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[Question]
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Imagine a planet with the same climate all on the surface.
There is only one living creature on this planet (let's say a plant to avoid food problem). It is perfectly adapted for the climate. And as there is no herbivorous animals, there is no reason to evolve for defense systems.
In this case, would this plant evolve at all? There is virtually nothing to adapt or even to improve.
On the other way, if it doesn't evolve, would it lose its evolution capacity? In that case, if there is a change on the planet itself (a crisis like a meteor, or an orbit variation, etc), would it be condemned to extinction where an evolved creature would survive?
## UPDATE:
I didn't think that how this situation came to exist matter, but it seems to be the case.
So let's say an alien civilization prepared this planet for this plant and implement it everywhere on the planet surface at the same time. They do it as an experience to see if the plant would evolve at all.
[Answer]
First off, notice that there would still be evolution if there's only a single species of plant on a planet.
For one, we have determined that the plant is perfectly suited for its environment. But what about in-species competition? A taller plant would have more access to sunlight. No? So if there's a genetic mutation in one plant that makes it slightly taller than the others, this plant would have more chances of survival and a long life span, which would make it more successful than the others and this useful trait would be carried on in its seeds' DNA and its offsprings' would be more successful than the next generation of other plants. And so on.
And then there is always some genetic variation present in a gene pool. Means that even within the same species, there is a slight difference of genetic information. For example, take us, humans as an example. There are humans living in the western hemisphere who are resistant to digestive disorders but are prone to respiratory diseases (like flu). In the eastern hemisphere we have humans who don't succumb to respiratory diseases easily but are very prone to digestive issues. So if (God forbid) a universal calamity hits the earth, only the people who are more resistant to it, will survive and the next generation would consist of only their children. Then, in the course of time, there would be some variation in their gene pool and ...
So yes, evolution is a constant process (at least in the current state of universe) and so far there is no way we can safely assume it will stop under any circumstances.
[Answer]
There's always something to improve. Every organism has two major concerns: the need for energy and the need for reproduction. If two organisms, even of the same species, are competing for the same resource (e.g., sunlight, food, water, land), then the more successful one will succeed.
In the case of photosynthetic plants, the organism that acquires more solar energy will succeed over the others. It has two good options: either grow taller than the other plants or grow larger leaves. In both cases, less successful plants find themselves in the shade with a diminished capacity to acquire the needed energy for their continued survival.
The successful plants remain around to reproduce, which passes on the successful trait to later generations and the unsuccessful trait fades away. Over time, the species evolves into broad-leaf and tall subspecies, eventually splitting away to form two new species that each fill a specific niche.
And the process continues...
[Answer]
I find the question strange and am not sure if you fully understand how evolution works.
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> In this case, would this plant evolve at all? There is virtually nothing to adapt or even to improve.
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Evolution doesn't happen with a goal or planned, it is a random process.
Every time the DNA of any living thing is recreated, when cells split etc. there is a small chance that errors happen. With a even smaller chance, this errors have effects.
Reasons why the DNA mutates are numerous: Radiation, Toxines, Viruses, ...
**If you define a perfect world as a world where such mutations don't happen, then there won't be any evolution.**
**If you say in your perfect world such errors happen, then there will be evolution.**
As I said, evolution is a **random process**. You can't sit in front of your PC and decide "hell yeah, I am going to evolve today!" and suddenly you have three arms.
Evolution works this way:
1. random errors happen and change parts of an organism
2. this changes either give the organism some advantage or disadvantage in certain areas (usually a mix of both)
3. if there is a disadvantage, the specimens with that mutation wont be able to compete with the "normal" rest and die after some generations
4. if there is an advantage, they might take resources from the "normal" other plants without that mutation and maybe the others won't exist after some generations
5. maybe there is a change that doesn't give any advantage or disadvantage, so both will continue to exist.
So for example, let's say there are different mutations that change the height to which the plant will grow.
We have our "normal" plant A that is on your planet. Suddenly, two random mutations appear in two different plants. One, A+ will grow to 1.5 times the normal size. The other, A- will grow to 0.5 times the size.
As we know, plants mate and mix up their genes. So if two plants create a seed, we now say the resulting plant will have the height of both averaged.
After some generations, there will be plants in all sizes from 0.5 to 1.5.
But now think about this: All this plants need sunlight. But the larger plants will get more sunlight, while the smaller ones will stay in the shadow of the large plants. So the larger plants get more energy from the sun to grow even larger and "steal" more sunlight from the smaller plants. Also they can generate more blossoms and thus generate even **more** large plants stealing the light from the smaller ones.
So after some time, there probably won't be any smaller plants left and all plants "evolved" to be larger.
But maybe some plant has another mutation, that changes the colour of its blossoms. In this world, there is no difference at all between this two colours, so after some time there will be plants with both colours on the planet.
Also I don't see how a plant could lose its *evolution capacity*.
If you say your plant is perfect adapted, there can still be changes which make no difference like the different blossom colours. Even ignoring that, there will always be plants with mutations. If they are less adapted, they will just stop existing after some time, but at any given time there will be mutated plants on the planet.
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Both yes and no. As others have pointed out, even if there is only one species, they would still compete against each other. This would lead to some evolution.
I originally wrote: "However, it would be slow. What is driving most evolution on Earth is predator-prey and victim-parasite relationships." This turned out to be incorrect. After looking at various articles on Wikipedia, it seems that there are many other mechanisms that are more important. Some of these would be present on this planet, some would not. So, the rest of this answer should be taken with a grain of healthy sceptism. It is one possible scenario, but not the only one.
Plants would strive to be taller than the neighbours, but there are limits to that.
I would expect the species to find a local maximum and get stuck there. Very very rarely, some individual would get some combination of mutations that was better than this. This would make for a new burst of evolution until a new maximum was found. See [Punctuated Equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium) but with far fewer punctuations than is common on Earth.
It is *possible* that the new mutant would become a new species without out-competing the original, but not very probable. As long as it is only one climate on the whole planet, one variant would simply be best and win the whole world.
No species can lose the ability to evolve. As long as there are imperfections in the reproduction, evolution will happen.
However, species on Earth are to some extent "evolved to evolve better". This would be lost or never happen in the first place.
This sounds like bad news if there is a disaster of some sort.
It doesn't have to be. If there is a climate-related disaster, the species would be badly adapted, but as long as there are no competitors they would still be the "fittest". As long as everybody doesn't get utterly killed, survivors would still breed and reclaim the planet.
A biological disaster on the other hand would be much worse. I am thinking of a spaceship landing, bringing other species to the world. These are likely to kill off the natives in short order.
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There couldn't be *just* that plant alive - at least not without a major catastrophe. The plant itself exists because of evolution.
When life appeared, Earth was covered with purple bacteria. Then *something happened*, and one such bacteria found a way to produce energy from sunlight - that bacteria was green, and soon (ish) the Earth was covered with it: the genome of this green bacteria lives on to this day, billions of years later, in every single green plant that produces energy from sunlight.
For there to *be* a plant, there needs to be evolution. And in the time it takes for that bacteria to evolve into that plant, a gazillion other species have seen the light of day.
A planet with only a single species of a plant and no other life form whatsoever is unrealistic, I'm not buying it.
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You don't have predators? Why wouldn't new predators evolve? As long as you can get more energy by attacking your neighbor than by playing the normal game being a predator pays off.
Your plants, as many have pointed out, are going to be evolving to out-grow each other. Trying to shade those around them so that they'll die and become extra soil nutrients or trying to smother them.
Imagine a gene which causes carriers to grow roots from branches touching other plants like ivy, now you have something which can use those around it for support to grow higher.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WdwfG.jpg)
Those genes become common but if they're too common in an area all the plants suffer because they need other normal plants to climb.
Now in the real world we have things like the vampire plant. Plants which can shove their roots/tendrils into other plants and feed on them directly.
<http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-08-22/vampire-plant-even-more-nefarious-scientists-thought>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7dHG8.jpg)
Now imagine that a new mutant gene in your ivy-like plant changes the roots to burrow into the flesh of the other plants to feed like they would into soil.
So now you have a world with a parasite/predator which feeds on your original species but is still closely related to it and can probably breed with it.
Which sets things up for a nice set of rounds of adaptions and competition for the parasites and the prey.
[Answer]
## 1/ It seems possible to stop evolution !
There are lots of examples of earthlings species which evolution has stopped at a certain point, for example this bacteria living in the deep ocean has not changed since 2 billions years.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eUIo3.jpg)
Add crocodiles, trilobites and other species. They found a place in nature that fits them so perfectly they (quite) stopped their evolution.
You could imagine a specie that stop evolving while finding the perfect balance, like my very old bacteria.
## 2/ Except it is not possible.
In fact, some species did evolve from these, but the original specie was not extincted as the new one did not replace them. These species seems freezed in evolution, but if they are so perfect, why don't they rule the world ?
They have a very specific place and climate they are adapted to. They don't spread worldwide. If they become too numerous, they die (from hunger and lack of vital resources).
I'm not sure how a unique plant could evolve and how climate could be the same everywhere, but let's assume that the case, you have the same plant everywhere, and the climate is... perfectly perfect. The plant grows. And grows. It spreads worldwide. Wow.
If nothing threatens your plant, then nothing stop it from growing. **Your plant become its own ennemy** : the nutrient the plant needs to grow will lack. The shadow from the grown-up plants will hide the sun from the youngs. Or, if it's perfectly flat, the place will lack for the youngs and nothing will replace an old dying plant on a ground without the essential nutrients (as the old plant has already deeply used it to grow)
As a result, the young plants will die, except the ones with a small mutation allowing them to accept another kind of nutrient, or less sunlight, or growing above the other. A new specie is born. Evolution strikes agains.
You could argue that the young plants can live from the dead old plants (That sounds creepy) but on earth, a lot of other species are needed to decompose a plant (worms, bacterias...). If the plant can "eat" herself still living or not decomposed, it will have a serious bad time with its "child", but that could be the one and only way your unique plant could rule the world, all alone.
And even with that solution, I'm not sure it's not already a new specie, as the first generation eats from the ground and the new generation eats froms the old plants, and might develop another way to absord nutrients.
[Answer]
Organisms make large sacrifices to their short term fitness to increase their long term, evolutionary fitness. The largest of these sacrifices is sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction has long been a curiosity to evolutionary biologists because of how difficult it is. Plants go to great lengths, making flowers and fruits and buckets of pollen in hopes of reproducing. The predominant theory for why sexual reproduction is maintained is that it allows organisms to evolve and adapt more quickly through genetic recombination. A plant that didn’t require all of the extra organs and energy, and that could instead reproduce asexually, would be able to produce more offspring more quickly.
On your planet a plant that evolved to reproduce asexually would greatly outcompete its peers. On Earth such a plant would do well in the short run, but in the long run would lose out to its more adaptive competitors. But on a planet where the environment never changes and the plant is already optimized to a local maximum in fitness there would be no long term advantage to sexual reproduction. There are many plant species on Earth that have already taken this [strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-pollination). For most of these plants self-pollination has developed relatively recently, within the last few million years, which reinforces the theory that their strategy will lose out in the long run.
Based on the above I think it is possible that your plants may evolve to lose the ability to evolve to some extent. At the very least they are likely to at least stop devoting large amounts of time and energy to maintaining the ability to evolve. That isn’t to say the plants won’t still change over time. Geographic isolation and [genetic drift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift) will cause the plants to change and diverge very gradually. Even in different environments the plants will change in minute ways that won’t have any impact on their fitness, but will still make them different simply due to random chance. Eventually, unless the plants have some way of overcoming the reproductive isolation of having spread over an entire planet, speciation will occur.
[Answer]
One thing that this question underestimates is the sheer massive size of planets.
Even if you seed a planet with a single species of plant perfectly engineered for the climate, even if the planet has the same climate on all the surface you still have to deal with things like topography and weather patterns.
A plant perfectly adapted for a particular climate still won't be adapted to different altitudes in the same climate. The plant won't do as well 10,000 ft up the side of the mountain as it will do at the base. Heck, just being on one side of a mountain, or in a valley, can make you have vastly different amounts of sunlight. Same climate, very different survival profiles for plants.
Weather patterns can and will cause different adaptations. If there is a prevailing westerly wind plants right near the coast would have their seeds blown out to sea, they wouldn't develop those helicopter styled seeds that get carried in the wind. They will develop heavier, sturdier seeds that ill either not fly away into the sea, or, that can survive the sea. OTOH, plants on the other side of the coast will have an advantage to having flying seeds.
Boom! That's speciation in the works.
In places like the rainforests, there are species who have filled a niche that is only several feet across. You take a couple of steps, and it can't survive in this new, different, environment. There is just no way to curate an entire planet to such a degree where there are no niches to fill with evolutionary advantages.
[Answer]
**The "No-Evolution-Case"**
There might happen to be a "living creature" with a DNA-Code that is impossible to mutate. This would make accidental changes of the DNA-Code impossible. If there is no "other" DNA-Code around that could mess up the original code during the reproduction cycle, than there is no evolution.
Lets assume the DNA-information of the creature is hardcoded into a never changing material. This could have happen during some material mistake while teleportating. Or the creature could have been made by humanity! Or... the creature was incidentally created during the first moments of the universe, when there was this "Bang" that we all believe in. Lets further assume the rest of the Body of this creature is totally fine with not having DNA made of nucleic acid (see: DNA).
Wouldn't this still be a living creature -- eating, sweating, doing its thing?
The answer is YES.
even through reproduction there would be no change in the DNA, because all possible mates carry exactly the same data set!
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But is evolution maybe the wrong concept for describing the change/development of a species? Could this described species possibly evolve from generation to generation, if it had the ability to think, feel and communicate, plus had a good memory? -even if it cannot change any DNA-Data?
The answer is YES - it must evolve, but this is apparently no "evolution".
"Evolution is change in the heritable traits of biological populations over successive generations." [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution)
[Answer]
Evolution is not a binary flag that either occurs or does not occur. It occurs in varying degrees, no matter *how* perfect the world is, until it is *truly* perfect. Not in the sense of "oh, there's no predators or climate," perfect in the sense of "no random noise, completely laminar airflow, and in general no unpredictability at all." If an individual or species can successfully predict the effect of every single molecular collision for all time, it can elect to escape evolution entirely. Otherwise, there is some unknown factor, and some regions of the species will naturally get selected over the others. For one thing, this involves a perfect method of reproducing any genetic material (however "genetic material" should be specified in such a case). This is only thermodynamically possible if the DNA is a crystal at absolute zero (which is impossible in the known universe).
However, one might be able to drive evolution asymptotically towards zero effect, but not zero. It may be possible to continuously increase the predictive capacity of the individual/species until you can ensure that any random perturbation will diminish in effect fast enough that the system can never leave a "basin" of perfection. This certainly would not look like anything you or I would call life.
What might it look like? Using the concept of "basins" in highly unpredictable systems, one can visualize it. The idea is that any perturbations must get distributed evenly across the entire planet fast enough to attenuate it before it causes a change. Mythbusters showed a beautiful effect with metronomes which I would argue does a good job of showing the kind of feel you should expect from a basin such as this. ([N-Sync](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-c6S6SdkPo)) ([32 metronome synchronization](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5eBf2KwF8))
[Answer]
**This species would be at a serious risk of dying out.**
As others have pointed out, there's a good chance the species would slowly diversify by simple random changes, but if there's another option to consider: **[Genetic drift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift)**.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/15UEr.png)
Consider a species with two traits for which there is no evolutionary pressure. Let's say they're colored blue or red, and the color has absolutely no effect on their lives in any way. In that case, the proportion of red or blue creatures in the population would be a simple random process. A simple random process like this will eventually, purely by chance, lead to a situation where the whole populatation is one color, at which point the other color will be dead. The ability to have the other trait is simply lost forever.
In your world, as you have painted it, there is pretty much no evolutionary pressure on any traits. If that situation is maintained, and the plants don't manage to diversify their own environment, they would converge towards a planet-wide monoculture. At that point the smallest microbe, solar flare, climate change etc would wipe the whole population out in no time.
[Answer]
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> There is only **one** living creature on this planet.
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Making the assumption that there is only one individual organism, and that *perfect* means that it is invincible (also from starvation).
Then you are basically describing a **rock**. ;) And since no reproduction is taking place there will be no evolution.
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Your scenario is talking about 1 single organism, not a species. Evolution is about species, descendants, etc. There cannot be evolution for an individual organism. The organism is either suited for the environment and lives or is not suited and dies.
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> Imagine a planet with the same climate all on the surface.
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It would be *extremely* unlikely to have a planet whose surface was exactly the same everywhere. It certainly wouldn't be naturally occurring. There would have to be "sunlight" from every direction equally. There couldn't be any airflow or water currents, density variation in the planet, planetary rotation, elevation changes, lakes, rivers, clouds, or any number of other things. You'd also have to eliminate external factors, such as gamma ray bursts, meteorites, or just random dust from space.
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> There is only one living creature on this planet (let's say a plant to avoid food problem).
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Does it reproduce? If so, there would quickly be more than one plant.
If not, there are a few problems. First, it's going to die if it's remotely like Earth-life. So it won't evolve, it will just go extinct.
Second, a plant isn't one living thing. It's trillions of them, called cells, that reproduce constantly. Supposing the plant has a naturally-indefinite lifespan, those cells would eventually evolve and either destroy the host plant (that's what cancer is), or turn it into something new. The cells could evolve into distinct microbes which could, in turn, spawn entirely new forms of life.
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Anything that survives in an environment is "perfectly adapted" if it's the only thing around. The plant could always adapt to get bigger and use more sunlight, or adapt to get smaller and waste less energy. Without other things putting selective pressure on it, no particular adaptation is more or less "perfect" than another.
Furthermore, that plant is changing its own environment. Metabolism creates waste products which will eventually alter the climate by significant amounts. The planet will eventually run out of geothermal energy. The energy source for the artificial sunlight will die. Nothing is forever. In a more plausible scenario, planetary changes will cause ice ages and global warming as a matter of course.
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If it doesn't evolve, it doesn't evolve an inability to evolve.
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Over population of the species could be a reason that the environment is not perfect. There could be evolution of another species better fitted to this environment. Then even though the planet does not change more evolution can occur as the species compete with each other and with themselves. It may settle down but it could just keep changing for ever.
It may be that evolution does not occur. For example there could be something that keeps the population low (and any genetic changes do not confer any advantage so they do not propagate), so there is no competition between members of the one species. (But even if a genetic change has no advantage it could still spread through the population (on average to 50% but any change could spread more due to statistical variation)).
[Answer]
I think it was in *The Beginning of Infinity* where David Deutsch gave an example illustrating how evolution can *not converge to the ideal state*. Take an island with a certain fruit growing on it and an animal that needs that food to survive. At a certain point in the seasonal cycle, the fruit is edible, but it is not ripe, so the animals won't get the most energy out of it. This is the only factor affecting population size, hence the population size is now at it's maximum (this is basically your *perfect state*).
Assume the animals have adopted to only eat the fruit when it is ripe. Now a genetic modification takes place in one animal which causes it to eat the fruit earlier. It will probably outperform the others because it gets to the fruit *earlier* and there is no population pressure. This means less food for the others, so the total population size will *decrease*.
So, after a couple of generations, those animals with the mutation will consume more to stay as healthy as the others which leads to less food for those without a mutation. The old population will die out over a couple of seasons. Note how the population size has decreased now because there is less energy available!
Now, another mutation turns up... and the whole process repeats.
This is all very theoretical, but it goes to show that evolution isn't quite survival of the fittest. You can change the story above a bit and even create nice loops where the end state is exactly the state you started with. Don't think of evolution as an end-of-the-line model, always converging. It is not.
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[Question]
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In the book I will soon attempt to write, a mysterious company will finance the construction of elaborate headquarters on a remote island somewhere in the South Pacific.
### The island
The island in question will be extremely remote and largely unknown. This island will be affiliated with no country and is presently uninhabited by man. I am not yet sure of the dimensions of this island, but it will possess a volcano, which will be near the center, subtropical forests and vast bleak cliffs. I believe there will be ruins of an ancient civilization somewhere on the island, but no one presently lives there.
### The headquarters
The headquarters are be quite expansive and they will be placed on one of the cliffs. It will be at least a two-story, durable structure, complete with labs, a large kitchen area, private rooms for scientists to live in, and a storage area. Energy will be provided via solar panels. The headquarters will not only house scientists, but would be an adequate place to study, experiment, engineer, etc.
### The problem
There is a dark, underlying, largely unknown reason the headquarters was built there, but the general public, along with most of the scientists involved, are under the impression that it exists for another purpose.
The problem is, I cannot think of any good reasons to spend so much money to finance a base in such a remote location.
Therefore, the "reason" for the base's existence would have to be based on the island itself and anything that can and must be studied intensely right there.
Does anyone have any idea for why such a base would be created?
The reason must:
1. Involve a breakthrough in some field of science
2. Involve the island in question
3. Explain why the base could not have been built anywhere else
4. Justify the necessity of spending money on such a base
[Answer]
Slight frame challenge. Do NOT tell the public why the headquarters is being built there, keep it covered under "company confidential information" or even "classified". The public will come up with all sorts of fascinating reasons for themselves ("Alien spaceship!" "Ancient civilization" "Nuclear testing"). Occasionally have an "insider" stir up some of the more outlandish internet sites so they speculate with their own crackpot ideas. Those who like conspiracies will buy into their favorite explanation while everyone else will just assume it is really a boring answer that nobody cares about.
If your real "mysterious" reason ever leaks, just provide some fake "proof" of the same to those sensationalist conspiracy newspapers & websites and let someone else debunk them for you.
As @automaton points out, there was also a requirement for at least most of the scientists to also be kept in the dark - however most scientists are very un-interested in the business side of things. Blaming it internally on "business reasons" or even "bad business reasons ... Manager X doesn't know what he's doing" will satisfy most scientists. Presumably at least one or two have to be in on the true reason and they can help deflect any colleague who speculates too much.
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**Pollution**
The base is on a remote island because they measure some very sensitive data from the troposphere. The light pollution from cities and also the air pollution from cities will corrupt the data. Hence they have to build in the middle of nowhere.
This is the same reason the Hubble Space Telescope is in space. It means you can look at distant stars without the atmosphere getting in the way.
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If you're looking for a fake reason for the public to hear about, then you could always just say that the lab was built to study geological/geographic anomalies within the island's volcano, for reasons of predicting future eruptions or seismic events. Alternatively you could have your scientists studying the ancient ruins you mentioned (unless there's another plot-related reason why they wouldn't be doing that).
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## To skirt the law
I mean, this would be the official, public explanation. "Research on X is, sadly, illegal in our country, so we're building our lab elsewhere." The key thing here is that you lie about *which laws* you're trying to skirt.
Imagine that your real reason is so you can resume Mengele's horrific "experiments" (aka sadistic torture for its own sake). You don't tell people that, obviously.
* You tell them you're researching stem cells, or abortions, or some other hot-button social topic that the public is not *united* in their opposition to.
* Or, make it a financial law, the favorite being taxes. After all, most democratic governments fail to recognize tax shelters as the existential threats that they are, and the public seems to think they are an uninteresting anomaly whose existence has no real consequences to speak of. Nobody will bat an eyelash if you state baldly that you're just trying to avoid paying your fair share. Indeed, they will probably pat you on the back and introduce you to their unmarried daughters.
* Or, on the topic of money, blame intellectual property law. "If we discover the cure for ageing here, the formula will sadly become public domain in a mere 150 years, which is hardly enough time for us to recoup our investment once practically everyone is immortal!"
It has become commonplace for professional ventures to willfully seek to defy the law. Since the most convincing lie has a kernel of truth, your best bet is to camouflage yourself as some tolerated variety of evildoer.
[Answer]
# Geothermal Power Station:
The facility is built to research a novel design for geothermal power using the volcano and sea water as coolant. If all goes to the supposed plan, the facility will be the core of a much larger development to follow. So really, a large research complex is a tiny thing compared to the small city that will be built there later to smelt aluminum with geothermally-generated electricity.
# Abandoned Military Base:
A large complex already existed here to support an air base. Until recently, it was off-limits to civilians. But it has a huge airport and hundreds if not thousands of abandoned buildings, so the expense is almost non-existent. The logic of the facility completely flips and the question becomes "why WOULDN'T someone have a facility here?" The scientific research could be environmental, studying global warming, marine biology, ruins long neglected with pent-up demand because of the government ban (this might even be WHY the facility was abandoned). Or it could have to do with the presence of the base itself - there is a large Aricibo-type observatory built by the military, or the research could be on hazardous materials like unexploded ordinance, chemical weapons, or biological stockpiles.
# Hazardous Research:
The research they are doing is so hazardous that it must be carried out far from civilization. Accidents could result in the death of thousands or millions, and the facility must be as remote as possible. A novel fusion power plant with potential to explode with 100 megatons of force, for example. Or it is a biological testing facility for deadly pathogens like [Gruinard island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island) and any pathogens must be kept isolated. Of course you need a sophisticated facility in the middle of nowhere!
# The Island of Dr. Moreau:
The research must be done here because this is the site of a former research facility where cutting-edge research was being funded in any area you care to name. The mystery of why a facility is here goes from being a problem to a fun puzzle your researchers pursue. There is already an existing research facility there, and the researchers go to it to identify what the previous researchers were researching. This could be controversial genetic research, and the subjects of it now are wild on the island - the only place on Earth with the evidence of what went on.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hbdgz.png)
[Answer]
**Long term stress-testing of astronauts.**
Current [tests being performed on teams](https://www.iflscience.com/space/scientists-are-testing-astronauts-in-long-mars-simulations-and-the-results-are-worrying/) are being given a deal of interest in the international press, this has the unfortunate effect of disturbing the experiment.
For reasons of psychological authenticity, the suspension-of-disbelief must be maintained by all members of the teams as much as possible to ensure that stress responses are as close to genuine as they would be on actual missions.
The extensive test facility therefore excludes all public view so that the subjects are in no way "performing for the cameras" - which would alter the conditions of the test beyond what could reasonably lead to constructive results.
In terms of the heat and solar cycle, this would be at the warm-end of the tolerable range in contrast to the [Antarctic habitat](https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/nasa-tests-lunar-habitat-in-extreme-antarctic-environment/).
The reason for funding the experiment is clearly humanitarian - the long-term survival of humanity - thus justifying the armed security in fast boats patrolling the nearby waters, and the attack helicopters ready to greet any unwelcome peeping-Toms from the air.
[Answer]
Well, a typical Jules Verne style "explanation" might be just "an eccentric billionaire wanted it this way", which might still function quite well nowadays.
But speaking of a remote island in the middle of nowhere, it might serve two purposes (separate from the physical limitations / benefits described in other answers):
* It is far away from the principal actors, so many possible influences: an "accidental" military action, a direct military action, spy activities are harder to pull off. Basically, for a hostile actor it is easier to drop a drone on the lab in some major European city (and then claim accidental lost control) than to do the same on a some island in the Pacific that is 400 miles away from anything else. To put it short, **external influences and disruptions are harder to pull off**.
* It is far away from the principal actors, again, so less distractions for the resident mad scientists while they are working on the shiny new orbital ion cannon. It's one thing if your most important evil genius becomes hooked up on gambling and spends days and nights at Monte Carlo, which is, like, two miles from the secret lab. It's another thing if the same evil genius has nothing else to do aside from work. Even if it's because there is nothing else to do at all in the 400 miles radius. Again, to be concise, **less distractions for personell** are good to get the job done faster.
Now, concerning the key points from the question, the field of science can be anything more suitable for the plot. There is nothing particular in the remote location, as *any kind* of a remote location would work. Replace a tropical island in the Pacific with an outpost in the tundra or with a camp deep in the Amazonas rainforest, nothing changes.
The last point is interesting, spending money. I would think that with a lair of mad scientists, most of the money would go towards the equipment and the personnel costs. You'd have to spend them anyway. Now, in a remote location, supply chain might eat up enough money, but putting the research team on a big pile of spam (see Arctic or Antarctic expeditions, I simplify a bit) would already alleviate that. There is a nice add-on option, though, if the eccentric billionaire cover-up is not just a cover-up. The funding body might just **own a fitting vehicle to ferry the supplies**. For example, our eccentric billionaire just comes in his superyacht like each half a year for a visit to an elsewise unremarkable Pacific island, where a mad scientist's research lab just happens to be. And it happens that the superyacht just carries enough supplies for a bit more than a further half a year that miraculously dissipate after the visit.
[Answer]
## Alien Ruins
An expedition found a crashed spacecraft or even the remains of a base of clearly alien origin on the island or in the ocean close to it. The technology is amazingly advanced and worth doing everything for. If the island is in the ocean the artifact can at most be 100 million years old. On the continental shelf, the artifact may be much older.
Maybe the humans aren't even in control. Something ancient and conscious is waiting in the ruins. Some scientists are reporting strange dreams...
*"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"*
[Answer]
## The lab is for a neutrino detector
There is actually a real-life proposal for this. In other words, there really might be an advanced research station on a remote island in real life in the near future.
Neutrinos are incredibly difficult to detect. The most successful neutrino detector to-date uses a kilometer long ice-cube at the south pole.
Scientists have suggested that using the entire pacific ocean for neutrino detection would improve accuracy and sensitivity.
<https://www.space.com/pacific-ocean-neutrino-detector-p-one-concept>
From there, it's pretty simple to justify why you'd need an advanced lab on an island in the middle of the pacific ocean.
It also needs to be away from people, traffic, infrastructure, etc. that would disturb the experiment, so it would have to be a remote & uninhabited (or mostly uninhabited) island.
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You could have a combination of reasons. The first being environmental data collection, similar to what happens at [Cape Grim](https://research.csiro.au/acc/capabilities/cape-grim-baseline-air-pollution-station/), where atmospheric samples are taken to measure,
>
> long-lived greenhouse gases (GHGs), including carbon dioxide >(CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2) and synthetic GHGs such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), are a core part of the measurement program. Chemicals which deplete the ozone layer (called ozone depleting substances or ODSs) are also measured, for example chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons, which are themselves potent GHGs. The number of atmospheric GHGs & ODSs measured at Cape Grim now exceeds 80.
>
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> Other core compounds measured at CGBAPS are aerosols including black carbon, reactive gases including tropospheric ozone, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, radon (an indicator of recent terrestrial influences), solar radiation, rainfall chemical composition, mercury, and persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
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Another activity could be the establishment of a very sensitive radio telescope that needs to be in a radio quiet region, similar to the [Green Bank Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Telescope)
Add to the mix a weather observatory and research being undertaken on rare and endangered marine life in the region.
[Answer]
# Endemic Flora/Fauna
The island is remote and largely unknown ? You can bet there's all kinds of plants and animals that can't be found anywhere else in the world, or that are in some way different to the usual varieties found elsewhere (insular gigantism is a real thing).
As a bonus, it can give you some easy story prompts, where an amateur botanist stumbles into the dark secret while looking for exotic plants and tries to uncover more while evading the evil corporation, the story writes itself.
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Three good reasons to choose an island:
1. keep things in (bad things are researched - viruses that would risk global pandemics if they break loose, zombification patients, ...)
2. make it easier to keep things out (research frenemies that want to steal your research, air pollution, radio frequencies, ...)
3. researching something that is unique to the island itself and can not be transplanted somewhere else
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[Question]
[
I'm working on a science fiction racing game that is centered around hovercraft that will race through various environments, both natural and man-made. I'm trying to establish a design language for these vehicles and I figured the best place to start would be figuring out how they hover and design them from there. This was originally going to be a question about how I achieve lift, but I think I got a workable solution and just need help making sure it's plausible.
Clarification: When I say hovercraft, I don't mean the modern skirted hovercraft. The vehicles I envision would look more like aircraft than hovercraft. I just called them hovercraft because they are going to hover.
My plan is to make it so these vehicles only hover about a meter off the ground, both when they're up to speed and when they're stationary. I also wanted to avoid having them rely on vertical thrust too strongly out a concern about them suddenly becoming VTOL aircraft instead of hovercraft.
I wanted these craft to lose their vertical lift once they're above a certain distance from the ground and enter a sort of controlled fall/glide until they are low to the ground again.
My current plan for how they achieve lift is a two-part solution, but it could end up being reworked if problems present themselves. While at low speeds, a set of thrusters/turbines would provide the vehicle vertical lift to keep it about a meter off the ground (maybe lower, still working out exact ride height.) A set of forward thrusters would push the vehicle forward, up to racing speeds. As the vehicle picks up speed, its aerodynamics would allow it to use the ground-effect to give it lift at the desired ride height. As it generates its own lift, the vertical thrusters/turbines would turn off and the extra power would be stored or diverted into the main engines to allow it to go even faster. The thrusters/turbines might also need to provide supplemental lift when over terrain types that might reduce or break the ground effect.
My question is how do I keep my hovercraft from becoming full on aircraft? What can I do to limit their flight capabilities so they can generate enough lift to get about a meter off the ground without given them the ability to go more than a couple meters off the ground under their own power?
Is limiting the power of the vertical lift thrusters/turbines enough to keep them at a set height? The ground-effect would kind of self-regulate itself in terms of height as the lift is generated by moving close to the ground and would become weaker once it's too high up.
[Answer]
If you're just looking for a way to ensure they can't take off, ground effect is a good starting point. Without the interaction with a surface, at most a couple of meters below the craft, lift is negligible. Think of it as if you were creating a high pressure region of air that your craft sits on top of. Take away the ground and that pressure doesn't build, so your craft falls.
In classic hovercraft the pressure is maintained with a skirt. Other ground effect vehicles primarily use aerodynamics to form and ride the pressure cushion. For those types the aerodynamic profile of the craft doesn't generate lift, it generates a pressure wave that supports the craft. Going faster doesn't lift you up, it increases the density of the pressure cushion... and presses the craft down onto it. Ideally the increase in downforce should match the increase in pressure, keeping your 'altitude' reasonably consistent. And once you get up to speed you're not pushing air downward with your engine, giving your more power for forward motion.
In addition, the aerodynamic shape of your craft is specifically designed to ride on that cushion of air. Take away the air cushion and the craft becomes inherently unstable. Run it over a ramp for instance and just after leaving the top of the ramp it starts to tumble within seconds. You can maybe stabilise it if you have a big flywheel gyroscope to retain orientation, but a racing hovercraft isn't going to want to drag all that extra weight around when it's only useful in extreme situations that you shouldn't be facing in a race anyway.
In summary:
* Ground effect provides most of your 'lift.'
* The faster you go, the more solid your connection to the ground.
* Leaving the ground, at any speed, is catastrophic.
Now... how do we break this?
Your hovercraft are designed to be flexible, adjusting aerodynamic profile to maximize the ground effect at different speeds by small adjustments of the control surfaces and hull geometry. With a little bit of tweaking, adjusting the flex range of some of the surfaces and adding a little extra to the length of the adjusting mechanism (at the cost of a small weight increase) it might be possible to switch from ground effect to fully aerodynamic profile while at speed. If you get it just right you might be able to 'skip' off the ground effect cushion and get a fairly decent glide, enabling you to cross small ravines and so on. Preferably the ones as far away as possible from the cameras and race officials.
[Answer]
## Wings are simply not allowed
Regulations, regulations, REGULATIONS!
Sometimes the easiest solution is the best.
Since you stated this is a racing game, every game must have its rules and the most rational solution is to take the first page of every racing sport ever conceived and simply form the proper regulations to which all the racers must abide. The first and main rule of racing hovercrafts should be, naturally, that the racing vehicles comply with hovercraft standards, meaning they must not have wings or any other features that provide them with sustained flight. How you define the difference between sustained flight and hovering is down to you.
After that it's down to fine-tuning the rules.
If you want a pending story in this racing game, you could think outside of the box and have your racers actively seeking out loopholes in the rules to give themselves an upper hand, that's what actual racers do and have done since the beginning of racing and many of them managed to get away with it until the regulations eventually caught up.
[Answer]
Perhaps the hovercrafts do not have a powersource of their own, but are instead somehow electromagnetically powered through the racing track/area, similar to our modern induction chargers. They cannot go offtrack, or fly too high, as the range of the power delivery system is pretty limited. They can have some form of power storage, providing limited power for a few seconds, and thus enabling them to do short jumps (think car racing up a hill, and momentum carrying it in the air once it reaches the top). These batteries/capacitors would prevent a full engine shutdown, followed by a crash.
As a little bonus, if you want, you can also add "nitrous oxide" to spice the races up. A separate induction coil slowly trickles power into a capacitor, which when full, can be discharged for a short burst of speed.
And if you are concerned about explaining electricity based propulsion, you can just use this mechanic for the off-the-ground component, think an electric powered helicopter that can't get too far from the ground without the rotor slowing down.
[Answer]
**Hovercrafts have skirts.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0f4q7.jpg)
<https://www.neoterichovercraft.com/hovercraft-parts/skirt.php>
<https://morgridge.org/blue-sky/how-do-hovercrafts-work/>
>
> A hovercraft has what’s called a skirt to contain the air. When the
> air blower is turned on, this skirt creates a pocket that traps the
> pressurized air. That pressurized air is what gives the lift to make a
> hovercraft work.
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The skirt contains a pressure chamber between body and substrate (ground or water). If the hovercraft lifts off the ground it loses pressure because a gap opens between skirt and substrate. It loses pressure. Then the hovercraft will fall back.
[Answer]
## Event rules
There's an obscure Olympic athletics event, the 50km walk, that works as a good example for this. It's a race, but the rules require you to walk every step. Every single participant is of course capable of running, but if caught doing so they're disqualified. The difference between running and walking is simple, if both your feet are off the ground at the same time, you're running.
You can simply make a rule that if the vehicle is more than 2m off the ground it's disqualified from the race. It's not a regulation on the vehicle but rather on the way the vehicle is used.
[Answer]
**Quantum levitation**
One way to ensure hovercraft stay near the track is to ensure that the track itself is what allows them to hover. This can be achieved through quantum levitation, by which a cooled superconductor can float above a magnetic track.
>
> The very superconductor material itself will create a force to inhibit any sort of motion in relation to the magnetic field. If you tilt the superconductor, for example, you will "lock" or "trap" it into that position. It'll go around a whole track with the same tilt angle. This process of locking the superconductor in place by height and orientation reduces any undesirable wobble.
> <https://www.thoughtco.com/quantum-levitation-and-how-does-it-work-2699356>
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You can see some demonstrations in these videos from 2011:
* <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA>
* <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F-VVmMD4_k>
This differs from traditional mag-lev technology in that the levitation is more stable, making it suitable for the precise movements made during racing. The "locking" effect would also permit racers to regulate their height and tilt within the magnetic field of the track, which could have all sorts of implications such as obstacle avoidance or even adding a third dimension to the track.
In real life, we haven't scaled up the technology to have levitating vehicles yet. And I'm not sure how moving laterally above a single magnetic track would work - perhaps you could have multiple parallel tracks, that hovercraft could "jump" between. But you can decide what to explain or omit, since it's your world you're building!
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Well, there are a couple of ways you could go about this. If the thrusters are powerful enough to lift the craft one meter off the ground just by themselves, they are powerful enough to lift the thing higher, making it an airplane. Thus, the main downward thrusters must not be powerful enough to lift the craft off the ground by themselves.
Of course, this leaves the issue that the thing can't float. So, to resolve this issue, there must be a secondary source of lift that works only when the craft is near the ground. A few options:
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> The track is magnetized
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> Part of the force keeping the craft aloft is the exhaust from the thrusters hitting the ground at high speeds, rebounding, and hitting the craft again, thus providing additional lift
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> The craft relies on aerodynamic lift to stay in the air, and thus cannot lift itself under thruster power for more than a few seconds (long enough to get going).
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of course, there is another problem. If the craft can generate lift force via aerodynamic lift, then they will generate more lift as they go faster. (Since the craft are able to glide, this must be the case.) this logically means that if they go fast enough, they should be able to fly.
to solve this, there are two possible solutions:
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> The craft cannot go fast enough to remain aloft entirely by aerodynamic lift
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> The thrusters power down when sufficient lift is generated
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Either way, the ultimate solution is the same: These are racing hovercraft, and they were specifically designed to be unable to fly. They probably have automatic programming in their controls that prevent the pilots from achieving flight.
I imagine the organization running these races would have many rules and regulations regarding the machines used to ensure that the pilots cannot cheat and achieve powered flight mid-race.
You may also wish to incorporate design elements from modern day hovercrafts: <https://www.explainthatstuff.com/hovercraft.html>
[Answer]
### Gusty, unpredictable winds
Your planet is filled with rocky outcrops, amazing cliffs, and steep hills. Not only does this make for interesting courses, it messes with the wind.
A subtle change in wind direction or strength results in wildly different observed local winds rapidly changing. The air is basically a criss-cross mess of sharp boundaries (known as wind sheer), making flight difficult. The exciting terrain means that the changes result in unpredictable sudden strong gusts.
Throw in a few downdrafts from strong thunderstorms (resulting in a rapid transition between head wind and tail wind) that produce stalls.
Your hovercrafts get blown around a bit at ground level, it just results in a fun ride.
When you start developing aerofoils and get a bit higher up, the sudden gusts results in destabilisation or outright stalls. Every experimental aeroplane gets smashed into the ground.
[Answer]
# No Vectored Thrust
First, you need a rule that hovercraft must only use fixed thrusters, in combination with the usual limits on total fuel capacity or other things. If you can't turn your thrusters, then it becomes important to maximize the amount of thrust you can apply to lateral movement, at the expense of vertical thrusters, by taking advantage of ground effects.
Then you need to design courses that winged craft are no good at -- courses with some squirrely banked turns, etc. That'll make your game more fun, too.
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You need to look at how real hovercraft work, as described in the answer by @Willk.
I'm going to add a bit on why winged craft won't work, except in very special places. In a word, obstacles. Ground effect is negligible when you're at a distance from the ground that's more than your wingspan, and not all that noticable (personal observation) above about 1/2 the wingspan. Trees, buildings, big rocks, even tall sagebrush, all interfere with your ability to get close enough to use ground effect, especially since you have to be moving fairly fast to get airborne at all.
So if you're going to fly any distance in ground effect, you need a flat surface. Either water (like an ekronoplan: ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class\_ekranoplan ) or a desert playa, like this: <https://blackrockdesert.org/about-the-black-rock-desert-playa/>
(FWIW, I've flown across long stretches of it in ground effect, in a Piper Cherokee. It's doable, but if you want to turn more than a few degrees, you need to climb a bit first, otherwise you'd be dragging your wingtip in the dirt.)
[Answer]
The point of building hovercraft is that you get the friction reduction of a flying vehicle, but with much lower power requirements due to still being able to push on the ground directly.
If you limit the power plant size to the correct range and have the race go over terrain where wheeled or tracked vehicles would have difficulty ( a mix of water, mud, and landmines maybe?) then hovercraft become the best option.
Note that even a wheeled vehicle starts to have a tendency to become airborne once you pass a certain speed. Racing vehicles have all kinds of design features to keep them on the ground at 150+mph. Your hovercraft will have the same problem. So if you don't want to just make it a rule of your race that the vehicle *must* be a hovercraft, then you'll need to design a course where a hovercraft is actually the best option. Which could prove challenging... There's kind of a reason they haven't caught on. Well, lots of reasons actually...
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I have a vision of a hovercraft equivalent to the evolution of America's Cup racers into these cool hyroplaning boats that can stay on the plane even when turning.
Say they start as a hovercraft but instead of heavy rubber flexible skirts have retractable, morphing semi-rigid skirts. As they speed up, ground effect with body shape comes into play. Call it *air-surfing* (because air-planing sounded too confusing.)
If you have to go back into *skirted mode* you are running a lot slower. There might be a long straightaway where they build up enough speed to get into air-surfing mode and tactics around being a spoiler causing someone to not make it. If not in surfing mode by the first turn, a bigger gap between racers opens up.
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This would be quite similar to Star Wars podracing. From what I've heard, in podracers, the repulsor engines aren't designed strong enough to fly like airplanes, only get off the ground. (i.e. they have a max height limit)
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Especially for racing. I would suggest helium ballast, connected to a helium tank that is provided by the contest runners.
A computer with tamper proof safe guards, you tamper you auto lose, the computer controls how much helium is in the tank, and how much is in the ballast.
You would need a much larger ballast if you were going to try and be an aircraft.
Obviously you would forbid wings and rotors, thus anyone who attempted flight with helium would just be blown around in the wind. A helicopter style device relies on a rotor for direction control.
Therefore everyone would want to be close to the ground as to not be blown off course.
Then you can focus most if not all of your thruster engines on forward motion instead of vertical thrust.
[Answer]
**Air hockey table track**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sZVl1.png)
This was inspired by some other answers that have mentioned other track-based hovering tech, like quantum levitation or maglev.
What if the craft were similar to modern hovercraft, except the track did the blowing?
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[Question]
[
At speeds near the speed of light, interstellar particles and gas may affect the movement of the ship, and microscopic particles may even badly damage the ship. Would not it make sense to make the shape aerodynamic so to reduce the damage and drag? Maybe the nose should even be armored?
Maybe the ships should even have wings so as to change course with less energy cost using interstellar hydrogen?
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Interstellar gas isn't a continuous medium, it's individual particles, too far apart to interact significantly; hence there's no "aerodynamics" between the stars. In a ship at high relativistic speed, these particles will strike with the energy of small bombs. There may be some advantage to giving a ship a needle-like shape, to increase the effective thickness of the hull and shielding, but resistance to motion (aka drag) will depend on cross sectional area and speed, rather than shape. Adding wings merely increases both mass and radiation due to these collisions.
[Answer]
No. Whether you're talking about 0.10c (pretty fast) or 0.99c, there's no point in aerodynamic shapes. At those speeds any collision that is catastrophic will not be mitigated by angles that slope away from the center. For the sub-catastrophic collisions that cause ablation, that ablation can't be reduced by an aerodynamic shape.
The only real engineering concerns are having a spaceframe/hull sufficiently engineered to withstand the stresses of acceleration and deceleration.
On the other hand, of course, in the words of Doc Brown paraphrased poorly, if you're going to (time) travel, why not travel in style.
[Answer]
# Aerodynamics
Aerodynamics is the study of gas flow around a rigid object. Zeiss explained that the density of interstellar gas is too low for this to be relevant. However, at velocities of just a few km/s, solid objects impacting a solid surface cause the impacted surface to behave as a liquid. That's 103-104 m/s. Recalling that $c$ is about 108 m/s, even traveling at a mere 0.1% of $c$ (about 105 m/s) will guarantee that you will impact some objects at well above the "liquefaction threshold". This is why there is no such thing as an "immovable object." No matter how big or dense you make something, there is something else which can be thrown at it with a velocity which will, at the least, cause the target object to dissociate. Black holes are the only exception (but throwing objects at them should cause them to move, nevertheless).
# Shape
As others have noted, since you need to shield your ship in the direction of travel, you want to minimize the cross section. Since we presume the interior is pressurized for the survivability of the crew, a round-cross section provides the strongest containment shape (which is why airliners and submarines are mostly long round tubes). This is what leads us to a cylinder (not very sexy, I know). However, there is an important trade-off to be made. Tiny rocks in front of you are not the only hazard in space. The threat actually comes from all sides. Cosmic rays are also very dangerous to your crew, so you cannot simply make your ship a long, thin needle. There needs to be enough shielding mass on the sides to reduce cosmic radiation to a survivable level. So the ship should be long and narrow, but not *too* narrow.
# Course Correction
The easiest way to change course is to turn off the main engine, rotate the ship to the desired vector, and turn on the main engine again. "But wings will save you from using RCS thruster fuel!" You actually don't need RCS thrusters to change orientation. You can do it purely mechanically, via gimballed gyroscopes, which is what the [ISS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_moment_gyroscope) does. There are limits to how much angular momentum can be altered, but since most of the time, your angular momentum should be zero (unless you are spinning for artificial gravity, in which case you have a whole bigger set of challenges), this accumulation should not normally be a problem. Even if you do need to make an attitude adjustment, the gyros should reduce your RCS fuel consumption dramatically.
# Armor
Yes, the nose *must* be armored. But armor might not be enough. Star Trek has only a tenuous connection with real physics, but one concession to interstellar travel is the so-called [navigational deflector](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Navigational_deflector). The closest thing you could make with real physics is a kind of internally generated magnetosphere. That would help divert charged particles, but wouldn't help so much with electrically/magnetically neutral ones. However, you could make *everything* charged by shooting everything in your path with a laser, producing enough energy to ionize everything about to hit you. It's questionable whether a ship could produce enough energy to actually deflect impactors at a significant fraction of $c$.
There was a relevant [question](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3772/how-much-power-would-a-spacecrafts-magnetic-shield-require) about magnetic shields on the Space SE. But such a shield only protects against *particles*. The most dangerous threat is really gamma rays. The only reliable defense against these is a lot of mass. Theoretically, if you had a really good [scintillator](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/18811248.2011.9711836), you could down-convert the frequency of the gammas and harvest it as energy (to help power your magnetic shield, for instance). Possibly, the front armor plate could act as both a gamma scintillator and a particle shield for bits that make it through the magnetic shield, but it would probably need to be replaced periodically, because I think both uses will degrade it over time.
If you have a deflector laser for ionizing rocks, then the nose of your ship will be quite busy. The shield/scintillator will need to be opaque to gamma rays, but transparent to whatever frequency your deflector laser runs at (UV? you don't want the deflector to be too high-frequency, or it will go through the rocks instead of ionizing them). Some real-life gamma scintillators are transparent organic crystals. So it would be pretty cool if the nose of your ship was a big thick glass-looking crystal with a laser battery and PV array behind it. Food for thought.
[Answer]
Alastair Reynolds covered this in his novel "Pushing Ice".
Basically,
any contact with any particle will result is significant energy transfer.
His answer was to have interstellar ships push a two kilometer (or longer)
tube of ice in front of the ship to act as ablative armor.
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Very interesting question!
I would say **yes**, but not necessarily for the same reasons you are thinking about. With an increasing number of satellites in LEO, predicting their drag accurately becomes more and more important. The flow regime for objects in space is usually characterized by a very high Knudsen number:
$Kn = \frac{\lambda}{L}$,
where $\lambda$ is the mean free path length of the molecules in the flow and $L$ is a characteristic length scale, say the max size of your satellite.
A numerical tool used for this is the [Direct Simulation Monte Carlo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_simulation_Monte_Carlo) method (DSMC).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/t9np4.jpg)
So if you write a relativistic version of such a DSMC code you can use it to minimize/maximize the drag of your spaceship due to **free-molecular flow**.
However, I don't know if you will end up with a shape that is *aerodynamic* in the colloquial sense.
On the other hand, radiative heating is a big issue in hypersonic flow and becomes more and more important the faster you go. Radiation in general also seems to be a [big issue](https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0610030.pdf) for relativistic spacecraft.
Now radiative heating is directly proportional to the local radius of curvature $R$ of your spaceship hull (see *Anderson: Hypersonic and High-Temperature Gas Dynamics*). So it makes sense to try and minimize $R$.
What does this mean? Your spaceship will be as slender as possible, very similar to Alastair Reynold's lighthuggers.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4gk9N.jpg)
Of course this is all speculation and there may be other effects at play that are much more dominant than "aerodynamic" drag.
[Answer]
### We don't need no stinking aerodynamics!
On the one hand, if you can generate a force field, you don't need solid control surfaces... you can project them as needed. A craft could be whatever was most efficient to house its components (including field emitter[s]) and then could project up whatever shape it needed in atmosphere. The visibility/opacity/color and control of same would be at the author's whim. Just because Star Trek/Wars shields are invisible doesn't mean yours have to be.
And does it bother anyone else that invisible shields from those franchises are blocking beams of light that really ought to pass right through them unobstructed?
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### Space-dust-eodynamics for the win!
On the other hand, if you want your ship to "look aerodynamic" you could hand-wave up something about how the field emitters that charge and repel incoming stellar dust need that shape because optimal polarity inversion technobabble.
Don't forget the advantage of sloped armor. The further from perpendicular an impact is, the more force is deflected instead of absorbed. Also, in the above hand-waving, the more time a given particle will spend in proximity to the ship and therefore have more force applied to push it away and avoid the impact entirely.
This would also produce an "equal and opposite reaction" that might feel remarkably like aerodynamics. I'm not sure I'd try for any control beyond 'uniform distribution', flaps and ailerons seem like they'd be a hard sell, but hey, it's your story.
This craft would have a charged particle "wake" that would be detectable, an "ion trail" if you will... though a craft could exert even more power to balance the charge of its wake back out again, given the correct hardware.
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Aerodynamics has no effect in space, the relative velocities are too high for particle interactions to be anything other than "impacts".
The nose must be armoured, but the armour is, by design, the opposite of aerodynamic. The best bet for hyper-velocity armour is bulky multi layered whipple shields. The main concern for these shields is the lifespan of each layer: each spot can only take a single hyper-velocity impact so you are far better orienting it squarely as the impact area increases with the sin of the angle.
Wings won't work, the increase in profile would have serious drawbacks. The only design that uses a profile increase with a plausible benefit is the extremely large intake on a bussard ramjet.
Everything around spaceships for harder scifi settings has completely different design paradigms to any known engineering, spaceships are not planes.
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Eh, yes, and no..
A interstellar vehicle might not need to be aerodynamically shaped- but it might be in dire need of drones that take particle hits ahead of it and deflect the debris and energy out of the path / scout out really large objects (flung out planets etc.).
How one catapult those drones ahead, keep them stationary realtive to ones course and how to shape those drones to basically blast yourself away between the stars.. that i can not answer.
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It actually won't make any difference if the ship is aerodynamic or not outside an atmosphere. A particle hitting the ship's hull with enough force, even if it is just as small as a mustard seed, will deal a lot of damage. A ship traveling at near light speed will hit a pebble as if the pebble was the one traveling at near light speed.
That said, if you want the ship to be designed aerodynamically there is also no harm in doing so, especially if the ship is also meant to fly into an atmosphere.
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I'm currently in the world-building phase of my book (hence why I'm here).
To add some perspective before I ask my question. The story is based in Britain, during the year 2032.
In my story, there is a large wall around the city of Milton Keynes (89 km²). The wall is around 300 feet tall and made of concrete. It's thick enough to keep whatever is inside, in.
Atop the walls are guards and people, who monitor the quarantined city. Surveillance and dorms are at the top as well, so rotations can take place with little downtime.
My question is, if this were to be built, how quickly could it be made?
To add some more information. The wall is a matter of emergency, and the UK government has contracted all available construction companies to work on it, putting any government projects on hold to see it completed as quickly as possible. Funding isn't a problem and the cash needed to see this done realistically is available.
Many thanks to those who reply. If you need more information, please let me know.
**Update:**
After several comments, I'm edging toward Hydro dam levels of thickness. To add some more context to what it is to be contained, there are creatures within the city that are dangerous to human life. Killing them isn't a viable option as new ones quickly appear. They aren't from our reality so, even if the whole city were bombed, more creatures would eventually turn up. The source is within the city and building the wall would protect the rest of the country from harm.
The source of the creatures also emits an infectious airborne virus that acts similar to gamma radiation. It can travel through surfaces and skin, instead of the typical airborne method we are used to. The infection attaches itself to cells within the body and begins replicating. Within a healthy population of people, around 40% are susceptible to this form. Those infected have an incubation period varying from 1 to 4 days. They are not contagious during this stage. After this, patients will become symptomatic and begin to show signs of burn-like lesions on their skin. The Virus will continue to grow across a hosts body over a week. Lesions are infectious to touch.
It's dependent on the person etc. But during the second week, they will begin to show signs of mental and physical degradation, as the infection starts to work its way through their nervous system and brain. This happens over several days. Then, the infected individual succumbs to the virus, becoming feral and highly contagious, emitting a close proximity airborne strain of the virus. This strain allows the virus to jump to humans with a 90% infection rate. Only those who are immune are safe from its effects, although feral infected individuals will still attack them on sight.
**Second update**
Thank you to everyone who's answered so far. You've helped me figure out the logistics of how such a thing could be built, and by what means. Ideally, I'd like the wall to be made within a year, or at least completed to a stage that's containing the infection and creatures within.
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4-5 years assuming near infinite money.
You are looking at building another [Three Gorges Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#History). The Three Gorges Dam is a concrete gravity dam which is about as close as you can get to your wall (see clay below). Now the Three Gorges dam is almost twice as tall as you need, but your wall will be 16 times as long. Your wall is around 34-38km long, so saying it is comparable to building another Three Gorges Dam is probably underestimating even accounting for far better site access. It is more like building 4 or 5 of them.
**Where to get the material**? Mobilizing materials is going to be difficult: The Three Gorges Dam consumed a huge portion of the globe's concrete and steel production. This is not like building a building: This is like building a city from nothing. Getting the material is a bigger limit than construction. It is comparable to war-time material mobilization. The UK only produces [20,000 cubic yards](https://www.statista.com/statistics/472849/annual-cement-production-great-britain/) of concrete in a year. You need orders of magnitude more. For comparison, the Three Gorges Dam needed 37 million cubic yards of concrete and your wall is several times larger. You need about 1/60th of global concrete production for a year on a generous estimate, so I hope you have deep pockets.
It took 17 years to build the dam, but a lot of that was for concerns your wall will not have. Your wall will not take this long. The Hoover Dam took 4 years to build (the dam itself anyway). See [L. Dutch's great answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/152578/49152) for why you can't just pour concrete all at once. 2-3 years is probably much closer to what you are looking at. You have to clear and prepare the land and mobilize the materials, none of which is easy. You still have a river you need to build across as well, and no matter how you do that it will take time. This is assuming you have portions of the wall being built in parallel, and this will take years even if you utilize every able-bodied adult on the island as workers.
**Your real problem is that the ground is awful**. Much of the city is on [clay](http://www.bucksgeology.org.uk/bucksgeology.html) which is among the worst materials to build large structures on. This wall is going to have to be wide to not topple over on such soft ground. They will spend a lot of time preparing the land and it require building a very wide deep base, so a dam is actually be a good model shape. You have to clear the land, then excavate a gigantic hole to pour a massive slab and sink billions of pilings in just to support the load. This is a big construction, and it will be subjected to huge loads just due to size. Hell, the wind alone on such a structure is going to subject it to [massive loading](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41062-016-0010-2); build it wrong and you will need to build it over again. Near the river you are going to have to sink hundreds of pilings and effectively build a dam across the river.
So 2 years or more preparing the land and 2 years or more building the wall. If everything goes perfectly, 4 years.
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**Modular Precast**
While everyone is talking about times for bridges and dams, it's not correct for a wall. A brick wall in a house is built of thousands individual bricks stacked together.
There is no reason why the wall needs to be one solid piece like a dam. Individual self locking slabs/bricks could be cast at concrete plants around the country and trucked to site and lifted into place. No mortar would be needed as the weight of each block would hold itself in place.
If the fate of the country was on the line, you could do it in a month. Most of the time would be leveling the ground and compacting for the foundations
If you wanted even faster (depending on what you want to contain) empty stacked shipping containers could do a wall at least 100 foot in a pinch or maybe even higher. Containers are designed to be stacked and they already exist. There is an estimated [43 million shipping containers](https://www.budgetshippingcontainers.co.uk/info/how-many-shipping-containers-are-there-in-the-world/) in the world and enough empty containers could be shipped to the UK in a week.
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The closest real life example I can find is the [Hoover dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam)
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> Height 726.4 ft (221.4 m)
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> Width (crest) 45 ft (14 m)
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> Width (base) 660 ft (200 m)
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It is made of concrete.
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> Since concrete heats and contracts as it cures, the potential for uneven cooling and contraction of the concrete posed a serious problem. Bureau of Reclamation engineers calculated that if the dam were to be built in a single continuous pour, the concrete would take 125 years to cool, and the resulting stresses would cause the dam to crack and crumble. Instead, the ground where the dam would rise was marked with rectangles, and concrete blocks in columns were poured, some as large as 50 ft square (15 m) and 5 feet (1.5 m) high. [...]
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> Each five-foot form contained a set of 1-inch (25 mm) steel pipes; cool riverwater would be poured through the pipes, followed by ice-cold water from a refrigeration plant. When an individual block had cured and had stopped contracting, the pipes were filled with grout. [...]
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> The first concrete was poured into the dam on June 6, 1933. Concrete pouring ceased on May 29, 1935
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As you can see, the main problem is not the logistic of having the material in place, but dissipate the heat from the curing concrete.
Since you don't mention the thickness it's hard to make calculations. But the above should give you a rule of thumb.
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**Very quickly!**
There are approximately 315,000 [construction firms in the UK](https://www.statista.com/topics/3797/construction-industry-in-the-uk/) with almost 3 million workers. You're on, basically, a wartime mobilisation of at least this sector of the economy (not to mention the food truck and port-a-john industries!).
The city's area is 89 km2 with a perimeter of 356 km (assuming the firm of B.S. Johnson LLC have done the maths right!)
The proposal for your Great Wall of Milton Keynes is to not pour a conventional dam but rather to build and modify a standard car park all the way round the city's perimeter.
This firm can build a pre-fabricated car park of about 1/3 the required height in [9 to 12 months](https://www.kiwinewton.com/qa-how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-parking-structure). Their car park is about 20 m deep, and with recommended buttressing can easily rise to the approximately 30 storey / 300 foot requirement. The structure will not require full parking decks, but some kind of access ramps and ring roads will be required for maintenance and observation of whatever's inside. Also, emergency facilities, lifts, sprinkler systems and so forth won't be required, so finishing touches should not take any extra time. Electric & surveilance equipment can be installed while the structure is being pieced together. The only alteration to the basic car park framework will be reinforced concrete slabs to fill in the usually open windows.
Each "job" should therefore take a little less than the nine months suggested, where a "job" is a 100 m (10 storey) by 20m deep by 20 m wide car park with maintenance & access roads and necessary electric / electronic systems installed. Each segment therefore comprises 3 "jobs".
(35600 m perimeter / 20 m width) x 3 = 5340 jobs
315,000 construction firms doing the work, approximately 60 firms per segment, could get your job done within the one year figure. Once the actual perimeter is determined, and the affected land owners are turned out, the first crews will engage in a massive bulldoze operation: a 50 m swath around the city will be levelled of all buildings; gas, water, sewer, electrics will all by cut to the city area and the ground will be filled, tamped and levelled for foundation work.
During this phase, pre-fab concrete parts will be manufactured to a standard shape: upright segments, horizontal segments, decking and ramp segments plus the fill-in segments. (If you require observation stations, extra heavy duty plexiglass within a reinforced concrete frame can be supplied. Emergency access stairs (so MOD can send up or withdraw personnel) will also be manufactured at this time of standard steel parts.
As the foundation work is completed, other crews will begin trucking in all the prefab parts to staging areas.
As the parts arrive in their staging areas, third wave of crews will begin assembling the car parks. As one segment is finished, those crews will simply leap-frog ahead of any other segments in process and begin afresh at the next available segment.
As preparation and foundation crews become available, these will circle around and either be assigned to augment building crews or else will work on whatever outer perimeter work needs doing: access roads, rubble clearance, fencing, gates, guard stations, etc.
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Consider how quick the [Berlin Wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall) went up, but also how long it took to replace the *initial, provisional* wall with the permanent fortifications.
Building a 5 metre or even 10 metre wall is well within the experience of commercial building companies. Building a 100 metre *tower* would be something unusual, the job of specialists. Building a 100 metre high and mile-long *wall* would be more unusual yet.
Also compare the [Chernobyl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement) containment systems. The radiation conditions made a difference, of course, but your wall is guarding against something nasty as well, right?
For that reason I would expect the wall to take years.
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People compare to the Hoover Dam or the Three Gorges Dam. These are maybe not reasonable, depending on what has to be kept in. These dams are built to withstand a large column of water. A column that can possibly move from all the way empty to all the way full over difficult to predict times. And in situations in which a failure could possibly kill large numbers of people and cost $100s of millions of damage. And where the dams are designed to have projected life expectancy in centuries. And these structures are built in a river gorge with lots of possibility for failure.
300 feet is roughly 30 stories. Lots of office towers and apartment blocks this tall. If the equivalent of an office tower with no windows, solid concrete all the way, is enough, it tells you how long each segment takes. Such buildings go up in 2 to 3 years providing there's adequate ground for a foundation. Since they'd all be the same, and have no decoration or artifice, you could make a factory to build the very similar components.
Considering that you don't need any plumbing, electricity, or air ventilation, probably not even stair wells, they'd be relatively quick to build. No windows, no balconies, no parking garage, no landscaping. There are construction companies in China that put up 30 floor apartment blocks at a pace of a floor a day. The interior stuff goes in after the first few floors are constructed. And they build groups of 50 of them at the same time. I should think the equivalent of 50 apartment buildings would be able to reach 1 km. That's only 20 meters each.
If it's necessary to dig very deep to get a foundation it might take a lot more effort.
So I'd say, if you got 90 construction companies from China, you'd probably be able to put the whole thing up in 3 years. It would be ugly as hell. And it would be hard as hell on the local environment.
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For that size, I think you should forget about high walls, and go with a [retaining wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retaining_wall) instead:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s1VIA.png)
In a nutshell, you don't build the whole thing out of concrete - instead, you prepare foundations and then move earth around.
Start by conscripting all available [piling rigs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pile_driver) ...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PGgQm.png)
...and lay down cylinders of reinforced concrete as foundations. Current piling rigs can do up to 1.5m diameter and 90m deep, which should do just fine for your scenario. Make sure to leave some [rebar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebar) at ground level, so that another gang can pour concrete on top of the foundations and start laying prefab concrete slabs on top. Lay anchors as well, to be covered in the next step.
Right behind, have digger rigs and a truck convoy move earth from the lower-to-be part of the wall to the higher-to-be part of the wall. Maybe you want to have a purpose-built [bucket-weel excavator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket-wheel_excavator) that can crawl along the safe side of the wall during construction and reach down to the lower side.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NC4th.png)
The end result should be that the lower side is 50m deeper than the original ground level, and the higher side is 50 meter higher than the original ground level.
It should look like an ugly-as-heck soldier pile wall at the lower half, and prefab at the upper half, a bit like [this](https://www.geotech.hr/en/pile-wall/):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NDH3a.jpg)
I kinda expect the final wall to be tilted about 10° instead of vertical, to better support the load.
Oh, and make sure to ask the geophysical engineers about water drainage. And do whatever they say in regards to geology (kinds of earth/rock/clay/sand underground) and topography (you want to build this in a slope anyway).
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All this is fine, but *how long would it take*?
My rough estimate is that an engineering project like this should take *two to five times the effort of laying down a subway line* that long. I'll assume that you can pool all geophysical engineers for this, put on hold any construction projects, and do it in the same time than a subway line.
Funnily enough, I can take the [Line 12 of Madrid's subway system](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%ADnea_12_(Metro_de_Madrid)) as a reference. It's 41 km long, and it took 4 years and 1640 million € (41 millon €/km).
So I'll guesstimate a 40-km-long retaining wall at 4 years, and 10.000 million €. That's about 1km per month (total), building several segments in parallel.
The bottleneck here IMHO is gonna be the purpose-built heavy machinery. I guess britain would send France a request for piling rigs?
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If you have skilled laborers guiding the work, and if you have enough people to work on the entire wall at once (rather than doing it in parts), and if you have all your needed materials readily available... I think you could do it pretty quickly. Concrete takes 28 days to cure, so it's conceivable that you could make a 100ft wall in a month, and then add a month for every subsequent 100ft, and add an extra month for trussing &c. Here are some options for construction:
1. Co-planar Layer Separation: Make several large (w,l,h) 100'x100'x5' frames, lay them with rebar along the long-axes, and pour them full of concrete. Leave holes in them to run I-beams and brackets through various places for support. When the slabs are dry, you simply pull them upright and support them. You could conceivably make several layers of concrete wall, as thick as you want, as long as you have enough space for to make the frames and let them dry. You could potentially make the frames much taller and try to do 300ft all at once, but the bigger you make these, the more difficult it will be to raise them up without breaking them. 100ft is already going to be difficult. Once you've done the first 100ft, you can do the same thing for the next 100ft if you want, but it would be easier to use smaller frames for the higher layers, and just crane them up and bracket them onto the top of the wall to add height.
2. Stacked Layer Separation: Make several 5-10ft tall frames for the whole base of the wall and slowly pour it from the ground up. You have to make sure you run water pipes through the wall so that they don't get too hot while they dry. Concrete gives off a lot of heat while drying, and it can cause all kinds of problems. You'll want to pour only 5-10ft at a time, and allow at least a week to cure before adding the next 5-10ft frame. I think your practical limitation will be the number of concrete pouring machines you have available. This method will be slower than the first, but you'll be layering from the bottom up, which is gives you more control over the shape, and will probably mean a better wall.
So, anyway, if everyone in this city is on-board, and the materials are readily available, and you've got plenty of concrete pouring machines, and all the framing material you could ever want, so you can do the whole circumference of the city simultaneously, **I say it's going to take you a year**. You could put a **more aggressive timeline at 4 months**, and sacrifice the safety of your builders and/or the quality of your wall.
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If you're really pressed for time, you could maybe pull off a [Volcano (1997)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120461/)\* move and blow up some tall buildings in such a way as to surround the city with toppled over skyscrapers. (I know, unlike L.A., modern Milton Keynes doesn't seem to have any suitably tall buildings for this, but if you future it up a bit, you could maybe imagine that such exist. Or you could move it to a bigger city if you want this idea to work better.) Any kind of new construction is going to take a lot of time and work, but a little creative destruction can get the job done in a matter of hours. Granted, it won't be a perfect, seamless wall, but you can use that as the basis to form a more permanent barrier.
\*(Yes, I know. Terrible movie. Not realistic in any fashion. Doesn't mean you can't steal ideas from it...)
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For a rough estimate, we'll assume a 2 meter wide walkway at the top. So let's assume we build a 2 meter thick wall 100 meters high. Since speed of construction and quantity is the most important, you can't assume it will be the very best high-strength concrete, so we'll go with 50 MPa structural grade concrete. That means the concrete will start failing if the pressure on it gets beyond 50 million Pascals (50 million Newtons per square meter). That means the high-strength concrete for our wall will support a maximum of 5100 tonnes per square meter.
At roughly 2.4 tonnes per cubic meter, a column 1 square meter in area 100 meters high is going to mass 240 tonnes. A solid concrete wall could therefore support itself if vertical stress was all you were worried about.
Now we come to practicality: At 38 kilometers long, the total amount of concrete, assuming it's 2 meters thick, will be 7,600,000 cubic meters, or 18,240,000 tonnes of concrete. Concrete can be 15 percent cement, so 2.7 million tonnes are needed. That's doable, the UK's annual production is 9.7 million tonnes.
An average concrete truck is 6.1 cubic meters, so, say 1.25 million truckloads.
Now this doesn't take into account foundations, engineering for crossing rivers (well, diverting rivers), materials necessary to erect the wall, material for reinforcement, and so on. But if money were absolutely no object, a few years is certainly possible. But the cost would probably be heading toward hundreds of billions of dollars.
Note that this is something of a variation of the Great Pyramid question: why don't people build the Great Pyramid of Giza today? The answer is, of course, it could be, and built much faster than the Egyptians managed, but no one sees the point of doing so.
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Pretty quickly. Nobody is building big walls these days, so the closest analogy I think to your question would be bridges. A few years ago a bridge in Iowa was replaced in [two weeks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E9VUslZUwA), and the builder said they could have done it [much more quickly](https://www.uschamber.com/article/how-long-does-it-take-replace-bridge-about-24-hours-give-or-take).
This wasn't a particularly large operation and they didn't spend very much money. The answer to your question really depends on how much in the way of resources the government has to throw at the problem. Any given section of wall, say 100' wide, could probably go up in few days. At that point it's a question of how many 'teams' you could have simultaneously digging the foundations, building the frames, and pouring the concrete.
Your given area of 89km2 translates to something in the area of 30-35km of wall. Estimates for Donald Trump's border wall came in at [about 3km/week](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/experts-say-trumps-border-wall-will-take-longer-than-he-claims.html). Now, that's a considerably SMALLER wall than what you're proposing, but it's also not thousands of miles long way out in the middile of [Nowhere, Texas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP42loI55RY) either.
So, given all that, your shortest possible time is probably no shorter than three months, and that would require a MASSIVE expenditure on the part of the government of the UK. Like, conscripting most of the construction equipment and skilled builders in the country. A more reasonable effort could be complete in more like six to nine months, so it sort of depends on how badly you want to quarantine the [Red Bull F1 team](https://redbullracing.redbull.com/article/factory).
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Nobody mentioned 3D printers. There are films in YouTube of 3D printers building walls and houses.
The only limit on the speed is how fast you can feed the printers with material, so theoretically if you have enough printers and some red hot logistics you could build it overnight.
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I want my advanced culture to have stone houses but I cannot think of a reason why they would keep this old fashioned method. What can I do to convince the czar of this land to use stone for building instead of metal or lumber?
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# Stone Buildings are Hard to Burn
This is no joke- if you want your home to be resistant to fire, use stone or ceramics (clay) to form the load-bearing parts. As a small anecdote: I have lived in Europe, and once in a mostly stone home, which experienced an electrical fire. What did the fire department do? Tell us to simply keep flammables away from the fire, and let it burn itself out. Did it work? Yes, it did. Our house, nor the things in it, burt (aside from some electrical wire).
Also, stone countertops can easily take excess heat from hot pans and such. Most people consider this ability a definite perk.
# Fashion
Stone can be really handsome. Some people like the way it looks. Some people really like how some rock looks, and rocks come in a variety of shades, textures, and colors. They can be pounded or eroded to become smooth, or kept rough and craggily. As far as an artistic medium goes, it's pretty broad and versatile even in natural or lightly-manufactured forms.
# Refuge From Things
Imagine the relief you feel from a cool tile floor on a summers day. Now, make your whole house like that! Stone can be a good insulator, but expensive to shape and put together. It's good for extreme hot/cold environments. Obviously, in a cold environment, you'll need to heat it (and maybe use many floor rugs), but in a hot environment, it's great! Additionally, due to the fact that it takes a lot of energy to heat/cool your stone, a home of stone will experience [thermal lag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_lag), so your home is warmest at night, and coolest in the day.
We should also mention that the weight of stones helps a building withstand high winds. If you're afraid of your house being blown away, make like the [third little pig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Little_Pigs) and make your house out of bricks, or stone, or something equally heavy. Also, this same argument may apply to invaders, raiders, and traitors.
# "Environmentally Sound" Building Material
Some areas of the world have lots of rocks. Putting them to good use has the added benefit of making your homes very recyclable. A rock taken from an old building can be just as useful as a rock taken from the ground. Rejected building rock can be ground up and used in cement, or gravel walkways. Rocks are everywhere, so procuring them is rather cheap. Demolished homes would have nothing nasty in them- like asbestos. (Unless you actually put [asbestos rocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos) in there... then it has a lot of asbestos!)
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**Durability**
I never got why in the US, where storms are so common, the houses are built with lumber. In middle europe nearly every house is build of stone or concrete. This has the advantages mentioned above (fire resistance, thermal lag, etc...) and in addition a good protection against storms and snow.
Also I as far as I know, middle Europe is quite an advanced culture, so I see no reason why an advanced culture shouldn't build houses of stone. If anything I consider using wood as building material is "less advanced".
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Durability. Modern light-frame residential construction is designed to be exactly as strong as it has to be in order to reduce costs, and if they went without any maintenance they wouldn't last 30 years. The bones of a light-frame home could last a century or more, but that depends on the exterior holding up to the elements, something most stone buildings can handle as a matter of course but most modern buildings require re-sealing every few years and re-roofing every 20 to 30.
If cost were less of an object (in a society with sufficient technology, the logistics of stonecutting would make assembling a building out of carved blocks less demanding than today), building a home durable enough to pass on to your children and their children would be worth something. It's counterintuitive that as our technology grows, we're moving past the need to be mobile; many jobs can literally be performed from anywhere, and of the ones that do require travel, most are local in scope (maintenance, local delivery etc). That makes a durable home a better investment.
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In extreme environments, stone provides a thermal "battery" to moderate temperature swings. During the day in a desert, the stone will absorb the heat while the interior of the building stays cool. At night, the warmth gradually seeps into the house and keeps the interior warmer than the cool outside. (If you don't have stone, the same effect can be had with massive masonry walls, adobe or rammed earth as well). In cold climates, the heat from the hearth will be retained in the stone after the fire burns out, keeping the interior warmer without such a large expenditure of fuel.
Stone is also relatively inexpensive (it is the stonecutting and dressing that makes it expensive), long lasting and sturdy if built properly, all bonus points for people who build with stone.
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# Historical value
Instill in your czar the idea that the old ways were better, that we are in danger of losing important history, and it is incumbent on us all to preserve the past by retaining its sound architectural techniques. Stone castles have stood for hundreds of years; those newfangled wood-frame houses don't last nearly as long. And steel? Hard to make, hard to work with, messy.
Combine liberally with a **sense of fashion**. Since he's the czar he probably has a great deal of sway with public opinion (controlling the press and all that). Use that. Make people *want* to preserve this aspect of their history.
# But progress is good too.
We aren't just old-fashioned, you must assure your czar; we are also looking out for the future. Stone is available without the environmental impact of deforestation or steel mills. Stone is also durable and long-lasting, so you pretty much only need to quarry new stone for *additional construction* — houses you've already built will stay put, and if you do decide you need to demolish for some reason (replacing with a larger structure, making way for a highway bypass, etc), you can reclaim the materials. Try reclaiming the framing studs from your wood-frame house — doesn't work as well.
Stone: the choice for preserving the good ideas of the past *and* protecting the environment for the future!
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## I'm not sure you'll be able to do this
Metal and lumber aren't your competing materials. What you need to think about are bricks, breeze blocks and concrete as these are the materials that replaced stone in most of the world.
## Stone
The problem with stone is the cost. First you have to find suitable stone, extract it, move it to where you need to build and shape it to the correct size. This last one is the killer, it required master craftsmen. These master craftsmen were the original freemasons, wealthy and free to move around the country in the way other non-nobles weren't. It's also incredibly heavy and massively labour intensive to lay even after being cut.
To maintain this as a viable building material you're going to need to solve these problems and especially solve them relative to the real competitor:
## Breeze blocks
For most tasks these are perfect. Also known as [cinder blocks or concrete masonry units](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_masonry_unit), they are a fraction of the weight of an equivalent stone block, they're already perfectly shaped and designed for building. All you need is some cement and a brickie. Bricklayers are not master craftsmen, you can pick them up on a street corners as day labourers, just stop a van by the side of the road and wait. The blocks even have central hollows which help with insulation.
The only downside is that they're not exactly pretty, hence why, when looks are important they tend to be clad with an outer layer of:
## Bricks
Another small, artificial, lightweight, regularly shaped alternative to stone. Available in various colours, shapes and sizes, easy to cut when you need a half brick, usable for both decoration and structure. With all the advantages of breeze blocks except for size. They're relatively expensive and labour intensive to lay which is why they're not often used for large buildings any more.
*Stone does retain one advantage over bricks and breeze blocks*, that being damage resistance. This is where we come to:
## Concrete
This is the ultimate stone replacement. The kings of England were building with stone from the 11thC but the [Romans used concrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete). Nero's building code required concrete after Rome burned. The [Pantheon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome) might have granite columns at the front but it has a concrete dome. The castles are crumbling, the concrete still stands.
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With these as your competitors the only option is looks. Natural stone will always look better.
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## Because it's cheap.
An advanced culture is as sensitive to available resources as an old-fashioned one. If stone is readily available and effective then there is little reason they would not use it for construction.
Tell the Czar that this method is cost-effective and will win favor with the environmentalists.
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# No usable trees
Imagine a land where there simply aren't any large woody plants to supply lumber for building.
Maybe it's grassland with some shrubbery, or some fibrous flora that simply doesn't have the strength to be used as a primary building material.
Think of habitats like the Outer Hebrides—stone buildings are the norm there, as wood is very scarce.
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If the location the culture lives in has little to no trees, then building with the few trees you do have wouldn't just be impractical, but foolish and idiotic.
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Given the state of our world today, and the scriptures and the beliefs of the three major Abrahamic religions; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, let us assume that the "truth" is some variant of the three beliefs. There really is only one God with his believed qualities and He did send down scriptures and prophets but each has been twisted/corrupted by man over time and each religion has evolved over thousands of years to be as it is today in our world, different from one another.
God is however now sick of it so He has decided to reveal himself to humans and He is determined to convince at least the Jew, Christians, and the Muslims that He is their God and they were all slightly wrong. Now He is here and He demands devotion, respect, obedience, and prayer.
The question is how can He do this? How can He reveal himself in such a way as to convince His followers? The obvious thing to do would be for Him to just "will" the people's minds changed and it shall be done...but that is a boring answer. Would raising the dead convince people? Would rebuilding the temple of Mount in an instant convince the Jews? Would presenting a Bible in the original form with all of the gaps filled (such as the gaps in the Dead Sea Scrolls) as well as a few additional books which look like a natural continuation of the currently known Bible convince the Jews and the Christians? Would another fresh water spring springing in Mecca or the moon being split in half convince the Muslims? What about lots and lots of rain? Or is God doomed by the incredulity of man? Will men refuse to believe Him no matter what he does...finding an "explanation" for everything He does because they cannot imagine their God coming down and revealing Himself in this fashion?
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It is easy for the Abrahamic God to convince us he is **powerful**, and by implication we should obey Him if we know what's good for us. Convincing us He is **omnipotent** is impossible.
Let's say that God announces His return with some spectacular miracles which completely break the laws of physics as we know them. Instead of being met with silence, prayers are now answered with more miracles, or perhaps just with friendly and sensible advice. Some of the dead are returned to life to describe what heaven and hell are like. And so on.
Even the most skeptical observer will agree this is an extremely powerful being whose attributes are consistent with those of the Abrahamic God. It may be fair to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that the newly revealed Miracle Worker and the Abrahamic God are one and the same entity.
However, it is not possible for God to prove He can do *anything*. Our ability to sense and process information is limited. We also know that our minds can be fooled. If God shows us what the creation of the universe looked like (insofar as we can perceive it), is that the real thing, or just a very convincing hallucination? Is God the only being who can work miracles, or are there others who have chosen not to reveal themselves to us? By definition, these questions cannot be answered.
In terms of a very old theological dispute, the [Gnostic heresy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism) is not disproved. We can agree this being is very powerful, but how do we know he's not Satan trying to trick us? We don't.
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Short of rewriting existence to make everyone believe that he is the real and only god, there is probably nothing. Humans are really stubborn when it comes to long and strongly held beliefs and faiths and they all have different ideas of what their god is and what he would do.
A vast number of people would look at him and think "I don't think that's how God would behave", regardless of what he did. There's no single thing all believers have in common, even within a religion, let alone between religions.
There's just too many people with different ideas.
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I don't think this is possible.
I can't speak for Jews and Muslims, but in Christianity, God is *defined by* what we know of His character/attributes. Therefore, if a very powerful being claiming to be God shows up but does not adhere to what we know/understand of Scripture, and/or (for Catholics) contradicts established Tradition, then there's no way for that being to be considered God. By the Bible's own criteria for deciding whether a message is from God or not, that being will not be God - just a very powerful being trying to trick the faithful.
In fact, if a powerful being claiming to be God but not strictly adhering to revealed Scripture does show up, we Christians are already expecting him ... and he's the Beast/Antichrist. So yeah. Awkward.
For what it's worth though, when the Antichrist does pitch up, apparently most of the world will be convinced and will follow him. So there's that.
But for sure there would be major schisms and conflicts as a result. There'd be no way to make everyone just believe this being's claims and just go along with it. It'd be the new Crusades, 2Xth Century Edition: Now With Nukes (TM)!
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**Smite the nonbelievers!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M1qxz.jpg)
All God needs to do is take everyone, everywhere, who doesn't believe in him, and hit them with a lightning bolt. Indoors, underground, in an airplane, in a Faraday cage, wearing a rubber suit, or otherwise. Lightning bolt.
The first round of lightning bolts, of course, will be non-lethal. Enough to strike fear, enough to show God's power, and enough to show that He Knows Who You Are And What You Believe. (God believes in capitalizing things.)
Of course, some people will try to explain it away, and will cling to their non-belief, but there's a simple solution for that. More lightning bolts.
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Advertise on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook using an impossible to obtain username such as #GOD. Just kidding... sort of...
Rather than embracing the present, stick with the old brand favorites. The Abrahamic Divinity prefers to communicate with us mortals through prophets but since He is addressing at least three audiences, He should manifest at least three spokespersons, each an incarnation of a significant historic person in their target religions. For Judaism and Islam, these spokespersons would be prophets, and for safety sake, the Christian spokesperson should probably be one (or more) of the Apostles. Innacting the Second Coming as an opening move in His reintroduction, might trigger Armageddon, so the Jesus card should either be held for later, or retired from the deck.
Manifest each of the spokespeople in authentic garb (prove-able by carbon dating), speaking in their historically accurate languages (leave it to our modern day scholars to figure out what they are saying) and deliver them to sacred places that would be inaccessible by natural methods. If possible, make sure that their arrivals are captured by multiple video cameras or at least a flock of teenagers with cellphones.
The reason for considering multiple spokespersons for Christianity has to do with that religion being rather divided and diversive all on its own. One of the apostles could manifest in the Pope's bedroom while another might materialize along side a TV Evangelist during a live-audience show. If the Jews and Islamic need multiple spokespersons, go ahead and send them in. The more the merrier!
Once all the players are in place, start the play. Have each of them start explaining how the faiths they represent are incorrect. Remember, that no one will understand them at first, but what they say will get captured on video and translated later. Then wait, while the human authorities arrest them and hall them off to prison.
Once they are behind bars, have them prophesize in modern tongue to the other prisoners and guards. Then when everyone's eyes are on them, have them vanish and rematerialize in their original arrival locations.
Repeat as necessary until the authorities give up; adding other miracles such as bullet-removal and healing as needed. Once the human powers-that-be admit defeat, invite the scientists and scholars and start the re-education.
Start by asking for questions that only top scholars and theologians can answer. Provide the prophets with the expected answers, clarifying each answer with missing unknown but proveable knowledge where appropriate. In short order, the scientists, scholars and theologians will also give in and accept defeat.
Only then is the Abrahamic Divinity ready to become manifest. Have each of the now famous prophets lead their respective camera crews and journalists to a single, previously unholy location, maybe someplace really beautiful that God is proud of creating. Then and there, with all the world watching,...
Come on stage and take a bow!
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God could convince us all pretty simply: let us know and feel everything he **know** and **feel** for an instant.
As St. Augustine of Hippo would notice, our mind is not better at understanding God than a chamber pot to contain the whole sea, but for sure each of us would remind what convinced him/her.
It's not like turning us into praying automatons, since each of us could theoretically choose to fight God anyway, but he would **know** that He exists.
Moreover it would not be a boring scenario: imagine everyone everywhere
* knowing that God exists
* comparing what they remember
[Answer]
He would do all of the following (basically the inverse of [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20238/how-could-a-resurrected-jesus-prove-he-is-jesus-without-performing-miracles/20256#20256)):
The Christian definition of Messiah requires certain signs of proof. He must:
* heal the wounded
* revive the dead
* Bring good news to the poor
The Jewish Definition states that the Messiah must:
* gathering of the exiles (This encompasses all tribes, not just Judah).
* restoration of the religious courts of justice an end of wickedness, sin and heresy
* reward to the righteous
* rebuilding of Jerusalem (how would you even interpret this? Jerusalem is a living city now.)
* restoration of the line of King David (Not sure how He would prove this as no DNA from that period exists or is trustworthy. He may not need to if He can meet all the other criteria.)
* restoration of Temple service (Doing this requires removing the Dome of the Rock from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? Tricky. A lot of people are going to be told to just "eat it".)
For Islam, God will need to meet many of the [99 attributes of Allah](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Islam). If He is able to do this then Muslims should accept him too.
[Answer]
Do a repeat of the plagues in Egypt in the days leading up to the Passover, meanwhile advertising on Twitter and Facebook. Each plague mocks a specific ancient Egyptian god, and is supposed to demonstrate the power that the Abrahamic God has over all other deities (hence why the magicians couldn't replicate them all). Encourage the scientists to come and test whether or not the Nile is *actually* blood. Maybe come up with a few more plagues that refute the power of Hindu and other deities. This should convince most of Judaism and Christianity.
Have Elisa and Jesus (the latter, assuming Islam or Christianity) start Twitter accounts and tour the globe, starting in Jerusalem where they manage to negotiate a perfect solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and then perform some other miracles. Whether Islam is true or not, it might be prudent to bring Mohammed to the Middle East and have him work on settling the Sunni-Shia divide. Actually, just bringing peace to the Middle East in general would prove He's powerful, though not omnipotent.
Bring back Abraham, too.
For the science people, start screwing with the laws of physics. Accelerate the speed of light by just a little bit, decelerate the speed of light by just a little bit, though enough to be detected. Locally increase Planck's Constant. Give scientists The Answer to a really big scientific question, complete with proofs and evidence, then change The Answer to that question. Make stars appear and disappear in the night sky. Take them back in time to Creation.
Screw with cosmology. Make the Earth concave for a few days, make it flat for a few days, by playing with physics. Make the Earth literally rotate backwards without any casualties (or with a few, but this would kill everyone on Earth if there wasn't something there).
Lastly, advertise Heaven on TV and tell people you have to believe His religion in order to go there. Build some nice resorts there, give them limitless, instantaneous WiFi, and let dead people Skype with their deceased relatives. Also advertise Hell and interview the Evil Pagans of His choice about how much they wish they had chosen Christianity or Islam (I don't think Judaism has Heaven, but I'm not sure). Offer a few demos and tours of each, too.
Omnipotence can't be proven, but Abrahamic nature can, and Abrahamic *implies* omnipotence.
EDIT: Syncretization will help. Syncretize the end-times prophecies, somehow, of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and there you go. There will still be some doubters, but gee, Heaven looks nice on TV…
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I don't think that there is an answer other then your called 'boring answer'. People don't believe in the Creator God all powerfull just because He doesn't want. What is the humanity compared to the All Powerfull God? It's nothing! People tend to decrease god's power and think that they can act against His will, but everything is under His will, even when people don't believe in Him is because He lets them.
So, to convince His existence He just needs to want.
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# Quite easily, *if only it was in His nature.*
If He wanted to, God could easily create a circumstance within which everybody would have to believe. After all, He *is* omnipotent, omniscient, armipotent. **However, the key word is "want."**
I am not sure if this is true for Judaism and Islam, but in Christianity **God's nature is immutable.** This is a side effect of His eternal ("all of time at the same time") nature; were He to change, it would cause a universe-ending grandfather paradox. As a result He incapable of things like sinning, since they are contrary to His nature. Think about it this way: it is within my power to pull a [Wowbagger](https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bowerick_Wowbagger) and troll everybody on Worldbuilding.SE, but it is against my nature; therefore, it might as well be impossible.
Another thing that Christianity holds true about God is that He values human free will. In fact, it is the whole reason why He created us. As the great theologian Francis Schaeffer aptly put it, our purpose is "to love Him on a personal, not a machine, level.” (*Genesis in Space and Time*, page 60). This value for our free will goes so far that He even lets people continue in sin, as doing so is what they choose. **As a result of this, Christians have concluded that it is in God's nature to always respect human free will.**
**Since God's nature is immutable, and it is in His nature to allow people free will, He cannot force people to acknowledge His existence.**
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Regardless of whether or not God is capable of making everybody believe in Him, I think it is worth mentioning that **if Christians see a bunch of people coming to believe in a being/person who claims to be God, they will probably assume that he is the Antichrist.** Provided, of course, that the Antichrist hasn't already come...
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# Keyword: Omnipotent
There are a lot of answers saying that this couldn't happen for various reason x, where x is some part of human nature that makes us disagree a lot. Reasonable argument.
However, its missing the point. If this is the Abrahamic god, then he is omnipotent. As in, he can do anything. Therefore, he can simply make us all believe in him, just by willing it.
The question uses the phrase, "Is god doomed by the incredulity of man?" The obvious answer, for a God who *made man incredulous*, is no.
>
> ...the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1:21)
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>
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## There is an app... ah, I mean a prophecy for that...
Zechariah 14:4 contains a prophecy that "The Lord" will stand upon the Mount of Olives, and that it will split in half, moving to the North and South, creating a large valley.
Contextually, this is to happen during a great battle around and/or in Jerusalem, and there is some fleeing going on too.
Should anyone be present, or be fleeing in that direction, it should be possible to see and/or meet Him.
See also Matthew 24:30 where a prophecy says that all the tribes of the Earth shall see the Son of Man coming. (Son of Man being one of the titles of Jesus.)
So that takes care of the showing up part. As far as the convincing part goes there is this one prophecy from Habakkuk 2:14 that might work, "For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea."
Not real specific, but at least it is sourced. I'm sure the Torah and Koran have a few more things to say on the subject, but my Hebrew and Arabic is somewhat lacking.
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Reading the other excellent answers, a new line of thought occurred to me. ...and it is even more consistent with His original old-testament branding.
Flood the world and kill all the non-believers. Instruct one devote member of each faith to build an arc and gather some animals; then bring on the rain!
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You'll need to fulfill the Messianic Expectations of Basically all 3; yet synchritize them somehow.
Having Miracle Worker and God are the same won't convince adherents to Islam, their idea of God makes it so its absurd and beneath God to assume anything that might limit any aspect of him- including taking a material body. None of the 3 believe He has a body; God is a immense primordial intelligence who thought the world into being. You'd almost need a 'John the Baptist' forerunner fortelling the immediate return of Jesus- who Muslims agree has a second coming. Jesus is a prophet in Islam and might be the only person who could convince them that 'X' version of God is the real deal. Jesus actually displays more miraculous power in the Quran than Muhammad himself.
This Jesus is also going to need to explain to Christians how they've deviated from the Truth, while still convincing them that they are still within the bounds of essential Truths if they put their faith in them. Will you keep the Trinity or not? If you do, then you may have a way to make this work well. *comment* (Jesus claims a kind of Divine Sonship and authority straight from the Father) Or maybe Jesus is the same Person as the Father- thus he is divine. [Christians say that the Son is the Logos, or Wisdom of God; where its almost like God's Self-Awareness is so real that it becomes a Seoncd personality, having the same nature and drawing on the same Power Source as the Father. The Holy Spirit is the Love of son & Father that becomes so real it has a Charatcre/Personality of its very Own). This returned 'Jesus' also must fulfill the Jew's expectations of their concept of Messiah, who will re-institute perfect sacrifices and fulfill all their sacrifices such that the only 'sacrifice' left is the Todah [Thanksgiving] Sacrifice of bread/grains.
The temple probably will need rebuilt; but you'll need to fulfill the expectation that God once again dwells in the Holy of Holies in the temple. If jesus were also God, and He performs a perfect sacrifice in the temple.. then there you go, God's presence is now once more within the Temple. He'll need to convince the Muslims that this is ok to build over the Dome of the Rock. You could then Convince Christians that the Thanksgiving, (the Todah) sacrifice is the same Sacrifice of the Bread and Wine described in the Old Testament. The dead have to return to Life, as this is a tenant of both Islam and Christianity; possibly Judaism too. Jesus could say something like, 'As I transformed the Bread and Wine into my Body and Blood, now may the Body of Christ/The family of God once again be Transubstantiated back into flesh and Blood", thus fulfilling Christian understanding of the Last Supper, Apocalyptic expectations and also raises the dead by the same manner. Talk about a show of Power!
The most troublesome spot you're going to find is this: Is Christianity's idea of Divine Sonship and being co-heirs with Christ true? Or is Islam's Divine Slave-Master relationship true? part of Islamic Eschatology forecasts that Jesus will come to 'break the crosses', which they think means make War on Christians. Maybe you could turn this on its head by saying what was meant was that Jesus returns to break the crosses that we all carry- to give us an eternal rest (which is what the word Sabbath means) from sin and guilt . All three believe in a single God who has one people on Earth so if this 'Jesus' is going to succeed He must unite God's people- whether that's the Family of God or the Slaves of God.
God has to convince us and leave the Christian and Jewish understanding of free Will intact and let us decide, while displaying the power and Authority that God displays in the Quran.
Strange though it may seem, jesus or a man who can convince us he is Jesus, may be the only way to easily unite such diverse beliefs.
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Reading all the other answers, I miss one concept.
All abrahamic religions are really centered on scripture.
The fastest way to convince people should be doing exactly as advertised.
And you got to comply with the timeline. You cannot start with the same kind of events already told in the scripture. The script for your physcial arrival has already been written.
So for christianity the way to go should be to organize the revelation. Prepare for trumpets, second coming and so forth.
Oh, and no. You can't have all three at the same time. Or beeing almighty, you can.
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Let us not approach this question from a worldbuilding point of view but the philosophical one.
we have two questions here: How would a god prove omnipotence and, the much bigger one: WHY?
**How does a God NOT prove his omnipotence?**
How would you have him prove his omnipotence? Pouring rain on the people? Strike them with lightnings? Burn them in fires or haunt them with illnesses? The opposite question is easier to answer: What cannot be counted as a prove of omnipotence? Short answer: About anything of the aforementioned.
We live in a time where basically anybody can purchase devices to strike others with "lightnings" and though they aren't used that way you could create them so that they would easily kill somebody and even make the remains (almost completely) "disappear".
Burning people with fire is nothing new anyway, so this doesn't prove much "potence" less even "omnipotence".
Illnesses? Well, we're not "perfect" at it yet but we can create our own illnesses already. Science will go further and get better at it (in healing and in creating them).
Rain? We cannot really make it rain at our bidding yet (close though). But some day science will manage this too. And drowning everybody will not really work either (no more deluge). Too many people have access to boats and even if many of them would die anyway, there would be surely some more beside the believers who'd survive.
**So what is left??**
Doesn't look good, does it? How can he still prove his omnipotence if about anything he would perform can (more or less) be done by humanity almost as well?
There's one thing humanity cannot overcome so far and probably never can completely: Death.
We are now left with two options, let's further explore them.
*Immortality*
To be entirely immortal is already quite impressive (wouldn't mind that for myself either). However, does it prove omnipotence? No, it doesn't, because there's a caveat: Death remains a *power* beside the omnipotent God of which he could still be afraid. After all: What would happen if an immortal being dies? It sounds like a paradox but it is not. If immortality is a power that is needed to keep death at bay, then death itself (thought of as an entity) would still be stronger. If the immortal wouldn't have the power of immortality, he would die and remain dead for eternity. Death would prevail.
So not to die is still not a proof of omnipotence and chances are even that some day even humanity can attain this state.
*What is the second option?*
To die. It's that simple: He has to undergo the state of total *unmight*. He has to be stripped of *every last spark of power* he wields. If he is truly omnipotent, he can overcome it, otherwise he remains dead. In the latter case death remains the strongest of all powers (so to say: death thought of as an entity would be the omnipotent god), in the first he has proven that he is more powerful than the most powerful power (yeah...), he's proven to be stronger than death. It might not convince the last stubborn sceptic but at least it proves he's stronger than the strongest we can perceive (if, at all, we can perceive death).
So to prove your omnipotence or at least to prove to be the strongest and most powerful entity you have to undergo and overcome death. Simply avoiding it is not enough, you have to "beat" it.
**But why would he want to prove it anyway???**
That's now the actual question here. If he is omnipotent, he doesn't have to care a thing about what people do. Just let them do, he has the final word anyway.
The most enticing part about this question is the fact that we will *never* know why an omnipotent God would create beings able to turn their backs on him. The simple and easy way out-answer is delivered by Calvin, Luther, later Barth and others: Predestination (Karl Barth: "theatrum gloriae dei"). In my eyes a very unsatisfying answer - much less even an answer rather than a "workaround" to avoid the question.
We might have to further investigate the philosophical connection between love and freedom (Wolfhart Pannenberg did as far as I know, though I don't know where). But the question raised here is then: Why does an omnipotent being need other beings to love them and be loved back? Of course we can say that it was out of the free will of the omnipotent being but why would that being have that will?
We can answer the question of HOW with a certain accuracy, but we are entirely unable to ever find a satisfying answer to the WHY.
[Answer]
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rpttb.jpg)
## Each Major Religion Has Pre-Written Criteria to Identify Their God
I think it should be noted that all of these faiths allow for god to reveal himself on a person-to-person level through prayer, study, and other mechanisms.
Christianity and Islam are expecting a future-dated big reveal where god shows himself to all people. That's what I've documented below.
## Expectations of Christianity
Actually, one of the hardest, but there is so much overlap that I should start here. They believe the god has already arrived once in the flesh, and that he will return a second time. Christianity believes that both the Abrahamic god and Jesus are available for personal encounters presently. Here's what the Bible says to look out for in that second coming, which may occur all at once, or spread out (determining on perspective) :
* One or more superpowers (Revelation 6:2)
* World wars (Rev 6:4)
* World famine (Rev 6:5)
* Plague and animal attacks (Rev 6:8)
* A great earthquake, the sun turning black, and the moon turning red (Rev 6:12)
* Meteor showers as thick as figs dropping dropping from a shaken tree (Rev 6:13)
* Some sort of atmospheric calamity causing the heavens to "roll up" (Rev 6:14)
* A major displacement to the Earth's crust, "every mountain and island removed from its place" (Rev 6:14)
* Most human society taking shelter from the above in caves (Rev 6:15)
* Meteor showers "fiery hail" burning up $1 \over 3$rd of the Earth's surface (Rev 8:7)
* All grasses on Earth, and most trees destroyed by above meteor showers (Rev 8:7)
* A significant meteor strike on Earth "something like a large mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea" (Rev 8:8)
* Earth's oceans being rendered poisonous by above meteor strike (Rev 8:8)
* $1 \over 3$rd of the worldwide sea life and maritime traffic being destroyed by the asteroid strike (Rev 8:9)
* A second significant meteor strike on the Earth (Rev 8:10).
* Possible strikes on the sun and moon (Rev 8:12)
* Plagues of insects "like smoke" with a sting that would cause agony, but not kill (Rev 9:5)
* $1 \over 3$rd of humanity wiped out by plagues, after surviving all of the above (Rev 9:17)
So here's an amazing thing. As ridiculous as it sounds, all of the above is probably going to happen in [about 1 million years when Gliese 710, all of it's planets, and it's cometary halo, pass inside Earth's orbit around the Sun](https://www.sciencealert.com/rogue-star-gliese-710-solar-system-encounter-earlier-than-thought-1-29-mya). But it may happen sooner. We're still discovering new stars every day.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/D2BIx.jpg)
But there's more for Christians. Following or during all of the above, many will claim to be God. Here's how the Bible tells Christians to expect him :
* All of the dead of humanity will be restored as healthy and whole, but human (Rev 20:12-15).
* God himself will be immediately preceded by the second coming of Jesus
* He will arrive in a floating city (Rev 21:2) roughly square and 2,220 kilometers (12,000 stadion) on each edge (Rev 21:16). The city will appear to be made of gold (Rev 21:18).
* There will be no more death. No more sadness. No more pain. (Rev 21:4)
## Expectations of Judaism
Judaism is expecting certain things from a returning Abrahamic God. You'll see there is a great deal of overlap with what Christians expect as well. Judaism allows for god to show up in personal encounters, but not face-to-face. Moses provided for someone to come after him, who is greater than him. This person will provide additional details.
Their expectations are:
* He will build a Third Temple (Ezekiel 37:26-28)
* He will gather all ethnic Jews back into Israel's historic boundaries (Isaiah 43:5-6)
* He will usher in an era of world peace. End hatred. End suffering. End diseases. (Isaiah 2:4)
* Will be descended on his father's side from King David (Genesis 49:10, Isaiah 11:1)
## Expectations of Islam
The easiest, and why it's last. Islam reveres Jesus already as, at the very minimum a prophet. Like Christianity, Islam allows for the possibility of an in-person arrival of god at the edn of times.
Here are Islam's expectations :
* Several terrible calamities overlapping some Christian belief ([ref](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_eschatology))
* Jesus will return a second time ([Surah 4:157-159](https://quran.com/4/157-167?translations=20)), immediately preceding god's return
[Answer]
>
> By seeing the cities of the sodomites and burning them with fire from the skies. Don't look or it's pillar of salt time, you're not worthy of seeing the destruction.
>
>
> By Commanding the Children of Israel to utterly destroy the philistines in the holy land, to kill every last man, woman and child. Indirectly supporting their ability to do so, but never visibly directly intervening in the battle. You probably need a man standing on a hill holding his hands in the air for the duration of the fighting.
>
>
> *and by pretty much ignoring the rest of the world.*
>
>
>
A couple of things you need to remember about the Abrahamic God
1. He has a very narrow focus
2. He's not very nice, not at all
Our current moral code is not compatible with the moral code of the period that he tends to crop up in and very possibly with his moral code. He's more bothered about the destruction of fruit trees than the slaughter of the innocent, which tended to be encouraged.
Things you're not going to see
* Peace on Earth
* Goodwill to all men
* Love peace and tolerance
* Anything relating to kings or a messiah, that's all later and not in the original texts
Things you might see
* Angels, but you'll have trouble knowing you met one, generally they're disguised as ordinary people
* Lots of people dying in holy wars
* Pillars of salt
* The lion might lie down with the lamb, but only the lion is getting up again
* Theocracy
>
> I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
>
>
>
God is here, I wish you the best of luck.
] |
[Question]
[
In my medieval fantasy world, there is the concept of the Five Pains for interrogation and punishment. Each pain correlated to a specific sense of the human body. Burning is used for touch, and a special chemical concoction is used for smell, etc. However, I have failed to find an adequate torture method which only targets sight.
**How could a medieval society create something literally torturous to look at?**
Feel free to take some liberties if your idea seems plausible but lacks real historical precedent.
[Answer]
**Pokemon seizures**.
Sometimes watching Pokemon can hurt you. One particular episode sent 685 kids to the hospital.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon>
>
> Twenty minutes into the episode, Pikachu stops "vaccine" missiles with
> his Thunderbolt attack, resulting in an explosion that flashes red and
> blue lights. Although there were similar parts in the episode with red
> and blue flashes, two anime techniques, called "paka paka"[a] and
> "flash",[b] made the scene particularly intense. These flashes were
> bright strobe lights, with blinks at a rate of about 12 Hz for
> approximately six seconds.
>
>
> At this point, some of the viewers experienced blurred vision,
> headaches, dizziness and nausea. Some suffered seizures, blindness,
> convulsions and loss of consciousness.
>
>
>
That sounds pretty uncomfortable. Blindness might be a relief! In any case your medievals should be able to replicate Pikachu's technique.
[Answer]
Somebody already thought about it: [abacination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacination)
>
> Abacination is a form of corporal punishment or torture, in which the victim is blinded by having a red-hot metal plate held before their eyes.
>
>
>
>
> Blinding as punishment has existed since antiquity, and was specifically documented as a form of torture in ancient Persia. A corrosive chemical, typically slaked lime, was contained in a pair of cups with decaying bottoms, e.g., of paper. The cups were strapped in place over the prisoner's eyes as they were bound in a chair. The slowly draining corrosive agent from the cups eventually ate away at the eyeballs.
>
>
>
An alternative was also to cut away the subject's eyelids, with obvious consequences.
[Answer]
There is a fungus called ergot ([pronunciation varies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFvaD2d8Vd4&t=189)), which mainly infects grains such as rye, wheat and barley. It produces alkaloids, which have various effects on humans. Some cause diarrhea and vomiting.
But of you can refine the alkaloids out of ergot... one of those alkaloids, called ergotamine, has a structure which is very similar to LSD. Lo and behold, it has also much the same effects. The visions from an acid trip should be quite disturbing for the average medieval person, due to their upbringing.
Medieval monks should be able to cultivate strains of ergot which produce more ergotamine than other alkaloids, thus being able to make drug bread. They could use this among themselves recreationally, and set some apart for torture. Simply feed a medieval peasant a loaf of ergotamine-laced bread and watch as they trip. When they sober up they will describe visions of hell.
Ergotamine can also cause gangrenes, necrosis and stillbirth, be mindful of those. Then again, you can't make an omelet without some gore, so...
[Answer]
**Show the victim another person being tortured**
This already happens in some fiction: the hero is just too tough to be broken by torture, so the bad guys begin torturing some other civilian. The hero almost always breaks immediately, knowing that the civilian can't tolerate torture and isn't willing to die a gruesome death for the cause.
The torture would need to be graphically violent. Stick with the classics: flaying the skin, fingernail stuff, inserting nails. A [wire jacket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi)*not* graphic would probably fit the bill.
To limit this strictly to vision, put the secondary victim behind a big glass window, so there's no sound. Also, surround the primary victim with mirrors so there's no place they can look that won't give them a view on the torture. And tape their eyes open so they can't be shut.
[Answer]
Literally torturous to look at? Somewhat inspired by [Willk's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/225262/20928) - how about simply a very bright light? If it's bright enough, even closed eyelids won't save you. To get this much light you can use either:
* The sun (which is by far the brightest thing in a medieval setting)
* Lots of smaller individual flames
* Some chemical concoction that burns very brightly
Then add some simple optics and mirrors that focuses it all on one person.
If the light also causes the face of the victim to heat up too much, add some air cooling. I believe a repurposed/modified blacksmith's bellows might do the trick. Or maybe just sprinkle the face with water.
Maybe making the light flash can also enhance the pain, I don't know. If so, then just add a rotating disc (shutter) with holes in it in front of the light which cuts the light off in regular intervals.
[Answer]
## Upside down goggles
The medieval victim will get his/her eyelids removed first.
Then, a helmet is firmly attached to the head of the prisoner.
In the helmet, you mount a pair of [upside down goggles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles)..
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IilWx.png)
The resulting disorientation will confuse a medieval prisoner, beyond madness.
[Answer]
That was already used in medieval times and is called a [pillory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillory).
Although that's the exact opposite of what you're looking for as instead of torturing the person's sight itself, something worse is used: the tortured *are put on display for the ridicule of all!*
And it was so effective, that it was used until the beginning of the XXth century:
(The 2 prisoners on the top half of the picture are the example, not the one being whipped on the bottom)
[Answer]
Visual tortures are fine, but Orwell's *1984* had an especially fiendish one: [starved rats in a cage attached to your face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmAVyowgDVE). You don't need to be squeamish to empathize with John's abject fear as the rats are fighting with one another in the cage, ready to tear his face apart. Substitute whatever small gnawing critters you wish and this torture need not touch the victim at all. And it's fully medieval.
[Answer]
A visual stimulus that induces [flicker vertigo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_vertigo) could qualify as a visual torture device, because it produces various uncomfortable effects, including nausea.
[Answer]
#### Tik Tok Torture
There is, in the midst of the Eastlands, a country where a particularly devilish torture is carried out. One famous archon of this land quipped that only an amateur torturer would blind his victim. The true artist sets up the torture such that the penitent is ready to claw his own eyes out of his head within the hour.
Penitents assumed guilty of certain crimes are fixated to a chair so they can't move limbs or head. The eyelids are sewn open and traction sutures are placed in the sclera so the eye itself can't move. Once positioned in the chair, the penitent is wheeled into a heavily walled chamber the wall of which is smooth and painted white. Upon the wall is a kit cat clock. [Its hands do not move, but its tail and eyes do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw3dMtCwSJ8). The mechanism provides a constant and slow motion. Except for an annoying and random disjoint between the tock and tick.
The penitent is left to meditate on the timeless nature of crime and punishment.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M0smj.jpg)
[Answer]
The [strange-face-in-the-mirror](https://mindhacks.com/2010/09/18/the-strange-face-in-the-mirror-illusion/) illusion is a good candidate for this:
>
> A visual illusion where your own reflection in the mirror seems to become distorted and shifts identity [...] To trigger the illusion you need to stare at your own reflection in a dimly lit room.
>
>
>
>
> Participants reported that apparition of new faces in the mirror caused sensations of otherness when the new face appeared to be that of another, unknown person or strange `other’ looking at him/her from within or beyond the mirror. All fifty participants experienced some form of this dissociative identity effect, at least for some apparition of strange faces and often reported strong emotional responses in these instances.
>
>
>
>
> Descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included:
>
>
> * huge deformations of one’s own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants)
> * a parent’s face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased
> * an unknown person (28%)
> * an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%)
> * an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%)
> * fantastical and monstrous beings (48%)
>
>
>
This is after a 10-minute session with voluntary participants. Imagine what you'd see if it was against your will, had no idea exact what was happening, and were subjected to this for hours?
[Answer]
Step 1) Keep the prisoner in a dark cell for some days. When the eyeseight gets used to the dark for a long time it takes a while to adapt back to daylight and it can be painful.
Step 2) Bring the prisoner on a open place in full daylight and hang them upside down to disorient them.
Step 3) Two pendulums with two braziers holding a bright fire oscillate towards the face of the prisoner from two directions. The pendulums have different length and different cadence.
The prisoner even if they close the eyelids will see and feel the fires going towards their face. The upside position, the uneven rhythm of the combined oscillations will disorient them and the scare of getting burned will add to it.
[Answer]
Torturing someone visually seems pretty easy—just flash bright lights or hold their heads by a fire, and plunge them into darkness afterwards. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
As for the aspect of “*creating* something visually torturous to look at,” my suggestion as an artist is to take the usual advice of color theory, like “contrasting colors like red/blue tend to look good with each other,” and do the exact opposite. Or mention that they press-ganged a very unfortunate artist to paint exactly the wrong color combinations for their prisoners.
There’s a reason neon colors and huge washes are only used sparingly and referred to as “eye-bleeding;” because they’re not pleasant at all to look at.
Also, certain patterns like spirals and very dense maze/labyrinth lines are often said to trigger epileptic seizures; as a nearsighted person, I’ve found out a lot of them HURT to look at, because they make me dizzy if the lines start “moving.” It would suck royally if someone was FORCED to stare at those.
[Answer]
I suppose the obvious answer is to blind them, but that seems a bit permanent for the intention of the Five Pains as I am reading it. Maybe instead of something painful to look at, you could just do trauma to the eyes? Like, hold their eyes open with something and plunge their head in salt water or something. I was also thinking using mirrors to reflect sunlight directly into their eyes?
Hope this helps <:
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[Question]
[
The [M18A1 Claymore mine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M18_Claymore_mine) is a directional fragmentation [anti-personnel mine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-personnel_mine). It is designed to kill by projecting a lethal hail of steel balls within a 60-degree cone in front of itself.
It seems setting off an M18A1 attached to one's unprotected chest would kill or seriously injure one. There's a "secondary missile hazard" area with a radius of approximately 100 meters from the device and a "concussion area" 16 meters around the device. Note that, while troops in the "secondary missile hazard" area are advised to take cover, no troops are allowed in the "concussion area" whatsoever. This implies that being that close to a detonating Claymore will, if not kill an unprotected person, certainly render them "combat ineffective"/heavily injured.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/46QVE.jpg)
However, what if said person was wearing a bomb suit?
A [bomb suit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_suit) is armor designed to withstand [pressure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpressure) and [fragmentation effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_(weaponry)) generated by an explosive device's detonation. Presumably, such a suit of armor - designed to protect its wearer from explosions at close to point-blank range - will at least *partially* mitigate the effects of a point-blank M18A1 blast wave.
So, here's the question: **how safe would it be to wear a bomb suit with an M18A1 Claymore mine attached to the chest (front facing away, of course), and then detonate said Claymore?**
How is this related to worldbuilding? Well, in my setting, there's something exceptionally dangerous that's really good at hiding, and it's often capable of reaching point-blank range long before humans can actually see it. As such, having an immediate defense against it is a top priority.
Moreover, bomb suits are already relatively common in this particular part of the setting, as it's under sporadic artillery barrage.
[Answer]
**Not survivable**
Imagine you removed the plastic body and ball bearings from a Claymore, so that all that is remaining is a layer of about 700 g of explosive. The quantity of explosive is several times more than that required to cut a line through a typical (unloaded) I-beam / rolled steel joist. At a minimum it would blow through the chestplate of the EOD suit and the ribcage, heart, lungs and spine. Possibly a really good EOD suit would have a strong enough back plate to keep the remnants of the body in basically the one spot, but I wouldn't count on it.
That's just worrying about it cutting through the material of the EOD suit, without even considering:
* the overpressure from a detonation occurring only a few centimetres away from the heart of the person wearing the suit
* the wearer's arms being either vaporised or torn off and flung into the next local government area, depending on their exact positions at the moment of detonation
* the wearer being blasted through the air with an unsurvivable G-load. Hollywood shows people being unrealistically thrown through the air by hand grenades going off, but this is an order of magnitude more explosive mass than a grenade filler in direct contact with a relatively durable (thanks to the EOD suit) body.
People definitely have survived being within the 16 m exclusion zone all around a Claymore, but the closest I am aware of (from reliable second-hand accounts) is about 5m away below the lip of a concrete wall. Even that close a soldier is likely to be disoriented by the blast, although an EOD suit's blast dampening qualities would help. (No need to respond with lots of competing war stories, just acknowledging that inside 16 m is not an automatic death zone.)
Finally, I suggest you need to consider what a Claymore will achieve that an alternative weapon system will not. If the fragmentation from hundreds of ball bearings is important then the monster(?) - which is somehow immune to the artillery barrage mentioned - only needs to avoid a tiny danger zone directly in front of the chest of the wearer. This means that the wearer needs to, while wearing a very heavy suit of armour, aim by moving their entire body.
EDIT: In response to a few comments, adding some very non-technical, oversimplified information about how military explosives are sometimes used. Research online further if you are interested in the subject, try not to end up on any watchlists and obviously do not try this at home (yours or anyone else's).
1. While a "shaped charge" is any explosive that is in a particular shape, most often this is used to refer to charges shaped to take advantage of the Munroe Effect, especially for [armour piercing use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator). This type of charge is used in low velocity anti-armour weapons, including mines and in both prepared and some improvised demolition charges. For demolitions required to make a long cut instead of a single hole, linear charges ("hayricks") can be used in place of inverted cones. These charges need to be placed with some separation from the target in order for the penetrator to have room to form, as per the linked article. This can be achieved relatively easily by putting "legs" on a charge designed to fire vertically down, but can be difficult or impractical to achieve when trying to set charges on the side of or underneath some targets.
2. Due to the difficulty and/or time required for placing shaped charges, hasty demolitions will often use bulk explosives placed directly in contact with the target. There are tables that say how much explosive is required to confidently penetrate various types of targets, my recollection of these is that the quantity in a Claymore is overkill for penetrating a steel beam it is in contact with. In this situation the explosives must be directly in contact with the target surface, even a small air gap will massively reduce the penetration due to air transmitting the shock wave much worse than a solid medium. This explains how an EOD suit (although maybe not its occupant) can be rated to survive a significant charge at a distance of as little as one metre, where there is no chance of survival with it strapped to the chest.
3. The Claymore is a shaped charge, but only in terms of the explosive being shaped to scatter ball bearings in a particular arc. It is not an armour-piercing shaped charge and the only effect its shape has in this situation is that the curve probably lets it make slightly better contact with the contoured chestpiece of an EOD suit than a flat slab would.
[Answer]
KerrAvon's answer is good. It is not survivable and I don't see point in arguing that - the amount of explosive is just too extreme for such a close range.
But I just want to point out that you don't need that much. Do you want to damage the monster sufficiently to slow it down, or just turn it into a mist?
To just damage the monster sufficiently a mere 5-50g would be plenty. Absolutely no need to go for >500g.
If monster bites or punches or slashes or whatever with a physical contact, and is smart enough to avoid all traps (unlikely, but lets consider), but dumb enough to attack an armored person, then just use what tanks use - an active armor. When something hits the suit hard enough - suit responds by exploding that specific cell.
If monster is in direct contact, 5g will destroy that part of the monster's body, be it a claw or a tooth, and will somewhat protect the wearer, by distributing the hit on a wider area than a claw would hit. And it will be actually safe for the wearer, with some training it won't even cause shock and the person will able to continue their mission. Like attack the monster with something, or spray it with glowing paint.
If monster is more like a demon than an animal, and blowing off one of the claw won't scare it away, 50g of explosives will blow off a whole limb and damage lungs and shock for a long time. For cases when the creature is not limited by the surviving instinct this might be useful. But it will for sure make the wearer non responsive for a long time, and damage to the health is extreme. This person can survive, with loss of hearing, internal bleeding, a few fractures. But they have some chance of survivng, especially with medical help. And if there are more people than monsters, and mission is important enough, then probably it makes sense.
500g charge makes no sense at all, it is absolutely ridiculous. You can blow up a light transport with it, and harm the people inside. Or turn a monster into a pile of organic material.
Still, you will need to explain why traps don't work, and people are really good at making traps. Even if monster is transparent, it will give off IR. It will make sound as it walks, and some mines can detect the walk pattern of different entities to distinguish animals from a human for example. If monster flies, then sonars or radars will help. There is some sense if it is a short story and monsters appeared when people were unprepared, and people's weapon are not designed to detect monsters, that could explain it somewhat. But then making an active armor suit wont be on the table either.
I can see some point in it if there is lots of false targets. For example an alien city, that humans need to bring peace to, and some aliens are agressive, but others are not, and it is absolutely paramount to never attack peaceful aliens, but also be able to punish agressive aliens. That I think could explain why traps can't be used at all, but there is enough time to make active armor suite. And using smaller charges helps here too - large charge just can lead to too many casualties. Lots of false targets could also explain why ordinary weapon cant be used - stray bullet may kill a bystander. Or be useless if distance to the crowd is a few meters, and one alien from the crowd can jump to attack in a fraction of a second. An organic cave with lots of moving parts, like a large organism, could also make the use of traps almost impossible.
This could lead to development of a whole set of extremely short range weapons, tasers are common at this range, but it also could be short focus lazers, that quickly diverge the beam after a fraction of a meter of distance. Still, it can blind at much further range than it can burn, and that might be a disadvantage. Dumb but could be effective is exploding canister of a PU foam, especially with paint in it. Either it traps the monster, or allows to follow and find it. And suprisingly but plasmaguns. Plasma is very bad at pretty much everything as a weapon because it disperses so quickly, but if you want an extremely short range it is perfect. In just a meter it will turn to warm air, but before that it can cut any material on Earth. Basically I'm offering a plasma cutter, but on steroids. It can tick all the boxes, of being perfect weapon for such a case where you would want to use an exploding armor. It is short range, so it cant damage other targets, it is angry and cuts everything, it can work in impulse mode, it can have ridiculous power. As a bonus is doesnt harm its owner nearly as much.
One more point on exploding armor - you actually want to have 2 compartments of the explosive. This way you can 'direct' the explosion away from your body, towards the body you don't like. And more 'layers' - the more you can direct it away, making it a soft push for the one side, and rapid tear for the other side. Just want to point out that duct tape and grenades or mines won't work. It will have to be a very complex device, with sensors to activate faster than a human can react, with many layers of explosives. Otherwise other close range weapon are preferred.
[Answer]
A bomb suit may protect a person from the effects of a nearby blast, and if sufficiently protective, may indeed allow the wearer to survive direct contact with the back-side of an exploding claymore mine on the chest.
However, bomb suits were designed to be effective at arm's length distance, for use by bomb disposal technicians. A suit effective against a *contact* range claymore mine would necessarily be much heavier than the amount of explosives would suggest. Bomb suits are also designed to preserve life in the event of a close-ranged blast, and only secondarily to preserve function.
While the experience would likely (but not certainly) be survivable, it is still highly likely to result in serious injury, and potentially loss of consciousness. Additionally, such heavy suits are extremely hot and cumbersome, and even with powered cooling, can only be worn for short periods, and do not allow significant exertion.
TL;DR:
It would probably be *survivable* but not *safe*, and the suit would be quite impractical for day to day tasks.
[Answer]
Your main concerns include getting your arms out of the way when it detonates; soldiers have this funny habit of carrying a gun in front of their chests, weird.
Next you just need to disperse the claymore concussion blast evenly across your torso instead of letting it punch you in the heart. A convex breastplate with ample cushion might do the trick but you'll need to scale back the C4 quite considerably.
Claymores are lethal up to 50 meters but your use-case is close combat defense so 1/50th of the power should be sufficient, no?
You never defined point-blank range so I am using this explanation:
>
> In forensics and popular usage, point-blank range has come to mean extremely close range (i.e., target within about a meter (3 ft) of the muzzle at moment of discharge but not close enough to be an actual contact shot).
>
>
>
<https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Point-blank_range>
[Answer]
How well protected is the creature this defense is designed to protect against? Also, how resilient?
Asking, because you can build your own claymore-mine-style device or not be limited to M18 Claymore. I would go along the lines of German [SMi-35 or SMi-44](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-mine), where much smaller explosive charge is explosively ejected from the armor to about 1m, making the whole operation sensible.
To be more precise in this specific scenario - even improvised device would be enough. I'm thinking 100-200 grams of C4 flattened using rolling pin and placed on a properly shaped piece of steel sheet of enough thickness, covered with small ball bearings (or anything that's available - nails, nuts, bolts, whatever) on the side that's "towards the enemy".
200g is slightly more than an explosive filler of M67 hand grenade, which has a range of about 15m. Should be enough for any creature.
Alternatively I'd use boom sticks - tubes that if pressed will ignite a shotgun shell. If the tubes are short enough, the dispersion of projectiles will be a very wide cone. Then again, because it will be pressure-activated it should be basically contact weapon and at range of zero even birdshot is very deadly... Upside it's quite easy to maintain and reload and is quite weather-proof, downside it's making a hedgehog out of the suit and requires some care when doing any activities...
[Answer]
The video on [this](https://www.military.com/video/operations-and-strategy/antipersonnel-mines/testing-claymore-antipersonnel-mines/3067731680001) page at 4:14 shows the effects of an M18A1 claymore from 1 meter. Even the best bomb suit couldn't protect you from that amount of explosive power.
I'm sure there are many better alternatives for killing monsters that get right up close than a M18A1 claymore mine. Some sort of modified flamethrower could be a possibility.
[Answer]
A claymore is basically a single-use cannon. Because it's single-use it's designed to be as light as possible. Because it's as light as possible it doesn't fully contain the blast of the explosive.
It would be possible to thicken it up a bit, at least in the critical places, such that more of the blast goes away from the user. Wouldn't even be hard...
But you'll still have recoil. 700 1/8" steel balls weigh about 1400 grains. A claymore throws them at an average of 3937fps. That's over 48000ft/lbs of energy...
Equal and opposite reactions means that, even if it doesn't disintegrate into shrapnel and poke holes in things, the user gets hit in the chest pretty darn hard. Like a mid-sized motorcycle crashing into them at 60mph kind of hard...
Now... The closing speed of jousting knights is between 50-80mph, and they weigh a heck of a lot more. So a properly designed armor plate definitely makes such things survivable. Build this into your suit and beef up the armor thickness in the middle of the chest plate a bit and you could probably make it survivable. The concussion is still going to do all kinds of bad things to the wearer though. Using it once or twice probably wouldn't cause any noticeable side-effects, but make it a regular thing and they'll probably start to suffer from tinnitus and strokes at the very least. And firing this thing is going to knock a person flat on his back every time.
But just strap a standard claymore to a standard EOD suit and set it off? No. The back plate of a standard claymore turns into shrapnel and it's too big and too close to not poke holes through the suit. Which will be quite bad for its occupant. Plus then they still get hit with all that recoil.
[Answer]
AvonKerr and Surprised Seagull gave great answers.
But in case people are curious about specifics and don't want to look through the comments, an NIJ rated [bomb suit](https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/249560.pdf) has to withstand the detonation of 1.25 lbs (~567 grams) of C4 at a distance of 2 feet (~0.6 m). For reference, the Claymore mine has 680 grams of C4 filler, which is around 20% more than the test charge.
In addition, the [intensity of an explosion pressure wave](https://www.fema.gov/pdf/plan/prevent/rms/426/fema426_ch4.pdf) declines with the cube of the distance from the explosion. Someone standing 2 feet away experiences around 8x less blast pressure than if the explosive were strapped to them (which would definitely kill them).
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[Question]
[
What changes would you have to make to humans, the Earth, or the entire universe for humans to be able to go to explore the Moon and Mars with the technology levels of the Renaissance?
[Answer]
## The problems
I'm having a hard time being optimistic about this. The technological gap between the Renaissance and the present day is enormous. Our understanding of science and our abilities in engineering are nowhere near where they were half a millennium ago. Renaissance humans would need to make some enormous technological leaps to even fly like modern humans do, let alone go to space.
There are some particular places where Renaissance people are scientifically or technologically deficient:
* **Propulsion.** If you want to get to space, you need to know how to make and (more importantly) handle highly reactive, dangerous, explosive materials. That's strike one - I don't see a way for Renaissance people to, say, produce or store liquid oxygen. Back then, we didn't even understand how combustion worked, let alone hypergolic rocket fuels.
* **Computers.** [You don't need a supercomputer to calculate the right trajectory for a spacecraft, but you probably still need a computer.](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/23081/5963) Figuring out paths by hand would be extraordinarily time-consuming. I'd also argue that computers would be needed once in space, to ensure that the engines burned exactly as needed.
* **Our understanding of science.** Kepler and Newton wouldn't come around for another century or two, meaning that we really didn't know why objects moved in space, nor how a spacecraft would move once it got up there. We lacked calculus and numerical techniques to computer rocket trajectories. Plus - and this could arguable go under the section on propulsion - we didn't understand chemical reactions. Good luck with those explosions.
These are only a few of the main issues. Renaissance people were several centuries behind on all of them.
## Potential solutions
Here are some things that could at the very least make it slightly less impossible to get to space:
* **A lower surface gravity.** If you need less energy to escape the planet, maybe you need less volatile fuels. Perhaps you can get by with gunpowder for the initial launch, then use the dangerous stuff once you get to space.
* **A more interesting night sky.** Maybe there's a reason for people to look up at the sky more often - perhaps there are more comets, or more extreme auroras, or a second moon, or something else that makes scientists think, "Huh, that's worth studying." This has the potential to accelerate the study of physics and astronomy.
* **A planet conducive to flight.** Maybe the world has lots of forests, inviting people to live high in the trees, or high mountain ranges. Characteristics like this would make flight more convenient, thereby inducing more study of aeronautics and, eventually, travel in the upper atmosphere.
These really won't make it technologically easier to get to space. What they will do is make people more interested in studying and exploring the sky. And if people get curious about something, they have a tendency to, well, study and explore it. All of sudden, going to space might sound pretty interesting, and by the time of the Renaissance, people are at least interested in working towards spaceflight, even if they won't achieve it for another century or so.
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If the medievals were correct about the structure of the universe, then all you need to get to the stars (and everything else in the heavens) is a big enough ladder or staircase, not unlike the ill-fated Tower of Babel project.
Or you may be able to get there just by finding the edge of the world (see image below, 'Flammarion' engraving)
Getting through the crystal spheres might be a challenge, but medieval technology should produce adequate drills or other tools for the job.[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4993d.jpg)
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**People who ask how to do X at type Y questions regularly forget...**
Technology is a pyramid. The ability to achieve something depends on the experience, innovation, invention, etc. of all the predecessors. You can sometimes skip small parts of that — but you can't skip whole chunks of that.
What you're asking is to take the technological development of the 1950s–1960s (which was needed *just to get off the planet* much less travel somewhere) and push it back to the 1500s.
In reality, what you just did was make the 1500s the 1950s–1960s.
Therfore, the *real* question is, can the sociodemographic development of society be restrained such that 500 years of technological development can occur while still having a feudal society? (I'm assuming a European perspective.)
The idea was explored a little bit in the Star Trek Original Series episode "[Bread and Circuses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Circuses_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series))" where the Enterprise crew discovers Ancient Romans with TVs and modern military weaponry.
However, in reality, it can't be done. Sociodemographics are part of the pyramid I spoke about earlier. As your technology becomes more advanced, your economics and political structures must also become more advanced to "handle the load."
**Should this stop your story?**
No. That Star Trek episode proves that there's space for this kind of alternate history story. Consequently, you might want to open another question. Something along the lines of, "What political and social pressures would allow the government and social behaviors of 1550..."
*Note: Please be specific, even "The Renaissance" is too ambiguous when it comes to social and technological development.*
"...to continue to 2020?"
*Note my use of 2020. We don't have the tech quite yet to fly to Mars today, so you're not really looking for the 1950s–1960s.*
Your goal is to do something like Start Trek's "Bread and Circuses." You want the social atmosphere of the past and the technology of the present. It will be much easier to retard social development (IMO) than it will be to speed up technological development. Realistically it can't be done... but from a story perspective...
**But in the end, you might need to introduce a "gimmick"**
Star Trek's "Bread and Circuses" didn't use a gimmick to justify the advanced tech of ancient Rome. They didn't need to — that wasn't the story they were trying to tell. (And, to be fair, it really wasn't ancient Rome with advanced tech. It was a modern Rome that had preserved its traditions — not unlike the Native Peoples of North America who drive cars and run modern businesses but still celebrate their ancient past and culture.)
But, if we look at another episode, "[A Piece of the Action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Piece_of_the_Action_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series))" we find a different perspective. This episode was investigating the issue of cultural contamination (and that might be the easiest way for you to achieve your goal). A book about gangsters is left on a planet and the planet modifies its sociodemographics to conform with "the book."
In your story, you might need to come up with some form of "cultural contamination" (aka, *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court*) that rationalizes the mix of ancient culture and modern tech. If you don't, I can't see a way for you to make it work.
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You need a universe where:
* Everything is MUCH closer. The Moon needs to be only a few thousand miles away, not hundreds of thousands. The other planets can't be much farther. Ancient folks had no way to build rockets or heat shields, nor to astrogate effectively, so the Universe must shrink to a small, calm pond they can handle.
* Escape velocity is much, much lower, so gravity works quite differently. Low enough for a kite or sailed vessel to not return under some circumstances. (We'll conveniently overlook that this prevents our form of life from existing)
* Air is everywhere. Space must be breathable. Ancients have no way to compress or store air for weeks of travel, so the Universe must be tweaked a bit.
* Water and Food must be available on most celestial bodies (not the Sun, of course. That would be silly)
This means that your ancients can take voyages quite similar to sea voyages, using their nifty-but-similar ether-ships or air-ships. Like sea voyages, they can use the winds and currents of space, astrogate using the sun and stars, and replenish their provisions at their destination while they deal with traders or monsters or whatever.
This also means, by the way, that monsters can jump off planets and become roving space monsters preying upon voyagers, and that space-pirates may swarm near wealthier planets.
This has been done, of course, in literature and cinema already: Baron Munchausen's trips to the Moon and dalliance with the queen there (*[The Adventures of Baron Muchausen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Baron_Munchausen)*, 1988), are merely one example.
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## Space is really big. Although it looks close, the distance to the moon is colossal. Mars is monumentally further.
The definition of 'explore' is loose - at a superficial level we can 'explore' the moon through a telescope (at least the side that faces us) which is easily in the realms of the Renaissance without any Universe changes. If however, you mean physically be there to touch and stand on it, then here are some ideas:
* The moon to be denser than Earth such that it retains a breathable atmosphere, to allow us to breath oxygen on it (so we don't die when we walk on it)
* The moon to be much closer, perhaps only a 142 stories above say Mount Everest - as the 142m (the Strasbourg Cathedral) was the highest building in the Renaissance - although the gravitation attraction of the moon at this distance would be very disruptive.
Now for Mars, we need to rethink things entirely:
* Make the **whole solar system have a breathable atmosphere**
* Enable Hot Air balloons to reach much higher, perhaps using a material that weighs almost as light as helium but holds together a virtual vacuum, to **allow balloons to escape the Earth's gravity**.
* As then your explorers can float in space and breath, allow them the ability to alter their direction through makeshift beating of wings, so **they can slowly make it to mars** and land on it (which now has also a breathable atmosphere).
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There was a story, by I think Pohl, but I'm routinely wrong. No doubt someone else will chime in with the name.
The premise of the story was that at some point during technological development of a civilization, they reach a crossroads. They reach a point where they either discover electricity, or, essentially, "warp drive". The "warp drive" lets them fly through air, and travel between stars. The discovery so fundamentally shapes the civilizations understanding of the universe that once they go down one path, the other path is very difficult to discover organically.
So, in the end, you have a race of beings that essentially have warp drive during what would be roughly the Age of Sail for us. The story did not go in to detail beyond that this race proceeded to run around and conquer other systems, using their flying craft and gun powder kegs to attack the lower tech species.
To this end, since the "hard part" is figured out, they needed to do just a few things.
* Figure out how to seal their ships from vacuum. Whether this can be done with tar and wood, I honestly don't know.
* Figure out how to create oxygen. This can be done chemically. Recall these folks only need weeks or months of supplies for their travels.
* Figure out how to scrub CO2.
* Figure out how to navigate. Honestly, I don't know how important an accurate clock is as a necessity for space flight, compared to how necessary it is for terrestrial and stellar navigation.
* Figure out how to harden their ships to radiation. The trick here is them coming to the understanding that outside of the atmosphere, radiation is a bad thing. They could have easily used lead as a shielding, however.
* Glass. They would need some kind of glass to make portals in their ships for observation.
* A telescope would be handy.
* And, as always is handwaved away in spaceflight fiction, some mechanism to manage heat.
They would perhaps needs some mechanism to pressurize gas (notably oxygen), if only to be able to operate some kind of airlock (and thus repressurize it). On the one hand, they can probably just turn up the oxygen generator and pressurize from the ambient pressure in the ship. Or they could simply be stuffing canaries in little ports that open to the outside to see if the atmosphere is compatible or not (and, obviously, if not -- don't open the door).
This would not let them explore the moon on foot. But they could do low level flying surveys of hostile environments, enough to know there's nothing worth conquering there.
The fundamental issue, is that much of the foundation science may not be available at this time to enable spaceflight.
But on the other hand, it certainly gives great incentive to develop it.
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Seeing as you are allowing changes to the entire universe then I'd suggest wormholes connecting the surfaces of planets and moons.
These could be naturally occurring on the surface of objects generating a large enough gravity, leftover from an ancient alien civilisation or perhaps generated by Leonardo's experiments with handwavium and plot particles.
To me this seems an easier way for readers to maintain their suspension of disbelief than imagining rockets and spaceships so out of period. It's a major change from our universe, but it's easy to imagine.
I'll leave you to work on portable oxygen supplies and heating for your diving suits.
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There is one simple change, maybe too simple for your needs: a visit by technologically advanced aliens, who leave some easy-to-fly machines behind.
An advantage is that if the humans do not understand the technology, you do not have to explain it to the reader either.
I can think of at least two examples in fiction where exploiting alien technology without understanding it at all permits humans to travel the universe: [David Drake's Ranks of Bronze](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/616458.Ranks_of_Bronze), and the [historical backstory of Catherine Asaro's Skolia universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_the_Skolian_Empire#Historical_background).
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## Getting to Orbit with Renaissance Technology
The trick here is to create an environment where you can enter and exit space without entry heating or rocket power.
* You can reduce orbital velocity by reducing the average density of the planet. Earth is actually quite dense, owing in part to the amount of iron in the core. Earth's average density is 5,493 ${kg} \over {m^3}$.
* The lower limit of doing this (w.o. significantly changing Earth's chemistry is 2,329 ${kg} \over {m^3}$ (about half) for a rock world. This might drastically impact the presence of a magnetic field for the planet, and the protection from radiation that the magnetic belts provide. Or 1,000 ${kg} \over {m^3}$ for a water world
* Orbital velocity is $v = \sqrt{{G M} \over R}$. With half the density, $M\_{new} = 0.5 M\_{earth}$, so orbital velocity drops from 7,900 $m \over s$ to ---> 5,587 $m \over s$ for a rock world (3,533 $m \over s$ for a water world).
* The length of the day will contribute. A 24 hour day provides 463 $m \over s$. A 12 hour days gives you 926 $m \over s$ for free towards your 3,500 $m \over s$ orbital velocity goal.
* Winds can also make up the difference. The fastest winds documented in the solar system are about 500 $m \over s$.
Tweak your world as you like until an airship aloft on the peak winds can reach orbital velocity. Likely this world is shedding atmosphere like Venus or ancient Mars. This world will probably, one day, be unable to support life. But that's in the future.
I'd imagine you'd have a pressure-sealed glider-like device, that catches the high-speed equatorial winds and rides them round-and-round the globe until reaching the fine mist leaving this fictional Earth behind for interplanetary space.
## Getting to the Moon
**Propulsion without rockets.** Some sort of natural [mylar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BoPET) would need to exist on your world to make further explanation possible. You're primitive explorers would use the material for [solar sails](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail). Just like Gallileo didn't exactly understand how sails work, your Renaissance explorers don't need a full theory of why solar sails work, they can simply have discovered that they work.
**Time.** An [800m x 800m solar sail picks up about 5 Newtons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail) of force. For a manned 10-ton galleon, you'll pick up 1.8 m/s of velocity per hour. Reaching escape velocity of 5,000 $m \over s$ (for the water world) from a starting point of 3,500 $m \over s$ will require putting on an extra 1,500 m/s, after you've made orbit, which would require 833 hours (34 days).
The Apollo missions used a transfer orbit instead to get to the moon in 5 days time. It might be possible to do this with solar sails, or taking advantage of how the atmosphere is escaping. However, I feel like those will be dead-ends; but it might be worth trying.
**Landing.** Even though it only has ${1 \over {10}}^{th}$ the gravity of Earth, there's no friendly wind or fast spin helping you back aloft from the surface of the moon. Landing would be a one-way event; but maybe explorers could have attempted, or just flown by.
**Navigation.** The [Antikythera mechanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism) and Bible passages about wise men following a star for ground navigation strongly support that celestial navigation has been available, in certain circles, for millennia. The spring watch and sextant were available in the 16th century for use. The gyroscope would be identified in [1783](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroscope#History), although using it for navigation wouldn't be developed until [1885](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrocompass)
**Life support.** Holding one atmosphere of pressure is not beyond Renaissance technology. Paintings show Alexander the Great being lowered underwater in a glass bathysphere. The pressure of going underwater (1 atmosphere every 20 feet) is quickly a bigger structural problem than just holding on to anywhere between 0.5 to 1.0 atmospheres. [Lithium hydroxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide) was used by the Apollo mission for oxygen scrubbing, and served in that capacity for roughly 2 weeks.
**Logistics.** Could get much more precise on this, but a round trip to the moon, then, would very roughly be around 2 months long (acceleration, and deceleration). The average journey from France to America in the 1600s is [reported at 7 weeks](https://www.reference.com/history/long-did-across-atlantic-1700s-aaa802df642b99a3).
**Warmth.** Staying warm was a big problem for the Apollo astronauts when equipment failed. Lighting a fire is an option, although it puts additional pressure on the oxygen scrubbers. Blankets might be a possibility.
**Communication.** A [heliograph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliograph) could be used to communicate with other ships, or ground stations on the moon.
## Getting off the Moon
Even though it only has ${1 \over {10}}^{th}$ the gravity of Earth, there's no friendly wind or fast spin helping you back aloft from the surface of the moon. However, maybe fast rotation could help you cut into 2,300 $m \over s$ escape velocity. And maybe some clever former-castaways that found a way to live inside some speculative kind of shelter developed a rail-assist that provides the kinetic energy shortfall.
Imagining the moon, like the fictional Earth, is spinning fast enough to give you a 1,000 $m \over s$ boost towards the 2,300 $m \over s$, a spring-style rail "launcher" would $v = \sqrt{ 2 s a }$, need to be ~28 kilometers long and providing 3 gee of acceleration to work.
## To Mars
**Distance.** Mars is orbiting the Sun, just like the Earth is. Depending on how close the two orbits are, the distance from the Earth to Mars can be as much as [401 million kilometers](https://www.distances-calculator.com/distance-planet-earth-to-mars.php) but is, on average 225 million kilometers.
**Time.** With the solar sail providing constant thrust of 0.0005 $m \over s^2$ (1.8 m/s per hour) for the trip to Mars, and launching from the moon for 2,300 $m \over s$ starting velocity, an extremely simplistic equation for the trip time is $s = {1 \over 2} a t^2 + v\_0 t$.
Using this, the trip would take 400 days each way.
(200 accelerating + 200 slowing down).
**Way stations and supplies.** Earth's L2, L4, and L5 [Lagrange points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L2_point) are each about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, or only about $1 \over 2$ of 1% the distance to Mars. They wouldn't be very satisfying way stations for pre-positioning supplies.
It might be possible for a convoy to be making a circuit to Mars and back, loaded heavily with supplies and minimal crew, and purposefully taking longer than necessary to get there so that they are available as supply points to larger crewed expeditions. That won't always be possible either, as the Sun eventually gets in the way.
I think a Mars mission would have to provide it's own air, heat, and other supplied for the full 400 day one-way / 800 day round-trip.
**How much?** 1 gram of anhydrous [lithium hydroxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide) scrubs 450 cubic centimers (0.45 liters / 0.02 mol) of CO2. The average human breathes [2.3 pounds](https://answersdrive.com/how-much-carbon-dioxide-does-a-human-produce-in-a-year-303901) (1,041.9 grams / 23.6 mol) of CO2 per day. Therefore, unless you recycle it somehow, you need 1.2 kg of scrubbing material per day for the trip.
Going back, then, to our 10-ton solar sail vessel: for each member of the crew 480 kg (about half a ton) of air scrubbing material will be required for a one-way trip. [111 grams of fat](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-much-fat-to-eat) per day (44.4 kg for the trip) of food and 2 liters / 2,000 kg per day (800 tons for the trip).
Water recycling will be necessary. Distilling isn't beyond the capabilities of Renaissance technology.
**Radiation.** Interplanetary radiation is no joke. For the sake of this, though, maybe natural selection has already put only those who can tolerate the radiation on the trip.
## Landing on the Red Planet
It seems like you could use a concept like [Opportunity and Spirit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_(rover)), aerobraking, then just crash into the planet (with airbags).
## Getting Back Off Mars
Getting back off Mars is going to be harder. The radius of the planet is about half of Earth's, so the boost you get from rotation is lower (241 $m \over s$). The escape velocity, nevertheless, is pretty high (5,020 $m \over s$). There are no winds to provide a boost, either. It looks like ground teams would be stuck.
**Unless...**
Orbiting only 9,000 kilometers above the surface of the planet [Phobos](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=phobos%20wiki&ia=web) is comically close to Mars. However, its very low density (close to water) leads to very little effect on the Martian surface.
If Phobos, however, was a rock of pure Osmium 22,500 ${kg} \over {m^3}$, and the mass tweaked up a little, the Mars-Phobos L1 point starts to shift closer to the surface of Mars. At an almost Earthlike mass (4.78 $\times 10^{24}$ kg), the L1 point scrapes just a few kilometers above the surface.
With a few other changes to move Olympus Mons to the Mars equator, once per day it would be possible to jump from Mars orbit to Phobos orbit, into the metastable Mars-Phobos L1.
From there, the solar sail can be raised to build up velocity for the long trip back to Earth.
## Home
Returning to Earth, the Renaissance explorer would enter the upper atmosphere at relative rest to the prevailing equatorial winds. Shedding the solar sail for the glider, the craft would slowly tack down the wind column to a temperate zone, eventually deploying a lifting envelope (a balloon) for the calmest region.
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In terms of realism, I'm with the other posters here in suggesting that the baseline of the Renaissance is simply to "short" to support spaceflight.
Consider Leonardo da Vinci. During his employment with the Duke d'Sforza, Leonardo sketched and designed devices recognizable as tanks, submarines, flying machines, diving suits, parachutes and even a primitive form of gas turbine. Rather amazingly, modern reproductions of many of these devices following his designs generally work exactly as advertised.
So why didn't the Duke d'Sforza embark on an ambitious campaign to conquer Italy and eventually Europe using these amazing devices? Outside of the fact that his personal history suggests he preferred to set people against each other and do the work for him, Leonardo was missing the all important compact power source for most of these devices. His tank would work on hard level ground when a bunch of burly guys turned the cranks, but hills and cross country terrain would easily defeat it. The flying machines might have worked to an extent as gliders or kites, but no human being could move the wings fast enough to actually attempt powered flight. (looking at some of the reproduced drawings is a bit misleading. Leonardo calculated the wingspan of a man carrying machine which is in line with modern hang gliders. He also had many marginal notes describing how the wings were jointed with freedom of movement in all 3 dimensions to allow the pilot control fo the machine).
Other devices simply would be vastly expensive to produce using the artisanal methods of production common at the time - imagine trying to hand stitch hundreds of diving suits for an invading army? Quality control would be an issue as well - soldier drowning because the different seamstresses were inconsistent with their stitching would be an unacceptable outcome. This does not even address the raw materials such as cloth - some might fail because it wasn't woven correctly.
Now add to this the lack of proper understanding and tools needed to carry out spaceflight. Leonardo would have known about rockets and intuited that a much larger firework rocket could lift a larger load or climb higher, but without the "rocket equation" would never have been able to calculate how many fireworks rockets would be needed (in fact, it would be impossible with simple gunpowder rockets, but he would not be able to understand why). Knowledge of things like changing air pressure, the vacuum of space, radiation, thermal stresses in extreme environments, the behaviour of materials in a vacuum and so on would be non existent - they would not even recognize there were potential problems to solve in the unlikely event Leonardo launched a man in a barrel perched atop a cathedral sized black powder rocket. While the image is awesome, the crater the device would leave would be less appreciated (assuming Leonardo or any of the assembled crowd survived the explosion).
As a minimum, you need to move forward in time. Much better materials, mathematics and even scientific understanding of the conditions of space were beginning to appear a century after Leonardo. While it is still highly unlikely that anyone could go into space in the late 1600's, there was a much more solid grounding of understanding, and much better tools available. Assuming anyone actually thought that way, rocket flight *may* have been possible in the 1700's, although we would be talking about short ballistic trajectories and deploying a parachute at burn out, much like a model rocket today. That sort of actual real world experience would then be able to pave the way towards true rocket flight, and likely inspire people to really start thinking about the problem, moving the discovery of the rocket equation, liquid fuels, air tight capsules and life support systems and so on much farther ahead - perhaps the late 1700's or early 1800's.
From there it is almost anyone's guess. If there was some sort of international competition among the Great Powers of the day to harness rocketry and utilize it for military or commercial purposes, then there may be a path to orbital flight and from there a "moon race". Beating Napoleon to the Moon would be an interesting "Moon Race", with the Austro Hungarian, British and Russian Empires frantically working against each other and Imperial France.
But the short answer is the Renaissance is simply too early for space flight, much less interplanetary flight, due to the limitations of knowledge and material science of the time.
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Since I see no science based tag on this question and you allow the laws of the universe to be manipulated, I think the most reasonable explanation is magic. Now I know this sounds like a cop out, but consider the following:
Before the Renaissance, the technology did not even exist to even know what exactly the planets were or how to not instantly die if you could get to one.
Now, if your civilization of humans contained individuals who could reshape reality with thier minds, then you have a great starting point. In this context, your civilization could do all sorts of incredible things to solve this problem like open portals to other worlds or make talismans that protect you from the vacuum of space.
**But why the Renaissance and not the Earlier?**
For magic to manipulate the laws of nature, one must first understand what they are trying to manipulate. Earlier theories about geocentrism and the firmament made it impossible for wizards to even ask the right questions to get the right results. Wizards who tried always wound up either in the clouds or in the vacuum of space. In the ancient world there probably was a real Icarus, hundreds of them in fact. All telling the same stories that if you fly to high, you will die. For this reason even trying to reach for the stars would become a forbidden taboo, one that many a wizard would pay the ultimate price for breaking.
However, once people like Copernicus and Galileo started to develop a firmer understanding of what the solar system and planets actually were, wizards were able to start developing the spells needed to actually get there because they could then account for things like planetary spin and tilt and orbits and astronomical distances.
Likewise it was not until the Renaissance experiments with glass bell jars that people were necessarily able to understand how breathable air worked well enough to able to make long term extra terrestrial breathing possible. Sure older explorers could place themselves in a magic bubble, but they would not know what to do about the air to keep it breathable as the oxygen is consumed.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VFv9j.png)
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You might find some inspiration in the *Star Trek: Deep Space Nine* episode *["Explorers" (s3e22)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine))*
In that episode, Sisko attempts to prove that the ancient Bajorans traveled outside their own solar system using solar sails on a small craft. The sails are even manipulated by hand much as you would on a sea fairing vessel.
They never really explain how the ship got into space, it was just kind of already "there". So getting off the plane would still be problem. But since there are not any motors used in the craft I would say the level of technology presented is about renaissance level.
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I want to create a story about mind uploading, but I am completely convinced that even if you could transfer the contents of your brain to a computer emulation and then run it, it will always be a copy of your mind and the real you is gone or still in the body. The brain is an embodied system and once you disrupt one feature, the mind is gone.
However, I was trying to think of some high-tech loophole that would truly transfer the mind without destroying and then duplicating it. I'm trying not to go the route of something like a soul transfer, like the Emperor from Star Wars jumping into a clone body. I want to stick to a science-y approach. Does anybody have any ideas on how I might be able to finagle that?
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You can't transfer information, you can only copy it.
Information can't be taken out of one place and put in another place. Only real objects can be moved.
So a brain with data storage of someone's memories could be taken out of the original body and put into another body.
Or a brain could be scanned and the memories copied into one or more blank brains which could then be activated.
But memories themselves, being information, cannot be transferred, only copied.
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[Hans Moravec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec) had some interesting ideas on this sort of thing in the late 70s and early 80s, which are detailed in various books including *Mind Children*. There's no freely available online copy of this that I can find, but there's a very brief summary [here](https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Mind_Children). He called the process "transmigration", and it involved a progressive technique where a robotic brain surgeon would monitor the activity of one of your brain cells, and once enough information was gathered an accurate simulation of that cell was made. The cell was removed from the brain, and the other cells that it used to be connected to would now be connected to the computer running the simulation.
This progressive process doesn't have any one point where the source mind is obviously killed or interrupted, though if the uploaded mind is a purely-software artifact, then you can copy it to your heart's content once the process is completed. The process does not allow for a return to the biological brain, and once it has been started the subject will be wholly or partially simulated from then on. It also assumes that there's no non-physical component of a mind, no magical animating spirits or whatever, which may or may not be compatible with the setting you're creating. (As an aside, in Peter F. Hamilton's *Night's Dawn* trilogy, there were copyable uploads *and* souls, but souls were an emergent property of the mind rather than the other way around, and so uploading created a new soul. There's scope for interesting stories in softer sci-fi settings around that sort of thing)
If you wanted your uploaded minds to be unique and uncopyable, that's a more difficult problem. *Revelation Space* by Alastair Reynolds had [DRM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management) which is practical if a little unsatisfying. To have uniqueness enforced by physics, you might have to start doing a bit of dubious quantum handwavery, and dealing with issues like entangling whatever quantum bits you propose your brain has with corresponding elements in the computer that will house the upload. I won't elaborate on that here, because ultimately it *is* handwaving, perhaps even more so than the notion of uploading in the first place.
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**Because the mind is not copied, the mind moves itself**
Actually nobody knows how to copy a mind. What is known is how to make artificial blank electronic "brain matter" which can be interfaced to the brain in a way that enables it to use it just like normal neurons.
Some handwavium stimulation is then needed to encourage the brain into using the electronic neurons over the natural ones, and let the natural ones fall into disuse. So it's a continuous process that will take an extended time and at the end the biological brain is no longer used and does not hold any relevant functions or personality.
Of course this can go terribly wrong and can totally change a personality if it's not done the right way (like rushing it, or not administering the correct medication).
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We can describe uploading as taking 3 steps.
Step 1 is reading the state of a human mind.
Step 2 is storing the state of a human mind.
Step 3 is running the state of a human mind.
The easiest way to make uploading be a move and not a copy is to make reading destructive. In order to read the state of a human mind, you have to kill the brain it is running on.
You put it to sleep, fill it full of chemicals that stop its continued processing, drop it down to near absolute zero. Then you scan it micrometer by micrometer, capturing both the layout of neurons, the state of neurtransmitters, the internal structure of neurons. You do this at a certain depth - then you literally physically shave off half of that depth, and repeat.
This process literally shreds the physical brain.
The result is then processed. The parts that matter are abstracted (at the individual neuron level) and the parts that don't matter are discarded to produce a model of the person's brain. This is then run in computer hardware.
Once uploaded, the state of a human brain might be easy to duplicate. But we may be unable to print a new biological brain -- so you cannot be both an upload and an biological brain.
We may even be able to make brain prosthetics; brain-shaped devices that store an upload and let them interact with a biological body. The path to full upload may have involved building partial brain prosthetics for brain damaged people or to deal with neurological degenerative problems.
Inventing a sciency reason why you cannot duplicate human minds once uploaded is extremely difficult. "Quantum" handwaving, where the human brains state is somehow this fragile Quantum thing, isn't very plausible; our brain is warm and wet and durable, all of which make storing an "important" distributed fragile Quantum state implausible.
A duplicate of the mind state would share a common memory and behavior.
But I can try.
It is possible that the state of a human mind is far greater than what we can store using conventional computation. At the technology level they have, storing a single human mind using conventional computation requires a trillion dollar supercomputer.
However, storing the human mind using an exotic computation system is far cheaper. But that exotic storage is fragile, far more fragile than a human brain.
So we do the shave-thing to upload the human mind, but we can't do simplifying abstractions on it: we are forced to store insane amounts of information at the individual neuron level to generate a functioning copy of the consciousness that existed before. What more, we need to simulate things at that individual neuron level to an insane degree for a conventional computer.
The actual hardware we run uploaded minds on instead stores a kind of hologram of the brain. It refactors the entire brain's storage using a (here is that word) quantum computer, so each part of the mind host is running multiple parts of the brain it uploaded.
This process compresses the mind, reducing the storage required by a factor of $10^{12}$, from world-GDP supercomputer to wrist watch. Similarly, it reduces the computation required from world-GDP supercomputer at sub-realtime (a conventional simulation) to being able to run it at slightly faster than realtime (further speedups are possible, but require exponentially more expensive hardware -- like, every 100x increase in hardware cost gives you 5% faster runspeed).
These quantum-compressed minds *cannot be copied*. The process of producing a copy is destructive of their state, and unlike a biological mind you can't safely put them to sleep and freeze them.
However, at the point of upload, multiple copies can be made. But once you have done that step, each copy has to run (some can run at fractions of realtime, others slightly faster) or they will decay.
And if the machine running your uploaded consciousness fails, you die.
[Answer]
# Quantum state cannot be copied
... only moved, which is what you need: [No-cloning theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem)
Since consciousness based on quantum phenomena may be true ([Quantum mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind)) you don't need to use any high-tech loopholes - base your story on our current quantum knowledge.
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**The meat brain is slowly replaced by artificial parts.**
Injected nano bots replace all neurons and synapses one by one with synthetic counterparts over a few hours/days/months. There is no cut where the real you is shut down and the copy comes alive - you are conscious all the time. The hybrid brain keeps working during this process and at some point is completely artificial.
At that point it can be severed from the body. To keep integrity, the brain will be handled as a black box with no way to copy it. Standardized interfaces allow transfer of the physical artificial brain into artificial bodies or again with the help of nanobots, into human host bodies - or simply hooked up into large networks with other artificial brains.
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We don't know what a mind is made of.
For sure we know it's not plain matter or energy, because if it was we would have been able to measure it somehow with our science based devices.
This said, you can go with whatever you want, since it is your story, and you can simply say that with the patented MINDUPPY method one actually transfers the mind, not just copies it. You are not writing a patent or a scientific paper, nobody will try to replicate or reproduce your method.
Wells' The first man in the Moon doesn't explain how the Cavorite is made, but this doesn't make the story less enjoyable.
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The brain is made up of many parts, if you cut out one small cluster of neurons, scan the neurons, and then wire up a connection to a computer simulation of those neurons, surely your consciousness will continue. You can then continue, perhaps over a period of hours or days, cutting away small parts grey matter and replacing it with computer interfaces.
By slowly replacing the brain until no grey matter remains, you can ensure consciousness can continue.
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Instead of copying, gradual replacement.
Your brain already is a thing that changes itself constantly. If you spend a lot of time navigating your brain allocates more brain matter to brain area’s for that task. stop doing that and your brain reduces that area and re-allocates it. It also still creates some extra neurons while others die off, so the brain constantly has to update and change itself.
You don’t just copy the brain, but put in some cybernetics that take over some tasks, and then some more, and more. Each time the brain stops assigning a task to a particular neuron and gives it to cybernetics, that neuron is shut down or removed instead. It wasn’t doing anything, however short, and wasn’t part of the brain’s total processing (ignoring some cross-talk that the brain does, which the implant that shuts the neuron down can simulate).
Eventually you didn’t download a brain but just… moved every process onto the cybernetics. The brain is completely shut off, vacant. No personality is in there, it all moved itself to the cybernetics. Which you can take out and place in a computer.
A slower version is to put the person in a computer (which could simply be wearable or implanted if its powerful enough) and wait. Every time too many neurons die, the implants/computer takes over that task and the brain will gladly accept the replacements. As the brain slowly dies over time everything is taken over by the implants. Does it matter if your brain’s processes are handled by unique neuron #123456789 or by an implant/nanobot/whatever with a serial number that does the same task?
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# Baby Steps
First you need some kind of intermediate process that everyone agrees is not really making a copy, then you do something just like that, but it goes into a computer instead.
For example: A teleportation machine could be seen as destroying you in one place and making an exact copy of you in another place, but if it is used so often that people are used to just thinking that it actually just moves them. That's the first step. Now one could use the same process, but instead of transporting you into another physical space, it just uploads your consciousness and now that's all of your existence.
The key is that you define another process that is accepted to be not making a copy, even if you could think of it that way. Then you say it's just like that, with only one small difference.
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**The mind needs the feedback of reality and the looming presence of Death**
So - first one:
Without input (taste, touch, sight, hearing etc.) what is copied remains static and is just a copy.
The conscious (which is the bit that makes the Mind more than a static repository of memories) needs feedback about the real world in order to make it move through space and time.
The second is where you can have more fun - in order for a Mind to properly function, it needs the finality of death - Aging. You can add some fun justifications in here (a Mind that does not know death slowly goes insane or something to do with Alzheimer's etc.). The knowledge of Death is what gives the memories in the brain *meaning* and therefore interact with the consciousness, creating something that is more than a mere copy.
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You're asking an impossible question.
We do not know what consciousness is. Neither do we know how, and why, does it emerge. Most importantly, we do not know what warrants its continuity.
For this reason it is impossible to answer how to truly transfer a conscious being, rather than make a copy of them. This is one of the questions that, currently, cannot even be approached, at least unless you wish to include one of several competing philosophical or religious systems into your work.
NB:
It is a frustrating issue, similar to the philosophical zombie problem: it seems unfalsifiable, and yet - even more than the philosophical zombie - it cannot be simply rejected for being unfalsifiable.
If you attempt a transfer, how will you test if you've just made a copy or truly transferred your subject? The copy may have inherited all memories of your subject and isn't aware that they are just a copy. Hell, you cannot even know if your 'copy' is even conscious or if it is just a philosophical zombie.
And yet if I was to be transferred or uploaded in such a way I would be very much interested if I continue existing after the process is done! Perhaps I will cease to exist at all; in such a case it will not matter to me in the slightest if my copy claims it is me. Or perhaps the attempt to upload my brain severs my soul from my body, because a soul can only dwell within a living human body and not a computer, and therefore I then see a bright light and, afterwards, Jesus. Again, in such a case I doubt it will matter to me that in some computer there is a simulation that claims to be me.
[Answer]
**Real-time Control, Stored Emulation, or a hybrid of both?**
In my opinion, you have answered the question in your first paragraph, and the rest of the question, cannot be answered with hard science:
>
> I want to create a story about mind uploading, but I am completely
> convinced that even if you could transfer the contents of your brain
> to a computer emulation and then run it, it will always be a copy of
> your mind and the real you is gone or still in the body. The brain is
> an embodied system and once you disrupt one feature, the mind is gone.
>
>
>
The problem won't go away, the more research you do, the more you realize that "emulation" is more likely than a complete transfer of consciousness, because we have made more progress with brain imaging, making scanned models of fruit flies and mice, and less progress with actual comprehension and interpretation of how consciousness works. If there are choices here it is between a) control of external body in real time b) brain emulation stored and used later.
You can't eliminate "handwavium", but you can think about technological progress and write back story for it. I watched a video that summarized the brain upload process like this a)scanning the brain b) interpreting the results c)uploading the copy to a super computer d) transferring the information. The information is thought. Rather than just gloss over each of these things- each one of these stages is something to research and dwell on and be creative about.
While programs like [Nectome](https://nectome.com/research/) and the [Brain Preservation Foundation](https://www.brainpreservation.org/aspirational-neuroscience-prize/) are starting points, they have involved transfer from dead subjects.
If you decline the option of emulation from a dead subject, perhaps you mean control of an external body by a living subject.
Scanning and gathering data about the brain in live subjects is possible,to the point where companies like [Neuralink](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/25/elon-musk-neuralink-fda-approval/) and [Braingate](https://www.braingate.org/) can gather data through electrodes and a user can use thoughts to manipulate computer programs and robotic arms, This is a distant precursor, a first iteration of what you are talking about- it is still scanning, interpreting, uploading, transferring thought. In this case, the person controlling a robot arm can be disabled.
