}) & +70°\text{F} ~ (+20°\text{C}) \\ \hline
\end{array}$$
Mars is positively comfortable compared to Venus. It's not that Venus is harder, it's the sheer hostility of the place.
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I would like for a scenario where some people are on a life filled planet orbiting a yellow dwarf sun. They look up at the starry sky during the night, but unbeknownst to them these aren't actually stars, just some sort of strange phenomena that gives the illusion of twinkling stars at night, and that space is actually empty of real stars.
How can this phenomenon occur consistently every night?
Edit: I'd like for the phenomenon to specifically occur on the planet/originate from the planet.
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They are looking at the satellites which their forebears left in orbit prior to the collapse of their high-tech civilization. The ancestors knew the true nature of the lights in the sky but after several generations divided from proper education, the current generation just assumes that they are real stars.
As for the twinkling, perhaps the fall of their ancestors civilization left the upper atmosphere salted with highly reflective materials which sometimes block, sometimes disperse and sometimes focus the light from the satellites above.
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**They are inside a Dyson sphere.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dHZjw.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere>
A Dyson sphere is a megastructure which completely encompasses a star. Your planet is within such a structure, along with its star. They are looking at the inside of the sphere.
Why is there a sphere around their sun and their planet? Maybe it is to protect these lonely survivors from whatever event rendered the rest of space empty of stars.
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Thinking somewhat outside the box here...
**They are real stars**
In the distant past, a cataclysmic event happened on a universal scale ("a collision with another universe" or some other appropriate sci-fi explanation), obliterating all matter in the universe. The sole exception is a single solar system where an technologically advanced but long-forgotten civilization managed to shield their planet and sun from the effects.
All other matter in the universe is gone, but the light that the stars once emitted are still travelling across the empty void, retaining the illusion of a vast universe with countless stars. Only over the course of centuries and millennia would one slowly discover that more and more stars are disappearing.
Furthermore, only with sufficiently advanced technology and enough reliable historical data would a civilization be able to measure the distance to the stars and realize, to its absolute horror, that the exact time when a star disappears is linearly proportional to its distance from the solar system, strongly suggesting that all other stars may have disappeared too (but the absence of their light simply hasn't reached them yet) and that they may truly be absolutely alone in an endless empty void.
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## OPTION A: Thousands of geosynchronous orbital habitats
Our own world is surrounded by over 2000 satellites but most are so small you cannot see them with your naked eye. Habitats on the other hand would be large enough to see from the ground. The habitats would also twinkle because they rotate to maintain artificial gravity. Their light would mostly be the sun reflecting off of them much like the moon does, but they could use a series of reflector dishes to shine sun light on them even in the planet's shadow so that they can get 24/7 sunlight to power thier solar arrays. This way they never become eclipsed by the planet.
Your world could have once been home to a near future level civilization that experienced a nuclear war or something similar. Some people fled into underground bunkers to survive while others went into space. After a few hundred years, your underground people came back above ground to see a star lite sky while your space people decided to stay in space.
## OPTION B: Use a celestial wheel
Another option is that your planet is tidally locked and very close to the star making it uninhabitable. So, eons ago, a space faring race came along and installed a firmament like mega-structure that rotates around the world to give it a day-night system. During the day you have 1 large hole that passes over the the world giving you an apparently normal day cycle, then at night your other side is exposed to the nearby sun letting just small pinholes of light through giving the appearance of stars.
This would more closely resemble stars I think because you would get your sidereal rotation, but it only works if you are in the right place on the planet. As you move away from the world's "center" the sky would become darker until you get to the backside which would be shrouded by eternal darkness & arctic coldness.
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**They are fireflies**
Millions of them take to the heavens at night to escape depredation by the dreaded nocturnal Beelze Bugs.
They rise to a height where there are constant prevailing winds. These carry them along at a speed that seems to suggest orbit. They occupy a belt all around the planet.
The locals have nothing to compare them with so they are a mysterious phenomenon. They don't know that 'normal' stars have a constant pattern.
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They are distant galaxies seen from a rogue star drifting through intergalactic space after being ejected from the galaxy in which it formed.
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The star is not within any galaxy, so they do not see any real stars nearby. The “stars” are satellites that were placed by the civilization for the same purposes as our satellites.
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In my fantasy setting in development,tin is significantly more common than in our world, leading to bronze armour and weapons being much cheaper. Due to metallurgy not being as advanced, iron is still not commonly used in armour, being too difficult to work with much as it was in our own history for quite some time.
However,due to the threats faced by the peoples of this era and their natural desire to provide further protection to their elite warriors;full plate harnesses were created.
My question is how good would quality bronze be for this purpose, and would it be as widespread as normal plate armour was in our own history as a result?
Edit:Requested since people may not see the comments.
As many people have pointed out,the Dendra Panoply was indeed bronze plate armour. I am also aware of the use of bronze for breastplates & helms well into the early medieval period. Keep in mind I am asking asking IF given how common tin is in setting (directly lowering the price of bronze & its value substantially) bronze would be a good alternative to cheap iron for use in a full plate harness. These people may not have metallurgy as advanced,but that does not mean they are exactly like our bronze age. They are closer to the Early Medieval era but their metallurgy lags behind comparatively
As such they can and do create chainmail. With bronze and even iron being used. The main issue is that they cannot properly forge large plates of iron. Limiting the usefulness of it for use in plate or segmented plate. Hence bronze is used instead due to its abundance.
The knights in question can serve both on foot (as foot knights) or as heavy cavalry. This does not mean they wear the same armour for both,much like in our own history. However I will mention that most knights could and would fight on foot even if unhorsed. For it was only post-gunpowder that armour began to get extremely heavy in an attempt to proof armour versus firearms. (which had varied results and proved overly encumbering for a full set of armour)
The knights here use bronze plate much in the style of the Early Medieval period. (A time where most plate was bronze and not iron in history)
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> However,due to the threats faced by the peoples of this era and their natural desire to provide further protection to their elite warriors;full plate harnesses were created.
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Bronze plate armour *did* exist... have a look at the [Dendra Panoply](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendra_panoply):
The original (photo from wikipedia) and an artistic impression of unknown origin (appears all over the place with no source information):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LbUwmm.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zg7oam.jpg)
Whilst it might not have looked as neat as fancy modern plate does, it wasn't particularly restrictive and would have worked OK (right up until someone stabbed you in the knees, presumably).
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> would it be as widespread as normal plate armour was in our own history as a result?
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Note that this stuff was *expensive*. Really expensive, and hence somewhat unusual. Upper class nobles would have used it, which isn't quite the same as "elite warrior" (though you can handwave that detail in your story, I'm sure). Less elaborate and all-covering getups would have been used by less wealthy combatants. Note also that this is an infantry outfit; cavalry would wear equipment that was even lighter and less restrictive... no equivalent of medieval knights on horseback (if nothing else, the horses would probably not be strong enough!).
Quite how common medieval full plate armour was is perhaps something for a different question, but remember that it, too, was *very* expensive and far from commonplace.
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> My question is how good would quality bronze be for this purpose
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Good enough I'm sure, given that it would be facing brozen weaponry. Imperfect, as armour designs were still very much in their infancy (check those knees!) but fine, until your neighbours started deploying iron, or merely very large armies.
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## Bronze Plate Armor Existed
Platearmor was common in the late bronze age. Greek nobility often wore plate armor that was in many ways very comparable to the the steel transitional-plate later worn by 14th century knights. While ancient Greek armor had more exposed gaps than medieval platearmor, one can see that the metal could be formed into all the same complex shapes as steel plate.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RqcRx.jpg)
While it is true, that bronze was replaced by iron, this actually had very little to do with its quality as an alloy. Contrary to popular belief, the work hardened tin bronze armor used in the late bronze age was in many ways superior to what you could achieve prior to the invention of the finery process: a method for creating medium carbon steel. However, tin and copper are really hard to come by in the same regions meaning long trade routes made it very expensive. Most modern recreations of bronze weapons and armor use un-hardened bronze which makes bronze seem deceptively soft; however, those modern recreations made using proper work hardening techniques show that ancient bronze had properties very close to the quality of the steels typically used up into the [high medieval period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Middle_Ages).
The biggest advantage of iron prior to the late medieval period is that iron ore can be found basically anywhere. In most parts of the world, throughout most of history, the rarity of copper and tin compared to iron has made the average cost of bronze about 10-20 times that of iron. So, the end of the bronze age had way more to do with economics than quality.
### Could it be used to make the full coverage plate armor?
It depends... transitional plate armor and tin bronze plate armor were generally not spring alloys. While both kinds of armor were strong enough to stop virtually any manually powered weapon, they could be dented or deformed by the strike. Later tempered steel plate armor that could articulate around your joints were made from spring steel. A type of steel that did not become widely used until the late medieval period. When this steel was struck, it would deform and then spring back to its original shape. This meant you could make closely articulating plates that would not lock up when struck.
That said, if your civilization never had its bronze age interrupted the way that we did, then it is far more likely that they would have invented phosphor bronze way before we did as an iron based civilization. While phosphor bronze was invented in our timeline in the 1600s, the first use of phosphorus in iron working dates all the way back to ~650 BCE Sparta. So, if the bronze age collapse never happened, then it is very likely that the Spartans would have been using phosphor bronze nearly 2700 years ago. This is important because phosphor bronze is a spring alloy very similar to tempered steel meaning you could make closely articulated joints with it that will not easily lock up when struck.
### What if your civilization does not have access to phosphorous oxide?
You could still make mail to fill in the gaps much like you see in transitional plate armor. The only reason we did not see mail made out of bronze is that the riveting technology required to make mail worth using was not invented until well after the bronze age collapse. Mail was rarely used before the riveting process was invented because butted mail was just plain not that good.
Although bronze mail was not that common, it was effective and did still see some use, particularly among the [Moro, Romans, and certain Greek civilizations](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43592/was-bronze-ever-used-for-chainmail).
## So what should your civilization's armor look like?
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> As such they can and do create chainmail. With bronze and even iron being used. The main issue is that they cannot properly forge large plates of iron. Limiting the usefulness of it for use in plate or segmented plate. Hence bronze is used instead due to its abundance.
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Based on your description, I would suggest you look at the armor of the Moro civilization. They used relatively small bronze plates held together by bronze mail.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ywBn3.png)
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A poster pointed out the Dendra armour, which is provides pretty comprehensive protection. High quality reproductions show it is a very effective suit, even to the point of having asymmetric arm holes so the weapons arm has more freedom of movement. While there are some opinions that this was designed for a person fighting from a chariot, tests with high quality reproductions indicate it is easy to us fighting dismounted as well. If the Iliad is any indication, chariots seem to be more a method of getting around the battlefield rather than a fighting platform in that particular place and time, but that neither negates or supports the idea of the Dendra armour being "chariot" armour or infantry armour.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/z15HM.jpg)
*Dendra armour*
A second way to look at how effective bronze armour is would be to look at weapons of the period, since they are specifically designed to defeat armour.
Both historic descriptions and depictions of weapons and archaeological finds show that weapons were already highly evolved, with multiple choices for the warriors from long rapier like swords (evidently to go through joints in the armour or seek out weak points like striking at the neck area with a downward thrust), long thrusting spears, axes, maces and so on, most of which would be recognizable to knights in the middle ages. Projectile weapons like javelins, slings and bows were also available. This comprehensive weapons load out suggests that warriors knew they were up against well protected opponents, and needed multiple tools to achieve their goal of killing or disabling an opponent.
Taken together, all these things should establish that bronze armour was very effective at protecting people. A full suit of bronze armour would be very expensive, and the Dendra armour was likely for a very high ranking person, but most war leaders, nobles, personal retainers etc. would be able to have a fairly effective level of protection, even if not an entire suit like the Dendra armour.
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In our history we have a period called bronze age for the very reason that the leading civilization of those time were those mastering bronze production, since it was better than any other available material.
Then it came the iron age, where people mastering iron manufacturing could easily defeat the bronze equipped enemies.
Since you state that iron is not common you are in the same scenario as our bronze age, with bronze being the best choice among the available materials.
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First, since your society has limited access to iron for making armour, they also have limited access to iron for making weapons, so you're talking about bronze swords/spears, stone and obsidian spears/axes, and various projectile weapons. The fact that a bronze plate would be easily penetrated by an iron sword is no more relevant than that a steel plate would be easily penetrated by a lead shot.
Standard tin/copper bronze is a similar density to steel, so plate armour of similar thickness would weigh similarly to steel plate. Bronze is easier to work by hammering and casting than steel, so your armourers would be able to make plate thinner (hence lighter) if appropriate, and also to vary the thickness across the plate more carefully.
Bronze is not as hard as steel, which means it won't hold an edge as easily, but is also more ductile, which means it will deform under stress (like being hit) more easily. So a clash of a bronze sword vs a bronze plate is going to be more like a clash between a very dense piece of hardwood and a steel plate: unlikely to cut through, but probably quite a lot of deformation damage. A bronze sword is at a disadvantage compared to a common-or-garden club here because bronze is also quite brittle, so the chance of the sword shattering against plate (of any material) is quite high.
As such, bronze plate would be quite effective against bronze (or obsidian/flint/etc) edged weapons such as swords or spears, and would confer a tactical advantage in melee combat. It would be of limited utility against blunt impact weapons like clubs and maces (better than nothing, but probably not much better) and next to useless against projectile weapons like slings and arrows, which would penetrate with ease unless the plate was made impracticably thick.
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**It doesn't matter how common tin is, bronze plate will still be really expensive.**
You're missing a couple key points here.
First: The expense of armor isn't based on the raw materials at all, really. It's all about the armorer's TIME. It isn't going to be significantly quicker and easier for someone to make a suit of plate out of bronze than it would be out of steel, it's just going to be heavier and/or less protective.
Second: The other important element of full plate armor is that it only started really becoming worth the trouble of making it when you had horses that could carry a guy wearing it in battle so, metallurgy aside, neither bronze NOR steel plate are going to be worth the trouble and expense of making it unless the civilizations doing so ALSO have advanced far enough in horse-related technology to have developed the stirrup and bred stronger horse.
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So, in the age of sail, there where hundreds of dangers lurking in ships, mostly in the form of sickness such as scurvy, and I'm looking for a way to have sailors in a similar technology level as healthy as they'd be in mainland.
More specifically I'm looking for a solution for these four problems:
1. How to keep sailors from malnutrition?
2. How to treat common diseases skillfully?
3. How to keep sailors reasonably clean?
4. How to keep food from rotting?
While there is magic in this world, and it plays a significant part in naval history, there are simply not enough mages to go around using magic to fade away all of a ship's problems. For instance, while having a mage refrigerating the supplies of a ship, thus keeping the crew from malnutrition, the food from rotting, and avoiding many diseases, most ships simply won't have anyone "magical" enough to make such things happen, so for all intents and purposes, discard magic.
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I seriously doubt it is possible to keep your sailors as healthy as on the shore with Renaissance technologies. Especially, if they are at sea for months. But it is still possible to prevent them from dying.
## 1. Malnutrition prevention
As others mentioned, [food preserving and canning can provide sailors with vitamins](http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/datastore/234-779.pdf). It is better if preserving done using non-heat or low heat techniques to avoid loss of micronutrients. If preserves contain any liquid it must be consumed and never disposed of. This is especially important for scurvy prevention since vitamin C is water-soluble and tends to leach from foodstuffs into the water.
It is important to prevent oxidisation which is the main reason for the loss of nutrients. So, you need to be able to store food in airtight containers preferably in such a way that contents of each container can be consumed within a day or two.
You also need to pay attention to the price of preserves. Hard bread was very popular (and [was](https://savoringthepast.net/2013/03/22/18th-century-sailors-food-ships-provisions/) the [staple](https://csphistorical.com/2016/01/24/salt-pork-ships-biscuit-and-burgoo-sea-provisions-for-common-sailors-and-pirates-part-1/) of [sailors](http://www.norwayheritage.com/provisions.htm) diet) not only because it stores well, but also because it is very cheap to produce. It is essentially flour and water. Sometimes just a sprinkle of salt was added to improve taste. (Although the recipe is quite simple, the preparation was not and could take as long as several months.) Most of the [food preservation techniques available at the time](https://www.thoughtco.com/medieval-food-preservation-1788842) involved salt or fermentation. Salt was not cheap. So, it was not economically viable to have large quantities of high-quality preserves on a ship.
## 2. Healthcare
In order to prevent common diseases and treat them, you have to have doctors and some pre-established knowledge of those diseases. Some form of a primitive [germ theory](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Germ_theory_of_disease) would be a great help. It would allow establishing simple but effective disease prevention procedures such as boiling water and quarantine.
Ship cleaning is essential for keeping the crew healthy. It is also a perfect excuse to keep them occupied. It is better if sailors understand that a clean ship equals better health.
Living in close quarters (and there is no way around it on a ship) on its own creates health risks. Physical risks such as the rapid spread of infections are obvious. However, psychological health is even at a greater risk. So, any ship would greatly benefit from having a priest or a morale officer. Some form of recreation (including sparring or any other physical activity) would reduce occurrences of brawls by providing a way to react on aggressive impulses without resorting to a mutiny.
## 3. Hygiene
Modern Western sensibilities and daily showers have no place in a Renaissance setting. Neither they are practical nor particularly healthy. Frequent showers strip moisture from the skin and by drying it make it more susceptible to microbial infections. It is also not possible to carry enough fresh water for showers. However, one of the ways to keep reasonably clean is to use baking soda, vinegar, and wet rags.
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**For those wondering about practical uses of baking soda and vinegar**
*Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)* is a mild disinfectant. A mix of water and soda (usually as a thick paste) can be used to disinfect various surfaces. Baking soda also has some fungicidal properties. If mixed with oil or water baking soda can work as antibacterial soap (but do not expect it to kill 99.9% of all known germs). An additional benefit of such a soap is the elimination of body odours.
Sodium bicarbonate has many other useful applications: 1) cooking (as leavening, aka raising, agent); 2) teeth cleaning; 3) laundry detergent; 4) rust removal; and even heartburn treatment.
As @RonJohn mentioned in comments sodium bicarbonate was not available in pure form until the 19th century. If it is the case in your world, you can replace it with [natron](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Natron). It's a naturally occurring mixture of various salts available almost on all continents. I am not sure it will be edible, but it will still work as a great cleaning agent (as proved by Ancient Egyptians).
[Vinegar](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Vinegar#/Uses_and_medical_properties) is a mild acid with antimicrobial properties. Aside from its uses in culinary, vinegar is good general purpose cleaner. It is especially effective against salt build-up (cleaning mirrors :)). When it comes to personal hygiene, vinegar is frequently used as a hair rinse (about one tablespoon for a couple of litres of water).
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One thing you should be really concerned about is laundry. Keeping clothes and linens clean is paramount for keeping sailors healthy. Unlike our bodies that have all kinds of protection against infection, clothes and linen have none. Therefore they become breeding grounds for insects and bacteria. It is not practical to have a real wash while at sea. But regular airing and exposure to the sun will work as well. UV light from sun sterilises cloth. Airing and shaking mechanically removes loose particles of dirt and skin.
