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If I understand it correctly, moving in the absence of forces like gravity and without friction doesn't require energy, only accelerating and decelerating does. So you could move a spaceship a very long distance with very low energy requirement if you just move it very slowly. Now spending more energy to achieve the same end result just in less time sounds a bit strange to me so I was wondering if there is some theoretical way around that.
For example, on the earth, there are bikes with brakes that wind up springs. After you brake, there is elastic energy in the spring and when you release the spring, it gets converted back to kinetic energy. Brake again and you moved fast and the bike is theoretically (no friction) in the same state as before, just in a different place and because it both accelerated and decelerated, I assume the earth didn't move, even minimally. So theoretically, the bike could do this infinitely.
Now, is something like this theoretically possible in space? For example, could the spaceship collect the propellant in a really long elastic bag which then snaps back and decelerates it again?
P.S.: I'm not a physicist so apologies if I didn't use some concepts correctly. I know energy cannot really be lost, what I mean with "expended" is that the spaceship has less of it.
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No, it's not possible.
Your bike example is not a good analog. When you accelerate the bike one way, you actually also accelerate the Earth itself the other way. You stay in touch with the Earth, and that's why you can collect some of that momentum later and get energy back from it. But the center of mass of you + Earth stays in one place and does not move at all.
In space, this would work to some extent. But again, the centre of mass of your starship and propellant would stay in one place. This means that either you would need an interstellar / interplanetary long elastic bag, or you wouldn't move really far.
There were many attempts to solve what you are writing about. It's called [Reactionless Drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive) (for not expending propellant, at least). Go read the linked article if you want, but long story short: **Maybe it is possible, but the best we have is some speculations.**
For not expending energy, we don't even have sound speculations. Escaping gravity well and changing velocity to match it with target is going to cost energy no matter what, as far as physics is understood nowadays. And to see why can't we get energy back from braking, see [this question on Physic SE](https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/317359/104551) - there are details of physics involved.
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Not only it is possible but it is used often. Unfortunately, [gravitational assist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist) has some restrictions.
Gravitational assist means that you aim towards a massive body (for local travel a planet, for interestellar travel it could be a sun) and use it to change your speed. The gravitational pull of the body will make your ship go faster as you approach the planet and slower as you get away from it.
The trick is that, if you want to accelerate in velocity in a particular direction, you approach a planet that moves in that direction. While in relation to this planet the maneuver is neutral (if you do not apply thrust you move at the same speed with relation to the planet at the beginning and at the end), part of the energy of the movement of the body is passed to your ship, that gets accelerated.
Of course, the restrictions are considerable:
* There must be a planet that moves in the general direction that you want to accelerate towards.
* You must get to the planet.
* The time between flybies around stellar bodies may be considerable.
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An example of storing energy along the lines you ask, similar to the regenerative brakes, was described by [Robert L. Forward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward) as an application of [space tethers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_exchange_tether).
Imagine you have a long teather, spinning like a propeller. A cargo pod docks at the center, then moves to the fast-spinning rim, whereit is released. This throws the pod, reducing the energy stored in the flywheel. At the other end of the voyage, a similar teather *catches* a fast moving pod, gentely as its velocity is the same as the moving tip. Then it is shifted to the center where it is released.
Once spun up, cargo pods can be exchanged with no additional cost of energy. The energy needed to propell a pod one way is ballanced by one going the other way, and likewise the change in potential energy is ballanced by two-way cargo of the same mass. I think this *regenerative* momentum exchange is exactly what you were asking.
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The full energy re-use is true enough for the *pods*, but there is still an ongoing energy need that I don’t think was explained in the tether explainations I’ve seen, but was detailed in a recent short story *Stepping Stones* by Greg Egan.
The momentum wheels on the terminal ends of the route, as well as any that have unballanced traffic in general, will pick up (linear) momentum in the same direction from both throws and catches. That is, they will repell each other.