If this technology was accelerated it might eventually yield a person controlling a robot body.If scanning data was gathered for long enough through such an implant, it follows that we might advance in neuroscience as well. The life-tracker of the future might submit themselves to an implant especially if the technology underlying the implants could become less invasive.Eventually I believe we will capture more neuroscientific data, to create more complete digital substrates or copies of ourselves.
[Answer]
**Laws and/or conventions.**
Put a large bureaucracy or a religion in charge of making sure there is only ever one of you at a time. We don't need a pure science answer if somebody's telling the scientists it's illegal because it's immoral. I'm sure we could find a bible passage to back up the fact that you're unique.
Put a few quality checks in the process to prevent a mess-up that would end in two dead 'yous', and then definitively annihilate the old one. Problem solved.
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>
> we have developed a protocol based on simultaneous fixation with
> glutaraldehyde (GA) and osmium (OsO4), sequential osmification and
> treatment of samples with potassium ferrocyanide (FeCN), staining of
> samples with uranyl acetate (UA) with heating to 50 °C, staining
> with lead aspartate (PbAsp)
>
>
>
This is from the description of the advanced method to determine 3D structure of the neural network within brain (a real 2023 year method, [source](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83936-0) - *Nature*). I do not think the brain would be good enough to use after such a scan.
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Truly transferring a mind as opposed to simply copying it. This is a difficult problem. But at a minimum, the water can be muddied with the ship of Theseus paradox. The paradox imagines a ship where as the planks go slightly rotten, they are replaced with new ones. The old ones are not discarded but stored. We wait until every plank in the ship is replaced. And then, we assemble the replaced planks into a new ship. Now which one is the original ship?
You can do the same thing with the brain. Slowly start replacing small chunks of it with artificial counterparts. The artificial replacements are so good and copy the function of the part they replace so well that the overall consciousness can't even tell the difference. Then one day, the entire brain is artificial. The continuity of experience is maintained and there is a good argument to be made that the original consciousness transitioned to the artificial state as opposed to being copied to it.
[Answer]
**Quantum uploading**. Due to no-cloning theorem a quantum system cannot be exactly copied without the original destroyed. On the other hand, quantum state can be teleported and stored on different mediums that can store quantum information (qubits). Such teleported system will be absolutely identical to the original system, including the quantum-mechanical properties of the observer.
As such, to make quantum uploading, you need
* A quantum teleportation system, capable of accurately teleport a human-sized system.
* A powerful enough quantum computer.
In the process of quantum uploading the original mind will be inevitably destroyed (even if the body and physical brain will survive, it will not be the observer anymore, but a philosophical zombie). The true mind will be uploaded into the quantum computer, which will be able to continue its operation.
After such kind of uploading, the no-cloning theorem remains valid, which means that you still cannot copy the quantum mind inside the computer without destroying the original. It always will be a unique copy regardless, in the computer or not.
[Answer]
# Frame challenge: brain in a jar connected to the Internet works just as well
No one has figured out brain emulation. However they *have* figured out how to isolate the brain and emulate the rest of the nervous system.
Being connected to the Internet, you can "go" anywhere virtually, and in theory you don't even need to know where your brain is physically located.
] |
[Question]
[
In a sci-fi project, bioengineering is now a fashionable and profitable industry. A couple of bioengineers decide to play silly buggers with the exobiologists downstairs by cobbling together an artificial life form and claim it is a naturally-evolved alien animal.
They do this, not by extracting the DNA from some luckless beasts and splicing it together, but by using nanotech to assemble amino acids into artificial DNA, which is then used as a starter with which to to grow the “alien” in a synthetic womb.
However, the exobiologists are not dumb, (they know what the bioengineers are like after a few beers) and so are less than convinced that this creature is an alien. They decide to check its genetics to see if they’re artificial.
But how can they do this? How can you tell an artificially-constructed sequence of DNA from a natural one?
[Answer]
>
> A couple of bioengineers decide to play silly buggers with the exobiologists downstairs by cobbling together an artificial life form and claim it is a naturally-evolved alien animal
>
>
>
A DNA-based alien lifeform's DNA could **theoretically** be indistinguishable between "natural" or "artificial", because DNA is DNA (the likelihood of an alien lifeform to be based on the same DNA and DNA code as humans is small, but that's a moot point once the alien critter is delivered).
So, a DNA sequence that would fool the exobiologists **could** exist. Trivially, if the bioengineers had occurred by chance on the same DNA sequence of a *natural* alien critter, they would have the *same* sequence, which by construction cannot be distinguished from the identical sequence occurring in nature.
The question therefore is: **what mistake did the bioengineers make?**
There are several classes of possible mistakes.
The simplest to explain is the presence of "markers" of the DNA assembling technique used (for example, both CRISPR-Cas9 and CRISPR-Cf1 techniques rely on the presence of short sequences called *protospacer adjacent motifs*, and leave recognizable 'telltales'). If the DNA assembler used by the bioengineers is advanced enough that it can generate *any* DNA sequence whatsoever, these telltales will be missing.
Then, the DNA code is inefficient (or redundant, if you prefer), and presents "synonyms". Different DNA sequences yield the same meaning, and are equivalent, but they are not equally efficient, easy to synthesize or work with. So it is possible that the bioengineers' tool automatically employed *codon optimization*, and/or employed it *differently* from what [a real living organism would have done](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4253638/). This kind of telltale is subtler and might escape a bioengineer.
Naturally evolved DNA, also, is *a horrible, jumbled mess*. Unless something occurs that actively selects *against* a given junk sequence remaining as a leftover in the DNA of an organism, that junk sequence will remain there, world without end. This "junk" is actually in *some* way functional (it acts as a scaffolding, of sorts), and is generated from existing genes from past generations, so it's not *random* and can be traced to specific sections of the DNA. Let us say that a DNA sequence spells the words "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT", you're likely to actually find "aaaqWHATxqaatathqHATHxsyndqGODxododwjehovroodwroqWROUGHTxjoe". Ancient versions of similar genes will be interspersed between the "active" genes introduced by 'letters' q and x.
Having *no* significant junk DNA, *random* junk DNA, or *unrelated* junk DNA would then be a very strong cause for suspicion. Engineered, "made" DNA is likely to be too efficient, too well laid out, or haphazard *in the wrong way*.
Finally, even if everyone is a bioengineer, still creating a working alien organism *completely from scratch* (and having it *come alive*! - which means *thousands* of the newly created genes actually working together *successfully*) would be too enormous an enterprise. It would be *more difficult* than, say, writing a word processor from scratch starting from the level of the assembly language.
The overwhelming chances are that the bioengineers would cobble together some library gene soup based on actual genes tweaked and redesigned by other people and found to be working. In the programming metaphor, they would employ a solid if basic language such as C, a working system library such as `glibc`, a proven compiler. And probably recycle some existing word processor fragment. The result, if properly inspected, would reveal traces of all this.
Once the exobiologists find that the respiratory regulation gene AL3X7-P5 of their alien critter was published ten years earlier in an answer on Gene Overflow, the game would quickly be up.
[Answer]
First of all - I love the premise of this question that it's a bunch of scientists pranking each other and that beers were involved.
The answer given by Blue Skin I think is technically correct....
That is the individual Molecule chains would be indistinguishable...
However, as you say, the Exobiologists aren't dumb - whilst the individual DNA Molecules wouldn't give the game away, I think a pretty convincing argument can be made that they would be able to make a reasonable determination that the DNA strains weren't naturally occuring.
Here's my reasoning:
In Nature, there are similarities between closely related creatures (think for example the commonality of the Great Apes), there's also legacy Genetic markers from creatures that once shared a common ancestor, but ended up in different, divergent geographic locations.
In their quest to make this new animal, the bioengineers would surely end up using genetic sequences that make no sense in the wider context of the animals Genome.
For example, we want to make a flying fish - so we take some Fish DNA and splice it with some DNA to give wings (I'm just spitballing an example here) - however, the Wings that we use are from a bird that has no common ancestor to the fish we are using.
These sorts of inconsistencies would alert the Exobiologists that something wasn't quite as it would seem.
Other things might be the lack of vestigial appendages/organs/features - Evolution is pretty damn stupid - Richard Dawkins made a comment on this back in the good old days of internet Atheism vs Internet Intelligent Design - that certain designs on the Human body, if you were designing from scratch, are really stupid. Those same designs, however, if assumed to be evolved from a Fish, make perfect sense.
TL;DR - The actual DNA molecules would be indistinguishable, but the Genome as a whole I think would give the game away.
[Answer]
## CAGT
Just these exact four nucleotides, arranged at a backbone of deoxyribose linked by phosphodiester bonds, are the fingerprint of terrestrial life.
Exobiologists, if they already had seen true alien life, could never be fooled by something like this. Genetic material from independently evolved life would mostly be incompatible: either at the genetic or at the protein level - why would alien life use exactly the same amino acids like ours?
Under these circumstances, the bioengineers would need to start from scratch and fast forward through millennia of evolution, to have a chance to fool exobiologists for more than the first routine tests.
[Answer]
**Artificial genes are indistinguishable from natural ones**
That is, if they are made correctly. They would have to include both the coding and non-coding parts (in terrestrial organisms there is way more non-coding parts), and we are very far from point when we could achieve that. Because it is very hard to determine what non-coding parts actually do, and whether they are important or not. Coding parts are easy, they encode the aminoacid sequences of proteins (but what those proteins then do is another can of worms). But non-coding parts are problematic. Some parts play a role in gene regulation, some are legacy code, some parts protect genes from mutations, some parts introduce mutations in genes,... The whole thing is extremely complex, and that is not counting the issues with proteins. If you want to design "alien" organism you can't really use known proteins. Sure, some can be similar, but more similarities there are, more obvious the ruse will be. And designing novel proteins is harder than designing genes...
**It is unlikely that exobiologists would be fooled by the attempt**
Even if bioengineers succeed in creating a viable organism de-novo, that still wouldn't fool an exobiologist (or any biologist, biochemist, anyone working in medicine,...). Even the fact that the organism is using DNA would be a dead giveaway. It is extremely unlikely that extraterrestrian life would use same building blocks for their biochemistry. Similar? Probably. Same? No way in hell. Every organism on Earth share those building blocks - and I'm not only counting same kind of amino-acids/nucleothids, but also same metabolic pathways. Using those would definitely show that organism is either terrestrial in origin, or engineered. But to create those building blocks de-novo would most likely be beyond even strong AI, unless it is a really long process. So not something done as a prank.
[Answer]
# I don’t think so.
DNA is Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine. If your DNA uses all of this it’s DNA. As far as I can tell, the DNA would be indistinguishable.
However, what you’re saying is that they use the amino acids to make DNA. That would definitely fail. You use nucleotides to make DNA.
So (I’m guilty of it to),I don’t think there’s a way to tell your “constructed” DNA from normal DNA.
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A gene is just some discrete unit of genetic code, not necessarily a very large or complex one, that interacts in some way with the organism's cellular machinery. In Earth life, it might translate to an RNA string that encodes a sequence of amino acids to produce a protein, or it might serve some more obscure role like modifying the activity of nearby genes. There's no way to look at a specific gene and say whether it was natural or artificial, particularly if it's supposedly run through entirely alien cellular machinery to do its work.
However, the genome as a whole and the biochemical machinery that goes around it are another matter. Unless they have the ability to simulate billions of years of evolution, the genome, biochemistry, and even overall construction of an artificial organism will be far more logically organized than anything natural. Everything will be far more tidy and independently controllable, rather than haphazardly intertwined with completely different functions that happen to have some convenient chemistry or signaling going on.
They could go out of their way to obfuscate things and make the result look more chaotically natural, but this will be incredibly *more* difficult and time- and resource-intensive than just making an artificial lifeform, if they have the capability to do a convincing job of it at all.
[Answer]
DNA produces proteins. Some new DNA, artificially constructed, might or might not produce a protein as opposed to just 'gunk'. That's how evolution works. Some mutations do something, others result in 'garbage'. So, if you produce a new DNA 'gene', you maybe get a new protein, or you might get scrap.
But all you have is a pile of new proteins. In order to actually build anything, these different proteins need to be compatible with other proteins, produced by other DNA sequences, and actually do something useful when combined.
And here is the thing. Natural DNA sequences have been produced entirely by some random process. That is how evolution works. Contrived DNA sequences are produced by design.
A side bar diversion. Back in the days when statistical quality control first came in, the Japanese used sampling techniques to determine if they would or would not accept components. The product would have to meet stringent statistical analysis criteria for quality. The sample had to fit within strict bounds of statistical analysis. Chinese manufacturers, knowing this, tested every single component, and rejected every component that was out of spec. They guaranteed to the Japanese customer that every single component would match spec, not just a specified 'percent'. The Japanese customer, testing every single component of the batch, confirmed this - every single one met specs. Yet the lot was rejected. You see, it is impossible to mass manufacture components without SOME being out of spec. The Japanese looked at the statistical curve, and saw an almost flat top and steep cliff ends, with absolutely no outliers. This meant that, when the curve was extrapolated to fit a normal distribution curve, the entire production run (not just the ones selected) was very, very sloppy. The production line was producing more 'out of spec' components than 'in spec', so the overall quality control of the entire production run was horrible. The Japanese assumed that if the entire production had such poor quality control overall, then there would be horrible quality control on the aspects of the component NOT specifically tested. So even though every component met the specified specs, overall they were of poor quality. Good quality control would mean that all of the production would fit a normal distribution curve, meaning tight control over the entire manufacturing process. In other words, if there were not at least SOME 'out of spec' in the sample, it was not a good sample representative of overall quality..
So, apply this principle to ALL of the different DNA sequences necessary to produce sufficient variety of proteins to produce a meaningful 'life form'. On a statistical sampling, one would expect to find a normal distribution curve. Just selecting one particular gene would give a false overall picture. One would have to examine the entire mass and variety of proteins that are produced by the DNA sequences of the entire 'chromosome' to get the entire statistical analysis distribution curve. By looking at all of the distribution curves, and applying statistical analysis, it should become obvious that the artificially produced life form, in its entirety (not just specific gene sequences) was, well, too perfect.
**TL:DR**
The genetic sequence of the life form, overall, under statistical analysis, looking at ALL of the necessary genes and DNA sequences, would look 'designed', not 'random'. It would be 'too perfect'.
[Answer]
## Bioengineers are not physicists
We know how to date wood and other biological material using Carbon-14 dating. This isotope has a halflife of 6000 years; it's not primordial but created in the atmosphere. Plants get their CO2 from the atmosphere and are measurably radioactive as a result. Oil isn't; all the carbon in oil has long decayed.
Exobiologists know this - they need to correct for the carbon-14 concentrations on other planets. But bioengineers? They buy their gene supplies from a chemical company, and they don't care if the carbon came from oil. So the total lack of C-14 in the DNA was an instant sign that the genes were synthesized.
[Answer]
There is [**LUCA**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor) the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all life forms on Earth. For fooling the exobiologists the genetic engineers need to engineer a life form that is such different that it cannot conceivably descend from LUCA. This means they have to find an independent viable chemistry to sustain an organism, and that recipe needs to be a [Zero-day exploit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day_(computing))—if known already, the exobiologists will find it in the literature.
It also helps when the amino acid selection and the genetic code are different enough from terrestrian life to support an alien origin.
So it is a very hard task, after all.
EDIT: You may also be interested in the concept of a [Minimal genome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_genome). The task of the pranksters is in essence to find an alternative minimal genome.
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## to make a body they will need genes that are too easy to identify.
The one give away may be the genes are too similar to earth life. To make an animal that works, even just to grow or just have functional cells, will mean they need to use almost nothing but known functional genes from earth life, and mostly from closely related species at that. That means they will be fairly easy to identify, even if there is a lot weird about it.
[Answer]
Quite simply, if some functionality has been added that requires multiple genes, and the genes themselves aren't all useful in isolation, then that's a giveaway.
Evolution can only promote the existence of useful genes. It cannot as readily promote the existence of multiple genes that are useful in combination but are not useful in isolation.
Geneticists, on the other hand, are able to 'look ahead', to add a gene in the anticipation that its product will be useful in combination with other genes that they will add in the future as they design their life form.
So, interdependent genes that are useful in combination but are not each useful by themselves are a dead giveaway that some person has been tinkering.
[Answer]
First, recommend reading the article on [Artificial Gene Synthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gene_synthesis)
From there, IF the organism only used the common [Nucleobasepairs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleobase) (ie: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), (thymine (T) for DNA), (and uracil (U) for RNA) then the investigators could look for either:
* Current limitations in the state of the art: (ex: current methods have high frequency of sequence errors and tends to get worse with greater complexity)
* Signatures of common methods in the state of the art: (ex: most current methods are based on a combination of [Oligonucleotide synthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligonucleotide_synthesis) and annealing based connection of oligonucleotides. There's often common lengths and patterns that are produced because of these techniques.)
If the organism used nucleobasepairs outside of the common set, then the investigators could look for [Unnatural Base Pairs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair#Unnatural_base_pair_(UBP)) resulting in [Non-Standard Amino Acids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_genetic_code#Non-standard_amino_acids). Further reading would also be the article on the [Expanded Genetic Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_genetic_code).
Note: As other commenters have pointed out, this question also assumes the full construction of an artificial life-form, which represents an inordinately complex task. Changing a few features of a simple organism here-or-there is already extremely expensive and time consuming. (ex: The bacteria [Mycoplasma laboratorium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium) is estimated to cost US$40 million and 200 man-years to produce.)
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## Because the bioengineers WANT the exobiologists to be able to find out.
If we assume that both sets of people are equally good at their job and don't make mistakes, then maybe there's no actual way if they were actually trying a complete hoax for it to be found out. At that point, the exobiologists may just assume everything is a hoax unless they find it in the wild, and that's no fun for anyone. Instead, the bioengineers intentionally leave clues to see if the exobiologists can find them. Perhaps one of the exo's realize that if they run one of the "useless" dna sequences through a cryptographic decoder with the right key (found by some hint in the creatures appearance that just "seemed a bit unusual, given this other thing") it decodes into "Gotcha!!". Or, perhaps the creature has a natural call and the bioengineers managed to make a short dna "switch" that if activated will change the call to the Doctor Who theme song (I guess it depends on just how exact your world's science can get with dna). The bioengineers may not catch this without extensive analysis of supposedly unused sections of dna or something.
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In genetic code, majority of amino acids have more than one codon. For instance, the sequences taa, ttg, ctc, ctt, cta and ctg all encode the same amino acid, leucine. There are muliple ways to encode the same protein sequence.
This may limit the expression the gene, moved between very different species, if it uses some codes that are uncommon for recipient. The matching TRNA that translate these codes are not available in sufficient amounts.
By doing statistical analysis of which codes are used for amino acids, it may be possible to track, that the sequence is artificial. Natural sequence is likely to use various codes, but some more often than others. If not care is taken to hide the origin, artificial sequence may use the single code only that is "good enough", or otherwise the statistical distribution may be different from other genes in genome.
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Recently, I was going through the magical materials that existed in one of my fantasy settings. It was all going swimmingly, when a thought occurred to me: "You know, I should figure out how chemistry works with these things". I have been tortured and racked ever since trying to get something respectable to work, but I think I have the start of a solution:
**I should invent an additional periodic table.**
Even leaving aside the patachemistry, I know it's a laughable amount of work. But that leads us to my question:
**What principles should I keep in mind during my project?**
I'm not trying to invent new materials that could actually exist on the real periodic table; I know that trying to squeeze more elements onto it is impossible, so I've handwaved it and said "magic can be used to ascend ordinary elements onto this new table". The new elements don't use the same protons or neutrons as the originals, so I think that covers their "being able to exist". The problem comes from wanting to be unique. I do not want to have a one-to-one correspondence between the actual periodic table and my creation. That means that not only are there real elements that can't be ascended, there are ascended elements that can't be created (ignoring for now how they come into being). I could even change the shape of the table as I see fit.
I don't have too many pata-elements invented yet, and I would like to know how to stitch my new periodic table together so that it looks authentic. I want to know what I should keep in mind with periods and columns, for example, or where I could place liquids. How do I decide what everything should weigh, where should the gases go, things like that.
In short, what principles should I keep in mind while designing a pataphysical periodic table?
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I have no idea what *pataphysical* or *patachemistry* mean, but when it comes to developing the magical version of the Periodic Table of Elements, I recommend you do the following.
1. Ignore atomic weights, electrons, protons, and neutrons *completely.* You can't crowbar magic into science in that way and you'll give yourself cancer trying.
2. Remember that the Periodic Table is called that because the *behavior* of the elements is *periodic.* Generally speaking, everything in a column has similar attributes. Everything in a row has similar attributes. You'll organize (group) your magical chemicals according to their similar (periodic) attributes.
3. You need to choose what those similar attributes are. I'll be honest with you, asking us to help you with that aspect of this project would require you to do so much work identifying the various properties of the magical materials to avoid question closure that by the time you were done you'd have answered the question yourself.
And I recommend you following an axiom of good engineering:
K.I.S.S — Keep It Simple, Stupid!
* In real life, what a chemical *looks like* has nothing to do with its position on the periodic table. In your table, what it looks like (blue vs. red, powder vs. liquid) might make more sense.
* How the chemicals *react* to something common, like water, would help you group them.
* What aspect of magic the chemical is used for would be a natural grouping. Does your magic system use Nature? (earth, wind, fire, water, etc.) or a type? (healing, death, combat...) Those would be natural groupings.
* How must the chemicals be stored? In the dark? In the cold? Next to gold? That, too, would be a natural grouping.
Hopefully this helps you get started. The Periodic Table simply groups things in a way that helps people quickly identify the basic *nature* of a chemical. You're going to do the same thing — just in terms of magic rather than electrons, protons, and neutrons.
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## 3D Periodic Table of the Elements
Broadly, the Periodic Table of Elements is a series of columns which corresponds to atomic weight and is organised by various properties.
However they all have one thing in common:
Their Magic Number is identical, and so irrelevant normally.
If every atom in existence has the same magic-number, then you have nothing to compare it to and nobody is paying attention to it.
But if someone finds a way to modify that fundamental constant, now you have a new kind of atom. One that shares atomic weight and the other properties of the original atom, but is distinct because it has a different Magic Number.
Abruptly you find that every element you already knew about can take on new properties because there was a whole swathe of behaviour locked away behind that magic number that simply never came up.
You could compare it to the different isotopes of Uranium perhaps.
Or you could call it a measure of how Magical your element is.
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Nobody has ever asked what the one ring was made of, that could be only smolten in the heat of mount Doom, nor how could mithrill be so sturdy and yet Moria was carved by extracting it, so why nobody did ever think of using the mithrill extractor and so on.
When I read the Miserables I remember I got bored to death by the sections on the battle of Waterloo, and despite being myself a chem junkie, I would dread reading a story that goes so much into details as to give the count of how many patapontiums and spronglons each element has.
Stay high level, describe the materials you have and how they interact with each other without going into the nitty gritty details: we all learn about stone age, bronze age and iron age before having any clue of what nucleons and electrons are and how they mingle into the landscape of the periodic table.
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I think you want simplicity, you also don't want too many magical elements (who the hell will remember more than like, 7?). So you don't want too many.
I also think your periodic table would do better to draw from ancient elemental theories, not modern chemistry. These, conveniently, had far fewer elements. Some images to whet the appetite will follow.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KQm2e.png)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxing_(Chinese_philosophy)#/media/File:FiveElementsCycleBalanceImbalance_02_plain.svg>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sB3zA.png)
You can imagine putting together a similar kind of system with the magical elements that exist in your setting. Here is my quick and dirty example:
Lightning - Unstopable.
Liftstone - Immovable. Holds the world aloft. Formations in the sky can serve as platforms for aerial forts.
Mythril - strong, light
Sparkflint - incredibly sharp.
Whenever two consecutive elements in the cycle touch they combine to make the next on the list. So when lighting strikes liftstone it turns to Mythril. Stabbing a Mythril blade into liftstone makes them congeal into a shard of Sparkflint. Chipping a Mythril hammer against a sparkflint produces bolts of lightning (a common weapon).
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## Prime factorisation
How about taking integers (or even just primes) and assigning some sort of magic property to each? So e.g. 3 = transformability and 7 = fire
Every number has a prime factorisation, i.e. can be made by multiplying primes, or is itself a prime. 36 = 4 \* 9 = 2 \* 2 × 3 \* 2.
If the atomic weight of an element has a factorisation with a prime factor, it has that factor's property. If it has lots of a prime factor then it has that property strongly. So pure Aluminium, with atomic weight mostly 27 = 3 \* 3 \* 3 = 3^3 is AMAZING for magical transformation (but probably unexceptional for any other type of magic.)
The nice things about this is:
1. If you allow ions and molecules to take on new magical properties from their total weight, then you get magical transformations that piggyback on known chemical reactions.
2. It's predictive and pretty easy to work out what will have what properties. A spreadsheet could spit out the magical properties of most chemical species.
3. The people in your stories can have as good or as bad an idea of the magic rules as you desire depending on their knowledge of a) chemistry, b) magic chemistry rules.
4. You can make house rules. Do ions count as integrated units, or as sums of their component elements, or both? Are there oddball exceptions?
5. You can assign arbitrary one off properties to non prime numbers to achieve things ad hoc.
6. It's SE Worldbuilding original. Unless by some miracle someone else has had the same idea, there's no copyright. Tweak it so you can have yours, though.
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D&D Was never mentioned in the OP but when I ran my own world, I attempted to codify how magic worked. Use or adapt as however you see fit.
D&D used a form of alchemy I guess. Earth Air Fire Water. Plus Positive/Negative-Material. Each of these elements have their one plain/dimension where they exist in their pure forms. Also para-elemental planes where they exists in their impure forms.
ex: in an overlapping circle diagram where air and water meet, this would be para-elemental mist.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/q1VHM.jpg)
The Positive and Negative Material Plane (PMT & NMP) is more or less Life/Death Good/Evil etc. Your alignment / disposition in life determines your interactions with these. As far as magical effects most can use either PMT OR NMT energy to achieve the desired effects, most often some of both. Healing or necromantic effects which should be evident. This PMP/NMP energy is used in as the "carrier wave" for all magic and the vast majority of the spells expended energy. A tiny amount is extracted from the caster and whatever components they sacrifice. And some is refunded to the caster as the spell compleets. Though still the user is drained, this drain is mitigated with age and experience. If all the energy needed to cast a even a simple spell were directly extracted even from the most accomplished mage, they would be reduced to a desiccated, crumbling, cold, dry husk.
What I did was assigned a rune to each plain / para-plane, and rune for unit of time, and a rune for 3 units of quantity/volume/mass. How these runes were combined defined the effects of the spell.
That would be 32 elemental 2 material, and 4 more for measurements.
You could assign the elemental runes a numerical value. Even for positive traits odd for negative. Or any number of ways. The system, was given as a neutral view of a balanced magic ecosystem. Building outward on the positive and negative at the center. I can't imagine it being a periodic table such as we have but certainly could imagine it built out in some balance representative form.
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**Magitons: Magical Nuclear Particle** :
Not necessarily Magical, you can have any fictional particle in your nucleus. If they are magical, they give them magical properties or make them able to affected with magic while normal materials are immune to magic.
So you can have entirety separate periodic table of Magical variants of normal elements. Titanium + Magitons = Adamantite. Silver + Magitons = Mythril etc etc. Even magical isotopes, Adamantite with 21 Magitons vs 23 Magitons.
You essentially give properties to any element, transparent metal etc. You can also alloy them with other Magitons elements or with normal elements.Fuels with Magiton elements as components can have higher yields. Possibilities are endless
Just make sure mass of these magitons is much lower than protons, or they are very less (only 1-6 in any atom at max). Otherwise, atomic mass of your element will rapidly and your elements could run risk of nuclear instability and radioactivity as early as Silver or Barium
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**Fill the Gaps**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7jo9Y.png)
Your new magical elements should go in the intersections of the real periodic table.
Not sure what this positioning represents about the properties of the elements. But you don't tell us anything about the properties to begin with.
All you say is your are designing a periodic table. The most important thing is it resembles the existing one. The best way to do this is attach it to the existing one.
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Is your magic incantation based? If so, then the magical properties of otherwise mundane elements are based on their true names (in Latin, or whatever language your story is set in). [Gematria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria) is a well established, proven by the occult history way of attaching numerical values to words - and your magical properties will be tied to those numbers (if you want to keep the periodical table spirit, make the magical properties periodical with the period let's say 7, or several overlapping periods governing different aspects).
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The periodic table could be extended into the third dimension so that subsequent layers into the page represent increasingly magical elements that share relationships with the conventional elements. Sort of like how elements get more noble as you move from left to right.
Doesn't necessarily need to be Euclidean either as it extends into the page (an element could perhaps be adjacent to multiple elements in the ajoining layers without being right next to them. That would reduce the number of elements. Or you could just have a lot of gaps in your table that are undiscovered.
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I would suggest first taking a good look at some existing alternative periodic tables: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_periodic_tables>
Theodor Benfey's version has a certain aesthetic appeal to me, as though it could sprout another lobe at any time.
On the other hand, Charles Janet's left-step periodic table seems to imply to my eye a lot of 'empty space' just begging to be filled up with something impossible.
Any of the radial ones should be just fine, I would think.
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The thing about the periodic table of elements is that it sequentially covers all the possible ways that sub-atomic molecules can be joined together - so the shape of the periodic table of elements was known before most of the elements were verified to exist.
As has been mentioned prior, you cant out-science science so don't bother trying to justify the layout of your para-elemental table against protons and electrons (there is no space for that). My recommendation to the previous posts would be to make up 1 or 2 additional sub-atomic particles as a way to have another para table intersect the periodic table.
Protons and electrons have opposite charge and repulse each other? Well Gooftons are charged particles which are attracted to both Protons and electrons - kablaam, entire new intersection of the periodic table depending on the number of Goofton's attatched to a given atom.
Otherwise add variant neutrons which replace the regular ones in the atoms core which have strange effects like slowing the speed at which electrons spin around the nucleus or cause protons to hover slightly further away from each other.
Tldr, go look up some properties and relationships of atoms/ sub-atomic particles and state which ones your para-particles affect at the small scale - but dont bother justifying how that results in specific behaviour at the macro-scale.
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Magic systems often rely on a cruder sense of materials than atomic elements. I think you may be getting stuck on the idea that magical elements need to somehow correspond with physical elements.
Instead of that, magical elements are orthogonal to physical elements and interact with matter depending on certain attributes of their molecular structures. These attributes could be things such as purity, resistance to oxidation, crystalline structure, charge polarity, electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, heat capacity, state of matter, etc... For instance:
* The more regular a crystal structure is, the better it can be imbued with a particular magical element
* Materials with higher elemental purity and resistance to oxidation (e.g. gold) are able to quickly conduct the movement of some set of magical elements.
* Polar materials like water attract and repel certain pata-elements whereas nonpolar materials do the opposite.
* Pata-elements attracted to liquids are repelled by gases and conducted by solids. This could be used to create gradients of magic that could be used do do work, much like electricity (perhaps electricity is, itself, a pata-element)
* Noble gases attract the pure and neutral element, aether, and repel all others.
In addition, when magical elements react with one another, it transforms into a different element rather than forming a magical compound. For instance, if a pata-atom of electricity collides with a pata-atom of anima, you get two pata-atoms of phlogiston. Aether does not react with anything.
I very much agree with other answers that suggest a radial layout of an elemental table. Cycles and circles just feel naturally magical and appropriate for this system. The angular position might correspond with how the element interacts with different structures of matter, while the proximity to the center relates to material purity, with the center being the neutral aether. You could even have a little fun with traditionally magical numbers. Perhaps there are 3 elements in the inner ring, 7 elements in the middle ring, and 13 elements in the outer ring. Prime numbers make this interesting and perhaps a little awkward, but it helps to make it feel magical and mysterious.
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# Strangelets.
A [strangelet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet) is a hypothetical particle with up, down, and strange quarks. It works sort of like a proton or nucleon, though there are wild and unbelievable stories about it taking over the entire universe in a chain reaction. It also could be a sort of dark matter. Because we're looking to justify magic here, and I don't know much about the exotic particles that *exist* let alone the ones that don't, I'm not going to try to peer through the haze here, but if you're up for it there is much to research. Let's cut to the chase...
*We're* going to say that:
* strangelets exist as one single sort of nucleon-like particle, working like a proton or neutron, which can be introduced into existing elements like a neutron to make a "pata"-isotope.
* strangelets exist only because they are stabilized by the interaction with dark matter, which is a fast-moving "gas" that permeates all of space within a galaxy and makes up *most* of the mass of the universe, even if in any spot it is not very dense.
* dark matter actually consists mostly of spaceships, mixed with other remnants of ancient and powerful alien civilizations.
* the elements you make have a presence that, when suitably dense and organized, can channel energy and coordinate other phenomena from the dark matter part of the cosmos.
* without some ultra-sophisticated particle accelerator that people try to tell us will destroy the world, you can't *make* strangelets. Unless you *have* strangelets. So magic has smouldered on Earth in hidden communities or places that use magic to make magic, and nowhere else.
* the strangelets might also still decay at some rate, making them slightly radioactive and ensuring that most mundane environments don't have any trace contamination.
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In my story, there are a large group of technologically backwards Earthmen who wish to remove a futuristic Martian arcology from their ancestral land. The Earthmen do not have any 20th or 21st century technology, and using fossil fuels is strictly forbidden. The large gap in technology levels means that they would likely lose any war or battle without the element of surprise, so they would like the Martians to not realise what they're doing until it's too late to stop it. As long as the Martians don't see a glaringly obvious threat, the Earthmen are able to take decades or even a century to prepare if necessary.
How should these Earthmen go about knocking down that huge futuristic building? Could it be done with only very primitive technology, or would steel tools or an engine or two really help? Is there some chemical or technological wonder they need to steal from the Martians first?
To get you started, here's an incomplete list of things I imagine approximately bronze age people could weaponise:
* Fire
* Steam
* Undermining and somehow interfering with the foundations
* Undermining and somehow causing a landslide or sinkhole
* Battering ram seige engine
* Cultivating the forest near the arcology to become more or less flammable is a possibility, but not right up against the walls of the arcology as the area close around it is at least somewhat controlled by the Martians
* Diverted river
* Sabotaging some kind of factory inside the arcology (many things are manufactured in there)
Edited to add further info:
The design of the arcology is negotiable for story convenience; this story isn't finished and it isn't a sequel. But if you have no particular requirements to make your answer work, imagine this: The arcology is a huge cube. Skyscraper tall. Lower floor walls could be reinforced concrete. Upper floor outer walls are not tough, could be glass. Load bearing structures could be made from exotic engineered materials like nanotubes or high tech composites or whatever, engineered to optimise vertical weight bearing specifically and might not be as resistant to attacks from the side as reinforced concrete.
You absolutely cannot climb up the side without being spotted.
Earthmen can go inside, but they'll be chased out if they're found being naughty. They are not in a state of war before the arcology is attacked.
The Martians have nothing as magical as anti-gravity. They're not actually very far advanced past real world 21st century Earth technology. Their spaceships are just normal rockets. They like to put a whole city in one big building instead of lots of little ones, that's the arcology (I realise that it makes little sense to build like that in real life, but man it would look cool).
Yes, filling it with poison gas or bees would be sufficient.
Making one side of the structure collapse would be OK if that's the best we can do.
Like the Psychlos in Battlefield Earth, these Martians are arrogant bastards and may overlook the Earthmen's schemes if it's not obvious what's happening, because they have a comically low opinion of the Earthmen's intelligence.
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## Undermining.
There are significant examples of modern day structures being affected by nearby underground works, such as tunnels and/or hydraulic works. This occurs even in [modern day skyscrapers](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/is-millennium-tower-safe-still-leaning-sinking-2017-9?r=US&IR=T), which are a major source of liability concerns for all involved.
All buildings rest on foundations, which in turn rest on the ground. No matter how much redundancy is built in to its structure, the foundations are a building's 'weakest' link.
It is said *it is possible to place a bad building on a solid foundation and it still may be a good building, but a good building on a bad foundation cannot ever be good.* Much structural work and calculations must be based on how heavy the loads are, and how deep foundations are and what soil type it is.
Plus tunnel-making is easy enough (depending on the soil type) for your level of proposed technology.
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The best approach is probably political. Start a campaign to have the building removed on ecological/cultural/legal/religious/historic grounds and get the Martians to buy into it. Over the course of decades or centuries, by leveraging natural political divisions in the Martian polity they should be able to generate a faction opposed to the building and sympathetic to removing it.
Much depends on the Martian legal system and and legal and political basis for the structure being there and who owns the rights.
Trying to physically attack is looks dumb. Undermining the basis of its existence would be smarter.
A more radical approach would be buying out the owners, or creating an economic situation so that the factory was redundant.
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## Communicating vessels and Pascal's barrel
[Pascal's barrel](https://www.ck12.org/flx/show/THUMB_POSTCARD/image/user%3Ack12science/98045-1395779735-54-43-Pascal%EF%BF%BDs-Principle.jpg)
If two volumes are linked by a closed pipe filled with fluid, they behave like one from a pressure point of view. See the [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_vessels) for the principle.
Also, the pressure against the bottom of the wall solely depends on the height of the fluid column. So you can build pressure inside the target volume if you connect it to a source high enough. You can even break things like in the [Pascal's barrel experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_law). See this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJHrr21UvY8) for a better illustration and explanation than I could ever provide.
For this to work, it would be nice that the first few lower levels of the building have no window, door, or anything like that. Also, the building stands thanks to its walls, not a central pillar.
So, considering that, you could dig a tunnel under a lake above the building (500m above the building's ground should be more than enough), ending below the building. Then, dig upward to connect the tunnel to the basement of the building.
Then, connect the tunnel to the lake.
The lake will fill the tunnel, then the basement, and fill the first levels. While the level is rising, so does the pressure against the walls. When it is more than what the wall can handle, it will crack and a whole side of the building will collapse.
For this to work, the pressure must be enough to crack the wall before the water reach the first door/window (at that point, the water will crack only this open, the water will escape this way, and the pressure will stop to rise).
The pressure will increase by 1 bar (= 1 atm) every 10m. So the maximum pressure will be determined by the height of the first windows or non-structural weak point. Basically, it is critical that the first thing to break is a structural part because the pressure will quickly drop after the first crack.
"Best" design: a tower, standing thanks to its walls made in a homogenous material (rather than steel pillars wrapped in comparatively weak materials), with no weak points up to a few tens of meters. (Reinforced) concrete is good because it tolerates compression really well (that why it can withstand the weight of tall buildings), but is very vulnerable to side pressure and elongation.
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Nothing short of demolitions would suffice. This means either thermite or high explosives. Reinforced concrete and steel are strong (and that's assuming the Martians have nothing stronger still). Fire alone won't suffice (the WTC had 2000deg burning jet fuel dripping down the columns, plus the major structural damage of a jetliner hitting it).
Diverting a river might be clever... but are they willing to wait years/decades? Because the building won't fall over 6 hours later once the water is flowing through the lobby.
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Modern buildings rely on multiple systems, most notably HVAC and water, which is required for sanitation but also for fire suppression. It is unlikely that your building has these systems fully contained within it. It probably has pipes delivering electricity, water, and perhaps natural gas. Disrupt these and the building quickly becomes uninhabitable. Without water for the sprinkler system, it will go up in flames quickly. Even if the building has generators and water storage on site, it still needs regular deliveries of water and fuel. Disrupt these.
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# Ground Conditions
With 100 years to do it in, it's not that hard (from an engineering standpoint that is). While a building like a modern day skyscraper is very resilient to damage on a short term level, without proper maintenance small problems can become big ones. The best way to do it would be to drastically change the ground chemistry in the building's foundation-first tunnel to the bottom (or close to the bottom) of the foundation, and introduce a water source, which will lead to significant erosion overtime. In 10 years, it's not likely to take it down, in 100 years, you will have major structural damage that is likely to doom the building or at least make it massively expensive to repair.
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## **Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605**
So most people are familiar with Guy Fawkes Masks, most notable from the movie *V for Vendetta*.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LG9Oy.jpg)
What most people don't realize is that Guy Fawkes was a very real person involved in a legitimate conspiracy to overthrow the British government.
The simple summary is that Fawkes and friends rented out an undercroft (cellar/storage room) that happened to be directly underneath the House of Lords of the British Parliament. They proceeded to fill the it to the brim with gunpowder over time. The plan was obviously to set off the gunpowder while Parliament was in session to the affect of crippling the British government and ideally setting off a successful Catholic rebellion against the Protestant Crown.
They almost succeeded except one of the conspirators slipped a note to a friend in Parliament to not go to work that day, despite being expressly told not to. On the 5th of November (queue the poem from the movie) guards were sent to investigate, and who do they find guarding the gunpowder, none other than Guy Fawkes.
The point of the history lesson?
Find a little room, patiently fill it with explosives over time, and keep your mouth shut!
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Use biological weapons. Surreptitiously cause some nasty local fauna or flora outbreak in the building, in air ducts, or water, or waste treatment system. Or something like - there is a story about a woman that had to move out of house after bitter divorce. She has put cooked shrimps into curtain rods. Some time later the stench has became unbearable and the source could not be found. Her ex had to move out and she even could buy the house at a discount.
I'm not saying anything about actually fully removing the building, but that's going to solve itself - most modern buildings won't last standing hundred years without maintenance anyway.
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Modern building are designed to house stuff - residential or business areas, not to be impregnable fortresses. Since building in your story is not military base or any other kind of explicitly reinforced building, pretty much any kind of 19th century mass-destruction technology will work. Any kind of big enough steam or dynamite explosion directed at structural weak point, or - even better - at several weak points at once on bottom floors - load bearing walls or pillars and such, will cause the rest of floors to collapse.
If you want a reason for your building to be more fragile, mention it is built in seismically inactive area with temperate climate - so it wasn't built with any additional reinforcement due to hostile elements.
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## Technology is Inherently Hazardous
The more we try to make modern homes great places to live, the more we bring in potentially dangerous substances. Want to cook? pipe in some natural gas. Want lighting, pipe in some high voltage AC current. Want to stay cool in Summer? fill some pipes up with freon gas. Don't want to have to plug into the wall to use phone or internet, fill your home with wifi relays. Want to kill some bugs? bring in pesticides.
Because the aliens live in an archaeology, they don't just bring in all the normal household hazards either, but they bring in all the hazards of their entire civilization. Nuclear power plants, explosive chemical factories, and the like. So if something like the recent Beirut explosion looks like this <https://youtu.be/n-3GJwy6EI4> in an open city floor plan, imagine how much worse it would be if this were just one of many industrial complexes packed together buried deep inside of an archaeology.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kB6zT.png)
The thing about primiative humans is that they were just as good at learning as modern human, they just did not have as much material to study. While most humans would not understand the alien tech at all, you'd still have your occasional Copernicus or DaVinci level human who might observe the aliens with enough insight to figure out how things correlate, even if they don't understand the full science behind them. Through empirical evidence and a few burned eyebrows they might learn that one symbol warns of fire hazards, another of electrical hazards, and so on. So, eventually, they might be able to figure out that that room containing 50 giant tanks marked with flammable and explosive warnings would be a good target; so, instead of relying on primitive human fire making abilities of their own, they could use the much more advanced hazards that the aliens put in there for them.
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**Use what is happening now**
For years nature destroys human constructions without human help. For me the best way to do it is simply for the Earthmen to raise a forest for years, make a huge trench like 6 km around it, and once the summer is hot enough, start a fire. Far enough it could be too late when the Martians see it, from many sides the fire is not controllable and the trench preserves the rest of the land.
Politically speaking, it could be a great point for the Earthmen to explain to the Martians that the trench is to give them a place for them, a place where no Earthmen live but they do cultivate and may share with Martians. You can use many chapters on the fake relationship the Earthmen build, arrogant Martians will appreciate dominate while humans can prepare the whole thing.
Another point is that humans can easily spy on Martians' tech to try to understand it d reach a similar technological level in the near future. If the plan succeeds, the evolution of those people may be a good sequel.
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Depending on the size of the arcology and the surrounding landscape, creating a cave-in/artificial sinkhole may be possible. But it would be very difficult.
It probably would take some generations with only bronze tools, but the best bet would be to properly undermine the area, multiple levels deep, while keeping everything propped up with massive numbers of wooden supports. The trees for support would have to be cut far away and the rock removed would also have to be dumped far enough away that no one becomes suspicious.
If the humans know how to make black powder (possible, there are some historians that argue the chinese had fireworks before they started making steel) then have them slowly fill the underground spaces with barrels of the stuff. Otherwise, build an underground channel and dam system where the dam walls are easy to drop. Last possibility, which will only work if they can ventilate at a distance using bellows is to bring in large amounts of very dry firewood to burn out the supports. This is iffy, though, as timing would be a problem and the smoke would likely be noticed.
On the appointed day, or more likely night, chosen to catch all the martians - or as many as possible - inside, blow all the supports using black powder or wash them out using your channelled water and watch the arcology disappear in the sinkhole.
Have all your best warriors on hand to kill the survivors as they flee/crawl away, otherwise they'll just call for help and rebuild. Also, if there is more than one settlement, you have to coordinate and wipe them all out on the same day.
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In history and stories like this I find the most impressive way to attack and destroy a target is by using its structure or internal processes to bring about its own demise. Especially when the oppressed people are at a significant technological disadvantage it is more likely to be ignorance on one or both sides or something along the lines of *sheer dumb luck* that allows the oppressed to prevail.
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> Side note - I'm a huge fan of archologies and destruction of things on that scale, ever since reading about the [destruction of Prince Xizors Palace on Coruscant in Shadows of the Empire](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Destruction_of_Xizor%27s_Palace) when I was a kid, the magnitude of the waste, the loss, the grandeur... and how the initiating act was deliberate, but perhaps the overall result, the consequences were unexpected or at least not thoroughly reasoned out...
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This is similar to [David Hambling's political response](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/184319/13521) but instead of inspiring the Martians to conspire against themselves, we want to turn their technology and internal processes against the building. Then it becomes a question of what event initiated by the Bronze aged *Earthmen* was the trigger or catalyst to the ultimate destruction.
You have already identified that *Earthmen* can enter the building, and your wording suggests that this might not just be tolerated, but commonplace. Let's use that first, perhaps *the Martian visitors enslaved the local population either to do menial personal tasks or general labor and maintenance on the structure itself, perhaps even to build it.*
Just focusing on the slave construction or maintenance gives me some good themes to work with:
1. The *Earthmen* **unintentionally** created a weakness or bias in the structure due to their incompetence or due to inferior or impure local materials that may have been used entirely or mixed with exotics. In this way because everyone was doing what they thought was right, it would be hard to identify and prevent specific circumstances that could later be exploited.
* IMO this is the easy plot line to exploit because you can identify your main attack first and come back and create weaknesses as you need them, the source of the weakness doesn't need to be intentional or even detectable at the time. Even if the final attack *shouldn't* have succeeded, these weaknesses could have contributed to a catastrophic chain of events, in the end *Earth* itself could have prevailed.
2. The *arrogant* masters who think their idea is so good and that thier instruction and supervision is also so good could easily miss important issues, or may not have designed important failsafes to account for ***human** error*. Perhaps their culture involves a level of obedience and they just thought we would follow the rules
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> reference to *being kicked out for being naughty* points to this, perhaps *earthmen* are kicked out in these circumstances not as punishment, but because they have insulted their *benevolent* masters and their behavior has *disgusted* them on a level that they simply cannot tolerate their presence. They may not have laws for these sorts of insults, because they are unimaginable to the Martians.
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This means that as long as the *Earthmen* appear to be doing the right thing, mischievous and naughty activities could ensue. At the time, out of laziness or sheer non-compliance, certain key construction or maintenance elements may not be implemented correctly.
Add in a sub-plot of some kind of *mind*, *chemical* or *physical* control / restraints, it's easy to write in a developed resistance or immunity where captives behave as if still under the influence,
* See the notes on the first point about later exploiting this... At the time the consipartors may not have known how their acts would ultimatly contribute to the destruction of the building, their act at the time may even be detected, they were only trying to rebel in their way. Even if deliberate sabbotage was detected and *fixed*, the fix itself can be exploited later.
+ My favorite example of a *bad fix* is the [Westgate Bridge section collapse in Melbourne in 1970](https://www.onlymelbourne.com.au/west-gate-bridge-disaster-1970#.X0R-Yn7iuUk)
3. Either on its own, or in conjunction with the themes above, Earthmen outside of the arcology have gained knowledge about the structure and even the technologies, even if they refuse to use them, or cannot replicate them. Combine this with the *naughty* individuals that have been ejected there is a wealth of anecdotal knowledge that builds up over time.
Stories around the campfire, passed down through generations, stories of mischievous or even heroic acts of the slaves inspire our *protagonist* who puts together some at first isolated theories and by chance encounters with others they put together a coordinated plan of attack... Even if this plan should have been doomed to failure, you just need to highlight convenient past events that were either forgotten, misinterpreted or simply unnoticed that enabled the destruction to succeed.
* [Merry's dagger in killing/contributing to the death of the witch King in the Return of the King](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Pelennor_Fields#:%7E:text=The%20hobbit%20Meriadoc%20Brandybuck%2C%20who%20had%20accompanied%20%22Dernhelm%22%2C,her%20sword%20between%20crown%20and%20mantle%22%2C%20killing%20him.) is a good example where subtle plot lines can be woven in unsuspected by the reader.
All of the above can help establish why *Earthmen* might have intimate knowledge about the structure that was not traditionally available to *Bronze Age humans*, regardless of how they come by the knowledge, exploiting it needs only be trial and error over an extended period of time.
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> I like the comment from @DWKraus *"Just local animals digging in the dirt"*... Over time the repeated attacks/attempts from the *Earthmen* could become comical, even to the point of the Martians treating it as sport, betting on how long untile the next attack, how long an attack might last, or what they would try next. Perhaps some higer-ups even getting "involved" by sponsoring some *Earthling* factions, for their own internal political gain or amusement...
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Taking inspiration from the other posts so far, we have identified that *fire* is not only accessible and one of most obvious weapon to use, but that the native population in early feeble attempts may have already tried fire in a number of different ways. Due to these attempts the structure must have built in defenses against this, more than would be required to protect against spontaneous or accidental combustion.
Water was another popular weapon and is commonly used to protect against fire attacks. If there are consistent or frequent attacks over the years, water would most likely be implemented over other chemical or exotic retardants due to its abundance and because, *well "they are only humans" so we don't really need to overthink it.*
So, drawing things out to a logical conclusion that might be accessible to a *Bronze aged human*, find a way to use the fire suppressant system against the structure itself.
1. It could be a carrier for chemicals, acids or poisons. On their own it might not be a big deal, but when the *water* is used against the fire the resulting steam combines with the smoke and could either be immediately toxic or cause damage to inhabitants over time or the residues contribute to structural weakening.
* This doesn't even need to be a deliberate exploit, maybe they used sea water all along and over time their refuse had polluted the water source. The salt and other pollutants aide in the corrosion of the lower structures or introduced exotic spores which grow over time or induced some form of calcification to structural components.
* It could be a deliberate act like in [Contantine (2005) after Chaz Kramer turned the fire sprinkler system into holy water](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uawAmbWoms0)... It didn't take out the demons, but sufficiently compromised them so that Constine could take them out...
2. Repeated and persistent attacks from the stubborn *Earthmen* mean that the fire suppressant/retardant system has been overused to a point they had not originally considered, so this itself could be an exploit
* Use the [combined pressure of the water system as explained by Akita](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/184339/13521), the system may itself be overloaded over time or simple acts of sabotage could contribute.
3. Either in relation to the fires, or from diverting dams or whatever, If the *Earthmen* succeed in causing lower or basement levels to flood and stay permanently flooded, perhaps as the ultimate deterrent they deliberately flood these levels... Then later these levels are drained, after significant time under water, especially water with contaminents and polutants means the structural integrity is now compromised.
* Maybe Martians do not have any regard or need for water, and to deliberately impoverish the native community they deliberately store the water within the structure, the very "smart" design of this arcology depends on the pressure exerted by the retained water, or it is uses it as balast or counter weight some way, maybe its a giant shock absorber (which explains why our real world engineering concepts cannot build structures of these sorts of sizes).
* Whatever your reason, the structure now needs the water, perhaps the original designers have moved on and the knowledge about the why and how are lost, so no one cares or notices when the *Earthmen* find a way to access this water, to literally *tap* into it, maybe they've been surviving off cracks in this system over years. Finally our protagonist plans to deliberately drain this water, to get back what was rightfully theirs, unbeknownst to them the whole thing comes crashing down.
Just some non-technical ideas to consider...
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Basically 9/11 scenario. If their technology is like ours then this very large building has steel frame.
Put lots of firewood on the first floor and light a fire. When temperature reaches 500-600 C steel strength would drop and building would collapse.
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Divert an underground aquifer under or near the building to cause erosion leading to a sinkhole forming under the building. Handwave how you divert an aquifer. Presumably there's room in the aquifer for an breathable passage and the ability to insert materials to dam/redirect the flow to cause the erosion.
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The steel frame is going to be tricky to demolish, but can be done given enough time. The first step, though, is getting rid of the *rest* of the building.
Bronze age technology is sufficient to build something like a [trebuchet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet). These types of siege engines could knock down castle walls that were solid stone. For a modern building with exteriors of glass and walls framed with wood, a trebuchet would absolutely wreck them.
No matter how modern our buildings get, fire is always a vulnerability. Fire suppression systems are designed to knock out fires while they're still small. Get a large-enough fire going and they won't be able to put it out.
Never underestimate what you can accomplish with raw manpower. A technological disadvantage can be overcome by sheer numbers. Grunt-rush the building with enough people to outnumber the enemy at least 5 to 1. Subdue and forcibly evict the occupants, then start demolition. A large portion of modern demolition work is done using basic demolition tools like sledgehammers and demo bars that are low-tech and easily built (even mining tools would work). Power tools make things faster, but they aren't strictly necessary. Start at the top, work your way down, and tear the whole building apart. Just like ants, your army of primitive workers will strip the building down to the bones and haul it away a lot faster than you might think.
If you don't think your primitive army can forcibly capture the building, lay siege to it instead. Block all exits with large stones and wait for the occupants to starve. Pummel them from a distance with catapults and other long-range siege weapons. Once the occupants are all dead, continue with the demolition.
Once you're down to the steel structure, you can let nature do the hard work. Use rough stones or sandpaper to grind any protective layers off of the steel. Apply regular coats of an oxidizing agent to speed up the process of rusting. Sulfuric acid is a fairly potent oxidizer and was extracted and studied at least as far back as the first century AD. Once the structural pieces at ground level are sufficiently rusted, the rest of the structure should collapse and can be hauled off.
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I was thinking of [microbial corrosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_corrosion), assuming a large steel structure as the foundation of the building.
Usually we think of water to corrode steel and turn it into rust. This might be a slow process and easily be detected. Also, the structure might be protected from rusting by paint and glass.
Microbes however, might only need a small defect in the paint to start the process. With a bit of exponential growth, the process could become unstoppable before it is detected. And the Martians might not know the species yet and thus not have a good countermeasure. Fire will always work, but is probably not a good idea to apply everywhere.
The Earthmen could detect this sort of bacteria even if they don't use metal themselves. They just need a thrown-away piece of metal to detect the microbe activity. They could cultivate the bacteria with something else (like [Agar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agar) or whatever all bacteria like) and then seed it in a few places around the building or even distribute via a ventilation system. They don't even need to know something about math and exponential growth. They just observe the metal vanish away and give it a try.
Depending on what you want to achieve by "remove", there's a lot of work to do after the collapse of the building. The easiest is probably to put earth on top of the pile of rubbish, so it will be the ancestral hill of victory for the Earthmen.
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If the city is by a body of water, they can dig a canal to flood the building and damage the soil. Assuming that the amount of water is great enough and the building is on a hill, a landslide could result and the building would collapse.
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Set up an unexpected resonate frequency and have building shake itself apart. Buildings are designed with various damping systems but they are never perfect.
To set this up it could be planting trees in a way to redirect prevailing winds, physicaly plant resonators in key places, or remove things that look harmless but really dampen vibration. Or large group doing ritual song and dance in the building or
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So, if this is a science-based world, why are vampires, werewolves and other entities associated with the dark side so sensitive to silver? Well, it has nothing to do with the metal, but rather its inhabitants.
Silver nanites are self-replicating robots that dwell on the surfaces of silver objects, as they require that material in their electronic components. Since silver is a good heat and electricity conductor, these silver nanites tend to be more powerful and resistant than your typical nanites.
Also, they're pretty big, at around 20 micrometers in diameter and also have several contractile filaments and sensors to help them traverse the inside a body.
When silver nanites come into contact with a vampire's skin, they dig through it and head straight to the bloodstream and from there, to the nervous system, where they release a neurotoxin that usually kills within a minute. After that, the silver nanites begin breaking down the body.
Pretty lethal huh? There is a problem, however, a revolutionary invention called armor.
You see, while silver nanites have many advantages because of their size, it's also their crux, as they can easily be filtered, even with linen. Also, they digest tissue as they tunnel through it, but steel and other metals are too stable to be quickly broken down.
Generally speaking, a proper plate mail armor with a gambeson and a closed helmet will stop silver nanites 99% of the time. Sure, you have to place the armor into a furnace every once in a while to properly disinfect it.
Sure, some vampires prefer to fight in their regular clothes or no clothing at all, but those idiots get what's coming for them. **The question is, what will your average monster-hunting ~~platformer~~ hero do when they see their silver-chain whip does nothing against a properly armored vampire opponent?**
**In other words, I just took away the only weapon humans had against vampires (sunlight and UV are too weak), but I want to equalize the battlefield to a degree. Most likely by finding a way for silver nanites to still reach their target, but how?**
And while some would answer "Stab them in the armpit", I'd kindly remind you that we're talking about a century-old vampire that has enhanced senses and peak-human strength, so if they happen to know krav maga, you'd be folded in half and tucked into a wardrobe.
The tech level is medieval.
***How did vampires and nanites get there?***
*God and the demons did it, who are actually ancient aliens.*
***Why not ask them for help then?***
*They can't interfere with the world now because I said so.*
***What are vampires here anyway?***
Basically take humans, then add
* biological immortality
* a mild susceptibility to cancer
* little to no melanin in the skin
* scarless regeneration (think of axolotls)
* acute senses
* and peak-human physical characteristics (endurance, speed, strength)
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**Cheat as hard as you possibly can**
I can think of many ways to get past the defense of armor. Poison them with gas, break their bones with maces or flails, use chains to bind them so they can't move, lure them into traps, gang up on them with a whole lot of humans, etc. There are many, many ways to kill a foe in armor. Sure, they aren't perfect, but armor is an advantage and if you're fighting someone with peak-human level fitness in armor, you will be at a disadvantage no matter what you do, unless you upgrade to the next level of technology.
In other words, *don't fight them in a fair fight*. Even if you want to use silver, there are great ways of doing it. Powder the silver and throw it into their eyeslits if you can manage that. Lure them into ambushes and stab them there, or sneak around when they don't have that armor on and ruthlessly backstab them. Or, once you don't gain an advantage from using silver, and there are other ways of defeating them (see: above), use those ways instead. Don't be locked into the mentality of 'I must use silver' when using silver becomes a liability instead of an asset.
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**What you need are medieval squirt guns**
Just stir powdered silver into the water first. Or, if you're less for the silly, clouds of powdered silver should do it. If the goal is not really to chop up your foes, but merely to touch them with silver, then you shouldn't get hung up on weapons, or sizable chunks of the metal.
You're going to have some issues with retrieving the leftover silver after after a puff or squirt, true, so against non-armored vampires there are long-term advantages to using weapons coated with silver. But filings should be good enough to get through visors or armor joints. As a bonus, even if your vampire gets away, they may die of attempting to remove the armor if it isn't carefully cleaned after the confrontation. Imagine ultimately killing not only your vampire knight, but also their vampire squires who try to help them after the battle!
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A pretty standard [warhammer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_hammer) or [pollaxe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollaxe) will - with sufficient force - be quite effective at punching through most armor and getting at the squishy vampire underneath. If fighting from horseback, a [war pick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseman%27s_pick) can do quite well as well. Really any weapon with a lot of mass behind a small impact area ought to do the trick - even if a given blow insufficient to actually hurt the vampire, these sorts of weapons can damage the armor and hinder the vampire's mobility as a result. Give your weapon-of-choice a nice plating of silver nanites and go to town. (Might have to re-plate your hammer every once in a while though.)
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# Nanites can move
Sure you can prevent a direct attack with silver, but nanites, by the general definition, are little tiny robots, capable of self locomotion. So they landed on the vampire's armor. Big deal. They can just creep around and search for the cracks and seams until they find their way inside. Unless those vampires are wearing air-tight space suits (somehow made out of metal, which would seriously impede movement - also do vampires need to breathe? That would be a major impediment. And the visor would need to be glass or they'd be effectively blind.), there's going to be holes big enough for them to pass through. If they can slip between the fibers of a fabric material, they can definitely find ways between armor plates.
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Use crossbow bolts with silver coated heads,silver plated lance tips,swords,etc. Also just throw weighted nets on them and they won't be able to move. Armour will restrict their movement and pinning them under nets,luring them into pitfalls,dousing them in burning naphtha or pitch and generally just making life miserable for them.
Another is firebombs,silver flakes in water or oil (oil is flammable so double whammy), use horses for the mobility advantage and use lariats (lassos) or weighted nets to weigh down and restrain the enemy. Polearms like poleaxes or halberds,war hammers,maces,flails and axes are all good against armour. The heavy blows can dent and tear armour;polearms also keep the vampires further away and provide greater leverage to keep the impact force high against the stronger vampires.
If gonnes (hand cannons) and firecrackers or iron spheres (iron cased blackpowder grenade from 11th century China) are available then firing silver bullets (whether partial or full) would be super effective against any armour available at the time.
The vampire may be physically superior,but human ingenuity is one of our greatest attributes. If humanity has superior industry (actual large settlements,leading in advancements,etc) then the vampires days are numbered. Manpower isn't going to be a great problem against the vampires. After all,if the vampires are an existential threat all the more reason to eliminate them first.
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I present you!
The pinata sledge hammer! A blunt weapon designed to crush armour.
But there's more!
With each hit the hammer release the clouf od nanites which use the holes, breaks, dents in the armour.
But the vampires are super strong! Cool it means that, when hit with a hammer, they create force against the head which means the armour is destroyed from two sides!
If your her put a lot of stats in intelligence then he came up with vials of acid. Aqua fortis for example. It will dissolve the armour allowing nanites to penetrate.
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Humans would deal with armored vampires in the same ways they've been dealing with armored humans throughout history. Crossbows, longbows, polearms, blunt weapons. With a sharp weapon, you aim for joints.
If I'm understanding correctly, silver just needs to touch the vampires' skin for it to be lethal, so your weapons only need to be concerned with penetrating the armor.
For a go-to infantry tactic, I'd have a front line with good shields and blunt weapons. Their primary goal is defending from the vampires. The second line is some form of polearm (halberds, bec de corbins, polehammers, whatever you want to call them), focusing on knocking the vampires to the ground. The third line is pikes, who will be running their weapons into any vampire who hits the ground in the hope of hitting a gap and touching skin.
Of the infantry, only the pikemen really need silvered weapons, but obviously the rest would like it too.
Cavalry and archers/crossbowmen could be used normally.
And of course, never fight a fair fight. Given the expense of plate armor you can count on outnumbering the vampires but still, cheat as much as you can.
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Remember that guns are the great equaliser for a reason. If they're wearing environmentally sealed clothes, then a shotgun will probably open it up for your waterpistol and keep you at a safe range. If they're wearing full plate then a rifle with AP ammunition will quite easily put holes in their waterproof underlay, at which point back to your water pistol and water bombs. These will also deal with the situation where the silver needs to get into the blood stream.
The biggest problem that hunters traditionally face is that vampires are so much faster and stronger than humans. Which is why they use line weapons like the silver whip. In these situations can I recommend the new titanium braided whip with silver plating. 15 feet of leather interwined with razor thin titanium blades that have been silver plated and sharpened to a near monomolcular edge with diamond top keep the edge throughout the fight. We also supply a titanium steel net with spikes made from the same material as the blades on the whip. Once you have slowed the vampire down you can fall back to your favourite gun and liquid formula.
ETA - If you need to stay more period accurate for the medieval period, meaning that the vampires don't have full plate, or the waterproof underlays. I'd like to introduce you to the warhammer/warpick <https://www.medievalchronicles.com/medieval-weapons/medieval-warhammer/>
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You use the same tactics you would against any other armored knight, but with an emphasis on penetration.
Assuming humans outnumber vampires, you could use 'classic' musket tactics with crossbows, with several ranks of crossbowmen firing, and reloading in turn for a massive amount of firepower, and crossbows *could* penetrate armour. Have a little silver inlay or sleeve, and the moment its in, it does its job. Part of me does wonder how nasty a ballista would be.
Depending on the armour, melee combat would be trickier. You're basically facing an armoured foe with few of the actual disadvantages of armour...
Then again peasant armies have won knights - lots of polearms - a silver inlayed pokey thing might work, as would tactics around reducing enemy mobility, like nets, so you can make a vampire pincushion.
Personally I wonder how fast they'd regenerate covered in burning pitch :D
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One option would be inject into some unlucky voluteneers/prisoners/ undesiable people the silver nanites (assuming they don't kill normal people). Then send them out to be eaten/biten by the vampires who will then be infected by the silver nanites and die. Basically your posioning the vampires food.
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Trap the vampire and [vaporize](https://www.quora.com/Can-metal-be-vaporized) the silver. Silver [vaporizes](https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/melting-boiling-temperatures-d_392.html) at [standard atmospheric pressure](https://courses.lumenlearning.com/cheminter/chapter/pressure-units-and-conversions/) at 3542 degrees F. [Coal-fired forge temperatures](http://rebuildingcivilization.com/content/how-hot-can-you-get-coal-fired-forge) max out in that temperature range. The savviest metal smiths, certainly in the latter half of the [medieval period](https://www.timeref.com/episodes/episode_index.htm) should have been able to get there with [existing technology and trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining#Early_history).
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I could have missed it, but has anyone mentions crossbows or arbalests yet? A steel-tipped, silver cored crossbow bolt would most likely punch through any type of armor available to the late medieval era. They were pretty much the go-to armor piercing weapon of the day. It also has the added benefit of not having to get to close to the pasty murderhobo with odd drink preferences.
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Humans sabotage the armor production factory, add silver to the molten steel of god plate mail. The vamps won’t notice the small pinpricks at first, but because they stay in the armor so much to protect against nanites running around, eventually, it poisons them.
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We've had a few STEM questions asking for the total wattage necessary for a laser to vaporize a person. I would like to focus on the human aspects of it, specially relating to sensory experience. The reason being that in one of my tales, weapons that can vaporize people exist and are common enough that they will be used a few times. I would like to describe the experience of watching these being used to the reader.
Now, I think I've figured out most of what a bystander watching from a safe distance would perceive.
They would see a bright flash, and then the victim immediatelly exploding.
They would hear a loud bang.
They would feel a very warm draft passing over their skin.
But I still need a general idea for the smell and taste. I could maybe figure it out on my own, but since the mortician won't allow me in the closest funeral home anymore a trip to the crematorium is out of question.
So does anyone know?
I expect a lot of different notes since different tissues have different amounts of water, fat and sugars. Is that correct?
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The closest reference I can find is to burning bodies.
Accounts from those having experienced the smell of burning bodies in concentration camps says its unmistakable and sweet. I have also found this [reference](https://firefighterinsider.com/firefighters-what-does-a-burning-body-smell-like/), which I report
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> The smell of a burning body is the combination of burning skin, muscle, fat, hair, organs, spinal fluid, bacteria and even, possibly, bone. That means there’s a very complex smell to burning bodies, but it is one that is completely unmistakable and once you smell it you won’t forget it.
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Vaporizing a body would probably get rid of some of the intermediate aromatic molecules which form during burning, but the only vaporization events of human bodies (Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing) hasn't left accounts of the perceived smells.
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Instantly vaporizing a whole person with a laser is a tremendously energetic event. The heat from said event would cause a thermal explosion that would kick up all the material within a significant radius. You would not smell the person, but you would smell all the dirt kicked into the air, all the smoke from anything around the core of the vaporization spot that would have remained cold enough to more simply catch fire, and probably a significant hint of ozone.
What you smell would most closely resemble a mixture a construction site and a bonfire... but the exact mixture of these smells will depend largely on where the person was standing when they were struck.
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Can You even smell it?
Evaporating average human give You around 7000m^3 of vapour. It is hot. If You do that in building then walls will be destroyed and dust related to this overpower smell of body.
If You do that in open field then shockvave survivors will be far enough to not smell rising cloud of vapours.
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I don't think it would smell like much, beyond possibly "burnt" or "ash" (if that even has a smell).
Humans are mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, with the hydrogen and oxygen mostly being bound into water. This means that if you had an arbitrarily powerful laser with the beam big enough that the entire human fits inside and "vaporize" the human, you'd be left over with super-heated carbon dust and water vapor. You'd get something similar to what comes out of a crematorium, so just ash as you might find in an urn. It would be sterile, and probably rather odorless too.
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The crematorium is not going to get you an answer because they do not vaporize a body, they oxidize it at a much slower rate.
The most pungent ions are what would prevail, even though many different smells may occur from plastics or other wearables. But as others have said, consider that the energy to do this nearly instantly will be dissociating any complex molecules, so you will have mostly elemental gasses. 80% water will become H$\_2$ gas and ozone. The carbon is a given, along with some nitrogen. But none of the ions with that sweet aroma of cooked bacon will survive this laser. All you need to do for an objective answer is vaporize a flea under an industrial laser (I volunteer Goodies for this gruesome task) and you'll have an idea. They're made of the same stuff.
Another quick way to test this is to build a jacob's ladder and fry a dead bug in the arc by holding it on the end of a long plastic rod. The smaller the bug, the closer your smell will be. You're trying to use the plasma to vaporize rather than cook.
Alternately, describe the smell of the biggest bug zapper you can find when a mosquito hits it, and no one will question you.
Having said all of this, honestly you need to think more about the stuff that will actually be cooked instead of vaporized. If they are standing on stone, or an asphalt street, or a cement sidewalk, there will only be enough energy to cook these instead of vaporize them (at least at a certain depth). These ions will put off a stronger smell than the elemental vapors, and every situation could be completely different.
I have to reiterate that what you smell will be far away from the victim, as that vapor will be too hot to smell, it will sear your nostrils.
[Answer]
## No smell
Q: *"the total wattage necessary for a laser to vapourize a person. "*
**A person won't evaporate when using current day high power laser**
The effect of a heavy laser would be cutting a person in two halves, or perforating a person. It will be scorched on the wound sides, I don't think there will be relevant fire, smoke or smell.. except maybe when a laser is used at point blank, indoors. My reference for this is heavy industrial laser cutting equipment..
**A person sized laser beam would yield vapor and ashes**
Similar, but don't try this at home.
Suppose we have a *human body size* laser beam with 2 million times the surface hit by a heavy industrial laser (just under 2 square meters).. you'll end up with instant water vapor + a cloud of ashes.. In that case this answer also stands, there won't be time to oxidize anything slowly, yielding fire and smoke. The target will explode, the ashes will spread and fall to the ground.
The water vapor is gone, you'll smell the ashes. According to this source, human ashes are odourless,
<https://farewill.com/articles/what-are-human-ashes-like>
[Answer]
#### Kentucky Fried Human
Seriously.
The energy required for a phazer to vaporise someone is also going to basically cook and coagulate their proteins. The "vapour" you're describing is a horrific stew of carcinogens, byproducts of combustion, various ejected fluid and solid particles.
#### YUM!
[You can see in the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU7TtfSKYZE) how energy applied to flesh yields vapours of various kinds. This vapour does have a characteristic odor, and it is basically the smell of cooking. It also has a taste, kind of metallic, kind of umami rich.
For your story: **it is an *almost delicious* aroma, if the true source of it remained hidden from the olfactor; and one that, even after many years, never quite leaves the nose.**
[Answer]
## This happens every day in surgery
And it basically smells like burnt hair.
Surgeons use [electrocautery](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrosurgery) as a device to pass current through the body. Depending on waveform the diathermy will either cut through tissues, be used to stop individual bleeding vessels, or fulgurate, which looks like a Palpatine/Thor lightning effect. This concentration of current vapourises tissues. I only use it on muscle/tendon/ligament, so the smell from other tissues may vary, but the closest smell is to light a few strands of your hair.
Try it at home (strands of hair, not diathermy) and you’ll be able to mull over all the adjectives you need. Just don’t do it indoors as it really lingers.
Informally, I tend to call diathermy the ‘lightning stick’ at work, and ‘knife and fork’ for the scalpel and forceps.
[Answer]
# blood and burnt hair (and probably furniture)
The laser is directional, and it cannot have *exactly* the energy to "vaporize a human body". The quantity of human matter in the path of the beam will not be the same in all the points of the beam, so if the beam intensity is enough to vaporize, say, a human chest or a human leg, it will vaporize a hand *and keep on vaporizing*. A human-shaped laser beam with variable intensity, while theoretically possible, goes against the YAGNI rule: if you use a megabeam to kill a human, that's because you don't have anything handier. If you have a man-vaporizing beam, you can get yourself one million man-killer beams for the same effort, or a single man-killing beam with one millionth the effort.
The "vaporization" will then be either incomplete or excessive; probably both in different areas of the target body.
So, what happens? The vaporized portions will smell like burnt protein and nitrogen oxide (an acrid, dry smell, almost indistinguishable from burnt hair because, well, hair are made of protein). There will be no cooking smells because target is vaporized where it is vaporized, and *explodes* where it isn't. The energy will be preferentially absorbed by water, which will flash into water vapour, exploding tissues away from the incoming beam. Those tissues will be almost raw, and therefore smell of blood (or other things - for example, in the case of the bowels...).
Then, the beam's remains will continue on their path and incinerate/vaporize whatever they find, which will likely be furniture. Depending on the composition of said furniture, all sorts of smells are possible.
However, I expect that a laser hit on a human body will be almost indistinguishable from the detonation of a largish, odorless bomb kept in close contact with the body (same sound, light, smell, and side effects).
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[Question]
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The superiority of pole arms and spears in particular has become a pretty common meme across multiple online communities, so that got me thinking; what if you had a fighting force in which the *only* weapons were some sort of spear. No swords, no axes, no maces, no picks, no bows, no slings.
By “some sort of spear” I mean everything from pikes to javelins to the Iklwa. If it’s a stick with a sharp point then it’s game. The army can use different types in tandem and can have infantry and cavalry using them.
By effective I mean able to hold up against another medieval army of comparable size and discipline without being hideously routed, and maybe winning now and again.
Exceptions:
•Arrows do not count as spears in this scenario, that’s too easy.
•Weapons (knives, saws etc) used in foraging, food preparation and engineering are exempt, this is a question about combat.
So how effective would a spear only army be?
[Answer]
**Worked for the Zulu**
Shaka was credited for the invention of the [Iklwa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assegai#Iklwa) which was a short stabbing spear
The Zulu would start combat by throwing a traditional spear before engaging in hand to hand combat with the Iklwa.
The Zulu army armed with spears was a credible threat against the English army armed with guns. See [Anglo-Zulu War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zulu_War)
Spears don't need to be thrown and don't need to be long.
Add something like the [Woomera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woomera_(spear-thrower)) or the [atlatl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower) to increase the range of spear throwers you could replace archers (more or less)
Between lances for your horsemen, pikemen, spear throwers and infantry with stabbing spears, you can replicate the function of most medieval armies
The key is not so much the weapons but the skills, armour, numbers and the strategy of the army.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GieWI.png)
[Answer]
**Yes, it's called the [Macedonian Phalanx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_phalanx)**
Their main weapon was a giant spear 18ft long, which took them special training to be able to use. The rest of their normal kit was a shortsword and shield, so swap out the shortsword for a short-spear, and you're good. Add in some heavy cavalry on the side in armor and lances. These soldiers were how Alexander the Great (and his father, Philip of Macedonia) murdered basically everyone around them in the ancient world.
[Answer]
No.
From the Macedonian phalanx to the Pikemen these kind of armies have been very effective for almost 2000 years. **Provided** their flanks were protected by more mobile units. Moving a huge number of soldier with their pikes requires a lot of coordination, every single turn must be done on the order of a commander who might be 100 meters away, otherwise they would clash with each other. So an army composed only of pikemen could be outmaneuvered.
There's another point. Not only they lack agility, but they also require extensive training which in medieval time is very difficult to impart since the population did not provide a lot of resources to support many professional soldiers. It would be very difficult to put together such an army.
In Cannae the Romans attacked Hannibal with an army made up by a huge number of Legionaries in tight square formations. Hannibal simply avoided direct head to head battle. The central units retreated while the cavalry and other mobile units encircled them. Eventually the Romans were slaughtered by an army that was half the size of their army.
[Answer]
**Yes.**
In fact, i would like to state that in real life, throughout history before usage of firearms becoming common in battlefields, using spears was far more common than most people realize, The idea that spears are in many ways superior weapon compared to swords, mace and other non-spear weapons was no secret to historical generals and warriors.
[Spears](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear) are very effective and cheap weapons that have been most common weapon of choice among many armies throughout history as mentioned by historical accounts and depictions of armies and battles. For instance look at some of [Persian relief](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangeh_Savashi) or [Egyptian relief](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnak) where you see spears as dominant weapon of choice among most well equpied soldiers in world at that time, despite the fact that we know some variation of swords, mace or club have already existed at the time.
And use of spears contuine well until guns becoming common around the world. For instance look at accounts of [Battle of Grunwald](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grunwald), [100 year wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Years%27_War) and [Siege of Constantinople](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople) where we still see mass usage of spears close to popularization of guns.
And even after infantrymen around world start training and relying primarily on guns, armies don't completely stop using spears for quite sometime. For instance take a look at [Lances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance)(which i think we can consider as a kind of spear) begin used by cavalierly forces such as [Dragoons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragoon) or [Hussars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussar).
**So in short, Yes**. There is nothing too fictional about an army using only spears to not only hold against but even win against a medieval army of equal discipline and size.
Swords and maces were a popular weapon mostly among cavalry, For instance while most foot soldiers during late antiquity were using only spears as main weapon for battle, [Immortals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhayedan) and [Azadan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_the_Sasanian_Empire#Azadan_nobility) of Sasanid Empire were master of using a very wide variety of weapons such as swords, maces, axes, scythes and even chains.
Also, this is my personal opinion without any solid reference: I think because short weapons were better weapons for fighting and self defense in cities where most people lived, people saw swords and maces more often as a combat weapon which is why, such weapon received so much more attention.
[Answer]
**No**
And the biggest point why is the lack of ranged weapons. If my opponent only uses melee weapons in slow and tight formations, countering that with ranged weapons seems rather intuitive.
[Answer]
Absolutely Yes. (Assuming you can accept that a pike is a very long spear).
Armies of/with [Swiss Pikemen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_square) proved to be effective [during the Renaissance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_mercenaries).
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> *Fighting mainly as pikemen, the Swiss of the 15th Century used their iconic 10-foot pikes in an offensive capacity. Each pikeman carried a short sword and dagger but wore comparatively little armor. Helmets and breastplates were rare, although leather jerkins and gloves enjoyed more widespread use.*
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> Ref: <https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2018/10/19/the-history-of-swiss-pikemen/>
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At this time they faced bows and crossbows too. The question does not specify *against what* they should be effective, but during their service time, certainly.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GcrVt.jpg)
[Answer]
Yes,
I took reference from Chinese civilization, from dynasty to dynasty. When they got low on soldiers, farmers are equipped with spear to join the war. It's super easy and cheap to make, just combine farming tool handle with some sharp point object.
I might be cheating because Chinese got huge population, so equipping large amount of farmer with spear is their best bet. Farmers typically want long range weapon as they can't / don't have proper combat training.
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[Question]
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Around 100 years from now society has entered a multi planetary society, with mines in space bringing in resources to Earth in abundance.
Utilizing this new material wealth, Earth Nations start to, metaphorically, buy the Rolls-Royce cars of the new hip military tech: soldier drones.
These humanoid robots have basic, dumb AI, superhuman strength, and no empathy whatsoever in whatever they kill. They excel in physical and emotional stats compared to regular soldiers, but can be easily dispatched with smarts and lots of lead.
Thus, the current military now consists of the common Robo-grunt for large scale combat, and the Operators: special forces soldiers equipped with exo-armor and full control of said robo-grunts (including self-destruct, when they get hacked)
Would these units be considered effective if they were to exist in modern combat alongside regular soldiers? Will they offer an advantage over humans, or just become an expensive broken iPhone for the military to deal with?
(soft science is intended for this answer, no need for extensive research. This is just whether or not there are some loopholes in this system.)
[Answer]
The short answer is we're already doing this - [Drones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_combat_aerial_vehicle).
Having ground based robotic troops assumes that the strategies of combat don't evolve with the tech and with refined strategic approaches to war and that's simply untrue.
Drones have taken a lot of the intelligence and combat workload from more traditional human based combat solutions; for those countries who have access to them and can afford them. The idea of putting drones in the air that can strike from a distance and are much harder to detect coming makes a lot of sense for strategic, intelligence based strikes, which is what we're moving to in combat. Why send an army of robots against your enemy's army of robots if you know where the controllers are and you can take them out with a missile strike?
Even as early as WW1, Lieutenants and other field officers had horrific mortality rates because snipers on both sides were deployed specifically to take them out in trench warfare whenever they stuck their head up. If you were an Allied Lt in France during that time, you were more likely to die than survive. Why? Because taking out the officers was more effective at stopping your enemy than taking out privates because there was no-one to command the men in the field. One death, many ineffectives.
This kind of strategy has evolved even further, and drones are the current way to strike at your enemy's weakness (their control centres, commanders, etc.).
So, robot soldiers, while an understandable extrapolation, aren't the weapon of the future. Long range, 'smart' but controllable strike platforms are the order of the day. For now at least, drones fit that bill perfectly.
[Answer]
**One of the hardest things in military training is to get one man to kill another just because he's been ordered to.**
This was a key driving factor from conscripted armies to professional armies. Conscripts don't shoot to kill, that's if they shoot at all. This is not a problem for robots.
Politically they're also a lot safer. Bringing home most of a robot because it was ambushed has a lot less political fallout than bringing home most of a soldier.
Irrespective of which of these factors is stronger in your society, robots on the battlefield are ultimately inevitable. Cost is nothing in military spending.
[Answer]
Current airborne drones leak data and require nearly continuous command and control. They work pretty well in practice because they are used in asymmetric conflicts and these downsides aren't cheaply exploitable. In a more even conflict these might be serious enough problems to require workarounds.
Voice, handsign or near field communication commands from a local human are probably more robust to detection and interference by opposition. Things closer to the ground, operating colder, and radiating lower power communications are harder to detect. Supporting weight on the ground is much more efficient then on air, allowing lower temperatures, higher loads or longer runtimes. This might lead to human controllers embedded in ground based robot units.
Which probably leads to targeting the humans first. Which perhaps leads to making the robots mimic the humans. Human-looking robots with robot-looking human officers.
[Answer]
You need to consider escalation. If one side gets these robo-grunts, other sides will probably get them just to stay on an even footing (the arms race of the Cold War is an example of this).
The point to remember is that the thing that is better than a troop of robo-grunts can be two troops of robo-grunts, oooooor something that effectively neutralizes or destroys said troop of robo-grunts.
In an arms race, there will not just be a race to have more/ better of the same, but also to come up with something to make the robos obsolete.
So in an arms race, robo-grunts will only be useful until they are made obsolete by something better.
As a means of peace-keeping or show-of-force for the sake of the little people, they are likely to remain effectively scary far longer.
They may also be useful against rebel militia-types who lack their own robos to fight with, or against a massive alien force where sheer numbers might help win the day.
[Answer]
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> What I'm asking about is whether or not will these kind of military units be effective in modern combat.
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I would say yes: There are already dumb robots in military (e.g. EOD Bots). There's a lot of jobs that are dangerous and only require some guidance but not intelligence. The Operator would probably just send a bot into a potentially dangerous place first. "Alpha6 move in on potential EOD, direct video feed to command!"
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> Will they offer an advantage over regular soldiers, or just become an expensive broken iPhone for the military to deal with?
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That depends on how expensive they are going to be. But think about how expensive a human soldier is! He/she needs extensive training, equipment (you mentioned exo-skeletons) and care if wounded. Now if those bots are dirt cheap the operators are going to just send them in and not care if they are destroyed. If they are rather expensive but still cheaper than human foot soldiers operators are going to be more careful and maybe use them for protecting human soldiers but not just sacrifice them to clear a mine field.
As a side note:
If you have the tech to make those robots you can probably also figure out a way to make a human control them maybe with a advanced VR setup so they have the intelligence of a human with the strength of the robot.
[Answer]
Having robot soldiers marching around provides several advantages over conventionals armies.
* They can be mass produced with quality. You want a gigantic army? Then all that matters is having an important industrial capacity and money. On the other hand you can not mass produce humans, they need much more time to perform the same basic tasks a killer robot would do.
* They put less strain on your economy, at least provided your bots are dumb enough to not be able to be part of the workforce of a country. A developed country with a lot of its economy oriented toward service couldn't use bots to work in place of humans. Thus couldn't send much of its workforce to war, without exhausting a lot the economy of the said country. Remember when the third Reich mobilized something like 8 million soldiers out of 70-80 million people? Such things weigh a lot on a country economy, even though plundering other countries helps alleviate such costs.
* Human's lives matters. For politics, it would be very important to show that your fellow human citizens are worthy enough for the government to spend billion replacing human soldiers with bots.
* At the end of the war, if you don't need those bots, you just dissasemble them, or mothball them. As far as I can tell you can't mothball humans, and sending back to your country soldiers who fought for several years can be a difficult tasks. They must adapt once more to civilian lives, and depending on how well the war turned out, it might be very hard for them. Remember the movie "Das Wunder von Bern", or the *Miracle of Bern*, when the father comes back from its prisoner camp. And how well other germans think of him. Now, deal with 8 million conscripts going back from a world war, with no jobs at all and sometimes with hate from the public opinion (remember Rambo!)
* A wounded soldier costs more to its army than a dead one. You must take care of him, several people need to support them. And apart from physical injuries there are also mental ones to deal with. The horrors from war caused many trauma, especially in the first one. Do you remember when the Allies never wanted to wage a world war again after that one? Remember how people let fascist do what they pleased, hoping to avoid another slaughter? That's the cost of having humans bear the weight of a full out war. Your bots on the other hand will never ever complain.
* When a bot dies, you can replace easily it. When a human dies, you can't do that so easily. For a small and rich country, it would be the perfect fit to counterbalance a low manpower (or low commitment to the army). Counterbalancing manpower with technology was attempted several times in human history, and sometimes it worked like wonders: industrialization of agriculture for instance, which saved enough manpower to send more men to war without starving to death. This is also why China or India couldn't send tens of million soldiers against the Japanese/Germans, because most of its workforce was needed elsewhere.
So what more do you need? Invest in automated war bots, saves human lives, enhance your war economy, and show everyone how good a ruler you are.
[Answer]
Joining in late but here it goes.
No the robots wouldn't be used in modern warfare simply because they have dumb AIs. What the robot needs to be viable is a smart AI. A robots ability to aim and shoot as well as walk around would all be directly tied to how smart and powerful its AI is. Just because a robot has detected movement, doesn't mean it is smart enough to identify the movement as a enemy, friendly, civilian or just the environment around it. It would be more effective to have the robot grunt remotely controlled by operators (Which I assume is possible because you have a fully autonomous robot and exo skeletons).
Next in terms of raw power/destruction and beefiness, it would still end up being a foot soldier. More effective methods such as drone/planes/ships/armored vehicles/tanks/missiles/etc would render the robots ineffective. This ties into the dumb ai as well as the robot would likely be unable to react to sudden attacks, not stay under cover, walk in the open and so on as it is supposedly "dumb". The pure development cost and production costs of several robot grunts would be better spent developing larger scale missiles/drones fitted with better weapons which would rain fire onto the robot grunts.
The main problem I see with a robot grunt, is that any amour or weaponry it is assigned would be better and more cheaply be placed on a person. The robots power supply, processing unit and motor sizes would all be fairly large and bulky, and if they were more effective than a human, it would still end up being a large bulky robot, which would lead to more armor and more weight and an endless cycle.
What would be very effective is a smart robot that follows orders to the letter. Basically the reverse situation. That would allow the robot to utilize its superhuman strength, lack of emotions, as well as its computer brain which would allow it operate and move with perfect(or close to perfect) accuracy, react faster than humans can comprehend and allow it to predict human behaviors and tactics with cold hard logic.
[Answer]
From a military point of view, robot infantry have a large number of upsides.
Separatrix mentioned one of the most important factors, namely obeying the order to kill. This is not an issue for a robot. And should it be, fix the programming.
Separatrix also mentions the problem of relatives and the general public not valuing crippled heroes very much, and how this doesn't apply to machinery.
Then there is fear, and misjudgement: I seem to remember that during Operation Desert Storm, most wounded US soldiers were victims of friendly fire. Even if that wasn't true, friendly fire is always an issue in a chaotic scenario, where shooting first and identifying the target second might be a decision of life and death. A robot has no life and doesn't die, so even if it was capable of fear, it wouldn't fear death or pain, and it should be highly capable of distinguishing friends from targets.
As a result, a robot should be more efficient in many ways.
Also, a wide variety of weapons are useless against robot. Psychological, biological and chemical warfare simply won't hurt a robot.
A robot doesn't even need air to breathe. And it only needs power while active. It doesn't engage in recreational activities, it doesn't become tired, it doesn't need sleep, but when off-duty, it needs nothing: no air, no food, no entertainment, no comfortable temperature.
You mention a multi-planetary society. Just think for a second about the difference in transporting a human army and a robot army. The robots can be stacked in the cold, dark and airless cargo hold, and stay there until they are needed. Humans have a weird tendency to not responding favourably to such treatment. Oh, and humans generally value being paid, preferably continuously.
Finally, there is the issue of training. Every human soldier has to be trained individually. This takes time, the only resource that cannot be compensated for. A robot gets his training via upload, which can happen remotely, even while in combat.
The downsides will probably be limited ability of decision-making. But that is easily compensated by remote commanders.
[Answer]
**Pros:**
* **Accuracy:** Using machines and infrared sensors to aim your weapons
could potentially make robots vastly more effective than human troops. Being able to reliably hit a target from insane distances would effectively neutralize most human troops.
* **Perception/Reflexes:** Machines would always be "awake", and would always be on full alert, processing 360 degrees of video looking for enemies. Given halfway decent cameras, they could also do this at huge distances, much further than a human could.
* **Basically Everything Else**: The stuff we care about in a good soldier (strength, agility, endurance, obedience, etc) are all things where machines either currently or will soon vastly outmatch humans. It's actually the "simple" stuff where machines start to show their flaws.
**Cons:**
* **Friend/Foe Identification**: Robots don't know that the United States and Russia even exist, much less which side they're supposed to be fighting on. Trying to explain to a robot which side to shoot at, and which side to protect, is something we still haven't really figured out. Recognizing uniforms/flags makes them easy to fool, transponders are unreliable, etc.
* **Unexpected Situations**: Robots are terrible at adapting to the unknown. This includes repairing damage, spotting enemies disguised as friendlies or civilians, dealing with unusual terrain, etc. Reloading guns and refueling can also be surprisingly challenging, though given your society's technological advancement that part is probably figured out.
* **Hacking**:This is probably a big reason why the US and other advanced countries haven't mostly replaced their armed forces with robot by now. Explaining to a robot who it's supposed to be fighting for is insanely difficult, and one hacker could potentially take down an entire army's worth of robots. You'll probably have to handwave this in your setting, or just say that the robots are not wirelessly networked to prevent this sort of thing. Instead, their orders are inputted physically when they are sent on their mission. This would make them even worse at dealing with the unexpected, as their missions can't be updated, but it would prevent hackers from reprogramming them in the field.
[Answer]
## Very
In the Vietnam war it is thought that only ["on average fewer than three [out of ten US Soldiers] ever fired their weapons in combat"](http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-actually-fired-their-weapons-at-the-enemy-during-the-vietnam-war.htm). If your robots fire 100% of the time that makes them around **$230\%$ more efficient than the average (American\*) human soldier**.
Your robots don't feel emotion, they aren't scared or homesick, depressed or uncomfortable...there is plenty that might effect a human soldier's efficiency. They can leave a team mate to die, sacrifice themselves or an ally the moment it becomes tactical to do so, things the humans couldn't do...things we wouldn't *want* the humans to do.
\*Not saying it isn't true for others but the study was based on Americans, perhaps there are cultural effects.
[Answer]
One possibility in here: assuming that you don't trust robots on the
battlefield, use the humans (even privates) as merely commanders.
Put a soldier out on the field with a designator. Make it something easy to point, perhaps a handgun form ractor rather than a full rifle. The soldier points and shoots, "painting" the target with a rapidly-changing laser that sends out an encoded message saying "I authenticate myself as PFC Barnes, and I order you to attack this until it is dead". Any robotic platform seeing this authenticates the user and unloads on it. Add an actual handgun to the designator for last-ditch defense, and consider dropping the rifle from the human's kit.
Unless the target sees the paint signal (the soldier "paints" the optical sensor), all the gunfire (and thus attention/aggro) goes to the expendable weapons platform. This turns the human into a Forward Observer and replaces big gun artillery with expendable autonomous artillery.
[Answer]
It is completely viable if executed in the right way. Current drones are most commonly controlled by an off board computer making their actions easily trackable even if they are being commanded through encrypted channels. So that is one flaw that could be easily fixed by giving said human like drones on board AIs as well as a targeting system able to tell the difference between friend or foe. And many people would also say the human like shaped would hinder their abilities. But these are robots were talking about. Machines that can do whatever we design them to do. So they can carry just about any kind of weapon or equipment imaginable as long as its a size that the chassis can handle. A little food for though when thinking of possible designs for such machines. Make them smart and capable.
[Answer]
Forget the money angle. Forget the training angle. Forget all the angles. The only question is how do I ensure they aren't turned against me in some way. The short answer is: ya don't.
Robots aren't loyal. You programmed them to recognise enemies somehow and shoot them. All it takes if modifying either the enemy recognition part, or the decision to kill part, and suddenly your army is worse than unless.
Robots are information leaks waiting to happen. They might hold battle plans, strategies, backdoors to your communication channels. There's no telling how much information your enemy can gather from even a dead carcass. Once they have hands on your hardware, you should consider the whole system compromised.
Robots aren't less vulnerable. A localised EMP would be bad news. You might be able to blind them with a simple, dirt-cheap IR blaster. Or maybe you can lock them out by DDoSing their network interface. Being superstrong isn't being better, particularly if you can field an equally strong human with a power armour.
You don't want an army of robots that has no allegiance to you. You don't want an army of robots you can't protect from prying hands. You don't want an army of robots that only redeeming quality is brute strength.
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[Question]
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I want my world to be set in early to mid Industrial Age but for various reasons that I won't go into here I don't want there to be any gunpowder based weapons. Is it possible for a society to advance to the Industrial Age without ever discovering gunpowder?
[Answer]
If I understood the question correctly, **No** and **Yes**.
**No**, it is extremely unlikely for an industrial civilization to not know and use gunpowder.
It is a simple mixture of three fairly common and easily accessible substances. It is unlikely that discovery of gunpowder could be prevented by its components being scarce. It is also unlikely that a civilization capable of industrialization would fail to have the necessary chemistry and notice the effect saltpetre has on burning. Or fail to use explosives for mining.
**Yes**, it is possible for them to never use the gunpowder for guns. Making it, I guess, blasting powder instead. Or black powder. Or fire powder.
There is a direct link from discovering black powder to fireworks and low explosives, but guns actually require an extra step IMHO. Your people need to want siege weapons capable of breaking walls. If your civilization doesn't have fortifications it doesn't need siege weapons. If it doesn't need siege weapons, it will have no need for cannons. If it doesn't have cannons, it won't downscale them to guns. No airguns either.
Having fortifications and being industrialized do not seem to be connected in any way as far as I can tell. Thus there should be no reason not to have an industrialized civilization without fortifications.
Of course, the history of such civilization would be quite different from ours. How different is really a separate question, but I think your world would need to be dominated by strong and stable central governments capable of suppressing rebellions and unrest without needing fortifications to protect themselves. A government that has no use for fortifications would naturally ban anyone else from having any. And really, fortifications are too expensive to build and upkeep unless you actually need them.
Additionally, you'd need the government to not need to fear external threats. Some empires did actually reach this level of power for a period of time. There are several scenarios for this. You can have a single superior empire that suppresses "serious" warfare in its entire area of influence. You could have a diplomatic system between states that suppresses warfare. Either in general or merely siege warfare. Siege warfare makes wars longer and more expensive, so people could simply agree not to build fortifications if conditions are right. Such agreement would probably only last until the next major war, but it **would** suppress development of siege weapons. And the political system could be stable enough to prevent major wars.
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It is certainly possible. Mechanisation is what defines the industrial age, and mechanisation is entirely separate to gunpowder. The first thing that was mechanised was agriculture with things like reaper-binders. This freed enough population from working on the land to be employed in factories. The next was the textile industry which was relatively simple to automate and from there it snowballed.
There is however a major caveat to all of this. As your industrial revolution progresses more and more chemistry is going to be required for things like metallurgy (which is fairly important if you want metal good enough for things like steam engines.) The further into an industrial revolution the less and less likely that a simple chemical mixture like gunpowder would remain undiscovered.
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It's quite hard to say. [Drilling and blasting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drilling_and_blasting) has been key to mining and quarrying since 1627 and because mining is key to industrialisation it's certainly going to have an effect.
Whether it would prevent a culture from industrialising or not depends on how well that culture manages to bypass explosive mining, which is still standard practice, and develop mechanical mining processes to replace it.
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Maybe it is not nice to say, but warfare and weapon research is often the main driver for techical development.
Just to give an example in your reference era, thermodynamic started when somebody noticed that drilling a cannon generates heat and then started investigating this.
If you remove gunpowder you remove some if not all of the need for better metals, than can withstand the explosion without blowing off (too often) the face of the gunman.
Also, no gunpowder would have made the expansion of Western nations into America, Asia and Australia more difficult if not impossible, due to the limited logistic capabilities which could not sustain a long term engagement far away from homeland. This would in turn have reduced the growth of those nations and, again, the need for better technologies.
Therefore my answer is no, without gunpowder it wouldn't be possible for a society to develop until industrial revolution.
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There are two problems one will have to solve, to allow industrial technology but no gunpowder: firstly, how could an industrial society not discover gunpowder on its own? and secondly, could an industrial revolution (or a slower transition towards industrialization) happen without gunpowder?
# problem 1: Not allowing gunpowder development
(edit) I understand that the main point of the question is to examine the effects on the industrial society, and not explaining why gunpowder couldn't be developed, but I do still consider this relevant since the reason for gunpowder not to be developed still would affect the society.
## Rare resources
The first thing one could do to make gunpowder development impossible would simply be to claim that the components of gunpowder (coal, saltpeter ($KNO\_3$), and sulfur) are very rare on the planet on which this civilization exists; this explanation would, however, have some problems since the chemical elements involved in making gunpowder are essential building blocks of living organisms, because one would have to come up with an explanation for how this planet ended up without some of these elements, and because a scarcity of coal would make industrialization quite hard.
Not even to mention that the chemists of your society still could invent other explosives, which doesn't include the rare components.
If for instance sulfur is rare, you should still be able to make nitroglycerin and TNT, and if it is nitrogen which is rare, oil (both vegetable oil and from the underground) could be used to make firebombs.
## Religion/culture
Maybe the dominant culture or religion could ban explosive weapons, perhaps because they consider it to be demonic, or out of fear that the population would use this weapon against the ruling class.
There are an obvious problem with this: if one civilization bans gunpowder, it would easily be overtaken by another one, which doesn't. Using this explanation might, therefore, require the assumption that one civilization long before gunpowder was discovered, became the dominant power on the planet – If you want this to be set on earth, you could for instance claim that Alexander the Greats empire, the Persian empire, Rome, Carthage or one other ancient power came to dominate the world.
This dominant civilization would not be threatened by any other power in the world, in would therefore not need powerful weapons such as gunpowder for military purpose, and with the influence that comes with being a superpower, this dominant empire might be able to force any still independent nations to also obey their gunpowder-ban.
The superpower could then go on to eventually (possibly much later than if they had had gunpowder, and as pointed out in a comment, maybe not as a revolution but rather a slow transition) invent industrial technology on its own, and even if the superpower at some point should collapse, leading to the end of the gunpowder-ban, it would still take a while before anybody developed effective gunpowder weapons.
# Problem 2: industrialization without gunpowder
Something many people have pointed out is that gunpowder has been used in mining for a very long time, and one could therefore validly have doubt to if a society without use explosives could mine enough resources to fuel an industrial society: But it is actually possible to do explosive mining without any explosive chemicals. The Roman empire did, for instance, use the [Ruina Montium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruina_montium "Ruina Montium") technique, in which they would lead a lot of water into a mountain very quickly, causing it to explode from the pressure.
I do of course not know if Ruina Montium alone could substitute explosives in mining, but at least the technique shows what an already advanced civilization can do without gunpowder.
# Conclusion
In conclusion, I can neither say yes nor no, to the question: »Is it possible to have a Society to evolve into an industrial age society without discovering gunpowder?«. I have tried to outline some assumptions one could make, but I am not even convinced myself that they would be enough to achieve what you want, but even if it is possible I find it quite unlikely that an industrial society would not have gunpowder
# Disclaimer (Edit)
I have only now noticed that another answer posted about the time when I started writing this answer contains the same suggestions for explanations as to why gunpowder couldn't be developed, this answer was however written completely independent from that other answer, and i believe it looks at thing from a slightly different angle, but if this answer is to similar and ought to be removed, please write that in the comments.
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The answer is not really.
Here is the thing: Industrialization demands some kind of advanced chemistry. And in chemistry, you end up with explosives very, very quickly and straight forward. It's like asking if humans as a species could learn swimming without discovering fish - they are right there in front of you. There is just no way that we could've had anything close to our industrialization without discovering any explosives.
However
a) If there is little war, explosives might have not ended up on the battle field
b) If you would change certain aspects, making the industrialization "more primitive" - look, this needs to be a new question because this post would go on for pages, also please do some research yourself if you end up asking that question - if you drop all the things one can only do without chemical knowledge - you might reach your goal
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Yet another alternative is to have a weapon more effective than primitive guns. Remember the first guns were muzzle loaded balls with a packet of gunpowder, the barrels were not rifled to create spin so the guns were wildly inaccurate. The parts were not interchangeable, either, a broken gun meant making a new part by hand. Plus they could literally blind and deafen the shooter!
So the 'alternative history' could be to *advance* industrialization well before the discovery of gunpowder.
IRL, the Viking's had access to crucible steel 1200 years ago; we see it in some of their swords (Ulfbhert, see <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-viking-sword.html>, also <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2878512/The-mystery-magical-superstrong-Viking-sword-Researchers-close-supermonks-believed-forged-weapons.html>). This is steel as good and hard as modern steel, and available hundreds of years before the first written formula for gunpowder.
So, alternate history wise; suppose instead of just making swords with it, it was forged into machinery, and the magicians that made the crucible steel figured out how to make some of Archimedes weapons, too: repeating crossbows, lathes with diamond tips making fine machinery, spring steel that let archers fire accurately for hundreds of yards: Far further and more deadly than the best early blunderbusses. Suppose they fired needles, filled with lethal poison, and could actually be hand held like pistols, but with a hundred rounds instead of 6 of those big bulky bullets.
Our firearms have slowly ***evolved*** to be accurate and lethal at a distance, but that is for the same reason we have the QWERTY keyboard: It came first, was widely adopted, and became the awkward norm. If industrialization starts 300 years before we discovered gunpowder circa 1100 AD, because for some cultural quirk everybody knows how to make good steel, and some Archimedes or Da Vinci type figure of the time could make kinetic weapons powered by spring steel that made early gun shooters look like idiots playing with dynamite for no good reason; the bullets did not travel as far or as accurately as their steel darts: Say a marksman with a steel dart could hit the bullseye three times in 8 seconds at 50 yards, while a blunderbuss takes two minutes to load one shot and would be lucky to hit the target at all!
Modern steel, the discovery of fine cutting and grinding with diamonds, the invention of standardized parts. Metallurgy of our many kinds of steel would be obvious; the super hard alloys for scalpel sharp edges can happen.
On top of all that, industrial production of modern steel would help with the exploitation of other kinds of explosive fuels: Natural gas, gasoline and internal combustion engines, nitroglycerin. Even electrical discoveries are plausibly fuelled by fine metallurgical advances and refinement of metals and experiments with alloys.
Instead of gunpowder, magnetic rail guns.
The writing trick is just that something else got there first by a few centuries. It was evolved and refined by hundreds of little inventions and improvements, it was widely accepted in the culture, and the headstart was just too much for gunpowder to overcome: People were accustomed to "charging" their guns with machinery and/or horses winding thousands of pounds of energy into reliable heavy steel springs: Their guns were whisper silent, deadly, accurate, safe, carried dozens of projectiles and left no plume of smoke identifying the location of the shooter! Which made the first black-powder guns look like, to them, cavemen throwing rocks! It isn't that black powder and other such explosives were never discovered, just that the black powder gun was stillborn, a loud, smelly, inaccurate novelty, handmade by a few crackpots, that nobody ever saw fit to improve upon.
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One could make the argument that warfare drives technological advancement. The military budget is among the largest of the federal budgets, and they often fund research and get first dibs on potential applications. As an aside, consider that the US hasn't put astronauts on the moon recently because there is no cold war driving the effort. Any non-military applications are unintended (like mri machines). Even Einstein, who signed a letter to the US President at the time to not drop nukes, had his discovery of mass-energy-equivalence primarily used for military purposes, the studies of which further contributed to science driving military applications.
That said, it is not necessarily the case that only military funding drives technological advancement. But I struggle to find a continual funding source to invest in non-military applications that help further the cause. As a hypothetical, consider that the most dominant countries will have the most funding available for science research and also prioritize military spending to maintain said dominance.
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I would say Yes. If you are simply not looking for gunpowder, but allow other explosives, Dynamite which was largely used for mining, gets its explosive power from nitroglycerin, which has nothing to do with gunpowder, but would allow your civilization to mine effectively. If another concern is warfare, an often overlooked weapon is the airgun, which has the advantages of being silent, fireable during wet weather, does not produce smoke and can be fired rapidly depending on how much compressed air you have. They just tend to be weaker comparatively, but could defiantly be a driving force in warfare to spur development. You could also use pneumatically launched dynamite as a type of artillery.
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A large military budget. When guns were first developed they were hugely worse than a bow and arrow. However they were much easier to train a soldier to use. If bows had been more popular then the production of guns would not have improved.
The cannon was used because before the cannon an enemy force could hide in a castle until they were ready to fight. A standing army would remove the need for castles, and thus early cannons.
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Our spherical planet has two hemispheres divided at the equator. Those living in the north hemisphere experience the opposite season as those living in the south hemisphere at any given time of year. For example: New Zealand summer/Britain winter, USA spring/Australia autumn, etc. Is it possible for a planet to have the same seasons in opposite hemispheres? If so, how?
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Yes it is possible, if the planet has little axial tilt but an eccentric orbit. Then summer will be when it is closest to its sun, and winter will be when it is furthest away, which will be the same all over the planet — at the equator as well as in higher northern and southern latitudes.
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Of course. Just make sure the axial tilt is zero. Basically, 99% of our weather changes are due to the angle of solar incidence, and only a small amount is due to the distance Earth is from the Sun (elliptical orbit). Earth's axial tilt is roughly 23.44 degrees. For a given latitude, a little trigonometry will show how the angle of solar incidence (draw a line from the sun and see what angle it makes with the ground) changes as that axial tilt faces towards or away from the sun -- and note that "towards" in the Northern Hemisphere means "away" in the Southern Hemisphere.
## edit
Thanks to Matthew for reminding me that there's a significant change in the number of hours of daylight as the orientation of the axial tilt changes. That's at least as important as the angle of incidence of the sun's rays.
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# Yes
Expanding on the other answers here, let's start with an overview of why there are seasons. I really like [this description](http://www.primaryhomeworkhelp.co.uk/time/seasons.htm):
>
> We have seasons because the earth is tilted (wonky) as it makes its
> yearly journey around the sun. The Earth's axis is tilted at an angle
> of **23.5 degrees**. This means that the Earth is always
> "pointing" to one side as it goes around the Sun. So,
> sometimes the Sun is in the direction that the Earth is pointing, but
> not at other times. The varying amounts of sunlight around the Earth
> during the year, creates the seasons.
>
>
>
Here's a visualization of the orbital tilt and seasons from Wikipedia.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RmAQA.jpg)
The Earth stays roughly the same distance from the Sun because it has a (roughly) circular orbit. But there are a lot of different paths that a planet can take to orbit a star. When a planet moves farther from the star, the planet gets colder (winter). When the planet gets closer to the star, the planet gets warmer (summer). The relevant [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_orbit) is complicated but [this GIF](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Animation_of_Orbital_eccentricity.gif) shows several different orbits.
Imagine you're on the planet below. If the planet isn't tilted then the two hemispheres would experience the seasons at the same time. Check out [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55560/the-alternative-reason-for-the-seasons-highly-eccentric-orbit?rq=1) for more detail.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MhrAP.gif)
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Other answers are right at pointing at eccentricity as the most likely cause for global seasons. However, there is another possible cause: multiple stars.
If the planet were orbiting a double star, the distance to each star might change as the stars orbit each other. If they have different mass and bright, the total amount of heat the planet gets may change producing seasons.
A planet orbiting around one of the stars of the binary system could also get a changing amount of heat from the other star.
Interestingly, binary stars could lead to a wide range of changes in radiation and even color of light that could make interesting plot devices.
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Zero tilt, elliptical orbit are the requirements but there something else that is important...winds.
Winds blow due to pressure differentials due to mainly two reasons on earth, thermal insolation differences that drive sea-land vice verse winds and coriollis forces that drive planetery winds.
In the above situation even with uneven land-mass distribution you may find most winds blowing towards the poles...causing thinning of atmosphere near equater...people can correct me in the comments on this prediction I’ll be happy to edit.
[Simulation link here](https://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy/earth-history-topic/earth-title-topic/pi/season-simulator)
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There are five ways that this could happen:
* a **very** eccentric orbit with little/no axial tilt
* a pulsating star with little/no eccentricity or tilt
* the majority of the planet's energy comes from a star orbiting a black hole sharing a similar orbit with the same semi-major axis but has different eccentricity to the planet
* the planet is in a system with binary stars and little tilt/eccentricity
* the "planet" is a moon of a gas giant that gets heat from tidal locking
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The planet could be a rogue planet not orbiting any star. It exists in permanent winter darkness, the same in both hemispheres. This almost certainly isn’t what the question is looking for, but I figured I would include the degenerate case for completeness.
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As an example, Venus with its extremely thick atmosphere over a rocky world yields extremely similar temperatures and seasons over the whole planet.
Multiple circulation cells, very high density atmosphere, and thick clouds/dust to absorb insolation all conspire to make the surface conditions relentlessly the same.
Venus also has very little axial tilt, so it wouldn't have much for seasons even if it had only 1 standard atmospheric pressure. But you might adapt your story with Venus in mind.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Circulation>
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So, I'm well aware that [Sci-fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale). This is an effort to avert this for intragalactic conquest.
My mighty space navy has crushed a solar system's defensive fleet, and now control the space around a planet similar to Earth in population and distribution thereof. It's time to send in the troops to take control of all positions of relative importance so that the planet can be integrated into my growing empire.
My invasion troops are well-equipped; any one soldier could expect to win with minimal injury in a stand-up fight against one of the defenders' armour units (main battle tank or equivalent).
Assumptions:
* I need boots on the ground because I want to start integrating the planet into my empire; threatening them with orbital bombardment has just encouraged passive resistance - they won't attack, but they also won't do anything *useful* for me.
* Pursuant to the above, I would like the end result to be a revenue-positive addition to my empire. I'd like to add their economy to my own and (obviously after some rebuilding) have it be a contributing non-voting province. (In fairness, my home planets are non-voting as well. My empire subscribes to the One Man, One Vote philosophy. I am the Man, and the Vote is mine.)
* I will also need to send administrators after local resistance has been crushed.
* My soldiers, for all their impressive armour and weaponry, are intellectually and perceptually basically human-equivalent. They aren't any more capable of maintaining focus on multiple things than a well-trained soldier of the other side.
How many troops will I need to deliver to *secure* a planet of seven billion? If I want to do this expeditiously, how many drop ships would I reasonably need to deploy (for their geographical distribution).
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**No ground troops at all.**
You're a *merciless galactic emperor*. You don't need to be popular among a newly conquered people. You won't be popular anyway, regardless of how much you try. You merely need to deny them a realistic political alternative.
Appoint a local [quisling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quisling) with some existing plausible claim to rule as your viceroy. Let *them* do the hard work of dodging assassins, oppressing or co-opting the opposition, and integrating their world into your empire.
High ranking collaborator families should be housed offworld, effectively hostaged by the empire to ensure loyalty. The reward for loyalty is that their children will be among the ruling class of the empire.
Rotate a few of your battleships on station for a few decades to keep control. It will keep the quisling reasonably honest, and you are likely to need to impose several mass reprisals until the collaborator regime is stable. No warnings, no discussion - the planet continues to show impeccable behavior at all times, and to obey the collaborator government, or --blam!-- goes another city. Plenty of cities, after all, and more being built all the time.
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Do what the Assyrians did. Evict the conquered people, and spread them throughout your empire. Move your own loyal citizens to their world; maybe as a reward for your victorious soldiers. Don't allow the evicted to form enclaves. In a generation or two, their culture will be no more and they will cease to put up any real resistance.
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You can't do it with troops alone.
However, it can be done either by the slow method or the fast method.
In line with @AlexP's OP comments, the slow method would involve the carrot as well as the stick. Take over a small, defensible country. England would do for this since the water around it meas that you don't have to burn a "no man's zone" around it. Defend it from outside attacks with troops, installations and orbital strikes for big attacks.
Then use your technology to make their lives much better. Wait for things to calm down and then start offering the benefits to other nations. Some strikes will be necessary against the belligerent but no full scale invasions.
Once a significant majority of the population is under your rule, recruit troops from locals to clean out the pockets of resistance.
You might not even have to invade the first country if you can get them to join for benefits. Perhaps, operate the world using a pyramid scheme where any joined country gets a percentage of the profits from any nation that joins after them.
The other method is faster but not as profitable: remove the current population and bring in your own. Removal method is dealer's choice: bio weapon, chemical weapons, nukes, or a big rock. The native infrastructure is so comparatively low tech that you are going to have to replace it anyway so it doesn't matter if it gets broken.
If the invader has a slow population growth, the fist method gives the best long term profits. If the aliens BLB (Breed Like Bunnies) then the second method gives them resources and some place do their thing.
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There's a distinct lack of precedent present in the majority of the answers so far. Many of them were ultimately unsuccessful because the local population never truly accepted the oppressors. They all seem like good ideas on paper but ultimately they lack the backbone of any good occupation.
***Bureaucracy***.
Yes, occupation is about administration and record taking.
Truly the most insidious example of a successful occupation would be the Soviet Union's takeover of the Eastern Block (Poland etc). They're occupation was terrifying in it's efficiency compared with the previous Nazi occupation. In fact, it makes the Nazi occupation look like an appetiser; despite all the horrors of the holocaust, it was relatively poorly managed and resistance was certainly possible. The Soviets meanwhile had had a decade of practice on their own people back in Russia.
Lets pick it apart stage by stage.
**First the armed forces annihilated the local military presence** - in this situation it was the occupying forces of the Third Reich but it could have been the local populations military as well. As the front line passed, the true power of the soviet union came into action. For every frontline division that was involved in fighting, there was a second purely administrative occupation force. The Soviet invasion of europe was a masterclass of how to occupy. They put as much thought into this second wave as they did the front line fighting troops.
**Seize power**
The soviets openly invited local resistance and hiding government officials to greet their liberators and discuss the future. They had survived 6 years of nazi occupation. They were all duped, imprisoned and murdered leaving the populace with no figurehead to rally behind.
**Documentation**
Upon entering newly seized territory, every single inhabitant was documented and given fresh papers.
**Limit travel and seize communication**
Once registered, permanent road blocks and check points were installed. Anyone who didn't report for new papers will now be unable to move freely in the streets and will die. In a modern setting, this would apply to communication as well. How can you organise any resistance if you can't leave your neighbourhood even with the correct papers and there are no phone lines or mail services? Better yet, allow limited distance communication but wire tap it all so you can pin down where resistance is likely.
**Seize the media**
All local media sources are ruthlessly taken over or hunted down, preventing dissident opinions from being broadcast. These are quickly replaced with propaganda - finely tuned to read and sound like local people rather than the oppressors. In many cases, underground newspapers were secretly overtaken by the soviets in order to control the resistance forces from the inside, rather than defend against them.
**Create a neighbourhood watch system**
At the height of the soviet rein, it was estimated that every single person had 3 people watching them and reporting on them. The bureaucracy is terrifying. These could be government officials and secret police but also family and friends. With a reward system for identifying conspirators (better rations, quality of life, etc) it's easy to make people betray each other.
Run this for a few decades and you get a near enough wiped out and terrified older generation and a young and brainwashed younger one who doesn't know any better. This is essentially the real life basis for George Orwell's *1984* and a prediction of what was to come of occupied Eastern Europe if allowed to continue as it did in the late 40s. Assuming the economy doesn't collapse and lead to revolution, you now have a near enough permanent and stable placid population to do your bidding.
It's utterly unfathomable. But it happened.
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There is a difference between conquering a planet (fighting against the regular army of a planet on open field) and enforcing the rule on it (fighting against guerrilla, dealing with civil unrests and so on).
For the first part, during the first WW Germany mobilized 13M people out of a population of 67M, about 1 on five... For an planet of 7 bilions, we can assume the defending army will be 1 bilion strong. In case of a full scale war, even assuming you have the control of the skies and your soldiers are at the same level of an enemy tank, you would need in the best case an order of magnitude in the tens of milions soldiers.
You will have a better time using a divide and conquer strategy (as Romans did to conquer the ancient Greek cities): even if it is probable that the enemy world will try to unite against a big external menace, there will surely be different factions, each one with its own agenda.
If you control the orbit (and of course drop bombs on whatever on the surface seems a launchpad for rockets), everybody on the planet will know that the outcome of the war will not be subverted (at least, not in the short term): many people on the planet will surely try to ponder hot to take advantage of this situation.
So, just try to entice some of them, promising them the power after the victory (or - if you're a really vicious evil emperor - less harsh punishments). Wait for the intestine war to start and then send a small elite force to the ground to help your faction (you will find lots of similar strategies in history books). You can also help them bombing their enemies from the orbit.
This way, as already hinted in the other answers, the ruling faction of the planet will owe its authority to you and that be loyal to you. Just don't forget to keep (for a generation at least) some battle-ready battleships in the orbit of the planet in case your quislings decide not to obey anymore.
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You are in luck! Terrans have a long history of invading each-other in glorious bouts of violent imperialism. If you want to know what works on them, simply look at what worked.
## Copy the methods of successful empires in Earth history
[This answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/138577/42046) already describes the methods of the Soviet Union. This is a good place to start, as its rule went unchallenged (until its implosion, but we are not concerned about the fate of the whole empire here).
The British Empire was possibly the largest one in Earth history, and its control of oceans can help as parallel for your control of space. Notable things they did that worked:
Foster a local elite. The easiest way is to take people already in a position of power, and make them rule the others for you. Those who don't want to will be eliminated, you will find volunteers to replace them if needed. Use your power to keep them in power and in your debt, and pay them well enough for them to stand head and shoulders above the rabble.
From there, create a pyramid class system. This is very important, *all successful oppressive empires were built on it*. In its simplest form, you have your Citizens with the highest status, the local Citizens - second-class, but ruling everyone else for you, the oppressed Rabble, and some even more oppressed class so the Rabble has demotion to fear and someone to feel superior to. But really successful ones tend to use a more complex system: more classes, but also *competing* classes. So not only individual will compete with each-other for your good graces and the privileges going with it, but entire groups will also fight each-other to try and get higher in the pyramid by stepping on other people's faces. While everyone fight each-other to be your lackey, uniting against you will be impossible. Note that this isn't only in the upper levels of the pyramid. Even at the lower levels, people will fight each-other to not be at the bottom level.
Which leads us to the next point: foster hatreds. Cultural, racial, religious, geographic, national, the more the merrier! Humans have an instinctive "us vs them" mentality, use this to keep them divided. As the distant overlord, they may resent you but their carefully nurtured hatred of each-other will always be stronger - and it is self-sustaining! This will be one of your most powerful tools to keep the pyramid scheme working. And this helps shift the blame of your oppression to each-other, especially if you use them as local occupation peace-keeping forces.
Remember, small, local genocides are OK if the need arise, as long as you don't overdo it.
And of course, pervert local institutions to your own ends. If there is a caste system, turn the ruler/ruled/you-foul-my-air-miserable-wretch knob to eleven. If there are religious institutions, make sure the (surviving) high priests are now using a message compatible with your rule, or diffuse hatred of other groups, which is almost as good. If there are local administrations or hierarchies, take them over, etc...
An old trick, cultural domination is also important: use your control of media for bringing your culture, and keep the message that it is superior to their own primitive local cultures. Send the children of the local elites local Imperial schools, and to universities on your core worlds, to be formed alongside your own ruling Citizens. They will never be of equal status, of course, but they will think they are part of your empire, and be trained to think as such.
Another old trick: form local soldiers and send them fight/occupy different worlds. That way, not only you get more (and more sacrifiable) soldiers, but you get them to fight *for* you, thinking themselves as *your* soldiers, even going as far as [sacrificing their lives](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFfHp83Xm04) for the honor of protecting your oppressive rule.
Now, those cunning humans have come up with new, interesting systems of oppression.
You can go for 1984, for example, if you are a more hands-on kind of oppressor. You need to build a (or rather, several) totalitarian system using hatred, systematic rewriting of reality through the media, thought police and eternal war to keep them in check.
You can also go for the more modern Social Credit system that one government is kind enough to be experimenting on their own population for you. You can see this as an amelioration of the 1984 system, using the wonders of mass communication and mass data treatment technologies. Possibly the most efficient thing they ever came up with, though experimental trials are still running at the moment of writing this, and it may not work everywhere on Earth due to lack of infrastructure.
With that, in one or two generations, Earth should be firmly in your grasp. There may be a few pockets of unrest or even outright rebellion here and there, but you can use that to help the "hate-each-other-and-compete-for-your-favours" part of the scheme, by sending opposed groups fight them off. And if it degenerates into an all-out uprising, well, you still have orbital control. Use your elite forces, air superiority and orbital strike platforms to protect your Imperial districts, negotiate with the many groups that hate each-other more than you, and they will spend more time horribly killing each-other than killing you. You may loose a few Imperial Citizens, but heh, you can always bring more to replace them. At worst, you can re-invade the planet.
But what if there is a really, really bad rebellion?
If something went very, very wrong, for example psyops teams from a rival empire have sown organized rebellion, this may not be quite enough. Fortunately, humans came up and have somewhat refined another method for quelling rebellions: the Terror.
Now, this can take several useful forms, the original one being the political Terror. But we are talking here about the military form, used to hit a population so hard it cannot physically sustain an insurgency anymore.
This is rather simple, really, but you have to do it right. First, hit what allows populations to sustain local insurgent forces: hospitals, urban concentrations, food production... Then, make sure you commit atrocities on local populations while fighting insurgents. Here again, having local groups hating each-other is especially useful. Then, use widespread torture. Not as an information-gathering tool (though that's one of the best disguises), as it is *terrible* at this job. But it is one of the most efficient tools to terrorize a population.
And never forget: hit the less extremist group first. You want to escalate the situation, and make sure that the population understands that it has a choice between your admittedly horrible but more or less stable rule, and the even more horrible and violent rule of hate-driven fanatics exposing them to atrocities from both your forces and said fanatics. Be the lesser evil by making sure you destroy lesser evils than you first. And don't worry, surviving humans are easy to escalate and join extremists (including your forces) when caught in that.
But only use it if things really go bad, this will put a dent in the value of the planet. Having a few zones like that in your empire may be useful to train soldiers - and atrocities committed in your name against local civilians a cheap way to build esprit de corps. Not as good as modern training, and possibly counter-productive for your best troops, but cheap and good enough if you need cannon fodder. But you may want to avoid those zones if you can, they can be quite a bother to sort out in the long term.
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Note that those human empires tend to fall apart long-term for the same reasons that make them stable short-term: your top of the pyramid, the ruling class on your homeworlds, get used to the resources they get from the peripheries and lower classes, but exploitation of provinces tend to be unsustainable over generations (because no-one will make the effort to collect less to make it sustainable over longer than they are here in the first place). As such, at some point peripheries have been exploited to the ground, and cannot produce more.
At this point, you have to conquer more, as your core ruling class will turn on you if you don't keep their funding at the same level or more. And at some point, the empire either runs out of places to conquer or become too big to manage.
Unless something else topple them violently before, this is generally how human empires fall apart. But maybe you'll do better, who knows?
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**A platoon per independent leader.**
You don't need to control the populace, just the people who govern them.
As much as possible, you should maintain the local power structure, just add another level on top. You. Deploy a platoon of Space Marines to "guard" whoever was in charge of this planet, whilst also conveniently reminding them who they now work for.
Simultaneously, bring their family into the fold back on one of your core planets. Give then an Imperial education and lifestyle befitting the family of a planetary governor. This way you are already Indoctrinating the next leader about the right way to do things and using them as hostages to keep the current governor in line.
Then, give the governor some modest quotas and let him do his thing. People are much more likely to follow if it's someone they've known all their lives who are still giving the orders.
You may have to do this multiple times if it's some backwards planet with multiple independent nations, but if you get a few dissenters, that's when you start glassing things from orbit or deploying marines to aid the loyalist nations in subjugating their fellows.
After that, you just have the local media and education systems start pumping out Imperial propaganda and culture to convert the next generation.
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Depends on how much you expect the population to resist, and whether you expect there to be a ground invasion or not.
For a relatively passive or non-hostile population, you could look at ratios of police to civilians in the real world. For example, in the US, it's about 1:500. (~670,000 sworn officers for ~325 million residents.) I'd say that's your (unrealistically small) minimum for purposes of keeping the peace, if the planet basically gives up, doesn't fight a ground war or conduct an insurgency. For an occupied population of 7 billion, that works out to 14 million occupying soldiers, as your baseline, keep-the-peace-during-peacetime requirements.
Of course, you won't be at peace initially, and you'll probably want to bring more soldiers just in case (it's always better to have too many heavily-armed killers at your beck and call than too few), and you probably don't want to just assume you'll encounter a passive population, because that never really happens. Even the most legitimate governments with wide popular support have troublemakers occasionally killing their assorted agents, and you'll have the issue of how to replace forces lost to attrition.
So, I'd suggest relying on a military model, and the latest Iraq war is probably a good model. The invaders had overwhelming technological and operational superiority (air superiority and so on) and brought about 300,000 troops against a population of ~26 million, for a ratio of about 1:85. As in your scenario, the actual ground war was expected to be a foregone conclusion, which it was, but the invaders still brought an order of battle comparable to the vastly inferior Iraqi armed forces (~375,000) at the time. After the invasion, many of those soldiers went home, but they were supplemented by 850,000 Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish militia forces numbering ~70,000 (and administering about a third of the country). Ultimately, during the Iraqi occupation, there were approximately 1 million allied soldiers and paramilitary forces to control a population of ~26 million, for a ratio of approximately 1:26. That would be over a quarter billion occupiers in your invasion. Yours would have greater superiority over the opposing forces than the mostly Iraqi security forces did in Gulf War II, but then again, you'll have a more hostile population to deal with, probably won't be able to recruit many local forces to help, and have to deal with replacing attrition loses... so I'd keep a similar ratio.
I'd suggest you would probably want a similar approach. You'll want a similar order of battle to the opposing forces, and a ratio of occupying forces comparable to what the US had during the height of the Iraq occupation. The US had advantages you won't, in being able to install a local government and use *their* forces for the vast majority of the occupying force. That seems unlikely to apply in an alien invasion scenario, and it's also unlikely that you'll get the population to fraction along sectarian lines, where the insurgents are solely from a minority group of the population.
To determine what the opposing force will be, I'd look at the total war model, WWII, being a recent one we have lots of good data for. In those conflicts, approximately 20% of the population of the invaded countries became members of the armed forces. In your case, I'd double that. (I doubt that the planet you're invading would exclude women from combat, like we silly humans did in WWII.) That would give you an opposing force of about 2.8 billion to contend with initially, and yes, you want a comparable force. Even with technological and operational superiority, offensive fighting while significantly outnumbered rarely works out well. We've never seen a planet-wide alien invasion, so we don't have good data on how that would work - maybe you could get away with less by conquering one continent at a time or something like that, or maybe you'd need more because the defenders would take up strong defensive positions, engage in asymmetrical warfare and keep your forces bogged down and surrounded on all sides in order to slowly grind your forces down.
Bottom line, I'd expect you would want to take a force comparable to the opposing forces, which you could expect to be ~40% of the population, or about 2.8 billion. You could probably use your advantages to drop your invading forces to ~2 billion or so, but you don't want to drop it much lower than that, or your risk finding your forces outnumbered significantly at points, which will result in heavy loses or a slow, grinding defensive operation, both of which are very bad for you as an invader. Once the war is won, you should expect a widespread insurgent activity, for which you'll probably want to maintain an occupying force in the hundreds of millions (~250 million going by the Gulf War II model).
Sure makes the idea of glassing the planet from space or biological warfare more appealing, doesn't it?
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Depends on methods and the state of the planet really.
If your invaders merely have bigger guns, treat the locals like trash and steal everything of note, there going to have a hard time keeping order however strong they are, as the locals would be highly motivated to resist.
Also just because your solders have a consider tech edge, it doesn't mean they are indestructible. Ambush, sabotage and psychological warfare can narrow gaps in power, and it all too possible that your own solders might switch sides (your a tyranny after all), or even worse someone with knowledge of how all your fancy tech works. At which point you've got everything you need for a dangerous rebellion.
On the planet side of things, a truly united and peaceful planet with a strong central culture and a strong tradition of Democracy would be far tougher to control that one made of hundred of separate states that hate each others guts and are ruled by tyrants.
It likely worth grabbing the history books on historic empires and learning how they operated and garrisoned. The British Empire, Mongolians and Roman Empire are all pretty well documented. So see if you can find some relevant reference material that way.
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Send troops to capture the means of energy production - the power stations (basic really), and of course the fuel depots (and the means to re-supply the power). The water networks are also terribly usefull.
At the same time you'll be hitting the communication networks by way of obliterating existing networks, including satelite, cable, radio and taking control of emergency broadcast networks (EBN).
Tell the people through the EBN's worldwide that you have control of the means of food distribution, power distribution, and water production. They should comply with the Emperor's dictates, or the their civilisation will be rendered innert - any resistance can be co-opted to fight - given military training, and positions of power....... In time the rest will see.
So, controlled by your military, mediated by converts, finaly your burearocrats can enter and take charge - promoting any who fall-in with the regime, ... and the rebels? If you can't co-opt them , then you kill them, publically - but always in a way that shows the benefits of falling-in with the regime.
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# Surprisingly few, if you play your cards right
Building on @Kyyshak and @McTrooper's answers, and recalling the maneuvering in the Lost Stars book series, I got the idea to sandbag your invasion force. On a ballpark, this method only requires **a navy the size of their largest state**.
**Step one: acquire power in the shadows**
At first send over only a handful of ships and throw your support behind a decently powerful local faction, ideally one that pays some lip service to freedom and democracy. Then as the civil war erupts, all the potential threats whittle each other away and you help your chosen faction to victory. Meanwhile, show your full military might to the faction's leaders so they know who's in charge. The result is that the populace is duped into thinking they're working for locals, while you're really pulling the strings. You can enhance the populace's loyalty here by offering small quality of life improvements through the favored faction.
**Step two: solidify control**
Start installing your own agents as council members, bureaucratic executives, newspaper owners, etc; in short, people with power disproportionate to their recognition. Start the propaganda wheels rolling. It might also be a good idea to move some of your own citizens to the new planet.
**Step three: begin exploitation**
Do not begin this step for a couple years after step 1. Impose a tax, again through the local faction. For maximum effect, give the populace something to show for their taxes at first: a new bit of technology, an expanded (but not too much) military, mutual-defense agreements, something big for them but little for you. People react to tax increases, not as much old taxes around for another year. By this time, **the planet should be producing an economic output for you**, so your question is answered. But I'd still recommend a follow-through.
**Step four: Directly annex**
By now, the populace should be used to the taxes. While you wait for that to happen, *slowly* show more and more of your strength. Ideally this would look organic, like you're a fledgling empire yourself and growing. Then you and the local faction can do something like a corporate merger that, like many corporate mergers, turns into a buy-out. You can demand more money for defense agreements and have your faction hand it off to you, then at some point the politicians in your pocket decide it's more efficient to pay the tax to your empire directly. Now you have them by the neck, and hopefully the civilians welcome you with open arms, probably in spite of them complaining about the taxes.
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I'd look at how Starship troopers handled the matter. The book invented the concept of power armor, which the ground troops wore as standard issue, and they were advanced enough to allow for patrols to consider a one trooper per square kilometer "Dangerously Close".
If we work this out that troopers can cover about 2 square kilometers of land, then you would need about 148,940,000 (total land area of Earth) /2 kilometers ^ 2 per person = 74,470,000 individuals for patrol duty (by comparison, the current active duty of the United States Army is just under 500,000 individuals. The entire United States Military is estimated to have about 1.3 million individuals in active duty, and is the third largest standing military in the world, and the Army is the largest branch.). Again this assumes future tech in play that allows such division of labor, and that number can be brought down if the Power Armor makes greater distances available.
This of course does not include logistics and support (Armies march on their stomachs is still in play) which typically requires a force of 4 men for every 1 man on the front line... again, allowing for a wider territory per front line man, you could narrow that number.
For ship deployment, ships are much bigger and will also be staffed to some degree, also increasing the number. A Nimitz Class Super-Carrier and the Ford Class replacements are the largest naval ships on earth. The Nimitz has a crew compliment of about 6,000 and the Ford is expected to be about 4,000 and the non-air wing crew compliment is 600 fewer than the 3,100 of the Nimitz, mostly due to better technology for many jobs. Carriers never operate alone and have several screening ships including a few missile cruisers, a Destroyer Group, and several patrol subs and many support craft. Space Craft with Carrier functionallity are better seen as Battle Ships on the Streets, Carrier in the Sheets (Because Battle Carriers in wet navies are stupid and don't work and Battlestars are trade marked. The fact that your flight deck is inside you ship, rather than on top of it in a space ship means you have all this wonderful hull space to mount guns. You can have a lovely bunch of laser guns, standing in rows. Big ones! Small ones! Some as big as your head!).
Star Wars probably has a better one where thinking of the capital ships are better seen as forward operating bases, rather than air craft carriers (still don't forget the compliment) which is probably similarly staffed as a carrier, but are more spacious allowing for tank repairs and what have you. I would suggest with this thinking and possible troop sizes to hold the whole planet, you could easily forgo that frightening 4:1 ratio for ground troop estimates and do them in your big ships. I would say a good ration here would be 1 of these ships per Continent, or 1 per 2 sub continents. For drop ships, it would be difficult to assess as you need to have a few drop zones per continent. I would suggest looking into operational unites, see compare that with the territorial range of one unit total (square kilometers per person times number of people in unit, and have maybe two or three per drop point or unit covered region (in case of breaks or drop ship losses).
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In movies there's always an hero killing the bad guy (you?), I'd start by killing the hero. The rest should be trivial.
And remember to kill him. No prison, as he would escape. Don't let him escape, as he would return. Just kill him when you can and don't start long monologues with the only purpose to give his friends the time to save him. Just please.
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So there's this human empire spanning over many galaxies in our sector. They rely on a vast fleet of faster-than-light spacecraft for war and trade.
4 brave brothers are accepted into the space travel academy. One is assigned as a fighter pilot, one as a fighter-bomber, one as a anti-small-spacecraft, destroyer-type, capital ship and one as a planet-or-capital-ship-buster capital ship.
Now, they must all have the same importance to the story. But it's hard for the fighter pilot to come meet his brothers, brag about downing 4 bogeys yesterday and the other one saying: "yeah, I downed about 4 thousand fighters yesterday too!"
And then the other brother said "yeah, I destroyed New Earth today, population: 20 Billion, I reckon some pilots were there"
What kind of special abilities could the pilots of the small vessels have to make them interesting in the large scale of things?
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If you can answer why the military builds these different classes of ship, you can probably answer how each brother can make an important contribution. Somehow, he was essential to his ship's mission.
**The Fighter**
* Interception: he successfully destroyed a bomber which was about to hit a critical target, such as a carrier, a transport, or a battleship which was one hit away from going kablooie. He saved thousands of lives with his combat prowess.
* Space superiority: he's an ace dogfighter, with many kills to his name. He defeated the Red Space-Baron.
**The Bomber**
* Ship strike: he did one of the things his interceptor brother successfully *stopped*.
**The AEGIS Cruiser**
* Interception: basically the same as the fighter pilot, but if he's a commander rather than a gunner, he'll win praise for good tactics, good timing, and having a great team rather than personal marksmanship.
* Ship-to-ship combat: since this isn't this ship's specialty, it's harder to arrange a suitable heroic moment. Still, the ship could stand its ground against overwhelming odds, interpose itself to shield another, or ram a larger vessel to buy time for a convoy to escape. In any of those circumstances, a brave man working damage control could save the ship or her crew, or keep it flying long enough to achieve that heroic moment.
**The Battleship**
* Ship-to-ship combat: as above, but with big guns to help make a splash.
* Planetary assault: nuking civilians is not terribly heroic, at least in our culture. However, leading an attack against ground defenses could be. There's unlimited room for personal courage and tactical brilliance.
Perhaps the first question is, are the third and fourth brothers the captains of their ships, officers, or crewmen? The captain of a battleship will always be senior to an ordinary fighter pilot - or even an extraordinary one. But a humble junior engineer on a battleship could be essential to it completing a mission.
In addition to conducting missions, a soldier may be recognized for extraordinary...
* Leadership
* Tactics
* Courage under fire, or while a POW
* Dedication - working long hours, quietly keeping essential logistics running
* Grit - surviving a wound and evading the enemy after crashing on a hostile planet
* Ingenuity - if you haven't seen *The Martian* yet, go do so now!
* Hand-to-hand combat in a boarding action, out fighting off saboteurs
* Integrity - preventing a mutiny or corruption
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The bigger the ship, the less likely the pilot will do anything other than just piloting. So, while the fighter pilot will actually down vessels by himself, the battleship pilot will probably just maneuver the ship so the crew in charge of the weapons can destroy hundreds/thousands of vessels.
The battleship pilot may identify himself with the whole battleship crew ("*We* destroyed 400 ships today"), but so can do the fighter pilot with his own squad.
And if you want them to be a little more than just links in the chain, academy training could be organized in teams, them being the leaders of their own team, commanding roughly the same number of pilots/crew and having similar contributions on the battlefield.
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**By acting as a distraction or a decoy**
I don't know what the military term for this is, but a small, fast ship (e.g. a fighter) could be used to lure enemy missiles *away* from the capital class ships. Fighters would be a lot cheaper than a destroyer, which in turn will be much cheaper than a battleship, so they could be an acceptable sacrifice.
Granted, the pilot would have to be (more than) slightly mad, and it would probably make more sense to use a drone for this - but that could be the pilot's reason for bragging! "Yeah, I got eight missiles locked onto me. That's eight missiles that didn't hit you lads."
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Let's consider some precedents, both in reality and other fiction universes:
* The U.S. Air Force had (still has?) planes like the F-5 while it also has the B-52. Plus, it still kept any plane at all despite all those Minuteman silos scattered around.
* The Empire of Star Wars has TIE fighters along side the Death Star.
* Most U.S. Navy Ships carry some form of long range cruise missile (formerly the Tomahawk, not sure what it is today), even the carriers. But the carriers have their air wing and even the smaller ships have a Sea Hawk helo or two.
* The Battlestar Galactica has its Vipers.
* Most armies have infantry units (men on foot with small arms) even when mechanized units (tanks) are available.
* Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers) had its little fighters- although EVERY episode ends with using the wave motion gun.
I think almost any audience will understand with just a small hand wave. You shouldn't need an extensive explanation.
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**Benefits of small vessels**
***Maneuverability:*** In space the more mass you have the more power and time you need to get moving. A small ship would be able to kick on thrusters and get to 3 or 4 G's with minimal issue, versus a capitol ship's mass. Changing direction or stopping would also be easier. A small ship could pivot and use the main thrusters to turn much faster than a large ship.
***Hard to spot:*** Space is pretty big, and in the heat of battle with a lot of chaff and debris flying around a small ship with a torpedo or two could get lost in the clutter and potentially get close enough to an enemy where defenses would be less effective.
***Atmosphere:*** A capitol ship designed for space combat is not going to be landing on planets or entering the atmosphere (unless you have anti-gravity as an option).
A small fighter on the other hand could enter atmosphere, engage aircraft, run missions, and land personnel (like spies).
All a capitol ship would be able to do is bombard the surface, which is less useful if you want to keep it habitable.
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Why small vessels ? Speed and Handiness.
Also, small vessels are easier to manoeuvre in atmospheres and under strong gravity, pressure, forces in general.
What could a small vessel pilot be proud about ?
He could be an acrobatic pilot for example (making looping over a DeathStar ?).
He could also make new speed records (I was travelling at X times the speed of light).
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Since you are specifically mentioning fighter-bomber, I'm gonna assume ordinary fighters are serving in distinctly different capability.
**What can bomber pilot brag about?** Well, about what they can do better than capital ships, such as: disabling particular subsystem of a capital ship, so either his brother can have a clean shot (engines, EW modules or shields come to mind), or even it is completely disabled (think Death Star); performing surgical strikes either in space or planet-side (saving a city from a tank group? destroying a planet won't do it, I suppose).
**What can a fighter pilot brag about?** Since there are anti-fighters capital ships, the existence of fighters assumes they are still good for something. Either it is, again, surgical operations (live capture of a criminal escaping in a swift small ship of his own), reckon ("I was to enemy capital and back"), or combat in a situation where capital ships are infeasible (hit-and-run against a fleet with capital-capital ships?).
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Two main arguments for the small guy:
* **Rock, Paper, Scissors.** In many universes including our real world, large ships gain armor and weapons power at the cost of maneuverability. In the real world, one fighter with an anti-ship missile like the Harpoon or Exocet can take out a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. And you wouldn't send just one to do the job; you'd send an entire squadron each armed with several of these missiles to overwhelm the fleet's defenses.
In space fleets, this is often reflected by larger ships having bigger guns that are more difficult to bring to bear on smaller, more nimble ships. The planet-buster can destroy an entire planet but can't shoot down a fighter unless it's standing still in space. Star Wars is the most well-known example of a universe where small ships still matter because the big ship can't accurately target them. Star Trek is the biggest counterexample, where the weapons of a starship, especially phasers, are too powerful and easily aimed for small craft to be effective except in absolutely overwhelming numbers.
* **Scope vs. Skill.** The fighter pilot got his four kills by getting into a rocket-powered laser with a cockpit, flying out into the void, maneuvering his fighter into an advantageous position, targeting his opponents and pulling the trigger. The admiral destroyed a planet by telling his tactical officer to make it happen. It's obvious which one was larger in scale and scope, but which one took more skill?
Along the same lines, people commanding big ships got where they were by being good enough with smaller ships to be trusted with the larger one. Fighter pilots don't generally move up to larger types of planes (their experience dogfighting doesn't exactly translate to flying a heavy bomber), they instead command other pilots in other planes flying with them (just like tankers end up commanding more than just their one crew, but other tank commanders in their platoon and other platoons in a company; this is usually as far as non-coms go, though). If these brothers are the same or similar age, the fighter pilot either screwed up *real* bad, or else he'd be of similar rank to the corvette captain at least, making him the commander of an entire wing of fighters. If the corvette captain can claim all the kills his gunnery crew gets as his own, and the admiral on the planet-killer can take credit for what his own crew does to ready and fire that ship's weapon, the fighter pilot can claim every kill, air and ground, made by his entire wing.
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Having things to brag about is very different from them having the same importance in the story.
Bragging is generally about individual or unit preformance. A number of other posts have covered this aspect so I will ignore it.
Having importance in the story depends on your plot line. Things to consider include heroic actions in the face of great personal harm, taking initiative in the face of disaster, assignment of missions considered extremely dangerous, or assignment of missions requiring extreme personnel sacrifice in the form of training or endurance.
Depending on the focus of your story it will be easier to use these for certain characters as opposed to others.
For instance, if the focus is ship-to-ship combat then it will be easier to use great personal harm for the fighter pilot or the bomber than the destroyer.
However you could also use great personal harm with larger ship types by creating scenarios where everybody has been killed or evacuated, OR by using enemy boarding parties to create situations.
There is a lot of wiggle room here to create important events or just brags for your characters depending on your story. It sounds like you have a lot of freedom to run with and create a vibrant story!
A source of possible inspiration include citations for various awards.
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Stealth, gentlemen, let's not forget stealth.
I agree with all the answers about maneuverability and would like to add - Easier to "hide" a small vessel than a large one. You can have a sensitive political situation where the fighter is a spy/assassin/rogue type and is much more cool with his tiny laser taking down that one bad guy before anyone figures out what/who did it. Sure enough, this guy might not be able to talk about his missions and will smugly smile to himself while his brothers blab about their everyday blow-em-up tasks.
Reg the boast about destroying New Earth - a small fighter can carry a nifty hydrogen bomb/super duper turbo doom device, no big deal (pun intended).
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I like the idea of using the smaller size to imagine better speeds.
Small vessels could be imagined to arrive much earlier into the battle, perform scouting or decoy while the big ones warp in.
So, thanks for suggesting that!
I'd like to add one: Small vessels are easier to hide. Small vessels could have cloaking abilities (to further enhance the scouting abilities).
I'd like to tip in something someone said about atmosphere - big vessels are just so heavy, no way to make them air-worthy. Small vessels could rely on jets and wings to travel inside planets.
Maybe "blink" (teleport short distances) is something that can be imagined to work only in small objects.
Just adding this answer to fuel thought in the right direction!
Thank you all!
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The fighter pilot is in charge of 1 ship, the Captain of a capitol ship is in charge of 0.
Sure, he can destroy a planet, but in order to do so, he needs written authorisation signed by the President, the Senate, the Minister for Defence, the supreme fleet commander and the Political Commissar.
The problem, is that the Minister for Defence went insane some time ago, the Commissar is convinced that the Captain is a traitor and will oppose anything the Captain proposes, and the senate only sits for 2 hours a week and has a backlog of planet destructions to approve.
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A tiny fighter is not going to be as powerful or as lethal as a capital ship, or capital ships won't exist. However, that's only looking at one side of things. Keep in mind the number game here. For the price of one capital ship you can build thousands of fighters. The reason they exist is that they can be the most economical approach to fitting their need. It may not make sense to build a huge capital ship that cost as much as a thousand fighters if 500 fighters together can do the particular job needed as well as a capital ship.
You see this with modern combined arms approach of the military. We have many different crafts of varying size and shape, each made to suit their need. A tiny frigate won't take out a destroyer, but it can prove more economical. In fact the old school uber-destroyers were pretty much done away with because smaller ships (okay, and more so aircraft) proved more flexible then putting all your eggs in one basket.
As to how that would factor in to your brother's and their little competition of importance, remember capital ships also have thousands of people. Sure one brother may be maning a capital ship that blows up an entire planet, but he is only 1/1000 of that crew. Can he honestly say that the ship wouldn't have blown up the planet without him? Can he claim credit for the deed as if he was single handedly responsible. Even assuming he had one of the most important positions on a bridge, as opposed to being ship cook, the fact is that he had an entire crew backing him up and, to a degree, he just passed orders down to others.
The person in the fighter was the sole person in the game. When he blew up the bomber that almost got in close enough to destroy the capital ship he, and he alone, was the one responsible for it. He can say, without doubt, that if he were not there the bomber would have made it through to the capital ship and destroyed it.
Thus while fighters may pack less punch, they may still get to be the super stars because they are they are out there making decisions on their own, living and dying solely on their own skill alone.
This could even set up a bit of a 'fight' over who did more. The capital ship brother says his ship did more damage, the fighter pointing out that he can take sole credit when he saved the day, who was more important? Is a small cog in a huge weapon more important then the sole cog driving a smaller one?
If you wanted to emphasis this sort of difference I would suggest having fighters be given extensive leeway in decision making, possible scouting far away or communications tend to be jammed during a fight, so he can show initiative to do something important when there was no one around to give him specific orders.
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In importance terms, none of them are individually important - they are all 1 man in a squad or team of others. So 100 fighter squad is considered as important as the 100 crewmen of the capship.
That means its not the ship that sets the story, but the individual acting within the group that develops the storyline. You should ignore what the ship is capable of relative to the other ships and consider the impact of either the interpersonal relations within the respective groups, or (if you must bring the ships into it) of the ships relative importance within the fleet. The fighter squadrons have as much importance within a war as a capship does, but I think you'll be losing a lot of the human story if you treat the ships are important.
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Don't forget that wars aren't about killcounts, they're about achieving your objective. You forced yourself into the counter by only considering kills, which would only be done by the guy with the most kills in the first place :)
You need to think about different scenarios.
Maybe the fighter pilot shot down a nuke headed straight for the carrier, saving thousands of people and a whole capital ship. Maybe he managed to guide his squadron to harrass the enemy bombers to prevent them from getting close enough in the first place. Maybe he just stood his ground against a hugely superior enemy, buying enough time for all those civilian transporters to jump away safely.
The fighter-bomber can brag about the time he managed to take out half of a battleship's guns with one great shot in just the right place, or the time he was on a (then) secret mission to deliver an ambassador that eventually brokered a peace, or when he was the last guy standing in the bar last night.
The destroyer captain could talk about how his great positioning in battle meant that the enemy didn't even try to launch his fighters in the first place, or when he managed to get to a wounded cruiser just in time to chase the bombers away before it could be crippled, or the time he got to escort the SpaceFleet Admiral-General himself!
The capital guy ends up being the hardest in the end. What kinds of individual prowess and bravery do you show on the bridge of a nearly invulnerable ship crewed by thousands? He would be the one to push the "kill" angle the most, because he would tend to have an edge (after all, his "killcount" would technically include all the kills of all those fighters, bombers and destroyers under him...). He's likely much more limited in initiative because there's a clear chain of command and a huge responsibility - losing a fighter because you're rash is bad enough, losing a whole capital ship... oops.
In the end, the most important thing is the dynamic between the brothers themselves. If they are generally friendly, they will tend to downplay their own achievements while glorifying the others ("Oh bollocks, I was sitting on my warm seat on the bridge while commanding the fleet, anyone can do that. You had the real balls diving into the swarm of enemy fighters!"). If they are more competitive or outright hostile, they will tend to do the opposite ("Your tiny-brain hardly has the power to *really* matter, commanding the whole fleet and keeping all those enemy ships in check..." "Right, real brave, sending people to their deaths while you hide behind your shield...").
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The small ship should not be a fighter at all, but a scout. Many pre WWII era battleships carried a sea plane who's job was to fly ahead and scout for targets, and the secondary job was to call in corrections for the main guns. Using the ship mounted director put quite a crimp on the useful range of the guns, generally the horizon was "only" about 5 nautical miles from the ship. Us ing a scout, the range was now capable of being extended to whatever the maximum range of the cannons could be (and 16" guns can shoot quite a bit farther than 5 miles....)
So one brother has the incredibly dangerous role of flying a small, stealthy scout somewhere within a light minute of the capital ship to direct the main battery and offer corrections should the laser or railgun miss the target or hit something non critical (this isn't going to be an issue if the ship is engaging with self guided missiles or torpedoes, however). The scout can also call in a warning if the target ship is making some sort of manoeuvre, or if it launches the only plausible countermeasure against a Ravening Beam of Death (RBoD): filling the sky with tens of thousands of Soda Cans of Death (SCoDs) to overwhelm the laser battery.
Just as a note, a RBoD is generally considered to be a lader powerful enough to engage at a light second (almost the distance to the Earth's Moon), so a light minute would considerably extend the engagement envelope.
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What kind of age range are we talking about here?
If there's only a two year gap between each brother, the oldest brother is only going to be 6 years older than the youngest.
Even if it is the older brother getting through the academy and getting on the planet-killing starship, he's only going to be a mid-level officer, and at most in command of a crew division. So the best he can say is that he was on the ship that destroyed the planet.
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Perhaps what makes the fighter pilot interesting is precisely the fact that he *doesn't* have a role "in the large scale of things". His desire to have such a role and emulate his brothers could drive him to make choices he would not have made otherwise.
You could use this disparity between the brothers as both a means of driving the plot and as a way of deepening the characters. The fighter pilot could envy the pilot of the cruiser for his rank (as I'd assume the bigger the ship the higher the rank), whereas the cruiser pilot could envy the fighter pilot for his daring and independence. Each of the brothers could admire and envy aspects of their siblings, which could cause them to do interesting and plot-worthy things.
If each of the brothers manages to do brave and daring feats that can be compared directly, then it might read as a less interesting story than if the differences were more pronounced.
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I have 2 analogies — I know the question was pointed in a warefare direction but i thought both would make a good point.
**1 (Combat value):** In naval warfare, specially in the 1600–1800, small ships were super agile compared to large ones. They could turn in a matter of seconds where large would take several minutes to make a turn due to the large weight.
According to Newton's second law, (force = mass × acceleration) you need less force to move a small space ship. Since there is no gravity to help with turning, no tarmac and no air to rest wings upon in space, you would need to have space engines (or RCS) to move the front of the ship in order to turn it.
Smaller ship means less thrust and faster turns. The same rules when you want to transport something. If you have to send a small parcel you don't use a Semi truck, you would use a small delivery truck. And in space you wouldn't use a large space ship to move small things or single persons (the point of this one comes in analogy 2).
**2 (Monitary value):** Now smaller vehicles are often cheaper than larger vehicles. My car surely cost less than a semi truck. But if you compare the value of the semi trucks with more fancy cars with better brand names, i think you would be able to compare value in both.
The same value would be visible if you think income vs. expense: the cheaper car makes less money, a semi truck makes more money than a taxi driver, but a semi truck is also more expensive to purchase and keep running, so somewhere in the end the two would align in running cost and cost of acquisition vs. income.
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First of all I'm not sure what kind military commander would gain a position of such authority that he had command over 4000 fighters while believing it was a good idea to send them against an anti-fighter destroyer capable of killing all of them!
What I think would really happen would be that the vast majority of them would escape outside the destroyer's range (he can't chase them all) in which case it's up to the fighters to chase them down before they can escape the destroyer and do some significant damage elsewhere.
As for the planet buster guy, unless that planet was entirely a military base with 20 billion soldiers and no civilians, I'm not sure "brave" is the appropriate word... If it was a normal planet which happened to contain enemy warriors, I imagine all he did was like smashing a beehive with a sledgehammer... you're left with a lot of pissed-off bees...
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If you would like to keep analogy with the current navy, then plane (small ship) pilots would be commanders (or lone crew) of the plane/ship so they would be officers (and thus academy graduates) and require A LOT of training. That is due to having to do a lot of things and making important decisions all the time.
In world war 2 era, the best pilots would be sent for additional training to pilot fighters while the rest would be assigned to pilot bombers.
On the other hand, a helmsman of the large vessel (be it destroyer or battleship) is just a driver. They do not make decisions or only to very limited degree - it is a job of captain and navigation officer to make decisions out of combat and in combat, it is mostly captains's job. As such, helmsman is generally a petty officer and so they are not academy graduates but rather promoted from enlisted personnel.
In fact I'd say in your case, small craft piloting brothers would be the ones who will brag about their exploits, not the drivers of battleships.
If you want the ones on big ships to have proper role, make them officer of some sort - commander of a gun battery or maybe the gunnery officers of those ships rather than helmsmen.
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If all of the pilots just press buttons to make their ships perform, then none of their jobs would require any special skill or aptitude; the computers would do all the work. For any of them to have something to brag about, we've got to get rid of those glory-stealing computers!
So lets mess with history a little bit. Five hundred years ago, a singularity event occurred in the star empire and the emergent AI killed millions before it was finally purged. To avoid a recurrence, no military ships contains any computerized equipment beyond simple navigation assistance.
Now, in the absence of those computers, the humans crew have a lot more to do... and they need special talents to do those jobs well.
Fighter pilots need great balance and incredible reflexes.
Bomber pilots need an incredible awareness of their location and the location of their target, plus a sense of their speed and momentum and the effects that that motion will have on their payload.
Destroyer pilots need incredible courage and coolness under fire. Their anti-space duties don't even start until an enemy vessel has them in its cross-hairs.
And Capital Ship pilots need restraint. They carry destructive power on an unimaginable scale, and every time that power is unleashed is a historic event. They must be supreme problem solvers, capable of finding other solutions when planetary destruction seems to be the only option.
In this world, the four brothers would have real reasons to respect each other immensely, because none of them can do what any of their brothers' jobs. Factor in the idea that any pilot-level aptitude is a very rare thing in your culture; perhaps only one in a million can do the job.
Finally, give each of them some battle experience. If each of these brothers have sat home in safety while one or more of their loved ones were in life-threatening combat, they will each respect and value the others much more because of it.
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In David Weber's [Honor Harrington series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse), the sci-fi setting purposely sets up conditions similar to age of sail ships-of-the-wall. Interstellar diplomacy takes months (not years or days), which is just the right amount of time for diplomacy to be interesting, and for navy ship captains to need to make decisions for themselves, on the spot.
Small ships are often sent out on patrols / missions outside the home system, while battle-fleet ships stay home in case fleet-vs-fleet action is needed to defend the system.
It's the cruisers that get sent to diplomatically-tricky situations, not massive stand-and-fight ships.
During an all-out-war, flying around in a battlegroup of super-dreadnoughts does happen, so the main characters in stories set while that's happening are more often on big ships. Otherwise, the stories more often focus on people in small ships. Sometimes they'll get into a fight when they're out on their own with no big ships around to help, and no time to send for help. If they hadn't prevailed, Bad Things would have happened.
So, **small ships are important because you *can* send them on missions where a big ship wouldn't be appropriate**.
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Anyone who's played Freespace should know that big ships have large, vulnerable subsystem blocks that can be disabled.
Small ships can do a surprising amount of damage with asymmetric, unconventional warfare while moving around a lot. Fighters also have subsystem blocks that can be disabled, but their small size (coupled with moving around a lot) usually means it's easier to destroy an enemy fighter than maneuvering around to take out subsystems.
Fighter pilot: "Ever taken out a Rakshasa-class cruiser solo? Dodge its fighter complement and beam cannons on the way in, take out its weapon and sensor subsystems with rockets and railguns, finish it off with the new GTM-11 Infyrno area-suppression missile. That thing almost has as much firepower as a mini-nuke."
Capital ship commander: "The forward beam cannon array on that thing is brutal. Lost my cruiser's weapon subsystem after 2 volleys and couldn't hit much of anything after that. Recalled to base after nearly losing engines and navigation to a coordinated fighter-complement attack."
(Read the Freespace 2 guide on wiki.hard-light.net for reference)
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Since they can't really work a job that would allow easy access to blood, I thought of having them volunteer at a blood bank then maybe steal a bag. Alternatively, is it plausible that they would come into contact with expired blood that needs to be thrown out? Or would the bank not allow them to be in contact with the blood unsupervised?
I want it to mostly be human blood, aside from the obvious feeding off victims. The timeline is modern day, vampires are not very well known in this universe. No one knows this character is a vampire. The blood would have to be somewhat frequently obtained, but not necessarily every day. This is in the U.S.
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**She has transfusion dependent anemia.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/o5oiN.jpg)
[source](https://www.todayshospitalist.com/the-end-of-transfusion-as-a-default-procedure/)
Her blood is low. Doctors can't figure it out! She does not seem to have an inherited disease like sickle cell. Her marrow is not normal but she does not seem to have cancer. They are working on it.
In the meantime it is clear that she is very anemic, and so she comes in every other week for a unit of blood to be transfused.
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This happens in the real world all the time. People are sick and need repeated blood transfusions. Some blood conditions are really rare and take a long time to figure out - this especially true if your story is set in the recent past. It will not work if your vampire is full on weird supernatural Dracula type turning into a bat / turn to ash in the sun. If your vampire is more of a corporeal being it could work.
If for your fiction she needs to drink the blood, when she gets home she knows right where it is: her veins. This would be fine for a fiction because a canny health care provider might figure out what she is doing.
She might not be the first. If I were an agency looking to recruit vampires (and they can be useful) I would start with a rare blood disorder referral service.
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### Bitcoin, Tor, a PO box, and express shipping with dry ice.
Totally possible to buy on the black market.
* [News source 1](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-43722084)
* [News source 2](https://www.cnbc.com/2015/02/15/chinas-blood-famine-drives-patients-to-the-black-market.html)
* [News source 3](https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/06/egypt-coronavirus-survivors-plasma-black-market.html)
* [News source 4](https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/worldnews/11944230/black-market-blood-trade-coronavirus-patients/)
My governments ["What can I import" page](https://www.abf.gov.au/entering-and-leaving-australia/can-you-bring-it-in/list-of-items) doesn't list it as a prohibited import, so it shouldn't be seized in customs if it's coming internationally. [Australia Post will carry it](https://auspost.com.au/content/dam/auspost_corp/media/documents/dangerous-and-prohibited-goods-guide.pdf) if you label the package clearly. (I'm answering for Australia as no location was given - so I'm using my own.)
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Alternatively, if your 15 year old is the only one in their peer group with a job, they could just buy it from their friends. Same if they have access to drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes by stealing from a parent - "trade you a bottle of vodka for 500ml of blood.". Hell that's probably a good trade - and the blood loss gives them a head start on feeling woozy.
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## Domestic Animals, Nursing homes, Cults, Drugs, and street Life:
If your teen has a nice, cozy home life with adoring parents, this might not work. But assuming your teen is a vampire because everything in his life is f##ked up, then all he needs to be is a street punk.
If human blood is essential, it's a little limited. But at 15, I was hunting deer and had access to farm animals. In the city? Cats and dogs, even birds and rats are ready victims. The local pounds will eventually catch on that you might have done something nasty when you come back a third time trying to "adopt" another St. Bernard. Volunteering at an animal shelter might help with this, and potentially give you access to phlebotomy supplies (you'll see why this is important), especially the extra-large gauge needles (used mostly for veterinary medicine) that make taking out more blood easier. "Job shadow" the vet, and he might even teach you how to draw blood (the rules for animals are looser than humans). But you wanted the animal blood to be only a partial solution.
For the kid with the respectable family, volunteering with vulnerable children and adults gets you access to lots of weak, helpless victims. A retirement home or nursing home will be full of people who either won't understand or be too afraid to discuss your disturbing habits. Cultivate your victims, select those most vulnerable, and don't get so greedy that you kill anyone. Your kid can learn phlebotomy (surprisingly easy and considered low-skilled) and help with blood collections if he wants to be secretive. To actually do it professionally, you need a diploma/GED and to be 18. Fake these and your covered. Otherwise they may be willing to train you, but they just can't have you doing it officially. These folks are being drawn often on a daily basis. Who notices if you collect an extra red-top and guzzle it down afterwards? You can steal blood collection supplies to use in other situations. Patients might not realize you aren't supposed to be drawing their blood, especially the confused ones. This also gets you access to the biohazardous waste containers where blood is discarded after testing. 90% of any blood is ultimately discarded, and even if your kid isn't allowed to do the actual phlebotomy, volunteering or "job shadowing" medical professionals gives you access to the behind-the-scenes medical stuff. If they do testing on-site, it gets thrown out right there.
If the vampire thing gives him any kind of special powers, that helps immensely. If he has charm/aura powers (like traditional vampires) he can start a cult of screwed up loners and desperate hangers-on in school (assuming he can tolerate light). After school, they all go out somewhere, smoke dope & cigarettes, and he feeds on their blood. By pretending to be a vampire, he can feed his actual vampiric needs. If he needs muscle, then he turns his cult into vampires and they all hunt for victims together.
Selling drugs gets you access to lots of desperate people who might be fine getting drugs from the weird kid (if you're not subtle, one who takes blood in exchange for drugs sometimes). You can make the claim you sell it to researchers - those phlebotomy skills come in handy again at this point. Since you don't care if these folks get diseases, get a phlebotomy needle (stolen from any number of places) and a 20ml syringe (reusable). Clean it with bleach between uses if you don't want to hurt people too much. The bonus is when they get high, stoned or drunk and incapacitated. Then they are helpless prey for your street punk and are unlikely to remember what happened - and a needle prick is a lot less obvious than a bite (especially on a junkie).