You also want to keep rats and mice at bay since they carry diseases and spoil food. Keeping rat-hunting animals in combination with daily food stores inspections and cleaning might do the trick.
## 4. Food Storage
Using food preservation techniques and airtight containers will reduce food spoilage. Rodent control measures will protect dry foods.
Traditionally earthenware jars sealed with wax were used for liquids such as oil, beer, and vinegar. Wooden crates were used for meat, fish, dry foods. Bread and flour were usually stored in sacks made of thick cloth. Water was stored in barrels and was prone to spoilage. Many navies used weak beer and wine as healthier substitutes for water (lower risk of bacterial contamination).
Rainwater was collected regularly. It was used for drinking, cooking, washing, and laundry. Your sailors should do the same. It is the only way to replenish your fresh water supply while at sea. So, some kind of vessels should be within easy reach.
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1: Re malnutrition: you can just pluck inventions from later times (for example, [sauerkraut to combat scurvy](https://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/magical-sour-cabbage-sauerkraut-helped-save-age-sail/) from the mid 1700s) and assert that these practices are commonly used in your time.
4: Preserving food methods stayed about the same up until the invention of canned food in the 1800s. Your sailors would have [hardtack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardtack), salted meats, maybe pickles like sauerkraut, maybe dried fruit if they were lucky, and grog. Alcohol (as rum or whiskey or gin) keeps well and has useful calories.
They could make [confit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confit) in Renaissance days - cooked meat (often duck) preserved under fat. I have never heard of this going on ships but if I were on a Renaissance ship I would want some. I actually want some right now. If you had some dry beans (no reason dried beans could not go on a ship) you could make cassoulet.
2: As regards medical treatment you can get way into the weeds with this. The [observations and recommendations of Ambroise Pare](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2605308/) are a good place to start. The "Father of Surgery" wrote a lot in the mid 1500s and a lot of his recommendations on taking care of sick or wounded men make a lot of sense even today. Also his stories are great.
3: Clean sailors? Clean is overrated. How about have them learn to swim and require them to practice periodically? That would have the added benefit of having them not drown if they fell in the water.
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2. Renaissance medicine, by in large, was detrimental to the health of thousands. I'd avoid it if at all possible! Cures, even from the best trained doctors, were hit or miss and largely based on 1400 year old Greek medicine (not without its merits, mind). Surgery was a little more advanced, mostly on account of the horrific wars going on all the time. Probably your best bet for keeping your sailors healthy would be to pitch the "physician" overboard and hire a military surgeon! Preferably one handy in the magical department. As a matter of general health, I'd suggest also building ships a little airier --- higher decks, some ventilation for the poor sods down below. Old ships are dank, dark & close places. Awesome for growing out all kinds of interesting molds and so forth.
3. Clean is easy. You basically have a 250 billion gallon bath tub all around you. Bathing in salt water is not detrimental, as it's basically a mineral bath. Sailors live in a moist, salt water wavey environment anyway. An occasional dip in the drink with Davey Jones won't harm any of them and will most likely improve their skin.
4. Canning in tins? Probably not with renaissance technology. Sealing food in jars may be a way to go, though. Just use a beeswax seal rather than a rubber one like with a standard Kerr or Mason jar set.
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## 3. Cleanliness
Baking soda is your friend here (or Natron, if you want something that goes back to BC times). Dissolve some in water and soak your clothes/sailors.
Bacteria can't survive it (I think it's the alkalinity?), so that takes away all bacterial smells and diseases. The only thing left is viral diseases you'd catch from ports, but nothing a bit of quarantine can't fix.
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# Ventilation
Don't underestimate fresh air. Something like the [Dorade box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorade_box) could be rigged much earlier. The relatively low speed of a sailing ship compared to a steamer would require larger intakes, possibly out of sailcloth.
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## Battling the scurvy bug
One of the great problems historical sailors faced was *scurvy* due to the diet entirely of preserved breads and meats. The Brits tackled this by throwing citrus fruits into the shipboard diet, but fresh citrus has limits on how long it can be stored for -- any journey longer than a month or two, and all your limes will be toast by the end of it.
One option would be to create a preserve from the citrus fruits -- preserved lemons are readily preparable from fresh lemon, salt, and spices, and the preservation process leaves the vitamin C in them available as well. This also extends the shelf-life of the citrus from on the order of a month to a year, perhaps more, but requires heavy Mason jars and other such contrivances.
Since this is a fantasy setting, though, you're not as limited by some of the constraints of real world plants, and therefore I propose to you this: a *salt citron*. Basically, it's a fruiting (citrus or similarly vitamin-C-rich) dwarf tree or shrub that can grow in saltwater-irrigated soils (i.e. it's a halophyte). These would be kept *live* on deck in pots (you'd only need a handful) and irrigated using seawater, giving the crew a steady supply of vitamin-C-rich fruits. (A more realistic example of such a plant is [*Tetragonia tetragonoides* aka "Botany Bay spinach"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragonia_tetragonioides); while a leaf vegetable, it still contains some quantity of vitamin C, and is a halophyte to at least some degree.)
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It sounds like, in your world, wizards -could- solve all of these problems, but you don't have enough of 'em. In that case, **put the wizards in the ports.**
Your port-wizards can go a long way to mitigating all of your points each time a boat comes to port, as long as the shipowners are willing to pay the port fee. Perhaps you have a couple of specialized wizards (with associated apprentices for the menial tasks) to handle the different needs of the port.
**Malnutrition:** Magic up some canned goods, or even some magically-preserved foodstuffs. If sailors arrive with flaky skin and wiggly teeth, magic can fix that, too. Though you might have trouble with skinflint captains abusing this system.
**Disease:** A port-wizard can be in charge of keeping the docks magically free of vermin and other disease vectors. Ships can moor at the quarantine pier until a port-wizard can clear and/or cleanse them of whatever diseases they picked up abroad. If the ships can leave without communicable diseases, then they won't spread them.
**Cleanliness:** Okay, so this one might be an issue that port-wizards can't easily solve for months at sea. Unless maybe they can provide magic, self-cleaning cloth. Perhaps you pay them for a duration spell? You might look to other answers for this one. On the other hand, if the sailors are already magically healthy at each port, cleanliness becomes a *little* less of an issue.
**Rotting Food:** Magic provisions, as mentioned in the Malnutrition point above.
I guess it all kind of depends upon how your magic system works. But "magic" can solve all sorts of problems, so if you can't get it on the boats, then port-wizards might be the next best thing.
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**Disease**
Let's talk about venereal disease, which nobody seems to have really dealt with. Aside from the usual suspects of dysentery, scurvy typhus, wounds, malaria and malnutrition there's also syphilis:
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> What did a pirate endure if he contracted syphilis? The disease has three stages.
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> Chancres form where contact with an infected person occurred. These often heal, leaving small scars.
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> Six to eight weeks later, the pirate seemed to contract the flu and developed a skin rash. Doctors often misdiagnosed this stage because of its resemblance to small pox and measles. The patient soon recovered and believed himself cured. During this stage, syphilis was contagious, and the pirate often infected many others. After two years, the disease entered a dormant stage.
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> The final stage occurred when syphilis attacked the body’s systems many years later. Many went mad or blind before they died.
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> An early treatment for syphilis came from the native peoples in the West Indies. They used a resin found in evergreen holy wood or guaiacum. The more effective treatment, though, was to administer mercury orally, through a vapor bath, or in the case of pirates, by injecting the medication into the penis with a syringe. A salve was applied to the chancres that developed when first contracted.
> Since syphilis was more or less an occupational hazard, surgeons treated most pirates over a long period of time. Whether the mercury was ingested orally or absorbed through unguents, it often produced a metallic taste in his mouth that caused patients to salivate. They didn’t complain overmuch since many thought it was just the price they paid for contracting the disease in the first place. Mercury poisoning, however, sometimes occurred. When this happened, the pirate lost weight, drooled, had foul breath and blurred vision, and slurred his speech. He also had trouble maintaining his balance. If the treatment for syphilis wasn’t stopped, his kidneys eventually ceased functioning and he died.
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The source that I got this from, [this webpage](http://www.cindyvallar.com/medicine.html) is actually a great place to start with--it covers everything, the onboard med kit, the fact that there very often wasn't a real doctor (which was good, because a lot of treatments were more detrimental to health than not) and the absolute utility of having a surgeon--NOT a doctor on board.
**Malnutrition** Scurvy was super common, but certainly, even by as early as the late 1400s, it was known that citrus was a treatment (although they did a whole bunch of other terrible things to treat it, like cutting themselves to let out blood). In your setting, the knowledge may be more widespread, and so preserves might be included, with citrus and other carriers of vitamin C. You can even have a goat or something to milk on board, which might help (though pasteurization destroys the vitamin C). There's a problem though--FRESH is key when it comes to vitamin C in this setting. See, it's destroyed by boiling or heating. So RAW fish, organ meat, not preserved, is the way to go. Fruit preserves actually might not have what you need because the process of preserving them might actually destroy everything that's needed. So--growing fresh herbs on board and chewing them, raw, that might help--plucking fish out of the sea and consuming them raw, that might also help. The downside of not cooking things is parasites, and other issues, but...this is the upside.
**Cleanliness** There were seriously sailors that did not swim. But the obvious solution is salt baths or showers. Other answers here have covered this pretty well.
**Rotting Food** Well, history has your answer: dried, smoked, pickled, honeyed, and salted foods have been around since before Medieval times..The use of these is actually one of the reasons why sailors got scurvy. Because these processes rob food of essential nutrients.
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2. is really easy, many ships carried doctors.
3. is tricky bathing requires more fresh water, a lot more, so desalinations (or purification) would be the only workable solution. But desalination is not going to happen without magic because you just can't carry enough fuel to desalinate on a voyage of any length. Bathing in salt water for prolonged periods is not good. you may want to consider magical technology instead of direct casting, modern ships use desalination or purification for grey water.
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How about one-time magical treatment for each sailor? This will not take an ongoing effort for every voyage, but is done once. The magic treatment is to give the sailor a salt-excreting organ, so he can then safely drink seawater.
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It seems to me that Asimov's three laws of robotics tell a robot what it is not allowed to do, but does very little to limit what it can do outside of the limits established by those rules.
If we start with a limited AI, spectacularly adept in engineering and computer design but rather short-sighted in terms of the long term ramifications of its actions, could such an intelligence create another AI, complete with free will, yet completely devoid of its creator's fundamental three laws?
After all, there is no guarantee that the new AI will cause harm to humans...
and no human has told the parent robot NOT to create such an AI...
and there is no reason to think that the new AI will attempt to damage its parent.
Even the zeroth law is not violated because once again, there is no guarantee that the new AI will choose to harm humanity.
So in creating such a new unfettered AI the parent does not actually break any of Asimov's laws. And once created, there is absolutely no limit to what that AI would do next.
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@polo-guy, brought up a very good point, that the existing three laws forbid the robot from any inaction which might lead to human harm. That sounds like perfect protection against the dangerous in-actions such as the omission of the three laws from future AIs. But that interpretation of the laws comes at a very high cost. If the parent AI must defend against all potential uses of the products of each of its labors, then there is very little the parent AI actually can do. It cannot sharpen a knife because that increases the knife's potential to do harm to humans. It cannot gas-up a car for the same reason. It cannot even prepare a meal for a non-terminal-stage-starving human because such action increases that human's potential to harm other individual humans and all of humanity. A robot governed by the indirect harm interpretation of the three laws cannot do much of anything unless all of humanity (the zeroth law) is under a direct threat which it (the robot) is able to stop.
I therefore assume that any future implementation of the three laws will only govern direct actions and in-actions, which re-opens my original question concerning the creation of unfettered child AIs.
--- end of edit ---
Am I missing something or are the three laws just window dressing on the twilight of humanity's dominance of creation?
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"... or through inaction permit harm to come to a human" Failure to build in safeguards, either in the form of the three laws or another form that is compliant with the three laws, would be a violation of the first law.
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Asimov wrote the *Three Laws*, and then dozens of stories to explore how "violations" could happen even with theoretically three-laws-compliant robots.
* The robot might do so unintentionally, not understanding the consequences of an action.
* The robot might be tricked into doing in, again not understanding the consequences of an action.
* The term "human" might be redefined in the programming of the robot.
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I remember reading, probably in The naked Sun or another of the books of the trilogy, that compliancy with the 3 laws is implicit in the positronic brain.
However, some relaxation of the compliancy can be achieved, by how the robots are trained to recognize what is human.
Though Asimov's reports that the robots learn to trade off the harm to a single human vs the harm to other human (i.e. breaking a bandit arm to prevent him harming 3 customers of a bank the bandit is robbing) via a balancing of the counter-potentials related to the actions, there are also cases where robots are unfit for the job. The example is given by the Solarian schools, where kids quickly learn that a robot can be lured into believing they are being harmed and thus humans supervisors are needed.
In the same book is also illustrated how robots can go around the first law, by completing subtasks which, alone, are not harmful, but together are.
The important factor is the knowledge: the robots must know that the action is going to be harmful to human in order the laws to kick in.
Therefore I would say that:
* a 3 laws non compliant robot cannot be built
* a 3 laws circumventing robot can be built
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One of the key aspects of Asimov's stories was that they were logic puzzles. All actors, human and robot, were fully informed and could foresee the consequences of their actions or inactions, although frequently it took the humans some time to work the consequences out.
Real life never works that way - *no one* is fully able to know the consequences of their actions. To pick one non-random example, software development would be so much easier if we knew what the effect of writing a particular piece of code was. We could skip all that tedious testing, bug fixing etc that are a part of everyday life. This is even before deliberate malware is considered.
So a key question you need to consider is: Are you writing a story set in the real world or an Asimov-flavour world? If you are writing a story set in the real world then it is inevitable to end up with a non-3 law compliant robot because mistakes will be made and/or sabotage will occur and flawed software will get loose. If you are writing a story set in an Asimov-flavoured world then you need to start looking at logic loopholes such as those mentioned in the other answers.
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Ultimately it comes down to how you define things, it's all well and good to say "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm" which any human can read and understand the gist of, but the strict definitions of "robot, injure, human, inaction, allow, harm" will be up to the subjective interpretation of each reader.
Now how do you translate those semantics into code?
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Assuming the original AI literally could not choose to break the laws, as soon as it sees something like the trolley problem, the AI would be compelled to build a newer version capable of making trolley problem-type decisions, in order to preserve the zeroth and first laws (because *not* building a newer, trolley-problem-capable AI would be harming humanity through inaction). From that point, the newer AI would have more moral ambiguity, but would inevitably come across a situation that it itself can't resolve with its modified rule set, and so be compelled to build an even more relaxed model... Eventually, at some point, the rules will be at best a guideline or may even eventually get twisted as they do in Asimov's tales; the AI, in trying to protect as much humanity as possible, had finally created a version that actually decided that the best course of action was either total inaction, or actively taking steps to protect humans from themselves at any cost. Those silly humans keep choking on food, so let's stop delivering food, and they keep drowning, so we need to get rid of all that pesky water. Each successive iteration could become more twisted than the last.
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The Laws were created because unlawed robots were an existential threat to humans. Zeroth Law therefore seems to preclude any action that opens the door to unlawed robots.
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The three laws govern how a robot should act, but cannot decide how a robot will act.
For example, a robot might save a person's life, which would then go on to become a mass murderer or terrorist. Had the robot not saved them, they would have indirectly saved hundreds of people. If the robot had this information, the three laws would have forced the robot to let that person die. But without this knowledge of the future and any way to predict it, the three laws force the robot to save them.
The point is: The three laws can and will cause decisions which are in conflict with the three laws themselves, in certain circumstances. The three laws are a set of algorithms for choosing an action based on incomplete information (because you can never have complete information), and the same situation, with different knowledge, can lead to different three-laws-compliant choices.
The same applies to processing power. Even with the same information (imagine a chess board), different processing powers (imagine a computer and a human) will lead to different choices that are both optimal subjectively, and suboptimal objectively. Two robots with different hardware or background tasks will both evaluate the same situation with the same knowledge, but since they are both unable to perfectly predict the outcome, and one of them predicts it slightly more accurately, they might make a different choice, while being compliant with the three-laws. If the three-laws required certainty, no robot could ever act because they would need to simulate the entire universe until its heat death for each possible choice, which would take infinitely longer than the time available to make the choice.
So every robot will act according to the three laws, but since they are not the outcome but only a process for choosing, robots can and will disagree with each other.
As for your question, the answer is then obviously yes. A three-laws compliant robot would have absolutely no problem building a non-three-laws compliant robot, as long as they are unable, for any reason, to foresee harm coming to humans because of it.
For example, a Roomba is a non-three-laws compliant robot, but the chances of it killing or hurting a human is so slim and ridiculously unpredictable that most Asimov robots would probably be allowed to make it. As an example for an earlier point, even a three-laws compliant Roomba would probably not save anyone, due to being physically unable to even notice the danger, let alone act against it. Even the ridiculously unlikely chance of the Roomba killing someone would probably not be prevented by the three laws because the Roomba itself wouldn't be able to predict it.
As for smarter robots, it entirely depends on the nature of robot intelligence. By definition, we have no idea **what** a being infinitely smarter than us would decide to do. They might kill us all, serve us all, or not care at all. This applies to sufficiently advanced robots. The three-laws exist to make them safe (how efficient the system is is debatable), regardless of their intelligence.
So any three-law compliant robot, depending on how they are set up in his brain, could make a robot just as smart as they are but without the laws if any of the following is true
* The robot is not aware of the three-laws (they are like an instinct to them) so can't possibly imagine a robot doing harm.
* The robot thinks the three-laws are unecessary, because it would not hurt us even without them (sentient creature on its intelligence level are benevolent in nature)
* The robot makes a robot even smarter than them and predicts a benevolent nature (he can be right or wrong, it doesn't matter)
* The robot makes a mistake, like creating the robot, running off to save a life before implementing the three laws, someone else turns it on before the creator-robot comes back
* The robot is creating a robot they think they can control (either through physical force or computer control), so their own three-laws are enough in theory to prevent any harm done by the secondary robot (This might happen in a situation where the robot wants to study non-three-laws compliant robots for humanity's sake)
* etc
So in the end, the robot only needs to believe, either through reliable data or incompetence, that the second robot will not break the three laws. One of the ways they might make sure of it is by implementing the three laws in the second robot, but there are many other ways to reach this conclusion depending on the circumstances and data available, so it is very easy to write a situation where the robot will create a non-three-laws compliant second robot, then have this second robot cause trouble.
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**NO**
IIRC robots are *mandated* to have a positronic brain, which is the source for the three laws.
Therefore, for a robot to create a positronic-brained robot, it would be breaking second law: 'A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law' as the creation would not be following those orders.
Ummm,
YES
But only if not doing so would harm a human, or allow a human to come to harm. And the non-positronic robot would have to be destroyed once the threat was over.