There is no law of physics that would prevent cancelling out the excess by sending surplus momentum from one to the other. Say, connect them with a rope! But barring a *practical* engineering solution, each momentum transfer station will need to deal with it. One way is to be in an false orbit that *relies* on the excess momentum to work; e.g. the station closest to the sun would be at a slightly farther position so that the constant thrust in the sunward direction gives it the closed orbit. Likewise, the station farthest from the sun would be positioned somewhat closer.
But in general, the momentum transfer stations will need active station keeping, even if only a fraction of the true momentum excess.
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Yes, it's possible.
Your elastic bag is Universe itself.
And there is a thing called [Interstellar medium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_medium)
You expel the propellant in one place (at the starting point) and collect it at another place(at your destination point).
The main problem, actually two, are the following
* a way of making the collection possible, fast enough.
* recuperating the energy, the efficiency of the process.
[Bussard ramjet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet) is one of the concepts which suggest exploiting the situation in favor of interstellar ships. Not everything is easy with it, and it has its own problems, but it is close enough to what you describe, even when it expels and uses energy.
Also as a note, the absence of friction does not mean you need a little energy to move, it depends, gravity forces and gravitational potential is different in different places of the universe, and you have enough kinetic energy to move from gravitational well to a place with higher gravitational potential. Also, those forces do not stay still because planets, stars, and galaxies also are moving.
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Sort of, perhaps.
The *specific* example you gave won't work for the reason Mołot gave, but there is an alternative: move the space that contains your ship.
The [Alcubierre drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive), the real-world's warp drive (unfortunately still hypothetical), does not directly require reaction mass or consume fuel while it's switched on. Instead, the drive expands space behind your ship while contracting space in front of your ship, so despite ending up somewhere other than where you started, in many important senses you're not actually moving to get there.
The drive has *many* problems, including but not limited to: The stuff it's made from might not be a thing that exists.
(I'm not qualified to say for sure, but I suspect the fact you're moving the space your in rather than your ship means it doesn't give you more kinetic energy, which in turn means you can't use it to escape a gravity well. I think I have a new question to ask physics.stackexchange.com!)
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Yes. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surprises-from-general-relativity/>
There is a swimming-like motion that expends no propellant that permits changing one's orbital position laterally. But look how slow it is. :(
EDIT: that article sucks. :(
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I think this is within the scope of your question.
This is a real project with real funding and a real solution with a now proposed upgraded solution. Using a Sail on a "superfast miniature probes" using a Laser to provide acceleration to relativistic speeds. Approximately 20 years to go 4.22 Light Years. Both solutions use Energy, but the Probe (ship, Proof of Concept for scaling) does not carry propellant or expend energy for propulsion. A good analogy would be a Sailing Ship.
[How We Could Visit the Possibly Earth-Like Planet Proxima b](http://www.space.com/33844-proxima-b-exoplanet-interstellar-mission.html)
This is not really the story I was looking for but good enough. In the comments you will see a post suggesting using the Solar Wind from the Target Star to slow the device down. Well I am 75% certain it was a group from Cal Tech that did the math and models that suggest a larger Sail will do the job but would add some years to the trip. BUT a benefit is the Sail then could use that Same Solar Wind to Navigate around the Star System looking at it in detail and for a long period of time. The Sail could possible be used as an Energy Source for the on-board electronics.
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I've read over these answers and most of them are trying to give you realistic alternatives to what you actually want: an inertia battery. That is, you want a way to store and retrieve velocity sans acceleration.
Now, that's not actually a thing that we know how to build. It may be a physical impossibility in this universe. But if you're going for "semi-believable sci-fi" then you can certainly throw some handwavium in there. You wouldn't be the first. Larry Niven's [Outsiders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_(Known_Space)) use such a technology, though he doesn't name it as such.
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Yes, something similar to this is indeed somewhat possible.
By throwing out a ball (propellant) on a really long rope. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), you will stop as soon as you run out of rope, and you'll move back to your starting point if you reel the rope back in.
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BenRW mentioned Warp Drive. I'm going to clarify a few things regarding that. The way warp drive works is by causing mass to invert without affecting volume. Imagine a 10KG ball traveling at 1KMps. If you cut its mass in half without removing the energy in its momentum, you can double its velocity. All you have to do is figure out how to reduce the mass without changing anything regarding its composition.