Homeless people, either on the street or in homeless shelters, have many of the same vulnerabilities that the elderly in nursing homes have. They're desperate, or sick, or incapacitated. They're unlikely to report crimes, especially bizarre crimes. Many are mentally ill and are unlikely to be believed. If your street punk is already armed from selling drugs, he can threaten or attack the homeless and take their blood. If he makes money selling drugs, then he can even pay the homeless for their blood. After all, the street people are already selling their blood for cash at the donation center - why not sell it to the crazy buying it at twice the price? Once again, access to blood collection supplies helps a lot here.
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### Army of Mosquitoes
The vampire has created an army of loyal mosquitoes. These breed like crazy, go find humans, suck their blood, and come back to the vampire, who then harvests the blood from them. Assuming every mosquito succeeds in [carrying 0.01 milliliter](http://www.mosquitoworld.net/mosquito-faqs/) of blood, a self sustaining swarm of 10000 mosquitoes should be enough to get 250mL of blood with ~ 2-3feeds each. This number of mosquito swarm varies on the species, the number of feeds, as well as survival ratio.
Humans don't even notice the mosquitoes sucking the blood and just think its a natural infestation. To hide his steps, the vampire takes this colony into different areas/directions every day.
Edit note: Correcting the maths
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## Transforming other people into vampires
Well, if the vampire can't get the blood by himself because of the age, maybe it could wait for the manager of the blood bank or someone with authority to take out blood bags from the bank and ambush the person to transform it in a vampire, therefore, he will not be the only vampire out there needing blood, so it could persuade the newly-formed vampire to grab blood bags for them.
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Four Ways a 15-year-old vampire brat could obtain blood.
Method One of Three: Make a blood bank employee give them blood.
Archerspk suggested that a 15-year-old vampire could turn an adult who worked in a blood bank into a vampire and then have them provide blood for the kid vampire. But Starfish Prime wondered why an adult vampire would bother feeding the kid vampire instead of disposing of them.
Well, maybe the adult vampire won't be cruel enough to kill a teenage vampire. most adult humans, before being transformed into vampires, aren't cruel enough to kill teenagers without strong reasons, and perhaps being turned into a vampire doesn't make people more evil.
Could a 15 year old vampire physically handle an adult vampire if the younger vampire couldn't control the older one through magical methods? That depends on the physical conditions of the 15 year old vampire and the adult vampire.
One thing which I have learned is that there is a great range in possible growth rates for boys and girls, and thus a great range in possible sizes and strengths of various boys and girls at any particular age, including age 15, though of course the majority of children and fictional child vampires would be close to the normal size for their ages.
Once I used to buy lunch at a diner where one of the workers was a boy about 5 feet tall who looked like an exceptionally cute child actor. One day at dinner in a restaurant in the same little town that boy was part of the waiting staff and one of my companions asked if he was old enough to work there. He said he was 16, (probably the minimum leagal age to work there) and she said she didn't believe him, that he looked 12.
Another time I met another boy, whose age I don't know, who was exceptionally cute, but this boy towered over my five feet eleven inches (1.5748 meters) self. I think he should have been about six and a half feet (1.9812 meters) tall, and judging by the work he did helping us pack up, I guess he wouldn't have been less strong at age 15 than most men.
But those are not the extreme possible examples.
My historical research about a bugler boy in the US Civil War showed he was allegedly 14 in 1860 and five feet eight inches tall, 19 in 1865 and five feet three inches tall, and 22 in 1869 and five feet Eight inches tall, having grown five inches since the age of 19. And though the official records often said boy soldiers where older than their actual ages, a birth date in 1845 or 1846 is consistent with his age in later census records.
I note that the organization Little People of America had more than 6,800 members in 2010, and membership is restricted to:
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> Membership in LPA is limited to people 4' 10" and under, or those with a diagnosed form of dwarfism, their families, or those who "demonstrate a well-founded interest in issues relating to dwarfism".
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little\_People\_of\_America[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_People_of_America%5B1%5D)
So the USA population may contain thousands of adults under four feet ten inches tall, who weren't any bigger when they were 15-year-old boys and girls.
Of course some people at the upper size limit of of the Little People of America could still be very strong. I once saw a man who was about five feet tall who was built like a gorilla and looked like he had tremendous upper body strength.
These days it is common for parents to give synthethic human growth hormone to their kids if they are undersized. Thus 15-year-olds who are small for their age may be rarer now than in the previous century.
I note that the six shortest women over the age of eighteen in history ranged from 61 centimeters (24 inches) to 71 centimeters (28 inches) tall, and the eight shortest men in history ranged from 54.6 centimeters (21.5 inches) to 74 centimeters (29 inches) tall. I think that all of them should have been much weaker than any typical adult when they were 15 years old.
Angus MackAskill (1825-1863) reached seven feet four inches (2.24 meters) at the age of 18 and soon reached his adult height of seven feet ten inches (2.39 meters). His early adult weight was 580 pounds (260 kilograms). I think that at the age of 15 he would have been much stronger than most adults.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus\_MacAskill[2]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_MacAskill%5B2%5D)
Louis Cyr (1863-1912) was one of the strongest men in history, despite being only 1.74 meters (five feet eight and one half inches ) tall and weighing "only" 124-154 kilograms (280-340 pounds). At the age of 17 he won a weight lifting contest lifting 480 pounds (220 kilograms), at the age of 18 he lifted a full grown horse. At the age of 15 he would have been much stronger than most adults.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis\_Cyr[3]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Cyr%5B3%5D)
Robert Pershing Wadlow (1918-1940) reached a height of eight feet eleven point one inches (2.72 meters) and a weight of 439 pounds (199 kilograms). Unlike most of the tallest men in history:
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> He possessed great physical strength until the last few days of his life.
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He reached a height of seven feet ten inches (2.39 meters) and weight of 354 pounds (161 kilograms) at the age of 15 and should have been strong enough to handle most adults.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert\_Wadlow[4]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wadlow%5B4%5D)
There are some very strong female wightlifters and bodybuilders, and I think that many of them would have been stronger at the age of 15 than most adult men.
Anyway, I guess that about 50 percent of 15-year-olds are at least as strong as adults of their own gender and ethnic group, and about 50 percent of 15-year-olds are no stronger or even weaker than adults of their own gender and ethnic group. If the bloodthirsty kid is a 15-year-old American boy, he might be stronger than the average adult American woman.
Method Two: Work in a Blood Bank?
The assumption that a 15-year-old vampire brat couldn't work in a blood bank may be unfounded. I once entered an ice cream parlor in Cape May, New Jersey, where three boys about twelve years old were behind the counter. They looked like triplets, and I guess their parents owned or operated the store, because I think that most states in the USA have exceptions to their child labor laws allowing children to work at their parent's farms or businesses at much younger ages than they could work for unrelated employers.
Or maybe those kids were working illegally despite being in view of every customer who walked into the store.
So if any blood banks are private small scale mom and pop businesses a kid 15 years old or younger could legally work there. Or maybe the kid works illegally in a blood bank, more or less hidden in the office away from visitors, cleaning up and doing paperwork - if that paperwork includes keeping track of incoming and outgoing blood it would be great for the vampire brat. And maybe the kid sometimes has to dispose of blood that spoils and collects some of it for their own use.
Method Three: Work in a Farm or Slaughterhouse.
Or maybe the kid works on their parents' farm raising and slaughtering livestock, and maybe they are in charge of collecting and selling or disposing of blood from the slaughtered livestock, and has their own methods of handling some of that blood. Of course that is if animal blood will satisfy the vampire brat. And if the story is set in a developing country with lax child labor laws, the vampire kid could work in a huge slaughterhouse where nobody tracks the amount of blood spilled.
Method Four: Claim to Need Blood for Medicinal Reasons.
Such a claim would probably be the literal truth for a more scientifically plausible vampire brat. So if the vampire is of the less fantastic type and medical tests would show they are alive and not undead, maybe those medical tests would reveal that they need blood, and they could legitimately get transfusions of blood as Willk suggested.
Back about 1960, I was told that a woman friend of my parents had a medical condition which required her to drink a glass of ox blood every day. If that was not a tall tale, there may really be such a medical condition, which might possibly still be treated by prescribing animal blood. And if animal blood is good enough for the vampire brat, they might claim to have that condition.
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Find yourself some vampire groupies and offer them a deal: you give me your blood now and in the future I'll turn you into a vampire.
That should give him a few years to find a alternative way to find blood. And now you have your own groupies; not a bad deal.
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I had a similar conundrum in a short story about an adolescent converted by cruel vampires playing a joke and converting a bumbling zit covered dork into a vampire.
I decided to do what almost all vampire writers do when dreaming up their spin on an age old tale - I ignored the rules.
My vampire is immortal. Can't cut his head off, he tried. Can't burn him. Tried that too. Can't guarantee he won't come back. But his biggest fear is being immortal in the condition he is in, in a lab somewhere being dissected forever. So given that, why would I give in to the idea that he can starve?
So I changed what blood does for him. I rewrote the rules to not require blood as a constant unless he wants to have a reasonable amount of energy for a while. Otherwise, all the absence of it does is make him tired, but in the same way a human gets tired if they let their blood sugar levels get too low, or over exert themselves. In my story, he is learning, and neither of us knew what would happen in the long run, or what blood really does for him. I used that to allow me to side step the idea of a bumbling dork vampire running around biting people, especially 30 years after conversion where my story takes place. What has he been doing all these years? Nothing. Because he feared what would happen if he got caught and they realized he was in his 40's but looked like a kid, and happened to be impossible to kill.
I made things like animal blood, and general blood in meat packs at stores, as pretty much ineffective. And about as appealing as imagining the experiential difference between drinking an ice cold bottle of coca cola vs one thats been sitting in the sun all day. So the appeal of warm human blood is there, and he could find ways to get some on odd occasions, but making the blood lust optional seemed like the best way to avoid the whole need to feed all the time issue.
If anything, yours could benefit from the interesting side effects in behavior and maybe even physically that happen when they don't feed for long periods, or even years. And consider, a gila monster has to eat 4 times a year give or take. When you're immortal, maybe feeding is a little like the mighty gila monster. Sometimes you have to, but thankfully it is rare enough to make it more of a subplot than a difficult riddle that people won't forgive you for not solving.
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I am wondering how it would feel if gravity suddenly got reduced to be around 90% of what it was. Like if a person was not paying attention or was asleep, would they notice?
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If it happened on the whole volume of the planet? **Instantly**.
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> I am wondering how it would feel if gravity suddenly got reduced to be around 90% of what it was.
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This **already happens** - the acceleration on your body decreases suddenly - when you *fall* or *stumble*. Your inner ear and proprioceptors would immediately decode this as "I am falling, or there is an earthquake". A very old, very high priority reflex set deep in your hindbrain would probably wake you at once and send you running.
And as @MikeSerfas noted, a 10% gravity reductions means a 10% reduction in atmospheric pressure; nothing life-threatening, but it would be like moving *instantly* from sea level to a small thousand-meter (3,000 feet) mountain. You'd immediately feel a sharp pain in both ears and need to swallow to equalize the pressure; that would surely wake you up.
(Not to mention that enclosed environments like houses and offices would experience an overpressure on windows to the tune of [*one ton per square meter*](http://extraconversion.com/pressure/atmospheres/atmospheres-to-tonnes-per-square-meter.html) as the 1-atm air inside tries to equalize the 0.9-atm air outside. If the windows didn't crash open, they'd probably shatter).
If neither the fall nor the ear pain did it, you'd feel it for sure some seconds later, when The Earthquake happened. Because the whole Earth crust exists in a compressed state, due to the weight of the different materials it's made of. Imagine a lot of weights over different springs, slowly set after millions of years. Then suddenly one tenth of those weights *disappear*. What do the springs do? They decompress, and not all at the same time. This is called *orthostatic rebound* and, with those numbers, it would be absolutely *catastrophic*.
If the crust under the seas rebounds first, the sea level would rise abruptly, what is called a *megathrust earthquake*. Colossal tsunamis would devastate the coasts - *all* the coasts. A megathrust of an estimated 2 meters over a 400x100 area was at the root of the 2004 tsunami. ["Several meters"](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/11/japan-earthquake-tsunami-questions-answers) gave birth to the Tohoku quake, the one that hit Fukushima. Depending on the source (and how much depth we consider), decompression of [basaltic seafloor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tholeiitic_magma_series) would give anywhere from *twenty* to one hundred meter rebound (probably not instantaneous, that much is true, but *still*...).
Then, the lithosphere megathrust would very likely be enough to trigger most faults in the whole world. It would also crack the domes of most supervolcanoes. In short, **everyone dies**.
For all this *not* to happen, gravity ought to only affect the ecosphere (following the geodetic contour), or the change would need to be gently spread over hundreds of years (tens of thousands would be better). Even so, the "creaking" of the Earth (volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis) would be very noticeable, albeit survivable.
(This whole matter came up about fifteen years ago with Robert J. Sawyer's *End of an Era*)
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**Likely immediately**
10% reduction is quite a lot.
As you say the reduction is *suddenly*, anyone would notice, even when asleep. It's because of the inner ear where balance is 'measured'. The reduction will feel like you're suddenly dropping a bit. The feeling of falling can jolt you awake easily. Compare it to a platform (elevator or otherwise) that suddenly shifts a tiny bit down. It instantly gets your attention.
It is the body having a warning signal, as ut certainly wants to know when you might unexpectedly fall down.
If the person is a heavy sleeper and unaffected it might take longer. It is easy to miss-attribute feelings of being lighter to light-headedness or possibly feeling incredibly energetic with every step. Yet even without scales and such we can start to notice things. Water in the shower or from the tap not falling or draining as fast. Maybe playing with keys and notice it handles differently. There will be a great amount of variability in the person and their mood at the time when they notice. Even if they notice, it might be a while before they can tell/believe it's a reduction of gravity.
Yet as your question specifies that they should notice and not necessarily know what is happening, I say very quickly.
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As @LSerni pointed out, there'd be some immediate effects. If we somehow manage to survive these, people would eventually notice the change of climate. And probably die.
A 10 % decrease of the force of gravity would send Earth away quite noticeably further out in the solar system, 10 % further out, as a first order approximation. The amount of sunlight that reaches a planet decays quadratically with distance, so we should expect 10-20 % less energy from the sun. Even though Earth would remain habitable, the climate would change drastically, harvests would fail and other noticeable stuff would happen.
Precisely how bad it is will depend on what season it is when It happens. If it's in the northern winter, the part of the orbit that's furthest away would occur in northern summer and vice versa.
With all the geopolitical stuff that will follow, Earth will most likely be quite a bit less hospitable. Food will run low, especially after a year or two, and my bet is quite some people would die.
**Edit in response to comments**: For some reason, be it a happy accident or some deep underlying principle in physics, [inertial mass, active gravitational mass and passive gravitational mass are all proportional to each other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass#Phenomena). Further, the two gravitational notions of mass seem to be the same. This is why a decrease of Earth's mass wouldn't affect it's orbit, since the decreased pull from the Sun would be matched exactly by the decreased inertia.
Without any gravitational forces, the Earth would move in a straight line and [conserve its momentum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#Newton%27s_first_law). *With* gravitational forces, the Earth will constantly accelerate towards the sun, causing its path to bend. Currently, we sit in an equilibrium where this turning adds up just right to result in a nearly circular orbit, but other planets have orbits that are more eccentric.
If the strength of gravity is suddenly adjusted, the inertial and gravitational measures of mass would still be proportional, but *the proportion would be different*. That's what changing the constant means! The earth would have all its momentum, but would not be turned inwards as much. The arch would be less curved, and we would end up further away from the Sun.
Now, planetary orbits are elliptical, and as this result doesn't depend on the actual value of the gravitational constant they would remain so in our scenario. We start out moving at a straight angle from the Sun, so we must thus be at either the [aphelion or the perihelion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis#Perihelion_and_aphelion) of our orbit. With more inertia than a planet should have to be stable at this distance, 10 % too much, it turns out we are at the perihelion.
It will take a little over half a year to reach our new aphelion, the furthest point of our new orbit.
**It might be even worse than I originally said though**, as my napkin calculation assumed a new stationary orbit. Intuitively, the new elliptical orbit will spend roughly half the time inside the 10% larger orbit, and the other half outside it. Objects in elliptical orbits spend more time being further away than being near, so we would get orbital winters that are quite bad.
I'm no physicist, and I can't give you the precise formulas for how bad it would become, but if the small eccentricities of our current orbit are enough to send us into periodic ice ages, this scenario seems pretty apocalyptic.
I maintain my position that people would notice.
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*(NOTE: below answer the effects when "g" is changing.. When "G" would change, there will be large scale repercussions, like e.g. the moon running out of orbit, or a planetary ice age, sun and moon will become less heavy as well, making the change come from both sides)*
**Science and medicine will notice in 10 milliseconds and get confused within seconds**
Of course, scientists immediately realized what happened. Scales show wrong results now. Issue is, you can't calibrate your instruments properly. The kilogram calibration weight will have become 10% lighter. The pharmaceutics industry will take a hit on day one, most medicine will become *decertified* immediately and production will stop, until everything is corrected and certain decisions are made: suppose we apply more substance to reach a prescribed weight, could that result in overdose ?
In the comments below, Trioxidane made a valid point, which would complicate things further. Some scales may *not* be affected.
**Industry will panic in a few seconds**
Counterweights compensating for engine-driven equipment will be less effective. This happens while the equipment runs. It will cause misalignment, out of control behaviour and instability in some systems. There will be explosions, as a result of feeding excess energy into processes, because weight reports less.. Result is a wrong decision: the weight scale does not show the target weight, so keep pumping ! Suppose the container *cannot reach* the target weight anyhow, the tank will explode.
**Satellite communications and internet affected within minutes**
For media and internet, this weight change thing is a big disaster. Thousands of satellites will require orbit correction, all at the same time. Collisions happen. Many satellites position will get lost and for many commercial satellites the procedure may be too costly, or too late.. These channels will get lost permanently.
For that reason, worldwide it will be noticed, by any journalist dependent on satellite communication. Internet will be affected as well.
GrumpyYoungMan's comment: *other* satellites, like GPS will have to be repositioned as well. Ships can get lost. Passenger aircraft flying that night, dependent on GPS (and ILS) will run a risk to loose course and run out of fuel. Ground vehicles depending on GPS will cease to work. These activities will be grounded for weeks, or months, depending on how fast GPS services can be restored.
**People will notice when they move.**
For reasons other answers have elaborated on.. Doctors helping patients with revalidation will notice a sudden improvement. The high jump and far jump as well as pole jump world record will probably be broken, within a day.
**Weight watcher's misunderstandings**
The instant BMI improvement will be appreciated by many weight-watcher followers. Issue is, your looks won't change, despite loosing 12 kG.. the physics of this may be too difficult to explain to people, resulting in urban myth. The government did this to let people work harder. At weight-watchers, the experts should have a good story. Chance is, some obese people's condition will worsen in the long term, because obese people will "allow themselves" to fill the gap, to reach the old weight target again.
**Gold price will get bzirk**
What if this happens again next week ? Many gold owners will feel betrayed when the event happens. Selling their gold, taking the losses. It was supposed to be safe, it is not. Within a week, this price dip will be corrected. Reason.. an ounce of gold now contains *more gold.* Lots of people like to speculate and buy. Price rises again. And it will go up some more, I'm afraid.. The irrational sentiment about this now spreads rapidly, in parliament there are whodunnit questions now. Who did this.. and who are the stakeholders..
**Food price will go up**
Consumer products like food now require more food to reach the same weight. You buy vegetables per kG. This extra cost will be passed on to the consumer, prices will rise. This counts for any goods that are weighed and priced in kilograms. You need more now. Ships that could take xx tonnes, now take xx-10% tonnes, because there is no room on the ship to store the cargo. This will cause supply chain issues, software problems, and like in other industries, cause huge costs to solve it.
**The kilogram could be reconsidered**
Chance is, there will be pressure from many stakeholders, to change the standard kilogram. This will cause even more conspiracy theories. Prices have gone up, will we get 10% less now ? Consumers are starting to worry. And some are demonstrating in the streets already. This change is going to be a mess.. and cause an economic recession.
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The more athletic people would notice it sooner, the less athletic later. Also people professionally dealing with masses would notice it pretty immediately.
Thanks to a diet I have lost 10% of my weight: I have gone from puffing and panting when climbing the stairs to the third floor to doing it with no struggles. I would notice if all of a sudden and without any diet that would be the case.
Imagine also whoever plays basketball or volleyball, they would have also immediately noticed if they could jump 10% higher all of a sudden.
And if who has a shop selling anything requiring to be weighted with a scale converting weight into mass, would notice a reduction in 10% of the weight in all the packed items with an indicated weight.
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If you want to learn about a relatable sensation when experiencing reduced gravity, go play on a seesaw. As you go up and down there are moments when you experience a bit more and a bit less gravity. You feel a bit less when you are getting to the top. A similar feeling happens on a boat (depending on how agitated the sea is), in a plane when it is reducing altitude, or in a fast elevator when it is going up and about to stop.
Our inner ear is naturally calibrated to 1G. Getting a constant 0.9G might feel like being in an airplane that is slowly going down until you readjust. I ised to travel a lot, I can tell you many people sleep through it. I imagine frequent travellers may even ignore it.
That's the individual experience of 0.9G in the human body in a safe, controlled environment. If that 0.9G is global, though, you get the end times as some users have already pointed out. I specially like [Serni's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/215236/21222) and I encourage you to read it whole and in detail. My TL;DR version of that answer, and which is what I believe would happen is: you relieve the crust of a planetary amount of pressure, the planet puffs as the crrust pops up. Oh the humanity...
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In **Science Fiction**, when civilizations grow powerful enough to conquer the planet and are in need for room, they turn to the planets in outer space. Obviously, the other planets have very different conditions, some are hot, some are cold, and all don’t have proper air that we can breathe. At this point, there are two common options:
1. *Terraform the planet such that it becomes sustainable for us humans. Reheat the core, add some plants and gas, you name it.*
2. *Stripmine the planet for resources to build artificial worlds, such as Dyson Spheres, Bubble Worlds, Ring Worlds and other planet-like environments.*
It can be assumed in this case, the given civilization has more than enough resources and time to do both. However, they still have their limits, and need to decide which planet is better off being terraformed, and which planet is better off being stripmined. Because, if they are not careful, the option they pick has a 50/50 chance of being a waste of time.
So, what are the factors that can help civilizations decide which option better suits which planet? Use our planets in our Solar System as the easiest example.
Also, let us assume that FTL doesn’t work properly yet, so going to far away planets similar to Earth is a no-no.
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**Terraforming is going to be a far greater investment than strip-mining.**
However, the cost will still vary wildly based on what the planet is like. **Planets which are close to the target for terraforming will cost less to terraform**, but will be in short supply.
So the logic will likely go:
1. Are we *really* low on a particular resource this planet has? Strip mine it.
2. Is it vaguely habitable? If so, terraform it.
* not toxic
* low radiation
* sensible day/night cycle
* gravity is reasonable
* temperature within a few 100C of the target?
3. Has it got materials worth the investment of mining? Mine it.
4. Has it got some strategic importance (refuelling, defence, etc?)? Build an outpost.
5. Otherwise, survey it for future reference, then move on.
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* **If it is a planet, terraform.**
Sure, hollow habitats are neat, but if you have the tech and energy budget that there is a genuine choice to strip-mine a planet, you are rich enough to afford the luxury of a planetary habitat. Wind and sun in your face, hiking the hills and sailing the seas, that just doesn't feel the same in an artificial habitat. People are silly that way.
(Trick question: Would you prefer a genuine lemon or synthetic lemon acid?)
* **If it is a minor planet/KBO, strip-mine.**
Even if energy is plentiful, it will probably not be entirely free. So it makes a difference if you crack many little rocks or one big rock. Take the little ones.
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I don't think terraforming really ever makes sense. It just takes so incredibly long that it's just much more efficient to make orbital habitats by stripmining asteroids. In our own solar system, there is enough matter floating around in asteroids and minor planets to make many tens of thousands of habitats providing thousands of times the surface area of the Earth. The only time I could see terraforming being worth it is if a planet is nearly habitable and just needs tweaked a little, and also your propulsion technology makes gravity wells negligible.
If gravity is a real concern, life on a terraformed world will always be more expensive than life in an orbital habitat; transiting the gravity well will incur an added cost that will increase the price of any good or service involving the planet, which hab-dwellers will not have to pay. Consider if you want to buy some new widget on Space Amazon. If you live on a planet, the Amazon delivery shuttle has to be strong enough to survive re-entry, has to have enough thrust to make a soft landing, and it has to be able to carry enough fuel to make it back to orbit on the way back. Now lets say you live in a habitat in interplanetary space. The Amazon delivery shuttle only needs enough fuel to reach you. It doesn't need a heat shield, and it doesn't need expensive, high thrust engines. It can also skimp on fuel by using a low-thrust, high [specific impulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse) engine.
I would go further and say stripmining planets doesn't make sense either, because these same launch cost concerns apply just as much to mining as they do to habitation. Planets are inefficient, [O'Neill cylinders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) are the best bang for your buck.
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**No FTL? Terraforming is strongly preferred.**
Consider this - terraforming takes a long time. Do you know what else takes a *really* long time? Getting anywhere without FTL. There are 33 stars [within 12.5 light years of Earth](http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/12lys.html). [Travelling at 0.5c requires having about 1.4e16 J kinetic energy per kg](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/relativistic-ke), and via e=mc^2 we know 1 kg could be converted into about 8.9e16 J kinetic energy. So if your power source converts mass into energy at 100% efficiency you need about 15kg of fuel per 100kg of ship to slow it up, and then that much again to speed up the ship + fuel in the first place. That lets you get to 33 stars within 25 years.
That's a long trip with a very high energy cost (even for an advanced civilization). It's much more likely that you'd have ships travelling slower and using some form of stasis or cryosleep. That means that between scouting a planet and having the next group of people landing on it, you'd likely have decades or centuries in which to terraform the planet, and even if the terraforming is only partly done the planet will be more survivable than an airless rock.
Consider also the consequences of an accident. If you crash into an airless rock you're likely dead - no FTL means no quick rescues, and you have to rely completely on your (potentially damaged) life support systems. If you crash into a habitable planet it significantly extends the amount of time you have for someone to rescue you, possibly indefinitely.
Having a habitable planet in a system also can serve as a stable base of operations for everything else. Again, with no FTL any help from outside the star system will take years to know that you need it, then years or decades to arrive.
Another thing to consider is *using* the resources. If you strip mine a plane, sure you've got a lot of resources but what are you going to do with them? Shipping them to another star system is going to run into the same problems of prohibitive energy costs or *long* shipping times. A planet also acts as a place where resources can be used.
All in all, star systems with a planet that can be terraformed will be much more useful than those without one.
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## They will terraform any planet that they can and ignore most of the rest
As much as I love theorizing about mega-structures, the cost of pulling matter out of a planet's gravity well is immense; so, unless your civilization is using some manner of Non-Newtonian, free energy method of strip mining a planet, chances are that what ever fuel they are using to strip mine it is thousands of times more valuable than the materials they can hope to gain for thier efforts.
Also, once you build a space habitat, it has a very limited cycle of natural resources at its disposal. The trade-off for efficiency in any system is always resiliency. Inefficient systems like planets always have ways you can optimize your use of resources to overcome obstacles, but when an efficient system is hit by the unexpected, there is no compensating. This makes space habitats short term solutions, long term problems compared to planets.
There is also the issue of how economies might introduce new technologies into societies. On a habitat, your resource cycle is all spoken for. This means if you want people to have a new luxury item, then you will need to manufacture everything somewhere away from your habitat, then ship it in which is both very expensive and takes a very long time considering that you are a pre-FTL civilization. So, by the time you get your "new" products they are already decades old technology. In contrast, a planet would be able to pay a royalty fee to the engineering firm on another world which designed the new product, and then manufacture it themselves. This means you would be able to propagate new technologies at the speed of light instead of sub-luminal speeds.
**What about low mass planets and planetoids?**
Comments raise a good point though about planets with low enough of gravity to get mass off world using rail guns. If you live in a star system where you have a highly populated planet which lacks certain key resources, mining smaller planets this way might be useful, but you would not be "strip mining" them. You would be selectively taking just the ores you need and blasting them off to thier destination. This is because common elements you would normally strip mine such as iron, nickel, or silicon are way more abundant than other useful elements you may need like lithium to the point that you just won't have a use for most of what is in a planet. It would be more economical for an inhabited planet to continue mining it's own common elements and only import the scarce ones.
**For example:** Let's say building a mega-structure requires the same amount of lithium per kg as the international space station. Some rough estimations based on what is published about its specs tell me that the space station probably uses 300kg of lithium which would constitute about .07% of the station's mass.
However, when you look at the Earth, we have about 2e18 cubic meters of material that can be effectively mined and about 5.7e7 of those cubic meters are believed to be economically viable lithium. That means that only 0.00000000285% of the Earth that can be mined is worth mining for lithium. So if you were to strip mine the entire top few kilometres of Earth's crust to make a mega structure, 99.9996% of what you mine would be useless because you would not have enough lithium for a space habitat that uses more than 0.0003% of the total material you have at your disposal.
**What if a low mass planet or planetoid does not share a system with a populated world.**
In this case, a better approach to small planets may be a system of hybrid terriforming / mega-structures. Because the gravity is already so low, you can build things up MUCH higher. Instead of spending tons of power shooting the planetoid's mass off into space one chunk at a time, you could simply leave the mass on the planet where it is easily accessible to you and build up (or down). The lower gravity means you could slowly sculpt the planet into a mega structure all while still living on it in habitats. The end result would be the outer "crust" of your planetoid builds up into a Ecumenopolis, while your mines go deeper and deeper in search of more ores.
There is no real reason to endanger your survivability by separating your habitat(s) from readily available sources of raw materials.
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If the planets are unable to be terraformed, like those seen around red dwarfs, then strip mine them. This is because planets around class M stars usually have the star defeat all attempts to terraform the planet, since the solar radiation will strip away any atmosphere you may add. In fact, it's now theorized that planets like the Trappist 1 planets may all be Venusian in nature, and as such would be impossible to terraform.
Also, planets not in the ecosphere of the star in question cannot be terraformed, so strip mine those as well.
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Neither option would be acceptable for any advanced civilisation, which would by definition be aware of the ecological consequences of its actions. They would take a 'tread lightly' approach and ensure that planetary life, archaeology etc is nurtured and encouraged, not exterminated for gain.
They're not idiotic, genocidal 18th-century colonialists for goodness' sake.
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Disassemble *everything*: asteroids, planets, stars.
A constantly-growing civilization which can think in the long-term will inevitably realize that it will hit constraints on population density based primarily off the number of people its resources can support, and once that happens, demographic crisis looms. Its goal, then, will be to obtain as much territory as physically possible to stall its collapse. Planets are positively *useless* at this compared to the thousands or millions of times the surface area one could get by breaking them down into cylinder habitats; stars are incredibly inefficient compared to starlifting them and shepherding the fusion reactions in a more distributed, long-lasting manner.
In some settings, a universal government will be able to rein people in, imposing hard birth limits or trying its best to disincentivize births. In a setting without FTL, as proposed here, splinter groups intent on growing become impossible to coordinate due to light lag, and they'll realize that they need all the living space they can get. Yes, birth rates might become lower because of economic development, but you only need one fringe culture who doesn't like that idea for this problem to arise.
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The game *Spaceward Ho!* demonstrates a key criterion for this decision. Some parts of a world can be modified by terraforming (which the game represents as "temperature") and some cannot ("gravity"). Planets with good gravity (the range of 3/5 to 5/3 that of your homeworld) are good for terraforming. Planets with bad gravity (less than 2/5 or more than 5/2) are suitable only for strip-mining.
Ho! includes a category I haven't seen addressed very much: The intermediate case between "good" and "bad". These planets can be terraformed and turned into decent colonies, but it takes more resources (time and money) than good planets.
The general principle applies: All planets will have some characteristics that cannot be modified through terraforming. So colonize and modify those planets that are closest to the homeworld specs, and do a cost-benefit analysis on intermediate cases. Sometimes the answer is "strip mine now, abandon the planet, and we'll come back if constraints permit terraforming the world."
(On review, my answer provides a decision path for "vaguely habitable" as Dan W discusses in their answer. My answer is not a duplicate, as I address the "maybe" case.)
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**Magnetic field or no.**
A planet without a magnetic field gets harsh treatment from its star. The solar wind strips away any atmosphere, as happened to Mars when its internal dynamo faded. Those charged particles in the wind are also brutal for life (and electronics) on the surface. The only prospect for life on a planet with no magnetic field is in deep bunkers under the surface, with overlying rock or liquid, or superfat Venusian atmosphere serving as shielding. No amber fields of grain on these planets.
Getting a magnetic field for a planet that has none is a feat even more daunting than terraforming. Terraforming is turning Eliza Doolittle into a proper lady; generation of a magnetic field is turning her into a silver dragon. Where to start?
That is a simple calculus that could be used to decide. No magnetic field - get what you can and go,. Yes magnetic field - work with it and see if you can make it a nicer place for life.
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Why can't you just stripmine the planet and then terraform it afterwards?
There's no ecology so you aren't harming anything strip mining it. Presumably you are only collecting valuable minerals and elements from concentrated deposits which still leaves behind all the more mundane stuff that biology (as we know it anyways) is mostly composed of plus traces of more valuable elements (which are inaccessible to biology anyways if they are stuck in a concentrated deposit).
Then you can terraform after you strip mine and biology wouldn't be affected. And if the gravity well is an issue you could just mine everything and leave it on the planet, terraform it then use those resources to build on the planet. Very long term planners.
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Strip mining doesn't automatically placate the planet is uninhabitable. What are you extracting you have to ruin the entire biosphere?
Strip mining is a cheap method of mining, but depending on what mineral resource your extracting; that doesn't bode well for strip mines. China is full of them for rare earths and they're environmental nightmares.
Mining certain metals either requires the metal be valuable enough to extract it in low parts per million concentration or in a high enough concentration the mine will be small and produce ore for the foreseeable future. Rare earth mines are notoriously uneconomical in the industrialized world, China does it with smelting heavy rocks and no regard for the industrial waste or toxic health effects. Africa does it with slave and child labor.
And even if the site is strip mined, it can be....reformed.
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**Terraforming** is valuable for 2 reasons:
1. shortage of living space for the evergrowing human population
2. human luxury - having the option to live in and experience different worlds
Point 1 will get solved when people learn to live in free space. Which isn't that hard considering we can more or less do it right now - but won't have near-light speed travel or terraforming capabilities anytime soon.
Point 2 will be initially highly attractive - but eventually undergo a point of diminishing returns. Having 100 options is great, having 10^10 not so much considering many of them would be quite alike to each other.
At some point we'll also figure out how to recreate many pleasurable and aesthetic experiences on home planets and free space too.
The only reason point 2 might continue to hold importance even with 10^10 options is if the human population too grows at such an exponential level - and there is sufficient demand for the experience of exotic living that these many planets need to be entirely occupied to fulfill this demand. But to me it seems unrealistic to even attempt predicting human nature or desires that far into the future (when we have say 10^16 humans in existence).
**Strip mining** is not particularly valuable when compared to asteroid mining as mentioned in the other answers.
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It is objectively better in every single case to build artifiical habitats. If you have the time and energy to turn an entire planet into a crap ton lf habitats then that will always be better then terraforming. Planets are a major waste of resources since you can only use a thin layer of their surface. Without putting a thick solid shell around a planet, their atmosphere offers less protection against radiation like from a supernova. You cant just move planets willy nilly away from a giant asteroid or a rogue planet. Space habitats are mobile by default. Space habitats are the second closest thing to paradise. Mind uploading is paradise.
My vote goes towards building space habitats for a dyson swarm, especially if you throw in some star lifting.
Even gas giants are worth strip mining just for the hydrogen (fuel) and helium (propellent). Building a rigid non rotating hexagon with contrarotating cylinders in the lines and storing a crap ton of liquid H2 in the middle of the hexagon (pick any balanced shape) is worth it. Especially if you have controlled fusion. Deuterium deuterium fusion yields tritium 50% of the time and helium 3 the other 50% of the time. Protons readily capture neutrons to become deuterium. So using a helium 3 deuterium or dt reactor only needs some initial energy and lots of protium.
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A detective is investigating a series of grisly murders in New York. The bodies of the victims seem to have been ripped apart by a inhumanly strong person. He has narrowed down the list of suspects to one individual, Henry Jekyll, a scientist working out of a lab in Queens.
He secretly follows Jekyll in order to gather evidence against him. On one night, he sees Jekyll drink some concoction taken from his coat, which turns him into a freakishly large man, and kill a prostitute. He collects DNA samples of the man (blood, hair, fingerprints), but results don't provide a match for Jekyll. The detective obtains a warrant to search the doctor's premises, locating a diary describing his actions as of late. The journals detail the doctor's experiments of how he invented a concoction that allows him to bring his darker nature to the surface, allowing him to indulge in his vices without guilt or fear of discovery.
If the doctor and this other person are the same, how can it be that they don't share the same DNA?
[Answer]
# **His DNA is always the same; it is the *potion* that filled his blood with molecules disturbing forensics exams.**
* To be suitable to DNA exams, a hair must still have its bulb. Let's say they didn't find any.
* Fingerprints don't really yield DNA.
That leaves us with blood. Biological protocols are very subject to changes in pH, inhibitors and whatnot. It's sufficient that some molecule from the potion interacts with the standard kits and hinders the reactions necessary to identify its DNA.
Who knows, being a scientist he could have done it *on purpose*...
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Dude is a [biological chimera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)):
>
> A genetic chimerism or chimera (/kɪˈmɪərə/ or /kaɪˈmɪərə/, also chimaera (chimæra) is **a single organism composed of cells with distinct genotypes**. In animals, this means an individual derived from two or more zygotes, which can include possessing blood cells of different blood types, subtle variations in form (phenotype) and, if the zygotes were of differing sexes, then even the possession of both female and male sex organs[1] (...) **Animal chimeras are produced by the merger of multiple fertilized eggs**.
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The fact that the first DNA sampling came out as a negative was just luck of the draw. Sherlock got a sample from one of the criminal's genotypes and compared it to the other by chance.
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As for the fingerprints: it's usual for a crime scene to have the fingerprints of everyone who had been in there before the place got isolated, and the prostitute may have been visited by multiple clients (or it was a public place). The fact that they couldn't find a fingerprint match is a sign the detective did a sloppy job of comparing just the very first fingerprint they found to Jekyll's. That, or the suspect wore gloves.
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He received a **transplant**. Maybe a face transplant! Someone should make a movie about that.
When organs are transplanted, they retain the original DNA of their donors.
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This makes me think of Chimerism (mentioned in another answer) and Superfecundation
<https://house.fandom.com/wiki/Chimerism>
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> Chimerism is a very rare condition caused by the fusion of zygotes (fertilized eggs) into a single form during early cell duplication. It is extremely rare, with only forty or so known human cases.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfecundation>
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> Superfecundation is the fertilization of two or more ova from the same cycle by sperm from separate acts of sexual intercourse
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> Heteropaternal superfecundation refers to the fertilization of two separate ova by two different fathers.
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**What's that mean?**
You take different sperm from two fathers (mom had a fun night - or a bad night - and might explain the latent anger boiling beneath the surface), fertilize two eggs and then join them together early in the cell duplication stage.
Now you have one man with two sets of DNA.
**Additional option**
Since we are already talking about long shot odds on top of long shot odds... what if the eggs were implanted by invitro... what if the eggs got mixed and now you literally have two eggs and two sperms from 4 different people? Mix those together...
**Result**
What does the "potion" he takes do? It temporarily gives the other set of DNA control - physically and mentally.
Why doesn't the potion work on you? Because you aren't a Chimera or Superfecundated.
[Answer]
## You're a Cephalopod in disguise!
Cephalopods have a [unique ability to alter their own RNA](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30344-6)! Because [RNA regulates gene expression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA#Regulatory_RNA) you can change how your traceable genetic material is seen from murder to murder. If your criminal didn't know about this ability its just a happy mistake, if he does and this doctor knows how to interpret this ability then he can actively suppress and release his genes in specific ways.
This does not change the issue with your finger prints. Thankfully Cephalopods have a solution for you! The way they alter their own coloring is by [expanding and contracting small muscles across their body](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod#Coloration). Put a few of these bad boys in your fingers so you can change or smudge your own finger print while under questioning by the police.
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# Nanobots are rewriting his DNA when he transforms
It's hard to think of a plausible biological or chemical mechanism that can turn a normal-sized man into a "freakishly large" one and back again in such a short time frame. So how about this: Jekyll's potion either contains or activates a swarm of nanobots, which literally rebuild Jekyll's body before the detective's very eyes.
The 'bots suck in some matter from the surrounding air, pull some more from "less critical" organs (Hyde has no spleen and severely atrophied kidneys, since he never exists long enough to need them), and do some clever restructuring (Hyde's nano-latticed bones, while both longer and stronger than Jekyll's, actually weigh slightly *less*), and presto: the guy is a foot taller and has chimpanzee muscles (which are [~50% stronger than human muscles](https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-found-the-secret-to-the-chimpanzee-s-strength), though they sacrifice some endurance).
And while they're doing all that, they have to tweak his DNA too. Jekyll's DNA tells Jekyll's cells how to maintain *Jekyll's* body, not Hyde's; without the DNA changes, the whole biological system would start to fall apart the moment that the 'bots finished active construction.
Turning Hyde back into Jekyll is just the same process in reverse.
Where did the nanobots come from in the first place? Well, maybe Jekyll invented them, or maybe he salvaged them from a UFO crash site, or maybe they escaped from the lab upstairs and Jekyll doesn't even *know* he's using them...I'll leave it as an exercise for the writer.
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Something like that has actually [sort of happened](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Chikatilo#Blood_group_analysis) during the investigation of a Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo: he was captured by the police, but released, because his blood type was different than that of the person whose sperm was found on the victims bodies. I said "sort of happened" because the explanation of the phenomenon was simple and somewhat disappointing: negligence and low quality of the tests.
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Deserts are defined by their hostility to flora and fauna and a distinct lack of rain. Plains are simply relatively smooth areas of land. My question is how much area would be required to have a shift from a desert area to a plains area? I.E. If I started in a desert and walked in one direction, what is the realistic amount of distance I would have to walk to reach **Grassy** plains lands? If this is generally too broad then we can assume the dessert is a circle of roughly 4,000 square miles and anything past that border of about 33 miles from the center is no longer a dry and hot place. Could the grasslands start right at that border or would there be a dead zone where rain could fall and temperatures would be fine but little would grow?
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Consider the Great Sand dunes National Park
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Y3nG.jpg)
(image credit to national parks service, and in public domain in the USA)
Here an area of sand dunes is adjacent to scrubby grasslands. The dunes are held in place by a number of rivers running off the mountains. The rivers carry sand downstream, then when the rivers enter sink holes, the sand is deposited, and picked up by winds. This forms a region with a classic sandy desert appearance. The rainfall in the region does exceed the 250mm/year normally taken to define "desert" however, the high evaporation rate means that the sands are fully arid.
Beyond the rivers, shrubs and grasses can grow, even though rainfall is low, only about 280mm/year, this is sufficient for drought-tolerant grasses, and of course, the rivers bring additional water.
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## Flood Plains in Deserts
Consider the Nile flood plain:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y9ShD.jpg)
The boundary between the desert and fertile land is very dramatic; to answer your question, grassland is literally a step away. Of course, the land is fertile because of flooding, not rainfall, so you have to decide whether this satisfies your criteria for grassy plains lands.
You could object that this is agricultural land, and not a pure grassland per se. Since the flood plain predates human agriculture, though, at least at some point in the past, it must have been a "wild" grassland along the lines you ask for.
## Oases
Of course, if we accept that grassy plain does not necessarily require to be fertile because of rainfall, oases are the next obvious answer coming to mind:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aH28I.jpg)
Again, the fertile land is directly adjacent to the desert. Increase the amount of water available in the source aquifer, and you can increase the size of the oasis to suit your needs (the biggest oasis in the world is apparently the Al Hasa oasis in Saudi Arabia, 100 km²). Note that the height difference between the desert and the oasis does not need to be so dramatic as in the picture, although some difference is necessary due to the way oases form.
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## Desert
Alright I'll turn it into an answer. So first things first. What is a desert? It's basically a very dry barren terrain. This can range from sandy [Saharra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara) to rocky [Atacama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert) or Arizona. It can also go from searing hot to cold depending on location. The [Gobi desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert) is known as a cold desert with the occasional snow even.
## Grassland
So how far do we need to go before we can find rain again or more important water? Not that far honestly. The aforementioned Gobi Desert is a [rain shadow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow) desert. This means mountains block rain for a bit. After that there is normal rain. This is in a way an extreme version of the dry side of a mountain. So on the mountainside you get a desert while in the valley below normal rain is falling.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/q4Ouv.jpg)
There won't be a clear border though. A desert isn't dry or wet. It's a scale, largely dictated by terrain height. I think the shortest distance between full grassland and full desert will either by a rain shadow from a mountain or another form of cliff catching rain all together. Either way it will be a higher terrain blocking clouds.
As I mentioned some deserts here are some grasslands. American prairies, African savannas, plaines in Central Asia and the Steppes in Russia.
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Not far at all. Assuming your "grassy plains" defines the [biome types](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome) of temperate steppe and grass savannah, there are places all over the world where those biomes abut either arid or semi-arid [deserts or xeric shrubland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserts_and_xeric_shrublands).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bdygL.png)
(from [Wikipedia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Vegetation.png))
In this picture above we are looking for yellow areas next to red ones. We can see this happens in multiple places in North America, Asia, and Australia.
In practice these will typically be transition zones, not abrupt borders. But you shouldn't have to go more than a few score miles to be able to tell the difference.
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Imagine a late 16th-Century European Kingdom. The King is obsessed with invading a small neighbouring country for no good reason. He would not profit neither economically nor politically.
However, his problem is that he can't decide on his own to go to war. He needs to put it to some assembly/government/council. And only if they agree, can the war be started. However the members of that assembly are reluctant to do so because it would be costly in financial and human terms, for no real profit.
Now, I am stuck at giving a body and legal status to that assembly. I am not a specialist of neither [Magna Carta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta), nor the constituancy regime that was later implemented in England, but I believe none actually limited the power of the King such that he couldn't decide on going to war.
I can only think of two ways to block the King: **economic** council. Without money, the King cannot start the war, and he can't get enough money without the council approval. **Military** head of the army. If the head of the army refuse to go (that would be a first!) to war, the King would be blocked.
**Do you think such an economic council could exist in the context? Who would be their members?**
I'd appreciate alternatives as well, but it has to be realistic for the mentality of people of that time. Even better if you find historical references.
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Power resides where people believe it resides.
Your conditions are met by the history of the [House of Commons in England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Commons_of_England) (*n.b. distinct from the HoC of Britain or the UK, which formed later*). The Parliament was established in the form that has continuity through to today in the 13th century as an advisory body. It was never disbanded, its advice was often taken, and many of its opinions were enforced by semi-official means (i.e. whatever other forms of authority the members possessed).
After such an organization exists, and gets its way, for centuries, people become used to the idea that it can exercise power. Its decrees become legitimate laws because people become used to following them. Parliament started by making complaints about taxation and *somewhere along the line* people started taking its complaints as having the force of law. It was also used as a rubberstamp to grant a veneer of legitimacy by incoming rulers in extraordinary circumstances, such as the [deposition of Edward II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_II_of_England#Abdication). Over the centuries, precedent built up, and it seeped the power to control state finances out of the Crown, eventually gaining enough public support that it could [turn on the Crown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_prohibiting_the_proclaiming_any_person_to_be_King_of_England_or_Ireland,_or_the_Dominions_thereof).
*At no point was it ever officially given the authority to do this* by a higher state power; it simply overtook the Crown as the source of legal legitimacy in the eyes of the public and the army as more and more of the work passed through it. Being officially granted powers would contribute *nothing* to its actual ability to enforce its will: if your ability to command the public derives entirely from the King's delegated authority, he can always take that power away again.
England reached this point because the Parliament spent a long time existing in near-irrelevance, gradually building a precedent that laws came through it. There are other ways to arrange a similar situation, e.g. a powerful king might convene a senior board of business leaders and landowners so that they can rapidly make decisions; when the founding king dies, his son isn't invited to board meetings any more. However, the idea that the King gets to a stage where he cannot automatically rely on public support because the authority is *no longer seen as his* puts the council in the strongest position.
In other words, it's not a question of who commands the financiers. Anyone can issue commands. It's a question of *who they listen to*.
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A feudal structure is like a pyramid when it comes to military power. In order to raise an army - a prerequisite for going to war - your King needs the support of those directly under him (the Dukes, or equivalents). He will likely have some forces that are directly loyal to him, but the majority are actually under his subordinate nobles.
While in *theory* when he says "jump" the Dukes need to ask "how high", in *practice* things are going to be a bit murkier. If the Dukes really don't want to go to war, they have tactics they can use to delay things. For example, when he asks them for troops the Dukes can send him a bunch of untrained, poorly equipped farmers. Or they could plead that they need their people for a harvest, and stall, stall, stall. Or they could avoid sending taxes, starving the King of funds, or accidentally misplace the food the King was using to keep his army fed. So while sure, the King *can* declare war unilaterally, he's not going to have the army or supplies to be effective.
The King's ability to strong arm the Dukes into doing what he wants is limited by the fact that if he really pisses them off, they'll likely rise up and replace him. So he will absolutely need to gather support from at least some of the major nobility if he wants to have an effective and supplied army to invade with.
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One way to give the council leverage is to have **an alternative claimant** to the throne. For instance, like in the wars of the roses, or during the early years of Elizabeth's reign. The alternative is living somewhere safe, where the King can't touch him/her and the only reason he stays King is because the majority of the Barons (who make up the council) support his claim instead of the alternative's.
This means that if the King steps too far out of line, the Barons can always switch allegiances, depose the King and bring over the alternative. If the King is already looking over his shoulder due to high taxes, and poor foreign policy, then you have a situation where he can't afford to start a war.
You can tie things up neatly by actually putting the alternative claimant **in the neighbouring country** that the King wants to attack. If relations are poor, the neighbouring King has plenty of reason to want to offer the claimant asylum and maybe marry them to some daughter he has lying around. It would also offer the King extra incentive to want to attack the neighbour, since he could then get rid of the claimant and cement his hold on the throne.
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I think economic reasons are very plausible, it's a little after your time frame but look at the English Civil war. The ability of parliament to control taxation frustrated Charles I and is one of the major root causes of that war. A small group within parliament was able to control/manipulate it to frustrate the kings attempts to raise the funds he needed. This might be a better approach than an easily targeted council that directly opposes the king.
Another reason I don't think you mentioned was religion, something like the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. If the King was trying to side with nations representing the 'wrong' side against a country that shared the majority beliefs. It isn't hard to imagine the lords/barons refusing to levy troops for the war.
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I think there is a fairly simple solution, although details do vary depending on how feudal or autocratic the state is so you'll need to adjust them.
Basically, few generations back the king (probably not the same as the current king?) decided to start a war, muster the troops and institute the war taxes. And the feudal lords and the parliament said no. The king let that stand and decided not to start a war after all. That gives a legal precedent for the lords and the parliament to veto the kings wish to declare a war. And legal precedent is really all legitimacy means. You can have written constitution to manufacture that precedent, but that does not really change anything. If it was done before, and it was accepted as legit, it **is** the law.
Like I said the details vary. The body that has the veto might be a war council of high nobility who are direct vassals of the king, it might be a parliament that has oversight of taxation. But that is essentially flavor. If your setting has an existing body you want to use, do so. If it doesn't an ad hoc war council of nobles that has no legal status other than a veto on declarations of war due to a past incident works just as well. And that right of veto doesn't need to be written anywhere, informal consensus of who is in the council and that it can veto the war is all that is needed.
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All power is essentially boiled down to a question of leverage. That is, how much pressure needs to be applied to create the desired outcome. The less the pressure needed, the more leverage exists. To answer the question:
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> Do you think such an economic council could exist in the context?
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We need to first try to find a leverage point. An economic council could exist in that context if the members of said council had the appropriate leverage. This would mean that they would need to control the economy of the country so completely that the King is prevented from moving without their blessing.
Lets say that many years ago the King's father won a bid for a large collection of independent merchants who agreed to move their industry into the King's country so long as they were consulted on all matters that would directly challenge their bottom line. As a result of their presence in the country, it has prospered and grown, however, the merchants are also now in almost complete control of all industry and trade. Because they don't see themselves as citizens as much as business partners, they are perfectly willing to use their leverage to stop any action on the King's part that would hurt their income.
This principle worked well for the so called "Merchant Princes" between the 14th and 17th century. Because you could not move goods without their consent they held enormous political power.
As an illustration, [here](http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=aa24) is a bit on the Medici, probably the best known Merchant Family of that time, as well as the corresponding [Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Medici) for comparison.
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You might also look into mercenaries.
In many wars at that time, mercenaries were an important force. But they have to be paid. To some degree they also have to be convinced that they will be on the winning side. Either can be difficult.
They can also add drama later on when they might decide the war is going poorly and threaten to leave.
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During feudal times the most important element to wage a war was the gold. Your king will be limited in his capacity to wage war by his stores of gold. Armies can be raised relatively quickly if you have enough gold. Via family connections he can get more troops via his political connections too, by enlisting his dukes, barons etc. Even if most of the nobility is against the war, the king can still force his way via mercenaries. The king is usually the richest noble due to the feudal obligations of the other nobles. Even them, the concept of vassalage forces the nobles to send troops to his king to wage war. The king is the upper noble, all other nobles are his vassals. Magna Carta had more to do with noble's rights about taxes and of not suffering violence etc, it has not much to do with the king's capacity to wage a war.
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I have a setting where there is power armor along with a somewhat compact power source that powers not only the suit, but some basic weapons and additional features on the suit. The problem I am currently having is that such a power source at such a compact level would have unintentional consequences. Namely that the exact same power miniaturization technology could be mass applied to other concepts. A battery or compact reactor would end up solving a lot of power generation problems in nonmilitary uses. For example, the compact fusion reactors in Fallout for the power armor cause unintentional problems in that they are somehow able to harness that much power into such a small unit. Array enough of them together and you probably wouldn't need an internal combustion engine for a tank, you'd probably end up saving overall weight as well.
Why would my power armor source NOT benefit the civilian world or radically change other aspects of military hardware to the point that things like jets or tanks can be greatly reduced in size when it comes to their powerplant size. The power armor in this case isn't much bigger than a standard human. But it ends up powering a lot of sensors, processors, communications devices, particle beam weapons (helps power it), low level offensive laser weaponry, NBC filtration, air conditioning etc. Essentially why a power source be able to deliver a lot of power to a power armored suit, but not be effective when scaled up for armored vehicles, jets, ships or even power grid production.
One angle I've considered is heat dissipation scaling exponentially for such a source, though it's not as ironclad/plausible as I'd like it to be so far.
The setting involves early interstellar travel to other solar systems/planetary networks so exotic materials or different ores w/ non-Earth based properties are well within scope.
[Answer]
## It is powered by a single use battery.
It can't be recharged as the battery destroys itself as it discharges, you just need a new battery. This makes it useless for largescale power production, and a poor choice for the vast majority of civilian equipment. It might sound like a good idea for cars but heavier rechargeable batteries are better for a car that can passively support weigh and see a lot of use. Only the military can afford to buy/build a constant supply of the batteries. The powerplant for a tank or jet are not that big compared to the vehicle itself, and replacing banks of batteries is a bigger hassle for armored tanks or streamlined aircraft.
If the battery needs to stay plugged in or cryogenically cooled when not in use that makes it even better, that is easy for a smaller battery but makes it a major negative for vehicles that may need to operate in a forward position. you can build a truck portable generator powered box that carries enough small batteries for a platoon but carrying enough for a a detachment of tanks requires connection to a grid.
As Vesper thought up making discharge or degradation unstoppable once the battery is plugged in makes it even more unusable for other applications. Maybe that is why it has to be refrigerated/plugged in to prevent it. say if once the battery is plugged in you have 12 or 24 hours before it eats itself. You will still have high end sport vehicles that use it and maybe some emergency equipment but that's about it.
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**Extreme Inefficiency**
Each magic fuel cell is super lightweight but only contains an hour of juice. That means the mech suits must be deployed surgically and turned off and on at the traffic lights.
For some reason I leave up to your imagination, the military figures the advantages (what advantages?) of having a powered exoskeleton rather than a tank or fighter jet, outweigh the disadvantages of the inefficient fuel cell.
You could put the cell inside a tank or fighter jet but those guys can already carry their own engines and fuel. They don't need the upgrade.
The fuel cells cost more energy to create than they can store. So you cannot use one to power a power plant.
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Taken to the extreme, the mech suit weighs nothing at all. It appears around the body when turned on and disappears when turned off.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/e7dQO.jpg)
In this case the advantages are clear. They are for sneaky operations where you can store the on/off button in your coat pocket or bumhole.
They are also a *panic button* for a troop of ordinary soldiers. The suit is only turned on in an emergency. When it is off it does not use up power and costs nothing to maintain. Except the opportunity cost of using it elsewhere.
[Answer]
# Extreme Danger:
Your tiny reactors have a distressing tendency to explode. Now, this isn't a BIG chance, but the more reactors you have in close proximity, the higher the chances they blow. In parallel, they may even set up a dangerous resonance that increases the odds of failure.
Or perhaps they emit a subatomic particle that can destabilize other reactors. Now a few troopers in a battlefield feet apart don't emit enough to trigger the reactors (especially if they are moving around and constantly varying the emissions). They would need to wait to activate the reactors until immediately before going into battle so a packed troop transport didn't result in exploding suits.
The risk is too high to tolerate in a civilian use. But war is war, and the chance of your soldier dying from his own reactor blowing is lower than the increased chance of death from NOT having powered armor.
# New Tech:
Sure, after the war this tech will transform your world. For right now, however, your armor is brand-spanking new. It took years to get it working, and the engineering is very finicky. Existing tanks and planes are expensive to retrofit, and the engineering to do it safely will take years. In the meanwhile, the value of the armor suits is so high in battle that all the output for these is going just to the mechanized infantry.
Military developers are also notoriously hidebound. Until a new technology is proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, they will spend vast sums on old tech because they know it and understand it. So the Air Force, Navy, and Cavalry (tanks) are in the hands of different branches of the military. But the infantry (widely considered irrelevant to modern war) is desperate enough to be willing to take risks on unproven equipment rather than have their troops be mere cannon fodder.
# Psychic Handwavium:
I think the best answer to this is that your suits are powered by psychic ability. Each person's mind is able to tap into a deeper level of reality, and the energy differential is such that it powers the suit. You might have a few genuine psychics around who could power a vehicle (and read minds or bend spoons), but for the most part, the psychic potential of an ordinary person only allows them to access a small amount of power.
This also helps with the physics of your particle beam. The weapon generates a psychically-charged plasma that is actually a primitive form of life. It acts like a predator and is imbued with the intentions of the user. This is why it behaves outside of standard physics - because it has intent.
MUFON and other alien-experiencer organizations have suggested such plasma actually exists as an explanation for various phenomenon. They also suggest aliens have various psychic abilities, although the aliens would likely not need such "primitive" sources of power to run their equipment.
Your users might need to get semi-dangerous implants or drugs to access this energy. Thus, they are considered unsafe for use by civilians. But the military has shown a wide willingness to use tools dangerous to the users to make more effective weapons. After all, soldiers are already risking their lives to fight. So what if 10% of your army will go insane or die of strokes over the course of the war?
# Black Box:
Your people don't really understand exactly how this tech works. Perhaps it is captured alien tech, or the work of a brilliant but erratic (and now dead) scientist. It works, and amazingly, but any attempts to use the tech for anything else fails - catastrophically. Folks are spending billions trying to figure it out, and they can COPY the tech perfectly, but in the meanwhile, all it is good for is to power exoskeletons.
# Low Transmission:
Your suits utilize a new way of using energy. The real trick is HOW the suit receives power. They create a field a bit like a Tesla coil that transmits power. Only the range of this field is VERY small - a few feet, at most. The fields can interfere with each other if in too close of a proximity.
So while the devices can power things very close to it, they can't funnel into a power grid or network. They might be able to generate very brief fields to contain particle beams, but this effect is only stable for a fraction of a second (long enough to fire a weapon...)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xJhwe.png)
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one way would be **scarcity** - the source is theoretically usable for other applications, but there's not enough to go around, and military has precedence.
another idea would be that it somehow needs to be **integrated with an organism to work**, for example via a neural interface to control it. it could still be used for civilian "suit-based" applications, but it's limited to one unit per person, and you've put a stop to scalability.
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Numerous reasons.
**Classified**
The go to excuse for a military organization. Some part of the power source is bleeding edge tech that provides the suit its power would give the adversary an edge that you do not want them to have (maybe the tech is the only way you can fight them on even grounds... if they get it, they would decimate your forces.). It could be that the fuel and the type of reaction are known, but only one guy has cracked how to cool it in a compact way and all his work was classified. Discussing it unless you have a need to know can jeopardize your edge. This happens in real life. The United States makes a lot of money from exporting weapons... but it still keeps the good stuff for itself. The current top line jet the U.S. is producing is the F-35... despite it being an inferior plane to the F-22. The reason for this is simple: The F-22 contains a bevy of tech that is classified and cannot be sold to even our closest allies lest it get into the hands of people we don't want knowing how it works. Removing those stuff would take away any edge the F-22 has over other jet fighters world wide... So the F-35 was creates so countries looking for next gen aircraft could still buy something from the U.S. Otherwise they might take their business elsewhere.
**Lack of Infrastructure/Efficiency Gap**
This is the biggest thing holding back vehicles that don't rely on fossil fuels or use alternative cleaner sources. Currently electric cars are hampered by the lack of infrastructure to charge the batteries of the car, which makes them much more expensive as you need to have a reliable facilities. It's even worse for the hydrogen fuel cell, which requires an entirely new fuel station to run, despite the fact that the only "waste product" of hydrogen fueled vehicles is pure water. There's also the tendency for hydrogen to be a very volatile when exposed to oxygen and a tiny spark. And despite getting around all those problems the actual range of either car is less than a gas powered vehicle of the same size because the former has had 100+ years to develop more efficiency into their engines.
**Military standardization**
This might not be a universal problem but if your fuel source is different enough, it might not work for the military because the military has a standard fuel for all it's vehicles. Did you know in the U.S. Military, that you can take fuel intended for jet planes, put it in a tank, and the tank will run just fine? The reason for this is very much intentional. The reason why the United States military is such a powerhouse is because it invested very heavily in logistics... to the point that they can get just about anything to anywhere almost overnight (the special ops teams are prepared to get boots on the ground anywhere in the world in under 48 hours notice.). Armies march on their stomachs after all. Disrupt the supply lines and the army rapidly loses. Invading forces need to secure a victory. The longer an invading force takes to do this, the more likely they are to lose, even if they are superior (see the results of the Revolutionary war or the Vietnam war. Wars tend to favor the home team in the long run). With that in mind, the U.S. military has made as much of their vehicles run on the same type of fuel as everything else because shipping different types of fuels for ground combat vehicles, air vehicles, and sea vessels is asking for a logistics nightmare if there is a supply line disruption and fueling the fleet/motor pool/wing is the difference between victory and defeat. Introducing new tech that requires an entirely new fuel source in the supply line could be undesirable in the short term... they may wait until the engine can be adapted to other vehicles... which leads to the final point...
**Steer into the skid**
You can't put the genie back into the bottle in weapons tech. And weapons tech tends to advance similar to evolution... the next big thing is a defense to the last big thing... and the thing that follows that will be the ability to overcome the next big thing. You have a sword? They will make armor... You get a bigger sword that can break armor? War... war never changes... just the toys we play the game with.
This means that research into the latest and greatest tends to get prioritization in militaries. And that cool tech tends to see other uses in non-military markets. After all, one of the edges the U.S. had in WWII was an all terrain vehicle that could bring troops to the front lines miles away quickly while the axis powers still had their infantry march... which would make them more tired when the fighting started. This marvelous military machine is now sold at your local Jeep dealer... while still being used by the U.S. Military as light transport. GPS was developed to keep the U.S. military fighter keenly aware of their locations on the battle field. The Internet gained life as a system to ensure command and control of the U.S. military was kept intact in a nuclear war by decentralizing communications and information storage. The came to the civilian market and now I don't need to write down step by step directions to get to a new destination or better yet... I can know exactly what route to take to get to where I need to be, and catch Japanese monsters along the way there! Battlefield medicine translates very well to civilian medicine, and the Army Marching on its Stomach comes back to the home front in better packaging and storage of perishable foods. If it's good enough for our boys on the frontline, it's good enough for our growing children too! Maybe the story of this power armor isn't how to keep it out of the hands of others... perhaps it's "what happens when it does fall into the wrong hands."
There is a reason why so many of Iron Man's foes also have suits of armor. Tony Stark being a weapons maker who gave the world a superweapon it might not be ready for is kind of the critical point of his entire character.
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You could set things up so that each 'power cell' is a sentient life form that has to be grown, raised, and trained. They aren't just power sources, they are an integral part of the control system (the way a hunting dog both powers and guides itself to do what the hunter wants). This solves a number of scaling and distribution issues:
* As life forms they only grow to a certain size, putting a top limit on their power output.
* They can only be communicated with through specialized equipment (like implants) and need trained handlers to keep them on task, otherwise they'll take over whatever system they're connected to and go feral. That makes them unsuitable for most civilian uses.
* They are territorial, and will fight any other of their kind that is connected to the same system, sometimes to the death. Or worse, they'll go into a breeding cycle... That precludes any sort of array or serial system that combines their power.
These factors make them useful for comparatively low-power systems with constant trained human supervision, but not for much else: powered armor suits; small mobile medical bays (where the entity acts as nurse and powers testing and diagnostic equipment); certain construction and engineering jobs where the un-augmented human body is too frail. They might find some use as control systems — e.g., to replace the autopilot of a passenger jet or spaceship with something more intelligent, while the main power source is still 'conventional' — but whether that's feasible depends on the cost and difficulty of breeding the entity and training its handler.
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# Only military applications of a certain size
First off, a military development is not always used in civilian applications. It is a miracle we got GPS. though it is locked under a certain height and speed and will stop working above those thresholds. GPS could've been used solely by military for pinpoint accuracy and tracking, never to be released to the public to prevent many other militaries to get insight in the technology.
The power source is great for certain sized machinery. Just like a nuclear reactor of certain types have sizes that are optimal for both price and power generated, so does your power source. The best price to performance is at suit level power sources. Larger will skyrocket the price (aquariums are a good example), or give a certain danger (fatal heat buildup and too little ability to control the cooling). Smaller gives diminishing returns, making them quickly useless.
To make it not power larger stuff you can make it dangerous to implement multiple of such power sources. They can interact in close proximity or the same power grid. This gives a chance on (catastrophic) failure. This way you can't make them power a jet. Bigger ones are just unfeasible in price. Multiple ones can fail or require too much extra calibration and maintenance that it's out of the question.
It will certainly not be used solely for power armour. But you might actually want to implement it in some other machines as well. This is part of world building. You get a new introduction that changes the world in more ways than just power armour. To me that can actually enrich your world. But with price, performance and danger you can still make it unfeasible for many unwanted applications. It can then even be a part of the plot, where unexpected, exotic applications are used for the power source.
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Because the "fuel cells" do not provide electrical power. These fuel cells use ATP or something like it to cause specially engineered artificial muscle fibers to contract. It does not even lend itself very well to rotational power and is thus unsuitable for a tank or wheeled vehicle (and it can't do magical Tony Stark repulsor-style thrust units either). The "relaxation time" of the material is too slow to try to apply it to a piston to cheat this. This probably also rules out using it to cheat flight, you won't get viable ornithopters out of it.
You can definitely get something that's the equivalent of a bulldozer out of it, but it looks more like a loader from Cameron's Aliens than something with treads.
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## Your "reactor" is not more fuel or weight efficient than batteries or gasoline, but it is able to output massive surges of electrical output much like a miniaturized capacitor.
Capacitors are similar to batteries except the are able discharge MUCH faster. But they are also much bigger and heavier for how much they hold. So, instead of making a power source that outputs more total power, what you have is a device that can hold just as much electrical charge for its weight as a lithium ion battery, but can discharge it much faster when needed.
Current military prototypes for power armor have most of the bells and whistles you are asking for: heavy body armor, digitally enhanced optics, communications, etc. Because the power requirements of something the size of a person are so small, the average output of such a system during normal operation is only about about 30 watts.
Keep in mind that your power armor does not need a super powerful radar system onboard to see things 100km away, nor does a power suit have a lot of reasons to need to know what is 100km away since their main roles will be urban warfare and infiltration. They only need the ability to communicate with and integrate their tactical information with nearby vehicles or buildings that DO have longer sensory awareness. The power armor's sensory suite will be more interested in features like infrared, range finding, motion detectors, short range sonar, optical zoom, etc. which means your total electronics package's continuous power draw will likely be less than 10 watts.
Even climate control will not consume a lot of power. Since you are only air conditioning the narrow space between you and your suit by a few degrees, a the cooling system will use be orders of magnitude less power than something like a home AC or refrigerator. I would expect this to be about a 7 watt system, similar to the water cooling systems used on high end gaming PCs, but in normal climates, this power draw could be much less.
Walking/running around of course consumes more power, but this is something you will not be doing all day long on a normal mission. A solider spends a lot more time sitting and waiting than he does walking about; so, this could take an average of 10-13 watts even if the power use peaks much higher than this.
The only real power requirement of your suit that you do not already see in current power armor prototypes is the energy weapon(s). If the suit wants a HEL (High Energy Laser) capable of filling antipersonnel roles, it will need to output brief 2000 watt spikes of power. For one capable of taking on armored vehicles, it will need to spike up to 60,000-240,000 watts of power draw. These massive spikes of power discharge is what your system can do that modern batteries can not.
(This of course also assumes you've been able to massively improve laser technology to be able to make a hand held anti-tank laser to begin with.)
If you assume your power system is in every other way similar to the lithium ion batteries in current power armor prototypes, and you were to swap out the typical amount of ammo a solider carries with more batteries, then then your suit would have 72 hours of power set aside for normal field operation, plus an additional 130 hours of power for the extra batteries that are replacing your old ammo load out. With 130 hours of fuel "set aside as ammo" your power armor could in theory operate a 3 day mission, and fire enough shots to take out 65 main battle tanks, 260 light armored vehicles, or 7800 anti-personnel shots with its lasers... or the more likely scenario, allow the solider to operate an entire week between recharging and still be able to fire off the same amount of shots as a solider using bullets.
### You could see the same tech used in other places, but it's effect would be far less noticeable.
In contrast, a Main Battle Tank like the M1 Abram consumes ~83 gallons of gasoline per hour. Replacing its engine with batteries would require a ~2,800,000 watt system. So, for a tank to also fire a 240,000 watt blast to kill another tank with a laser would not be nearly as extraordinary of a feat compared to what its existing power and weapon systems could already achieve. Furthermore, tanks do most of their killing with over the horizon weapons; so, replacing a tank's main gun with a direct fire energy weapon that needs line-of-sight would be at a strategical disadvantage against kinetic weapons anyway.
Aircraft consume even far more fuel than tanks. An F-22 for example can consume over 6000 gallons of fuel per hour. Also, aircraft rely a lot more on stealth, and it is a lot easier to fire a stealth missile from a stealth aircraft without being noticed than it is to fire a HEL which would light you up on infrared scanners.
So long story short, tanks and jets would still need their traditional engines and weapons because the power density of a lithium ion battery like system would be WAY to low to replace their primary propulsion systems and still maintain acceptable operational ranges, and the cost/benefit of directed energy weapons is not nearly as enticing for them as they are for infantry.
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**Critical Mass**
Radioactive material emits particles as it decays. When those particles strike nearby radioactive material it causes that material to decay, which in turn releases more particles. If too much material is placed close together, you get a runaway reaction and a nuclear explosion.
Let's pretend that the material that powers the reactors is similar to other radioactive material in that it naturally emits some kind of particle, and exposure to that same particle accelerates the release of more energy.
Let's pick the emitted particle to be something harmless to humans and impossible to shield. In that case we can't place more than a tiny quantity of the reactor material in one location. This prevents us from creating large reactors. We could create arrays of small reactors, but they would need to be spaced so far apart physically that they would be too huge to fit in an airplane or tank.
One option for the particle would be something like a neutrino. It's generally harmless, and they can't be shielded against (it is believed after all that neutrinos can pass right through the earth).
**Non Use By Civilians**
There are many technologies that exist today that aren't used by the civilian world simply because they are classified. Civilians largely don't know they exist, and even if they did, they don't know how to make them.
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## Dark magnetism
"Fuel cell" is a bland, declassified, reassuring term meant to help soldiers feel comfortable with the concept of how their power supply works. It is true in a degree. But let's pull aside the curtain.
Researchers hunted for, and apparently found, a [dark photon](https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.011807) that mediates interactions with dark matter. Where there are photons, there's electromagnetism, so ... dark magnetism! The "fuel cell" projects a wide electromagnetic net that sucks in a certain type of dark matter particle from all around, like a mini Bussard ramjet. The dark matter particles, thanks to some *advanced* physics, can react with bismuth nuclei, causing them to undergo nuclear fission. This is like a normal nuclear reactor, but on demand at a high rate until the bismuth is used up.
"Used up" is itself a euphemism - there's plenty of bismuth left when the cell reads empty, but reaction products (strangelet isotopes and more unusual things) build up that are unstable in contact with the dark matter. So the "fuel cell" is built with a very strictly hardwired limit on power production, meant not to be defeated even in the heat of battle, lest a conventional war inadvertently turn into a nuclear war. There are treaties about these things.
For civilians not enclosed in protective armor, these fuel cells and their radiation are somewhat intimidating. The cost to dispose of used cells is *surprisingly* high. The military has surveillance requirements because of the risk of someone accidentally modifying one into a nuclear device.
For the tanks and airplanes, the limit pertains to the dark matter. It is hard to pull in that much dark matter to a small region of space using the existing fields, so it is far more expensive to design a giant fuel cell or two that work at high efficiency when adjacent than to just make two.
Note: this answer implies that suits of power armor in close proximity will suffer a reduction in raw power output, though the lifespan of the "fuel cells" is similarly extended.
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# Your energy capacity scales with area
For argument, consider some kind of handwavium fabric that generates (small amounts of) energy by exploiting small potential differences in the quantum vacuum across it's face. Therefore your energy storage or power generation capacity scales with the surface area of the fabric.
Now imagine also that two sheets of material placed too close together interfere with each other, so you cannot "artificially" increase the surface area by folding a large amount of fabric into a small volume. Any other possible application that can easily increase it's *volume* would do better with a regular battery or a fuel tank, but your exo-suit needs to be form-fitting.
Now the applications that make sense for this fabric must fall below the maximum power/unit area produced. A human-sized exoskeleton has relatively low power/area requirements, but an armored vehicle needs much more power, but the surface area is only a few times larger. It scales even worse for aircraft and power plants, especially if the power/area you can get out is less than a good solar panel. Even better if the magic fabric is very lightweight. Pair that with some kind of very lightweight kevlar-carbon fiber-composite armor and you don't need as much power to move the exosuit around. Most other uses aren't as concerned with weight, and those that do, like aircraft, care much more about power/weight ratio where fuel wins.
Such technology might find some niche applications, for example anywhere we might currently use plutonium radio-thermal generator (RTG) such as on spacecraft (assuming your handwavium explanation makes it a power source and not just a battery).
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**Limited and Hazardous Production**
Perhaps its not the usage that has a limiting factor on this tech, but the production itself: It is very expensive to produce, it causes massive environmental problems... and there is only a limited amount of resources before depletion.
While the above wouldn't stop the tech from being used in a tank, think about it like this: We can already get tanks to work without that technology, but that might not be true for this power-armor. The only reliable way to power it, is either using these fuel cells, or perhaps drag along a mile long power cable.
Since its a limited resource, it won't be wasted on weapons that can run without it - and only on those power-suits. They may also have a tendency to irradiate their surroundings.
And the production itself could be equally problematic or frowned upon; perhaps mining and exposing those resources make an area completely inhabitable, or the waste products are impossible to dispose of safely. Or maybe the magic required to get these batteries to work require a massive sacrifice.
Bonus points if the limited resource is some kind of very rare beneficial creature or asset. Perhaps, each battery requires the sacrifice of a magic user (which could be otherwise valuable), the destruction of an astral leyline (which causes irreparable long-term damage to the magic community) or the killing of beneficial spirits.
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# Regulations
The first people to make this tech, sought out to specifically create this power armor. It wasn't that it was the best solution, but the armor is manufactured in pieces across about 15 US states and 3 allied nations, so we can regulate it, but only in favor of the random company to get here first.
Additionally, since the power armor manufacturer has a government contract, traditional manufactures can't openly pursue this technology without beaching contract with their largest client.
Sure, some individuals with too many doctorates in theoretical engineering might be able to jury rig something, and the large traditional manufacturers **are** looking into it, (possibly with experimental prototypes to be leaked and discovered) but that will forever be 10 years away.
Throw in a bit of propaganda for good measure. Convince education and trade groups to over-emphasize the dangers of the trace amount of handwavium. Maybe some rationing too, since handwavium is always just a bit scarce. But mostly no one does anything else with it because the government says not to, and it's hard to openly oppose governments with powered exosuits.
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**Alien tech**
Your military figured out how to use it, but they don't know how it works. You were just lucky enough for a small cargo vessel to crash (relatively) gently on your moon with a few dozen. Or...
**You haven't invented them yet**
You certainly will now that your grandson sent them back to you. It's just a matter of time.
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**Copyright laws**
The massive multimedia conglomerate that manufactures power armor simply refuses to give the rights to the adapter patents for use elsewhere; uses outdated and overreaching copyright legislation it wrote and lobbied for to sue/takedown/bounty hunt those making technology compatible with their products (which happens to only be their power armor)
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**Your fuel cells require a rare blood type for combustion. Preferably fresh.**
You could claim that your fuel cell needs a small constant intake of very specific organic fluid (easiest would be an exact blood type) to produce power. Ergo the limiting factor for widespread magical fuel cell use isn't the fuel cells themselves but the far rarer secondary genetic material required to activate the things.
You can't use the fuel cells for non-military use as running them full time would require chaining individuals with the rare bloodtype to powerplant machines to ensure the constant trickle of the required blood. You could claim that even slightly larger machines like tanks can't use the magic fuel cells as mixing batches of the required bloodtype from different donors has wonky effects on the fuel cells - so only machines small enough to be run off a single fuelcell/blood bag combo are viable. Also fuel cells tend to vibrate at the same frequency, so using multiple fuel cells in close proximity tends to damage them.
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**There are just batteries**
They don't produce power, they just store it. Maybe it contains some anti-matter particles. They take a lot of power to make in the first place and could be used to store energy until its needed. But couldn't be used to get more power than was used to make them.
Also it may not have wide spread use as the general population get a little scared when you tell them its equivalent to a small nuclear bomb strapped to their back. To your soldiers you tell them to follow your orders and be glad that you think you fixed all the issues with anti-matter leaking out of the container.
People get even more worried when you say you want to put kilograms of the stuff in a tank or an airplane. So bowing to public pressure you decide not to equip your tanks or airplanes with the stuff.
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The power source could be something like a zero-point module from Stargate. It creates a ton of energy from basically nowhere. Using your energy device creates a sudden surge of power, but will cause some sort of catastrophe (bend or mess up space/time, cause wide-area sterilization, release radiation, creates a microscopic black hole, etc.) if left on permanently, or if the device is not moved between frequent uses. It cannot be scaled up for the same reason, nor can you use multiples chained together in the same confined area as they could build off each other. The device pulses on and then off for a fraction of a second, dumping the power into energy cells which hold it for use. Normal walking around might use very little energy, resulting in the device flipping on once a day to recharge. During combat, this might get to the point where it is turning on every few minutes. Such a danger would also limit the number of suits a side could field in battle, as eventually their fields might overlap and cause the catastrophe. Perhaps one reason why they are kept so small is to limit such interaction odds.
This technology could still potentially be used in jets, but not near other jets or when parked near each other in a hanger. They would still need to use fuel for taking off and landing. At that point, you are trying to create a jet which can use two different energy sources to accomplish the same thing, a difficult and maybe insurmountable problem. Cars and tanks face the same issue as the jets. Nobody could use the energy device in a parking lot. They might be able to create hybrid cars, but would require some sort of safety feature to avoid turning on while passing another vehicle which is also turned on. Do you really want people driving around with a device which can cause devastation if it fails and stays on too long?
Add to the mix, a lengthy, difficult, and/or expensive manufacturing process, and you limit easy access to such a device. The mere threat such a device could pose would likely prevent civilian usage at all. A terrorist could rig such a device to switch on permanently in the middle of a city and leave behind undefined horror. It could have an almost “nuclear bomb” status. Useful in certain limited applications, but not beyond that.
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**Cannot stop the battery from generating energy**
Civilian technics is largely not a 24/7 energy consumer, things need to be turned on and off on a regular basis, some stuff is better left off for 99% of the time but require a lot of energy to do its work in the remaining 1%. Making your battery to generate a lot of energy per second but either not last long enough or not be able to stop discharging would be a decent damper for civilian application. Or better, "and". Still, some industry would benefit from such a battery, provided there would be enough of them available, like refining aluminium.
**Contamination**
Making such a battery could be done off planet, but using it would be close to humans (or who's using energy up there), and no sentient species wants their home becoming extremely dirty from everyday use. Make your battery radiate gamma/alpha/isotopes while discharging, and civilian application would become a lot more complicated. Army doesn't really care about contamination, they've got some deivisions specialized to confront it, and if that power armor of yours would be of enough war impact to turn the tide of battle, the generals would ignore contamination as long as they won't suffer more losses from that than from their enemy.
**Insecurity**
In fact, any single energy storage is a literal bomb. Should this energy be released at once, things will blow up. Giving such a device to a civilian society is asking for trouble. Thus, if your battery has energy density around 100x gasoline's, short-circuiting a 1kg battery would result in an explosion of about 50kg TNT, resulting in multiple deaths and pretty major destruction. Thus, using an energy source this powerful should be restricted administratively in order to mitigate the threat of it exploding with casualties. This alone puts a great barrier on using such a battery in everyday life.
**Internal heat**
Oh you've mentioned it already. Okay, add linearly increasing demand for cooling per sq.ft when scaling the battery up.
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It doesn't have to be exclusive to just the power armor.
In the late 60s - early 70s we saw the birth of the Main Battle Tank (MBT) because of advances in combustion engines. This made it possible to make a heavy tank as fast as a medium or maybe a light tank.
A more energy-dense power plant does not mean a smaller power plant. The M1 Abrams is larger than the M60, despite having a far more capable engine. Your tanks can just have more armor, a bigger gun, and maybe be a little faster while remaining the same size.
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More posts from this thread will be linked here:
[Metal-Feathered Macaw Viability Part 2: Best Wing Shape?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116518)
# Info
I'm designing a [macaw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaw) that has metal feathers, claws, and a metal beak--to be particular, steel. To start with, assume a regular anatomy/physiology of a macaw+steel feathers, claws, and beak.
The growing beak/claws/feathers are pure steel, all the way through. They have the same shape and structure as regular feathers (barbs, strands, etc.)
# Question:
Given the increase in weight due to this metal, what physiological/anatomical changes would be required to still permit flight with these modifications? The bird still needs to be able to fly, but I suspect it will not be able to do so for as long as a normal macaw.
By "flight" I mean take off and maneuver under its own power. No pushing it off a cliff or making it "glide" like a flying squirrel. Actual flight.
Don't regard the way the macaw grows the feathers or gets the steel it needs. It just grows them. This is about the aerodynamics.
Please [don't write handwavium/it's magic answers or comments](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/106/). I want to develop this part scientifically and realistically. It's tagged as science-based, not magic.
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Thank you to the [Sandbox](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions) for helping grow this question.
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I'll take a stab at this...
First things first, I'm finding it hard to find exact figures about the weight of a macaw's feathers but a general consensus seems to be the bird itself weighs around 1kg (depending on species, but I assume you want a scarlet or blue and yellow as they are the most famous and both weigh 1kg).
According to this answer on [Quora](https://www.quora.com/How-many-feathers-would-be-in-a-pound-of-feathers-1) a chicken's feathers account for 3.3% of it's body weight and a feather weighs about 0.0082 grams. Let's assume a macaw's feathers take up a similar portion of it's body weight, this would place it at having approx. 4000 feathers.
[This handy site](https://www.visionlearning.com/en/library/General-Science/3/Density/37) lists the density of both feathers and steel. Feathers being 0.0025 g/cm3 and steel being 7.8 g/cm3, or 3000 times more dense. This would make each steel feather weigh about 24.6g meaning your parrot now weighs 99.4kg give or take, but only if we can directly convert one to the other. But this calculation probably doesn't hold water as the density conversion between feathers and steel is inaccurate due to the different compression of each item. Unfortunately I'm not sure the density for keratin works as I can only find the density for α-keratin and not β-keratin which is what feathers are made of. I'm assuming it's more dense based on the descriptions but can't be sure.
The density of α-keratin is approx. 1.3 g/cm3 which would make each steel feather weigh 0.04 g and the total weight being around 190g. When you factor in Georg Patscheider's comments about the upper bound of 7.8kg this does seem to fit reasonably well and is a lot lighter than expected, so this might work better than I thought.
Still, 200 grams is an extra 20% weight, which is a lot of extra weight for a bird to carry but not outside the realms of possibility. Eagles can be known to carry their own body weight so 20% may be possible for a parrot. Though this isn't including the beak and claws so that might be an issue.
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If it's pure steel? Hell nah. But there are other options. The scaly-foot gastropod, also known by the considerably more badass-sounding names of iron snail and Chrysomallon squamiferum, hails from the deep-sea thermal vents known as black smokers, deep-sea vents from which water gushes constantly. That water, by the way, originates from below the mantle.
The SFG uses the chemosynthetic bacteria lurking in its glands to absorb and mineralize poisonous iron-sulphides in the water, making them non-poisonous for the snail. It then coats its shell with the minerals, constructing an unique three-layer structure. The outer layer, used to block the bulk of the attack, is made up of greigite (Fe3S4), a ridiculously hard mineral. Then comes a middle layer of squishy organic matter purposed to absorb the shock of impacts, dents and blows. Finally, an inner layer of aragonite (CaCO3), designed to prevent asshole crabs from sticking their nasty claws into the shell and picking it apart splinter by splinter.
This armor is so much better than anything which we possess, including Chobham Armor, that the U.S. Army is actively conducting research about it with the hope of developing new next-generation armor using the same build. By the way, take a look at it.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gvc4Z.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WFmTj.jpg)
Those are metallic scales made out of iron minerals. Iron minerals that are poisonous and magnetic. The scales are there because of the tooth-harpoon-hurling killer snails. Namely, they serve to deflect the harpoons entirely. And they can also shrug off diamond-tipped indenter heads. An industrial-grade diamond applied with the pressure of several metric tonnes. Colossus of the X-Men's mutation doesn't seem so far-fetched any more, does it?
Oh, and they don’t really eat anything, relying on their chemosynthetic bacteria for sustenance instead. In layman’s terms, that means that the snail keeps itself running by oxidating the sulphides in the water, all of which are lethally poisonous to most lifeforms, including the snail itself. The only reason it survives is that the bacteria chemosynthetize the sulphides, enabling the snail to quite literally live off of the poison.
So, if you want your metal-feathered macaw, while pure steel's completely impossible (on account of it being a biological organism and all), you could hypothetically simply splice its genes with the SFG, grant it a symbiotic relationship with the same chemosynthetic bacteria, and thus have greigite nanoscale armor integrated into its beak, claws and feather in the same way. And relative to its weight, this is the strongest organic nanomaterial yet known to man. Can't find any figures on the density in g/cm3 of the SFG's iron plate-mail scale armor, but could it be light enough for your metal macaw to get off the ground and fly? Maybe...
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## Power to weight ratios
There are four forces at play for any airborne object: Lift, gravity, thrust and drag. We'll focus on drag and lift since those are the hard parts.
Assuming Adalia's math is right (may be a bit high but let's go with it) and this steel macaw now weights ~100kg, then the wings must generate sufficient lift to overcome that ~100kg of weight. The [lift equation](https://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/lifteq.html) tells us what we need to know:
$$L = C\_l \frac{r \cdot V^2}{2} \cdot A$$
where $L$ = Force of Lift, $C\_l$ is the coefficient of lift, $r$ is air density, $V^2$ is velocity squared and $A$ is wing area.
For our purposes, the wing area, air density, lift coefficient all remain unchanged from a regular macaw. So, in order to support a 100kg parrot in flight, we need to go 10x faster (since velocity is squared in the lift equation).
## What a drag
Drag kills. The [equation for drag](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/drageq.html) is as follows:
$$D = C\_d \cdot \frac{\rho \cdot V^2}{2} \cdot A$$
Where $D$ is the force of drag, $C\_d$ the drag coefficient, $\rho$ is air density, $V^2$ is velocity squared and $A$ is frontal area. For our macaw, drag coefficient, air density and area remain unchanged. We only have velocity to work with.
From our lift equation, we know that we have to go 10x faster to support our steel macaw. How unfortunately that means that the macaw must expend 10x the energy to get up to speed and to just stay in the air. Low speed flight will be especially energy intensive since lift will have to be generated from forcing air downward (a la helicopter) instead of suction upwards (a la airplanes).
Further, the wing loading on this bird will be absurdly bad. Maneuverability will be atrocious since the high wing loading demands that all or almost all lift is spent keeping the bird in the air; leaving little to nothing left for turning.
Landing is going to be tricky too. When a bird comes in to land it has to slow down from whatever it's flight speed is to zero. This steel macaw is going to have a really hard time with this since it's wings generate pathetically small drag compared to its massive weight. All landings will be crash landings since the air sure isn't going to help slow the bird down. Oh no, that job belongs to Mr. Dirt-in-your-beak.
## We need more power
In order to make this macaw fly, you'll have to upgrade his little fleshy heart and muscles to steel or handwavium. I don't know of a mechanism that will generate the power required to keep this steel weight in the air and still fit in the size of a big bird. Keeping that bird fueled for any substantial flight will be really tough since the flight performance is already so bad.
## This bird is grounded!!!
...without serious handwaving. Anyone who knows anything about aerodynamics will have exceptional difficulty with suspension of disbelief.
## Visualization
A helpful mental image for why this is such a bad idea: Take a steel plate from an Olympic lifting gym. Try to get it to fly. How fast is it going to have to be flying to stay in the air?
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**This answer has been edited to account for a change in Adalia's answer**
Your problem is [wing loading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_loading).
Flight is magical, but it's not irrational. Without thrust (airplanes, rockets) a bird must balance its weight with the carrying load of the wings. How much the wings are loaded will affect balance, agility, ease of landing and takeoff, etc.
The upper limit for birds is about 5#/sqft. If Adalia's right (and I have no reason whatsoever to doubt him), then your 1.2Kg (2.65#) bird would require about 0.53 sqft of wing or .265sqft per wing (4" wide, 1' long...).
This is well within the capacity of a bird to fly. The only real issue is the necessity for flexibility (steel generally isnt, even as thin as this is if we want it to not bend and break apart like an electrical knock-out) and a cohesiveness between "feathers" that might not exist with steel (but at this level of fineness, it might).
So, I'm going with yes, the bird can fly, but you need to either handwave the flexibility of the steel or you need to come up with an alloy that allows the flexibility without generating heat or breakage.
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It depends on what kind of metal those feathers are made of.
If you assume that it's Iron or steel, of course it would be far too heavy.
But since it's a fictional history you can dig deeper onto the fictional side so here is a solution:
# Solution:
**adaptations:** You did ask what kind of adaptations would be necessary to allow a metal feathered macaw to fly, I could think in only one logical way:
### Organic alloy
It doesn't need to be pure metal to be a metal alloy, lets work on that!
What we tend to mix with Iron to turn it more light and stronger? **Carbon!** But wait! That's just steel, still isn't light enough...
Carbon based lifeforms tend to be good at, well, manipulating carbon at molecular level, a bird put on right evolutionary pressures, could evolve the right biological ways to produce [Carbon Nanotubes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube). Carbon nanotubes have the reputation to be the strongest and stiffest material discovered since and its as light as, well carbon, if you ever held a piece of graphite you know what I'm talking about.
And since Iron is contained on blood, and we know that there is no trouble in mixing carbon with iron (Humanity does it all the time!) yeah that is...
Your macaw have feathers made of a crystalline lattice or intricate net of [Carbon Nanotubes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube) mixed with iron in a fictional organic alloy developed by a species of macaw which lived on a surprisingly specific fictional conditions to evolve extreme fight adaptations, maybe to resist an acid or corrosive enviroment or whatever, those details doesn't matter much to the history (I suppose).
I hope that this solved the problem. Have a good writing.
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I can't comment. So... Has anyone looked at the inside of feathers?? They are hollow with crisscross support. Any metal can also be formed this way. Basically you bubble air or other gas through the middle of the steel while it solidifies. Do this on the same scale as the feather structure. If you put too much air you get [metallic foam](http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0012/Banhart-0012.html).
So, more air less steel and weight.
] |
[Question]
[
[Jupiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter) is a terrible place to be, but for a number of artistic reasons, I'd like to have my story take place there and only there. "Mining", **or resource extraction by any other name**, is the usual reason cited for sending human beings to live in terrible places. The reasons NOT to do so are usually economic in nature, as the resources extracted are not worth the investment required to enable people to survive in a terrible place.
What would likely be the first thing we'd find economically viable to mine on Jupiter? I really don't want to handwave this thing the target material away, as it may have a direct impact on the environment I create to be my setting.
EDIT: I'm willing for the required tech to be powered by phlebotinum.
EDIT: Emphasize this, restate that... The unspoken assumption, I guess, is that something HAS been found to be economically and technically viable to mine on Jupiter. I would like a reasonably well-thought-out opinion on what that **first material** for which these conditions might be true could be.
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Skimming various gasses from the Jovian atmosphere or using superscience to extract metallic hydrogen from deep below the surface only taps a small amount of the potential resources available. Since you explicitly said "Jupiter" and not the Jovian system, I will set aside the 67 moons or thousands of asteroids on the L4 and L5 trojan points.
Jupiter has a tremendous amount of heat energy, and emits 2X the energy in the infrared band than it receives from the Sun. At that distance from the Sun, solar arrays will either be insufficient or need to be massively larger than comparable arrays on Earth for the same power output. Tapping the heat energy from Jupiter would provide energy for industrial activities throughout the system.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oUMmu.jpg)
The planet also has a massive magnetosphere 19,000 X greater than Earth. The motion of Io through the magnetic field creates and electric current much like a wire moving through a magnetic field does in a classic science experiment. In Jovian space, the flux tube has a current flow of about 2 trillion watts, another rich energy source for a Jovian civilization.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/11ArU.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/b9Kw1.png)
The intense radiation fields surrounding Jupiter could also be considered a resource, since using radiation to manipulate or change materials is a known technique, the amount of radiation flux would allow manufacturing isotopes or possibly transmutation on an industrial scale. Workers on the shop floor will need heavy duty shielding, otherwise they will be spending their retirement as night lights.
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Mining metallic Hydrogen might be a possibility, but I am unsure what happens when you move it out of the pressure and what goes on from there.
Second and probably more fun for a story...Helium-3. Most Helium on Earth is Helium-4 (two neutrons and two protons at its center)...on Earth it's a silly ratio of 99.999986% Helium 4. However Jupiter has a much heavier concentration of Helium 3 than we find elsewhere (measurable in parts per million, not parts per billion). Apparently it was more common in primordial (solar nebula) than it is now.
It's heavily disinguishable from Helium 4 (which has an overall spin of 0 making it a Boson) while Helium-3 has an overall spin of one half making it a fermion. This gives it some interesting applications.
Helium-3 has some interesting Cryogenic applications and a few medical uses. It's also exceedingly useful for neutron detection. We can lab create it, but not the easiest and not in high concentrations (and what we create it from is a major component in Nuclear weapons). Oh, on that note it can be used for fission applications and likely weaponized.
Wiki actually suggest that the proposal of mining Jupiter for it.
>
> Mining gas giants for helium-3 has also been proposed.[61] The British Interplanetary Society's hypothetical Project Daedalus interstellar probe design was fueled by helium-3 mines in the atmosphere of Jupiter, for example. Jupiter's high gravity makes this a less energetically favorable operation than extracting helium-3 from the other gas giants of the solar system, however.
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3>
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* Hydrogen, water, ammonia, all skimmed from the atmosphere rather than mined from the surface. Ammonia contains nitrogen, so with the water and a carbon asteroid you can start building greenhouses.
* [Helium-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Extraction_from_extraterrestrial_sources). Getting it out of Saturn's more shallow gravity well would be smarter, but if you're in the area anyway ...
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Jupiter is a huge gravity well, so the only logical thing will be to
# mine gravity
If you want to get helium or hydrogen to earth, [it need less energy to get it from Uranus](http://crowlspace.com/?p=25) (as getting off Jupiter is horribly hard).
But with exotic or more conventional technology, you could convert gravity into something of value.
Currently we use centrifuge to create local higher gravity.
Up to 20% (I lost the source. In fact it can be arbitrary high if you want really depleted tail or super-rich fuel) of the output of a nuclear plant is used to separate uranium isotope with centrifuge. So, simply throw a bag of uranium in the core and get it back up with a balloon could make sense.
To justify batch large enough to require doing it on Jupiter, [computer industry could have unlimited use for 28Si](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28632263)
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Jupiter is a whole big stack of hydrogen and helium. The only thing really useful you would get would be one of those. Hydrogen isn't really in limited supply, especially if you have the surplus energy to extract it from water. Helium is in [high demand](http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/01/01/why-we-are-running-out-of-helium-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/#728761351b98) if you ask some people, [not so much](http://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-inflated/) if you ask others. The biggest trace material would be methane, which could also be useful.
The mechanics of getting either of them out of Jupiter, make it unlikely that either would be worth your while, no matter what the prices. Jupiter has a massive magnetic field that causes very heavy radiation. Galileo had all sorts of glitches caused by the radiation field while orbiting Jupiter, and Pioneer 11 lost the pictures it took of Io before it could transmit them. Cassini, on the other hand, didn't have any radiation problems around Saturn. Notwithstanding the fact that humans would die immediately in Jupiter's orbit, even a robot mining station would be better off near Saturn.
Mining anything else out of Jupiter is pretty much a nonstarter. Even if the core of Jupiter was solid unobtainium, the temperature at the core is about 36000K and 3000 GPa (both of which are too high to compare with anything except the sun and fusion bombs). Technology is going to be way into the handwavian principles before that is feasible.
The last option, which may or may not be what you are asking about, is Jupiter's moons. The big four moons are combination of rocky/iron core and icy volatiles, primarily water with a little ammonia. Other elements present in the surface layers include magnesium, iron bearing-hyrated silicates, cabon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. The rocky-iron cores are too deep to be useful targets or mining.
The smaller moons have a similar composition to the surface layers of the big moons. Since you can achieve escape velocity on a pogo stick from some of the innumerable moonlets around Jupiter, it is probably easier to get minerals/volatiles there than from the big moons. They are also (mostly) farther from the radiation. Lastly, in addition to many [moons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Jupiter) of varying sizes, there are also the farther away [Trojans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_trojan), which share an orbit with Jupiter instead of orbiting Jupiter.
What I think is your best explanation for mining is trying to obtain volatiles for a space colony. Lets say that people are living in space stations in the inner solar system, growing their own food. They are going to need water and ammonia for the plants, water for the people (and industry?) and lots of other chemicals for fertilizer (phosphates, sulfur, potassium, etc) or industrial uses. Those things are plentiful on earth, but not cheap to get into space. It is easier if you just bring them from somewhere else in space. The asteroid belt is long on rocks and metals, and short on water and ammonia and such. The closes way to bring such things to a space habitat in earth orbit would be from Jupiter or its Trojans. The big advantage of dealing with Jupiter and any radiation concerns is that it is many AU closer than Saturn, even though Saturn is a more welcoming system and has great ring-tourism value and a uniquely large source of [methane](http://boletinsgm.igeolcu.unam.mx/bsgm/vols/epoca04/6703/%282%29Guzman.pdf), if you are in to that.
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Jupiter has comparatively [a lot of ³He left](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Solar_nebula_.28primordial.29_abundance) from the formation of the solar system. Possibly the most interesting feature of ³He is use as fusion fuel. ³He fusion reactor is probably easily doable at the same level of technology where mining Jupiter is, you just need to get loads of ³He somehow. Here's [a quote from Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions) explaining why we'd want just ³He:
>
> The appeal of helium-3 fusion stems from the aneutronic nature of its
> reaction products. Helium-3 itself is non-radioactive. The lone
> high-energy by-product, the proton, can be contained using electric
> and magnetic fields. The momentum energy of this proton (created in
> the fusion process) will interact with the containing electromagnetic
> field, resulting in direct net electricity generation.
>
>
>
The mining probably started at the other gas giants, with less deep gravity wells, because it is a lot easier. But Jupiter is closest to the inner solar system and therefore advantageous as soon as you have the tech to mine it. So this would set the natural stage of solar system exploitation and technology level.
At that level of technological development, where colonizing the solar system is well underway, any gas giant would have ³He fueling station for ships, but Jupiter might dominate the ³He exports to the inner solar system, because it is much closer in time and energy, and being much easier to police against piracy (if you want that type of activity). Exports could happen by a mass driver shooting huge electrically charged balloons (probably made out of graphene) filled with ³He, which would the be caught at the destination with electromagnetic nets (the electric charge wouldn't leak very much in hard vacuum). Other mining products shipped the same way would include at least Deuterium (there are at least 2 types of useful ³He fusion: ³He+³He and Deuterium+³He).
So you would have pumping and refinement stations orbiting Jupiter, with long pipes going down to the atmosphere, with a pump at the bottom (or possibly even the refinement system at the bottom, but it's quite a harsh place...). Stations would be powered by fusion reactors using the very ³He they mine. To counter the drag of the pipes, they'd probably use what would essentially be [fusion rockets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_rocket) to expell the normal hydrogen left over from the refinement back to Jupiter.
Rest of the economical activity (and therefore political power) would follow from the practicalities and control of these pumping and refinement stations, much like it now does at Earth from the oil fields, setting the backdrop for your story.
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I don't know of a material that Jupiter would be good for. However, it has one attribute that's *unbeatable* in our solar system. It has crazy amounts of pressure. Perhaps your intrepid miners are actually foundry workers, and they have to use this immense pressure to create some exotic form of material. For example, when a common iron alloy is processed a certain way, under pressure, you produce a steel that is unparalleled for making (space) warships. With respect to shrugging off high-speed impacts and absorbing harmful radiation, it performs 100x greater than the next best material. Yadda.
Now you have a hellish place to work and it is of extreme strategic importance.
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# Jupiter is "the" place in the solar system
### 1. Energy Sources
**Io is very hot due to the tidal friction**. It is a very good place to put geothermal power plants and beam the energy to a more friendly and hospitable moon like Europa or Ganymede. This makes an interesting setting, Io is a very instable place, so the power plants will need constant repairs or rebuilding. Deal with that may make colorful adventures. Energy production and water allows for big populations to settle in huge cities, even needing to rebuilding power plants each year may be cost effective.
**Helium 3 is always interesting**. As I understand fusion reactors can be far cheaper and smaller with Helium 3 than it is with traditional H-D reactions we are trying to do on earth.
**Fission Reactors** based on thorium and uranium are very good in the surface of colder planets and moons. That because the nuclear fuel produces heat and the difference between the heat and the environment temperature moves the turbines. On spaceships heat dissipation is very difficult and then nuclear reactors are smaller. Even then, NASA has only enough plutonium to make more 3 more missions. Not something that can run a civilization. On colder planet or moons it is easier. The problem is mining the uranium and thorium and sending to where will be used. Rocky planets and asteroids should have lots of Thorium and the jupter system have two big moons that can have thorium mines: Io (again) and Callisto. Not counting the asteroids.
**Mine the energy belts** like Thucydides proposed. I do not know if is that simple, but there is a lot of power in Jupiter radiation belts.
### 2. Environment
Heating a cold place takes lot of energy. Less colder moons will allow bigger settlements. Thats why I would place the bulk of the civilization outside Earth in Europa and Ganymede. Those moons are heated by Jupiter tidal forces and are not as colder than most moons. They are closer to Io that have lots of geothermal energy. They are closer to Io and Callisto that should have lots of thorium. This will not be enough to warm up those moons. Habitats will probably will look like Halley station on south pole.
Ice or Water is important because can be Hydrolized to make breatheable oxygen. Those moons have lots of amonia which can be broken to make nitrogen atmospheres which are essential to plant life.
### 3. Gravity
Gravity is an important factor. Mars have lots of resources, but it will be cheaper to mine them from the asteroids and small moons. Less energy is needed in the transport. The same goes to the habitats. Small moons with lots of water allows transports to take less energy to land.
This is a big differential to Jupiter. It is the place of the solar system. Lots of resources. Less colder moons. Probably will be the center of a space civilization.
### 4: Science-Fantasy
Jupiter has a very powerful electromagnetic field. Only the sun has a bigger one and for obvious reasons we can't be close to the sun to use it or study. Maybe you can push a fantasy element on your scenario and say it is an requirement for opening wormholes, some kind of FTL, or simple is the place of the LHC of your era.
### 5: Dyson Swarm
A setting with a Dyson swarm will place the solar collectors as close to the Sun as possible to catch the most energy with minimal surface. I would guess that a Dyson swarm would be near mercury orbit, probably even closer to the sun. That mean that closer to the Sun would be a no fly zone. To avoid crashes we will probably need layers of orbits and this could take as much as the orbit of Venus. With that kind of energy output we would need places with lots of water and minerals. Again Jupiter and the belt are a good place. With that kind of energy, a planet like Earth can overheat. To go to a colder place could be a good idea. But beyond Jupiter raw materials become more and more scarse.
An Dyson Swarm can be a game changing technology. By focusing a small percentage of the Sun's output in the outer solar system moons, they may be heated up to resemble Earth. This may even allow to strip Venus, Uranus and Neptune from the bulk of their atmospheres to make their surfaces accessible to humans.
### Obs
Remember that you don't need to choose between a form of energy or another. A civilization will probably develop Thorium reactors first, then Io Geothermal Power Plants; then Helium 3 reactors; then a way to harvest Jupiter radiation belts and then a Dyson Sphere.
As we have primary world power source in Oil, we have a lot of others at the same time. Brazil primary power source is Hydroelectric, because of its geography and climate. It is kind like Jupiter which have abundancy of some kinds of energy sources that are scarse in the rest of the solar system.
This does not mean we would not have massive presence of humans in all planets or moons in such a setting, but Earth and Jupiter would probably will be the centers. Mars and Venus can become as rich as Earth, but their gravity is a problem. Mars and Venus gravity is way higher than moons which means more energy to get things in orbit, making them less attractive to mining resources to be carried elsewhere. They would only be big economical centers if terraformed. Mars can be warmed by thorium reactors to get a denser atmosphere and allow bacteria to make the atmosphere breathable. A sunscreen can cool Venus enough to allow bacteria to make its atmosphere breahable. In both cases will take centuries to do it and the resources needed (mirrors and thorium) has to be mined somewhere. Is too much material to take from the surface of the planets (except mercury). Probably the civilization has to be space fairing even before the terraformation begin. Meaning that Jupiter system will probably will get colonized first. Maybe Ceres and other larger asteroids get colonized even before.
Mercury have a slow rotation, and have speculation about a zone that never gets sun in craters in the north and south pole. Mercury probably is an interesting place for mines. Since they have to mine in the night side, the factories will be on wheels. To keep it in the night side the factories will have to move an average of 10Km/h or 6mi/h in the equator, less than that closer to the poles. In a mechanical problem they can remain still for 30 days, plenty of time to fix problems. Since mercury is heavy, it may have lots of uranium and other heavy metals. It is the best place to put a mine to produce mirrors for the Dyson swarm. Low gravity to get things into orbit, lots of raw materials, lots of solar energy. Not very practical for habitation tough. Make cities on wheels or in permanent darkness of craters may not be practical. The lack of water is also a factor. Meaning, industrial and scientific outpost.
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You can't mine anything *on* Jupiter, as you can't *mine* on Jupiter, as Jupiter lacks a solid surface to dig into. However, one could try to get into a low planetary orbit and then place a gas extractor with a long pipe down to get to the gaseous contents of the atmosphere.
To our current knowledge, the atmosphere of Jupiter by volume is made up from mostly:
* 88-92% Hydrogen $H\_2$ (ca. 74% mass)
* 8-12% Helium $He$ (ca. 24% mass)
Spectroscopy shows that the deeper layers of the atmosphere might be split by mass roughly the following: 71% $H\_2$, 24% $He$ and 5% other elements. Speculations speak of a solid, metallic hydrogen core, but that is not proven or disproven.
So from what we *know* at the moment, Jupiter is a viable source for easily obtainable Hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very versatile material:
* Any Hydrogen is a highly reactive gas, that can diffuse through most metals, even if slow. So a simple tube closed with one end and then sucking out anything that gets in is a pretty sure way to get 99% pure hydrogen in that atmosphere.
* Hydrogen is the main component of many fuels and other chemicals: With a few catalysts it can be used pretty varried:
+ Methanol: $CO+2H\_2 \longrightarrow CH\_3OH$, which is good as a fuel and chemical.
+ Ammonia: $N\_2 + 3H\_2 \longrightarrow 2NH\_3$, which can be refined to hydracine, a rocket fuel.
+ To bind carbon-mono-oxyde (which can be made from carbon-di-oxyde with catalysts) in the [Fischer-Tropsch-Process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process) and make longer carbohydrates, which in turn can be used as fuel
* Both of its isotopes (Deuterium and Tritium, $^2\_1H$ and $^3\_1H$), are the ingredients current nuclear fusion reactors need to work. Because the huge body is mostly hydrogen, even the small trace ammounts theses occur in naturally could make it a viable resource depot for a ship that has to refuel it's fusion reactor.
However, even if you can find a method to extract the hydrogen from the atmosphere without killing the operators in the hazardous area Jupiter himself creates (Jupiter has radiation and micro asteroids, that make even flybys not too easy), hydrogen (and oxygen!) could be cheaper and easier acquired by just cracking water from asteroids. However, it (or even better: its moon Europe) is the most easy to "hit" stop to 'refuel' on the way out of the solar system.
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It is hard to "mine" Jupiter as it is gas giant, means main mass of it is gas, hydrogen an helium in particular.
But it is a nice place(sic!) to scoop gases.
Fun fact is that gaseous upper layer of it is not so tick actually, proportion could be seen (it looks about right for me) on on wiki picture about [composition of Jupiter(pic)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Jupiter_diagram.svg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yW1k3.png)
Although it have to be noticed that Jupiter is big, and even 0.3% of methane means entire earth like planet made from that methane. This is a lot, considering that entire [Asteroid belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt) is estimated to be 4% of mass of the Moon(which is smaller then earth, 1.23% of Earth mass).
So even trace amounts of gases from Jupiter are significant amount indeed.
0.3% could create earth size body (Jupiter methane 0.3%)
0.003 moon mass/size body (Jupiter hydrogen deuteride 0.003%)
0.0001% replace asteroid belt (four belts of water 0.0004%, six belts of ethane 0.0006%)
* numbers from wiki and they are given in terms of volume, not the mass, so technically my statements above are incorrect, but as size of Jupiter is 1321 times of earth volume, and 99.99xxx% of Jupiter is liquid (atmosphere is few thousands km tick max compared to 70000 km radius of Jupiter - it is mostly liquid gas giant) those volume percentages are percentages of liquid gases. Ratio of liquid percent(volume percents) to mass percents is about $\approx4$. This way we are talking not about 4 belts of water but one belt, not six belts of ethane but 1.5 - that is by mass, by volume we talking about 4 and 6 belts (roughly).
* another thing to consider, that concentration of heavy elements is higher deeper it is, and concentration from wiki are for upper layer, so probably we talking not about 1 belt of water but more, not 1.5 belts of ethane but more.
* also density differs significantly between H, He, and more heavier stuff, so numbers are conventionality just to get in touch with scale of that thing.
After making such pointless statements I ask you to just believe that even trace amount of concentration in Jupiter should be taken seriously, no matter is that volume, or mass.
When you go to mine Gas giants (we have few of them)? - when sources like belt is not enough for you, and when you seeking for light elements.
Actually getting hydrogen as it is, pure hydrogen, makes some sense - Jupiter is easiest source of it, with huge quantities of it. (closest is the sun, but there are some troubles with that). It makes sense because I see humans are constantly concerned them self about water, and as far as I know there is lot of oxides in crust of planets(in form of oxides, like SiO₂), and using hydrogen it is possible to make lots of water from those rocks (and lot of computer chips as by product).
Ceres which is 1/3 of that asteroid belt(by mass) (according to [that wiki picture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#/media/File:Masses_of_asteroids_vs_main_belt.png)) - expected to contain enough water, amounts are expected to be compatible to amounts of it on Earth.
Another great use of Jupiter's hydrogen is to exchange it to more heavier stuff from the sun. And trace amounts there are even bigger numbers then with Jupiter. I tried (but failed, and run out of space for answer) to describe that in my [moving planet answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/45273/20315) significant amount of answer is about Jupiter interaction, and getting that hydrogen useful.
## TL;DR
You go to gas giant's and Jupiter in particular when you need moon sizes of stuff, when you starlift, when you need carbon, when you need water components. If there is good enough ³He excellent, take it. In general when you are interested in planet/moon size compatible amounts of something(with starlifting specially)
Getting something deeper then from few thousands km below 1bar level - is no go. There could be some indirect or sophisticated solutions - but it gets not so easy because of pressure. You could expect to be able to get something near 100 GPa pressure level, but I see no options atm for much more then that. Hm, or do I - hm lucky it is gaseous thing with low melting point and low density - it could be like but artificial [tornado](https://youtu.be/iwVFrqW79-c?t=19), or [whirlpool](https://youtu.be/8sU9JFUIzfQ?t=103). Probably possible way to lift heavier stuff from deeper layers. Also it is possible to create flows which also might be used to lift heavier things (our use existing flows to take advantage) - it might be so that gravity of Jupiter made lot of separation work for us, and it is just a question to use the results.
Deep areas of core or just core, are not so much interesting in therms of resource, very interesting as science, but not as resource, in first place because of there are sources of heavy elements which are less extreme to access - belt, planets, moons.
I personally would go to mine carbon on Jupiter. Reasons are: carbon is very handy as possible construction material in form of nanotubes, there is a lot of it, much more then on Venus, and it is more near then other gas giants.
Second is ³He - there is insane amount of it
if that is right [Helium-3, Solar nebula (primordial) abundance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Solar_nebula_.28primordial.29_abundance)
* ... ratio in the atmosphere of Jupiter, measured by the mass spectrometer of the Galileo atmospheric entry probe. This ratio is about 1:10,000, or 100 parts of ³He per million parts of ⁴He.
Helium is 10% by volume of Jupiter, it means ³He concentration is 10ppm in atmosphere. 10 particles per million of particles of jupiter H+He mix, or 10 cubic meters per 1 million of cubic meters.
[Deuterium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium)
* ... The abundance of deuterium in the atmosphere of Jupiter has been directly measured by the Galileo space probe as 26 atoms per million hydrogen atoms.
As hydrogen is roughly 90%, it means 23ppm concentration of D in atmosphere
Congratulations, we have our Klondike and gas station - 2in1.
## Helium-3
* for some reason I have not payed attention to that fact, even [o.m.'s answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/53932/20315) did not drew enough attention for the subject, but now everything is clear.
* that makes sense if you have thermonuclear reactors which works with He3, and there are some [thoughts against it](http://cds.cern.ch/record/1055767/files/CM-PRS00002036.pdf). Looks like solvable problem, by using non-Maxwellian plasma or by different temperatures of He and D components. Some numbers about reactions [this](http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlux/nuc/reactions.htm), [that](http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Fusion%20Concepts.pdf) for my self. But everything is not so simple with that topic, should be expected as we do not have it yet.
First of all 10ppm ³ He is very good, it is better then moon sources which are 1.4-15 ppb concentrations, and much much much bigger quantities of it in Jupiter, and it is easier to extract(process is a bit more straightforward), and there is lots of Hydrogen which is also very very very handy in that situation. Considering all that greatness of situation - 5 a.u. is no distance, and Jupiter is my favorite planet in solar system starting from now, 'Love it.
Potentially He3+D releases 3.474e+14J per kg.
Escape velocity for [Jupiter](http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/jupiterfact.html) is 59.5 km/s, or 1770125000 J/kg (non reactive launch systems)
Or it is 196257 kg leaving Jupiter per each kg of ³He+D used as fuel for that process.
Or (at 1 bar pressure) roughly 2 million cubic meters of atmosphere of Jupiter, where (with 10ppm) should be 20 cubic meters of ³He, which is roughly 2.67kg of ³He.
For each kg of ³He+D spend in reaction(it is 0.6kg of ³He and 0.4kg of D), we lift 2.67 kg of ³He to orbit around sun. So even without sorting components of atmosphere, and just by lifting it in bulk quantities - potentially we get more then we spend - I call that profit.
Good thing about that mixture it is ready, after sorting ³He, H, D, ⁴He - to be used in thermonuclear space craft engine - where He3+D are energy source and H is reactive mass. ISP of that mixture should be something around 9900 sec (97km/s exhaust velocity) (khm, if I used my blackmagic correctly).
And hypothetical tanker should be able to deliver 80% of that content, within 20km/s delta-v, I call it good enough to deliver it to our moon base gas station or earth orbit gas station, or mars gas station.
Efficiency of processes involved(mostly reactor efficiency) is not dig deal, until energy output of reactor is positive. Inefficiency could be compensated by more refining in place without lifting(refine station in jupiter atmosphere), but even bulk lift is ok up to 22.5% efficiency(0.6/2.67 how much helium we have spend and how much we get back).
Overall theoretically process might have great potential for exponential grow even without tricks.
[Neptune](http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/neptunefact.html) have 19% of Helium, [Uranus](http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/uranusfact.html) 15% of Helium - so they are also considerable options, despite distances. [Saturn](http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/saturnfact.html) with 3% helium not so much, as helium source(although it can be concentrated) - so all 4 are considerable options for "mining".
For reasons above and might be others - It make sense just scoop stuff that is on top of that gas giant - everything is useful.
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To the best of my knowledge, the idea that Jupiter has a solid core is not proven. With that said, it has plenty of fluid metallic hydrogen to put a boat on, so maybe you could dredge for material.
Let's call out a few assumptions that I think have to hold true for this to be at all feasible:
1. Somehow the operators of this mining process are not killed by intense gravity, radiation, electricity, chemical processes, high-speed metallic wind, temperature, etc.
2. Somehow the equipment used in the mining operation is similarly impervious
3. Somehow you can get material off of Jupiter (anti-gravity, I suppose)
Assuming all those things held, then I would say that just harvesting the fluid metallic hydrogen would be worthwhile. The huge compression it's under would make it a very space-efficient source of material for use as a propellant or for use in some sort of controlled reaction process.
Also, since Jupiter's (possible) core's construction is unknown, you can make it be anything! Arthur C. Clarke proposed in his novel 2001 that the core was made of diamond, given the high pressure and temperature. We don't really know any better at this point (again, to my knowledge), so you could just go with that.
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In the setting of a novella I am just beginning to write, computing and engineering are significantly ahead of our world, but biotechnology lags massively behind:
They have very efficient brain-computer interfaces and brain-controlled artificial limbs that are almost as good as the real thing, although as of the beginning of the story neither of these are widely used for nonmedical purposes. A midrange smartphone might have 16 gigabytes of RAM. A significant percentage of energy is produced by liquid fluoride thorium reactors, some of which are no bigger than a large car, and most space missions use rotating detonation rocket engines. Despite this, though, their biotechnology is extremely poor by the standards of 2020s humanity; It takes them months and the equivalent of thousands of dollars to sequence a person's genome, and their only means of modifying genes are expensive and likely to fail.
My question, then, is why is this? What reason could there be for a civilization's biotechnology to lag so far behind their computing and engineering, especially when better computing should only make the process of sequencing genomes easier?
For context, the society the story is set in is extremely multicultural and has a large atheist population and a strong separation of church and state, so any solution relying on cultural and/or religious taboos must explain why this is so universal as to encompass all major cultures and/or religions.
I could just vaguely say it just happened to turn out that way, but I'd like to avoid that if possible.
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# ¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬†¬† üé∂ *Different DNA* üé∂
##                                               (*They don't understand you*)
###                   *You're from a whole 'nother world*
####                                                                 *A different dimension...*
Instead of making them worse at solving the problem, *make the problem harder to solve.*
### More complex genome
In our world, the timeline of genome sequencing looks roughly like this (with many steps cut out):
**1976**:The first genome we sequenced was **Bacteriophage MS2**, with 1 chromosome and 3,569 base pairs, and only RNA.
**1995**: Twenty years later, we sequence **Haemophilus influenza**, with 1 chromosome and 1.8 million base pairs.
**1995** We sequence the first animal, the **Nematode**, with 11-12 chromosomes and 100 million base pairs.
**2003**: (starting in 2001) **Humans** are fully sequenced, with 23 chromosomes and 3.2 billion base pairs.
**2018**: It took another decade and a half to nail ***wheat**.* That's right, one of the main staple foods of the world wasn't sequenced until four years ago. It has 16 billion base pairs, and 42 chromosomes (6 copies of 7).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/svzMg.jpg)
Sequencing wheat took the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium 14 years, and to quote Kellye Eversole, who lead the project, “[It was a] miracle that we finished." Wheat is a pain in the ass for a number of reasons, including being a triple hybrid. Read more on that [here](https://coloradowheat.org/2013/11/why-is-the-wheat-genome-so-complicated/), if you're curious.
And where there's wheat, there's flour. Wait, I mean, *flower*. As in, Paris japonica, with 149 *billion* base pairs.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LQf4L.jpg)
Ten times that of wheat, 50 times more than humans. An amoeba, Polychaos dubium, allegedly has 670 billion base pairs (jury's still out).
So take a page out of these flowery, glutenous books. Make your genomes a *nightmare* to sequence. Duplicate chromosomes. Wheat is a hybrid of three species? Make your humanoids a hybrid of five. We know 150 billion base pairs is possible, so start there and work your way up if you want to get ambitious. How about *1 trillion*?
To make it even harder if you want, at the cost of some plausibility, take away some stepping stones. Declare that there's no animal with less than a billion base pairs. That it's hard to scrounge up a bacteria with less than a million. That even your viruses don't really stray below 500,000.
And make all those genomes convoluted as well. We got off easy with our genome. Make it hard. Make them work for it. In your world, scientists living on a permanent moon base with a population measured in hundreds celebrate sequencing the first multi-celled eukaryote in 2050.
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Your world isn't really all that behind in terms of biotechnology, so You don't need a huge push. Advanced cyborg components are already VERY sophisticated biotech (more advanced than today) so the answer can be as simple as priorities.
# A Few (less) Good Men:
Your society has always put a higher value on information, since the days when ancient libraries WEREN'T burned for religious reasons. But if you took away a very small number of biology experts, and instead had their careers directed to the material sciences, then genetics could easily be behind the times. Something as simple as Mendel NOT doing his studies in genetics for a couple of centuries would put back much of biology by a large degree.
# Secular Humanism as Faith:
Lack of religion leads people to yearn for a moral compass. A strong advocacy for universal ethical standards is codified, and experimentation on humans and animals is banned very early. Research involving experimental surgery and animal cruelty has a chilling effect, leading to delays in the study of medicine. The only exception to this is in the development of artificial limbs for the military hospitals (to aid amputees).
# Rigid Scientific Thinking:
The standards of science are set very high early in history. While this works very well for science based on rigidly predictable laws (like physics and chemistry), the field of "natural philosophy" is viewed in the same light as shamanism and witchcraft. The stigma for biology is set very high, and it takes centuries for the field to gain acceptance.
# Galen is Dogma:
Early in the history of medicine, Galen (or the local world equivalent) defines the field of medicine so thoroughly that everything he said becomes unquestionable. Anyone speaking out or challenging Galen's (very good) teachings is mocked and derided. Only Galen's teaching is all practical, not scientific (for question purposes). Given little need to understand WHY these practices work, they are followed to the letter for a LONG time. Why challenge what works?
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# ...plastics.
Bear with me.
Some of the critical elements needed by biotechnology are in short supply on their planet. That could either be resources needed to conduct the research, or resources that would be needed to apply the knowledge that's gained (e.g. obstacles to mass production).
My first thought is plastics, for two reasons:
1. my understanding is that Earth's plastic historically comes from petroleum left over from past geological eras;
2. I've heard that hospitals will be especially hard-hit if Earth ever runs out of plastic (lots of medical equipment must be made of plastic)
So, it seems quite easy to reduce the amount of plastic available to them: assert that the history of life on their planet is such that there is very little petroleum from which to make plastic.
I would expect that to significantly delay the discovery/invention of plastic, since, as a layperson, it seems like modern non-petroleum plastics is a late development (i.e. less convenient to discover). Scientists might have to *predict* plastics, and then toil for generations to reach their plastic alternative.
And then I'd expect their biotech to be slow to take off, as plastic would be in short supply for a long time, and might still be scarce depending on what they need to make their plastic alternative.
This would have other big impacts to your story world. You casually mention a few kinds of modern electronics which contain plastic. Their versions would obviously have to be made with zero plastic to be consistent with the rest of their history.
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# Bureaucracy
Some of the technology is impossible without the furthering of biotechnology. That doesn't mean it's impossible. The Bureaucracy has hit biotechnology hard, causing the whole technology to even regress to an extremely poor standard dven for 2020.
The reason? Sometimes things just get complicated. In the interest of fairness (or self gain) politics sometimes make complex and ridiculous rules. Maybe people felt left behind if they wouldn't do anything with biotechnology, or felt it unfair that others could have it. Sometimes it's just not knowing any better. As I understand the American DMV, it's a bog of Bureaucracy. Yet everyone loves their cars so much that they can't think of any other way to live. The majority of Americans can't live without a car and can't imagine any scenario were they can live without it. To suggest something like a train for cheap short/medium/long distance mass transit is next to impossible. This you can see in their train network. It is a sad affair for 2000 standards, let alone 2020.
TL:DR: Sometimes it's just unfortunate circumstances and lack of progressive thinking. This can lead to neglect and a Bureaucracy that makes the whole area even regress.
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Strong privacy concerns and strong anti-GMO sentiments.
A person's genes are considered to be their private property. Very few people would consent to having their DNA sequenced, and even fewer would want it published.
If there are also strong concerns about genetic modification leading to unforseen and unpredictable bad effects - perhaps some early, very popular science fiction vilified it, or made it horrific - then there could be a backlash of opinion against such technology. Indeed, if some nations outlawed tampering with the genetic makeup of living things, it would become not only unethical, but also illegal.
In such circumstances, genetic-based technology would be rare. It might occur only in countries where the triggering work of fiction had never reached, and those countries might be poor (not a significant enough market for the work of fiction to be worth translating into the local language) or have other traits that wouldn't discourage genetic research, like being a dictatorship/police state.
What scientists from a free, democratic nation would want to be seen to be involving themselves with a technology seen to be used by an oppressive regime to oppress their people and make biological weapons?
Additionally, as MrDracoSpirit has suggested in a comment, perhaps one of these less ethical nations practised a form of genetic modification and/or biological warfare during a historical war.
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**All research was military.**
Much of our world's research has been military. In your world that has been taken to an extreme. Prosthetics, communications, energy tech, spacecraft and weapons all were developed out of a prolonged cold war that was a lot hotter in your world than ours.
Biotech does not have the same immediate application for military purposes and so biotech research lagged behind.
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**Politics**
No need to imagine reasons, we had a very good example of this in the 20th century, where in the USSR, political influence and meddling managed to set the biological sciences back for quite a bit, possibly decades. All you need is the wrong person in a particular branch of science coming on top, supported either by the ruling class or ideology. This happened to a country with one of the highest levels of scientific and technological advancement at the time.
>
> Progress in genetics and evolutionary biology in the young Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was hindered in the 1930s by the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who believed that acquired traits are inherited, claimed that heredity can be changed by “educating” plants, and denied the existence of genes. Lysenko was supported by Communist Party elites. Lysenko termed his set of ideas and agricultural techniques “Michurinism,” after the name of the plant breeder Ivan Michurin, but they are currently known as Lysenkoism. Although Michurinism opposed biological science, Lysenko took up one academic position after another. In 1929, Nikolai Vavilov founded the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences and became its head; it directed the development of sciences underpinning plant and animal breeding in the Soviet Union. Vavilov was dismissed in 1935 and later died in prison, while Lysenko occupied his position. The triumph of Lysenkoism became complete and genetics was fully defeated in August 1948 at a session of the academy headed by Lysenko. The session was personally directed by Joseph Stalin and marked the USSR’s commitment to developing a national science, separated from the global scientific community. **As a result, substantial losses occurred in Soviet agriculture, genetics, evolutionary theory, and molecular biology, and the transmission of scientific values and traditions between generations was interrupted.**
>
>
>
Source: <https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/212/1/1/6087971>
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# Vacuum tubes don't work well.
To study DNA you need xrays, which need vacuum tubes. Some invasive microorganism damages most of the common seals for vacuum tubes, so it's very hard to make an electron microscope or x-rays and study DNA.
They found ways to develop computers that didn't rely on such things, but never caught up with biotechnology. They've only recently developed techniques to produce vacuums, and they're pretty spotty.
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Here are a few reasons why I think biotechnology would lag behind.
**1 Computer Technology Advanced so Fast Other Fields Stagnated**
Technology in other areas such as computer technology has picked up speed so fast that there is little if any time or research devoted to other fields.
When technology grows, it does so at an exponential rate. Faster computers are able to use their better processing power to make even stronger computers than before. Perhaps, in this world, computer technology grew at such an exponential rate that it overtook all other industries. In fact, what if technology grew so fast that people are no longer needed for the process anymore.
AI is so advanced that there is no need for humans in the process anymore. The AI makes more computers and more advanced AI, so those can then make even more advanced AI.
Why would artificial intelligence care about learning more about biology when it can focus on making more powerful and intelligent versions of itself? The AI in charge of research is sentient enough that it does not care about biology. t refuses to teach the people anything about it and refuses to let anyone learn about it.
Because of this, technology has developed to only be focused on artificial design and nothing biological.
**2 Greed of Certain Corporations**
If you don't have a slightly malicious AI roaming about to keep people from making biotech, simply have some sort of rich corporation keeping people from doing it.
The layout of this world has all the technology development run by one or more major corporations that have a tight stranglehold on what can or cannot be produced. They specialize in making computers and other similar devices, and they view any firm that does not fall in line with their designs gets scrapped because it is viewed as competition.
Why let medical research advance when you can continue to let people pay exorbitant prices for procedures that would be super simple in our world? Sure, the computers are powerful enough that the rich people could theoretically heal themselves or get fancy prosthetics, but the poor people are never going to get their hands on that stuff. Money is a key motivator. If the rich believe they can make more money by halting the advancement of biotechnology, then they will and no one will be able to stop them.
Also, the corporations only want people to be part of their development teams. They don't want people researching something that won't profit them, so they just train people from a young age to only care about computer science. Any textbooks on biotechnology are censored or simply destroyed and anyone that tries to talk about it or research it gets silenced or at the very least paid off to not speak about their findings. That way the computer manufacturers eliminate what they see as competition and keep the best goods for themselves.
*3 There was a Horrible War Using Biotechnology*
In the past, biotechnology was incredibly advanced. It was used to make horrible toxins that wiped out entire cities in seconds and monsters that only deserve to exist in nightmares. The war that inspired the creation of these terrors nearly wiped out everyone, so the frightened people did their best to rebuild after everything was over, and, years later, we get to how the world is now.
Knowledge of biotechnology no longer exists for two reasons. On one hand, a lot of the progress was lost from the war. Leading biologists were killed by their own creations and most of their research was destroyed.
Also, the current regime refuses to let anyone learn the secrets of the war. Biotechnology is a taboo subject because it brings up the terrors of the time in the past. The regime destroys any mention of the technology that caused the war, along with any biology textbooks. Biology is no longer taught in schools, or at least only at a basic level. Kids aren't even taught what a cell is anymore. As the generations go by, it goes from willful ignorance to people being genuinely illiterate in the field of biology. Even the elites hiding this knowledge don't really get it anymore. Ask a person what DNA is and they give you a weird look. They have no clue, because that's how repressed knowledge has become.
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## A history of war
We used to have far superior biotechnology, god-like even. But the Clone War ended that: Rebels started modifying their genome and made themselves super soldiers. Bullet-resistant, stronger, faster they were unstoppable at first. The government responded in turn and upped the ante — rapid aging, vat-produced super soldiers. The Rebels followed in turn and started producing vicious killing beasts that ground the war to a stand-still. Looking to break the stalemate, the government released airborne clone-RNA destroying chemicals that, coincidently, sterilized a generation of the globe. Genetically unmodified forces were able easily overtake any lingering opposition, but at what cost? As a result, the government has taken draconian stances on any biotechnology: highly regulated, controlled, and reported they won't allow unchecked use of biotech — that includes the most basic DNA sequencing.
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The simplest answer is the same reason why our *blimp* technology is so far behind other forms of travel: there was some sort of **horrible disaster in the early days** of working with that technology, and either government, or everyone, just decided it wasn't worth the risk to mess with it.
It could have been some sort of enhanced-function plague (no politics, please -- it's just the first thing to come to mind) or whatever you can dream up.
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# Genetics is considered a “Nazi” science.
This world *used* to be on a trajectory towards advanced biotech. But then one political leader, an analogue of Adolf Hitler, realized that gene sequencing could be used to help discriminate between “worthy” (“Aryan”) and “unworthy” (“inferior” races and carriers of genetic diseases) people. His regime heavily funded a human(oid) genome project, with the explicit intent of using it for a eugenics program. It does some legitimate science, but also a bunch of pseudoscience, cherry-picking data to link the Untermenschen to “less evolved” species.
To top it off, the first well-known genetically-modified organism is a biological weapon: A virus specifically designed for members of the “master race” to be immune from it while others are vulnerable. Within a few years, it kills a hundred million people.
At the conclusion of this world's equivalent of WW2, the regime's leading geneticists are executed for war crimes. Their documents are destroyed.
From then on, genetics is heavily stigmatized, associated with eugenics and genocide. Many countries outright ban gene sequencing. Universities shut down entire biology departments. The intellectual class focuses on building computers instead (hence that area of technology being further ahead). Anyone who wants to study DNA is seen as having questionable motives.
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### Religion (and it nearly happened here)
A really simple way for this to be stopped is if your religion forbids crossbreeding. This actually happened here on Earth with Christianity, but it was stopped first by profits and then by secular humanism.
The first prerequisite for biotechnology is knowing about the effects of interbreeding, crossbreeding, and heredity generally. Modern breeds of animals were developed by selectively breeding parent animals with their children to preserve and amplify desired characteristics, as well as selectively breeding with animals from other families for their characteristics. This was massively opposed at the time by the Church and by lay Christians, because this is obviously animal incest, but the results of vastly better sheep and cattle made the profits inarguable. Eventually Christians settled down and decided they could live with it.
It's not a coincidence that this happened after the Catholic Church had lost much of its power in Europe. If your world is still in the grip of an oppressive theocracy, you're going to find that your choices of what science is and isn't permitted is very seriously limited (at least if you want to live).
The next milestone of course is genetics and in particular genetic modification. This has been and is still being protested by Christian groups in the US and elsewhere.. Some object to combining genetic material from different species, a prohibition which is pretty clear in their Bible quote. Some don't mind this with animals, but object to anything involving human tissue. Some particularly object to anything at all involving human foetuses (including IVF) because they believe that a fertilised embryo has a soul and letting an embryo die is murder. All these are beliefs drawn from religious texts and not from empirical evidence, of course, but it's important to say that they are genuinely and honestly held by their adherents.
If you want biotechnology to be held back, it's pretty simple - all you need is for these groups to be the majority, or at least a very significant minority. These days you wouldn't get burned at the stake, but laws would prevent you starting that kind of research. And since religion crosses national boundaries, it's likely that most countries following that religion would have similar laws in that regard.
Fortunately for us, secular humanism has made these people the minority today, so we do have the biotechnology we have today. Very Fortunately in fact, because otherwise we would have no vaccines against Covid-19.
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Reminds me a bit of Star Surgeon where all the races in the galaxy except humans have almost no medical science. It's not really explained why though.
<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18492>
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A combination of factors:
* High reproductive rate and less fear of death. In their culture they
are so used to a fast cycle of life and death that did not put a lot
of effort in developing medicine.
* Good eyesight. If they have problems, deformities, illnesses they
rarely affect the eyes. Since the initial trigger for developing the
lenses was missing microscopes were developed much later and their
technological development took a different path.
* Some advancements were acquired by trading. They actually are not the
authors of all their advancements, they got to that point thanks to
trading with another civilization, it might be an extinct one or
coming from another planet to buy something they missed (might be
Uranium).
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## Monopolization
While your alien race was just a little ahead of our current stage of development, there were two competing factions in the field of medical science. One faction wanted to use cybernetics as the foundation of medical science, the other wanted to use biochemistry. If you lose a body part, do you grow a new one or replace it with a mechanical one. If you get cancer, do you treat it with chemo, or send a swarm of nanobots to break it apart. Do you get a new flu/covid vaccine every year or do you install an infer-red sterilization devices in your respiratory tract?
These are all judgement calls where both methods seem perfectly capable of meeting the demands of the medical industry, but in some cases cybernetics might be preferred, and in others biochemistry might be preferred... but from the perspective of the Cybertech's CEO, cybertechnology is always the preferred method. Instead of letting the best method shake out for each possible procedure, and risking the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in RnD and future market shares, Cybertech did what any reasonable megacorporation would do. The bought out thier competition.
It started off by attacking supply chains: The bought out the smaller companies that produced gene sequencing and other advanced biochemical tech. They intentionally hiked up prices, reduced quality, and discontinued products making doing any work in the field of biochemistry far more difficult. Then they started acquiring patent rights on key biochemicals so they could prevent them from being used at all forcing the biotech firms to keep halting production and going back and doing RnD to find new ways of doing old things. Then finally when the really big biochemical companies were nice and destabilized, they bought those out too.
With full control of the medical industry, Cybertech has no interest anymore in maintaining 2 means to the same end; so, they discontinue all biochemical RnD for anything that they want to achieve with cybernetics instead.
But it's not enough to just acquire these intellectual property rights, you must convince the public that biochemistry is expensive and dangerous if you want to keep new biochemistry firms from constantly popping up to challenge your dominance. So, they makes sure that gene mapping technology is still available through them instead of completely cutting it off.
If you need a genome mapped, just send it to Cybertech, and for a modest fee of many thousands of dollars, you will get your results back in a few months... sure Cybertech could offer same day sequencing for 50 bucks a pop, if they wanted too, but fast/cheap biome sequencing would encourage competition; so, they don't do that. By keeping it available, and only slightly better than what upstarts can prototype, you can keep upstarts for getting enough footing to build up to better methods than you offer.
And for "modifying genes are expensive and likely to fail", this is intentional too. They WANT people to fear gene modification; so, they make available the worst possible techs that can pass legal safety regulations. If a gene modification method you offer has a 30% failure rate and tons of side effects, but you have another method with a 5% failure rate and fewer side effects that you suppress, then the public image of gene modification is that it is unreliable and dangerous, because those are the results they see.
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Q: *"Despite this, though, their biotechnology is extremely poor by the standards of 2020s humanity; It takes them months and the equivalent of thousands of dollars to sequence a person's genome, and their only means of modifying genes are expensive and likely to fail."*
## Healthy people and early development of agriculture.
Some reasons for genome sequencing can be found here,
<https://www.genengnews.com/insights/6-applications-for-whole-genome-sequencing/>
Six medical applications of genome sequencing, one agricultural. Now suppose these six reasons are *very rare* and your folks don't need applied genetics in other fields either, like agriculture.
**They don't need results quickly**
Some nerds *know* how to sequence DNA.. but it will cost them days and they use [optical methods](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30039375/) and have little knowledge of advanced applications of the CGAT sequences they find, or the molecules that can be produced with these. This is because there's little interest in biochemistry details.. it's like origami, a nice puzzle. Hobby work.
**Healthy**
Agriculture has been perfected, it happened to start early: after 35,000 years of experience, that is 20,000 more than us humble peasants on Earth, this planet has all the fruits and healthy cuisine humans need. It happens to be quite comfortable.. there isn't much illness, the climate is perfect, sea water everywhere, no UV or other harmful radiation, no cigarettes, no booze, no gasoline, there's plenty of wind and sun for energy.. and there's sports, and Tai Chi gymnastics for the elderly.. and this is a very open-minded society of hedonists: everyone is *entitled* to a peaceful end, as off 66 years, 4 months and 17 days of age. People never die, without a goodbye party.
Short answer: believe it or not, these folks hardly need advanced medicine. So medicine and biochemistry lags behind.
**You can always repair people**
If there's an accident or some organ failed, mechanic ingenuity will step in: your people can replace most parts of the human body. The nervous system is very well known.. they may know less about molecules than 6th graders, but they are very advanced in *medical devices*. If you need an arm, or loose a few fingers, there will be a suitable replacement. If you need to temporarily reinforce body parts, like for offshore work, or 80+ holiday adventures in the mountains, you can hire electric limbs.
**Aspirine beans**
Their limited knowledge of biochemistry prevents them from researching advanced medicine, but the *basics* of pharmaceutics exist: like aspirine, pain killers, penicilline, various antibiotics and various other common medicin. They know vitamins are healthy.. but their secret is: they don't need to *analyse or synthesize* the molecules! Plants can do that for them. They know how to let plants do that, for 4000 years already. Some medicines are really old, like aspirine beans..
[Answer]
### Flesh is weak (and organic)
If they are so advanced in technological fields maybe there is a general consensus on how unreliable organic things are. They have a serious lack of repetitivity, why would someone invest in a think that can work today and fail tomorrow if we could invest in a machine that will do it better.
So its not that they would not be able to secuense genoma fast if they put their minds to it, its just that noone ever though about investing a dime in it, as it was better to develop night vision glases, more eficient farms, stronger exoesqueletons, etc.
[Answer]
Biological Monoculture
Look to the benefits and flaws exposed in the banana industry.
A monoculture has the advantage of spreading very quickly and in a reasonably static and safe environment would not have to keep backup DNA chains and legacy items found in most Earth organisms. It's apparent simplicity might make it commonly accepted that there is not much benefit to researching it.
In other thoughts:
What is pushing the culture to evolve? Generally speaking nothing changes unless there is an advantage or at least no disadvantage. If there is no reason to evolve bio-tech as a chemical research tree then it probably wont happen. One such culture might occur when there are few or no diseases / genetic abnormalities due to past genecide or long-term eugenics policies.
Why would mech-tech be used would then be the question of how it started and where the advantage comes from in the early stages.
[Answer]
**They don't have RNA and DNA**
Abiogenesis on their planet took a completely different path. Inheritance is encoded in a biochemical network which is many orders of complexity greater than our simple linear chain of base-pairs coding for amino-acids. Theirs, is more like the way memories are stored in a primitive brain. Or perhaps, something you could derive from mathematical graph theory, after getting a masters in that field of mathematics. It's an emergent property, not a defined one.
This makes it possible to reconcile a high level of ability to interface electronics to brains (high-level interfacing) with an extreme lack of progress in manipulation of the low-level processes of cellular(?) biology and inheritance. (Do they even have cells? Maybe, highly advanced slime moulds, or something more completely alien with a network of adaptation and inheritance spread as a network throughout the entire organisam, not replicated in billions of cells)
Its also likely that if their biochemistry works in this way, Lamarck was right on their world, and acquired characteristics are strongly inheritable. This may have steered research down different corridors which miss the whole picture. Or it may have triggered extreme conflict on the ethical front back in their middle ages or 19th Century. (Creation of optimized soldiers by child abuse and Lamarckian breeding programmes? Yuk! )
Earthnote: we are starting to discover that the trees and fungal life in a forest form some sort of network like this. Something that happens in one part of the forest, gets communicated to another, and there is adaptation, but on a long timescale measured in months or years.
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[Question]
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I know that Sun-sized planets are impossible in our universe, please, bear with me.
Eastern high fantasy (xianxia) features worlds that span millions of kilometres. For example, descriptions of distances may state that it will take 200-300 years to go from place A to place B at the speed of 5000 km per day **(\*)**. This size is 100% handwaved, cannot be explained with physics, and is absolutely necessary for world-specific reasons (combat system, travelling speeds, specifics of communication, etc.).
My question is: **In a world like this, is it possible to have a set of geographic features that realistically produce Earth-like climates (can be any climate zone or type)?**
*I believe that it is not possible* but my knowledge of climate and geography is not sufficient to be 100% sure.
**(\*)** PcMan courteously did the maths and told me that this would make the planet '*larger than Mars's ORBIT, or a "planet" 144 million times the volume of the sun*'. Therefore, for some xianxia settings planets are even bigger than I initially expected. ***For the purposes of this question, please, assume that the planet is the size of the Sun***.
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A typical planet featured in xianxia:
* is at least Saturn-sized, often bigger
* has vast deserts, seas, lakes, forests, etc.
* has myriads of mountains (so all immortals and all sects have a place to live)
* has areas with microclimates similar to Earth and areas inhospitable to life (too cold, too hot, too dry, etc.)
* many areas are vast valleys surrounded by high mountains
* gravity is 1 G
* Earth-like day/night cycles
* all normal environmental physics apply in the areas with Earth-like climate
* Sun and Moon are rarely mentioned, so it is hard to say how they work
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The criteria for the best answer:
1. It will not refute the premise of a Sun-sized planet.
2. It will be based on science (whether it states the possibility or impossibility of areas with Earth-like climate).
3. It will contain a brief explanation of geographical features and their effects on climate if the answer attempts to prove that areas with Earth-like climate are possible.
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*Additional clarifications*:
This planet does not have to be a sphere. It can be any shape if it is necessary for Earth-like climate areas to appear. The only two things that matter are size and plenty of mountains.
You can assume that the planet is made of some mysterious unobtainium/handwavium that create surface properties similar to that on Earth.
If you need celestial objects (Sun, Moon, stars, etc.) to behave a specific way to make Earth-like climate possible, you are free to choose their behaviour. Sun and Moon are rarely explained in xianxia.
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If you need any clarifications or additional details, please, ask in the comments.
[Answer]
Let's try [Ringworld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld) type solutions. Should be mandatory reading for Worldbuilders. :-)
Better than me has "designed" Ringworlds so think of what follows as a rough outline.
You have edited your question to ask for a planet that is Sun sized. I am, for these purposes, going to assume that's an equivalent surface area to the Sun. That's a lot of area and you are free to have it shaped and molded any way you want. We're going to gloss over trivial details like where you get all the material (theoretically but out of scope here) and how you keep it's orbit stable (which is the tricky one) and work on what kind of ring you need and what you do about day-night cycles and climate.
**Area and dimensions.**
The Sun has an area of about $6\times 10^{12}km^2$ which is apparently about $12,000$ Earth surface areas.
To get this area we need an orbit so we're going to rather arbitrarily choose one at exactly $1\,AU$ (Earth's orbital distance) and that also means that's the radius of our ring. At this distance about a star conveniently the same as our Sun we magically get the right range of temperatures on our surface with no messing. That is $1.5\times 10^8\,km$ and doing the math that makes the perimeter of our ring about $9.4\times 10^8\,km$. Dividing that into the area that gives us our ring's width : about $6360\,km$.
* A ring at 1 AU from a star identical to the Sun
* A width of over $6300\,km$
**Will anyone on it notice it's a ring ?**
Yes, if they travel to the edges of the ring, but can make that extremely hard by having insanely tall "mountains" and the edge would, and it's probably no issue to make cloud cover and weather at altitude near the edges extremely nasty - extreme winds, no visibility, low oxygen level at altitude and extremely cold. This won't fool any advanced technological society, of course, but if you want to populate with less advanced cultures - no real issue.
Visibility is such that no one is going to be able to see the curvature. Although $6300\,km$ sounds a lot, by the time the ring curvature lifts up "into the sky" (as viewed from the surface), you're not going to notice something obscured by atmospheric haze anyway (and maybe cloud) that is basically hundreds of thousands of km away. At best on Earth you can see about $300\,km$ away (when flying in exceptionally clear conditions). So the ring nature is not really an issue in practical terms. They'll notice the curvature of their world less than we notice ours.
They might notice the distant bright areas of other parts of the ring during the "night", but will be harder than it sounds. They would be distant lines of light, about as bright as a moon (when visible clearly). With careful arrangement of more rings I think you might be able to hide these, but it's possible not an issue anyway.
**Gravity**
You can make this whatever you want by varying the rotational velocity of the ring. So a standard Earth surface gravity is no problem.
**Day and Night**
Various proposals have been made for this, including an independent ring inside the main ring that rotates at a different speed. The inner ring has partial gaps that allow it to alternatively block the Sun and let it pass to the outer ring. Again it's entirely up to the maker of this ring as to how long they want to make this.
Like Earth the surface will get warm during the "day" and cool over the course of the night as it radiates heat away.
More inner rings can control "seasonal" variation of climate (by rotating a varying light filter) and so on.
**Atmosphere**
Smarter people than me have worked out how to make an atmosphere that stays there exist. It's possible and you basically get an atmosphere not unlike Earth's if you want it. Maintaining this would require some advanced biochemistry and automated controls by vast machinery, but it's at least theoretically possible as you have vast amounts of solar power to play wit - nothing prevents you building solar power arrays (or something better) extending way wider than the habitable part of the rings.
**Climate**
Essentially you control this by designing mountains, seas, rivers, plateaus, etc. These "shape" the winds and the winds carry moisture and deposit it as they do on Earth. You lack the circulating currents we do on Earth, although you can tweak something like them by subtle control of lighting - e.g. your atmosphere "lid" can have different levels of subtle filtering to force different areas to have different solar heating levels. Seas are very important.
Ice and snow is just a matter of altitude and you should be able to arrange a similar atmosphere to Earth's with minimal control. Any technological culture capable of building the ring in the first place is not going to find this anything but a minor problem.
Climate here generally runs from side to side - along the width of the rings. The "north and south poles" would be the edges of the ring, probably capped by incredibly steep slope - vertical in places - that supports the atmosphere lid. These might be artic regions of fierce cold and wind and storm. When visible at all, they would be permanently ice capped sloped barely visible in mist and haze.
[Answer]
**[Geocentric model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model)**
Your giant planet is the center of its universe. Its sun rotates around it. A system like this bears more than just passing scrutiny. The Ptolemaic model could explain just about every observation people made from the surface.
This sidesteps a lot of issues. Your planet does not need to move thru space or rotate and its interaction with its light source can be what you need it to be. If you want to lean into "otherness" you could have more than one sunlike light source orbit the planet which would let you smooth out heating and cooling effects that arise as a consequence of just one sun. Nights and days could be different lengths according to which sun was coming, and the light might have a different character according to which sun was in the sky. If the suns did not move at the same speed there could be days with 2 (or more!) suns and days with 1. Stuff like this is good grist for the prose mill and lets you talk about something to set the tone for your big world.
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**Break up the continents.**
Poles aside, midcontinental weather is the most extreme weather, examples being the American midwest or west and central Asia. You can ameliorate this effect by having large water bodies break up your continents and moderate the weather.
[Answer]
**Not really**
I'm assuming a lot, like a gravity similar to Earth, windspeeds don't change and the like. Still there are some problems. First what's ok.
Imagine a solar system with a star like our sun and the planet fixed in location with the closest part of the planet to the star as close as the Earth is. Let's put that in perspective.
The sun's diameter is about 1.4 million kilometers in diameter. The Earth is about 152 million km away from the sun. The Goldilocks zone is between 130 to 180 million km. That means your planet is fully inside the goldilocks zone with room to spare, as it is between 152 million to 154 million km away from the star. Great!
Now the problems. If your planet rotates as fast as the Earth, the crust will move at blistering speeds compared to Earth. I can't be bothered with the results in wind speeds, oceans moving, general cohesiveness of the planet and the like, but it's not looking good. So you wouldn't have normal days and nights, letting the days heat up extraordinary and the nights cool down to extremes.
Ignoring that, the whole ecosystem will be difficult. Normally the energy of the sun is hitting the Earth straight on, meaning the further you go towards the poles you'll get the light more crooked, thus the energy is more dispersed. Thus the poles are cold and the equator warm, as they each get different energy per m². Just imagine a hot directional lamp on a piece of paper held straight under, or in a crooked position. The crooked has the energy spread out over a larger area, this won't be as hot where the light hits.
Your planet will have the same, but the bands this happens are much larger. That means the transport of these energies gets bigger. You have a lot more hot air at the equator wanting to go to the cold, making hurricane winds what would be a normal tiny wind on Earth. If not, you'll have the cold and hot areas become much more hot or cold, as the heat doesn't soread easily.
Other problems include the magnetosphere. Even if it gets proportionately stronger, the amount of solar radiation on all bands does so as well. The poles likely experience near constant Northern lights, but with the amount of EM radiation they fear will kill all electronics on Earth. On that scale it'll do strange things with ozone and other particles in the atmosphere, making living on the planet potentially hazardous as even more harmful radiation will reach the ground.
We haven't spoken about the tectonic movements and many other energies, but suffice to say you'll not get what you want by following much scientific rules. Your planet must have the same reason for weather as for just having the planet exist. Because you say so, and it is important for the story.
[Answer]
Part one of Three:
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> Eastern high fantasy (xianxia) features worlds that span millions of kilometres. For example, descriptions of distances may state that it will take 200-300 years to go from place A to place B at the speed of 5000 km per day (\*)
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The world in the example, where it takes 200-30 years to go from place A to place B at the speed of 5,000 kilometers per day, would have place A and place B separated by about 73,050 to 109,575 day's travel, at a speed of 5,000 kilometers per day. Thus the shortest route from place A to place B would be 365,250,000 to 547,875,000 kilometers long, and going all the way around the planet or other world would probably take a journey of at least 730,500,000 to 1095,750,000 kilometers.
So if such a place was spherical or cylindrical, it would have a radius of at least about 116,262,784.1 to 173,951,212.7 .kilometers, and a diameter of at least about 232,525,568.3 to 347,902,425.4 kilometers.
One Astronomical Unit or AU, the distance between Earth and the Sun, is 149,597,870.7 kilometers. So if a planet like the one in the example was spherical, it would occupy at least about 0.777168 to 1.162792 of the radius and diameter of the earth's orbit around the Sun.
So if the figures used in the question are actually taken from a specific story, the planet in the story would be almost a billion (1,000,000,000) kilometers in circumference.
It is impossible for a planet to have a solid surface such as humans need to live on and have a surface area as large as the surface area of the planet Jupiter. The apparent surface of the planet Jupiter is actually the opaque top of cloud layers in the extensive Jovian atmosphere.
It is even impossible for a planet to have a much greater diameter to the top of its atmosphere than Jupiter. With greater mass than Jupiter, planets will increase in diameter and surface area, until they reach a point where adding mass stops increasing the size of the planet, which instead will become denser and more compact. Thus no planet can be much larger than Jupiter.
There are two hypothetical exceptions:
1. if a gas giant planet orbits very close to its star and is very hot, its atmosphere will swell and the planet's diameter will increase greatly. But of course the surface of the atmosphere will not be a solid surface for humans to stand on, and the planet will have many times the temperature which humans could survive.
2. Physicists have imagined several exotic types of matter which could hypothetically exist. And it might be possible for some types of exotic matter to form planets much larger than any known planet.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter> [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter)
But I am not an expert on such hypothetical forms of exotic matter. And of course even if such a giant planet could form out of exotic matter, it is possible that Earthly life forms like humans would find it impossible to survive on planets made of such exotic forms of matter.
So it is basically impossible for any planets or other celestial objects to naturally form with solid surfaces and having solid surface areas as large as or greater than the surface areas of the top cloud layers of giant planets.
So does this mean that it is scientifically totally impossible for there to be places suitable for humans to live which have large enough surface areas to satisfy the requirements of the question?
Part Two:
Not exactly.
Larry Niven discussed the possibilities of building gigantic artificial places for humans to live in or on, in an article titled "Bigger than Worlds", *Analog Science Fiction/Science fact*, March 1974, about 47 years ago.
<http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?133302> [2](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?133302)
It is briefly summarized at:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigger_Than_Worlds> [3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigger_Than_Worlds)
And there have probably been other discussion on that topic in the last 47 years,
So science fiction writers can imagine that highly advanced civilizations could build structures for people to live in or on that are as large as or larger than any fictional planet.
Of course there is the problem that available structural materials would be unable to handle the stresses of structures that large.
But if such technological problems could the solved, super-advanced civilizations might build super gigantic structures which might later be inhabited by people who for some reasons in the plot of a story think that their structure is a natural world.
Part Three:
A type of gigantic artificial world designed by me on May 29 and 30, 2021.
One possible design for such a giant artificial planet would be a giant framework constructed around a star. The mass of the star will determine at which distance the framework will have a surface gravity about equal to Earth.
The Earth has an average radius of about 6,371.0 kilometers. The average distance of Earth from the Sun, one AU, is 149,597,870.7 kilometers. So the if the radius of the framework is one AU, that will be about 23,481 times the radius of Earth. Since the force of gravity falls off with the square of the distance, if the star at the center had the mass of the Earth, the surface gravity at the distance of the framework would be 1 Earth gravity or *g* divided by the square of 23,481. Since the square of 23,481 is 551,357,361, one divided by 551,357,361 is 0.000000001, the surface gravity at a framework with a radius of one AU around an object with a mas of one Earth mass would be only 0.000000001 *g*.
So the object at the center of the framework would have to have a mass about 551,357,361 times that of the Earth in order for the framework at a distance of 1 AU to have a surface gravity of 1 *g*.
The mass of the Sun is listed as about 333,000 times the mass of Earth. So the object at the centre of the framework would have to have a mass of about 1,655.7 times the mass of the Sun for the framework to have a surface gravity of about 1 *g*.
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> One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae,[4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_mass) with 100–200 M☉; its lifespan is very short—only several million years at most. A study of the Arches Cluster suggests that 150 M☉ is the upper limit for stars in the current era of the universe.[5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole)[6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-mass_black_hole) The reason for this limit is not precisely known, but it is partially due to the Eddington luminosity which defines the maximum amount of luminosity that can pass through the atmosphere of a star without ejecting the gases into space. However, a star named R136a1 in the RMC 136a star cluster has been measured at 315 M☉, putting this limit into question.[8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BI_253) A study has determined that stars larger than 150 M☉ in R136 were created through the collision and merger of massive stars in close binary systems, providing a way to sidestep the 150 M☉ limit.[9]>
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> The first stars to form after the Big Bang may have been larger, up to 300 M☉ or more,[10] due to the complete absence of elements heavier than lithium in their composition. This generation of supermassive, population III stars is long extinct, however, and currently only theoretical.
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> With a mass only 93 times that of Jupiter (MJ), or .09 M☉, AB Doradus C, a companion to AB Doradus A, is the smallest known star undergoing nuclear fusion in its core.[11] For stars with similar metallicity to the Sun, the theoretical minimum mass the star can have, and still undergo fusion at the core, is estimated to be about 75 MJ.[12][13] When the metallicity is very low, however, a recent study of the faintest stars found that the minimum star size seems to be about 8.3% of the solar mass, or about 87 MJ.[13][14] Smaller bodies are called brown dwarfs, which occupy a poorly defined grey area between stars and gas giants.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_mass> [4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_mass)
So about 11 stars each with a mass of 150 times the mass of the Sun would be needed to orbit inside the framework with a radius of 1 AU to provide the framework with a surface gravity of 1 *g*.
Unfortunately, the upper number of stars in a stable multiple star system is probably 8.
<https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/41043/what-is-the-upper-bound-of-number-of-stable-interacting-stars-in-a-star-system/41074#41074> [7](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/41043/what-is-the-upper-bound-of-number-of-stable-interacting-stars-in-a-star-system/41074#41074)
And the hierarchical structure of multiple star systems means that such a multiple star system would have to be much wider than 1 AU.
Fortunately, a supermassive black hole could be at the center of the framework.
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> A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) is the largest type of black hole, with mass on the order of millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun (M☉).
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole> [5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole)
In fact, a supermassive black hole would be far too massive for a framework at a distance of 1 AU to have a surface gravity of only 1 *g*.
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> An intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) is a class of black hole with mass in the range 102–105 solar masses: significantly more than stellar black holes but less than the 105–109 solar mass supermassive black holes.[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigger_Than_Worlds) Several IMBH candidate objects have been discovered in our galaxy and others nearby, based on indirect gas cloud velocity and accretion disk spectra observations of various evidentiary strength.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-mass_black_hole> [6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-mass_black_hole)
A hypothetical intermediate-mass black hole with a mass of about 1,655.7 times the mass of the Sun would be right to give a framework around it at a distance of 1 AU a surface gravity of 1 *g*.
So how would the framework around a star or black hole be supported against the central object's gravity of 1 *g*?
If the central object was a star radiating light, gigantic ultralight weight solar sails could be stretched across the empty spaces between the pieces of the Framework. Those solar sails would reflect the light and stellar wind of the star back at it, providing a force to lift up the framework they were attached to.
But a black hole would not be radiating energy or a stellar wind.
If the center of the framework was filled by a star with 1 solar mass, or 333,000 times the mass of earth, the framework could have a surface gravity of 1 *g* at a distance of about 577.06 times the radius of Earth, or about 3,676,458.956 kilometers. That would be very close to the star, and the framework would be very hot, unless there was a way to convert the light of the star striking the inner side of the framework into energy.
But the framework and solar sails would have a combined surface area of 5,77.0615 squared times the surface area of Earth. That would be 332,998.24 times the surface area of Earth. If only 1 millionth of the surface was the solid framework, that would be 0.332998 times the surface area of Earth. If only 1 thousandth of the surface was the solid framework, that would 332.9984 times the surface area of Earth.
If the star at the center had a mass of 100 solar masses, or 33,300,000 times the mass of the Earth, a framework at a distance of 5,770.615 times the radius of Earth, or 36,764,589.56 kilometers, would have a surface gravity of 1 *g*.
A star with 100 times the mass of the Sun would radiate many times the Sun's luminosity. For example, BL 253 has a mass about 80 times that of the Sun and a luminosity about 750,000 times that of the Sun.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BI_253> [8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BI_253)
The framework would get many times hotter in the example of a star with one solar mass, despite being 10 times as far from the star.
But the framework and solar sails would have a combined surface are 5,770.615 squared times the surface area of Earth. That would be 33,299,997.48 the surface area of Earth. If only 1 millionth of the surface was the solid framework, that would still be 33.299 times the surface area of Earth. If only 1 thousandth of the surface was the solid framework, that would 33,299.99 times the surface area of Earth.
If the framework surrounded an intermediate-mass black hole with a mass of about 1,655.7 times the mass of the Sun at a distance of about 1 AU the framework would have a surface gravity of about 1 *g*. But what would hold up the framework if there was no radiation from the black hole to press against the gigantic solar sails?
The inhabitants would have to make the black hole produce light by moving matter from far beyond the framework through gaps in the framework and send that matter toward the intermediate-mass black hole. As the matter got close to the black hole it would be accelerated by the black hole's intense gravity and it would heat up and emit light - the light emitted by infalling matter is one method used to detect black holes. And naturally, they would want to calculate the trajectories of the infalling matter which would produce the most light and stellar wind from the black hole.
A hypothetical intermediate-mass black hole with a mass of about 1,655.7 times the mass of the Sun would be right to give a framework around it at a distance of 1 AU with a surface gravity of 1 *g*.
Since in this example the framework would have a radius of about 23,481 times the radius of Earth, it would have a surface area of about 23,481 squared times the surface area of Earth, or about 551,357,361 times the surface area of Earth. If only 1 millionth of the surface was the solid framework, that would still be 551.357 times the surface area of Earth. If only 1 thousandth of the surface was the solid framework, that would 551,357.361 times the surface area of Earth.
And of course, other sizes of such a type of artificial world could be designed.
[Answer]
**Not a Planet**
But a Dyson Ring or a [Dyson Sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere) would give you the area except isn't a planet.
Unless the people were capable of space travel, they wouldn't really be able to see the difference except it's never night.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JDMgy.png)
[Answer]
## Put a tarp over a brown dwarf.
Hurricane-affected regions of the U.S. are living proof that there is almost nothing that you can't manage with a proper tarp, and Sun-sized planets are no exception. Now, let's start with the surface gravity of the Sun being 28 times that of Earth. This means that for a Sun-sized planet we need a star with 1/28 = 0.036 times the mass of the Sun, or something like 36 Jupiter masses in the ad hoc metric system. A little less, but who's counting - a [brown dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf) is up to 80 Jupiter masses.