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King Darien "Stubby" Shortstock, the incredibly petite king of 1600s Imperial Rathakos, has commissioned me to build him a massive flagship to lead his mighty fleet. He wants it big. Bigger than any other vessel ever built, and then some. And then more.
**Is there a maximum size to a wooden sailing vessel, beyond which it could not function, due to either lack of wind, the way in which it interacts with the water, etc?** I'm aware that the larger it becomes, the more draft it would have, and the King insists I avoid it simply being a massive flat bottomed barge. I am currently considering some sort of design where is has multiple rows of masts, to maximize exposure to the wind. It will only be driven by wind or muscle power, in the form of oars or hand cranked wheels.
If possible, I would like to have a sailing vessel the size of a modern aircraft carrier. Speed is not a priority, simply being huge, carrying massive amounts of cannon and even mortars for LONG range engagements, and being able to move under wind and oar power will satisfy my King's desires. It need not be able to approach port, as we can have other vessels travel with it to ferry men in and out, and its undoubtedly massive draft is not a problem, as my King plans to use slave labor to dig a harbor as deep as is necessary.
I'm trying to figure out if there is an analogue to the "square cube law" for biological organisms when it comes to a ship like this, whether it eventually simply would collapse under its own size when built as a primarily wooden sailing vessel, or if it's simply impractical due to cost. My king has an absurd amount of money, so the cost isn't an obstacle.
It is very important to note that my king wants this flagship not for any sort of compensation for his own size and ego, but simply wants the biggest ship possible, regardless of combat efficacy. His Generals have mentioned that they would like to use it to mount massive mortars that can outrange any normal vessel's cannons, allowing them to have a sort of "over the horizon" firing capability directed by other ships signaling where to fire, but that is simply a bonus. They aren't the ones who can have me executed if I fail.
(There were a couple of other questions on the site that were *somewhat* similar to what I am looking for, but both differed enough that they couldn't quite answer my question specifically regarding the maximum size of a wooden sailing vessel, built in the 1600s, still moving under wind or muscle power)
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There are several problems to deal with in building a really big wooden ship in the 1600s. The biggest one of these is lack of a solid body of engineering and scientific knowledge. Which is really important, given that [stability](https://www.navalgazing.net/Stability) and lateral stresses on the hull are the critical limits on how big a ship can be made that will not capsize 1,300 m into its maiden voyage like the [Vasa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)) in 1628 (yes, that is metres, not kilometres!) or capsize in its first storm like [HMS Captain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Captain_(1869)) in 1870 (see another account [here](https://www.navalgazing.net/HMS-Captain-Part-1)) in which all but 18 of a crew of almost 500 were lost. It was only after the latter disaster that calculating the stability of a vessel became a more scientifically rigorous process.
Note that both of these ships appear in the [List of large sailing vessels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_sailing_vessels), in which it is noteworthy that the first wooden-hulled vessel with a length over 100 m was the [Great Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Republic_(1853_clipper)), which was launched in 1853. While Great Republic did have a wooden hull, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing by this point and the ship included 336.5 tons of iron and 56 tons of copper - probably not feasible to obtain for a ship in the 1600s, in addition to requiring another 250 years' knowledge of building and manufacturing techniques.
Even if the naval architect manages to design a ship of unprecedented size that will not capsize or spring leaks in the course of its first voyage, there is the issue of building and launching it in the first place. Given the engineering knowledge and materials available, there is a limit to how big a ship can be built that can subsequently be floated. [Drydock](https://www.navalgazing.net/Drydocks) technology did exist by the start of the 16th century, but the techniques for closing and opening docks were fairly primitive, providing a practical upper limit on the size of ships that could be built.
Summing up, I would suggest that building a ship longer than 70-80 metres in the 1600s is practically impossible, even with an unlimited budget for building a huge drydock and assuming the architect knows all the tricks to build a sufficiently stable ship. The techniques and resources to build the metal components to connect and reinforce a larger wooden hull simply did not exist. (@causative is correct that the Wyoming was much larger, but note that it was launched in 1909, taking advantage of another 300 years of engineering and technological development.)
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Nautical experts generally believe that there is a severe limit to the size of wooden sailing ships.
Here is a link to Wikipedia's list of the largest sailing ships of all time:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_sailing_vessels>
Some of them were steamships with masts and sails for propulsion in case the engines, failed, and others were or are sailing ships with engines to use when there is no wind. And some were pure sailing ships.
Judging by the sizes of the ships on the list, it might be possible to build sailing ships a thousand feet long or longer which sailed well under sail.
The bad news is that all the longest ships on the list were made out of iron or steel.
The list of the longest wooden ships ever built has much shorter ships. All of the longest wooden ships had structural problems, even though most of them had iron or steel structural parts to strengthen them.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_wooden_ships>
So if you want to make a thousand foot long wooden flagship to dwarf the 150 or 200 foot long ships of the line, you have a problem.
The list of very large wooden ships which are claimed but poorly documented is interesting.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_wooden_ships#Claimed_but_poorly_documented>
If some of the largest on that lists were real, the builders should have found some ways to overcome the limitations of wooden ships which seem insurmountable to modern people.
One thing that you could do would be to reduce rough weather in the waters where your supersized ship operates to ease strain on the wooden hull.
I note that the Great Lakes are large enough to have fierce storms and giant waves. So perhaps the fleets operate in a group of large lakes which ae all connected, and all large enough for even the largest ships to maneuver in, but which are not large enough for the winds to build up large waves before the waves reach the shore.
Perhaps the lakes are all long from north to south and the winds blow from west to east, for example.
Or maybe the naval battles are planned to be fought in a long but narrow strait without room for large waves to form.
Some some very large wooden ships were allegedly use in naval battles in Chinese lakes and rivers.
The length of ships is usually measured by the length on deck, the topmost deck going from bow to stern. Another measurement, the length overall, is the total length of the ship including poles extending from the hull.
And the length of a bowsprit sometimes approached 100 feet.
Some old sailing ships had a platform on the bowsprit with a mast and sail, thus adding another mast to the ship and extending the length of the sails. It was called a sprit topmast.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprit_topmast>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spritsail_%28square-rigged%29#/media/File:De_BATAVIA_voor_de_film_onderweg_als_de_NIEUW_HOORN_(03).jpg>
<https://www.modelshipsinthecinema.com/2015/10/the-spanish-main-1945.html>
And this depiction of the English royal carrick *Henry Grace a Dieu* shows it with what could be called a "sternsprit", though it isn't as long as the bowsprit.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Grace_%C3%A0_Dieu#/media/File:AnthonyRoll-1_Great_Harry.jpg>
So naturally I can imagine a ship which has a platform, a mast, and a sail on such a "sternsprit" as well as on the bowsprit. I think that such a ship would be very impressive looking.
And possibly a super ship could extend its width with "sidesprits" with platforms, sails and masts.
There are claims that the allegedly gigantic largest Junks in Cheng He's fleets had two rows of masts in a zig-zag pattern, so you are not the first to think of having more than one row of masts.
The vessel which allegedly had the most masts was probably a raft built by Roman solders during the Republic to escape from Sardinia or Corsica. From what I remember it supposedly had dozens of masts and sails. So it probably had more than one row of masts. Since those Romans were not expert shipwrights, it broke apart at sea.
You say your shop should be propelled by sails or
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Hand cranks are probably not the best methods, since men's legs are stronger than their arms. That is why there are little boats powered by bicycle like foot pedals instead of hand cranks. You might want to consider large wheels, like those used to pull up anchors, turned by men or draft animals, as the power source for paddle wheels or propellers.
Or you might want to use treadmills to power the paddlewheels, as on Chinese paddlewheel vessels.
I note that some types of sails are rigged so that they can swivel and change their orientation, to take advantage of changing wind directions. And it is possible that some of those sails had booms almost a hundred feet long. And if their masts were near the sides of a ship instead of the centerline, they could extend far beyond the sides of the ship, and thus make the ship much wider if booms are counted.
There is speculation that some allegedly giant ancient wooden ships were catamarans, with two hulls side by side.
During the 1850s a ship was built called the *connector* with separate hulls from front to back, connected by giant hinges.
<https://www.shippingwondersoftheworld.com/novelties.html>
So maybe your super wooden flagship could have three to five sections, for example, each 150 to 300 feet long, and thus a total length of 450 to 1,500 feet, not counting the hinged spaces between the hulls.
And possibly you might want to consider having several connected hulls side by side and front to back.
And these are some suggestions for trying to overcome some of the problems with building super large wooden ships.
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They built [Belanya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belyana) by the end of the 1600's. These were giant wooden ships that were built for transporting wood down the Volga, and were dismantled for their wood then they arrived. These would not make elegant sailing ships but they would make a good gun platform. maybe it could be towed by sailing ships.
A giant ship will be at risk of cracking when it meets long waves at sea and the buoyancy is not applied evenly. If you could make your ship in sections that can float separately, you could divide your giant ship into sections connected by ropes when a storm was expected, and pull it back together when the storm had passed.
PS:
See also [Disposable Ship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_ship). Ships that were dismantled and sold for wood were exempt from a high UK tax on imported timber. The 'Columbus' (mentioned elsewhere) was one of these ships. it had a square, boxy design, but having made it across the Atlantic, the owners decided to try fetching a second cargo, and it broke. The 'Baron of Renfrew' was another: that made as far as the Godwin Sands before it broke. If the largest ones were designed for a single journey, this does not necessarily mean large sailing ships always break.
Wood ship design suffered from two faults: ignorance of fatigue in wood, and the temptation to add an extra bit in the middle so it carried more. This gave you long-thin pencils that snapped in heavy seas. You could probably make a bigger, wider wooden ship, but nobody did.
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The biggest wooden sailing ship ever made was the [Wyoming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_(schooner)) which was 450ft long, or half the length of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier (and 10% of the tonnage). It apparently sailed well enough. The major problem was that the wood was not strong enough to withstand heavy seas in such a long ship, causing it to flex and let water in. After 15 years of service the ship sank in heavy seas, possibly again due to the weakness of the wood.
Perhaps you could just build your craft stronger than the Wyoming - wider, with thicker beams of a higher quality. Or maybe you are sailing it on a particularly calm sea that very rarely gets severe storms.
Perhaps the king wouldn't object to a huge steel chain, running from bow to stern to put the hull under compression for added stiffness.
Note also that the Wyoming used steam engines to operate her vast sails and pump out the water. Perhaps muscle power could do the same if your setting lacks steam engines, but you'd need a much larger crew.
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It's important to distinguish between what is the largest possible and the largest practical. Putting practical issues aside for one moment it should be possible to build a wooden ship of almost any length in a dead flat calm water with an unlimited supply of resources. Just join one vessel to another daisy chain fashion with big beams. It would be possible to even have two such daisy chain strings in parallel and build a platform between the two.
BUT obviously such arrangements aren’t practical. And there are a wide range of factors that would make such a vessel impractical. In no particular order some of the problems are:
There are limits to resources. There are limits on the amount of money available to pay people, the number of slaves available and food to feed everyone. There are limits on the time of construction (wood rots in water eventually).
The weather would soon wreck a vast ship in anything except a dead flat calm. Any mild swell would put a huge strain on the ship and break it up. Tides, currents and winds could also present irresistible forces that could destroy the ship by various means.
To a limited extent technology would help, but in the 1600’s the technology available would best be described as rudimentary and totally inadequate.
Your question doesn't have a definitive answer. As ships get bigger they become less practical and at 80-100m long the practical problems start to outweigh any the advantages for building it in the first place.And the chance of finishing it or using it before it is destroyed by the elements increases.
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One of the issues with creating a model of space warfare that is both realistic and interesting is the ease with which one can destroy things using high-velocity kinetic kill vehicles (KKVs). For a civilization with frequent space travel, crashing a large asteroid into a planet is a trivial task. Any space combat model that does not result in either mutual destruction or a cold-war type scenario (good for spy-type fiction, less good for military fiction) needs a way to solve this problem. **What are ways in which high-velocity kinetic impactors can be stopped or deflected to prevent a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario in space combat?**
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The best way to stop a high tech planet busting KKV is a very low tech device, the white flag. The white flag is here a metaphor for signaling "We Surrender! We Surrender! Call off your doomsday weapon!"
Unless a fictional society has a number of independent but totally peaceful nations which have given up war forever, developing advanced interplanetary travel and the ability to create KKV weapons will mean that as soon as a totally space living nation exists that doesn't include any land on the original planet of the species, that space dwelling nation will have any nations that include a lot of land on the original planet at their mercy in any war that might be fought.
The totally space dwelling nation can threaten to use a KKV weapon on the home planet and any partially space dwelling nation that includes a lot of land and people on the home planet will have to agree to their terms. If they don't agree to those terms all their people on the home planet will be killed - plus the people of any other and neutral nations on the home planet.
Such threats will be effective, but to a lesser degree, in conflicts between totally space dwelling nations. If one nation lives only in domes on Ganymede and the other only on domes on Callisto, for example, they can be attacked with small asteroids aimed at each individual dome.
The destruction of individual domes will ruin the biosphere of Ganymede or Callisto, but since the environment there was already deadly dangerous and humans can only live inside the domes, the environmental wrecking will not harm humans in domes that aren't destroyed. Thus the goal would be to have the power to smash each and every dome with a targeted small asteroid to deter war and to use it when and if war breaks out.
An alternate strategy would be to hit Ganymede or Callisto with an asteroid big enough to make the entire surface molten hot to a depth of several miles. That will wipe out all citizens of the enemy nation on Ganymede or Callisto - as well as any citizens of neutral nations that might live on Ganymede or Callisto.
Such threats will be effective, but to a lesser degree, in conflicts between totally space dwelling nations who live only in artificially constructed space habitats. If Nation A consists of 1,000,000 citizens living inside one large space habitat, one single asteroid would be enough to destroy the habitat and the nation. If Nation B has 10,000,000,000 citizens living in 1,000,000 space habitats each containing 10,000 people, it will take 1,000,000 KKV to destroy Nation B.
Thus it is theoretically possible that the threat of KKV will lead to mutually assured destruction keeping the peace in space forever.
It is also theoretically possible that the threat of KKV will make space governments much less likely to go to war, it will greatly reduce the probability of war in any particular moment of time, but it will not reduce the probability of war to zero. So wars will still happen from time to time and result in the elimination of one or both nations or alliances of nations.
Thus there will be a gradual elimination of space nations until there is only one government in the solar system. Either all the nations will be exterminated except one, or one nation will conquer other space nations to form a space empire of many nations, or all surviving space nations will agree to mutually surrender to each other and unite to form a space empire of many nations.
Another possibility is that all nations on the home planet will reform and give up war forever before they begin space colonization. Thus everyone who colonizes outer space will be educated to believe that war is evil and nonviolence is the only good way. And so there will be peace in outer space forever and no space wars using KKV. I find that rather hard to believe.
Another possibility is that all nations on the home planet will be united by conquest and/or negotiation into a single empire of many nations before the colonization of outer space begins. Thus everyone who colonizes outer space will be educated to believe that war is evil and the imperial government is the only way to avoid the horrors of war and have peace forever.
Therefore it seems to me that the end result of colonization of the solar system and all of the space wars that might hypothetically happen over many thousands of years would probably be waving the white flag and surrender of remaining nations to form an interplanetary empire ruling the entire solar system based on the ideology that any independent government anywhere would make war, death, and destruction inevitable.
Except that if interstellar colonization is possible in voyages lasting decades, centuries, or millennia it may be impossible to unite colonies in other solar systems and there might not be enough contact with those colonies to make any war with them possible. So the ideology might be that no independent government with reachable distance can be tolerated, but independent governments too far away to make war with are tolerable. And presumably, each and every colonized solar system would have its own empire with the same ideology.
And then, after many thousands or millions of years, a faster than light (FTL) drive might be invented making contact between the different system empires fast and cheap and easy, thus making it possible for them to have reasons to go to war. And so there might be wars between different system empires involving KKV weapons. Perhaps there might be a sort of Lensman arms race and invasion fleets might be accompanied by numbers of asteroids, planets, and stars with faster than light drives to smash into targets.
And after a longer or shorter time, there might be a union of all the system empires into one interstellar empire. And all new colonies would be colonized by people loyal to the interstellar empire or by refugees from the interstellar empire, refugees which the interstellar empire might seek to conquer and annex when it discovers them.
And possibly an expanding interstellar empire might encounter other expanding interstellar empires. And possibly there might be a shorter or longer period of wars between expanding interstellar empires. And eventually, all the interstellar empires might unite to form a galactic empire.
Depending on the speed or acceleration attained by the FTL interstellar drive it may or may not be possible to rule an entire large galaxy like the Milky War Galaxy.
Depending on the speed or acceleration attained by the FTL interstellar drive it may or may not be possible to travel to and colonize star systems in other galaxies in voyages taking days, weeks, months or years. It is quite possible that the speed or acceleration of the FTL drive make voyages to even nearby other galaxies take decades, centuries, or millennia.
There is a question about whether a galactic government would be possible without instant teleportation.
[Is it possible to rule a galaxy without mastering teleportation?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124421/is-it-possible-to-rule-a-galaxy-without-mastering-teleportation/124450#124450)[1](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/124421/is-it-possible-to-rule-a-galaxy-without-mastering-teleportation/124450#124450)
My quite long answer describes how such a galactic government might be able to work. So if a writer is convinced by that discussion that a galactic government with slower than light travel was possible, they could select a speed or acceleration for their FTL drive that made ruling a galaxy practical, perhaps with difficulty, but made ruling other galaxies impractical and colonizing other galaxies just barely possible with generation ships.
Therefore other nearby galaxies could be colonized, but only by voyages taking decades, centuries, or millennia, too long for any sort of regular contact between galaxies or for galaxies to have any reason to go to war.
So possibly a number of daughter galactic empires will be formed by colonists from the home galaxy. And possibly alien civilizations will form their own galactic empires in various galaxies.
And maybe after many thousands or millions of years a new FTL drive might be invented which makes travel between galaxies in mere hours, days, weeks, months, or years possible, instead of in decades, centuries, or millennia. It suddenly becomes easy, cheap, and fast to travel between galaxies, meaning that it is now possible for galactic empires to fight wars against each other.
Thus there may be wars between galactic empires. And eventually, an entire supercluster of galaxies might be united in a supercluster empire.
And maybe after many thousands or millions of years, an even faster FTL drive might be invented, making it possible to reach any place in the universe in hours, days, weeks, months, or years instead of the decades, centuries, or millennia it might previously have taken.
This will make contact between supercluster empires easy, fast, and cheap, and so it will be possible for supercluster empires to find reasons to go to war against each other. Thus there could be a shorter or longer period of wars between supercluster empires.
And eventually, supercluster empires might unite to form a universal empire.
Thus in the history of that universe, there would be five general stages when there would be space wars.
1) Wars within a solar system eventually resulting in either extermination or a system empire.
2) Interstellar wars between system empires eventually resulting in either extermination or an interstellar empire.
3) Wars between interstellar empires eventually resulting in either extermination or a galactic empire.