Warp drive works on an asymptote on the reverse curve. By creating a negative mass, you can never mathematically go below the speed of light. A common theoretical particle that does this is called a tachyon which can travel the length of infinity instantly due to it's own mathematical quark.
So in short; to speed up, reduce your mass. To slow down, restore it. You'll still incur an energy penalty depending on how you accomplish this.
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Low energy travel within the solar system is possible, as long as you can wait long enough.
Once you reach the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, there are very low energy transfers available to take you to other Lagrange points within the solar system. The downside is that these may take so long that they are not only restricted to cargo, but also not usable for cargo that has to get there in a reasonable time - materials for building your Mars base for example.
See [Wikipedia Interplanetary Transport Network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network)
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If the universe wraps around on itself then if you expell a mass opposite your trajectory to get you going, you can encounter that mass later in time when it flies around the closed universe. You can exchange momentum with the "propellent" again to come to a stop at the destination.
You don't actually *expend* any propellent because you reabsorb it later when it wraps back around. In such a setup you could hypothetically reuse your reaction mass.
You'd have to vary the mass of your ship & propellent *and* take into account the size of the universe in order to plot trajectories & travel times accurately--and have some foreknowledge as to whether the space you launch your propellent into is clear of debris that could potentially destroy it or set it off-course.
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You probably couldn't do this in our universe. Even if our universe were closed, unless you could halt the expansion of space your reaction mass would never be able to complete a circuit.
It would be easy and maybe even preferred in a smaller closed-universe, maybe millions of AU to a few dozen or light-years "around". I'm imagining a spacecraft with an immense coilgun hundreds or thousands of kms long, accelerating large masses toward its destination *opposite it's direction of travel*, flipping, and then rendezvousing with those masses, capturing them within the coilgun and then decelerating them, recapturing that momentum and coming to a halt.
For a universe nearly the size of ours, you'd want to achieve seriously high fractions of *c* to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. We're talking condensing billions or even trillions of years down to a hundred or less via time dilation. At that point, you're likely flinging stellar masses around to travel a regular size spacecraft.
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## Attach a Flywheel to a Space Elevator
[JDługosz's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/72974/57832) does such a great job of describing how a flywheel can be used to recapture energy that I feel no need to elaborate on that part further... however, his answer does not resolve the question of how to keep your flywheels somewhere useful.
Instead of tethering your two flywheels to each other, you just need to teether them to an adequately massive, spinning nearby object like a planet or large asteroid. A [space elevator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator) uses a counterweight that extends far enough into space that the angular momentum caused by the planet's rotation exceeds the acceleration of gravity. This causes your counterweight to "fall" away from the planet creating tension to hold its tether taught. Because the counterweight is constantly pulling the teether in the opposite direction of the planet's gravity, when your flywheel catches a cargo pod and gets pushed off to the side, it will immediately begin to fall back to its geosynchronous resting location. Because you add the inertia of an entire planet to your system, the reaction's center of gravity only experiences a very marginal change in velocity allowing you to stop a fast moving object without sending your flywheel station hurdling off into deep space or needing to spend its own fuel to maintain a proper orbit.
Also, space elevators are a GREAT way for getting things onto and off of planets without having to fight with any tyranny of rocket equations; so, not only do you gain a ton of cost efficiency with the flywheel, but you also save tons of energy getting stuff onto and off of the planet itself.
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I will try to give an easy to understand explanation of why it won't work. First of all, you need to understand that everything can be seen as a 'system' with a center of mass. Imagine a solid sphere. Its center of mass is exaclty in the middle.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7vdfG.png)
(the center of mass is represented with a blue dot)
Now imagine you have two of those spheres.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LnjxN.png)
Both the spheres have a center of mass. However, the system as a whole, consisting of both spheres, has its own center of mass. (represented with the red dot in the picture above) This doesn't necessarilly have to be inside an object.
Whatever you do, the center of mass of the entire system will always remain at the same spot, unless something from outside the system interacts with it.