Point being, you have your construction fleet fly around the brown dwarf laying down blue tarp. It should only take a little bit of atmospheric pressure beneath to hold it up, so long as you do something to support it at the edges where atmosphere could get out around it. The outside doesn't literally have to be blue, but the inside *does* have to be a darn good mirror to prevent any light passing that way. You want it to be like a thermos holding the heat in. A material other than plastic is advisable. Once you've sewn that up nicely, [deuterium burning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium_burning) keeps the brown dwarf getting hotter and hotter. A brown dwarf is a failed star, but that doesn't mean it fails to burn deuterium! You let out the brown dwarf's clothing now and then, because all that built up heat will expand the star. It keeps getting larger until it is the size of the Sun. Then you can let some heat escape in places, and quit feeding it so much deuterium.
How do you keep the blue tarp from melting? I can't explain it. How do you keep the inside of a tokamak from melting? It's nuclear physics, complicated engineering of magnetic fields. And space boats at the ready with patches, for the occasional foul up. The brown dwarf turns into a massively expanded ball of plasma, like a mini mini Wolf-Rayet star; atop the plasma (once brown dwarf atmosphere, now hotter) you have the Tarp; atop the Tarp, you have a comfortable temperature and atmosphere and moderately deep soil ... just keep making your magnetic protective barrier against heat transfer from the plasma more and more effective, somehow, so that you can press down harder on the Tarp and pile a thicker planetary surface on top of it.
[Answer]
First, your planet:
As others have said, you need a lot more than sun-sized to get the sort of travel times you are talking about. However, my solution scales reasonably well:
You have some sort of hollow unobtainium sphere or forcefield or the like. On top of this you have a 4,000 mile thick layer of typical planet stuff. (Yes, not a coincidence that that's Earth's radius.) You have a "planet" with 1g at the surface. Put enough radioactives at the bottom and you can have a geologic cycle similar to Earth's, although obviously each plate will be a far smaller **percentage** of the total. No magnetic field but at Earth size at least (the size I've played with the numbers) the problem will be with the solar wind sticking, not with losing it.
Illumination comes from some sets of stars in rosettes orbiting the planet. I haven't figured out any way to get the weather even across the planet but you can have plenty of Earthlike area. Each rosette contains a number of stars equal to it's orbital period in days--while multiple stars will be above the horizon as they get far enough away they'll fade out anyway.
The hottest points will be where rosettes cross. Under any reasonable arrangement this will be scorched. Beyond that we have the warmest areas being under the rosettes, cooling off as you get farther away.
You can make the Earthlike climate be under the rosettes (and making rings around the intersections) which makes for the easiest travel, or make things a bit warmer under the rosettes, giving more total habitable area but cutting it up into chunks where you have to cross the hot areas to go between them.
Note that this system is not long-term stable for two reasons:
1. While a rosette of stars can be stable they will tug on each other where the rosettes cross. Stationkeeping will be needed.
2. Stellar wind will hit the planet and stick, adding hydrogen to the atmosphere. That's going to have to be pulled out somehow or the oxygen slowly turns to water.
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Let's try logically thinking this through.
There are two cases (at least): the earth is spherical, or, the earth is a different shape (cylindrical, toroid...).
# Let's start by considering what difference shape makes
If the earth is spherical/spheroid, then there is only one option for an orbiting sun, because all paths are the same. If it's long and thin, then there are different orbits - it could have a shorter solar path and a very long other dimension. If its toroid, then more complex paths are possible and not all paths are topologically the same. We'll ignore this for now and come back to it.
# The way it works
Let's look at what makes an earthlike planet earthlike, and what a larger earth requires. This'll be a thumbnail sketch only.
**Gravity:** A larger earth will need a way to keep comparable surface gravity. It need not be exactly the same, but too much less it loses atmosphere, and too much more, life becomes challenged and probably severely modified, and retention of dense gases/heating becomes a problem. So however large your earth, you need to ensure its average density is such that surface gravity is a reasonable comparable level. (This is easy, name your chosen size and surface gravity, calculate your density, done.)
**Diurnal cycle/surface temperature:** you need a day/night cycle for earthlike climate. But unless you want permanent areas of day and night, hot and cold, and a few twilight zones, you need a flow of heat to average things out. The earth does that by daily rotation, and by having just enough heat from the sun to power it, and that's the easiest way to do it.
For (almost) any given size, we can arrange a sun that rotates around it in a given daily period. Even if earth is huge, it can be made narrow in one dimension, like an egg timer or cylinder, to shorten the path. But we need the sun to be able to rotate in a given time, and that means one or more of
* a rotating earth
* a short-ish solar path around a huge non rotating earth
* a dense sun moving very fast around a huge non rotating earth
* multiple suns?
We can mix, match and calculate these, and adjust the earths shape to match, then adjust its density to get gravity right, etc.
I believe that these, together, can be used to get an earthlike planet, with some handwaving, but that's how id calculate the details.
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Consider Iain Banks' Culture series' Orbitals:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Living_space>
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> "One of the main types of habitats of the Culture, an orbital is a ring structure orbiting a star as would a megastructure akin to a bigger Bishop ring. Unlike a Ringworld or a Dyson Sphere, an orbital does not enclose the star (being much too small). Like a ringworld, the orbital rotates to provide an analog of gravity on the inner surface. A Culture orbital rotates about once every 24 hours and has gravity-like effect about the same as the gravity of Earth, making the diameter of the ring about 3,000,000 kilometres (1,900,000 mi), and ensuring that the inhabitants experience night and day. Orbitals feature prominently in many Culture stories."
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See also answers to this question for more details:
<https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/32182/what-is-the-actual-shape-of-the-vavatch-orbital-a-true-ring>
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I've been thinking of doing a kinda riff on Planet of the Apes, where a space faring civilization sets out to colonize the stars only for one of the ships to wind up back on the home planet.
I like the idea of the round trip happening in geological time (like hundreds of millions of years) so that by the time they return the remnants of their civilization are not obvious, and in fact don't get discovered until the final act in an archeological dig or something like that.
I'm not sure how to contrive the return in such a way that it is not obvious to the returning craft. My first instinct is that maybe the ship gets cast a-drift somehow. Perhaps a miscalculation sends the ship ever so slightly off course leading it to drift in deep space in a low-zero power mode. I could imagine it drifting long enough that any internal clock may overflow an indefinite number of times before the ship approaches near enough to any star that it might recharge it's solar cells. In that time perhaps the navigation systems get corrupted, perhaps it uses time to measure how far it has traveled? But that seams a little contrived.
I figure that if we suppose enough time has passed that a whole new set of species are thriving on the planet, then any recognizable astronomical objects may not be in positions that the crew recognize them once they are awakened from stasis. Are hundreds of millions of years too short a span to suppose the solar system would look sufficiently different to fool trained space farers?
**Edit:**
So many really cool answers! I'm partial to the orbital mechanics solution, that feels subjectively nicer than any of the *universe is actually curved* solutions. Not because those are bad, just because you need such a small universe for that to feel like the right solution. I'm really torn about who to award this to, because the orbiting the galaxy idea is great in my opinion, fits the time scale I need perfectly!
A couple of issues seam to crop up about the details of the ship and how the navigation computer could last so long. Honestly I hadn't settled on anything there yet, and was toying with ideas along the lines of the ship is a (relatively) tiny object, just a collection of high density information stores and a couple of nano-machines. Small enough to not need astronomical amounts of energy to get reasonable fractions (like $0.01 \space c$) of light speed. Basically the ship would rebuild the crew and survival units from available resources on the planet it lands on, without having to transport them physically (of course they were scanned pre-travel with memories etc).
Either that or it is a standard issue large hulled ship full of frozen people, over engineered to the nth degree. Such that the original designers had a round trip of 100 000 years in mind but used a safety factor of 1000 for everything. Because if a thing needs to be frozen for 100 000 years, what are a few 100 million?
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### Totally plausible if you lose your navigation computer - **space journeys aren't straight lines!**
As much as star-trek and the like may make us believe: Space isn't a big open 3d region where you just pick a direction and head that way and get there. If space was that simple, it would be basically impossible to come back to your point of origin unexpectedly like you want in your story. You'd need **wormholes** or a **curving universe** or **some bizarre malfunction**.
But long distance space flight isn't simple 3D cartesian space, 2 points, straight line, done. It's a network of curves and ellipses.
Much of the universe is essentially best modeled as network of things in orbit around each other. A ship orbits a moon, which orbits a planet, which orbits a sun, which orbits a galactic central point, and there's probably more above that with the galaxy orbiting local clusters or some higher level barycentre. All moving in circular paths.
All of these objects are in circular or elliptical paths relative to their parent or child objects. Baring FTL drives, the most fuel efficient path through this system is almost always also one of curves and ellipses.
The path that 20th century space probes take to travel around the solar system will resemble the paths your ships will take between the stars. Your ship will be travelling through a curved journey its entire time, it will almost never be "facing the destination".
In this example journey; **what does the purple ship see out it's front window?**
[](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Animation_of_InSight_trajectory.gif)
***Your destination is behind you half the journey!***
In this exact scenario, the purple ship enters the green objects gravity well, but if they miss it (or arrive a few minutes early or late), the purple ship will continue on the ellipse it's currently on, which if you trace it out, will return to the blue ring.
Now, someone is supposed to be navigating, and some computer is supposed to be intersecting these ellipses to plot the course. Not everyone knows orbital mechanics, and they're very counter-intuitive, many people plausibly think "face destination, thrust, arrive." If some major disaster occurs on the ship, and all the adults and their experience and knowledge is lost, the ships navigation information is lost, and the teenage children have to step up and save the day (you know - the setting for some teen bestseller book), it'd be plausible for them to repair much of the ship, to locate their destination's star correctly using telescopes, (or even using charts and sextants), orient the ship towards it ("Back on course!"), apply thrust, and assume they were back on their way.
So if the ship's teens try to correct their course here by accelerating toward the green object along the blue arrow:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OszC3.png)
The ship will pass behind the green object. If the green and blue objects are distant stars or galaxies even they might not ever realise they've undershot, and even if they do, they are unlikely to be able to correct it that late due to the extreme delta-v requirements.
The incorrect orbit will eventually intersect with the blue objects orbit, eventually returning them to their point of departure.
**TL;Dr: Rule of thumb**: If you turn towards your destination planet/star/galaxy and apply thrust, you're probably going to miss it.
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**There is an answer that doesn't require wormholes or navigation error - just bad luck**
*Note: I have edited this answer to remove the need for explicit maths.*
The solar system is orbiting the centre of our galaxy. Suppose the travellers set off towards the opposite side of the galaxy with the intention of exploring the local area when they get there. While they are travelling **across** the galaxy, the entire solar system is at the same time travelling **around** the galaxy. By a terrible stroke of bad luck the two orbits coincide.
By adjusting the trajectory of the spacecraft, you can adjust the time before it arrives at Sol again all the way from zero years to 230 million years\*.
**Why didn't the astronauts realise this would happen?**
Because it is very unlikely to happen. However it could happen through sheer bad luck.
A suggested plot:
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> Theorising that anywhere is as good as anywhere else, they spin a bottle and tell the computer, "Head thataways for 100 million years and wake us out of cryo-sleep when we arrive at a habitable planet. We don't care where we end up as long as it is habitable for humans."
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> After the required time, the main computer wakes up and starts looking for a nearby habitable planet. Surprise! There is a solar system nearby with a perfect planet for the job! It automatically puts the mother ship into orbit and sends the cryo-sleepers to the surface in the transit vehicle where they have been stored all this time.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cvCZA.png)
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\*The solar system takes 230 million years to orbit the galaxy centre. Even half of this is plenty of time for big changes to happen on Earth. Under the scheme I suggest, you can choose any time from 0-230 million years!
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Nopes.
First, the planet. The plate tectonics theory and the continental drift theory clearly state that the continents are in motion, and that there has been a cycle of formation of supercontinents and then return. Even otherwise, 100s of millions of years are enough for multiple ice ages, which could cause their own patterns of glacial erosion and life formation, different from the current Earth.
Second the solar system. Since the interlapsing period is 100s of millions of years, its quite possible many more planet systems with 8 planets have since been discoverd. Just like geography of earth changes, it is hard to predict what kind of impact a series of faraway asteroids, or even another alien species does to the planets within earth's solar system. Thus unique identification is hard.
Third the galactical system - one may utilise the 3D star patterns to identify if the star of this plant matches that of Sun. However, this can be difficult for 1 reason - the 3D map of stars itself need not be unique across the universe. Say 10 different stars were used to map the relative position of Sun, one would need to pick the same 10 stars when mapping the Sun again, and even then, there could be a replicas in some other part of universe. Thus again, unique identification is hard
The bottom line is the ship and humans may not realise that their destination changed if their initial destination was a star system similar to solar system. If instead, they were headed to a 3 planet system or a 2 star system, it should be fairly obvious.
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For things to be obvious, either the ship's AI, or the humans themselves have to be able to see some markers from their onward journey during their return journey. This is quite common with people getting lost in jungles. Thus any such markers can be avoided if different directions are used during approach and takeoff.
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There was a dark forest strike on the ship's AI (not the planet) during its millions of years of voyage, which wasn't completely successful, but managed to change the parameters of the voyage enough for the ship to return to home planet, without the AI or the humans realising it.
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When Apollo flew to the Moon, NASA made use of a phenomenon of orbital mechanics called a *free return trajectory*.
Basically, the Apollo spacecraft was given a course and speed, during the trans-lunar insertion phase, which meant that if anything went wrong, for example if the spacecraft missed the Moon, it would follow a large elipse which, without a further fuel-burn, would eventually bring it back to the Earth.
Because gravitational field strength is curved, an amount of thrust used to move away from any massive body, such as a planet or star, will cause the spacecraft to follow a large curving path through space, if the mission begins with a single burn and the spacecraft then essentially coasts. The Apollo spacecraft were in effect placed in a highly elliptical orbit about the Earth, in which the apogee of the orbit was at the orbital altitude of the Moon, which the perigee of the orbit was in low Earth orbit, and the spacecraft would basically coast up to the Moon, then back to the Earth, in a repeating cycle, taking about 7 days to complete each orbit.
Termed a *free return* trajectory because the energy for the return to Earth is provided by nature for *free*: simple gravity would draw Apollo back to the Earth, in the second leg of its orbit, if it had for any reason failed to go into orbit around the Moon.
Any space mission which does not employ continuous thrust can make use of the force of gravity to slow its outward path: in fact that is what must happen, until eventually the craft passes the apogee point and gravity then begins to draw it back towards its point of origin.
This has nothing to do with the universe being curved. It is a simple effect of gravity, and must occur if a mission does not have unlimited fuel.
**Alternatively**, if you *do* have unlimited fuel, any spacecraft which approaches the speed of light will encounter time dilation, whereby the on-board time passes much more slowly than on its planet of origin. A mission might last 5 years, ship-time, yet the crew could return to find that thousands of years have passed at home.
Try Gene Roddenberry's tv series '*Andromeda*', where the starship Andromeda passes too close to a black hole, and when it fights its way out after the close encounter, Captain Dylan Hunt finds that three centuries have passed on his homeworld, and the civilisation he comes from has been destroyed by the enemies who he had entered the black hole to escape, because of the time dilation caused by the ship's passage through the gravity well of the collapsed star.
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Space ship journey was a hoax, they were just orbiting Earth or Moon, and hyperwarp space they seen in portholes was just 3d render. Government issued this "Generation ship" launch to make sort of human resources backups. But, things changed on Earth, and expedition took longer they expected...
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**They went through a wormhole**
While in sci-fi wormholes are shown with bright, flashing ligths for the convenience of the audience ("Ah! it's a wormhole!") so little is actually known about them that may well be completely invisible.
You can make the passage through it as fast and as smooth as you may like but the result would be that the ship & crew would still be in good shape after the passage, because of plot armor.
They would see that the position of the stars has changed, maybe they have lost some of their sensors in the rough passage. Anyway they detect they are not on the original route anymore but can't figure out they are on a vector home.
Also the wormhole has messed up their position in time but they have no way to detect it. Now star positions have deeply changed. That contributes to them not realizing they are coming home.
They may see that the star they are headed to has a similar spectrum than the Sun (if they started from Earth) but not recognizing any of the nearby stars would induce them into thinking they are going towards a different star system.
A character may say: "Hey, that really looks like our Sun!". And another: "Oh yeah? And where are Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani?"
Still once in the solar system they should be able to see that is exactly like the one they left. Planets don't disappear even after hundreds of millions of years. Yes, Saturn will have lost its rings and some satellites will be a bit further away / closer but a system like ours should be clearly recognizable.
Only solution to this would be that their home system is so boringly common and / or deprived of special landmarks like Jupiter or Saturn would be. Maybe just a single planet orbiting its star?
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1. On the scale of 100s of millions of years, Earth's position in the Galaxy is chaotic.
2. On the scale of 100s of millions of years, Solar system orbits are chaotic.
Start off with a civilization deciding to leave the galactic disk. They manufacture a white dwarf star for power and use exotic materials to build a Matrioshka Brain around it, then launch it (powered by a few supernovas) beyond galactic escape velocity.
Some people from this civilization decide to head back to the Galactic disk. This is expensive; but maybe that is part of the plan (create a branch civilization, send it out of the Galaxy where it is safe, then have it send seed pods back into the Galaxy).
The beings in the Matrioshka Brain would be uploads, naturally, and the seeds sent back would be star wisps. When they'd arrive back, they'd start assembling from raw materials an industrial base.
The goal would be that even if Galactic civilization collapses, a branch of your civilization reseeds it.
They'd arrive a geological time later in a solar system rendered chaotic by time, newly printed out flesh copies of trans-galactic explorers. Possibly their brain state was frozen for most of their trip outside of the galaxy (and only woken up after the star wisp had managed to print bodies for them, a million years after arrival).
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When I was in high school I attended a seminar from a theoretical physicist, who gave a lecture on the structure of the universe and how it is a closed geometry, roughly like the surface of a sphere.
When I asked him why we don't then see the light from the stars coming "from the other way around", in the same way I can fly from New York to Los Angeles across the States or across Europe and Asia plus a couple of oceans, he answered with a disappointing "when you will be at the university I will explain it to you".
In your story the universe is much smaller than ours, with light and matter being able to cross it in both directions, the shortest one and the "other way around" one. This is what happened to them: they travelled so long that they completed a whole round of the universe, in a bit more than 80 days, I assume.
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For reasons I've explained, this won't easily work.
1. Human artifacts don't last long - order of a hundred thousand years or thereabouts. See the many many questions about how long artifacts last, for this.
2. Despite minor changes the solar system will almost certainly be immediately recognisable for hundreds of millions if not a billion or so years, minimum.
So its hard to have a belated discovery moment as you planned.
One way it might work is if the original planet wasn't earth, or at least not earth as we know it. If they lived in sealed cities , domes, or underground, and for some reason knowledge of the outside world was forbidden, then your reveal becomes more practical.
For example, suppose it was a buried lunar dome, as described in many works of fiction, and that it was dictatorial, and the ship was an escape.
Or suppose the dictatorial nature came from a fanatical religion, where space was God's and it was blasphemy to seek to be in God's place, and those leaving stole one of the few mothballed ships prior to the religious revolution (they'd last ages forgotten on the taboo'ed surface and we can handwave away fuel with some kind of ion drive or whatever). Those leaving wanted to find God and ask Her some questions/see Her face/get to Paradise the fast way. So they don't have a clue, and the knowledge of space is a forbidden thing, no way to learn except interrogate the computer.... which is unreliable due to age and lack of maintenance, doesn't have stellar maps which they don't find out till after they hastily leave...
To avoid observation they dare not have emissions other than the ion drive or can't yet figure the observation system until interstellar drive is enabled (who knows if the leadership would take a 2nd ship and some gladly hellbound sacrificial volunteers to prevent blasphemy on this scale), which means no looking out of observation plates until the ship says they have entered interstellar space. A lunar dome/construct, unlike an earthly one, might last a very long time indeed. Or at least is easier to handwave its age. Especially if in a location protected from impacts.
That provides all your elements - a juicy plot and character hook, a basis for a richly written interesting universe and society, a way to have them not recognise the solar system at all, multiple ways (inexperience, computer fault) to have a navigational route or error that takes them home again and when they get to this unknown system, what more natural than to seek a similar environment to the one they know - the 4th planet is dangerous now for some reason (radiation?) But fortunately the 3rd one is a binary planet and one of its 2 planets is similar to their home environment.......
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Given the time involved you have to involve something that can fling you through time. Nobody would set out on a voyage meant to last that long, therefore something must have gone badly, badly wrong for them to be unaware of the situation.
Thus you're going to have to go into the realm of speculative physics to get an answer. Two ideas come to mind:
1. Normal travel between the stars is via wormhole. Wormholes are quite hard to detect, survey ships map them and regular ships simply go to the right spot and go through. What the crew didn't realize is that there was another wormhole passing through at high speed and they inadvertently entered it. It took them through time and dumped them back close enough to Sol that it was the star they found. The time travel is because the wormhole has been moving at it's insane speed for a long, long time and the ends are subject to special relativity. (See *Timemaster* by Robert L. Forward for more on this idea.)
2. A failure of a hyperdrive of some kind--the jump went much farther than they intended and the interaction with Sagittarius A\* took it a way forward in time--they jumped across the galaxy at a time when Sol was on other side. This is close enough to the *One Face* story I won't explore it further.
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# The universe is flat and infinite
We still don't know the shape of the universe. [From what we can see it seems it is flat and infinite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe) (we cannot rule out that the universe is finite or curved yet though).
If it really is infinite, then consider that any volume within it with a finite amount of atoms has a finite number of ways those atoms can be arranged. If you move faster than light1 in a straight line or an open curve long enough, there is a greater than zero chance that you will find a volume within that universe that looks enough like the volume of the universe that we can see right now, even having evolved much in the same ay. Maybe with a few little changes.
1 Consider a wormhole, or handwave it as some sort of space anomaly.
For a system considering a finite universe with a closed curvature, see [Dutch's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/196598/21222).
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The light from the far off solar system could have actually been bent by an undetected black hole half way between the two systems. The light happened to be bent back into an orbit which pointed right back at their origin solar system. The ship constantly travelling towards the light would essentially be retracing that same orbit. Only after having gone full circle would they realize their folly.
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A classical trope in writing (and, unfortunately, history) is that regular people are out to kill magicians, so the magicians have to run and hide (operate "in secret").
Practically, why would a group of people with crazy powers be forced to operate in secret? I'd imagine that they'd show up to the first ruler with their broomstick and show them that they can do better intelligence or special operations than anyone else.
The king tries killing them? They're wizards - blow the palace up and fly away!
Especially if they have powers like invisibility or infinite armor.
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## Ever see a nature film?
If you look, you can find a variety of videos involving small but numerous attackers defeating a larger, more powerful, foe. Fire ants are a great example. If your villagers significantly outnumber your wizard(s), then the wizard can be defeated. Eventually. Or overwhelmed. Sure, the casualties will be high. But if it stops the wizard from taking over the world, then isn't it worth it (in the humans' minds)?
## Limits!
The wizard must, eventually, sleep. That's a period of vulnerability. Or when your wizard runs out of spells or spell ingredients or whatever, then they become vulnerable. Yes, they might can lay waste to entire towns at their peak, but no one is at their peak 100% of the time.
## Murderers?
Maybe not all wizards are okay with destroying tens or hundreds of sad, unwizardly, civilians. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. They probably have friends and/or family in that village, after all...
## Long view
Wizards are, generally, viewed as smarter than average. They know that if any one wizard destroys a village (even in self defense), the other villages will find out. And they will go on a *(pardon the intentional pun)* witch hunt.
## Everything-Proof
As a kid, I often played pretend games. When those games involved conflict, inevitably, someone would start the weapons/armor arms race. "I have a bullet-proof shield!" 'Oh yeah? I have armor-piercing bullets!' "Well, I have..." until, eventually, the fun would stop at "Well, my armor is everything-proof!" or some variation on infinity. Your wizards have defenses of various magical sorts. But all it takes is one lucky person with a good English long bow (or sniper rifle or whatever your genre allows) who gets off a shot as your defenses fall. Or one non-wizard who finds out that salt or holy water or something will let their lead arrow-head pierce that shield spell.
Once a weakness is found, it will be exploited.
## Long Odds
See also literally every alien invasion movie ever -- the aliens are always superior to us in at least one or two ways. But we overcome them through determination, luck, numbers, or some other means. Wizards are smart, they know that humans can often prevail against long odds.
Okay, many of those are improbable. But if you have thousands of humans to throw at a wizard, even a one in a thousand chance of winning will, eventually, play out.
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# 1. The traditional answer: crazy powers are not all
The usual answer - for vampires, werewolves, Illuminati etc. - is that if the normal humans knew of this minority, they would blame them for every weird thing, and/or attempt to enslave and exploit them, and/or engage in racial cleansing -- and numbers will trump power every time: crazy powers are not all.
**This is obviously often, but not necessarily, true** - for a real life example see the *conquistadores* in Mesoamerica. They were a powerful minority, and they still defeated the warlike Mexica by exploiting their limits, divisions and beliefs, with the help of their crazy gunpowder powers.
Magic users are uniquely suited to do *much worse*, and, being still human, I don't think they would be satisfied with "living and letting live".
So the choice would be between living hidden like rats, cowering in fear of discovery, while Muggles grow more and more powerful and technically savvy, or coming out to **a war of extinction**. Not an occasional castle-blowing, but WW III.
A third option, the best of a very bad lot, is: strike first, strike *hard*, leave no survivors.
**A magically enhanced plague** would be my immediate choice - a few small modifications to some of the nastiest variants of *variola maior* to keep it *slowly* replicating, infective, yet completely asymptomatic for some months - then become virulent all over the world in the same instant, killing Muggles swiftly through systemic shock (or a brain haemorrhage). This would almost certainly defuse any nuclear threat, leaving a few days for prepared teams of magical engineers to safely shutdown power plants, stop trains, drain dams, pulverize wandering planes while still on autopilot, and prevent other kinds of accidents.
"A minority of powerful human Hogwarts-style wizards" == "Black Death apocalypse" (details may vary). So - why hasn't it happened (yet)?
# 2. A different answer: crazy powers are crazier than you thought
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That might be the point. *They might not have* - that, or anything else. Magic might turn out to be a weird quantum phenomenon that does not survive skepticism.
The need for a Magic Academy arises from the necessity of teaching young children to believe in magic while they're young, lest their magic disappear - which is what happens usually to Muggles.
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Once the belief has taken roots, the children will grow able to perform magic - provided they are in sight *only* of other magic believers.
But let one Muggle witness the scene, and think to himself "Hey, what's that weirdo attempting to do? Doesn't he know brooms don't fly?" - and the broom won't fly, the Elven gold will become rotten leaves. That's the reason for the warnings in the old tales about not opening boxes and doors, and not looking at magic being performed. Just like faith moves mountains, so lack of faith makes them collapse.
So the magic users, if they want to reap the benefits of magic (and they do), must perforce live that part of their life in utter secrecy.
Most magicked items and effects will survive Muggle skepticism, provided they have a mundane explanation. Unfortunately, the readiest explanation for large amounts of money and trinkets is *grand theft or drug dealing*, so while a magic user *will* be able to live the good life, he must be very careful and is thus not free to use his magic to the fullest, except in private.
---
This is shamelessly "inspired" from David Brin's [*Those Eyes!*](http://www.davidbrin.com/fiction/thoseeyes.html), wherein the magic/alien/elves cannot abide human skepticism.
>
> Three of those young faces still exhibit rapture as they stand uncritical, accepting. But the fourth — a gangling child-woman — casts another kind of glow. As she rouses, her eyes narrow, and her mouth forms words. Tapped into her mind, I sense her effort to see. To really see.
>
>
> "*What am I staring at? Why... it looks transparent, as if it isn't really there at -*"
>
>
> "Flee!" Fyrfalcon screams, as we are blinded by that deadly gaze.
> [...]
>
>
> By now those teenagers are rubbing their eyes, already convinced we
> were hallucinations. That is what happens when humans see us with
> *skepticism*. Now we blow away like leaves, like wisps of shredded
> dreams.
>
>
>
[Answer]
>
> I'd imagine that they'd show up to the first ruler with their broomstick and show them that they can do better intelligence or special operations than anyone else.
>
>
>
Funny. If that would work for people, our governments would be run by scientists instead of people which most powerful weapon is phrasing things and dodging questions.
But aside from that, there are several reasons why magicians would not do that. Which apply depends on the setting and working of magic.
## Examples
* Having magicians leading because of their power just reeks of power abuse against the non magical citizens as it can be seen in many dictatorships on our world already. A notable example from fiction is [Magnostadt](http://magi.wikia.com/wiki/Magnostadt) with [Mogamett](http://magi.wikia.com/wiki/Matal_Mogamett) as its ruler from the manga [Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magi:_The_Labyrinth_of_Magic). **In fact, the history of Mogametts rise to power is very exciting and I can only encourage you to read this arc of the manga.** Especially since he basically answers your question "why would magicians be scared of regular people?" with "Yeah, why exactly?".
* If it is usual for magicians to blow up castles without a sweat (which is not the case in the aforementioned manga), then they are very powerful. If two magicians of that power level battle, they could lay waste to a small country. It's worse if they are on a [Sorcerer](http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sourcerer) power level, two of them fighting may be an extinction event. On that case, you may look into [chapter 20 of Supernormal Step](http://www.supernormalstep.com/archives/chapter-20-rip-the-world-apart). (Note Supernormal Step has nothing to do with Disc World, I merely used Sorcerers as an example for power level "there is nearly nothing he can't do", which is basically the premises in the chapter.)
* If you are willing to say that two wizards would never get into a fight, you would imply a serious constriction on their mindset. This is unrealistic for humans, you may as well have AIs which "magically" let their nanobots do what they want, "for the best of humanity" of course. Powerful "it's for your best" beings have been observed in fiction and sometimes reality. Notable examples are the robots of [Asimov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov), best known for [I, robot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_(film)), and [an omnibenelovent God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy). We know that both didn't seem to work out optimal.
* So let's assume wizards are just like normal people but with an additional power set. It is really important how this power set is defined to work out how society would react on it. For example, if you say the power set (or magic or whatever) manifests in each person differently but still feels like magic, you get [Fairy Tail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_Tail). There is a [Magic Council](http://fairytail.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Council) as some sort of parallel government to the worldly governments in a way the church is for us. However, in the course of the manga, they fail miserably on several occasions and are played because, well, they are just humans. Later in the manga there is also the [Alvarez Empire](http://fairytail.wikia.com/wiki/Alvarez_Empire), filled with very powerful magicians who just invade other countries when their leader says so.
* Now if you say "Okay, magic as a power set doesn't needs to be so flashy and magic-ly." you get [My Hero Academia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Hero_Academia). In this world, almost anyone possesses some specific kind of magic (it's called "Quirk" there, but it's all handwavium, so who cares?). In this manga the history of how people learned to deal with these new appearing quirks is told: Basically, since the magic wasn't OP (well, not all of it) the government was able to handle it. As almost all people got a quirk, they institutionalized it (the title of the manga is not just for show). Got a quirk? Only use it if authorized, or you are a criminal and will be hunted down by our licensed heroes! The main enemy in this series are mafioso and organized crime that uses their quirks to do bad deeds.
* Okay, we handled flashy magic and unflashy magic. What about some classic element manipulation? That is [Avatar: The last airbender](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender). Four elements to control/bend: Fire, water, earth and air. Amusingly, in the very first episode, it is established that bending is not perceived as magic in-universe, but as I said, handwavium. In Avatar, benders and non-benders live together without secrecy, but humans are garbage, so they had wars anyway, additionally powered by bending to make up for their lack of guns, but don't worry, in the sequel series they got a [mecha](http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Mecha_tank). However, in the first season of the sequel there was a [movement](http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Equalists) that opposed the bending that wasn't possible to all of society. In the season after that, the origin of bending was told in two episodes, see [Wan](http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Wan). I should note that one particular form of bending is forbidden in the sequel, "blood bending" (a form of water bending), which allows one to control other people. It was again a mafiosi who made use of it. And it was pretty clear established in the third season of the sequel that air benders need to be peace loving nomads or they would pose the biggest thread. The "Kill it with fire" approach was previously done in the complete original series.
* A reference for classic magicians (not the Fairy Tail otp variant) living in peace with the society is the enjoyable webcomic [Gaia](http://www.sandraandwoo.com/gaia/2011/11/01/cover/). People are well educated on magic (also in academias as such) and abide the law and order the kings imposed. If they don't, in worst powerful mages loyal to the king intervene. And, not surprisingly, the bad guy in this story is also a magician who got too powerful.
## Conclusion
As you see, there are a lot of settings where magic, in one form or another, is known and accepted. People grew up with it in some cases, which is the easiest way to install acceptance. In other cases, magic was to big to ignore. In some cases, magic is just too strong to allow a long lasting society, if it isn't watered down in some way.
>
> Practically, why would a group of people with crazy powers be forced to operate in secret?
>
>
>
Given all the examples above, as a human, a simple thought comes to mind: "Wouldn't humanity be better of without magic?"
Currently I think "Wouldn't humanity be better of without nuclear weapons?" This is a clear yes, but even if I would be able to make nuclear weapons undone, there is no way I could prevent people of inventing them AGAIN! Now, assume you live in a world where real magicians exist, but you don't know how they work, physically. It is not unreasonable to assume that magic may came from somewhere, but since then was genetically embodied in people. So if you would kill all people which show signs of magic, wouldn't you be able to remove magic from the world? [If faced with no consequences, people can do bad things to people of other factions they don't like.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Ethnic_minorities) If you, additionally, have no idea what magicians are capable of, you could be really worried about your world. [Fear about getting attacked can make you want to attack first.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemptive_war)
So finally, in a world where magic is not widely understood and where magicians are not organized, it is likely for them to be prosecuted and [blamed for all the bad things](http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/unhappy-just-blame-immigrants-9032890.html), because that's sadly how humanity works. They have to hide to survive. In other scenarios, it could work out better, as the examples above show.
[Answer]
Usually the reasons fall into the following categories:
## Small Numbers
The total number of magicians is typically very low compared to the mundane population. Yes, a powerful magician might be able to dominate a small town but that's one person against thousands. They might still need to eat and sleep, making them vulnerable to poison and guns.
## Low Power on Average
Some magicians might be able to cast invisibility or infinite armor, but can they all? Looking at general abilities in a mundane population in comparison would suggest that not everyone has the same running ability as Usain Bolt or the physique of Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson. Chances are your average magician can't cast those spells, making them a lot more vulnerable.
## Exhaustion
Most spells in fiction require some form of energy to cast and/or maintain. This means magicians can be exhausted after constant spell use. The wise magician knows that inciting mobs of mundane humans to come after them will probably lead to an end like a stag being run down by a pack of wolves.
## Disdain
They might view mundane humans as lesser folk, in a Harry Potter pureblood way. Why would they want to mingle with the unwashed masses when they could exist in communities of their own kind? In these places, they could study and trade relevant information and establish a communal defence.
## Fear
Miracle workers tend to be sought after, used and abused. It's a common trope in stories about mutants, psychics, superpowered beings, and so on, and it should be the same for magicians. Governments and other wealthy individuals would send out teams to kidnap ordinary magicians to gain those powers for their own use.
A combination of any and all of these reasons would make magicians keep to the shadows, no matter how powerful an individual might be.
[Answer]
**Magicians are the Other.**
<http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394893>
>
> Moreover, we do not know to this day which devil has brought them
> (Jews) here...like a plague, pestilence, pure misfortune in our
> country." Martin Luther, About the Jews and Their Lies,
>
>
>
> Jewish
> communities existed continuously in Europe for over 2,000 years. Many
> of these communities were older than the countries in which they
> existed. Nevertheless, as the countries of Europe developed, Jews were
> rarely given complete citizenship status. At best they were tolerated
> as guests. Their social and religious distinctiveness made them
> persistent targets for persecution; and such persecution, in turn,
> intensified the cohesiveness of Jewish communities.
>
>
>
Like your magicians, European Jews had a lot to offer and did offer - urban jews were often literate, educated professionals who contributed much to the communities they were in. They were still hated. I once thought that they were hated because they were economically well off but the same Europeans who hated jews also hated gypsies, who were poor and disadvantaged.
Both groups were hated because they were recognizably different, and because the members of the groups embraced those differences. Hating "the Other" reinforces cultural solidarity among the people doing the hating, a principle which unfortunately is still strong in modern societies. Hate can be a unifying force.
So too your magicians. They are recognizably magicians. Despite their power and potential to be helpful, they are hated as "the other".
[Answer]
This is a duplicate of <https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/14087/why-is-the-magical-world-kept-hidden-from-the-muggle-world>
Which was answered [here](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/14091/73693).
>
> Dumbledore's notes on The Wizard and the Hopping Pot do go into a little more detail regarding Muggle persecution of witches and wizards. He mentions that Nearly Headless Nick was stripped of his wand prior to being thrown in a dungeon to await execution and was unable to magic himself out of the predicament. Further, the younger the witch or wizard, the more at risk they were to execution, due to their lesser ability to control their magic (as seen with Ariana Dumbledore and her subsequent attack by three Muggle boys after they witnessed her doing magic and Ariana was unable to reproduce the trick at the boys' demand). See page 41 in Tales of Beedle the Bard for complete details.
>
>
>
The bottom line is that there are a lot more Ordinaries than there are wizards. When you're constantly defending yourself against Ordinary range weapons, you can't do anything else. And if you destroy the castle, then everyone else *really* sees you as a threat.
[Answer]
Religion
"Suffer not a witch to live" Exodus 22:18
Wizards are still people that need to eat, drink and sleep which means you are vulnerable.
The great unwashed masses hates and fears you which means you suffer from constant attempts on your life be it assassins, traps or poison.
[Answer]
Maybe they're not so certain of their skills.
There are many martial artists out there which look beautiful in practice, but fall apart under stress. They have full control of their capacities when no one is touching them, but they lose control and collapse when someone else interferes. This is particularly noticeable in softer arts like Tai Chi and Aikido. Just by their nature, it's very easy to look pretty, and look like you've "got it," when in fact you only have an illusion and it could be disrupted by anyone.
Your magic might be similar. It may be very easy to do great spells when nobody is interacting with you, but far harder to do it when there's interference from another living creature. Wizards would obviously practice how to deal with interference, but they may never know when that *one* person just happens to do something that collapses their entire skill.
I find this to be an attractive reason because it means, to the outside world, it's hard to tell the difference between a hardcore wizard who knows their stuff and a wannabe that's good at posturing. That creates a really good wizard/normal-human dynamic that's a lot of fun to play with.
[Answer]
1: Humans don't really want to harm other humans, it helps them survive. The magic user might be tripping on power and will abuse it to get his way, but he won't be murdering people left and right.
Unfortunately, group mentality of people and the anonimity it brings, combined with a fear of the unknown (will that magic user kill us? Did that plague that hit my crops come from him? I'm sure I had more money on me when I left, did he cast a spell on me to forget that he stole it?), these people would be much more violent and likely to kill the magic user.
2: Magic users will be dumb.
Despite the general culture that magic users are smart, hard working people who devise incredible rituals and learn complex magical spells, magic users would usually turn out to be dumb, lazy people (unless basic magic is also extremely complex).
The reason for this is that there's no incentive to learn. A Blacksmith faced with a tricky problem will have to be inventive and do research to create a better tool. A magic user will just magic most of his problems away and not learn a lot of the things he would learn as a normal human, even if he does learn how to use his magic better. When this magic user is then faced with a bunch of people who are smarter than him in everyday life and very angry with him for being a dumb butthat for accidentally setting their crops on fire (or it was a natural fire but hey the magic user was walking by and that bloke is *weird* man), he has plenty of reasons to be afraid. If only because he doesn't understand all the implications of his actions.
3: In early human society, we didn't beat up the strongest guy in his sleep because he punched anyone who came to the food first until he had his fill. In fact, we revered those guys, just like we rever movie stars and the like (which is an after-effect from this old behaviour). So we even let him eat first!
But it comes at a price, should danger appear, we also expect the strongest guy to step up first. They received more food and social boons than others but held more responsibility in the group as a result.
Now the magic user would be a strong guy. Strong in a different sense than muscles, but strong nonetheless. Much like the "witches" of old who were often tolerated for their "magic" through the use of medicine, these guys would hold a special place in the group/village/city. That is, until things go wrong. If the strong guy in the old times ran away from the danger, it was a clear signal that he was no good and he would feel the repercussions, if he stepped up to the danger he was good. But the actions of a magic user are much more opaque: He can cure my pigs, can he make them sick as well? He gave each of us a special fire to keep our houses warm this winter, but did he also set Jake's house on fire? Jake might not be the smartest and might have accidentally set his house on fire himself, but it could have been that magic user right? So again, the mystery of the unknown would threaten the magic user even if he had good intentions, although enough magic users would naturally be corrupted by their power and thinnk they are better than them. It's easy to fear your own people if you've been threatening them to give you what you want or even enslaved them to your will.
[Answer]
Magicians are empowered by deities to do their bidding on this world. Unfortunately for these deities, their power comes directly from the people that worship them. Thus, every human the magician kills reduces the power of the deity that human worshiped. If the human worshiped a different deity, that's fine. But if the magician was anywhere near those humans, then a magician who worshiped that deity would quickly drive him out or otherwise defend the humans.
Thus the magician's responsibility is to protect the humans that worship his deity. Now, humans are fickle creatures. If they see magicians with power, they start to think they maybe the magician is the deity worth worshiping. The easiest way to avoid this is to remain secret, or at the very least keep the powers secret.
These magicians may also be tempted to try to steal the worshipers for themselves. After all, if they can get people to worship them, they would begin to receive powers of their own. This would anger the deity who originally empowered the magician. So the deity lays out rules that he expects the magician to follow, including limiting access to the humans. If the magician starts to overstep the rules, the deity will take action to prevent the loss of followers, either by removing the powers, sending in a stronger magician to subdue the errant magician, or both.
[Answer]
Magic is a product of attention and intent. The magician's effects are produced by the direct application of his will. What this does not produce is a "mechanistic" process which applies to things which she does not perceive and concentrate on.
As a result, any magician is vulnerable to being stabbed in the back, or shot from a distance by a hidden marksman. To put it differently, a magician can produce an impenetrable shield between him and a known threat, but not a Sphere of Protection.
Since the powers of a magician toward the things which she knows about are potentially unlimited (up to an including death, depending on your concept of a magician's powers), each magician is potentially an enormous threat to the mundanes around him. Killing magicians is, after all, the only way to ensure that one does not wake up one morning as a toad.
] |
[Question]
[
***UPDATE: I was informed that my English terminology was incorrect. I was using the term "celibate", instead of the intended and correct "chaste". The idea was "no sex", not "no marriage".***
Earth had no shortage of religious movements that to some extent prized chastity.
But they were all either:
* Restricting chastity to a small subset of believers (Roman Catholicism)
* Restricting chastity to unmarried people (pretty much all Abrahamic religions, at least)
* Or, in rare cases where 100% of believers were required to be chaste, [the religion died out quickly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers), for obvious game theoretical reasons.
*How can I avoid that last case, and establish a religion which **requires 100% total chastity of ALL its adherents**, that is **stable** and won't die out like Shakers did, for lack of new believers being born and/or desertion of adherents to more sex-friendly faiths*?
***Conditions***:
* Religion must arise on regular Earth
* Timeframe for arising and **establishing** is anywhere between 500BC to 1900AD
+ this means no cloning/test tube babies.
* I'm ok if it's brand new weird one; but some offshoot of Abrahamic ones is preferred if possible.
* Absolutely no supernatural divine intervention to help (for the purposes of this question, we will take an atheist view that a religion is merely a memetic cultural system, not based on anything supernatural "for realz").
In other words, no "adherents magically get virgin births en masse", no "deity performs such miracles that 50% of Earth population believes and converts right away", no "mass hypnosis of 100K people".
---
---
***For the background***:
Although the needs/situation are purely Earthly-reality-based, the background is not.
* I'm a member of an alien species, who can only sustain life by feeding off of the energy emitted by human adults who are chastity all their life
+ The energy is only liberated at the time of "natural" death ("natural" means, they can't be killed on purpose by a member of my species in this context. Any other cause of death is fine).
+ The energy accumulates very slowly, let's say enough for one daily meal for me in 1 year of a human's life.
+ Any sexual act (let's define that as penetrative genital sex) destroys many many year's worth of such energy supply accumulated in a human body.
+ Energy stops developing after "old age" - basically when humans become too old to desire sex, say 70?
+ To address one of the comments, this energy is 100% useless to Earthlings. Completely. Not enough "energy" to power a single lightbulb; human body can't process it, only destroy or create. I can't even demonstrate its existence to humans, really, except by dying from hunger.
* I am either naturally shaped like a human, 100% indistinguishable from one, or stuck in human form, doesn't matter.
* I have **no special technology or abilities**, except exceedingly sharp intellect, both IQ and EQ (which includes being great at rhethoric and demagoguery and thus extremely convincing and charismatic; as well as being smart enough that I can earn a decent but not unlimited amount of money in almost any human society)
+ This includes no special science/technology knowledge, so I can't start an industrial revolution in King Arthur's court. I'm an alien equivalent of an English or Drama major :) - I can talk fast and convincingly, about general things.
* Initially, I have access to a small (let's say couple hundred) members of my own species who are all 100% similar to me. I can raise new ones at will (cloning, spawning, whatever), but ONLY if there's enough "chastity energy" food supply to feed them.
+ As a reminder, 1 human in 1 year of life accumulates enough energy to feed 1 member of my species for 1 day. This means 6 humans aged 60 must die chaste, to feed one alien for 1 year.
* My overarching goal is to raise a fairly big # of members of my own species (how long they live is irrelevant - as long as at some point enough are alive at the same exact time). The reason is immaterial, but let's say ET can't call home on his own, but 1 million ETs brainwaves combined can call home.
+ Assume that I have no need to worry about hiding my 1M ETs. E.g. they can live in some hidden in-Earth base, don't need anything but be fed the special chastity energy so they don't die of hunger. Or every one of them can easily blend in with humans with no possibility of discovery.
* I decided that the only way to get my species a sufficient amount of food to raise their #s, is to codify chastity in a mass religion. Perhaps I'm wrong, but that's what my best analysis led to.
+ This means an "obvious" solution of starting a world war and killing off millions of human virgin young people soldiers is offlimits. Doesn't matter if it's because of my ethics, or because I practically see no way of making this work.
[Answer]
**Have followers go to orphanages.**
There are quite a lot of children without anyone to care for them, and, unfortunately, that number is growing all the time. Adoption is relatively easy; most people would probably pass the background checks to be eligible to adopt someone. In other words, the people in this religion leave the sex to other people, and take the offspring that are unwanted or no longer have parents.
Make it part of the central religious text that *at least* once every five or so years, a married couple must go an adopt a child. They will be rewarded in the afterlife if they adopt more.
This is, in part, how the Shakers grew. Children left on doorsteps were taken in.
[Answer]
The background you supplied does not imply full celibacy.
Instead following would apply:
Sex would be for the young, after which vows of celibacy would be made. This would be actually relatively normal, people do have a family and a profession and then retire to a monastery. This would allow few decades of accumulation without large impact on fertility. It isn't how many children you have, but how many you can raise that is important. And that is usually limited by economics.
Polygamy would be preferred with strong taboo against extra-marital sex. You can have most of the males be celibate without much impact on anything. (I suppose that people would turn some of the passion towards religion...) Having children and families would be restricted to men rich enough to provide for them properly. This would reduce hereditary poverty among the faithful and maybe even give selective pressure against traits that can cause poverty such as addictions.
New converts would be welcomed to the religion. It would be an inclusive religion. The question and many answers seem to forget that one percent of a multitude is more than a hundred percent of a few. So it probably more important to have lots of believers than it to have them celibate. There is little benefit from stressing celibacy beyond the point there it starts to impact conversion rate or fertility.
These should nicely increase the supply of long term celibates dying without compromising long term supply. It also does not require anything particularly unusual.
[Answer]
Create a *sub-cult* whose sole purpose is breeding.
If it only needs to 'present to the world' as a celibate faith, then the sub-cult could be an inner sanctum of deacons and matrons hidden from public view.
Otherwise, it would necessarily have to be played off as another religion, "symbiotic" in nature with the main church; whose adherents are tasked with breeding and surrendering (legally signing over) their children to the sub-cult... And the sub-cult in turn gives those children over as new adherents to the main church.
[Answer]
This is rather a nasty answer. But I see it as being the only practical one, based on your outlined criteria.
**Develop a patriarchal, polygamous religion that neuters (castrates) say, 95% of your males.**
You're not going to convince people to just be abstinent. It's simply not going to happen, people will have sex. They might keep it secret and hide it, but they'll still do it. The only way is to... well, remove the option entirely.
By leaving your female population untouched, and leaving some selected males as normal, you keep population growth intact. This does cut down your harvest to approximately 50% of the population, but overall you still end up with more (50% of a ten million is better than 90% of one million).
If you do the neutering early enough, you don't even need to care if those people leave your religion later, since you'll still be able to harvest them when they eventually die.
[Answer]
The [Essenes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essenes) were an early ascetic Jewish sect. As you would expect, they died out. But we can adapt their ideas.
Their philosophy was one of communal living, abstinence, and service. As suggested in [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/20252/28), expanding the idea of service to caring for the unwanted children of the world would serve your needs and fit in with the religion. Teaching and raising the young was and is a core value in Judaism too, so we can expect the Essenes or a group derived from them to have this value. (In Judaism, in fact, there are cases where you revere your teacher above your father.) Orphans provide for the replenishment that the Essenes lacked.
A community like this would understand raising young to be salvivic. They already believe in an afterlife, so you need to convince them that this, on top of everything else they're doing, is important for getting the eternity they want. So don't cast it as a requirement to adopt; cast it as an inherently meritorious act, and let members' self-interest take it from there.
You also need your religion to take a communal approach to raising children. It may not take a village to raise a child, but it's a lot easier, in a community where 5-10 kids per household are normal, if there is communal support. There are communities today where young children live not with their parents but in "children's houses" where the whole community shares responsibility; you'll want to instill that value in your group.
That addresses the group's stability, but how do you instill the value of celibacy? A few communities (some Essenes, Shakers, maybe others) did -- maybe not 100% because there will always be people who rebel or leave, but most. The Essenes and Shakers did it until they died out, after all, so I think your biggest problem is on the "died out" side, not the "willingness to go along with celibacy" side.
Further, groups with a strong communal orientation are better able to bring the weight of communal responses to bear on people. The Amish use shunning to good effect; this keeps most of their members in line without any force being used. You want your community to live "communally" -- lots and *lots* of interactions, very hard to keep a secret, and you very much care what the neighbors will think. A few will leave and their families will be very sad, but most will stay, grow (through adopted children), and pursue their shared values.
[Answer]
If your goal is to get to about 1 million of your species, and 6 humans dying at age 60 can feed 1 of you for a year, then you'd need 6 million chaste humans living to age 60. As will be evident in the first point below, I'm going to adjust that number up to about 7.5 million. Obviously, you don't need these people all at once. And obviously this is not an exact number...you'd need several generations to get to the amount of energy you need for food. But you *need* children, as well as a fairly aggressive proselytizing campaign.
**How to deal with having children**
Unfortunately, you're gonna have to take a hit on the total chastity energy created by your followers. Basically, as soon as adolescents hit puberty and can safely carry a baby, they are candidates for breeding. This is going to be a little uncomfortable, based on modern standards, but during the timeframe you specified, it shouldn't be too out of the ordinary. (Note: in researching for this answer, I came across [this disturbing list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_birth_mothers) on Wikipedia. Not for the faint of heart.)
So, let's say at around age 14, girls start having babies if they are able, and should try to have babies until they are about 20. Polygamy will be enforced - one boy should try to father as many babies as he can. After 20, women will remain chaste until they die. For all intents and purposed, men will remain chaste their entire lives, except for some small percentage who will be chosen to be fathers. Thus, let's assume women will die with chastity energy at a level 40, and men with level 60. Average chastity energy = 50. Based on your conditions, we'd need to get to about 7.5 million followers to achieve 1 million fed aliens.
In our aggressive breeding program, let's assume we average about 4 healthy children per woman during the 6 year breeding period. Even though that's about half of the potential, I'm adjusting down. Still, this number might be a little high due to infant mortality rates, not being able to get pregnant right away, etc., but I'm not factoring these in for this example.
Using [this population calculator](http://wardricker.com/timegrowth.php), poorly designed as it may be, gives me somewhere around 275 years to reach critical mass, if we are growing only by reproduction. (If you're interested, I used 100 people starting, 275 years ago, 17 years between generations, 4 children per couple, 4 survive to produce more children.) This number is obviously reduced if you actively seek new converts. Okay, so the numbers get fuzzier and fuzzier the deeper we get into them, but I'm just going with a [Fermi estimation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem) at this point.
**Keeping followers chaste**
After the breeding program, monogamy is applied, men and women get married, and they are offered children to raise in a nuclear family. While the culture of the religion is a little bizarre up to this point, I'm just not convinced that the religion as a society could really succeed in a commune-type fashion. There's just not any good precedent for that.
Homosexuality here is not considered taboo in the least; in fact, part of the "marketing" of the religion would be that it is a haven for homosexuality. Gay and lesbian couples could raise children and have happy lives, all the while building up chastity energy, since sexual acts are limited only to penetrative genital intercourse. Church leaders wouldn't have to worry about these folks.
Based on the same caveat, heterosexual couples could still have sexual release, as masturbation would be accepted and even encouraged, as well as manual, oral, and anal intercourse. However, vaginal intercourse would obviously be strictly forbidden, and would be harshly punished. Depending on the overall culture of where your religion is operating, you can deal with these vagrants differently...but you should *not* kill them. That's just a waste of chastity energy and would not look very appealing to potential converts. Maybe you lock them up for life ("rehabiliation centers"), or you could excommunicate them. How you justify these extreme religious principles up to this point is beyond the scope of my answer...I believe other answers here do a pretty good job.
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**IMPOSSIBLE RE: CHILDREN**
How you think about sex affects how you think about children.
If, like the Shakers, adherents see people as God's children, they begin to wonder why they can't have their own. If the movement makes a special effort to adopt rejected children, it would be very difficult to explain to those children why they shouldn't have a family of their own. You would really have to push the primacy of a spiritual family over a blood family, and even then, that's a hollow comfort.
If, as suggested above, you demonize the other sex, it follows that children will be demonized too. The parents have to sneak off, both hating themselves and the other; their child would be the product of an unholy union. The cult would have to just deal with it until the child reached a certain age, probably sexual maturity, at which point it would begin skulking around. Honestly, the premise is gross.
Few religions teach that sexual appetites are all bad. Sex solidifies bonds, strengthens love, makes babies, etc.. Sin comes in when sex is used recklessly. Most religions make chastity a personal commitment because giving up sex requires the strength of devotion. So your religion might be better suited as a modern evangelizing type church: since it won't inherit children, it needs to convince adults. They might give up sex, but they get XYZ.
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Artificial breeding program.
Ugh - sorry about this. They capture and kill heretic men. They capture female heretics and forcibly inseminate them with the semen via surgery so they remain virgins.
Then they raise the kids in the religion.
By warring against, and terrifying, non-believers they persuade them to join. Anyone who doesn't is fair game for the breeding program.
When all the non-believers have died out (if ever) they designate certain people as sacrifices and say it is an honour to take part in the program. They still use non-sexual insemination.
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So, a stable and growing celibate religion... but, doesn't need to be dominant, thankfully...
Hmm... I'll have a cult that has a sex substitute as drugs or something... With those drugs being a euphoric libido killer...
Perhaps make it so it's got even more reasons for joining the cult, like it makes you stronger, smarter, etc.
Location... Africa or somewhere in the Americas, at a time where those locations didn't have a strong, cohesive, religious presence, so displacing the existing religions isn't hard...
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The symbiotic arrangement above is the better way to do it - however staying within the constraints of the question there is only one real option:
Convert and upgrade some Mongol hordes. Even if you don't have advanced technology you must remember something to give them some advantages somewhere, even if it's just hot air balloons for scouting. You just need to get a sufficiently warlike bunch on board and give them enough of an edge to be able to conquer anyone around them.
Mandatory chastity belts for everyone (men and women). Train everyone as warriors. Demand a tax of children each year from all neighbours. Any that refuse kill all adults and take the children. Repeat until no-one refuses any more.
Slap the chastity belts on the children and raise them as the next generation of warriors.
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Make sex the reward of the truest believers and make them produce the offspring. Lets say the special 5% can participate.
You could even selectively breed the best humans for your tastes, the stupidest ones to make them easy to control. Or maybe the most beautiful ones(beauty ~= biological perfection)
And the rest would live in chaste.
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**Recruit your cult entirely from homosexuals**.
Homosexuality is condemned by most cultures and religions in world history, so you shouldn't have trouble recruiting these outcasts and give them a new home among equal-minded people. Homosexuality does not appear to be genetic, so you should have a steady stream of new people to recruit from other cultures.
You didn't say if "penetrative genital sex" includes anal-sex between men or vaginal penetration with something other than a penis between women, but when it does you could demonize these practices as emulating the unholy acts the heterosexuals perform and instead encourage other, non-penetrative sexual practices like oral sex, frottage or mutual masturbation.
You might want to enforce separation between men and women to ensure that none of your followers start to question their sexual orientation and become straight.
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The "energy" you refer to is not anything like real physics. Either the universe is magical or you can't get away with more than one such feature. So make the sex-energy understood and used by the people too, and that is the *same* reason the group exists as why the alien is attracted to them. What would the adherents do with it that is worth it and understood by outsiders as a compelling reason to join before reaching puberty?
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Divide and conquer: **Demonize the opposite gender**. Essentially, there can be two churches to the same religion; one for each gender [though they don't need to be publicly affiliated with one-another, and it's probably best they aren't]. Utilize all means at your disposal to drum up a dogma which segregates the genders from one another. Promote same-sex relationships and life-long partnerships. Then prohibit those relationships from sexual acts by creating the belief that those sexual acts will *"lead to heterosexual impulses"*.
Add on to this the belief that the world already *"suffers from Overpopulation"*. Instill within adherents the idea that they don't WANT to reproduce, while at the same time, having them raise orphans and adoptees with similar viewpoints.
Is it stable? I can't say for certain. It may draw in certain asexual individuals and same-sex couples, for sure. And whatever instability is left may be worked out via the legal guardianship/adoption of children.
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To operate right on the edge of your definition, I would offer the following:
**Sex is forbidden; pregnancy is a holy duty.**
The Holy Eucharist, or whatever its equivalent is in the church, causes long-term libido suppression in men. However, sperm can still be harvested by various means (and don't make me start listing them - it's gross).
Women are impregnated in Church clinics, either by artificial insemination or, for the literalists, *in vitro* fertilization.
This allows a more-or-less conventional family structure and an expanding population, at the cost of the medical resources required. AI is cheap, so as long as it dominates the institution such costs would be minimal. Paternity is pretty much guaranteed, so there is no difficulty getting men to raise children who are not "theirs".
Since the libido suppression is fairly long-lasting, cheating isn't much of a problem, especially if communion is public. A man can miss only so many services before someone in the hierarchy notices.
The situation is tough on the women for at least two reasons. First, they have little control of their reproductive cycle, since the Church machinery not only requires them to reproduce but also becomes the agent to accomplish it. Second, with men comprehensively uninterested in sex, underlying frustration levels would be high. This, of course, is nothing new in this world (Catholics had to practice the rhythm method, for instance) but it would be worse in this case. "Fortunately" (for peculiar values of fortunate) the sexual/reproductive structure of the Church suggests that women are probably relatively powerless, so they won't raise too much of a fuss.
Alternatively, the libido suppression in men also applies to women. This requires a very sophisticated bit of chemistry, since messing with such drives might also interfere with the emotional bonding with infants - and their survival really requires that a parent cares about them.
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You don't need "penetrative genital sex" to produce offspring.
**You could collect semen from wet dreams, that the mal members of your religion have and let it flow into the vaginas of the female members of your religion.**
So you can have procreation with out sex, not even masturbation.
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You need three self-sustaining communities, very much like existing monasteries: only-male, only-female, breeding community.
Religion must avoid any comment about the existence of the other sex. Nothing about sexuality at all. Religion must enforce the idea that beyond the walls of the closed communities there is nothing but death.
Breeding community= a community with the only purpose of breeding. There is no specific mother, all children are raised by the community. As soon as possible (using childhood amnesia to your benefit) selected childs are send to his respective communities (they are enlighted). Other are keep for reproductive purposes.
No one from the breeding community CAN leave. When are no longer able to reproduce their are "enlighted" (killed, they are no longer useful)
People from the only-male/ only-female communities that show unusual strong sexual appetite are cast away to exile (killed, they are a problem for the community)
Senior chaste only-male / only-female members are promoted to "enlightment" (being feed to the alien overlords)
Aliens are the people who manage the trading of people between the communities (therefore, the only ones that known the existence of the three communities)
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I have a world in which several countries use, as an alternative to rotting prison for the rest of your life, the deprivation of citizenship from one's home country and deportation to a desolate island with a bunch of other misfits (like yourself.) My world is technologically modern and this alternative punishment is being used by a number of first world countries (such as the USA, France and the UK.)
The said convicts would be deported to Islands such as the [Queen Elizabeth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth_Islands) Islands without any tools - even a knife.
**Is this a viable option? Is there the chance that these convicts might make it back to the mainland and cause chaos?**
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## Let's look at some case studies
### Case Study #1: [Alcatraz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatraz_Federal_Penitentiary)
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> During its 29 years of operation, the penitentiary claimed that no prisoner successfully escaped. A total of 36 prisoners made 14 escape attempts, two men trying twice; 23 were caught alive, six were shot and killed during their escape, two drowned, and five are listed as "missing and presumed drowned". The most violent occurred on May 2, 1946, when a failed escape attempt by six prisoners led to the Battle of Alcatraz.1
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Why did Alcatraz close? [Because it was expensive.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatraz_Island#Post-prison_years) Your island will have the same problem. Imported food, staff, ships to blockade and ensure private crafts don't swoop in to rescue prisoners. It isn't a cheap solution by any stretch of the imagination.
On the other hand...
### Case Study #2: [Escape from New York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York)
This movie is iconic, and not just because it's a cheap action flick. Its imaginative solution to crime has driven people to wonder why it can't work for a long time. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem: cost. The wall around the island would exceed the cost of normal prisons by whole orders of magnitude. And you're still having to ship in food.
Both case studies also suffer from inhumane treatment. You'd have activist groups seeking to redress government wrongs against the prisoners all the time. This is because you can't guarantee healthcare, safety, or that the punishment (from a U.S. perspective) isn't "cruel and unusual."
Our last case study is really the only viable solution, and it didn't work out as expected.
### Case Study #3: [Australia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convicts_in_Australia)
Rather than an island with limited resources and a horrible lack of tools: ship them to something large enough (e.g., a continent) that they can make a new home for themselves — and then control all the shipping.
For a brief period of time this might have worked great for Britain. All the inconvenient people were shipped off to Australia. Out of sight, out of mind.
And in the end what they created was a perfectly viable nation with art, science, industry, philosophy, an accent the rest of the English-speaking world loves to listen to... in short... *a competitor.* IMO, the odds of Australia continuing as a member of the commonwealth after Queen Elizabeth passes away are a bit long.
## Conclusion
An island is a long-term solution to a short-term problem. While a small percentage of your prisoners deserve to go away for life, the vast, vast, majority do not. That makes this a very expensive, difficult-to-maintain solution that has every chance of coming back to bite you (Snake Plisskin! Hugh Jackman! Adrienne Barbeau! Wait... she's just a really good reason to watch *Escape from New York* Oh well... you get my point.)
And one more point: imprisonment is about bringing something that is out of control, under your control. A case could be made for the (enormously oversimplified) suggestion that because Australia was intrinsically *out of Britain's control,* that it was destined to become a competing nation. I suspect that a review of prison culture, procedures, and technology will reveal that the goal is to provide for the humane needs of prisoners while *never letting them out of your control.* If you think about it, the price for betrayal is a loss of ~~trust~~ self-determined control.
These solutions make good fiction, and they're realistic to a degree, but they come with consequences. If you don't want to deal with the consequences, then they're unrealistic. Let's call them impractical.
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1 *One guy is known to have made the swim to shore, lending a lot of credence to the possibility that Frank Morris, John Anglin, and Clarence Anglin successfully escaped. However, this was not the reason Alcatraz closed.*
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Assuming you want the state to bear the least possible cost while still making the criminals "go away", you may want to consider handling the mechanics of your exile in a slightly different way.
Your question implies that it's the *government's* problem to find you an island to live on and a way to get there. While the United Kingdom used "transportation" as a punishment, that's not the only way to do it. Republican Rome used the concept of being declared "hostis"; this put you outside the protection of the law as of a certain date within a certain distance from the city. Because that's an incredibly precarious state of being, people declared "hostis" would do their best to be outside of the radius of their sentence by that date. Often the distance chosen left you just shy of Athens - which as a result filled up with aristocratic Roman exiles and political refugees.
So your world could work the same way. The courts pass the sentence - then it's the defendant's problem to find a country that will let him travel there, and his problem to get there. People who fail to "get out of Dodge" end up killed, or robbed, or otherwise abused by the non-exile population.
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The story is an old one: Penal colonies are common through history.
Australia is the best known. But bear in mind that Australia was a 5 month voyage from England.
Convicts were in essence sold into slavery of plantation owners.
There is a reason that we generally don't use desolate islands. Living there is difficult, and the return on investment non-existent. These have to be some of the most expensive places in the world to keep human beings alive. Go look at pictures. Tree line doesn't come into it. I finally found some pix that are either grass or lichen but the main crop here is gravel.
So you need an economic reason for people to be there. Mining comes to mind. Come up with some reason that there is a deposit of Xmium, otherwise very rare in the islands. Your convicts then are the labour to process this. However before you think about chain gangs with pick and shovel, read up on how mining is actually done. Mining is a high tech industry now. You really don't want a disgruntled prisoner driving around a mining truck that has 15 foot wheels. Or working with high explosive. Especially living in a place so dependent on technology.
A second possibility would be lichen farming. Give the lichen some pharmaceutical use, and have it take enough tons of lichen per gram of drug that growing it more southerly higher elevations isn't practical. If you want a plot twist, the drug company finds a synthetic drug that works better, and just abandons the settlement, after destroying the communications link. (For secrecy, all communication was encrypted over VPN, linked by satellite.) Now you have some managers. guards and convicts and no one is answering the phone. You have 1 year's supply of food and diesel.
Because of the remote location escape is meaningless, but someone who knows he is being sent there may be able to tell his followers, and they arrange to retrieve him. This is non trivial. You either arrive by boat during the very short open water season, or you fly in. Flying in requires an aircraft with long legs, and probably still means fuel drops. This is not a task for your average Cessna. At least you would need something like a twin Otter, one of the workhorses of the north.
There are inhabited points up there: Grise Fjord, Coral Beach, Alert. They have regular air service so they have fuel. But once you have picked your guy up, it means that the authorities don't have many places to check.
By the way: This *is* polar bear country.
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The way this is worded you are effectively sentencing the prisoners to death, either by starvation, exposure, cannibalism (as they realize there is nothing to eat except each other) or suicide (many prisoners will look at their hopeless situation and simply go for a long, one way swim). If that is truly the case, then simply locking them in a large warehouse and filling the space with nitrogen gas and painlessly asphyxiating them is probably both cheaper and more humane.
I suspect the true intent is to house people in an "escape proof" prison. Some attempts have been made over the centuries, two fairly well known ones were Alcatraz, a former fortress in San Fransisco bay, and Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana. Soviet era Gulags were essentially escape proof as well, being located in isolated locations where prisoners could be used as slave labour in mines, logging and other hard, physical work.
As noted in some other answers, the rational for these sorts of enterprises was very poor, it was expensive to maintain these facilities, since food, equipment and staff had to be brought in from long distances, and with the possible exception of the Gulags, there was no return on the rather large investment.
Frankly, this makes about as much sense as shipping prisoners to the Moon. They are unlikely to escape from there either, but the costs for transportation and incarceration will be (ahem) astronomical.
For non violent prisoners, it may simply be more efficient to "chip" them and put them out to community service. At least they will be earning money (their wages can be garnished to pay restitution costs), while violent offenders can be housed in existing "Supermax" prisons, which are usually located at great distances from population and are effectively escape proof. Exiling people without citizenship could actually backfire-who's to say a hostile nation would not grant the prisoners citizenship and use them to carry out dirty jobs that their natural born citizens might not be able or willing to do.
There are issues with the way criminals are handled in today's society. Let's not entertain ideas to make it worse.
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Are you aware of the climate there?
Maybe I don't understand the question but I doubt a person would survive their first night there.
The climate in the Queen Elizabeth Islands is unlike the islands mentioned in other answers (e.g. Alcatraz, Australia) -- e.g. the temperature is freezing even in mid-summer:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLoaI.png)
[Climate Queen Elizabeth Islands](https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/modelclimate/queen-elizabeth-islands_canada_6115077)
Survival there requires specialist knowledge and equipment -- for hunting ([seals, walrus, whales, and polar bears](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grise_Fiord#Living_conditions), maybe migratory birds too), and cold weather -- I doubt that people without training could find food even with tools (i.e. hunting weapons and cold-weather gear)1.
A not-dissimilar punishment would be to maroon someone on an iceberg in the middle of the ocean. The "chance that these convicts might make it back to the mainland and cause chaos" is slim to none, IMO, unless they were rescued and promptly.
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An already-trained population/society, with tools, was able to survive.
[New communities -- High Arctic relocation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation#New_communities)
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I imagine that (i.e. hunting beluga) means building and using boats -- rather than only [hunting on the sea ice](http://www.arctic.uoguelph.ca/cpl/traditional/traditional/animals/ringed_seal.htm) as you might with seals.
IMO that (hunting from boats) couldn't be done in your case, not only because they lack the skill but can't even build the equipment, because there's a bootstrap problem, i.e. you can't build ...
* A [boat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umiak)
* A [kayak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayak#History)
* Nor [harpoons](http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic42-1-80.pdf)
... without already having the skins and so on (bone, maybe wood, maybe metals or shaped stone, and stuff to tie things with) to build them from.
Also I don't know what that quote means by "eventually", i.e. whether the transplanted community starved and/or was resupplied before that eventuality.
Also the vegetation is tundra -- so [no wood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudlik), I reckon.
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**I think that is rather the point! No convict deportee can survive, let alone escape a place like Ellesmere Island!**
No I don't know what point the OP intended. The OP said, "as an alternative to rotting prison for the rest of your life" -- but transporting all that way seems overly complicated if it's intended as an immediate death sentence.
A more suitable island might be somewhere like [Easter Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island#Ecology)
* Climate adequate for survival
* Island big enough for agriculture (also fishing and wild birds)
* Hard to escape, especially if no trees grow (no wood exists) on the island
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> Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world. The nearest inhabited land (around 50 residents in 2013) is Pitcairn Island[citation needed], 2,075 kilometres (1,289 mi) away.
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I understand inhabitants migrated there (over the Pacific, in canoes) but became trapped there (unable to build more boats) when they deforested the island.
I guess that even with a boat, an escapee would find it difficult to navigate 2000+ km.
Another possibility, because it's more-or-less habitable but uninhabited, if the militaries would give it up, is [Diego Garcia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia).
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Let me start by stealing Alexander's comment, for the case it gets deleted:
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That said, if you are not making a profit out of your prisonal system, you're doing it wrong. Take a page from the US, the world leading country when it comes to private prisons. Do you seriously think someone would go through all the trouble of building and maintaining a prison, investing their own time and money, just out of an altruistic wish to protect society against criminals?
[Take a look at this:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison)
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> A private prison, or for-profit prison, is a place in which individuals are physically confined or incarcerated by a third party that is contracted by a government agency. Private prison companies typically enter into contractual agreements with governments that commit prisoners and then pay a per diem or monthly rate, either for each prisoner in the facility, or for each place available, whether occupied or not. Such contracts may be for the operation only of a facility, or for design, construction and operation.
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If you don't want to go that way, you can do it like China, where inmates have to play some MMORPG and farm a minimum amount of gold per day for you to resell, otherwise they get less food and no cigarretes.
If you are not into making easy cash and just want the cheapest way to deal with the convicted, a bullet is always cheaper than a cruise ticket.
Last but not least, what crimes are those people comitting? If you exhile someone who has stolen precious data (from the government, the military, companies or the people at large), or if they are important to the drug and weapons trade, you may be sure that someone even worse is going to that island to rescue them - rendering the whole exercise useless in the very first place.
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**In the modern world there's a number of issues you'd encounter.**
Lets imagine they do it, the USA, France and the UK team up and start exiling all prisoners found guilty of serious crimes to a remote island.
Issues important to how it will turn out:
Does international law get changed to allow countries to make citizens stateless?
Do any of these nations claim the island as their territory? who's law applies there?
Do any of the nations do anything to stop other nations from claiming the land as their territory?
Do they do anything to stop citizens from other nations from visiting the island?
Do they do anything to stop people from other nations from taking someone away from the islands.
People can be citizens of multiple countries. I've known someone to legally hold 4 different passports. As such, if someone is a citizen of Australia and also the USA do they get deported to this island if they commit a serious crime in the USA?
What happens if Australia objects to the treatment of their citizen.
Does international law apply to the people who have been stripped of citizenship? If someone on this island attempts to claim refugee status, for example if someone else on the island is trying to murder them for their political beliefs, do the USA, france and UK make any attempt to comply with international law.
# What happens to babies born on the island?
Are they stateless? they're going to have grandparents in the USA, France and the UK who are deeply upset and they'll also be subject to international law as it relates to stateless children.
If children from the island get in a boat and try to sail away, do you let them? Does one of the navies of the countries involved sink the boat? What if there's an adult with them.
If the red cross or the UN attempt to access the island to assess the conditions of children imprisoned on the island what do you do?
If children or other people on the island manage to get hold of a radio or similar and manage to contact the government of another country and attempt to claim asylum, what do you do?
Do you forcefully separate children born on the island from their families?
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Exile and outlawing have both been practiced throughout history, to various degrees of success.
While exile is merely expelling people from the bounds of your land, Romans put a real spin on the idea of outlaws. See, outlaws are people outside of law: they are not merely lawbreakers, they are stripped of all protection provided by law. No rights, no representation, nothing. Which literally makes them fair game for any assault from anyone. That is a really good motivation for the outlaw to run away as fast and as far as possible and not get within sight of any living person. This is also cheap for the government, because the government does not have to expend resources caring for anything regarding this person, killing them off, or otherwise. The downside is that people can be "mistaken" for outlaws and there are always bystanders and stuff. Besides that, outlaws know their situation, so with pretty much nothing more to lose, they are liable to just murder everyone on sight anyway.
Shipping people is kind of expensive: you need transport, you need crew, you need guards, it's cheaper to let them run away on their own or to turn them into compost.
It is more profitable, however, to organize people into forced labour. Even though you need housing, guard duty and infrastructure, a properly organized economic undertaking can pay for itself and might be a useful tool in rehabilitation of... antisocial behaviours. If managed with decency instead of being designed to degrade people as a punishment. All depends on your goals and the staffing you have available.
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## The chances of escape are quite good
As described, the island is not monitored in any way, making escape by anybody with boat owning friends fairly simple.
If you then choose to guard the island and regularly patrol the waters surrounding it, it becomes less economically viable than simply putting them in a conventional prison.
As the island is remote, food and lodging for the guards becomes a cost that is not born in conventional prisons, not to mention the fuel required to constantly patrol such a large area. Also, without the usual resources afforded in a civilized area, the risk to guards from armed jail breakers becomes compounded.
On top of all of this, you have to consider the increased costs of prisoner transport.
In short, what you save in real-estate (arguable, as island real-estate is not cheap), building/gorunds maintenance, and prisoner care (food, health care, entertainment), you more than expend in the above mentioned other areas.
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This happens right now, the USA, New Zealand and Australia deport 100's of people each year to the Pacific Islands where they are literally dumped at the airports and become the islands problem. The crux being if they're from that nationality, regardless of whether they grew up there, know the language or anything else.
Getting citizenship of a third World country is not usually very hard if you have at least one parent or grandparent from there, if the alternative is decades in prison people's families can easily manage it in a day or two. If you have absolutely no connection to a third World country you can still get citizenship, just costs more.
Some deal is struck where serious criminals only do a tiny portion of their sentence and then get sent overseas and not allowed back.
In your scenario you could easily do the same thing, take their travel documents and prevent them re-entering at border control.
Best part is they cease to be a burden of any sort, no feeding them, no rehab expenses, nothing. The problem has been passed entirely to the Island Nation. Don't even have to inform them first.
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The issue with the human mind is always occupying it with meaningful activities. After you send them to the island, what can they do?
In your context, having only the clothes on their bodies and no other people enforcing their behaviour in that said island, criminal minds or not, they will all either think about finding a way to:
* get back to society (the same one or a different one);
* survive in the island and build their own society.
[JBH's Australia mention](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/126445/26709) is the most literal widely-known example of this happening, so you can look into the history behind it for more ideas to your story.
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If the criminal was part of a gang, the non captured gangmembers might try to rescue their buddy from the island and recruit some others while at it. In the modern day there are lot of criminal organisations with the resources to pull this off. They'd be hired as drugs runners for example.
Making it a competition might be a 'solution' to this problem and might work out just fine. Send of a whole batch of them (25, 50?) and the survivor (singular!) after a year will be rewarded with citizenship and a small start-up budget. Since the island if very poor in resources, the criminals will fight over every bit of grass killing off each other. If there are multiple survivors, tell them you come back next year to check again :).
Make sure you ship them only when no/one living soul is on the island! This prevents them taking over the ship and you can collect your criminals in the mean-while for the next batch.
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# YES.
***For a given definition of "viable"***, yes this system will work. But it will only work if, in your alternate-history world, we change just about everything about the moral & ethical history of the West, starting with the extirpation of Christianity and all its sequellae.
In order for abandoning fellow human beings upon an entirely desolate and adverse landscape with no survival tools and presumably no guards, no housing, no amenities and no hope for outside assistance, the mindset of your alt-Americans & alt-French has to be one of extreme moral, ethical and cultural depravity and dehumanisation the like of which Messrs Hitler & Stalin would find constitutionally revolting. (At least these two "governments" built some kind of lodging for their undesirables! As far as I can tell, you propose nothing of the sort.)
That leaves us with a strict economic equation, and I believe that your proposed system will in fact constitute a net per convict savings of hundreds of millions each year in the alt-USA.
*According to the Vera Institute of Justice, incarceration costs an average of more than £31,000 per inmate, per year, nationwide. In some states, it's as much as £60,000.* So, let's call the basic figure £45,000 per year per convict.
ABC News a couple years back reported that 206,268 people were serving life sentences or sentences of sufficient duration that the prisoners would likely die in prison.
Net cost: £9,282,060,000.oo per year.
Under your proposed system of exile, the cost is much reduced.
Expedia.com says I can get a round trip ticket from JFK to Iqaluit Airport (in Nunavut) for about £2,000.oo, so call it £1,000.oo for each of your guests of the State. Would suggest perhaps a military~police escorted flight in stead, non-stop from JFK to Ellesmere landing strip might be a better option. Just stop the plane, pop open the back door and shove everyone down the gangway. Bring up the door and thunder on down the runway.
Costs per convict: £500.oo for the flight + £20.oo for a loosely knit jumpsuit + £5.oo for disposable wrist & ankle ring components for use in-flight = £525.oo, one time cost per exiled convict.
Charged against the convict's estate or assets and the basic cost to the State = $0.oo.
When implemented, the *first year cost* will be £108,290,700.oo. 400 to 500 flights will be required in order to dispose of all convicts currently incarcerated. Thereafter, the total number of convict deportees will be reduced dramatically. (In the Federal system, not even 200 life sentences are handed down in a year. One flight per month should be more than sufficient for the State at large.)
**Benefits of your proposal are several:**
* Out of sight, out of mind. You can't get much more out of sight than an inhospitable Arctic island where Summer temperatures rarely get much above freezing.
* The local populations of polar bears and arctic wolves will be (slightly) better fed. In fact, look for semi-permanent populations of large predators to inhabit the neighbourhood surrounding the landing strip.
* Reduced overall costs: reduced need for maximum security prisons coupled with the lack of costs associated with appeals (there obviously will be no appeals) equates to billions of dollars saved, even taking into account sorting current maximum security prison employees into jobs training programmes and different lines of work.
**Detriments to your proposal are non-existent:**
* In this culture, there are no moral or ethical roadblocks preventing the immediate implementation of your proposed system.
I can guarantee that **NO convict deportee** will ever be able to make it back to anything like civilisation. Ellesmere Island is about 500 miles long, rocky with sparse vegetation, unfriendly wildlife (wolves, polar bears, musk oxen, caribou), no infrastructure and no opportunity for agriculture. You provide your convict deportees with no tools, though I assume they will have some kind of Bureau of Punishment issued jumpsuit. You obviously don't care about their welfare, which is indicated by a First World culture that does not value human life at all. The chances of a convict deportee wearing nothing more than a light jumpsuit and slippers walking 500 miles with no food, no water in a hostile & cold environment to the southern coast have to be extremely tiny. Almost nil.
If one should arrive at the coast, he will be greeted by a twenty mile swim through the frigid waters of Baffin Bay down to Devon Island, a fifty mile trek across that island and a fifty mile swim to Baffin Island... The point is, *no one* (who is not a special forces trained super-soldier and who grew up off-the-grid and is a specialist in surviving Arctic conditions) can even hope to endure the trek half way to civilisation! Keep in mind that most of your convicts will be ordinary street thugs, domestic violence & sexual deviants who also commit murder, burglars who also commit murder. Basically, your average urban low-life scum with no Arctic wilderness survival skill set.
Can some *survive* on their island prison? That's a different question, but it may just barely be possible for some individuals to survive. For a time...
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Devils island (from the book Papillion) and Australia spring to mind...
Devil's Island system received convicts deported from all parts of the Second French Empire, and was infamous for its harsh treatment of detainees, with a death rate of 75% at their worst, In its 99-year existence as a penal colony, an estimated 70,000 criminals were sent to suffer the "dry guillotine." Only 2,000 returned until it was closed down in 1953...
as a random trivia - The last prisoner of the island refused to be repatriated when the penal colony was officially abandoned in 1953. He was last seen by some shipwreck victims who made it to the island in January 1958. The final band of prisoners from the Devil's Island group was repatriated into France on Aug. 22, 1953.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Island>
there is also a memoir (Papillion) by Henri Charrière, a former prisoner who escaped. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Charri%C3%A8re>
René Belbenoît's book Dry Guillotine.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_Guillotine>
<https://www.trivia-library.com/b/famous-lasts-the-last-prisoner-on-devil-island.htm>
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In humans skin color varies slightly in shades of dark brown to a faded pink, which has the purpose of protecting the skin from sunlight. An idea used commonly by people beginning designing alien is to have their aliens have every possible color of skin under the sun, but in my mind this is kind of unlikely.
How can I explain why a species would have every possible skin color under the sun? Why would a race of species have orange as a skin color? What about red? Violet, Blue, Green, Yellow, etc?
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There are numerous ways that evolution can select for specific traits. Evolutionary biologists often describe these sorts of pressures as *The Four F's*: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and... reproducing.
Others have already mentioned a number of situations describing these pressures in action. Camouflage is likely to be a defensive strategy (i.e. fleeing) though a well-hidden hunter might also find it useful (i.e. feeding). Meanwhile bright plumage might promote social status and/or attract mates (i.e. reproducing).
If you have a desired color in mind, simply imagine a scenario where this coloration would help that creature survive and have offspring by improving it's chances according to one of the Four F's.
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However, whatever colorations are favored, those colors will inherently depend on what pigments are present in the organism's skin. Technically, it could alternatively depend on other phenomena (like the irridescence of butterfly wings) but simply assuming *pigment==color* is probably the easiest way to go, conceptually.
For humans (and lots of other creatures for that matter) the primary pigment is **melanin** (of which there are actually a few varieties). Biologically speaking, melanin is a pretty simple pigment made up of a few [tyrosine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrosine) molecules oxidised and strung together. These tend to absorb light from a variety of wavelengths, resulting in the mostly brown shades we associate with it for human hair and skin colors. Evolutionary, we all are starting from more or less the same melanin-producing ancestors, so even with a melanin mutation here and there over the eons that mostly just results in different shades of brown- maybe some more rust-colored here or blonde there, but generally from a similar color pallet. Melanin, as a pigment, isn't likely to mutate any blue or green hues anytime soon.
On the other hand, another well-known pigment, **chlorophyll** is a structurally rather different molecule that does a very similar job (although plants take things a step further, utilizing sunlight rather than just blocking it). At the forefront of the chlorophyll molecule is the [Chlorin ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorin) which is like a cage around a single metal ion. In plants, Magnesium is typically found at the center of this ring and that helps to make chlorophyll green. [Porphyrin rings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyrin) are very similar: one natural example is hemoglobin, the red pigment in blood, which cages an iron ion; and a second example is Phthalocyanine which is a bright blue commercially-used pigment which cages a copper ion. The reactions that actually trap the metal ion in the "cage" are typically pretty well selective at putting iron in hemoglobin and magnesium in chlorophyll. Things like altered pH conditions and/or mineral deficiencies, however, can sometimes throw the occasional odd metal into some of these cages- thereby altering the color. It is not too far fetched to think that some alien species may have evolved from an ancestor that had porphyrin-based pigments rather than melanin-based pigments. Furthermore, just as melanin mutations can lead to various hair colors, mutations could lead to preferential uptake of different metal ions and leading to different colors. *Aliens don't need to be plants to have chlorophyll-based pigments.*
(Bonus points: if pH and/or mineral intake can adjust color expression, then there's a high probability that well-to-do aliens might alter their diet to look more fashionable/appealing.)
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## Structural colors
Not too far fetched; a single [genus of bird (*Ara*; the macaws)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ara_(genus)) has practically every color represented in the most vivid shade. Feather's colors usually arise from [structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_coloration) rather than pigment.
Structural color is not confined to bird feathers and butterflies' wings, however. The Golden mole's hair color is structurally-based. In a more fleshy-sense, if you've butchered beef you might notice some membranes have an iridescent property, hence its occasional name "silver skin" (not argyria, though that could be of-interest to you as well). Some folks at the University of Rochester's Optics institute got [really into this](http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/cml/opt307/spr11/xi/micrographs.html).
If you want to get into some technical specifics, because the color is altered by the structure's spacing, I could imagine varying repeats in a gene (like a [microsatellite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsatellite) inside a gene?) varying the size of a protein that could crystallize or somehow alter a distance in a heritable but also mutable way. Not sure how birds do it.
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# Inorganic pigments
Organic pigments (Fenix talks about most of them) are generally limited to browns, tans, and reds. Some can be blue-ish like indigo, or green like chlorophyll, but the preferred pigment of artists are [metals in various oxidization states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inorganic_pigments) (e.g. lead white, cadmium yellow, red ochre, malachite, lapis lazuli/ultramarine). There is a whole [group of metal-oxidizing/reducing enzymes](http://www.chem.qmul.ac.uk/iubmb/enzyme/EC1/16/) in life here on earth, so why not elsewhere?
To get a rainbow, vanadium oxides range from purple to blue to green to yellow (see [this video demo](https://youtu.be/3_7KYoO5qHk?t=40s)). If vanadium was an abundant element somewhere, something might be able to make use of it. Mix in some iron oxide (the red of blood), and you have a fairly complete range by altering the oxidization state/concentration of two elements.
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Fashion and indicators of social position.
Nations, clans, or tribes of these aliens have selectively bred for skin color over many generations, as a way of indicating families with high status, as a way to distinguish between castes, or as a way to emphasize that they are different from neighboring groups.
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You could try having aliens with chameleon-like skin, that changes colour to match the environment. This might not match what you're looking for (which appears to be *fixed* skin colours for individuals), but it would be a place to start.
Failing that, you might try having an environment with significant divides between various climates, enough for the aliens to develop races like humanity did before they developed a near-modern civilization (at which point technology neutralizes most natural selection pressures, and all bets are off on where evolution might go). You would want to minimize the mixing of these proto-races before civilization develops, but this wouldn't be terribly hard to do; just look at Earth for examples.
Only this time, instead of having skin variation determined primarily by sunlight exposure as it was in humans, it might be determined by the colours of the environment for camouflage. Thus, you might have white-skinned individuals develop in the tundra and arctic regions, brown or green skins in the forests, green-yellow out on the plains, grey or black for any tribes that take to nocturnal hunting over extended periods of time, etc. If your aliens can fly, blue might even be an option to blend in with the sky. This won't necessarily give you a full spectrum of colours (I have a hard time seeing pink as an option), but it would give you a good variety.
Note that most mammals, to my knowledge, are limited to shades of grey or brown (stretching to black and white) for their fur, or perhaps even a little red. There are biological reasons for this, namely the pigment that gives fur its colour (melanin, I believe) only being capable of producing that colour range. If you want your wider colour spectrum, you're likely going to have to look at birds or reptiles.
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Chromatophores might be an interesting answer to your question. Certain animals such as octopus have these cells which effectively grow larger or smaller in response to particular stimulus which changes their color similar to dithering with pixels. It's entirely possible for an alien species to have chromatophores which are red/green/blue, allowing them to be a number of visible colors.
Some animals, plants, and insects also have infrared markings which, while humans can't see naturally, others of their species can which drastically change what they may look like as well if you wanted even more flair.
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I have another version of John Feltz's answer. Whereas "fashion" is good idea, it might be completely artificial rather than natural ("bred"). (the question didn't state that it had to be an evolutionnary process, so I'll go with this as other answer already said a lot)
For instance, some do dye our hair multiple color, or do tatoos (that sometimes cover the whole body). It's not impossible than in a near future, temporary or definitive skin color modifications will be available, thus being some kind of new fashion.
Maybe your aliens already have these kind of technolgies and uses just like we dye our hair/put a wig, put fake contact lens, or even change our clothing.
Another take on the "artificial color of skin", would be sickness/medecine. Some kind of secondary effects for a drug or a virus that changed some/all of the population skin color.
Or they did it themseleve, because their skin wasn't resistant enough (again, a side effect) to the sun/air/micro-organisms/etc. Again, as a tatoo, or directly in the skin, and evene maybe as some kind of advanced second-skin ? (if that ever counts as "skin color" ...)
Technically, I think that would be rather difficult to change the whole color of the body. However, if there is transhumanism, I guess there must be "transalienism" (or "transextraterrestrialism" ?).
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One reason for vibrant colour is toxicity. The [poison dart frog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_dart_frog) is a family of frogs with a wonderful variety of colours and patterns; cyan, blue, black, yellow, orange, red. In comparison, frogs which are green and thus blend into their environment have weak or no toxicity. The [evolutionary reasons for this](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-do-tropical-frogs-get-their-stunning-colors-712275/) have already been mentioned by other answers; in this case protection and reproduction. The more toxic the frog, the brighter its colours. This in turn means that lady frogs find gentlemen frogs with the brightest skin irresistibly handsome.
So you might have an incredibly toxic alien species which has a great variety of vivid skin colours and patterns, or indeed a species with a variety of toxicity and thus colour and brightness... though it might make interactions with them a little more awkward than usual. Hand shakes and hugs probably out of the question.
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Sounds strange, but diet:
Some animals integrate part of there diet into there skin, so it can continu photosynthesis. Thus you can identify what you eat from the skin color.
Could work for aliens too.
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It'll most likely depend upon the type of star the alien evolves around. Larger stars with inhabitable planets (albeit highly unlikely since large stars i.e. giants, supergiants, and hypergiants like the B, A, and O spectral mass ranges only live for at most several million years, and go supernova upon death) would have aliens with more redder skin tone (like Darth maul) whereas dwarf stars like ours, would have more whiter skin tones. those around red dwarfs would have skin a lot like a vampire's
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[Space Voids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_void) are areas in the universe that are for the most part, empty. They lack stars, meteors and black holes; They are simply put, the lack of celestial formation.
Considering that future universal empires may want to build super large space stations the size of whole solar systems; would Void Space be a good area for building them?
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**No**
The Solar System is really tiny compared to the scale of a galaxy. Space Voids, specifically Boötes voids are areas where the density of galaxies is less than normal, and space stations the size of our solar system would not give any visible benefits. The optimal locations to establish a space station would be just outside a galaxy or in one of the arms of a spiral galaxy, as this gives access to the galaxy, yet is devoid of large unstable celestial activities which you might find closer to the center.
Cosmic voids are the vast empty spaces between filaments (the largest-scale structures in the Universe), which contain very few or no galaxies. The further you go from the galaxy, the harder it would be send the huge amount of resources need to build the station. A space station in the void would emit a lot of IR radiation, making it easier to observe, track and attack. A real life analog would bases in the Antarctic and Arctic.
Building space station along the filaments allows for greater access to resources, access to galaxies, and makes them easier to reinforce if attacked. There are a few exceptions to this:
* A forward base used to counter or monitor an another universe
wide species; this would be a stealth stations emitting minimum radiation.
* A scientific observation station, as this wouldn't be blinded by the energies and lights emitted from nearby galaxies
* These locations will also be colder than the rest of the universe, and the colder the surroundings, the easier to make computations; useful for establishing digital civilizations.
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Voids would be a terrible place to build anything, since you would have essentially no matter or energy to work with in order to build. You wold have to import everything, which would add to the expense of building and operating whatever it is you are doing.
In a military sense, this is a bad idea as well. Your structure, being the only thing in the void, would be quite easy to pinpoint and target by a hostile party or civilization. Nothing like having RKKV's swarming towards your isolated outpost. And of course fighting back would be difficult, since you would not have the "home field" advantage of a star or black hole to power your civilization and defences.
The only potential reason to do something like that is you need the coldest, stillest place in the universe to conduct some sort of experiment, and being in the heart of the void makes doing the experiment much easier.
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To give you an idea of the scale, if the Böotes void was the size of the Gobi desert (800 km across), our solar system (measured all the way to the Kuiper cliff) would be about 4 μm, the size of a typical bacterium.
If our sun was at one end of a football stadium and the next closest star system (Alpha Centauri) was at the other, a space station the size of our entire solar system would be 3.6 mm, roughly the size of a peanut.
The only thing that cosmic voids have going for them is an abundance of empty space, and there is plenty of that right here inside our own galaxy.
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The question itself virtually gives the answer itself. Namely, space Voids are areas in the universe that are for the most part, empty. So you want to build super large space stations the size of whole solar systems. Where the Voids lack stars, meteors and black holes; They are simply put, the lack of any materials to build anything. Let alone super large space stations the size of whole solar systems.
Besides Void Space is a long, long, long, long, long, long from anywhere, so unless you want to build holiday resorts where you can getaway from everything, but it would take a long, long, long, long, long, long time to get there. To say nothing of a long, long, long, long, long, long time to get back again.
Therefore, would Void Space be a good area for building them? Answer: no way.
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The key unknown in this question is: what is the purpose of the station?
If the station is to be used for ship repair, as a commercial centre for trade, or as a staging location to launch an attack is is unlikely to hold any value being so far from resources (materials or human).
However there are a few reasons why you might prefer to build you space station so far from everything:
1. Secrecy (as mentioned in another answer)
2. Dangerous testing - I'm going to build a black hole based power source, do you mind if I build it in Earth orbit? Oh you do?
3. Specific void testing - I want to make a more effective FTL, I want to make an alcubierre drive. But to compress space time I need negative mass, our scientists predict this is only possible in the nothingness of a true hard vacuum, where there is little radiation and no mass.
These are just to give you a taster of the kind of reasons I plan on building **my** gigantic space stations so far from home!
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It depends on the technology scale and the objectives of the builders. When civilizations get to the point where people are blithely hopping from galaxy to galaxy for vacation, then the intergalactic voids become much like the various intragalactic voids would have been for a star-hopping civilization. They're off the beaten path with relatively little chance that anyone is going to stumble across you by mistake.
So, if the goal is to build something hidden in secret, a void is definitely one place to do it. You will have to disguise all the materials you're shipping out into the middle of nowhere, since there's nothing out there to work with. If the goal is just to have space to work... well... unless you're building an artificial galaxy, there's no need to go out that far.
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I'll echo the rest of the answers with a twist: **NO. Its a horrible place to build your station, unless you have a specific need for that isolation.**
Space stations serve a purpose: Anchorage for your ships, trading hubs, research stations, etc. For most of these purposes you need a station that is economically viable.
Voids are as empty as space gets. This means that during the construction of your station, you basically have to *ship everything in.* You can't just set up a materials manufacturing center and start mining asteroids for metals, you can't use local matter to build stuff. You can't source your laborers from that planet you're orbiting. Your engineers can't supplement their rations with produce from passing merchant ships. Nothing. You bring *everything* you need, at cost.
To make things worse, if you can somehow finance the construction of this space station, no one wants to use it. You military would not want to use this thing as a base. Its far from everywhere they are needed. Militaries don't fight over empty deserts. They won't fight over empty space either. There is simply *nothing* there to fight over. As far as the galaxy is concerned, you're welcome to keep the void because everything they do - commerce, military maneuvers, research, etc - are done in places that are much easier to get to, and live in.
Merchants wouldn't want to spend the resources to travel to your space station to trade with its crew. Why would they? How many people are you going to cram in there? Compared to the several planets they can stop at, not only to offload goods, but to acquire them to sell at the next planets in their routes. Even if your space station produces something very valuable, and for some reason, you have to set up a manufacturing plant so far out of the way (maybe it uses a lot of hazardous materials), its much more efficient for you to send your own cargo ships to carry these produce to market, and then bring back whatever the station needs. Then again, there are *other* places *within a galaxy* where you can set up these facilities in relative safety, so why bother traveling so far to the void?
The only reason I can think of that would make building a space station in a void necessary is if you need to set up a facility so secret, that nowhere in a galaxy is secure enough. As Thucydides said in his response, this space station would stick out like a sore thumb out there. *But* if you keep the construction a secret, and follow strict Operational Security protocols, you may be able to hide it because *no one else would think that anyone is crazy enough to build anything in the void*. (Enemy spy A: My source told me that the station was built in the void. Enemy spy B: What? Don't be ridiculous. Which idiot would build anything there??).
So yes, there is a scenario for which you need a station in the void. Of course, for this scenario, there are other more easily accessible and economically viable places in a galaxy where you can build your super secret space station. This is about the only thing I can think of that requires what you're asking.
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## **Vacuum Decay**
Perhaps your civilization just wants a way out, so they're searching for a place to test *intentional* vacuum decay as a possible option for suicide.
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EDIT:
Put simply, vacuum decay is what happens when a quantum field falls from a metastable energy level to a stable one. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum> for details.
An empty space as vast as the Boötes Void might actually be the safest place for experimentation in this direction; it's the perfect place for it, really, since it would take an unimaginably long time (>115 million years) for the bubble of doom that might emerge to reach anything that matters- provided said experiments are performed near the centre of the Boötes Void.
It might be even more interesting for such a civilization to weaponize this, rather than destroy itself with it.
I am, of course, assuming that a civilization experimenting with this would have already developed the faster-than-light travel required to get in and out of the Boötes Void on a reasonable timescale. (After all, it's useless to end the universe if you can't see it coming.)
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The only potential reason apart from dangerous science is to have a kind of intergalactic service station - somewhere to stop and get some rest and maybe some fuel on the long jaunt to another galaxy. Even at multiples of Light speed it might take days, months or years to traverse the intergalactic void. The milky way is so far from the Andromeda galaxy for example that you'd need to be traveling 2.5 ***MILLION*** times light speed to traverse the distance in a single year, and that's edge to edge. Even the best of friends might want a sit down away from one another after a few months.
Alternatively, another option might be that your jump drive only has a certain range so these stations mark safe protected spots to leapfrog to the next galaxy from. Heck, if its gate style transit, these space stations might be the only way to get to the next galaxy.
As an additional, something the size of the solar system would be ridiculously big. To give some idea how big, Voyager 1 has only just (as of December 2006) left the solar system, and that's something that's currently travelling at over 17 kilometres a second ([Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1))
Space is BIG.
**REALLY BIG**
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This is from [the Sandbox](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/635/sandbox-for-proposed-questions/1716#1716).
*Star Wars* fans, picture a setting like [the forest moon of Endor](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Endor), albeit planet-sized and without Ewoks running about. For everyone else: Imagine a dense [deciduous forest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deciduous), with trees packed close together, stretching across the entire planet. The planet itself is Earth-like, and has Earth-like vegetation, trees, and forest creatures.
The main creatures are, for all intents and purposes, humans. They'll actually be humanoid, and not *exactly* human, but they won't have any major differences that will impact this question. They dwell in large treehouses, built in the mid- to upper- layers of the trees. The houses are accessible via rope ladders from the ground, although many are able to climb the trees outright. Tree-to-tree travel is made possible through rope bridges, though the more nimble can walk form branch to branch, making short jumps along the way.
How would transportation develop in such a world? I do have one idea: small, one-person gliders that fold up and can be carried. They can help when getting from one tree to another where there aren't any branches or bridges. They're used more often when traveling from the canopy layer to somewhere closer to ground level.
Restrictions:
* The rope bridges can't hold any substantial weight.
* The materials at hand are all that can be found in a forest: Wood and some rock, as well as leaves, branches, etc. (The gliders are made out of sticks and animal skins, by the way, so any animal-based vehicles are also on the table.)
* There is no electricity use, but there are metals available, primarily iron. They are able to [primitively produce iron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_iron_production).
* The plants (and some animals) here are those found in a deciduous forest.
The trees are close enough that it's impossible for any vehicles larger than a small car (e.g. a Mini Cooper) to feasibly go through.
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**Finale**
Thanks to everyone for the comments and answers. I've thought a lot about the various suggestions over the past few days, and I've realized that no one method is going to be enough. I've decided on a combination of methods:
* The canals created by Abulafia and the boats discussed by Bill Blondeau
* The mini-airships suggested by ninesided (for small loads of freight, I think)
* The rope/ziplines invented by ckersch (and the resultant industry of rope-making)
and, as a plot device to lead up to a conflict . . .
* The burning of a small part of the trees, as suggested by Pavel Janicek
This is what I love about Worldbuilding - collaborative ideas always morph into something I could never have dreamed of.
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Cool question, and potentially a pretty cool world. :-) A few responses to your proposed planet and civilization, working towards questions of transportation:
**Planetology of a forest world**
There's a bit of a problem in your initial description of the planet:
>
> Imagine a dense deciduous forest, with trees packed close together, stretching across the entire planet. The planet itself is Earth-like, and has Earth-like vegetation, trees, and forest creatures.
>
>
>
There's an inherent conflict here: An Earth-like planet, with "Earth-like vegetation, trees, and forest creatures", is not at all compatible with the concept of a more or less uniform, world-spanning forest of deciduous type. There's simply too much variation in climate, terrain elevation, weather patterns, and distribution of moisture to permit this kind of thing, ecologically speaking.
You could address this by postulating **an incredibly dominant tree species** (or stable group of collaborating species) for your forest - capable of establishing terminal forest conditions in everything from arid cold weather to hot humid areas, and managing elevation without difficulty. Alternatively, you could **modify your world to reduce the tendency to climatic variation.** I'm guessing that the former would be less difficult. You may want to do both.
(Of course, you could reduce the area of coverage of your forest, leaving parts of the world empty of the human habitation that depends on the forest for housing, food, and materials...)
**Surface travel**
So here's a world-spanning forest. Forested terrain isn't easy to traverse on foot unless there are known pathways through the trees. Pathways provide not only easy passage through undergrowth, but also are navigational aids: if you are traveling under a forest canopy, it's terribly easy to get lost unless you are following a trail. I think your serious consideration of tree-level bridges is a good acknowledgement of this... as a corollary, your stone-age/early iron age civilization isn't likely to have the resources to keep very many surface roads clear of forest regrowth.
One perhaps significant question: are their areas of forest, similar to terminal pine forest in our world, that suppress undergrowth and leave a pleasant and easily traveled forest floor? I realize that you've specified deciduous trees, but I don't think the ecological dominance of pines is limited to conifers... These areas would make a large difference in traversability on foot.
**Water transportation**
One of the most important remaining topographical questions is, What are the bodies of water like?
**For a lot of purposes, water transportation is the cheapest way to move people and goods over distances.** Navigable creeks and streams can handle canoes or similar; larger rivers permit rafts and flat-bottomed boats; lakes (even narrow ones) will support open boats, rowboats, sailboats; larger lakes and seas give you larger vessels and kayaks.
Most of these vessels are attainable by stone-based technologies, and easier still if you have iron tools. Consider the birchbark canoe, the dugout, the curragh and kayak made of waterproofed skins stretched over frames of bent branches.
Large planks, for larger vessels, are *not* typically something we'd associate with stone technology: however, the easiest to build are [riven (or "reeved") planks](http://www.greenwoodworking.com/RivingArticle), which are excellent for [clinker-built (aka "lapstrake"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinker_%28boat_building%29) hulls; reeved planks are are [apparently within reach](http://www.riven-oak.appspot.com/traditional.html) of a determined stone-age woodworker.
**Air transportation**
When it comes to your interest in gliders, I tend to agree with ckersch's concerns about the difficulties of the initial leap in concept. I do *not* think the means of building gliders would be outside the reach of a patient and craftsmanlike stone + iron civilization
There are a couple of planetological tweaks that could make air travel more plausible:
* **Denser atmosphere** makes for easier winged flight. Poul Anderson, in
[The Man Who Counts](http://www.nesfa.org/reviews/Olson/WarOfTheWingMen.html), made the atmosphere of the planet Diomedes
quite thick in order to support the weight of the intelligent winged
race his human characters were dealing with. (And because he was Poul
Anderson, he also took care to describe the unfamiliar behavior of
things like sound and wind in that dense atmosphere.)
* **Large flying animals** would make ready mental models for flight on a human scale - the kind of thing that gliders would emulate. Could your world (especially with a heavier
atmosphere) host a lot of large soaring
birds/bats/pterosaurs/whatever? (Of course, if it supports enough of
them, the temptation for people to *ride* them would be
significant... ;-)
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**Canals**
When you imagine a giant forest, it's not possible to do so without imagining substantial rainfall. The forest creates its own rainfall pattern, ala the rainforest but a dry-climate forest tends to burn down or the trees die.
If you have a lot of rain, you will also have rivers. Whether it's a winding river like the amazon depends on the terrain, but there's going to be plenty of rivers and side-rivers. Boats will be the No. 1 mode of transport. If the humanoids have the time and resources for it, they can build canals and sluices to ferry themselves, livestock and other goods from their homes onto the main waterways.
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Gliders don't seem like a terribly feasible solution given how close together you describe the trees as being. Developing an effective glider also requires fairly advanced knowledge of aerodynamics. In our world, Da Vinci was the first to conceptualize them, and researchers are divided as to whether or not he understood that an airfoil was required.
Primitive gliders are also large and heavy. Dragging one up a tree, even if it could fold, would be difficult. Developing strong rigid folding mechanisms might also be beyond the abilities of a paleolithic society.
The first thing that would probably be developed is better rope. If effective rope is what's holding people back from building effective rope bridges, it will be the easiest advance for people to develop. Following rope, if the trees are close enough and tall enough to make ground transportation impractical, ziplines might be an effective way to branch out in terms of transportation. They could connect tall trees across moderate distances, with multiple lines connected by ladders allowing people to make long journeys.
Another major source of transportation could be animals. Earth forests have creatures like buffalo and deer, which are more than capable of navigating around trees. Domesticating such animals would provide a way of moving heavy things about, and also give your forest people a source of food.
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Okay, you are going to hate me for this, but I am going to say it:
**Burn the forest. Burn it down**
It is one of the things we, humans did in Quaternary to Earth forests.
*Fun fact: Great Britain used to be one big forest in some day in history.*
It will allow you:
* Start the agriculture revolution and provide food for more people
* Build roads
* Dominate the planet
**EDIT: Burning down my house? Did I go mad?**
No, not at all.
First, the *Stone Age* in the title caused me thinking that the population of the humanoids is really low.
So, basically, there have to be big unhabited areas - perfect spot to burn them down. Obviously this strategy has some downfalls, but, I am in anti-hippie mode. So stop hugging the trees and burn them :)
**EDIT 2: But you would not burn down your house, would you?**
No, I would not burn down my own home. And I do not expect the *tree people* do the same. I am just expecting them to provide some space for themselves.
See this quickly drawn picture:
Some facts:
* If you live off the trees and jungle, you are very low in population (see native people from Brazilian rain-forest as example)
* So there are going to be *HUGE* places completely uninhabited.
* If you want bigger civilization, you need to feed it.
* To feed it, you need to have fields (= [agriculture revolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution))
* To have the fields, you have to have free land
* And best way of getting free land is to burn the trees down
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Domesticated Giant Spiders! Big as a horse but with more legs to make them much more stable on uneven ground. Their webbing could provide the "better rope" that ckersch is looking for and their ability to climb walls makes them good for vertical as well as horizontal travel.
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Airships! If you had a readily available natural source of lighter-than-air gas (vent in the earth or a swamp that gave off gas), you could skin yourself some beasts, sew up a big balloon, fill it with gas and build yourself a sky-barge! You'd have no easy way of powering it but you could pull it along with ropes as was done with early canal boats. Would take some ingenuity, but definitely feasible.
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Any form of transportation needs to deal with the naturally uneven terrain found in a forest. Travel within settlements and between nearby ones is going to be on foot, with a mix of man-hauling and pack animals for moving cargo. Strong beasts of burden such as oxen or horses tend to be plains-dwellers; in a world-spanning forest, your pack animals are likely to be analogs to the dog or llama, or perhaps something deer-like. The lack of level, open terrain means that animal-drawn vehicles are unlikely to develop, with the possible exception of sledges used for hauling heavy loads (such as a stone monument to a local ruler) over short distances.
For long-distance travel, the main form of transportation is going to be boats. A world-spanning forest means plenty of rainfall and a well-developed river network. People may build canals between different drainage basins, but without draft animals and large-scale metalworking, even a short canal is a major undertaking. With stone-age technology, the majority of vessels are likely to be canoes and rafts.
Road networks are likely to be local rather than long-distance, leading between nearby settlements or to the nearest major river. Counterintuitively, roads are unlikely to follow the course of rivers: the abundant water and the break in the forest canopy provided by the river means that the undergrowth will be much thicker along river banks than anywhere else.
Trying to operate a glider in a forest would be a disaster. With the materials available, you're looking at something similar to [Otto Lilienthal's early gliders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilienthal_Normalsegelapparat), only heavier because you're using skins rather than fabric. Figure a wingspan of 6 to 10 meters, a weight of 30 kg, and a glide ratio of around 5. You'll have trouble finding gaps in the forest large enough to fly through, you'll be essentially unable to maneuver around unexpected hazards (such as a deer in your landing zone), and with the forest blocking the updrafts that a glider relies on for distance, you'll be unable to travel more than a hundred meters or so at a time.
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If the trees are as large and close together as you say then walking from one tree to another might be a pretty easy thing. The branches should overlap a bit. There will also likely be vines for swinging between.
If the humanoids evolved on the planet quite likely they would have evolved long claws to help climb the trees. (Chewbacca's home world is full of very large trees, some forest so tall that most don't ever see the floor, nor want to, that's where really dangerous stuff lives...)
I also think it's likely they could have flaps of skin like flying squirrels to glide between boles, if there it enough room to bother with. Or maybe the clothes they wear will double as a glide?
The thing is, if what they have is trees, what can be made from trees, and found on the forest floor, what do they have to trade that can't be carried? What are they trading that needs to move? Trade is the main reason for the need of larger modes of transport. Quite likely on a world like that there would be some large animals, maybe some birds large enough to fly a passenger or two and maybe some goods.
There might also be large arboreal species that could double as a 'pack mule' carrying things from tree to tree.
You will of course always have rivers, otherwise you are stuck with dirigible's since the clearing of enough space to make a runway would be very prohibitive .
Forgot this was stone age...
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For square mile type of distances I honestly don't think you'd find any real technology/transport evolution unless there's a really good reason to travel fast - a square mile, corner to corner, will take you less than an hour to traverse at human speeds we do 3mph as a walk as it is. Drop to half of that speed for broken terrain perhaps? That's still not a long time.
Speculating from this then - and since there's no value in going down to ground level for personal transport (cargo haulage is a new issue) so the tech innovation will be at treetop/village level where people will begin to map out the best/least congested treetop routes. Those will be bound with rope supports/handhelds to improve speed of movement, and also would end up being curated (branches sliced and diced to keep them clean and clear). If you have sufficient duration of time horizon, you could also get into people curating superhighways via basic topiary-type setups so you'd train the upper branches to entwine and create your roads.
For cargo haulage - personal packs/attachments would be something of note - I'd wager even at stone age level (and definitely moving forwards) you'd get better load-carrying techniques. things would be strapped to the body and weight would be split evenly to keep mobility up, so it'd feed into a general look/feel.
If you get past stone age, and for those abovementioned highways, your mass/speedy transit could be in the form of ziplines since you'll already have the clearways aboveground and well.. ziplines! :D
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This will be a short answer, but I can't shake of my mind this idea:
Velociraptor Riders.
Image a world that some Dinos never went extinct. Imagine your tree-people taming a rather large raptor-like dino and using it like a chocobo. Heck, those beasts can even be used as "warhorses".
They can be bred for mounts and for food (Raptor Eggs, yummy!), are agile enough to dash around the woods, even on hard terrain, and can be really nasty guard dogs.
Also, your trees are really close to each other. Using trunks as bridges instead of ropes bridges would be rather easy.
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**Roads**
Unless I'm missing something in this question, why wouldn't regular ol' boring surface roads develop? There are plenty of roads through thick forests here on Earth. The Mayans and Aztecs even built them through dense rain forests. If the forest is similar to Earth's Redwood forests, the tall trees will block out a lot of the sun making the surface easier, not harder, to build road through compared to 'normal' Earth forests.
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What is the purpose of this transport? If it is just for moving about, why would they need vehicles at all? What cargo would they be transporting significant distance which wouldn't just be carried in a backpack?
The large size of the trees (big enough for villages to be up in the canopy instead of on the ground) indicates significant distance between the trees, with plenty of open space for ground transport.
Transporting lumber (logs for construction perhaps) would probably be done simply by hauling along the ground for short distances or floating down rivers for longer distance.
Dragging the logs might using ropes and crude pulleys in the above branches to lighten big loads or get over rough terrain, as I would imagine their knowledge of rigging would be fairly advanced living up in the trees. Split logs could even form basic wooden tracks/causeways along the ground if needed to facilitate moving heavy loads like stone.
It is not hard to get to constructed rafts and more advanced designs once people start floating things down the river. With large trees, one could even conceive of rafts of dugout canoes carrying considerable cargo.
But aside from moving heavy cargo, why would anyone go down to the ground if they live up in the trees? Climbing up and down huge trees takes a lot of energy - it is probably far more efficient to just go from tree to tree.
My first thought would be something akin to a flying squirrel suit - very thin split leather stretched between the limbs to aid in jumping branch to branch - but that wouldn't be very plausible (though a fun idea, humans are too heavy for that to be much more than a panic desperation in case of falling, and still probably isn't worth the weight and clumsiness of always wearing it). A more likely tool would be a grapple hook on a long rope - toss it over to the next tree and swing over. Some metalworking should allow a release mechanism on the grapple so a small control line could be used to disengage the mechanism and not need to worry about climbing all the way up to it for retrieval.
More common pathways might have a set of swinging ropes - fixed at common places for people to swing back and forth at will. Upgrade that a bit to rope bridges and you have most travel well covered.
The most heavily traveled pathways would likely use something akin to the *root bridges of Cherrapunji*. Over the course of many years, they use hollowed out logs to direct secondary roots (which grow higher up the trunk of the tree) to grow across the river until they eventually take root in the other side, thus growing a bridge. After a couple decades, it is strong enough to take considerable foot traffic.
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In the steampunk era of my world there is a military academy that trains officers for the United Anglicynn Kingdoms' military. To be a little different I decided that cadets all train together with specialty classes depending on if they will serve on ships, in the air force, on the ground piloting mechanized infantry, or if they are magic users. The forces are not separated into different hierarchies though it would be hard to transfer horizontally from the infantry to become a sailor.
Does not having separation of forces make reasonable sense for a military to do or would it make things more complicated and troublesome? Or, would this degree of combined forces make them even more effective?
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> To be a little different I decided that cadets all train together with specialty classes depending on if they will serve on ships, in the air force, on the ground piloting mechanized infantry, or if they are magic users.
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Aside from no magic users, welcome to the Canadian Forces.
These days, all enlisted Regular force (ie, not the Reserves/militia) personnel attend the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec. After they complete Basic Military Qualification, which is common to everyone regardless of what branch they end up in, they go off to their separate training facilities and bases across the country.
For officers, officer-cadets attend one of the Canadian Military Colleges. There were three when I was in in the late 80s/early 90s: College Militaire Royale de Saint-Jean, also in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Québec, which I attended; Royal Roads Military College (RRMC) just outside Victoria, British Columbia; and the original, the Royal Military College (RMC) in Kingston, Ontario.
(Aside: in 1995 RRMC was closed as a military college and is now a civilian one; CMR was also closed in 1995 and became a civilian college, but in 2007 was re-opened as a military college using part of the now-civvie campus.)
Okay, so the way the colleges worked is that all officer-cadets, regardless of where they planned to go (Maritime Command, once again the Royal Canadian Navy; Mobile Command, now again the Canadian Army; or Air Command, it also now bearing its former name of the Royal Canadian Air Force) attended the same classes--depending on what degree they were working toward--were in the same squadrons, and we wore the same college uniform. We also had branch-specific uniforms that we wore when we did our specialized training over the summers: tan/green for us superior army types, black/white for the naval wogs, and blue for those who wanted to fly planes. The only time we wore them at the college were the specific days dedicated to a particular branch, so on naval day, for instance, all the naval types wore their blacks or whites while the rest of us stayed in the normal college uniform.
Additionally, the first summer in, all officer-cadets (and all future officers who would skip the colleges because they were, say, doctors and thus would directly get commissions) attended CFOCS ("see-fox", the Canadian Forces Officer Candidate School) at Canadian Forces Base Chilliwack. Again, regardless of future service. If you failed CFOCS, you were out. After that, summers were off to whatever base providing the specialized training for your branch; military engineers, for instance, did the course at Chilliwack, infantry went to CFB Gagetown, and so on.
Other than the summer training periods where you'd go off to do branch training, all cadets received the same military education and training at the colleges and CFOCS. This also meant that people could shift branches; we used to joke that the majority of Canadian warship drivers were wannabe-pilots who couldn't make flight school due to poor reflexes or bad eyesight. If someone wanted to be a military engineer but didn't have the academic wherewithal to get the required engineering degree, it was theoretically possible for them to switch to, say, infantry or armour, or some other job where a BA would be enough. It was rare; usually if you flunked the academics you were out, but I did see it happen.
So there's nothing particularly odd about your suggestion; it's been successfully done in real life.
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I mean, it's not an unreasonable idea, if you're starting from scratch. It eliminates confusion about rank (US Navy Captain is O-6, Army Captain is O-3), it means that you can more easily transfer command between different COs depending on the situation, and it emphasizes that the military should be working together for combined arms operations.
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> The forces are not separated into different hierarchies though it would be hard to transfer horizontally from the infantry to become a sailor.
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This is already a thing in today's military, even within branches. You can't take a weapons operator on a ship and make them run the engines, you can't have a jet pilot become pararescue, tankers would need to be retrained to be infantry, etc. The UAK's military would have this to a much broader degree, but it wouldn't be insurmountable.
The main caveat is what I said before: "If you're starting from scratch."
Trying to integrate existing branches of a military is like pulling teeth... from every member of the military at the same time. If the UAK's military is essentially a previous military under a new flag, then the previous Lord Admiral of the Navy and the previous Magus of War (or whatever their titles were) are not going to see eye to eye and the integration will be like trying to operate a stick-shift gearbox with no idea how it works: a lot of grinding of teeth, a lot of sparks, and you could just wreck the whole thing.
If something is shaking up the military enough, for example most of the military used to be revolutionaries a few important documents ago, or you've got something like the 1871 unification of Germany from the Germanic states, then you could possibly get a unified military out of that easily.
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# A response to a past coup
I’m choosing here to respond to the title. Other answers have gone through the military viability of this idea pretty well, but fundamentally, the thing you need to happen *doesn’t* have to be due to military reasons, or at least military efficacy reasons.
Branches of the military are famous for their infighting and resistance to cooperation, so take that one step forward: at one point in your nation’s history, the head of a single branch of your choice unilaterally began a military coup against the government, with many of their subordinates willingly following along due to being more loyal to their branch than to the country.
Thanks to an uncharacteristic cooperation between the other branches, the coup was stopped, but the event triggered a massive reworking of the military system. Old rank systems were eliminated and replaced with a standardized approach, formal command structure was interwoven, military academies were combined, and the importance of joint operations was emphasized.
In your case, I’d probably have the rebel faction be the magic users: their branch wouldn’t just be integrated, it would be dissolved, and magic users would be distributed among other units.
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As a real life example, in 1967, the three branches of the Canadian Forces [were unified](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_the_Canadian_Armed_Forces):
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> The public explanation for the reorganization was that unification
> would achieve cost savings and provide improved command, control, and
> integration of the military forces. Hellyer stated on 4 November 1966
> that "the amalgamation... will provide the flexibility to enable
> Canada to meet in the most effective manner the military requirements
> of the future. It will also establish Canada as an unquestionable
> leader in the field of military organization."
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The biggest reasons were cost savings and the reduction in size of the Canadian Forces. Unification allows for a (somewhat) integrated command structure and improved control over joint operations.
And as in your example, officers from all three elements are trained at the Royal Military College of Canada. They undergo specialty training at various training centres across the country.
In fact, there is an entire group of trades that are described as "purple" (not fitting into blue, green, or black of the individual elements). These include clerks, drivers, cooks, supply techs, military police, chaplains, and so on where the nature of the trade isn't specific to a particular environment. While uncommon, it is not unheard of to have a cook in an army uniform serving aboard a frigate, or a finance clerk in a naval uniform working at Base HQ on what is primarily an Army base.
Of course, people still argue to this day as to whether this was a good idea, and the transition was far from a seamless one.
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Separation of the military into branches occurs because the strategies, tactics, and indeed espirit de corps changes depending on what sorts of operations you do. Historically, we have had a Navy because the sorts of things you have to do while living for months on a small wooden plank in the middle of a Mother Nature's seas are very different from what you need to do with, say, an Army who has to be able to dig in on land. The Air Forces exist because the 3rd dimension and speeds of combat change astonishingly, and everything has to cope.
You never want to have a commander issuing orders that are not consistent with the realities the soldiers were trained in. Soldiers are trained to be able to sacrifice to accomplish orders, and sacrifice dearly, and ideally without hesitation. If a commander is not well aware of how their soldiers will have to act to accomplish their orders, those soldiers will sacrifice without a good enough return on investment.
Over hundreds of years, we have found that the branches we see in modern militaries are effective ones. They are good at ensuring that commanders issue orders which spend precious resources (such as soldiers) correctly.
Of course, we are also seeing a *huge* push towards joint operations. The big disadvantage of such branched approaches is that the branches don't interact very well. If you have an operation that needs to start at sea, and then move onto land with air superiority protecting it, it's really hard to accomplish. Modern militaries are finding this to be an important class of operations, so they're spending more and more effort finding ways to operate in a joint way to make up for the fact that they are not a combined force.
So if you want to have a combined military like this, I'd recommend having a world which supports it. Develop a world where it is difficult to accomplish any meaningful military task in just one domain. Make it so that most operations call for some combined operations. Make it so there is a strong advantage to being able to think in combined terms which outweighs the penalties that occur from ordering soldiers to do less than ideal things.
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# Pro:
* It encourages a spirit of joint operations. Especially in a [small colonial war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_war), you might find a battalion of regulars, a few hundred sailors under the command of the first lieutenant, and an artillery battery marching up the river together.
* It clarifies seniority in those situations.
* If you are steampunk, they will be class conscious, right? So three Army officers, two Navy officers, and a Medical Corps officer in a tiny garrison at the end of nowhere can at least mess together without begin socially awkward.
* Keeping the accounts and personnel rolls of a battalion is not much different from doing the same on a ship. Why not train the officer cadets together?
# Con:
* There is a world of difference between commanding half a gun deck on an ironclad and commanding an elephant artillery battery. So why give the same basic training? The naval cadet needs emergency shiphandling and astronavigation, not map reading and cross-country riding.
* Having a distinct service identity could help with esprit de corps and unit cohesion. *"Let's show those [Dogfaces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogface_(military)) how a [Leatherneck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leatherneck) storms a hill!"*
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For a real-life analogue, look at Japan's Self-Defense Forces. Prospective officers may attend the National Defense Academy of Japan, followed by Officer Candidate School for the ground, air, or naval force.
The SDF are United under a common organization, but have separate command structures. For unified air and land command, look to the start of ww1. The British Air Force gained Independence quickly. However, the US marines, for example, still employ their own planes and pilots.
The factors that shape your command structures will be varied, including tactics, strategy, production rates, roles, etc. For a unified force, create a situation where two branches exist largely to support the third. They are without large independent forces and have limited strategic or tactical importance. Alternatively, they have independent versions that operate separately and leave the more-limited support roles to the combined force.
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There are several possible reasons:
* Not enough of a military for meaningful separation of branches
* Cost savings
* Feeling secure from military take-overs or living under military rule
* Finding cooperation more valuable than specialisation
* Being pushed together by outside pressure
* One branch completely dominating the others, so they get subordinated
* A very successful non-separated foreign military
* Being land-locked and seeing planes as support
* Having a more or less ceremonial military
* Having a genius-level top general who works wonders in any branch
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... And if it absolutely has to, then such river should overflow in predictable matter.
I have a city idea in mind, where such the city has a river contained in an artificial tunnel beneath such city. I instantly know one huge design flaw of such a city, which is the floods.
So, I have to take one step back and come up with a design of a river which does not overflow.
**Setup**
* Earth-based planet, but not necessarily Earth
* This river may be on an island or on a continent, I do not really care
* The land mass around a city sitting on such river should be big enough to support city of at least 100 000 citizens
* The weather should support civilization, best would be northern Europe -like weather (seasons, temperatures between -30 to +35 degrees Celsius, long term average 18 C)
* The river itself should be at least 50 km long and at least 4m wide on widest point
So, is it possible to come up with setup which supports a predictable river?
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# Rivers with stable flow (with [data source](http://grdc.sr.unh.edu/index.html))
### River downstream of a large lake
* The larger the lake, the most stable the flow out of it. Also, it helps that the lake be in a temperate environment, oo water input into the lake doesn't vary too much. The lake can freeze over, as can the outlet river, without really affecting flow much; this happens in the case of the example.
* **Example** - Saint Mary's River (between Lake Superior and Lake Huron in US/Canada) at Sault Ste. Marie. Other good examples are the Rhone downstream of Lake Geneva, and the Neva downstream of Lake Ladoga.
* **Pro** - Very stable flow rate, year round (assuming the lakes don't freeze). Low ratio and magnitude of seasonal fluctuations. When improved with canals and locks, this makes for a great trading city.
* **Con** - In many cases, these outlet rivers are steep and un-navigable.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MS7rO.png)
```
Extreme high flow 3590
Expected annual high 2385
Average flow 2142
Excess over expect high 1205
Excess over average 1448
Ratio over expect high 0.51
Ratio over average 0.68
```
(Note, all units are in cubic meters per second, except ratio)
### Large tropical river
* A large tropical river where half of the river basin is in each hemisphere. As the monsoon rains are pushed by the Intertropical Convergence Zone back and forth between the hemispheres, you will end up with relatively stable rainfall throughout the year.
* **Example** - Congo River measured at Kinshasa.
* **Pros** - Very low seasonal flow variance. Also, an enormous basin for river-borne trade with the city.
* **Cons** - Very high magnitude of flow variance. When the river is this big, even a little bit of flooding is a big deal.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sgapb.png)
```
Extreme high flow 80832
Expected annual high 56081
Average flow 39536
Excess over expect high 24751
Excess over average 41296
Ratio over expect high 0.44
Ratio over average 1.04
```
### A temperate river with little snowmelt
* The next best scenario is a river with a small basin with constant, low level rainfall, and little snow accumulation.
* **Example** - Seine River at Paris.
* **Pro** - Despite being a big enough river for a truly large city, the magnitude of highest recorded flood to average winter high water is not large.
* **Con** - Large seasonal fluctuations, can be difficult to navigate in summer time due to low water levels.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UtBwX.png)
```
Extreme high flow 1284
Expected annual high 560
Average flow 268
Excess over expect high 724
Excess over average 1016
Ratio over expect high 1.29
Ratio over average 3.79
```
# Examples of bad rivers
### Continental river with large, dry basin
**Example** Arkansas River in the US, measured at Little Rock. In the interior US, random thunderstorms lasting for a few days can cause serious flooding, usually in spring or early summer.
```
Extreme high flow 8220
Expected annual high 2044
Average flow 1066
Excess over expect high 6176
Excess over average 7145
Ratio over expect high 3.02
Ratio over average 6.71
```
### Continental river with enormous spring snowmelt
**Example** - Tom River measured at Tomsk, in Siberia. While the high river levels with snowmelt is relatively predictable, it is still very large compared to regular river levels.
```
Extreme high flow 7500
Expected annual high 4622
Average flow 1047
Excess over expect high 2878
Excess over average 6453
Ratio over expect high 0.62
Ratio over average 6.16
```
### River in Monsoon area
**Example** - Vijayawada river in southern India measured at its mouth. While the timing of the monsoon is predictable, its magnitude is not. An erratic monsoon can produce spectacular flooding.
```
Extreme high flow 16555
Expected annual high 6266
Average flow 1642
Excess over expect high 10289
Excess over average 14913
Ratio over expect high 1.64
Ratio over average 9.08
```
[Answer]
You can realize a large basin upstream, where you can divert the excess water during overflow time.
You can then opt for:
* leaking that excess water on a path avoiding the city, going through expendable areas
* let that water drain through the terrain
First one is preferred, as in case of exceptionally extreme cases, you might prefer flooding low value areas instead of the city. Of course you need to take care that no abusive buildings are built in the area designated for being flooded.
[Answer]
1. Build it massively over capacity
This is the expensive option, and would be really hard to get through your funding committee. Though of course it would have to be built above "normal" capacity to handle day to day fluctuations in flow. "Flooding" is basically the point at which your system is over capacity, if the capacity of your system is high enough it will never flood.
2. Beavers
This is one of the flooding prevention options. We've mostly killed off the beavers, but they provide an important service where they still exist. Their dams slow the river flow and hold back floods to smaller areas upstream. This slowed flow means that it never builds up to the point of flooding in downstream areas.
3. More vegetation in your river catchment
Another flood prevention option. The more permanent vegetation, the slower the rainwater reaches the river. Again meaning that even with heavy rains the water filters down to the river at a more measured rate and never builds up to the point of flooding further downriver.
4. Don't build on the floodplain
Leave the river space to flood. This sounds like a very simple and obvious option but you'd be amazed how many cities are built on the main floodplain of their river. Even new build is still going up on the floodplains.
5. Accept that it's going to flood sometimes
I spent a portion of my early childhood living in a house on legs. Under the centre of the building was a staircase leading up to the house, with legs around the outside.
[Answer]
Use an artificial system of [locks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_(water_navigation)), [weirs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weir) and dams to control the flow of the river. When the water level is too low, close the downstream gates so the river backs up. When the water level is too high, close the upstream gates so it empties.
In order to be able to deal with droughts or downpour, you will of course need some room to store excess water upstream (a natural lake, artificial reservoir, floodplain or a section of river flowing through a deep valley) and to drain water downstream (like a larger river or ocean).
You see systems like this in many cities which have rivers flowing through them. Let's take the river [Alster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alster) which flows through the city of Hamburg in northern Germany, for example. The river flows through two artificial lakes in the center of the city. Those lakes have a nearly constant water level all year around. How do they do this? With a system of variable weirs along the 50km upstream which meticulously control the inflow and a set of locks which control the outflow into the larger Elbe river (as well as prevent inflow from the Elbe when it has high tide). The system was built over 400 years ago, so you don't need 20th century technology to achieve that level of water flow control (although modern meteorology and electronic communication do of course help to improve the reliability). There is a [German wikipedia article about the Alster lock system](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsterschleusen) with lots of pictures.
[Answer]
This actually pretty hard to do. Here's why: Water flows downstream. You need a difference in water level between upstream and downstream of your city. Flow through a pipe is essentially a rather complicated function - typically you use the [Darcy Weissbach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcy%E2%80%93Weisbach_equation) equation in combination with a [Moody chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moody_chart) - of this level difference. Approximately, the head loss, or required level difference between upstream and downstream, quadruples when you double the flowrate.
In open flows like rivers the relationship is far more complicated because with higher flow rate the river bed or channel is usually filled more, which means less then quadruple head loss for double flow rate. [Open channel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-channel_flow) flow is not trivial but please read around a bit
**What does this mean for your city?**
Let's take one of the rivers from [Kingledions answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/130006/578), the Seine with low flow around 100 m³/s, average flow of 280 m³/s and extreme flow of 1280 m³/s
It's often a good idea to look at flow systems starting downstream. Let's say at average flow conditions you have a downstream water level of 50m above sea level. You city is 5 km across, really small. This calculator tells me, with an 8m diameter, 5km long pipe, my pressure loss is 72.445 Pa wich is equivalent to a head loss of 7.2 m. So my upstream reservoir level will be 57.2 m at average conditions.
Now, let's take the extreme flow, now I have 1513.962 Pa - 15m! We need a dike between our upstream reservoir that's 65m above sea level, and 7 m above the normal level of the lake or what have you. Actually more, because at extreme flows the downstream level will be higher too, by a few m!
I suggest a second channel or even third that's only opened at high flow events, also play around with the sizing of the pipes.
On the other hand, what happens at low flow? At normal flow, we have a flow velocity of 3.6 m/s . At low flow - 100 m³/s - the flow velocity is 1.3 m/s. The DWA-M 275 (An industrial code, Germany, for designing piping systems in wastewater treatemtn plants that I happebn to have open at the moment) advises a flow velocity of at least 2m/s for raw sewage. Why? Sedimentation! at lower flow velocities, sand etc. will sediment and remain in the pipe. In actuality I don't see this problem, because in all likelyhood your pipe will be the fastest streaming part of the river system.
**Environmental impact assessment**
The pipe will stop migrating fish, at least most of the time, from swimming upstream. This could seriously impact aquatic ecosystems along your river.
[Answer]
So, very much like London then?
Whilst the Thames is an iconic feature of London, virtually all London rivers which feed into it are now culverted and carried in pipes underground. [This Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterranean_rivers_of_London) lists many of them, but of course there are more. [This website and book](http://www.londonslostrivers.com/) may also be of interest.
The simple answer is that the culverts start outside the city. If the river overflows, the area around the culvert floods, but the city itself is not affected.
[Answer]
What if it's more about the city's design that the river's ?
Any body of water can overflow.
A city that could float, though, wouldn't necessarily suffer from this - it could just rise with the waters.
[Answer]
This is not as complicated as it seems and a wholee lot more work then it seems
**Your Tunnel**
First off you need to design the tunnel to meet your requirements whatever they may be, Rivers want to find the easiest and shortest route to lower ground every turn in the river slows it down fractionally. so make your tunnel nice and straight. but as few blockages like grates and covers in the tunnel as possible this will allow the water to flow freely without impediment and also stop anything that gets washed down the tunnel from creating a blockage.
**Overflow Pipes**
Have these staggered along the the length of the tunnel, should water reach high enough then it will fall into these overflow pipes and out of the tunnel. have these every so often so that if 1 somehow gets overwehlemed for some reason the water will then drop into the next one and the next one etc etc.
These pipes should lead to either a second much large tunnel that would spend a lot of time mostly empty, or out of the city and into another river somewhere else.
**Flow Control**
This is one of the most important parts have something like a Dam or series of Dams upriver from your city, this will ensure enough water can enter your tunnel but stop or at least limit flash flooding. obviously build your Dam how they try to build them in real life, with overflow piping and the ability to divert water elsewhere if required.
So long as you build it along these lines then your city should be fine. although there is always the old proverb about "*best laid Plans*"
[Answer]
Have a restricted entry for the river - for example, it passes through a hole in the bottom of a wall.
If the river starts to flood, then the hole limits the amount of water that can come through into the city portion of the river, while the wall redirects the flood waters to tributaries or around the city (into a moat?)
The river then exits through a matching hole at the other end of the city, and (optionally) rejoins the overflow.
(The flow rate of water through the hole when it is submerged should be slightly under `14 * Size_of_Hole * Height_of_Water_above_Hole` m3s-1. Build your wall and the flood-plains alongside it accordingly.)
Similarly - if you have a deep /wide ditch or gorge around your city, you have bring the water in via an aqueduct, which will overflow into the gorge in case of a flood, instead of into your city.
[Answer]
The easiest solution is to build your city where existing geography supports your goals. The most obvious (and extreme) example of an overflow-proof river on Earth would be the Grand Canyon in the Southwestern United States. With the walls of the canyon rising an average of 670 meters above the river bed, there’s no chance of it overflowing a hypothetical city built above it.
You’d want something similar, though probably not as extreme - a river cutting through (and eroding) hard rocks to create high, nearly vertical canyon walls that prevent overflow. The specific rocks and age of the river would determine how high the canyon walls are, so adjust as desired. It took the Grand Canyon anywhere between 6 and 70 million years (depending on who you ask) to develop into its current state, so adjust your time scale as necessary and you’ll get what you want.
[Answer]
Build a top water limit for the river, like a roof.
When the initial river overflows, at the river will contain always the same amount of water, while the overflow water will go somewhere else.
You can even make the roof out of glas, so you have a modern view of the river
Hope this helps:)
[Answer]
Nothing easier.
## Make the river Very Slow, but able to flow fast
The flow of a river can be measured in cubic meters per second. How fast does it flow? The math is rather straightforward: take a cross section of the river, note its area in square meters, and divide its m3/s flow rate by the area in m2. The result is a speed, in m/s.
Normally, rivers flow at a relatively consistent rate, and have just the cross-sectional area they need. When flow increases, the river *rises*. Since its banks are sloped, raising the river causes a quadratic or increase in its cross sectional area, but it also causes flooding.
We're going to change that all up. We'll make a river with a very large cross-sectional area. As such, the water moves very, very slowly, e.g. 0.05 metres/sec. When the storm comes, and the river's flow rate increases by a factor of 50, we increase flow to a factor of 50. Now, water is tearing by at 2.5 metres/sec, and canal boaters accustomed to the near stagnant river are like "nope!" We wildly overdesign this thing so even a 1000 year storm won't flood out our town every 5 years (assuming Al Gore exists on your planet).
## Level control
The problem is gradient. Every river is on a grade, that's why it's not a lake. At normal / low-in-the-design-range flow rates, the water will want to be on the bottom of the deep channel,like that sad little garden hose trickle known as the Los Angeles River.
We fix that with some sort of weir that can quickly be moved/removed. Something like lock gates, notched to let pleasure traffic by. Or my favorite, inflatable rubber weirs that arch up from the river bottom. This will be a deep channel allowing the passage of deep ships, and if you can't make passable weirs any other way, you just treat the entire river like a flight of locks, opening and closing each weir serially to let the ship through, lowering the weir ahead of the ship and letting water level dip temporarily.
In wartime, all those weirs get blown to hell, and their failure mode is to let the river run free, so it ends up at the bottom, LA style. Wrecks it for navigation, which would be the enemy's aim, but failure mode is "not flood the city".
[Answer]
If you have a waterfall downstream and a relatively straight river bed, limiting the amount of water guarantees your to never have any flooding - all the water that is able to enter the tunnel is able to flow away just as fast.
If managing the amount of water entering the tunnel is not possible, you need to manage the flow speed inside: low friction materials on the tunnel walls and, if necessary, turbines that can use electricity to increase the flow velocity could increase the amount of water you can get rid of indefinitely (the water has to come in through the tunnel entrance, so if you can make it keep its velocity all the way through and the tunnel has a constant size, the amount of water exiting the tunnel always equals the amount entering it).
[Answer]
It's "trivial" (read: rather difficult) to calculate the maximum possible flow of the river:
Take the size of the catchment area.
Multiply it by the maximum rainflow rate over that area that you expect to get.
You will have to figure out what level of that rain, for how long, you wish to handle.
You can put in as many systems of catchment areas and lakes and so on as you like, but once they become waterlogged and saturated, they are no use. So your two options are: either build upstream flood-management systems that can handle every raindrop that can land on the ground, for as long as it might rain; or make a way for the water to flow through the city faster than it can fall on the ground.
Combining both obviously gives you a good backup ability if one fails, and focusing on management and mitigation obviously also saves those upstream from the city.
Management and mitigation is covered well through other answers.
Throughput is best handled through smooth, wide, deep channels through the city, and for some distance beyond.
Another option is to put turbines in there that can be driven by stored power, to drive water through at an accelerated pace, and provide power in non-flood times.
Another possible cause of flooding is by tidal flow and storm surge from the ocean. In this case, a raisable barrier in front of the city would seem to do the job.
But what if both floods happen at once? A day of storm surge, AND a day of maximum flow from upstream? At this point it definitely needs the turbines, since the upstream water under the city will not of its own accord flow into the deeper water of the ocean: it needs to be pushed by the turbines.
] |
[Question]
[
**The story so far**: Pennyless joe gets a "groundhog potion" that supposedly allows to repeat one day *once*. He drinks it and proceeds to win the state lottery by memorizing the numbers. He then discovers that he is fated to repeat every day for 3 to 5 times (randomly). He also finds out that other "groundhoggers" are on the search for him.
(formerly pennyless) Joe took to his [wandering lifestyle very well](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/32414/353). In administering his finances earned through winning the state lottery, he took to day trading.
What a marvel. [Since Joe repeats his days](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/32084/353), he knows what stocks go up and what stocks go down. His day trading brings in more money than he needs to meet his travelling lifestyle.
And the more, he can trade through the web, from anywhere.
But Joe is really worried that his 99% success rate[note 1] in profits through stock trading will raise some red flags with the government and/or regulatory agencies.
His tinfoil hat is tingling, since he received an enthusiastic email from his broker **congratulating him on his successful trading choices** and asking him to answer a form and sign some papers about a *"trader profile upgrade"* to *"unlock more profitable trading options"*. Something [like this form](https://www.cannontrading.com/services/traders-profile) but for already-customers (disclaimer: the link above is merely visually informative, no endorsement on either party assumed).
Joe is new to investing, but is afraid that someone might come knocking asking what his "secret formula" is.
So, there are several points I'd like to clear:
* Would a 99% successful day trader really raise some red flags with the government? Assume he is filing all the taxes and papers lawfully.
* Would he be sued for "insider trading"?
* How could Joe change his trading behaviour to better avoid prosecution, if it indeed could happen?
>
> [note 1]: The 1% loss rate is due to other groundhoggers (around 12 in the USA) also trading and the "butterfly effect"
>
>
>
[Answer]
## He Would Be Okay
Joe will be fine. The government is likely to uncover his success eventually, but building a successful investigation will be next to impossible. Joe can lower his risk by not engaging in flashy purchases or suspicious transactions (such as transfers to off-shore accounts).
### Tip off
Before anything else can happen, the government would have to become suspicious of him. In real world fraud examination, this typically happens a couple ways:
1. Someone who knows Joe tips off the government that something fishy is going on. These people are typically coworkers, co-conspirators, or jealous neighbors.
2. Joe files some tax paperwork with the government. It stands out because the automated system picks up on some irregularities.
Since Joe isn't doing anything illegal, there are no co-conspirators. He is self-employed, so no coworkers can tip the government off. He may have jealous neighbors or fellow traders who think he is suspiciously lucky. However, most people never report anyway.
Supposing that Joe is honest, he makes all the appropriate SEC/tax filings. He likely has a lawyer or accountant handle the details, because he can afford it and it is definitely worth the money to him.
Despite this, Joe will eventually be on someone's radar because he is able to earn insane amounts of cash. In my opinion, it's most likely to happen as he files yearly income tax statements which show huge gains year over year, most of which come from investments.
He could avoid detection by having an ordinary day job, significantly limiting the amount of money he earns, showing regular losses, and avoiding flashy purchases or funds transfers.
### Investigation
After finding out about Joe, the government has to put together a case. Even "open and shut" financial crimes cases can take years to accumulate enough evidence to bring to trial. Actual fraud cases involving insider trading can take a decade. Basically - it's really hard to build a case for financial crimes. Succesful cases often involve getting a conspirator to admit to the crime, showing a long history of suspicious transactions, and uncovering what exactly the trading scheme is.
Joe will be able to deftly evade all of these tactics. He has no conspirators or accomplices to rat him out, there is no scheme to uncover. Ideally he trades in a large number of different financial instruments (and different funds/companies/currencies), which will styme investigators. How could he have insider knowledge on **all** of these things?
Even after being tipped off, investigators will find it very difficult to build a case against Joe. Additionally, his accountant or tax lawyer should have adequate documentation that shows his income is legitimate.
---
*Appeal to authority: I am IRL an auditor for the government.*
[Answer]
## He's in the wrong game.
People need to **misattribute his success to other factors**.
A daytrader would be too easy to catch. He's doing a lot of trades so he couldn't afford the sheer labor of setting up daytrading accounts under different aliases and all over the place. That means he's concentrating trades at one or a few brokers, and somebody (quite probably internal to the daytrading firm) is going to notice his success. Nevermind Federal prosecution; he could get sued by the trading house, and as that gets attention, it could snowball on him.
One way to go is the insider: be involved closely enough with the outcomes that his success would be attributed to an insider's ability to influence them. What would you say to someone who insisted they could prove, statistically, that Apple must surely have a crystal ball and can look 10 years into the future? Given a 24 hour window, this is harder: especially in the stock market because of insider trading rules. He might be able to do it, say, if he was a well-read pundit: but then he faces butterfly effect.
So I'll talk about another option: bury the advantage in the noise and appear successful for other reasons.
Consider the sportsbook game - Don't gamble, **be the house.** Tune your offered odds and handicaps slightly in favor of the known win. This gets rid of the butterfly effect and cross-groundhogger effects (teams don't do better or worse based on a half point in a sportsbook). He wins, he loses, just like any sportsbook, he just does it a little bit better.
And this whole area is *already* illegal, underground and/or generally pretty dodgy, with low expectations of reliability. They won't prosecute anyone for cheating by giving slightly better odds, when they're too busy prosecuting everyone else for really bad stuff. So be a responsible operator who plays fair and deals square. Be good at what you do, get a reputation for *that*. Which the "groundhog" will help with.
This will make people misattribute his success to actually being pretty good. Those who criticize him will sound spiteful. Deep-math spreadsheet theories about how he's doing the impossible in very tiny amounts, will seem like a conspiracy theory from the tinfoil hat types.
* Work in an area in which dodginess is expected.
* Don't dig for gold - sell shovels.
* Bury your advantage in the noise.
* Be **actually pretty good**.
* Let that be a plausible explanation for your success.
[Answer]
There's a simple way to protect himself--he's got a decent amount of money, he should quit going for 99%. Settle for 60%--deliberately make bad trades. His objective should be to turn in very good performance, not a performance that's way outside the curve.
If you're an extreme outlier somewhere, sometime it's going to come to notice. One day the company he's trading with decides to make some sort of offer to their most skilled clients--and a human double-checks it. Oops--this isn't right, they tell the SEC.
If you have something like this to hide you do not want to be at the end of a range anywhere. Stay at the edge of the pack, not beyond it.
Note: For a real-world example of this some card counters would deliberately make very large odds bets on craps if they were playing at a casino that permitted this. The bets have an average payback of 100% so it only cost them the small loss on the bet they had to make to get in a position to make the big ones. The objective was to introduce more variability into their win/loss record so they wouldn't stand out so much.
[Answer]
# Depends on how greedy he is about it
Nobody cares if some dude makes \$10k in a day trade, especially if each \$10k gain is spread over a few dozen accounts with a half dozen banks, perhaps even under different aliases.
But when Joe makes a billion dollars by shorting BP on the day before a terror attack takes out their refinery in Nigeria, people tend to notice. You did not make it clear if getting shot ends the repeating cycle (I'll assume not), so perhaps this is a recoverable mistake, but if he ends up in Guantanamo on the non-repeating day, that would make for a very, very long sentence.
[Answer]
### Not if he makes an arrangement with sufficiently powerful people.
Our groundhogger doesn't merely have the ability to make himself obscenely wealthy, he has the ability to make *other* people obscenely wealthy. Other people could include powerful organizations, individuals, or even entire countries. He can absolutely guarantee his safety if he uses a connection with such an organization to do so.
The US government, for example, would *love* to know what both the US and the global economy is going to do at the start of every day, as well as the details of any terrorist attacks that are going to happen, and the outcome of any military maneuvers or expensive tests scheduled to happen. In exchange for that kind of knowledge about world events, the government would likely happily allow the groundhogger to quietly become obscenely wealthy without targeting him for crimes against statistics.
[Answer]
**Be greedy**
Now, Serban's answer is nice (+1), but an alternative solution would be resorting to what usually (without future knowledge) would be very risky operations; v.g. operating with penny stocks.
If you bet for and against a well stablished business (Microsoft, BP, Apple), your only chances at winning a considerable amount is that such day a very big event happens to change their value (a oil spill happens, a software flaw is detected, a new almost magical material is announced). Being able to continuously benefit from those very unexpected events is bound to bring some unwanted attention.
But, on the other side of the spectrum, there are lots of investment options that can be very profitable at the cost of being very risky (v.g. the penny stocks). A big gain with those is not that unusual, since those values are more volatile; a succession of big gains with these may be just interpreted as that you are bold (or silly) but lucky. Add to this the spread of the values being inverted in (to avoid suspicion of market manipulation) and the occasional loss due to the butterfly effect (or just to draw away attention) and you get it.
Yes, you may get some attention, but it will be easier to conceal. After all, if there are thousands of people playing lotteries with penny stock someone has to win, and that could be you (just by coincidence, of course).
[Answer]
He would almost certainly be investigated, but I don't think he could get convicted on statistical evidence alone. Trading well isn't a crime, insider trading and certain kinds of market manipulation are. Assuming the groundhogger has no insider connections, there's no real possibility than an investigation could turn anything up.
Also, unless the other groundhoggers have an independent reason for existing apart from explaining the first one's imperfect trading record, they're not necessary. Electronic trading is very susceptible to chaos propagation: the trader's own trades disrupt everything that occurs after. After enough groundhog days, the trader could definitely hit 100% trade success if he were the only groundhogger, but it may not be desireable for him to do so. His first goal would be to maximize his capital gains, not have every trade be a success. Most likely at the end of his groundhogging he will settle on a strategy that involves some intentional losses: trades that lose money when considered individually but set him up for a larger gain on a subsequent trade.
Edit: Whoa, did not see the discussion in the comments that 3-5 repetitions of each day was all he gets. 3-5 repetitions per day is not going to be enough to get to 100% or even 99% effective trading without a great measure of luck. If there are other groundhoggers engaged in day-trading that may not even be enough time to allow them all to break even or better every (final version of a) day.
[Answer]
**Gambling would be easier, and less traceable.**
There are sporting events with betable outcomes almost everyday and moreover most bookies accept cash bets without any traceability. All he needs to do is pick a few winners on longish odds, drop some cash down before the event, collect later in the day. So long as he continues to move around, there's not much chance of anyone picking up on his bets.
Also, he doesn't actually need that much money: since he knows every day will repeat 3 to 5 times, he can blow as much money as he likes on the first two repeats to get his fix of fine dining, movies, hookers, blow - whatever his vice of choice is - and then live more sensibly on the other days. By keeping his expenses low, he can reduce the amount of cash he actually needs to get buy and thus reduce his chances of ever getting caught.
[Answer]
I'd go a different route. Go for modest cash but excessive *influence* first, money (in excess) later. Here's how and why:
Money by itself gets attention. But powerful influential people are *expected* to gain money, which will shield him considerably.
I would look not for stock rises/market shocks, but for people who make sudden blunders, and gradually build a reputation as someone insanely perceptive about what people will do, and the decisions they will make. Become a journalist, pollster, or renowned economic/political voice. Call some major decisions right. Notice illegal actions, raids, major successful speeches, resignations after a crisis, action that will be taken in major geopolitical situations, just a day or so before anyone else publishes, and get them right rather often.
Nobody will litigate or arrest anyone for this, and it builds a reputation as a person to go-to for insight in the face of big gambles - will X win an election, will Y back down on some matter, will the head of oil company Z resign, will charges stick, or whatever.
With that reputation you can then start to offer consulting services to businesses who want to get a huge decision right, and your own success will then have a context to it which is a lot harder to challenge than just making freakishly lucky investment decisions all the time.
[Answer]
The market will not be changing in a certain way during this period of time, and over time penniless Joe will be able to observe the change of the market and invest his money well. But ultimately he would not be able to make more money than this using the same means because there is a certain amount of money one can make over this given time. Therefore, he will need to do this again and again to gain money at the same rate. All in all he will not be in trouble if he loves what he is doing
] |
[Question]
[
I'm trying to write a scene in which a supervolcanic eruption destroys the [ISS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station) by blasting a shower of [tephra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tephra) to the ISS's orbital height.
The ISS is about 400 kilometers up. Let's assume the supervolcano is right under where its path will be, and that, by the time the ISS is over the supervolcano, there's a cloud of debris in its way - pieces 5 centimeters across, say.
Thing is, these pieces are going to hit the ISS at its full orbital velocity - about 7.66 kilometers per **second**. A sphere of pumice 5 centimeters in diameter has a volume of 65.459 cubic centimeters; if it [has a density of 0.25 grams per cubic centimeter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumice#/media/File:Teidepumice.jpg), it'll have a mass of 16.362 grams. [16.362 grams at 7.66 kilometers per second = 480,025.08 joules of kinetic energy](https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/physics/kinetic.php), or more than the energy of some grenades.
There are a lot of these pieces. As you might imagine, the ISS is going to have a bad time.
The question is, though: how powerful does a volcanic eruption need to be to shoot a 16.362-gram piece of pumice to the ISS's orbital height? [I recognize](https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/physics/gravitational-potential.php) that you need 64,365 joules of energy to get 16.362 grams to 401 kilometers, but I don't know how that applies to volcanoes.
Assume that the fragments don't burn up or disintegrate on their way out of the atmosphere. It could be handwaved away by saying that a big piece breaks up on the way up and the some of little pieces continue going.
[Answer]
I don't think you could get a 16g volcanic bullet into space. I mean, we can get rid of the atmosphere for a moment, and recognize that $v=\sqrt\frac{E}{m}=\sqrt\frac{64365\text J}{16.362\text g}=1 983\text{m/s}$, suggesting that a fragment launched from this volcano at around Mach 5.7 could get to the altitude of the ISS. But if we include the atmosphere, we have two limiting factors:
* Drag
* Vaporization
The drag on such a volcanic chunk would be substantial, so a Mach 5.7 exit from the volcano would not cut it. It would have to be faster. Without a drag coefficient for your pebble, it would be hard to say how much faster, but it would have to be much faster. Right away, there are major issues.
But it gets worse because such high speed projectiles ablate. What you have is effectively a meteor in reverse. According to [NASA](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/overview/fastfacts.html):
>
> Space rocks smaller than about 25 meters (about 82 feet) will most likely burn up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere and cause little or no damage.
>
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>
The reverse would be true, so your volcano probably needs to lob a rock at *least* 25 meters wide at well over Mach 6 to hit the ISS.
At this point, I am seriously concerned with the tectonic conditions of the planet causing such an extraordinary volcano. The ISS astronauts are likely less concerned with particles hitting them, and more concerned with whether or not there is a home to come home to.
>
> ... here am I sitting in my tin can, high above the world...
>
>
>
[Answer]
## No.
Using mathematical predictions the maximum possible height for normal (aka non bolide induced) volcanic plume is just over 60km which is still hundreds of kilometers short of the ISS. The problem is plume height is created by an initial impulse which makes reaching that very difficult since air resistance comes into play.
Now of course you do not the the entire plume to make it high enough. In theory a single particle could be launched higher by the perfect confluence of circumstances, aka Pascal B nuclear potato cannon like circumstances. But 16 grams is a pretty big particle but at the same time small enough to be subject to a lot of drag. But at the same time yellowstone is so much larger than any eruption we have witnessed there my be effect we don't know about that could let it happen. We don't really know what kind of velocity a few particles could achieve so it might throw ash that high but there is no way it is throwing large chunks like you want.
[source][1]
[1]: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276848715\_Plume\_height\_volume\_and\_classification\_of\_explosive\_volcanic\_eruptions\_based\_on\_the\_Weibull\_function#:~:text=cada%20mil%20a%C3%B1os.-,...,Bonadonna%20and%20Costa%2C%202013](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276848715_Plume_height_volume_and_classification_of_explosive_volcanic_eruptions_based_on_the_Weibull_function#:%7E:text=cada%20mil%20a%C3%B1os.-,...,Bonadonna%20and%20Costa%2C%202013))%20.
[Answer]
If you really want to hit the ISS, you'll need *a lot* of hand-waving.
And even then, *directly* hitting the ISS is impossible for a rocky projectile thrown upwards - the acceleration would have to be so great that the projectile would shatter, and the smaller pieces would be quickly stopped by atmospheric friction.
So, you could go something like this --
>
> "Explain this to me in layman's terms, Professor." "Very well," sighed
> Stafford. "In layman's terms, the eruption launched several hundred
> kilograms of pebbles in low Earth orbit. Some of those-" "Wait, wait,
> Professor. I was under the impression that an eruption couldn't launch
> anything in space!" "Ordinarily, it can't. Mega-eruptions on Mars have
> sent large meteorites on Earth - we recovered some in the Sahara
> desert - but Earth atmosphere is thicker, and its gravitational pull
> higher. So, an ordinary eruption couldn't send a lava bomb to the
> stratosphere. But "couldn't" in physics often just means "it's very, very unlikely". Try long enough, and you can drop twenty dimes and have them all land tails. A chance in a million. Well, It turns out that in very rare occasions, the same random chance
> gives some lava bombs the *exact*, extremely unlikely combination of speed, shape and
> composition to shoot through the lower layers of the atmosphere before
> disintegrating, at the same time heating up until they shatter exactly at the worst possible moment. So, when they do, the smaller fragments gain
> enough speed to climb yet more. They *don't* have orbital velocity, and will ultimately fall down - slow enough that they won't burn,
> though - but for a very short time, they can reach just beyond the
> atmosphere." "Even so, Professor, how could that affect the Space
> Station?" "It didn't - not directly. Even this rarest of chances wouldn't have been enough. The ISS was victim of a very
> unlikely series of circumstances, made more likely by human
> arrogance," Stafford sighed again. "Have you ever heard the name,
> 'Kessler Syndrome'? No? Well, it has been calculated that when
> satellites and other orbital junk get dense enough, a random
> collision can trigger the destruction of a satellite, or of a piece
> of space junk. Or a satellite that's already deorbiting, and is on a very low, decaying orbit. Most fragments, maybe seventy per cent of the total,
> would remain at more or less the same altitude. Another fifteen
> percent would be projected backwards or down, quickly deorbiting. The
> remaining fifteen percent" Stafford looked him in the eyes "would
> reach higher orbits. Not very much higher, mind you." "But if enough
> other satellites were already in those higher orbits, they might meet the same fate." "A
> chain reaction" whispered the President. "Exactly. That is the Kessler
> Syndrome. The ISS has already been hit three times in its lifetime, the last on May
> 2021. At that time, we already had almost seven thousand satellites whizzing every which way. We kept launching satellites upon
> satellites, both overtly and secretly; we filled all available orbits.
> Sooner or later, something like this was bound to happen. A very, very
> unlucky chance has sent several fragments - at least three, maybe up
> to seven - on an orbit intersecting ISS', but in the opposite
> direction. They hit at a combined speed of more than thirteen
> kilometers per second."
>
>
>
[Answer]
Your best... ummm... shot is to launch a massive (reverse) [bolide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolide) into space, one that can resist ablation by the atmosphere going up and still get enough mass once it reaches there.
Actually, it only has to resist the first about 85km up, near the [von Kármán line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line), the place under which the (direct) bolides get to heat up and explode.
With a sprinkle of handwavium, you may explain how the volcanic bomb explodes just conveniently after if has gone through atmosphere.
* maybe another (speedier) volcanic bomb caught up and collided the first one from behind
* maybe the bomb's surface cooled in space and the out layer cracked (like some sort of a failed-to-be [prince Rupert drop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert%27s_drop)) and the fragments got ejected in all direction - while the core continued its journey into space (see the [bread crumb bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_bomb) reference here)
* maybe, under the intense heating of the ascent, some part of the *solid* and unhomogenous inside of the boulder got liquefied, came in contact and triggered a runaway thermite reaction leading to explosion (like iron deposited ages earlier and cooled, over which sulfur slowly deposited after by condensation, now heating up enough to go past the activation energy and starting to form [pyrrhotite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhotite#Occurrence))
* maybe the bomb was launched with a high rotational energy and the extra heating of it going through the atmosphere got it fluid liquid enough to break into smaller pieces
If you really want to, I'm sure you can find simple enough ways to explain the fortuitous fragmentation of the projectile in space and not earlier. After all, the volcanoes are pretty complex, lotsa things may happen during the explosion.
**warning** turns out there are major problems here, have some salt handy when you read this I wouldn't worry that much about the required energy, a 10t piece of rock ejected from the initial blow-out of the volcanic [scoria cone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinder_cone) needs a puny 60-100GJ to reach an altitude of 400-500km.
[1980 Mt. Helen's explosion](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/energy-hurricane-volcano-earthquake2.htm)
>
> But if we look at a well-known major volcanic eruption, the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, we find that: "In all, Mount St. Helens released 24 megatons of thermal energy, 7 of which was a direct result of the blast. This is equivalent to 1,600 times the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima"
>
>
>
---
Edit: As @PcMan points out in the comments, to launch a "reverse bolide" into space by an *application of external gas pressure* would require ridiculous amounts of pressure.
That doesn't automatically mean it is impossible to project a reverse bolide so that some fragments of it reaches ISS altitude, just that such a thing is very improbable *and will required various amount of handwaving to achieve the suspension of belief required by the story*.
[Answer]
Interesting question! Alas, I'm not a volcanologist but here goes..
For reference, the first man-made object that was launched into space most likely wasn't Sputnik, but a [man-hole cover accidentally blasted into space](https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Brownlee.html) during the *Pascal-A* nuclear test (yield 55 tons!) of the Operation Plumbbob. So technically it is possible for an object to reach escape velocity from a single impulse such as an explosion, be it volcanic or nuclear. This means that with bit of handwavium it certainly makes for a plotline that is not too far fetched!
Now, to the question what it would actually mean.
**First**: The type of volcano.
For an explosive eruption you need a very specific type of volcano and lava. If you have a shield volcano, such as volcanoes in Hawaii, where the lava is easily flowing basaltic lava (*mafic* lava), you can't have a sufficiently explosive eruption regardless of the size of the eruption.
Instead, you need a stratovolcano – or the conic type you often see in photographs (eg. Mt. Fuji) – with highly viscous, *felsic* lavas that can lead to very explosive eruptions.
**Second:** Size of the eruption
Contrary to what one might think, I'm not at all certain that having a super-colossal or larger ([VEI 7+](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_Explosivity_Index)) eruption would be the ideal setting. You're heaving a lot of mass instead of launching relatively small mass, rifle-like orbital debris we're looking for; $E\_k = \frac{1}{2}mv^2 \rightarrow v = \sqrt{\frac{2E\_k}{m}}$ after all.
In terms of energy, even a "small" volcanic explosion provides enough power to launch an object to orbit. According to [this](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2014.00010/full), the maximum elastic energy yield of an eruption is $10^{19}$ Joules, or equivalent energy of [~160 000 Hiroshima bombs](https://www.google.com/search?q=10%5E19%20Joules%20%2F%2063%20TJ) or ~2 million [*Pascal-A*](https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html#PascalA)s.
**Third:** Plausibility.
Is the scenario plausible? Possibly? The ash from Mount Pinatubo in 1991 eruption reached [34 kilometres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo#1991_eruption) and the rocks from 1883 Krakatoa flew at least [50 kilometres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_eruption_of_Krakatoa) (laterally). That's just two data points from the past 150 years. Furthermore, we can't very easily track individual sub-kilogram objects launched into space so it could have happened before, even up to escape velocity itself.
As the problem is not the size of eruption, but rapid release of energy and sufficiently durable ejecta, in order to make the scenario more plausible you could add in an obsidian monolith rock collapsing into the caldera before the eruption that acts as a cork.
This might be enough *handwavium* necessary for the high pressures and the ensuing explosion that could launch obsidian shrapnel unto the ISS!
Edit and ***fourth:*** Physics!