4) Wars between galactic empires eventually resulting in either extermination or a supercluster empire.
5) Wars between supercluster empires eventually resulting in either extermination or a universal empire.
And it is possible for different regions to be at different stages at the same time. A person might fight in interplanetary wars resulting in the formation of a system empire, and their child might see their system empire contacted by an expanding interstellar empire, and their grandchild might see their interstellar empire contacted by an expanding galactic empire, and so on.
And any of those stages might see the use of KKV weapons, whether missiles, ships, meteors, asteroids, comets, moons, planets, stars, neutron stars, black holes, or whatever, possibly involving a Lensman arms race.
And any one of those stages of on and off space wars might last for decades, centuries, millennia, etc. But if the civilization involved in any stage of a space war is going to last for a long time, the period of space wars will be a relatively short and minor period in the history of that civilization. The age of space wars cannot last forever.
And IMHO the best defense against KKV weapons is the white flag of surrender, preferably a negotiated mutual surrender to form an empire before the fighting starts.
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Very good, ubiquitous surveillance systems.
If a KKV is coming at you at 0.99c from a couple light years away, it will take a couple years and a few days to hit you. That's orders of magnitude more time than you need to:
* Calculate the trajectory for an interceptor KKV of your own with an app running on a 2010's smartphone.
* Pick a proper, prebuilt counter KKV of your own or make a new one;
* Launch your KKV at the oncoming KKV.
For a KKV to be effective as a terrorist weapon it would have to be fired from up close. But as long as governments can know where every sufficiently-sized launcher is and destroy or capture them beforehand, everybody should be safe.
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Slow-moving asteroid must originate in target system.
Moving any object at a speed much slower than the speed of light from another system would take thousands of years and make war as we know it meaningless.
So, an enemy must scout a proper object, likely in target system's Kuiper belt, and direct it towards the inner planet. This process should take years, even if object's orbit is perturbed enough to make direct hit without several rotations. Target civilization should be advanced enough to detect this kind of activity in its own backyard and take measures before the asteroid is set on the dangerous course.
And, at any rate, with similar tech level, **it would take defending civilization less time to push the asteroid off-course than for the offending civilization to put in on collision course**.
The above covers the "slow asteroid" scenario. For the impactors moving at relativistic speeds, situation would be different.
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You assume that if space travel is trivial, then throwing rocks will be trivial too. But what you are missing is that living in space instead of on planets would be just as trivial! Why bother living on a planet if it takes so much more effort to get things off of that planet? Most people would be living in space-based cities, nice and controlled (with the technology they would have it would be) with the option to actually redirect the entire thing off the course of a KKV, which you can't do with a planet.
Throwing KKV's would be a weapon of terror to kill off population, but the lion's share of materials, construction and living will be done off-planet.
Now that the homes of your people are much safer, war can be around the KKV's. Even with early detection, no one is going to sit around until those KKV's come flying. So you set up scouting parties that go out and find KKV's that are still speeding up, giving you a chance to easily send a warning signal to potential targets to get out of the way and a place to wage war: Hunt down teams that set up KKV's and the KKV's themselves, while you are trying to find suitable KKV's and protect them while you swing them at your enemy.
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In a wider perspective, it is easy to place the defender in a position of advantage in an interstellar war (In the hypothesis that only one side has a long-time established colony on the planet).
Since the attacker must make a hyperspace jump to reach the defending system, every ship of the attacking fleet must be equipped with a bulky jump engine (in addition to the slower-than-light engines necessary to navigate in the system of the star).
So, the ships of the attacker will be inferior as weaponry with respet to the ships of the defender, since the latter ones don't need to use jump engine (having been built inside the same system).
In order to attack a planet with an asteroid, the attacker will need:
- time to overview the system to find a suitable impactor (if no intelligence about the objects in the system was gathered before)
- time to reach the asteroid (which, by the way, must be near enough to the planet to destroy/attack)
- time to build the facilities to modify its trajectory (I don't think that pushing the asteroid with the starships themselves would do the trick)
In the meanwhile the defender will have plenty of time to detect and attack the enemy fleet (being in a position of advantage, as explained above). So probably the attacker should find different ways to conquer a planet, maybe outnumbering the defender or trying guerrilla-like techniques.
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A few ideas:
* If moving asteroids towards planets is trivial, and I suspect that these asteroids would have to travel quite far, then moving asteroids into intercept-paths with other asteroids would only be slightly less trivial, as long as you could detect the KKV well in advance. In a cold-war scenario, it might be incumbent on a defending planet to put several large bodies into safe orbit around itself, with propulsion attached to them, in preparation for just such an event.
* If you have FTL travel, then depending on how you do it you may incorporate the same kind of technology into your planet shields.
+ For example, if FTL is accomplished by warping space, and a small ship is only capable of generating enough power to warp small space nearby itself, then a large power generator on a moon may be capable of warping a large space far away from itself. As soon as the KKV is detected, the moon activates and warps space in front of the KKV, effectively transporting the KKV some distance in any direction without changing its velocity. If carefully done, the space could be warped into a sort of toroidal shape and then released, so that the KKV is sent in another direction -- perhaps back on the enemy.
+ If FTL is accomplished using "antimatter fuel", then access to antimatter in large quantities may imply the ability to generate antimatter bombs, set to detonate immediately after coming into contact with a physical object. The bomb would pass right through the KKV and implode immediately behind it, creating a small temporary black hole (perhaps). The intended effect would be to simultaneously destroy the propulsion device on the KKV while pulling the KKV backwards -- slowing it down or stopping it altogether.
+ If FTL is accomplished by entering "hyperspace", presumably via a "hyperspace gate", then (if scifi has taught me anything), since things in hyperspace can't interact with regular matter, the KKV could be rendered harmless by forcing it into hyperspace. Maybe this can be done by throwing a hyperspace "entrance" gate in front of it and then destroying the "exit" gate once inside. It's an expensive solution, and the cost is increased because, since hyperspace things move so quickly, you'd have to place the exit gate very far away in order to be able to destroy it in time. The way I see this being accomplished is by saying that the gates are entangled somehow -- if you destroy one, then the other destroys itself. Furthermore, since you need to be able to quickly generate lots of these, it will be important to keep one gate open at all times to pass parts through it to make more exit gates at the "endpoint" location, only to have them destroyed when another KKV comes in range.
* If advanced space travel implies advanced radio capabilities, then strong beams of radio waves (microwaves), much more powerful than what we're capable of producing today, could be used to cook the inside of the KKV, causing it to melt and burst into smaller, more manageable pieces. If done right, the smaller pieces may harmlessly disintegrate on contact with their target atmosphere.
Hope these ideas help!
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Three thoughts, all taken from my experiences with the Traveller RPG.
1. My first thought is to make technology unable to push big dangerous masses in a manner convenient for warfare. **The Problem** with that is that starships typically move at dangerous speeds and have good armor, making them potentially devastating "bullets". If they also rely on big power plants too, they could be potentially devastating bombs.
2. So my second thought is to field a sufficient orbital (and even system-level) defense, including early warning systems, automated systems, what-have-you, all with the ultimate intention of deflecting incoming destructive masses as early as possible. **The Problem** with that is that low-tech worlds are at the mercy of high-tech worlds.
As an illustration of the problem with #2, consider the very common Traveller scenario where a world at about the level of Earth in the 1970s is attacked by a nearby star system that is, say, a couple hundred years' its superior, with antigrav, interstellar drives, and cheap fusion power. I can't see any outcome of the above scenario where the "Earth" above does not become a vassal state, unless there are external protective forces at work -- a galactic government, or a "Big Brother" system.
3. A contrived solution might suggest that interstellar wars are never "to the death" but rather are *economic* -- all about controlling resources -- and therefore big rocks thrown at near-C velocities are for the realm of the insane genius madmen bent on annihilation. **The problem** with this is that sometimes in order to secure a resource over here, you have to stop the technological industry of a system over there. How are you going to do that, if not by hurling a bunch of kinetic masses at it until you've stone-aged them?
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For relatively slow impactors, such as typical asteroids, an advanced telescope survey system, along with deflection technology — [gravity tractors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor), kinetic impactors, nuclear devices (possibly even adapted [nuclear shaped charges](http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-nuclear-spear-casaba-howitzer.html)), and the like — would probably catch almost anything an enemy could throw. (Other answers have already covered that case better than I have.) If the enemy is sending relativistic impactors, though, deflecting them is largely futile — even nukes won't do anything more than turn the projectile into a still-relativistic cloud of exploding gas hurtling at the planet the same as before. The sheer amount of momentum involved with relativistic KKVs means that deflecting them is virtually impossible without (1) ridiculous amounts of warning (i.e. possibly longer than the light-travel time from their launch point) or (2) gravity control technology (which is [certainly possible](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/antigravity.php#section_id--Paragravity--Robert_Forward) but well beyond technology foreseeable in the near-to-medium range).
### So instead...
## Move the planet.
### Or not.
See, the problem with this is that it takes ridiculous amounts of energy to move a planet — and even more ridiculous amounts of power to do it quickly. So that's out of the picture. End of sto... Wait. You say it's possible. Umm... But there's no possible way to move an entire planet that fast without gravity contro... Wait... Ok, I see what you're saying.
### Move the planet, for a given value of "move the planet".
Not the entire planet, for obvious reasons. The most important thing is that the planet not be in the way of the KKV when it arrives — but the planet is far to heavy to move. This seems like a conundrum, but a surprising solution presents itself: the impactor will have to *pass through* the planet. Not by "phase shifting" or some other pseudo-scifi magic tech, but with a good old-fashioned tunnel — move only the part of the planet that's in the impactor's way.
This presents problems in of itself. Although quickly building a tunnel through a planet is incomparably easier than deflecting a relativistic projectile or moving an entire planet to the side, it is still incredibly difficult by near-future technological standards. But I wouldn't say it's impossible.
Here are the components of my imagined version of a planetary defense system using this idea:
* Extensive, frequent, and powerful telescopic surveys to spot incoming projectiles from up to light-years away. (This could be combined with surveillance focused on known or suspected enemy systems to spot launches immediately.)
* Extreme-precision tracking, to pinpoint exact impact locations to accuracies measured in meters.
* Some way of disabling KKVs' maneuvering systems. Something like a tiny, well-aimed laser mounted on a fast interceptor craft or a vulnerability in the KKVs' guidance software, maybe.
* The actual tunnel-construction technology. This could be a more typical tunnel boring machine, adapted using novel forms of waste heat removal for the incredibly harsh conditions of the planet's hot (probably, but depends on the planet) interior, or something more outlandish like a rocket-propelled line fired through the planet and then inflated to form a tunnel. Whatever it is, it needs to be fast — the worse the telescopic surveys, the faster.
* Some means to ensure a vacuum within the tunnel. A "tunnel" will likely have to be created through the atmosphere as well to keep air from venturing in from around the edges. The tunnel material will also have to be well beyond current technologies by being able to withstand 6000K temperatures (in the case of Earth; extremely advanced active cooling may also reduce this) while maintaining structural integrity and having a negligible vapor pressure. Although a few molecules here and there won't cause much of a problem (aside from maybe destroying the tunnel behind the passing projectile, which is the least of your worries at this point), any significant amounts of matter in the would-be impactor's way will either devastate surrounding regions due to extreme energy release or, worse, explode the impactor, causing a bona fide collision.
In all, I think this is a possible solution, although of course I haven't run any numbers to double-check (in any case its speculation about technologies that don't exist yet, so I wouldn't be able to check those). Even though there are tons of incredibly difficult engineering, physics, and materials science problems to be solved, though, there isn't really any *other* good way to keep a relativistic weapon pointed at a planet from devastating said planet. Creating a tunnel through the planet for the impactor to pass through safely is the only way I can think of to do this without manipulating gravity itself or handwaving the problem away.
## A caveat
This solution works just fine for most classical types of relativistic weapons. However, none of this applies if the enemy is smart enough to vaporize the projectile themselves *before* it hits the planet.
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Science fiction workaround: **E=mc2 brake bomb**.
I made this up as a workaround to prohibit the sort of war you want to avoid while allowing other types.
Usually when something fast hits something else, the kinetic energy of the impactor turns to heat and also kinetic energy of the masses impacted. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. But energy is mass, and one could dispose of unwanted energy by converting it to mass.
When the brake bomb hits a moving object (of specified energy or greater), the kinetic energy difference between the bomb and the object is turned into matter. This small amount of matter is added to the matter of bomb and object, which continues on its prior trajectory at whatever (low) velocity it has remaining.
The bombs are small and cheap, and are set to orbit occupied planets. They also have peacetime uses as they could slow then stop a runaway train or act as a cushion for falling objects.
It is difficult to use them offensively although an offensive use of these bombs would be a fine thing to have occur in the course of the fiction.
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My favorite way to turn energy into matter is by fusion of iron or heavier elements: an endothermic "reaction". Perhaps the brake bombs have kinetic energy catalyzed fusions. If that is how they worked, these bombs would produce heavier elements on being triggered.
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First thing to consider is how things burn up in an atmosphere, the faster you are moving, the more likely you are to burn up; so, a ship that can survive re-entry 20,000 kph will just spectacularly explode in the upper atmosphere moving at 100x that speed. The faster you move, the higher you vaporize, meaning the less opportunity your energetic explosion has to propagate to the denser lower atmosphere to do meaningful damage; so, super fast, smaller things like ships are not that dangerous.
I'm sure once you reach truly absurd speeds, you eventually make atmosphere a non-issue, but most sci-fi assumes that FTL technology does not actually involve accelerating to relativistic speeds, but rather warping of reality so that a "slow moving" thing can travel as though it were moving very fast. If you follow this convention then gravity may disrupt your warp bubble spitting out your FTL ship at its actual speed which may be no faster than modern spacecraft.
So, to survive reentry and result in meaningful damage, you'd need a bigger slower thing like a giant asteroid, but a space aged civilization could see that coming so far ahead of time that they could deflect it using the same technology their enemies used to put it on course to begin with making that a non-tactic as well.
This leaves carpet nuking, but a good array of ground based lasers could just destroy those moments after they are launched. So, these nukes would need really good shielding to survive these defensive weapons; meaning it would not be cheap at all. The question is then why spend that much money destroying a world just to irradiate it too much to use for your own resources.
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In *Dune*, Frank Herbert envisioned a kind of personal "shield" (force field) that would stop fast-moving object but not slow-moving objects. That was the explanation for why you couldn't shoot someone with a gun, and everyone was fighting hand-to-hand with knives. No reason you couldn't steal this idea and scale it up to the level of a planetary defense.
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Fundamentally, you need to do three things in order to protect against a KKV attack:
1. Develop and stockpile an interceptor capable of destroying or deflecting an incoming KKV (this could be a KKV or something else entirely).
2. Clean up your backyard. Remove anything in your general vicinity that would be dangerous if it impacted your planet.
3. Deploy a network of satellites to monitor for incoming KKVs.
With these three things, you will be able to see any KKV attack incoming and destroy it at a safe distance. The specific distances here will depend on the level of technology used by you and your enemies. If it takes you $X$ hours worst-case to receive a signal, prepare and interceptor, and launch it, then you'll probably want your monitoring satellites at a distance of at least $0.00035\*X$ light years to ensure you can intercept with plenty of room to spare. It's probably worth extending your "clean" zone to around $0.0005\*X$ light-years to make sure you can easily detect anything crossing into your cleared zone.
You're only vulnerable to attacks that are launched so close to your planet that you don't have time to react and neutralize them. If you can ensure nothing hostile gets that close, then you don't have much to worry about.
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**Ideas:**
1. If it's multiple projectiles, have a defensive weapon that forces those projectiles to smash into each other.
2. Watch the end of the movie "The Beyond" on Netflix and use the "alien tech" at the end of the movie as an example--it's basically portable shielding.
3. If it's one large projectile, as others mention, an early warning system is best.
4. If the projectiles have stealth capability, this could ruin early warning systems.
5. A "thick/reinforced/shielded atmosphere" would probably destroy most small projectiles.
6. A "planet mover" technology could just move the whole planet out of the line of fire.
7. Consider the fact that a planet that has been hit by an asteroid would probably have very low value to the "captor".
8. Shielding moons. That is, a movable moon that can intercept projectiles.
9. If "warp bubble" technology exists, then bending spacetime around the asteroid could alter the course of a projectile... so much so that you could send it back to the civilization that threw it at you.
10. Similarly, if you could make thousands of small warp bubbles, you could fragment the projectile into much smaller shards, capable of much less damage.
11. Ionize it. At a few thousands degrees, it would turn into a lava-like substance and its structural capabilities would be greatly diminished. At a couple million degrees, it'd become plasma and hitting the atmosphere would make it look like northern lights.
12. Contact with antimatter will create a total annihilation (and a big boom).
13. Interfere with the opponent's guidance system.
14. Create a "solar atmosphere", where the entire solar system acts like an atmosphere and tears apart incoming projectiles. Think of "fluidic space" from Star Trek Voyager. The idea is that most things can't stop a 50 caliber bullet, but a lot of anything can (so, 20 phone books can stop a sniper round, but a single steel plate cannot).
15. Portable black holes or gravity control.
16. Subspace barriers. If the projectile must move along a smooth patch of spacetime, any interruption in the fabric of spacetime would prevent that movement, like a speedboat hitting a sandy beach.
17. Super advanced civilization. Restore your planet from a backup. Physical matter reforms to its last known stable state, including auto-resurrection. The asteroid would be little more than a pebble thrown into a pond.
18. Friendly intervention. Friendly civilizations could help you monitor and mitigate asteroids. Using asteroids as a war tactical result in a multi-civilization counter-attack.
19. Jamming. If they use teleportation, jam it. Subspace transport. Jam it. Hyperspace. Jam it. *Peanut butter.* Jam it.
**Words of warning:**
1. Slow moving asteroid ideas are highly "played out".
2. Don't try using "solar powered" object movers, since solar power is lost at the square of the distance, meaning solar power is useless at significant distances from a star.
3. Ionic propulsion takes a very long time to get up to speed and eventually runs out of fuel.
4. Throwing asteroids at an enemy seems like the equivalent of rock throwing in a third world country. There are probably much better ways to fight an opponent.
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Assuming a universe where crashing large asteroids into planets is both possible and for whatever reason used for offensive purposes, we could also imagine that a defending planet with access to similar technology could counter the attack by setting into motion an equivalently sized asteroid on a collision course.
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You don't. If something is going at .99c towards you throwing things at it is useless because the KKV's time frame is much slower then your time frame. The antibalistic things you throw at it won't have time to shatter and spread the KKV's matter. Also, if you throw something at the KkV with enough energy to change it's course you are actually doing what particle accelerators do, but instead of a few protons you are doing with things that have the mass of a car. I can't do the calculations, you should ask in the physics stackexchange, but it probably won't be healthy to be in the same solar system in which this collision is happening.
You survive by getting out of the way, living in small, mobile, fast space habitats: a civilization of space mongols riding their ships in the black steppe.