When one of the objects pushes itself away from the other object, both objects will fly away at such speeds that the center of mass of the entire system is still at the same spot.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q5bjv.gif)
When one of the objects goes to the right, the other goes to the left. When one of the objects stops the other, both objects will stop. This is called conservation of momentem. When a system goes at a certain speed (in our example 0 m/s), nothing inside that system can cause the center of mass of the entire system to change velocity. The reason we can still say that a rocket changes speed is because we constantly redefine the system to be only the rocket itself and the fuel it hasn't used yet. This way we end up with a system with a center of mass that is moving relative to the original system, but with less mass.
This is the reason why it isn't possible to change speed without the loss of mass.
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I would say no to energy, but yes to propellant.
Scifi: Gravity Drives could be used to move from place to place if the mass can be localized enough, (I'm pulling this from the video game "Space Engineers")
Real science: I remember coming across a boat that allowed movement by slowly winding up a massive weight and then ramming it forward to accelerate the mass and by its extension... the boat.
Newton's laws will come to play but don't expect to get anywhere soon, especially in the presence of gravity
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From the moment it was born, a Spartan was bred to service the state. If a baby passed inspection with a clean bill of health, he or she would be spared until age seven--agoge season. If a baby showed a visible physical deformity, then that baby would be vulture fodder.
At the age of seven, the child who survived started school. Years of intense training for military strategies, pain tolerances, to name a few resulted in an upstanding Spartan soldier, the envy of all the other Greek military academies.
But agoges were Social Darwinist schools. Many began training, but few survived for long enough to reach graduation.
Despite this detriment, the agoge system worked for a city-state as militaristic as Sparta. But Sparta was just a city.
The military ensured the success of **empires.** The Romans, the Mongols, the Persians, the Qin, the Franks, the Ottomans, the Russians under command of Ivan Grozny (the Terrible)--they made names for themselves through the might of the armies. They could have easily worked the way the Spartans did, so let's say that in an AH scenario, any one of these empires used infant inspections and agoge disciplines. In the grand scale of empire-building, would these sort of disciplines only augment the issues of population detriments?
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Spartan citizens could afford spending years and years on full time military training only because they had a large base of workers/slaves gained with the Messenian wars, who replaced them in all but military/reproduction tasks, which is not easily scalable to an empire size without creating issues with the conquered populations.
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As @L.Dutch pointed out, there are reasons why a large nation probably can't maintain this.
... but what about a military *caste* of a large nation?
Instead of the entire nation going through a Darwinistic process, segregate a section of the population as a dedicated military and have them go through it. The rest of your citizens keep your country going while the military caste keeps your borders strong (and expanding?). You could also more easily indoctrinate (er... "educate") this caste with a profound sense of patriotism: a willingness (or eagerness) to fight and die in the service of the empire.
In some ways, this would be similar to what the Ottoman Turks did with the [Janissaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissaries): an elite military caste separate from the rest of the nation. (Spartan Janissaries just sounds frightening.)
Add in some future genetic "manipulation" or even modern "better living through chemistry" and you could get some truly frightening results. [Draka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination), anyone?
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Maybe but why would they? Killing off you citizens seems counterproductive. There are a few situations where this makes sense.
Despite what you see in the movies 5 okay soldiers are often better than 1 really good one. So keeping the mediocre soldiers would normally increase the strength of your army.
Killing off weak looking babies and boys that have trouble in training, makes you miss out on all the good they would have done either as mediocre solders or workers in some other field.
There are three versions of this that would work,
* there are limited resources food land or something else so that the
empire has a strictly limited population, in this case the extra
people would have starved so might as well kill them early
* Instead of killing the drop outs point them into a different field (they all
become farmers or something) so we don't lose their effort
* Finally the weeding process might be fairly lenient only killing those who
would be of no use anywhere
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"Service to the state" needs to be defined differently in the case of an empire rather than a city state. Most of the work will be administrative. Your model here should be the last of the great empires, the British. The British Empire was built with a relatively small army and a massive administrative system.
That is the service you're going to have to send people into. It'll take educated intelligent people with a desire to travel.
Build yourself a nice class system, induct the lower classes into the armed forces and encourage the upper classes to be officers and overseas administrators.