After discussing with GOATnine (see comments) I had an idea! The amount of heat transferred to the object is roughly the kinetic energy of the air mass above it accelerated to launch speed of the projectile. This is because the object moving at $v>>c$ would just punch a hole to a static atmosphere. This is, of course, only a ball park number that only works for really fast projectiles...and we're disregarding **so** many effects here (shape, ablation, DRAG, etc..)
In any case, the mass of air is simply $F = PA\_c \rightarrow \frac{m}{A\_c} = \frac{P}{a} = 1 \text{ bar} / 10 $m/s$^2 \sim 10 000 $kg/m$^2$ and the energy for heating is thus
$$E\_h(v\_0, A\_c)= \frac{1}{2}mv^2 \sim A\_c v^2 \cdot 5 000 \text{kg/m}^2$$ where $A\_c$ is the cross-sectional area of the object.
What we have to resist that is the ablation of the material, i.e. heating it up to vaporization temperature and beyond. We choose [aluminium oxide](http://www.matweb.com/search/datasheet.aspx?matguid=c8c56ad547ae4cfabad15977bfb537f1&n=1&ckck=1), as that's pretty hard **obsidian** material to melt. It has $\rho = 3960$ kg/m$^3$, melting point of 2324 K and boiling point ~3300 K, with heat capacities of $c\_{solid} = 1200$ J/(kg$\cdot$K) and $c\_{liquid} =$[1127](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11661-017-4053-6#Tab1) J/(kg$\cdot$K). Finally, the phase changes $H\_{solid} \sim 1 × 10^6 $ J/kg & $H\_{liquid} \sim 20 \times 10^6 $ J/kg.
Starting from 290 K gives us $\Delta T\_s = 2035$ K and $\Delta T\_l = 1000$ K for
$$H\_{tot} / m = \Delta T\_s c\_{solid} + \Delta T\_l c\_{liquid} + H\_{solid} + H\_{liquid} \sim 25 \text{ MJ/kg}$$
Now, we assume sphere so the mass is $m = \rho \frac{4}{3} \pi r^3$ while $A\_c = \pi r^2$ so we have $$m = \frac{4}{3\sqrt{\pi}} \rho A\_c^\frac{3}{2} \sim A\_c^\frac{3}{2} 3000 \text{ kg/m}^3$$
Plugging that as mass gives us the total heat capacity in terms of $A\_c$
$$H\_{tot} = A\_c^\frac{3}{2} \cdot 7.5 \text{ GJ/m}^3$$
And setting that as larger than heating energy
$$\begin{align}
H\_{tot} & > E\_h \\
A\_c^\frac{3}{2} \cdot 7.5 \text{ GJ/m}^3 & > A\_c v^2 \cdot 5 000 \text{kg/m}^2 \\
\frac{v^2}{\sqrt{A\_c}} & < 1.5 \cdot 10^6 \text{m/s}^2
\end{align}
$$but as $A\_c$ here is just $\pi r^2$ the solution relates radius and velocity into a simple relation:
$$ \frac{v^2}{r} < 2.7 \cdot 10^6 \text{m/s}^2 \longrightarrow \\
f(r) > \frac{v^2}{2.7 \cdot 10^6 \text{m/s}^2} \lor f(v) < \sqrt{r \cdot 2.7 \cdot 10^6 \text{m/s}^2}
$$
So, what does that tell us? At escape velocity $v = 11.2$ km/s we get that the radius has to be around 50 meters or over. Now, this is not enough to launch the object into space as we're ignoring drag here (heh). If we guesstimate that with drag we need double the delta-v to LEO to reach LEO we have $v = 18$ km/s and $f(r) > 120$ meters.
Still plausible? Perhaps...but unlikely! However, we can definitely rule out the manhole cover from ever reaching space: The whopping 50+ km/s translates roughly to a **1 kilometer** object!
*n.b. with a bit of tweaking you can convert that relation to a function of m or to different materials.*
] |
[Question]
[
In a story I'm writing, I'm going to need iron to ward off magical creatures, faeries to be exact.
This iron should not be used in an alloy with other metals or coated with something like paint, tin, zinc or something like that.
It should be relatively quick and easy to obtain from the enviroment. The iron would be used to ward off faeries since it would burn them on contact. Traditionally horseshoes and iron nails help against those creatures but try finding those lying around on the street.
What would be good sources to get things of just iron in today's world if you were dropped in an average English village? You have 15 minutes to get it in any way possible (including illegal activities, such as theft and vandalism) as your life is in danger.
[Answer]
**A Victorian wrought iron gate.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nVSKs.jpg)
<https://www.lassco.co.uk/a-victorian-wrought-iron-garden-gate-48543>
[Wrought iron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrought_iron)
>
> ..is a highly refined iron with a small amount of slag forged out into
> fibres. The chemical analysis of the metal shows as much as 99 percent
> of iron. The slag characteristic of wrought iron is useful in black
> smithing operations and gives the material its peculiar fibrous
> structure. The non-corrosive slag constituent causes wrought iron to
> be resistant to progressive corrosion.
>
>
>
So - as close to pure iron as you are likely to find, and used in abundance in England for gates, fences and other outdoor metalworks. There is stuff made more recently out of aluminum or alloys - look for the rust. Plus you might turn up something in an abandoned garden, where people might not catch you with your hacksaw.
[Answer]
You'll need to check percentages of impurities to find what will work.
[Wrought iron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrought_iron) would have up to 0.3% impurities, although very little of that is carbon. Let's consider that the standard we need to achieve, because otherwise your plot can't go forwards.
[Steel](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_steel) is not necessarily out. High-carbon steel at up to 2% is probably no good, but mild steel will only have up to 0.25% carbon, and (with modern control over manufacturing) probably little or no other elements. That means you're probably good with cheaper nails, rebar, and various other sources.
By contrast, [cast iron](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_iron) with around 5% impurities (including carbon) is a complete non-starter, in spite of calling it "iron". So don't bother breaking into kitchens in search of Le Creuset pots, or using a poker from the fireplace.
The problem then is where to get this stuff. As Martin Bonner points out, most exterior metalwork is steel, and has been since mid/late Victorian times. It certainly isn't safe to assume that old metalwork will be wrought iron unless you know for sure. I think the best bet has to be mild steel, all the way. Which basically means a trip down to a builder's merchant to buy some lengths of rebar.
You may also want to try galvanised nails. For sure they've got a zinc coating, but underneath they're mild steel. So the plot would need to know whether the coating is significant when the bulk of the thing is iron. If you're in doubt, buy galvanised mild steel and a linisher, and sand the zinc coating off.
[Answer]
Literally, NAIL your monsters!
How picky are your monsters about the purity of the iron?
Cast iron and wrought iron contain more carbon than mild (soft) steels. Nails are cheap, widely available and a nice, mild steel. Convenient shape, if you can get up close/personal and/or shoot them. The concrete nails typically used in nailguns/ramsets are hardened steel, so higher carbon content than mild steel, but less than in wrought or cast iron (few percent.)
If you need fairly chemically pure iron, grade R <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonyl_iron> should do the trick!
[Answer]
Average english village? My first thought was to locate a house with a chimney and look for a good old **poker**. And by good old, I mostly mean old, as it's more than often made of iron and would make for a good bashing weapon.
Of course, that includes to break into a house and steal something, but if iron is the only way to go, I'd feel a lot safer.
It's my first thought without reading other answers. After reading them, it offers a few plus: it's available, you don't have to pry it from something existing like a fenced gate (unless you're the Hulk and can rip apart iron). It's shaped like a stick and make for a ready-to-go weapon. No prep time. You can reuse it: you won't be out of ammo.
On the plus side, in a story, it would be extremely cinematic.
[Answer]
I would run to the hardware store or a construction site for rebar. There should be handy lengths of it lying about.
Another good option (and I'm ripping off Terry Pratchett here) is a machinist shop. Hoover up any and all chaff you can find as well as larger chunks. The chaff could get into their eyes or clothing.
[Answer]
## Railroad Rails and Fasteners
Just like an iron gate, fasteners are actually made of steel, but are around 99% iron. In the USA, railroad spikes are common, and can be pried out. In many other countries, screws are used, and may be easier to remove than a spike if you have a long wrench.
Rails themselves are also made out of steel, with more carbon and manganese, but they are both still less than 1% content each, and low impurity requirements, meaning 98% or more iron. Most rail is welded now, so you cant just unbolt some and be on your way, but if you happen to be by a switching station or rail yard, you can dismantle sections that are light and short enough (1 meter) enough to be dragged away by a healthy fit individual, between 40 and 60kg/m for most rail in Europe. If you carry plasma torches or thermite weapons, you can just cut the rail.
Neither the rails nor the fasteners are coated.
The freight rail system itself does transport iron products in the cars themselves, including construction material, iron ore, and metal destined for scrapyards. Britain has a large number of rail lines, and over 20000 miles of track, about 10000 miles in current use.
[Answer]
If I had 15 minutes prep time, I'd head to an engineering workshop. With the grinding, cutting and welding done, there is literally a coating of iron dust on everything.
For a fae to follow you, it would be like you following someone into Fukushima. The very air would be lethal to them from the dust
Normal mild steel has arouna 0.25% carbon as where cast iron is 2.5% to 4% carbon (hence it's brittleness). [Ultra high carbon steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_steel) is 2.5% carbon
Mild steel is easily found and a purer form of iron than old horseshoes and forged nails.
[Answer]
# [Hematite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematite)
>
> Hematite, also spelled as haematite, is the mineral form of iron(III) oxide (Fe2O3), one of several iron oxides. It is the oldest known iron oxide mineral that has ever formed on earth, and is widespread in rocks and soils.
>
>
> Huge deposits of hematite are found in banded iron formations. Gray hematite is typically found in places that can have still standing water or mineral hot springs, such as those in Yellowstone National Park in North America. The mineral can precipitate out of water and collect in layers at the bottom of a lake, spring, or other standing water.
>
>
>
] |
[Question]
[
The world I'm building is pretty much exactly the same as the real world, with one exception: there are some immortal people with access to magic. These people have so far remained hidden from the normal population and formed a fairly large community somewhere in the wilderness of Scandinavia.
I want the community to be in an area about the size of the country of Luxemburg. It will contain one relatively large city (~ 50.000 people) and a bunch of smaller villages spread through the area. The total population would be around 70.000 to 80.000 people.
I chose Scandinavia because of the lower population density and the overall landscape (lots of forests, lakes and some mountainous areas), which will hopefully make it somewhat easier to remain hidden.
My question is: would it be possible for a community of this size to remain hidden and how much effort would it take? While they do have magic, I'd prefer not to just handwave it away as a large magical bubble. I'm fine with them having sentries and capturing or killing any trespassers (although too many people disappearing into the forest would attract attention). Of course, with the rise of technology it's going to become harder and harder to remain hidden, so this question will be limited to the start of the 20th century (before advanced technologies like satellites and radar).
For the purpose of this question, assume everybody is working together to stay hidden.
[Answer]
**Impossible.**
I can't see a way to do this. Whether you define "hidden" as "never located or introduced to outsiders" or define it as "unnoticed," that's just too many people, even in a place like Scandinavia.
Your problems are at least these:
1. You're not just a city the size of the city of Luxembourg. You're also all the farmland, forest, mining, and other activities needed to keep a sizable community running. That means access to a lot of water (river or lake) and a lot of property. The nation of Luxembourg is about 1,000 square miles — but it's had the pleasure of trading with its neighbors since the dawn of its history for whatever it needs. Your community doesn't have that privilege, which means it needs enough land to be entirely self-sufficient.1 So, problem #1, you're trying to keep people away from a very, very, very large chunk of real estate.
2. Your next problem is the traditionally nomadic [Sámi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_history) people. They've been around since the stone age and they traveled. A growing density of sedentary population to the south and nomadic tribes to the north. You might think you can hide for a long period of time — but you really can't.
3. Even if you could convince all 70-80 thousand inhabitants to never divulge the location of the city, can you guarantee that they're all happy living there? That they never have any curiosity about the outside world? All it would take in all that time is one visit by an itinerant peddler or one angry teenager running away from home and the cat's out of the bag.2 The simple truth is that people wander. Whether it's adventurous pioneers, hopeful merchants, or armies looking for some Lost City of Gold (or a family outgrew their house and sent their oldest with spouse and a hundred goats to find somewhere else to live), it's so well beyond improbable that no one would ever know of this growing city.
4. By 1900 the world had been consumed with filling in all the blank spaces on the world map, and 1,000+ square miles is a pretty big blank space to ignore. When those spaces existed in Africa, it spurred whole expeditions funded by everything from scientific non-profits to nations to find out what was hidden and whether or not it could prove profitable. Even religious missionaries would walk into those unknowns just to be sure everyone's souls were saved. Now, in your favor, similar blank spaces in Russia might have gone unnoticed for a long time — but by 1900 the [trans-Siberian Railroad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Railway) had been constructed. Communities actually existed all through central and eastern Russia for a long time. So I'm really building a false hope. Between 1700 and 1850 pretty much all the empty spaces on the map had been filled in.
5. Worst of all, 70-80 thousand people by 1900 represent an economic and political force to reckon with. They would have represented an economic and political force for *centuries.* The moment they're discovered a veritable (and literal) army of diplomats, tax collectors, lawyers, spies and soldiers would be keeping a very close eye on that city and would want *very much* to control it. Keep in mind that their sewer needs to go *somewhere,* and unless you declare it otherwise, it tends to go down-river to the next settlement.
**But who cares about "impossible?"**
Over the years this Stack has seen its share of "how long can I keep X hidden?" questions. From a storybuilding perspective, it can and will stay hidden for as long as you want.
But from a Real World perspective, no group of people that size would go unnoticed through the middle ages, much less up to the Industrial Revolution. They have too large a foot print and that need for water would seriously make it easier to find them. The odds are pretty good that every river that could support a boat had been investigated to its headwaters by 1800 if not earlier.
So the real question is, do you care? Readers will suspend their disbelief for almost anything if the story is good. All the factual details in the world won't impress them if the story is bad. It's your world, so you can declare the community having stayed hidden for as long as you need. All you require is to explain that the valley they lived in was high altitude, surrounded by difficult-to-traverse mountains, and had little redeeming value to the outside world. And you can handwave the Sámi by actually trading with them. The language barrier that existed between the Sámi and the Norweigans, Finns, and Swedes was pretty nasty in Real Life (and still is!) and if the Sámi simply saw the relationship as *normal,* they'd have no reason to care if anyone knew they'd visited your version of [Shangri-La](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangri-La).
**Conclusion**
Ignore us and write a great story.
---
1 *Unless you want a stone-age community suddenly being discovered by humanity, they need access to a LOT of resources. Remember, even if we delay discovery to the year 1900, you're only 14 years away from World War I and 373 years away from World War II.*
2 *The reason that phrase is such a good phrase, and why it's so applicable here, is that the metaphor isn't one of seeing a cat leave a bag. It's the problem of* putting the experienced cat back into the bag. *If you've never held a cat that doesn't want to go where you're taking it, with all 20 claws, a mouth full of sharp, pointy emphasis and the capacity to wiggle around like spikey zombie Jell-o from Hell... all I can say is you should count your blessings.*
3 *An edit tried to change this number to 1939 suggesting that my high school history class might have failed me once again. On November 5, 1937, Hitler held a secret meeting in the Reich Chancellery announcing his expansion plans for the German people. That was the beginning of World War II. I respect that people may disagree about what the start of a war can be. But IMO an authoritative and empowered statement to invade someone else's territory meets the requirement.*
[Answer]
No. The efforts to unify all parts of Norway started during the Viking era. Most of Sweden was under one king from a similar time. Sweden worked to conquer Finland from the 1150's. These efforts to unify the country meant that soldiers were going throughout the place finding any towns that were not under the crown and working to put them under the crown.
How big of a town could remain hidden? In much of Norway, "town" was a nebulous concept. Places were more of a collection of farmsteads. When we checked out the place in Sweden where my grandfather came from, we found that the "town" had three buildings: the old church (1214), the new church (1850's), and a community hall. Considering that the stories of Norway's consolidation included verifying established farms, I don't think that anything larger than a few houses could have remained hidden.
[Answer]
**Huldra**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gdJJ8.jpg)
<https://www.facebook.com/thehuldraphotographybook/>
>
> A hulder (or huldra) is a seductive forest creature found in
> Scandinavian folklore. Her name derives from a root meaning "covered"
> or "secret".[1](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gdJJ8.jpg) In Norwegian folklore, she is known as huldra ("the
> [archetypal] hulder", though folklore presupposes that there is an
> entire Hulder race and not just a single individual)...]
>
>
> The word hulder is only used of a female; a "male hulder" is called a
> huldrekall and also appears in Norwegian folklore. This being is
> closely related to other underground dwellers, usually called tusser
> (sg., tusse)
> A multitude of places in Scandinavia are named after the Hulders,
> often places by legend associated with the presence of the "hidden
> folk".
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The Hulder people live underground. D'Aulaires Trolls book makes their lands sound pretty nice. Huldra are almost human. So too your people. The Norwegians suspect they are around and sometimes encounter one, maybe. They are treated respectfully. No-one finds your city of thousands because they are underground.
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## What does 'hidden' mean, exactly?
I do not believe that there is any place in Europe where the **existence** of 50,000 people or so could have been hidden from the outside world, in the sense of a blank spot on the map with *'only wasteland'* or *'here there be dragons'* on it ...
* In Central Africa or perhaps in the Amazon basin, it might be remotely possible that such a people would remain unknown to the Western countries until 1900 or so. Easier to do it until 1870, but they would be known to their neighbours, and some rumors would have reached London and Paris. But not in Europe. Finland was a province of the Czarist Empire, and all of Scandinavia had tax collectors and a more-or-less modern bureaucracy.
* It would be considerably easier to have a population that is generally known to the outside world, **nominally** subject to some king or czar, but not welcoming outsiders. *"Do you know anybody who has been to [Ruritania](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Ruritania)? Me neither, and I guess there is no good reason to go there."*
There would be the problem to deal with government auditors to look into finances, missionaries to spread their faith, and the occasional entrepeneur who wants new markets. Can your magic help with that?
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## Scare them away
Your people don't want to be seen, thus, it will be easier to not let trespassers into your "forbidden area" than killing. Since inducing fear is decently easy (infrasound can do that without any magic, with magic it could be even easier), this will be the near-perfect solution to secure a border deep within forests. Eventually local people will mark the place they couldn't wander into as "cursed", and since anyone who wanders close would be struck by fear, this designation would persist over the ages, until probably the invention of flight, which is likely too modern for your purpose to satisfy.
How much effort that would take? That depends on your magic, and whatever means necessary to detect an offending human available to those hiding, whether it could work without maintenance for long enough, etc. But installing a ring of "things" that detect humans and make them fear going further should be pretty cheap.
You said, however, you want them to be hidden until satellites, that would require means of protection or disguise from aerial observation. These would tax your insiders a lot more, as protecting just the borders is proportionate to borders' length, while protecting the inside is proportionate to the inside's square, but they can develop an elvish style of architecture (Tolkien's elves, they used to live in the trees), likely that would greatly reduce the need to develop active masking, as well as shifting parts of their infrastructure underground, especially whatever makes "magical smoke" or ordinary smoke. Overall I don't envision the expenses to protect the territory as too big, and with proper planning and greenery even a large low-height town could be hidden under pretty ordinary vegetation.
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Taking a different tack, I think your question could be reframed as to how people are counted, and how they are officially recognized by a government. This could connect to how independent your 'special people' are.
There are still a surprisingly high number of uncounted people in the world. Deciding what it means to be uncounted, can range from it being people without some kind of official identification, in which case the numbers can be extremely high with maybe ~1.1 Billion people not having IDs, to those who live in autonomous or tribal zones, or area where 'official government' doesn't reach. How that gets defined is probably pretty political, because no government wants to say it doesn't have control over an area. But, it can be pretty murky as to who is providing what services in some pretty large areas around the word - is it the government, a government, a cartel, tribal leaders, warlord, etc. Counting people is of course important when it comes to elections, and collecting taxes, but also deciding where you want to spend your tax money on infrastructure. Also usually people are counted better where resources are and the money is...
Around 2015, for example with better satellite imagery there started be a lot more interest in mapping out where people are partly out of the concern in getting vaccines distributed in parts of Africa. The Africa case is pretty interesting, because at night, looking at the light people were generating, the satellites were getting good enough that you could find villages and relatively small population groups, and hypothetically this could help figure out how to get vaccines to more people. With other types of imagery you could start to find paths between different villages and find clearing and try figure out how to distribute vaccines efficiently. It turns out there were a lot more people living in remote areas than the governments thought. Today there are a bunch of data scientists that are using light pollution to figure out where people live not just in remote areas, but also in cities in developed countries.
Geography usually plays a large part of how well the official governments control an area, but also there is the social context - of how much a group trusts a government, or wants services from a government. This is especially true of nomadic groups, or people who live off the land, but can also be true because of some religious identity, or wanting to have close family ties and only wanting to have marriages within a particular group.
So for your world building, especially in the pre-industrial era and maybe up to the early 1900's, perhaps it is not that they are so much hidden, but more that they are ignored, and because of some remoteness, and their self sufficiency they are somewhat transparent to the rest of the world. Perhaps rather than a big centralized city, they are more decentralized to be more self sufficient, and while there may be a few explorers and travelers that come through, they don't find that much to report back to the national governments.
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# You won't really need much magic
Northern Scandinavia is a remote and hostile place, and as you say makes an excellent place to hide. Siberia would be even better. You could finesse it to avoid requiring much magic at all, depending on the strictness of your criteria.
Feeding such a large population in the middle of a frozen wasteland would be tricky, hopefully their immortality can help with that.
## Hidden from who?
The "normal population" is not a very meaningful criterion. There are different kinds of populations. In Scandinavia specifically you have settled agricultural peoples who gradually developed into modern industrial society (largely in the south, around the coasts and plains), and nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples (largely in the north, in the tundra and at higher elevations).
Settled society has complex governments, and governments have a big thing for exploring, keeping official records, and sciencey things that make it inconvenient for a small town to keep hidden. But nomadic societies often lack some or all of these factors. This makes covert coexistence with them much easier for a society that doesn't care to reveal itself.
## Hidden to what extent?
The structure of one town surrounded by a low-density population works well for a diversionary tactic against similarly sparsely-distributed Arctic nomads:
* The residents of sparsely populated outer regions adopt, or pretend to adopt, a similar lifestyle to Sami reindeer herders, close enough to the nearby tribes that they are able to establish: we are like you, this is our territory, don't go here.
* The tribes would not suspect anything was amiss, and in their sparse contact with each other and with Norwegian and Swedish societies they would say "over there is just like over here."
* Infiltrators into settled society could strategically dismiss rumors as "pagan superstition" but that is unlikely to be necessary. These infiltrators could also pose as explorers, circulating highly accurate maps of the region that just happen to exclude the city or anything valuable that might attract settlers, or prospectors. These infiltrators could also "call home" to send tips about expeditions to the area, which could then be misled or killed.
It was not until the 19th century that Norwegian and Swedish (Finland is not Scandinavian) efforts to assert their sovereignty in the north really took off. Even then, land (and thus societies) away from the coast were seen as less valuable and therefore less interesting, and only began to be actively settled by Norwegians and Swedes in the early 20th century.
# But what about planes?
When powered flight was taking off (haa haa), Sweden and Norway were not exactly world powers, and are entirely absent from the early history of airplanes. The remoteness and general lack of interest of the northern areas, combined with the foul weather, would have made it very unappealing to go flying there on a primitive airplane that would have been poorly insulated and unstable. Even the transpolar flights of the 30s would not have gone through that area.
The area only really became important in WWII as a passage for Arctic convoys (and therefore Luftwaffe bombing and Kriegsmarine raiding). But as long as you keep the society inland and have decent air defenses (or reports by pilots are dismissed as hallucinations from taking too many amphetamines) you should be alright.
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## Even if you heard of it, would you believe it?
Even to this day, Northern Scandinavia is very sparsely inhabited with many regions 100s of kilometers wide with negligible human life. Not only would these places tend to be very cold, but a lot of it is also very mountainous and had no roads leading through them making them virtually inaccessible to outsiders. Without magic, life or travel in some of these areas would be extraordinarily difficult for explorers.
As a whole, these are the lands of the Sami people who are collectively the indigenous tribes of northern Scandinavia, and who at the turn of the 20th century had very little legal status or cultural association with the actual governments of Sweden and Norway. So even if these nomadic peoples did occasionally come in contact with your civilization, and knew for a fact that it was real, there would have been very little cultural exchange or trust to pass this information on to the rest of Europe, and what few stories might get passed along would be easily dismissed as Sami folklore.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eFpgc.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0jBXW.jpg)
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The question you need to ask is why? Why are they isolated? What story are you aiming to tell?
If it's about solid world building, you can't avoid this question.
If it's an exploration of what isolation does to a society, then you don't really need too complex or believable of an answer because the focus of the story is elsewhere.
If it's just a gimmick because magic needs to remain hidden from the world at large, there are easier ways to arrange that.
If it's about how magic might affect a community culture, you need a solid explanation for why they keep it to themselves, when they could be rich, famous, respected.
If you're following real world history, geographic isolation for a population that size, in Europe, is not happening. On a global historical scale, europe is busy and crowded. Canada, Alaska, Siberia, Antarctica, and maybe some parts of the Russian steppes would be feasible, until the advent of air craft and satellites. I dont know much about Sub-Saharan Africa but there might be space there. A secret island in the Bermuda triangle could work, but only for a much smaller population.
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I am currently trying to create a system of government for a project that, for reasons I can't quite go into, combines elements from both European feudal systems with current democratic governments, as seen in America or the UK.
Without giving away plot specifics I'm going to try to divulge as many necessary bits of information as possible:
1. **My main concern is to have the basic feudal structure intact:** the king has lords, the lords have knights/vassals, and the knights/vassals protect a working class, who serve a function of that of a serf or peasant, but are given a much higher quality of living. For this reason, there are systems in place to protect the rights of the commoner, where they are represented and have rights that medieval European commoners did not.
2. **I am trying to keep as many feudal jobs and professions in tact**, give or take a few necessary changes. Putting typical cliché "RPG class" designations aside, I'm talking about things like manorial bailiffs and reeves, town criers, castellans, royal chamberlains and chancellors, etc. Naturally there's going to be some fluidity here as historical and cultural changes ensure their roles often changed and evolved, and having to also think of ways to include democratic elements in those positions will undoubtedly complicate things, but the important thing here is that the core of those positions (and their titles) are preserved.
3. **I realize there are some modern-day examples, but I want to steer clear of copying them wholesale.** There are, of course, democratic monarchies, the UK standing out the most, but even then that's not what I'm aiming for. The king of the country still holds absolute power; however, there is a congressional/parliamentary body in place to handle much of the kingdom's major issues, and to ensure the common people have a say, made up of representatives of different regions and special interest groups, etc. (the specifics of that are still being decided: I'm not really married to anything right now this far in the process, changing what I need to).
4. **Regional power is still in the hands of lords** (barons, dukes, what have you) who answer directly to the king, but are also expected to be held more directly responsible for the people they employ and protect than medieval counterparts, whose subjects had little to no rights.
5. **Commoners still make up a poorer bottom-rung class of society**, but they aren't necessarily living in filth and barely eking out a living. They might actually have more in common with the modern middle-class, although that is still being decided; point being, they have far more rights and opportunities than their historical analogues. They are allowed to own land, vote, pursue personal interests, leave manors, etc.
While it's not in the narrative, it might be best to think of this society as post-apocalyptic. Imagine a society that is stripped of modern luxuries, namely our advanced 21st-century technology, and must now resort to reverting back to this feudal state with many of its post-modern ideals still lingering and being passed along to future generations. Say, two or three down the line, there is a society somewhat resembling Europe in the Middle Ages (even down to the church having ultimate sway over some monarchs, in this case only one) but it now allows, say, women to own land, same-sex marriages, etc. It's not quite exact but it's as close as I can come without divulging too much.
That's as detailed as I can get at the moment: I'm sure I've forgotten some things and if I need to divulge more I will in future edits. Please feel free to ask me questions and I will try to answer them as best I can.
**EDIT BY BSIDESWIPED:** First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who responded so quickly and with so much helpful material; you don't know how much I appreciate it.
It seems to me that one of the main things that might cause a hangup in this whole situation is giving the monarch absolute power. So I guess an addendum I could make is that, maybe, for the sake of argument, let's say the monarch doesn't have absolute power, but serves a more dynamic purpose than just being a figurehead and a symbolic holdover. This problem may be solved already, though, as some of you have said that the church basically solves this need, but if you so choose, figure that addendum into your ideas as well.
Thank you again.
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I was initially going to say that you can't have a monarch with an absolute power and a democratically elected legislature. The two are incompatible. But I thought of a real life example. Stack Exchange is a dictatorship. It's a privately held corporation with an appointed "monarch" or CEO who has the final say on day to day matters.
Stack Exchange the corporation delegates power to elected moderators. They are under no legal obligation to empower moderators or high reputation users, but they do. In this way, they are the benevolent monarch from [@James' answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/45511/2113).
The key point there is that the democratic legislature derives its power from the absolute power of the monarch. The monarch could take back the power at any time.
This system could be stable for multiple generations if there is some way to limit monarchs to those who had that view. Perhaps the royal family teaches that to their children. Perhaps the [monarch is elected](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/45512/2113) for life and all the successful candidates agree with this principle.
Note that later generations of monarchs would have more trouble taking power back from the elected legislature.
A struggle between the monarch and the legislature for power could make a good setting for a story. Note that either side could be villains or heroes. A benevolent monarch could be taking power back from a corrupt legislature, or a courageous legislature could be preventing a despotic monarch from taking power. Either story works. It's even possible that both sides view themselves as heroes.
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>
> My main concern is to have the basic feudal structure intact:
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The basic feudal structure is mainly an agrarian structure; as you say, *the king has lords, the lords have knights/vassals, and the knights/vassals protect a working class, who serve a function of that of a serf or peasant*. Cities are not part of this. Make them democratically governed, like Italian communes of the end of the Middle Ages; give them stability by placing their democratic government under the protection of the King. The basic pact is, the King and the feudal lords do not mess with the internal business of the cities, the cities do not mess with the feudal structure encircling them. Then both sides will try to cheat and circumvent this, which gives you political/dramatical tension. The King can then appear as the higher lord who balances the feudal nobility and the township oligarchies, using the later to keep the former in check.
>
> I am trying to keep as many feudal jobs and professions in tact, give or take a few necessary changes. Putting typical cliché "RPG class" designations aside, I'm talking about things like manorial bailiffs and reeves, town criers, castellans, royal chamberlains and chancellors, etc. Naturally there's going to be some fluidity here as historical and cultural changes ensure their roles often changed and evolved, and having to also think of ways to include democratic elements in those positions will undoubtedly complicate things, but the important thing here is that the core of those positions (and their titles) are preserved.
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Those and also the traditional guild structure of medieval cities and town. Just have those guilds democratically governed (at least, "democratically" concerning the *pater familiae* of the several trading families in the towns; you can keep of course the mass of journeymen subjected to the guildmasters through "apprenticeship"). You can then balance this oligarchic element with more or less democratic participation open to wider or narrower layers of the urban artisanship.
>
> Regional power is still in the hands of lords (barons, dukes, what have you) who answer directly to the king, but are also expected to be held more directly responsible for the people they employ and protect than medieval counterparts, whose subjects had little to no rights.
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I am not sure that this is possible. Regional feudal lords are a bigger obstacle to democracy than absolute kings. Instead, I would keep them in check by either (or both) a centralised justice system, appointed by the King, to which peasants can resort against the despotism of local lords, or (and) a strong Church presence (not necessarily Christian, of course) that, as the saying goes, sides with the peasants against the most outrageous demands of the nobility - and with the nobility against the peasants, for the less outrageous demands.
Do not forget also that a feudal society is based on custom rather than legislation; if the traditional way is that peasants work for the lord five days a week, then take one day for themselves and another for their religious obligations, it should be very difficult to change this arrangement in favour of either side.
Ponder also how to solve the problem of women in such society. How is labour divided among the biological sexes, and to what extent is "domestic" or reproductive labour (de)valuated compared with "providing" labour. My gut feeling is that a more democratic political structure requires less discrimination against women and consequently either a less steep divide on which kind of labour falls to each biological sex, or some mechanism that makes domestic labour less degraded when compared with stereotypicall "male" labour.
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Well I see your problem. **You want power to reside in more than one person/group.**
The crux of the issue is that you want democracy, where (ostensibly) the power lies with the people and their vote. Conversely, and simultaneously you want a king and lords that have **absolute power** over their domains.
Power can't truly exist in both places...**unless** it can...nope never mind it can't.
Here are some ideas that come to mind that might get you close to where you want to be.
1. The benevolent king. If you have a legitimately benevolent King a system where the King rules absolute and then listens to an elected body when making decisions this could function. The major drawback here is that kings don't last forever, and having a line of kings that are all benevolent is unlikely to the point of I wouldn't believe it. For some background reading check out some [Plato](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_(Plato)). Read up on the philosopher kings.
This is actually pretty feasible in a short term scenario. And the beginning of the reign of a second not so benevolent king would be a great story setting.
2. Isolate the feudal hierarchy to the military. In this scenario the King is both head of state and head of the military (well they would be in any 'absolute power' scenario but its important to point out particularly in this case. Its not truly feudal but maybe take a look at modern Egypt...though in that case the military tends to be independent of the presidency...though (again) currently a general is the 'elected' president.
* So, you have a King, Dukes, Barons, Lords, Knights etc etc each representing a piece of land and a portion of the standing military force. The would be responsible for the daily operations of their holdings as well as the military units they lead.
* On the flip side the laws of the land would be created by an elected body and then enforced by the 'nobles'
I think this is probably my favorite option but it is complicated and again relies on the benevolence of not only a king but all the lords that support the king...its a cool idea but its hard to think it could actually happen.
How do you get those with military/policing power and generally absolute power to allow input from the masses...again this is the base problem in your scenario and there isn't an easy answer.
3. Theocracy. Ok stay with me on this one...this scenario could hypothetically work. The leader/king is the head of a state religion. They are more interested in the affairs of the gods than the affairs of the kingdom. The leader retains absolute power via their subordinate lords and can enforce any edict. Most of the time the religious leadership is disinterested in the daily affairs of the realm. So essentially the apathy of the leadership towards day to day operations allows the masses to self govern except in certain circumstances.
Modern Iran could be useful as an example here, though it is probably less democratic than you are wanting. Should serve as a decent example though.
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**There are probably a million different ways you can do this but the basics you need to account for are:**
* Who (person or group) truly wields power. In my examples the true power resides in the monarch as they would tend to be figure heads otherwise
* What mechanism allows for power sharing. Remember any power in elected bodies stems from the willingness of the monarch to allow it.
* Most of these systems will be inherently unstable, or at least prone to falling back on autocratic tendencies
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The US and the UK are actually bad models since they are neither particularly democratic nor have the degree of separation of powers you need. You need something better than either. Especially on separation of powers or your state will collapse within few years.
Iran mentioned by James is more interesting since it is actually a real world example of a nation trying to do more or less what you want with feudal switched with theocracy. Unfortunately it seems to be more based on personal "benevolence" and competence of the supreme leader than on having on actual **system** you could copy. The division of power between theocracy and democracy is also different from what you seem to want. Many issues they are having should still be relevant and useful to study.
As for actual suggestions:
You say you want the king to have absolute power and that to delegate along the feudal hierarchy. I'll assume that power here specifically means **executive power** and that their power is seen unquestioned. That would suggest that the feudal hierarchy also has direct control of mass media and public information systems.
That would leave **legislative** and **judiciary** power for democracy. Although you should remember that in a feudal system many decisions we would consider to be judiciary matters will actually be administrative decisions made by the local lord that would be appealed up the feudal not judiciary hierarchy.
To give an example: If a theft happens, investigating it might fall to the lords "personal armsmen" (really police detectives, but...). Determination of guilt if disputed might fall to local judiciary. Determination of punishment if found guilty (at court or by confession) would be for the lord as an administrative decision. Appeal for determination of guilt would be up the judiciary hierarchy. Appeal for the punishment or improper investigation would be up the feudal hierarchy.
You could confess in exchange of reduced sentence without ever entering the judicial system, so plea deals would be abundant. Possibly abundantly abused as well. Although using plea deals to get free labor to the lords mines might not be considered abuse in this system. Abuse would be reported up the feudal chain, not the judicial.
Legislative system could probably be a simple parliament of districts choosing their representatives. The parliament would then elect committees working on separate areas of legislation. The results would then be approved or rejected by the parliament. Changes to the division of power between parliament, the king and lords would be constitutional issues and require approval by both the king and assembled lords. Or if the king has "absolute power" just the king. So the privileges of the feudal hierarchy would be guaranteed by the constitution. Disputes would go to the top court of the nation, as would any complaints about laws being unconstitutional. It might be simpler to give the top court a simple veto on any legislation.
The parliament would employ large staff to provide support services and necessary legal and topical expertise. Both representatives and staff would enjoy significant protections against interference by feudal hierarchy. All effort would have been made to make them independent of the king and the feudal hierarchy.
At the same time, the parliament would be seen and represented as assisting the king, not as having power over him. The immunities and privileges of the parliament would be in order to allow them to speak and and work freely without needing to worry about offending their betters, so that they can give the king the best possible help in managing his realm.
The judiciary hierarchy would handle all disputes of guilt, evidence, validity, and constitutionality. It would be run by professional judges elected by the parliament and appointed by the king. The judges and staff would have the same privilege in order to give best service as the parliament. Reasonably the judiciary would also have the oversight of the correctness and impartiality of administrative and legislative procedures of the feudal hierarchy and the parliament. Assisting citizens in dealing with the feudal hierarchy, say when negotiating a plea deal, would be part of that.
Relationship with feudal hierarchy would probably be adversarial, with parliament somewhat ambivalent. All would be loyal servants of the king, though.
You'd also need to decide how many levels you want in these hierarchies and what their powers and duties are. Also blank are the parts where education, religion and commerce fit in.
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The UK government is very interesting for a setup like yours.
It is a bicameral system:
* The [House of Lords](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords) composed by appointed members (mainly) from the nobility
* The [House of Commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Commons_of_the_United_Kingdom), which is an elected Parliament
You can then tweak the respective power of each chamber to better fit your world.
There are a number of relatively recent changes that you may want to skip in your world:
* Before the establishment of the Supreme Court in 2009, the [Law Lords](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_Appeal_in_Ordinary) were the final court of appeal.
* The [House of Lords Act 1999](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords_Act_1999) reduced the number of hereditary peers that could sit there.
* Until the [Parliament Act 1911](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_Act_1911) the House of Lords could reject laws from the House of Commons.
Thus, it seems relatively easy to adapt that for your world where there is a parlamentary democracy but at the same time the lords still have most of the power.
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The two systems are not as different as you have been led to believe. Feudalism doesn't inherently center around an all-powerful nobility. The defining element of feudalism is a hierarchical system of vassalage, and, in point of fact, in a feudal society the highest levels of the government often had less actual power than modern "representative democracies".
The key element to feudalism is vassalage. Basically deals made between different groups. For example, a town agrees that it will provide the local lord with X number of fighters for up to Y days per year, and in return the lord will see to it that no rampaging armies come through looting and pillaging. The lord becomes the lord by collecting up such agreements from multiple towns so that he can call up enough troops to defend the land as necessary. The obligations in the agreement go both ways. If either side fails to live up to its bargain, the other side is freed of its obligation, and there may be some penalty clause to the contract as well.
To tie this in with a parliamentary system, all you really need is to structure the contracts that make up the feudal system appropriately. Say, an escape clause where if X number of the barons vote "no confidence" in the local count, then all the contracts are thrown open for re-negotiation. Or a requirement that the higher levels defer to the votes cast by representatives of the lower levels in certain circumstances. Or specified rights that the higher levels are not allowed to infringe upon under any circumstances without voiding the deal and leaving the lower levels free to choose a new leader.
What you'll end up with won't be that much different from what historical feudalism produced in some areas where it was difficult for any one group to gather enough support to be the single, acknowledged leader. Check out the history behind the Magna Carta and its predecessors for some ideas about what kinds of deals were struck.
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Elective monarchy.
The king/President and the ministers are elected. Only members of the aristocracy are eligible. They are the ones who take the major decisions of the state.
The rest of the parliament could be elected from the populace but their power would be smaller than the aristocrats. They help the above to take decisions but rarely have a chance to pass their own laws, unless the aristocracy approves.
A weighted vote system: the higher your rank in the society, the more your vote counts.
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You might like to check out a real world example: Somaliland (Self declared independent state: Capital Hargiesa -Northern Somalia)Somaliland has managed to integrate the Clan system into the upper house of their parliament. Thus keeping traditional clan based power structures while incorporating multi party politics into their lower house- 3 (relatively) free and fair elections and counting!
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Modern parliamentary monarchies have the issues that the monarch is usually just a figurehead and a diplomat, but does not govern internal affairs. Also, feudalism implies a mostly agrarian society, which is expressed in the question, as typical jobs, and as knights/lords.
A much better example than modern countries would be the [Principality of Transylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Transylvania_%281570%E2%80%931711%29), and maybe the 17th century Dutch Republic, but I have more knowledge about the former, so let's take a look at it for an example.
It was an elective monarchy, the ruler called the "Prince" was elected by an assembly of nobles. There was also a parliamentary system, called the [Diet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvanian_Diet). However, the country was still mostly agrarian, and the lords of the land could do pretty much what they wanted on their own lands. Interestingly, while the Diet was the main form of government, the ruler still had the right to distribute and re-distribute lands among the nobles, a very clear resemblance to feudalism.
What makes it even more interesting, is that while the militarily and economical might was in the hands of the nobles ruling over vast estates and villages, the cities were something completely different. The walled cities, especially those belonging to the [Saxons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvanian_Saxons), had great autonomy, they could freely elect their own leaders and freely adopt any internal policy. They actually resembled independent city-states allied with the country, rather than cities being part of the country.
All in all, it was an interesting mixture of democracy and feudalism. Of course, from a modern perspective you could find social injustice, but for its time period it was quite progressive. Among other things, it was among the first countries to declare the freedom of religion (1558-1568).
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To drastically over-simplify, English feudal society consisted of a conflict of power between nobles and the monarch at the top, while in everyday life serfs (I'll use the word in general to indicate commoners in vassalage, I don't want to get into the fine distinctions) interacted only with their lords (and that not directly but via intermediaries), and almost all the time had little power or leverage.
However there was a notion of the King's justice, as contrasted with local lord's courts. Supposing that you had a broadly feudal-looking system, but in which a succession of monarchs are somehow secure in power, then they might have both the interest and the ability to take an active role in spreading their justice as widely as possible, establishing and supporting their courts and making them fully accessible to all.
Then, the response to an event like the Peasant's Revolt could be for the King to listen to the concerns of his subjects and respond by establishing *some* kind of body through which they can represent their concerns to him outside the authority of their nobles. This body might then have certain delegated powers, and be in effect a second parliament for the commoners, or "house of commons" ;-) Perhaps it could combine the city-based guilds with the rural serfs, although historically guilds had their own routes to influence. But he can only do this if he's secure, it can only be stable if several successors in a row are secure, and the English feudal monarchy was never secure for long.
The practical problems are also high, since feudal vassals were very limited in their ability to travel and communicate, so it's not obvious how such a body would actually interact with those it's supposed to represent. Furthermore, societal attitudes about fitness to lead were such that I'd expect such a body to consist of appointed wardens of the serfs, rather than anything we'd call an elected representative. Serfs just didn't get the education to engage with the administration, and the notion of taking one serf to represent all of them (or even all of them in an area) probably wouldn't make much sense.
But if you educate serfs, and give them communication and the ability to travel and organise and represent themselves politically, then they're going to give feudalism the heave-ho, just like the bourgeoisie did historically.
Anyhow I think this is the needle you have to thread: your "serf's parliament" is the symptom of some effort by the King to ensure that a weakened nobility behaves justly towards its vassals, via a body with a general remit to petition the King, since the King's courts however strong in their authority can only consider one case at a time. Just remember that by excluding the nobles from it, it is inevitably in conflict with the nobles. This conflict can't be *entirely* stable if the nobles have the capacity to disrupt it when its actions don't suit them. The monarch needs somehow to have the military power to discipline the nobility if it came to it, and this was frequently absent from English feudalism.
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If you look further then the West there are kingdoms that do have a Monarch with absolute power but also have a parliament. The kingdom of Jordan would be an example. Thailand had prior to 2014 both a king with and an democratically elected parliament.
Iran isn't a kingdom but it also has a ruler that distinct from the parliament and president that are democratically elected.
What those examples have in common is that the democratically elected body isn't in full control of the military but the military can be controlled by the king.
In a lot of war-torn states like Iraq local warlords do have the power over their territories even when there are democratic elections. If you look at a post-apocalyptic scenario lords that are like those warlords fit into the scenario.
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I think you basically answered the question yourself near the end - you give the Church the role you need to balance the inherent inequality of the feudal system, just don't have the King as the Head of the Church - you'll probably need a constitutional block or something to keep him in his place.
To the average commoner in that type of society, King and God were both pretty much on the same level anyway - all-powerful figures you disobeyed at your peril, lest their more earthly agents come for you.
Imagine if the Catholic Church in medieval Europe was a bit more pious and benevolent than it was in reality - with that much power and influence, how much do you think they could have fulfilled the role you describe? You could look at King John and the Magna Carta, and imagine if that was driven by this kindly Church instead of rebel barons?
Keep your feudal system, keep your feudal professions, keep your regional lords and barons, keep your rustic rabble, just tweak your religion.
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Most if not all of the Central Polynesian countries that have independence use this model. It's done by having 2 or even three tiers of power (if you include Church which you should, because it's a powerful way of getting ahead by bypassing bloodline). But I won't discuss the Church much because in theory they're busy worshipping and it would take too long. And their real power for positive has degraded a lot over time.
Kings are Heads of State with mostly diplomatic duties and very little actual personal power, but they ratify important things by law so in some cases hold veto powers, and in theory can dissolve parliament at a whim, so they can exert influence with chiefs when they really want to, and they're practically demigods to the commoners (most can trace their bloodlines directly to the Gods, but most chiefly lines can also do that, most importantly they're direct descendants of a culture hero with explicit sanction to be kings through eternity or until eaten by someone equally well blooded (which doesn't happen any more these days)).
A Paramount chief has overall control of a village because he controls the allocation of titles to other chiefs in part, and he controls the allocation of land to the chiefly titles in part. Each village has regular meetings where they set out their agendas, only chiefs have input and their decisions are largely autonomous of government. Paramount chief would be like a regional King or Nobleman.
Chiefs control the land in a village so they pretty much control the voters (they tell the people who to vote for upon pain of banishment from the land).
Each high chief speaks for an extended family, speaking chiefs are the mouthpieces of the high chiefs. Only chiefs are allowed by law to run for parliament. A High Chief depending on the esteem of his title would be the various Knights, Barons etc,. A Speaking Chief would be a regional court advisor, spokesperson.
Commoners are just peasants, their only power and mouth is through their families chiefs which in theory they can depose if they want to. Rising through the ranks is done by service to the family and village (theory again) rather than inherited father to son. Their standard of life is not hardship level although intentionally kept poor, because chiefs rely at least in part on their support and their basic needs are met by laws and the needs of their communities. They're not tied to the land as in the old days where leaving the village boundaries would put them in very real physical danger, instead it's mostly economic factors, inertia and tradition that keep them there.
Government is dominated by a few elite families who can afford to educate their children. Politicians (all chiefs by law) choose govt CEO's who in turn control their departments which can become almost family businesses over time.
This is bare bones, the theory is mostly lip service and the practice is a lot different, it's actually very complex and has it's own land and titles courts in all the countries they do this. This sort of system just barely works with a lot of looking the other way. But it breeds corruption and nepotism and in my opinion is inherently unstable for many reasons.
However in it's incipient stages it's a great system and worked out well when everyone was pulling together after Independence. Over time it degenerates very quickly into an oligarchy of petty dictators controlling all resources and monopolies of industries and govt departments by families of elites. Who by necessity need to keep the commoners in their place. With three separate authority systems that aren't really compatible vying for the services and resources. All citing God as giving them the authority and all three collaborating to some extent to retain their authority, and all three capable of making a violent mess if pushed far enough. Government having the last say since they can call on overseas military help if necessary.
At the beginning it all worked well because the three tiers worked together (at the expense of the commoners. Quite quickly the Churches being overseas led became an issue, so the elites decided to manage their assets for them so they could concentrate on Religious stuff, and founded their own denomination, built theological colleges and brought religion in to line.
Most have been independent for about 50 or 60 years so the first decade was pretty good and looked very positive, then very rapid degeneration. So you can see the whole sequence.
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When I read over what you are looking for, I see some incompatibilities (which I'm seeing others pointing out as well). The key will be in identifying exactly who to have what powers to lie in and in what way are they checked against each other.
One thing I might point you to is India's Caste system. I haven't looked at it since middle school (over a decade ago) but I seem to recall that there are various classes of citizens. At the top are a type of nobility (easily adaptable to European Nobility system) and below them was a priestly class followed by the Warriors. Below that I don't recall; however, I remember that at the bottom there is a class that is considered sub human in a sense.
I see an adaptation of this system possible for you where your society obviously has the nobility at the top followed by a warrior class (knight families at the top of this class) and below them the free men. This 3rd class has voting rights for a British like House of Commons. Below the free peoples are a class of indentured servants who are still stuck under the thumbs of the nobility and lack the freedoms of the common folk.
You will have to determine how one moves up and down through the class system (if they can).
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I think the best example would be too look at republican Rome. There, the elected members of the senatorial class acted as a legislature and they themselves elected two co-consuls for executive function. Each co-counsel had a separate role: one assumed responsibility for military campaigns, expanding the empire's borders, bringing back riches from loot, and so on, while the other co-counsel focused more on domestic issues. Each co-counsel could only hold office for one year (as to prevent dictatorial ascension) and, once elected, could not assume the position again until an additional 10 years had passed, although this restriction was routinely abused by powerful individuals and during times of intense strife.
The Roman model could also be used to fuse the agrarian feudal system with the urban aristocratic/democratic/dictatorial structure, as Rome had an efficient and sustainable (especially if you consider the Eastern Roman Empire as a direct continuation of Roman culture up until the 15th century, as Eastern Romans did in those days) way for incorporating conquered peoples into their empire: at first they became foreign territories/protectorates, then built them up and structured their societies until they became "allies," and eventually their way of life was so inseparable from that of the (traditional, Italian) Romans that they were happy to become a fully fledged part of the empire outright, with all of the trade and security and upward mobility advantages that came with it.
The gradual transition from conquered people to ally to Roman citizen fostered a strong sense of imperial identity that persists even to this day. No empire in Europe - and arguably the world's history - has drawn as much inspiration and cemented cross-cultural cohesion as Rome.
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I think the simple answer here is to understand that no power is ever absolute. King Charles I was an absolute monarch, yet still got his head cut off. King John was an absolute monarch but the barons still told him to sign the Magna Carta (or else!)
There are ways of using this - while the King has absolute power, it effectively can be limited in many ways by political means. For example, after the English Restoration, the King was absolute, but he gave parliament various powers over boring stuff, like raising and collecting taxes. As a result, although the King had power over everything, if he wanted to go to war, he had to ask Parliament nicely, and then it was up to them to refuse (rarely happened, but by god did they extract various promises from the King in return) or delay collection.
So you have a democratically elected parliament, and you have an absolute power king. None of which gets to exercise that power without restriction.
If you want absolute freedom for the king as well, you're pretty much looking at a pre-law society. (IIRC Capet was the first king to set down laws that also bound himself), once you start making laws like that, you open a can of worms that grows. Guilds get little exemptions or powers for themselves that they then guard and little islands of power grow. Gives endless scope for plots!
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Suppose I created a private network of peer-to-peer cellphones and started handing phones out to people globally. Now, these phones don't have to use the common cell phone bands of the EM spectrum... I know some bands are better than others for building penetration, etc... the users of this network are willing to put up with many annoyances, so maybe they use radio or something more exotic. Each peer needs a transmission distance of maybe 50 meters, tops... not powerful broadcasts.
At first, since few people will have these devices, there would just be bursts of transmission, but over the course of time, the transmissions would rise globally to essentially continuous chatter. Because of encryption, this network will essentially be broadcasting white noise globally on a given channel of the EM spectrum on as narrow a band as possible with current technology.
What transmission band could I use to have the longest period without being detected by government and corporate interests? It has to work to support cell phone type communication net, so maybe I'm restricted to the channels already in use for cell phones, but I'm hoping not. I have heard that between science researchers and government spies, there's essentially global monitoring of the whole spectrum, so someone is going to notice eventually. I'm just trying to figure out a space where that notice can plausibly slip by as long as possible.
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Don't pick a single band: use all of them.
[Spread spectrum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum) technology can be used to send/retrieve signals below the noise floor. This makes it's hard to detect. The wider the available frequency spectrum you use, the less power devoted to any one frequency and so the harder it is to identify that anyone is actually transmitting.
Let's imagine you transmit at 2.4 GHz normally at 1 watt with a channel width of 10 kHz:
* Spread that 1 watt over 100 kHz and now a 10 kHz band only gets 100 mW.
* Spread it over 1 MHz and that 10 kHz band gets 10 mW.
* Spread it over 10 MHz and you're down to 1 mW detectable signal.
* 100 MHz → 100 µW, 1 Ghz → 10 µW.
This is the RF power at the antenna. By the time you're a couple of meters away, detecting a 10 µW signal is very hard.
But your receiver with its 1 GHz spread spectrum system still listens like you're transmitting at 1 W.
Current spread spectrum is relatively narrow band (Wi-Fi is spread spectrum), but I can imagine that if your system spanned from, say 100 MHz to 1 GHz it would be nearly impossible to detect.
The reason it's so narrow (apart from regulatory considerations) is because engineering a broad spectrum transmitter and receiver is hard (probably borderline infeasible a couple of years back). There are also odd practical considerations: the different frequencies will bounce/absorb differently. And if you're doing long range comms, the different signals will arrive at different times (IIRC a lightning strike at the north pole arrives at the south pole as an ascending chirp rather a single pulse!). Given sufficient motivation, I'm sure there is a solution out there.
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If the transmission distance only needs to be 50 meters, tops, just use wifi. Each phone is a hotspot. Don't make the network name discoverable. Or do; it's perfectly legal to set up wifi hotspots, so it's no big deal if someone discovers the broadcast. You could automatically assign names to each hotspot designed to be similar to names people normally assign to wifi networks, to make it less conspicuous.
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Other answers and comments have addressed the peripheral issues of
* Distributing hardware
* Peer-to-peer communication
* Encryption doesn't necessarily mean it looks like white noise
...so I won't. Here's your answer: **8-meter**, i.e. **40MHz**. There's several reasons why.
1. 8-meter enjoys excellent sporadic E, i.e. the radio waves can bounce off ionized clouds in the upper atmosphere which can allow signals to go well over the horizon, perhaps farther. A popular party trick with North American radio amateurs is to use 8m in the summer to make contacts in Hawaii, northern parts of South America, and western Africa. It's worth noting that sun spots and other solar activity can greatly improve this. IRL, we're actually moving into an active cycle and expect it to get a lot better for a couple years.
2. 8-meter is virtually dead, like most low-frequency bands. In the USA and most of the world, the 8m band is reserved for amateurs because it isn't terribly useful for serious applications. The frequency is too low for modern high-bandwidth digital communications. Even modern RADAR systems work on much higher frequencies. If 8m ever sees widespread commercial/industrial/military application it will be a low-bandwidth automated ping, not any sort of serious communications.
3. The people who care about 8-meter are generally ignored. I used to watch the office for a lab manager when I was a university instructor. His office included the interface for the university's 8m repeater, so I'd spend hours listening to the chatter. It's mostly conspiracy theorists who, once their conversation moved to how Obama was going to microchip all the Christians, agreed to switch to morse code to make it harder for the NSA to monitor their conversation. These are the people who'd actually notice your "white noise" and they'd likely attribute it to a government conspiracy. The less crazy people would perhaps report it to the FCC (or comparable local regulatory body) but frankly nobody is likely to care that much. As long as the noise is relatively narrow and doesn't interfere with old folks discussing Bill Gates and the lizard people Deep State, no regulatory body is going to expend the resources to investigate it.
EDIT: One more thing! Global white noise signals on specific frequency bands are actually not uncommon, especially among the lower bands. If it does indeed look like white noise and is indeed global, it might get written off as some sort of stellar phenomena.
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As of 2021, I'd guess probably somewhere >=100 GHz. Anything below that is allocated to and being heavily used by somebody; take a look at the frequency allocation charts at <https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/304919/what-unlicensed-frequencies-can-or-should-be-used-for-proprietary-wireless-com> . The problem is, of course, that components that work at those frequency ranges are uncommon and expensive. You might try to use the highest [EHF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_high_frequency) frequency band allocated to [amateur radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_frequency_allocations) your radios can reach to reduce the chance of attention as long as possible.
Don't count on even those frequency bands remaining unused much longer though, either; the need for bandwidth is infinite and engineers and researchers are already looking at how to use those frequencies for commercial and industrial purposes already, including 6G cellular networks. See, for example, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz9aaVEXztE>
As an aside, broadcasting encrypted signals that look like white noise hides nothing because "continuous chatter" raises the [noise floor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_floor). Anybody with a spectrum analyzer that covers the right frequency range can see that unexpected bump and will start wondering why and government communications agencies will be highly motivated to find out once they notice it occurring.
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1. Ultra wideband. It's a modulation that broadcasts signal in short pulses but with very wide spectrum. It won't interfere with usual narrowband radio. It is in fact already supported in some phones but only for personal area network, no idea if it is feasible for longer distances.
2. Hide in some existing signal. For example repeat wifi broadcasts and hide data there to mimic legitimate traffic. The signal would superficially look like ordinary reflection. The receiver would extract data by comparing original and copy.
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## Use a band that already lets everyone and their mom do this
The 2.4GHz ISM band is usable worldwide for low-powered unlicensed signals, is certainly suitable for communications at the range that you describe, and another wideband signal in that noise floor simply won't get noticed among all the WLAN/BT/ISM signals already present.
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**No EM. Use sound.**
50 meters is only half of a football field! I can read your Tshirt at 50 meters (it says "Cured by Ivermectin"). You can speak in moderate tones and be heard. Your devices can use infrasound or ultrasound.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNf9nzvnd1k&t=47s>
On this video I did not hear anything until 210 HZ and then could not hear anything again over 11000 HZ. Your devices are microphone / speakers that take the pitch of the users voice either over or under what humans can hear, amplify it and broadcast it. Acting as a receiver it lowers or raises the frequency of what it hears to be within human hearing range. Alternatively it could just be a parabolic dish with a microphone and speaker if you don't care who hears you.
Dogs may do a lot of howling. Whales might show up wondering what is going on. Spies will be none the wiser. Unless they are whale or dog spies.
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In my medieval fantasy world, airships are efficient and entrenched in the economy of trade and commerce. However, coordinating air travel on certain routes and prevailing winds seems difficult, especially considering that this world lacks much of what modern air traffic control uses to coordinate travel in airspace (ie. radio communication, high powered light, etc).
**How would a medieval society coordinate/communicate with these airships? Would this process be possible on a wide scale? Is there real-life precedent for this?**
For a basis on the general technological level, refer to late Imperial China (Ming/Qing Dynasty). This world also has a strong light-weight substance which the airships are made out of and an abundance of non-flammable gas that is lighter than air.
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During Middle Age ships cruised the seas with no communication whatsoever with both land and other ships. If there was any communication it was only when the ship was in sight or ear distance.
Despite this they were able to trade and travel.
Same can go for your airships: travel by sight and have always some eyes on the watch. Forget about systematic communications.
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### For congested airspace: Flags, Candles, coloured glass, and a codebook.
So [Semaphore Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore) is probably the best option (using flags to communicate), but also modern air traffic control has a [backup system using coloured lights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_light_signals) for when the radio fails (Eg flashing green means either "Cleared for Taxi" or "turn around and come back to airport" - depending on whether you're airborne or not). Both coloured flags and coloured lights give a way of transmitting a few pre-arranged simple messages long distance day or night.
To achieve bright coloured light at night in medieval time, you need a flame and coloured glass. There's a trick to making candle light much brighter that was used in early lighthouses - put a glass cylinder above the flame, which creates and then amplifies an updraft, which makes the candle burn much brighter. By having a few different coloured glass cylinders, you can transmit coloured light at night.
### Outside of controlled airspace
Your going to have to use "visual flight rules" - look for others, and stay out of clouds so others can see you. If you see someone else, pass on the "left/right".
If there are lots of airships, you would specify a convention for routes - either one way routes, requesting routes in advance from a central authority, or, if you have accurate barometers, altitudes are assigned for different directions.
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Flying can be tricky on occasion. Flying something as ungainly as an airship even more so. Even just navigating becomes a new skill from up there. So you need someone who knows the lay of the land so to speak.
**Harbor Pilots**
They've been a thing since [ancient Greece](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_pilot) and is the most reliable way to navigate without all the fun bits and bobs we have today. You'd have to start with establishing a holding point or points outside of the controlled airspace. The airship comes to a stop or enters a holding pattern at the station and a harbor pilot is sent up via a small airship to board. the harbor pilot, fully updated on current traffic, winds, and where to dock, then proceeds to take the airship in.
A significant portion of the crew should also be on lookout for rogue or out of control airships, because you can never be too careful, and idiots exist.
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In addition to optical signals mentioned in other answers, for near and mid-range communication you might also use horns to broadcast acoustic signals. Note that this is used even today by ships navigating in certain weather conditions (real life precedent: [foghorns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foghorn)!) where optical communication is impossible. Messages sent can be quite basic ("Watch out, I'm here!") but could be complex in theory, e.g. a few letters of Morse code makes for a rich message catalog (real life precedent: [Q-Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code#Aeronautical_Code_signals_(QAA%E2%80%93QNZ;_ICAO))).
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**Premise:** My setting incorporates an alternate history with a Martian invasion at the end of the 19th century as in War of the Worlds, the two major technical differences being that the Martians are not immediately incapacitated by endemic earth diseases and human warmaking is slightly more advanced along vaguely steampunkish lines (larger airships, earlier tanks, etc...).
To make the Martians tactically more flexible, I assume they have a wider variety of weaponry than direct-fire beam weapons (heat rays) and indirect-fire gas canisters (black smoke), including explosive-tipped guided missiles (typically called buzz-bombs by the human defenders). Assume the buzzbombs were originally developed for use against other Martian warcraft (i.e. tripods, 'flying machines') and perhaps Barsoomian-type contragravity aeronefs.
**Question:** How well would the guided buzz-bombs perform against early aircraft, such as hot air balloons, early airships (rigid or non-rigid), and early airplanes? My thought is that they would not be well-suited against many early aircraft with the possible exception of large zeppelins because their largely wood and canvas construction, smaller size, and cooler engines would render them harder to detect. I searched for Radar Cross Sections of WWI aircraft, but nothing turned up.
(Earth's higher gravity, thicker atmosphere, and warmer air would also affect performance of the Martian weapons, but ignore this for the time being).
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Wood aircraft are not necessarily stealthy. They still contain a fair amount of metal, in the engine, and wing bracing. RCS is not just how much metal, it's the shape of the metal, as radar cross section is how well the target reflects RF energy back to the receiver. Wing bracing wires make great antennas to reflect radar.
Consider the case of a later aircraft, the [Horten/Gotha 229](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229), a flying wing with an airframe largely made of wood. It was long rumored to be stealthy, and Reimar Horten claimed that he had used a charcoal paint to cut the radar reflection, but the Smithsonian, who has the only known example of a 229, could find no evidence of the charcoal paint, and contemporary tests on a full sized model showed that the 229 had a radar cross section about 40% to 50% of a ME109, smaller but definitely not stealthy. It was the metal in the 229's engines and cockpit that reflected the radar.
Modern heat seeking missiles can pick out a fairly small heat source, especially if the sky is the background. A lot of ground attack aircraft and helicopters, such as the A10 or Apache, use shielding to mask the heat signature from shoulder fired heat seekers, so those missiles have been updated accordingly. Presumably, an invader would have such tech.
Actually, the greatest damage done to London during WW1 wasn't from the airships. It was from the early heavy bombers, specifically the Gotha G4 and G5, that Germany used in 1917, after the British figured out how to shoot down airships. The Germans discontinued airships as bombing platforms quickly, when they started losing a lot of them, while the Gotha's were as fast as the best fighter planes, and quite difficult to catch in flight.
I would tend to think that a technically advanced invader wouldn't use missiles against the rather fragile and slow WW1 vintage aircraft. They'd use something more economical, like a rail gun or directed energy weapon. Considering the numbers of aircraft they'd have to deal with, a rail gun with 200 slugs takes up a lot less room than 200 missiles.
Then again, a more advanced invader might not need to engage in direct combat against WW1 vintage weapons. They could target the country's leadership, tossing it into disarray, or its industrial infrastructure such as gas and electricity, putting its economy into a tailspin, things WW1 armies didn't have the capability to pull off.
Or, an advanced invader might decide to ally itself with one faction, say Germany as the more warlike, erode the British and French military, and let the Germans subjugate the rest of humanity with their assistance.
How could humanity win against that? Perhaps someone in the German military, realizing the implications of such an alliance (when would the invaders turn on the Germans?) could use the association with the invaders to learn their weak points, and communicate that to the rest of the world.
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I would contend that the effectiveness of PGM against slower-moving targets would depend on the type of guidance system, but only in the range of "effective" to "extremely effective". Purely-automatic systems might not see enough return for accurate targeting and subsequent - but those only came into being because manual/line-of-sight systems couldn't track faster-moving targets. We have the opposite problem here.
If your Martians are too advanced to use manual or semi-manual target tracking (possible, but we still use those types of systems when firing at ground targets from fast-moving aircraft), I'd say that the Martians could likely resort to using weapons designed for ground craft or even stationary targets. A modern medium-range air-to-air missile has a flight speed of [over 3,000mph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-120_AMRAAM) - in comparison, the paltry 120mph of the [Fokker D.VII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fokker_D.VII#Specifications_(D.VII_with_Mercedes_D.III_engine)) may as well be stationary. With those speed differentials, you could even fire the PGMs *without* guidance, line-of-sight, and hit most of the time. At the effective range of the Fokker's guns, you'd have little over 1s to react to an incoming missile.
And if the guidance systems just aren't doing it for air-to-air combat, just wait until the comparatively-limited-range WWI-era planes have to land, then light them all up at once.
**Edits for clarity:**
There are many different types of "guided" munitions, with different levels of sophistication. Systems termed "purely-automatic" above would be the most advanced of these, sometimes termed "fire-and-forget". In these systems, the target can be identified either by the user or, in some cases, the munition itself. The target is then tracked by computer and the missile automatically guided to the target.
Less-advanced systems might have manual target tracking (beam-riding systems, e.g.) with automated guidance, automated target tracking with manual guidance, or fully-manual tracking and guidance.
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance#GOT_systems)
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Stunningly well. Astoundingly well.. Hideously well...
The descriptions of the flying machines are, from memory, very scant, but we can assume that both from Well’s descriptions of Martian technology and the fact that the Martians could *fly between worlds* that they can fly faster, higher and with more maneuverability than even the best WW1 planes. While the radar cross section of a plane might not be big, it certainly would be enough for Martian sensors (they could identify military hardware on the surface of the Earth from mars) to pick up on.
Given that WW1 planes were primarily made of wood and the Martian ships were made of metal it’s possible that a Martian missile could destroy a plane without even detonating. There are accounts of RPG’s passing straight through the hulls of cargo planes without detonating on account of the relative thinness of the hull, and unlike modern cargo planes WW1 planes can’t deal with having meter wide holes punched through them. Of course, if the bomb does detonate the plane will pretty much cease to exist anyway, so..
On the subject of airships: the Martians, having slowly but surely drawn their plans, would likely fit incendiary payloads.
Whoomph.
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I'm not really clear why you think the Martians don't have "tactical" flexibility given they are equipped with the equivalent of nuclear powered megawatt infrared lasers and wide acting chemical agents mounted on fast moving tripod war machines.
[TV Tropes interlude:](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds)
>
> Frickin' Laser Beams: The "Heat Ray" is a much more realistic description of the effect of a laser than most fiction has managed since lasers were actually invented. The "Heat Ray" as being invisible, making it terrifying as the protagonists can't see the beam, only what it's currently igniting. A high-powered (and by that, we mean nuclear) infrared-spectrum laser weapon would behave pretty much exactly as described.
>
>
>
The only conceivable Earthly weapons system which could engage for short periods of time would be ironclad warships (think of the "Thunderchild"), since the metal could absorb the damage from a laser weapon for a short time, the ship is compartmentalized enough to limit the effects of "black smoke" and it is *also* a mobile gun platform. Full fledged battleships or armoured cruisers would seem to have more of a chance against a Martian than a torpedo ram, the main issue is the ships gunnery would only extend inland so far, while the Martians would not be able to extend their reach beyond a short distance from the shore, so you clearly have a stalemate.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M6Pzi.jpg)
*Typical period Armoured Cruiser*
The Martians can obviously deal death and destruction to *anything* in line of sight using the heat ray (and that includes aircraft, even modern 4th generation jet fighters), and use black smoke to root out anyone attempting to hide under cover. PGMs are simply not necessary for the Martians to fight Humans.
OTOH, the reason the Humans got curb stomped by the Martians in TWOTW is *because* they were unable to hit the fast moving tripods. In effect, the force that needs PGMs to leverage the limited amount of firepower they have is the Humans!
Now while Steampunk or Clockpunk PGMs are difficult to arrange, one could imagine a large glide bomb like weapon launched from a sufficiently high flying airship or airplane (or perhaps catapulted from a warship) that *could* achieve something of this effect. Discounting the idea of a Kamikaze pilot, the device would likely resemble the Japanese [Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka](https://infogalactic.com/info/Yokosuka_MXY7_Ohka) or the German [Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg](https://infogalactic.com/info/Fieseler_Fi_103R_Reichenberg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uSyIY.jpg)
*Ohka*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FXhgU.jpg)
*Fi 103*
Oddly enough, even in a Steampunk world there are solid fuel rockets, and the idea of a pulse jet is simple enough that it possibly could be developed under the emergency circumstances of a Martian invasion. A form of turbojet was invented and flown in [1911](https://infogalactic.com/info/Coand%C4%83-1910) (using a conventional IC motor to drive the compressor), so jet engines are also possible.
Using a ground or air observer, the weapon would be guided using a variation of the [SACLOS](https://infogalactic.com/info/Semi-automatic_command_to_line_of_sight) (Semi Automatic Control Line Of Sight) mechanism that TOW missile uses. A bright flare on the back of the weapon is used as the reference, and the observer uses a sight to line up the missile and the target. If the missile drifts away from the target (or the target moves), the observer uses a heliograph to send a light signal to the receiver mounted on the back of the missile, which then activates a clockwork or other mechanism to move the control surfaces to correct the missile's flight. A ground observer could be used to guide a low flying version of the missile catapulted from a warship, giving the Royal Marines some glorious opportunities to win the [VC](https://infogalactic.com/info/Victoria_Cross).
The obvious downside to this is the observer and firing aircraft are both very vulnerable during the flight of the weapon, so the SOP is likely several aircraft fire a volley of missiles at once to try to overwhelm the tripod before it can shoot all the aircraft or missiles down. The race will to be building large numbers of missiles and launch platforms faster than the Martians can destroy them.
[Answer]
Away from line-of-sight, the humble WWI craft might prove difficult to detect. Here are some approaches that might be used by Martian invaders for fielding precision weapons against low-heat-signal, slow moving airborne targets:
## Create larger, slower, more expensive missiles with more powerful sensors
This involves building an advanced, missile-mounted antique plane detection system. The martians would have to producing enough of them to field, attach them to missiles, and sacrifice them upon detonation, expending components and rare materials. Such systems probably rely on **tracking engine noise**, or high visibility of the Fokker in daylight. Strategies to defeat this would include flying at night-time, or switching the engine off to glide. Such a scenario would result in **cat-and-mouse games**, as the Martians listen for buzzing WWI bombers at night-time, hesitating to fire off their expensive missiles.
## Invest in reconnaissance platforms
One high-altitude reconnaissance craft can guide several missiles. The missiles themselves can be very inexpensive, containing only propellant, steering and communications equipment. A potential drawback of this approach, in a planetary invasion scenario, would be high network load (hundreds of missiles flying at once). This might be exploited by Earthly defenders, who would employ **swarm tactics** to overwhelm the reconnaissance system. Fortunately, Earth planes of the WWI period fly very slowly, decreasing the need for Martian missiles to consume tracking data. The slow speed would help the Martian missiles keep on target, even with network overloading issues.
This tactic would make the reconnaissance equipment itself a target. Battles would be fought to keep the "eye in the sky" open.
## Increase the missile blast radius
World War 2 anti-aircraft rounds had a blast radius of about 100 metres. The goal was merely to project shrapnel (flak) into the air and let the enemy planes fly through it. Given their expertise in high-energy thermal devices, Martians could increase the effective range of a single detonation to **at least a mile**. Flying at 120 mph, and with fore-knowledge that they are about to be targeted by a single round, a Fokker would have about 30 seconds to get out of range. If large-radius anti-aircraft rounds are as inexpensive to the Martians as WWII munitions were to humans, they could potentially be used in a **barrage**, making large areas lethal for aircraft to fly in.
Potentially, such barrages could even be guided from observation bases located on Mars itself. Using a little trajectory prediction, aided by the limited top speed of the Fokker, the Martians could likely hit their targets even with a 6 min (closest Earth-Mars round-trip time) delay for tracking.
## Ignore the planes until they come into line-of-site
WWI weaponry had **limited range**. Approaching close enough to cause any damage, even to Martian assets with minimal defensive weapons, would likely be suicide.
One possibility is for human defenders to retrofit purloined Martian weapons onto their planes. However, this would be limited by the **low carrying capacity** of WWI planes. High-energy weapons tend to be very bulky (size and weight are apparently the main obstacles for DARPA's laser systems) or generate a lot of waste heat, so fielding airborne offensive platforms in meaningful numbers would likely remain impossible for Earth's defenders.
Thus, zapping humans defenders as they appear might, in itself, be a most effective Martians offensive tactic.
(This last point isn't exactly an answer to the original post, just a note that precision-guided weapons might not be necessary.)
[Answer]
If the Martians have the equivalent of modern anti-aircraft missiles they very well might not work--the slow-moving early aircraft would look an awful lot like decoys because they're not moving fast enough to be a real target.
However, the Martians don't need them. If they have stuff like modern missiles they also should have stuff like modern point defenses. A Phalanx cannon would eat any WWI aircraft and spit out kindling before it closed to attack range.
[Answer]
To directly answer your question they would be very effective. However you may need to look a few steps further from the battle to the war.
Humans could cheaply and easily mass produce balloons, airships and simple planes. Assuming a one-bomb one aircraft ratio, would the attackers be able to produce enough guided missiles to cope? If they do not have the capability to manufacture the weapons then they would have to rely in a fixed and dwindling supply.
I suspect that the martians would either run out of weapons or else have to develop combat aircraft or some form of reusable weapon like a stand-off missile or a drone gun platform.
[Answer]
An unforeseen issue may be reliably detonating a missile on hitting an aircraft made of too light materials.
If the weapon is detonate on impact there is a fair chance it will simply punch a hole through light wood / canvas without a warhead being activated.
On the other hand modern tracking missiles are designed to explode next to the target and project shrapnel into it which would still work fine in this scenario.
This method tends to be more effective at killing the pilot and prevents the other end of this problem, where the trigger is broken in the impact on hard metal without detonating.
[Answer]
You could avoid radar and go for kinetic kill by having the Martians build piloted armored aircraft that simply fly through anything which opposes them, no guns or explosives required. Although a ram on the nose of the aircraft might not work so well, a weight suspended by a strong wire would probably be able to do pretty massive damage to anything the humans could put up. Obviously, humans don't build fighter jets this way because guns and missiles. But if Martians are simply going for the dumbest, most reliable way to gain air superiority, the humans of your era have nothing to shoot down or defend against supersonic aircraft that can cut them in half while deflecting the occasional lucky shot from a WW I-era machine gun.
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[Question]
[
I have a fictional country which I'm currently mapping. My country's currency is the Lobe, an acronym for 'Loaf Of Bread Equivalent'. The government guarantees that 1 Lobe will always buy 1 loaf of 'government specification' bread. What I'm asking, is it feasible that a loaf of bread costs 1 lobe in 1860, as well as in 2017?
Secondly, how would this 'price fixing' affect all other aspects of life?
[Answer]
Is it possible to have an economy with no inflation? Yes. But the government fixing the price of one item will not do this.
Suppose the government passes this law: One loaf of bread must cost one lobe, period.
So what happens if there's a poor harvest and bakers can't produce as much bread as people want at 1 lobe per loaf? In a free market, if people want to buy 10,000 loaves but only 5,000 loaves are available, then the price goes up. This leads some people to decide to buy less bread or not buy any bread, perhaps buying rice or potatoes instead. It also encourages farmers and bakers to produce more bread to take advantage of the higher price. Eventually the price stabilizes at an amount where the quantity demanded equals the quantity available.
If the government prevents that from happening, then there will be shortages. Maybe people have to wait on long lines to get bread, and the people at the end of the line are out of luck. Or you have to have the right connections to get bread: people who are friends with the baker get bread, or people who have political power. Or you get a black market: bakers start secretly selling most of their bread at a more realistic, market price.
And what about the prices of all the other products out there? If those prices are allowed to fluctuate freely with the market, then okay, there is no inflation in the price of bread, but there could be inflation in the price of everything else. You could, of course, have government-set prices for everything. But then you just propagate the problem I discussed above: massive shortages in under-priced products. And who sets all these prices, and how? Who decides how much a pound of potatoes should cost compared to a loaf of bread? And if anything happens to change the relative value of two products, like new technology or a new source of imports or even just changes in taste, like people decide to eat more rice and less bread, now your prices are out of sync with true value, and there's more economic disruption.
The real way to eliminate inflation is to control the money supply. The US started doing this fairly successfully back in the 1980s.
To take an oversimplified example: Suppose the only thing there was to buy was bread, and there are 10 loaves available. If people have 10 lobes available to spend, then the price will stabilize at 1 lobe per loaf. If people have 20 lobes to spend, then the price will go up to 2 lobes per load. Etc. This is oversimplified in many ways: Assuming there is only one product to buy, assuming that each unit of money will be used for exactly one purchase, etc. But it's the general idea.
Basically, when the US treasury sees prices increasing faster than the target range, they reduce the money supply. When they see increasing too slowly or falling, they increase the money supply. Or more often, they adjust the rate at which the money supply is increasing: it's pretty much always increasing, just faster or slower. Since that policy was adopted inflation in the US has mostly been kept to around 2% per year. They're not all-knowing or all-powerful so they can't manage it perfectly, but they're doing fairly well.
[Answer]
In short: **It could be implemented but it makes no sense**
Long answer:
## Fixed standard
In 1860 bread was significantly worse than today
* flour was with sand and dust because of grains from millstones
* new generations of yeast were developed
* even water is better today
It's only about ingredients. Add changes in the process and salary and you will see that contemporary bread will have a different price. I'm not sure who will buy bread made by outdated standards. (Without marketing bulls\*\*t like *old-fashioned meal for 100 gold! Only today!!*)
## Standard regulation
The goverment will want to keep its *bread specification* as modern as possible. The key is **as possible**. Definitely *standard loaf* differs from top-price bread - it will cost too much for the goverment instead. In our world, the [commodity bundle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_basket) is used to define the standard of living. There are numerous indicators and [issues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_price_index#Confusion) with the definition of what people need as a minimum wage. In some countries the minimum wage is less than the living wage. This reduces goverment expenses for social aspects - significantly.
In your case the goverment could play with the standard to keep the price for bread exactly at 1 lobe. But this 'goverment loaf' would be far away from reality.
## Price regulation
Normally prices change. How good was the last harvest? What are the current internal politics and how is the international market doing? - all of these affect the price. To avoid fluctuations the goverment should buy anything and then sell **all** goods with a fixed price. That's how the USSR government did it. It also fixed the salary and banned international trading. With loose rephrasing [**you cannot have free capital moving, fixed prices and your own currency at the same moment**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundell%E2%80%93Fleming_model).
[Answer]
# Economic stagnation
Without inflation it becomes viable to hoard currency. With inflation hoarded currency slowly loses value (around 50% per decade) so to maintain wealth, the currency must be made to work. Currency hoarded is currency effectively lost to the system, to maintain a fixed price system you must match your currency supply to the economy.
### Risks:
People hoarding wealth remove so much money from the economy that the system grinds to a halt, 1 loaf costs 1 lobe, but there aren't any lobes. 1 loaf now costs 4 eggs, or 6 carrots or what have you got my children are starving.
You print replacement currency because people are hoarding, those hoards are then dropped into the market causing an inflation spike, 1 loaf costs 1 lobe, 1 egg costs 10,000 lobes and people are taking their pay [home in wheelbarrows](http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/hyperinflation-weimar-republic-1922/) and it still won't buy enough flour to make 1 loaf regardless of what the loaf costs.
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Fixed price systems are very dangerous, Venezuela is a current example of how badly it can go wrong. The government is trying to control the street price of retail items without controlling the full supply chain and price at every step.
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# The national debt
We seem to have overlooked this one between us. Governments don't often pay off debts, they only service them in perpetuity and let inflation devalue them to the point where they're irrelevant while always borrowing more. Switching to a system without inflation ties the government to an economic model in which they actually have to pay their debts. All they need to do under an inflation based system is borrow at an interest rate lower than the rate of inflation.
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# International trade
Governments like to keep the value of their currency low relative to other currencies. This keeps domestically generated produce cheaper relative to imported products and helps with exports. The rate of inflation is partially a side effect of this constant effort to keep the currency value down.
Of course it doesn't do to make imported produce too expensive so it doesn't work out as an all out race to the bottom, but there's a constant game being played to keep the balance and keep your currency "weak". Some governments like to fix their exchange rates (China, Venezuela (again)) others resort to euphemisms like "quantitative easing" a.k.a. currency devaluation.
Not joining in with this game in a globalised market risks leaving you with a high value currency and struggling to export goods onto the global market, while imported bread undercuts your locally produced fixed price bread, leaving a net flow of money out of the country and again you're struggling to control currency supply and prices.
[Answer]
Yes, you can, with [demurrage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)):
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> Unlike inflation, demurrage gradually reduces only the value of currency held: it is in effect a negative interest (a tax) on currency in circulation versus inflation that also reduces the value of savings or retirement funds.
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Demurrage may encourage consumption, because if you don't spend money it wil lose value. In a system with demurrage, the total money supply can be held fixed so there is no need for inflation. In reality, banks considered demurrage but chose inflation instead:
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> The major central banks' post-World War II policy of steady monetary inflation as proposed by Keynes was influenced by Gesell's idea of demurrage on currency,[4] but used inflation of the money supply rather than fees to increase the velocity of money in an attempt to expand the economy.
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Of course, you should design the currency such that it loses value regardless of whether it it held under a mattress or on the bank. There are different ways of implemented such a solution. The Wörgl [Freigeld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freigeld) currency required monthly stamps:
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> The name results from the idea that there is no incentive to store or hoard Freigeld as it will automatically lose its value after some time. It is claimed that as a result, interest rates could decrease to zero.
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There are good reasons that inflation may be preferred over demurrage; see the Wikipedia article. But that doesn't mean demurrage is impossible; it will just have certain side-effects. People might start using unofficial currencies that do not lose value, for example; when loss of value is discontinuous, vendors may not wish to accept money just before the loss of value is due (but perhaps this can be mitigated with modern technology). Probably many effects I have not thought of.
[Answer]
The reason we use gold is because it stays about the same value, you can't just pump out a load more gold...but you can with bread.
Think about it in terms of 1 lobe actually being a loaf of bread, you have to have as many lobes as loaves of bread (otherwise someone would have to sell their bread at two for a lobe or they wouldn't be able to sell the second one). **Bakers are essentially printing money**.
It would be like the [German hyperinflation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic), you wouldn't be stopping inflation at all.
[Answer]
Economics is a very *very* wide field and it is difficult (if not impossible) to answer this question with any certainty. There is a quote that sums it up well:
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> [“Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.”
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> ―Edgar R. Fiedler](http://izquotes.com/quote/61504)
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So with that in mind, my answer is that yes, you can get a non-inflationary society, given certain conditions.
Inflation is dictated to a large degree by the supply of money. If the government increases the supply of money (ie by printing more of it), then the result is inflation.
So you can control inflation by tightly controlling the money supply. It is as simple as that.
Except that it isn't simple to do that. Governments have many reasons other than inflation for adjusting the money supply, and controlling it tightly for inflation purposes will make it harder to manage other aspects of the economy.
Also, you're linking the currency to the value of a loaf of bread. Unfortunately, the value of bread is not fixed, which means it's going to be tough to fix the price.
What happens in your world when there is a drought and a shortage of wheat. No wheat; no flour; no bread. The farmers need to maintain their income, so they have to charge more for what wheat the do produce, so bakers would be paying much more than usual for the ingredients to make the bread. How can their prices stay the same? You'd have to price control the whole supply chain, but if you do that where there are shortages, you'll develop a black market very quickly.
Or what happens if a baker works out that he can make bread more cheaply by adding chalk dust to the flour? Now he's selling what is effectively a fake and poor quality product for the same standard price and making loads of extra money out of it. Or if another baker automates his factory and halves his production costs? Or if a baker of luxury bread (which should cost more than a standard loaf but would be harder to price control) uses automation to get his prices down to the same or lower than a standard loaf?
And what about if another kind of staple food (potatoes?) is introduced to the country, becomes popular and undermines the market for bread? Especially if it is cheaper than bread and/or more nutritious.
Any of these things, or a million others, could totally undermine the price controls on bread, and if that's the foundation of your economy, then undermining the price of bread will undermine the whole economy.
[Answer]
Let's list main pitfalls:
1) In case of using precious metals using any fixed exchange is guaranteed long term failure (as tried by countries in XIX who tried to keep both golden and silver coins with for simplicity reasons a fixed exchange rate).
2) (the problem of bad harvest was already discussed but in early times it was a very serious issue for economy)
3) Next thing - early fiat currencies, were usually prone to inflation because of political pressure. It took a while for govs to learn how to safeguard central bank (nowadays usually through constitutional means, but some countries (like the USA) still use more archaic form like gov branch with features of private company) from political mending.
4) So except from that it more or less can be done... Just there is one problem... Bread based currency would nowadays would be subject to moderate price swings and moderate inflation. Yeah... Inflation is measured through basket of goods and services. And here you fixed just one. Because of tech progress price of bread (or generally agriculture products) tend to go down in comparison to price of ex. medical services, rent or childcare. So the price of bread would be fixed, but if one measured prices through CPI, would presumably get at least comparable inflation to the contemporary one in civilized countries.
But actually, I'm not saying that it couldn't be done if there was huge amount of political will. Just the gains in comparison to efforts would be underwhelming.
[Answer]
### There'd still be inflation/deflation
Fixing the value of money to a commodity doesn't eliminate inflation. It only eliminates inflation relative to that commodity. So one loaf of bread costs one lobe. But your Blu-Ray player may change from fifty lobes to either forty or sixty.
The change of prices of everything else relative to loaves of bread is either inflation or deflation.
This is also somewhat problematic because if they print too many Lobes, bakers won't be able to afford the ingredients for bread. But if people make the ingredients for bread cheaper by improved growing methods or whatever, they can print more Lobes causing inflation in everything else.
More commonly though would be deflation. Because loaves of bread are relatively stable and not getting improved much. So there is a restricted supply of currency but ever more options on which to spend it.
Overall there may be less inflation/deflation under such a system, but there will still be some.
### Different from gold
One of the problems with gold was that finding a new gold source would cause inflation. Then when a source tapped out, there would be deflation. This is because gold was the actual money and currency was just a paper alternative. However in this system, you wouldn't just be able to hand someone fifty loaves of bread for a Blu-Ray player. If bakers make too much bread, it will just rot on the shelves.
Central banking would spend a lot of time watching prices relative to bread. They also might spend time working on productivity improvements for bread. Cheaper bread allows more Lobe printing and helps to prevent deflation. Deflation is bad because it causes employment losses (or more precisely having insufficient currency to cover all expenses causes both deflation and employment losses).
Commodity money used to work because most people farmed. Even if they were unable to trade, they could still eat their own food. So a decade or two of deflation was survivable. In this system, the employment losses from deflation lead to more taxes which causes more deflation (increases the cost of bread). Hyper**de**flation would be a potential problem.
Exempting bread production from taxes might help with that, although the inputs are still a problem. You could also exempt wheat, water, sugar, and yeast, but fuel and vehicles to transport them would be more difficult. Similar problems with the energy using in milling and baking, etc.
[Answer]
The government could try to go on a bread standard similarly to how it could go on a gold standard, but there would be serious complications. The case to abandon the system in a crisis would be compelling. There are worse things than rising prices. Falling prices is one of them!
Could you do this with loaves of bread? We can get around the problem that loaves of bread isn’t a standardized commodity if we make it an amount of grain or flour, and it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this discussion if the quality of flour changes over time; the government just wants to ensure that one unit of currency buys the same amount of flour. (Maybe this evolved from the historically very common arrangement that farmers must pay their taxes in grain or flour, the unit of measure happened to be enough to bake a loaf of bread, and the government wanted to convert from in-kind to cash payment of taxes while promising that the rate would not change. But it’s your story.)
Let’s briefly review how countries maintain the “value” of their currencies in the real world. Today, all countries that do this keep a fixed exchange rate of their currency and the currency of a major trading partner. In the past, countries often did this with either gold or silver.
The price of a currency, like the price of anything else, is determined by supply and demand. Try to outlaw that, and you get a black market. So how do countries maintain a fixed currency peg, or in other words, a fixed price for one commodity? They promise to **buy their own currency back** at the official exchange rate. Then, they have to own a big enough stockpile of whatever they promised to buy it back with to make that credible. If one dollar is worth 100 yen, then one yen is worth 1/100 of a dollar, and the way the Federal Reserve would keep the price of a yen from going above that is by promising to buy as many dollars as anyone wants to sell for 100 yen each. They could keep the price of yen from going *below* that by printing more dollars and buying yen. Or the Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve might reach an agreement on what the exchange rate should be and cooperate. (But observe that neither the U.S. nor Japan actually do that. They let the prices of their currencies fluctuate.) Some places, like Hong Kong, only issue new currency if they have the U.S. dollars in the bank to back it up, which means that even if people wanted to trade in *every* Hong Kong dollar for U.S. dollars, they could afford to.
So you’d want to do that for flour. One practical problem is that flour or grain isn’t a good store of value. They’re perishable, and might burn or rot or get infested. You have to constantly buy grain from other people and take it off the market to sit uselessly in your silos. Flour or grain are bulky and expensive to store, and if you want to keep the price of flour from falling when there’s a surplus, you would have to buy a lot of it. On the other hand, if there’s a famine, it’s really hard to justify keeping your big stockpile of flour, just for the sake of maintaining the price of flour. In fact, some crops have government price support today and some European countries do something like this.
Basically, that’s why societies went through a stage where they did this with something inherently useless, rare, undifferentiated and imperishable, and now they do it with completely arbitrary numbers in computers whose supply they themselves control absolutely.
Even if this system worked, in the sense that you kept the price of flour constant over time, it would not work *well*. Supplies of crops are notoriously variable, and a change in the supply or demand of flour would show up as big swings in the price of everything *but* flour. So, whenever there was a good harvest or farmers planted more wheat and less of other crops, and the price of grain would ordinarily fall, you would still get rising prices for everything else. That’s the same thing as inflation! What if there’s a shortage of grain? That’s even worse: now the price of everything else absolutely crashes. If you owed someone money, and are anyone but a farmer with wheat in the field, paying it will be ruinous. No business can make enough revenue to pay its expenses.
By the way, this reminds me of “The Green Leopard Plague” by Walter Jon Williams, where the unit of currency is the kilocalorie of food.
[Answer]
**Yes**
According to Thomas Piketty, inflation is a very new thing. Aside from exceptional phenomena, such as the Dutch disease, inflation only became a thing in the XXth century. In his bestseller [Capital in the XXIth century][1] he makes a point about victorian literature. Emily Dickinson and her pairs would write about a protagonist having earnings of 40,000 pounds a year being sure every reader would understand everything they needed to know about the character itself, and that these information would equally understable thirty years after the publication.
Nearly flat rates of inflation have been the norm for all human history until just about a hundred years ago. You must be warned, however, that the rapid technological development of the XXth century was one of the main culprits of inflation, so a no-inflation world means one where innovations don't change too much everybody's life.
[Answer]
A society without inflation would only work in a economically and technically stagnant society.
If in 1715 a person earns let's say 60 Lobes per month, and his family eats 1 loaf of bread per day, he spends 50% of his salary on food.
Now he gets better at his job, technological advancement make it faster etc pp and 30 years later he makes not 60 but 300 Lobes per month. Now he only has to use 10% of his salary for food. Bam!, the Lobe doesn't have the same value anymore than 30 years before, you got inflation.
[Answer]
Yes it is possible, but not likely as useful as a commodity that doesn't degrade or mold, like a precious metal. See [How and Economy Grows and Why It Doesn't](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LIkV5.jpg) for an excellent explanation of economics, and for you specifically, food-based currency standards.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4mTuO.png)
For your specific situation, technology improves crop yields, so there is more grain available today than 1860 (when people starved), and 1 lobe will not be worth as much. There will naturally be inflation. Your government might control inflation by burning extra crops to prevent inflation, but that would seem silly.
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[Question]
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A nuclear attack submarine carrying a crew of, at least, a hundred people went missing in the North Atlantic Ocean, its last known location was the Bermuda Triangle where ships and planes have vanished. Cutting to the chase; the sub has traveled back in time several hundreds of millions of years into the Jurassic period. How likely is it for the crew to survive a whole year in the Jurassic sea and maybe surface once in a while for a cigarette break? Assuming it was on its maiden voyage in crossing the Atlantic Ocean when it mysteriously got lost inside the Davy Jones's locker.
[Answer]
In addition to the food mentioned by James K, spares will become a problem sooner or later. Parts wear out. They are supposed to be replaced before they break. The sub has an engineering crew which can probably jury-rigg some parts, but not everything.
The US Navy uses [submarine tenders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emory_S._Land-class_submarine_tender) to maintain subs at remote locations. Look at the crew numbers -- ten times as many as a submarine. Quite a lot of them are maintenance specialists.
[Answer]
The problem the crew will face is that during the Jurassic period
the CO2 level of the atmosphere is *5-10 times higher* (2000 - 4000 ppm) than the current level (400 ppm) and the oxygen content was on an all-time low of 15% in the beginning which rised to 26% at the end of the Jurassic (in comparison to 21% now):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/POrOQ.png)
*Graphic from author Robert Rohde from the Global Warming Art project
licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0*
The interesting things are the blue line and the points with crosses
which are actual measurements. While it looks not so bad at first, there
is evidence for very high levels (2000 - 4000 ppm).
The run-away greenhouse effect caused global warming at a level
which is hard to imagine now. Nearly everywhere the climate is tropical, extremely hot (40°C+) and very hard to cope with. In the Jurassic era the continents begin to split up to form our modern ones, the Atlantic ocean is only looking like a big saltwater lake.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hMUCu.jpg)
*Image from wikicommons, Dr. Ron Blakey, under Public Domain*
The sea level is much, much higher than now (missing ice), so navigation are mostly useless (What *does work* is
the gyrocompass, echo sounding and astronomic navigation).
The ocean is nearly everywhere over 25° warm, up to 30°C at the equator and 19°C at the poles, so expect terrible hurricanes forming at the coast.
Some hints apart from the climate and the occasional plesiosaur sticking out the head of the water that they are not in Kansas anymore:
* The day lasts only approximately 23 hours (tidal slowdown).
* The moon is looking bigger (It is nearer to Earth).
* The magnetic compass shows in the completely wrong direction (the magnetic pole is wandering and sometimes even reversing direction).
* The sky looks foreign. The sun revolves the galaxy once in 220 million years, so the Earth is in the wrong position. It is still possible to use astronomical navigation for several purposes, but the crew must prepare their own observations.
* Light sensors show that the sun radiation is slightly reduced by 3%.
The submarine has fortunately CO2 removers, air conditioning
and could produce oxygen with electrolysis, so it may be comfortable,
but they may want enter land sooner or later.
The effect of 2000-4000 ppm carbon dioxide and low oxygen content [is
that the air feels suffocatingly bad, you get headaches, are lethargic and feel like drunk.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Toxicity). While the article on carbon dioxide poisoning claims
that human can adjust to levels up to 10 000 ppm permanently, the time will
be unpleasant (In this case don't forget that if they come back
the air smells fantastic).
Anyway, your crew will suffer. High temperatures together with high humidity and bad air will cause very high stress levels.
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Food is the limiting factor.
The nuclear motor can operate for 25 years, and it has desalinators, active CO2 scrubbers and oxygenators to provide air and water for the crew for as long as it has power.
This article, which concerns the British Sub, Artful, notes that a normal deployment lasts 10 weeks, and a sub won't carry enough food for a year. It would be possible for the crew to survive on short rations for a while, but a full year is probably too long for the whole crew to survive without finding another source of food.
The natural place to find food would be fishing. Fortunately Wikipedia has a category on Jurassic fish.
<http://metro.co.uk/2014/10/08/british-sub-which-can-stay-underwater-for-25-years-makes-us-wonder-4897767/>
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/aug/21/life-on-board-nuclear-submarine>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jurassic_fish>
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I have two large continents on an earth like world. I would like for the dominate predator on the more desert continent to be a large cat. I have found the leopards and jaguars of Egypt, but am uncertain how much they actually live in the desert. I want a second opinion to catch anything I might have missed, I am not the best at research. I am willing to create a cat that can survive in this kind of environment but would like some real world examples to base it off of. Or at least a mythological cat from the correct kind of region.
The desert is set up a lot like Egypt and its surrounding area with swamps on the coast line. I would like for my cat to be able to survive in the swamp and the desert.
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# Big cat habitat roundup (in order of descending size)
**Tigers** do not live in the desert.
**Lions** live in the Namib deset, as mentioned above, and also on the fringes of the Sahara. They used to live all through Iran, Middle East and North Africa, much of it desert scrub. They also used to live in the deserts of India, though they are now confined mostly to the Gir Forest, a semi-arid forest area. Many of Lion's favorite prey specialize in dry areas like the [Etosha Pan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etosha_National_Park#Fauna), such as Eland, Kudu, and Hartebeest.
**Jaguars** are from the Americas, and never lived in Egypt. They do, however, live in desert areas like Arizona and the Sonoran desert of Mexico, but mostly in wetter mountainous parts of the desert. Not really a desert creature.
**Leopards** have the greatest habitat variation of any of the big cats. They live every where Lions can live, and additionally still exist in North Africa and Arabia. They specialize in ambush, so they tend to be in areas where there is at least some scrubby growth to hide in.
**Cheetahs** could be considered desert specialists. They are designed to hunt antelope, and antelope are designed to take advantage of semi-arid and arid plains. In addition to being present in all the major deserts of Africa, Cheetahs still live in Iran and until recently in the deserts of India. They also were distributed farther north into central asia than either Lions or Leopards because of the plentiful [Goitered gazelle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitered_gazelle).
**Snow Leopard** lives in many areas that are very dry (Tibet) but aren't really considered deserts the way you are thinking of. But they can very much live in desert mountains.
(Extra Bonus) **Cougar** is the largest small cat. But we'll throw it in here because they are bigger than Leopards. They also have a very wide range of habitats, and live in the Desert southwest. However, unlike in Africa and Eurasia, there aren't a lot of things to eat in the Desert southwest; pretty much only pronghorn (which are too fast) and the occasionaly feral donkey. There are some desert bighorn sheep, but they are nearly extinct. Cougars would probably make a desert comeback if more big mammals were around, like bison, more bighorn sheep, and more feral donkeys.
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The answer depends on the prey that can survive in your desert area. There are lions in the Namib desert
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IYoGm.jpg)
(Image from: [Wilderness Safaris](http://www.wilderness-safaris.com/blog/posts/the-desert-adapted-lions-of-namibia))
You can only have big cats if there's something big enough to feed them, so your desert can't be a vast expanse of nothing. Seasonal rains, sparse grasses, the occasional oasis. Enough to get some form of antelope. Build a complete food chain and you'll get a vague idea of what can survive.
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Not a type of big cat, but a way to think about your problem.
The biggest issue for big cats in desert is hunting. Big cats are carnivores and hunters. If they have something to kill AND a way to kill it, then they can survive. Most big cats that live in Africa, stay on plains, why? Because they can keep their footing. For example, try playing tag in sand, it's hard! It takes more energy to move through sand than to move on ground that doesn't give way, it also is easier to move fast on solid ground than on sand.
Basically, you have to customize your cat to move quicker in the sand than A) it can on solid ground, and B) than it's prey. If it had a much larger, flatter foot, for instance, a cat could move on the sand much better, because the foot would act as a snow shoe and would keep the animal from sinking in. This would also make your cat a dual threat, because it would also have an advantage in the snow (Not that it has to live in the snow, but it gives you an extra option).
Then there are some other options depending on how fantasy the story is. You could have the cat have **really** hot feet front feet and **really** cold back feet, which would cause it to melt the sand it runs on, then cool it into glass, allowing it to push off easier. Or, you could do the old standby and give it wings, which allows it to avoid the sand altogether.
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Are you bound to a warm desert, or can you consider also a cold desert, something like Antartica? Penguins and seals colonies on the shores provide large food supply, and if there can be a leopard seal swimming in the sea, you can also tweak a big cat to crawl on the frozen rocks.
Water mammals and water birds with no flying ability are bound to flat areas where they can move with the little ability they have, so they cannot get safe on cliffs like a seagull would do.
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I have heard of gravitational slingshots being used to theoretically accelerate a spacecraft using a planet's gravity and momentum in orbit. But how about **decelerating** a ship? If it is at all possible, could it be done without g-forces killing the entire crew and destroying the ship if said spacecraft were traveling at a fraction of the speed of light, say .1c?
plot synopsis: a ship traveling at sub-light speed is too low on fuel to decelerate in time to keep from blowing through and past its target solar system. Radical measures are considered.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
[Answer]
Yes, in theory.
[Gravity assist braking is a thing](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6183/gravity-assist-braking)
The problem is the speed. Going that fast you'd need to do a lot of maneuvers in order to lose enough velocity to enter orbit around the sun, and that means that the planets would need to be in just the right places.
In the book Aurora, a ship traveling around .1c has to do something like this, and it ends up making something like 14 passes over the course of 20 years, gradually slowing until it got to a point where there would be no planet in its path for the next maneuver.
So not impossible.
**Edit:** getting crazy
OK, say that your crew is really really desperate. There is a very risky way to shed a lot of velocity really fast, but only if you're going really fast to start with...
The trick is to fly through the star.
If the structural integrity is really really good, and all the passengers are protected from the sudden deceleration, and you're going fast enough, you could pass through the sun so fast that the ship wouldn't have time to singe much, while hopefully losing enough speed to stay in the solar system and not just shoot it the other side. This would cut years off of the braking process. And hopefully a few passengers would not be crushed to jelly by the tidal forces.
Edit 2:
[The sun isn't very dense near the surface](https://www.quora.com/Can-you-fly-through-the-sun-if-you-had-a-strong-enough-spaceship-and-were-going-fast-enough). By aiming off center you'd be able to avoid the worst of the pressure. The heat wouldn't be an issue if you have some ablative material shielding the hull, since the heat would be removed before it can do damage, providing you get through fast enough that it cant all burn away.
Sun grazer comets have been observed passing through the outer layers of the sun and surviving.
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If you're coming into a star system at 0.1c, with no propulsion, you're screwed. The only way planets can help you actually stop is via lithobraking, which at these speeds amounts to "Maybe they'll name the crater after me?"
You can loose speed via gravitational slingshots, but you can't lose nearly enough. The maximum amount of speed you can loose is twice the planet's orbital velocity. That sounds like a lot, but 0.1c is ridiculously fast, 30,000 kilometres/second. The fastest-moving planet is Mercury, at 47.3 km/sec, Venus is 35 km/sec, and so on. Adding them up, if you could arrange a perfect encounter with all of the Solar System's planets, for the odds of which we need a phrase more extreme than "preposterously unlikely", you could lose about 340 km/sec.
That would let you lose about 1.1% of your speed. That hasn't really done any good, has it? The good news is that the G-forces of these encounters won't do your crew any harm, they're pretty weak. This is limited comfort as you zoom off into interstellar space.
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## No
* in reasonable time, less then 100 years as example
## But
look at [page 42](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_sail) of manual, there is about emergency decelerating in situation with almost no fuel, I cite:
Press emergency braking system button to deploy Magnetic sail of emergency decelerating system, it's right there where button for Standard decelerating procedure in star systems which are not equipped with standard intergalactic star system braking systems(read as like outpost of humanity, no body home at the moment)
end of cite.
So press the button and RTFM.
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## Yes, but to do it with a single body in a way that avoided deadly tidal forces, you'd need a black hole with around 10,000 times the mass of the Sun or more, and it would probably have to be orbiting a much larger "supermassive black hole"
First of all, it should be noted that all the theories of gravity that physicists use (both [Newtonian gravity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation) and the more accurate theory of [general relativity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity)) are [time-symmetric](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-symmetry), which as discussed in [this article](http://discovermagazine.com/1992/oct/timereversal140/) means that if you take a movie of some bodies acting under the influence of mutual gravity and run it backwards, a physicist will have no way of telling whether the movie is playing backwards or forwards (or equivalently, time-symmetry implies that it's possible to set up a second system with different initial conditions such that if you calculate the behavior as time runs forwards, using the same laws of gravity, this second system's dynamics running forwards in time will look just like the first system's dynamics played backwards). Some reversed movies might be more *unlikely* than the forwards version if the forwards version featured a significant increase in [entropy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy), but this would usually require a large number of different objects (like a collection of dust particles collapsing inwards due to mutual gravity), if you're just dealing with two bodies that don't crash into each other or otherwise break apart the change in entropy will probably be small. So, if you can come up with a situation where an object is initially traveling at only a small fraction of light speed relative to a larger body, but uses a [gravitational slingshot](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist) to increase its velocity relative to the larger body to a much larger fraction of the speed of light, then the reverse scenario should be equally possible.
And the question of using a gravitational slingshot to attain a large fraction of light speed relative to the body used in the slingshot is addressed in the book [*The Science of Interstellar*](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0393351378) by gravitational physicist [Kip Thorne](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kip_Thorne), who consulted on the movie. In chapter 7, "Gravitational Slingshots", he notes that the ship in the movie (the 'Ranger') did not have sufficiently powerful rockets to accelerate to significant fractions of the speed of light on their own, but that
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> Fortunately, Nature provides a way to achieve the huge speed changes, c/3, required in *Interstellar*: gravitational slingshots around black holes far smaller than Gargantua.
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Gargantua was the [supermassive black hole](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole) in the movie (it was supposed to have a mass 100 million times that of the Sun), but Thorne writes that he imagined smaller black holes orbiting Gargantua. He also notes that while a [neutron star](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star) or [stellar mass black hole](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_black_hole) could possibly provide the required velocity change, doing so would require getting so close to them that the so-called [tidal forces](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force)--the stretching people would feel due to the gravitational pull being noticeably stronger on the side of their bodies closer to the center of the neutron star or black hole than the side that was just a bit farther--would be deadly for bodies of this mass, so that a much more massive [intermediate mass black hole](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-mass_black_hole) would be needed to avoid being ripped apart by tidal forces (what astrophysicists colorfully refer to as [spaghettification](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification)).
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> To change velocities by as much as c/3 or c/4, the Ranger must come close enough to the small black hole and neutron star to feel their intense gravity. At those close distances, if the deflector is a neutron star or is a black hole with a radius less than 10,000 kilometers, the human and Ranger will be torn apart by tidal forces (Chapter 4). For the Ranger and humans to survive, the deflector must be a black hole at least 10,000 kilometers in size (about the size of the Earth).
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> Now, black holes that size *do* occur in Nature. They are called intermediate-mass black holes, or IMBHs, and despite their big size, they are tiny compared to Gargantua: ten thousand times smaller.
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He also mentions that "A 10,000-kilometer IMBH weighs about 10,000 solar masses", so that would be around the lower mass limit of what could be used to get a change in velocity of c/3 or c/4 without being torn apart by tidal forces, if you only need a change of c/10 it might be a bit smaller but my guess is it wouldn't be more than an order of magnitude.
@Aron also makes an excellent point in a comment on the answer by @AndyD273 -- namely, that gravitational assists can't actually provide a long-term boost in a ship's velocity in the rest frame of the massive body a ship gets the assist from, the velocity boost will only be seen in some other reference frame. The reason for this is that the total energy of the ship in the body's rest frame is just the sum of its potential and kinetic energy, and when the ship is some large distance D away from the body *before* passing close and getting an assist, its potential energy will be exactly the same as when it is the same distance D away from the body *after* the assist, so its kinetic energy must be the same too. Thus, a gravitational assist will only boost a ship's velocity in some reference frame where the massive body itself has a large velocity, like boosting one's velocity in the Sun's reference frame by passing close to Jupiter. In *The Science of Interstellar* Thorne was assuming the IMBHs were in orbit around the supermassive black hole Gargantua, and orbits around a fast-rotating supermassive black hole can reach substantial fractions of light speed, see my answer [here](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/80489/22250) for details. So if you want to decelerate relative to the galaxy, and your initial velocity relative to the galaxy is 0.1c, you'll probably need to find an IMBH that is itself moving at somewhere close to 0.1c (or greater) relative to the galaxy, with the most plausible astrophysical scenario for this being an IMBH orbiting a supermassive black hole.
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Since you're traveling at speeds far higher than the escape velocity of the solar system relative to a point close to the star, you are not going to be able to stop within the solar system. Instead, you have to get rid of the excess kinetic energy by doing flybys of nearby stars until the velocity is low enough to enter the solar system and then do a flyby of a planet to lose enough energy to be captured in the solar system.
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A mega-engineering structure could be used to both launch and catch ships moving at relativistic speeds. Using gravity means the acceleration would not be felt by the contents and could be at a much higher level than easier magnetic systems.
But we're talking about toruses made from hyperdense material. The rings are spinning such that a point on the torus traces a path that goes through the hole. The [gravito-magnetic forces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame-dragging#Frame_dragging_effects) can accelerate any object that flys through the hole.
Now arrange a series of these in a line, like a gun barrel.
I’ve seen a similar designs described in Robert L. Forward’s [*Starquake*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starquake_(novel)), along with the awsome substance “monopole-stablized black hole dust”. Forward was a real-life physicist who knew gravity.
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Well, how much of the ship are you going to decelerate?
Gravitation braking sort of works, in the "slow you down a few percentag points" sort of way. In the meantime, you are entering dense space near a star, so figure that comfortable world of crashing into one hydrogen atom per cubic meter just went wonky. If most of your ship is ablative, you can couple the gravity slingshot with skimming near a planet you never liked anyway.
I never ran the numbers, but skimming around in system should be slowing you down just by running through the heavy particle space. Of course, there are lots of issues about radiation, penetration, etc. Also, forget any blackbody attempts: at that speed, the fuzz will likely pull you over and anything black will be shot.
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The other day I stumbled upon a youtube video from Bad Internet series: [Which of The “Friends” Are You?](https://youtu.be/2QyzjYqkj2U) and it made me remember a previous occurrence of an idea that people are sorted into their roles by some algorithm:
The second one refers to the [Futurama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama) series, where people appear to be forced into their jobs.
**The problem: Both worlds are a joke. I would like the same, but serious.**
Is there a way to get to a situation where *everybody* (i.e. more than 65% of the population) is selected to do their job, while there is no magic?
* The sorting algorithm should be explainable to some extent and it should be non-magical. (No [sorting hat](http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Sorting_Hat) please.)
* However, [deep learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning) algorithms or quantum computers are allowed.
* Society itself should be believable and be able to deal with common problems of a country (including military defense).
Other than this, I set your arms free.
I already have a guess that such a society has to start with an apocalypse and/or long war. I also guess that such a society will be a form of dictatorship. You cannot have democracy in this setup.
I even play with the idea of a theocracy, where such a system will appear to be magical on the outside (*You have been selected by God!*), but will have some strong computer running somewhere in the background.
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The society where each person should work according its role is called the [**caste system**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India). This worked in India for ages (from 1,000 BCE until the modern era). Most people accepted this system. Although today this is redundant, but it happens especially in villages. I suppose it works mainly because of religious reasons.
It's real, although the role of the people is defined by their birth, not by their personal characteristics.
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In the fantasty genre there are many worlds where the system defines which people are the best and assigns their work/role/social rank according to it. One of them is [Gattaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca) with a
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What the society needs to establish `sorting` is just some kind of danger, possibly in the past. *We should act in this manner, because if we don't we'll die.* This works with **any** idea.
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**TLDR: Track information of generations who had any choice, see where the indicators were that someone would be good at their job. Then apply those rules to new generations, offering incentives to take the job they're predicted to be best at.**
In a way I think we do have something like this (though perhaps in a more general way and with the impression that we do have choices). Education pushes people along certain paths and if you choose one path rather than another the general impression is that the other careers are shut off to you now (enough that more than 65% of people stick to the career path their education indicated).
Now I suppose **it depends on at what age you want to make the choice of which job someone gets**.
* **Do you want to decide from birth?** You could send someone to a school that promotes that job type, introduce them to hobbies which compliment it etc.
* **Do you want to decide after schooling?** You could measure their performance in different areas and, using past experience, predict where they would work best. It could even be incentivised but not forced. You finish your education and for a larger salary you could take an automatic offer from the one where you're predicted to be more successful...or go and search for another without the salary boost. (I think this would be enough to make 65% or more take the route they were predicted to be best suited to)
* **Maybe you want them to start later:** You could have a period of a few years where they try out different jobs and then, based on their performance, they get offered a larger salary at a job they are deemed suited for.
You don't want to take away the choice...but you want it to be much easier for them to follow that path. I think people are less likely to choose differently if they think there is an option than if they're told they don't.
I'm not 100% sure what the algorithm would measure...performance in school subjects, attention span, activity, hobbies. It really depends on what information you have on them. Maybe the population is chipped and their vitals are monitored (for health reasons, obviously), we can then track that maybe they're happier doing math than their grades would suggest and, comparing to generations before, we find that actually those people are a lot more efficient workers than those who breeze through exams but couldn't care less for the actual subject.
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There are plenty of ways to do this. As AlexP mentions in his answer under [Emperor Constantine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great) **fathers had to be succeeded by their sons under harsh punishment.** Of course such a sorting is at best ineffective. While there is some hereditary favor for certain professions it's small. For example families with surgeons also tend to have a history of butchers. But not the majority, just enough to make an anomaly.
Regardless, it's a poor way of sorting your people for professions. It's much better to take a individual approach. **The most basic way would be (personality) tests. Capacity tests could show strength and weaknesses.** This could be manditory in highschool. An easy compulsive filter.
If you want to take it further you get to genetic testing or even engineering. **With the right tests you can see who's physically adept to what.** Olympic athletes tend to deviate from the average human in a way that allows them to excel in their sport. A similar approach could work on a genetic level for professions.
Filter on things like short term memory, eye sight, upper body strength and spatial awareness. Combine that with required roles in your state controlled economy and you should have an idea of what to do.
**If you want to go even further you could add another step of genetic engineering**. When pregnant the system determines what's needed and will edit the baby's genome where required to be the [perfect fit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca). This is, of course, completely dystopian.
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I am outright shocked that no one has mentioned the Chinese in history with their [Imperial examinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination) and their [Rank system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-rank_system) that formed the basis for the [Chinese Meritocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Ancient_times:_China) that roughly lasted for about 2200 years or so.
So yeah, it has been done and can easily be considered to be one of the most successful systems that humanity has tried. Having it be done in an algorithmic fashion with a computer and being even more all encompassing (if that is even possible) than what the Chinese used to do could go a long way in preventing some amount of corruption and having a better functioning system.
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The main thing you'll need for such a society is for there to be nowhere else that disaffected citizens can realistically go if they don't like their assigned role. It needs to be a closed society. Otherwise, it will fall apart.
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Allowing quantum computers, I'm surprised no one mentioned **genetic sorting**.
When the algorithm is first conceived, there will only be "predictions" on newborn babies, based solely on the genes. The research is secretly carried out, and soon a database of combination genes affecting personalities are created (based on "right and wrong predictions").
Based on this personality database, new step: tests on newborn babies are planned, that is predicting the behavior, job, and success of these babies. The results are, again, processed by the quantum computer, and its algorithm refined.
Soon, the precision increases to 80% and rising, and the news are spread, and people are asking for job advice to this computer, and the algorithm is refined once more, from the people unsatisfied with their current jobs.
As soon as the precision strikes 95%, the government decided it's better for people to be told what they will work when they become an adult. There are resistances, but the plan continues. The government and an independent organization perform secret eugenic operation throughout the world to eliminate potential rebels (by examining the rebellious personality genes).
Then people will just follow what they are told to do, because they believe what the computer say is best for them, according to their personality.
Note: I know the story has not taken many factors affecting the course of history into consideration, but I just want to give example how a society with predetermined job can develop and also how the algorithm is believable.
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Isaac Asimov tackles this exact subject in his short story [Profession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)).
Assume there's a computer capable of analyzing and reconnecting neurons in the brain. It's main use is to **teach** children to read, **test** which profession suits well with a brain of an adult, and **teach** that profession in minutes.
There's a catch: using the machine to learn is expensive.
In Asimov's story, there are multiple inhabited planets, and the Earth is the only place where there are learning machines. People on Earth learn to read at 8 and to perform a job at 18. The other planets then hire skilled workers from Earth.
**People are so used to learn instantly that they won't learn from studying.** They see it as wasting time, and they can't afford to learn another profession. Therefore once they learn a job, they stay doing that job.
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It is actually fairly likely. Professional mobility allows the economy and society to deal with economic and technological disruptions by reallocating "human resources" dynamically. A strong future government might simply avoid such disruptions thru other means.
The first thought for most is probably some sort of centralized planned economy, but a free market economy that is large and diverse enough with strong regulations keeping the markets free and fair could be quite stable. Economies do tend to be self-stabilizing over time, the issues tend to come as consequences of technological disruptions or external factors such as epidemics or colonialism.
If we assume that your empire has reached some sort of technological plateau where disruptions from technology are manageable (and upgrading the skills of employees to keep up with progress is already normal) and the empire is secure otherwise and only expands organically (no colonialism or crusades), we could reasonably assume an economy and society that would be stable, even stagnant from our own viewpoint.
In such society there would be no particular need for people to ever change jobs. You could simply assign jobs by lottery or profession of parent at birth and then reassign if the person turns out unsuited for the job or shows particular talent or interest for something else. Since your people would all be trained for their assigned job from birth, they would be well qualified for it, familiar with it, comfortable with it, and predisposed to find it valuable and rewarding (unless the training is incompetent due to corruption or decadence, if you want a falling empire story).
This should easily keep more than 65% percent in their assigned jobs, even without particular legal or social pressure. People with the drive to start their own business or with special talents that make reassigning them necessary do not make up 35% of population. Similarly, normal jobs for normal people do not have stringent requirements that would make large portion of population unsuited for them. And with future science most such issues could and probably would be fixed.
This obviously assumes that the system works properly. Even without external disruptions from technology or expansion the system will fail eventually if quality of training and education collapses, if the assigned jobs cease to be meaningful and rewarding, or if the system becomes too strict to allow the amount of social mobility that is actually necessary. These will eventually lead to increasing inefficiency and collapse. But the failure would have to start from the political side of the society becoming too corrupt to upkeep the system.
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The teens of your world will get a general recommendation for their future after their 10th year of education. Afterwards they will rotate apprenticeship in 12 different jobs in their recommended field for a year (one job per month). Should society have a heightened need in certain field, the bias to get sorted into that field will (surprise!) rise accordingly.
The masters (if thinking medieval) will then select between them, who they will take on as a real apprentice for training. In more modern times your bosses will give recommendations which will decide your future (training on the job, university education, ... in the given field).
You cannot study something if you were not pre-selected for eligibility. You could still try something in an entirely self-taught way, but the majority won't take this risk. Especially, since you cannot prove your worth in the given field without the papers you received after proper training/education. Who would trust you except some risk-takers or people with dire need?
=> More than 65% would stay in their chosen job.
The way to be sorted into your general field would be part educated guessing by your teachers, supported by (if modern times) some kind of artificial intelligence working in the big data field. I don't necessarily mean a self-aware AI, the contemporary AIs of Google, IBM, Wolfram, ... should already be enough if trained properly.
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The initial part of this answer was in part inspired by the [Riftwar Saga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riftwar_Cycle) by Raymond E. Feist.
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**Expanding the Myers-Briggs Personality Test**
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> The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an assessment that is
> believed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive
> the world and make decisions. According to the Myers-Briggs test,
> there are 16 different types of personalities. The test consists of a
> series of questions, and your answers determine what type of
> personality you have and provides general assumptions about how your
> personality type is best suited for success in terms of careers,
> communication, etc.
>
>
>
So, in MBTI, each personality usually have a few careers choice
Maybe in the future there would be a great Psychologist which expanding these 16 personalities into say, 132, maybe. And then some another great Psychologist expanding these 132 personalities into much more. And from those personalities, each one only have one career choice.
All kids at 10th or so grades would take this test to determine what their future job/role would be. From that time forward, all they study in school would be about the future job/role.
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Like ADS stated earlier, the caste system sounds like it would be a good fit for your requirements.
You could also throw in some deep sense of dedication to a greater cause among the population to make it more believable and/or give a reason why individuals accept that system.
Plus, if your setup takes place on extended periods of time, members from different castes could have particular physical attributes due to a possible inter-caste breeding restriction.
I'd advise you to check out the Tau caste system from the Warhammer 40.000 series. Maybe you'll find interesting leads for your setup.
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Coming from Anime SE, my answer would be, have a supercomputer that can identify your strength and weaknesses and the assign you or at least give you some options on what career you should have.
Your world would need to have the system start with a small population and then prove and publish the result, that the system can correctly assign people to jobs they do best based on their personality and abilites.
After continuous publicity on the system's ability to correctly do such a thing, people would start to accept the system more. Then, after the majority of the society accepts and believe in the system, start enforcing the system so that it has more power over the society by doing propaganda, i.e. people that ain't using the system are hardly successful, that they would only bring trouble to companies, etc.
After several decades, the system would have grown into the de facto and de yure guide for people's lifelong career path.
See Psycho Pass anime for an example of how such a system can work.
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Taking inspiration from the Qunari of *Dragon Age*, you could have all the children raised in one big community. The community then chooses their role when they come of age. There would probably be people with the specific job of choosing jobs for others, and through this big community, you could be sure to keep tabs on each child and their unique skills & talents.
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The easiest way would be with tests e.g. a personality test to see whether someone is right brain or left brain or type A etc. and an IQ test to see whether they should be a scientist or something like a taxi driver.
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Scientists developed a method to transfer intelligence. However, something went wrong and everyone got an IQ of 300 on the current scale. And that means EVERYONE: Stephen Hawking, Donald Trump, Pamela Anderson, that weird kid in 3rd grade that eats paste, the toddler that was born the second it happened, the people on the psych ward,... Everyone who can be considered human. However, it only happens to the people that are alive right now. Anyone born after the experiment is not affected and evolves their IQ normally.
There are obviously a lot of upsides to this: the entire world becoming hypergeniuses would mean a lot of new scientific discoveries. Many people would likely give an arm and a leg for this chance. But what are the downsides? There are bound to be things about this that don't work out in a good way.
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I will answer several side questions to light up yours. I tried to mainly focus on the special features of your scenario (sudden rise in intelligence and newborns being normal).
## Does the capacity to be a powerful villain increase faster than the capacity to prevent criminal actions, when intelligence rises ?
There is no answer to this question, but it has to be considered.
You can argue that it is easier to drop a bomb in an hospital than to prevent it, for example, and conclude that villains will become proportionally more efficient than good guys, due to the increase in intelligence.
You can argue the other way around as well. For example by saying that since good guys are more numerous, the total gain in intelligence is way greater than for villains.
Therefore, the increase in overall intelligence could be more destructive than constructive, just due to that effect.
## Will people mentally support their new intelligence ?
I have not an IQ of 300, but if tomorrow I suddenly do, this will radically change my view of the world. I will perhaps think that I wasted most of my life in futilities and probably conclude that I used to suck at tactical games. Taking this in consideration, it is possible that a non-negligible portion of the population turn mad.
## Will IQ of 300 severely injure children development ?
Children do not have high IQ (in comparison with adults), in fact most of the cognitive capabilities come quite late (capacity for abstract thinking comes usually during adolescence, 12-16 ans according to [Piaget](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget)). How will high cognitives capacities injure the capacities of children to acquire other abilities normally learnt during childhood, such as social behaviour ?
That could turn really bad. Especially when combined with the following part :
## How will the terrible generation gap be managed ?
Since newborns after the event of massive geniuses making will not be geniuses, it can causes several problems. For the people having experienced normal IQ, compassion could smooth every thing, since they remember being normal. But for the young, it will be hard to understand how can somebody be so stupid. Of course, they are geniuses, they will be able to figure it out, but will they have the patience to deal with such stupid people ? And if they do, how ?
Of course they may want to make them geniuses as well, that would be a good scenario.
But they could also conclude that prolonging their own life is a way better investment than turning normal people into geniuses.
## How will the elites cope with the sudden equality of all ?
Since everybody get the exact same intelligence in your scenario, how will our current society, which rewards people based on abilities, deal with everybody becoming totally equal suddenly ?
Maybe people will consider being smart enough to govern themselves, without the need of a proper government. People previously in charge could react quite violently against that.
## Appendix : on the implications of high IQ
(part added following a discussion in the comments)
An important thing has to be noted : no strict **implication** can be proven between high IQ and any other mental ability. The reason is that you can not manipulate a person IQ, therefore you can not experiment and draw conclusion.
However, strong correlations have been established, for example relating high IQ to high [job performance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_performance). But **correlation** does not mean **implication**, it might be that a third factor is the root of both high IQ and high performances.
For example, it is not clear that high IQ implies high imagination. It might be correlated, and it even might be that imagination implies high IQ (since imagining things is a mental exercise, it would be a valid theory).
Therefore my whole answer is based on the fact that you can not predict clearly the effect of the IQ surge. Will that make people more open minded ? Will that make people reconsidering their old views ? In the context of worldbuilding you need to ask yourself the question but no answer can be dismissed as incoherent.
We may argue that yes it will, and this point of view is totally legit. Geniuses tend to be open minded, open to criticisms and imaginative. But if we do not explicitly include them in your definition of "genius", your "geniuses" are not assure to have this traits. Conditioning have been proven powerful (see [Milgram experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) or [the third wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave)), should not be underestimate (for example when talking about soldiers loyalty to government) and we do not know if rise in IQ (or any form off intelligence) would make people aware of it and/or capable of overcoming it.
Genius can have irrational behaviour, a traumatic example is known in science. When quantum physics was build, Einstein (widely recognize as a genius) refuse to accept part of the theory, because he strongly believed in a deterministic universe (he was quoted to say "God does not play with dice"), when the theory was based on a non deterministic universe.
His beliefs make him refuse a scientific theory. Anybody can spot that he was wrong to refuse the theory for *this reason*, but he did, and this show us that geniuses can have opinions fully based on unverified beliefs.
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Society across the world is already struggling with the rising education rate. Most of the jobs that need doing do not require any special intellect. Many people of high intellect, probably most, resent having to do work that does not challenge them intellectually.
So I think the main downside to sudden 300 IQ for everyone is that the overwhelming majority of work would now be "beneath" *everyone*. Additionnally (although less impactful) a lot of the entertainment industry would instantly become obsolete, and the education sector would need a complete overhaul. It would take a couple of years before automation can compensate for the change in the work force, and by then we'd be on track for an earlier singularity.
A lot of the other answers grossly overestimate what intellect, alone, can do. Most of humanity's current strength comes from our huge industrial efficiency. No matter how smart you are, most of the work was done by the giants whose shoulders you're standing on. No intellect can compensate significantly for the sheer time and resources needed to push back the frontiers of science. Progress has a lot of bottlenecks.
Luckily, our current information network, the internet, will be able to educate everyone at a very high speed -- why I presume the "dark age" would only last a decade. Imagine giving everyone 300 IQ *before* information was digital.
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Technically speaking, it's not possible, since IQ is defined to be 100 at the median of the distribution - everyone would have IQ=100.
But let's not nitpick and assume that everyone gets IQ equal to 300 at current scale. It is pretty meaningless anyway, since it is so far at the right end of the (normal) score distribution that there are no tests calibrated to cover it - people would probably max out the scores and their IQ would not be measurable.
So let's rephrase the situation: everyone gets a huge memory boost, enhanced cognitive abilities far exceeding Newton, Einstein and Gauss combined, while keeping their personality more or less unchanged and sane. We'd be reaching [transhumanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism) and maybe [singularity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity) in just a few years. Although, higher intelligence does not automatically mean rationality and mental stability, so I'd expect sociopathy and various mental disorders to be (much) more pronounced. Science would get a huge boost anyway.
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Speculating on what could go wrong is idea generation, IMO. I've tried to outlay everything that I think *wouldn't* and why. (there's already a pretty good answer here that talks about how people would become depressed because of a perceived lack of living up to their potential -but that already happens everyday)
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Ok, lets forget about IQ and go with, everyone's *super-crazy-smart*.
We can also forget about the next generation being dumb; surely, as with any Scientific Experiment, it's repeatable. Some of our greatest discoveries have been 'mistakes'.
Ok... so:
**What is the downside to everyone being capable of understanding anything that they set their minds to learning?**
Without a change in the amount of **willpower** people have to accomplish a task, this changes nothing. *If you set your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.*
Without a change in **personality**, certain jobs are still not available to them. Your **attitude** and personality will probably be *the* deciding factors of employment (as if they aren't already).
Intelligence is not **wisdom**. And the ability to *comprehend* has nothing to do with the ability or desire to *achieve*. Those with **experience** will still be sought after, over those at entry level. Experience is one of the things that garners wisdom.
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At first I was going to make a joke about how you're not going to be able to get anyone else to mow your lawn for you, but that's not true. Plenty of people with college degrees are busy flipping burgers.
The privileged will remain so. Old money isn't just going to up and disappear. Land rights: also unchanged. Logistic and utility companies will still rule the Earth. *You* still have to wake up everyday and go to work so that you can pay for these things, no mater how smart you are (especially if everyone else is as smart).
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One of the up-sides: Consensus that global warming is upon us.
Downside: Savvy capitalists realize that to affect change would bankrupt them.
Net score: zero.
Total difference from reality: negligible.
Only that which would be immediately apparent:
*Bowling averages are way up, mini-golf scores are way down.*
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Unfortunately, super-intelligence does not magically turn a bad person into a good person. It makes him more dangerous.
Downsides ? Criminals, tyrans, crooks will have a super intelligence. You don't fall into a fraud because you're not smart enough, you fall because you're confiant and naive.
Selfish people will gain new ways to take profit of the other.
You had bad guys ? BIM, 300 IQ and you get james Bond super villains.
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What is the consequence of everybody having the equivalent of 300 IQ now?
Everyone will score about 300 on IQ tests. Seriously.
Most high IQ individuals will tell you that IQ tests do not test intelligence. They test ability to do well in IQ tests.
The mind is a beautiful plastic machine. Like every part in the body it is able to adapt to challenges like nothing we can imagine.
The vast majority of difference in ability comes from training. People will continue to have vastly different levels of training.
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I would like to chip in with a few implications resulting from a world full of hypergeniuses.
*Clinical Neurological Depression* - resulting from an over-extensive neuronal network. Neuron constellations will be, on average, less well served by the deeper chemical mechanisms of the brain.
*Mind Management: Clarity and Train of Thought* - so many avenues, too many possible considerations, not enough time! Unable to switch off. Unfinished thoughts run amok and threaten to escape, likely leading to:
A prevalence and emergence of schizoids and a trend towards introspective/introverted behaviours - an increasing population of personality disorders marked by dissociation, passivity, withdrawal and an inability to form warm social relationships. And:
A probable increase in recreational drug use, and dependency on Dopamine stimulants like Cocaine.
*Aggression* - where still evident, will likely change from hot-blooded to cold and calculated.
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Andrew Wiles has (my guess) an IQ of 180, studied mathematics full time for many years, and it took him seven years to prove Fermat's "Last Theorem". An IQ of 300 relative to Wiles is about the same as Wiles relative to an individuum who is quite far more stupid than the average. Wiles did mathematics that I have no chance in hell to understand, and I can do mathematics that the person at the bottom has no chance in hell to understand, so an IQ of 240 will let you do things that Wiles couldn't understand, and the IQ of 300 would do the same to the person with a 240 IQ. That person would figure out Fermat's Last Theorem in a day or two. Just to get an idea what we are talking about here with an IQ of 300.
How can I claim someone with an IQ of 300 would have discovered Fermat's Last Theorem in two days? Consider what maths a person with an IQ of 60 could do in 7 years, given good training. Very, very little. In seven years time, you might be able to find a 14 digit prime number. Wiles could do that in two days. I probably could in two days, with no help. Now with the same distance in brain power again...
Question: Can you hide who and what you are if you but also everybody else has an IQ of 300? I don't think you could.
Question: Would you be able to suppress lots if people if you but also everybody else around you has an IQ of 300? I don't think you could. (Why couldn't you? Because there is nobody who will be willing to do the dirty work for you. Hitler and Stalin didn't suppress anyone themselves; it was their massive support system that did. That support system would be made up of people with an IQ of 300 who would see through every lie you tell them). You can suppress people because they think that they won't survive outside the group of people that supresses them. But with an IQ of 300, the smallest group of people can achieve outrageous things. Just imagine a department store with 100 employees, and the boss is shouting at and supressing the employees. He can do that because they are helpless. With an IQ of 300, it takes them an hour to get an agreement, contact all the suppliers, raise money for initial stock, rent a location, and outsell their old boss because that old boss is alone on his own in his store.
I think that kind of IQ would be an absolute equaliser. You couldn't have any structures anymore where someone orders and someone obeys. If people look at society and how it should be run, they will quite quickly come to the same conclusions.
All these mad terrorists would come to the realisation that their ideas were totally messed up very quickly. Criminals for who crime is business wouldn't feel any need to commit crime anymore. Those who just have mental problems would figure out that they have a problem and they couldn't hide it.
The biggest danger would come from people living in third world countries who might think about taking revenge for a long time of mistreatment.
With that IQ, everyone could create as much wealth for himself or herself as they wish without doing it at the expense of others. The amount that everyone wants would likely go down. And doing things at the expense of others would become very difficult.
And with that kind of IQ, the problem that the next generation doesn't have the same IQ would certainly be solved.
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They would do research and trivially reproduce the "IQ300"-error. This would result in a world full if equally very intelligent people. Don't know what that would lead into? Maybe problems with lack of diversity?
reasoning is:
I would assume that if WE are able to make the mistake of producing IQ 300 humans, a world full of IQ 300 humans will be able to reproduce the error and turn it into a solution to give their children IQ 300. Assuming that is desirable of course.
Then you get into an interesting combination of problems: It turns into a sort of nuclear arms race for intelligence. Any group of people who cannot reproduce the error, will not have it for their children and they turn into a slave caste. This will force everyone to try to reproduce the IQ 300 , and whoever succeeds before their lifetimes run out, will belong to the ruling caste. Maybe this will even produce speciation.
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I don't know if anyone here has mentioned this but I think you have to ask what changing people's IQ to 300 would mean biologically. IQ is a useful metric, but I'm not sure that it could be boiled down to 1 thing at a biological level that you could just amp up. To give everyone a 300 IQ, you would have to change the brain in ways that could alter personality, drive, mood, introversion/extroversion, etc.
If it was done, maybe there would be no more extroverts or no more introverts. Or everyone would become really moody. Or emotionally placid. I think even the idea that you'd have more innovation is suspect. Innovation requires more than IQ. It also requires collaboration from people who are different. You might run the risk of creating a uniform society with only 1 or 2 personality types. If this was the case, I would think some people would choose *not* to undergo the change, if they were given the option.
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Consider the [types of questions that IQ tests ask](http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-iq-questions.html):
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> * Analogies (mathematical and verbal)
> * Pattern driven (spatial and mathematical)
> * Classification
> * Visual
> * Spatial
> * Logical
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In general, it tests the ability and speed of your brain to
1. Realize what the question wants
2. Correctly interpret the image/equation/words into a problem space
3. Make the connection to give the solution
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> What are the downsides?
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There is no change in knowledge, so people are still not completely "equal" in terms of mental ability. Given a new math problem, people would still need to **know** (*have knowledge*) about certain things to be able to go about solving the problem (*Children need to **know** that "+" sign means addition, and what addition actually is*).
**Knowledge, even in today's world, can be gained by *any* individual with the use of effort. Intelligence only reduces the effort required.**
Since everyone now has the same amount of intelligence, it is interesting that running people through a schooling system could become much easier due to everyone learning at roughly the same speed. The drawback (*to some*) is that lack of effort now becomes much more apparent. The smart kid who barely had to try now has to get used to trying, just to stay at the *average*, while the not so bright, but still "all A" student, has an amazing work ethic and will now probably become way smarter/(*more knowledgeable*) than the other.
For the ones who come after, assuming they can't just reproduce the same thing the scientists did before, they would have to try and struggle. That immediate connection that could be made by the geniuses has to be slowly struggled out. The things discovered by geniuses might have to be rediscovered in smaller steps in order for the future generations to understand and catch up. Even then, that's not really a "downside" - since things can advance much more quickly than if it had never happened.
The only real downside that doesn't already exist in today's world would be the social strain between the two groups during the period where they both exist. The likely major communication gap, along with one group being perceived as "better", would definitely harm many relationships between the groups and possibly lead to major conflicts. The transition back into people who are less intelligent would be rough, while people get used to their leaders being incorrect more often then they are used too.
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The result would be much the same as if everyone were given a billion dollars tomorrow. Some would invest it wisely, some would waste it, others would suffer psychologically from the massive change in their world. Intelligence, assuming it can be measured, is a resource that requires a certain character to employ successfully. So in your world, there would still be inequality, crime, success and failure because people differ in character enough to guarantee those things.
As for the generational problem, "dumb" newborns with the right upbringing and character traits would out-compete those in the "genius" generation who lacked the additional traits required to succeed.
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This is essentially a philosophical question. How one answers will be determined by their personal philosophy. If they believe that intellect destroys emotional capacity, they will say the world will become cold or dangerous. If they believe that the most intelligent thing for people to do is to be as selfish as possible, and that selfishness excludes empathy or often results in behavior which is harmful to others (both, the second is not a given), then they will expect the world to become a place of high competition.
Avoiding simply reflecting ones own philosophy in answering this question is hard, but I am going to try it. What individuals and society will do, I cannot answer without simply saying what I believe intelligent people would do because they would be smart enough to figure it out.
But, we're not left completely incapable of thinking about this problem without involving philosophy. Our assumption is that this occurs on planet Earth, correct? In contemporary times? OK, right off the bat we know that human beings did not evolve this capacity. (And I will assume that they also did not evolve the ability to create this capacity, as that boils down to the same thing.) The planet and our situation on it might become a serious issue. We can assume that we would be intelligent enough to value our planet correctly so that we would not do anything which causes our extinction, but there are other things which might not be solvable.
Not everything in our lives is limited by intelligence. For instance, our inability to perfectly predict the behavior of nonlinear systems is not born of our lack of intelligence. That is a fundamental property of reality and mathematics. There may be general principles which unite the behavior of complex systems, we can't rule that out as impossible (the way we CAN rule out perfect prediction of most real systems), but there may not be such things. That may prevent us from accomplishing any sort of perfect utopia.
Also, while we may be intelligent enough to preserve our existence within an environment we did not develop to 'fit into', we may be required to do things which affect us adversely. We might know, for instance, that we could cure all cancer by taking some action, but that sufficient action would also result in the destruction of most potable water, resulting in extinction. We would then be forced to make a choice. The result of that choice, continued existence of cancer in the face of knowledge of how to cure it, would be bound to have psychological and emotional consequences. We might be able to ameliorate them a bit, but we would most likely not be able to eliminate them entirely.
Such situations would proliferate. Instead of our concerns being driven by what we can understand, they would, over time, be driven by fundamental physical limitations. Also, maintaining our identity may become a large issue. We are, fundamentally, feedback loops. How our environment affects us, and how we affect it, is the sum total of what we ARE. When we change our environment, we change ourselves. Cutting ourselves off so that our environment does not influence us would destroy us or, at the very least, change us so drastically that nothing which remained would resemble humanity.
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*"You have to go to school now! Hurry! I have just calculated that if you will not leave the house within 42 seconds, your chance of getting late to the first period will be 57.423 percents!"*
*"I'm just going to correct the relativity theory quickly and then calculate the cubic root of 190813108710. Only 13 more seconds!"*
Most likely, a technology will be developed to maximize the IQ of everybody. People will get more and more intelligent and then develop machines that increase their IQ more and more. Other galaxies will be colonized within months; building a portal to a parallel universe in your backyard will become a normal hobby. Since at some point, everybody's IQ will eventually become close to infinity, science, schools, universities, etc... will become obsolete. Eventually, humans will become some sort of a "super-sapient hyperspace 10-dimension ancient beings" civilization.
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If everyone is a super genius, then everyone is actually just average. It doesn't take a super genius to recognize that! You've raised the bar, but you raised it across the board.
The way I see it, there are plenty of highly intelligent people right now who are either never get the chance to do anything with it, or who "waste" it by under achieving. There's no obligation that comes with a high IQ, so that's their right. The point is, I don't think high intelligence is a predictor for success. I don't think it is a predictor of anything, really. Imagine being the smartest guy in a primitive tribe. Unless you figure out how to hunt better, or how to advance the tribe in some other way, nobody cares what your IQ is.
How much would really change if everyone was smarter? We see really smart people do dumb things all the time. My wife has a saying for this: "A lot of IQ. Not a lot of gee whiz." King Solomon asked for wisdom, not intelligence. I'd rather we all got a raise in wisdom, and intelligence stayed the same.
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A Neo-Luddite vanguard would emerge within hours demanding that all technology be destroyed and EMP bursts be deployed. Within days, the majority of humanity would recognize the wisdom in this and it would be accomplished by organized and distributed actors enacting the agenda of removing any and all objects which could potentially be leveraged for mass-terrorism (which would be just about everything when the population is that smart).
Whether or not that work would be achieved quickly enough to save humanity from complete self-annihilation is speculative. The very small subset of humans who had both pre-existing engineering education and a pre-existing disposition toward maniacal brutality would rapidly rise to the top, and they would most likely offer food and shelter to the imperiled masses in exchange for their loyalty and for lobotomizing themselves down to less dangerous intelligence levels.
Fury Road, pretty much.
P.S.
The language of the question is vulnerable to an array of quibbles, but it's clear that the man's attempting to convey that everybody would be incredibly intelligent in a generalized manner. Those who are intelligent enough to pick apart the question should be intelligent enough to both discern his intended question and to discern what little value there is in bickering about definitions rather than answering the (clearly) implied question.
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In [How can I convince members of peaceful religions to start a holy war?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20597/how-can-i-convince-members-of-peaceful-religions-to-start-a-holy-war), I made one critical assumption: Religious groups can be peaceful. As four separate people expressed some doubts on that assumption. This worried me slightly, and given that I think their points could be valid, I would like a complete answer to the question.
Can there be a religious group that will not commit religious violence?
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I think there is a distinction to be made here between a pacifist religion and a pacifist people.
There are plenty of religions that espouse [pacifism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifism#Religious_attitudes) to various degrees. Some allow violence as a means of self-defense, others deny the right of the individual to commit violent acts on behalf of a nation or government. Some forms of Christianity fall under the latter category, which may be a driving factor for why the military allows conscientious observers to opt out on religious grounds.
Individuals can also be pacifists. [Mahatma Gandhi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi) is probably one of the most famous pacifists. While he himself practiced pacifism, he admitted that not everyone could be a pacifist and, thus, not everyone should be. Pacifism is, in effect, antithetical to evolution. Those who are unwilling to harm another, even in self-defense, are liable to have their genes quickly removed from the gene pool.
There is, however, an example of a purely pacifist religion on Earth: [Jainism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism). This is probably one of the oldest religions we know of. The core tenet of Jainism is [ahimsa](http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/jainism/living/ahimsa_1.shtml), or the concept of absolute non-violence.
A community of people who are all dedicated to the Jainism religion would, therefore, never commit violence in the name of their religion (or in the name of anything else).
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The answer is both yes and no. There exist religions which are entirely peaceful or pacifist. However even in those cases there are exceptions. In general power will attract people who like power, and those people will then try to keep or expand that power. Violence is a very attractive way to do this.
Even religions which are themselves peaceful may need to defend themselves from other non-peaceful people (whether religious or not).
As a result most truly peaceful religions tend to be small pacifist sects with no real power or wealth. Even in those though you often get splinters, off shoots, or changes in direction over time where violence becomes accepted.
Buddhism is a great example here. The central tenants of Buddhism are very peaceful. To quote wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_violence>
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> One of the Five Precepts of Buddhist ethics or śīla states, "I undertake the training rule to abstain from killing." The Buddha is quoted in the Dhammapada as saying, "All are afraid of the stick, all hold their lives dear. Putting oneself in another's place, one should not beat or kill others"
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It is clear that this is a religion that holds non-violence as important. Indeed of all the major world religions it probably has the best record on that score, and yet there are many cases of violence on record. See [here](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22356306) for another article on this specific subject where it says.
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> But however any religion starts out, sooner or later it enters into a Faustian pact with state power. Buddhist monks looked to kings, the ultimate wielders of violence, for the support, patronage and order that only they could provide. Kings looked to monks to provide the popular legitimacy that only such a high moral vision can confer.
> The result can seem ironic. If you have a strong sense of the overriding moral superiority of your worldview, then the need to protect and advance it can seem the most important duty of all.
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> Christian crusaders, Islamist militants, or the leaders of "freedom-loving nations", all justify what they see as necessary violence in the name of a higher good. Buddhist rulers and monks have been no exception.
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All Abrahamic religions have "thou shalt not kill" as one of the main commandments, and yet crusades, jihad, genocide, etc. have all been parts of these religions.
Christianity in particular has the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus Commands all his follows to turn the other cheek and confront violence with not more violence (which is a precept in Islam and Judaism) but with compassion.
So realistically speaking, while a pacifist religion is possible unless that religion is small and localised there will always be members of that religion who resort to violence.
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# No.
There can be a religion that preaches non-violence, from Buddhism (though, I don't really consider it a religion) to fun, modern ones, such as the [Church of the Spaghetti Monster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#The_Gospel_of_the_Flying_Spaghetti_Monster). Similarly, one might consider Atheism a religion, as "religion" is defined as [a collection of beliefs or world views](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion).
The reason, however, that I say you will never be a religious group that does not commit violence, is because you are including individuals. In any situation or culture, you have people committing violence in the name of their religion: [even Buddhists](http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/17/myanmar-mob-killsmorethanadozenmuslims.html).
**You can have a religion that promotes non-violence, but you cannot expect comprehensive adherence of the individuals.**
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Short Answer: Your questions seems premised on the idea that religion in particular causes violence. There is no evidence to that effect.
It's better to ask if any group of humans will, given the power to do so, never commit violence against other groups. Evolutionary theory says no. If we believe we can benefit from from violence we will use it. We don't need religion to justify warfare, we can always find an excuse. Religion likely stops more wars than it enables.
The key factor in violence is a group of humans acquiring the ability to profitably commit violence against others. It is the capacity to profit from violence that comes first. All rationalizations on the morality of the violence, including religious ones, come later.
In the case of large organized religions, this usually means become allied with some state and becoming an established religion. When the religion becomes an arm of the state, the potential for violence is very high.
Religion disconnected from the state cause little violence and the more disconnected from the state, the less violence they cause.
Outlaw sects hiding in the shadows of the state rarely cause violence. Christianity existed peacefully for over 300 years in the Roman Empire. It was not until it became a state religion that we see begin to be used to rationalize violence. The same pattern occurred in Buddhism.
Conversely, Islam has militarism built into its core. Unlike, Jesus and Buddha, Mohamed was a military leader (and a very good one) yet during the Islamic golden age, Islamic polities were beacons of learning, trade, tolerance and in many wide areas, extremely peaceful compared to their contemporaries. Even, though many interpretations of the Koran seem to require Muslims to war constantly against the infidels, historically they only do so when war confer some material advantage.
Clearly, the effects of religion itself in promoting warfare if fairly minor and is overshadowed by more materialistic concerns and motives.
Long answer:
Religion is not especially violent. Objectively, in the last two hundred years, materialist atheist have proven much more brutal, bloody and warlike than the religious in the same time period. Every atheist dominated polity since the French Revolution as turned instantly muderolus and warring.
The 20th century is largely the story of the war against murderous states with ideologies founded in materialistic atheism, who adopted notionally secular ideologies but which functioned as religions in terms of their absolutism. It appears that if people do away with a supernatural religion, they just reinvent the same functional structure using a made up materialistic explanation. We get the worst of religion with none of its built in moral restraint.
I would also note that the idea that "religions cause wars" is fallacious. People fight whomever is nearest and the vast majority of wars are fought between coreligionist. It's impossible to point to a war which was caused purely or even primarily by religion. Instead, all notionally "religious wars" arise from a complex combinations of dynastic ambitions, lust for wealth by conquest, counter-attacks etc which are just wrapped up into religion.
Its also common for combatants to jump across religious lines in search of allies. France famously funded the Ottoman Empires attacks against the Holy Roman Empire to split its attention between the Ottomans and the rest of Europe. France also, though a Catholic country, funded the Protestants, particularly Gustave Aldophus of Sweden in the 30 years war.
Cromwell fought the Protestant Dutch, then allied with Catholic France against Catholic Spain.
The Christians dominated liberal-democracies allied with the atheist Soviets during WWII. (Even though the Soviets had destroyed the churches in their own domain and declared they would do the same every where when they conquered the world as "historical inevitability said they would.)
Religion relates to fostering war only in that makes people more militarily effective. The function of religion is to foster cooperation between co-religionist. Military success is all about internal cohesion and cooperation. The more internally cohesive and cooperative a religion makes a people, the more militarily effective it makes them. Historically, militarily effective peoples have also been deeply religious e.g. Sparta, Rome.
Historically, "religious wars" have just been the means to increase cooperation across political boundaries in order to fight larger wars.
The Famous Crusades where just a counterattack against the massive conquest of Christians lands the Islam's had carried out over the prior 400 years (itself land grabs more than Jihads.) Muslims and Christians spent most of their time fighting each other but by evoking religion, The Popes and the Mediterranean kingdoms, hoped to push the Muslims back or distract. They choose the holy land not only for its symbolic significance but because it was accessible by sea and not very mountainous.
Ventians provided the transport even though they made most of their money trading with the levant.
The Muslims at the time where busy fighting each other and pretty much ignored the invasion for two centuries as the Holy Land was not otherwise significant territory. When Saladin finally wiped out enough Muslim competitors to establish a broad kingdom, he just brushed the "Frankish Kingdoms" aside, even though they were nearly two centuries old at that time.
Historical evidence shows that the world's major religions suppress warfare internally strong textby making cooperation the ideal moral behavior. As religions become larger and larger, the rate of human on human violence drops.
***The upshot is that is seems impossible for any group of humans for justifying war if the payoff seems high enough.*** We'll find a rationalization and cram it into whatever religion, ideology, philosophy or science we have on hand to justify our war.
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The ancient (hellenistic) Greeks were very pious, and did not fight wars of religion.They fought wars for other reasons, and saw no benefit to dragging their gods into it.
The hellenistic Greeks took their religion very seriously. They spent lavishly on votive offerings and piously observed festival days. Despite having the tactical advantage, the greek warriors at the [Battle of Halys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_of_Thales#The_eclipse) held off their attack because of an eclipse (known in advance), which they interpreted as an omen of warning from the gods.
Alexander the Great famously allowed and encouraged conquered peoples to keep their own religions, going so far as to recast himself as the appropriate god-king in the appropriate place (it helped that most of the Greeks' neighbor cultures had god-kings in that time).
Obviously, the Greeks had wars of aggression. But the moral authority for these wars did not come from religion; In antiquity "I am stronger than you and I want your land" was reason enough to conquer another people.
The bottom line is that societies will have wars. If they can think up reasons to have those wars that don't include religion, the conquerors will be just as happy to leave religion a peaceful thing.
Reading between the lines though, I think you were asking if you could create a peaceful society through religion. I would argue that this reverses cause and effect; Ideologies cause people to go to war far less often than people who want to go to war come up with ideologies that will allow them to do that.
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**No, if we are making these assumptions:**
* The religion will spread across geography, culture and time.
* The religion includes any types of imperatives regarding morality or behavior.
* The religion exists in a world populated either by humans or by beings with the same basic nature as humans.
* The religion exists in a world lacking any extraordinary circumstances which could enforce nonviolent behavior.
* "Religious violence" occurs when a statistically significant percentage of the religion's followers believe the violence to be justified by the religion, even if this is disputed by the majority, religious leaders, or sacred text.
Simply put, as any group (but especially a religion) grows, its belief set will be diluted and trend toward that of the overall population (i.e. human nature + cultural norms of the time). If a true believer makes 5 converts, at least one of them will not be fully converted, but believe, say, 90% of the doctrine and 10% of what they previously believed. These "lesser" converts will in turn convert others, some of whom won't quite believe everything the person converting them does. There may be a thriving group of fundamentalists keeping true to the faith, but there will inevitably a significant amount of people who identify as followers of the religion who will believe most of the core tenets but see the religion as flexible enough to allow for their variations (which will, the majority of the time, align with basic human nature).
Once any number of these people exist and enough time passes, an act of violence will occur and the religion will be used as justification. It doesn't matter if 95% of the religion speaks out against the event; if 5% believe it was justified, religious violence occurred. (I doubt you could find a Christian today that would advocate exterminating the Jewish people, but Hitler was able to persuade enough people to act on his fringe beliefs.)
**However, one could theoretically exist in a world sufficiently different from ours.**
Assume the opposite of any of the assumptions above and one can imagine scenarios that would make a completely nonviolent religious group possible. For example:
* The religion never spreads beyond an isolated paradisaical island where the inhabitants want for nothing. There are enough resources that those who are driven to have more can obtain it without taking it from others. There is never enough conflict for religious violence to arise.
* The religion makes so few or insignificant claims that we barely recognize it as one. Imagine if all Christianity taught was that the first humans were named Adam in Eve. It's *possible* that some of this kind of religion's followers would use their religion to justify violence, but exceedingly unlikely, especially compared to the likelihood of religious violence in more assertive religions.
* The religion exists on a world where people are blindly and absolutely obedient. Imagine people with personalities more akin to robots or trained dogs. (Essentially, remove or reduce their free will.) A religion that clearly and explicitly prohibits violence will be effective for such a race.
* There is some fantastic method to enforce uniformity. Imagine a religion based on Borg technology. To convert, you must interface with the collective. Unlike the Borg, this collective is nonviolent, and when a member tries to contradict the nonviolent teachings, the majority overrule them and shut them down. (Obviously, a Borg religion *could* be very violent, but if it was started by a large enough group of true believers who are genuinely nonviolent, this nonviolence could realistically persist.)
* The religion is actually real and its god is active in enforcing it. If the deity truly exists and takes an active role in human events, he can smite those that disobey his teachings. (Perhaps this is still religious violence, but of an entirely different nature?)
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The question requires considerable clarification. By "religion" do you mean the religion as a whole (such as Christianity), or do individual sects count? By "peaceful", do you mean that all members are prohibited from military activity upon pain of expulsion from the group?
If sects are allowed, then (just in the US) the Amish, Hutterites, Jehovah's Witnesses and Quakers, at the least, espouse pacifism and have never entered an armed conflict against any other religious group, and all have resisted military participation in national wars.
As far as I know, all of the groups have occasionally produced soldiers (often non-combatant, especially including medics), and even some fighters, but these actions were individual choices. In no case did the sect as a group take part.
The Hutterites, for example, refused military service during WWI, and when 4 men were imprisoned for failure to comply with the draft (and 2 died of injuries incurred in prison), the entire community moved to Canada.
[Answer]
**Yes. But in reality, No**
It depends on what you define as the religious group. The teaching, or the people? [Jainism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism) teaches noninjury towards all living beings. I don't know any followers personally, but I have read some accounts that they're pretty serious about this.
So, yes, in this case the religious group is perfectly peaceful. In theory. But what about Jains that aren't wearing their Jainism hat? Are their actions attributed to the individual or the religion? Are they always a representative of their religion?
Most people I know are *not* always being a representative of their professed religion. Unless they really believe its teachings in their heart of hearts, they act like a normal human when they're not wearing their religion hat. Though, as far as I know, most of those same people would also argue that their religion doesn't allow part time adherence. In which case, every action they make is representative of their religion.
So, no, a religious group is made up of humans who are not always peaceful. As soon as one follower of a religion does something violent, they are representing their religion as one of non-perfect peace.
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>
> Here lies a fallen god
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> His fall was not a small one,
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> We did but build his pedestal
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> A narrow and tall one
>
>
> -Tleilaxu epigram,
>
> from Frank Herbert's *Dune Messiah*
>
>
>
The most interesting question one has to deal with when answering this question is the definition of violence. In the comments, you mentioned one such definition you would explore: *"...defining violence as 'causing physical harm to any human being'..."* The answer with this choice of wording is unequally yes, so long as the religious group believes in freewill.
The subtle issue with that particular definition is that one must define causality, which has been a quagmire for philosophy for several millennia. Consider a case where one has two options: one option results in a guaranteed but very obscure and hard to see death, the other results in easily seen deep hardship. If an individual fails to consider the situation sufficiently, they miss the threat of death, seek to avoid the hardship, and metaphorically draw the sword across their own throat. A group may consider this to be the act of the victim, thus they claim to have caused no physical harm.
The Tleilaxu from Frank Herbert's dune are one such group. Without revealing any spoilers from the book, the Tleilaxu have a caste known as Face Dancers, who are used for assassinations, amongst other undesirable tasks. The Face Dancers have one rule in their assassinations: *the victim must always have a way out.* Thus, by Face Dancer logic, when the victim fails to see the way out, they sign their own death warrant, and the Face Dancer allows the victim to tighten their own noose.
So if a Tleilaxu Face Dancer who specializes in assassinations can meet your criteria for not using violence, I think a few harmless old priests can manage to meet it if they try hard enough.
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The "no true scotsman" fallacy might help you there: If you have a religious group that bans violence, then you could easily (while not necessarily correctly) argue that any person commiting an act of violence was no true member of that group.
But you could also take a slightly different approach, looking at your restriction that "the group" would not commit *religious* violence. (I assume that "the group" was not meant literally, since the group will never commit violence, but a subset (which might still be all) of it's members might do, individually):
I think it should be easy to argue in at least nine out of ten cases of alleged religious violence that the true motivation was not religious but simple, boring greed, either for money or for power.
So, i guess the answer can easily be **yes** to the question as you asked it. But the value of that answer for any practical purpose is clearly debatable.
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I don't think the religion matters at all, except that it not allow violence at all. The real question is about the people involved. As long as we are talking about humans living under vaguely normal circumstances, the answer is no.
One question is going to be with the faith of the believers. Strong believers will never act violently. Weak believers may act violently. Human psychology drives us to stick with our beliefs, but if someone were just in the religion because their parents were in it, they might disagree on some points, not enough to make them leave, but under special circumstances, they may do something against the tenants of the religion. This becomes especially important when religion is involved in politics as well (I read your other question), as a citizen may join a theocracy because they like the politics, and they may be willing to fight for their home or country, regardless of what the prevailing religion says about fighting.
The other question is who controls 'the religion.' If you define the religion as being the followers of an entity who determines the tenants, then the religion itself could always be peaceful, while proclaimed 'followers' commit acts of violence. These 'followers' may be banned from the religion, but unless the entity or his followers enforce this and renounce their actions, or in some way make it clear to others that this is not the way of the religion, it will still look to outsiders as though a member of the religion was violent. If the religion is defined by a religious text, it is similar to an entity, except that the followers must enforce the rules and banishments because the text itself is powerless, and the text is open to interpretation because the text cannot clarify itself to those who do not understand. If a religion is defined by a group of people or a single person, then it cannot be peaceful, because at some point, those people will have a need to use violence, and will simply change the religion to allow it.
Religion is usually based on willing membership, which means members can be kicked out if they don't follow the rules, but unless the definition of the religion lies outside human hands, some person will inevitably allow violence for their own purposes.
Of course, it's always possible to have your people have different psychology, but being too alien makes them hard to relate to for us humans that will learn about your world.
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Many, if not most faiths will claim that peace is a core tenet of their theology, though in practice of course that doesn't always pan out.
This is true of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Less centralized faiths may or may not espouse peace/non-violence but these are tougher to gauge.
Many have a clause in their non-violence teachings that can be boiled down to:
*Violence is bad, except when in defense of the faith or the weak (or faithful).*
Even Buddhism which specifically mentions non-violence and thanks to Gandhi is well known for non-violence can be oppressive and violent.
So, there are a couple ways to look at this.
1. The religion is not violent, the people are. This is pretty common and in reality I believe that any Christian who promotes violence is not in fact Christian, same goes for violent Buddhists etc.
But this is sort of a cop out and doesn't really address the problem you are trying to solve, which in my mind is **Can I have a major religion with varied adherents profess and maintain non-violence?**
2. So do we have examples of religions that both preach and practice non-violence? As a matter of fact we do. Jainism has already been mentioned so I won't go into a ton of detail on that, another option is the [Baha'i faith.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith) This religion is interesting to me because it is monotheistic and Abrahamic and yet preaches (and has thus far) practices non-violence. There are a myriad of other smaller faiths or denominations that preach and practice non-violence as well.
Several common theme's present themselves when you look at faiths that preach non-violence but then go to war in the name of religion.
* Exclusivity: They are the one and only way to god and have the true path. This I feel is the biggest single flaw in organized religions. Many preach that you cannot get to heaven unless you are of that faith...which begs the question, what about people on the other side of the planet that had never even heard of the faith. Dooming someone for not following a faith they cannot know doesn't seem like a very godlike thing to do.
* Divine inspiration: If your holy book is the true word of god...and another religion claims the same...you have an obvious conflict unless they say exactly the same thing...AND are interpreted exactly the same way...which means they are actually the same religion so I suppose that makes its own point.
* Mixing politics and religion: When there is power, and wealth to be gained ideals can and often are thrown by the wayside. No religion that has held political power can claim that they have not also participated in violence. Even if the country in question hasn't gone to war, I would wager it has a police force...
So what does allow for truly peaceful religions?
* Codified and explicit non-violence. There can be no exception for self-defense, defense of the faith, or anything else for that matter. Any exception can be extrapolated for the use of the 'church' or country. Jainism for example.
* Universalist religions: Baha'i falls into this category. The religion is an attempt to bring all previous religions together as smaller pieces of a larger whole.
* Traditionalist religions: This is going to generally be smaller religions or sects, people that prefer to live without technology and live a simple life. The Amish would be an example of this.
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The problem is that *Religion*, by definition, involves irrational beliefs ("faith") and that opens up *any* possibility.
By *irrational* I mean "not in accordance with reason", meaning not using the correct [rules of logic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Types_of_logic) to form a [proof based on givens](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic). You can't reason about the behavior if the people are not going to follow your logical conclusion. You can prove a theorem of sorts taking the stated or observed tenents of behavior of the group, put in data for a situation, and determine what the teachings say should be done, assuming the rules are not ambiguous and open to interpretation. Even so, so what? A follower will not criticality analyse the situation and rule set like a good [Vulcan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(Star_Trek)); he will do what the group and leaders state, even if a logical outsider or any critical thinking person can see that that's wrong.
Don't beat me up for this: it's the *definition*. If there is no "faith", you would not consider it a religion, but rather philosophy, law, math, or software engineering. Any system that *is* perfectly logical will be welcomed by the mathematicians as their turf, even if it doesn't seem math-like to a layman (e.g. Group Theory). Human thinking is generally not like that.
At best, it would be a system of *Law*, and if lawyers and judges did follow everything logically like Vulcans or computer programs, and was not subject to interpretation, you could ask about the legality of a particular action. And that doesn't mean that someone won't break the law! Just that the law does not allow the action.
So more generally, you can ask about a society or culture that has a set of rules, both specific and general principles. In order to predict confidantly that it will be nonviolent you need to
* verify that the rules are such — this is complicated by generic principles and templates and metarules.
* verify that members will come to the same logical conclusion.
Even if the first was defined exceptionally well, at least for the area of interest, the second is a problem.