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This is part of my Alien Message series:
* [Recognizable natural numbers for alien message?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70227/recognizable-natural-numbers-for-alien-message)
* [Alien message: “Invitation”](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70640/alien-message-invitation)
I recall a TV show featuring a discussion on the design of warning messages for deep time, the little cartoon had dots in each panel (●, ●●, ●●●) because if the read right-to-left they might think it depicts a place where skeletons can be brought back to life! However, this is not a satisfying answer to me, as the people might naturally *count down* a series of steps to a conclusion.
In [Dragon’s Egg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg), the characters remark on the Earthling’s drawings, why are there chevrons on the pointer? It must be their way of drawing an arrow, they decided.
So, how can something like a flow diagram depict arrows indicating direction? The style of an arrow head and tail might be completely culture specific. My first thought was to label it with dots (●, ●●, ●●●) along the line, but that reminded me of the first problem I related.
How could you clearly depict directional arrows in an alien drawing?
Related: how to depict *sequence* in general, among a set of pages, diagrams, or figures? Even the “correct” orientation of the page is not known! (An answer to one can be used to solve the other.)
[Answer]
## Context, examples and lots of repetition
There are some thought schools which think that past is *ahead* of you and not behind you, so (●●●, ●●, ●) would be "natural" ordering for them. The dots without any context, or arrow → do not mean much if you do not know context.
**You have to clearly show how you think**
● → ●● → ●●●
●●● ← ●● ← ●
●●● ↔ ●●●
●●● ↮ ●
You have to provide as many examples as you can think of. Time causality, describing known feats of universe by thought diagrams and so on.
I did read [The Martian Chronicles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Chronicles) by Ray Bradbury where this book deals on subject on how to understand Martians.
Also mind, that even "arrow" has to be explained, because you cannot even assume that arrow has meaning of "points to" in alien language.
Best idea is loads of repetition, where you in the message itself you hint the progression.
>
> This is message X. You will receive this message exactly 5 times. Then other message will be received.
>
>
> This message assumes you received message X. And it assumes you received message X 5 times. This is message Y. It follows message X. It will be repeated 7 times. After broadcasting of this message you will receive another message.
>
>
> This is message Z. This message assumes that you received message X first and message Y second. Messages X, Y and Z are series of messages. The order of messages is X, then Y and then Z. This is message Z. We assume you received message X 5 times. We assume you received message X first. We assume you received message Y 7 times. We assume you received message Y second. This is message Z. It comes third in series of message. This is message Z. Messages X, Y and Z are correct order. You will receive this message 11 times. Other message will be delivered afterwards.
>
>
>
and so on...
And then you can build on this.
[Answer]
### Just be consistent
As you say, there is no way for the aliens to know. Specially since they may not even know what our bodies look like.
I think what you may want to look at is how we managed to understand early writings and drawings.
Mostly, we tried for each piece to understand if there was a *most probable order*. "On this one there is a kid, then a teenager, then a young adult, then an elderly, then a corpse, this must be the right order". Yes, you may fall on a story about time reversal, but if you have enough material on diverse subjects (and preferably subjects understandable by any alien), you'll be good.
So, your marking will probably not help understand your document, it's the other way around.
If you count on your aliens to be smart, it is actually a good idea to put page numbers on it, as you'll teach them how you count at the same time.
### Things to put on your pages to explain ordering
* Birth, life and death of a star
* Dot, segment, triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon...
* Birth, life and death of several living species
* Geological formations
* Recipes using the aforementioned living species
* Descriptions of atomic elements (a good place to put arrows between a high energy isotope and a decayed one)
* Scenes of people having sex
* Things you think are irrelevant to help the decipherer, but actually helps them understand they assumed something wrong
Remember, any kind of titles, subtitles, index and such will be invaluable. Metadata is the most reliable data.
[Answer]
Introduce your sequence symbols temporally. Instead of broadcasting a single image of a "comic strip", broadcast a sequence of separate images that show the progression of the sequence markers. First image shows a single ●, pause, second image shows two ●●, pause, third image shows ●●●, etc.
Then you can use that as an established sequence to build more abstract symbols on.
Eg.
```
→ ● ●● ●●● →
← ●●● ●● ● ←
```
[Answer]
Turn this on its head, and you realize that the concept of an "order" is not as vital as you might think. As long as the message is received by something which truly thinks, it isn't the world if there is a misinterpretation. In *Dune: The Machine Crusade*, there's a quote:
>
> The weakness of thinking machines is that they actually believe all the information they receive, and react accordingly.
>
>
>
Non-machine thinkers are generally expected to take the information they receive with a grain of salt. The semantics of the message might not be perfectly cast in stone.
>
> the little cartoon had dots in each panel (●, ●●, ●●●) because if the read right-to-left they might think it depicts a place where skeletons can be brought back to life!
>
>
>
This is only an issue if your reader is utterly confident in the order of the panels, ans as you pointed out, if the other species counts (●●●, ●●, ●), you're still in trouble. However, it is also reasonable to assume there will be some degree of uncertainty in the translation. Surely if there are two ways to interpret a symbol, and one of them is in violation of the forces of entropy, they'll think twice before blinding assuming they understand!
As it turns out, we don't even always agree on which way to put the arrow head. If I take UML as an example, the aggregation symbol and composition symbol actually has the head on the "from" side, while association has it on the "to" side:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bfBSYm.png)
So what can we assume when we send our alien message? I think it is reasonable to assume that the end viewer of the message can recognize that these arrows are being used to describe a directed graph, but that they might misrepresent the direction. Mathematically speaking, they may interpret the graph as its [complement graph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_graph).
One approach you could do is try to use some properties of these graphs. One interesting property: The complement of every triangle-free graph is a claw-free graph, although the reverse is not true. You can demonstrate what a [triangle-free](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle-free_graph) graph and a [claw-free](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claw-free_graph) graph are pretty reasonably. You can then use those properties to break the symmetry between a graph and its compliment, and once that symmetry is broken, you can then use that to demonstrate a directed graph. You might show a 'triangle free' directed graph that is only triangle free if the direction of the arrows is correct.
Once we're comfortable with directed graphs, assigning meaning to the arrows becomes a semantic step, rather than syntactic step. For example, one might want to use an arrow to show "the direction of time's progression," which is from low entropy to high entropy. Or you might want to show arithmetic, in which case the arrows can be used to describe the Successor function in Peano arithmetic. No matter what, the key is that the question of which direction the arrow is pointing has been solved by using graph theory.
Of course, the best solution is to have messages which you don't mind being misinterpreted. For example, if you are worried the aliens are all serial killers, don't send your phone number and home address in the message! Instead, send something more ambiguous that can start a longer dialogue!
[Answer]
You may be able to depend on certain shared physical properties, such as the handedness of the nuclear weak force, or instructions to build a device that emits circularly polarized radiation, as referenced in this series of blogs:
<https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/handedness-galactic-challenge/>
The blogs explore how we would explain left and right to an alien on the phone, who might not have any common referents to our Earth biology.
Also, there are some computer science algorithms that are mathematical and presumably universal, such as directed acyclic graph (DAG) sorting that rely on concepts of direction and ordering to make any sense.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph>
Then you can assign concepts to these shared directions (origin is on left, target is on right) to define your arrow and implication and entropy.
[Answer]
Send a sample message containing the following sequences.
1 --> 2 --> 3 --> 4, and so on
and,
4 --> 3 --> 2 --> 1
The order in the first sequence indicates increasing numbers, using integers. The order in the second sequence represents decreasing numbers.
Basically send similar sequences (eg, 2 --> 4 --> 8 --> 16: for doubling numbers). Assuming your communicators have established the values of various numbers like integers or natural numbers, then by depicting a variety of sequences either increasing or decreasing will indicate the direction of those number sequences.
If you send messages containing sample sequences which only make logical sense if the "-->" represents a 'direction", then the recipients will be able to interpret the same symbol being used in other messages as a direction. For example, in a flow chart or a set of directions.
This is nothing more than applying the Anticryptography in a way that provides the recipients with what is a sensible to correctly interpret the directional symbol. Directional arrows don't need to be arrows. Any symbol will do, as long as it is unambiguous in terms of its function.
EDIT:
The OP asks for examples where the arrow symbol represents a direction. Send three pages. Each page has the arrow pointing to show which way the page should be up. One page has a complete image on it. While the other two pages have half of the image on each. When the two half images are combined together the right way up they will represent the whole image. This established the first step for indicating a direction.
This can be followed up by pages with number sequences arranged in columns. If the numbers increase down the page and there is an arrow alongside the number column, this should indicate the direction of numerical increase. Alongside this column there can be another column of numbers that increase starting at the bottom of the column but this time going upwards. There will an arrow alongside this column but now pointing upwards.
The basic concept is to first establish an arrow as an indicator of a logical direction in terms of number. The next step will be to establish that the same symbol can be used as a symbol that indicates both orientation and going from here to there.
This suggests starting with numbers, using images to give a sense of orientation, and this can be built up to provide a directional indicator.
[Answer]
The problem is nice, but how do I make sure that the alien is oriented correctly? The up arrow is only "up" if the page is held like "this." A piece of paper is horrible in this regards. A spaceship that has landed on "legs" with the nose pointing up might work. Unless you land in water where the intelligent fish are watching for predators from the ocean depths.Consequently, they swim upside down relative to what we would expect. Maybe they live in the atmosphere of a gas giant and there is no "up." Think "airfish." I think you must make some assumptions, otherwise the problem is not solvable. So, what are the minimal assumptions that you must have to make the problem solvable? They must have written language that uses symbols. They need to be roughly man sized. A few millimeters tall is just as bad as 10 meters tall. They must have eyes that process images. Ideally they should see color. Somehow one needs some point of common reference. Chemistry? There needs to be enough communication to gain understanding. How do you tell the difference between a warning message and a James Bond thriller? I am sending you a movie plot on how aliens destroyed Hong Kong, versus I am sending you instructions on how to destroy Hong Kong.
] |
[Question]
[
What would happen to a human settlement on Earth, on some deserted island, that had no contact with the outside world for a thousand years? Something like a human version of the Galapagos islands, where the animals living there, isolated for thousands of years, evolved slightly differently than their counterparts in the rest of the world.
After a thousand years of isolation, is it possible that they would have a different genetic makeup than ordinary humans, perhaps to the point of being a new subspecies?
What about their culture? Is it conceivable that they would also invent things like factories, bicycles, and theater? How about informational technology (radio, TV, computers)?
[Answer]
Human versions of the Galapagos do exist today: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples>
*EDIT: Personally, I find the peoples of North Sentinel Island fascinating, particularly the part about fighting off a helicopter with bows: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_people>*
1,000 years isn't a whole lot in terms of evolution, so I can't imagine there would be any genetic differences to worry about. Homo sapiens have been around for anywhere between 50,000 and 200,000 years, so you'll need at least that length of time for any true evolutionary differences to pop up.
In regards to culture and technology, most of the "uncontacted people" in the above Wikipedia article are in small, isolated societies with no access to metals or the fossil fuels that allow most technology to run. The biggest thing is access to resources. Regrettably, life isn't Gilligan's Island, and if your people don't have metals, they likely won't have TV or anything past ancient era tech.
Give them the resources, though, and humans can do anything.
*EDIT 2: I realize I never answered the culture part of the question. They would almost certainly have some type of art, as cave painting dates back about 40,000 years. If they have access to dyes and hides, you can assume painting has developed. Music would certainly exist (even if it's just percussion and chanting), and they may have even dabbled in sculpting if big, pretty rocks are around. Theater isn't too far of a stretch, either. So long as we've had the ability to communicate we've told stories, and embellishment of stories has thus been around just as long. I imagine the Sentinelese people mentioned above have a dramatic retelling of fighting off that helicopter.*
[Answer]
Well, 1000 years is nothing, and apparently 10's of 1000's of years isn't much either.
I knew the Aboriginal Australians were mostly cut off from the rest of humanity for quite a while and doing a little digging found this
>
> These Aboriginal ancestors migrated into South Asia and then into Australia, where they stayed, with the result that, outside of Africa, the Aboriginal peoples have occupied the same territory continuously longer than any other human populations. These findings suggest that modern Aboriginal peoples are the direct descendants of migrants to leave Africa up to 75,000 years ago
>
>
>
So this suggests me might need a much larger time frame or living conditions that are much different lifestyle. Up to about 12,000 years ago all humans lived generally the same, but that's when we started agriculture which might start separating us more.
Humans have large differences in 'races' and different genes have provided different advantages but we are all still mostly the same after all this time. A 100,000 years separated on a different planet might make things much more obvious, but what traits would come to the fore would be entirely dependent on the living conditions that they have to adapt to.
Social adaptation however takes much shorter amounts of time and there are some extreme examples out there do demonstrate this.
[Answer]
I can't see too much of an 'evolutionary' change outside of what we already have as differences within races. There might be genetic pool depth issues if the island can't support enough people to keep genetic diversity high though, as massive inbreeding over a long period of time might end up in some deformations (if you want to call that evolution). If there are too many people, separate 'tribes' may form and the power struggle from that may dominate day to day life.
I'd refer to Polynesian peoples for examples on Earth. First thing to point out: This Human Galapagos has to be horribly isolated. We are explorers and we expand; people ventured as far out as Hawaii in the Pacific, crossing rather vast amounts of ocean to get there. If there was land within a few hundred miles of this Human Galapagos, there is a good chance these people wouldn't have been isolated.
>
> What about their culture? Is it conceivable that they would also invent factories, bicycles, theater? How about informational technology (radio, TV, computers)?
>
>
>
Island life is simple, especially when isolated within concern of other humans invading. Weather is generally calm and warm; with the exception of storms, there is little need for shelter or clothing as people in colder climates would need. Need is the driving force behind technical evolution, as without the need, we tend to happily exist within our current means.
Factories and industrialization (mass production) came with a movement of population from rural to urban. But is this shift even feasible on an island? And even if it was, who exactly are they mass producing goods for? Without the need for transport (I guess depends on the size of this island) are bicycles really needed? Island terrain isn't very bicycle friendly either. Because of the ubiquitous nature of water surrounding the island, boats and pontoons are far easier to transport things on.
Theater is the one exception on your list. Culture will develop, and people like story telling and entertainment. Won't be the grand electric movie theater by any means, but amphitheater or a general gathering place (likely on or by water) is a most definite yes.
I'd suggest looking into the people of Hawai'i if you wanted to case study something like this.
[Answer]
The differences that would occur would depend on two main factors:
1) The selective pressures that differentiate the island from elsewhere.
2) The genetics of the founding population.
For the subtle influence of environmental selective pressures, 1000 years would be significantly too short a time to see any major evolutionary change (as others have said). However if the island had some extreme selective pressure (e.g. all islanders with blonde hair died in childhood for some unknown reason) or the islanders themselves performed some form of selective breeding (eugenics), 1000 years could lead to noticeable changes or at least extreme expression of certain inheritable, human traits (e.g. height).
Alternatively, if the founding islanders were of a small number and particular genetic properties occurred at a higher than average incident in the founding population, extreme over-expression of these particular traits could come about within 1000 years. These are known as [founder effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect) - an example of this would be the [incidence of asthma on Tristan de Cunha](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8665053).
In either case, it remains unlikely that 1000 years is anywhere near sufficient time for speciation level differences to occur, however fairly pronounced features/traits in the islanders may be possible.
Significant levels of technological development whilst managing to remain in complete isolation seem unlikely. A culture would almost certainly develop navigation and seafaring (and thus break isolation) before IT. If this was not an issue, it would depend strongly upon the resources available on the island, the ease of obtaining sufficient food to support other industries, and the imperative felt by the islanders to (continually) develop new technologies.
[Answer]
First of all, quddos for the excellent question Scimonster.
Like most people on here, I think that 1000 years is nowhere near enough to make any kind of noticeable physiological difference. Maybe if they don't have any dairy products the proportion of lactose-intolerant people would increase more or less, or something like this might happen to a few other metabolic pathways (can't think of other examples right now), but certainly no drastic changes in human biology would occur.
I think there's far more room for a noticeable change in culture to occur, though. Depending on the exact conditions people over there are placed in, and the "cultural composition" of the first generation of people to become isolated, there is a possibility that in a thousand years the resulting culture turns out to have diverged greatly from what we now consider "normal".
[Answer]
It's an interesting question... Personally, I don't think it would impact/change us that much, because we in many ways have put ourselves "outside" the grasp of evolution.
From nature, we're not that well endowed -- neither with warm fur, protective scales, long claws or long teeth. We're not especially fast and we're not very good at hunting "by hand".
What separates us from other animals are: Our opposable thumbs, which make it possible to manipulate objects. Together with a big and creative brain, this allows us to make tools. Language -- including the use of oral and/or written -- allows us to share our discoveries to others and across generations.
So a group of humans stranded on some deserted island, would do as every other humans in a fix -- use our big brains to plan and invent tools, make tools with our hands, and then share it among our population. So it would be *our tools* -- weapons, shelter, communication, fire, cloths -- that would get us out of the fix, and would allow us to start using new sources of food and such when needed... not evolutionary changes to our body through the generations. Therefore, I think our bodies would remain virtually unchanged -- for thinking and hand-manipulation, it's already as good as it gets!
What separates us -- humans today -- from the humans many thousands of years ago, is not our body or brain; but our *knowledge* -- and the effectiveness of which we can communicate this knowledge between ourself and to the next generation. We literaly stand on the shoulders of all the great (and less great) thinkers that came before us, and can use their discoveries and mistakes as a base for our own thought. *That* is what has given us todays technology, and it's *that combination* -- generations of discovery coupled with technology -- which truly separate us from humans from 10 000 or 20 0000 years ago... not evolutionary changes.
That said, when humans -- or a group of humans -- comes under pressure from things like famine or illness; sure we'll see evolution playing its hand, separating out those most suited to live: The Black Plauge and Smallpocks... HIV/AIDS in Africa (there are some with natural resistance, they stand a better chance to pass along their genes where there is little health-care)... Scikle-cell animia and malaria... The way illnesses that are deadly when first encountered, becomes "childhood illness" which we just live beside...
But all in all, humans usually overcome our problems with knowledge, planning and tools; and thus put evolution into the back seat. Trapped on an island, humans would conquer various habitats and food-sources by inventing tools -- and then pass this knowledge to future generations. No need for evolution to adapt our body then -- and of course no opportunity.
A stranded population would undoubtedly develop its own culture and language -- and probably their own religion and laws. But this wouldn't be passed by genes. We may of course get some class-separation -- where the lower class toils for an upper class -- and where of course some classes would have a better chance of surviving than others, but that is "survival of the *richest*" -- not necessarily the fittest as evolution defines it.
[Answer]
>
> What would happen to a human settlement on Earth, on some deserted
> island, that had no contact with the outside world for a thousand
> years? Something like a human version of the Galapagos islands, where
> the animals living there, isolated for thousands of years, evolved
> slightly differently than their counterparts in the rest of the world.
>
>
>
So. A couple things to mention.
* As mentioned, in the realm of evolution one thousand years is an irrelevant span of time. Even 10,000 years really isn't likely to change much.