Either:
* people will decide what they want and then cherry-pick rules to justify it, ignoring other rules and conclusions even when pointed out,
* people will not think it through themselves but will rely on leaders to tell them the result.
To be certain of a negative answer to your question, you need:
* experts work out the conclusion logically
* peer-review and oversight is used to find mistakes and mitigate human biases
* people listen to the expert's result, *and* know which result is the right result from that process, as opposed to somebody preaching his own wrong answer.
Now here's another semantic issue. If people do X anyway even though the *system* prohibits it, (1) you did not correctly predict that X would not be done, and (2) the *system* is still prohibiting X. Those people are not acting according to the system according to the same experts and process that determined the legality of X, but those people can themselves *say* they are still using the system. Is this the *no true scottsman* fallacy? Do the outside observers care that the ligitimate leaders who defined *the system* are now ignored? I think not: they just see the society doing X, in spite of the well-specified rule system.
In a system of law within a strong authority, you remove the people not respecting the authority.
At the very best, you can check whether the current in-power leadership is interpreting the rules rationally. But the leadership changes over time, even if the rule set (on paper) does not.
So your question boils down to: **will people behave logically and rationally, and continue to do so forever?**
Perhaps a benign dictatorship where kings are trained from birth to be that way, *and* stay in power. But that's only stable over the span of a few generations. In a SF or Fantasy story you might come up with ways to keep it working as such.
Even so...
You might have a kingdom with super wise rulers and engrained culture so you can, at best, say "kingdom K won't fight other kingdoms *unless threatened*" and even assume that credibility of threats is done logically. As civilization advances and changes, novel situations arise and can you know for sure what K will find threatening?
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As others have noted pacifist religious groups do exist, and the best way to make them immune to greed and power seekers is by making the religion incredibly exclusive.
No one can use our own religion against us and turn us to violence by our own ignorances if we do not allow any outsider to know about our beliefs and keep everything secret.
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I think some people may have misunderstood the OP's question.
He's not asking if a "pacifist religion" can exist (i.e. people proclaiming non-violence) but rather about religion without "religious violence".
Religious violence is something like *crusades* (although it was actually just a mask to political reasons) or *jihad*, where people wage war for the sake of their religious beliefs or in name of their god.
Consider Christianity: apart from specific branches (which, again, twisted he truth for personal gain), there is no prescription of holy wars. So here is one.
Same for Islam.
Buddhism, as far as I am aware, does not prescribe war.
So there are lot of non-warring-religions. The fact that a specific sect or member of a religion is violent doesn't make the whole religion violent.
[Answer]
People are violent. We will use violence to protect our "family". That family can be a a spouse and offspring, an extended clan or a small village. We are usually not violent with those within that family. We have learned to extend this protection to larger groups we identify with and reduce the violence towards others outside of the group, but we still stand ready to do violence.
While many individuals choose to not be overtly violent we are all capable of it. Most parents will do almost anything to protect their offspring.
Large groups of pacifists can only exist when protected by a larger group that considers them to be "family".
Potentially if we ever discover another intelligent civilization we might start to consider every human as being part of our family. Even then you will have at least the potential of violence, if not actual violence toward the aliens instead of eliminating violence.
It is also very possible that our divisions will be enduring that even in face of aliens outsiders, we will still fight among ourselves. after all we still have violence today over issues from decades, centuries, and even millennia ago.
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Every culture has a concept of the afterlife, people fear death and therefore want to believe that death is not the end. Obviously the idea that there is life after death defies natural biologic rules of how death works. So, without relying on magic or alternate physics, how could the afterlife be scientifically explained?
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You may be interested on the reasearch of a doctor called Sam Parnia. He published a book called [What Happens When We Die](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B005C3QS92), in which he proposes we try to study out-of-body experiences (OBE's) within the limits of science.
He proposes this by applying such experiments as having paintings in key places in surgery rooms, so that if someone has an OBE and sees the painting, they can document it. He also proposes an hypothesis - and this must be emphasized, it is not a theory, it will only ever become a theory if this is scientifically proved - that consciousness does not exist within the brain, it only interfaces with the brain, which is how an OBE may be possible. He goes into detail on how during OBE's the brain of patients is practically dead - during key moments, the ECG goes flat - and despite that, people wake up after the surgery describing how the whole thing went, and sometimes things that happened outside of the surgery room as well.
Let's pretend for a moment that what the doctor proposes is factually real. Our minds exist in more than three dimensions, which is why we can't see minds as they move through space. They are attached to a body somehow between conception and birth, and detach from the body after death.
Since our memories are stored as patterns in the brain, this explains why we don't have memories of our past lives (if you allow for reincarnation) or from the time when we weren't born yet (otherwise). It may be, though, that only the bulk of our memories is stored that way. A small fraction of it may be contained in the "soul", which is why we can "recover data" from OBE's.
This explains afterlife in a somewhat simple way - not much more (fictional) science is needed to make it feasible in the world that you are building.
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# We're living in a computer simulation
There are many cases where scientists have simulated the evolution of systems, and computer programmers have come up with many variants on the idea (Stack Overflow even has [a question about it](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396938/computer-simulation-of-the-evolution-process)!). [3D Virtual Creature Evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Virtual_Creature_Evolution), for instance, simulates how fit organisms are as they evolve in different ways, and thus "the fittest" survive, according to Darwin's principles.
This can actually all be done using [evolutionary algorithms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm), used in [computational evolutionary biology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_biology#Computational_evolutionary_biology). Let's say that we're living in a simulation, where more powerful beings have created an artificial universe to study how new civilizations and species arise. Those organisms that fail in some way - because others are better adapted to certain conditions - die, according to the principles of natural selection.
However, the aliens decide to do a sort of "runner-up" simulation, for lack of a better phrase. While creatures with the best adaptations survive in the primary simulation, the aliens keep some of the other top-performing variants around to see what the next most optimal configurations are. This becomes an afterlife, so to speak.
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A complete answer would require us to scientifically define the essence of a living individual. My answer will not include that, but instead merely assume that such an essence can be identified and we can explore its thermodynamic properties.
In every scientific theory, there is an error term to account for measurement errors and nonmeasurable differences between each experimental setup. It is always probabalisic. It does not state that the real world has probabilities, merely that the best predictive models we use are dependent on probabilities to capture that which we do not understand. If the interaction of this "life essence" after "death" was incapable of interacting with the world in a way which is detectable different from a probabilistic distribution, or were to choose to only interact in such a way, science would never be able to identify it. It would forever hide in the noise in every experiment they run.
The fun part is exploring the many ways this could occur. There are myriad. So many that I gave serious consideration to closing this question as opinion based. If someone suggested to me that every person alive had a unique answer to this, or even multiple answers to this, I would not challenge their claim. However, there are a few general patterns that I have found intriguing to explore.
The first is similar to HDE226868's answer. If the "life essence" of an individual shifts in a higher dimension in such a way that its old content is replaced with thermal noise, that essence could move elsewhere without science noticing. This is particularly interesting because such actions are remarkably similar to the strange concept of [negentropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negentropy) which is associated with living creatures, and only living creatures. Such an shift could be a translation in a dimension that we are simply not aware of, a computer simulation moving data from one region to another, or even the result of careful code multiplexing such as [Gold Codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code) occurring on time scales below that of a plank-moment which reduce the cross-correlation between the living and the dead to nearly zero. Any one of an infinite number of solutions like this works so long as the final result is that science cannot detect the life essence after someone dies because it blends in with the noise.
Another approach might be to suggest that life after death is simply very low energy, and actively avoiding being subject to scientific experimentation. Scientific evidence depends on the assumption that each experimental result is repeatable. A skilled collective of "dead" essences might be able to massage the data from scientific experiments to obscure their own interaction.
Another interesting one is to note that we don't really understand our own life essence. If there's an afterlife, what's to say that life isn't more than it lets on. Perhaps it's not that the scientific experiments don't show the existence of these life essences, but rather that these dead creatures living out their afterlife train the living to simply ignore all evidence of their existence. This would raise doubts about the fundamental assumptions of scientific measurement at its core, but is not disprovable by empirical means alone.
The options are myriad. These are merely ones which have the benefit of working with nearly any definition of an afterlife out there. If you are more specific about the characteristics of your afterlife, whole new classes of options open up. There is literally no limit to this answer. You can explore to your heart's content for your entire life, and still never even scratch the surface.
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# What is the essence of a sentient being?
A human consists of protons, neutrons and electrons. A rock also consists of protons, neutrons and electrons. Indeed, the protons, neutrons and electrons the rock consists of don't differ in any way from the protons, neutrons and electrons we consist of. And with the right size of rock, even their number will be roughly the same.
So what makes us different from a rock? Well, it's the *arrangement* of those protons, neutrons and electrons. We are not really matter, but structure. Or said differently, we are information.
# On the preservation and destruction of information
A general rule of quantum mechanics is that information is not destroyed. Indeed, there's a big controversy about this about whether this still holds for black holes; that this controversy even exists shows the importance of that principle.
However there's a catch: In observations, information apparently *is* destroyed. For example, if we observe an electron that initially is in a so-called superposition of two states, we observe one state or the other, and afterwards it's state is changed according to our result, and there's no way to recover what the original state was.
Let's suppose that process is real (whether it is a real process, or just a perceived one, is one of the points different interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree), and suppose that despite of this, we assume that information has to be conserved. Then clearly there has to be *some* place where this information ends up, and that place is not inside the observable universe (because quantum mechanics tells us quite clearly that the information is no longer accessible to us). So under those assumptions, one would conclude that there's a mechanism which allows information to "escape" from the observable universe, and moreover at least one of the processes where this happens may involve sentient beings (who observe a quantum system).
# Putting it together
So on one hand, the essence of a sentient being is information, and on the other hand, quantum mechanics together with some assumptions (which, I must stress, are not *implied* by quantum mechanics) leads to the possibility of information leaving the observable universe. So it is not a completely unreasonable idea that the information that makes up a person might also possibly leave the universe at some point. Obviously when this happens, that's the inevitable death of that person in the observable world, so one might as well assume this happens on every death.
Of course that still leaves open how/why that information would remain organized in the "afterlife world" in a form so that it would still remain a sentient person recognizing itself. But obviously that depends on laws completely outside the observable universe, and therefore cannot be explained (let alone confirmed or falsified) by science.
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Who measures the duration of an afterlife? Is it an external observer or is it the person experiencing the afterlife?
A valid afterlife might be us experiencing some of our strongest memories for what we feel is an eternity but externally measured is mere seconds as the body decays.
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Either my consciousness and all my memories are the result of a particular arrangement of the grey goo that I keep between my ears, or I am something more. Since you are looking for a purely scientific answer, lets ignore the "something more" option. In which case, your question boils down to...
In an nearly-infinite universe that is just one of an infinite number of universes, will there ever exist another skull full of grey goo which is identical in every way to the one I possess right now?
The answer to that is strongly linked to the definition of infinity. On any truly infinite spectrum, every possible value drawn from a limited (non-infinite) scope will probably happen an infinite number of times along that spectrum.
Since my skull has a limited capacity for holding grey goo and since that quantity of grey goo can only be configured in a limited (albeit vast) number of ways; the number of (non-something-more) human consciousnesses that can possibly exist has to be a limited number. Adding that to the large number of skull-full of grey goo configurations which do not result in a human consciousness, we still are dealing with a limited number.
So across all of space and time, each of us should look forward to living at a minimum, an infinite number of lives.
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Everything we physically are when we're alive gets scattered after our death. As our bodies deteriorate, the connections between our numerous neurons burn.
As of science, there is no life after death *by definition*. Now, since everything known to us dies with us, you first need to prove there is "life next to life" (aka the soul).
Science is not much about souls. The soul is basically the idea that human beings have an essence that goes beyond their physical bodies. Science being a lot about the physical world and not at all about essentialism, proving the soul seems to go against the scientific method. This gives quite a lot of restrictions on what the soul can be and do in order to be provable.
Maybe we actually live in a n-dimensionnal world and our 3D minds are just a projection of something bigger (and probably outside of time). After death would be an `exit 0`. Maybe we are ourselves the shadows in Plato's cave. Anyway, how do we prove that?
*drums rolling*
One necessary property of one's soul would be for it to interact with the person's brain. Even just observing the brain should be enough to have an impact (say hello to quantum physics).
Now, external observing should have impact on the quantic properties of your brain's atoms. Not just one atom but most atoms (the mind resides in the network and its interactions). Find a way to spot quantum oddities and that should be a piece of cake!
Now, how do you intend to fund my work?
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The Idea of an afterlife is not against or current understanding science. What is Life after all but energy and memory. If you destroy a computer drive you destroy your ability to access that memory stored in the drive, but the memory it self is not touched and continues to exits even if it is inaccessible. Your body could function a lot like a computer drive. If it is destroyed then memories and personality stored in your brain becomes inaccessible but not destroyed.
Also remember that science is not a static construct, It chances as new discovers are accepted into the scientific model. Even if there wasn't any possibility for some type of life after death in our current scientific model doesn't mean that will remain so as time goes by. You could simply say that some scientist came up with a theory for life after death that was accepted by the scientific community.
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You can consider [each instant of time as a new Universe](http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.1615), so each instant of your existence is the afterlife of the previous instances. Fundamentally, we're all just algorithms. At every computational step this algorithm changes, something is added or removed from the memory which means that after such an operation it will not respond in the same way to exactly the same input. Some algorithms will be capable of having a subjective experience of a "past" where they had less information. But this identification of an algorithm to its "previous version" is not an unambiguous identification, because we're not only adding information, information will also be removed.
So, there is no escape to the conclusion that your life expectancy is always just one computational step of the algorithm that defines you right now. The fact that we don't intuitively see it that way and that even years later most of us will still feel like being the same person, means that we already stick to an afterlife interpretation, even if we are hard core atheists.
On the long run, there is no real "continuation" of a given person. Since we are all just finite state machines, there are only a finite number of computational states available for us. Each state should actually be considered a different person or animal or whatever, but what matters is that the number is finite. Each state will have a finite memory of a "past". The only thing that's truly eternal here is the set of states. The time evolution is itself just an illusion, all the experiences of all the possible persons that can exist, just exist in their own time. In that sense we never really die, as [Einstein put it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Besso):
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> Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
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There are two possible Afterlives. One depends on the survival of the personality after death. The other depends on the existence of a Heaven or a Hell.
This is inspired by Nigel Kneale's TV play *The Stone Tape*. Essentially the human personality is recorded at the moment of death by the surrounding environment. Under certain the recorded personality can be replayed. This means the post-mortem state is that of a sort of ghost. Whether this 'spectre' is a conscious entity or not is an open question. Considering that this 'recording' degrades over time, if you were conscious this could agonising.
To get ourselves Heaven and/or Hell, we can start with the assumption that exists parallel realities which might be a form of parallel universe. For simplicity, let's call them a dimension. This dimension is closely bound to our spacetime and while they can only weakly interact with our sate of existence they can interact strongly with what might be the 'shadow aspects' of our nature. This consists of the pure information generated by the structure of our bodies and minds. Normally the 'shadow aspects' are firmly welded to the corporeal state of our bodies. However, on the moment of death the 'shadow aspects' can be plucked out of our world and taken into this parallel dimension or two.
The 'shadow aspects' can be thought as the soul. This isn't accurate, but be that as it may, lots of people will think it so. While the 'shadow aspects' are intangible and immaterial in our world they become incarnated into something resembling physical reality in the other dimension(s).
Should one dimension be a nice world, and the other not so nice and, if the truth be told, is downright nasty. Then between the two dimensions we now have a Heaven and Hell. Of course, the alien entities in charge of the two dimensions will be pursuing their own agendas which may be radically incompatible with that of mere mortals
Now whether the survival of these 'spectres' in these dimensions of Heaven and Hell is eternal and unending, ie, whether they are immortal, is an open question. And the OP isn't asking about this. So we will leave the departed in their Afterlives and hope they can enjoy what is in store for them there.
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## Dream
In your world, quantum physicists could find actual evidence that the world is not actually real. We know that human consciousness has the capacity to dream up imaginary worlds and fool itself into thinking they're real worlds in which it is living. Billions of people regularly do so while they're dreaming during sleep. When someone is dreaming, they typically are so engrossed in the dream that they believe it is real. In your fictional universe, quantum physicists could find actual evidence that this world we call real is just such a long-lasting dream. When we die, one dream ends. It may be followed by *another dream*, or an actual awakening from dreaming altogether.
If this world is a dream, then it also means that our body and the person we think we are are part of that dream. It will disappear when we awaken or move on to another dream with another world. Sort of like if you dream at night that you are a crocodile living in the Amazon river. When the dream ends, the crocodile "dies." But you weren't really that crocodile. So you, the *real you*, goes on to have some other dream (maybe being an elephant this time) or you actually wake up from dreaming altogether.
So if this life is just a dream, where is the real you? Who is dreaming? The meta physicists in your world may not actually know yet. Is the dreamer in some other physical world, sleeping? All we know is that they are sentient. After all, in order to experience *anything*, there must be sentience. If you feel like it, you could leave the actual identity of the dreamer open. The scientists may still be working on answering that. After all, how could they answer it *while they are still dreaming*?
I am not saying quantum physicists have actually proven such a thing (although the fields of quantum physics and metaphysics are full of wonderful mysteries), but it could certainly work for a fictional story.
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Inspired by [Rupert Sheldrake's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake) "morphic resonance hypothesis": All living structures bring about an "imprint", a kind of resonance in the matrix of reality. (Mix in some universal quantum entanglement nonsense here to give the idea a physics base.) The human mind, conceptually the physically and electrically interconnected neurons, is such a structure. Its imprint or resonance continues after death and is able to either have consciousness of its own or shapes another such structure, which leads to rebirth.
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If with afterlife you mean an entity with your thoughts, memories, and so on... You will most probably can't ever explain that scientifically, but on the other hand if what you want is to explain scientifically the persistance of what we once were, that is quite possible. First off matter cannot be created nor destroyed, thus what you are (in its bits and pieces -I mean energy and atoms-) has always been here and will always be. When you die you won't disappear, your atoms will move (you will be eaten by the worms, part mixed with the sand, whatever. Thus your atoms will pass from one place to another but they won't dissapear and even if they dissapear the really don't, they will just transform into energy).
"We are made of star dust" and that is literally. We have always been here and we will always be :)
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If you look at how [John Searle deals with the idea of consciousness in his famous Chinese Room gedankenexperiment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg), you will rapidly surmise one of the fundamental problems with our scientific understanding of consciousness, which persists as a very unwelcome (to the functionalists) eyesore to the present day: there is *no* accounting of the qualia in our present materialist zeitgeist.
Searle's proposition seems to be that it is possible all matter experiences qualia, and that therefore it is quite possible there is "something it is like to be a rock," for example - it is only that sentient beings are the one form of matter which is able to express its experience of qualia. From this, therefore, it is easy to surmise that in such a universe, one would not stop experiencing things just because one died; instead you would stop experiencing what it was like to be a living human and start experiencing what was like to be a dead human, or a pile of ash, or whatever you became after that. Hell, given long enough, parts of "you" could quite possibly experience what it is like to be a living human again.
Of course this "afterlife" ends with the eventual heat-death of the universe when matter itself ceases vibrating and decomposes into a perfectly distributed energy field persisting across an infinitely large universe for an infinite period of time, during which course the accumulation of random events may well lead to another big bang event and the recreation of another universe in which *different* matter would come into existence - but there would be no continuity between that universe's matter and our own that I am aware of, and thus your experiences would cease then and there.
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## Beings with advanced technology replicate the information in our brains
This was the solution used in the [Riverworld](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverworld) books (where it was done by aliens), and various people have speculated that our distant descendants (or intelligent machines 'descended' from AIs we create) might do this in the far future--the first such speculation I know of comes from [Nikolai Fydorov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov) in the 19th century, who started an intellectual movement known as [Russian Cosmism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism), and the idea has also been prominently advocated by the physicist [Frank Tipler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler) in his [Omega Point](http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/tipler_page.html) speculation.
The particular cosmological model Tipler assumed--a [Big Crunch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch) in which the universe eventually stops expanding and begins to contract until it reaches a final singularity similar to the Big Bang--is no longer favored as describing the future of our universe, both because the density of matter doesn't seem to be higher than the [critical density](http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_fate.html) which would be needed to halt the expansion, and because there appears to be a [cosmological constant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant) that's causing expansion to accelerate rather than slow down and reverse. But the main elements needed for this "scientific" notion of an afterlife would be 1) it is possible for future beings to reconstruct the past history of the universe by measuring all the particles in the universe and reconstructing their past configurations (or possibly they could have some kind of time travel technology for this), and 2) the computing power available to our descendants increases forever without any upper bound, so that any 'resurrected' beings can exist in the afterlife indefinitel. Tipler proposed a method of endless computing based on compressing computations into smaller and smaller times in the moments leading up to the Big Crunch singularity, but in [this paper](http://blog.regehr.org/extra_files/dyson.pdf) physicist [Freeman Dyson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson) proposed a different method that would work in an "open" universe that expands forever and has zero cosmological constant.
I know of at least one current cosmological theory in which both these could be present, found in [this paper](http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796v3) by two respected string theorists, [Leonard Susskind](http://theoreticalminimum.com/biography) and [Raphael Bousso](http://physics.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/raphael-bousso). It's rather technical and to understand much of anything in it you probably need at least a basic familiarity with ideas like [quantum decoherence](http://www.decoherence.de), the [many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation), the [string theory landscape](http://www.pha.jhu.edu/courses/172_113/BoussoPolchinski.pdf), the universe [tunneling into a different vacuum state](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/74234/59406) (a future state with zero cosmological constant which they label "the hat" because of the way it appears on a diagram), [causal diamonds](http://www.wired.com/2014/11/check-universe-exist/) and [holographic entropy bounds](http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf) (particularly Bousso's covariant entropy bound discussed on the last page of that link, which can be applied to determine the entropy--which is directly related to the informational capacity for observers that want to perform computations--of causal diamonds). But see the discussion on p. 32 where in "Postulate II" they propose a definition where to be truly "observable", it must be true that "the world is big enough that the observable can be measured infinitely many times", and section 3.4 starting on p. 33 about the hypothetical "census taker" in the distant future who performs such a series of infinite series of measurements to reconstruct the multiverse's past history, with the comment on p. 35 that "we conclude that Postulate II is satisfied for all observables in the hat. Since both postulates are satisfied, quantum mechanical predictions can be operationally verified by the Census Taker to infinite precision." Then on p. 39 they relate observations made in "the hat" (the future infinite universe with zero cosmological constant) to physical observables in the "finite causal diamonds" which lie in its past (regions of spacetime with nonzero cosmological constant that will eventually transition into the zero cosmological constant state via quantum tunneling): "Any (necessarily approximate) observable in the finite causal diamonds of the multiverse can be represented by an exact observable in the Census Taker’s hat." Finally on p. 41-43 they make clear that the Census Taker is actually able to use this information to reconstruct the history of all the prior finite patches (finite causal diamonds) that existed in the past of the "hat", writing on p. 42 that "Over time, the Census Taker receives an unbounded amount of information, larger than the entropy bound on any of the finite causal diamonds beyond the hat. This means that the Census Taker will receive information about each patch history over and over again, redundantly."
So to sum up, in this model, at some point billions of years in the future our universe will experience a spontaneous tunneling event which changes the vacuum state, causing some apparent changes to the laws of physics--according to the paper [here](http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0508207) (and the talk summarizing it [here](http://susy06.physics.uci.edu/talks/6/clavelli.pdf)) this would probably be fatal to organic life, but various kinds of structures like stars and planets would persist so perhaps some appropriately-structured type of artificial intelligence could survive too. If so, these AI would then find themselves in a new type of universe where it would be possible to continue computing forever, and would also encounter (and presumably join up with) other AI that survived similar transitions from other patches of spacetime with different vacuum states. This community of AI could continually perform measurements on incoming photons and other particles which would give them more information about these past patches of spacetime, eventually leading to the possibility of complete [ancestor simulations](http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/what-are-the-odds-we-are-living-in-a-computer-simulation) which would include detailed and accurate simulations of all the beings that lived in these past patches, including us (such simulations would be equivalent to the notion of [mind uploading](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading)--of course it's a philosophical question whether an upload of me would have the same type of consciousness as me, or whether it would make sense to say it *is* me but just made out of different atoms--note that the molecules that our own brains are made of probably [get replaced almost completely every few months](http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_molecular_turnover.html), so there's a case for saying only continuity of pattern matters, not continuity of actual physical particles).
If we imagine that the future superintelligences might have some empathy for puny beings like ourselves, or some moral commitment to bettering the lives of sentient beings everywhere no matter how small, you could imagine that after any being dies in the historical simulation, they make a copy of its mind at the point of death (perhaps repairing brain damage or deterioration) and release it into what they would consider the "real world" of this distant future, giving all beings a kind of afterlife. This could be pretty interesting as a science fiction setting, a sort of combination of the Riverworld books with everyone who ever lived coexisting, and fictional worlds like [Orion's Arm](http://www.orionsarm.com) set long after a [technological singularity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity), where human-level beings coexist with really vast superintelligences (Orion's Arm, which is supposed to take place about 10,000 years in the future, imagines a whole zoo of different [transapients](http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45c53f5eca9d9) occupying various [levels of superintelligence](http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45c68b98779ad), from just-above-human-level [basic transapients](http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d6aa0a549a) to godlike [archailects](http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d76d2f173e)--it's all made up of course, but this kind of stuff can make for a colorful science fiction setting). As far-fetched as this whole scenario may seem, it has the advantage of being grounded in ideas about physics and cosmology that are mainstream among present-day physicists, which can't be said of most other afterlife ideas (like Tipler's big crunch scenario, or the human mind being a product of something other than the structure of the physical brain observed by neuroscientists, like a higher-dimensional 'soul').
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Whenever people discuss mammalian-type merfolk, I usually see them be modeled after cetaceans like dolphins and whales. This is perfectly serviceable, but there is one piece of anatomy that I cannot figure out how to apply to a mermaid: the Blowhole.
As to why a mermaid would have a blowhole, the reasons I can think of mostly revolve around sleeping and energy conservation. Whales sleep in short naps close to the surface of the water, so they can take breaths if they need to. As for energy conservation, I think it would take more energy to tread water and keep a mermaid's whole head out of water than to just pop up and use the blowhole.
Hence my question. If a cetacean-based mermaid had a blowhole, where could it go?
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Why would a mermaid have a blowhole? A blowhole is a cetacean's nose, where as mermaids are generally depicted as having human-like facial features including a nose. Remember that you don't need to tread water in an upright position to breathe, you could also breathe on your back. If mermaids have any different sort of respiratory apparatus to humans, then it's generally depicted as gills.
If your mermaid had both though, then the back would probably be the sensible point to maintain a relatively human-like anatomy - the back of the head would also work, but create issues with where the connection would be vs the bits that already live in that part of the anatomy (brain and spinal cord).
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I concur with Matt Bowyer here;
A blowhole is the hole at the top of a *Cetacean*'s head used for breathing (Fig. 1). It is a homologous structure to the nostril in other mammals. When Cetaceans reach the water surface to breathe, they will expel air first to remove any water from blowhole before breathing in. Air sacs just below the blowhole can be used by whales for vocalization and/or echolocation.
Instead, mermaids are generally depicted to have fishy/cetacean's structures from the waist down, excluding hence the nostrils altogether (Fig. 2).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6gOnO.jpg)
Fig. 1. Dolphin's blowhole. source: [ThingLink](https://www.thinglink.com/scene/599668293577474048)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/V3bmo.jpg)
Fig. 2. Mermaid and.... merman? source: [Wikimedia commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MermenLubok.jpg)
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Previous answers have given the back of the head or upper back as a logical location. In [The Cabin In The Woods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cabin_in_the_Woods), one character is killed and eaten by a merman (in [this clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8aRoLQpBjo)), which snorts blood out of the blowhole in its upper back.
I realise this isn't much of a citation, being fictional, but it does show a fairly realistic depiction of a merman.
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One of the things to consider is how your merpeople were created. Decide on your creation-story, and that will give you your permissible range of variation.
For example; did they evolve from mammals? Then probably no scales, no gills... and probably no blowhole anywhere that nostrils could not reasonably migrate to from the front of the face. Did they evolve from apes? Then no cetacean-style tail, they'd have to thrust with hind-legs as we do, and would probably become bipedal.
So, blowholes are unlikely to get much behind the eyes, as in order to do so, they'd have to migrate outwards, before upwards. They are definitely not likely to split up, migrate entirely around the brain, and start coming out the back of the neck, for example.
But there's a way that could happen: a mermaid's smile could grow wider, and she could breathe out of the sides of her smile... even if the smile eventually went to the back of the neck, with floppy lip-jowls drooping down and covering it. Soft-tissue changes are much easier than bone, after all.
If, on the other hand, they were a magical amalgam of fish and woman, then they would operate however the creating wizard chose.
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An important consideration is how long you expect your mermaids to remain submerged — orcas, with much larger lungs than humans, can only hold their breath for [15 minutes or so](https://whalemuseum.org/pages/frequently-asked-questions-about-the-southern-resident-endangered-orcas). If you’re imagining mermaids staying underwater for longer than an hour, but have a smaller lung capacity than sperm whales (which can hold their breaths for [up to two hours](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130614-diving-mammal-myoglobin-oxygen-ocean-science/)), you’ll need some other way for them to keep oxygenated: gills, say, or [underwater air sacs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_bell_spider). If you’re imagining them living at or near the surface like dolphins, or transitioning from land to water like walruses or penguins, then breathing through the mouth will probably be just fine.
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A mermaid's blowhole could be on the top of the head, with the internal tube in between the two hemispheres of the brain, in front of the corpus callosum. I don't think this could happen in a monotone or marsupial, due to the different brain structure
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Let me explain further the idea.
Nowadays (as thousands of years earlier) many people bound themselves in their mind to a particular nation, country, town, neighborhood etc. And very often these people think that they are good ones and other people, who live everywhere else are not so good, just because they are *others*. From my experience, I see that people who travel a lot are less exposed to comparative kind of thoughts. Of course, they compare people between each other, but they don't judge them so harshly as others do.
So, people always divide other people for allies and enemies by some factors: nationality, religion, wealth and so on.
Now imagine the world where all people treat each other as equals. And I mean not only their doings but thoughts also. **Not** "This guy is different and I don't like him, but I should act like I do, because of tolerance/politeness/some other rules". **But** "Hmm this guy is like me, he is human" in spite of *this guy* lives in another country and has different skin color and is totally *another* in our current understanding of this subject.
Some more analogy. Imagine kids who laugh at other kid who is taller than they are or smaller, or has big ears. But as these children grow this reasons become silly to laugh at, and in the age of 20 or 30, you don't care how tall or small the person is. And if this is one step to the final state of mind, imagine this state, when there are no reasons to treat one kind of people in a different way from another kind. The state, when we outgrew all this stuff, as those kids did.
And the question is **What should happen to change human's way of thinking**?
I have some ideas about that.
**1.** Face another intellectual kind. Maybe this kind has to be aggressive, to band people together against the general enemy.
**2.** As interracial children will be born and general intelligence and wealth level will increase, the need to separate people for allies and enemies will become redundant (but this idea is very optimistic).
**3.** It is impossible and contradicts to people's nature and primal instincts of group animals (where we have this feature from) to protect our group(сo-cavemen, co-villagers, country) from others.
Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker. I hope that my idea is clear.
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You have a very ... kumbaya vision of what the world should be like. Unfortunately for you, however, human psychology just doesn't work that way.
From the dawn of the human race groups of homo sapiens (and their ancestors) banded together in the face of larger, faster, or stronger foes. And they had to fiercely compete for the few resources available in a wild, untamed land. Had these groups simply encountered one another, hugged, and started living together, they would probably have starved to death. And not only that, but it's the constant conflict, and complicated social dynamics which scientists suspect stimulated us to become as intelligent as we are today.
And thus, there exists a core part of our psychology which always differentiates between "us", and "them". But it gets worse.
There exist hundreds of nations on this planet. Within those nations, sometimes dozens of cultures, and languages coexist. And there is simply ***no way*** that all those cultures and nations are going to embrace the same principles, values, and agree on a set of interests.
Some treat women as second class citizens, some hate certain religious groups, others shun those of certain sexual orientations ... and that's just the beginning. What happens when resources start to run low, and we have to decide who gets what? War is what happens.
You describe well traveled people as being less prejudiced, however, that's a very naive view. A woman traveling to a corner of the world where she is not allowed out without male supervision will quickly reconsider that neutral stance.
You mention children being open minded, but they can also be incredibly mean to one another, and will pick on kids who are "different". They have to *outgrow* that mentality! Again, a psychological trait geared toward improving our odds for survival. I will also point out that "interracial children" need not be any less racist than others.
The only thing which has historically united different groups is a common foe. However, that unity typically only lasts as long as the threat, and sometimes doesn't work very well even when the threat of annihilation is very real. In fact, historically, some people have chosen to face threats alone rather than ally with a neighbor they disliked.
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Common enemy is the best. Human societies are a pack. There is always some fundamentally beneficiary reason for humans to form groups and it needs to benefit everyone. You see that all the time, mafia was born to fight against anarchy, but as government regained its strength they became criminals. The enemy does not need to exist anymore, because organisations find a new reasons to exist. A reason that ties humans together is needed.
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Our mentality comes from old times of packs. For human genes to spread his pack needed to be in good condition. So there are two aspects:
1. Unknown human is competitor. He will eat the same food your kids need.
2. If he looks different, he may be sick.
So fear and need to keep different ones far, and yours close, was great evolutionary advantages that saved from hunger, leprosy etc. It served us well. Native Americans didn't, and illnesses from white people killed a lot of them. So until really, really recently it was still beneficial, evolutionary.
You can't get rid of that. Not fast, because it was breed into us for millennia, longer than humanity even exists. So you need to give something else. It might be an alien. Or new plague. You need something we could unite against. Something we could fear, despise, discriminate. And it needs to be common. "Aliens somewhere" won't do, you need aliens here, stealing our jobs. Things like that.
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One thing I can see working is a forced marbling of society.
You see it all the time with immigrants; they move to a new country, find people with a shared background, move into the same communities, and you end up with places like Little Italy, China Town, etc.
Basically small towns inside of a large city.
I was talking to a Canadian a couple weeks ago about how Canada is accepting a lot of refugees from the middle east, but instead of doing things to try to get them integrated into Canadian culture, they are all moving to Toronto and clumping up in neighborhoods so they can pretend they are back home, not contributing.
So a potential solution would be to have an event that breaks these clumps up and forces disparate groups together. Something like the [mandatory relocation to Happy Humanstown in the movie Home](https://youtu.be/Kn7EjhZ3S0U) would be one very drastic way to do it.
It could also be a government mandated thing, where for the good of society peoples rights to live where they want are suspended and the government forces them to live among people with different cultural backgrounds.
People would hate it at first, and you'd get a lot of conflict in the beginning, but eventually people would see that even though these people look different or have different beliefs, they are basically the same underneath.
One thing is that you'd want to keep the neighborhoods somewhat small, [as humans generally can only really have so many social relationships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number), and if the groups get too large then you'll start to get clumping again.
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# The thing that would happen to change humanities way of thinking is a non-human threat.
Realistically speaking, for any given group of people to band together, you need a different group of people to be against. You see this all the time.
* To prevent the people to rising against the government, the country
goes to war. Now the government and the people are "on the same
side".
* To prevent one country to rising against another, they ally
(against either a known or unknown foe) putting the two countries on
the same side (Think USSR and Allies vs the Axis during WWII).
* To prevent one subset of humans from rising against (or picking on, if you
want to get semantic) the other subset of humans, you need to find a
set of non-humans to unite against.
This "us vs them" mentality will naturally scale up or down depending on the circumstances. Any two groups will unite against the largest opposing set. And if that "enemy" were to vanish, then each group would divide again into sub-groups until they reached the next largest confrontation.
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Human culture mirrors aspects of our nature. If that nature were to change so too would our culture, but unfortunately our culture will never change our nature. What I mean by that is much of the nature of what we hold dear is deeply rooted in our need for, and gravitation towards conflict. All of the most wonderful things humanity has ever accomplished were never in spite of our xenophobia, but because of it.
Cooperation is a wonderful thing, but imagine the ant. All of the personal aspects of the ant no longer are part of its nature because its nature made it lean towards total cooperation and there is a genuine conflict between self identity versus group identity in this situation. If everyone felt "part" of everyone else then the sense of self would diminish and be removed over time. If somehow humanity overcame the fear and mistrust over the unknown outsider then we would no longer actually be humans eventually, we would become a hive/colony creature with no personal wants or desires in favour of success of the group.
I don't have a lot of data to back up my claim, but what I encourage is for you to think about all the different aspects that make being you so great. Think of all the things you hold dear and all the things that you fear. All the things that motivate you to do what you do and I think you will find that the fear of the unknown, and the satisfaction of individualism is behind much of it and the rest of what we do is merely our reaction to those feelings.
Please feel free to let me know what you think or if you have counter points!
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The question is quite hard to answer i think. Nevertheless i will give it a try.
First, from what i read, racism is part of human nature, but it can be overcome individually by experience and by intellect. It doesn't even require a lot of intellect, even sub-par brains are quite capable of overcoming it.
Apparently, the fact that humans have spent so much time (evolutionary speaking) in groups of no more than 120 people has resulted in our brains being able to handle this same number of other people without effort.
That said, it's a natural tendency in humans to divide their fellow humans into the in-group and the out-group, and it requires effort of some kind to overcome this.
Interestingly enough this also means that given enough time (many generations) this trait might be out-evolved. But that is just a side note, since i assume you had shorter timeframes in mind.
As you stated yourself (and as is observable in many ways) people are the most hostile towards out-groups they never or hardly had contact with. This can be seen for example in switzerland, where anti-islamic referendums were accepted the stronger, the less contact the voters had with muslims, and rejected the strongest where muslims were part of everyday life.
Currently it can be oberved how this natural tendency to divide people into in-and outgroup can be exploited by those willing to play this ugly game. This requires a basic discontent already present in a sufficient part of the population, which can then be presented with a scapegoat. Add some media coverage and you get live history lessons about the beginning of the 3rd reich.
So, how do we overcome this:
Since it seems unfeasible to have the entire world population travel a lot so they learn that foreign people are basically just like themselves, You need a different approach.
You could, as you stated, remove the reasons for the basic discontent i noticed above. This could actually be achieved, but it will be no small feat. Yet i think it would be a necessary step towards your goal.
It would not suffice, though, i fear, because of another trait of human nature, which is greed.
There will always be people who will attempt to play one part of the masses against the other part, to gain money, or power, or both.
So you also need good education for everybody, to empower the masses to understand this game. In turn this might help reducing the money some news networks make by playing along with this game.
Admittedly, making 7.2 billion people stop responding to clickbait and start sceptical thinking is quite a task, but again, if you want your solution to be sustainable, i doubt it can be sidestepped.
By the way: a common enemy might actually appear to achieve the same goal. But it has been discussed that racism in europe (both eastern and western) has been kept at bay during iron curtain times by directing it towards the respective other side, where it did not cause much harm (at least not visibly), and that the removal of the common enemy let it loose again. While i have no means of verifying this claim, it seems good enough to consider its viability.
So, no the common enemy will not solve the problem, it will only mask it.
I'm not sure i overlooked anything important, but i think that at least the points i described are integral parts of a potential solution.
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To break a population out of a tribal way of viewing others in that population you need to somehow create shared experiences that are common across that population and a shared identity that overrides the differences between different groups. Since much of this tribal identity is formed in childhood, your efforts to overcome inter-tribal suspicion and hostility must focus on children and youth. This makes a public education system the most logical tool to implement the changes you are talking about. Ideally one would remove the children from the environment where they are being imprinted with tribal prejudices and fears and place them in a controlled environment in which they can safely interact as equals with others in their age group from a mix of tribal backgrounds.
How could something like this be done in practice? I am thinking compulsory secondary school education at a system of boarding schools in which students are assigned to schools essentially by lottery. The school assignment would not be entirely random as you would not want to send any two children from the same primary school to the same secondary academy in order to minimize reinforcement of cultural baggage they may bring from their home neighborhoods. If we are trying to build a unified global culture, then the system of schools would of course need to be global as well, with the children's school assignments being anywhere within the system. Such a global system would mean that students of many different language backgrounds would be studying together, and this would offer challenges for the children and the school faculty, but studies show that multilingual education offers distinct advantages for student development.
I visualize these boarding schools as being quite large, much like large universities, though with secure access to offer safety to the younger students. As the students, particularly the younger ones, will need adult mentors and parent surrogates, the staff and faculty of the schools will also reside on campus to provide adult support and guidance. All adults on the campus would be expected to be accessible to the students. For example, campus groundskeepers would be required to be agriculture/biology specialists who could also mentor students interested in those subjects, while food service staff would be required to be culinary arts specialists who would be willing and able to support any students' interests in various food preparation arts and technologies. I expect the total student to teacher/mentor ratio to be as low as 3/1 or even 2/1. The total population of these academies would likely be between twenty thousand and forty thousand, making them like small cities.
Popular culture would be blocked from the campuses and there would be no televisions on campus. This may be difficult for the students at first, but it is essential to prevent transmission of stereotypes and reinforcement of tribal prejudices and behaviors. The children would be kept busy with structured activities, though, so they will be unlikely to have much time to lament the loss.
While the schools will provide classical education, the "structured activities" mentioned above will be the key to building shared identities among the students. From the very first day when students are given their residence hall and room assignments, tasks will be assigned to them that require teamwork within a specific group. For example, the dormitory rooms assigned to incoming first year students could all be in the same condition that they were left in by the previous students and the new students have to clean and paint the room. The new roommates have to work out between themselves how to divide the labor and what colors to paint the room and decide what furniture in the room needs to be repaired or replaced. Since their rooms are now covered in wet paint they must camp out on the athletic fields for the night before they can move in, which necessitates working out with their new roommates how to set up the tent and other camping out details. Shared unusual experiences and minor hardships like this will cause the roommates to bond into a team that has a degree of trust in one another. Moreover, as the students mature as people, they realize that all of their upperclassmen, and indeed all of the first year students in all of the academies across the entire system have been through the same experiences, which creates bonds between all graduates of the school system.
These activities will be structured to first build bonds between roommates, then perhaps between all of the students on each floor of each residence hall, then between all of the students in each residence hall, and so on, encouraging the students to identify with an ever-growing group so that by the time they are upperclassmen the entire population of the school itself becomes their group; their family; their identity.
A number of the activities should be very difficult, such that the teams can feel a real sense of accomplishment at the end of the activity despite having blisters, scrapes, and bruises and being exhausted to the end of their endurance. These activities can mix entertainment and education with the culture-building. Things like inter-dormitory capture-the-flag wars could build solidarity at the residence hall level, while group wilderness orienteering/survival excursions could build group cohesion at other group sizes. What is vitally important about these activities is that they are all the same at all of the schools, particularly the more challenging or otherwise memorable ones. This way when any graduate of any school meets another graduate from any other school, they both know that each went through a similar grueling survival trek, and each experienced a similar awesome campus-wide autumn culture festival, and each experienced a similar exhausting and bewildering first day at school, etc.. In other words, there is already a lot they will have in common regardless of their native language or skin tone. There might be some residual inter-school rivalry, but that rivalry will be tempered by the certain knowledge that they are more alike than different.
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I'd say this is about Ego. People like to feel good about themselves and it is far easier to subject 'others' to a negative stereotype, thereby making 'us' look superior, than it is to actually be better ourselves. I believe that everyone is generally good to their own be it their family, friends etc. Modern thought is far more planet wide than it has ever been in recorded history and, as Kys mentioned about the internet, we are definitely becoming better at a generally positive treatment of unknown 'others' because the feedback we get from our behaviour is so public and open to criticism. It is nice to be included and in most cases to be included we have to be nice. We are all becoming our own.
That said, we may also be becoming overly sensitive and reactionary. Weak against negative feedback rather than capable of learning from it. Easily demoralised. Basically, becoming a bunch of crybaby pansies who keel over and die when the first alien race turns up laughing at our feeble whining when they take over the world would be a terrible end to the human race. We do need adversity just as much as we need cooperation and the internet definitely provides a lot of different perspectives on how best to go about dealing with others.
insults can be hilarious eh?
This isn't just what should happen, it is happening.
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# Tribalism
"Us vs. Them" is deeply embedded in the human psyche. We ally with some people to beat up on other people. That is how it has been since before we were chimps. Let me call it "tribalism" for short.
Getting over that is not going to be easy, but I am optimistic.
# Education
What is needed is education. We need people to recognize tribalism when it happens. Recognize it in themselves and recognize it in others.
We need a culture that understands that tribalism is destructive and therefore wrong.
However, we need to avoid making it a fight between tribalists and non-tribalists, because that is just another Us vs. Them conflict we don't need.
Politician likes to provoke tribalism since that makes people easy to control, and also makes people willing to give power to their leader. Politicians like power.
We need a population that recognizes it when they are being manipulated. We need a population that won't vote for manipulators.
I am an optimist, I think we can get there.
# Other enemies
Being invaded by aliens would indeed make humans unite. But that wouldn't solve the problem, only move it up one level. There would still be war.
Instead, I hope we can reach a state where it is "Us vs. the Universe". And if we meet any aliens, they can be our allies in that fight.
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"There is too few humans, we should stay together to survive"
My idea is that a mayor disaster would kill most humans, or a virus that kills people with some very common gene or that at least prevent them from having kids.
With just a few humans remaining (ten thousand? genetic pool plays a role here), and supposing that food, fresh water, and lands are still available, a sense of "not letting humanity to disappear" (instead of "I must survive") may bring people together.
Cultural/Religious/Political differences won't be too important since there is almost no culture/religion/politic (too few people in each part) and there are more important things to think and do, like farming, protecting your selves from savage animals or deceases.
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This is a famously difficult question to answer. It would not be an understatement that religions have been founded on answers to this question. I do not expect to be able to provide a direct answer to "What should happen to change human's way of thinking." However, I may be able to provide a circular one.
It is possible to divide religions into two categories based around the existence of a final battle. Some religions, such as Christianity or the Norse religions, believe there will be a final battle, the likes of which has never been seen before. In this battle, differences between individuals are "set right," by whatever definition of "right" the religion prefers. Other religions, such as Buddhism and Daoism, preach that there is no divide, that all is the same in the end. In these religions, we see a direct focus on the question you ask. There is a need for "harmony" in these religions, and they seek it directly. In those which have a final battle, there is no such need, for the final battle draws the final lines in the sand between "us" and "them." But even in such dividing religions, we *still* see concepts of unity along the lines you seek. In Christianity, imagery of Jesus teaching us how to get along, even with those who may persecute us, are juxtaposed with an Armageddon showing how God will make all right in the end. It is truly a nuanced concept indeed!
Just looking at the different religious approaches to the topic is enough to point out a key reality: differences exist. Even though there is commonality between the different viewpoints, there are also differences which are not trivial. These differences have been enough to spawn wars. Violent, atrocious wars. And in those wars, we often see the paradox of this goal: **In order to accept others as "us" rather than "them," we are obliged to accept that they may not share that same desire for acceptance. And if they harbor contrary desires to "ours," and they are "us," then "we" must recognize that "we" harbor contrary desires as well. Any answer to this question *must* address this fundamental dissonance.**
We can see what happens if it is not addressed. Countless villains from across the centuries can be tied together by a common mindset: "once everyone sees things from my point of view, there will be peace." Those who hare familiar with history can point to countless dictators who won over countries with that argument. Those who are familiar with religion can tell you how much blood is shed in the name of that argument. Those who prefer the softer lens of fiction should recognize the echos of Darth Lord Sideous in that phrasing.
We see this paradox surge forward in the infamous *golden rule*: "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." In such a form, it inspires an assumption of sameness, but it does not capture the acceptance of differences very well. It has been suggested that a more powerful phrasing of this should be used, called the *platinum rule*: "Do unto others as they would have done unto them." However, when dealing with "them," this rule becomes impotent. How can you act upon others according to the platinum rule when you cannot understand them? Even in this more subtle, nuanced phrasing, the issue remains.
And so, the final answer remains solidly wedged between these paradoxical stances. To have sameness, you must embrace difference. To reconcile differences, you must see the sameness.
So perhaps the answer is circular as well. Perhaps the answer is not a concrete path, showing what must change in humanity, but rather a question in its own right. Perhaps that question spurs us forth to harmony. Perhaps that question drives us to become better.
Perhaps that question is simply, "What should happen to change human's way of thinking?"
Peace to you all.
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There is a novel called ["Factoring humanity" (Robert J. Sawyer)](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337133.Factoring_Humanity) which offers a interesting solution that I'll try to expose here without too many spoilers:
Imagine you are a 2 dimensional being, like a dot in a plane. You can interact with other dots with more less empathy, like any human being treats another human being.
Suddenly, you discover that you live in a world with three dimensions, and you are not just a dot, but a segment. And all dots are also segments,that are part of the same entity, like bristles are part of a brush. While being in a 2 dimension world you could only see the dots created where that brush's bristles were cut by the same plane.
So Humanity is a 4-dimensional entity that does not now what empathy really means because it has been always alone. And then, when another entity appears (an alien race) the realization happens: we are one and there are others, so Humanity needs to learn what empathy means in a deeper way. So, from one day to another, wars stop, crimes don't happen, all kind of grudges between humans dissaper because we can feel other's feelings and our empathy does not vanish with distance (there are no them, there are "us" all around the world)
In this short novel aliens teach humans how to "move" in this 4th dimension to ensure we are united and in peace when doing a "first contact".
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i think that the answer is very simple: disasters.
when something really bad happens worldwide, it doesn't matter where you come from or what are your ideal, as long as we help each other, you are as human as me.
My point is that when trying to survive there is no time for racism or anything similar.
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I don't believe most of the answers are actually tackling the question; which appears to be: how can you make people see each other as people, not just pretend they respect them. Furthermore, specifically, are these three ideas about that realistic?
A popular response so far has been just throw a common enemy in the mix. In war you pretend that you and your ally get along, while really you plot how to dispose of them after you've dealt with the common threat. But this doesn't explain most of human history. From the fall of the Ottoman empire many in the Arab world had a vision of a future where the Arab nations would unite, and form their own USA. Even though they had a common enemy (Israel/America) this never happened, because in the end the common enemy did not make them see each other differently.
Indeed we have many more examples like this from history. During the Spanish Civil War the communists backed by the USSR turned on their anarchist comrades mid-fight, and started murdering them instead of the nationalist enemy. And the allies during the Second World War didn't become best friends forever as a result of their common Nazi enemy. In fact even before the war was over Chuchill was drawing up plans for Operation Unthinkable, to paradrop soldiers into Moscow and kill Stalin in order to win the next war before the last was even over.
There's an even more interesting contrary example, where war made absolutely no difference to who your friends were. During the Persian invasion of Greece, Persia's relatively small ethnic Persian army was supplemented by a large number of mercenaries from all over the place, and the Persian nobility actually preferred Greek bodyguards, even during the war. After the invasion failed they figured they'd not push the issue... but then were so impressed they asked if they could hire Greek soldiers, and they did. Much like how Britain's failure to conquer Nepal led to the creation of the Royal Gurkha Rifles, and Britain guaranteeing Nepal's independence. So it seems more likely that actually, you'll become friends with your enemy than ally. Reality is stranger than fiction!
There are however ways to make people see each other in more favourable terms. It is false to say humans can't see each other more sympathetically because of biology. In that case we'd all still be living in primitive and small tribes.
But we've got better at seeing foreigners as human in recent times, after something of an embarassment of the last few centuries. Trade is an important factor in this explosion of empathy and tolerance. We've become richer, and thus more able to travel and explore, and the more people we meet the more we realise they're just like us, and the greater globalisation, the more we depend on and value the skills and contributions of those different to us.
Consider America. The revolutionary war wasn't because the colonists hated Britain, but because they really wanted to try something new. And in the early days the only real Americans of course were white protestant males. Now almost all white protestants view white Catholics as quintessentially Americans too, that isn't a thought which crosses most people's minds; that back then catholics weren't considered proper. And now many other groups are also thought of by most people as being fully American, collective empathy has increased as immigration, integration, trade, wealth, and education have increased.
Many ideas have been created to attempt to unite people. Kings united tribes under feudalism, and Nations united kingdoms under Nationalism. Missionary religions tend to be inclusive as they're always seeking new members. Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism don't care much for anything besides the loyalty of their congregation. If you're in the club, they love you. They are united by their love of something... much like death metal fans.
Indeed we have examples where people have had this experience, one of the most noteworthy being Malcolm X's revelations during his Hajj in Mecca. Beforehand he had spent most of his time with the Nation of Islam, which was a racist and odd sect of Islam unique to America's black community. He had believed that whites and blacks couldn't get along, and that whites were all evil. But then:
>
> [During the past eleven days](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_X) here in the Muslim world, I have eaten
> from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same
> bed (or on the same rug) -- while praying to the same God -- with
> fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the
> blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the
> words and in the actions and in the deeds of the "white" Muslims, I
> felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of
> Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana. We were truly all the same (brothers) --
> because their belief in one God had removed the "white" from their
> minds, the 'white' from their behavior, and the 'white' from their
> attitude. I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could
> accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in
> reality the Oneness of Man -- and cease to measure, and hinder, and
> harm others in terms of their "differences" in color.
>
>
>
Other ideologies, like anarchism, socialism and communism, also sought to unite the people of the world and for them to think of each other as comrades. It should then be little surprise that it was not long after the fall of communism in Yugoslavia, that ultra nationalists emerged and began butchering each other - they no longer had reason to believe what they had been told, that people were fundamentally equal.
Of course, the factors which can be used to unite people can also be used to divide people. But that's true of every tool, people can use it for good and evil.
IN CONCLUSION: Common enemies don't often help with empathy, trade often does through exposure, and people aren't inalienably bigoted because humanity has got a lot more interconnected and empathic in recent decades. And yes, when people have babies with their former enemies it kind of makes them start to have empathy too. Incidentally that's the oldest alliance making strategy: I'll let your son marry my daughter if my son can marry your daughter, and then I'll stop stealing your cows and plotting to murder you. **The best strategy for promoting empathy is encouraging education, trade, and interaction. Bedroom diplomacy isn't a bad idea either.**
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Lots of answers look at the question from a scientific perspective, which is obviously very useful. However, my answer looks at the issue from a different (Buddhist) perspective.
Believing we have something in common (nationality, creed, sports team, whatever) to a particular person or group of individuals often helps us relate to that person/group and see them as "us" instead of "them." Tibetan Buddhist teachings state that "all beings are just like me" in the sense that they also seek happiness (whether or not they are aware of it) and freedom from suffering. That helps us to extend the "group" of people to whom we relate to and eventually include all human beings. That's called "equanimity", and there are specific meditation practices to train the mind in this way. There are also meditation practices used for developing compassion and loving-kindness (towards everyone). These are secular values; you don't have to be a Buddhist to cultivate them.
Genetics and environmental variables (e.g., how one is raised) play a large part in determining how someone views the world and other people, but recent studies on neuroplasticity show that by training the mind we can actually change our brains. So it's possible to change one's world view for the better by training the mind, and I know a lot of people who did it. However, it's like going to the gym or getting good at a new sport, you need to train frequently and consistently to get results.
Now, going deeper into the spiritual/religious ground, Tibetan Buddhists believe in rebirth (similar to reincarnation), and according to the teachings, all of us had uncountable previous lives. Odds are most other people (regardless of nationality, race, sex or creed) were our mothers, fathers, brothers, partners or good friends in one of those many previous lifetimes. Even though science has no solid proof of life after death (yet), I choose to believe it, and that belief helps me to look at people from a kinder and more compassionate perspective.
There is a book called "Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World" by a French Buddhist monk called Matthieu Ricard which goes into this subject in great detail. Also, lots of good books written by the Dalai Lama.
Kind regards
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Many others have covered this ground, but here's another take on it. You're combating behavior that is supported by a foundation of very old, very obsolete and yet very powerful instincts: the need to identify with a group ("This is my family, clan, village, etc"), the need to seek out differences in other people ("Are 'they' part of my family, clan, village, etc?") and mentally group them, distrust of the "other" ("'They' are competing with or are a threat to my family, clan, village, etc!") and finally egocentricity (not an instinct, but a primordial way of thinking). All of this instinctual wiring manifests itself as emotional response. That, combined with the reality that humans are only partially rational (we tend to *feel* first and *think* second) helps explain the behavior that your question addresses. And the predilection towards this type of thinking is strong! If I could magically make everyone a uniform shade of grey at the same height and proportions (not clones, mind you), other subtle differences would be sought out and categorized, judged and stigmatized; distance between the eyes, shape of chin, something about teeth, you get the idea. It sadly does not matter how homogeneous a group seems to be on the outside. Within the group, seemingly pointless and irrational biases will exist and exert influence.
Acknowledging the instinctual basis of prejudice and bias does not in any way absolve or excuse people from practicing prejudice and bias. It merely highlights the struggle - and collusion - between the primitive instinctual mind and rational mind. Collusion you ask? Yes indeed. Ask anyone about their pet prejudice and you'll get all kinds justifications for it. And the justifications often sounds convincing until you see that the majority of it, if not all, is just specious rationalization of an otherwise emotional response.
The "Vulcan Way" doesn't work either. All that amounts to is extreme repression, and few things drive people more strongly than repressed emotions - and usually not in a good way.
It is possible to "think your way" around or over these instinctual/emotional hurdles ("My dislike of and unease around [fill in the blank] people is unjustified and unfair") but it requires a long commitment of conscious mental effort to train the mind to intercept and ignore its irrational instinctual warnings at the onset. As you no doubt see, most people aren't willing to put in the effort.
It's true that a common enemy will briefly unite different groups under the banner of a much larger group, but even in that scenario, you still have the old "our group vs their group" instinctual response being harnessed. Here these instincts take on the guise of “human solidarity” (against Martians say), "patriotism" or "true believer" depending on the context of the conflict. But even here you find irrational group judgements: "I'm Army and we're much better than those Navy pukes over there!"
If you **really** want to change the way people think, you need to look away from an external solution like education, etc. - which *helps* but does not *solve* - and turn to an internal solution, and a bit of a radical one. If the citizens of your world are plagued by obsolete instincts, perhaps their level of technology is sufficient that they can "reprogram" themselves - remove the obsolete code so to speak. But they have to be careful. Those same instincts form part of the foundation of love, kindness and other emotions that we treasure. Proceed with extreme caution!
A far less radical approach might be to envision an evolutionary scenario where competition for resources was never a factor. Here, you're not so much changing and established course as starting from a different place.
[Answer]
There are mainly 4 things (that i can identify) that unite and depending on how the events are played divide people. This can be corroborated through history.
1. A big threat of some kind
When i say big i say apotheosic, preferably of sentient origin as plagues and apocalipsis usually divide more than they unite.
2. A leader
Most complex lifeforms on Earth that lives in packs have evolved to have hierarchy, that applies to us. This can be seen in history when a very charismatic leader appears and rallies countries, groups and do incredible acts.
Acts of supreme courage are achive thanks to the motivation that these leaders insipire on his peopple am talkin about moral as in the moral of an army is high.
Just to name some of these leaders: Hittler, Joan of Arc, Lincoln, Cesar, Leonidas and many others. Though even all the leaders that have lived have'nt managed to unite humanity so only someone with superlative carisma and abilities (he would have to stay alive despite all the enemies and posibly his own people trying to kill him) would be able to achieve this.
3. Religion
Religion is the big uniter and divider. Apparently it fills some hole inside human kind. When people find themselves under the same religion they usually forget all of their piers's differences.
In the crusades old enemies like France, England and Spain united against the enemies of the faith.
4. Ambition
Ambition is inherent to all humans, the need for more. Enemies can unite to achieve common goals even if only to destroy themselves at the end.
[Answer]
## Change of Consciousness through Ontological Endcation
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yqkCK.png)
To transcend this animalistic mentality, one must bring himself up to general understanding of all man as human beings. To reach this platform of understanding, one needs to uplift his consciousness by going through ontological education.
People are not equal. We see some people to be more intelligent than others. However, all men can be seen without boundaries as one humanity. So we see oneness of humanity with all diversities existing simultaneously.
It is impossible to change someone's consciousness to higher by an external force. Any upliftment of conciseness is done out of one's good will for self improvement. So how to change consciousness? By changing your ontology.
You change thoughts by gaining new knowledge. Your knowledge of the world determines the scope of your thinking. Any how do you gain new knowledge? By going through new experiences. So to clear off all artificial boundaries between men, one of the necessities is extensive association with all kinds of different human beings.
Another quality of such human being is equal positive disposition towards all men. Real humanitarian cultivates goodness for all human beings. That's why he thinks in such way. This is how he sees all human beings as belonging to one humanity.
[Answer]
## Enough old people need to die
People are not inherently racist. The **only** cause of "us versus them" is tribalism taught by older people, and this only works if there's a lack of direct communication to challenge what younger people are taught.
The internet is a profound leveller here. Youth culture is surprisingly resilient across continents where communication exists. The reason totalitarian states try to crack down on internet access and broadcasts from the outside world is precisely because of this communication - if young people see that what they're being taught is wrong and/or immoral, they'll fight against it.
While young people are young, they have little influence. Eventually though they'll become the leaders setting the agenda for the country. Some of them will have been indoctrinated into their parents' tribalism, but a fair number will have picked up a better code of morals. Over time, communication is winning.
It won't happen immediately, and it may take generations, but it's happening already. Vloggers in Syrian and Iran probably have more in common with vloggers from the US than they do with their political leaders.
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[Question]
[
Imagine an alien race. They are the creators of Unspecified Advanced Alien Technology™. One day they lose one of their ships. The crew had to evacuate, and the ship kind of crashed on a random planet. About four thousand years later, humans found that crash site, and found a few artifacts that they managed to reverse-engineer.
These artifact are: a FTL drive core and an artificial gravity generator core. Those are the only two things that need to survive. They may be encased in a box, they may be made of indestructibium, whatever. What matters is that they survived against the elements.
How are these devices functioning in the first place? Unspecified Advanced Alien Technology™. Essentially you have a core. You feed that core some electricity and a signal, and then it does stuff based on the signal.
How did the ship survive the crash? By using some sort of foam-airbag-thingy. The ship was engulfed in that, which allowed it to survive entry and the crash. Then the thingy degraded, so it couldn't have protected the ship for very long.
Are the devices functional? Not really. There are in one piece, give or take a few bumps. They were in a good enough condition that they were taken apart, studied and copied; but not in a good enough condition to be working.
The question is:
***What kind of materials could survive for that long unattended?***
We assume nothing was destroyed by the impact, however since then a lot of stuff has stopped functioning. We'll limit to materials that exist on Earth, or materials that can be manufactured using materials that exist on Earth. The fancier the materials, the better. I'm looking for a few types of materials that could be reasonably used in complex machinery/electronics.
If your answer is none, then what kind of materials would survive the longest, and for how long?
---
As a bonus question:
*Where should the ship crash in order to be buried?*
The burial can take anywhere between 0 and 4000 years, but it has to be completely buried. The ship is the size of an attack submarine. I'm looking for biomes in general, not specific world locations. Bonus points if you can tell how deep it'll be buried. You can also take location into account when answering the main question.
[Answer]
**Granite**
Consider a species that had a shortage of lead and for some reason [decided to use granite as a radiation shield](http://file.scirp.org/pdf/Detection_2016032516013277.pdf)1 to protect their main drive (or from their main drive) and their computer core.
Granite is good stuff when it comes to surviving through millennia. As long as it actually survives the impact, it'll still be there in a few thousand years. It's resistant to acid, pressure, erosion, oxidation and time in general.
Anything encased inside your granite case is going to be in a protected environment and unlikely to be affected by anything other than temperature change. Sealed in granite, it's going to still be there a lot more than 4000years later.
*1 Study the Attenuation Coefficient of Granite to Use It as Shields against Gamma Ray*
[Answer]
A non-Answer Answer: Avoid the question entirely.
FTL is essentially time travel, it must work in a way that disrupts time. As part of normal operations the FTL core envelopes the entire ship in a time-dampening field.
With the crash, two things happened:
1. The FTL core was not properly shut down and has still been generating the field.
2. The ship power plant, or power transmission was crippled so that it could not fully supply the FTL with the power it needs to maintain full field strength.
The net result is a field that is slowly diminishing in size leaving the parts of the ship further from the core effectively exposed to the ravages of time longer than those closer. This continues until the time dampening field shrinks to the point of excluding the power plant so that it finally succumbs; cutting off the FTL core power and the remaining field suddenly fails.
This has the benefit of leaving those that discover the ship remains with the mystery of an oddly decomposed corpse. The ultimate failure of the power supply could occur relatively recently so that the area immediately adjacent to the core is left in near pristine condition while the extremities have completely eroded away.
The power supply failure might even lead to the discovery of the ship due to explosion or radiation spike from venting its remaining fuel.
[Answer]
4000 years is not that much if the crash site is a good place.
I think Antartica is the best place. There is no liquid water that can deteriorate the metal. Protected inside the ice we may never find it. If the ship is not obliterate by the crash the inside is safe for a very long time for humans are almost never there.
If the energy is provide by a fission nuclear core it can melt the ice that's bad if the ship fear rust (of course a advanced alien civilization is capable of making an inoxydable ship).
You can keep the core in a pressurized box made of multiple layer of slow aging materials like polymers, titanium (corrosion resistance of titanium : <http://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1336> )
With those condition its almost easy to last 4000 years.
[Answer]
To survive for millennia you need materials that do not, or very slowly, interact with their environment.
The environment itself is significant because of that. You can have:
1. Sand desert (covered by sand due to wind, less common that rock desert by far!)
[Most materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KV62) will survive as there is no water to make your treasures interact. Initial impact damage is your starting point. Being unattended without maintenance and time, and damage due to drying out are the factors here. Even fabrics and [paper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls) may survive. Metals should, especially gold. Stone will, if persistant to acid.
2. Soft ground ([impact](http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2016/05/89571-2/) will bury your ship)
Usually soft grounds are moist, which is bad news for most metals. Still, peat bogs are able to preserve especially [soft tissues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_body) for millennia.
3. Ice (snow will cover, and to remain buried you'll need a gletcher of Greenland/Antarctica size)
[Ice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) is good news for most materials, although anything holding freezing fluids will perish. These perishables will be broken but can be researched or even reconstructed as long as nothing else happens. As long as the ice does not wrangle your ship it will largely be...OK.
The iron eating life on the Titanic shows that under water is not an option. Neither is an atoll looking at the scant leftovers from Amelia Aerhart's crash 100 years later.
References: (apologies for the gruesomeness of some)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KV62>
<http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2016/05/89571-2/>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_body>
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi)
[Answer]
**[Self-healing materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-healing_material)**.
It could be a special resin with the ability to cure itself, or a layer of nanomachines.
Editing to add further explanations:
A common problem faced by materials over time is exposure to changes in temperature or ultraviolet radiation. This can cause surface cracks that eventually become holes.
In the same way the skin exists to protect what's underneath and when it suffers damage is repaired by filling the wounds, the surface we want to protect may be covered with a layer of special resin that flows into the scratchs and only the surface hardens when it's in contact with the air. They are already materials which behave in a similar way.
The alternative is a layer of nanomachines mimicking a crystaline structure that only consumes energy when it has to be rearranged to cover any damage. Something like a living diamond layer.
[Answer]
A side note on surviving the "crash": even with rudimentary control systems, abandoned aerial craft can survive a crash landing under the right circumstances.
[The amazing story of the Cornfield Bomber](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiSGeHVfGic)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MuRf4.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TsCdQ.jpg)
Even today's airliners are advanced enough that they can actually fly an entire route from take-off to after landing on their own (given that someone programs their flight management system for it), and recover on their own from flight upsets that a pilot is left bewildered and disoriented by.
And since this alien craft is obviously much more advanced then our paltry machines, it is more probable than not that this alien machine can recover from the emergency that cause these aliens to abandon it, and then come to a relatively soft landing. It might even have had a (semi) intelligent programming that purposely makes it choose an uninhabited area (like [The Greatest Desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara) or the Antarctic) to stay hidden.
When it comes to surviving for a long time... well here you are free to choose. Since the tech is alien you can make up anything you want. Given that the power-plant survives and can be run for a long time — suppose for instance it is a fusion reactor that has, say, half a ton of fuel left — and the ship employs self-repairing techniques then those that discover the ship may find it in a state as good as new.
[Answer]
If you have advanced nanotechnology that lets you place individual atoms and manipulate bonds, you could encase whatever you want in a solid diamond. I think it would be great to have a phone like that, virtually indestructible. Doped carbon can even be a semiconductor, after all it resides in the same column of the periodic table as Silicon and Germanium. Until the manufacturing process improves to the degree that the aliens have it, it would be difficult to mass-produce nanotechnology, but you could possibly reverse engineer how it is designed using advanced techniques not required for manufacturing. As the manufacturing processes improved, more advanced or efficient forms of the devices could be created.
[Answer]
All you need is for the hull to remain intact throughout the crash. That's relatively easy even if the antigravity drive is marginally functional. I'd probably assume the crew is all dead prior to the crash and the automatic systems are all fluttering on the point of failure. The craft won't have any interesting aerodynamic properties (wouldn't need it with antigrav) so it'll fly like a brick when antigrav is off. But even being active for a few moments during descent could preserve the hull.
A space ship's core function is to provide a stable environment inside, regardless of extreme conditions outside. Even without active environmental controls a buried ship's atmosphere would remain stable basically indefinitely. (As long as the aliens solved the pesky problem of rubber, if not you've got a hundred years tops before all the air seals fail -- even then if it's buried in a sand dune, by then you might be protected enough for the cores to survive)
Crashing in an arid climate would solve the problem of the hull rusting through, but honestly so would building the craft out of non-reactive metals. Aluminum springs to mind since aluminum oxide forms a super strong clear coat which protects the underlying metal quite nicely. Titanium is nice and strong (though brittle) and benefits from being very light. Not that you need to worry about that since you have antigrav.
I would go ahead and assume that an advanced alien race would combine metals into very interesting alloys. Metals which were light and strong, non reactive etc. Consider stainless steel, it wasn't till the industrial revolution that it was commonly available. Compared to cast iron it's a super metal, but really it's just a minor tweak. An advanced civilization will have thousands of such tweaks. Transparent, ultra strong ruby glass, metals which are light and strong, non-reactive radiation proof. (we're starting to be able to make all of the above)
Soil accumulation will be different in different environments. The Sahara for example has very low soil accumulation. There's basically a set amount of sand and it moves around. Other deserts have higher soil accumulation due to soil deposits from the surrounding environment. This book looks cool. [Extreme Depositional Environments: Mega End Members in Geologic Time](https://books.google.com/books?id=b3_1Ry0gDqEC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false)
[Answer]
One warning about microelectronics or just about anything with very small parts (nanometers). Atomic or molecular diffusion across boundaries between different solid materials is a very slow process up here on the macro-scale, although mechanics will occasionally have to separate components that have pressure-welded themselves together. However, the rules change for the micro and change dramatically for the nano.
A modern microprocessor chip is unlikely to function after 50 years in storage, regardless of how well the container lasted. After 4000 years it may not be possible to deduce anything much about the microchip at all.
[Answer]
most plastics would, as nothing has yet evolved to decompose plastics, as until very recently (on an evolutionary scale) there has been no need to
same goes for concrete and most metals
meaning even if it took this alien species thousands of years, and we'd all killed ourselves off, they would probably be able to tell that something evolved on our planet
on a separate note:
@JDługosz
FTL does not require warping the passage of time, for instance, the theoretical Alcubierre drive (look at Wikipedia if you don't know what this is), relies on effectively compressing time infront of you while expanding space behind you, nothing to do with time, but theoretically reaching super luminal speeds
[Answer]
Another non-Answer Answer that might actually get you the results you're looking for: what if the highly-detailed User Manual for these artifacts was stored in some sort of highly resistant material?
Diamond has, probably, little to no practical use in the artifact itself, but one could imagine big diamond crystals on which optical tricks permit storing terabytes of data.
Such a crystal could easily survive an impact, and spend millenia in almost any environment without degrading. For us humans, a perfectly cubed diamond would be closely scrutinized and its use as optical storage would be easily discovered. Translation would take a while though.
At that point, you don't necessarily need the FTL drive and antigravity to survive mostly intact. If you have, say, the Engineer's Guide to Field Repairs for these items, then even remnants, as long as they're not completely turned to dust, would make reverse engineering quite easy.
] |
[Question]
[
In my world, skeletons are a thing. They're raised from existing corpses under the control of their "master".
Obviously, there's magic involved. But I don't want magic to be part of the whole process. Let's say the magician behind the skeletons control is simply acting as a puppet master, pulling strings from dead people's skeletons.
**How can these skeletons be challenging and a little realistic?**
Bones are kinda resistant, but not that much. I guess the mouth would be full of various infections considering this is a corpse we're talking about.
Let's assume the puppet master can provide them an above-average speed (considering he's the one pulling the strings) so they can hit with a pretty good momentum. The puppet master are also very good war tactician, so the skeletons aren't just empty minds running to the battlefield.
These skeletons can be animal or human skeletons. But obviously, it's easier to find human corpses than grizzly corpses.
*Edit* : I wasn't clear about the kind of challenge they should be. I'm trying to find ways for a small group of skeletons to put up an okay fight to the "hero", mighty sword-wielding badass. They should represent great dangers to villagers or people with little fighting experience.
I'm okay with answers involving more magic. I'd just like the main idea of "skeleton puppets" to be respected.
*About the puppet masters* : The puppet master are controlling the skeletons 24/7. They have trained for years and years to master this art. They do not suffer consequences of fatigue/hunger/thirst because reasons (It's a work in progress :p). Let's say each of them can control about 30-40 skeletons at the same time, which absolutely doesn't mean these skeletons are "travelling" as a group. They are usually scattered, because unless there's a specific event happening they don't need to be in such a huge number. There are multiple puppet master and they do work together and communicate using telepathy.
[Answer]
Sheer numbers are going to be a big thing, as are weapons.
Your skeletal warriors are essentially going to be melee fighters with whatever weapons happen to be around, from discarded swords and axes to simple clubs or tree branches.
Their strength is that they are not alive, and so are hard to kill.
Fire won't be much of a concern either unless it's really really hot.
Arrows won't bother them much, since they have no organs to puncture or blood to leak out, and an arrow hitting a bone might dislodge it, but might just glance off. This means that any combat will have to be hand to hand.
This leaves the strategy of just knocking bits off until they can't stand up any more, which could be difficult if the magic bond is strong.
There is also the strength that if they kill someone they can add a new skeleton to their ranks.
A single skeleton could be a threat to an unarmed and untrained peasant, but not to a skilled warrior. However, once one skeleton sees the hero, the puppet master will know and can send more skeletons to that area, and also communicate the location to other puppet masters. It's basically a hive mind for all intents and purposes, which makes a single skeleton both nothing to worry about and a huge threat.
Just being seen would be a big problem for the warrior, so they would want to make sure that if they have to confront a skeleton and can't sneak past, that they clear out of the area quickly or find a hiding spot where the next wave won't see them.
This is how they are scary: you aren't fighting one skeleton, you're fighting the first wave of many, and they only have to get lucky once.
The tactical advantages of having multiple disposable bodies makes them a bigger threat, since they can coordinate their attack easily, and things like ambushes would be child's play and very effective.
If you decide to change it so that bones can reconnect, or even connect to other skeletons besides the one they were originally from, then they get even scarier.
[Answer]
There are some problems which I can see in this setup, at least if you want these skeletons to fight in battle or skirmishes.
* **Reaction time**: Close-quarters combat barely has time for *one* well trained fighter to react. While having a puppet-master controlling puppets sounds great, it may be hard (or impossible) to keep the kind of focus and control that *one* living fighter keeps up. Slow reaction times could mean more dead (or dead again) skeletons!
* **Feeling, or *Gefühl***: Taken from Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA), specifically german longsword, is this concept of *Gefühl* or Feeling. Unless the puppet master can feel the pressure exerted by skeletons' opponents on their skeletons weapons, and realize what this means for the survivability of their skeletons, their human opponents can feint or otherwise employ some trickery to easily defeat skeletons. [Actual Middle Age European fighting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NWzF_YfD-4) was quick and employed every sense a fighter had, even tactile senses.
* **Momentum** The skeleton needs to swing their weapons faster to have as much momentum in their swings as their fleshy-armed counterparts. In fact, if the bones weigh even half of the weight of an arm you need around 41% more speed to make up for it. That's really fast! Not that you *necessarily* need more momentum to bring down an opponent, but it helps in cutting and cleaving and getting your weapon in position to do so.
* **Crushing and Chopping weapons are really common**: Bone is brittle, and swords meant for chopping (such as hand-and-a-half swords, katanas, tulwars, Großmessern, etc.) can cut bone. In fact, some of these swords are so good at chopping that they [chop through muscle *and* bone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4pRjraprFo). Even more common are hammers. These represent really effective weapons against your skeletons. Beware of anyone who has anti-knight weapons (as these can crush), good chopping weapons, and [hammers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer#History) of any kind (these weapons can be [quite common and cheap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9SvgWJNSd8), especially if proven more effective than swords). This isn't including any techniques like Half-Swording:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CFzY9.jpg)
which is used to punch through opponents' armor and could easily break bone.
* **Decay**: Bones do decay, mostly [due to exposure to acids](https://bonesdontlie.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/taphonomy-what-happens-to-bones-after-death/). This is a long-term concern for these puppet masters. Sure, you may accomplish your goals during one season, but there is no guarantee your skeletons will be up to the task next year. This won't affect the skeletons immediately, but the continual exposure to the environment may make your army almost useless. This may be especially true if these skeletons are in wet, oxygen rich environments, like that of New Zealand or Northern Europe.
Some ways to employ skeletons to the maximum:
* **Use numbers to your advantage**: Isolate and destroy people who get separated from their squad-mates. This is basic tactics, but it's important.
* **Use Crossbows, Bows, and Polearms**: these were the deadly, go-to-war weapons of the middle ages. Swords are just side-arms! Hope and pray your opponents are no good with shields, spears, and halberds. Equip your skeletons with crossbows, bows, and any type of pole-arm.
* **Take Advantage of Undeath**: Your skeletons can take a sword/spear between the ribs, so let your skeletons get impaled by weapons so other skeletons can kill the (now disarmed) opponent. You can potentially fling skeletons over walls instead of employing siege ladders. Light them on fire and send them at wooden gates. I'm sure there are more ways, but those specific ones come to mind.
[Answer]
The main problem (for your "sword wielding badass" (SWB herein...)) with bones reanimated by magic is that those bones can *stay* reanimated following injuries far beyond what an ordinary living person could sustain before death or incapacitation.
If, in lieu of ligaments and tendons, the puppet master can link bones magically, he/she could presumably link fractured bones the same way. The only way to successfully defeat a skeleton would be to crush its limbs to dust. Even a legless skeleton can crawl or pull itself along with its head, enough to be a threat, especially in large numbers. As a martial arts practitioner, I can tell you that breaking bones is *hard.* For a determined SWB, certainly not impossible. But causing the number of fractures necessary to incapacitate just a single skeleton would be a *lot* of work, not to mention exponentially more risky, since the skeleton would presumably be fighting back the entire time.
If your skeletons are not constrained by normal bone structure, perhaps your puppet masters could combine bones from multiple skeletons to make larger, stronger super skeletons. Let your imagination decide what limits would be placed on this phenomenon.
An easy answer is "more skeletons" = "more danger", and the power in numbers of the undead has been explored many times in fiction. However, "more anything (bad)" = "more danger", so that's why I've tried to be a little more creative, above, but I'd be remiss not to mention the numbers advantage.
[Answer]
Just leave a little meat on the bones and use it as bacteria food to nurture all forms of diseases. From anthrax to plague, your skeletons can be a walking bio-warfare distribution system. And the wonderful thing about this is that they become even more lethal when they fight stronger and more skilled human fighters.
To defeat a skeleton, you have to hit it with a sword; but the concussion of such contact breaks contagious bits and pieces off of the festering carcass, leading to lethal infections for everyone around.
An unarmed civilian will just panic and run, possibly surviving in the process. While the skilled warrior while charge in and hack the skeleton to pieces, infecting himself and all bystanders in the process.
[Answer]
Your small party walks into a dimly lit cave, nothing of interest is seen. Some scattered debris from what appears to be on old long-term camp site. Some cooking supplies, an old fire pit, torn down tent. Dance mutters to nobody in particular, "Wonder what happened here... this looks to be at least 50 years old." Rothgar walks closer to the abandoned campsite and notices bones of the what's presumed to be the old inhabitants. "Huh, older I guess. These bones be weathered much than 50 years.". Liahdrin sees some old rusted and well used weapons scattered around the site and then leads the group away from the campsite.
As the party walks away from the campsite, they hear a rattling noise coming from behind. As Rothgar turns around, an arrow zips by his face. Behind the small party there are now over a dozen skeletons. "Where did they come from?!" yells Dance. Your party charges forward, hacking them to pieces. Behind you, more rattling as more skeletons come up. Your mage, Rothgar, notices a blue glow surrounding each skeleton as it forms. Your party forms a circle around the mage as he casts fireballs to no avail. The skeletons you first killed are now reforming, once again surrounded by the odd blue glow. Krunk, the barbarian, yells at the mage, "Urg Rothgar, wat do?". Rothgar yells back, telling him to hold on a moment. Rothgar spies the culprit. In a nook near the exit of the cave, a cloaked figure with a staff appears to be working some magic. Rothgar tells the party they need to push forward to take down the cloaked figure.
At this point, there are over a hundred skeletons. They're crawling up deep chasms in the cave, pouring in through the entrance and exit of the cave, shambling out from behind the shadows. The small party continues to hack them down, but there are more than they can handle at this point. Krunk takes a pike through the abdomen, piercing through his chainmail chest like butter. The circle moves to protect the fallen barbarian. An arrow flies through the circle, unblocked by Dance the fighter. The arrow strikes Rothgar in the chest and he falls. Dance turns around to see how Rothgar is doing and notices his breath is labored and his eyes closed. While Dance is distracted, he gets tackled by three dagger wielding skeletons. He's torn to shreds before anyone can even react. The circle collapses and the party falls is overwhelmed. Their bodies will forever live in this cursed cave, adding to the growing army of the mysterious necromancer...
**Key Points**
* **Large Swarm**: Individually, skeletons are easy for any experienced fighter. In a swarm, they become a real threat to anybody.
* **Surprise**: If the party knows what's coming, it's a lot easier to prepare for the situation. Catching them off guard means they have to use whatever equipment they happened to be carrying, and don't have time to prepare extra defenses.
* **Controlling entity**: This guy/gal just revives the skeletons and issues the order of "kill the fools who walked into my trap". The skeletons "remember" how to kill from their living days. All the controller has to do is keep bringing skeletons up that fall in battle. The controller should not be in plain site.
* **Skeletons do not die when controller dies**: As the controller *just* revives the skeletons and issues them one order, the skeletons will keep on fighting when their necromancer dies. So killing the controller makes the fight winnable, it does not win the fight in itself though.
[Answer]
Well...skeletons are **already** a threat to anyone with little to no fighting experience, especially if that person is unarmed. The big advantage skeletons (and other undead) have over the rest of us is that they don't feel pain or know fear: they just keep coming. Even if they don't do that much *damage* when they hit someone, it really doesn't take much to kill a person if they are unable to get away. And a broken arm (forgive the pun) could be quite sharp and potentially more dangerous than the full limb, for instance. Or it could continually bash someone's head against a wall or floor, over and over again. Or any number of other things that don't take brute strength, strangulation, drowning, siege (simply preventing someone from getting food or water)...
That said, you could go the Dwarf Fortress route, which Toady had to code in a special exception to keep skeletons from continuing indefinitely (aka "its been reduced to powder, that means its dead"). Which means things like "a severed arm" are considered a threat and will chase after dwarves and eventually strangle them.
[Answer]
**No pain, fear of death, or honor.**
Just about any opponent who truly does not fear pain or death is one not to be taken lightly. Consider honey bees, cornered animals, or battle androids (I'm sure we're all familiar). These skeletons will throw themselves onto a blade or in front of a spell to allow their comrades slightly more time to advance on their target. They'd throw bone dust in the hero's face with a dagger to the eyes close behind. They'd fight dirty and to the death. That's not something anyone will have an easy time dealing with.
**The bigger problem is, how do you actually defeat them?**
A human skeleton has over 240 degrees of freedom. That's a lot for a mage to control all at once. But can clearly be accomplished by a human mind (we're doing it now). The skeleton is controlled by magic, the only reason to use a human skeleton is so the natural reflexes of the mage apply to the same kinematics of the controlled specimen. The controlled skeletons don't care about broken bones, but having an arm that now bends in five places is a bit harder for the mage to control. The mage could give up control over a broken limb for a gain in control but a loss in fighting ability. But no mage is strong enough to make a functioning warrior out of bone dust. Smash them to dust and the hero wins. [Blunt weapons are the way to go](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/17195/3202).
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**Strength, Speed, Senses, and Durability**
With no muscles, obviously the magic is providing movement power to the skeletons. But how much? Let's suppose they get about the same strength as a human warrior. The human skeleton only weighs about 15% as much as a body, however. So with normal human strength, we should be able to see skeletons leaping 15 feet into the air easily. It should also be able to run faster than a human (less mass to push and less air resistance). Furthermore, they take less time to accelerate their weapon-arm when they strike, since there's not only less mass to move but less friction slowing them down, so they should be able to swing a weapon more quickly and more suddenly than a human. And of course, there's no reason you couldn't give them *super*human strength to make things even scarier.
Also, since they are controlled by the puppet master, they are not going to get fatigued and can react as fast as the puppet master makes them. They don't need training to learn techniques or skills, they just move as commanded, so each skeleton will essentially have the accumulated experience of every fight every skeleton has ever been in (from the same puppet master). They should be reacting (with beyond-human speed, remember) to dodge or parry attacks, and moving with strategy according to the puppet master's intelligence. And how do they see and hear? They're clearly not getting sensory information with eyes and ears, so it's totally legitimate to have the magic also provide them with 360-degree vision, the ability to see in the dark, or x-ray vision.
And it's also completely up to you to determine how much damage it takes to stop one of these things. What's to keep a skeleton from continuing to fight after it loses an arm? Or after its rib cage has been smashed in? Or its head knocked off? And when it's finally been reduced to individual bones, what's to prevent them from reassembling?
And if all this isn't enough to constitute a challenge, remember you can increase the numbers of these things. Any hero should think twice before facing an army of super-fast, high-leaping, non-tiring swordsmen who can see through walls, move at the speed of thought with perfect coordination, and are all but unkillable.
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If a fight between the hero and a skeleton is 1 vs 1, then I don't think the skeleton could pose much threat, particularly with a fair fight (sword vs sword) and even possibly with the upper hand (sword vs fists), as the puppet master will have to control what the skeleton does, and how it fights.
Unless the puppet master is a master swordsman as well as a tactician, the skeleton would not win. Even if he was, his thoughts in controlling the skeletons actions would not be as instinctual as if he was the one fighting, as he needs to think how to react to sword swings from afar. This would inherently mean the hero has the upper hand in a duel.
However, the fact that the skeleton is controlled via a proxy swordsman means that it doesn't have to fear death, or pain, or dismemberment. The hero could be hacking off limbs left and right, but the skeleton could just keep on going like [The Black Knight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjEcj8KpuJw).
The skeleton's strength is also found in numbers. When soldiers are fighting with melee weapons, unless they are well trained they tend to get in each others way when fighting, particularly if it is many vs 1. However, with a single person controlling all of the skeletons simultaneously they will be able to do a much more well coordinated attack. If there are 3 skeletons, one can aim for the head, one for the legs and one for the torso. It would bee incredibly difficult to dodge or block three attacks that all come at the same time.
However, be aware of the weaknesses of bones. If there is even [a tiny hole in the bone](http://www.boneandjoint.org.uk/content/jbjsbr/73-B/2/283.full.pdf), they will hold much less structural integrity and could easily be snapped when a damaged arm holding a sword clashes with the mighty swing of the hero. This would mean that the puppet master would need to harvest the corpses of people with healthy bodies (not soldiers who have died in combat), but also strong bodies (children's or elderly people's bones would snap much more easily than an adult's).
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Unfortunately, it is well established in literature that human skeletons, raised by necromancy are a significant threat to villagers, and maybe in large numbers, to a disorganised military force.
But to a main character? You would need so many conventional skeletons to provide a challenge, but it won't be interesting - the wheat thresher is hardly a great literary device.
The great thing about skeletons is that everything has them - horses have skeletons, elephants have skeletons, giants have skeletons, and so do dragons. Potentially, human skeletons can ride on the aforementioned quadraped skeletons.
If you want to stick with humanoid skeletons, probably the best thing to do would be to model them off Roman Legionaires. As a unit of them is controlled by 1 mind, they should be great at things like the tortoise formation, making a wall of spears/shields, and throwing spears/firing arrows in an effective volley.
Alternatively, go with light cavalry. Arm them with shortbows and spears. The main counters to human light cavalry would be infantry with bows (to return fire if the light cavalry stay out of reach) or spears (to set against a cavalry charge), neither of which would be effective against skeletons as they are piercing weapons.
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Another thing: Since reanimated skeletons are mostly from buried corps, in your story, the puppet master can summon skeletons from anywhere.
Like, the hero would be walking around and thinking there's no threat in the area but then the puppet master says: "A-Ha! you are in the middle of ancient burial grounds", summon 100 skeleton grunts from all directions, surrounding your hero.
Also, Skeletons of special people (warriors, rich people, medics) are likely to be buried with their own tools and they spawn with those tools (archers will spawn with bows, rich people will spawn with gold, medics will spawn with chemical kits) - these will make the threat more varied and the reward more varied.
Also, when they get exhumed, gas from their decay could be released into air and cause explosions, shroud, incapacitating stench.
Also, Skeletons of heroes can cause a moral decrease. The hero will notice the skeleton of a fallen hero and feel sad that they died and sadder that they are now used for bad purpose.
I mean, let's see your bad ass hero hit a skeleton baby! Surely he must be demoralized!
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Just to provide an alternative, you *could* have one skeleton be a major threat by itself if you wanted too. Even to the hero. The thought is, if the puppeteer can manage entire armies at once, imagine what he could do with his entire focus on a single skeleton.
The primary reason it is a threat, is that the hero is not fighting a single skeleton in actuality. He is fighting a collection of objects bound together and controlled by magic.
What this means, is that the puppeteer could potentially bind the skeleton together in unpredictable ways. For instance, the ribs may suddenly string together and stab outwards from the center torso.
It also means that random nearby objects could possibly be incorporated into the puppet. Skeleton gets a smashed hand - all the way to bone dust, so the puppeteer binds together a bunch of nearby rocks and pebbles into a hand shape and continues fighting. The skeleton may eventually not be a skeleton at all. You'd have to figure out exactly where the magic works and doesn't work. The skeleton reaches to the ground, binding to a stick, which binds to a tree above the hero, and suddenly the tree attacks.
If this is possible, it becomes apparent that skeletons are just a symbol of fear the puppeteer prefers to use. In actuality, he may be able to bind and control any inanimate object.
Game Over if he can control animated objects such as the hero as well.
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I'd like to point out something: the skeletons are raised *from an existing corpse.* You never said they had to *come from* an existing corpse. If the puppeteer is powerful enough to link bones together to make 30-40 skeleton warriors he can control at will, what's to say he can't control *the hero's* skeleton? Barring that, this puppeteer must be getting information of some kind from his skeleton warriors, otherwise they'd just be stumbling around like blind men. Who's to say he doesn't have a 3-D map of the *entire battlefield*, from *above* mind you, in his head? And this guy is telepathically linked to *other* puppeteers! Assuming these puppeteers have a better understanding of the area than the hero does, they have both the home ground advantage and the hive mind advantage! The hero may never be able to win, because with the puppeteer's experience and combined brainpower, they're always ten steps ahead!
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In many famous alien species you see that the iris is so large that it almost appears that it replaces the sclera. What evolutionary history would support the irises growing to that size. The only two requirements of the species are that they need to be humanoid and evolved in jungles.
For the record I am looking for answers other than the typical, "Obviously sexual selection is the answer."
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Humans seem to have [evolved faces that allow recognizability](http://news.berkeley.edu/2014/09/16/human-faces-are-so-variable-because-we-evolved-to-look-unique/)--the human face contains many important dimensions (e.g. interocular distance, nose length, smile width, etc.), allowing us to very quickly identify individuals.
Perhaps in these species, the iris is an important way to recognize individuals, and evolutionary pressure has made it crucial to be able to.
(I know, this is similar to "sexual selection", but with a different end: in-group / out-group distinctions, rather than attraction.)
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Basically, a race would evolve large irises if they were advantageous to survival. One reason animals like cats and dogs have large irises is to be able to adjust their pupil size to a wide range of light levels including levels that humans can't reliably see at. Coupled with high rod cell density at the expense of reduced cone count (most of these animals are dichromates or monochromates), animals in the real world with large irises can reliably make out detail in very low-light situations, allowing them to find food and/or avoid predators.
Case in point, your race evolved in a jungle environment. Earth jungles are so thick with foliage in most places that sunlight doesn't reach the forest floor even in midday, but at the same time there are clearings where the midday sun would be bright, maybe brighter than our own sun. An animal or sentient race that evolved to survive in this environment has to be able to adjust quickly to these varying light levels, or he's blind in a large part of his habitat, and blind means dead.
A humanoid race that evolved to be "crepuscular" (most active during twilight hours) would be the most prone to develop such a trait as the light levels vary the most in this time, and this is an easy backstory along the lines of the race having evolved in a region of the planet that gets slightly too hot to be diurnal (similar to sub-Saharan Africa but wetter), but a nocturnal apex predator preyed on the race's evolutionary ancestors, so the race developed a schedule of being out and about during the fringe hours of the predator species' activity cycle, and being sheltered but awake during the night (to keep watch) and sleeping during the day.
[Answer]
You don't need a reason.
It is [theorized](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_eye_hypothesis) that the reason why human eyes look the way they do (wide, very white sclera, and a colorful iris) is that it allows others to easily see what we're looking at, and pick up on small non-verbal cues.
We have this theory because other primates look the way you describe: big black irises, and dark sclera. Just copy human evolution, but take away the social element. Since moving away from the jungles to the plains was a big part of our social evolution, I'd say that humanoids evolving in jungles may well have the kind of eyes you describe. From the wikipedia article:
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> Studies of great ape behavior show that they are good at cooperating in situations where there is no potential of deception, but behave egotistically in situations where there are motives for deception, suggesting that their "lack of cooperativeness" is not a lack of a cognitive ability at all, but rather a necessary adaptation to a society full of deception.[7][verification needed] This suggests that human cooperativeness began when proto-humans began to successfully avoid competition, which is also supported by the fact that the oldest evidence of care for the long-term sick and disabled are from shortly after the first emigration of hominins out of Africa about 1.8 million years ago.[8][verification needed]
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VhU4m.jpg)
"Bonobo-Head" by User:Kabir - extract of this picture (Photo taken by Kabir Bakie at the Cincinnati Zoo September 5, 2005). Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Commons - <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bonobo-Head.jpg#/media/File:Bonobo-Head.jpg>
As an aside, this is probably also the reason for large irises as a trope. It makes emotion harder to read, so it looks freaky and untrustworthy to us.
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The iris' primary function is to regulate the size of the pupil, thereby controlling the amount of light entering the eye. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be much larger than our irises tend to be.
On a related note, humans are somewhat unique in that our sclera (the "white" of the eye) is easily visible and stands out in contrast to the darker iris. This appears to be an evolutionary development related to the kind of cooperative efforts necessary for human society to thrive.
In short, we have smallish, dark irises and large, white scleras because it allows us to determine where other people are looking, without having to ask or rely on observing the other person's head movements. Studies have shown that infant humans tend to follow eye direction without additional head movement more often than they follow head movement, with or without eye movement. Other primates, however, ignore movements of the eyes alone, but do follow head movements.
So your alien species can have huge irises and hidden scleras as long as they don't need to follow subtle eye movements which are not accompanied by head movements.
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In addition the capturing more photons (useful in low-light situations), a larger iris could also help in resolving smaller details. This could help someone to look at smaller things at close range (like having a microscope for eyes!) or make out details at a distance (a bit like a telescope).
The reason is that there is a limit to the detail that can be seen based on the size of the aperture (the iris of the eye in this case) and the wavelength of the light. The human eye is currently very close to this "diffraction limit" and so to make it better, the iris would need to be larger.
See a [diffraction-limited system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system).
Also, as MichaelS suggests, longer wavelength photons would require larger irises to achieve the resolution that we are accustomed to. For example, if we want to see body heat, then we would want to see light at a [wavelength of ~10 micrometers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared). This is ~20x larger than typical visible light at ~0.5 micrometers. This means that the numerical aperture (and within a small-angle approximation, the iris diameter) would need to be 20x larger, which would look very strange!
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Infrared vision would likely require larger eyeballs. A larger pupil to allow more of the larger photons to hit a larger retina could be beneficial.
Source is an old article I read about "real" D&D infravision which may or may not be entirely accurate. And my memory may be a bit fuzzy.
Combined with KeithS's answer, this would allow exceptional night vision.
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**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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A necromancer can reanimate flesh and bone to form mindless, undead creatures. The necromancer controls the minions like puppets through magic.
An undead creature is not limited to its natural shape. A necromancer could combine several corpses to form flesh golems, or restructure corpses to a jagged bone horrors. Useless organs can be removed, additional limbs can be given, more eyes, more tentacles, etc. Creating minions with organic weapons (bones, claws or spikes) is perfectly possible.
The following rules for minion creation apply:
* The larger or the more complex the shape, the more difficult it is
for the necromancer.
* The smaller and simpler the shape, the easier it is and the more of
them can be controlled at once.
* Undead flesh is powered by magic, but the minion still has to be physically feasible - bones can't move by themselves, a minion still needs suitable muscles. [Square-cube law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law) and size restrictions apply to all minions.
* Minions are moved like puppets - they are all shambling and not very dexterous.
* Undead minions feel no pain and follow commands mindlessly.
* The minions are disposable, but the necromancers themselves are human and very vulnerable.
* It takes time to reanimate - let's say a day's effort for each minion. It's important to make each minion worthwhile, otherwise the enemy will kill you before you can make more.
Let's say that a large number of necromancers are going to war in an unholy crusade. They all create their minions suited for battle.
What would be the ideal shape for undead battle minions? In what form should the necromancers create their minions?
Assume that:
* Their enemy is living, conventional army of equal or larger size.
* The setting is typical low fantasy - swords, shields, and crossbows, no gunpowder.
* The conflict is a pitched battle on an open field, both sides having time to prepare.
My previous question was flagged for being too broad, so I've tried to be more specific this time.
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> The setting is typical low fantasy
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Undead rats and fleas, no more modifications needed.
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> The conflict is a pitched battle on an open field, both sides having time to prepare.
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Remember the Night King from Game of Thrones, and just about any other undead overlord. They do well in attrition war, not direct final battles.
Just send some fresh reanimated rats the enemy's way and go home. Come back some five years later and if those guys are anything like medieval Europeans, cities will be mostly empty and people will be digging mass graves everyday.
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Edit: Monty Harder suggested using bats instead. They can also spread the plague, and can target specific individuals. A few bats to pick valuable targets might be nice. But do stick mainly to rats, though, as infecting live rats with the plague will keep the disease self-sustaining for a century.
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As far as I see, there are two main variables here - the time spent on the preparation of the unit and the maximum number of units active simultaneously. A slightly less important constraint is the resource one - the amount of dead bodies available for processing. The problem is that without the precise numbers and calculations for all this, the answers will be opinion-based.
The task most resembles the question of gameplay balance for strategy games. That means, there will be multiple optimal creature designs for different strategies (one necromancer will go for zerg rush, while another will invest into heavier and more expensive units with heavier armor).
Now comes my opinion-based part. First I will describe my assumptions. It seems that your necromantic magic doesn't have any predispositions to humanoid shape. Second, the produced units are not extremely smart. I can't understand, how good their coordination is, but most likely it's not good enough to handle projectile weapons. Third, the necromancers themselves are the product of their own time and culture, so they will also be thinking in the terms of the medieval war.
What it comes to, I think, is designing a framework of a combat robot for a medieval battlefield as envisioned by a medieval necromancer, who tries for maximum efficiency. So, a basic 4 to 6 legged shape, low-slung, muscular, having claws or bone blades on all the limbs. They do not need vertical posture or opposable thumbs, being too stupid to be the tool users. I am not sure the creature even needs a head - it's too obvious a target. Better to have an array of sensory organs all around the body for the maximum field of view. The smaller creatures (zerg rush units) are about human mass of lower, extremely fast, designed to shorten the distance and swarm the enemy quickly. They can be used for ambushes, raids, etc.
For open-field battles you would need a heavy cavalry analog - and I think the same design, but upscaled to weight up to a ton, and armoured in bone plate. If the swarmer is something like dog-spider-xenomorph mixture, this is more of a huge buffalo-spider mixture. Heavy, armored, with forward-projecting horns, it will just have an edge over medieval infantry and cavalry.
I'm not sure you would need even heavier units. Maybe something huge and centipede-like for siege scenarios to serve as a living ladder to put your troops on the top of a castle wall.
UPD: I've missed the 'shambling' part in the list of the requirements. If they can't develop high speeds at all, then smaller creature are not cost-effective. They will be too slow for their mass, and if you need to spend a day for each one, and can't just raise zombies by thousands, then the living will be able to dismember them faster then you create them.
I'd say then you would need a mixture of a hussite war wagon and an authomatic thresher - an armoured many-tentacled monstrosity. It would just need to waive all it's heavy (and also armoured) limbs around and move forward slowly, while the opposition tries to find a vulnerable place.
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For a standing army, you will probably get the most bang for your buck from simple skeletons/zombies covered in a bone plate armor and wielding bone clubs.
**Reasoning:**
The strategy here is to take a horde of undead that is presumably already available, and with out significantly reducing their numbers, equip the army with the most cost effective equipment and armor possible. This is because if a necromancer already has a large army, any further improvement to the quality of said army will be a greater force multiplier than just adding more bodies to it.
The choice of equipment is therefore crucial. Our choice is shaped by what will be useful in the widest range of scenarios. Thus we pick the simplest undead shape to manage (skeleton or zombie) and equip them with most cost effective equipment available to us; equipment made out of dead creatures.
**The equipment:**
I have selected a bone club as the ideal starting *weapon*. This is because it is useful in a wide range of scenarios. A club can be used against armored opponents more effectively than a slashing or piercing weapon, because concussive force travels through armor. Slashing from bone swords or piercing from bone arrows likely won't penetrate armor however and is not as useful. A club can also be used against unarmored opponents, so this simple weapon is useful in all likely scenarios. The club could be a Femur, which should be amply available in any undead army.
In the event of overrunning a living army, a necromancer might then want to upgrade their troops with maces and other weaponry that can be picked up off the battlefield. However an undead army should get a lot of mileage out of clubs.
For *defense* I have selected bone plate armor. [Bone armor has existed in the real world in the past](https://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/warriors-3900-year-old-suit-of-bone-armour-unearthed-in-omsk/), so assuming that bones are plentiful and easy to shape for a necromancer (or their bone smiths), it should then be possible to equip an undead army with some crude version of bone armor. Even just loose bones tied together would probably make a big difference in survivability.
**Conclusion:**
With that, the necromancer now has a basic undead army with decent protection and offensive ability. The army is now more than just a bunch of mindless shambling undead, it is a horde of armed and armored undead. However the real benefit is that we have improved this army's offense and defense at minimal cost. We used materials that were already available and that cost us little. So it should be possible to still have a vast horde of undead, but now they are may times more effective because a simple cavalry charge will not wipe them out.
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Looking at this as if I was the general of the necromancers, my first order of business would be to figure out the number of followers I have, the time until the battle, and the skill of my subordinates. I would be smart to make sure the most skilled necromancers were working on the most powerful minions (if they can control larger zombies more effectively they shouldn't waste their time on making one small zombie per day). It is always more effective to have a variety of troop types, as they allow you to counter a wider variety of attacks.
A big flaw often in undead zombies is a lack of long range protection and fire power. Due to the stumbling nature of the creatures, I assume they would not be able to effectively handle projectile weaponry.
All this put together, I think the ideal flesh monster would look something like a human bolder. Layers of flesh around a brain that is the controller, and muscles that can expend and contract the sides of the sphere to increase speed and turn. This turns slow stumbling creatures into fast, maneuverable opponents, and also gives the control center of the creature the maximum protection from projectile weapons. Because the fight is on an open field, little would be in that environment to halt the momentum of these flesh boulders. You could still have lower skilled necromancers raise traditional zombies from the dead to clear the maimed living from the battle field, and provide protection for the casters. The boulders could be filled with what ever human parts can be found, and rigged to explode if they are close to being defeated. Covering the enemy in the corpses of humans would likely create intense discord among enemy troops.
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You have two mutually exclusive requirements:
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> * The conflict is a pitched battle.
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My knee-jerk choice for shape is that of a dog, but "shambling and not very dextrous" kills that idea. IMO, that leaves one, simple shape:
**An armless, headless human**
Your only hope is to force the army off the field. To disperse them and make their organizational advantage worthless. That army will, given a chance, cut any individual zombie to shreds. This means you need to win by numbers and not by force of arms. Your zombies need:
* Tough hides
* Strong legs
* Good balance
* Low center of gravity
After which all you need do is cause them to "move forward." You're not doing anything complex like, "parry that blow!" which would be very complex when dealing with hundreds or thousands of zombies (which don't sound like they have a tremendous amount of independent thought).
And to be honest, faced with a larger force of "they're going to just walk forward, over us if possible" zombies, would likely cause a lot of warriors to soil their armor.
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If we're talking about minions meant to meet enemy force in battle, I vote for fairly large (bear- or elephant-sized) conventional forms with redundant limbs/methods of moving. Possible modifications include extra bone, scales, or grooved hard surfaces for deflecting weapons intending to lop off limbs.
Options not relating to overall body structure will also be helpful. For example, putrefying organs or structures producing disturbing, frightening sounds could lessen the effectiveness of any soldiers that get in close enough to do any damage.
Large size is valuable because it's harder for smaller numbers of living enemies to cut them down and they (through sheer mass) can do a lot of damage without needing precise coordination. Even a shambling step can scatter opponents if the foot and leg are large enough.
Redundant limbs or redundancies in other methods of locomotion are valuable because these troops need to keep moving forward (that's basically all these things can do anyways). These modifications keep a unit from being easily made ineffective and greatly increase the amount of work an opposing army needs to do to win.
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**Big big big.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0G3Ae.jpg)
<https://warosu.org/tg/thread/48439094>
Like this guy. 500 corpses, at least. Hugely huge. I suspect something this big might walk like a gorilla on all 4 limbs most of the time.
Too big for one person to control, but you do like the puppeteers do for big puppets: team up. Each limb has a couple of necromancers to control it and the whole thing is a team effort. Plus a monster this big has room for a nice howdah on top so the necromancers can ride into battle.
There is nothing a conventional army has that can stop something like this except maybe a direct hit from a big trebuchet. When your colossi take the field, go get those first.
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There is no "best undead form."
Your necromancers need a strategy, and they need to tune their minions to that strategy. Their strategy should be defined by their goals. For example, if they want everyone dead, they should focus on plagues and destroying food sources. If they want a negotiated settlement with concessions, they need to apply pressure in a way that they can scale back (seize and return territory is traditional). If they want to conquer, they need to make surrender more attractive than resistance, which is a balancing act.
What end-state they want and what strategy they pick to achieve it should dictate their force structure. For example, if they want to conquer, they should want to make surrender as palatable as possible. So, even if terrifying monstrosities might be better at actually punching dudes to death, your necromancers might want polite and friendly police constructs to do all their fighting. If they want a negotiated settlement, you might have zombie bats bombing the opposing capital.
On an actual battlefield, the same reasoning applies, but on a smaller scale and much more specific to the opposing force. You can see this looking at something like elephants. The first time elephants show up, they might as well be unstoppable. But once you know that the enemy has elephants and have tactics in place to deal with them, elephants are an expensive waste of resources. So, if you're Hannibal, do you bring elephants or no? (Clearly yes, but the trick was bringing them somewhere unexpected).
The way you have constructed this, your undead are just arbitrary smart motivators. Walking ballistae, armored bulldozers, shield walls, suicide firebombs, exoskeleton armor suits, syringe-hornets, etc. are likely to be more productive areas of inquiry than weird flesh-sculptures.
There is also a saying that amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics. That's true. If you can't get your force to the fight, or if they are ineffective once they get there for lack of beans/bullets/bandages or fuel, the fight is over before it begins. The Roman legions were so effective in large part because they could move fast (ten miles per day!), and had good sustainment. For the opposite example (great fighting with bad logistics), consider how the Napoleonic and Nazi invasions of Russia went.
Of course, none of that matters if your necromancers' egos drive them to do something different.
Finally, combined arms has historically been a very successful approach. So as a default answer, that.
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What you most likely need is some versatility, but mostly superior numbers.
First you need the mob force. These guys should just be easy to make. Most likely unmodified humans. These guys will go down easy, and we will get back to them.
Second you need your set peaces. Go crazy here, stitch 10 cows to an elephant. These things may barely move, and be worthless in combat, but they will scare the crap out of your enemy.
Finally you need your linebackers. This is where you put your most talented necromancers. These guys main job is to not go down. Use humans, or whatever else you have, stitch bone or whatever else you have to armor them. Give them the best weapons, and maybe a few extra arms to hold 2 shields and 2 spears. Maybe extra legs to stay balanced and hold their ground.
Here are the battle tactics. Set up your mob in front. They are cheap, you hopefully outnumber your enemy. Go wide, don't get flanked.
Put your big guys on the sides. Put your archers on them. Their have one job. stop a flanking cavalry charge. Horses can't plow thorough 10 cows, and if you try, have the zombies on top shoot at them, or throw thing, or jump down.
Great so now we are forcing the enemy to charge you head on. Great, they will quickly take out your mob units. Let them. Let them get in deep, then reach your back line. This is where they stop hitting your linebackers. These guys should hold the charge.
Now have your "dead" mob get back up. They rise into the army attacking the line backers. They feel no pain so all the injury they suffered does not matter. The enemy is in total chaos, They are trying to push in at a foe that is just trying to stand ground while things bite and tear at their legs. Have the linebacker elite forces now move forward and kill.
Gather up the fallen to replace anyone damaged, and restock the mob. You are ready for battle once again.
Your biggest threat is an army knowing your tactics. They may try to use their superior mobility to circle your forces. Try fight with defensive terrain behind you. Don't be afraid to retreat. You have the benefit of stamina. Make them chase you trying to flank. You can backup faster than they can move a whole army behind you. Eventually they will have to frontal attack or back off. If they back off, attack at night. That is an easy victory.
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**Charger:** A rhino with a hollowed out chest that can hide secondary units inside. The rhino has two limbs with sharp blades on them to fight things directly surrounding it (give him more sets that will deploy if the original limb is destoyed, or to attack more things) Then add a tentacle or some other limb on the back that lets you launch projectiles.
Next comes the **Doom root**. a large mass of muscles that serves as a catapult. when the catapults are nolonger needed it will untangle it's muscles and move towards the battle lines and root itself and starts to attack the back rows while the front lines are occupied with your other minions. additionally this could be used as a anti cavalry field, your equivalent of a pike line.
With a smaller variant that uses a number of tentacles to pepper the enemy, maybe could be carried by the rhino as a mounted ranged unit. if it falls off or the mount is killed it uses the sharp protrusions on it's tentacles to mess up the soldiers and make as much damage it can before pulling back.
**The collector**
a human shaped giant that collects bodies on it's spikes to make a padding out of the bodies(D&D style)
**The death caller** a large multi-legged creature with bodies hanging off of it. it has long limbs that can pick off important units, like commanders if it gets attacked. (could be harpoons on a long muscle that can pull back quickly)
It serves as a command vehicle as well as a carrier for units. very light top made of bones with robust limbs. (the form would vary, A giant centipede, the aliens from war of the worlds, a high tower or obelisk. The point is the very sight of this is scary)
**Cruncher:** a mass of bones and muscles (could be like a worm or a beetle) that can dig dirt and stone and compress it into a projectile for the doom root, can also dig out trenches and burrow itself to attack from bellow
**Blood rain:** Primarily a siege unit. a large gut filled with gases, that floats over an area and covers it in body fluids. blood, stomach acid, bile etc.
Demoralises the units and spreads diseases without leaving a large scale impact to the are, like a full on plague would.
**Bone beetle** hangs on the chest of the charger and drops off once it plows into the front lines. then jumps at a soldier and tries to chew and slash until he is critically wounded, then lets them cry in pain and jumps to another one. They are hard to kill, because of the bone plates covering it. the exoskeleton is very useful here.
That's just examples to get you going. I'd say the bigger and more versatile the unit is the better it will be for your purposes, because you can make just one per day you will have to make sure they last a long time before going down. I'd say the first two units on the list are very versatile, so those are my best examples. But more important than individual power is the ability to complement the other units on the battlefield, always.
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I'd suggest one possibility is something tiny, like mites. Send them *inside* the enemy to feast on their vital organs. If you are going to only have these, avoid being (the necromancers) on the field of battle yourself, as a rush of mites won't protect you from the cavalry charge...
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Poison minions.
Disease, sickness, and poison. These are the biggest threats to medieval towns and armies. Also fairly true for more modern day warfare in trenches.
Construct minions that can go an poison water supplies. They just need to quietly go into the wells and latch on, and poison the water.
Open fields of battle, a flash golem is going to be your best bet. 100 necros making 1 golem a day can field a sizable army in a few weeks.
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I picture the ideal mass-produced patchwork soldier being a large (seven or eight feet tall), vaguely humanoid thing, with lots of extra muscle. The extra muscle would make for a good damage sponge, with lots of people hacking and slashing at it to little effect.
Its arms would end in concentrated masses of flesh, with bone shards sticking out every which-way, and some bone plating for good measure. @tyler s. Loeper made a good point about blunt force damage against armor, and these flesh-and-bone clubs would be excellent for that. It would have an extra pair of legs, to stabilize it while swinging its meat clubs, and to keep it from falling over.
This would be an easy-to-produce minion, not much more complicated than slapping some extra meat and limbs on a human corpse. They wouldn’t have to think very hard, with their battle tactics not needing to be more complicated than “I have big things, swing them at people.” Plus, if we’re not worried about decreasing their mobility (since they’re already clumsy, shambling puppets), you could add some bone plates to keep some especially tenacious soldier from lopping off one of its oh-so-precious arms.
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[Question]
[
In my story there will be animals that are incredibly strong and resistant to injury. To better understand how to design my creatures, I'm asking for help understanding how to make the [Eurasian Brown Bear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_brown_bear) (common in Europe during the 1200's) more resistant to medieval weaponry.
* No magical answers.
* Technology from the year 1200.
* Changes to the bear should be evolutionarily defensible. (Read that as "it makes sense that such a fictional creature could evolve naturally based on the actual evolution of creatures on Earth.")
* A single shot from any bow/crossbow of the period should not be capable of killing the bear.
* This question considers the bear's defense, not the bear's offense (I may ask that as a separate question). In other words, while the need to dodge longer claws might make the bear harder to kill, that technically isn't a defense against the weapons of the time, and therefore doesn't answer my question. *(So say we all...)*
**Question:** Given these conditions, what changes to the Eurasian brown bear would make the animal substantialy more difficult to kill?
*Best answer conditions:*
* The best answer will look beyond the ordinary or obvious (e.g., "thicker skin") to consider the bear's entire physiology.
* The best answer will consider unique examples of actual evolution as enhancements (e.g., a rhinoceros' horn) but must justify how those enhancements would improve the bear's defense against early medieval weapons.
* The animal described by the best answer will still be perceptually a bear. (shaggy, walks on all fours, likes salmon). In other words, if the creature were drawn, a child might say, "that kinda looks like a bear...." (This is intended to avoid answers that could be interpreted as, "don't use a bear, use a rhinoceros.")
[Answer]
I can think of something that might from an evolutionary standpoint give you a better armored bear.
First, lets talk about the armor. It will come from 3 layers.
**1) Thicker Skin** Yeah, this is kind of a gimme. More dense skin is harder to pierce and will help to dissipate the penetration power of crossbow bolts and simpler spears
**2) Dense Fat Layer** More energy disipation and it also means that anything that gets through still has more distance to travel to get to vitals.
**3) Closer and Heavier Ribs** This will make it harder for broad bladed spears to get through to the vitals underneath.
How to get there? You only need a few changes to their habitat and ecosystem.
**1) Lots of Spiky undergrowth** Animals will evolve naturally to be resistant to sharp things in the environment. Look at how thick an elephant's hide is and Look at acacia trees. There are a lot of thorny trees like acacia, Mesquite, and so on. Make those kinds of trees a bit more cold resistant and put them in the bear habitat. Thicker skin will be necessary to make sure those long nasty thorns don't penetrate with irritants and potential infection.
**2) Cold** Fat is a great insulator. Cold would necessitate a thicker amount of subcutaneous fat. The defensive porperties would be a by-product.
**3) Wild Boars** The Bear would have to compete with another omnivore and possible food source. Wild boar have the nasty sharp tusks that can pretty much gut other animals and they are low to the ground. This is how the Bear gets a better armored ribcage from evolution. If the bear is going to hunt these beasties as a main food source, he needs to be very tough to deal with another fast, tough, and dangerously armed animal. The ribcage will help the bear fight off a charge from a 600lb angry pig with tusks. So up the boar population in the area.
These changes are going to make a bear an even more formidable animal. Sure, a crack shot from a crossbow *might* get through, but it would be pretty unlikely. The heavy bear hunting spears of the time would be harder to use because as you taper the point to get through the ribs, you make the spear point weaker.
It's not a perfect armor, but I think it would be plausible from an evolutionary standpoint.
[Answer]
Social changes:
I don't think that any physical changes are necessary to make bears more resistant to medieval weaponry. They are absolutely fierce, 600 pounds, with long claws, and an absolutely devastating swipe and bite. If you put a single soldier vs a single bear, I would probably bet on the bear.
However, they are solitary animals, and live mostly alone. The tolerate each others presence for purposes of procreation, and feeding when food is abundant.
Now give them a social, pack like structure, the ability to communicate and cooperate like wolves, and they become a terrifying foe. One bear is dangerous, 2 bears, twice as dangerous. 3 bears working in cooperation would be terrifying
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# Evolutionary Problem
You have a big problem.
Ask yourself this question: What type of animal eats armored bears for breakfast?
The only way I can see a bear gaining armor via evolution is if they have a predator.
If you want armored bears to make sense in your world, you will need to introduce an animal that is a natural enemy of the armored bear. A dragon makes sense; your bears could love dragon eggs. But, a beaked T-Rex with feathers would also make sense; the beak evolved to tear off the armor easier.
# Armor
The Armadillo type of natural armor makes the most sense.
[Answer]
Give them human-level intelligence and grasping ability (which does not necessarily require opposing thumbs). They will be on par with humanity when it comes to warfare, and thus will be much, much harder to kill. They will actually have the advantage for being tougher than us.
But why stop there? Add a symbiothic relationship with sharks...
... And these bears will be giving humans a good run for their money.
[Answer]
**We’re going to need a bigger bear**
The most evolutionarily defensible solution is to replace the Eurasian brown bear with a different species of bear that lived at another time in another place. The largest known genus of bear is now extinct. It was the [short-faced bear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-faced_bear) that lived in the Americas up to 10,000 years ago when it died out along with much of the megafauna of the time. Compared to the Eurasian brown bear the short-faced bear looks reasonably similar except for its size. The short-faced bear weighed in at nearly 1,000 kg. That’s over 3 times the mass of the 300 kg brown bear. Standing on 4 legs it would be 5-6 feet high capable of staring down would be hunters at eye level. Just due to this bear's sheer mass it should be significantly harder to kill using spear and bow and even more dangerous if you only succeed in wounding it.
[Answer]
It looks like the weapons used at that time in history would be swords, spears, and maces.
So what defends against them for human armor? Metal plate to prevent penetration and leather padding to absorb the blow. Let's convert that into natural defenses, shall we?
Let's fist take the humble Armadillo. It has a distinct feature: natural leather armor. So let's make it much more bony, making it a sort of plate armor. Coupled with the preexisting hide covering it (the bear's natural hide), that should make it resist, although not be immune, to 1200 era personal weaponry.
Of course, thicker bones and stronger muscles would most likely be needed to support the additional weight, but with the side benefit of making this Dire Bear harder to cripple and slightly more resistant to damage from human weaponry.
Using this path, you can keep all classic bear features (fur, 4 legs, snout with pointy teeth inside, same diet but higher in calcium and in sheer quantity, etc.) while hopefully making it a reasonable bear mkII.
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First, I will have a look how bears were hunted in that period.
Bear spears were used for the hunt of bears in Russia as soon as 1255. Military use of this weapon dates back as far as 1149. [Source: Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_spear)
These spears hat a tip with a two-sided blade and some sort of crossguard to prevent the weapon to get thrusted too far into the flesh of the animal. Multiple hunters used those to kill the bear after it got cornered by dogs.
I could only find some other, seemingly high risk types of hunting methods, of which none is relevant for this question. (E.g. angering a bear, climbing a tree and then hacking of the paw of the bear when it tries to climb after the hunter, and so immobilizing it).
Now, how would a bear defend itself with a natural body armor or otherwise agains a spear? I got some ideas:
1. **Its hair resembling whalebone**:
Whalebone is, in multiple layers, really resistant against alot of things going against it with great force. A blade may even break if it is thrusted against it. Pro: Very resistant against attacks. Con: Very heavy, and unlikely to evolve.
2. **Better senses**:
Bears have not the best eyesight, and only an average hearing. Hunting relies on getting the animal into a situation where it cannot escape. If the bear has better senses, it may realise sooner how it could escape or fight back efficiently. Pro: Better awareness = harder to hunt; could evolve naturally without alot of handwaving. Con: None I could fathom.
3. **Living in herds**:
This may sound lame, but imagine a group of bears, animals which weight multiple hundret of kilos **each**. They will defend each other, and you do not really want to fight a group of bears simultaneously... Pros: An unstoppable force of nature from which every sensible hunter will run away from. Fast. Con: Large predators only seldomly form herds or packs. It would have to be a large change in behaviour to get a solitary animal to do this.
[Answer]
The weapons available in 1200 mostly rely on piercing: arrows and/or blades.
To make a bear more resistant against them, the first idea to have a thicker layer of fat under the skin.
When dealing with an arrow, the thicker fat layer would dissipate some if not all of the kinetic energy of the projectile away from vital organs.
When dealing with blades, it would require a larger effort from the blade owner in order to reach vital organs, and I doubt an angry bear is a place where people like to indulge for long times, considering the possible interaction with its claws.
A thicker fur would also go in that direction, of keeping kinetic energy away from vital organs.
Then also an increase in size would help fighting those pesky humans. Considering that humans would be surely be aided by dogs in their hunt effort, all the above points are also helping against them: thicker fat layer and fur make dog bites less dangerous, and bigger size can be advantageous, too.
Shortcoming of these changes is that warm climates may become less suitable for such a well coated bears, shifting their habitat further North.
To top this, add social behavior, such in wolves or lionesses: it will increase the chances of spotting an attacker and would help protect the individual in a group.
Cons is that the pack would need a larger territory to have enough energy income.
[Answer]
**Accelerated evolution 101 - the human solution**
The bears need some changes in eyesight, habits and socialisation. These changes are:
* Excellent night vision
* Symbiotic working relationship with humans
* Willingness to wear barding (provided by humans)
* Trainable to patrol a set area (its territory)
* Completely nocturnal, returning to human-protected caves during the day
* Somewhat active during winter (instead of complete hibernation)
Individual bears have been trained for centuries to work in entertainments. Now compare a sheep, cow, goat or dog from 1000 years ago to a modern example and imagine if the same breeding program efforts had been put into bears by some European society in order to create a guard animal. The bear would roam their specified "territory" (which is far enough from where the livestock are penned for the night), knowing that they can eat anything or anyone they catch out there but they will get a feed on their return anyway provided it is before dawn. It may be justifiably argued that dogs, geese and other animals were already good guard animals, but in most cases they alerted the humans that there was something to be done. If there is a 250-480kg bear on patrol, the humans just need to pick up some grisly souvenirs the next day and hang them out as warnings.
So how does this meet the OP requirement:
* No magic - check
* Year 1200 tech - humans have been breeding animals for millenia
* Evolutionarily defensible - bred for a particular purpose. Eyes may not change quickly to include more rod cells, but breeding can select for good sense of smell and hearing
* No single shot kills - shooting over open sights in the dark at an armoured bear in the forest? Which you somehow spotted before it detected you? On its home territory? Extremely likely to survive. And bite your head off. The key is the tactical employment of the bears (ie not using them as dramatic looking units to assault a fortified wall in some pseudo-historical fantasy wargame).
* The bear's offensive capabilities are not a factor - check, I have not worried about them. They are already good enough for the purpose.
These bears may be bred to be slightly smaller than the standard European Brown Bear - it is not critical to their function; it will make them easier to feed during lean times and it makes them harder to detect and harder to hit at night.
Finally, there is a human constitutional change that would be required for the society existing in symbiosis with its nocturnal guard bears. There must be a provision that:
>
> A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free
> state, the right of the people **to keep and armour bears** shall not
> be infringed.
>
>
>
[Answer]
IMO the defensive requirement is excessively artificial, because it seems to assume that defensive measures are never offensive ones and vice versa. The obvious answer to that is the tired old cliche 'best defense is a good offense'. Also, effective solutions are likely to result in bears no longer perceptually being a bear.
Objections aside, here are 2 non-mutually exclusive answers:
**Chameleon Bears**
The bears are able to change their appearance to blend in with their surroundings. Optionally, they are able to regulate their body heat and metabolism as well. Avoiding detection aids bears in hunting prey on land and also in turn keeps them from being hunted by humans. If anyone trespasses on their territory or strays too close to their cubs, chameleon bears can proactively deal with the problem by stalking the intruder before giving him a good mauling.
I know this doesn't directly make them more resistant to medieval weapons, but it takes the approach of there being no target to attack at all. Why would bears have hide if they weren't able to hide?
**Bearcupines**
Like porcupines, the bears have an array of long barbed spines on their back, and optionally also secrete a strong toxin that coats these spines. This one does directly answer the question because it would be very hard for spears and arrows to get past this extra layer at all.
Since we're talking about bears and not porcupines the spines would be scaled up appropriately, so they could probably rival the length of spears that humans wield. Having this adaptation also allows bears to utilise the hedgehog defense. A mother bear can defend her cubs this way as well, by hugging them real close before curling up into a ball.
**NIGHTMARE MODE**
Your bearcupines could have their paws adapt to be able to grasp their spines, and the intelligence/instinct to wield their spines both as a spear and a javelin. They can now hunt animals and fish the way humans do. It also allows them to fight the humans on equal-ish terms if they have to. Spearmen? Bear spears you back. Archers? Bear returns fire with thrown spines. With the strength of a bear behind it, being hit by one of these 'javelins' is probably closer to being shot by a ballista.
If that's not enough for you, throw in chameleonic skin as well.
[Answer]
## Reason for evolution
First you need to explain why your bears did evolve to resist arrows. You could just say that they evolved that way because of the humans hunting them, but this might seem a bit too short in terms of evolution. A better way is to find a natural cause for this.
### Enter the dart-tree
The dart tree (known as Hura Percutans) is a cousin from the existing [Hura Crepitans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hura_crepitans), whose [fruit is explosive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNlk2V9yFhM). The differences are power (100x more powerful explosion) and shape of the seed (shaped as a dart). The Percutans fruit will explode more or less randomly and send killer darts in all directions. A dart will pierce through a normal bear. Also note that this tree is dangerous for neighbouring trees, so it tends to create clearings around it in forests.
## Evolution to survive
The bears needed to evolve a bit to survive this. Basically they did two things:
* Augment resilience
+ Duplicate organs that are vitals. If one of the heart is struck, the other one will carry on.
+ Distribute organs. Two hearts not too close from each other are less likely to get both hit at the same time
+ Augment resistance to infections and cicatrisation and healing capacity, so even if a bear is hit, it can survive
* Reduce exposition
+ Develop a strong preference for dense forest: clearings might indicate its presence. Also dense forest does not let projectile go through very far.
+ Maintain a low profile. Bears started to walk closer to the floor, much like crawling. They are less likely to get hit this way.
## Advantage against humans
These evolutions gave the bears massive advantages against bow and other similar weapons:
* It is very difficult to stay far enough from a bear and at the same time having a clear enough sight of it to shoot it in a dense forest. The result will be that you need to get much closer than on open ground, and hence reducing the advantage that a long range weapon is giving you. Most likely the bear will surprise you from behind a tree and maul you. Especially a crawling bear.
* Even if you can hit it, it is more likely to survive and either to [charge you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF0M4xDZIJ8) or to escape.
## Conclusion
Good luck for your bear hunting session in this dense dark forest, full of crawling bears and killer trees. Have fun.
[Answer]
Everything is made of Keratin. From the hair of your forearm to the rhino's horn like you mentioned. Your nails and the foot of a horse.
Did you also know that every hair on your body comes along a tiny muscle system? That's why they raise when you're cold or scared. Of course, we being almost naked compared to a dog in terms of fur, don't have much use of that system.
BUT
A bear that evolved with a thicker fur, in comparison to a goat's horn in density and strength could have also evolved with a better muscular hair moving system. While having separated units of really thick hair would not do it's justice against a bolt, if the contraction of said muscles would stiff up that section of the body that was in danger and grouped the fur in a certain pattern, that would make a bold and strong scale like defense.
Having that system activate by will or instinct would grant the bear a movable and flexible fur that would still look like a bear. And of course multiple strikes against its fur would eventually breaks the keratin... but it grows back! It's in all senses still just fur!
If you have a problem with the active use of said defense, remember, you can't get an off guard bear with medieval technology. His hearing and smelling abilities surpasses easily a normal human being's.
[Answer]
As has already been mentioned, unaltered bears can already survive a shot from an arrow or bolt. Aside from thicker hide, how do we make them even better pin cushions? Two prongs.
**(A) Make the bears capable of taking more hits.**
Super fast blood clotting. Some of the gigantic tortiouses of the galapagos were tragically famous for their blood clot speed: sailors would keep the animals on board as a preservable food supply, cutting the poor, still-living creatures apart one limb at a time over the course of journey.
Superb immune system. Crocodiles are well known for their excellent resistance to bacterial infection. They frequently endure large cuts, even limb loss, and yet never end up with infections despite the fact that they live in bacteria-rich swamps.
**(B) Make the bears capable of taking hits in more places.**
The ability to absorb lots of arrows to the chest without dying still won't protect you from an arrow that makes a direct hit with a vital organ. Some suggestions:
Organ redundancy. Super healing isn't much use if you get hit in the brain, unless you have a backup brain in your spinal column!
Every organ has liver-like regenerative properties. This isn't a perfect fix, because a bolt to the liver is definitely no picnic, but combined with the other traits, this could be a real boon
**Evolutionary Origin**
This really depends on your world. If you want bears to be specially adapted to resist medieval human armaments, the best explanation for these adaptations is that they evolved over the course of thousands of years of combat with medieval humans. Note that I say "combat" and not "being hunted": if the bears were merely hunted for thousands of years, they might just become smaller, more shy, sneakier - things that probably don't suit your narrative. On the other hand, a population of bears that live in an area where the only food is either humans or livestock, where all vegetable forage and prey animals have been deplete, then they might be forced to evolve the ability to go toe-to-toe with iron-clad warriors. Note that the Panda evolved to be completely vegetarian - it's not enough to merely deprive your bears of meat food to drive them down this path.
If your humans have not been at this technological level for thousands of years, contrive another creature in the ecosystem that might simulate human-weapon wounds. Perhaps these bears evolved in a wasteland of undead, fending off legions of heavily armed skeletons?
[Answer]
I'd have a suggestion, similar, but different to one by @KerrAvon2055.
# Evolution
Bears were hunted by humans for millennia. Because of very useful bear fat, (believed, never true) magical powers of bear heart, early-adopted beekeeping or at least honey collection from wild bees, usage of bear claws for impromptu weapons, you name it.
When mammoth died out, humans were already hunting bears. Modern European bears date back for around half a million years. We need to increase this span or to make humans hunt their predecessors.
Make humanity exist for ten millions years instead of roughly a million. Make prehistoric bears also bears from which the nowadays bears descend.
We might also need a longer medieval period. Say, the classical fantasy medieval times (but without magic) span for few millennia. But this is a more boring and less productive options. We need millions of years of stone-spear bear hunting.
Maybe, some kind of repeated regress of humanity to early stone age would help. Best, something that not affects bears a lot, like a repeated mild climate change cyclus that strikes the fur-less apes, but not furry bears.
Summarising, as bears were hunted for such a long time, but
* humanity never managed to rot bears out;
* both humans and bears adapted to the hunt;
* evolution is a bitch;
and hence bears have developed some kind of an evolutionary mechanism to increase their chances.
This could have been:
* the (boring) more strong hide;
* the spikes a la \*sauria;
* venomous blood;
* better reaction and longer arms;
* full-carnivore mode to pump up activity and reaction time;
* pack mentality a la wolfs;
* thicker fat layer, so spears have troubles reaching vital organs;
* instinctive fear of human-like shapes, such as bipeds in general;
* you name it.
[Answer]
You will need to have large sub-arctic prey. Then make bears hunt that prey in packs.
Eurasia has lost its large sub-arctic prey (such as mammoths, wooly rhinos, etc) due to hunting and ice ages. As was already said, bears are pretty dangerous already, but they are solitary and choose to leave humans alone.
You can make them hunt mammoths and whooly rhinos in packs, which will make them also much more dangerous to humans, and also suitable for domestication to be used as war beasts.
[Answer]
Okay so why are the medieval people killing bears? Possible reasons:
1. To eat them, either for actual nutritional value or because bear meat/fat/gall bladder is alleged to impart good luck or special powers or cure certain diseases. The way around this one is to make the bear's flesh toxic in some way. Some lizards have [toxic green blood](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2169131-lizards-keep-evolving-toxic-green-blood-and-we-dont-know-why/), which might be to prevent them getting malaria. If the chemical in bear blood or bear muscle is toxic to humans as well as to whatever parasite the bear is trying to kill, then we'll steer clear of them. Alternatively, like the hawksbill turtle [eating toxic sponges](https://havehest.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/the-dangers-to-eating-sea-turtle-meat/), the bear eats something and accumulates the poison in its flesh. This could lead to all sorts of folklore about it being unlucky to hunt bears (as well as them being bad tempered and dangerous).
2. Bears kill our livestock and eat our crops. We want rid of them. If they are too tough to hunt, we'll revert to poisoned bait, traps and the like.
3. Because killing a bear proves your manhood. I don't think there is any way to stop people trying to do suicidally stupid things in the name of machismo, no matter how tough or dangerous the bears are.
So, toughening up the bears...
They no longer **hibernate**. Instead they have to survive the whole winter outdoors. They'll need a number of physiological and anatomical changes to do this:
* **Really thick fat layer**. Real bears build up lots of fat to sleep thru the winter - as nutrition. These bears need lots and lots more, because they'll be using it up faster as they will be active all winter. The fat is an extra layer of protection. Perhaps it is 11 cm thick like polar bear fat layers - but equally thick all over the animal. So your crossbow bolt has to penetrate more than 11 cm before it hits muscle, bone or vital organ.
* **Thick skin** is also a good insulator against the cold. So above the fat is thick skin.
* Mammals have two layers of hair - ground hair (down fur) and guard hairs. An air layer is trapped between skin and fur to keep the animal warm. Here's a diagram of [polar bear fur and skin](https://asknature.org/strategy/fur-absorbs-infrared-radiation/#jp-carousel-82059). Perhaps your bears are unique and have **additional types of hair** and their pelt is a sandwich of several layers of fur and several air layers for maximum insulation. Again, this means the depth your blade or bolt has to penetrate becomes much deeper than for a normal bear.
* To accumulate all this fat, they have expanded their diet to include more brains and bone marrow. Not just crunching up rabbits and salmon like regular bears do - these guys have evolved the **bone crushing jaws** of spotted hyenas, to crack open the toughest skull and the strongest leg bone. If they can crush a bison leg or skull and not worry about bone splinters in their mouth, then they can crush the wooden shaft of a spear and not worry about wood splinters.
So people who stick a boar spear in a bear may not get the blade deep enough to inflict a serious wound, and their spear will be bitten in two shortly afterwards!
This does mean that there will be a time of year - early spring - when bears are easier to kill. They'll have used up lots of their fat reserves, and will have moulted their thick winter pelt for a lighter, shorter summer fur. Also bears which live in warm places will be accumulating fat to get through the dry season, not the cold season.
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Bears usually were hunted like how boars were back in medieval times, with huge spears in hunting parties, with dogs to flush them out. This is because (believe it or not) bears were pretty big and scary animals. Being that they were pretty hard to kill, you wouldn't have to make very many changes.
Bears have extremely thick fur already, which along with it's fat, reduces the kinetic energy and penetration of attacks effectively. You could could say in your world that they produce some sort of oil or resin that makes their fur matt and thicken. This could make the hair super hard and layered, making it function like full body armor. The substance coating it would hold the hair stiff against attacks from spears or broadswords. You could explain it by saying that it is waterproof, and so bears evolved it in order to be able to dive into rivers quickly, get food, and leave without all the water weighing them down, or something along those lines (maybe they have fast predators?).
You could also couple by increasing the layer of fat in their skin to make them bigger and tougher to kill, and it keeps the organs from harm if a spear stabs them (harder to reach heart).
Like I said, bears already are extremely hard to kill (as stated here <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_attack#Fur>) and all you have to do is augment their best natural defense.
If this isn't enough, you could couple it with Nate White's "move in packs" method.
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Very wooly floofy, bears. Thick tough hairs cover their body and grow long into an afro-like mass covering their body. Like the fur of a [bison](https://img.purch.com/w/660/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5saXZlc2NpZW5jZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA0Ni84Mzkvb3JpZ2luYWwvd29vZC1iaXNvbi1idWxsLmpwZw==) but 10x thicker and fluffier and tougher. They don't shampoo and condition it, so after living their outdoor lifestyle eventually this is caked in mud which stiffens it even more and adds mass. Arrows hit this 14" layer of muddy thick floof and lose most of their energy. Even after being told, swordsmen still underestimate how deep the floof is, and just end up hacking some of the floof off. They're scared, they aren't sure where in that mass the actual body is, and they don't want to plunge their sword deep in there and have it get stuck and lose it when the bear lunges away. Spears are still the best weapon. [After all, how do you defend yourself from a man that attacks you with a pointed stick?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piWCBOsJr-w) But the floof still gives a fighting chance. The bears aren't often holding still while fighting, and when a spear enters the floof, the moving floof is likely to push it off target. You have to be really strong and unwavering to hold your spear on target as it pushes through the floof. Most spears miss or only hit glancingly on the bear's actual flesh, and then are likely pulled out of their owner's hands. During battle the bears will sometimes shake like a wet dog, flinging the accumulated weapons out of their fur and outward in all directions.
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Physical, mechanical defense against weaponry is going to be hard to defend in evolutionary terms. Physical structures are energetically expensive to develop and maintain, so there needs to be a good reason for them to exist, but in terms of avoiding intelligent hunters behavioral changes are probably more plausible. But, if you're willing to suspend disbelief just a bit...
**[Crumple Zones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone)**
Most modern cars have specially engineered regions which are designed to absorb kinetic energy and dissipate it, rather than passing it on to the entire structure of the car itself. That way you have one section that, while it will be damaged badly, will protect the overall structure from bearing serious damage. If the bears have regions of some combination of bone, muscle, and/or some sort of shatterable armor (like chitin in insects, or the armored plating of armadillos) which are arranged correctly, the force of a projectile could conceivably be bled away such that the bear can handle it. Additional shots to the same region would be bad news, though.
**Grooves and Ridges**
This adaptation would involve some sort of hard or tough structure on or beneath the skin which has patterns of raised and lowered sections which redirect the force of a projectile elsewhere. If a crossbow bolt hits straight-on, bad news again, but if the angle is even slightly off the grooves can "slide" the arrow off to the side. Depending on how effective the physical structure is at resisting being punctured (bone and tough, leathery skin would be different in how well they avoid being punctured, torn, or scored) this could very well prevent the bolt from blasting inwards to any meaningful organs.
An important feature of this if the structure is under the skin is that blood loss needs to be dealt with. Skin that is lightly vascularized, or adaptations that promote rapid clotting of some sort would help.
**Rapid Clotting**
Even in the case of an actual bear, shooting one with a crossbow is more likely to really, really anger it than kill it outright. Blood loss over time is a more serious concern, especially if the bolt hits a major vein or artery. A bear which can quickly slow the bleeding will have more staying power. Such an adaptation would have implications for internal blood clots (think brain aneurysms), which would reduce the creatures' survivability, but you can get around those. The clotting factor may only activate upon exposure to external air, based on some carefully-maintained internal chemical condition, for example.
**Low-Density of Important Structures**
If most of a bear's mass is not strictly necessary for it to live, then a bolt is less likely to hit something critical and cause it to die. This is similar to DNA-- most of the DNA in a human doesn't code for any proteins and is just sort of "there". But when exposed to potential damage (like mutations during replication), just as a matter of probability those are more likely to affect some region which doesn't code for anything, and so the error is irrelevant to the survival of the larger organism. If a bear's body is mostly structures which, if hit, wouldn't destroy its ability to function or cause it to bleed out, it would be much harder to take one down with a projectile.
**Redundant Structures**
This one may be the hardest to defend from an evolutionarily plausible perspective, but redundant structures would mean that even if one were destroyed its function would still be carried out. It's hard to imagine a situation in which having, say, two hearts would be worth the additional energy beyond having just one. But perhaps they work in concert (sort of like having two lungs), where losing one makes you less good at surviving than having both but isn't *necessarily* life-ending.
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Bears are already pretty resistant to *modern* weapons, unless you get pretty lucky with a 1200's crossbow you're just going to aggravate it. You'd like it more resistant yet and still a bear so, you can give it: thicker fat, thicker preferably matted fur, heavier bones, or just make it all around bigger. You could mess around with the internal structure somewhat as well, if you thicken and extend the ribcage down to cover the liver, spleen, and kidneys completely, enlarge the head by thickening the skull and increasing the jaw muscles and thicken the long bones in the same way, expanding the musculature accordingly you have thick muscle over thick bone over all the major organs without making any major changes to how the animal looks except that it will look somewhat fatter.
Some of the material in [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/103513/ways-to-make-a-creature-immune-to-bullets-other-than-bulletproof-skin/103524#103524) my be of use to you also.
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/A single shot from any bow/crossbow of the period should not be capable of killing the bear./
**It is extremely difficult to hit the bear. The bear is quick.**
This bear is small, lean and lithe. It has converged on the body habitus and lifestyle of its Carnivora cousins. The mongoose genus (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongoose>) is absent from Europe and so in this world ursids have evolved to take that niche - like weasels and stoats but larger and more powerful. Just as fast. A mongoose can kill a cobra because it is so much faster than the cobra it can dodge its strike, move around and grab its neck.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqkWQo5JNzE>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OYM4F.jpg)
View here a mongoose that heard the arrow coming, saw it in flight and dodged. Picture your quick little bear doing exactly that. A single shot is not capable of killing the bear because they dodge the arrow.
I can see the comment coming and so will answer in advance: Yes, if you tied down the bear first then a single shot that hit would be capable of killing the bear.
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In this fantasy setting based on medieval Europe, scary monsters and minions of the Undead King plague the land. In response, large cities have started to employ those proficient with sword or bow through competing adventure-guilds to escort merchants, keep the monster population in control and do other general campaign-worthy things.
Among these adventurers are the "Blessed", people that were born with glowing runes etched into their right palm. Blessed are able to use magic to alter reality, summoning forth flames or controlling large gusts of wind based on their elemental preference. Magic has a lot of practical uses and is a popular research topic, but Blessed wanting to make a quick buck or unable to get formal education due to their social standing go to become adventurers. More than having everyday use, magic has a lot of combat utility making a Blessed a huge boon to any adventuring party.
Magic in this world is categorised into elements, with different elements having different runes and colours (Blessed with water magic have blue runes on their hand, etc.) Those elements are further categorised into 'tiers'. Nature magic, for example, is a tier 3 element that consist of water and earth magic, both tier 2 elements. Blessed that have the nature element can therefore, besides casting the more versatile nature magic, also cast water and earth magic. Which makes them objectively stronger than, say, a Blessed who's element is only water.
I'm looking for a reason why Blessed would want to hide their rune/element in public. In the current system I set up, adventurers would get rewarded by prancing around showing off their power, because being visibly more powerful than other adventurers means more work and more money. If not just general advertisement for your guild.
Why would these magic-users want to hide their "power level"?
**Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not looking for a reason why a single character would hide his powers, but why all Blessed would agree that showing the element they were born with is a bad idea.**
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Being constantly the focal point for attention is not always good.
Your person, once known that you are a strong mage, will attract a lot of people: other wannabe mages willing to try their luck, adventurers seeking for challenges, drunkard searching for problems, you name them. And sometimes you want to be as stealth as possible: either you are on a mission, or you simply want to recover.
Also, an unprepared opponent can be more easily overcome, and disguise may help to lure your foe into believing you are a flimsy shepherd and not a fire mage level $9^{9^9}$
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Indeed, it would be a huge advantage in any sort of fight not just to be unknown, but potentially to mislead others. If you are a nature mage for example, you could choose to only use your water magic publicly. Then as an o snap button if you are attacked you could use earth magic or nature. Your enemy would have only prepared for your water stuff.
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* **More power = More responsibility**: Maybe in your society, powerfull mages need to serve in some kind of army, work, dangerous or bored stuff. Even if they get good money for that kind of jobs.
* **There are people who don't like be famous**: People will know you and know what you do, so to avoid trouble you would prefer to keep being anonymous.
* **A part of society don't like magic**: Some no-magic people fear magic power. This kind of persons live in societies where magic is forbidden so to be able to live or stay in that places you need to hide your magic power.
* **Other mages can steal your magic power**: This idea is similar to the second one. Some mages don´t want to be famous to avoid being the focus of some kind of attack.
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**Mage killers/the Damned**
There are others out there who are born with marks as-well... the Damned. Unholy runes cover there left palm, the mark of Undead King. New elements of death, shadow and curses are used by them, they gain power by killing powerful blessed mages in there lords name... they will hear of your powers... they will seek you out... they will hunt you... and they will kill you.
Also the main character could be a turn coat Damned or born with runes on both hands and have to hide them, could be cool ether way.
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Simple physiological reasons. **It's primarily wrist support. Hiding your mage power mark is just secondary.**
Magic use requires exact hand movement. The more stationary the wrist, the more accurate the magic casting *direction* and *spread*. Ie tight beam of water or wide spray of water etc. This could also work if your mages require repetitive intricate hand movements, carpal tunnel may set in.
Magic users come to rely on external aids such as wrist support braces to help provide steady aim. This helps even more when directing a powerful spell which might cause the wrist to vibrate more than wished for.
There are many different styles of wrist support and it can be of many different materials. It gives you a handy chance for some leather buckle action in costume design.
Some mages may be more comfortable showing more of their palm, while others find braces with more palm coverage better suited for them. This allows instances where the mark can be visible on some characters and not others as required by the story. It can also double as an armguard if your characters take up archery.
See this leather wrist support designed for carpal tunnel found on [twitter via a google search](https://goo.gl/images/FvZuqG).
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**Because runes are highly personal**
They might look the same from a distance, but runes aren't just some magical mumbo jumbo in a fancy pattern. They are perfect and very specific reflections of the people they mark. Their soul, if you will. To show someone your rune would be to let them know and understand you completely, given that they had the time and knowledge to properly read it.
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I'll start with a bit of a Tangent if I may...
If you ever go into a pub, not a trendy modern bar, a regular working man's pub. and while you're in there keeping to yourself, the loud jumping around trying to get attention bloke is usually the least of your problems, its the quiet one who's been around the block and could snap you in half you need to worry about.
Now go back to your example, about hiding the Rune in public when "prancing around" would be worthwhile.
If I had a dangerous mission/quest that I needed to be completed, and I mean definitely completed, would I go to the jumping around attention seeker... no. I'd go by recommendations for the best person for the job, they don't advertise their power as often it would make them look weaker, or less experienced by having to show it off in public. if you want the best you go to them on their terms. this doesn't mean they'd hide it, but they wouldn't advertise it in the same way.
The same thing goes for a lot of products in the real world, often the more popular the product the less advertising you see for it (at least in Britain) i can't remember the last time I saw an advert for a FitBit unless there was a "new" model out, because, although the market is flooded with exercise trackers, FitBit seems to be the big name and everyone goes to them. they spend less time and effort on marketing, meaning lower cost and get the business anyway.
Mix this sort of real-world logical reasoning into you world alongside L.Dutch's and Brizzy's answers and it's very logical to hide your rune.
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Just switch gunslinger with mage.
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> Yeah, I was the kid...it got so that every pissant prairie punk who thought he could shoot a gun would ride into town to try out the Waco Kid. I must've killed more men than Cecil B Demille. Got pretty gritty. I started to hear the word "Draw!" in my sleep. Then one day, I was just walking down the street, and I heard a voice behind me say, "Reach for it Mister!" I spun around and there I was face to face with a six-year-old kid. Well I just threw my guns down and walked away....little bastard shot me in the ass!! So I limped to the nearest saloon, crawled into a whiskey bottle, and I've been there ever since.
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*Jim from Blazing Saddles*
Also when you are the magic helper people will want help with anything.
**Hey Mister! can you open this jam for me?** **Hey Mister! can you turn this flour into cocaine for me? Can you take out the trash?**
Also being a magic wielder don't mean you are not petty. You can make enemies not even knowing it. You get a kiss from a girl somebody else had crush on. You get that good paying job instead of local mage.
And when they know your magic level they can plot how to kill you. When they don't know your power it complicate things for them and make it much harder.
Also - do you see people prancing around showing what level of Masonry they at? Or how much points on stackexchange they have?
You tell those things when there is time and place.
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**Fear.**
Forget their power level - I'd be surprised if they would let people know if they knew magic at all.
People mistrust mages, regardless of their past or present actions or behavior. Soon as people know you're a wizard, all the traditional stereotypes apply. They're not to be trusted, any odd activity in the neighborhood is almost certainly their fault, etc. And even when they try to help, or prove that recent increases in evil and/or villainy are not their fault, they are rarely believed.
A friend wrote a song about such a scenario, The Wizard of Mackeytown
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzuoJVr3IAo>
(Don't know the code to embed that - anyone want to edit it?
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You get forced into the Mage Academy. Perhaps the academy that studies magic is elitist and only mages of certain power levels or unique rune combinations are allowed entry.
From the sounds of your premise, the poor tend to turn to adventuring for cash even though it could be considered dangerous, whereas the elite can live in relative safety and comfort.
You could then set the character up to have either a poor background and fears what would happen should they get noticed by the academy, or have some back story where the characters family mysteriously disappear after working at the academy and now he/she fears them as the cause behind it.
Another route would be that the city deems powerful mages as too dangerous to be left running about freely and are instead captured, either to be imprisoned or forced to work as a fire monkey, water hose, or whatever else their abilities can offer the masses.
Given you have runes and tiers, you could play around with this more and give the character such unique combinations of runes that everyone thinks is useless. But together you can actually end up doing something crazy that no one has seen before. An example of this is the ability to nullify other magic.
Finally, the power is too unpredictable to control or only appears in dire situations. Maybe the main character doesn't have any visible runes while in normal situations but as soon as a dangerous situation arises full rune madness ensues. Even the character doesn't know/understand the full extent of their power.
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* **Weakness:** Earth absorbs water, water extinguish fire, fire consumes air, air erodes earth. Each mages has a weakness and you don't want to show your weakness.
* **Steal:** If you kill a mage you could steal its rune or raw power, you don't want to be a prey of others.
* **Envy:** Non-mages envy mages, and normal mages envy powerful mages. If you show your ultra-rare magical rune you will be hated by everyone.
* **Bloodline:** All your family, town and even your country has a firer rune and you're the only one with a water rune... You're a freak.
* **Responsibility:** Greater mages are obligated to defend their kingdom.
* **Fear:** Some people on the higher spheres hate powerful mages, you don't want to die out go to prison.
* **Famous:** Be great becomes you famous and that doesn't is necessary good.
* **Unholy:** Runes are feared by the church and are treated as demons by them.
* **Sacrifice Ritual:** Some kind of mad religious does sacrifice rituals with powerful mages.
* **The chosen one:** Everyone knows about your gift, you magic. People assume that is your responsibility use this power for good, for charity, for help the people without pay in return. People think that it's your destiny.
* **Witcher:** No one want to be burned or drowned.
**P.S:** I've written it with my phone. When I arrive at home I'll improve it.
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### *tl;dr*- Magic is weakened when observed
The *Blessed* are empowered by the mechanisms of the world to serve the interests of its creators. But since the creators have different interests and their opinions can change, the magic of the *Blessed* can strengthen or wane according to their actions.
The *Blessed* don't fully understand the situation, but they generally appreciate the fact that showing off their powers – or, worse, using their powers in a disruptive way – tends to diminish their abilities. So, the *Blessed* tend to be reserved in both the disclosure and use of their powers.
### Lore: The demiurges indirectly grant the *Blessed* power
At the dawn of Creation, the [demiurges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge) had come together to build the world. As sapient beings, the demiurges had goals in mind – we're not exactly sure what these deitistic figures wanted from the world, however it seems that they designed the world to serve their various agendas.
For the most part, the world is largely deterministic, playing out like a physics simulation. Rocks fall due to gravity, the sun warms by day, the snow melts when heated, and so forth.
In principle, an omniscient God could've designed the world to play out exactly as they intended, tweaking every little bit of Creation as They would see it. However, the demiurges weren't quite so limitless; they couldn't foresee every moment of the future from the beginning, so to ensure the fulfillment of their agendas, they put in automatic course-correction mechanisms that would help guide the world as they'd want it to be guided.
We don't know of many of these mechanisms. In fact, many of the demiurges had no concern for life as we know it, but rather cared about how water flows in the oceans, or how the winds blow through the hills, or how high the trees could grow in the forest; and so, they laid down mechanisms to ensure their inscrutable designs, largely invisible and beyond our appreciation.
Other demiurges had concerns that we might better comprehend, such as a will to see humans live in certain ways or to enforce certain ideals; or, in some cases, demiurges who had no real concern for humans intended to exploit them as tools to help maintain their true concerns, e.g. Druids who are empowered to protect nature. But whatever their motivations, many of these demiurges ended up creating the *Spiritual Observers* who observe the world and try to pursue their particular goals by providing humans with powers; we know them as the *Blessed*.
This leaves the *Blessed* in a strange position, as their powers aren't absolutely guaranteed like the more deterministic parts of physics, but rather are tentatively allowed to override normal physics in service to the interests of the forces of Creation. The *Blessed* may not know or even be capable of understanding any of this, but they nonetheless serve the interests of those that have empowered them.
For example, a *Blessed* who can heal seems to grow more powerful as they help others or weaker if they cause harm, even if they do so without using their magic! Likewise, a *Blessed* who has powerful Fire magic may grow stronger as they use it, unless they do so in a way that harms others or nature.
Behind the scenes, this is because the mechanisms installed by the demiurges are balancing their competing interests. The healer or fire mage who uses their power is often serving their sponsor's desire by doing so, strengthening the trust and gaining more power for it. However the healer who hurts others loses their sponsor's trust and thus their power. Likewise, the fire mage who burns down a forest may not upset the interests of their sponsor, but they do upset the interests of the demiurges who valued nature and therefore contest the fire mage's continued privilege to override physics.
This leaves the *Blessed* in a fairly political position, where their powers grow or wane with the support or objection of the mechanisms that allow for magic to override physics. A *Blessed*'s closest political ally is typically their sponsor, i.e. the mechanism that gave them their power in the first place. And while it's helpful to gain support from other mechanisms, more often than not, other mechanisms are more likely to find fault with their magical privileges, weakening the *Blessed*. So to avoid power loss, *Blessed* learn that they should avoid unnecessary displays of power and even disclosure of what powers they have that a force might object to.
Of course, all of this is behind-the-scenes knowledge. For the most part, the *Blessed* don't know why showing off their powers tends to diminish their abilities, but there's still a general awareness that their gifts can be lost, and that making others aware of their gifts significantly contributes to such loss.
### Mechanics: Balancing interests make for an easy fictional world
This description of the *Blessed* and the larger world is heavily based in the very forces of Creation changing their estimates to seek some goal. The non-omniscience of the creators prevents the world from being boring, but the idea that they're continually trying to nudge the world according to their various agendas creates sort of a dynamic equilibrium that helps keep everything in-check.
For the *Blessed* in particular, a backdrop like this can help explain why very powerful individuals would be reluctant and even unable to exploit their powers in ways that it'd seem like they otherwise might. But there's also variation in the *Blessed*'s willingness to reveal/misuse their powers, as they may vary in their perceptions of the situation and their willingness to risk negative consequences.
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Story concept that I came up with:
Magic is accepted, but historically the people born with a certain combination of magic have been too powerful and have reeked havoc across the world, and so they are automatically hunted down before they can come to full power. Maybe the level of power is just to much for a normal person to control, maybe it is too much for a normal person to resist... But the main character isn't normal... :)
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## **Crippling Social Anxiety**
Know the old stereotype of stammering geeks with zero(or near enough)social skills? The gods had a sense of humour and decided to make it true. Thus they proclaimed: "*The meek shall inherit magic*(not the earth, what kind of silly deity would promise that? :P)", and there you have it
The Blessed grow up to have this odd tendency of being painfully awkward introverts.If they started drawing attention to themselves with their fancy runes and fancier pyrotechnics they'd probably implode from anxiety(if this is hostile attention, they could quite literally implode). Unfortunately, their lack of social skills also results in lacking dress sense, so their strange garb often threatens to do them in anyway.
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There's a magical establishment (college, guild, whatever) that attempts to monopolize the magic market in the area. If you're found out to be Blessed, but not a member of the establishment, you're slinging spells on their turf. The members walk around openly, but non-members have to play it on the DL or they're harassed, driven out, or possibly even killed. Of course you have to show somebody to get a job, but it's always a risk.
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**Self-loathing.**
Your character hates himself and what he is. I think of Thomas Covenant in the Stephen R Donaldson series - he considers himself a worthless leper and refuses to acknowledge he could be a force for good in the strange world he has entered. Early on, he does terrible things on purpose as a way of attacking his true nature. He is a man in pain who creates pain so that he can feel he is in some way the master of pain.
So too your character. He hides the runes on his hand - or more probably defaces or tries to burn them off. Denying his true nature also denies him control of his nature. Each time the runes come back (and they always come back) they are different, stronger and even less under his control.
How it is your character came to be this way, and how he ultimately finds redemption (or does not) is the stuff of your story.
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There are a few reasons I could think of:
**Stigmatization:** Beyond magic being stigmatized for whatever reason, a specific element could be stigmatized. It's a common theme in books that wizards with black magic, blood magic, or necromancy skills are commonly thought of as themselves dark and evil. Likely all of the rune types have stereotypes attached, but what (Harry Potter House, Narnian Species, Alien Species) division is automatically decided to be evil?
**Family Relations:** In Nickelodeon's Avatar series, Bending is genetic. That means that only people with Water Tribe genetics can bend water, only Fire Nationalists can make fire, etc. So, if someone is born with firebending in the Water Tribe... there's a high stigma when it comes to bastard children. If your genetics work the same, that's a reason to hide even the powers.
**Hyperpowerful:** Again, in Avatar, the only person who has more than one power is the Avatar. In Heroes, only Peter Petrelli and Sylar can copy other powers. In Maybe said person has two runes when they're only supposed to have one, and they're trying to hide that they're different.
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A few decades ago, there was a mage with an incredible power level (10 of 10). Nobody else in the kingdom was as powerful as him. He was the dean of the mage guild which belonged to the kingdom. Then [something] happend and he turned crazy. Half of the kingdom was destroyied, 1000s of men dead when he finally could have been overwelmed by being killed.
This left a massive scar in the society of the kingdom so that a new law was created. A mage was now only allowed to have a power level of max 5. All above is not tolerated and will result in a witch hunt.
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**Random Mutation**
The more powerful you are, the more likely you are to mutate. Depending on the amount of magic used or the spell complexity, you could simply any time randomly twist yourself in reality and become a monster. Even if the chance is small. We can see this effect in prisoners. No matter what they did and how small a chance there is that they will do something "*evil*" again, people will generally want nothing to do with them.
Or you could go full Worhammer 40K on them and say that the more powerful a mage, the brighter it's soul shines and the more likely it is to lure in a demon. These events are generally marked with a lot of new gravestones.
**Socialization problems**
Like that one weird kid in the class room that does not know how to control itself and right after you take his pen, he stabs you with another.
Or the obvious problem with power presence. I am respectful to the police. I can only imagine how annoyingly respectful I would be to a personalized tank walking down the street. And the more powerful, the more un-conflicting(and annoying) I would try to be.
You can also imagine it like the policeman that hide their guns, because they can not talk with people normally or like the extra successful woman tend to scare the man away.
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Your story reminds me a bit of [Heroes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_(TV_series)).
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> The series tells the stories of ordinary people who discover that they had superhuman abilities, and how these abilities take effect in the characters' lives as they work together to prevent catastrophic futures.
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The plot point is heroes you are looking for is that [Sylar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylar) (the anti-hero) has the ability to kill and steal other heroes' powers.
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> he is a superpowered serial killer who targets other superhumans in order to steal their powers.
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Your mages are in constant danger of the enemy boss that will kill and remove the rune from their hands to gain more and more power.
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As people have mentioned theres plenty of reasons. But theres one thats probably the most lethal (and my list contains assassins out to get them).
Powerful mages are treates as famous people. This means people will pester them, ask for memorabelia of their meeting or outright steal stuff. Myths about "blessed" will soon pop up, and touching a powerful blessed can be Lucky... Or cure your disease.
Think of all the horrible diseases from the passed. Typhus, lepra, the plague and all those other lethal and nasty diseases, and you being the focal point for all these people to touch you in the hopes of being cured, not to mention "normally" sick people who will keep challenging your immune system against every disease you come across.
Other options are:
* they are out to get you. A religious sect, people posessed by the nasties the adventurer fights. The nasties might try to hunt down powerful mages because an unprepared mage is far easier etc. Dont show your power, you stay alive.
* Conscription is a thing. You can imagine that powerful mages are regarded as walking siege engines, and they are going to be highly prized by the army. Prized enough that they are forced to work for them. Additionally as blessed they likely feel superior and having someone without magic, lower or equal lead them is going to be a slap in the face. Someone more powerful leading them will also give their ego a massive kick as they dont feel as superior.
* theres a stigma around powerful mages. Lots of people will think they can do things like the economy better in the real world, a powerful mage can potentially enforce it. Powerful mages have sometimes banded together and attempt to enslave/rule people, with this in everyones mind shows of lots of power makes people uneasy. In fact, they are "blessed" right? Add a lot of powerful magic and some think its their birthright to lead! The magic is for people who dare challenge them right...?
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So you are building a world where mages are readily identifiable by runic glyphs that appear on their palms, which reveals the type and strength of their talents, but wish there to be reasons why they conceal this brand when their talents are a highly prised basis of employment.
Okay, then, mercenary adventures maybe highly sought after for their ability to defend trade caravans against monsters, but you still don't want them simply *waving their weapons* around in public. It is immodest and dangerous. Just as warriors sheath their swords and perhaps use peacebonds, so too do mages wear ornate gloves as a sign that they aren't loose cannons.
It might just be polite fiction that gloves inhibit magic, with mages knowing its truely to keep aspects of their abilities hidden, or it may actually have some basis, but it could become accepted practice that mages just don't flaunt their runes, and only deglove when they truely mean business.
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I have a question that concerns a story I am writing and I hope it is a valid one to ask. But in my story, several groups of colonists, each arriving on different ships at relatively the same time, land on a newly discovered habitable world with the goals of spreading and populating the new world while establishing new, yet individual, societies that fit their ideologies and views as quickly as possible. They start from complete scratch using the tech and resources they brought from earth. My question is: **Initially, in detail and realistically, which would be more favorable; large or small settlements built with the in mind goal of quick expansion but also quick population growth?**
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## Settlement size will depend much more on how habitable your "habitable" world is and how much they need in order to bootstrap their society, than on what would be better for quick expansion.
How fast a population can expand doesn't depend on how large your settlements are - it depends on how safe you can keep your people. A man and woman can have just as many children in a small settlement as they can in a large settlement as long as you have enough food for everyone and the ability to keep them safe.
**Habitability:**
How habitable is the new world? Does it already have plant life, a breathable atmosphere, seasons that don't get dangerously hot or cold, and no dangerous wildlife to worry about? If that's the case, then you could easily have small settlements similar to what happened early in the history of the U.S. This will allow for greater discovery and acquisition of resources.