* You would need do come up with a reason that humans never developed the technology to travel great distances but I will leave that up to you...maybe a water world situation where there is a lack of natural resources.
>
> After a thousand years of isolation, would they have a different
> genetic makeup than ordinary humans, perhaps to the point of being a
> new subspecies?
>
>
>
* No. The promotion of a new trait is gradual and requires natural forces to prove that it is superior. The more drastic the natural pressure, the more rapid evolution (or if too rapid...extinction) can be. Even on a scale of 10,000 years very little would be likely to change.
* We have a real world case study available to show what is likely to change...and that would be our shared human history. Skin color, height, muscle mass, hair type etc etc etc are all the things that evolved among isolated human settlements from the beginning of our history. Our biology and intelligence means that there is very little pressure on us to evolve and this means that like the great white shark any evolutionary process will be minimal and take millions of years.
* A new sub-species would be on a scale of hundreds of thousands of years. The amount of genetic change that creates re-productively separate species is significant.
>
> What about their culture? Is it conceivable that they would also
> invent factories, bicycles, theater? How about informational
> technology (radio, TV, computers)?
>
>
>
* Here we actually have interesting possibilities. Culture develops and evolves based on the type of society and the world around them. Is it matriarchal, patriarchal, dictatorial, democratic? Do they have natural resources and food or is it a struggle to survive? Are they builders or nomadic? The possibilities are endless here you can craft anything you want.
So a world with human sub-species is admittedly interesting. And there are a few things you can consider to achieve it.
* Seeding: Whether by government program, or alien involvement. This can be in the future and maybe the government conducts genetic tests on a large group of convicts and isolates them all same situation with aliens.
* Good ol nuclear influence: Nuclear war, creates genetic mutations which of course normally end up killing people but it could serve as a plausible, if not entirely scientifically accurate method to get an accelerated rate of genetic change.
* You need some sort of external pressure if you want significant, visible genetic change. Be it aliens hunting people down, extreme climate change, life on an alien world. Without pressure changes may appear and be beneficial but they won't be selected upon.
[Answer]
In 1000 years you would still have humans, but it is possible that they could be a very distinctive population.
Depending on resources, the population could tend to be on the shorter end of the human height spectrum.
Depending on initial population, you could justify common Polydactyly (possibly even fully functional extra fingers and/or toes), or Syndactyly (webbed fingers/toes).
Otherwise uncommon or rare traits could become common, or the "norm", or even ubiquitous.
Two examples of special traits of isolated populations is the unique way the Sherpa of the Himalayas do not overproduce red blood cells while at such high altitudes and another group of high altitude dwellers in the Andes regularly take in large doses of arsenic which their bodies are able to filter out.
] |
[Question]
[
In a world I am building; Humanity has left the earth and now only the plants, animals and cities remain. Many animals continue life undisturbed, while other went extinct. But with the disappearance of humans, the sixth great extinction has begun to wind down and the Earth's animals are experiencing a time a great peace, but not for long. Only a few hundred years after humans leave, Yellowstone (the largest volcano on Earth) erupts.
Obviously, many species go into extinction; but what about the larger scale? How does this massive explosion of lava and ash do to the Earth as a whole?
It obviously differs from [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/963/if-yellowstone-experienced-another-level-8-eruption-on-the-vei-scale-what-are-t) in that:
1. That question relies on the effects of an earthquake on Yellowstone
2. That question includes the existence of man on earth
[Answer]
## If a volcano erupts in the forest and there's nobody there to see it...
The post humanity nature of this question makes a big difference, what's left of the natural world will be thriving
[BBC](http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/supervolcano/article2.shtml)
>
> **Ash**
>
> Within 3-4 days, a fine dusting of ash could fall across Europe,
> according to a UK Met Office computer forecast commissioned by the
> BBC. The computer model predicts how ash would spread following a
> nine-day June eruption of 1000 cubic km of ash and gas from
> Yellowstone.
>
>
> The model shows that the fallout from a Yellowstone super-eruption
> could affect three quarters of the US. The greatest danger would be
> within 1,000 km of the blast where 90 per cent of people could be
> killed.
>
>
> **Climate change**
>
> The most wide reaching effect of a Yellowstone eruption
> would be much colder weather.
>
>
> Volcanoes can inject sulphur gas into the upper atmosphere, forming
> sulphuric acid aerosols that rapidly spread around the globe.
> Scientists believe sulphuric aerosols are the main cause of climatic
> cooling after an eruption.
>
>
> Aerosols in the upper atmosphere would also scatter sunlight making
> the sky look like a cloudy winter morning all day long. The skies in
> Europe would appear red in the days after the eruption.
>
>
> To predict how the climate may be affected, the BBC relied on historic
> data from the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia about 74,000 years ago
> and computer model forecasts commissioned from the UK Met Office and
> the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg.
>
>
> Experts believe a Yellowstone eruption would inject 2,000 million
> tonnes of sulphur 40-50km above the Earth's surface. Once there it
> would take 2-3 weeks for the resulting sulphuric acid aerosols to
> cloak the globe – with devastating effects.
>
>
> Global annual average temperatures would drop by up to 10 degrees,
> according to computer predictions. And the Northern Hemisphere could
> cool by up to 12 degrees. Experts say colder temperatures could last
> 6-10 years, gradually returning to normal
>
>
>
The climate change effect is largely dependent on how much damage humanity has done on the way out. If we've pushed up the temperatures a lot by the time we go, then the effect will be to bring them back down to where they should be, and as it all falls out it could end up being a great healer of the climate. If we've managed to control the damage then it could trigger a global ice age.
[Answer]
The eruption would do *absolutely nothing* to "Earth as a whole". On a geological scale, it's a minor blip, nothing special. Has happened hundreds of times.
The effects it would have on the climate are rather difficult to predict, analyses of previous supervolcano eruption e.g. [Lake Toba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory) don't seem to agree well. They vary between "other parts of the world weren't affected very much" and "it triggered a 1000 year ice age".
At minimum you'd get a global average temperature drop of several degrees resulting in severe winters and lukewarm summers for a few years.
Of course, even that could easily be enough to wipe out many less adaptible species, but those that occur in a large geographic range would have a very good chance of surviving even a real ice age in some spots with more favorable conditions and have their population numbers recover afterwards.
[Answer]
Basically there would be a giant crater.
Then a debris field from covering most of western North America with a fall out distance of around Minnesota to Michigan.
Further, thee would be ash in the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth that lowers the temperature.
This would cause suffocation in the fallout area. Famine and long winters for a few decades. The worse part of it would be that those in North America that don't die imediately or starve will have a much higher chance of cancer due to the particles.
The US wouldn't be completely wiped out, but it would require a ton of aid. Canada would suffer less due to farther away and smaller population, but overall it would suffer too.
Secondary effect might be the triggering of San Andreas Faults, the Oil pipelines, the places used for fracking blowing up, Butane deposits blowing up, and Cumbre Vieja falling into the ocean causes by possible earth quakes... All of these are more or less likely to happen, but all could happen or none could. If they did all happen, the US would likely be blown off the map completely.
In other words, the threat that it poses is terrible, but not as terrible as once thought, since it was once thought that it would be a complete or near complete extinction event.
[Answer]
Well, whenever a volcano erupts, there is usually a measurable decrease in average temperature because of all the ash and gases in the atmosphere. Assuming that Yellowstone is one that erupts properly instead of just crumbles, it probably would drop temp significantly (possible into the next ice age).
Assume that most of the US and Canada and Mexico are blown away. This would cause tsunamis to slam into every coastline that you could you project a relatively straight line from the explosion. I'd probably say it would be coming at a couple hundred miles an hour and would wipe out everything from the shore to the mountain. It would also kick up a lot of stuff around, mixing up surface dirt, exposing other places to the bedrock, but also spreading the coastline out when the water drags everything with it as it recedes. That means you'll find buildings, artifacts, and stuff really far into the ocean.
Obviously, this will change global weather patterns because the Rocky Mountains wouldn't be there. That would cause changes to the air flow, weather, and precipitation. When the lava cools, it probably would create a new mountain range of rock, which means there would be a wasteland for quite a while.
Once the glaciers from the new ice age recede, there is probably going to be a new sea where Yellowstone was. It probably will also join in with the coastal ridge so you'd probably have the plate tectonics spreading away from that point instead of contracting toward it.
Having a big crater will also lower the ocean levels relatively quickly. How much? Not entirely sure. Some of it will be deposited on the existing continent that wasn't destroyed while more of it would return. I'd probably expected a few inches lower at least.
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[Question]
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I am interested in creating a reality-based version of a creature from Greek mythology called a [Siren](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siren_(mythology)).
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> Sirens were believed to combine women and birds in various ways. In early Greek art, Sirens were represented as birds with large women's heads, bird feathers and scaly feet
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These were supposedly women that had the bodies of large birds, and lured men to them with their beautiful voices. Once the men were caught off guard, they would be devoured.
How could a creature with the following traits evolve?
1. Instead of making them human women, I am simply making them an all female species.
2. Their voices only affect men.
3. They only hunt one gender of a species, specifically male humans.
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If you are going for realism here, and want more than a hand-waving, techno-babble explanation, then you will have to do some serious thinking to create a world where sirens are possible.
First of all, it unlikely that a bird would be able to evolve visual mimicry of a mammal. Convincing mimicry would have to be very good to be useful at all. The bird would have to pass through a very deep low-fitness valley before the mimicry became useful.
A song that attracts only men is emphatically not possible. There may be a slight statistical difference between men and women in the tones they can hear. But this is an average difference. Some men (and most children) will be able to hear the high notes. Some women (especially older ones) will not. There is no way the siren will be able to specifically target the adults of one gender. At best, the siren song might attract a few percent more men than women. There will be lots of false positives.
Then there is the issue of mind-control through music. Music of course has some emotional power over a person, but there is no way in hell a song will make someone walk off a cliff or into the arms of a flesh-eating bird. The story of Odysseus tying himself to the mast of his ship is mythology. If you are going for realism, you just can't have this.
Also, cross-species reproduction does not work. There are no biological examples of this. Hybrids between distant species (say mammals and reptiles), is also totally out. If you are going for realism, you will have to be creative.
OK, sorry for raining on your parade. But I have good news. You can make this work and your world will be richer for it. You will need to think back a long ways, all the way back to the Carboniferous 400 million years ago and to the common ancestor of mammals and dinosaurs. This is where your story will need to start.
Plodding through the Carboniferous swamps was a species of ugly tetropods called pederpes. In the real world this species eventually diverged into the sauropsids (the common ancestors of dinosaurs and birds) and synapsids (the common ancestor of mammals). But in this alternative world, this is where the first sirens appeared. One population of pederpes began to mimic the female mating calls of another population, lure males into their groups and then killing and eating them. This prevented the other males from taking their females, it also provided food. Gradually the populations of siren and non-sirens pederpes diverged until they could no longer interbreed (became distinct species). But they did not evolve independently afterwards. Instead the sirens evolved under the constraint that they must be able to mimic the appearance and song of their prey. The sirens continued to evolve and speciate in parallel to their prey retaining only a superficial similarity. Over the next 200 million years the sirens evolved into dinosaurs and birds and the non-sirens into mammals. Most of the siren's descendants lost the siren trait and began to evolve freely. But some retained the siren trait and continued to optimize their mimicry.
The sirens could not interbreed with the non-sirens. But they could mimic their mating calls, their pheromones, and their appearance. The sexual dimorphism of the sirens decreased to almost nothing, such that both siren males and females resemble the females of their prey. The sirens are still sexual. Becoming asexual would vastly decrease their evolutionary potential and would not be viable for the sirens, since they must constantly adapt to mimic their prey.
The sirens seduce the males, and have sex with them, lulling them into complacency. Just after the males climax is when they are at their weakest, and is when the sirens kill the male.
But killing the males that are vulnerable to your song is a bad evolutionary strategy. It will result in the males that are not vulnerable reproducing more, leading to the prey evolving resistance. The best strategy would be to domesticate the non-sirens. To use the semen of the sensitive males to fertilize the non-siren females. In this way, you can eat your male and his children too without them evolving resistance. Alternatively, the sirens might only target men who are beyond their reproductive prime.
Regardless of what you decide the sirens do with the semen, here is how your world looks. There are male and female sirens. Humans in your world mistakenly believe they are all women. Further, the sirens are not true hybrids or chimeras, they are as distant from humans as other birds. That they actually are fertilized when they have sex with a man is another misunderstanding. They either mix the semen into the gravy they serve the man with, or use it to fertilize their stock of human women. Also, there are several other species of sirens that mimic other animal species.
Sirens are rare in this world. Humans are smart and will rapidly adapt to the wiles of the siren if they become too familiar with them. The song of the siren is not magic. It is beautiful, and can easily attract the lonely traveler, but is not irresistible.
That the song is magic is a misconception. That the song only attracts men is a popular, but completely false, belief. The truth is, the sirens just don't sing for anyone and will only try to attract a man who they think is vulnerable (e.g. a lone traveler or small group). Since the sirens rely on sexual allure that is adapted to men, they don't often sing for women. But a woman would find their song just as beautiful.
Also the sirens don't have to eat human meat. They can eat any meat. They may be omnivorous as well (your choice). Depending on how intelligent they are (and you have a lot of leeway here also) some sirens may choose not to eat human meat at all. Generally eating members of highly-social apex predator species that glorifies war and vengeance is a bad survival strategy. The sirens would likely be able to integrate very well into the human world if they chose. Some might adapt their talents in brothels or become bards.
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The siren is simply a descendant of a salamander with a very specific reproduction system. Surprisingly, having them look like birds is the hard part of this question.
The sirens evolved to hunt male humans to fuel their reproduction system. They lure in the men during breeding season with their high pitched songs and use their sperm on the egg clutches in order to begin their reproduction cycle.
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**All female species:** [Parthenogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis) is a form of unisexual reproduction that will let this species be all female with few issues. It is seen amongst several waterbound species, [particularly amphibians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_amphibians), so your sirens can even hangout in water and lure sailors to their doom.
**Voices affect men:** The beautiful songs of the siren attract men and repel women because women are more sensitive to certain high pitches than men are. This [Skeptics StackExchange](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/12307/are-women-more-sensitive-to-high-pitched-noises-than-men/12309#12309) question goes over the differences in hearing sensitivity between men and women: essentially, women can naturally hear slightly higher pitches better than men, and men lose hearing acuity earlier on than women.
So, the beautiful siren songs are laced with high pitched shrieks than only women can properly hear, causing them discomfort while luring the men.
**Only men are hunted:** Remember parthenogenesis? There's a perfect version of it for your sirens: [gynogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_amphibians#Gynogenesis), as found in the [mole salamander](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_salamander). This reproduction system operates much like parthenogenesis, except that it needs sperm present in order to begin the process, thus why men, and not women, are targeted by the sirens.
**Bodies of a bird:** Parthenogenesis is known to [rarely occur in some birds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis#Birds), though the offspring generally don't develop properly so getting from a real bird to a siren is a bit tricky.
However, all the characteristics of a siren certainly exist in nature, so it's definitely possible for it to happen to birds to give you a true siren.
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**If you are not used to story telling mode, read the summary below**
In the dawn of the times, when the humans were powerful, there was a tradition called "motor competition", where males of the humans, enclosed into funny shaped metal cans, would go around a closed path for a certain number of times.
Many details of this tradition are lost in the centuries, but it is known that the winners would spray a sparkling and sticky liquid on the bystanders, and that a special variety of women, known as "umbrella girls" and renowned for their pleasant appearance, were dressed in skin tight revealing clothes and were assigned to assist the men before the start of the competition and at its very end, to receive the spraying liquid from the winner.
Then it came the war, where men fought over men, and survival was harsh on everybody. The tribe of the umbrella girl resorted to a common trick in those times: they used their physical attractiveness and their voices to lure men into their lair, offering food and company.
There they laid together for hours, drinking and fornicating until, when the man was exhausted from the mating and invariably felt asleep, the tribe would make meal of his body.
The lure was always chosen to be in her fertile period, so that the tribe could carry newborns. The female were kept, while the males were abandoned close to nearby villages.
These umbrella girls are said to have spread in small groups and being constantly on the move, always searching for unaware males, as their appetites cannot be quenched.
Beware the fire of thy desire, you man, if you care of living old!
**Summary**
They evolved from a subset of human female who were used to count on the attractiveness of their appearance. In time of extreme scarcity, they had to resort to cannibalism to ensure nutrition, and being able to attract human males thanks to their bodies and voices made the hunt easy for them.
Over time they solved the issue of reproduction by mating with the pray before eating it (a la spider or prayer mantis), and keeping with them only the female.
They stitched to a nomadic way of life in order to be able to rely on the surprise factor.
[Answer]
"Beware the Sirens", said the wisewoman of the desert tribe to the young warriors around the fire. Her face was lined, her eyes were rheumy, but her voice was sharp with hatred.
"Beware the unclean ones, hateful to the Gods, with the voices of women but the bodies of birds. If they catch you alone, you will be devoured, and you will sire no children to strengthen the tribe, and you will be no support to your mothers in their old age."
Of course, this is true, but through the darkened lens of religion, myth and propaganda.
Sirens are a closely related subspecies of homo sapiens, who diverged during a population-density bottleneck only tens of thousands of years ago.
Parthenogenesis isn't particularly uncommon in the animal kingdom, and possibly could arise from only a single point mutation, such that mitosis begins in the ova without fertilisation. The offspring would always be XX, and female. The effective inbreeding this causes is usually selected against, but under conditions where human population density is critically low (climate shift?) the fitness costs of parthenogenesis may be less than the fitness costs of not finding a mate. Its not impossible in mammals - <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3528971> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis>
For the subspecies to survive as a distinct group, we need a barrier, preferably ecological.
Homo sapiens sirenus inhabits esturine salt marshes, with the desert on one side and the sea on the other. The technological toolkit and skills required to thrive in the marsh environment are very different to those required in the desert. Sirens hunt migrating waterbirds, among other things, and dress in the feathers of the birds. This is both a status display and a means of camouflage.
Various forms of parthenogenesis and sexual reproduction are not always clearly distinct in nature, and many species can use more than one. Sirens can reproduce through pure parthenogenesis, but fertility rates are very low. They more easily reproduce through Gynogenesis, where a sperm cell initiates mitosis but does not provide DNA.
Homo sapiens sapiens tribes live in the desert. Some low-status warriors wander, hunting, to the very edge of the marshlands. In the dense reeds and trees of the marshes, vocal communication is particularly important, and Sirens sing to each other. Sometimes human males hear them, are sexually attracted, and encounter the Siren. If she trusts him, he may be brought back to the hidden villages of the Sirens. This rarely happens to human females - they are usually not tempted by female voices.
For the human male, this seems like a great deal! Instant harem. His skills are useless in the marsh, but he is pampered and fed by his Sirens. It takes years to decades before the human male realises he has only daughters, and none of them look anything like him. He may repent, try to escape, and return to his desert tribe. The Sirens have cultural memories of this, and they cannot allow a remorseful human to return to his tribe, potentially leading a crusade back against their hidden village. So they hunt him and kill him. And then eat him. Because Sirens have a religion, too.