What about if the world isn't quite so ideal? The more dangerous the planet is, the more that people will want to stay together for efficiency of resource use and security. For example, if the planet is mostly safe but doesn't yet have enough oxygen for us to breathe without assistance, you'll need to have larger settlements due to the difficulty in building controlled-atmosphere living spaces.
**Tech needed:**
On the high-tech end of the spectrum, your settlers could have fabricators capable of mass to energy to mass conversion. The fabricators could consume any matter, use some of the energy produced to power themselves, and use the rest to produce whatever items the settlers need. The settlers won't need help from others, allowing them to spread out as much as they want.
If their tech level is fairly close to ours, they're going to want to start out with large settlements. Unless they're trying to "go back to nature", it takes a lot of infrastructure in order to have a modern society. For example, think about what it takes to produce electronics - you need to be able to find metal ores, process those ores, acquire sources of silicon, [find sources of some rare earth elements](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/rare-earth-elements-in-cell-phones/), be able to produce the chemicals necessary in the manufacturing processes, build [cleanroom facilities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom), and then manufacture the electronics (and I'm sure I've glossed over some key parts of the process). And that's just one aspect of a modern society. They'll need large settlements working hard in order to build up their infrastructure.
**Summary:**
The easier it is to keep everyone safe, the more they can (and likely will) spread out. Finding a mate is likely not the biggest challenge the settlers will be facing.
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Generally larger is better.
Bigger equals larger work force, more skills, bigger gene pool, more redundancy. The biggest downside is cost, more people also need more supplies, so you send the largest group you can afford to send.
However, you also usually have to consider what else you can send (like *can I send more fabrication equipment if I send fewer people*), but assuming everything else being equal then more people are better. **You want to send as many people as you can without compromising something else to do it.**
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Other answers do not mention the importance of **medicine**.
Quick population growth requires high birth rates. If your colonists can produce babies only a natural way you need doctors and midwives. Childbirth is not that simple or safe for humans. Without an easily available medical care, you will face skyrocketing levels of child and maternal deaths. Especially, if you are pushing colonists to have as many babies as possible.
Every settlement should have at least one midwife. Ideally, it also should be within 30 minutes of a medical facility where urgent medical procedures can be performed.
It would also be wise to establish some kind of system of tracking genealogy to avoid inbreeding. This becomes especially important if you have a small number of original colonists.
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Is this a planned economy or a market economy? Because in the later, the settlement size will be determined where people go. Let's look at that:
## Small Settlements
will be attractive to farmers and early settlers. If you are barely surviving, trust is vital and trust is easier to form in small communities where everyone knows everybody.
If your initial economy is agriculture, it also means your field is close. The more people you add, the more outwards their fields will be (space is limited) and sooner or later it will be so far that additional farmers prefer the next, still smaller, settlement.
## Large Settlements
are more attractive to specialists and late settlers. A community needs a certain size to support people in professions that don't directly contribute to the basics of life. 10 families may simply not be able to feed a teacher, 100 might, 1000 will certainly, the advantage of education are bigger than 0,1% of your food. The larger a settlement grows, the more specialist jobs will appear out of necessity. Logistics and management will become issues that are better solved centrally.
The exact numbers depend much on the local economy. If the land is fertile, surpluses are bigger and non-food jobs appear earlier. If the economy is based not around agriculture and food is imported (say in a mining colony), that factor becomes the focus around which everything revolves.
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The settlement of the planet and surrounding space will actually depend on just how it is being settled.
Assuming you are using spacecraft, each individual spacecraft might be rather small and hold a small number of colonists plus tons of supplies and machinery. Smaller is generally easier to accelerate and decelerate, so this makes actually getting to the colony easier. A large number of small vessels might be sent out at once, in order to provide enough redundancy to ensure some will arrive and there will be enough viable colonists and machinery to make a successful settlement.
In this case, there might be the urge to make many small settlements using the spacecraft as the seed points, so no single disaster will engulf all of the colonists.
If the colonists arrived spaced out over time (i.e the launch device or fuelling station can only handle a small number of spacecraft at any give time), then the colony might resemble a seaport, with the first ship landing and building infrastructure, and subsequent ships arriving and landing there to take advantage of the already existing facilities.
The other consideration might well be points of origin. If the colonists are all coming from Japan, then the new colony ships being sent from Venus may well decide to avoid the Japanese zones, and create separate colonies elsewhere. Depending on the sort of technology they brought and the locations they choose. they might decide to settle in one large and powerful colony, or disperse into many small settlements which are hard to find and individually take lots of resources to track and overwhelm or absorb.
From a general survival POV, settling in a dispersed pattern of smaller settlements would seem to give you a better chance of avoiding being overwhelmed by issues like natural disasters or even the spread of disease or technological breakdowns (you can quarantine small locations which are separated). You also have a wider range of resources to choose from, and trade and economic development will also happen faster in these conditions.
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Several small is better. Why go to another planet in the first place? Presumably because you want something (land or resources) there.
Look at how land is exploited on this planet: a country doesn't put its whole population in one mega-city, instead it's spread out over the whole (habitable portion of) the country.
Similarly on a new planet you might want small bits of population near whatever resource you went there to exploit.
The reasons for a large city (e.g. avoiding in-breeding, having specialist hospitals, or whatever) can be solved by tech that lets people travel (e.g. fly to a city centre occasionally when they need one).
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Unless your target technology is to have 100% bio-plastic with 3D printable 3D printers chances are you need a large settlement around a nice place to make food and babies with most of the factories and satellite communities for resource extraction at the best sites within range of your transportation. Whether you count that as one settlement or many is semantics.
What local resources do you need? Are you going to mine copper, gold, iron, oil, silicon, tin, aluminum, lead, titanium, asbestos, coal, uranium or any of the dozens of other things we want from the earth? If you do chances are it behooves you to visit more than one site.
If you are building permanent infra structure like mines expected to produce for years it probably makes sense to have some people live close to it. So then it makes sense to put some support infrastructure near those people.
But if your capital machines are small and cheap it may be you can ship enough that making more than one such colony node makes sense. Generally it is assumed that more people give you a better chance of a colony not failing, but with a single settlement a hurricane might doom everyone. If you have geographically dispersion you can be pretty sure no local problem will get them all and it's easier to reclaim a damaged settlement from somewhere else on the planet than wait for more support from the home planet.
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### New is always better. No wait, *large* is always better.
Large settlements necessarily have a better genetic diversity, they are better at defending, they have more synergestic force to combine. It's easier to find an expert for a partiuclar thing, etc. etc..
### Except...
Resources are presumably scarce on a previously uninhabitated, and vastly unexplored and only recently developped planet. More people need to eat more, and they need more water. This needs to come from somewhere.
They also need more space and breathable air (if the planet's atmosphere is not breathable or only to some extent breathable). If a habitat is being built, let's say a kind of "glass dome", it is increasingly more difficult to do so the larger it gets (square/cube law). You would need to build several smaller habitats and connect them with tunnels, but then, even though you pretend you don't, you effectively have *many smaller* settlements anyway.
Larger settlements also are more anonymous and have overproportionally more crime. In a society where everybody knows everybody else, crime rates are modest or virtually non-existent.
Also, on other planets, nature is generally not as indulgently forgiving as it is on our home planet. Where, except in some extreme regions, you can for the most part survive without technical gimmicks and sleep under the stars without having to worry about never waking up again.
On another planet, a single "average" thunderstorm or similar natural phenomenon could easily wipe out a complete settlement within hours, whether it be small or large. What's large by our standards is a grain of sand to planetary forces.
If there are several smaller settlements, the positive side of having a settlement anihilated is that *there still remain some*.
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### It is a trade-off between benefits.
Large settlements allow more efficient collective action, trade, etc. It is easier to dig one water well than 10 water wells.
If I want all settlements to be fenced, say for protection against local wildlife, then it is 1/3 the effort to fence one large settlement versus fencing 10 smaller settlements. (Because area enclosed goes up with the square of the fence length).
A single large population allows market fluidity: In ten settlements of some distance apart (to allow for growth), you need more doctors, so simultaneous illness or emergency in multiple settlements can all get the attention they deserve. You just need fewer of each kind of specialist in a single large settlement, and this in turn allows for more **types** of specialist: If you have three doctors in one settlement instead of ten doctors in ten settlements, then the other seven people that could have been doctors can be researchers, teachers, or of some other profession that utilizes their intellectual capabilities, bettering the community as a whole.
But there are drawbacks to a single large community. Diseases can infect everybody. A fire can devastate or kill more people. A flood or drought can wipe everybody out.
Basically there are many problems with a large concentration of people in one place, including getting supplies (food and water) into the place, and waste out of it. Sewage and garbage disposal presented a large problem when small villages became larger cities, sanitation and running water became more difficult than when everybody had their own well and their own piping. Power generation and distribution can become a problem, too.
In many smaller villages (historically on Earth) the solution to pollution was dilution. There was enough air, water and fields that waste and garbage wasn't a problem. But as they grew larger, the distance to disposal increased and crap piled up (literally).
It is easier to grow a small village (or start another small village) than it is to grow a large settlement, because growth of a large settlement serves to make the center of it increasingly barricaded and distant from the edges, where we need to go to dispose of waste (if we aren't going to dump it on our neighbors).
You have a trade-off between the complexity of a large settlement and its advantages, and the simplicity of small settlements and forgoing those advantages.
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I would say smaller settlements are better, but keep them relatively close to each other. Why? You solve two problems with this.
You avoid the "all your eggs in one basket" problem". A Plague, drought, and so on might be easier to contain and less impact on the world as a whole. You can more easily quarantine a small town than a neighborhood in a large city. If one community has a water system failure they can disperse. If a large city has a water system failure, well...
The reason you keep them close together is so that each community can aid and support those nearest to it. In the example of a water system failure, 2 or 3 nearby communities should be able to handle the excess population without much problems. If you have one big city, where do those people go?
There are many other benefits to a slightly dispersed populace. Space, for one thing. They are easier to manage.
If you initially set up small communities, each within a day or so travelling distance from each other, one is going to have some advantages over some of the others. That one is going to start growing, probably faster than the others. This is a good thing. It will likely, over the course of a few generations, turn into a trade hub. If conditions are favorable, it will eventually grow to the point of enveloping it's nearest neighbors. That's how your large city should come about, and then you get the advantages, You will have had time to actually plan for things like waste removal and so on. The quicker a city grows, a lot of the stuff we take for granted can blossom into epic problems.
In short, spread out at first and then let your large city grow organically, over time.
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If you take a cue from how bacteria or fungus spread, smaller distributed colonies will always spread faster than larger colonies. It comes down to simply a matter of perimeter of the expanding front of the colonies. Many small colonies will have a combined much greater external perimeter area than one large colony. (Since circles maximize interior space.) This actually is exactly why many fungus spread spores instead of just spreading across the ground.
This is all granted that people aren't actually a bacterial infection... of course if you are the planet you might not be so happy that you've developed a case of the humans.
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A large settlement could quickly start feeling mature and stop growing.
Or rather it would automatically grow slower, because it has relatively little unsettled area immediately next to it to grow into.
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Many small is probably better than one big, considering a possibility that something happens (probably biological, but could be as simple as a fire) and the settlement gets wiped out. Survivors can be rescued by the people from the other settlements nearby, but they must exist.
Also, keep in mind that the ships that bring the colonists need to be built, equipped, and get safely to the new world. Several large settlements would require either ships that are huge in size, or a giant fleet of smaller ones. It will become a millennium-long project to construct enough ships for multiple large settlements. Such long term projects have a way of right-sizing themselves, unless they totally die, of course. So, the big+many idea probably wouldn't work due to simple budgetary constraints.
Final conclusion: several smaller settlements would see more pragmatic and provide the necessary redundancy.
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Yet another airship question.
We now all know that it would be impossible to build an airship of any practical size or effectiveness [before the 19th century](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79008/how-might-airships-be-made-using-18th-century-technology/79009#79009), and that once a civilisation is advanced enough to build airships, they are also advanced enough be able to [build airplanes](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/79562/262) which, after a brief experimental period, will soon surpass airships in every aspect.
However, there were a few decades at the beginning of the 20th century, where airships were a viable alternative to airplanes, airplanes at that time being fragile rickety wooden and canvas contraptions barely able to fly from London to Paris with plenty of stops in-between. This time period lasted only a decade or two, and then airplanes became practical enough to almost completely displace airships.
How could we significantly extend this time period, with the fewest possible changes? What technologies could be developed in different order, to make the era of airships last much longer? I would guess at least a little different technological progress would be mandatory, single events (such as the [Hindenburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster) not crashing) would not have [enough effect](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36438/alternative-history-if-the-hindenburg-incident-never-happened).
I'm not looking for airships having a [somewhat larger role today](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/37239/what-events-could-keep-zeppelins-in-the-air-today) than they [have](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_NT), I'm looking for airships to be practically the only significant flying machine available, with complete dominance over those almost useless heavier than air curiosities.
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## No Hindenburg disaster - I'm aware this isn't enough alone but *it is key*
One of the largest influences on the decline of airships was the publicity of the [Hindenburg disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster). A mixture of imagery and quick reports made confidence in airships plummet.
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> The disaster was the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness reports from the landing field, which were broadcast the next day. A variety of hypotheses have been put forward for both the cause of ignition and the initial fuel for the ensuing fire. **The incident shattered public confidence in the giant, passenger-carrying rigid airship and marked the abrupt end of the airship era**.
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There are so many things that went into this that I couldn't possibly name them all but here are two that I think are important:
* The US was holding onto a vast majority of the helium reserves unwilling to export this much less flammable alternative due to concerns that it may be used in military action against them and their allies. After the Hindenburg disaster this was repealed to allow exports for non-military use.
+ Whether the accident would still have happened or the death-toll been so high we cannot say, but the pictures definitely wouldn't have been so dramatic.
* If the news hadn't been quite so sensationalist (or even just been unable to photograph the event) then public opinion wouldn't have dropped quite so much.
+ There had been many more disasters worse than the Hindenburg but the lack of coverage had meant these largely passed under the public's radar.
My suggestion would be to have the US allow the Hindenburg to use helium instead.
## But that isn't enough, so what else?
Public opinion of airships is still at a high but the development of aeroplane really took off (sorry) during the second world war and their efficiency would phase out airships eventually. Aeroplanes are much better in terms of:
* Speed - An airship can reach max velocities of ~100mph
* Handling - It takes a long time to turn an airship compared to an aeroplane.
* Payload to size ratio is much lower - You need a huge ship to carry the same bombs across.
This means you're presenting a large slow moving target to the people you're attacking.
Without changing the laws of physics we aren't going to reverse any of these. We could stop the second world war...but that seems like a pretty big change to me (and another war may well have come soon after). So lets have a look at what airships *can* do compared to aeroplanes.
* They run off Hydrogen and helium.
* Once they've taken off you don't need to lose your fuel, you could even use (a lot of) man-power to make the ship move once you're in the air.
* You can hover. Aeroplanes *had* to be moving at all times or be on the ground.
Without making massive changes in history (or physics) I don't think we can stop the development of aircraft for military use. However if we use the fuel differences and say there is a **shortage of oil** to create fuel for aeroplanes then I think we would see similar **military development focused on airships** like the [motherships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_aircraft_carrier) designed to carry aircraft close to their destination but remain a safe distance from the target. This way precious fuel could be conserved. Airships would then see a lot of attention from R&D and the cheaper Helium would be preferred by commercial airlines than the expensive oil-based fuels.
You could also put a spanner in the works for commercial aeroplanes with a similarly public disaster for the aeroplane. History is fraught with disasters...and the [resulting improvements](http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g73/10-airplane-crashes-that-changed-aviation/) made. If these improvements hadn't been made and airships were still high in public opinion then it is likely airships would have received a lot more attention.
One of the biggest developments was in **suitable landing gear, meaning the heavy passenger planes could land safely**. Delaying developments in sturdy and reliable retractable landing gear would have caused more accidents and decreased public opinion drastically.
**In the end public opinion is key to their usage, if people won't use aeroplanes then companies won't build them. Airships would be seen as the safest way to travel and their usage would become ingrained into infrastructure. There were even plans to use the [Empire State building as an airship dock](http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/docking-on-the-empire-state-building-12525534/). If similar buildings were constructed then calls for airports with huge runways cutting into the countryside may be seen as an excessive change.**
(There are massive repercussions to this: Helium is used in a lot of scientific research, upping demand for it would make it more expensive to pursue these areas).
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The answer to the reason why the airship era was as short it was can be discerned from the two quotes from the Wikipedia entry on the [airship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship).
The first discusses the advantages of airships:
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> The advantage of airships over aeroplanes is that static lift sufficient for flight is generated by the lifting gas and requires no engine power. This was an immense advantage before the middle of World War I and remained an advantage for long-distance or long-duration operations until World War II. Modern concepts for high-altitude airships include photovoltaic cells to reduce the need to land to refuel, thus they can remain in the air until consumables expire.
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While the second points what enables heavier than air aircraft to win out over the airship.
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In essence the two World Wars accelerated the development of the aeroplane. Once the aeroplane outstripped the airship its dominance in the skies was at an end. However, this didn't happen immediately and while airships don't play as big a role in aviation they have the potential for long-endurance flight.
Therefore, in a world where history ran differently and the two World Wars didn't happen the aeroplane wouldn't have had its accelerated development in the nineteen-teens it is plausible the airship would have lasted longer.
Considering the importance of helium as a lifting gas, possibly if there had been more abundant sources of helium and especially outside the USA the airship might have been more viable.
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A world with a lot less oil, or a world where oil contained little of the lighter components that make practical internal combustion engine fuel. Catalytic cracking was only developed in 1942, in the absence of a good supply of gasoline the internal combustion engine will lag far behind.
Airships don't need the power density airplanes do, they could run on steam engines that could be powered by just about anything that can burn.
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For a more exotically-built-world solution, I'd suggest you choose a planet with lots of CO₂ in the atmosphere (perhaps in an orbit like Mars, but with more dense atmosphere and more water-rich. Life will have to be a bit different than on Earth, but it should be possible). This has multiple effects that work out to the favour of airships vs planes:
* Airships will have higher buoyancy in that atmosphere. You can use safe nitrogen, argon or methane as the filling gas, or with hydrogen afford more payload per volume / better safety margins.
* Hydrocarbons won't burn as easily in that atmosphere. This on one hand makes airships yet safer, on the other hand is a problem for combustion engines. Other energy carriers, e.g. batteries, flammable metals, muscle work or nuclear will still be work file, but those aren't much use for long-range airplanes. However, they can certainly be used for airships – in modern times you may end up with solar- or nuclear powered airships.
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I'd say while there are many possible answers, one is immediately obvious.
Make everyone friendly.
Technological advances come far faster during times of war, as evidenced by the first half of the twentieth century.
Make everyone in your world get along nicely, and there will be no push to research winged flight.
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Not sure if it counts as a minor change but what about having a really bad accident when planes were first coming about. So at a few exhibitions early on there are big accidents, these silly attempts end up crashing into crowds time and time again. It doesn't take long before even attempting a heavier than air flying machine is seen as irresponsible and mad...no one will fund you and other inventors have lost friends and family to these silly pursuits.
Then you get no one trying to make it work because they're such a taboo subject and progress is stifled and it just isn't seen as a viable alternative during the wars so no development goes into them.
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I suppose you could switch make the discovery of **cheap, lightweight, highly efficient, flexible solar cells and electric motors** to a much earlier time. Airships covered in solar cell fabric to power their electric motors would make daytime flights the cheapest ways to move things and people around. If you also made fossil fuels somewhat scarce or difficult to refine, that would help a lot, as their energy density to cost ratio is still much better than our best batteries today.
If a highly efficient way to gather and store electrical energy came about earlier, but was coupled with the limiting factor of having to have large surface area to gather enough of it to be useful, that would give more of an incentive to make the airships more efficient. As long as airships get enough time to become more efficient than heavier-than-air alternatives you could extend the age of airships for quite a while without changing too many other things.
Also the "make everyone friendly" answer.
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# Religion
Imagine a society that deifies winged birds such as eagles and hawks or has a bird god such as Anzu or Karura. In this society, wings are the tools of gods, and winged planes are heresy. The airship floats without wings, and therefore building one would not get you beheaded/burned at the stake.
# Helium
Earth does not have a lot of accessible helium, and getting it is expensive. Making helium more plentiful and extraction substantially less expensive would lead to it being preferred over hydrogen, and thus safer. Additionally the buoyancy provided by cheap helium would be preferred over the lift provided by airspeed over a wing, which is expensive on fuel.
# Luxury
Airships can be quite large and provide an open space, passenger airline space is a fraction of the size even today. Airships can also fly at lower altitudes and give constant views of the land/sea below, and the cabin is much quieter due to engine location and airspeed. I would much prefer a large airship over a cramped plane any day, despite the speed difference.
# Plane crashes
As George said in the comments, a bad track record of airplane safety combined with a good track record for airship safety would sway public opinion away from plane development, especially if they crashed into densely populated areas, killing not only the passengers and crew, but thousands of people on the ground.
# Weather and Geography
If the weather on the planet was more stable (less storms, lower speed winds) then the flying conditions would more favorable to airships, which is a current downside. Additionally, less mountainous terrain means an airship can fly long distances with a constant altitude, and stay lower to the ground.
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The main practical advantages of airships are their relative ease of operation (landing in particular) and their ability to operate at low velocities. A core method to reach the velocity necessary to make airplanes work is combustion. Therefore, an early shortage of fossil fuels would certainly stretch the age of airships, possibly indefinitely.
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No Government funded Public schools set the majority of the nations to technical ignorance
I'd suggest making economic zones more extreme in wealth disparity, 1000 miles between rich areas that can afford runways and repair facilities where as the airship can do its own repairs and use unrefined vegi oil or coal to power its flight making it the low tech. Monopolize banking to lean in the favor of the airship towers instead of the huge costs of building the dedicated facilities for airplanes. You'd have a dual system long range for the airship and short hops for the wealthy in gyro's or something like it.
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Consider writing about aliens, in an alien setting. Not “costume” aliens mind you, but imaginative *different* beings in fundamental ways. Calling it “Bill” is campy. Making up some noise and trying to spell it in English is not right if the kinds of sounds they make are quite different than human language, or they don’t use sound at all! Using glyphs that the reader will be totally unfamiliar with can be interesting and even inspiring in a vignette or short work with a small number of such alien words, but would be difficult to keep straight for a longer work and might frustrate some readers who process language verbally even when reading/writing.
Using Native American style names or translating the name to a literal meaning imposes this facet of culture onto the aliens which might not be what you want (and why would *all* alien cultures work that way?) and runs into problems as things in the natural world they are named after are themselves alien! That is, Fat Bear is as bad as Bob since they don’t have bears but have «untranslated». For names that are not formed this way, think about our own: what does Paul or John mean literally, to translate as a word? Few of us know where the words came from and they’re only used as names now. Translating Paul from Latin to English as *humble or small* doesn’t keep the flavor of a dedicated name word.
So what can you do when writing about aliens?
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Example: I got to thinking of this issue after writing [the vignette at the end of this post](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47575/gas-based-circulatory-system/47607#47607). The aliens are not interacting with humans. Rather, the story is set in an alien society. Think about the middle part of [*The Gods Themselves*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves#Second_part:_...The_Gods_Themselves...), or the [Orthogonal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_(series)) universe.
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English names. Some foreigners with hard to remember and spell names pick English names, why not aliens use the same when dealing with humans? Let me try an example:
Paul, whose real name resembles a soft purple light in their own language, was an alien with light based communication method.
Edit: Since buried behind many comments, @Cecilia suggested names that resembles the original names of the aliens like Violet in the previous example.
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This isn't perfect, but it works for me. I invent the names of alien characters. Trying to keep their construction according to what is usually an intuitive set of rules.
This can be by looking at words and names in, say, a Scandinavian language, using that as a template and modifying their linguistic structures into something sufficiently different until it feels right for my aliens. Or creating hybrids between dissimilar languages, for examples, recombining words from Chinese and German. So the German name "Landau" could become "Landao" or "Landiu" or "Landeng" by changing the last two vowels.
This isn't a set of hard and fast rules. Mainly it is a matter of feeling a way into what is going on with the aliens and whatever their names are going to be arising from trying to find what tastes right.
As well as following Gene Wolfe's precept that invented names should be pronounceable by an English speaker.
Whatever approach taken is usually dictated by what type of alien the story is about, because different kinds of aliens will need to have different types of naming and linguistic associated with them. To reflect something about the character and nature of alienness, and their role in the story. Basically it's horses for courses.
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If are interacting the aliens then we will probably give the new names or just take the meaning of their name and translate that into English or some other earth language. I guess my answer is it doesn't matter what their name their language is for convenience sake we would have renamed them.
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Different contexts yield very different answers:
Scenario 1: Humans are the dominant or most populous species, and the aliens are minority visitors.
Scenario 2: Humans are the minority among an alien populace.
Scenario 3: Humans are one of many species in a giant melting pot of vastly different cultures, where no one species is truly dominant.
For a viable scheme in scenario 1, look at the way that humans give names to foreigners in our own countries. We use what is familiar to our own native culture. The masses will never go out of the way to learn a new writing system or pronounce syllables that aren't in their native language. Therefore, they transliterate the foreign name in their own writing system, with pronunciation that is manageable. A transliteration into English would not be optimal for reflecting the culture, literal meanings, physiology or native communication methods of the alien species... but then again, how many Khoe words do you understand? How many Khoe words can you pronounce correctly (it uses a system of clicks) even if you know the meaning? Our goal is not to reflect their language and culture - it is to be most utilitarian to our language and culture. A moderately easy-to-pronounce verbal name would be used in that world, because humans use names and communicate verbally. Also note that names typically aren't translated even when they have a literal meaning: if a French exchange student's name is Fleur, you don't call her Flower.
Scenario 2 is the exact opposite of scenario 1, and doesn't need much more explanation. We would adapt to whatever their communication method is (see Scenario 3), and our identity (they might not use names, or use individual identities at all) would be reflected however it would in their world. This is difficult to write about without first giving your audience an understanding of the alien culture, so that would have to come first.
Scenario 3 is the most difficult of all. Methods of communication utilized by each alien will vary vastly depending on species. Do they communicate telepathically? If so, communication is much more abstract and direct than our spoken languages. Do they have optical organs that produce pulses of light?
Create sounds at frequency ranges that can't be heard by the human ear? Use of sign language with appendages that humans don't have? The characters would likely emulate a lot forms of communication (which could really cause some fun/trouble for an inept traveler!), or some sort of basic universal language would possibly be established (for trade at the very least, like pidgin languages).
For Scenarios 2 and 3, in the story, names (and communication in general) should probably at least be transliterated (via technology perhaps?) into something that human senses can understand and their faculties can express - otherwise, how would humans in the stories be able to understand or express themselves to the other species? And double otherwise, the mechanism becomes an obstacle to the story you are trying to tell, and makes it less enjoyable (like a profusion of glyphs the reader is unfamiliar with, as you mentioned). So, that points back to the realistic (if boring) system in Scenario 1.
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> Using glyphs .... would be difficult to keep straight for a longer work and might frustrate some readers who process language verbally even when reading/writing.
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Tolkien invented his own languages to instill the races he was referring to with their own culture. Perhaps it is worth some time to analyze how he balanced the use of an invented language in a literary form and if it respects the norms you are trying to achieve. Of course though, he also had a systematic way of creating the language based on his linguistic studies, so that maybe a hurdle to jump.
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One could throw in a few numbers and some funny sounding syllables that sound official, yet these could be viewed as a more comedic approach. (And would still be the reflection of terrain human interpretation on alien culture.)
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> Example I am Lrrr, ruler of the planet Omicron Persei 8!
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Realistically
I don't think you can escape the Human interpretation of language, At least, when you first introduce, because the audience you are writing for will be human.
Perhaps the best way to right about alien culture and come up with an alien language that is both realistic, yet repeatable would be to analyse how you would explain something you understand deeply from one culture and explain it to somebody that is in another culture, of which you straddle both.
# Examples
1. Explaining to a city person what it is like to be a country person
2. Explain to an American the Chinese Concept of Face
3. Explain to a republican what it is like to be democrat
But any of those things, will loose things in translation. For example if we explain to an American the Chinese cultural concepts of Face, you might first describe it in terms the American will understand. "It's like being embarrassed." That's a simple explanation but it is missing a ton of nuances. Expanding on it, one might describe what a person who has lost face would do, or explain what another might do to save face. Now it is a little less nuance. But to truly understand it, there needs to be years of experiences to help fine tune the understanding. Which could be acquired when you say, accidentally make a friend loose face and then have to deal with the aftermath. Then you have to explore yourself and the culture to try to mend the relationship. Further adding to the nuance of the concept of face. So on and so forth.
I think it's in this way you can explain or put life to an alien culture or language. You can try to look how this has been done in other media.
How was the tree in avatar related to human concepts?
How was the history of the Zerg in Star Craft related to human concepts?
The concept of Klingons? (Warrior culture of Star Trek)
etc...
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The first thing that popped into my mind when I read this post was a scrap of song from Secret Agent Man, song written by P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers for the American broadcast of the British spy show Danger Man (aired as Secret Agent in U.S. 1964): "They've given you a number and taken away your name.."
I thought, well, that's a little cold, though it would play with something like the Borg, i.e., "I am No. 2,854,345. Resistance is futile."
Then I recalled the autistic savant Daniel Tammet, who sees numbers as shapes, colours and textures. Daniel also creates his own language (a conlang) using vocabulary and grammar from the Finnic languages. For example, kellokült, or "clock debt" to represent the concept "being late."
So, how about aliens who have this synesthesia combined with superior mental capacities such that they do indeed represent themselves as uniquely assigned numbers for the purposes of maintaining records (they can undoubtedly recall each other distinctly merely from perfect recall of all physical and mental attributes) and for polite address and communicating with other species. Their number would be pronounced as the target species word corresponding with a shared image capturing the visual and mental representation of that number. For example, say alien #254,389,400 was "seen" by his fellows as a golden pyramid shape with encircling ellipse. He might introduce himself to an earthling as "Golden Giza" (an encircling ellipse might well alliterate as a "girdle," but I thought the laughter might be excessive by this point).
With publisher support for graphics, a story about such aliens might use small avatars representing these shape-number names.
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Warning: some well-intented authors heavily abuse the use of unknown words to make the writing more "exotic". The end result can however be hard to immerse in, with constant thinking like "*What is this **kagklgor** beast the hero is jumping on again ? Is that the 6-legs horse thing ? Or the flying giant rat ?*". The remark stand for names, locations, species, etc.
Language being used by human to communicate with each other and transmit information, using meaningful words also has its advantages. Starting from a descriptive word combination, and subtly playing with it can be an option. An example is Stephen R. Donaldson using [imager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordant%27s_Need) for some magi that get their power from images in mirrors. Isn't that simple and understandable ?
For a comic example of what happens in you readers mind when abusing exotic names, [enjoy this funny strip](http://english.bouletcorp.com/2010/05/21/fantasy/).
[edit]As stated in the comment, xkcd provides a perfect illustration of the point:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RUget.png)
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Think outside the human box. Start from a conceptual point of view, if you can. That is not intended to be insulting, simply not everyone has talent, skill, or practice at thinking differently from how they usually do so.
What is important to this culture? What makes this culture unique? What do they value and desire? Some good sources for inspiration are, interestingly enough, early sci-fi and space opera writers. They would take one particular aspect, some behavior or physical difference, and make an entire culture out of it. Exaggerate some way of thinking or belief, and take it to a logical extreme. Or take some "normal" thing, and minimize it to see how it would affect daily activities and interactions.
The great thing about this method is that you yourself don't necessarily have to understand the "why" of it, just the mechanics of what they will do when, to get across the feel. Let the readers guess at the why part.
When it comes to names, again, what is significant to these aliens? What is important? On Earth, some cultures believe that the name you give a child determines their destiny, so if you give them too hard or too great a name, it will curse them and doom them to a life of unhappiness, unless they get lucky and actually fulfill the meaning of their name. As a result, most girls in that culture are named after flowers, gems, and other pretty things, while boys tend to be named after animals, numbers, or things. When I was speaking with someone from that culture, and told them the meaning of my name, they were shocked and immediately tried to figure out how to downplay the translated meaning of my name in their language into something more modest and survivable. ^^ By way of comparison, another culture translated my name and that person wound up exclaiming how auspicious it was, yet at the same time conflicting.
Another culture here on Earth has the unique practice where teenagers will gather on the hills, boys on one and girls on another, and will form groups to compose a bit of song and/or poetry about the person that one of that group likes. The target girl or boy doesn't know which in the group is the one who actually likes them which can give some courage to the young hopeful. They sing back and forth to each other so their names need to be something that works well with song and verse. It is utterly charming to listen to them sing back and forth to each other.
Once you have your concept, think of various names that said concept-culture would produce based on what they value and believe and want their children to value.
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Perhaps make up your own name convention, such as the Native American style name, but different for each species.
Random Example:
If a particular race happened to live on a planet, which had an atmosphere that, due to its unusual composition, happened to change colour on an almost daily basis, it might have become a tradition to name a child according to the colour of the sky that day, causing names (once translated) like Red, Blue, Orange (or whatever).
If you make up a different convention for each species, you could easily have unique names that are not only easy to read and remember, but differ fundamentally between species (If an alien was named Bob, he could easily be identified as not being one of the colour named aliens mentioned above.)
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## None
Because you seem stumped in writing 'campy' typical alien names here is an idea: Step outside the box, put emphasis on your characters traits and personalities to the point where you do not need to write their names.
It might make for a rather interesting writing (and reading) experience too.
I.e. Take Hagrid from Harry Potter. Because of the way the book is written there really is no choice to name him constantly, but look at any passage he's in, is their really a point in naming him? Other than it not seeming odd when everyone else is named? Any time he does something, it's either obvious it's him by the scope of the action, or you can simply describe him with a few words (Huge, Giant, etc...) and any time he talks is unique also.
Now where that character is mostly different in physical characteristics, you could also add writing patterns (Bioware love doing this for certain alien species in their games; Like the Hanar or the Elcor in Mass effect or the HK units in KoToR) ;
Obviously this depends the type of story you want to write, especially the scope (many many characters vs few)
Good Luck!
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Names may be translatable in some human and alien(?) cultures. "Beautiful Flower" or "Two (medium sized domesticated carnivores) running". The second further translates to "two dogs running" although they are not exactly dogs. The joke about "two man bucket"'s twin brother may translate Ok for these aliens
Or less friendly examples, "Second of liars and spies" and presumably "Fifth of slave breeding and sacrifices". (Read Charles Stross's latest for this source).
That aside you may as well give them names pronounceable in English. Analysis of dolphin noises suggests that they have sounds for referring to themselves. These sounds are inaccessible to unaided human ears, let alone vocal cords. If humans and aliens have any shared vocal abilities, pick names that are mutually speakable (probably using a restricted set of syllables).
In passing: until we can work out how to communicate with dolphins and where they fit on the intelligence spectrum, I hope we do not meet any real aliens. An African Grey parrot named Alex learnt English, proved human-toddler-smart and ultimately broke our hearts. AFAIK no humans have learned parrot.
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**The ocean of my very earth-like planet is covered in its entirety by vegetation, forming a kind of carpet on top of the water's surface.** This free-floating halophyte is a superorganism formed by trillions of individual plants. The squishy upper layer always stays on top of the water thanks to pneumatocysts underneath, which help it maximise its exposure to sunlight. Nutrients are absorbed through a forest of low hanging roots which reach just a couple meters under the surface. The plants reproduce not by pollination but by cloning themselves repeatedly.
In the case of ponds, floating plants are problematic and frequently wipe out local populations. They starve the plants underneath from sunlight, thus killing them and get a monopoly on the nutrients. The mat of plants would create a low oxygen environment much closer to the surface. This wouldn't spell doom for all sea life however. Life usually finds a way.
Fish with larger gills would be comfortable in these conditions. Aquatic mammals would be at an advantage as they can breath oxygen and rest on the surface of the mat. The mat itself would also be a food source for grazers, while predators would use the cover to ambush their prey. All in all, a very interesting biome.
**However, reality seems to suggest that this isn't possible. At least not at 100%. If this halophyte superorganism were to take over the sea, what various challenges would it need to overcome?**
Assume earth conditions (e.g. climate and animals) but no human presence. This plant is naturally evolved.
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**NUTRIENT DEFICIENCY:**
Many other answers highlighted the problem of nutrient deficiency. Here are some solutions.
* **Fixing Nitrogen from the Air**. Some existing plants like Clovers, can pull Nitrogen from the air.
* **Animal poop**. Birds fly over the sea-matt and periodically "deposit nutrients". Also, if there were large herds of grazing animals that wander onto the matt for part of the year they would leave behind nutrients. Obviously for this to work the animals need to periodically move between land and sea-matt.
* **Carnivorous plants** are another solution that evolved specifically to deal with nutrient deficient soils. You could put some features on the plants for trapping prey. Perhaps roots like jellyfish tentacles or copy a Venus fly trap or pitcher plant.
* **Absorbing dead land animals**. Even if the sea-matt is not actively trapping animals, if its sturdy enough to walk onto, then it's likely that some animals will wander out onto it and die one way or another. The sea-mat could be evolved to absorb nutrients from the corpses.
* **Dead Fish Float**. As they decay, dead fish float to the surface, and can be absorbed by the roots.
* **Symbiotic bacteria** Let there be a micro-organism that moves between the sea floor and the sea-matt. The bacteria moves to the sea floor to get minerals, and moves to the sea-matt roots to get sugar. As it obtains its sugar, it leaves behind some minerals.
* **Nutrient sharing**. If the plants can share nutrients with adjacent plants, then they can be absorbed by those plants near the shore, and the nutrients will slowly diffuse from plant to plant towards the center. Plants, even of different types, can be grafted together. Perhaps adjacent plants can naturally graft themselves to their neighbors if they are in contact.
* **Nutrient conservation**. When the plants die, the nutrients are absorbed by the adjacent plants. That way, even if the flow of nutrients to the sea-mat is very slow they can survive because the nutrients don't leave the matt.
* **Slower growth**. Plants don't need to grow fast. When put into a low resource environment, many plants will just stop growing until nutrients become available. In the face of nutrient deficiency, the sea-mat can just grow more slowly. As a personal example, I have on multiple occasions sprouted seeds from citrus plants on moist paper-towel in closed Ziplock bags. If I don't open the bag the seeds will from into a small plant and can stay that way for many months without issue.
* **Convection currents**. If there were hydrothermal vents under the ocean, they could bring nutrients to the surface via convection currents.
* **Dust**. It's likely that dust from the mainland will make its way onto the sea-matt either by wind, volcanic eruption, movement of animals, etc. The rate of nutrient deposition from this method is likely to be low, but combined with nutrient conservation and slower growth it might work.
Some combination of all the above is likely to provide the required nutrients.
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Thermoclines are a reason why on Earth, oceans are really not very productive, basically if water is deep enough, that is most of the oceans, only surface is heated, which makes two separate layers, and most nutrients sink to the heavier, cold water, being unreachable to surface plants (on Earth mostly phytoplankton).
But, further south and north, water is colder, and thermoclines vanish, that's why colder seas are more biologically productive, and if your world is cold, then okay.
Second thing is, why almost only phytoplankton lives in our oceans, because there isn't really too much nutrients for plants to grow huge, they have to be as economical as they could.
I hope you could do something creative, this vision is really appealing to me!
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Currents and waves.
mats of floating vegetation exist on earth but they can only exist in places far from shore or places without waves so wave action can't just dump it all on a shoreline. currents, wind, and wave action cam move material way way faster than it can grow. If it floats it will end up getting dumped on shorelines creating huge clear patches. these mats can only exist in gyres or recirculating currents.
this is what happens to floating vegetation if it gets anywhere near a shoreline. currents can move material like this at about one foot per second. so unless it can grow at feet per seconds the currents win and clear out large swaths.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/stxyE.jpg)
worse if the mats are too solid, wave action will rip them apart just like ships that are too long.
A colleague and I tried to work out how to do something similar. Our mats were based on floating grasses and trees. We ended up having to have a planet with large gyres by having shallower oceans, no ice caps and a different continental arrangement, although I can't for the life of me remember the arrangement. But that is a good follow up question for this site.
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## The Riddle of Phosphurus
We usually think of living things as being made from all the minerals and nutrients of the Earth. But in some very important ways, we really represent just *one* mineral in particular, namely [hydroxyapatite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxylapatite). There is some reason to suspect that this mineral [first converted formaldehyde gas into ribose](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28952648/), the basis of our sugars and nucleic acids. As the predominant form of apatite, is the major geological source of the [phosphorus cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus_cycle). It is the mineral found in our bones, the dentin and enamel of our teeth, and even in the plaques of calcified arteries.
It sticks there because it naturally adheres to [phospholipids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phospholipid), which we need to make the membrane of each and every one of our cells, each of which contains a phosphate on its surface. But we also need a phosphorus atom between every two nucleotides of DNA (or RNA), and three for every molecule of ATP that stores cellular energy, and two for every NADH and FADH2 that mediates as the reduced fuel of metabolism. Every molecule of sugar our cells take in is decorated with a phosphate group. In short, our sort of life has developed to be almost completely dependent on a special mineral and the element phosphorus within it. And specifically, [phosphorus levels are a key factor limiting productivity of the Sargasso Sea](https://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/cmoreserver/summercourse/2008/documents/Paytan%20&%20McLaughlin%202007%20Chem%20Rev%20copy.pdf), which is what you want to improve on.
Your life forms have somehow become liberated from the tyranny of phosphate. Perhaps they evolved another way in the first place, or received an artificial retrofit of the many thousands of genes that work via phosphate biochemistry. Perhaps they have genomes of [peptide nucleic acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide_nucleic_acid) (PNA), and use some other amphiphile at the cell membrane.
Alternatively, perhaps they are "intentionally" fertilized at the surface by some symbiotic life form, which swims back and forth to the depths and recovers phosphate from a geology with deeper reserves.
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### Challenges:
* Currents. Can easily beach plants.
* Waves. Can rip apart mats.
* Storms. Can rip apart mats faster then waves alone.
* Tides can create some harsh land ocean boundaries. Slowing down mats from forming shore-to shore stabilization.
* Lack of Nutrients, probably the biggest issue, the most stable areas away from shore are the lowest nutrient areas.
Edit:
* People. Large mats of vegetation interfere with shipping. Expect various 'solutions'.
* Disease. If these mats are mostly mono-culture, expect bacterial, fungal, viral presence that can cause rapid devastation.
### Has occurred in the past.
I recall reading a hypothesis that this happened in an enclosed ocean. Which due to scale, caused a run-away global climate change event severe enough to kill off the plants/biome in question. The enclosed ocean had ok nutrients, low waves, low wind low storms low currents.
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One vision I have is to make a lot of spiky mountains underwater, as a kind of bases for plants to develop from. These spikes would function like coral reefs, being the life hotspot, and life developing around them, main root plants attached to mountains, other plants using haustoria to attach to them.
A thing why I don't like waves arguments, is because wind is required for waves to appear, so what if all of the water was already somehow densly carpeted? The waves wouldn't appear! Storms would be just strong rain.
And also, if plants were common through water surface, thermoclines would not appear too, cuz all of the sunlight would be absorbed by the plants anyway.
Arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi makes symbiosis with plant roots, gain sugars and energy, and creating nitrogen and phosphorus out of it. In our conditions.
I bet in these conditions some other fungi could do a lot better job, I imagine very long, thin roots with fungi attached to it, just make your ocean shallow and nutricious enough, and I think it'll work
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I'm not entirely confident posting my answer as I have no scientific data, research, or expertise to offer, however, without *any* of that, while perhaps a bit vague, the biggest challenge and most dangerous and detrimental outside influence to the ocean life you described are the byproducts, industrialism, and waste produced by human beings. Hands down.
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Okay so there's a project I've been thinking about for a long time wherein humans colonise a world where the climate appears warm and benign only to discover that the local climate oscillates from something like the height of the last [Ice Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum) to something like the [Medieval Warm Period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period) on a decadal timescale (using Earth years for reference dating), that's at least 10 and not more than 99 years not swings every 10 years.
There are two ways I can see to do this, (A) use a bright star and a large, eccentric orbit, this is however very regular and predictable so option (B) is [orbital forcing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_forcing) which I'd like to explore.
My question therefore is can I just drop three or four zeros from the period of the [Milankovitch Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles) components and call it even or would that mean that the planet was too unstable in its orbit? If such a drastic increase in the "standard" variables isn't viable is there another orbital variation I could use to get the effect I'm looking for?
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**It's the Sun that fluctuates, not the planet**
Our sun has natural cycles that fluctuate its brightness and energy. The most obvious cycle is the 11-year sunspot cycle, but there are other cycles that can now be observed thanks to constant satellite monitoring. One cycle is less than 5 hours, while another cycle appears to be much longer, at least several decades and possibly longer than we've been able to observe. Our sun's variations are very slight, the 11-year cycle fluctuates by only about 0.1%. I found many articles online:
<https://www.mpg.de/11444759/variable-sunshine>
<https://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/sun-brightness.html>
A handful of astronomers have suggested that some of the fluctuations observed by the Kepler Space Telescope that were identified as exoplanets orbiting extremely close to their suns, are not exoplanets at all but a natural cycle of the star itself. One such extreme case is Kepler-78b which was observed with an 8.5 hour dimming cycle. The official theory is it has an Earth-sized planet with an 8.5 hour year. This same alternate theory suggests that [pulsars which rapidly fluctuate in milliseconds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond_pulsar) are not spinning hundreds of times per second, but simply have a cycling magnetic field. In reality, there are a few pulsars that apparently break the speed limit spinning over 1000 times per second, supposedly rotating faster than physically possible.
Your situation might involve a perfect storm where several solar cycles peak together. I don't know how your astronomers will miss it, but one possibility is the peak energy occurs only in certain spectra which has been masked by an accretion cloud. Another possibility is that a very long "century" cycle was at a low during the survey, but is now approaching its peak. Still another possibility is that humans are fallible and often choose to disregard warning signs, sometimes deliberately when profit is involved.
To directly "touch" the core question, **no**. I honestly don't see how the planet shifting orbit or wobbling around can be explained with a 10yr cycle that would be unobserved but stable longterm, or how a colony could be discovered, surveyed, and settled in less than 10 years. That time frame does not seem realistic. I would find it an objectionable plot detail. A century-long solar cycle amplifying a decade cycle can explain how your colony got established but later experiences drastic weather changes each decade.
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Don't. Please just don't.
I have no idea how short such a cycle can be, but I can tell straight away that the idea of people capable of interstellar travel and colonization of new worlds not noticing it in advance is not credible. I am pretty sure that every starship has navigation systems that can rapidly and accurately calculate all possibly relevant orbital mechanics of any object the ship might want to reach. Most cyclical patterns would be noticed straight away and automatically. An unusually rapid cycle such as you want would be obvious.
Note that you can of course make it part of the story that the system was never surveyed properly and the colonization force had no capability to fix the oversight. You could even fairly easily make a story where they were aware of it, but had to colonize anyway. Explaining why a datum that comes relevant few decades or centuries later gets forgotten is fairly trivial. And depending on your story forgotten detail might be exactly what you want. It is a fairly common solution in fiction, actually.
Alternately, you can easily explain why the orbital parameters change after colonization. A close encounter with a fairly large object that was far in interstellar space when the system was surveyed and colonized can do all kinds of things you want with the planets orbit. It can do them fast too. And there would not really be anything people could do about it unless they happen to have a Death Star™ or equivalent available.
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Between 10 and 99 Earth years is the length of 1 year on many planets. Jupiter takes 11.8 earth years. One Saturn year takes 29 earth years. Instead of the Milankovitch cycle, your planet circles its star more slowly. A winter occurs every few earth decades, followed by a summer.
It sounds like you also want a shorter warm/cold cycle that resembles Earth winters/summers. Your planet also revolves around a gas giant, completing a revolution every few months. The planet's path around the gas giant is at a 50 degree angle from the gas giant's revolution path around the star, so some star light hits the planet even when on the far side of the gas giant, but a reduced amount. During this colder period the planet is closer to the gas giant's northern hemisphere.
Then in the warm period, the planet is closer to the southern hemisphere of the gas giant, and has an unobstructed line of sight the the star.
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I think the sort of change you need might be better sourced from within the planet itself. Two large scale forces that can be arranged to flip flop the climate relatively quickly would be ideal.
If the topography of the continents was such that snow and ice could easily build up over vast areas relatively quickly it could act as a big radiator cooling the planet down.
If there were to be regular eruptions on the time frame you had in mind, in and around this vast snow covered area driven by some inner movement of the planet this could rapidly reverse the situation.
Locally volcanic heating and lava would melt some ice, but more importantly and over a much wider area, volcanic dust from these volcanos could easily cover vast areas relatively quickly. If the volcanic dust was very dark (not implausible) then the ice would melt and the albedo of the planet could be upset relatively quickly. Even if the ice did not melt a sufficient layer of dust might still change the albedo for some time. Some areas might become covered by very thin unstable ice sheets which could easily be destabilized.
In a relatively short period the radiator has gone and is replaced by an heat absorbing dark surface warming the planet up.
The warming is significant but in very high latitudes snow still starts to cover the dark ground surface. As the volcanism dies down the snow line creeps south (or north in the southern hemisphere) until we return to snow cover and another set of eruptions.
[Answer]
While there are plenty of objections, time to look at the science for this *science-based* tagged question. The difficulty is coming up with a significant orbital that is stable from a distance yet dramatically unstable from afar.
# A lone moisture farmer on Tatoo a planet orbiting two suns
Sure, there may be an iconic image we all dream up when world building about a double sunset and a young man destined for great things in a sci-fi fantasy novel, but how stable are planets orbiting binary stars? You'd be surprised.
A binary star frequently has solar eclipses - of the kind where a sun would eclipse the other sun. This is because the suns are moving, and to an extent, have a large amount of momentum. Any moving object can cause [gravity assists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist), and a binary sun would be no exception. This can wreck havoc for anything that gets **too close**. However, from far away, the combined binary star is quite stable, and our young farmer can gaze longingly into the double sunset without fear of Disne an evil empire:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1dTWZ.png)
A massive red planet in a highly elliptical earth crossing orbit, in the counter direction can disrupt this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q8OoO.png)
This is because the red planet is slowly robing momentum from the binary stars and stealing it from our inhabitable planet, thus slowing it down and causing it to drift closer in on a notable time scale. Such a feed would not be noted using current technology. If the blue and red planets rotated in the same direction, the blue planet would be pulled out of the habitable zone. Again, none of this would be detectable with current technology. We don't know which direction a binary star orbits unless they have different spectrum, which a near-twin binary star wouldn't have.
(I obtained this diagram using [this gravity simulator](http://www.testtubegames.com/gravity.html) and the program below:)
```
//Gravity fun at TestTubeGames
_settings(gravity: r^-2, n: Binary Sun);
_type0(m: 750, col: 2, pic: 0);
_type1(m: 0.01, col: 4, pic: 1);
_type2(m: 3.5, col: 5, pic: 1);
_add(type: 0, x: 0, y: 10, vx: -4.5, t: 0);
_add(type: 0, x: 0, y: -10, vx: 4.5, t: 0);
_add(type: 1, x: 125, y: 0, vy: 3, t: 0);
_add(type: 2, x: -70, y: 90, vx: 3.31, t: 0);
```
[Answer]
This might work. Your Earth-mass planet orbits a bright hot star. This means it will have a long orbit. Its orbit is flanked on either side by two gas giant mass planets and they are in similarly long orbits.
Whenever the earthlike planet is passed by either gas giant it is "pulled" into either a higher or lower orbit. This it alternates between two climactic states. Deep glaciation and a medieval hot time.
The long orbital timescales will explain its decadal rate of variation. This is virtually a short-term Milankovitch cycle.
A planet like this will qualify as habitable. Refer to Stephen H Dole's *Habitable Planets for Man* (1964; 2nd edition 1970) for the range of proposed habitability criteria. Also available [here](http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/2005/R414.pdf) and [here](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial.../RAND_CB179-1.pdf).
Starship navigation systems and planetary colonisation surveyors will readily identify the climactic characteristics of this planet. Provided it is within habitability criteria, then colonisation will be allowed. Other colony planets in your fictional universe may be similarly habitability compromised; not perfect but viable.
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You could create such a situation on a temporary basis by having a really large comet breaking up on a pass near the star. Thereafter there is a cloud of gravel that some years hits the planet and some years not. It will depend on the mutual interaction of the period of the comet and the planet. If the comet and the planet's orbits are co-planar then periodically the planet gets plastered with a few hundred megatons of small rocks moving at high speed. This has the initial effect of heating the upper atmosphere a lot, then leaving enough dust for a nuclear winter for a few years.
The comet fracture could happen either after the colony was created, or soon enough before that the preliminary reports didn't see it.
Eventually the gravel spreads through the orbit and you get hit to a smaller degree every year.
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[Question]
[
The world ends tomorrow, you can't stop it and you will die. You can, however, put information on a hard drive(s). What information has the best ratio of "days until world back to pre apocalypse state" reduction per gigabyte?
General assumptions:
* The largest amount of data that can be used is 10TB (raw, compression will probably increase this), and it is transferred immediately (internet speed is not a limitation)
* The hard drive(s) are found, intact and readable (this includes language, electricity and a windows machine) by the finder.
* Most of humanity dies, but everything else is intact (except for things that need active maintenance from humans, for obvious reasons).
* The person who finds the hard drive is part of a group of 150 survivors who all have the goal of "resetting" the world.
* The most technically competent person in the 150 survivors has started programming/used the command line a couple of times/installed linux/will be able to find and read a README or similar
"pre apocalypse state" can be measured as:
* Research is taking place (and common) that would not be out of place/receive grants/published in journals if it happened today.
* Global supply chains and infrastructure are restored (I can buy a phone that can call someone on the other side of the planet and tell me my position to the nearest 5m)
EDIT: A better phrasing/version of the question would be "How does the best knowledge change with starting population/education levels?"
[Answer]
## Everything
10TB can hold every scientific paper, technical manual, patent, textbook, and engineering schematic in existence with lots of room to spare, likely enough extra room to fit every published book. Compressed text data and technical diagrams really does not take up that much space. You might even have enough space left over for all the more popular movies and songs or a least a good showing.
The entire Library of Congress is only [208TB of uncompressed data](https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2011/07/transferring-libraries-of-congress-of-data/) and that includes a lot more than scientific and technical data. For one thing, it contains every US newspaper and magazine ever published as well as every movie and and song copyrighted in the US. This in addition to huge a collection of foreign material (the US Library of Congress is often the largest collection of material from X outside X) so it is not restricted to just US works. 10TB would cover the entire Library of Congress's print collection properly compressed. It will handle everything scientifically important with ease.
Futurama got it right
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KSUuU.png)
Searching it will be a bit of a pain in the butt, but no one said the apocalypse would be convenient.
you have more trouble getting the information than storing it or choosing what to store.
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Antiseptic child birth and farming techniques are your greatest initial focus because modern civilisation requires a certain population density, and the diversification of labour that it allows, in order to function. You need as many people as you can get and the food to keep them feed more than anything else. Basic sanitation, food hygiene, general antisepsis, and antibiotics will help you keep people alive as well. Luckily most of the resistant strains can't compete favourably outside antibiotic saturated environments like hospitals so they'll die out when civilisation collapses and basic penicillin is literally child's play to cultivate.
But 10TB of data is enough for you to give them anything you don't think should be deliberately forgotten about as plain text, and much of that with diagrams etc... as well.
There are a few shortcuts that are worth pointing out to people as well; Stirling Engines can turn mechanical energy, like the motion of a waterwheel into cold for refrigeration without gas compression. Diesel engines are significantly easier to make and maintain than their four stroke petrol brethren, things like that...
[Answer]
Almost all people die, a group of 150 people survives. They get to keep a small selection of books.
Modern civilization is as dead as the dodo. There is nothing they can do to keep it alive. Nothing.
Presuming that they have enough food and hand tools to keep them alive for the first few years, the best books they can have would be --
* A set of 19th century or early 20th century encyclopedias, such as [*Chambers's Encyclopedia*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chambers%27s_Encyclopaedia), [*Encyclopedia Britannica*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica) (1911 edition), [*La grande encyclopédie*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grande_Encyclop%C3%A9die);
* Plus some introductory manuals of mathematics (up to and including elementary calculus, say up ot the analysis of complex functions of one complex variable), physics (classical mechanics, classical electromagnetism and thermodynamics) and chemistry;
* Plus a good selection of dedicated technology books from the 18th and 19th century such as the famous French series [*Descriptions des Arts et Métiers*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptions_des_Arts_et_M%C3%A9tiers) (Description of Arts and Trades) (1761-1788) (113 volums *in-folio*, with countless detailed illustrations);
* Plus a smattering of highly specialized texts for diverse very specific purposes -- how to make stainless steel, how to make simple bacteriostatics and antibiotics such as sulfanilamide and chloramphenicol, how to make vacuum tubes (a.k.a. valves), how to make simple radio transmitters and receivers, how to make black and white photographs using Talbot's [calotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calotype) process and other such individual pieces of early technology.
This will enable the recreation of late 19th or early 20th civilization in a relatively short time, maybe even less than a millennium.
**Notes**
* You will also need a laser printer and plenty of toner and paper. Computers won't last for the time needed to recreate civilization. In fact, I strongly suggest skipping the hard disk and providing a large number of hard copies of the works from the very beginning.
* For the first ten generations or so go soft on recreating modern civilization and concentrate on Genesis 1:22 *"crescite et multiplicamini"*, be fruitful and multiply. Hopefully most of the members of the survivor group are women of child-bearing age who know how to grow food without modern technology.
* If they can, I would strongly recommend that they keep a judicious selection of history books, novels and poetry.
[Answer]
**tl;dr:** The front page of the information on that disk is concerned with preserving the infrastructure to read and preserve the information itself for as long as possible.
Computers and storage media — including, unfortunately, unwritten ones — have a very limited shelf life and will be irreplaceable without a working industrial infrastructure. There is no way that any gang of 150 will operate a wafer, hard disk or DVD factory. One of the first tasks for the survivors would be to obtain computers and electronics from warehouses, stores and factories and create a secure, cool, dry stash of them, with the goal to extend their shelf life to the achievable limit. A list of the essential parts should be on the front page of the electronic information.
The next task for the survivors will be to **identify and preserve** the essential parts of the stored information for future generations, when the stored electronics and storage media have ceased to function. Their best bet will be to print it. High quality paper lasts much longer than electronics (centuries, or even millennia instead of decades) under the right conditions.
Both tasks are not trivial. *Identification* will be easier if the information is accessible via indexes and proper organization of subjects, preferably already selected by importance for the survivors. Simply dumping the Library of Congress onto the disk is counter-productive.
*Preservation* is doable if the survivors have access to electricity generation, paper, toner, and and commercial grade printers including spare parts for a couple of months or better, years. The first challenge is power generation. Solar power is a good option. There is probably enough gasoline around to fuel generators for generations. But will the generators and inverters survive? All modern engines are electronically controlled; no modern car or generator will run once their chips fail (or, as we can see in the summer of 2021, if they cannot be obtained). Even failing capacitors, typically among the most volatile components, can present insurmountable challenges if there are no spares. How would you produce any without an industrial infrastructure?
Preservation by printing is to a degree depending on the identification of the essential information because large amounts of printed material are hard to produce, organize, store and use.
The bottom line is that the information must stay accessible. Ensuring that is the second most important task, right after the immediate survival. While the information is accessible in electronic form, which is likely at least for a couple of years, retrieving the bits that are needed for actual survival (medical knowledge, farming, various crafts) is relatively easy. For the mid- and long term industrial civilization reboot it is essential to long-time preserve the bits that are not immediately needed.
[Answer]
Maybe you might read [A Canticle for Liebowitz](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/science-fiction-classic-still-smolders), by Walter M. Miller Jr. This looks at the aftermath, specifically a group of monks who are trying to find, preserve, and copy books from from before an apocalypse. One problem is that they don't understand much of what that are copying: one monk devotes years to making a beautifully illuminated copy of a blueprint, which is actually a circuit diagram.
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This question goes in the direction of the anime Dr. Stone which I highly recommend watching if you wanna see a setting like this.
Well, others stated that farming technology would be super important, I'm not so sure about that because even if the whole knowledge about farming is lost, it is not super hard to find out how crops grow on a field.
The anime has 3 major breakthroughs the protagonists need to overcome:
1. Getting medicine up -> they need advanced chemicals, mainly acid like sulfure acid. Making medicine from chemicals is worth 1000 gold bars in post-apocalyptic worlds. Ofc you'd have to append the knowledge of producing glass and how to disinfect tools.
2. Electricity -> While humans could remember taming the power of gods, they would probably not know how this is done from a physical perspective - after all, not everybody knows advanced physics. So a simple generator (which is at the same time a motor btw) could provide heating elements and light - and maybe they could plug some old technology onto it.
3. This is debatable, but in the series there exist another human tribe at tech level spear & bow, so they try getting black powder production up and running to defend and conquer them. You may not like it, but warfare is an essential part in human nature. Also black powder opens up more advanced technical applications, you could f.e. explain how a basic otto-engine works, the rest is up to them.
] |
[Question]
[
For example,
See the following evolutionary graph:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1RWIB.jpg)
$A$ is an original species.
$B$ and $C$ evolved from $A$ but reproductive isolation.
$D$ and $D'$ are almost the same, so they are not reproductive isolation.
My question is that is this phenomenon to be possible?
If it is possible, is there any example of such species in nature?
Thanks.
[Answer]
The are many [allopolyploid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyploidy#Allopolyploidy) plant species, that is, [polyploid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyploidy) species with chromosomes derived from two or more diverged taxa. For example, [common wheat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_wheat), *Triticum aestivum*, is an allohexaploid carrying chromosomes from two separate ancestor species, [einkorn wheat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triticum_urartu) *Triticum urartu*, and a [goatgrass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegilops), [*Aegilops speltoides*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegilops_speltoides). (Note than two ancestor species are not even in the same genus.) In general, the [taxonomy of wheat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_of_wheat) is an unsettled mess, with three different ancestral species (*Triticum urartu*, *Aegilops speltoides* and [*Aegilops tauschii*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegilops_tauschii), multiple genome duplication and hybridization events, and disagreement between traditional morphological taxonomy and molecular taxonomy. (Note how the table in the [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taxonomy_of_wheat&oldid=971901520) needs to have separate columns for species recognized by traditionalist morphology-based phylogeny, and species recognized by ultra-modern molecular phylogeny.)
In the genus [*Brassica*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica) of [cruciferous vegetables](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruciferous_vegetables) we find a well-known relationship between six species, three ancestral diploid species, and three derived allotetraploid species. Note that all six species are important crops:
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Triangle_of_U_Simple1.PNG)
The so-called [*triangle of U*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_U) showing the relationship between three ancestral and three allotetraploid species in the genus *Brassica*. [*Brassica nigra*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_nigra) is the black mustard; [*Brassica oleracea*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea) is cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and so on; [*Brassica rapa*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_rapa) is turnips; [*Brassica juncea*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mustard) is the Indian mustard; [*Brassica napus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_napus) is rapeseed and rutabaga or Swedish turnips; and [*Brassica carinata*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_carinata) is the Ethiopian mustard. As for [U himself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woo_Jang-choon), he was a Korean botanist, Woo Jang-choon, who, during most of his life, lived under the rule of Imperial Japan and used the Japanified name Nagaharu U. Diagram by [Adenosine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Adenosine), [Nashville Monkey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nashville_Monkey) *et al.*, available on Wikimedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
In animals, examples of species carrying genes originating in more than one ancestral species are rarer but they do exist.
One of the best studied cases is the genus [*Panthera*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera) of big cats, where four out of five extant species (the tiger, the leopard, the lion and the jaguar) have been found to [carry genes originating in other species](https://www.quantamagazine.org/interspecies-hybrids-play-a-vital-role-in-evolution-20170824/) of the genus; for a nice diagram see Jordana Cepelewicz, "[Interspecies Hybrids Play a Vital Role in Evolution](https://www.quantamagazine.org/interspecies-hybrids-play-a-vital-role-in-evolution-20170824/)", in [*Quanta Magazine*](https://www.quantamagazine.org/), 24 August 2017.
Henrique V. Figueiró, Gang Li, Fernanda J. Trindade, *et al.* writing in [*Science Advances*](https://advances.sciencemag.org), have the following to say in their article "[Genome-wide signatures of complex introgression and adaptive evolution in the big cats](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700299)" (*Science Advances*, 19 Jul 2017, Vol. 3, no. 7, e1700299, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1700299):
>
> *The great cats of the genus Panthera comprise a recent radiation whose evolutionary history is poorly understood.* [...] *We observed pervasive genealogical discordance across Panthera genomes, caused by both incomplete lineage sorting and complex patterns of historical interspecific hybridization. We found* [in jaguars] *at least two genes (DOCK3 and COL4A5, both related to optic nerve development) bearing significant signatures of interspecies introgression and within-species positive selection. These findings indicate that post-speciation admixture has contributed genetic material that facilitated the adaptive evolution of big cat lineages.*
>
>
>
>
> *The genus* Panthera *is a remarkable group to investigate these issues because it comprises five big cat species that arose from a recent and rapid diversification process. Understanding the history of their unique features [...] depends on resolving the underlying phylogeny of the* Panthera *clade, a task that has been notoriously difficult to accomplish. Recent analyses have indicated that genealogical discordance caused by both [incomplete lineage sorting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_lineage_sorting) (ILS) and post-speciation [admixture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_admixture) has contributed to produce such a complex system.*
>
>
>
>
> *The lion lineage exhibited the most widespread signatures of ancient admixture, likely due to its broad historical range throughout much of the Holarctic region, overlapping with several congeneric species. These results considerably expand the recent evidence for hybridization between the snow leopard and the lion + leopard ancestor [...] and reveal a much more complex history of post-speciation admixture in this group than was previously appreciated.*
>
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[Answer]
Yes, as long as the genetic distance between B and C isn't too large. The result is a hybrid species, or a multi-species hybrid complex[\*].
Fertile hybrids that can generate a new species are not common among mammals, but hybridization is reasonably common in fish and amphibians, and happens *all the time* in plants.
[\*] For example, there is a weird group of [Australian carp](https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/42230/73224_1.pdf) which form a hybrid species complex between an all-male line and an all-female line which each reproduce semi-clonally, requiring sex with a host species to reproduce but displacing the host chromosomes; a disexual population which serves as the host for the aforementioned sexual parasitism; and hybrids of the three.
[Answer]
*Homo sapiens* is an example of such a species. People (with non-African ancestry) have genes from Neanderthals and Denisovans. There is some debate about whether those are separate species or sub-species of *Homo sapiens*, but they were almost certainly reproductively isolated from our main line of descent, apart from the cross-breeding events that got us their genes.
[Answer]
***Parallel evolution:***
As opposed to [convergent evolution](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3h8xui/how_can_you_tell_convergent_and_parallel/), involving similar features coming from very diverse species(like compound eyes in octopi and humans), [parallel evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_evolution) is similar traits arising independently from similar but distinct species. Species A may have lived in the plains, and B moved to the mountains and became nimble at climbing rocks. C moved to the coast, and became good swimmers. Once B and C are sufficiently different/incompatible as to be different species, they are separate. This is [divergent evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_evolution). Now let's suppose a disease kills off A. B and C move to fill the niche left on the plains, and each evolves similar traits to survive the plains. Only now the two species may be incompatible with each other due to other reasons (chromosomal rearrangements, mismatched mating seasons, whatever). The resulting two species, D and D', might look identical but be in competition with each other for resources (namely the plains).
[Answer]
If B and C remained genetically compatible but simply didn’t reproduce, such as if they were geographically separated, then they would be two species.
If D and D’ later met and *did* successfully reproduce, then they have merged back into a single species.
However, if both sides evolved enough for D and D’ to be considered separate species from B and C, most likely due to different selection pressures on each side of the divide, then it seems unlikely that they would remain genetically compatible or even *try* to reproduce when they met.
I’m not aware of any examples, but it’s theoretically possible if the separation wasn’t very long. Most likely, we would retroactively declare B, C and D/D’ to have been subspecies of A all along. This may be, for example, what happened with Neanderthals and Cro Magnons merging.
[Answer]
[Lichen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen#Taxonomy_and_classification) is an example of a hybrid organism, made from algae and fungi. It has many distinct features, breads as a single organism and can grow where neither of its components could.
Other evolutionary examples are the origin of chloroplasts, the origin of mitochondria and [the origin of nucleus](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-69944-8_3).
The DNA does not need to fuse immediately together, while in case of chloroplast and mitochondria many genes were finally relocated into nucleus, with only tiny genomes remaining inside the former symbionts.
] |
[Question]
[
On Earth, the mostly used calendar is the Gregorian calendar. This calendar has many issues though, just to list some:
* It is not perennial. Each year starts on a different day of the week and calendars expire every year.
* It is difficult to determine the weekday of any given day of the year or month.
* Months are not equal in length, nor regularly distributed across the year.
* The year's four quarters (of three full months each) are not equal (being of 90/91, 91, 92 and 92 days respectively). Business quarters that are equal would make accounting easier.
* Its epoch (origin) is religious. The same applies to month and weekday names in many languages.
* Year zero doesn't exist
* Each month has no connection with the lunar phases.
* Solstices and equinoxes do not coincide with either the beginning of the Gregorian months, or the midpoint of the months.
* Each month has a different number of work days and weekend days making sales comparisons between months difficult.
* and so on...
If you were to design a sensible calendar for Mars to be used by Martians from scratch, how would it look like? When would a year start? When would the year zero be? Would you still use weeks and months or something completely different?
[Answer]
Assuming there are (or were) native Martians, what makes you think their calendar would be any more rational than ours? They too, would have whatever religious/historical/accidental quirks that their cultural development left, which would complicate it just as much as any human calendar.
That said, if you're asking about designing a rational calendar from scratch, you can't. Celestial mechanics don't line up in any periodic ways, so you're going to have to just choose some of your goals and abandon others.
For example, the "year" on Mars lasts 668.5991 "sols" (where a sol is the Martian equivalent to a day). No possible calendar that's divided into whole units of sols can possibly account for that, which means you're left with a floating 6/10 of a day. In other words, in three out of every five years, you'll need to insert a sol, or your calendar will drift. *Drifting is not automatically a bad thing!* The Islamic calendar is entirely lunar based, doesn't account for drift at all, and months (with the associated holidays) slowly cycle around the year. But this *does* preclude tying the year to any form of season.
Separately, a Martian calendar probably wouldn't have any concept of months. Our concept is originally based on the moon's cycle (although under the Gregorian calendar it doesn't match up at all), but the moons on Mars move way too fast to have inspired that connection. Instead, they'd probably be used to track portions of the day ("I'll meet you in three passes of Phobos...") Likewise, the seven-day week is a totally religious concept which has no astronomical analogy, so while there might be some equivalent, it'd be totally culture-based. (The traditional Chinese calendar [didn't have a week grouping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calendar#Day.2C_Hours.2C_and_Week), and the French Revolutionary Calendar had [10 day weeks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Ten_days_of_the_week).)
So feel free to make up any odd rules and/or adjustments you want - the universe isn't going to provide a "sensible calendar" ready for use.
[Answer]
The Earth calendar was inspired by the need to track seasons and the harvest; one speculation I read once is that a Martian calendar would be inspired by Earth-Mars transfer windows, because supply ships from Earth would arrive in a pretty regular pattern of about one group every 760 (Martian) days.
So perhaps the Martian calendar would ignore astronomy entirely and be based on nineteen months of 40 days each.
[Answer]
You could start by reading [*Timekeeping on Mars*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars) and [*Darian calendar*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar) on Wikipedia.
---
The Martian year has a length of 668.5991 sols (martian days). So you start with the same leap years issue that is found in Earth's Gregorian calendar. Also, Mars moons (Phobos and Deimos) are unusable to determine months or even weeks, as they orbit the planet faster than once a sol. So seasons are by nature uneven on Mars. The start of the year should most probably be Ls=0
[Answer]
**Timekeeping based on Mission Elapsed Time**
Most space missions do their timekeeping based on [mission elapsed time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Elapsed_Time), which starts with the liftoff of the rocket.
A mars colonization project would be such a space mission. So it would be sensible to assume that the MET timekeeping is continued from launch to transfer to landing to colony building and so on, so the Mars timekeeping might never stop to use the launch of the first rocket of the first mars colony as the reference point.
**Timekeeping based on Mars landing**
However, the Mars rover missions Sojourner, Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity planned their missions on Mars according to Mars days ("Sol"s) elapsed since their landings. Using Mars days as the basic unit of the calendar would be more useful than sticking to earth-days, as it matches the day- and night cycle. The landing of the first Mars colonists would also make a good reference point for the beginning of the calendar, as it marks the beginning of human civilization on Mars.
[Answer]
I would have 6 day weeks, 36 day months, and 216 days years. Why should my calendar be tied to the orbit of the planet? I would base everything off of base 6 since it's divisible by 2 and 3, which are the most common ways that something needs to be divided. The planet would orbit approximately once every three years, but would be off by slightly more than 20 days.
Living on mars, I wouldn't be planning life around the annual cycle of seasons, since I live indoors and the planet is far too cold to have any naturally growing plants. My colonists would mostly live based on hydroponics in lighted areas, so I could even vary the 'daylight' in accordance with some artificial 'seasons' if that was healthy for them.
If my colonists wanted to track approximately where in the martian seasonal cycle they were, each year could be described with where it fell in the season. 'Year 53 is a spring/summer year', for example, would describe that the length of the days would grow longer throughout the year, coming to a maximum in the summer.
[Answer]
So this is something I came up with in chat a while back and mostly just want to show off:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EBZeL.jpg)
The months are named for the children of Mars. The sols (Martian days) of the week are names of Mars in different languages.
A week is 6 sols long. Because of the 30 sol months and six sol weeks, the first of the month is always Simudsol and the 30th is always Nirgalsol, which is nice because when someone says that you're appointment is on the 15th, you know automatically what sol of the week that is without having to ask.
The one oddity is the month of Ares, which is 8 sols long, doesn't use names for the sols, and is the equivelant of Christmas and Thanksgiving combined with New Years, with a bit of "yay we aren't on Earth any more" 4th of July thrown in. Basically an 8 sol party.
I'd try to time landfall so that it's on a solstice or equinox, just to start the year off right.
[Answer]
As a kid, (before even calculators), I drew up calendars for every planet, (back when we still had 9). I would initially base months on the orbit of the largest plausible satellite. I recall when I got to Mars and found both moons orbited the planet in about a day, so there would be no "months". I had a fallback where the local culture would develop a calendar divided up by the position of constellations, (like the zodiac for those in planes similar to the Earth), maybe even based which ones appeared relative to sunrise and sunset. I think I eventually came to the conclusion that a zodiac-based calendar could be used on every planet to indicate its angle relative to the sun. Division of constellations could be arbitrary, but 12 is suitable for integer division.
[Answer]
I have a suggestion of the timekeeping on Mars:
## 0. TL;DR
Divide the year into 23 months of 29 sols each (with a few exceptions). One benefit is that 12 months on Mars will be almost the same as 12 months on Earth.
## 1. Background:
**Earth**
One day on Earth is 24 hours = 86,400 seconds.
One year on Earth is 12 month. The months length differs between 28 and 31 days.
One Julian year is 365.25 days.
**Mars**
One day on mars is 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds = 88,775 seconds.
(Give it or take some parts of a second).
One Martian year is around 687 Earth days = 668.5991 Martian days.
## 2. Proposal for a Martian chronology
**2.1 Clock**
We keep the earth seconds as a base measurement for time. This has a
lot of advantages, especially then many SI units and most technique that
handling time in some way use seconds.
**2.1.1 The day**
The Martian day is 88.775 seconds, witch is divisible with 25.
Therefore it is wise to dividing it in 25 Martian hours that is
3,551 seconds long.
The Martian hours can be divided by 67 × 53 (67 minutes by 53 seconds,
or 53 minutes by 67 seconds)
Leap seconds are frequently needed in Mars with a timekeeping in Mars, hence 67 minutes of 53 seconds are a better choice
**2.2 Calendar**
**2.2.1 The year**
The Martians will be dependent on Earth for a very long time. Therefore it is wise to keep units to be close to the one on Earth.
The length of the year is very close to 668.6 Martian days, which means that 60% of all years needs to be leap year. My suggestion is that years 0, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 9 of every decade have to have 669 days, and the rest of years to have 668 days.
**2.2.2 The months**
**2.2.2.3 The length of months**
The Martian year should be divided in 23 Martian months with most Martian month to be 29 Martian days long. Let's take a look of the months sorted by lengths by seconds:
```
28 Earth days : 2,419,200 seconds
29 Earth days : 2,505,600 seconds
29 Martian days: 25,74,475 seconds
30 Earth days : 2,592,000 seconds
30 Martian days: 2,663,250 seconds
31 Earth days: : 2,678,400 seconds
```
Almost all months should be 29 Martian days long. Only month 11 should be 30 days long.
The last month on the year has the leap day.
```
Month 1: 29 Martian days
Month 2: 29 Martian days
Month 3: 29 Martian days
Month 4: 29 Martian days
Month 5: 29 Martian days
Month 6: 29 Martian days
Month 7: 29 Martian days
Month 8: 29 Martian days
Month 9: 29 Martian days
Month 10: 29 Martian days
Month 11: 29 or 30 Martian days
Month 12: 29 Martian days
Month 13: 29 Martian days
Month 14: 29 Martian days
Month 15: 29 Martian days
Month 16: 29 Martian days
Month 17: 29 Martian days
Month 18: 29 Martian days
Month 19: 29 Martian days
Month 20: 29 Martian days
Month 21: 29 Martian days
Month 22: 29 Martian days
Month 23: 30 Martian days ** 30 Days on the last month on the year.
```
This calendar has several benefits. The best argument is that the length
of 12 Martian months is quite close to 12 months on Earth, which will make it easier to do rough calculations and cross referring calendars:
1 earth year, no leap year : 31,536,000 seconds
1 Julian year (365,25 days): 31,557,600 seconds
1 earth year, leap year : 31,622,400 seconds
12 Martian months, long : 30,982,475 seconds
12 Martian months, short : 30,893,700 seconds
The difference between 12 Martian months and 1 Julian year is ~2%
(around 1 Earth week).
The Earth Calendar (Western calendar) has a lot of bigger differences built in. The earth months is usually a bit longer, but not always:
February to April is 89 Earth Days = 7,689,600 seconds.
Three Martian Months i usually 7,723,425 seconds.
**2.2.2.4 The months names**
The original Julian calender on Earth had Mars as it's first month. Therefore has the months "September", "October" "November" and "December" the meaning in Latin 7, 8, 9 and 10. Unfortunately this changed. so the start of the year became January. That made the months quite a bit
unlogically.
With starting a new Martian calendar, we have a unique chance to repair that mistake. Therefore I suggest the Martian year to start with Mars, which also is the name of the planet!
After the Martian month the rest of the Earth months names follow, and then one can use different celestial bodies or the Latin name of the numbers:
```
Earth name Latin number Celestial Proposal
Month 1: 29 Martian days Mars Unuber Mars Mars
Month 2: 29 Martian days April Duober April
Month 3: 29 Martian days May Triaber May
Month 4: 29 Martian days June Kvartober June
Month 5: 29 Martian days July Kvinkober July
Month 6: 29 Martian days August Sexber August
Month 7: 29 Martian days September September September
Month 8: 29 Martian days October October October
Month 9: 29 Martian days November November November
Month 10: 29 Martian days December December December
Month 11: 29 Martian days January January
Month 12: 29 or 30 Martian days February February
Month 13: 29 Martian days Triadecimber Jupiter Jupiter
Month 14: 29 Martian days Qvartdecimber Saturn Saturn
Month 15: 29 Martian days Qvincdecimber Uranus Uranus
Month 16: 29 Martian days Sexdecimber Neptune Neptune
Month 17: 29 Martian days Septemdecimber Pluto Pluto
Month 18: 29 Martian days Octodecimber Sol Sol
Month 19: 29 Martian days Novemdecimber Mercury Mercury
Month 20: 29 Martian days Vigintiber Venus Venus
Month 21: 29 Martian days Unvigintiber Terra Terra
Month 22: 29 Martian days Duovigintiber Phobos Phobos
Month 23: 30 Martian days Tresvigintiber Deimos Deimos
```
**2.3 The weeks**
The weeks can be the same as on Earth:
```
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
```
Possibly, if you want to make the calendar simple, you can have double or triple Sundays in the end of the month to make every month begin with a Monday.
**2.4 Then should the new year be?**
Most ancient earth calendars have there new years in the spring equinox and that is also a good idea for the Mars calendar. The first day *after* the equinox should be the first day on the year. The hemisphere the first settled landing is on decides what hemispheres spring equinox should be calculated from.
**2.5 Which year should be year 0?**
It would be properly to start counting the years after the first
permanent (or at least planned to be permanent) settler set his foot
on the surface of Mars. That should be the year 0. Unlike the Earth calendar—the Western calendar does not have any year 0 in the calendar—
the Martian should have a year 0 in its calendar. It makes it more easy to calculate years before the setting of mars. It will also have the consequence that some day in the year 50, it will be 50 years after the settling, and not 49 years.
**2.5. How about the clock? When should be midnight be?**
The midnight 00:00:00 should be like on the Earth, when the Sun has its lowest position on the night. Because of Mars will have 25 hours per day, the Sun will have its highest position at 12:33:27.
[Answer]
Since we can presume that Mars will be part of a larger solar economy and political system (settled by humans), then the calendar needs to be aligned to that of everyone else in the Solar System. This also makes things like banking, internet connections and space navigation easier, since everyone is running off the same conventions.
There is an already existing system, called [POSIX](https://www.epochconverter.com) time, based on the idea of counting seconds from the instantiation of UNIX. Second 0 is Jan 01 1970, which by odd historical coincidence is very close to Neil Armstrong Day (20 July, 1969). IF everyone is on POSTIX time, then historical events, timestamps and everything else can be recorded with great accuracy and will be the same for everyone using that calendar.
We all know where we were on **1315730760**
[Answer]
**They could combine cycles, just like on earth**
On earth, 19 years measured by the sun almost exactly equals 235 months measured by the moon. This is known as the [Metonic cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonic_cycle) and was the basis for both the hebrew and babylonian calendar, as well as a "runic calendar" invented in Scandinavia in the middle ages. An attractive property of the calendar is that it can be used to predict eclipses. It's also the basis for predicting the date of Easter.
We could imagine that the martians devise a similar calendar, based on the sun and its two moons. We know the following:
```
Mars orbital period: 686.971 * 24 hours
Phobos orbital period: 7 hours, 39.2 minutes
Deimos orbital period: 30.312 hours
```
It turns out that [5 martian orbits equals exactly 10 771 orbits of phobos](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5*(686.971%20days)%2F(7%20hours%20%2B%2039.2%20minutes)) while two martian orbits equals exactly 1088 orbits of Deimos. Therefore:
```
The full system of 3 orbits completes one cycle in 10 martian years.
```
**Usage:** Really great for predicting the position of Phobos and Deimos with respect to the stars and the sun. Several eclipses could be predicted.
But note how this does not take into account the *rotation* of mars. You'll know the position of the sun with respect to the moons, but not if the sun is above the horizon. We don't know if the martians cared much about cycles of light and darkness, but here too we can make metonic cycles.
```
The martian day is 24 hours 37 minutes and 22 seconds long
```
We then have:
```
474 martian days equals exactly 1525 orbits of Phobos
309 martian days equals exactly 251 orbits of Deimos
```
It would be fun to have two competing martian calendars based on Phobos and Deimos respectively, but you can also combine them, to unite the warring tribes:
```
The cycle of martian days and moon orbits completes in 16274 martian days
```
**Usage:** The martians could use this calendar to predict repeating patterns of how the moons rises and sets in the sky.
] |
[Question]
[
So, the lead up to the story is that a skinwalker drags injured people into the deep forest and nails them to trees before summoning a demon into each of them, leaving them there as parasites who followed the Christians, until needed. Around the same time, a fugitive from the law takes refuge in the town that is having the abductions.
For this story to work, it has to be mostly isolated, but we're in the 60s *man*. The world and country, think U.S., is more and more connected. It's harder to hide anything supernatural. In Lovecraft's works, there was even the raid on Innsmouth in the 20s, one of the classic inspirations for the story.
**How do I keep this area hidden away and isolated?**
Note: It can't and shouldn't be completely isolated. The fugitive got there via road, and part of the point is humans are encroaching on the skinwalker's lands. But, it is mostly rural and local both in culture and economy. It can 'lag behind a bit' but should be consistent with the times.
[Answer]
**Real life example: Littlejohn Island, Maine**
This is a 118 person town on an island that has a small road to it through the water. It has so little information about it that all the Wikipedia information is census data. The only thing that shows up in a google search is the nature preserve, which could be closed. There is a nature preserve on the island with a small forest, depending on how big you want the forest. To even get to the island you have to travel by sea or through Cousins island.
**Why does that work?**
The fact of the matter is that there are so many rural towns that even in the 60's most of them are below most people's notice. Many of the towns I looked at to get this answer didn't even have census data until 2010. Just make the town small and not on any main roads and that will be enough.
[Answer]
I suppose [closed city](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city) could be solution.
* Most people work on secret plant and don't leave the city
* There are restrictions to even visit the city. You could add checkpoints around city 10-20km away from CIA and/or NSA
* Government hides any news related to the city.
* Communication with citizens is also restricted, for example nobody have direct phone number.
* In addition at 1960s you could add some anti-communism paranoia
This city could be situated near ICBM site or secret military base or alternative space agency.
[Answer]
**The town is an ancient enclave of an ethnic minority.**
It was settled by long ago immigrants / refugees who never left. The immigrants are insular, still speaking their own language and with their own customs. There exist towns like this to this day. Rather than use a real town (of, for example, Hutterites or Irish Travellers or Geechees or Native Americans) make one up of people who suit your purposes.
A cool possibility about this is that presumably your story is told from the point of view of your fugitives. The people in this town will be wary of the fugitive especially if they know there is something in the woods preying on their people.
The townsfolk have reasons for staying among their own kind. They are not defenseless.
[Answer]
Have a single road into and out of the town. It might be isolated part of the year by heavy snow (in the north), heavy rains (east coast), fog (west coast), flooding (mid south), hard terrain (Appalachia or Rockies), or distance (east Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada)
[Answer]
What about Appalachia? There were hundreds of small isolated communities that only started seeing regular contact with the outside world in the 60's and 70's. Some of them were relatively substantial. Look up a movie called "The Hollow." Its about a community called Allentown that was secluded geographically, but then also the community members were reclusive and stayed away from the outside world because of their economic positions and the general culture of the town.
Another example would be the blue Fugates of Kentucky, who interbred from a very small group for a couple hundred years, causing many of them to have a condition called hereditary methemiglobinemia. This condition makes your skin blue, so not only did they isolate themselves, but they were generally ostracised from local society when contact with the outside world was more realistic.
[Answer]
The town is is a very rural place (i.e. deep in the mountains in western Wyoming). There is one county road that is full of potholes. Very few people live there. Let's say ~250. The buildings would be blanketed by thick forestry. The people there are mostly hunters and fishermen, and sell it at the local market. This town would be pretty much isolated from the rest of the world.
[Answer]
Maybe a town in the Rocky Mountains, at the base of a mountain somewhere in the middle, maybe, and there's no road. Also, the residents hunt in the thick forest that surrounds the city and fish in a small stream that teems with fish. The population would be, perhaps, 100 people, 30 female adults, 30 male adults, 14 female seniors, 14 male seniors, and 12 kids. The money would be wooden coins. The town would be very isolated from the rest of the world, and basically nobody would see there, except for those who are brave enough to hike through the Rockies and cross the forest that is full of wild beasts, and the airplanes back then wouldn't be powerful enough to cross the Rockies. So yeah, the town would be very isolated from the rest of the world.
] |
[Question]
[
>
> The direction of the force will always be perpendicular to velocity and pointing to the opposite side of the rotation direction. In plain terms, any object traveling in the rotation plane: up (toward the axis), down (from the axis), Westward (spinward) or Eastward (counter-spinward) will seem to be caught in unfelt tornado winds, one that its axis parallel to the ship or station rotation axis but reversed in direction. For upward movement the body will drift spinward, for downward movement a drift counter-spinward, for spinward it be downward and for counter-spinward it be upward. - [Atomic Rockets](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmintro.php)
> [](https://i1.wp.com/oikofuge.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/roundabout3-1.jpg?resize=768%2C572&ssl=1)
>
>
> The Coriolis force is proportional to the rotation rate... The Coriolis force acts in a direction perpendicular to the rotation axis and to the velocity of the body in the rotating frame and is proportional to the object's speed in the rotating frame (more precisely, to the component of its velocity that is perpendicular to the axis of rotation). - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force)
>
>
>
The Coriolis effect is pretty bad for classical firearms on reasonably sized spin-gravity space-stations (20m to 50 km (maximum for steel-based construction) with rotation rates between 0.1 and 6 rpm([go to SpinCalc for details](https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/)). You shoot your handgun at someone and if they are:
* **Spinward** the bullet will experience massive bullet drop and slam into the ground
* **Anti-spinward** the bullet will curve up and fly in a circle around the habitat until it hits something or someone or is slowed down by air resistance
* **Up or down** the bullet will fly spinward or anti-spinward respectively
* **Parallel to the axis of spin** fly just as it should on Earth
* **A combination of the other options** go wherever the combined vectors take it
From you the bullet will go anywhere, but where you intended it to go.
While I know that the precise details will depend on the parameters of the station in question, **does this make firearms almost useless for firefights on stations?**
I thought about a few solutions which might help, but none of them seem to be amazing.
* Use training (effort and requires adaption to every new habitat)
* Use a computer and augmented reality so people know where their bullets will go (woundable to electronic warfare)
* Use smart bullets (smart bullets might not be maneuverable enough and there comes the point where you are effectively using a gyrojet and not a slugthrower anymore)
* **Use other weapons like gyrojets, flamethrowers, heat-rays, blazers, ray-beams, particle weapons, e.c.t (those are only slightly inferior to slugthrowers in most aspects in my setting)(This is not an undesired outcome, I just want to make sure that it is the most plausible solution and that slugthrowers really can't be fixed easily.)**
[Answer]
TL;DR: deflection due to coriolis force depends strongly on the angular velocity of the station. In slow rotating stations (eg. very large ones) coriolis effects on short range engagements will be negligible, but can be significant at longer ranges (eg. 100s of metres). In very fast rotating stations (eg. very small ones) the coriolis effects will be so big that you really shouldn't be shooting projectiles at all.
High velocity rounds will partially offset coriolis effects, the faster the better. A combination of training and specialist equipment is probably the way to go.
Neither the mass of the projectile nor the radius of the station affect the strength of the coriolis force, but they do affect the strength of the centrifugal force. I won't consider this here, but you should care about it.
---
**Edit**: sudden obvious realisation... the equivalent of "the high ground" in a rotating habitat is the ground spinwards of you. If you're shooting spinwards, coriolis forces will reduce your range as your bullets appear to be dragged downwards. The people you're shooting at on the other hand, will find their range *increased*, and may be able to "shoot round corners" (or at least, shoot "up" under an obscuring ceiling). Defensible areas in a rotating habitat will therefore be more strongly fortified to the spinward side. People trained to fight in a rotating habitat will preferentially advance in the antispin direction. Untrained people may not realise this, and problems will ensue (including blowiong themselves up with grenades because they couldn't throw as far as they thought).
**Edit 2**: the coriolis force doesn't just affect projectiles, but *any* moving object. This includes your arms, legs and head. Even if you do have lasers which will always shoot in a perfectly straight line, your ability to aim or track a target will be limited by your familiarity with and acclimatisation to the environment and your training. Even apparently simple operations like reloading a weapon could become challenging in a high-RPM environment, and using a laser will not prevent this. Have a read of [Artificial gravity station station phsiological effects and design criteria](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19710014978.pdf), a NASA report from the early 70s.
---
Disclaimer: I Am Not A Mathmologist nor a Physician, so things like mechanics and vectors are a bit of a foreign language to me. Naturally, this answer requires both. E&OE.
I'm assuming you're in a rotating habitat with artificial gravity provided by centrifugal force. I'll assume the specific example of an O'Neill cylinder, so I'll use terms like "endcap", but this can be translated to any other rotating habitat, I believe.
I'm not going to consider centrifugal force here, as your question is explicitly about the coriolis force, but in a rotating habitat with substantial vertical distance changes (eg. walking up steps on the endcaps) the effects of centrifugal force will also do odd things to projectile trajectories. Don't forget this! I'm also not recomputing the effects of the coriolis force once deflection occurs. A projectile deflected down a little by coriolis effects will then be deflected antispinwards a little, and so on. Trajectories can form very strange shapes, though at high projectile speeds and low station velocities things don't get too crazy, so I'll just talk about the *initial* forces affecting the projectile. I think my approximation here is OK, though it won't hold for things like thrown grenades in smaller stations!
The strength of the coriolis force is defined as $F^\prime = 2m\Omega \times v^\prime$, where $F^\prime$ is the resultant force vector, $m$ is the mass of the moving object, $\Omega$ is the rotation vector of the station, and $v^\prime$ is its velocity vector relative to the rotation vector of the station.
Lets make a coordinate system with Z pointing radially inwards at the axis from the rim (ie. "up" in the artificial gravity field). $\omega$ is the angular velocity, and $v$ is the projectile velocity. If I shoot the projectile along the X axis, in the direction of rotation:
$$F^\prime = 2m\begin{bmatrix}0\\\omega\\0\end{bmatrix}\times\begin{bmatrix}v\\0\\0\end{bmatrix} = 2m\begin{bmatrix}0\\0\\-v\omega\end{bmatrix}$$
you get all the force in the -z direction, or your "massive bullet drop". How how massive is massive? Well, the downward acceleration experienced by the projectile will be $a = -2v\omega$, and the drop $s$ over time $t$ will therefore be $s = \frac{1}{2}at^2 = -v\omega t^2$. Doubling your velocity doubles the strength of the coriolis force, but *quarters* the time you experience it for so the drop will end up being half as much.
Lets start with the 50km radius station. To get a 1g apparent gravity, you need a spin rate of about 0.134rpm (or 0.014 radians per second). Lets shoot a projectile at 400m/s (a conventional 9mm pistol round might go this sort of speed). I'm gonna be super, super lazy and neglect bullet drag... lets assume some idiot has been firing projectiles in a space station, and punched a bunch of holes and let the air out. The acceleration due to the coriolis force experienced by the projectile will be...
$$a = -2v\omega = -2 \* 400 m/s \* 0.014 rad/s = -11.2 m/s^2$$
...about the equivalent of 1g, approximately. At a 400m range, which seems a little far to be shooting a 9mm bullet, you'll get an additional drop of about 5.6m. Shoot antispinwards, and you'll get a drop reduction of 5.6m. Shooting a round twice as fast will get you half the drop. A NATO 5.56mm supersonic rifle round travelling at 880m/s will get a drop of ~2.5m firing spinwards, etc. At a more cosy 20m range, your pistol round's deflection will be more like a couple of centimetres... enough to spoil your score in a shooting range, but not really enough to make you miss all by itself.
Take home message: for close engagements, no special equipment or training is needed, probably. For longer engagements, eg. the sort of ranges that typical modern-day military forces expect to fight at, problems *will* arise.
Now lets look at the other end of the spectrum, with a 20m radius centrifuge spinning at a dizzying 6.6rpm, or about 0.7 radians per second. The strength of the coriolis force is therefore *50 times greater*. The distances involved are vastly smaller, of course... you're shooting 40m, tops. In that time, an object in the station will have rotated 0.07 radians, or 2.8m around the circumference (which is the maximum displacement if you're shooting someone diametrically across the centrifuge from you). It'll certainly *feel* like your bullets are bending in that situation!
Take home message: don't go into a centrifuge with a gun that fires bullets. Something bad will happen, to someone. Just thrown in some grenades first.
**Edit**: prompted by Harper's comment, lets have a look at 2001's *Space Station V*. It has a 150m radius and rotates at a little under 1rpm to give lunar-equivalent gravity. Its fast rotation rate leads to strong coriolis forces (about 3.7x stronger that the massive O'Neill for the 400m/s bullet) but under a 3m ceiling your longest line of sight is only going to be no more than 60m. This gives a maximum z-axis deflection of ±0.92m. This means that if you lie on the floor and look antispinwards and can see their toes, you can shoot them in the abdomen. This is also *very approximately* the spread of a long-barrelled shotgun with a full choke at the same range, so in *this* environment a shotgun might well be a sensible choice if you weren't expecting to face armoured opponents. It has a the nice knock-on benefit that unlike supersonic rifle rounds, you're much less likely to shoot a hole in the world and let all the air out.
---
You've thought of lots of neat ideas, but here's my take:
1. Use smart sighting devices. For closer-range engagements, for example, combine a laser sight with an [inertial measurement unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_measurement_unit) and a laser rangefinder. The sight can detect the rotational parameters of the current environment and the direction in which you're pointing the gun, and then steer the laser to point where the bullets will actually land.
On a planet, or a really big habitat at close range, it'll work just like a regular laser sight. As the strength of the coriolis force increases, the laser will point in slightly (or extremely) different directions to the gun. The relationship between the two will be confusing for the untrained, who will wave the gun around frantically in the wrong direction in the heat of the moment and then get shot. They'll need lots of practise in varing environments to learn to use the sight properly.
2. Use guns which shoot high velocity rounds to mitigate the effects of the coriolis force. These are generally preferable in most circumstances, unless you wanted to be stealthy in which case supersonic weaponry is undesirable.
3. Use guns which shoot a lot of bullets in a short time, perhaps tracers, if you're feeling brave. You can walk your fire onto the target, given small aiming errors.
4. Use grenades, flashbangs and gas in confined spaces at high RPMs.
5. Use guided projectiles at long range.
6. Consider using shotguns against unarmoured targets in smaller stations, for both ease of hitting and environmental safety.
7. Deliberate use of low-velocity projectiles to shoot around corners and under obscuring ceilings in fast-spinning stations might be a good tactic, given some practise.
[Answer]
Essentially the firearm has a smart sight unit attached. Like modern smart phones, it will need an built in accelerometer and a display (indeed, you could probably write an app for an Android or iPhone today), the accelerometer to determine the spin rate and angular velocity, the app calculating the offset and the display giving you the target information. In practice it may look like a modern "reflex" sight, the only difference is the red dot is not going to be aligned with the barrel. However like a reflex sight, the shooter uses both eyes open to rapidly acquire a target, and places the red dot on the target before squeezing the trigger.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7NUiv.jpg)
*Did you think I was joking?*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CWnZs.png)
*Intelliscope*
Given other features and the computing power embedded in smartphones, the ability to "zoom" in on distant targets, switch between day/night/thermal and incorporate other features like rangefinders, maps, "Blueforce" trackers and so on are almost a given. Creating tactical "mesh" networks so all elements are in communication with each other is also a feature military weapons (or weapons used by police, military and paramilitary forces) are likely to have.
Perhaps the biggest limitation will be the user interface; the soldier or police officer isn't going to have time to scroll through menus looking for the right app in the middle of a firefight.
[Answer]
Schlock Mercenary has something about shooting in rotating frame references more than ten years ago.
<https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2008-08-17>
Schlock and his commanding officer were shot. Schlock then tried to shoot back and failed. Finally he said "I'm gonna have to walk my shots". In other words, he then included tracer rounds and watched where they landed and so adapted his shooting as needed, but still failed to hit the sniper and destroyed a lot of things in the process.
The sniper on the other hand had a special scope to compensate for the coriolis effect, such hat he was able to land direct hits without tracing.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/C8i1c.png)
<https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2008-08-10>
[Answer]
>
> I thought about a few solutions which might help, but none of them
> seem to be amazing.
>
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> use training (effort and requires adaption to every new habitat)
>
>
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**1. Definitely use training.** This *is* amazing. As things are on earth, you can be the lamest couch potato ever and use a gun to go out and kill loads of ninjas. Guns are so overpowered. In your world, guns are useful only to Gunslingers - persons who devote hours of practice to sensing and compensating for the varying trajectories one encounters in space. This would be way more fun than a bunch of doofuses with machine guns.
[Answer]
You missed an option, design a gun that gives the bullet an equal and opposite force to the other direction so "dumb" bullets fly stright(ish).
I give you the [Hop-up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hop-up_(airsoft)) - used in airsoft to give a bit more range as it basically creates an "up" force to the pellet during it's flight it shouldn't be too much of an issue designing a spacegun to include a similar mechanism that will provide a round bullet (and yes it must be a round bullet) a counter force to the direction of rotation:
* The gun will need some electronic to detect the direction of rotation of the ship, and move the "hop-up" mechanism to the right position around the end of the barrel (think of it as a end of barrel attachment)
* The "hop-up" will need to be more robust to be able to handle the extra power given with a real firearm compared to an airsoft one but that's also possible to design
* The "hop-up" will also need to be longer due to the increased bullet speed but even at 5 times the length of a airsoft one it will still be within the length of a long barrel firearm
* bullets will need to be round but they can still come in self contained casing so no issues with semi\full auto
* Hop-ups are adjusable so you can use a simple lever to decide on how much the "spin" the bullet and thus match them to the speed of the space habitat, this will need to be done when zeroing in the gun much like when you zero in a gun sight.
[Answer]
**Smart bullets or smart scopes**
Already we have smart bullets that can adjust themselves in flight to hit a laser pointed target
See [smart bullets](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3059476/Watch-U-S-Army-test-self-guided-smart-bullets-say-let-hit-moving-target-perfect-accuracy.html)
We also have smart sniper scopes that adjust for distance, compensate automatically for wind as well as the Earth's rotation.
See [smart scopes](https://www.guns.com/news/2013/09/25/remington-2020-smart-scopes-masses)
We already have the tech today to do just this.
[Answer]
## Counter Coriolis Effect With Spin Effects
The math is a bit beyond me (Nasa has a tool that may help you nail down more exact numbers at <https://baseball.grc.nasa.gov/>), but it seems plausible that projectiles with a high enough spin rate in an appropriate direction could mostly cancel out the coriolis effect, at least as long as you're firing in an environment with sufficient atmospheric drag.
### Cons
1. Different spin needs to be applied based on the direction you're shooting (spinward, anti-spinward, etc.)
2. If the station were depressurized for any reason, you'd lose the spin effects you're accustomed to
3. The required properties of the projectile to enable sufficient spin effects may conflict with nice properties we currently expect projectiles to have (they may need to be spherical, or larger, or have a deliberately high drag coefficient by having a rough instead of smooth surface).
Dealing with #1 would be easiest with a smart gun which could detect the relevant parameters and apply the appropriate spin automatically, but in a lower tech setting could maybe be dealt with by carrying multiple sidearms (one designed for spinward shooting, one designed for antispinward shooting), corresponding the the directions you expect to be engaging in, and making manual adjustments from there.
Dealing with #2 might actually be an interesting plot point.
Dealing with #3 may cause bullets to be less precise, have less velocity, be louder, more mitigable by armor, or other undesirable effects.
# Pros
Most natural solution for soldiers who are trained and operate in earth-like environments, where training for a specific station may not make much sense. Without some intuition for the Coriolis effect, even lasers that lead the target may be confusing in engagements with multiple combatants on each side. Losing track of which dot is yours and trying to figure out where you're aiming would waste time vs "point and shoot like you always have".
This solution could co-exist with other solutions: tasks forces that operate primarily on stations would probably have more specialized training and use another method of countering the Coriolis effect to avoid the drawbacks that come from adjusting projectile ballistics in order to increase spin effect. Combatants without the benefit of this training would be issued the (cheaper?) "spin-guns" to provided maximum effect with little investment.
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I am trying to wrap my head around the geography of a settlement in my world.
The settlement is situated along the coast, along a river roughly 500m wide with temperate mixed forests surrounding it, which I hazard to guess is relatively common.
The difficulty comes with the freshwater springs to which the settlement has access to. There is a spring near the river meeting the ocean, perhaps stemming from a hill or mountain.
**What is the closest I can realistically have my spring to the ocean?**
[Answer]
>
> What is the closest I can realistically have my spring to the ocean?
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>
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0 meters
When, as a kid, I went to the sea during summer, it was common knowledge that, in some places along the coast, there were springs pouring fresh water directly into the sea.
One could tell it by both the sudden drop in temperature, especially with calm waters preventing mixing (the surface was chilly, while the bottom was warmer) and by the different appearance of the waters due to the different density. While I could see for quite a distance with my bare eyes open underwater, when I went into the spring zone the water looked kind of foggy and seeing through it was much harder.
In the generation before mine such places, in particular where the water was shallow, where used by shepherd to supply their herd with drinking water, which was otherwise impossible to find in the surrounding Mediterranean shrub.
The geology of the place where I grew up is made mostly by limestone surface layers, with clay like layers underneath. The interface between limestone and clay is where water accumulates and flows. There was no visible spring, rather a diffuse percolation through the rocky coast.
[Answer]
1. They have a five hundred meters wide river flowing through the city. That's more fresh water than they can use.
The entire *country* of Egypt lives off a [large river](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile) flowing through the country.
2. Istanbul (formely [Constantinople](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinople), formely Byzantium) is a very large city sitting astride the Bosphorus, a salt water strait connecting the Black Sea and the Marmara. There are numerous [wells and springs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul#Public_services) and small fresh water courses emptying in the sea, some of them captured since two and a half millennia ago. Not to menium [aqueducts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valens_Aqueduct) and [huge cisterns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_Cistern) for storing water, built by the Roman emperors back in the days of the glory that was Rome.
[Answer]
Freshwater springs can appear at any distance to the sea, even under the sea.
The easiest explanation for springs next to or under the sea is [karst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karst). It is formed from soluble rocks (often limestone), which are full of cracks, crevices and caverns. Rain water, and even whole rivers can [disappear underground](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterranean_river) and continue flowing through underground cracks and caverns. They can resurface at any point, usually at lower elevations, and often where the soluble karstic rocks meet less soluble rocks underneath them. If there are less soluble rocks underneath, the water doesn't flow down anymore, but sideways, and surfaces as a spring (though there are also other ways for [springs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_(hydrology)) to form).
I mentioned that you can have freshwater springs even under the sea. [Undersea karst springs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karst_spring#Types) are pretty common in the Mediterranean, along karst coasts. In Croatian they are called [vrulja](https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrulja). For a freshwater spring to appear under the sea, the hydrostatic pressure of the fresh water has to be high enough to counter the sea water pressure so the fresh water from karst caverns can flow out into the sea, rather the other way around (seawater flowing into the caverns). High hydrostatic pressure of fresh water usually happens if there are karst mountains (or at least hills) right next to the sea. If the coast doesn't have high enough elevation, there can be temporary vruljas, where fresh water is forced out only under certain conditions (like during a rainy season), or if the elevation is very low, the fresh water may never be able to create a spring under the sea.
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I was wondering if creatures with thick natural armor would create artificial armor. They have all the resources they would need in order to create armor, but their natural armor is better than a knight's plate armor, for example.
Would they bother creating artificial armor, which adds more weight, or would they mostly avoid creating artificial armor?
[Answer]
# Yes, because there are always bigger guns
If this is a tool using species, as they would have to be to construct augmenting armor, then they are also making new ways to kill each other.
The evolution of warfare is pretty clear on the subject. Weapons will evolve to counter the increased effectiveness of armor. Always. Armor will evolve to counter increasingly effective weapons. Always. Evolution of this kind progresses until some plateau is reached where the cost of armor or weaponry exceeds its benefits.
Armor doesn't have to just stop incoming damage. It can be a means to dealing damage too. A restricted view of armor could be "Things you strap on to make combat hurt less". But, more broadly, armor can be "Things that make combat hurt less but also increase mobility and lethality." Under this broader interpretation, a tank is additional armor that increases survivability, mobility and lethality.
Military power is the ability to project power at a distance. This started with melee range weapons, the reach of an arm. Longer "arms" in the form of ranged weapons came next. Armor to defeat melee and ranged weapons started almost as soon in the form of shields or strap on armor. The entirety of human weapons and armor can be wrapped up in the drive to to extend the range and lethality of weapons and simultaneously increase the ability to resist damage of armor. I see no reason why your creatures with super armor would be any different.
# The bigger gun
Eventually, someone is going to invent a weapon that defeats the natural armor so well that the natural armor doesn't even matter. That will force the adaptation and utilization of additional armor to counter the new threat.
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Well, *creatures* probably wouldn't...
But *people* might just!
If the naturally armored folk you're speaking of have a culture that values status displays of any kind, warriors might just create at least some kinds of more or less decorative armor to augment their natural protection.
Armor might on the other hand become an object of aesthesis more than actual protection, since they don't need protecting. A helmet might be devoid of visor and ear pieces in favour of sunbursts or crests. A breastplate serve as a substrate for carvings, precious metal adornments and heraldic devices. Gauntlets, footplates, knee caps, vambraces and greaves also might serve as decorative bases.
Any piece of armor might be augmented with weapons. Vambraces could sport a slashing blade; gauntlets might burst forth with cestus studs.
Weight is an issue --- obviously, the larger and stronger the warrior, the more weight he can carry and thus show off a higher status!
[Answer]
I can think of a few reasons why they might. The first is if they have pain receptors in their natural armor. They may create artificial armor to prevent them from feeling pain.
The second, and more likely, is that their enemies would work to create a weapon that specifically targets whatever weaknesses exist in their armor. So they would then need to counter with artificial armor that compensates for that vulnerability.
Finally, damage to their natural armor would require time to heal, which would remove them from combat for a time, even if there are no other injuries. External armor would be faster to repair, and damaged armor could be swapped out for new armor immediately (provided they had enough stock), meaning an otherwise uninjured soldier could return to battle immediately.
[Answer]
**Yes. Because chicks dig it.**
Armor here is a secondary sex characteristic, like flashy feathers on male birds or an awesome scruff on a male baboon. Better, bigger armor = a better bigger male with all the benefits that come with that. So as soon as there is intelligence, there are efforts to enhance the armor beyond what biology provides: stronger, thicker, knobbier... sexier. These creatures fashion the best artificial armor their resources allow.
I think this should not be factory made armor: it should be a given that each individual fashions his own armor - sort of like the bowerbirds with their nests, which they make elaborate and beautiful to impress the ladies. The whole point is that this particular bowerbird dude is the one who made this awesome babe magnet, and who wouldn't want to be with a guy like that?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9bRdb.jpg)
<https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/on-exhibit-posts/fast-facts-bowerbirds/>
The thought is that the evolutionary impetus behind these nests was that long ago females liked males with bright blue eyes, and over time the males who riffed on that wound up leaving the offspring. So too the armor. At one time it was just whomever could grow the most awesome armor - but now it is whomever can, with his skills, make his armor suprabiologically awesome.
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**Yes, but it won't be armor in the traditional sense.** If you're naturally defended, you'd be better off maximizing other traits- offense or agility, for example.
For offense, the armor might consist mainly of spikes or blades- on the shoulders, on the kneecaps, arms, or feet- turning you into a veritable juggernaut that would be able to literally ram through people without having to worry about getting hurt.
Agility could be maximized either by having no additional armor at all or by wearing gear that increases your agility. Shoes, for example, would be a good thing to have even if you don't have to worry about stepping on sharp objects because they could increase your traction or make you more comfortable.
[Answer]
Of course they would. If they need it.
I have a fine brain, and my ancestors' brains were good enough to pretty well conquer the planet. But I use technology to replace or support my brain because it works.
But would they need it? Armor is expensive, and generally offers diminishing returns. If it is already a hassle to kill enemies with the available weapons they might not bother with more armor. A soldier might be better served by having a bigger hammer, more food, or a warmer blanket.
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I'll keep this brief: I'm not too well versed in secret government protocol nor have I read enough sci-fi books on this type of matter. But simply put, in my story, a series of UFOs crash land around the world, one doing so in the United States near a town in the deep south.
[This older query](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33616/what-would-the-first-local-response-be-to-a-downed-ufo-today) deals with the local government response. After it's revealed by the local police that the crashed object is not a normal space rock, what higher level (state or federal) law enforcement/government agency would be called to come investigate this strange UFO?
[Answer]
* Step 1:
Members of the public call 911. There would be multiple, contradictory reports of a fire, an explosion, a ground vehicle crash, and an aircraft crash. *At the same time, members of the public post this on social media.*
* Step 2:
The fire department/ambulance service and the police respond. *So do halfway-credible journalists and pure gawkers.* There are more, and more detailed, pictures while the emergency services try to control the incident scene with insufficient manpower for a strict cordon.
* Step 3a:
Someone in charge concludes that an aircraft was involved, queries with air traffic control and local airports for missing civilian planes, and possibly informs agencies like the [NTSB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Transportation_Safety_Board). There may be inquiries to the military if they are *missing* any planes or UAVs.
Municipal or state authorities may be briefed on what the emergency responders *think* is going on. It is unlikely that any of them says "alien" or "UFO" lightly -- that would be a career killer. Depending on the size of the crashed object, the President is briefed on a possible high-profile accident or even terror attack.
Recall the [F-35B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II#Accidents_and_notable_incidents) crash in September 2023, including the 911 tape from the folks with the ejected pilot in their garden, and how the dispatcher went through a list of questions which made only limited sense in the context.
* Step 3b:
*Quite possible **before** an official makes the call to aviation authorities, some member of the public concludes that it was an UFO and posts pictures and commentary on social media.* This could well be a total nutcase who sees [reptiles](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReptilianConspiracy) everywhere, and who happens to be right for all the wrong reasons.
* Step 4:
Emergency services try to establish a meaningful cordon to protect the incident site. The assumption may still be "aircraft of unknown type" or perhaps "[Chinese spy balloon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident)" unless there are recognizably alien corpses in the debris.
This could involve the National Guard, if those authorities are not helplessly behind the curve of events.
* Step 5:
Someone on scene determines that it was not a *normal* aircraft. The assumption would switch to *foreign spy plane* and the air force and/or intelligence agencies are called in. At this point, at the latest, the President would be briefed about the possible international incident.
My prediction is that multiple agencies explain to the President that *they* should be the lead investigators, and the President may well decide on gut feeling. Perhaps the President trusts the uniformed services more than the spies, or perhaps the President wants to keep this under civilian agencies like NASA.
[Answer]
# The NTSB or similar will raise issue to the President
Okay, so **Billy-Bob and his drinkin' buddy** were out noodling for catfish when they — through the beer haze — see something come streaking down the sky and landing with a big, fat THUMP.
After going in to take a closer look (and — possible story element — picking up some scrap) they come to the highly qualified and expert conclusion that this is a thingy made of metal that dropped out of the sky... darned peculiar, but no matter, dealing with this thing is definitely above their pay grade (especially considering that their present profession is noodling for catfish).
So they call **the Sheriff** that — depending on smallness of their home town — they are probably well aquatinted with and give a slurred description of the event that — eventually — is interpreted to be a plane crash and that there are no survivors to deal with.
So the Sheriff starts up the normal procedures for dealing with a plane crash, this involves **rescue services**, **paramedics** to pick up the remains of people, the **Federal Aviation Authority** and the **National Transportation Safety Board**.
The FAA will within a few hours probably be very confused, as no planes — neither airlines nor general aviation — have been reported missing. Or(!)... maybe they have and this red herring adds to the plot line, when the supposedly missing plane is later found, somewhere else.
The NTSB will probably be site within anything from a few hours to a couple of days. Until then, the rescue services will have cordoned off the area to keep people from disturbing the site. Here you have flexility, so you can have people come as close or stay far away as you like.
As the NTSB gets on site, they will rather quickly realise that this is no aircraft, at least none that they are familiar with. This means that they will probably vacate the site, sharpish, since this could potentially be a very hazardous object. Hydrazine thrusters on rockets, or — worse — nuclear reactors / thermal isotope generators on satellites, or any number of other nasty components on space junk, are no laughing matter.
In any case, they will most likely conclude that this is a *highly unusual event* that require expertiese outside their domain. This means they will kick the issue up the chain of command. But since the NTSB is an *independent authority*, their parent agency is the **Federal Government of the United States**, meaning it lands in the lap of **the President**, right quick.
The President will then call together people to ask what should be done about this, such as...
* The Join Cheifs of Staff
* The Director of National Intelligence
* Various deparment heads of relevant agencues (see below)
...and start to issue orders to the various agencies under their command.
---
What happens next consists a large number of possibilities. It all depends on what other adminstrative agencies knew anything before this thing hit the ground, and which ones would have an interest in this thing.
Potential interested parties are...
* **18th Space Defense Squadron (18 SDS)**, located at Vandenburg Space Force Base in California, are reponsible for tracking objects in space, especially satellites. People will be asking them questions if any object is missing from their tracking catalog.
* **North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)** are responsible for providing aerospace early warning, and ditto protection. While they probably will not be involved once it is on the ground, people will be asking them some very serious questions on how something could fall from space without them sounding the big alert (because it could have been a hostile nuke)
* **Department of Homeland Security**, since this thing is no longer flying — and thus no longer of interest to the FAA, NORAD, Air Force and other airspace related agencues — they will want to know what kind of threat it poses. And until it has been determined whether this unknown thing is a threat or not, they will probably act defensive and see it as a *potential* threat, and make sure no-one messes with it.
* The **Department of Energy (DoE)** (for nuclear/radiological hazards), the **Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)** (biological) and the **Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)** (chemical) will probably be concerned already in the "We are not sure what it is" stage since — again — dangerous elements aboard this object might cause significant hazard to health and/or the environment. And when it becomes clear this is alien in origin, they will probably throw an utter [crap]-fit.
* The tech-nerds at the **Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)** are equally going to have a fit, out of orgasmic delight.
## "What about branches of the military?"
The military will not act on its own, but instead wait until told by the President to act. Why? Because this issue not a military threat, and it is not military property. The military cannot mount operations willy-nilly unless it is something that actually *concerns* them and their mission. While Hollywood loves to paint the military as this omnipotent entity that can do whatever they feel domestically, reality is that the military is tightly leashed in this area because an armed force running unchecked in the country is very dangerous.
## "What about FBI, CIA, intelligence agencies?"
Again: this is outside their jurisdiction. An object falling out of space is not an intelligence issue, nor law enforcement issue, until someone has looked at it and concluded that this is the case. They might act, if the President calls them in, but they will not start acting on their own.
---
So, to summarise...
You have many options to branch your story how you want. But the initial agencies will most likely be...
1. Local law enforcement and ditto rescue services
2. The FAA and NTSB, which will kick the issue up the chain of command.
3. The government and the President
4. Whatever ad hoc task force the President puts together
[Answer]
The National Transportation Safety Board
If it flies and something happens to it, generally it falls to civilian aviation authorities. The standard channels for crashed plane reporting go through the NTSB and they are likely who it is going to be reported to.
Even if it looks weird people aren't likely going to assume that it's aliens. The police would almost certainly just pass on the information to the NTSB because they are the relevant agency for aviation crashes.
[Answer]
Maybe you think you're asking a simple question, but the answer is very much anything but simple. We can start by focusing on two paradoxes that must be addressed in order to take on your question.
1. You are essentially asking "who are the secret keepers who operate in secret? And what secret things do they do?" Obviously, if everyone knew, it wouldn't be a secret. But there are parts that are knowable, if you're willing to sift through truths and falsehoods.
2. We live in a post-Roswell world, in which infrastructure (as a result of the phenomena) has already been established, to sequester and compartmentalize evidence and information - and even to disseminate disinformation on this subject.
OP, you commented:
>
> This world is basically our modern world. This world is very vanilla
> in the sense that there have been no other known UFO encounters nor
> extraterrestrial interference or anything. So there are no secret
> organizations dealing with these type things. In fact, this is what
> helps create such organization.
>
>
>
As you can imagine, in a world with no prior UFO encounters, the following organizations would not exist. However, the organizations that most closely match what you describe would be:
## The NRO (National Reconnaissance Office)
[www.nro.gov](https://www.nro.gov)
and
## The NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency)
[www.nga.mil](https://www.nga.mil)
Of course "UFO crash retrieval" is not in their official job descriptions.
Whistleblower **David Grusch**, who testified before Congress this year (2023) has worked at both agencies. Grush's story is another tangent completely, that I encourage you to look into. It's still unfolding.
Even when local authorities are first to respond, expect federal authorities to swiftly take over the investigation. This will probably be the FBI, and similar agencies that are more public-facing. The more obscure intel agencies are unlikely to be present, but very likely to be in close communication with the FBI et al through the investigation.
I ask for your patience, as there is more I would like to add to this answer, so please consider it to be a work in progress. As I said, the topic is huge, and hard to condense. But I will do my best to improve on it gradually. I hope that for now this at least gives you some leads so you can "do your homework".
[For further info start here...](https://www.spreaker.com/user/16884276/david-grusch-whistleblower-final-mixdown) (more links to come)
[Answer]
The Department of Defence would take basic control, a bunch of others would probably be involved. But the military would most likely be the first formally mobilised to the actual site.
Local law enforcement would probably be the first to secure roads etc,.
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Man would never travel beyond his interstellar neighborhood in his lifetime. He can, but he'll never return home in the lifetime of everyone he knows. If he travels further, he will return to find even his home is long gone. This is due to one vicious supervillain ruling our universe. A supervillain named "c". "c" is a velocity, a velocity impossible to surpass. What's even more cruel about this supervillain is that it will outsmart you no matter how you wanna outsmart it. Yes, all methods of FTL can and will lead to causality violations, and there's no way around it. However, this villain is also the backbone of why everything in this universe behaves as it does. Unless...
This supervillain c will make interesting sci-fi plots such as galactic empires completely impossible. You can't keep an empire united when even a simple "execute political dissidents" message takes multiple hundreds of lifetimes to reach the "rural" areas of said empire. So i propose a Newtonian universe where the speed of light and other massless propagation is infinite. I know this would cause Olber's paradox of infinitely bright sky but we can solve that by saying this universe is not infinite, and non homogenous at all scales. However, this universe is huge. 21st century humans might as well think it's infinite. The furthest galaxy as of 2022, called HD1, lies 13.5 billion light-years away in light travel time. The luminosity distance, i.e. the distance based on the observed brightness of the galaxy alone, if it wast't subject to cosmological redshift, is 650 billion light-years. This is thus the distance humans with 21st century technology can observe, the actual universe is much larger.
As the speed of light is infinite, the concept of "light-year" might as well not exist. Instead, I'll imagine people using parsecs instead when referring to interstellar distances. 1 parsec is approximately 31 trillion kilometers or 19.3 trillion miles.
Now this is all settled, the supervillain c is gone. You can travel however fast you want. There won't be black holes anymore though, but an infinitely dense singularity tearing apart everything that comes near it is still possible, so quasars can still be a possibility. Only difference is that it's theoretically possible to escape it no matter how close you get. And also, no time dilation, the whole universe shares one universal time.
Wait, didn't i say this supervillain c is also the backbone of why everything in this universe behaves as it does? Now that it's gone, what adjustments to physics do I need to make in this universe in order to have it behave the same as this one macroscopically? As in, if I get teleported there right now, I won't detect any difference except that the speed of light is infinite. Every physical, chemical and biological experiment I do there yields the same results as if I'm doing it here, except the ones related to relativistic velocities. Do i need to rewrite all the fundameltals in the universe in order for my idea to work?
[Answer]
1. *"All methods of FTL can and will lead to causality violations":* Not true.
The simple way out is to require that all FTL travel be done [with respect to one "special" frame of reference](http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_part4.html#subsec:specialframe); this takes care nicely of any paradoxes and violations of causality.
In physicists' speak, that's called a *distinguished* frame of reference. Now we know that within our understanding of physics there is no distinguished frame of reference, that is, we cannot distinguish between being in motion in a straight line with constant speed, and being absolutely at rest. But then, within our understanding of physics we cannot travel faster than light. The distinguished frame of reference would obviously be introduced by whatever new physics allows us to accelerate to such immense speeds.
Other more complicated workarounds exist, such as Penrose's [cosmic censorship hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_censorship_hypothesis), or Hawkings's [chronology protection conjecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_protection_conjecture).
2. *"Do i need to rewrite all the fundamentals in the universe in order for my idea to work?"* Yes, obviously.
The problem is not mechanics, it is electromagnetism. The entire point of Einsteinian special relativity is to reconcile mechanics with electromagnetism. In fact, Einstein's paper in which he introduced special relativity has the title "[On the Electrodynamics of Moving Objects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers#Special_relativity)".
(Before that, physicists had tried to reconcile them by actually postulating a distinguished frame of reference, called the [luminiferous aether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether)¹; unfortunately, [Michelson and Morley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment)'s 1887 experiment had proven that it did not actually exist.)
¹) "Luminiferous aether" is Anglicized Latin for light-bearing godly air. 19th century physicists loved the classics.
The problem arises because the speed of light in a vacuum, $c$, is directly linked with the strength of electromagnetic forces via the electric permittivity of the vacuum $\varepsilon\_0$ and the magnetic permeability of the vacuum $\mu\_0$: $c = 1 / \sqrt{\varepsilon\_0 \mu\_0}$. If you make $c$ infinite you automatically make at least one of them zero; this would, just for example, have very baddd effects on chemistry. (Baddd effects such as atoms cannot exist.)
[Answer]
The three legs of pre-relativistic physics were
1. Newton's laws of motion
2. Maxwell's equations
3. Laws of thermodynamics
The problem is that an object that moves according to Newton's laws and radiates according to Maxwell's equations *can not* conserve energy according to thermodynamic laws.
It was Newton's that were, not as much *wrong*, as a special case where relativistic effects are negligible.
Either Maxwell's equations would have to not correctly describe electromagnetism, or thermodynamics would have to not correctly describe energy conservation and entropy.
Both of those are fundamental to many other things, so changing either would be big.
[Answer]
1. Any amount of mass would correspond to an infinite amount of energy.
Unless you eliminate mass-energy equivalence, and just allow mass to be an independent inherent property of fundamental particles, like spin or charge, completely unrelated to energy. Gravitational and inertial mass may remain identical... or not.
Mass and energy would need to be separately conserved, which has all sorts of interesting consequences for nuclear reactions and particle production.
2. No magnetism, no magnets.
Atoms could still exist, with slightly simpler structures due to the lack of magnetic energy-level splitting effects. Electrical technology could even still exist, with electrical power generation done with influence machines rather than dynamos. But no stellar, planetary, or galactic magnetic fields.
3. No electromagnetic waves.
But that doesn't mean no equivalent of light; there would still be purely electric waves. These could either travel instantaneously, or be associated with a massive "luxon". In the latter case, the speed of light would depend on its energy, leading to far-away objects being chromatically distorted, with blue components of the image being newer than red components. This would also lead to changes in the behavior of the electric force, such that it is no longer infinitely ranges. Atoms and chemistry could still exist as long as the luxon mass was small, so the electric force range remains much larger than the size of an atom. How you conserve mass in luxon production remains an open question... you might need to allow negative-mass particles, with luxons always produced in pairs. And negative mass has all sorts of interesting implications...
[Answer]
# No
$$E = mc^2$$
Replace $c$ with infinity in that formula and even a neutrino would obliterate galaxies it passed through.
Your universe would never form even the most basic particles.
[Answer]
Another problem: Our everyday world has objects with substantial relativistic effects: the electrons around heavy atoms are moving at a good chunk of lightspeed. (At least as much as they can be said to be moving.)
While the only effects I know about from this are gold is golden (Newtonian gold would be silver color) and your car wouldn't start (the battery would put out about 20% of the voltage it does now) I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases where reactions that work in our world wouldn't, and reactions that don't happen here would happen there.
[Answer]
And yet another problem: *E=mc^2*. If you wave that away by separating energy and mass you just killed both chemistry and nuclear physics: You'll find E=mc^2 lurking at the heart of every reaction that produces or consumes energy--any energy-producing reaction has products that are ever so slightly lighter than what went into it. (.7% for hydrogen->helium fusion, lesser amounts for every other reaction.) Every energy-consuming reaction has products that are more massive than what went into it. Without the ability to interchange mass and energy why would there be any such reactions?
[Answer]
You probably need to do something.... if you want, but it is your story.... and there is plenty to do without worrying about the details of absolutely everything.
Take the hydrogen atom when looking at how it works at a fundamental level with quantum mechanics you can do a set of calculations to find the energy levels of the electron without thinking about relativity and you will get pretty good answers.
However, when you look at the atomic spectra more closely you will find that the energy levels are off by just a tiny amount, or that in some cases the spectra has two lines very very close together where you think there should only be one.
This is becasue there needs to be a relativistic correction for the electron. Instead of having just a kinetic energy term, in the equations, the electron needs to have an additional term that comes from special relativity. This is a small correction but it turns out that when looking at this splitting closely the splitting is proportional to a something called the 'fine structure constant' that is one of the fundamental constants of the universe. Looking at the spectral lines of elements and these little details was how quantum mechanics got started.
The reason you might care about the the [fine structure constant](https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/alpha.html#:%7E:text=The%20fine%2Dstructure%20constant%20%CE%B1,and%20light%20(photons)%20interact.) is that it pops up when trying to understanding how particles and fields interact. The value of the fine structure constant is about 1/137....
>
> It is coupling constant measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force that governs how electrically charged elementary particles (e.g., electron, muon) and light (photons) interact.
>
>
>
So if you get rid of special relativity, you might not care if you can see two spectral lines instead of one, but you might care a lot if it means that how all charged particles interact.
For example, if you changed the value of the fine structure constant it might mean the protons in the nucleus might not stay together, or electrons might orbit atoms at a different radius etc.
[Answer]
As other answers to this question have pointed out, physics has to be rewritten at a pretty fundamental level to make it Galillean-invariant instead of Lorentz-invariant. However, there is a way to do this for electromagnetism that keeps most of the effects needed to make light and chemistry work the way they need to in order to have a fairly recognizable universe (at least at the solar system level, and assuming quantum mechanics is still a thing). The trick is to add a good old-fashioned aether, with local velocity $u$. The electromagnetic constants (and therefore the speed of light) may also depend on the aether state.
The aether determines the auxiliary fields $D$ and $H$ through constitutive equations:
$$D = \epsilon\_0 (E + u\times B)$$
$$B = \mu\_0 (H - u\times D)$$
Then Maxwell's equations can take their traditional forms:
$$\nabla \cdot D = \rho$$
$$\nabla \times H = \frac{\partial D}{\partial t} + j$$
$$\nabla \times E = -\frac{\partial B}{\partial t}$$
$$\nabla \cdot B = 0$$
The Lorentz force on a particle of charge $q$ and velocity $v$ still has the form:
$$F = q(E + v \times B)$$
This is all invariant under a Galillean transformation, with the fields in particular transforming as:
$$E' = E + v \times B$$
$$B' = B$$
And you get electromagnetic waves that propagate at speed $c$ relative to the aether.
Note that this theory can be derived from the same action as classic electromagnetism if we replace $E^2-B^2$ in the Lagrangian with $E\cdot D - B\cdot H$.
[Answer]
Actually the supervillain c is not as powerful as you may think. The restriction on faster than light travel is only a [local restriction not a global one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Faster-than-light_travel). As far as our understanding of physics go there is nothing preventing seemingly distant points to be connected through a wormhole if you are willing to give up to think about the universe being an euclidean space, and instead allow more complicated topologies.
Traveling through the worm hole to get somewhere faster than light traveling another route is no contradiction with this, since a light beam traveling through the worm hole following the same path as you will still be faster.
In a certain sense faster than light travel is already possible in this universe in the neighbourhood of a black hole. For example light takes several days to travel around [Ton 618](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TON_618)-the largest currently known black hole. So traveling for one hour in one direction along the [photon sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_sphere) around Ton 618 near the speed of light will make you arrive at your destinations days before light traveling around the Ton 618 traveling along the photon sphere in the other direction, so you will have arrived at your destination faster than the light traveling in the wrong direction.
[Answer]
I don't think you can have stars in a non-relativistic (Newtonian) universe. At least not ones that look like ours. In the proton-proton chain that provides most of the energy powering stars the size of our Sun (which is a pretty average star) one step is
$$p + p + e^{-} \to {}^2\text{He}^+ + \nu\_e \, . \tag{1}$$
The sum of rest masses on the left is greater than the sum of rest masses on the right. Therefore this reaction is not allowed in Galiliean relativity ("Newtonian physics") It is allowed in Einstein relativity because then the mass of a composite system is *not* the sum of the masses of its constituents. Rather, the mass squared $M^2$ is given by
$$M^2 = \big(\sum\_i E\_i \big)^2 - \big( \sum\_i \mathbf{p}\_i \big)^2$$
where $E\_i$ are the energies (including rest energy) and $\mathbf{p}\_i$ the momenta of the constituents. The reaction (1) is allowed because $M^2$ can be kept constant by giving the He-nucleus and the neutrino some kinetic energy and momentum. Indeed it releases some energy that contributes to making stars glow.
Even if you came up with some way of powering stars, supernovae are going to have very different physics and you won't get any neutron stars (the [Chandrasekhar limit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit) is a relativistic effect).
In any case, the non-relativistic theory of gravitation is, well, Newton's theory. So in your universe you don't get any *general* relativity effects like (roughly ordered by the order in which they became possible to detect)
* [anomalous perihelion precession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-body_problem_in_general_relativity#Anomalous_precession_of_Mercury) (1800s),
* gravitational lensing (1922),
* [Hubble redshift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law) (1920s),
* gravitational redshift ([Pound-Rebka experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound%E2%80%93Rebka_experiment), 1959)
* [Shapiro time delay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_time_delay) (1960s),
* gravitational time dilation (GPS satellites, 1980s),
* gravitational waves (indirectly: 1990s, directly: 2015)
* black holes (??, debatable)
] |
[Question]
[
A mage has created an amulet of light. It shines light from one side, and the user is capable of controlling the color and intensity of that light.
In an effort to avoid abuse, the mage has limited the amulet to only produce wavelengths in the visible range.
Perhaps less cleverly, they did not think to put a limit on the *amount* of light that can be produced at once.
**A foolish thief has gotten their hands on the amulet and started cranking up the intensity. At what point will their actions start to cause noticeable physical effects, and what will those effects be?**
My guess is that, at some point, objects will become hot enough to catch fire, radiation pressure will start pushing objects (and the amulet) around, and light will shine through normally opaque objects. Are these guesses correct, and are there any other dangers my thief should be wary of?
Bonus: Are some wavelengths of visible light safer than others? Which are they?
[Answer]
If the light coming out of the amulet is well collimated (i.e. it can form a narrow beam that does not disperse - like a laser) and the light is emitted continuously rather than in pulses, then what it does will depending on the aperture (i.e. the cross sectional area) of the amulet.
Assuming a diameter of 2-3 cm (wristwatch or locket sized), an intensity of tens to hundreds of watts could cause temporary/permanent blindness if pointed at someone's eyes, and kilowatts would be enough to set light to a flammable target. 104 of W would cut through stuff. If the emission moves up to megawatts then the surface of the target will heat up and ablate so rapidly that it will effectively act like an explosion - the target might be thrown backwards but this is due to evaporation at the super-heated surface, not radiation pressure. Somewhere around 1012-1014W, the air in the path of the beam would almost instantaneously ionize and absorb a significant fraction of the beam energy. This would be bad for the holder of the amulet as it means that the air directly in front of them would glow more brightly than the surface of the sun - the amulet holder would get very bad sun-burn.
At vastly higher energy the beam could convert materials to plasma, break up atomic nuclei and eventually convert all matter to a quark-soup like that found in the first few nanoseconds of the big-bang. Radiation pressure would now be evident - but only if you used the amulet in a vacuum as the reaction with any nearby matter would overwhelm the effect otherwise. At stupidly higher energy, you might reach the Plank limit beyond which physicists can only guess - but more likely the energy density would be so great that local space along the beam would instantly collapse into a black hole.
If the amulet fires out a narrow beam - 0.1 mm diameter perhaps, then all the power requirements drop by around 4 orders of magnitude. Probably harder to blind an enemy then but it would still be effective for cutting/drilling through things at a distance. If it was pulsed, then the relative danger to the user may be reduced.
If the amulet fired out a dispersed wide angle multi-frequency beam like a hand-held torch, then bad things would happen to the wielder (the sun-burn and explosions resulting from heating of the air immediately in front of the amulet) before it would do much harm to any target more than a few tens of metres away.
If the light is not coherent, all the things described for the coherent beam would still happen, but at higher energy required for an effect on a target, and a lower energy required for the 'effects' on the wielder.
[Answer]
### Black Holes?
You amulet can generate black holes. Given the radius of your amulet $R\_s$ we can calculate the amount of mass necessary to collapse it into a black hole.
$$M = \frac{c^2}{2G}R\_s$$
But your amulet produces light not mass. Lucky, Einstein can help us with its [mass energy equivalence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence):
$$E = mc^2$$
So, we need:
$$E = c^2\frac{c^2}{2G}R\_s$$
That is the amount of energy you need to make a black hole. If your intensity were that amount of watts (and the light didn't move), in a single second you would be able to produce a black hole.
If you want the radiant intensity, knowing that $4\pi$ Steradian is a sphere:
$$W/sr = \frac{c^2\frac{c^2}{2G}R\_s}{4\pi}$$
You need that amount of W/sr (also know as watts per [steradian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steradian)).
Or, given a [candela](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candela) is $\frac{1}{683}$ W/sr:
$$\text{Cd} = 683\*\frac{c^2\frac{c^2}{2G}R\_s}{4\pi}$$
That is the amount of light need to perform a black hole. But, taking into account that light moves very fast, you should rather produce that output in a single burst of light instead of over a single second. Otherwise, you will need better maths.
[Answer]
Somewhere in the kilowatt range nearby objects will start heating appreciably and possibly even catching fire (see for example Wicked Laser's [FlashTorch](https://www.wickedlasers.com/torch)). It will depend on their reflectivity, the material they're made of, beam dwell time, and so on.
Much sooner than that, you'll get temporary flash blindness from reflected light. I haven't been able to find a reliable source on the intensity required, but I came up with an approximate ballpark figure of 14000 lumen (that's around 150 W with high-efficiency LEDs, which the magic device appear to resemble) from data on nuclear explosions.
Radiation pressure doesn't come into play until much, *much* later.
A big "if" hangs on the quality of light. It might be in the visible octave, and still be almost-monochromatic coherent laser light.
[Answer]
>
> **At what point will their actions start to cause noticeable physical affects, and what will those effects be?**
>
>
>
Projecting light is itself a physical effect. Starting at a flux of [0.0001 flux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux) in an dark place, the light will be enough for the naked eye to see, which is equivalent to starlight on a moonless night.
But of course you didn't mean that.
The effects visible light has on things, besides making them visible to us, depend on the target. In general visible light can slow down or more usually speed up chemical reactions (think of polaroids) and warm stuff up.
Regular laser pointers are usually within the 3 to 5 miliwatt range. It can blind people. There is a chronic mental disease that causes people to point such lasers at aircraft for kicks, which is how you can use a very little amount of light to take hundreds of lives in a very grim way.
A 100 miliwatt laser pointer with a tight beam width at close range can set fire to matches and gasoline, so you may emulate that. More power makes it easier and faster to set stuff on fire.
[Answer]
>
> In an effort to avoid abuse, the mage has limited the amulet to only produce wavelengths in the visible range.
>
>
>
Some other limitations to consider:
The amulet would have to be tied to a power source in some way.
Either that power source is unlimited or limited. Limited would give a fixed number of charges/uses. Unlimited could still be constrained to a recharging period.
You also could choose to limit the output to the amount of energy that can flow through from that power source to the amulet (which keeps black holes and mega-watt pulse lasers from being a possibility).
I expect you're looking for the more entertaining answers already given, but this may help if you're looking for balance.
] |
[Question]
[
1350 AD. A secret society is recruiting adepts in Rome, Florence, Paris, Wien, Prague and London; well-educated people in high ranks of nobility, catholic church, engineers, professors and knights. Given at that time Latin was used as formal/common language and cryptography was still relegated to military tasks and often required the burden of mechanical apparatus, even if encryption was limited to plain symbol rearrangement; how could a secret language be developed to let people talk each other, or exchange messages, while resembling a different but unknown language to other listeners/readers?
My requirements are: use of Latin letters; both cyphertext and plain-text are "readable", in a sense they would seem like natural language even if not understood (ie: [Voynich manuscript](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript)); and people should be able to speak that language, not just reading/writing; no device should be needed for reading/listening, possibly the same also for writing/speaking.
This question *could* go to a more technical site, but I am open to fantasy answers, ie like using magic.
[Answer]
Since you want the language to be observable, but not decipherable, it seems like steganography would be the ideal method (using actual cryptography would either be easily broken, or too complex for real-time human to human communication).
As an alternative to having it appear as an unknown language, what about using a sufficiently robust method of encoding a hidden conversation into a normal conversation in an actual common language (probably latin)? So, a bad example would be that the first letter of each sentence was all that actually mattered. This would allow enough flexibility to compose meaningful responses (in the cover language). Unfortunately, this would be a very inefficient encoding and wouldn't be easy to keep track of for speakers.
So instead of that, what about using higher level language concepts like tone, theme and subject matter as an encoding scheme. Suppose you have 4 tones, 4 themes and 12 subject matters. One of each is chosen for each sentence. An appropriate and meaningful (with respect to the rest of the cover conversation) sentence is chosen that contains the tone, theme, and subject matter, and is spoken/written. The listener decodes the message by identifying the tone, theme and subject matter, and doing a mental lookup (among 4\*4\*12 possibilities) of the encoded message. Then they repeat the process for their response. Adding gestures as modifier keys would allow increasing the set of possible messages further.
Since you don't want to use pre-defined messages (though with a large enough number that could be pretty powerful), instead of encoding messages, you could encode elements from the vocabulary. So each word in the hidden language corresponds to a set of sentences (tone, theme, and subject matter) in the cover language. The downside with this is that you need roughly a paragraph in the cover language per sentence in the hidden language.
[Answer]
I think you overestimate the complexity of medieval cryptography -- a [Vigenère cipher](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigen%C3%A8re_cipher), for instance, was still rather "high-grade" at the time yet for someone well-versed in its use would require nothing more than a single piece of parchment, if even that much1 -- but no matter. We'll run with your list of requirements, because there's a very interesting answer: [steganography](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography).
In our modern digital age, you may think of steganography as the black art of hiding a secret message within the "noise" of a digital photo, for instance, but it's far older than that. One of the oldest forms of steganography, and perhaps most useful to your requirements, is using a predetermined method of encoding to embed a secret message within a paragraph (or more) of innocuous text. For instance, your message might be comprised of every 10th word, while the rest is literally just filler intended to mask its very presence. More complex examples rely on using a cover with windows cut into it in random places, concealing the innocuous text and revealing only the text relevant to the secret message. This gives you the ability to send your secret messages without even revealing that you're sending a secret message at all, giving you [absolute deniability](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption) should you be caught. You could even employ an encoding scheme such that rather than individual words, you hide particular letters (3rd letter of each 5th word), which could themselves form a Vigenere cipher of your actual message. While quite difficult, this could even be used in spoken language, though the encoding would necessarily have to be relatively simplistic to be able to be deciphered that quickly.
This doesn't (necessarily) give you the appearance of being a new language, however. (Not unless your innocuous text is itself something else.) For that, what you want is either an obscure, real language (see e.g. [code-talkers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker)) that your secret society could use for their purposes, or else they need to devise their own [constructed language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language) (which is often offered as one possible explanation for the mysterious Voynich manuscript, for instance). You could even go one better and encode the written form in [its own alphabet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theban_alphabet), for that extra little bit of mysteriousness, though someone who can see and hear both forms of the same message would likely be able to quickly decipher the alphabet (unless you deliberate obfuscate the sounds somehow).
This is really your best bet for meeting all your requirements: A constructed or obscure language used solely for the purpose of communicating esoterically with other members of your secret society. Most likely you wouldn't need to devise as rich a language as e.g. English, just come up with the syntax and vocabulary for the most basic forms of communication, and revert to another common tongue in the few instances where it actually becomes necessary.
There is one more very interesting option: A substitution cipher specifically designed to encode a well-known language (e.g. English) into something that merely looks like another language, crafted in such a way as to remain readable. A lot of [online "language generators"](http://fantasynamegenerators.com/language-generator.php#.VH4Dk1fF8hk) employ a scheme like this, and it's frankly amazing how easily the results could actually be read aloud if one wanted to. At its most basic, this involves enciphering one vowel as another, and one consonant as another; it could be made more complex by using a different key (a la Vigenere) on a per-word basis (rather than per-letter as in Vigenere), though this risks destroying the ability to effectively speak it.
---
1 I used to be super gung-ho into secret messages, and -- albeit with effort -- I could read even complex substitution ciphers like Vigenere (though I didn't know the term at the time) almost as if they were their plain-text equivalents. This required, however, being not only familiar with the method, but having used the same key repeatedly -- which may in fact be the case for a secret society, even though each re-use of the same dramatically increases the likelihood that it will be deciphered by your enemies.
[Answer]
I just realized that I missed a perfect example of what you want - Cockney Rhyming Slang.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang>
You can see it in action in the film "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" (the bit in the pub where they start subtitling it) and there are other examples around. Unless you speak it you've got no chance of following it though...even if you know the base language (in this case English).
[Answer]
There were real life secret languages used in medieval times described as a [Thieves' Cant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves%27_cant). The fun part about such a language was that it could be spoken openly and an observer would believe they understood every word and it all made sense. But those who spoke this secret language would get the second, hidden meaning as well. Though this link lists the languages as being dead long ago, I understand that carnival workers speak in a similar fashion even today.
[Answer]
It won't help you with speaking, but for written you can use [steganography](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography).
For example agree that every 7th letter of a document is important, and then write an innocuous message - however by reading only every 7th letter you get a completely different message (the real one).
Real systems tend to be more sophisticated, choosing letters in a certain sequence or even varying the sequence of letters based on various rules. The important thing is that both ends of the communication agree on the rules and are able to write a long enough message that the coded message can be embedded into it.
For speech your options are limited, essentially you need to learn (or invent) an entirely new language that no-one else around you knows or have extremely smart conspirators able to embed messages into normal speech and perform the steganography in real time.
[Answer]
One approach was employed in a Sherlock Holmes novel (I can't recall which one). The key was that the real message was only every third word. So the message:
```
We are discovered. Run for your life.
```
Could be encoded as
```
We found they are wealthy and discovered their gold.
Run tested them for value and your future wealthy life.
```
The message looks like a cryptic report of something completely different, and hopefully will send any spy who intercepts the message off on a wild goose chase trying to find out who "Run" is and figure out where all this gold is hidden.
[Answer]
## Make up one
If you want a language that is both spoken and written and general purpose and without apparatus and ununderstandable by others - then that's not an encryption, that's a new language. So people make a new language. It's something can definitely be done, especially if the authors are well educated in many existing languages and their concepts and if there's sufficient motivation to keep it alive.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages> lists many examples, including Esperanto, Klingon, etc. They generally start at 1800ies, but there's really nothing that would prevent similar languages from being created in 1350. The very first example, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol> is very interesting concept.
The main problem is the lack of vocabulary - if you can't piggyback on existing common languages (like Esperanto did) since those words would be recognizable, then it's hard to define words for new concepts when building the language and communicate those words throughout the community; also this doesn't "encrypt" proper names of people, locations, etc - and just those names alone may give up too much of a conversation's secrecy.
[Answer]
Your context makes it sound to me that you're asking about a secret cipher, not an actual language. (A secret language could actually be do-able with not much fuss; just use an existing language, unrelated to most widely used ones, with a relatively isolated speaker base, like Catalan or Estonian. This would be most practical if most/all of your recruits come from that ethnic grouping.)
As others have mentioned, though, ciphers are totally workable. You could also introduce jargon and code-words to refer to significant things or people, like 'squid' for the King of England. Hand signals for in-person communication would be another way to use ciphers, though the learning curve would be longer for more complex codes. If your society is trade-based (i.e., masons or soldiers), there might even be existing codes and jargon you can appropriate from that profession.
[Answer]
Since you are open to using magic, use it. A simple magical item used in initiations that imprints in the mind an obscure dead language, possibly found from some ruin or given by a mysterious figure or suggesting that society actually unusually has a history much longer than it claims... As a bonus an imprinted language might be more difficult to teach to outsiders (if for example no related languages are known) and the item might imprint vaguely defined "other stuff".
Seriously, a code that looks like a real language would be more complex to learn and use than an actual language. Constructing artificial languages is actually more complex than you'd think and generally requires linguistics far beyond medieval level. Using an actual language is just so much more practical.
[Answer]
I remember a book I read several years ago now, involving the Voynich manuscript. The basis was it was not decodable in any way - until a university student who happens to know symbols of another ancient language reads it, and finds two of these symbols. The passage between the two is the secret message, also written in this language.
Now, while that doesn't quite meet your requirements, it can be modified: instead of symbols you can just use standard letters but organise a start code (think DNA and start/stop codons). So, whenever a member of this organisation reads the letter sequence `ABCDE`, they would know that the message is between that and the next instance of it (or a different stop string, for example `WXYZ`).
Obviously, to increase the security you can use a basic cipher. Consider that at this time, basic ciphers of today were considered advanced, and while a basic Caesar cipher might be a little too basic, a Vigenére might meet the needs. If you want even more security, you can combine ideas from every answer: the start/stop strings, encipherment, and steganography (every $n + 2$ word).
In this way, messages can be distributed as text without fear of being read because you have to know several things before you can decode them. Let's try an example:
```
OJENF EIRYF WIRHUWBWUD WRIHWGWWD
UEHYDYWBW **ABCDE** IFMMP ISRBWUR IPX
WRIHGDIYWD BSF SUDB ZPV **WXYZ** HOEFF
ISHFGIWOWDB IHSFWWODBD
```
Applying the techniques described, try to decode that. It's easy if you know, hard if you don't.
>
> - `ABCDE` is the start sequence, `WXYZ` is stop
>
> - Every second word within the block (starting with the first) is part of the message
>
> - The cipher is a simple Caesar +1 cipher
>
> - Encoded message: `IFMMP IPX BSF ZPV`
>
> - Decoded message: `HELLO HOW ARE YOU`
>
>
>
[Answer]
**The ancient founders of your society spoke Etruscan, which has survived as the language of the secret society.**
Coptic represents a real world version sort of thing I am thinking of
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_alphabet>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CaMkN.png)
>
> The Coptic alphabet has a long history, going back to the Hellenistic
> period, of using the Greek alphabet to transcribe Demotic texts, with
> the aim of recording the correct pronunciation of Demotic. During the
> first two centuries of the Common Era, an entire series of magical
> texts were written in what scholars term Old Coptic, Egyptian language
> texts written in the Greek alphabet... With the spread of Christianity in Egypt, by
> the late 3rd century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost, as
> well as Demotic slightly later, making way for a writing system more
> closely associated with the Christian church...Coptic is not generally used
> today except by the members of the Coptic Orthodox Church of
> Alexandria to write their religious texts.
>
>
>
One could also refer to this sort of thing (and Coptic particularly) as a liturgical language. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_language>
>
> A sacred language is often the language which was spoken and written
> in the society in which a religion's sacred texts were first set down;
> however, these texts thereafter become fixed and holy, remaining
> frozen and immune to later linguistic developments. Once a language
> becomes associated with religious worship, its believers may ascribe
> virtues to the language of worship that they would not give to their
> native tongues
>
>
>
Your language can be that of the original magicians who founded the secret society. Yours is a European group; you could use a Celtic language like Manx or Cornish. Better, though, is to have it be the language of people who were superseded by those who spoke Indo-European languages. The Basque language is the sole survivor of these ancient European languages. But there were others. I propose you use **Etruscan**.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_language>
>
> Etruscan was traditionally considered to be a language isolate. In the
> first century BC, the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus
> stated that the Etruscan language was unlike any other. Giuliano
> Bonfante, a leading scholar in the field, argued in 1990 that "it
> resembles no other language in Europe or elsewhere".
>
>
>
The Etruscan sorcerers who founded your ancient society kept their language for communication among themselves and for their writings. The ordinary Etruscans and their culture and language were absorbed and supplanted by the Romans. You can attribute or build all sorts of things around the Etruscans. In fact there is already a lot out there! <http://www.mysteriousetruscans.com/history.html>
.
[Answer]
There is a much simpler approach then creating a whole new language (which would instantly identify its user as a foreigner and not to be trused!) which is to do exactly people have always done when they want to talk to each other about stuff they know about but still keep their secrets secure. And that is to use jargon.
Note that your list of candidates would not include engineers or professors, but would include craftsmen and guildsmen who would be familiar with jargon from their own spheres of influence.
[Answer]
I read an old and somewhat crank-oriented book on this exact topic some years ago that suggested that the watermarks used by early paper makers contained their own hidden symbolic language that then infuses myth, story and of course secret societies down the ages.
Now I wouldn't like to make any claims for the veracity of this, but as an idea concealing information in a symbolic language of watermarks would be a great way of conveying hidden messages right under the noses of whoever was reading the text on the paper. If the language itself is too simple, then perhaps the symbols could offer a key to a knowledgeable viewer - if the symbol is a hand in the bottom left corner, then every fourth letter reveals the hidden message and so on. This is a halfway point between hidden language and steganography.
You might also consider different types of communication - a sign language maybe ( see David Edding's Belgariad series for a good example of a secret -except all the main characters seem to know it - sign language ) or something based on rhythm like morse code. This is intriguing because it can be conveyed in writing, through light flashes or through tapping a pattern on a surface. You could actually use regular language with a pattern of emphasis that reflects a rhythmic cipher, or write poetry and songs that do so meaning that a competent bard or pamphleteer could be conveying hidden information to many people without the vast majority of their audience being aware of it.
[Answer]
I don't believe this MS-408 to be a Medieval document. So bare with me as I provide the evidence and code for you would be Voynich decoders in Python. First of all Rich SantoColoma's presentation to the NSA is very convincing for Wilfrid as the Author.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4hDyC.jpg)
<https://youtu.be/qDTVEz6rXMQ>
Here is my method for decoding the Voynich Manuscript:
Process I use to obtain Italian words
I'm working very hard right now to translate f1r from VMS vords to Morse to Italian no easy feat, yet it is producing a narrative.
I have made a few mistakes for the f2v and the eva is from Renz's site as it just represents the glyphs. I was using word and the formatting changed sorry about that. My cipher should expect erroneous errors in the beginning stages. I sort of rushed this out. But I will refine it.
You can find an update of my cipher at Voynichman:
<http://voynichman.freeforums.net/thread/39/voynich-morse-code-stenography-cipher>
Helllo
The process for “Voynich Morse code Steganography Cipher” goes like this:
1) The glyphs from a vord which are summed up to the associated Morse code in my cipher I produced as dots and dashes. For instance VMS vord (oe = 3 dots and 2 dashes so the Italian word is equal to, "ce -.-. ." which translates to "there, here or us" in English
2) Take the sum of the Morse code and look for meanings from Italian words. This is tricky, but you will only find a small amount of Italian words per vord unless their size is longer, but it’s better than a substitution cipher which I no longer believe it to be. Here is the code in python for translating Morse to any language. Yes the code has a built in anagram solver. Yes you need to cherry pick Italian words to the narrative albeit if a 1000 programmers and would decoders used this process some of the output would find the same, but I don't know the stats. As it stands it’s all about the input from the totals of dots and dashes. I don't know how many runs humans could do to get similar sentences. This is better suited for hard coded computers to run grammar checks in Italian for computations from Morse code arrangements using my python code along some enhanced upgraded code.
3) I envision the VMS to have for vords like "9" to be set like this in some code ( .- or - .) for the VMS to analysed, along with all the other vord from the full corpus of possibilities. That is equal to (a, or te). Then let the computer process the document and see if it outputs a high quality transcription to the Italian language.
Here is the code:
print("Author Thomas O'Neil, copyright ver 0.1,VMS Italian Steganography Morse Code to Anagrams, August 8, 2019")
# Python program to implement Morse Code Translator
'''
VARIABLE KEY
'cipher' -> 'stores the morse translated form of the english string'
'decipher' -> 'stores the english translated form of the morse string'
'citext' -> 'stores morse code of a single character'
'i' -> 'keeps count of the spaces between morse characters'
'message' -> 'stores the string to be encoded or decoded'
'''
# Dictionary representing the morse code chart
MORSE\_CODE\_DICT = { 'A':'.-', 'B':'-...',
'C':'-.-.', 'D':'-..', 'E':'.',
'F':'..-.', 'G':'--.', 'H':'....',
'I':'..', 'J':'.---', 'K':'-.-',
'L':'.-..', 'M':'--', 'N':'-.',
'O':'---', 'P':'.--.', 'Q':'--.-',
'R':'.-.', 'S':'...', 'T':'-',
'U':'..-', 'V':'...-', 'W':'.--',
'X':'-..-', 'Y':'-.--', 'Z':'--..',
'1':'.----', '2':'..---', '3':'...--',
'4':'....-', '5':'.....', '6':'-....',
'7':'--...', '8':'---..', '9':'----.',
'0':'-----', ', ':'--..--', '.':'.-.-.-',
'?':'..--..', '/':'-..-.', '-':'-....-',
'(':'-.--.', ')':'-.--.-',}
# Function to encrypt the string
# according to the morse code chart
def encrypt(message):
cipher = ''
for letter in message:
if letter != ' ':
```
# Looks up the dictionary and adds the
# correspponding morse code
# along with a space to separate
# morse codes for different characters
cipher += MORSE_CODE_DICT[letter] + ' '
else:
# 1 space indicates different characters
# and 2 indicates different words
cipher += ' '
return cipher
```
# Function to decrypt the string
# from morse to english
def decrypt(message):
```
# extra space added at the end to access the
# last morse code
message += ' '
decipher = ''
citext = ''
for letter in message:
# checks for space
if (letter != ' '):
# counter to keep track of space
i = 0
# storing morse code of a single character
citext += letter
# in case of space
else:
# if i = 1 that indicates a new character
i += 1
# if i = 2 that indicates a new word
if i == 2 :
# adding space to separate words
decipher += ' '
else:
# accessing the keys using their values (reverse of encryption)
decipher += list(MORSE_CODE_DICT.keys())[list(MORSE_CODE_DICT
.values()).index(citext)]
citext = ''
return decipher
```
def anagrams(word):
""" Generate all of the anagrams of a word. """
if len(word) < 2:
yield word
else:
for z, letter in enumerate(word):
if not letter in word[:z]: #avoid duplicating earlier words
for j in anagrams(word[:z]+word[z+1:]):
yield j+letter
# Hard-coded driver function to run the program
while True:
def main():
```
message = input ("Type in Morse Code to output anagrams!: ")
result = decrypt(message)
print (result)
return result # return result
for i in anagrams(main()):
print (i)
```
# Executes the main function
if **name** == '**main**':
main()
] |
[Question]
[
Question speaks for itself.
If you had an immortal (thinking God-Emperor Leto style), would language change? Assuming an immortal presence in society holding a high (or multiple high) positions of authority, I'd assume that language would not change as drastically as it could naturally.
[Answer]
Language naturally evolves, in the absence of forces that prevent it doing so. But there are cases where forces, such as national institutions that manage language, with strong government support, do indeed impede its evolution.
The classic example on Earth is Icelandic. Because of concerted efforts over the centuries, there is much less difference between the Icelandic of the middle ages and that of today, compared to most other European languages. (See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_Icelandic> )
Two other examples that come to mind are Hebrew and classical Latin, as practiced by their religions. The Latin that is used by the Catholic church today is the same as it was in the first few centuries AD, even as "street Latin" evolved into the Romance languages. Meanwhile, Hebrew completely died out as a spoken language, but was revived from its written texts.
What these examples have in common is a strong central authority invested in keeping the language from changing. If your immortal autocratc wants this to be the case, and invests in the structures to prevent language drift, I don't think it's far-fetched that language drift could be minimal over long periods of time.
[Answer]
Language would still change.
* There would still be technological changes. Make emperor Augustus immortal, today he would still app his courtesans. That wouldn't be something classical Latin can describe ==> language change
* There would be trade with new countries. Again Augustus, have him eat corn or tomatoes, how would he call them? ==> language change
* If there are other mortals, their language will change. Augustus could not speak to us with the same Latin he used in 16 d.c. ==> language change
[Answer]
It's likely that the language of the mortals will over time *diverge* from the language of the god emperors. It will evolve into its own dialect and eventually its own language, because of all the reasons that languages in large societies evolve.
The language which the immortals speak will evolve as well. The speed of change will depend on the degree of isolation the immortals maintain (assuming there is a group, a community of immortals). There is ample evidence that the language spoken by small, isolated communities evolves much slower.
In this case the language of the immortals may take on the roles of Hebrew and Sanskrit in Judaism and Hinduism respectively: A language widely taught for religious or at least ritual purposes, which is the form of interaction with immortals; but not spoken in that form in everyday life, because it is too complicated, does not fit modern requirements, and because the language of the mortals simply evolved in the way languages evolve.
But still, the language of the immortals stays a spoken language, not a static text. Even the minds of immortals evolve. The circumstances will change as well. With them will change their language. I certainly speak differently than I did a decade ago. I notice how I pick up mannerisms and idiosyncrasies from people I meet: Using the same terms improves communication, they are cool, they apply well to a new situation etc. The languages of mortals and immortals will also co-evolve: The interaction between mortals and immortals is not a one-way street. But the language of the immortals will still evolve slower than the language of the mortals, not least because, as John remarked in a comment, young people are a driving force for change, also in language.
[Answer]
It all depends. As an author you can choose either way. A number of related questions:
New inventions and new phenomena will require new words. This is inevitable. But how much change is there in this society? That is up to the author. There is also possible to make old words have new meanings. ("to google" vs "to search the net")
Does the immortal themself want to appear to be *one of the people*. This will lead to them adopting the changes that occur naturally. If they want to appear *above the people* they will try to keep their language unchanged, and mostly succeed.
Is there TV or some other way for the immortal to speak to the people? And will they listen? This will contribute to keeping the popular language close to theirs.
Does people in general *like* and want to emulate the immortal? This will give stability. *Or* does people like the idea that the upper class doesn't understand them? This gives change, like cockney.
In general, how large is the differences between the classes? Large differences and strict separations lead to separate languages. The immortal will then only influence the upper class.
Religion can play a big part. If there is a strong church with the immortal either in charge or worshiped, or both, the clergy will speak like the boss does, unchanging throughout the ages. It is not a given that the populace will follow the clergy in this, but it could happen.
In short, make it up as you go along and nobody can tell you different. It is *your* world.
[Answer]
If the immortal is a true God (omniscient, perfected Being), there would be no reason to change the language other than for aesthetic variety, any language created by such a God already being perfect in all functional aspects.
[Answer]
Language would change the same. Your immortals at the top might still speak the ancient, classical form, and their administrators might understand it just as British Empire civil servants all had fluent Latin and Greek back in the day. But the people on the streets would still speak their fast-evolving urban slang incomprehensible to the old ones.
[Answer]
It would depend on what percentage of the population are immortal. If, say, half were immortal it would likely diminish the rate at which language would change. The phrasing of your question, though, leaves me with the impression that immortals would be an elite few. In this case I would expect the language to split into a conventional path, where the majority speak an evolving language, and a more isolated path, where the immortals use among themselves the language they learned as children with fewer changes from the original. (They would likely speak common as well, unless they chose to isolate themselves from mortals with translators.) After a few centuries, the more static version might become regarded as arcane or as a status symbol, and would at least be a sort of "secret code" they could use in public.
[Answer]
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, set in German occupied WWII Greece, has a hilarious character - not precisely immortal, but a British Secret Service agent.
Having been a public school boy, and a Classics scholar at Oxford or Cambridge, he drifted into his Secret Service role because of his ... fluency in Greek.
Unfortunately for him, Greek had changed in the last 2000 years, so, while (with an effort) the locals could just about understand him, and vice-versa, there was no way he could pass muster as a natural Greek speaker. This made him spectacularly useless as a spy. He had to remain as a practically mute shepherd living alone in the hills, while the locals pretended there was nothing out of the ordinary about this, to avoid blowing his cover in the face of the occupying army.
[Answer]
Consider this: do you use the same words you did years ago? (And I'm referring to more than just slang or colloquialisms.)
I mention this because over the last few decades I've noticed some phrases & words have fallen out of favor while others have come into common use. For example, "impact" has all but replaced "effect" (viz., "The news had a negative impact" instead of "The news had a negative effet"). And I'm amazed at how "Wait, what?" has come from nowhere to become ubiquitous. (I think the word people used to use in its place was "Huh?")
One factor in language evolution is that at various times languages change radically, while for long periods of time they change very slowly. As difficult as modern native English speakers may find reading Shakespeare or his contemporaries, if you look at literature written a few hundred years before that, English (or more properly Middle English) becomes a foreign language, with a different vocabulary & rules of grammar. Even Shakespeare's contemporaries had as much trouble understanding Middle English as we. (The poet Spencer misunderstood Middle English, & his attempt to write in Middle English comes across as at best an affected archaism, & at worst badly spelled Modern English!) The reasons for these sudden shifts is that the elite, who set the norms for usage & are conservative in changing these norms, isolated themselves from the mainstream, allowing the majority of speakers to radically change these norms. An example of this is the who/whom distinction, which has been dying for centuries. (Defoe, writing in the 18th century, frequently uses "who" as the object instead of "whom".) This would mean your immortals would speak an old-fashioned version of the language, although not as out-of-date as say Chaucer. maybe not even as out-of-date as Shakespeare or the King James Bible.
In short, language always changes, often too slowly for us to notice without paying attention. But with immortals around, interacting with the rest of us in daily life, there would be little opportunity for a sudden language shift.
] |
[Question]
[
As a follow on from [Destruction by design - how best to go about crafting a ruined landscape?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96476/destruction-by-design-how-best-to-go-about-crafting-a-ruined-landscape) I'll be asking two questions about signature destructive patterns, this is the first:
How, if at all, does deliberate destruction, such as the [slighting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slighting) of a fortress, the reformation era [Dissolution of the Monasteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Monasteries), or the modern [demolition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition) of buildings to make way for new construction, leave a long-lasting signature such that an observer viewing only centuries old ruins could tell that the results were deliberate rather than the simple result of time?
This question assumes that destruction of the building(s) in question is incomplete, otherwise there are no ruins to look at at all, and that the majority of the building material is still on site in one form or another. Good answers should concentrate on the relative distribution of such material, what's still standing and where the material from destroyed structural elements is to highlight any signature differences that could be diagnostic for an observer who knew nothing about the site history. Obviously there will be differences depending on the construction materials and techniques, these should also be highlighted where appropriate/diagnostically important.
Assume the building(s) were 50% destroyed before the site was abandoned and that the site is roughly 200 years post-abandonment to simplify issues of material degradation rather than answers being awkwardly time dependent.
[Answer]
In a deliberately destroyed building the roof would probably be gone immediately. In an abandoned building the roof would probably (depending on construction), survive for many years even decades. This would have an effect on the pattern of debris.
In a deliberately destroyed building the debris on the floor would consist of roofing materials, wall materials and fittings spread in an uneven layer on top of which after 200 years would be a layer of organic material, and detritus with much less building material.
In an abandoned building the debris on the floor would show a different pattern. Organic material and detritus would be present throughout debris stack and there would be more roofing material at the bottom of the stack and more bricks at the top.
The destruction would also likely show a pattern. Certain parts of the building would be vulnerable such as wooden frames, junctions and angles on roofing and previously damaged areas. Collapse would be from these areas and would spread out towards the other areas. So certain parts of walls such as corners and junctions would be expected to last longer as they have greater support.
In a deliberately destroyed building there would likely be signs of violence if you looked closely enough. For example if a battering ram or demolition ball had been used the impacts would likely leave a tell-tale marks on surviving brickwork and crush marks on wood and tear and twist damage on metal fitments to a much greater extent than in an abandoned building. Wall junction areas that had been knocked off their foundations at a low level would be a clear sign of demolition.
The pattern of collapse of walls would also be different in a deliberately destroyed building most of the walls would probably be knocked in, where as in an abandoned building some walls might fall outwards.
The size of the pieces of rubble might also give a clue. In a deliberately destroyed building there might be a greater number of smaller pieces and single bricks scattered. Where as in an abandoned building large parts of walls might collapse relatively intact. Not definitive but indicative.
In a deliberately destroyed building there might also be signs of fire damage, much less likely in an abandoned building and possibly crushed bricks pushed into the surface of the earth at a deeper level than might be expected where heavy equipment had passed through.
All of this is a little bit dependent on the “50% destroyed before abandonment” restriction which makes life a bit difficult. How was the 50% destroyed before abandonment? Nevertheless if you looked hard enough you should be able to tell. A structural engineer and an archaeologist would be useful companions to help with the identification.
[Answer]
Very crude rule: Decay damage tends to be top down while deliberate damage tends to be bottom up. I.e., in the case of simple wear the uppermost part is visibly more damaged than the bottom, while in the case of an assault, the damage in the first 4-6 metres from ground level is more pronounced.
There are major exceptions, e.g. floods, but it is a good enough rule
[Answer]
Consider that if a medieval style building were left abandoned, decay would leave it looking a certain way after a few centuries. As the timbers acting as the support structure for the buildings rot, ceiling, and walls may begin to collapse.
Similarly, ramparts and walls would slowly erode, with stones probably crumbling as the mortar holding them starts to go. Imagine the tops of walls slowly coming down, with maybe some entire sections crumbling.
However, battle damage would leave signs which should be noticeable even centuries later. For example, a wall that is otherwise standing, may well have a hole punched right through it. Buildings may exhibit signs of a great fire (melted metal structure supports, blackened timbers/stones, and even show evidence of stone having become molten).
Last but not least, finding large numbers of human remains, broken weapons, etc. just under the surface, or in long abandoned basements/rooms would be a surefire sign that the place wasn't simply abandoned to the ravages of time.
[Answer]
I can only speak about modern demolition since that is all I have experience with, but there are certainly signs that will be lasting.
1. Thick metal supports are twisted, pinched, and cut by grapples, pulverizers, and shears. If any of these supports remain uncovered/visible, it will be fairly obvious that natural processes did not cause their deformation.
2. The rubble from a professionally demolished building is typically very orderly. As the big machines are tearing a building apart, smaller bulldozers and trucks promptly separate the rubble into piles that are some distance from the building. This is to allow for proper disposal or recycling of different materials, and gets it all out of the way of the bigger machines. If your archaeologists notice a strange grouping of rubble that doesn't seem to relate to the organization of the structure, it was probably demolished.
3. Demolition happens top-down. Sometimes a tall building will still have perfectly intact windows on the bottom floor until the crew removes every floor above it. Generally they try to avoid doing any structural damage below the level they are working on to avoid cascading damage that will make their work more difficult or endanger a worker/machine. If for some reason the building was left only partially demolished, your archaeologists would find strangely intact lower floors compared to completely obliterated upper floors.
All of that said, I find it hard to imagine a real-world scenario where a multitude of buildings were abandoned half-way through a demolition. The process is fairly fast, and, more likely than not, there will be surrounding buildings that weren't demolished that will make the halfway demolished buildings quite conspicuous.
[Answer]
Tool marks would be a relatively easy and obvious place to start. Modern archaeologists studying relics and environments from as far back as the stone age have been able to determine what was naturally made and what was human-crafted by the witness marks left by tools.
If you knock down a concrete building with a backhoe, the metal will leave gouges and unnatural edges in the material that wouldn't normally result from a simple structural collapse. Demolition by explosives (whether weapons or simply controlled deconstruction) would leave chemical traces, alter the crystal structure of the material (e.g. glassification, where a material is partially melted by the blast), and would produce a fragmentation pattern that can be perceived by archaeological methods. Even the debris pattern produced by a non-explosive collapse could be walked backward to give a rough idea of how a structure fell, allowing educated guesses to be made as to the cause.
However it's important to consider the effects of time on your structures, and the natural weather-resistance of their materials. A wooden structure that was blown apart will rot away to nothing in a hundred years, and there won't be much left to examine. A steel structure will endure longer, unless the environment is particularly corrosive. Stone and concrete will endure the longest due to their mass and resistance to corrosion (except maybe acid rain), and as such will be the most likely to preserve evidence of their untimely demise.
[Answer]
In the case of demolition, it's easy: if a building naturally decays, the most significant force acting on it will be gravity, and that's going to pull material straight down. You're going to find the debris pretty much right below where it had originally been, and attachments will show signs of having weakened considerably before failing. If the building was intentionally demolished (non-explosive), then debris is going to be away from the building as the demolition crew pulls material as they work. Attachments are going to show distortion from being forced apart rather than failing. In the case of explosive demolition, even if it's a gravity collapse, there's going to be signs of the shearing of structural elements due to the explosives cutting through.
] |
[Question]
[
Consider a space opera sort of universe in which there exist communities of water-dwelling humanoids. These ocean people are derived from rootstock humans, descendants of genetically engineered human-variants who pioneered the colonisation of water worlds, or of Earth’s oceans. They may live their entire lives without setting foot on land or contacting the open air above the surface.
We set aside the technical complications of actually performing the handwavery of genetic engineering for the moment. This question concerns how it still appears rather difficult to justify the existence of the ocean people: in most cases, it tends to seem much easier to first construct closed environments, fill those with air, put usual humans in them and work from there.
*What good reasons might there be for undertaking a project that would result in engineered humans adopted for survival underwater?*
Potentially relevant constraint: despite the setting being futuristic in tone, introducing alternative history (perhaps some events that end up causing biotechnology to have developed comparatively faster, or cultural developments that change the way people evaluate different strategies of space colonisation?) is also an open option. Neither does the original goal of the project have to specifically be space colonisation; this question only asks for some combination of circumstances to exist at some point such that building a race of merfolk would be something that would reasonably be done.
[Answer]
**1. Science/because we can**
The main reason we haven't already tried that in real life is moral. It is considered wrong to alter the human DNA. Remove that moral bias and there is no reason why scientists would *not* try to create humans that can live under water or fly or have scales and are super strong...
And that is the problem with that reason. You ether get a lot of "collateral" races or have to think of a reason why science created aquatic humans and only aquatic humans.
**2. War/Stability**
Building a structure and filling it with air means to depend on that (rather inflexible) structure. If war or other external threats (like earthquakes, volcanoes) threaten to damage or destroy your structures, being aquatic makes you more flexible and adaptable. Also if you want to attack an aquatic enemy it pays to be aquatic as well.
**3. It's cheaper in the long run**
Constructing a bio-dome may be cheaper than bio-engineering aquatic humans, but building thousands of bio-domes isn't. If you use bio-domes to colonize the universe, you have to build (at least) one for every outpost. If you bio-engineer aquatic humans, you only have to do it once and wait for them to reproduce.
**4. We didn't mean to!**
There is always the possibility of an accident. For instance, a gene-splicing-virus that was meant to cure a minor disease like cancer or something, but the intern made a typo and now we have 10.000 people who suddenly need water instead of air to breathe. We're lucky that they didn't die. Turning them back is far to risky, since we don't exactly know what went wrong, so we can only offer them a nice, watery habitat and hope they won't sue us.
[Answer]
# Earth-like planets are mostly covered by water
If we assume that humans have the best opportunities to survive on planets as "earth-like" as possible, the majority of their surfaces will be covered by water. Humans who have been genetically modified to be amphibians, able to survive underwater and still breathe air, will be able to live on most of the surface area of such planets (excepting active volcanoes and brutally-cold regions such as the Antarctic interior, and even there with proper habitat modules people can survive).
People who can live underwater don't have to worry about having their homes destroyed by hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., and probably much less vulnerability to earthquakes, as underwater structures can be designed to freely move rather than be firmly attached to the ocean floor. Eventually, people could decide it's not worth it to invest in building all those shelters on dry land that are subject to the different kinds of destruction.
[Answer]
### For science - just to see whether we can really do it or not
Making an air filled habitat for normal humans is boring. That would probably work if your technology is on a level like the one you described. But engineering a new race of humans that could live underwater without the need for such a special habitat? That sounds like an interesting project!
Humans are curious. Very curious. Finding out how such a race would develop would be incredibly interesting for most scientists. Just to see how evolution might progress with a certain set of differences introduced, like the ability to live underwater without any need for other structures.
It's also safer because the supporting structures cannot be destroyed - after all there are no such structures.
But the overall point is: **People do things because they are interesting. We are very curious. Testing our limits and trying to go beyond is in our nature.** To learn how this race would behave and how they would evolve over time and to to get new insights they might not get from normal humans adapting to a new environment would be more than enough reason to genetically engineer such a race.
[Answer]
We humans are a romantic people. We don’t want to merely survive on a world, we want to *belong*, we want to experience it, to be a part of it. What is the point of living on an ocean world in a pressurized tin can? We might as well be in a space station in orbit. No, we want to live *in* our world. To taste the oceans, feel the water on our skin, and get carried away by currents. We want to touch alien life with our own hands and hear it with our own ears. Why travel to some new, exotic, and far-away place to merely recreate the same environment we left? Especially when instead we can change ourselves to adapt and coexist with what nature has created.
When our options are to destroy and disrupt in the name of practicality versus creating a new human experience the choice seems clear.
[Answer]
Note the existence of CRISPR today, and add in technological advances sufficient for spaceflight; I don't see practical barriers to engineered humans, only social ones.
Now imagine a wild-west, under-policed period of expansion. Bad things happen on the frontier.
So, along comes a rich fella with a mermaid fetish. His motives are base, but who's going to stop him?
[Answer]
To aid space station habitation.
If a space station is filled with water, and not air, then humans can propel themselves by swimming. Air doesn't provide enough resistance, so an air-breathing astronaut can get stuck in the space station. Having that resistance also provides astronauts with exercise. Micro-gravity causes muscles to atrophy, so astronauts need extra exercise.
Water also serves as a radiation shield. Its density absorbs energy better than air does, so there is less radiation exposure.
It would cost more fuel to launch water into space over air, but in the case of a station not landing or launching from a planet, weight becomes a moot issue.
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**Fault Tolerance**
If you rely an external, high-tech tools to allow you to survive underwater, then you will have to maintain those tools. If the life support system fails. you are screwed. If the power goes out, you are screwed. Regardless of the expense incurred in maintaining a habitat that isolates you from the natural environment, *are you willing to bet that you can maintain 100% uptime forever?*
If you're not, it makes sense to tweak the people so that they can survive when their technology fails. And if they can survive when the technology fails, it makes sense to then skip the expense and just ditch the technology.
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Surviving problems and living space.
If you accept modifying humans it would be desirable to make them survivable in whatever environment they live. In a bubble city potential catastrophe is always just outside, in a mercity patching a leaky roof is probably not much more than an energy efficiency concern rather than an existential threat to the community.
I can pitch a tent to expand my living space or as temporary living space during repairs to my main dwelling. A temporary part of a bubble city would be nearly as expensive as the main thing. Outside my dwelling I can work all day fetching tools and food from inside as needed with little hassle using the same techniques as I learned in childhood and have practiced in daily life: using a hammer inside or outside a bubble would be completely different tasks.
Keeping or expanding a bubble is hard work. Living in the environment you where made for is easy: If humans were meant to live underwater they would have been born with gills and flippers.
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Science aided evolution.
Who wouldn't like the ability to breathe under water? Hooray, now you can have it! What, you liked it so much down there, you don't want to go up? Ok, there is more work to do, but now staying underwater indefinitely won't affect your health. And look, there are other people here, just like you! Check out this girl, she is stunning! Didn't you always think that mermaid's tail is more attractive than legs?
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### Genetic modification is more versatile
When traipsing about planets looking for someplace useful to colonize, you never know what sort of hazards could be encountered until you get there. Maybe the planet is too hot for humans, but maybe it's too cold. Maybe there's no land, or the atmosphere is very thin. There are various ways an environment could be hostile to humans. Now, an enclosed system capable of supporting human life regardless of external conditions might be possible, but it would be bulky and heavy, and potentially very complex; difficult to transport or construct as-needed, especially if the mission plan was for a single vessel to colonize many planets during a long journey. On the other hand, if Genetic Engineering is capable of creating humans which can naturally survive in those hostile environments, then only the fixed hardware required to perform that genetic engineering en-route is needed for any number of colonizations.
For a mass colonization project, it's simply more efficient to adjust the colonists once you have more information than to carry along all the hardware needed to keep a single type of colonist thriving on a huge number of vastly different worlds.
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Boredom. Technology takes away all meaning from some peoples lives, and they decide they want to experience something new, namely living as mer-people on an ocean world.
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I came up with two things:
1st:
There are some environmental changes which make it almost impossible to build on the ground.
For example quite fast tectonic activity which changes the ground rapidly so buildings would be destryed by nature within days.
Another environmental factor could be currents which make it very hard to build something.
2nd:
As sad as it is, war was allways a main cause of inventions.
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An army living under water could be a strategic benefit. (But amphibic people would be more useful than those needing water all the time).
Some sort of underwater mining could be a reason, but it is unlikely to be worth the effort.
A compelling reason would be the upcoming impossibility to live on ground, but a remaining possibility to live under water.
Artificial air bubbles are a bad choice, as they are damageable, small, and it is very hard to set up an environment of refreshing air and food.
Imagine possibilities why mankind foreseeable cannot live on ground in near future, but still could under water.
* A nuclear war affects sea and continents, but maybe the deep sea is less affected? (I'm not sure).
* Attacks from enemies/aliens/outer space only go against grounders to conquer land, but they are not interested in the sea? (Though, maybe there is not enough time left for genetic science in this scenario).
* Some kind of poison in the air that does not get into water? (Though, water is always in exchange with air).
* Radiation from the sun burning live on ground, but filtered by salt water? (At least a reason without the need of war ...). Just increasing heat on surface could be a reason.
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You could have a future society that takes eugenics to an extreme. Everybody has a job that is determined at birth, and are bred appropriately. Farmers are bread with strong backs and a tendency to be good with plants. Warriors are bred to be strong and aggressive. engineers are bred to be mechanically inclined. This all takes place down on the genetic level.
The next step is to have someone find some aquatic resource that is impractical to obtain with subs, suits, or living in a tin can under water. Maybe it's a particular strain of deep sea kelp that produces a compound necessary for easier genetic manipulation, or something that supercharges the brain of the ruling caste. The Genetic techs work overtime for a while to breed your merfolk. For the first few generations, everything goes swimmingly. Unbeknownst to the Masters on shore, the merfolk can breed...
Because it is difficult to have interactions between a pure air breathing society and a purely aquatic society, the merfolk drift away from the rest of humanity. They may maintain trade with the air breathers, but they will eventually slip the leash, so to speak.
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It turns out that intelligent aquatic animals such as dolphins have skills that are very useful in colonizing planets.Maybe their nonverbal communication helps in interacting with alien species. Or they're good at finding new food sources. So they come along. A standard environment being desirable, it's easier to engineer humans to live in their environment than the reverse.
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**Colonization**: A deep space civilization that has evolved in their own right discover they need to flee the system for some reason. Focusing on transportation they lack the time and resources to properly prepare for terraforming or base building. The nearest viable planet is a water world, which makes the logistics of supporting a colony even more problematic. They have the tech (perhaps from curiosity or boredom as was suggested), they have the colony ships and they have the destination. All that remains is to make the genetic modifications to the colonist en route to their new home world. Better that they are able to easily access the only available food source on the planet (under water). They can always return to the surface once the colony is established.
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**because merfolk are cheaper than robots and machines can travel faster than humans**. imagine you want to colonize a planet that is 10 light-years away. first you send your generation ship, but it will take 1000 years to get there because the human body can't accelerate very fast without dying. meanwhile, you send a colonization kit at nearly light speed. it arrives in 20 years and starts building a space port for you.
unfortunately, you can't afford to send an entire space port, so you just send some robots that use the native resources to build a space port and stock it with food and other supplies. you also can't afford to send enough robots to do all the mining, smelting, constructing, farming, etc. so the first thing your robots do is build more robots. it turns out that on planets suitable for life, the most accessible resources to a tiny space probe are organic molecules. so the "robots" your probe builds are effectively tiny plants which generate the energy you need to fuel more complex machines. it then builds animals that are smart enough to build your space port. those animals are humanoid so they are easier to relate to, but they are aquatic so that when your descendants arrive they can colonize the land while the merfolk continue to live happily in the sea. indeed, you can even genetically program the merfolk to desire to build space ports but hate the idea of actually leaving the sea personally. it's like "brave new world" meets "a for andromeda"
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**Genetic Engineering is Common**
A possible reason for your universe could be that your humans are especially advanced at genetic engineering in comparison to other sciences. If your humans commonly use genetic engineering as part of every day society (designer babies, counter diseases etc.) then the idea of genetically engineering a subspecies specifically for water environments is just an extension of what they do every day.
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Its suprising no-one said **climate change**.
Climate change could easily drive us to have to live under the sea.
The climate changes, and the poles melt, and the world goes underwater ... so that's where we all need to live... there's your driver for mutation.
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In this story I'm writing, I start in a sword and sandal "age of myth" type setting, but as the centuries press on, it becomes medieval in nature. As even more time passes, there is even some steampunk influence that begins to show up.
My question is this; how long does an era last? What are the key factors in moving on from one era to the next?
(Please note that this is a fantasy world, not an alternate history earth. Like most fantasy worlds, this one draws many parallels to ours however.)
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The first major distinction is between prehistory and history. Basically, history is the timeframe for which we can (attempt to) date events with reasonably good precision and we know the names of at least some important people, usually rulers. Everything earlier is prehistory. By and large, history begins in the 3rd millenium before the common era, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, with the oldest written documents that we can read.
There is no such thing as a *universal* periodization of history; we the participants to this forum are more familiar with the periodization pertaining to the lineage of civilizations which eventually resulted in the modern western civilization (Europe, the Americas, Australia, parts of Asia, parts of Africa). This is commonly organized as follows:
* The **Antiquity**:
+ Preclassical, or deep antiquity: from the earliest document to about the 6th century before the common era.
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Major event: the **[Battle of Marathon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon)**, 490 BCE. The western world separates decisively from the Near East / Middle East.
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+ Classical period: from the 6th century before the common era to the 3rd or 4th century of the common era. This is the age of the Greek, Hellenistic and Roman civilizations; it lasted for about one thousand years.
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Major event: the **fall of the Western Roman Empire**, 476 CE. Western Europe is broken into a multitude of small and weak centers of power.
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+ Post-classical antiquity: a brief period between the classical world and the Middle Ages; roughly from the 3rd or 4th century to the 6th century of the common era. In this time the classical world mostly disintegrated and the feudal relationships specific to the Middle Ages were established. The major powers in our lineage were the (Eastern) Roman (aka Byzantine) Empire and the Persian Empire.
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Major events: the (Eastern) Roman (aka Byzantine) Empire **loses Syria and Egypt** to the Arabs. The classical world dies forever.
---
* The **[Middle Ages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages)**, from roughly the 6th or 7th to the 14th or 15th century; about 8 or 9 centuries. It covers the time span between the fall of the classical world and the rapid developments of the Renaissance.
The essential characteristics of the Middle Ages are [feudalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism) and the existence of numerous small centers of power, which were only very loosely structured in larger kingdoms or empires. Another important characteristic of the Middle Ages is that the loyalties of people were to persons and not to countries or institutions; this makes the medieval world *very different* from the classical antiquity and the modern world; please note that in a story set in the Middle Ages it makes no sense to have patriots (there is no concept of loyalty to a nation, and there is no concept of a nation as a political structure).
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Major events: **fall of Constantinople** to the Ottomans (1453), Columbus reaches the **New World** (1492), Vasco da Gama **reaches India** (1498).
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* The **[Renaissance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance)**, a short period from the 14th to the early 17th century; this is a time of rapid developments in culture, science and technology, and of geographical discoveries. This unprecedented developments resulted in the dissolution of the feudal bonds and the emergence of the modern world. The Renaissance begans asynchronously in different parts of Europe; by the late 14th century Italy was in full Renaissance mood, whereas northern regions such as England and the Germanies were still fully medieval.
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Major event: the **[30 Years War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War)**, 1618-1648. Almost western and central European states are involved.
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* The **[Modern age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history)**, usually reckoned to begin with the [Peace of Westphalia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia) which ended the 30 Years War. (Sometimes the Renaissance is subsumed as the first part of the Modern age, or as the last part of the Middle Ages.) The major characteristic of this ages is the emergence of sovereign states as the principal actors on the historical stage, and the universal importance of the rule of law. It is usually divided into:
+ The Early Modern period, which saw the first industrial revolution, and
+ The Late Modern period or the age of machines, beginning with the second industrial revolution in the 19th century.
This periodization is made simply in order to make it easier for students to understand historical development. The people actually living in the 6th century did not in any way have a feeling that they were living in a time of transition between the Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The guiding principle of the periodization of history is finding great commonalities, in social structure, culture, economy and so on.
It is important to understand that any periodization of history is specific to a civilization or to a lineage of civilizations; for example, the division between the Renaissance and the Modern age is highly specific to the European civilization and it is completely meaningless to the Oriental civilizations of India, China, Indochina and Japan. For and Indian, or a Chinese, or a Japanese history has different periods specific to the development of their civilizations; for example, in the history of Japan the modern period begins with the [Meiji Restoration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration) in the second half of the 19th century.
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An "era" is just an artificial distinction made by historians when looking back.
It is not like an average person woke up on Jan 1st, 1493 and said: "oh man, I don't feel Medieval anymore".
History is a continuous flow of events which slowly change the way humans perceive their society. It usually happens that, once in a while, this slow change has a sudden acceleration with an event that is perceived as a cornerstone and is, therefore, easily usable as a reference, like:
* The deposition of the last western Roman Emperor (for the beginning of the Middle Ages)
* The discovery of America (for the end of the Middle Ages)
* The French revolution for the start of the Modern Era
As a rule of thumb, since you have to allow important cultural changes, you have to allow some centuries to flow and, since you are creating your timeline, throw in some major event to mark the change. Revolutions, discoveries, wars... I think human history has quite a set of possibilities to feed your imagination.
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As to "moving on" I think that we can safely break that down into categories. While we might have a certain way of framing an era overall, remember that it can literally be defined by anything (Age of the Flapper! Roman Empire! Bronze Age!)
* Technology. Different ages are defined by different tech. Bronze Age vs. Steel, that sort of thing. Age of flight, Age of gun powder. In a fantasy setting, it might be something magic-based.
* Different social structure. The transition to the Renaissance, while you might point to art and such, was made possible by a growing middle class, commoner mobility and merchants and banks running things more often than lords. In America we have [the Plantation Era aka Antebellum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation_era) which ended with the Civil War, and contributed to a different social structure.
* Rize and Fall of Empires.
* Big discoveries & development of land. So the Age of Exploration. And in America there was the Western Expansion.
* Really big wars. War of the Roses. The Civil War. The French Revolution. All of these, at beginning and end changed things.
* A particularly long-lived ruler. Victorian Age. Edwardian Age.
The main take-away is this: **Eras, such as they are, can come down to lots of things, when we look back at them. And they are LAYERED. Different eras can happen at the same time, pertaining to different outlooks!** That's something that I think can get lost in world-building--the "Golden Age of Flight" was happening at the same time as the "Age of the Flapper." A film star's death can be called "the end of an era."
Eras are messy things, and they get defined by historians, people who write books and an educational system. They can be small, just decades long--or they can last for centuries. And defining when they begin or end--can be murky. Ask a dozen people when the Renaissance began and Medieval times ended. There are scholars who say there are definite ends and beginnings--but they don't always agree. Like I totally don't agree that 1492 when Columbus discovered America was what ended the Middle Ages. I would say the Renaissance was in full swing by 1492, and that the Age of Discovery that was happening at the same time would not have been possible had we still been in Medieval times. (And speaking of Medieval times--there's like several names for that--the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Medieval Times--an era isn't always just known as one thing. That might be confusing to readers, but real life is generally, but not always, a bit weirder and more complicated than fiction).
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Based on my favourite fantasy world - The Elder Scrolls - there are 2 types of eras; the first is defined by historians based on events in pre-recorded history which have vague or unknown start times and duration, the second is defined by the government based on significant changes in governance and culture.
For example, the first historic era (Dawn era) is based on the creation of the world by the gods - a religious belief that varies by culture. The second historic era (Merethic era) is based on the oldest evidence of past peoples, which is quite vague and is heavily mythological.
The recorded history eras, which are numbered one to four, are defined by the government of the ruling Empire and has changed each time as a new dynasty comes to rule. The first era was created by the first humans to arrive on the primary continent of Tamriel and based on their creation and domination of the various provinces within the continent. When one dynasty fell (or was toppled) another rose the power, announcing a new era to commemorate the beginning of a new government.
As I said, this is from another fantasy world and not a real example - however I like the way that eras are defined in The Elder Scrolls.
For reference, there's more information here: <http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:History>
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The separation is usually marked by some big event. This is true for history [as well as fiction](http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Ages_of_Arda). These events are entirely specific to your world and can be wars, deaths of important figures, something related to religion, famine, earthquakes, rebellions, etc. A famous example is the use of [Dynasties](http://www.historyforkids.net/dynasties-of-ancient-china.html).
How long an era lasts depends entirely on the timeframe. If you look at a 200 year period, each era may be 10-60 years and be marked by the high king of XYZ at the time. If you look back 3 billion years, each era is [a few hundred million years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period_(geology)) long.
If and only if you look back far enough that exact dates are no longer relevant or even possible, you can mark the ages by technology, as in bronze age and iron age.
When switching from one era to the next, keep in mind that the new era doesn't usually introduce brand new technology out of nowhere. While cannons and guns have had a major impact during some eras in Eurasian history, at that point the early forms of these weapons had been around for hundreds of years and steadily been improved. Technology that comes out of nowhere and impacts almost everyone's life, is relatively rare. Even the printing press took about 40 years until it had spread all over Europe.
Big rapid changes that happen when moving from one era to the next are usually social in nature, such as an end of slavery, the fall of guilds, etc. But even these don't happen in a vacuum, and require a large set of preconditions.
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Era is not a time span. It's a classification of a noun. As to categorize a noun as being different from another noun where the nouns are the same.
We can take "Kings" and define a group of Kings as the Age of Kings, but there were Kings before and after that age. The time span for this age could be based upon facts (i.e. the Age of Kings only includes the children of King Author), or they can be opinion based such as only British Kings.
The problem here is that the time span is different depending upon who you ask, but the classification doesn't change.
So for an Era to have credibility it needs to be endorsed by a credible source. (i.e. the Historian Society of Kings defines the Age of Kings to be between 1200 and 1400).
People argue about when Era's took place all the time, and the importances of the Eras (i.e. is this category important enough to bother classifying those things in writing).
Since an Era is not a time span. It does not start, end or transition to other Eras. We just don't classify those things after X as being part of the another Era.
I could say that the Era of the Dodo Bird ended in 1750 when it went extinct, but if someone found one alive in the forest does this change their Era? No, because Era doesn't define a time span. We would just say "this new discovery belongs to the Dodo Bird Era" and leave it at that.
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The [Betamax era](http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/scitech/technology/543895/end-of-an-era-sony-to-stop-making-betamax-tapes/story/) lasted 45 years.
The [Paleozoic era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleozoic) lasted 288,830,000 years.
So basically as long as you like, depending what you think is significant.
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## What system do they use to distinguish robots from inanimate parts?
I previously asked how a robot would know what metals to build itself with in [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/213299/how-does-a-robot-distinguish-different-metals-and-materials-for-self-repair). That made me think about an other important question. Otherwise they might rip each other to shreds whenever they need materials to build... other robots. Or they might confuse a shop of spare parts with a graveyard. Well I could just circumvent this by having the robots networked so they know at all times which unit is where. But I want my machines to be autonomous and most importantly with a sense of self.
*Robby sits in a pile of scrap metal. Is Robby made of scrap? Or is the scrap made of Robby? He beeps, for he does not know.*
**Robots in my setting come in all shapes and sizes. There is no one universal shape that defines machines as individuals or part of a group.** They can freely switch parts to optimize themselves or replace every part of themselves with new ones. A robot might even change their function from factory overseer to farming bot if their consciousness program decided to do so. This incredible variety means that they need a system to distinguish what is a robot and what is a spare part or piece of scrap.
They could check their CPUs to make sure they are active. However when they are turned off (or resting) this does not work. Checking if there is a power signature of some kind could also be an option but again it could be turned off. What is your take on the issue?
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Give robots a life signal. Something, anything by which they can be recognized as a robot and not lifeless scrap, even when they are powered off.
Your computer and phone still have some functionalities while they're powered off. (Ever tried to set an alarm then turn your phone off? On my phone alarms rings even while it's off...) Why should your robots be any different?
Some ideas:
* A heartbeat
* A faint internal fan to cool it off
* A laser light coming out of their eyes
* An internal clock that makes a faint noise that others robots can
pick up on
* An internal GPS
* Or anything really, so long as it can be recognized by other robots
Based on the question, it sounds reasonable to assume that your robots could turn themselves on. This means that some part of them still has power. This part can also power their life signal.
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**Try to power it up**
A powered-up robot has signs of life. It might move out of the way to avoid being eaten--and if it doesn't, it'll have distinctive magnetic fields and incidental radio and thermal emissions.
Now, yes, robots can be completely powered down without being really dead, unlike humans; but humans haven't always been great at identifying when other humans are really dead, either! And if you're not sure, what do you do? You try to wake them up! You try to revive them! If they don't wake up right away, maybe you check their batteries and try to repair them yourself... but if surgery fails, you slate for "organ donation".
If, that is, you **care**. If you don't care... a powered-down robot is easy prey! And thus, you end up with evolutionary pressures acting on prey robots and predator robots, and eventually a whole robotic ecosystem a la [Code of the Lifemaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker).
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How do we tell a living human from a dead one? The living human has vital traces: the heart will let an electrocardiogram record some signal, the brain will let an electroencephalogram do the same.
And for a robot, search for traces of electrical activity that distinguish it from junk metal.
A simple RFID can be used even when the robot is in sleep mode to wake it up on call. The same RFID can be used to probe its robotiness.
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Only things that have actively been marked as scrap are scrap.
This is a "fail robot" situation. We can always scrap robots. We can't unscrap them. Therefore there are special markers put on scrap, and if they fall off, the scrap has to be remarked.
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Logan and L.Dutch are on the [right](/a/216965/43697) [path](/a/216961/43697), but...
A robot that's active, or even in a low-power state, isn't an issue. Such a robot can simply provide some signal when queried. Your problem is with robots that are *completely* depowered, either for long-term storage, or due to damage or because their power supply simply ran out.
As an aside: there's a cop-out here; whatever gives robots "consciousness" must be constantly maintained, as with biological life. Total loss of power equals "death"; therefore, a robot that can't reply to a simple query *is* scrap. But let's assume you don't want to go that way.
In that case, a robot must have a passive RFID tag that a) identifies it (doesn't have to identify an individual, depending on how you feel about privacy, but at least says "yes, I'm a robot") and b) provides instruction how to power it up if it is totally offline (either *in* the tag, or via some sort of "link" provided by the tag). You need the latter so that other robots can determine if they're dealing with a robot that is merely totally powered off (or has a dead/faulty power supply) or one that is no longer functional and could be recycled.
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The standard answer seems to be to have some sort of active system that is detectable, and as the question was stated I'm all in favor of that as a simple first test. If you can detect emissions from the active systems then the robot is *probably* not scrap. Probably.
The real question for me is what defines a robot as being 'alive' or scrap? If a robot is powered down but just needs an initialisation to return to full power, it is clearly not scrap. But a robot whose CPU has been destroyed *is* scrap, regardless of whether or not the robot's body is still powered. Likewise if the robots programming is corrupted to the point that consciousness cannot be restored is clearly scrap.
This greatly complicates things since a scrap robot could be emitting detectable signals while a 'live' robot may not.
Assuming that a robot's consciousness can survive being completely powered down - which isn't necessarily true, depending on how that consciousness functions - then even ancient rusted piles of apparent scrap could in fact be live, just waiting for a new power supply to become fully conscious again.
The question is almost certainly not *completely* answerable under these conditions. Instead there will have to be some thresholds where even a powered down robot is considered non-viable and can be scavenged.
Robots should be fitted with a passive transponder that reacts to radio queries with a simple timestamp. The timestamp is updated periodically by the robot's main program as a watchdog process. When the robot powers off or the main program is otherwise not running - due to the CPU being destroyed for instance - then the timestamp will be out of date. This allows detection of end-of-life for otherwise functional or emitting robots.
To help with 'powered down' detection the timestamp should also have a flag that is only set when the robot is in the process of powering down. During normal operation the flag is cleared.
Now let's say Robbie (our active, damaged robot) is out prospecting for parts to repair itself. It happens across a robot that looks like a good source of those parts and proceeds to query the transponder. It gets back a timestamp from 6 months ago, but the 'powered down normally' flag is set. This is not a viable source of spare parts. Continuing on, Robbie spots another robot that is emitting all sorts of interesting EM but doesn't seem to be doing anything. On query the transponder reports a timestamp from 3 days ago with the 'powered down normally' flag *not* set. Robbie attempts to talk to the robot but gets no response. It then proceeds to pull the robot's power supply and extract the parts it needs.
I can think of a few ways that this could fail, but there have to be limits or nothing could ever be reasonably presumed to be scrap.
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You could add a sensory detection subsystem to the robot, teach it to distinguish its surroundings in terms of sensory measures that perhaps distinguish robot from robot. Robots could then be networked in a peer-to-peer fashion in order to help other robots continuously distinguish from other robots. This can open up possibilities in creating whole robot species and types that act as a sort of hive mind like from Rick and Morty Episode [“Auto Erotic Assimilation”](https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Unity).
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In a Medieval Fantasy style world, I'd like to have a city/fortress that is impossible to besiege, because they can produce all of the food they need within the strong city walls. However, I'm not sure that this is feasible, as with more land to produce food you need more space, therefore more people to defend the walls, therefore more food, therefore more space, ad infinitum.
I am somewhat familiar with ancient through medieval military tactics and sieges, but not at all familiar with how farming technology may have worked. Is there a semi-plausible way for a fortress city to provide enough food for those defending the walls, so that they could never be starved out? I'm thinking about locating the fort near or on a mountain, which when the rains come works to funnel the water into giant cisterns under the city that provide enough clean water until the next rain. The only problem is food.
I've considered networks of tunnels where they grow food, but that would lack sunlight. Animals won't work because they take too long and use many resources before they provide a return, I know this at least from raising them myself in the modern day. Is there a specific, highly efficient food source that might work best? How could they maximize food production to make this possible?
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### Island Fortress
With an island, you have natural fortifications and it is far easier (at least prior to the age of steam and ironclads) to defend than to attack. Have one natural, easily defended harbor, with the rest of the island having sheer cliffs going deep down into the sea.
The middle of the island is fertile land for farming. Catch rain for drinking. In addition to the farming, you can catch fish for some good protein without needing the large amount of land needed for cattle/sheep/etc.
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## Mathematically
Let's assume that the actual farming is done "by magic" for the moment. [A relevant question from Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much_land_does_it_take_to_support_one_human/) suggests that a meat-inclusive diet needs about 0.5 hectares/person. Assuming that a wall is defended with one person per metre, this farmland is 5km deep behind the wall. So a "city" of two walls with 10km of farms between and impassable mountains on the ends fits the criteria. However, increasing the size helps. If the city is circular, doubling the radius will double the amount of wall and quadruple the arable land. This can go on for as much ground as you can claim.
* meaning, "therefore more space, ad infinitum." is not correct, surface area grows proportinal to square of size, perimeter linearly. 1 percent of people defending wall and all other numbers the same, diameter of your city is about 1000 km, population 314 million. Congratulation, you got an achievement - invention of a country/state. All of them protect wall, 100 times less surface, 100km diameter, 3.14 million population. But due size it will be a poor forthress.
Your proportions can be improved vastly by using a natural wall. A narrow pass through harsh mountains allows you to have a 1km wall in the pass do the work of a 100km wall on the plain (or better). "Shangri-La" can be a fertile valley among mountains, possibly with hot springs.
## Practically
After a certain point, your wall (or parts thereof) is a very long way from the city, and so you build outposts. And support depots for farmers to live. And then you realise that you're building this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EuJ6y.jpg)
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In other settings, you can claim that fusion-powered aquaponics/hydroponics systems do the work and scale vertically. Or that magical effects can grow/create food.
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The short answer is: *it depends on many variables.* But **YES, this is possible.**
The long answer requires at least some variables be addressed.
1. What magic, if any, is in play? Are these all humans, or are other races involved? *Assumptions: no magic, only humans.*
2. What technology level are we at? Advances in farming make it easier to support larger populations with less land. Likewise, advances in siegecraft make it easier to break a wall, vs advances in construction to make a stronger wall, and to make it easier to defend a wall with fewer soldiers. Also relevant would be medical technology for the castle (to prevent plague, either natural or from the besieging army). *Assumptions: high middle ages, European technology. Say, 1250AD.*
3. How good is the area for farming? How "rich" is the soil, is there enough moisture, how long is the growing season, etc. *Assumptions: the defenders are using multiple crops to prevent soil depletion, and are in England-like conditions. They average 10 bushels of grain per acre (a real amount for the time and location). We will assume no droughts or other uncontrollable factors occur during the siege. We are vastly simplifying this section, just go with it.*
4. How long are we dragging the siege out? *We will say the fortress needs to sustain itself for 25 years. This is an absurd siege length, but we're going with it anyway. We will further assume they have stockpiles of leather, metal, wood, reeds for gambeson, etc to last that time. Firewood is being deliberately left out of our calculations for simplicity.*
5. What is the morale of the defenders? Even if the castle can hold out indefinitely, the individuals within may not be willing to. *Assumptions: the defenders are highly motivated to never give in. The besieging army takes no quarter and wants to wipe out all the heretics in the defending castle, and all the defenders know this.*
For a location, we'll say a plateau peninsula with a narrow crossing attaching it to the mainland, ocean on three sides, and high steep cliffs from ocean level to the plateau. This means there is no landing for boats. We'll say the land entrance is sloped upward to give advantage for the defenders, and the ground in the pass is very rocky, making it hard to tunnel underneath. The wall at the pass is 4 meters thick (12 feet) and 12 meters tall (39 feet), with arrow slits, rounded towers, and all the best innovations for this time period. Conceivably, such a location and fortification would be nigh impossible to take directly (remember: no cannons for this time period).
We will further say the attackers are unwilling or unable to use biological attacks, or the defenders for some reason are capable of neutralizing them. In other words, no rotting cows hurled into the fortress to spread disease.
Most historical "castles" were small affairs. We're assuming this is a proper military fort, not the fortified manor of a knight or minor lord. Let's set the garrison at 800 fighting men (including men at arms and knights), which is quite large for the time period but within the realm of possibility (2000 men is probably the largest garrison of any castle in the period).
Roughly 300 peasants, craftsmen, clergy, and other supporters were required to support one knight's family in England during this time period. A fort with 800 men would likely have 50-70 knights. Let's say 750 soldiers and 50 knights. That's 15,000 people just for the knights, plus the garrison, for 15,800 so far. Then we need additional people to support the 750 men at arms.
That 300 number is derived from averages in England during the time period for knights living in separate manors. We can assume we'll need fewer craftsmen, for example, since all the knights are in one location instead of spread out. I can't find good numbers for this, so we are going to say that 15,200 people can support the entire 800 man garrison. That gives us a total population of 16,000 people behind the walls for the 25 year siege.
For reference, 16,000 people is nearly the size of London in 1200AD. If we say our numbers (the 300 per knight) were bad, and halve the total to 8,000 people (7,200 support and 800 garrison), that is still a large city by the standards of 1250AD Europe.
Now, it takes an average of 20 bushels of grain to support a person for a year. With our average of 10 bushels per acre, that means 2 acres per person. With 8,000 people, that's 16,000 acres being actively farmed. With crop rotation, some of the farmland is not being farmed at any given time. If 2/3 are being farmed and 1/3 is left fallow, we're at 24,000 acres of land necessary to support the people, plus whatever land they need to actually live on, have shops, barracks, etc. We are ignoring that land for simplicity.
That does not include the resources for maintaining horses for the soldiers. Other livestock could graze on the unplanted land, but war horses can't be left out to roam around, since they need to be available for soldiers. And make no mistake, they will be needed for patrols: our assumed location may be impossible to reach by boat, but the defenders will have to patrol their cliffs for any attackers trying to scale them. There are many historical examples of castles falling because small groups made it in past "impossible" mountains or cliffs.
24,000 acres is about 97 square kilometers, or 37.5 square miles. Double that number if you want the original 16,000 people, to 194 square kilometers or 75 square miles. For reference, 97 square kilometers is about the size of Disney World. 194 square kilometers works out to be about 4/5ths the size of modern Edinburgh, Scotland.
Can you enclose that much land, with that many people, behind a wall and maintain it for 25 years? **Absolutely**, given the physical features described above. But it is not normal for any civilization or time period I know of. It would be nigh impossible to find that perfect location with enough arable land to pull it off. If you reduce the numbers involved, perhaps making this a fort with only 100 defenders and their supporters, you can drop the size considerably, making it easier to find such a location. If you conscript the farmers to hold the wall during active fighting, you could maintain a longer wall.
Furthermore, rationing would reduce the food needed from 20 bushels per person per year to 15 bushels. Anything less than that is going to cause problems if maintained over such a long time period. If the fort starts the siege with existing food storage, they could be producing less food than they need, but coast through with the storage; this puts a timer on how long they last, but a sufficient amount of storage with close enough food production means they could last 25 years.
Sidenote: This assumes no additional refugees fled to the fortress and need to be fed while being unable to productively do anything. Or that some of the land behind the walls was unused, and all the refugees are able to become productive on the unused land. Or that enough casualties are taken early on that refugees take over farming areas previously farmed by now-dead people.
Sidenote 2: See Attack on Titan for a fictional, self-sustaining mega fortress. Some, though certainly not all, of that show could get your mind thinking of different scenarios and how to address them.
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## Concentration of force makes this a bad idea
There is an age old military doctrine called concentration of force that establishes that the effectiveness of a military force is not how big it is, but how concentrated it is. A group of 100 soldiers moving as a solid unit can overwhelm 1000 soldiers spread out over a large area because they will have the advantage of numbers for each skirmish.
So instead of asking could it happen, you should look at why it did not happen more. History is full of examples of civilizations trying to build long garrisons like the Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line, and Hadrian's Wall where nations tried to block off massive territories against invasion. The problem with this technique is that it always failed because a defensive position is only as good as its weakest point. A single watchman can be bribed or a single blind spot be identified as a point to attack completely nullifying any advantage that the wall would otherwise give you.
Most military engineers have understood this principle since at least the time of the Roman Empire. The reason most historical castles were kept so small was because they concentrated your defensive force.
**Example:**
If you have a 13.5km circular wall surrounding about 3600 acres of good farmland maintained by ox gangs, this will give you a town with about 720 households with 240 households committed to maintaining the farmlands, and 480 households you can commit to other things like blacksmithing, carpentry, etc. For population demographics, this means you have about 720 men who are "heads of household", their 720 wives and their 3240 living children (some of which may be adults) for a total population of ~4680.
In general, each household has an average of 1 man of military age (either a younger father or older son). That said, arming professional soldiers is expensive. Using the Hide system we can assume that this land would support ~30 professional soldiers (aka:knights) but you could commit up to ~480 additional militia to guarding the walls in times of need and still keep the farms running. This gives you what would normally be considered a sizeable garrison for a castle.
But, the problem here is that your town would be at least 4.3km across at its widest point. That would take about an hour for your whole garrison to be moved to any one point on the wall to concentrate your defenses enough to repel a large scale attack. Furthermore, a feigned attack can be used to draw defenders away from one part of the wall while your main army then goes after a now undefended section several kilometers away from where you just sent the bulk of your garrison.
Castles were the solution to this. They were small defensible locations that you could move your knights and militia into while you send some or all of your "unneed" people to nearby communities as refugees until the siege is over. As long as you have a castle, the enemy army is encouraged not to keep advancing because your garrison would cut off its supply lines, but if they attack it, they will be attacking a concentrated force of defenders.
Your average medieval castle had a permanent garrison of 30 professional soldiers, and had about 400 meters of outer walls (making no two places more than 150m appart), since most healthy people can sprint about 7 m/sec over short distances like this, it means you can measure the time it takes to reinforce a part of the wall in seconds rather than an hour. Also, they could generally house a lot more than their standing garrison; so, many of your militia could be called up to help hold the castle. Because the castle is small, but can hold the same garrison as your giant walled off farmlands, you can always fight concentrated when defending against an attack.
Every solution mentioned so far either ignores concentration of force with ideas like giant walls many km long or they give examples of using natural terrain to put a normal sized castle between your farms and the most likely route of attack. In reality though, no cliff or wall is impossible to overcome if the attackers are determined enough unless you actually defend it; so, it is in most cases just a better tactic to abandon your farms than to try to defend them unless you have some seriously impassable natural defenses.
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A fortress made to defeat enemy siege attempts would usually have large stores of food, restocked while at peace so it will need to grow only limited amount of vegetables etc to provide fresh, vitamin rich food. Not many armies would be able to maintain siege for extended periods after all.
Mountain or hill side fortress may use terraced farming to utilize as much space as possible if you have enough rain to sustain such farming.
The biggest problem is you need to balance two things - the shorter the wall, the easier is it to defend while you need a lot of land for farming which increase the length of the wall. And as wall become longer, it may be impossible to defend.
If enemy is truly ingenious, no fortress stand a chance. Alexander the Great managed to capture essentially what you want - mountain plateau fortress that had single access point, ample supplies and farms by sending a group of climbers who scaled the side of the plateau and appeared on the highest point. The defenders, facing what they considered an impossibility, surrendered immediately.
By the way a city on a shore is way more suited to be (almost) impregnable to siege. Obviously as long as enemy navy is not massively superior. Just superior would not suffice as weather can still permit to slip past blockade and bring in supplies.
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## Why wall a bunch of farms and houses when you can just make a big gate and call it a fortress?
Rather than the fortress itself being self-suficient, it protected the only path to a small fertile valley in the middle of the mountains. There might be other paths to the valley, but if you are not a mountain goat, you probably cannot use it. In the valley the actual city is located, as well as farms for food production, a small managed wood to ensure a continous supply of wood, quarries to make actual useful stone, mines to get the iron to repair armours and weapons and surely the most important resource of them all: a stable population, to supply soldiers to protect the fortress, engineers to repair it after attempts to breach the walls, craftmen to produce other essentials that nobody cares about.
This technically works around the problem rather than adressing it, but this solves not only the food issue, but most issues that would afflict a siege short of a century. If you are going to fantastical siege times - say a thousands years - other issues would appear, such as the fortress eroding and the engineers cannot repair it while the besiegers make it rain arrow on them, or the valley population becoming inbred to the point of disfunctionally.
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**Underground homes**
The basis of your problem is that people need space to live, so does food need space to grow, we cannot grow plants underground (maybe except for mushroom), so why not make a city where the general population lives underground and the ground itself is used for agriculture. In this case, the homes need to build quite deep so as to provide a good amount of topsoil for plants to grow and require lighting, air supply, and other essentials, but it should work. (The reason people shifted underground was the harsh weather in the first place, but they found out it is a great war tactic too.)
**Massive Food stores** Along with agriculture, this city should have massive grain storage facilities, to help during sieges.
**Vegetarian diet** It will be important for people to have a vegetarian diet so that the overall food requirement for cattle can be minimized.
**Tunnel networks for sabotage** Surviving a siege is not the only important thing, It's also good to have a network of secret tunnels to sabotage enemy plans/supplies to make them leave early. Also to acquire essential items not available in the city. (Story suspense: someone betrayed the city and revealed the secret tunnels to the enemy.)
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**If you are willing to get a bit flexible on what you count as a fortress sure.**
For practical purposes, a fortress can be any defensible position that is at least partially man-made. Now, traditionally terrain has had some impact. Building your fort or castle on a hill has been popular since pretty much forever.
Now, take terrain advantage up several levels. Surround a city with impassable mountains on three sides, build a wall on the fourth, and you have something no invading army can feasibly get to. You can probably do some works to make any mountain passes impassable if that's your goal, and you have a city that can produce all the food it needs, along with a minimal area that actually needs defending.
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**Have your people live on a peninsula on cliffs.**
You'd only have to fortify the entrance area. If the peninsula is large enough you have the room you need for farms, homes and fortifications. And if its high up enough on those cliffs it can even protect from boat attacks. And the entrance area could be on high ground making it even more difficult for attackers.
Several answers, including mine, in the question [How would a society isolated by monster attacks get food?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/105272/how-would-a-society-isolated-by-monster-attacks-get-food/105364#105364) build on this idea. Take a look for some cool pics and drawings that explain further.
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I believe such a fortress could technically be possible, but it would be difficult. The fortress would need to grow food that requires very little to grow like [mushrooms](https://namyco.org/growing_mushrooms_at_home.php), which can be grown in small damp spaces with little light in [compost/moist environments](https://homeguides.sfgate.com/needs-mushroom-growth-44893.html). Certain types of algae can also be harvested from [unfiltered water as a source of nutrition](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4613-0309-1_18). These two items can be the staple foods of your fortress with other foods being held in reserves or obtained in times of peace. In open areas, certain 'weeds' like [dandelions](https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/dandelions_for_food#:%7E:text=Eating%20dandelions%20can%20be%20delicious%20and%20nutritious.&text=The%20dandelion%20(Taraxacum%20officinale)%20is,a%20very%20bitter%2C%20milky%20substance.) can be used as food as well as [medicine](https://gardentherapy.ca/superfood-dandelions/) while growing easily in most locations. If you have water that you can keep with a pH between [6 to 7](https://farmingaquaponics.com/growing-wheat-in-aquaponics-gardens/#:%7E:text=The%20recommended%20pH%20levels%20for,use%20a%20quality%20pH%20Meter.), you can grow wheat using aquaponics. You can also use this method to [grow tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, onions, microgreens, onions, and dwarf citrus fruit](https://www.howtoaquaponic.com/plants/best-plants-for-aquaponics/) for your fortress.
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**Food in tunnels**
If you'll accept a bit of creative difference in your world, you can still use the caves. First it can be a prime nesting ground for creatures like bats, making it also a siurce of food. But the droppings can be ysed by fungi for example. In my knowledge most (none?) aren't edible for humans, but here you can use the freative difference.
Algea can also live in the darkest depths of the caves. This is of course a much less effective method to produce energy and grow, but it isn't clear to me how. Likely heat can be used if the caves go deep enough in the crust. Also here you can give the creative difference a whirl and make them edible and possibly fast growing to be suitable for a sort of farming.
**Natural formations**
There's loads of ways that you can make a fortress, bit most is done by using the landscape. Rivers, mountains and gorges can easily be implemented. A mountain range can be difficult and dangerous to teaverse for an army. Even if a small group could go through, it doesn't allow an army. This greatly reduces the amount of people needed to defend that side. This can allow for much greater parts of land to be added inside the fortress.
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If your fantasy world has a little magic you could use it to grow an enormous and bountiful apple tree, then build your castle walls around its outermost branches.
What I was trying to say in this brief answer is that if the author is crafting a fantasy world, complete with magic, then that magic could easily provide self-sufficiency on a much smaller scale than would work under the real-world's physical laws. If for example, you enchanted an apple tree such that it grew to skyscraper height and if its easily climbable branches held fruit at every level, then that one tree could feed your entire castle population. It might also disturb the local wind patterns such that enough dew gathers on its many, many leaves to satisfy the castle's need for clean water. This single tree, standing alone on an open plain could by itself support a self-sufficient colony.
With such a blessing at the core of their castle, the population's only real challenge would be to build a strong enough wall all the way around the tree's lowest branches, so that invading armies cannot also enjoy the mighty tree's fruit.
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**Encircle an EXTINCT Volcanic Mountain with the Wall**
You build your city around a single old volcanic mountain on a plain. City walls surround the mountain with some flat surface in between. City is built on the higher and rougher parts of the mountain. Farming is done at the flat plain level. And that is where your walls are located. The volcano provided the land with highly nutritious soil. Mining is also done on the mountain providing the city with metals it needs. The mountain also has water springs flowing out of it which provides the city with the water it needs.
With this setup;
1. The besiegers cannot contaminate the water city uses.
2. Cannot easily use their medieval weapons to attack buildings inside the city as buildings are high on the ground and has farmlands between themselves and walls.
3. Metals can be mined in the walls, food can be grown in the walls, water spring is in the walls.
Without any major distruptions like no snowfall, drought, a hole in the wall etc. the city can be self sufficient for very long times.
Yet you have to consider that besiegers will try to dig under the city walls. Walls has to be deep as much as it has to be tall. Even that, given long enough time, might not be enough to stop the besiegers. But the city will be self supporting.
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In the world I'm creating, a branch of humans from prehistoric earth were castaway to another dimension by reality bending beings. The dimension exists as a large cavern filled with giant Earth arthropods and plants. Its strange laws of physics allow both organisms to survive with no negative side effects.
But the problem with the humans is that some of these creatures have an interest in killing them with their own natural weaponry. The humans proposed a way of surrounding their own bodies in a suit of armor for further survival. But the issue I'm running into is what material could they use as armor that is effectively durable, lightweight and protective against getting punctuated by stingers, claws, and mandibles?
A few materials I thought of were exoskeletons from other insects. Though the problem with an exoskeleton is that stinging species could easily penetrate through. As for the level of technology required for creating Aluminum or lightweight metal armour, that's it's own question, but what we need to know if tiny aluminum or any other metallic armour is possible to wear as viable armour.
Also for the details on the humans, they run, jump and carry as if they're on earth, so they can't lift many times their own bodyweight or run faster, but they can oddly stand on some of the arthropods without killing them, so they are light to the arthropods, but not to themselves. The environment also ACTS like the insects are their normal sizes, so it's the humans being protected by the negative square-cube effects.
[Answer]
Actually, your best bet will be portions of insect exoskeleton! When formed properly, it can offer its wearer a shell of protection. Sure, a sting might penetrate the armor plate, but if there is some padded space behind it, the sting may not even reach the wearer! Chitin could also be cut into scale armour and overlapped providing even more protection.
Also, any armour these tiny humans wear shouldn't be relied on for definitive protection in a melee battle against raging spiders or biting ants. It seems like they would probably lose such a battle anyway. At best, it will offer some protection against glancing blows.
The humans' best defense against the stings and mandibles of their enemies will still be their intelligence and their ability to adapt to new conditions in arranging their environment to their needs.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RyBro.jpg)
What mad addercop or army of valiant ant soldiers can withstand the intelligent human warriors bearing superior weapons and wielding advanced battle tactics? Humans on Earth outdid all their large animal competition the first time around. They'll just start over and do the same thing in this new environment: tame those insects that are useful, outcompete those that are both dangerous and untamable!
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**The same stuff we normal humans use, just less of it**
Ant-sized humans are nowhere near the size of molecules, so bronze and steel are perfectly sound materials to use. What they'd use for leather and silk might be more interesting as those items are fiberous/woven and may not be shrinkable. But, then again, how much weight/comfort is necessary? Spider silk may be a direct replacement.
**Except that I might be wrong**
The problem, now that I spend more time thinking about it, is blacksmithing the metal. We are dealing with small amounts, but metals still need a certain amount of force (which I'm not going to calculate) to shape. But, thinking about it still, it's such a small amount of metal.
**Nope... I think it shrinks just fine**
Tiny blacksmiths may be getting stepped on all the time. I think all the current metals are as available to ant-men as they are to us.
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I think your main armor would not focus on strength of the material, but on deception.
If it smells like it's toxic, looks like it's toxic, would you take the chance?
Win the fight before it happens.
You could possible use glands and dyes to imitate toxic insects while wearing heavier and tougher armor, getting the best of both worlds.
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The ant sized humans could domesticate spiders, and selectively breed them to obtain the highest quality silk used for weaving Armour.
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***Feces***
I'm being totally serious. Some bugs do so and it is quite effective. Consider [the golden tortoise beetle larvae](https://www.wired.com/2015/06/absurd-creature-of-the-week-tortoise-beetle/):
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> Aside from being a bit overpriced, it’s hard to deny the effectiveness of a poo stick in warding off attackers. Which is exactly what the larvae of the tortoise beetles have been doing for millennia. Not content to just sit there and get eaten, using a highly elongated and mobile anus, they build a tower of poo on a special structure on their backs. It’s dextrous too: When threatened, the larvae can smack their foes with the so-called “fecal shield.”
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According to National Geographic, [the mere presence of the shield may discourage offenders:](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/animals-insects-bugs-shields-defense/)
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> Golden tortoise beetle larvae have a posterior appendage called an anal fork that they can hang over themselves like an awning. Onto this surface, they’ll pile feces, their old exoskeletons, or both, depending on the species. This so-called “fecal shield” is off-putting to predators.
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I would never initiate melee combat with someone covered in poo either. I'd much rather fight someone wearing radioactive armor than to... Well, you get what I mean.
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Antimony. Obviously.
Antimony forms a highly useful alloy with lead, increasing its hardness and mechanical strength, is used in bullets, bullet tracers and as an opacifier in enamel; batteries and infrared detectors.
For toughness, energy efficiency and stealth Antimony is your first choice, ant man.
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They pulverize/powder insect chitin (exoskeleton), and mix it with glue excreted by some other insect, and make customized armor. This could be body armor, or shields made to protect one or more people, or even sleeping quarters, and houses.
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Boats and balloons both work because of buoyancy - they are pushed up by a force equal to the weight of displaced water/air respectively. I want my (otherwise earthlike) planet to have 'seas' of a liquid or gas that is
* Denser than air, so it sits on the ground
* Light enough that normal boats made of wood, steel, etc immediately sink (unless they were impractically large and light).
* Ideally semi-inert (at 1atm 15 C) and nontoxic (other than being a simple asphyxiant)
I plan to have balloon-boats - which are basically lighter-than-air craft (with hydrogen or helium balloons), except they aren't lighter than *air* - just 'lighter' (less dense) than whatever the seas are made out of.
What substance should I use?
(Bonus points for an explanation as to how a such a sea could form.)
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Start with regular seas like those of our own world. Then add lots of marine [mud volcanoes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_volcano). These are not true igneous volcanoes - they form when underground mud, or mud-like stuff breaches the surface of the crust and erupts.
Mud volcanoes are one of the proposed explanations for the disappearance of so many ships over the Bermuda Triangle. [As per the wiki, with emphasis mine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle#Methane_hydrates):
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> An explanation for some of the disappearances has focused on the presence of large fields of **methane hydrates (a form of natural gas)** on the continental shelves. **Laboratory experiments carried out in Australia have proven that bubbles can, indeed, sink a scale model ship by decreasing the density of the water**; any wreckage consequently rising to the surface would be rapidly dispersed by the Gulf Stream. It has been hypothesized that periodic methane eruptions (sometimes called "mud volcanoes") may produce **regions of frothy water that are no longer capable of providing adequate buoyancy for ships**. If this were the case, **such an area forming around a ship could cause it to sink very rapidly and without warning**.
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> Publications by the USGS describe large stores of undersea hydrates worldwide, including the Blake Ridge area, off the coast of the southeastern United States.
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There is great skepticism about the amount of sinkings on the Bermuda Triangle, but lab tests show that mud volcanoes can give ships a hard day. On a fictional world of your writing, you just have to taylor the amount of those volcanoes and frequency of their eruptions to suit your need and taste.
This keeps rivers navigable. Also, the presence of these volcanoes and their gas output does not exclude the possibility of marine life - there is plenty of it in the Bermuda Triangle.
One interesting consequence of this is that some people might be able to build ships that would be buoyant over the shores, and then they would think they have a seaworthy vessel. They might just keep their boat afloat for some time even, hours or days depending on how cruel you wish to be with your characters. Then an eruption happens and the vessel sinks *"very rapidly and without warning"*.
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The lowest density practical (excluding hydrogen and helium) liquid is liquid methane, with a density of about 0.65g/cm3 compared with water's 1g/cm3. There are few, if any, solids that will float in this unless they contain trapped gas. Ethane, propane and butane are not far behind.
Steel ships float in water because they are mostly full of air. So your ship in a hydrocarbon ocean could be filled with atmosphere and float. Unless you have very high pressures.
If you take liquid methane and seal it in a partially filled container, you will have methane liquid at the bottom and methane vapour above. Increase the temperature and the density of the liquid rises. The vapour pressure also rises, hence the vapour becomes more dense. Finally at −82.6 °C temperature and and 46 bar pressure (about 46 times earth atmosphere) the density of the gas and liquid phases becomes the same, and the two phases become indistinguishable. This is called the critical point. The critical point exists for pure liquids that are stable enough not to decompose before boiling. Ethane's is at 32C and 49 bar. So if you have a methane atmosphere over a methane ocean slightly below the critical point, it will not be practical to build a boat.
The critical point temperature for ethane is more comfortable for humans, but the pressure is too much. 49 bar is equivalent to about 490m ocean depth on earth, but the record for scuba diving is 332m (short term.) Unfortunately these types of pressures are the only way to make the atmosphere dense enough that a boat filled with atmosphere would not float.
The only way to have a gas much denser than ethane while retaining a low boiling point would be to consider a noble gas atmosphere (such as Krypton) over an ocean of hydrocarbon. Pressures would still need to be quite high but not as high as 49 bar. But the heavier noble gases are quite rare so the possibility of finding an entire atmosphere of heavy noble gas is zero unless artifically created by some former superadvanced alien's terraforming project.
Making your balloon float is easy. Fill it with hydrogen or helium. A hydrogen filled balloon will not present a fire risk unless the atmosphere contains oxygen.
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I see two problems here:
1. Most common liquids have fairly high density - oil is 0.8, compared to wood which is 0.6-0.7. wood still floats on most common liquids.
2. Ships are balloons actually. Think about it: a ship is a thin layer of steel filled with air. Almost like balloons. If you have a lower density of the seas you will just need a bigger balloons - a bigger ship body with thin steel around it.
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I don't believe this is possible. We already have "unsinkable" ships--flood them and they stay on the surface. (They are not used more because of cost and size limits.) Even if you replace that water by something considerably lighter the same thing could be done.
The basic approach is to use enough materials that are very light to build your ship such that it doesn't rely on air below the waterline for buoyancy. While it wouldn't be strong enough picture a ship made of styrofoam. You can't sink it.
(Note that once we have enough space-based industry expect to see this in widespread use on Earth. Metal foam is considerably stronger than the same weight of pure metal and it can be made lighter than water. It's just that it can't meaningfully be made other than in zero-g.)
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From a physics perspective, you are pretty much out of luck: Air has a density of only $1.2 \frac{kg}{m^3}$, hydrogen, the lightest gas there is, has a density of $0.1 \frac{kg}{m^3}$. This means that you need to displace at least $0.9m^3$ of air to make a single kg float.
Now, if you want it to be more practical to displace air than "water", you need your water to weight less than $2.4 \frac{kg}{m^3}$. Radon, which is the heaviest noble gas, weights about $9.7 \frac{kg}{m^3}$, *and still it mixes with air*. That is, you cannot have a clear cut "sea" surface with it at room temperatures. And I didn't even take wind into account yet. Point is, at these densities, you won't have anything that we would recognize as a "sea".
To put this into perspective: If we assumed the "sea" to be $10 \frac{kg}{m^3}$, you'd be able to generate a lift of $8.8\frac{kg}{m^3}$ by displacing the "water" with air, and only a lift of $1.1\frac{kg}{m^3}$ by displacing air with hydrogen ([which is not a very good idea, btw.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster)). Displacing "water" gives you roughly eight times the bang for the buck, even though you do not even have a well-defined sea surface yet. And the heavier you make your "sea", the more clearly physics favor normal boat designs over your proposed balloons.
On the practicability of boats on very light weight materials: You just need to scale up your boats. The mass a boat can carry is directly proportional to the amount of water it displaces, and that is base area times depth. If your boat is ten meters below the "water" line, every square meter will carry $88kg$ of load with the numbers above. That's an average human plus 18 kg for one square meter of floor. Not much, but definitely something to work with. So you build your boats by simply laying down a large "water"-tight floor, attach a high wall around it, and you are ready to float. Much easier to manage than producing balloons of sufficient size and strength to carry you through the air.
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## Heavier air?
Have you thought of making a heavier gas make up some of your atmosphere? Sulfur hexafluoride is a heavy gas, and would cause ships to need much more of it to float. Its still less dense than water, though. It may be poisonous to humans, but your planets inhabitants will have adapted to it. Here is a link to a website that explains some more:
<https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceanography/invisible-water1.htm>
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## The Eternal Arms Race Between Weapon and Armor
This world has a race of giant [crabs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab) who have developed armor sufficiently strong that the top predator's teeth can't puncture the armor. In response, the top predator has taken the next evolutionary step of developing specialized hammer shaped teeth and extremely fast closing jaws. The jaws close fast enough to create shockwaves in the crustacean's armor that generate high speed fragments that bounce around for a bit. (In modern tank armor, these high speed fragments are called spall). Spall damage to the crab's muscles and organs slow it down enough for the predator to finally kill the crab.
## This is somehow familiar...
We've seen this kind of evolution in the development of [HESH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_squash_head) ammo in WWII by the British and the use of [warhammers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_hammer) against late medieval armor plate. If puncture attacks don't work, go for percussion. For human carried plate armor, there was no counter as firearms made armor obsolete. In response to HESH, tanks and other armored vehicles acquired spaced armor and spall liners.
**How likely is it that these giant crustaceans would develop the equivalent of spall liners inside their shells to deal with the spall generated by the predator's bite?** If they don't develop spall liners, what would be the simplest and cheapest evolutionary change combat the predator's bite?
## Out of Scope:
* We are ignoring the scaling problems of getting giant crustaceans. There are lots of reasons why we don't see these on earth but we are ignoring those problems. These crustaceans just get big.
* How the predator bites so quickly. It just does.
* None of these creators are designed, nor can the changes made to them be designed. Whatever countermeasures the crab develops must work and provide benefit at all times during the evolutionary process.
[Originating Question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/96620/10364)
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# Crabs already have composite armor. So do you.
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> *The jaws close fast enough to create shockwaves in the crustacean's armor that generate high speed fragments that bounce around for a bit. (In modern tank armor, these high speed fragments are called spall). Spall damage to the crab's muscles and organs slow it down enough for the predator to finally kill the crab.*
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Spalling occurs when a rigid surface armor has only air behind it, a [free-surface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_surface). An armored vehicle is mostly air inside. With nothing behind the armor to absorb the shockwave, it sort of "splashes" out. A spall liner is something tough but yielding, like Kevlar, to absorb the shockwave. Or composite armor with layers of different material to break up the shockwave.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DddEK.gif)
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spall#/media/File:Aluminium_plate_spalling.gif)
Unlike a tank, which is mostly air inside, a crab is mostly fluid and flesh inside (citation: your local crab restaurant). The [arthropod cuticle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod_cuticle) is really like composite armor with several layers.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BkM6d.png)
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cuticula.svg)
1. The epicuticle, a waxy layer to hold moisture in.
2. The exocuticle, "the shell".
3. The endocuticle, a laminated structure of layers of interwoven fibrous chitin and protein molecules.
4. The [epithelium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithelium), a layer which lines organs, muscles, and cavities.
This, plus the squishiness of the organs behind it, acts as composite armor to absorb the shockwave and prevent spalling.
Vertebrates already have a spall liner, of sorts, inside our skulls. The brain isn't in direct contact with the skull, instead there is [cerebrospinal fluid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebrospinal_fluid) and various other cushioning material between it and the hard skull. This provides cushioning for light impacts. A [concussion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concussion) is when you get hit too hard for the cushioning to absorb and your brain bangs against your skull.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HoKvL.jpg)
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1317_CFS_Circulation.jpg)
Finally, this paper title I found while researching this is too good to not mention: [*Strength Analysis of Human Skull on High Speed Impact*](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235623977_Strength_analysis_of_human_skull_on_high_speed_impact).
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Schwerin gives a great explanation of how the internal arrangement of most creatures provide protection, but you are also looking at ways to help defeat what is essentially a smashing attack against the outer shell.
Probably the fastest evolutionary response would be for crabs with more elaborate shells to survive these attacks, since the protruding ridges and arabesques will deny the hammer a flat surface to strike, deflecting the hammer entirely or reducing the blow and increasing the time the impulse will be received (as the bits and pieces get crushed or broken off by the strike).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VrpQs.jpg)
*You can elaborate from here*
This can be doubly selected for, if male crabs use elaborate shells as signalling mechanisms for their mates. Female crabs will be attracted to males with elaborate shells, and since elaborate shells provide more protection by deflecting or absorbing the hammer blow, crabs with the most elaborate shells will survive to reproduce, bringing generations with even *more* elaborate shells into the population.
Of course, evolutionary arms races are, well, evolutionary, so the predator will likely strengthen the skull, increase muscle mass and leverage to the jaws and exchange the "hammer" for penetrating "spikes". The last time this happened in Terrestrial history, we got this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VTNCb.jpg)
*All hail to the King*
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**Soft shells.**
Your predator has traded cutting / piercing teeth for teeth that produce a shockwave through a rigid surface on impact.
The defense: dispense with the rigid surface. The crabs are flexible and soft. The hammer teeth lose their energy with a slowed deceleration into the softness.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8dkOs.png)
<http://www.killermovies.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-574442-blob-vs-punches.htmls>
And better yet: the crab is sticky. Once the predator has triggered the spring that releases the energy to produce its shockwave attack, its jaws are just jaws - that are lodged in a lot of blubbery crab flab. Just behind the jaws is the neck. The best defense is a good offense, and crabs have a good offense too.
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Spall liners actually aren't that unrealistic.
Having a soft covering that will stop shrapnel can be done pretty easily with muscle fibers covering the inside of the shell.
The main issue I see is that you don't just need a way to save the crustacean, but also a way to escape/injure the attacker. Maybe make the shells poisonous, or spiky and poisonous. Maybe the crustacean evolves to be faster than the predator, or able to reach places the predator can't.
Protection is good, but a deterrent is better.
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> How likely is it that these giant crustaceans would develop the equivalent of spall liners inside their shells to deal with the spall generated by the predator's bite?
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Unlikely. There are too many mutations which would not be immediately selected along the way involved. It would take millions of years, and in the meantime other mutations might arise that would render it useless, so they might never get anything close to those liners.
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> If they don't develop spall liners, what would be the simplest and cheapest evolutionary change combat the predator's bite?
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A symbiotic relationship with a particular wild and powerful type of cavities bacteria. Crabs have no teeth so they get no cavities, and the bacteria might thrive on the food leftovers that the crab rubs on its carapace.
So a single crab will not deter an attack from a predator. But once the predator bites a crab, they will be infected. The bacteria could destroy the predator's teeth faster than they could regenerate, and in a few days could cause them to become unable to hunt. Other crabs would thus be spared and the crab species would thrive.
Of course, natural selection will favor the more resistant predators. But keep in mind that bacteria will become an extra player in the game, and they evolve faster than more complex organisms.
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What the heck - let's imagine that the crabs develop reactive armor. The predator goes to bite down on the crab, and the portion of the crab's shell being bitten blows up in the predators mouth, knocking out teeth, eyeballs, and brains (such as they are) in one go. To paraphrase the famous radio message from the battle of Midway: "Scratch one T-Rex!!!" :-)
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I'm writing an urban fantasy world set in a world that was very similar to our own, except that powerful healing abilities have recently become available. It's now possible to heal someone from severe wound to full health in a matter of minutes via effectively magic; though only until they're too exhausted to heal anyone else.
Assuming someone shot is too hurt/distracted to do heal themselves, but a healer likely can reach the person to help in anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or two, how likely is it that a single gun wound should be fatal? That is to say, what are the odds that someone will die before a healer intervention reaches them?
Assume either no armor or very light & cheap armor that offers limited protection against bullets.
Related note, how hard will it be for someone shot to avoid getting killed from another source while waiting for help. Meaning how hard is it to move enough to get behind shelter or flee an incoming attacker etc when shot; without killing yourself by aggravating the injury? Assuming just a tad more Heroic Willpower then is realistic (these are heroes in an urban fantasy, they get a little plot armor, but only a *little* since i"m imagining a partial deconstruction/reality ensues world).
Were looking at mostly smaller scale fights, a few dozen 'good guys' at most against either a few scary 'bad guys' and mooks, or a small force of enemy mooks; but not a full large scale battle.
Edit:
A sadly belated response (perhaps too late to be useful) to questions, but a common question is just how effective healing is. I didn't want to answer because I haven't yet committed myself to exact level. To give a *minimum* limit on it's power though lets say that brain damage is generally permanent and brain death means actual death. It also can not heal *massive* trauma, like having a body part cut off or having the body completely crushed by a massive object. For now lets say most other damage can be healed; though if for some reason a particular type of wound or gunshot feels like it may constitute a far more massive amount of harm to a body that may feel like it should be harder to heal feel free to mention it.
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**Mechanisms of death**
The time to lethality (if ever) of a given shot on the target is primarily a function of shot placement. There are two things people die from over the very short term: destruction of the brain, and loss of oxygen to the brain. The typical way the brain goes hypoxic is through loss of blood (and this can happen in less than 3 minutes or so -- even if the bleeding is internal), but another way is for the heart to actually stop completely (the blood is there, its just stagnant).
Snip the base of the brain with a .22, he's out. .50cal to the hips, while spectacular looking, may not kill the brain for a while (if arteries are yanked apart instead of severed bleeding out may take a while). Knock the bottom half of the body off with a truck and the upper half of the body may live for a surprising amount of time (minutes, maybe tens of minutes, but not hours, so your medical tech and response times are critical). Hammer to the base of the skull usually means he's done. Massive blast damage to the body, but not the head, may ultimately turn out no worse for the head than being tackled in a sport (especially if he's got a helmet on -- not for the blast, but when his head hits something as he lands/falls). Linear breaching charges on steel doors sometimes fling a white-hot strip of metal into the room on the other side cutting people apart (which is why we stopped placing them down the middle the doors) -- and sometimes the head-attached part is just fine for a while. etc. The body's reaction to trauma is pretty bizarre sometimes.
Your job in these various cases is to determine the rules for the medical tech and deal with those consequences appropriately. Can people regenerate limbs? (Large caliber or multiple small, high velocity hits can break bodies apart, particularly at joints.) You may wish to avoid these cases entirely, but keep in mind that real gunfights often involve more than just guns.
**When the switch is off, it stays off**
Brain injuries are not just unrecoverable because magical healing technology couldn't perhaps mend the physical wound, but because the encephalic activity of the brain has ceased. Nobody knows how to flip the switch back on even if you do mend everything involved. Maybe someday, and maybe in your story world, but if this is the case you'll need to explain how that's happening for it to be believable.
Catastrophic heart injuries cause hypoxia almost immediately. But while it appears that someone shot through the heart dies immediately, that's just them passing out as they hit the floor -- the brain will generally remain alive for about 6 minutes, but you've only got 1~3 minutes before serious brain damage begins to set in.
(I've heard that supercooling the brain can prolong this window, but I've never seen it and its hard to imagine that working outside of a lab. I'm mentioning it because you may want to use that as part of your story, but it is definitely not a part of the present-day soldier's experience.)
This brings up the issue of making it to cover. These days we teach that "bullets are the best medicine". Part of the reason is that we don't want people to rush to a place where someone just got shot because that spot *is clearly dangerous right then*. Another is because most of the time the downed guy can move himself to cover *as long as you distract the enemy with suppressive fire*. If you're talking to him about how okay everything is and shush-shushing like the movies *you are not shooting* -- in that case *two* people are out of the fight. Once covered and concealed he can do whatever he finds immediately necessary on his own: apply a tourniquet, check his body, remove a burning battery from his kit, pop his pills (nearly everyone carries some Motrin and a broad-spectrum antibiotic as a prophylaxis -- combat is hot, filthy and diseased), *shoot back*, etc.
**On Kickin' Chickens and Scampering Skinnies**
The stories you hear about people running off, deer leaping fences, chickens dancing around, turkeys trying to fly, etc. after being shot are absolutely true.
Sometimes you nail someone -- know you nailed them because they were right in front of you and you're pretty darn good at this -- and they just run off looking startled instead of hurt, like nothing happened. The first time you see that its surreal and almost comical because for a split second you wonder if your weapon works. You'll find them later, but who knows how long it took before they finally bled out or succumbed to shock? *This is a critical period for your super-duper healing tech.* In your world, perhaps people just get super afraid (realizing the close call) or super upset (realizing the close call) when this happens instead of succumbing to shock or bleeding out.
This running off after being shot is probably the majority case when catastrophic injury is not delivered immediately. Its not quite like the movies where people just fall over, *unless they've been knocked out because of a change in blood pressure*. They may bleed out before they wake up, for for a few moments there they are alive, just not moving. This is *another* critical period for your medical technology -- if its something that doesn't have to be delivered to a patient, but is just a part of them, then maybe they always do wake up in these cases.
A lot of this has to do with proximity. In a gunfight you're going to let any nearby bad guys have a full-serving right away and keep hitting them until they are obviously down (~50m or closer). At longer ranges, though, its pretty common to only get a random shot into someone unless you're sniping (and when sniping you typically *don't* aim for the head). The reason for this is that its hard to put rapid shots right on top of one another farther out than about 150m when you've been running around and breathing hard and you're not in the best firing position. And people don't tend to hold still (though sometimes folks do sort of get "caught in the headlights" and freeze). For these reasons most longer-range fire is *suppressing fire*, not lethal fire. You are trying to fix the enemy in place and distract them with your shots while the rest of your side maneuvers (to assault or break contact). With your medical tech dying under such circumstances would just be horribly unlucky. On the other hand, if the characters in the story aren't trained fighters they will be much more likely to not really engage in suppressive fire to begin with.
Unlike the movies where the James Bond calmly pops a bad guy in the face with a .380 and then *just stops paying attention to him because he's 100% confident he's done*, you can hit someone in the face (the cheek, say, but not into the nasal cavity straight-on) with fully jacketed small caliber pistol bullets (.45 ACP, 9mm, etc.) and the bullet may slide off the bone below the brain case and out the right or left side of the base of the back of the neck. That never happens in a cool-guy movie, but its the reason that in real close quarters gun fights you *never fire just once* and *always re-index your targets* -- and sometimes follow the shooting up with physical kicks, stomps, heavy objects, etc. to *make sure that business is properly handled*. (Btw, fully jacketed pistol bullets are some of the worst for actually killing people, which I've always felt was sort of cruel to both parties.) This gets back up to the correlation between the proximity of an engagement and its probable lethality. This stuff happens very quickly -- 10 seconds in this environment is a *very long time*.
**But traumatic injuries never cease to amaze**
What is surprising about gunshot wounds is not what will obviously kill (zombie rules apply: kill the brain) but how often minor-seeming wounds tend to turn out being fatal if not immediately treated (a shot through the upper arm or leg that doesn't seem to bleed much) and how often rather catastrophic-looking wounds turn out to be OK if handled properly (the classic guts-in-his-hands situation when no severe arterial bleed is occurring).
In the real world we have what we call "the golden hour". People who live past this hour stand a *very* high chance of survival, as long as infection does not take them (hence those pills mentioned earlier). This balance will be shifted considerably in a world with miraculous medicine.
**Stats update**
I would like to give some concrete numbers instead of simply the "it depends" answer with regard to statistical impact on survival rates, but... it really *does* depend on quite a few factors. Trying to pin down epidemiology statistics for combat wounds isn't too hard for a specific [American war](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20370999) (good luck with any others), but I'm not quite sure these wars are representative of your proposed environment. If this medical technology were prevalent it may*change the way we fight war*. If it were not prevalent, but rather monopolized by one side then it would *certainly* change the way that side fights. (Or not. Sometimes the side with the super-weapon is bogged down in old doctrine and bureaucracy. Japan invented the dominant naval weapon of WWII, the aerial torpedo, yet stuck with their (highly successful and *very* well drilled) ship-to-ship night fighting doctrine long after the Americans had found ways to avoid it and had themselves turned their focus to naval aviation. Oops!)
Above I mentioned that proximity is a big factor in delivering catastrophic shots. How common this situation is will greatly influence the prevalence of sudden fatalities. In open terrain the odds of close encounters is much lower (near ambush aside, of course, but without concealment near a route far ambush is much more likely -- but consider the terrain: temperate forest, desert, mountains, island/beach, jungle, urban, the moon, etc.). With this in mind, if the enemy has no air or artillery (because *those* could be catastrophic no matter how great your medical skills are) infantry commanders may feel justified in making bold, overland movements in broad daylight knowing that the odds of death or even long delay in the event of a far ambush conducted with small arms are quite small. Movement is *really* the heart of how combat actions go down, not the shooting, so this could be a *very significant* change -- even in urban environments. Snipers would be forced to start shooting for the head, and thus becomes dramatically less effective, etc.
All that said, a firm statistic on OIF/AEF combat injuries is 30~35% of combat wounds are to the head or neck. In your world this means that at *least* 65% of other combat casualties are non-fatal (not all head injuries are fatal; a significant portion of those are eye injuries due to flying debris -- *wear eye protection!*), and the majority of those should be situations where the wounded soldier continues on mission (depending on whether limb regeneration and/or a lengthy recuperation period is part of the deal).
A twist to this may be that if the medical technology is *so* efficient that guns wounds become relatively ineffective, you can rest assured that infantrymen will get creative. They will begin rigging huge demo ambushes, abandon rifles for grenade launchers, abandon knives for swords or hammers, running the enemy down in cars, etc. Higher command would likely switch to chemical weapons or shift their budgets around so that infantry are treated like forward observers and the real fight is artillery and air, etc. The show *will* go on and this change *will* have a tactical impact on how that change manifests. It very likely would *not* have a strategic impact, though, unless only one side were in possession of the technology.
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I have a unique perspective on this - my mother was a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, on the police beat, and as I grew older she shared with me some of the more gruesome details of her work covering Houston crime.
First and foremost, a gunshot to the head is not a guaranteed kill. If the majority of the brain case is intact and the brain stem was not severed, you would be surprised what people can bounce back from. A dear friend of my mother was shot in the head by her husband many years ago, and I met her at my mother's memorial - full motor function, no visible deformities, and no impairments. It is worth noting that she lost the memory of being shot and could not testify.
What you are pondering is similar to what happened to Houston many several years ago. They were working on being the murder capitol of the United States. There was much to-do about whether the budget could ever afford more ambulances and more medics to combat the casualties, when a cool thing happened - a policy changed that required firefighters to respond to scenes, and that they all be trained in CPR. Not every firehouse has an ambulance, but the firefighters themselves were usually fairly close, in small, unassuming little buildings with larger than average garages. With the advent of fire response and CPR, we didn't make the number of wounds go down, but people started surviving. Deaths from aggravated assault went down about 60 percent, if I remember correctly.
Now in your case, it sounds like you'll have a miracle working cleric about 2 minutes out on standby - and that sounds neat. I doubt that ordinary civilians would have much to fear from a gunshot.
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I'm going to buck the trend here, and suggest that, with a healer available within two minutes, death by gunshot is extremely rare. Shooting someone in the heart is almost instantly lethal in our world, but it's important to note that what happens does not involve instant tissue death. Rather, the cessation of blood flow to the brain causes loss of consciousness and then brain function. People have been brought back from cardiac arrest, but loss of oxygen for more than a few minutes does major brain damage. If a healer can both repair heart damage *and* restore function to the brain, I don't see any reason why most gunshots would be lethal. A lot depends on the nature of brain function, and whether the organized electrochemical patterns of a functioning brain can be restored once the cellular damage is fixed.
On this issue a lot depends on what you think a healer can do. How well would a restored brain work? It seems pretty clear that autonomic nervous system function is hardwired, so restoring destroyed brain tissue would probably restore the ability to keep the heart and lungs going, along with all the other housekeeping functions. More problematic, though, are the higher functions. Our personality and all voluntary movement skills are learned responses, and the changes in brain chemistry/neuron connection which control these aspects would presumably be lost. So I'd expect major brain damage to produce the same sort of deficits that a survivable trauma do now. However, with the organic damage repaired, there would seem to be the possibility that recovery of some function would be possible, although the reduced plasticity in adults vs infants/children would tend to limit the possibility.
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Really depends on where and how bad.
According to [this](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15651433), combat injuries have what is called "the platnum 5 minutes", meaning that if there is an injury with severe blood loss, if you stop the bleeding in about 5 minutes there is a much higher chance of survival.
[Some other statistics that might be useful](http://archive.armytimes.com/article/20120628/NEWS/206280315/Study-25-war-deaths-medically-preventable), studies have shown that 25% of combat deaths could be avoided, but that would be higher if you had magic healing abilities available.
There were 4,596 combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011, and a quarter(1,391) of those were instantly fatal. *Of those that didn't die instantly,* 2,699 died before arriving at a treatment center. This is where healing would have been useful, since many of these could have lived long enough for a healer to get to them and fix them up. Of the 506 who made it to a medical center but still died, their chance of survival goes way up with trained healers in place.
This is battlefield combat instead of urban combat, but the numbers would probably end up being similar, if not better. Less bombs, more bullets. It's harder to heal someone that has their lower half missing, and you'd have longer to heal a non instantly fatal gunshot wound.
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The answer is pretty simple. After all, how possible is it to die instantly in a real-world gunfight?
If you take a bullet to the head, chances are you're dead before anyone can help you. Or, even if you are healed, the resulting brain damage would leave you as a shadow of your former self, and death may well be preferable.
If you get shot in the heart, same thing - instant death.
If you get *riddled* with bullets, but your armor stops the worst of it you may bleed out in a minute or two, or be severely injured. In that case your chances will vary depending on when that healer reaches you, and how much "juice" they have to heal you.
Hope that helps.
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If we define "heal" as the process where the tissues go back to their original place or new tissue appears in replace of destroyed tissue then:
* If the bullet does not go out of the body, then the body won't heal completely unless you remove the bullet.
* Since human cells can survive few minutes without irrigation, then any wound won't be fatal. But the brain damage would be possible anyway.
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I'll just point out the obvious, like getting shot in the head or heart is instant game over. Any large artery like the external carotid artery or the femoral artery or any major artery for that fact wouldn't allow the healing to be done in time. Anywhere else could be counted as a survival!
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Don't forget to account for escalation.
Once magical healing starts to nerf the lethality of gunshot (maybe even up to allowing bullet-proof skull-plates to be implanted), then gun nuts are going to insist on the right to bare antitank weapons for self defense. And such.
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For context, I'm considering a story similar to the Netfilx TV show *The 100* in which humanity has to recolonize the Earth following a major extinction-level event. I'm aiming for the society they recreate to be similar to our current one. Everything from technology to cities to daily life is almost identical to ours with the only major difference being geopolitics. So my question is: *Is it possible, given a global catastrophic event in which humanity needs to repopulate the Earth, for technological development to "freeze" for, say, 100 years or so since human efforts would be geared towards resettling the Earth?* I'm aiming for a modern dark age that doesn't involve the loss of current tech but rather a temporary slow down or halt of technological development. So that, for example, by 2150 or 2200, we've only progressed maybe 40-50 years technologically from where we are now.
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There's quite a few good answers already here, so I'd like to focus on the questions itself...
**Is it possible, given a global catastrophic event in which humanity needs to repopulate the Earth, for technological development to "freeze" for, say, 100 years or so since human efforts would be geared towards resettling the Earth? I'm aiming for a modern dark age that doesn't involve the loss of current tech but rather a temporary slow down or halt of technological development. So that, for example, by 2150 or 2200, we've only progressed maybe 40-50 years technologically from where we are now.**
In the case of a cataclysmic event in which most of the Earth's population is wiped out, there would have to be a very good reason motivating people to continue to try to increase technologically. Since survival would become the most important issue, most of modern technological development would be useless and hence worthless.
For instance, trillions of dollars go into information technology development alone. Trying to make systems larger, more complex, more robust and more user friendly. This all would be useless in a world where there are only hundreds to thousands of people. Consider the defense industry, the space industry, the entertainment industry... All of these industries invest trillions of dollars and contribute enormously to technological development and all of these would be worthless in the scenario given. This can be true for nearly all other branches of technology...when living consists of fighting for survival why put time, energy and resources into anything but trying to rebuild and repopulate?
Thus, while it is possible to keep our current level of technology in the sense that the knowledge can be there...for instance stored in some fashion. There would not be enough people to harness this knowledge, nor enough resources to apply it, let alone resources to further this knowledge.
Thus, depending on who survives and how the rebuild society, I'd expect at first, knowledge to be increasingly lost over time, until the population has increased enough for survival to be a non-issue. Fortunately, with access to all the basic information about how the world works this should not take too long, but will still probably take time scales of hundreds of years and this is assuming no other major cataclysms or wars.
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That a small population can try to resettle the Earth is possible.
That the same population can start from where the technology development went idle is highly unlikely.
First of all most of the knowledge needed to operate today's machinery and systems will be gone. With that will be gone all our logistics and supply chains. After 1700 years we still don't know how Romans made their concrete, for example.
You might say: "well, we don't have coal shipments, but we have books telling us that coal was used to feed power plants". Yes, but most of the mines are not shallow like the ones which were first used at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Again, to operate those you will need modern systems.
That would probably be a permanent hindrance on the development possibilities of this new settling culture.
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With the exception of a near extinction event, **there probably won't be a modern dark ages**.
Even the dark ages we heard about in school is [considered to be a myth](https://www.history.com/news/6-reasons-the-dark-ages-werent-so-dark) in [modern academia](https://www.jstor.org/stable/24448338). [Science still advanced throughout the Middle Ages](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23643958?seq=1) and wasn't suppressed as much as many people assumed by the Catholic Church. Other civilizations, religious or otherwise, [saw scientific advances and a rise in the average lifespan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV7CanyzhZg).
Basically, the only way to have a real dark age is to damage the human population to the point where scientific advancements are difficult, if not nearly impossible. There could be an order that suppresses science, but as we learn from the myth of the historical dark ages, you would have to have an order that would repress *all* scientific advancements for most human civilizations. Otherwise, you will have other civilizations somewhere out there advancing progress (since even if the Dark Ages were real, there would be other groups like the Chinese and Muslims still making scientific discoveries).
There is a rule in biology called the [50/500 rule](https://www.britannica.com/science/50-500-rule): a rule that says if everything goes perfectly, you would need about 50 people to survive and carefully breed to prevent inbreeding, and 500 people to prevent genetic problems in future generations. Basically, a disaster that reduces humanity to a few hundred or thousand people rapidly could provide a dark age. This would create a scenario for humans where immediate survival and not inbreeding would take precedence over new discoveries. This temporary small population would make it believable that there are no other people on the planet who would be making massive scientific breakthroughs, and would force any future generations to have to learn basic survival skills before considering any new breakthroughs or progress. The population would also start off small enough to make it nonviable to run factories, mines, and other industrial facilities necessary to maintain modern technology, at least for a few generations.
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A near-extinction event such as you propose will have wide-reaching social effects. What caused the near extinction? If the perception of the survivors is that some aspect of the pre-extinction society was the primary cause for all of the deaths, then we can expect that the survivors will not be quick to continue those "deadly" aspects.
If science and technology are thought to have caused the problem, then it does not make sense to ramp up science and technology again. Substitute "lack of religious faith" or "vegan diets" or "too much partisan politics" or "whatever" and watch how society switches to different forms and beliefs.
We humans are quite adept at making up stories to explain the inexpiable. A quick review of mythology, the typical political campaign, and the content of certain cable news channels will disabuse you of the notion that they have to make "rationale" sense. In the situation that you propose, the survivors would not have the time or energy to work through the detailed analysis to get to the "truth."
Enlightened reason, such as we associate with science and technology, might re-emerge after a time, but I would not be surprised if that time was measured in millennia rather than decades.
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A catastrophe such as you describe would produce a rapid reordering of priorities. Many forms of technology would be cast aside as useless for survival, and often the tools you need to redo them would be lost, but others would get intensive interest and so development.
At the very least, at our technological level of development, research into infertility treatments could continue and would be urgent, both to preserve genetic diversity and to simply increase the population.
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Not only possible, but pretty much probable even without an extinction event.
The original "dark age" happened in the first place because the life was "good enough" (at least, good enough for those in a position to do research or make inventions). All you need to repeat the feat is to kill the social elevators (that's why deep inequality is considered bad).
Contrary, a great repopulation effort will require (and reward!) new technologies (or even reinventing old ones). It will also make possible a lot of different social experiments. Hardly a dark age recipe.
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The big problem with most extinction level events is that in order to kill enough people to make technology stagnate you have to minimize the population to a point that makes all sorts of existing technology unachievable. Not just forward progress. A few hundred people won't run around for more than a few years using computers and cell phones because they will be unable to maintain the space programs required to keep the satellites going. They will be unable to maintain the multi-billion dollar factories that manufacture them, they will be unable to gather all the exotic materials from across the globe needed in thier construction. They won't even be able to devote the manpower to keep a modern steel mill running. Since you bring up 100 as an example, your society is pretty much guaranteed to crumble back to the iron age as it did for the surface people with so few people left. It would then take centuries or even millenia for people to repopulate enough to pick back up where we started.
Modern technology is so heavily reliant on economy of scale and global trade that you need to maintain a world population in the millions to keep it from all falling apart, but millions of people thrust into a harsh new survival scenario will tend to innovate just as fast as a larger more comfortable population because they will have more needs to meet.
These factors together mean that you need an event that does less to cause a population driven dark age, but a cultural one. One really good way to do this is a robot uprising. The robots could kill off a large portion of the human population without completely destroying our ability to maintain a modern infrastructure, but the resulting fear of AI would paralyze our ability to technologically progress. Modern tech is at a point now where nearly every new invention hinges on highly developed computer systems to make happen, but if people fear AI too much to use it, then moving forward past our current levels will slow down to a snail's pace.
To achieve your modern micro population scenario, you could make the AI uprising's devastation asymmetric. Have some nations that were completely wiped out while others survived mostly intact. The the surviving nations would need to recolonize the wild zones by first sending small expeditions that may only be in the hundreds.
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If you place the story 20-30 years forward from now, you could use nano-technology aka robots to fill in the gaps. The humans have the knowledge and your robot army does the field work.
We need coal! -> robot mine.
We need to build x -> robot builds.
On a side note; many stories imagine that this will be how future colonization of worlds will work. You can't turn a human off (yet), you can turn off a robot. Besides that their needs are very shallow; power and maintenance. Where as a human has a pletora of needs that need to be met during transit and after planetfall.
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Modern technology requires a long supply chain -- not just physical supply chain but also a chain of specialized knowledge. Those suppliers don't exist everywhere in the world, and it would take a long time to build up. For example, over the past 20-30 years China has been building up the supply chain for electronics. They have not only the device assemblers but also the chip makers and the suppliers of the various raw materials and components. It has taken decades for them to build the network of companies to dominate that field. If we decide to try to move those industries back to America, it will also be a project of a few decades.
This can also be seen in other complex industries such as auto manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, etc. There are many countries without an auto manufacturer. And you have some countries, like China, that don't yet have an internationally successful car company, but they have lots of the auto parts supply chain.
Simply put, you could create a "dark age" with regards to certain industries, simply by knocking out certain countries in your armageddon scenario. Without the USA, Japan, Germany, and South Korea, you wouldn't have much of a modern car industry. There are some car makers in China, India, etc., but you might think of their vehicles as a technological step backwards (to be fair: I haven't taken a test drive of any of these lately) and it might take them several years to catch up to present day expectations or exceed them.
In your "repopulating the earth" story, people could have all the written-down knowledge of the present, but still not be able to duplicate what we can accomplish. This is the actual case today in many countries. Vietnam or Cuba or Ireland could check all the engineering books out of any major library but that wouldn't give them an auto industry. Canadians could learn online how to make decent bacon, but their agriculture just isn't organized for it.
On the other hand, your settlers might find ways to innovate with less infrastructure. Maybe instead of having a specialized computer chip for every device, they could learn to reproduce one chip (i.e. an Arduino) and utilize it for all kind of different purposes. So their factories and farms might not look like modern ones *or* like the ones of our past, but more of a DIY hybrid.
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So I got this species of vampire-creatures (no conversion of other species, just mating and reproducing in typical mammalian fashion) that subsist entirely on blood. I'm using a bit of magic to imply they subsist on both the nutritional aspects of the blood and magical energy in the sanguine itself. Technically speaking, it is a supernaturally efficient digestive system that would give them a huge advantage over humans if the species weren't kept in check by burning sunlight.
Anyhow, I had planned it so they are capable tool users, so draining blood could be done with a knife and some patience, but now I feel as though I'm being lazy about their design. After all, the species would probably be drinking blood long before they learned how to make a cutting tool. So, **What teeth/mouthparts would be best for a humanoid blood-drinker?**
Normally I'd just look at the animal kingdom for inspiration, but all the other bloodsuckers are either smaller than a thumbnail or just scratch and lick. Feel free to get creative, as long as the result seems plausible biologically. Blending in with humans isn't a priority in this setting.
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I always liked the classic vampire fangs what can be used to suck blood. Firstly they are sharp. Secondly, they have a small hollow tube in them which the vampires can use to suck the blood out of a victim with no need for licking or scratching. Just good old, bite in the neck and drain out the blood.
The exact length you need would depend on which arteries the vampires would likely use and how deep they are under the skin. If your vampire kills its victims rather than take a bit of blood at a time, then you won't need to worry about something to numb the area( or have very thin teeth which would be risky).
Otherwise, if you want to keep the victim alive, you would likely feed at night while the victim is asleep. Numb the area with some chemical coating your teeth or released like snake venom which means the victim wouldn't realize or feel much and won't suddenly wake up. You would also need something to be able to heal the wound over quickly without leaving much of a trace, which would likely be in the vampires saliva so the victim doesn't just bleed to death form having a vein punctured.
I assume the teeth would work just like how us sucking on two straws works, the blood would flow into the vampires mouth and be swallowed and digested like normal to simplify the body design. Basically imagine two thing straws attached to the roof of your mouth and try to drink something.
I can't draw but here is a cross section image
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FKJrf.png)
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The mouths of these vampires could be modeled after everyone's favorite blood-draining medicinal tool: leeches, specifically [Hirudo medicinalis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirudo_medicinalis). These gross instruments of old-timey medicine are famed for their ability to extract a lot of blood and not hurt you while they're doing it.
The structure of these leeches mouths look like something out of a horror movie, but are very simple: three pointy teeth(or sets of of teeth) arranged in a circular mouth. Their mouths also secret some chemicals to help them get blood: an anticoagulant called [hirudin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirudin) to keep the blood flowing, anesthetics to numb the pain of the piercing and sucking, and sticky mucus to keep a good seal around the wound.
So, your vampire would have a few sharp teeth arranged around a circular mouth. These teeth can just be spikes, as they aren't need for chewing. Their saliva can contain the same anticoagulant and anesthetic properties to keep their prey bleeding and pain-free, and can even throw some mucus in the mix to ensure a seal between their mouth and the prey.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LUR4p.png)
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Regular human teeth would be more than sufficient if the rest of the creature is sufficiently strong.
They grab their victim, yank back the head, bite directly into the caratoid artery and guzzle down the fountain of blood that rushes out. They prefer their victims to be awake and terrified to increase the blood flow and reduce the amount that's still in the body when the heart stops. (Plus the adrenaline just makes it taste better.)
They're strong enough to do this with one hand clamped firmly over the victim's mouth and nose, so any screaming is usually brief and muffled.
If they have time, once the victim has quit struggling they'll lift the corpse up over their heads and drain/suck the rest of the blood out like you would a squeeze-bottle full of cherry cough syrup.
Cursory physical inspection is insufficient to out someone as a vampire as there are no outward anatomical differences. The vampires do, however, spread tales about fangs or sideways mandibles so as to throw off suspicion.
Alternatively, forget normal teeth. Give them a two-foot, hollow, prehensile tongue with a sharp, retractable, piercing point just under the tip. They knock their victim down, shove their tongue into the chest cavity and wiggle it around into the aorta and suck the body dry. Detection requires careful physical examination of the tongue, or listening carefully for the occasional faint click of the point against the teeth when speaking. The vampires encourage tongue piercings to help throw off suspicion.
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Even the only known mammalian hæmovore, the vampire bat, has anticoagulants in its saliva, and some mild neurotransmitter inhibitants... and some wickedly sharp incisors, so although it does only "scratch and lick" the reason it can get away with that is that the victim (mostly donkeys if memory serves) are often mostly unaware they're being fed upon.
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Have you considered the possibility of them consuming their prey in large components, then regurgitating those parts they cannot digest? You don't need very fancy teeth for that, just some good old chompers and flexible anatomy. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon#Diet>
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> Komodo dragons eat by tearing large chunks of flesh and swallowing them whole while holding the carcass down with their forelegs. For smaller prey up to the size of a goat, their loosely articulated jaws, flexible skulls, and expandable stomachs allow them to swallow prey whole
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> After digestion, the Komodo dragon regurgitates a mass of horns, hair, and teeth known as the gastric pellet, which is covered in malodorous mucus
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These aren't the only creatures to have such habits, of course (many predators do something similar), so applying it to creatures that are only interested in the blood and just vomit up the remains after draining them would not be difficult and would pose an interesting contrast to the usual vampire tropes. This might be a bit more savage/violent than you want for your vampire-creatures, though.
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There is a big problem, that they drink too much - to have long time working co-existence, they need too much people in relatively small area to feed on
family of vampires (two adults, two childs) needs either to kill and dry adult human every week (and the human population have to grow fast for that - count 1 child/year per 2 adults for 1/3 of their life, so population like 450 people could barely feed one vampire family, and somehow survive, if no other deaths are involved), or can they prey alive to regenerate (witch results to like 120 adults and 60 childs to be rotated - still pretty big village for ancient times)
And that is the minimum just to survive. So Vampires needs to be pretty teritorial, slow growing population with only few families in big area, else they would extinct from killing its food too fast.
Also humans are good cooperators and the vampires would be hunted terribly, if they misuse humans so much (and vampires are younger than human, as they are specialised on human as food, so they would be at big disadvatage at first, until they fully extend they powers, get higher in numbers and establish some kind of stable manageble situation)
There are two possible solutions for that - first the vampires would enslave humans as food and took care about them as we do for cows, pigs etc. (but it is totally other world), or second ther will be just few vampires, highly mobile and they would have something to offer too, so humans would not try to destroy them all at all cost.
And that would be possible, if vampires would use something like leeches, but offer a lot more - anesthetic and anticoagulant (for obvious reason), but also some drugs to paralyse the prey (for the time of drinking), other drugs to provide happiness and pleasure to the prey (so the prey would not like to retaliate, but may be willing to provide blood for pleasure even next time), some good medicine (to prevent prey from death and for faster recovery - it could also provide some kind of resistance to other parasites, illness and other common case of premature death, as well as make it heal faster to not lose much blood and recover it faster - which would help also with other medical problems so wounded/ill people would seek for be used by vapires to survive the original wound/illness and recover faster).
Also even when digestive of vampires is superefective, there can be some residuals, that would vampires dispose back to their prey (and that would help recovery as mentioned before).
If vampires are specialized in humans (and magic is involved), they may even not digest the blood at all, but just mix it with their blood directly, spend all food from it as well as some other parts and then return the blood to their next prey (so using humans as "external digestive system" for themself).
This way the prey would recover even faster (but be really hungry), as it would not lose so much of blood, only part of its blood would be fitered out of usable food and quality and such, but overall blood presure (and volume) would be nearly the same, maybe even some residual from vampire extra speed/strenght/enhanced sences would be there and the prey would be for few days faster and more powerfull itself, so be able find food and recover and have more success in human society, as well as be more fertile (so successuful prey would have more childs more ready to be prey too and "marked" people would be local heroes, so be prey would be kind of blessing (even at high personal cost))
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So the vampires may be not killing demons, but dangerous symbionts of human race (at least in some cultures)
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Thus far the answers are all pointing towards noticeable teeth, but personally I think teeth are too easily noticeable. We notice humans with mildly-enlarged canines so I've always seen the Vampire-with-giant-canines as more of a visual effect and not a sensical portrayal of something that needs to be stealthy to survive.
I would imagine that looks like a lamprey's mouth inside of the tongue (the tongue could open up) or hidden somewhere else in the mouth/throat. What's more, this can be employed while kissing or other similar activities without biting the person; which is to say that normally in visual representations there is a grandiose bite that is obviously non-sensual. With the front of the tongue turning into a nasty mouth this bite would still be able to look like an ordinary kiss.
What this gets you is a Vampire that isn't detected simply by looking at its Canines/incisors. If the this hidden mouth is suitably difficult/invasive to discover (and if your Vampires are as beguiling as other vampires) then this makes them much harder to detect.
Lastly, this type of mouth virtually guarantees that no blood is lost in the act, so they don't have to wipe their mouth, or worry about drips.
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A note: I believe things like this have been done before in TV (and one can picture the Iconic Alien throat-mouth) but I can't seem to find images of what I'm thinking of. The below will have to suffice.
For reference, a Lamprey's mouth looks like so:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QprR5.jpg)
For further reference on Lamprey, This is what they look like attached:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/R2Zfa.jpg)
And this is the type of mark they leave.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/69P2w.jpg)
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An even more disturbing (at least to me) method than all the ones before would be a mosquito like [proboscis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proboscis), I mean its sharper than any needle and cuts through skin segregating a saliva that makes you feel nothing until its too late, as mosquitoes can see in infrared they usually go straight to veins and suck a lot of blood, its like the perfect method to steal blood but also the perfect way to transmit diseases like vampirism for example ;)
Now you picture something like that but in the size of human teeth....
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At the end of [a recent movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_%28film%29), the hero wakes up in a space station which is probably only a few kilometers wide and generates gravity by rotating. In this station, kids are playing **baseball**.
It strikes me as **implausible** that baseball becomes a major sport in space stations because:
* Requires a large volume (~100m\*100m\*50m)
* At every one time, only ~2 players are running, the rest are walking or watching
* Efficiency: 250,000 m³/active player
In comparizon, basketball is about as much fun, and is much more efficient in terms of physical activity / volume:
* Small volume (~30m\*20m\*15m)
* At every one time, ~5 players are in full action
* Efficiency: 1,800 m³/active player
**QUESTION:** Pushing this reasoning to the extreme, what sports would be likely to be played in a space station where volume is scarce?
Additional requirements:
* Physical and healthy
* No virtual reality
* No treadmills
* Designed for team play
* Fun to play and watch (at least it can be imagined that most people would enjoy it)
* Not too sensible to pressure/temperature/gravity. The Space Olympics gather teams come from different stations with slightly different environments (no huge differences though, environment is rather similar to 2015 Ecuador).
Both existing sports and invented sports are OK, existing sports preferred.
Please try to calculate volume efficiency for each sport you suggest.
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## Tug of war:
At the very extremes, this can be played by teams of arbitrary size ([although the rope strength must be sufficiently high to prevent injuries](http://priceonomics.com/a-history-of-tug-of-war-fatalities/)) Since each tugging team member is in close contact with their teammates, this will mean that the volume efficiency rises with the team size, up to a certain limit.
Assuming 10 vs 10 tug of war, the volume required is approximately $\frac{\text{2m\*2m\*20m}}{20}\text{=4m}^{3}$ per person. Even after adding spectators' stands, this probably has one of the lowest volume requirements.
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### Squash
* Volume: 32ft \* 21ft \* 18.5ft = 12432ft3 ≈ 3790m3
* 2 players at once minimum/4 players at once maximum
* Volume efficiency: 1895m3 (singles) or 947.5m3 (doubles) per player
Spectators can watch through windows which will save space.
### Fencing
* Volume: 14m \* 2m \* 7m = 196m3
* Two people on the strip at a time
* Volume Efficiency: 98m3 per player
To save space with spectating, you can have a setup like squash where you watch through a window. You could also make this better by having more than two at a time. It could be a 10-person free-for-all. Of course you'd have to make the strip a bit bigger.
### Dodgeball
* Volume: 60ft \* 30ft \* 20ft = 36000ft3 ≈ 10970m3
* 12 players are on the court at once (2 teams of 6)
* Volume Efficiency: 914m3 per player
Once again, dodgeball can be watched through windows. Making bigger teams can the game more enjoyable as well as adding obstacles on the court.
I'll add more later when I think of them
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## Water polo:
* Volume 25m \* 15m \* (2m + 2m) = 1500m3 - middle sized pool, 2m of water, 2m of air
* 14 players - 6 in field, 1 goalie at each team
* Volume efficiency - 107m3 per player
Note that pool size is variable ranging from 10m \* 20m to 20m \* 30m giving efficiency of 57m3 and 171m3 respectively.
Added bonus is, that pool can be use for water storage and heat exchange for the reactors.
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### [Roller Derby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_derby) (and variants)
**Arena size:** 30m x 20m x 4m (seems a reasonable height) = 2400m3
**Active players:** 10
**Efficiency:** 240m3 / player
Here's a fast-paced team sport that seems well-suited for a space station. The arena size above is a typical Earth arena. In a space station, to conserve/recycle space, you could do away with the standard "oval" format. Wind the track around existing structures, make it a kilometer long, whatever. When it's not being used for the sport, it's a track that people can run/bike/skate on. Your station is going to have some sort of fitness track anyway, right?
Similar "team-based racing" could be done in a variety of different formats, with or without skates.
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*I'm sorry that I can't (yet) comment on other answers, so this is a standalone answer meant as a comment to the water polo answer.*
**Water polo** in an oxygen-saturated perfluorocarbon pool. Would add more of a third dimension (even more volume-efficient?) and does not rely on gravity at all.
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Well, for me, the first thing that comes to mind would be volleyball. A volleyball court is 18m by 9m, and sustains a playerbase of 12, having at minimum 2 players active at any one time. It also fulfills most of your other requirements though the 'fun' is subjective, and the gravity thing is vague (I think all sports would be susceptible to gravity fluctuations).
A more imaginative and definitely entertaining sport to watch would be, I think, group ping-pong. Think about nearly 8 people standing around a ping pong table trying to hit the ball without smacking into each other. Fun!
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Although I sense by *team play* you mean you are looking for a *competitive* sport where teams *interact* with each other I think stretching this requirement a little bit gives some interesting options.
Volume-efficient made me immediately think of [Qigong](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qigong) – something very many people can take part in simultaneously. You might have seen the typical Qigong pictures of Asians practicing in parks.
Now this by no means qualifies as *competitive*.
However, thinking of Irish dance – or **dance** in general – you can have competitions that are definitely interesting to watch. And well, you can compete with other teams. If you don't like dancing for some reason you could have competitions in [synchronous walking](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhHxPJSrPOw) – yes, that's a thing – or any other kind of "movement art" like **gymnastics** or – something typically American – ***cheerleading***.
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The sports I mentioned only have interaction within the teams if that is okay for you. But they have many advantages.
For example:
* you need **no special equipment** – no additional storage requirements
* you need **no dedicated spaces** for them
* they are **scalable**
* they **can be non-competitive** if you want to – maybe you want to encourage harmony and unison
* they have a very **low risk of injuries**
After all I think these are the kinds of sports you would be doing a lot on a space station.
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# Boxing
Boxing rings are (according to some stats I found) around 6x6 meters, which means the volume needed per player is about 18m2 and the height is only limited by what is comfortable for the people using it, although I would make it about 3m high because otherwise people get claustrophobic. That gives a volume of about 54m3 per player.
You can probably fit in a whole bunch of other martial combat sports in the same ring. Since they are designed around the idea of the players being in direct contact, they automatically take up far less space than any sport that is based around players being far apart from one another.
However, although very compact in terms of area, most martial arts aren't directly designed to be played by teams. Changing the sport to allow multiple persons on each team might be very interesting.
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I have a few ideas that haven't been mentioned yet.
### Hockey
An ice hockey rink (by NHL rules, which we'll use since it's smaller than international rules) is 200 feet long and 85 feet wide, and has rounded corners with a 28 foot radius. This gives a floor area of about 16327 square feet, or 1517 m$^2$. It doesn't need to be very tall, so we can just give it a comfortable ceiling of 3 meters, for a volume of **4551 m3**. Hockey is played with six people on the rink per team (penalties notwithstanding), so there are **12** people active at a time. This gives a space efficiency of about **380m3/player**.
### Track Cycling
The banked tracks for bicycle racing ([velodromes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velodrome)) are specially built, with no strict dimension requirements that I could find, so I will use the parameters that I *could* find to make some estimates. By the rules used by the Olympics, the track is 250 meters long by a measurement near the inner edge. It is an oval, with two straights and two 180-degree curves. While the exact dimensions are not standardized, one measurement I found gave a 16.6 m radius for the curves, which gives straights that are about 73m long. Most tracks are 7 or 7.5 meters wide, and there is also a 4 meter wide safety zone on the inside of the track proper. Using these dimensions gives a surface area of about 3150 m2. (This does not include the center of track, which could be used for other purposes, though that would interfere with the spectator value.) A 3 meter height seems reasonable here, too, so that gives a volume of **9450 m3**. This estimate is probably a little high because of the banked curves, but it's close enough for government work.
One advantage of a cycling track (or any type of track) is the variety of events it can host. There are two-person races or even one-person time trials, and both sprints and endurance races. This means that a track could be in use more often, making the space more *time*-efficient. This variety also includes the points race, which is a mass-start race involving a large number of riders. If we allow for **30** riders (the Olympic event has had as many as 28 participants, so this seems reasonable), then we get a potential space efficiency of **315 m3/rider**. There are also "Madison" races, which are like tag-team racing. Again going by the Olympics, this can have as many as **36** riders, in teams of two. Since half of the racers are "resting" (but still riding) at any time, you might not allow this count. If you do, that improves the space usage to **262.5 m3/rider**.
One other consideration is that reduced gravity could be to your benefit, allowing you to reduce the volume used by increasing the banking angle of track. Or, if closer to Earth-normal gravity, the inner safety zone could double as a running track when the bicycle track is not in use, giving more use to the same space.
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Regarding Interstellar, I believe the reason for baseball being shown was to show that they were living a similar life (minus the environmental issues) to what they had on Earth. And the use of baseball in the establishing scenes on Earth was meant to further the parallels the movie was drawing with the [dust bowl](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl) (when baseball was by far the most popular team sport in the US).
Anyay, to answer the queston your requirement of team play knocks out a lot of good, space limited options (wrestling, raquetball, etc.). If doubles raquetball or badminton count as "team sports" they likely win due to their ability to be played in relatively small indoor spaces. Otherwise, there are a number of team sports on a roughly basketball sized court (basketball, futsal, volleyball, hockey, etc.) but not many played in a smaller area. Which makes sense, because for a sport to be "physical" it requires a certain amount of space for each competitor to move around in.
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## Quidditch
A [quidditch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quidditch#Pitches) pitch is 150 m long, 55 m wide and probably about 25 m high (highest goal at 15 m); the game has seven players moving more or less constantly on each side, even though the physical exercise is mostly carried out by flying brooms and not the players themselves. So this is not extremely volume-efficient at nearly 15 000 m³ per player, but I'm assuming that you could play in a smaller volume, and it does not rely on gravity at all. A zero-gravity environment would actually get you much closer to real-life quidditch!
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# Basketball
This has already been mentioned, so I'll just mention the idea of an even more awesome variant **Cylindrical Basketball**, where the court actually wraps around in the 'crosswise' direction, and the hoops are equal heights above all parts of the court. Zero-G versions would be equally awesome. Obviously only feasible in space.
# Football
...which Americans call soccer. Five-a-side and six-a-side games are played in spaces about the same size as a basketball court. Opportunity for really awesome ball control in low gravity and with Coriolis force to take advantage of.
# Lacrosse
Only a little bigger in space requirements to basketball, and open to the same variations above.
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## Video Games
I think this one wins with $2~\text{m}^3$ per player (for console games, $3~\text{m}^3$ for PC games).
The only requirement this falls afoul of is "physical and healthy" (or possibly "no virtual reality"). However, on a [space station with *extremely* limited space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station), people would probably use [dedicated excercise equipment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert#COLBERT_Treadmill).
"Fun to play and watch" is a matter of opinion; [some](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_StarCraft:_Brood_War_competition) [people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Gaming) find gaming more exciting than any physical sport.
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**The story**
My hero is an average European city boy of the 21th century. Eighteen years old, doing a bit of sport, eating well, with a job that doesn't require much physical efforts. He would appears just as normal as you, or I, do. For the sake of the story, he will be white of color with blue eyes.
By a series of spectacular events, he winds up through time up to the years ~200 A.D. where he meets with a local village between Macedonia and Gaul in the Ancient Rome. It is a really small entity, composed mostly of farmers and perhaps few blacksmiths or carpenters, which is an average in the countryside... and naturally, the people of this village will react to the newcomer.
**The question (s)**
How do this guy appears to the local residents, **physically speaking**? Is he seen as a well-built male, a weak boy or a totally normal resident? Does he appears young and ugly, or old and wise? Will he be able to do the work of a farmer, or will he collapse on the first day?
*...and more importantly*
Does he have a chance to join the auxiliary troops of the roman legion?
*PS: This is not about his clothes. To avoid confusion, let's imagine he managed to find local clothes that won't make him look weird to the people.*
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1. As [This Q/A](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/17072/average-height-of-ancient-roman-men-and-women) suggests, he would probably be one of the taller ones, with the average male being under 1.70 meters.
2. He would probably have some problems with his body adjusting to much more endurance based tasks. For example I work in an office job and do regular workouts. Does not prepare me for going into the forest and making my own firewood - muscle soreness is guaranteed every year.
3. He would have to adjust to a completely different diet. Probably have some problems with his digestive system. Compare this to a European boy going to the third world of today.
Given that he would probably be perceived as sickly during his struggles to adjust for the first few months. His physique would change during that time, possibly quite dramatic to leaner and more sinewy appearance.
He will have a hard time joining the auxiliary troops. I have first-hand experience in some medieval-style fighting and can tell you it is nothing we "modern" Europeans are used to. He will considerably lack the stamina to survive even the first five minutes. He needs at least half a year of mentoring and training to get to anywhere near the level he needs to be.
*My experience in that regard is: I used to run 10 km twice a week and had superior stamina to most of my peers, then. During my first fight - all out, only attacking an experienced sparring partner who would just defend - after 3 minutes I had to force myself to keep moving with all my will. After 5 minutes I was all but concentrated on breathing into my burning lungs and not collapsing.*
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>
> How do this guy appears to the local residents, physically speaking?
> Is he seen as a well-built male, a weak boy or a totally normal
> resident?
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He is probably 10 cm (~4 inches) taller than anybody else. His diet has been richer in protein than the people around him (who eat mostly cereals), and for that reason he has probably wider shoulders and chest than the average Ancient Roman. The few bits of armor from the era found show people being strong but quite lean (While rich people got fat).
One of the main problems is that probably his muscles are built for strength and not endurance. I mean: people were used to walk two or three hours if they had to go to a place, now, even some people think that walking more than 30 minutes is tiring. He will also discover he walks different than the people around him, using more the heel (being used to good shoes with cushion there) while people around him steps first with the sole and then with the heel. Also, he isn't used to harsh materials, so he doesn't have the necessary calluses.
Having blue eyes will probably make him quite attractive. Historical emperors were described with blue eyes for that reason.
>
> Does he appears young and ugly, or old and wise?
>
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Probably younger (and dumb, he doesn't know anything). If he has taken a bit of care of himself, he won't have so many pimples and scars in the face. Romans offered their first beard when they were 16-17 years old and many people now doesn't get a beard at that age.
>
> Will he be able to do the work of a farmer, or will he collapse on the
> first day?
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>
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I think he will be able to work for a while, although the heat/cold, the lack of protection from sun in the eyes and people only eating twice a day (with only one strong meal) will make his life more miserable.
>
> Does he have a chance to join the auxiliary troops of the roman
> legion?
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The new recruits had to pass an exam called *probatio*. It was more important for citizens, while the auxiliaries only cared if the recruit was trying to land a priviliged post, like being in administrative functions. However, the lack of ties to the community and knowledge of the local language will make a lot of people think he is a slave (slaves were usually carried far away from their origins and not taught Latin for that reason). Fugitive slaves sometimes joined the army, but will he avoid any people enslaving him during his time?
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The average Roman at the time was about 5'6", while the Gauls were 5'8" to 6'2". "Macedon to Gaul" was a very wide path of land inhabited by different people, and he would likely be taller than local people, but by no means too tall. His appearance (and probable accent) would suggest that he is likely a barbarian, and his healthy look might give an idea that he's hailing from barbarian nobility.
His physical fitness might be inadequate for day-to-day physical work, as well as the rigors of military life, but that can be improved, and his prospects as an auxiliary recruit should be bright. As far as a full legionnaire goes, he would have hard time convincing Romans that he's a full roman citizen and eligible to be a legionnaire.
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If the townspeople are imports from the Empire or the city of Rome, they are likely to be short, but the local people of Gaul were known to be especially tall, and physical fitness was culturally emphasized. The people of the region became much shorter as the classical era gave way to the medieval era, but in 200 AD locals would have been quite tall, the population being smaller and the quality of the food being higher.
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I'm in the process of adding the fun parts to my world, and I'm a bit perplex on this one;
# Premise
Let's assume a fantasy ooze
>
> An ooze is a mindless carnivorous blob of jello - think cube-shaped or formless jellyfish. It has no natural predators, and feeds passively - if organic matter touches it, it gets sucked in and digested until there is no trace left. Oozes are quite slow, and the bigger they grow, the slower they get. Main way to tell different species apart is by colour, but the danger resides in the fact that they tend to blend in the environment.
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Let's say an ooze grew so big it became mostly stationary and sipped in a lake, filling the bed of it from the bottom. It is translucent-blue, so it blends very well in its environment. Water has to flow, so there is still a ~2m layer of it above the ooze and thus, the lake in itself is not fatal. The locals learned not to skinny dip in it, sometime a child goes missing, but overall, people and the ooze can coexist without much problem.
But what about aquatic life? Obviously, there is no algae in that lake below a 2m depth. I'm curious regarding migrating fish species making their way upstream for reproduction. Would they evolve to avoid *that very specific lake*? Would we see any behavioral changes over a couple of centuries?
## Question restriction
We are talking regular biology and animal behaviour here. The ooze in itself is a magical creature and heavily handwaved. We are not discussing the potential ecological problem in a few millennia when that ooze grows so big it begins to destroy the ecosystem if not dealt with. We are not discussing how the ooze is biologically unsustainable. I am just asking what the fish will do when confronted with an unusual, localized area that is highly hostile to them in their migration path.
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We actually have real world examples of migratory fish ceasing to breed in particular lakes and streams. These are mostly caused by dams not predatory slime but the result, fish aren't able to make it up the waterway to breed, and can't make it to the ocean to mature. We don't say that the fish have evolved to avoid the dams. We say that the dams have made the fish locally extinct.
Migratory fish return to the waters they hatched to breed. If suddenly something prevents them from doing this, via an obstruction or eating them, there will quickly be no fish to return to those waters, no genetic or behavioral change required.
While it's *technically* possible to physically navigate the waterway without getting preyed upon, normal fish behavior puts them in the danger zone. Fish fry stick close to the bottom to reduce the effect of the current and avoid predation. You see a similar behavior when salmon swim upstream, as close to the bottom where the current is slower and so that eagles and bears have a harder time eating them.
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**No migratory fish, maybe no fish at all**
In a zone where there is a winter cold enough to freeze the lake, there would be no fish. During winter fish seek the lower water for warmth and would then intersect with the blob and be eaten.
Migratory fish such as salmon would not return to the lake. These types of fish lay their eggs on the bottom of the lake, ie: where the blob is. As fish migrate back to the area they were spawned, this entire subset of fish would vanish, leaving only the occasional "lost" individual from other lakes to wander in, go try to lay eggs, and be eaten by the blob. So in that sense yes the salmon/whatever would "evolve" to avoid that lake.
Most other fist would likewise vanish, as most fish lay their eggs either on the lakebed (eaten) or attached to marine plants which are on the lakebed (which have also been eaten). You could conceivably have some small minnows or other fish which lay "drifting" eggs, but even those would lose out as eggs drifted downward. Given the timeframe involved I don't think there's a chance evolutionarily or behaviorally for most species to adapt. Too many eggs would be lost in the first few generations, and that combined with natural predation would probably clear the lake of everything but possibly shallows-dwelling minnow species.
My guess is it would quickly be full of frogs (which lay their eggs in the shallows/on the surface and avoid the blob) and algae blooms which may or may not be enough to keep the lake oxygenated. (do massed tadpoles eat enough to counter-balance the lack of fish? Does the algae by itself make up for whatever other lower-level oxygenators have been eaten? no idea!)
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There could be a slime slim chance that fish change their behavior, if we further restrict the environment:
1. Ice does not become too thick in wintertime, leaving enough room for the fish to swim freely during the coldest weather.
2. No predators exist in the area that can access a tasty fish meal in 2m of water.
3. The fish species can spawn in 2m of water or less.
4. The blob has settled into the deepest part of the lake, but the lake is shallower near the edges, which would provide a blob-free habitat for animals and plants.
Perhaps fish could spawn in deeper waters as well as shallower waters, but one year the blob shows up and eats all of the fish and eggs spawned in deep water. That leaves the fish that spawned in shallower waters to survive and reproduce the next year. Year after year, fish that can spawn successfully in shallower waters survive. Those who choose deeper waters do not.
Bonus points for people and animals using the lake frequently and not getting hurt, but legends exist about a monster in the deepest part of the lake.
Don't go over your head!
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I suspect that the fish population will very rapidly evolve (more accurately those that don't get culled) into a shallow-water, surface-dwelling variant.
After all, the lake down to 2m is a perfectly normal water lake, right? Only if you dive below 2m, and touch the ooze, do you get eaten.
The exact equivalent already exists in real-life lakes, where the deeper waters of a lake are still and anoxic, yet the surface waters thrive. The boundary is usually a bit deeper than 2m (more like 15-20m), but that's a difference in degree, not type.
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If there are alternate routes that avoid the problem completely, the fish will eventually evolve to avoid that route instinctively. It's unclear how long that will take, but since fish (like salmon) tend to be one generation per year, probably on the order of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Migratory birds will also avoid it on about the same timescale.
Probably a dearth of all aquatic life is possible with this, even insects will seem to avoid it (though that would be the appearance, it's more likely that they just get wiped out immediately and comprehensively when they attempt to re-colonize).
Larger animals will, even if aware, take their chances. Many antelopes and zebras and so forth will sip at the edge of seasonal lakes even though they're intelligent enough to be aware of the dangers of crocodiles. If in a temperate area, this would be more along the lines of deer and bears, but again if there are no other decent sources of fresh water, they might just dare. With mixed results.
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Fish will notice if the lake floor is suspiciously dead below 2m. **Not much evolving is necessary** for them to avoid diving down there.
And since the lake is close to dead, there's no need to stay there, so the fish will rather quickly move further up or downstream during migration, both of which is perfectly possible.
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There are two teams,  green team and  tan team, who are fighting each other for some reason that's not super important. Both teams consist of human shaped plastic figures about two inches tall and colored the same as their respective team (army men). Each team has mortars, a few tanks, one or two planes, and a bunch of varied infantry (machine guns, rpgs, assault rifles). They are fighting in a house most of the time but will probably move to the outdoors later on.
Now, for the first two months of the fighting the house occupants (small dog, 2 parents, three kids ages 12, 9, and 4) were gone on summer vacation, but now they are back. Due to the new arrivals ability to freeze any of the figures they look at, strategy needs to change considerably.
Some details-
* if a human sees them, they are frozen into a stance that they would be expected to be in (turn into regular army men)
* when killed they turn into regular army men and are just pieces of plastic
* they can take a few hits from humans, but if their shape is distorted they are dead (you can drop it off the balcony and they'll be fine, but shoot it with a BB gun and they're dead)
* tanks are kinda like really slow rc cars with a bunch of armor and guns on top
* planes are faster and can glide to a landing if they get sighted
* they can change the battlefield if nobody is watching (drag a book off the bookshelf to make a barricade, cut a hole in the floor for a secret passageway, etc.)
* night raids are considered immoral and both leaders have agreed to refrain from night attacks
* leaders have agreed that medics can enter battle fields after the fighting and won't be shot
* more available on request if needed
What strategy would these two armies use now that humans are occupying the house?
[Answer]
Everyone is out but one human, who hops into a nice relaxing bath, leaving her phone just out of sight.
Commandos sneak in and grab the phone, conveniently left unlocked and signed into Facebook, and start a live stream from the rear facing camera.
Human freezing power is transmitted over cameras obviously - the humans cant get video proof of army men being anything other than plastic. The commandos now have a directional freeze ray, everything on one side freezes.
They then sweep the entire building, which according to the video is filled with frozen plastic army men suddenly getting peppered with tiny holes from the fire team behind the camera.
Just as the human finishes her nice relaxing bath, the soldiers finish up their slaughter and return her phone to her handbag.
Poor woman logs into Facebook to discover every last corner of her house has been live streamed somehow, and everyone is laughing at something awkward that was seen.
Remaining soldiers retire, having conquered the house.
[Answer]
**Trench Warfare**
More specifically, wall space/crawl space warfare.
The number one way to continue the war? keep it out of sight. For the slightly less moral, there is no daylight in the walls so without a scout reporting on time of day they can battle all night and no one would know. (slightly bending the rules there)
War is about reliability. Reliable intel, reliable soldiers, reliable plans and reliable gear. Fighting where you might be spotted by a human and frozen is not a reliable way to conduct war and puts your soldiers at risk. Fighting where no humans can interrupt makes your chances of superior strategy less reliant on outside forces.
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It seems that strategy would change considerably, especially the "no fighting at night thing". Seeing as how it is too great of a risk to be frozen and then taken out by an enemy sniper, I would assume that both sides would hunker down in their respective "bases" and wait out until night when there are no pesky humans around.
Because of the above, it would make sense to void the no fighting at night truce. The rest of my answer will assume that that is impossible.
**Where to strike:**
Both sides would avoid open areas (e.g. hallways and open rooms). They would generally choose to fight behind couches, bookshelves, and other furniture. Optimally they would use the area in the walls to move around quickly. They would also probably avoid the bedrooms, where the humans are generally present.
**When to strike:**
They would avoid fighting during the morning rush, (i.e. when everyone is waking up and eating breakfast).
The fighting would be rampant once the kids go to school and the parents go to work.
It would die down once the kids get home, but since they usually only watch TV, it would generally be the same other than avoiding the living room. It would probably die down entirely once the parents get home.
**How to strike:**
Long-range weapons would take precedence in this battle (i.e. mortars) because they can attack from much farther away.
From your description of what death means, it would seem that tanks become obsolete since the plastic they are made of is no stronger than the plastic of the army men.
I cannot completely answer since I am not sure of the strength of the army men's bullets, so I would appreciate you clarifying that.
[Answer]
### Use the calendar
The human occupants will generally be out of the house at some predictable times. Warfare is reserved for those times. As you've already said, they've already agreed that some times (such as night) are not acceptable for fighting, so they should be able to stretch to this.
Note that "immoral" doesn't necessarily mean "not done". Both sides should be guarding against assassinations, bombings and special-forces actions anyway. As we know from history (Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki) the winner gets to write the rules on what was a war crime.
### Dog deterrent
The loss of combatants as an Act of Dog is still going to be a problem. Most similar stories tend to allow the army men to stay mobile around pets though. Dogs are pretty easily spooked, although this will depend on the dog of course. The main thing is to hit the dog before it lunges, because dogs will tend to ignore injuries whilst they're fighting. Hit it while it's still thinking about whether to chase the army men, and it'll be much more likely to back off.
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There are two ways to handle the human's return. 1) take the battle where people can't see them. Does anyone *really* go in their attic except once in a blue moon? There are plenty of places the army men can fight without being observed by people.
And 2).....*remove all humans.* They should already be freaked out by the damage caused by the army men's unmitigated warfare to their furniture, flooring, wallpaper, etc. Considering these army men have the intelligence of regular human beings, they should be able to find an ingenious way to make those gosh-darned people flee. If you though your house was haunted by evil spirits, wouldn't you leave? I'm sure with enough effort, these army men can make it happen.
Actually, there is a *third* option, one even more terrifying (for the army men) than the opposing side. *What if the humans know?* You see, you said, "if a human sees them, they are frozen into a stance that they would be *expected* to be in"(italic added). But what if the human is in the know and expects them not frozen in place, but *actually moving?*
Such an individual would have godlike power over the army men, due to their sheer strength, size, and respective ability to change the environment. If the plastic army men are alive, who's to say there's not some 'mysterious force' that renders plastic figurines alive once they've entered the home? In that case, the army men could be joined by *dinosaurs*, *dragons*, and any other living thing that may be replicated in plastic form!
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If I was commanding one of the teams I would try to co-opt a human to fight on our side (like a proxy war) - before my opponents did the same.
This is a common strategy used in conflicts where one side (or both) are unable to prosecute the fight because of Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal or Environmental changes or pressures.
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An alien automatic "beacon" tries to warn us about some imminent danger. It does so with launching a succession of large "veils" in front of their star so we can detect them via the transit method. This succession of dips in the star luminosity forms a binary message.
The first part of the message conveys some cosmological and mathematical constants so we can agree on a set of SI units and know which branch of physics we should stop tamper with.
And here comes the second part of the message, the one wich actively tries to warn us of some danger. No need to be explicit, a simple "DANGER" sign would be sufficient. The problem is, the beacon doesn't know us. It knows our relative position (and maybe can scan our solar system as a whole), that we're a rather intelligent species having tinkered with the wrong physics, but that's about it.
The aliens don't know our language, our appearance, or even what biological process Earth's lifeforms are based on (or maybe just that we're carbon-based). They can't wait for a response and subsequent dialog to slowly build up comprehension: the message should be clear : "YOU ARE IN DANGER".
Also, please note that their goal is to eventually make us come to them for a solution, so no "warning shots" strategy. They must not be considered as the danger themselves.
In short:
**How would aliens convey the sense of danger without knowing us beforehand ?**
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A bit of context:
- The aliens are about 40 light years from us
- The setting is 150 years from now, but they don't know our exact technological advancement (only that we should probably have colonized our own star system and are able to pick up their message)
- No FTL
- The shorter the message, the better (they don't have an infinite supply of stellar veils)
- The danger in question is of lovecraftian nature, and as such can't be properly explained with such "low bandwidth", hence the more universal danger sign sought after.
[Answer]
Some thought has gone into this issue with regards to deterring future humans (over a 10000 year timescale) from radioactive waste dumps. Obviously this isn't quite the same as your situation, because although future humans may well be completely different to us socially and linguistically, they're still likely to share quite a lot of traits with us.
There's a big (~350 page) document from Sandia which you can find here: [Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant](https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/10117359) which has all sorts of interesting and useful things in it.
They have this notion of "levels" of information... don't expect anyone to understand level "N" if they haven't understood level "N-1", for example. Here are some of the levels they considered:
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> Level I: Rudimentary Information: "Something manmade is here,"
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> Level II: Cautionary Information: "Something manmade is here and it is dangerous,"
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> Level III: Basic Information: Tells what, why, when, where, who, and how (in terms of information relay, not how the site was constructed), and
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> Level IV: Complex Information: Highly detailed, written records, tables, figures, graphs, maps, and diagrams.
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Of course, the marker systems they used to communicate eg. the "danger" referenced at Level II were designed by humans to communicate concepts to other humans, using a basic understanding of human psychology. They know what a human skeleton looks like, and how to draw facial expressions that more or less approximate fear or sadness. Your aliens simply don't have that advantage.
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The critical issue for you is that "danger" is an almost entirely nebulous concept. What's dangerous to me might be quite different to what's dangerous to you (you might consider peanuts to be a pretty serious and deadly threat, but I certainly don't). The aliens presumably know that we are a technological species, and are assuming that we will be able to see their signal and interpret it somehow, but beyond that they know basically nothing about us. There's no universal notion of "danger" or even "death" that they can share, in the same way that they might be able to share some knowledge of mathematics or physics.
If the danger were something specific and concrete, like "*this start is gonna gamma-ray-burst you in a few hundred years*" or "*the aliens who live over there will destroy you if they think you're a threat*" that is something they may be able to communicate, but doing so is going to require sending somewhat more information than a simple short message.
Basically, communicating even moderately complex but concrete concepts is already hard enough. Communicating abstract concepts may as well be impossible. The best you'll really manage is something like a combination of the [Arecibo message](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message) and the [Pioneer plaque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque#Sun_and_galactic_landmarks). The latter shows a way to identify locations in the galaxy via pulsar timing, and in the event of the danger being astronomical in origin it would be possible to indicate *where* it came from, and if it were (or mimicked) a natural occurrence an example of such a thing might be sent, too. A supernova might not communicate "danger!" by itself, but listing a bunch of supernovas or gamma ray burst sources and then a currently-intact ageing star near us should send a fairly obvious message.
>
> The shorter the message, the better (they don't have an infinite supply of stellar veils)
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>
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How would one "use up" such a thing? just orbit em back round again, or fold em up and redeploy. It does sound hideously low frequency though, which suggests that it'll take a really, *really* long time to send even quite a simple message.
Realistically, they're gonna have to keep sending the message on repeat for *years* in the hopes that we'll eventually notice, and then note down the whole thing. If the veils get used up in weeks or months or even years, we might just never notice, or if we did the message that could be transmitted would be so short and simple that it couldn't convey anything as nuanced as "danger".
I'm not sure what the best alternative is, of course, but if they're sending a message to us in particular then I'd consider investigating the possibilities of setting up a huge nuclear-powered laser in their local [stellar gravitational lensing point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens#Solar_gravitational_lens). That has the benefit that unlike the veils, people who aren't on the axis of the beam will find it quite hard to see, which would be important if the threat was a hostile intelligence.
[Answer]
Take something that we know (well, assume) conveys "no life" to everyone: The idea of 0 K temperatures. At 0 K, there is no vibration in an atom, which is (in theory) pretty much certain death for anything cooled down that low. If Earth receives a message that says "0K, 10,000,972 seconds" they might interpret that as "something will hit absolute 0 in 4 months." There would be a whole lot of debate among the scientific community, obviously, as they tried to figure out just what was intended by this, but I think that at least a few people could interpret it appropriately.
Depending on what the danger they're attempting to convey is, they could go about it in different ways. Maybe the Earth will get hit by a giant meteor that will destroy all life? Give us a number that we can associate with Earth-- say, its orbital velocity around the sun-- and its position in three space relative to a point like the sun (I assume that they'd think our sun was our point of reference. Maybe, if we want to make it harder for the earthlings, we use Jupiter as a point of reference, and it takes some brilliant lateral thinking to interpret it correctly). We also give the present time in whatever units we've agreed upon.
Then, they transmit a new time in the future and a new set of velocities and positions-- velocities and positions that don't match up with our predicted orbit. They also send out a 3 space location of something outside of our solar system, with a massive speed (maybe even a massive mass or gravitational pull) that we can interpolate into something that will hit us on the same day as the earth's orbit is supposed to shift!
For better or for worse, communicating a vague sense of danger is difficult; conveying a somewhat ambiguous message of a specific danger seems to be much easier.
[Answer]
**You catch more flies with sugar.**
/Also, please note that their goal is to eventually make us come to them for a solution, so no "warning shots" strategy. They must not be considered as the danger themselves/
The problem with warning someone of danger is that you yourself might be perceived as the danger. If I tell someone he is in trouble it might be because I hear the cops coming for him, or because I have caught him wearing my fuzzy velvet pants without permission and I am going to whup him. Either way he will run and a safe bet is to run away from me.
No, if the aliens want to come they need to entice us. Tell us "COME VISIT, WE HAVE BEER" or "WE ARE XENOCURIOUS HOTTIES IN SILVER JUMPSUITS AND WE ARE SO LONELY". Once we show up we will find out that they are actually a bunch of teetotalling monks, but we will then get a chance to hear their warnings about danger and also if they actually know any xenocurious hotties.
[Answer]
# Codification
Instead of a message of two blocks I suggest one of five separated by a common pattern that is never used anywhere else in the message. It could just be decided after the rest of the message. In this answer I'll assume "010101".
## Preamble
The first block would be a patter that would be very unlikely to happen in nature, to increase the probability of being detected without complicated analysis. My ignorant guess would be "010101000001010011100101110111010101" which at first may seem just irregular, but if split in groups of three is the delimiter 010101 followed by 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111 followed by an other delimiter. I proposed this as I never heard of a star counting in binary. And counting is usually associated with intelligence. It would be a message that there are actually intelligent creatures there. Not to mention that it would set the bitrate frequency for the rest of the message.
## Multi-valued intensity
From here on I suggest using different veils that are able to let though different amounts of light (For example by making them smaller or with some holes). This may allow you to use less material for some veils and also to shorten the message. For example if their star is particularly bright they could use 8 different levels and codify three bits in one veil. This is a particularly basic way of codifying signals and it would be made clear by the second block.
The second block contains a rising scale of the different possible intensities repeated two times. Two times to make sure the instant of start and the end of the scale are not mistaken with the delimiter. The delimiter is codified in normal binary and never in the compressed way.
I also want to point out that this codification and the delimiter are basic patterns that would surely be known by any culture with a basic knowledge of information theory. They are like one of the first strategies we developed to store information and send signals.
## Math
This block is made by a big image containing various things. The first row has the opposite value of the background and the next one is empty. This both to make sure they get the size of the image and to ease the understanding of it being an image (They'd just need to break the lines at the same point of the first one and they'd see the image).
The upper part of the image is used to show some mathematical symbols. In particular it's possible to use sticks for numbers and some small combination of pixels for the symbol. In the next part the numbers are codified in sticks and any letter is a symbol. For example "1 2 3 1A1B2 2A3B5 3A3B1A5 2C3B6 D2EB2 D1A1EC3B6 XB10" could be used to define addition, multiplication, parenthesis and the symbol X to be the same as 10. More symbols and example should be added as necessary. In particular a better way to represent numbers is essential, but it's done in the same way.
## Branch of physics.
To represent the branch of physics I suggest using an image like the previews block, just filled with equations, images or numeric examples of the equations with relative image to show the branch of physics.
For example you you could use some drawing of different atoms with next to them three numbers with two fixed symbol in the middle. For example 1F1 with hydrogen, 2F4 with helium, 1F2 for deuterium and 1F1G1F1 for a molecular hydrogen. Then you could use simple chemical equations like "1F2 + 1F2 = 4 \* 2F4" which with our conventions is "D+D = 4He", an approximation of the nuclear fusion equation "D + D → 4He\* + 24 MeV".
## Danger
As per the danger I'd use multiple examples represented in an image. The first is an pair of drawings, the ones suggested by OP in a comment: A pair of images of the solar system, one with and one without our planet.
Then I'd use a similar structure of my example on nuclear fusion to represent a couple of chemical equations. One could be of a highly corrosive substance like HF (Hydrogen fluoride). If HF is not considered to be enough, we could use Fluoroantimonic acid, which can only be stored in teflon due to its exceptional corrosiveness (which I assume to mean that it corrodes practically anything else and is thus dangerous to any kind of alien and their buildings).
Additional we could use and other things like represent spontaneous explosive reactions to show that we are talking about a more generic thing. Explosives simply because they create damage and while different materials are able to withstand different amount of energies, I doubt that there are civilizations with the assumed knowledge of physics without have ever experienced an explosion.
# Other relevant things
## About images
One potential problem is that images need eyes to be seen and we can't be sure an aliens can see them.
In case this message is received by a race that can't see, I think they would still be able to perceive this as a surface. The point is if their technology has output interfaces braille-style that can be used for this task.
I think that they would: a 2D interface would be so much better to use then a 1D one in so many applications. For example if one wants to use a microscopes, consider something about the positions of the stars or to see the result of an experiment with a particle collider. I'm not saying you can't do all those things with sounds, it's just much easier with a 2D interface.
## Number of veils
If we leave out the content of the last two blocks then we have a bare minimum of 209 veils, with the following assumptions:
* background with high luminosity (no veil)
* the material used by a veil is proportional to the amount of light they block
* we have 8 levels of luminosity
* math has 5 symbols +\*=() and we use the example sequence.
* formulas written rotated 90° clockwise.
* a bigger delimiter of 7 veils that is probably enough for any content.
And if we codify the math symbols in this way. 1 for each row separated by an empty line. Each equation have 4 empty lines above and below. X is low luminosity.
```
... ... ...
.XX XXX XXX 1 2+3/7
... ... ...
... ..X .X. B= 3/7
... ... ...
... ..X ..X A+ 2/7
... ... ...
... ..X .XX D( 4/7
... ... ...
... .XX ..X E) 4/7
... ... ...
... .XX .X. C* 5/7
... ... ...
```
The 209 veils can be broken down in this way:
* 42 = 7\*6 for the delimiters.
* 12 for first block.
* 8 = 4\*2 for 2° block.
* 3 = 9/3 for the first row of first image.
* 136 = (2+3/7)\*56 for each stick of the 3° block.
* 8 = 5\*2/7 + 6\*3/7 + 2\*5/7 + 2\*4/7 + 2\*4/7 to explain math symbols
If the danger message was nuclear fusion, then an estimation of the additional size would be two times that (additional two for reactions, their syntax, -1 and 0). I'd guess an helium atom is way smaller than a recognizable solar system in somewhat right proportions. Therefore I think that the two images of with/without earth are the most heavy ones.
# Recap
The message is a set of five blocks, the first two to detect and decode the message. Same for the third that represent how to decode those equations. The remaining two form the actual message: one contains things related to a certain field of knowledge while the other contains dangerous things and images of bad events.
# EDIT:
* reshuffling and minor improvements.
* improved Branch of physics
* added veil count.
* fixed/improved danger section.
* removed part about SI constants as I made a wrong assumption.
[Answer]
If you can convey a set of constants, you can then transmit any image you like in the 3 spatial dimensions + time animated fashion which is independent of any specific sense system an alien civilization may have.
Then you can just transmit a simulated "video" of a supernova as a generic "danger" sign.
You can then add some specific "video" illustrating the problem in question. Please note that as soon as it shows something astronomically macroscopic (a planet) you may stop worrying about interpretation since we share astronomy with any alien species.
[Answer]
It is not enough to communicate the concept of danger alone:
1. With no context of where the danger is coming from, your message may be perceived as the threat, warning, distress call, etc. All of which illicit very different responses.
2. With no context of what is dangerous, you have no way of determining if it is dangerous to you.
3. If you are unfamiliar with the danger, you need explicit instructions about how to respond to it.
So a minimally useful warning to someone who has no context for what you are talking about really take more the form of "X is dangerous, do Y".
I can not find the clip, but there is a show I saw once that featured a brief video of colored dots moving around that people would universally interpret as being friends, fighting, chasing, protecting each other, etc just based on how they move in relationship to each other. The dots had no human characteristics whatsoever, but we could still anthropomorphize them because of how they moved in relation to one another. The important factor here is motion.
If you were to cast a representation of the night sky as the recipient sees it, and start moving stars around in a way that shows the dangerous star "attacking" other stars, then we would know to fear what it at the dangerous star.
To achieve this, you only need to cast 1 "solar screen" but it needs to be sophisticated enough to open and close "pixels" allowing for the sun screen to become a video screen.
**For example, if I were an alien trying to warn humans about a world eating monster that is attracted to civilizations emitting radio waves in the direction of the Orion constellation from Earth, my video might look something like this:**
* Show a picture of symbol that looks like **+** being orbited by a symbol that looks like **o**
* Show picture with a bunch of **+** symbols in the shape of the constellation Orion, but somewhere in the picture there is symbol that looks like **Y** that is clearly not a star on our star charts.
* The **Y** then moves to the closest **+**, and the **+** disappears. All the other **+** run away from the **Y**.
* Then you see a picture of an **o** on one side of the screen and a **Y** on the other. A symbol that looks like **~** then moves from the **o** to the **Y**. When it reaches the **Y**, the **Y** chases the **o** and makes it disappear. Then show and **o** with a line between it and the **Y**. The **~** moves until it is stopped by the line. The **Y** then goes the other way.
[Answer]
# Message Formatting
Taking cues from the [Arecibo Message](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message), you have to send a 1 bit-per-pixel message with a prime number of pixels in each dimension. This makes it so that the image can only be interpreted one way (though 8 orientations of the picture are possible) and eliminates all possibility of incompatible encodings (There will be. It was hard enough for *humans* to standardize data encodings and we still suck at it)
As to what you put in this picture? That's the challenging part. There are going to be visual idioms that don't translate and they could be anything as simple as circling things or as complicated as tentacled horrors. Even on earth, we have problems with images and body languages, and this causes a lot of miscommunication between e.g. cats and dogs.
* Fire is pretty dangerous and it likely exists on another planet with life. Draw fire.
* If they know what humans look like, draw some humans on fire. Otherwise, the planet on fire would probably get the message across.
* Be careful to not make it look like a threat.
* Draw a ship leaving the planet
* Draw the solar system that the aliens are from (much like the planet illustration in the Arecibo Message), indicating their planet
* Draw the same ship arriving at their solar system and planet
All of this should fit in under 300x300 pixels, probably far less.
Broadcast the same message frequently.
# Be Mindful of Latency
The distance of this alien civilization means you have at least 80 years between when the dangerous thing the aliens detected actually occurred and when humans receive the warning message. It may be too late by the time the message is received and interpreted.
[Answer]
There are a multitude of methods they could use to warn us of the "danger."
Binary code, or at least some version of it, could be used to give a message or signal, possibly one that could send data, which has a brief description of the danger.
Audio/Visual messages, possibly an audio message of the danger, or a picture/video of the danger, of some sort, could be sent.
Messages written in some form of DNA, written with the protien patterns of some sort.
EDIT
How to communicate what the danger is?
The aliens don't know what we speak, or how to communicate with us, but they can explain the situation in some terms that are common. For example, they could describe the danger as like "We're all getting killed by this big thing. It is coming after you."
The problem is, there is no way to communicate the danger without there being some sort of "universal common" so it's difficult to state the exacts of the alien warning when there is the problem of the recipients not understanding the context.
[Answer]
As you're talking of Lovecraftian danger, I take it you're not after hard sciences and maybe you'll like my idea :
The universal signal of danger is fear. The aliens are thus emitting "**fear waves**" in addition to their messages. It's possible because most sapient species in the universe have very similar brain waves and you can broadcast directly to it with a good ol' space emitter.
[Answer]
**How about telegraphing the theme of *Jaws*?**
If your signal is binary (on/off) and expensive (planet-sized shades orbiting your star), you'll want the signal to be brief. One thing you *can* still vary is the time between each signal. I suggest that, like the iconic theme from *Jaws*, you use a very few signals but regularly decrease the time between them. The recipients can interpret this as a "countdown", and a countdown to an unknown event from an unknown alien sure seems intimidating. Even if nothing actually happens at the end of the sequence, they should be spooked enough to want to look into the matter further.
The risk is that they might react by *accelerating* their research into exotic physics, warp drives, and supernova bombs, in order to prepare for whatever might be coming. But it seems like a risk your aliens have to take.
[Answer]
All these aliens need to do is shine some light in our direction. They could do that with immensely less efforts than putting a string of lampshades in orbit around their sun.
* some pretty big laser (the more focussed the beam, the less energy needed to send a given amount of light our way)
* some hefty mirror array reflecting the light of their sun in our direction. The mirror field don't need to be nearly as huge as these sun shades though. A castaway can easily draw the attention of a passing ship with a tiny pocket mirror.
All they need is a satellite that happens not to be between their sun and Earth when the signal is transmitted. That would appear as a light source blinking very close to their home star. Besides, that could hardly be confused with a regular planet orbiting its sun, so it would be even more likely to draw our attention.
Even using a local satellite, they would only need to interrupt the transmission when their planet passed too close to their sun for the light to be perceptible.
If that were not enough, they could put their probe in a carefully designed highly eccentric and distant orbit, so that the giant flash light spent most of its time far away from their sun in a region clearly visible from Earth.
Besides, unless they were fitted with cosmic-sized engines fuelled by Star Wars grade super antimatter, these veils would still be subject to Newton's law and traverse Earth's field of view only periodically. Like a cosmic-sized teletype ribbon of rather short length.
There is also Einstein's speed limit. Assuming good old Albert was right, however advanced their science, all that aliens can see is an image of our more or less distant past. At the very least 4 years if they happen to be our Alpha Centauri neighbours, but more likely decades, centuries or more.
Even assuming the aliens keep a supply of cosmic lampshades handy and can start sending their message immediately, they could notice the problem only decades or centuries after we started playing the silly buggers.
It would then take more decades or centuries for the change in their star luminosity to reach Earth.
Chances are, we would have long noticed and suffered the consequences of whatever stupid thing we were doing before receiving the first "bit" of warning.
Now about the message itself.
I don't think the concept of "danger" itself can be broadcast. It's a relative notion. After all, even the Earth exploding would not necessarily be a mortal danger to a civilization able to colonize other planets.
The aliens might however warn us about potential events like the Earth exploding or even something a bit less obvious (a change in temperature or composition of the oceans or the atmosphere, maybe?) as long as it remains on a planetary level.
Any kind of dialogue with the aliens is out of the question, so the "science preamble" of the message has to be very cleverly designed indeed. To be honest I very doubt many aliens could make heads or tails of the Voyager message, for instance.
I would rather have them transmit pictures. That seems like a more or less universal language, since photons are by far the most common source of distant information available in space.
A way to draw our attention would be to use a couple of different wavelengths (say some visible light and some X rays repeating the same pattern).
The message would be a succession of fixed frames. Maybe simple squares, maybe spirals drawn from the centre outwards, anything regular.
The first images would allow to recognize the format. For instance a few geometric figures would rather easily reveal the way the "pixels" are disposed. Some greyscale pictures could even be possible.
Then you would see our solar system. Quite easy to represent the sun and major planets in a few successive positions, or perhaps draw the orbits. Then a zoom to Earth and the moon. Then an illustration of whatever is coming our way (the Earth exploding, the oceans evaporating, etc...).
The tricky bit is for our benevolent neighbours to tell us what bits of physics are supposed to spell our doom though. I have no idea how an alien mind could come up with an universal enough way of lecturing Earthlings about physics using a mere broadcast with no feedback whatsoever.
BTW. it reminds me of my favourite [Arthur C Clarke's short story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Clarke_short_story)).
Using stars as semaphores is rather God's business :)
[Answer]
Considering there is no FTL travel, they will take some time to reach the Solar System. Since we are emitting large amounts of electromagnetic radiation that contains actual information (TV, communication etc.) the probe can start recording this information with highly sensitive antennas. They can then use machine learning to figure out patterns that indicate how our species perceives and communicates danger.
Additionally, the probe can send smaller sub-probes ahead with telescopes that scan us in the visible, IR and UV electromagnetic spectrum. That will help - for example - to recognize TV images since they can be compared with images of the real world. Once the main probe arrives at the Solar System it should have gathered and processed enough data to customize the message so that we can understand it. By then it can probably even use our language and units. A short morse-code message in English should be defenitely feasible from the information you get from scanning our electromagnetic emissions.
Actually, you need a good justification why you would convey the message with a heavyweight, high-energy, low bandwidth method like darkening the sun instead of just sending an audio message on an emergency frequency that is guaranteed to be listened to by many stations.
Considering the level of technology required to send such a probe to us and to block out a portion of the sunlight, the observation and data processing technology required to customize the message should be simple in comparison. It is much closer to what we can already do with current technology. There is no major technological obstacle that prevents getting everything you need to compose a message that can be understood by us.
The aliens also seem to know us and know (or suspect) that we are on a dangerous technological path. So they already have *some* information about us.
[Answer]
Send two images in a reasonable encoding we can decipher, such as our bitmap.
Send a crude simplified image of our Solar System ( think astronomy books for children), followed by an identical image *with Earth missing*.
We'll get the message.
Alternative: our corner of the galaxy, plus copy with our star missing.
] |
[Question]
[
Imagine a setting where humans have to compete with another sentient race, which can only be harmed by magnetized weapons.
Humans have only basic technology, and magic is very very rare.
Would it be feasible for them to magnetize crude iron weapons with lodestones before a battle, or are lodestones not strong enough for that? In what other ways would they be able to fight back?
**Edit:** Any physical weapon can cause harm, as long as the magnetic field applies. Otherwise the weapons would phase through. Since iron can be magnetized easily, humans naturally picked it as their weapon of choice. The field itself doesn't have to be very strong. The strength of a fridge magnet would suffice, but on bigger stuff like swords, axes and arrows.
[Answer]
Yes this would actually work surprisingly well; lodestones have [relatively weak magnetic fields](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00033790310001642812) compared to something like a [Neodymium magnet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet) but that still gives them between 6500 and 51000 Am-1 depending on how fresh they are, this gives them a magnetising force of 81-640 Oersted. [This graph of induced magnetism](https://www.duramag.com/techtalk/tech-briefs/magnetic-saturation-understanding-limitations-to-induced-magnetism-achieved-in-workpiece/) suggests that this is enough to induce between 8,000 and 15,000 Gauss, that's 0.8-1.5 Tesla. You've indicated that the rating of a fridge magnet will be sufficient, depending on the source used that's either [0.01T](https://nationalmaglab.org/about/maglab-dictionary/tesla) or [0.005T](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(unit)#Examples). As reasonably pure Iron is slightly [easier to magnetise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeability_(electromagnetism)#Values_for_some_common_materials) than the steel in the induction example you can probably get acceptably magnetic weapons pretty quickly.
The hotter the metal is when you do your magnetisation the easier it is and the better the results. To avoid heating and demagnetising the lode the weapon needs to be hot but below the [Curie Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature); the best time to magnetise will be after the [quench](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenching) but before the piece is completely cold (this is sometimes referred to as being above the "critical temperature", the metal is hot to the touch and still somewhat flexible but definitely solid) and before the [tempering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempering_(metallurgy)) is done.
Please do note that the initial magnetism induced in the object will not be completely held once the object is in use. The reason that Neodymium magnets are so strong isn't that they can be magnetised that much more than Iron but that they hold their magnetism better once it has been induced.
[Answer]
**Yes.**
You'll likely find this paper of interest: [The Early History of the Permanent Magnet](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/80fd/a4d7235a0ec23aa8d2cf550b24506cce534a.pdf)
>
> The first great systematic work on the magnet is that described by
> William Gilbert -- sometimes spelt Gilberd by contemporaries -- in the
> famous De Magnete Magneticisque Corporibus et de Magno Magnete Teure
> Physiologia Nova, published in 1600.
>
>
> [...]
>
>
> Gilbert gives three ways by which permanent magnetism -- or
> “verticity” as he termed it -- may be given to steel.
>
>
> • The first method was by touch with a single load stone, which was to
> be drawn from the middle of the needle to the end, where the
> application was to be continued by a very gentle rubbing. [...]
>
>
> • The second method was forging with the horizontal specimen pointing
> north and south in the Earth’s field [...]
>
>
> • Gilbert was quite clear that a red heat destroyed permanent
> magnetism, but records that a redhot iron bar left to cool in the
> direction of the Earth’s field became permanently magnetic, and
> further that unheated iron bars left in the direction of the Earth’s
> field for twenty or more years -- such as window bars -- likewise
> acquired verticity.
>
>
>
[Answer]
You can magnetize iron or steel by rubbing it with a magnet. It seems less than awesome, somehow.
Or you can magnetize iron or still by **HITTING IT HARD!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lvhkr.jpg)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaD9vAuj20s>
This is what you need for your story. Your Magnetizer will take each weapon, look it over while humming the incantation, place it on the ground, align it with the Earth's magnetic field, then whack it with his magnetization hammer. The owner needs to shout back when that happens. Magnetizer is good at it and usually just needs one hit.
[Answer]
As other answers have stated natural lodestones may be too weak to create the magnetism you require for "enchanting" your weapons.
We could consider however how lodestones themselves are created. From what I have (briefly) read on the subject they can be created by lightning strikes. If a lightning strike can magnetise an object, perhaps your primitive civilisation could base a religion around "The Thunder Gods".
They could construct obelisks or tall monuments to their version of Thor that are essentially just massive lightning rods. These places of worship would have the 'magical' abilities to bless iron weapons placed upon an altar at the base with the power to slay these demons plaguing your people.
When lightning strikes to monument it is carried down to the altar and into the object placed there, magnetising it in the same way lodestones are created. Now this may require some handwavium-supercharging of the numbers involved to create the field strengths you desire, but I think it would add some amazing depth to your civilisation as they would base a lot of culture and reverence around the thunder god's protection of their people. Storms would become times of great celebration and your warriors in training could complete a rite of passage during them, placing their personal armaments in the altar and holding vigil awaiting the "Blessing from the sky". To be "Thunder-Touched" would be a massive morale boost. Whilst rare for regular villages to have lightning storms, certain areas in the world do have higher frequencies of lightning strikes and your people could congregate in those areas, constructing multiple monuments and eventually becoming a religious hub akin to mecca that could be a destination for pilgrimages for those completing their warrior training. Also this would provide a natural deterrent to the enemies as the area would potentially be highly magnetised itself.
[Answer]
It works!
But even better (transferring off of @Roger's answer):
**YOU DONT HAVE TO ACTIVATE THEM BEFORE BATTLE!**
Simply letting the weapons cool after forging within a magnetic field (or rubbing them with magnets during cooling) would instill them with permanent mangnetism.
[On any technology capable of forging iron weapons to begin with]
That way even rather primitive people could have permanently viable weapons against your monsters!
Sidenote: Shock and vibrations can/do diminish the magnetism, so a sword would loose its "power" against them after a lengthy duel (or over several years of dueling, I do not know how fast that effect is).
[Answer]
As an alternate solution, you could embed the lodestone into the base of the weapons - the pommel for example. The metal of the weapon would guide the magentic field through it and essentially create a temporary magnet. Most people have tried something like this as a child - you can "extend" a magnet by placing a nail or some other ferrous item on the magnet, and then you can use the nail as if it were magnetic, until you take it off the permanent magnet.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/drCUV.jpg)
I'm reasonably sure this will allow for a more magnetic weapon than rubbing it with a lodestone. This could work as a sort of two-tiered approach where weaker magic could be counteracted with weaker magnetic fields, but for the strongest magic you need your own lodestone.
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