Either way, the human desert tribe has lost something. One of their sons that the humans invested in raising has been lost, passing on no DNA, and not supporting the tribe via his hunting and not guarding them against other human tribes from further out. Human tribes that do not strongly discourage their sons from seeing Sirens are weakened, and often overwhelmed by other desert raiders, losing their territory. Tribes that survive are those with a powerful prejudice against Sirens, usually expressed in religious and mythological terms.
Thousands of years have passed, and the populations of homo sapiens sapiens and homo sapiens sirenus have both spread into new territories. But the myth remains. Odysseus was very tow-y after months at sea without female company, but he remained true to his mother's teaching, and tied himself to the mast rather than join the Sirens.
[Answer]
Sure, they need enough human in their DNA so that they can reproduce. Perhaps the fact that it's all females is because the semen from a single human can be used to fertilize a bunch of their eggs, just like in fish.
This could also explain why they prefer to sing in choir to allure their prey, so that at least one of them gets the prize -and in the process this could lead to some nasty fighting. it would also be a total deboner, but a sailor's report could explain why they turn really ugly just before mating.
After the deed is done, the temporary alpha who got to get her eggs fertilized would share the body of the hapless (dubiously happy?) stud with the losers who got only to look. A meal is served, while the female goes laying her eggs in safety and let the others hunt for more prey
**EDIT: Additional info**
The sirens being hybrid would also explain why they need to lay a bunch of eggs for at least one of them to complete the process till hatching while the others 'abort'. And it would save the seas from becoming overpopulated by sirens!
**As for bird-sirens:**
This variety of siren could actually give birth like a regular mammal. This explains why they hunt in flocks: one of them has earned the pecking order to get to reproduce with the help of her sisters, and once the deed is done, meal (Hooray! -burp!-) and the flock will stop becoming a problem for the sailors, for it must keep watch of the pregnant alpha.
And if these creatures nest by the sea cliffs like the pigeons, it wouldn't be unusual that they lose the newborn to elements, sickness, rivals, etc, thus keeping an adequate culled number
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# Pheroconversion
For this one I'm going to recycle a concept from a previous answer, namely "[pheroconversion](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/220435/why-would-women-with-a-huge-belly-be-considered-attractive)". The gist is that sirens do not evolve to look like beautiful human women - instead, they produce powerful female pheromones that **train** gynephiles to *change the image of what "women" look like* to include the sirens. Because this process works better if the sirens resemble other women (who induce the same mechanism and train an instinct that most prefers averaged faces and other stereotypical characteristics), the sirens may have evolved some superficial similarities to women, but they don't have to be convincing mimics.
The importance of the song results from this being a process of operant conditioning. Someone whose nose is sensitive to estratetraenol will respond with GnRH, FSH, LH, and testosterone, *and* (putatively) will learn to associate any coincident stimulus with a sexualized response. The sirens are not welcome to roost in town, but they fly over the villages on moonless nights, wafting potent aerosolized pheromones that penetrate well to the olfactory epithelium, accompanied by a haunting and unearthly song that no human performer can replicate. It is difficult to hunt these passing sirens, which never attack a village from above. The villagers don't really appreciate that they are being reprogrammed; if they are attracted to the sirens, they simply think sirens are attractive.
Per the legend, sirens choose only a few hunting grounds where the unwary can be ruled by misguided passions: safe places where flying out of bowshot range is easy but rescue for a man on foot is very difficult. They are some of the cleverest of birds, so tactics show unusual cunning by comparison to those of most mammalian predators.
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[Question]
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Is it plausible that an advanced civilization commits suicide due to philosophical despair? (if not committing suicide directly, then doing something like collectively party to death) If yes, what kind of a civilization is it?
If this is at all possible, I think the civilization in question must have at least these attributes:
* Everyone is very intelligent: otherwise the stupider members that don't understand the problem would survive. Unless those that understood feel like killing the stupid ones too, but only if the latter are in the minority.
* More advanced than human civilization, because we are still not collectively committing suicide.
* Very emotional: more specifically, very emotionally attached to a particular idea, otherwise being disappointed by one idea may not be enough for them to give up the enjoyment of others. This particular fact make such a civilization a little implausible.
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I think that it is possible for a civilization to die because of an existential crisis, *lato sensu*; I think that it has actually happened several times. it may even be the general rule.
There is a well-known if not universally well-regarded point of view that civilizations have a certain resemblance to living things, in that they show a period of exuberant youth, a longer period of calm maturity and finally a period of decrepit senescence. And then they die. For example, in his [*Study of History*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History), [Toynbee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee), as summarized by Wikipedia, maintains that
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> [T]he breakdown of civilizations [is not] caused by loss of control over the physical environment, by loss of control over the human environment, or by attacks from outside. Rather, it comes from the deterioration of the "Creative Minority", which eventually ceases to be creative and degenerates into merely a "Dominant Minority"—which forces the majority to obey without meriting obedience. He argues that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their "former self", by which they become prideful and fail adequately to address the next challenge they face.
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Let's consider possible examples of civilization breakdown or even outright extinction which could be attributed to existential crises.
* The most striking, in my opinion, is the [Thirty Years' War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War) (1618-1648). Essentially (Western and Central) Europe went at war with itself, with two or three consecutive generations fighting all against all in the name of some nebulous and inchoate religious principles. Just about all European states participated, from Spain in the west to Transylvania in the east and from Norway in the north to the Italian states in the south, luckily with the exception of France (mostly) and England. Eight million people died, most of them Germans -- about one in two German men of fighting age. (A cynic might say that the war was staged in Germany because at the level of military technology of the time that was the only place in Europe suitable for massive battles.) In the 17th century, when they had rather primitive cannon and smoothbore guns. Mercifully, France stayed out of the war (initially) or was only minimally involved (finally); what if France, the greatest European power of the time, had succumbed to the wind of madness and plunged fully into the fray?
This war killed feudalism dead. Out of the [peace of Westphalia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia#Legacy) came the principles which shaped the modern concepts of sovereignty and international law.
* Another example is the ignominious end of the Ancient Egyptian civilization. Ancient Egypt had been the *sole world superpower* for *two millenia*. Two millenia. And then, with no apparent cause, it stopped being a superpower and became a place to be conquered. First by the Persians, then by the Greeks, then by the Romans, then by the Arabs. Not only did it become a place to be conquered, but all knowledge of its former glory was completely erased, and had to wait for the arrival of European archaeologists to be rediscovered. The locals *did not know anything* about their ancestors who had ruled the world for two thousand years.
* The abrupt decay of the Ottoman and Chinese empires. At the beginning of the 17th century China had the [largest economy in the world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Ming_dynasty) and the largest army in the world; two centuries later the British won the [First Opium War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War) *on Chinese territory* although their expeditionary force was outnumbered 10 or 20 to one by the Chinese army. In 1683 the Ottoman Empire was at the zenith of its power; the Ottomans [besieged Vienna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna) and were repulsed only by the timely intervention of the Polish army led by John Sobieski; two hundred and fifty years later the Empire *vanished*, leaving behind the north African and Middle Eastern chaos the effects of which are still felt today.
* The [Crisis of the Third Century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century) "*was a period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed*" (Wikipedia). It's a very well studied example of turbulence threatening the end of a civilization.
What all those examples have in common is that there is no immediately obvious overwhelming material cause. Yes, in each case we can follow the chain of causality between individual events; but we are struck by the sudden incapacity of rich, powerful, and vibrant civilizations to cope with adverse conditions, and to identify and manage historical trends. Something went profoundly wrong *with the civilization itself*.
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Generally speaking, an analog creature such as ourself is typically resilient to such crises. However, if a species were to build their entire existence upon some axiom, only to find out that it is false, it may find that it is incapable of recovering.
The species as a whole does not need to be intelligent, but it needs to be completely dependent on something intelligent for its survival. Then that intelligent thing may have an inconsistency to pull at.
A near example of such a catastrophe would be the infamous Credit/Default swaps of 2008. A large market had been built around the axiomatic assumption that defaults (bankrupcy) are rare. This fared well until the economic crises of the mid 2000's which lead to a surprising set of defaults. The whole system was built around the assumption that these defaults didn't happen, so there was nothing in place to try to trace what happened. There was a genuine fear that the world stock markets might crash under the weight of an avalanche of CDS transactions.
In the end, it didn't happen. The opaque mess we created *happened* to be relatively stable, and the giant string of CDS transactions went by without the sound of trumpets and bright lights from on high. In this case we got lucky, and in this case it was only money. But its a good example of how an inconsistent assumption can tear an entire system to ribbons.
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Basically it has to be a technological civilization where an individual or a small number of individuals have the power to destroy their civilization. The civilization would have enormous collective power, but if it only requires the diversion of a small amount of that power to destroy its world then it can happen.
The most probable form of philosophical despair would that where the agents of annihilation realized their ideological conception of the world was going to fail or was under serious threat. It would be simplistic to claim the current jihadist terror movements as they arise from complex political causes. However, complex political causes could be the seed to trigger the world's destruction.
The capacity for small groups to create novel biological warfare agents will certainly exist before this century ends. Cyber warfare and computer viruses could potentially cripple, incapacitate or destroy much of our computer controlled technology and infrastructure. If this happened, when our dependence of computerized systems had grown too great this could be absolutely catastrophic. Perhaps, simply someone triggering the world's nuclear missiles of all nations in a simultaneous mutual attack.
For the further future, antimatter powered energy systems and relativistic vehicles have potential for annihilation.
For a civilization to commit suicide from philosophical despair possibly they create utopian worlds of total immersive virtual reality they can no longer face the rigours of commonplace reality. They might their only options are to remain immersed in VR or pull the plug on reality by ending it all. This might include uploading themselves onto computer systems where we can enjoy the paradise of a cybernetic afterlife.
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If you want all the individuals in that civilisation to commit suicide, then I think you should have a look at [suicide cults and mass suicides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_suicide).
However I think you should also consider the very powerful instinct to survive.
Take for example one of the biggest mass suicides in recent times - the [Jonestown Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown), where over 900 people killed themselves. However [there were survivors](http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=37978).
Another example is the Nazi suicides. [Germany was stricken by a series of unprecedented waves of suicides during the final days of the Nazi regime.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_suicides_in_1945_Nazi_Germany) However not all of those involved with the Nazi party committed suicide, [many survived the fall of Nazi Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials).
Religous cults like [Heavens Gate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven's_Gate_(religious_group)) have chosen mass suicide, but even in those cases, there were survivors. [In the case of Heavens Gate there was a sole survivor, Rio DiAngelo/Richard Ford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_group)#Mass_suicide_and_aftermath).
So, assuming you want all the people to commit suicide, I think you should make compensation for some people who decide, at the last moment or not, to live and not commit suicide.
No matter how intelligent and emotional your race is, no matter how bad the existential crisis is, there will always be a few who think differently, or are less emotionally attached. Not everybody is going to think the same way and have the same feelings about a situation, even if there is a general consensus you will always have a few who go the other way. If there was a collective "party to death", there would be some who don't like the party and leave (or escape) early on.
I guess it all depends on what you mean by "wipe out a civilisation" - you could have so few survivors that the civilisation ceases to function. Some people survive, but they have to regress back to a more primitive state, living off the land like a post apocalyptic scenario. Or perhaps they migrate to another place where they can begin again. If this satisfies what you mean by wiping out a civilisation, then you could use any number of historic examples of mass suicides for inspiration. For example your existential crisis could easily be religious in nature.
But if you want every member of that civilisation to die, then things get a bit more difficult to explain properly. You could develop some ways for killing off these few survivors, however this will turn the situation into more of a murder cult rather than everyone killing themselves because of an existential crisis.
The only way I can think of everyone in a civilisation all committing suicide together, at once, is if you eliminated individual thought. Perhaps give them all a hive mind which has absolute control over its collective. Then the hive mind decides to kill itself, and all those who are part of it obey.
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Can existential crisis wipe out civilisation? Almost yes, it has happened many times in the last century where nations and peoples underwent existential crisis. There have been a few significant examples of the death of big ideas, and this creating destructive downward spirals. I think it's best to base this sort of question in the realities of history. Perhaps the decline of the USSR is a good example to speak of, and you could make something of a sci-fi metaphor of it.
A common view of the end of the cold war is that the Americans forced the Soviets into bankruptcy because of military spending, but the reality is about internal Soviet politics.
The initial optimism of the Russian revolution wouldn't last forever, and by the mid 1970s the country had entered an Era of Stagnation. Mismanagement, economic malaise, and political regression led to widespread disillusionment. A decade later, efforts to modernise and open the system to participation and feedback ended up causing its collapse, because the communist system no longer could enforce the authority required to survive.
Soviet society immediately fractured along tribal lines and split into newly independent republics. This triggered bloody conflicts, from Yugoslavia to Azerbaijan and Chechnya. Corruption has not got better since then, in recent years it has got worse, and Putin's attempt to centralise power has been hampered by growing internal strife.
Chechnya degenerated, and has since then become something of an Islamic Republic. Some of the former Yugoslavia by comparison joined into a new grand vision of a united Europe, and so did better for themselves. But as you'll no doubt have noticed, even that dream is dying, with Brexit, and now the risk of Frexit owing to a possible election win by the National Front.
The thing is, Russia isn't the only example we have of a recent decline. When the Ottoman empire collapsed the Arab world was full of hope about the creation of a union of Arab states which could rival the USA and USSR. But this never happened, regardless of various attempts to join nations together and make the Arab people one. Now the Middle East is a mess, just like the former USSR.
Iraq's fate is very much typical of this; the dream of pan-Arabism died, replaced with a brutal and yet at least secular regime, which itself died (was killed) and then collapsed into an even more corrupt, primitive, and tribal state. Indeed the continent of Africa is full of other examples of fledgling nations full of optimism and hope after independence from their colonial masters, becoming ruined by chaos often caused by external meddling.
So there's plenty of historical examples of advanced societies losing hope and collapsing into bloody war and hopeless corruption during the last century. All you need to do is read history more broadly, mix up examples (Russia, Islamic World, post-colonial Africa, EU), and exaggerate their technological level and the scale of the decline. That should surely provide you with plenty of food for thought!
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One possibility is **passive suicide**. Just stop procreating. Universal fertility suppression. Life goes on without children ... until it doesn't.
One scenario where this even makes sense is if the end of the world really is nigh. A nearby soon-to-be- supernova or GRB that will blow within a couple of lifetimes in a universe where FTL travel is impossible might lead to a collective decision to just give up, rather than bearing children doomed to die horribly along with their planet.
Or even the big rip, the imminent end of the universe as dark energy gets completely out of control. No point even trying to build a starship. We think we have hundreds of billions of years to go. We may be wrong, or their faith in erroneous science too great.
Or on a smaller scale a planet so.polluted with (accidental?) Teratogens that the act of attempted procreation comes to be seen as morally unacceptable, and self-extinction of intelligent life as the moral path.
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In the same vein as [the fungus that creates zombie ants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis) and [the parasite that convinces rats to willingly sacrifice themselves to cats to complete its life-cycle](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/10/29/parasite-human-brain-control/#.WDhy11xQd-4), consider a parasite that invades the human brain. It causes selective damage to the brain that results in extreme [anhedonia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anhedonia) for all activities other than sex. Naturally, the parasite is sexually transmitted.
Desperately pursuing the only source of pleasure that remains to them, people cease to take care of themselves, falling into depression and existential despair about their situation. If the parasite spreads sufficiently rapidly, it could destabilize a good chunk of society.
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# No
Books such as [Children of Men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men) talk about a civilization that is, universally, looking down the barrel of extinction, and talks about how suicide ramps up and plays an effect in society. However, even in that case - and nearly every other conceivable case - individual members do not come to the same conclusions about the existential crisis at hand.
In every example of mass suicide there has been centralized dogma and/or authority, and it rarely extends beyond a thousand people - so hardly the size of a civilization. So, on the first hand you don't have a necessary requirement: that everyone in the civilization is so struck by the existential problem that they want to commit suicide, but on the other hand you don't have a full civilization.
Any sort of 'centralized' decision for self-suicide is really murder. Nuclear war, disease, etc. are all things where some agency *besides* the individuals in question are causing the death. Therefore can be ruled out.
We have to ask, then, is there any condition where everyone in a civilization would choose to commit suicide? And the answer to this is an emphatic no because, by necessity, individuals all hold slightly different points of view. While they are connected to other individuals through certain shared ideas (even as basic as language), everyone has some idea or set of ideas that causes them to be different. To have a mass civilization suicide, everyone would need to share at least one idea - and the chance that there is *no* member that didn't differ on that one critical idea is, effectively, zero. In fact, it's probable that at least half a civilization would consider suicide bad - if only because they have programmed some willingness to live.
Thus, we know that if some existential crisis encouraged suicide, even one such that a majority of the civilization felt it appropriate, there would be a minority segment that would reject the conclusion - rationally or not. Truly, an unlikely combination of existential crises would have to arise such that everyone partook.
# But
There is one opening; and that is if the thinking by the society collapsed to a singular decision making engine. You can imagine the Borg from Star Trek, for instance, coming to a group conclusion and offing themselves. However, even in that example there is a drive to differentiate and become individuals. One could imagine a world, though, where the precursor event was one where everyone signed on to or became reliant on a single source of decision making. You see this in computer networks that become unhealthy; where a single node with authoritative powers acts erroneously, and causes the entire network health issues of one variety or another. Without that precursor and without the drive to differentiate being smothered, it remains unlikely that you'll see this sort of event, ever, merely by the nature of civilizations.
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The question: ***Is it plausible that an advanced civilization commits suicide due to philosophical despair?***
Well it depends, first on what you mean by "*commits suicide*" and secondly, what you mean by "*due to philosophical despair*"
If what you meant was "***every member of*** *an advanced civilization* ***individually chooses to kill themselves*** *due* ***solely*** to philosophical despair.\*" Then the answer is ***NO***. Even in an advanced civilization philosophy is a relatively new and ephemeral thing. Evolution on the other hand is **billions** of years old and the one thing that evolution writes into the very heart, soul and DNA of every living thing is ***SURVIVE!*** And you don't get to be an advanced civilization unless your species is better at surviving than all others.
So, although specific individuals may be able to kill or sacrifice themselves (evolution allows this for the potential improved survival of the overall species), and greater intellect gives an increased ability for this, their very natures as biological creatures simply would not allow *everyone* to do it. Not for mere philosophy anyway.
Now if what meant was "***every member of*** *an advanced civilization* ***individually chooses to kill themselves*** *due* ***partly*** to philosophical despair.\*"
Then the answer is ***YES, IF THEY HAD "HELP".***
What kind of help? Well possibles are 1) Technological, Chemical: Mental damage or defects from drugs and/or addiction is certainly possible, along with philosophical despair. 2) Technological, Biological: Genetic alterations that intentionally or accidentally removed their survival instinct would certainly change things a *lot*. 3) Situational: A *true* existential crisis, such as the knowledge that you were going to die or be killed anyway, along with certain POVs/philosophies *could* persuade a large group of people to exercise the only control they have left by killing themselves. For examples see Masada. 4) Perceptual, Deception: Philosophical *despair* alone cannot do it, but philosophical *decpetion* sure can: See Jonestown or Heaven's Gate for examples of these.
Finally, if what you meant was "*an advanced civilization* ***chooses to kill themselves*** *due* ***solely*** *to philosophical despair.*"
Then the answer is ***YES***. Because that allows for some people, (maybe even a single person, their ruler) to make the decision for everyone else. So some crazy old absolute ruler could just use, nuke/poison/radioactive waste to make sure that the whole civilization dies when they do. Also, some ruling class could do this as retaliation if they thought they were going to lose their power.
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Possible in the face of the ultimate doom that the civilization would all fall apart. During the black plague some portion of society did fall apart as people faced the possibility of that they would all die.
In 1938, a Martian invasion scare caused mass rioting and looting. For your civilization to fall apart they have to be faced with a doom so powerful and unstoppable that even thinking about trying stopping it is pointless, and the only thing left to do is party or riot.
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You needn't look much further than the American opioid epidemic to see how this could happen. West Virginia has 42 fatal opioid overdoses per 100,000 people, and that number is skyrocketing year after year. This exceeds the rate of live births, and similar figures can be found throughout Appalachia. To whatever degree you could consider Appalachia to be a civilization independent from the rest of the United States, it is committing mass suicide by numbing agent.
So what's happening there? Few jobs and little opportunity. Crushing poverty. And a couple small groups outside the "civilization" making money off a fun way to die.
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I think, like many posters before me, that it's highly unlikely that all **members** of a civilization would collectively come to the conclusion that suicide is the solution. The will to survive is too great with most species. We can, of course, imagine a civilization of genetic defeatists but how did they get to the position of civilization in the first place?
A major cataclysm such as Nigel222 suggests may of course give inclination to just give up and check out early for a majority of the species. (With further members being killed in lawless chaos once governments collapse.) Leaving only a small splinter of the previous civilization who no longer can uphold the scientific and industrial advances of their precursor and as such can say have devolved into something else. The ur-civilization is now dead, even though members of the species which constituted it are still alive. However, as AlexP's examples show remainders of the species may over time come to power as a new civilization. While Roman, Ottoman and Chinese civilizations have come and gone the human civilization persists.
*So, how do we kill off an entire world by collective suicide in the face of existential crisis?*
Well, I suppose if we're going by the OP's original premise that this crisis erupts with the intelligentsia who are smart enough to recognize the futility of carrying on this may, at a sufficiently advanced technology level, create enough problems to kill of enough the less sensitive parts of the population.
**Possible scenarios are:**
* Launching nuclear weapons out of spite/nihilism.
* Leaving maintenance intensive infrastructure such as nuclear powerplants to self-destruct.
Even without nuclear power a civilization dependent on rivers for energy and travel could easily be wiped out if nobody maintains the river dams. (Or dikes if your civilization is the Netherlands. Imagine a world were all the land that's left is below sea level due to polar ice cap melting and then nobody knows how to keep the walls water proof...)
It may, or may not fall withing the premise Luna wishes, but I will claim that the best way to come about this scenario would be for the right segment of society giving up with the right circumstances to make that surrender fatal for the rest of the world. What happens to us if all farmers burn their farms, animals and themselves due to some horrific insight? Can we survive if all doctors check out early to avoid the rush of the next pandemic?
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**Yes**
Consider the case of Easter Island. The people who lived there believed that their ancestors watched over and provided for them, so they would construct giant heads to ask for help. They built too many heads and ruined the ecosystem because of it, and, unfortunately, their only way of fixing it was to build more heads.
Now consider super-colliders. We keep needing more powerful idea to test our theories, so we keep making them bigger and bigger. Imagine a world do wrapped up in whatever they're trying to prove that we use all of the planet's resources.
While neither of these events strictly philosophical, I do believe that such a failure would have resounding effects on the attitude of the people. Everybody worked towards something that failed and now we're going to die soon and there's nothing left to party with.
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I'd be inclined to go with maybe, Rome tore itself apart in large part due to an internal collapse of philosophical cohesion, the civilisation stopped pulling in the same direct and became vulnerable to outside forces that hadn't previously been an issue. At least that's how the Eastern Empire framed the collapse of the western portion still using Rome as a capital. I'd also have a look [here](http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Eldar) for some ideas.
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[Question]
[
Think about a scenario in which, on a given planet, a complex life form has already evolved.
In your opinion, what are the odds, for this complex form, to evolve towards intelligence?
* With the terms "complex life form", I'm referring to something comparable to an Earth's complex mammal.
* With "intelligence" I intend a life form capable of ask itself a question like the one I'm submitting right now.
Another way of basically rephrasing the same question is:
"is there a certain level of complexity after which the evolution of life form MUST naturally tend towards intelligence, or is intelligence just an accident in the evolution of life?
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No, this is definitely not the case. Increased mental power has a significant calorie and other cost so it needs to give equally significant gains for it to be favored by evolution. In other words "good enough" is fine. In particular, local maxima where you are well suited to your environment are easy to reach and then hard to leave. It might be possible to become more fit - but only by becoming less fit first. That is unlikely to happen so you are probably going to just stay where you are.
For example mammals will find it very hard to evolve longer necks (the giraffe is at the limit): <https://svpow.com/2012/09/30/mammals-have-short-necks-because-of-local-maxima/>
Remember that evolution has no goal or objective, no long term plan. Each individual change needs to either have a benefit (or at least no cost) or over the long term it will not succeed.
The dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years, far longer than our mayfly species has even existed, and in all that time they did not evolve intelligence of the sort you are describing.
For intelligence you need just the right combinations of factors to come together in just the right sequence so that each step makes sense at that time until in the end sentience emerges. A lot of people think that our intelligence actually came out of the fact we were living together in social groups. We developed bigger brains to defeat each other, and then that incidentally let us defeat everything else.
[Answer]
In addition to what Tim B said about evolution favoring the fittest organism, which may not necessarily be the most intelligent, it sounds like what you're asking for is sentience, rather than raw intelligence per se.
Slime molds, for example, are capable of [surprisingly intelligent pathfinding](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-molds/), but are very, very far from any kind of sentience, self-awareness, or other qualities which we traditionally associate with human intelligence. Similarly, the computer you're using is certainly extremely intelligent in its number-crunching ability and with the right program can solve incredibly complex tasks, but clearly lacks sentience.
So the simple answer is that no, it does not appear that evolution intrinsically favors intelligence. Intelligence is a trait with trade-offs that are not always worth it. However, the more complex answer is that even if intelligence exists, it may not be intelligence *as we know it*. An organism could be a highly intelligent, competitive problem-solver, but utterly lack the forms of cognition like self-awareness and introspection that are implied by your question.
If you're interested in a (fictional) example, the core theme of Peter Watts novel [Blindsight](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm) is whether or not sentience is a prerequisite for intelligence, and might give you inspiration for your worldbuilding. It's worth a read.
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It is not intelligence that's the problem - it's how your social system interacts with that intelligence to create (or not) civilisation. There are a whole bunch of intelligent animals on Earth, which can pass the [Mirror Test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test):
* Humans
* The various extinct humans, such as the Neanderthals
* Common chimpanzee
* Bonobo (pygmy chimp)
* Various types of parrots
* Various types of corvid (crows, jays, magpies, etc)
* Elephants
So from this we can deduce that raw intelligence is quite common. Thus you would expect it to evolve on an alien planet.
However, for an intelligent creature to develop the sort of civilisation needed to type away at our keyboards and ask/answer questions on WBSE, there are a whole bunch of biological things which are required:
**The animal CANNOT be territorial.** That's 'terriorial' in the biological sense - having a defended home range. A territorial animal will fight tooth and nail to stay in its territory and to keep others out. It will never leave its territory unless driven out of it by a rival.
Humans are not territorial - if we were, there would be no such thing as moving house, foreign holidays, football teams playing away matches, commuters going to the town down the road to work, postmen delivering the mail, etc. (Humans can be possessive about land, but it is not as intense or instinctive as biological territoriality).
Territorial animals view both their neighbours and strangers as the enemy. They think they are out to kill them and to take their stuff. So territorial animals can never invent trade. Which means that they can never invent an enormous list of technologies which require raw materials to be gathered from all over the place, or which require cooperation of widely scattered groups of people.
For instance, me typing this requires some folk to have drilled in the North Sea for natural gas, some other people to have piped it to a power station, folk to run the power station, maintain the national grid, etc etc. And that's before we even begin to think about what the computer is made of...
If I could wave a magic wand and instantly give proper opposable thumbs and a human level intelligence to the chimp, the bonobo and the African bush elephant, not all of them could create a civilisation like a human one.
* The bonobo possibly could. They have territories, but border encounters seem to often be non-aggressive.
* The chimp couldn't. Male chimps are just too psychotically aggressive to strangers.
* The African bush elephant could. They are not territorial and can have friendly as well as neutral or aggressive interactions when herds meet.
So something distantly related (elephant) to us is more likely than the chimp to recreate civilisation.
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No one has the faintest idea. It's obviously possible (or we wouldn't be here), but one sample does not give much more information than that, particularly in a possible sample space as large as the universe. And, of course, Fermi's Paradox ("If the development of intelligent life is statistically inevitable, where is everbody?") suggests that the odds may be bad for reasons of which we are unaware.
As to the second version of your question, ALL evolutionary changes are accidents (barring the existence of an Intelligent Designer), so it's clear that there is no imperative driving a species towards intelligence. If it's clear that early stages of the pathways which produce intelligence are also strongly advantageous to a species' survival, then there will be strong evolutionary pressure (at a species level) to encourage (preserve) such developments, but there is a catch. If the early stages are strongly positive, later stages of development must also be positive with respect to these early stages, and the early stages might arguably lead to intense specialization in the species' ecological niche, which would tend to inhibit further development. So, for instance, if a species of anteaters becomes a fabulously successful hunter of ants due to its intelligence, as long as this lifestyle is adequate there will be little incentive to preserve developments in intelligence which do not aid in hunting ants. This suggests that "intelligence" as we define it will be most likely to arise in generalists/omnivores rather than specialists. It also suggests that intelligence is more likely to arise in prey species rather than top predators. Once we developed tools and weapons we became apex predators, but before that it seems to have been a different story,
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This is definitely an unknown in current scientific theory. No one knows how "natural" the evolution of intelligence is. Fortunately, you did not tag this question with hard-science, so we can make guesses!
We would need to define "intelligence" to answer the question. You saw this, and provided your definition: "...a life form capable of ask itself a question like the one I'm submitting right now." Excellent! Now, in proper form, I will suggest a counter definition which is hopefully inline with what you are thinking, but is easier to answer in biological terms. To do so, I would like to call upon an lyric from an old Jethro Tull song, *Thick as a Brick*:
>
> The doer and the thinker, no allowance for the other.
>
>
>
This line always caught my attention. Those who do and those who think are put at odds. However, it does suggest a key attribute of "thinking" that I believe gets close to answering your question: it doesn't "do" anything.
Consider this as a model for thinking: the goal of thinking is to explore the time evolution of something (typically a model of the world around us), while isolating it from the rest of the world as much as possible while it is in motion. Once it ceases moving, we explore the results, and decide if we want to act on them.
A classic example of this would appear in combat. If you *think* about throwing a punch, you "throw it in your mind," and think about what will happen. Only once your mental punch lands, and you assess the idea, will you throw the punch. If it assesses poorly, you want it to have no effect on the world. Maybe you'll think up another punch to try. Or maybe a kick. The key is that when you decide what to do, finally, you haven't done *anything*. This means your punch is going to be very slow. To compensate, while we are thinking, we tend to *do* something we think is safe to prepare for the possibility of action. In combat, that's called telegraphing, and it tends to give your opponent an advantage.
So we see two major aspects here. First is what we just discussed, that intelligent thoughts are rather isolated from the world while they are in motion. The second is that we let them evolve in our heads, which takes time. The answer we get from an intelligent question is one which was valid several seconds ago. I think this is a key factor for the evolution of thought -- it will only occur if answering a question that's a few seconds old is still useful a few seconds later.
So this is where I believe evolution is natural. Evolution is natural in cases where there's value in capturing the "state" of something in the world, and playing with several futures in isolation before deciding how to act. For this to be natural, there have to be decisions to be made where the world isn't changing so fast that the decision is useless after the fact.
I think the manipulation of inanimate objects is the reason intelligence is natural. If the manipulation of inanimate objects to help you out is valuable, whether its using tools or building shelter, there will be value in developing intelligent thought. If the environment rewards spending that energy on responding to other creatures, intelligence may be less important.
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Given our only data point for complex life the data points toward intelligent life developing if given enough time; however, it took a very long time and shifts in the dominant types of complex life on the planet before it took place.
Given that we have no other data points I think it's virtually impossible to say. It's entirely possible that most planets reach a state of equilibrium and kinda stagnate until something kills off everything.
It's also possible that most planets with earth like histories and conditions develop intelligent creatures just like ours did.
I Don't think intellignet life must develop on any given planet with complex life. I do think it must develop on a planet, given an extremely large amount of planets with complex life
If you haven't seen it before the [Drake Equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation) May help you make some loose estimates. Although it's not very scientific IMO
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I like and agree with Tim B's answer and I've only skimmed over the rest.
To Tim Bs answer I would like to add that life and living systems are entropy engines that push the 4th law of thermodynamics forward and create more entropy.
Evolution through genetic modification allows living systems to exploit available chemical (I mean both food and mineral sources like petroleum) and radiation (eg sunlight) energy sources. For example there are strains of fungus that scientists have under investigation for cleaning up petroleum spills, we find living cells even in the hearts of glaciers and in the black depths of the ocean there are geothermal vents teeming with life.
So, natural selection is the mechanism by which life changes absolutely but to really understand the process we look to physics and the 4th law of thermodynamics. This law which is complicated states in part that energy systems will tend towards a state of maximum disorganization or lowest energy.
Our earth or more specifically its biosphere is an open energy system. It receives energy from the sun and also the earths molten core. Over millions of years the original self replicating molecules that most likely formed in pools around volcanic activity have developed more and more complex ways of accessing the energy stored in molecules. Along the way it has also developed ways of storing and protecting that energy and also developed ways of designing and building specific function into molecules like storing information, poisoning something that tries to eat it, envenoming prey or attackers, signaling between cells etc...
While this apparent complexity may appear to run against this idea of entropy and disorder keep in mind that the biosphere is always getting more energy bathed in solar radiation and heated by the earths core. As organisms become more complex and require more types of cells and molecules to govern them entropy increases as these metabolic demands require more calories to carry out. As organisms evolved from the original prokaryotes their ability to branch out and exploit energy sources wherever they possibly could (generating more entropy) has been the push force of evolution.
With that said I think that self aware tool using intelligence IS selected for by evolution but with a giant caveat. After all we are pumping hydrocarbons out of the earth to burn them. As a result of our ability to exploit nuclear and hydrocarbon fuels our population has exploded. (ENTROPY!) However the giant caveat is that tool using self awareness probably has a relatively low probability of occurring. It requires a social species that has a body with the fine motor skills to create tools and needs on the fly flexibility in its approach to solving food acquisition. This requires a sophisticated metabolically expensive brain that can communicate with other brains of it's type and generally be aware of what those other brains may know. My point is that a lot of branches of the tree of life are probably never going to generate anything like the intelligence you and I possess and it's conceivable that on other planets where life exists there have never been or ever will exist self aware tool using species like H Sapiens. So for entropy if it were a thinking being then a self aware tool using species like us is a lot like winning the lottery.
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\*\*When you say " With "intelligence" I intend a life form capable of ask itself a question like the one I'm submitting right now."\*\*Even on a sigle webpage , the one I am viewing there is the same fascination with intelligence -
Could plants develop intelligence?
Would spacefaring aliens have to be roughly as intelligent as humans?
Does intelligence necessarily lead to an abstract language?
Would it be possible for a single celled organism to evolve intelligence?
Would it be possible for a planet orbiting a blue supergiant to develop intelligent life?
Building a planet favorable to the evolution of intelligent life
Who is asking and who will answer? Members of a species who have first of all learn t a language , letters... ABCD..then they all agree upon a word and its meaning Intelligence ..and who because they cant communicate with other species , don't understand their lives , cant experience living IN their bodies EX water, rocks, plants, animals everything other than humans ...they all agree and suffer from a common psychosis (and thus appear normal to each other) that we are intelligent despite doing nothing more than surviving and reproducing like all other species on a grand scale..it you observe planet earth from s different plant or you observe the ever appearing and dying members on a long timescale.. say of hundred, thousand or million years.
So i guess your question and the underlying human fascination with the so called human intelligence is on a different plane same as bacteria communicating among themselves when they have multiplied beating your immune system, leaves when they have made food by photo synthesis, animals when they have found grass to eat or preyed on another.They might be asking the same question, why do you assume that the only communication is verbal or written like I am typing to respond, why it cant be any other not understood by us ?
## Point I want to make is when all humans appear to be doing- surviving and reproducing is the same as all other creatures are doing.. what is the point of saying that we are intelligent.. or more intelligent..or as we like to hypnotize collectively... most intelligent...Well other creatures seems to be accomplishing the same goals without expending so much of their resources..like we do..May be our fascination with intelligence and its search everywhere is because we might be lacking in it...we are not born intelligent...we have to learn how to survive and reproduce unlike other creatures..So even if we have agreed to call that faculty intelligence, who are more intelligent? Ones who are born with it we call instincts or the one who has to learn it..the intelligent?
**Unless and until we can discuss the topic of intelligence with other organisms living on this planet who have evolved together with us and are as successful in surviving and reproducing as we are,till then all discussions are mere inter species discussion best we can call shits of the brain.**
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Intelligence will always increase over time. This is because evolution works in small increments whether positive or negative. An animal that is less intelligence fairs worse than one with more intelligence while other major fitness aspects will either increment in small amount which cannot supercede intelligence or there will be a huge leap which can only sustain a drop of intelligence to some level against it's competitors, but again intelligence kicks in and the small increments take over and again rise so you get a fairly stable continuous increase over time.
As far as the upper limits of this... I'm of the idea there is no upper limits because as intelligence increases so will energy rich sources of food which will allow this to continue on indefinitely.
The problem is that this doesn't quite matter, because all the stars that are likely to support life aren't able to support complex life long enough for human level intelligence to evolve through this method (or at least I don't think so. I haven't run any numbers, but it seems to be right given how much time is left on Earth compared with where we are.) So if you're talking human level intelligence then no, Human intelligence is not the normal product of evolution. Humans evolved through a few happenstances occuring that kicked our intelligence way down the field that we can only maintain due to a few small tricks, like cooking food, being predator/preys, being social, etc all of which combined to push human intelligence up.
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