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The Spartan System itself is ultimately suicidal. The mortality rate makes it unsustainable for anything more than 20 generations or so. It also doesn't scale well. Somebody has to worry about how all those big, bad, soldiers get fed.
If you look at history, wars are won on logistics as much (or more) as on any sort of brilliant tactics.
The best military forces have always had their soldiers come from the citizenry (those with the sovereign franchise, property, etc.) That way there is a connection on a gut level as to why we fight. Volunteer servicemen and women will always be more effective.
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Lots of nations have mandatory military service (conscription). I could see this as close to a modern equivalent, though obviously not quite as rigorous. However those failing to complete their service are denied rights as a full citizen, which is a bit analogous.
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Planetary invasions are usually depicted using drop-ships which come straight down from the sky. Pretty much armoured Apollo Era capsules. These can be bigger, for example Warhammer40k has company sized drop-ships, or smaller as in Starship Troopers (the books). However they seem very woundeable coming straight down. Even WW2 AA guns could probably take a significant toll on them.
Assuming I want to take the enemy capital (just an example, any strategically important location counts) instead of the ground zero where the enemy capital used to be after I dropped the Tsar Bomba on it, I've got to send in ground pounders. Assume further that the armies are quite heavy on robots but still require human foot soldiers (Geneva Convention). Nanotechnology is out as well, as it will mostly harm civilians and not combat robots.
My plan to prevent a single Katyusha equipped robot dog with smart antimatter tipped missiles (yield is low, antimatter is there for power density) from ruining my day is to use horizontal drop-ships. While traditional drop-ships come in from above, **my idea is to use hypersonic scram jets that enter the atmosphere wherever it is safe to do so, fly low while switching between stealthy glide and acceleration mode until the target is reached where they decelerate hard**. Light orbital bombardment and hypersonic missiles that came in with the infantrymen would provide covering fire while the troops deploy.
**Is this a more sensitive tactical option? What potential issues have I missed?**
Addendum1: This question is purely about the tactical utility of the hypersonic drop-ships vs the classical variant. The strategic context of no specific planetary invasion is considered. Assume that orbital superiority has been achieved and that significant orbital bombardment capabilities exist.
Addendum2: The setting is advanced but hard Sci-Fi. Think Orion's Arm Worldbuilding Project. The only rules of the Universe are no FTL, no aliens and ultimately asymptotically slowing technological growth. Assume no god-tec is involved, just rockets, robots, fusion, lasers, antimatter, AI, mind-uploading, ...
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A planet is a complicated thing to attack, and I feel a lot of military science fiction vastly oversimplifies this.
## Detection on Approach
Your incoming spacecraft are only visible out to about 7.2x their largest dimension in kilometers (for example, a 1 meter spacecraft is only visible out to about 7.2 km). This has nothing to do with radars or absorption. It is a fact of the size of the spacecraft in comparison to the size of the "sky" behind it.
**Here's the math :** $ \delta = { D \over d }$, which gives you an angular size, $\delta$, in radians. And takes your ship size, D, and distance, d, in whatever units you choose (as long as you use the same units for both).
Conveniently, one arc minute is approximately ${{1} \over {3600}}^{th}$ ($1 \over {60^2}$) of a radian. Just in case your want to experiment with designs, the number of pixels of information, n, available to a receiver with a gap size, K, is this --
$n = ( {{\delta} \over {2K}}) - 1$
Human visual acuity, for a benchmark is 0.6 arc minutes.
What about active detection (radar)? The equation governing this is :
$S = P\_{tx} - G\_{tx} + A - L + G\_{rx} - db (R \cdot A) - N - 2r$
Which is a lot of math for saying that the signal at a radar receiver is, at best, ${1 \over {4 \times distance}}^{th}$ the power at the transmitter, and subject to massive losses if you coat the craft with anti-reflective material or a geometry that angles most of the transmitter power somewhere else.
Bearing in mind that transmitters start to melt in the mega-joule range ($1 \times 10^6$), the usefulness of radar and other active sensing measures starts to drop off dramatically at around 250 kilometers.
**Back to strategy :** the sky is big. One hundred kilometers to the arbitrary "edge" of the atmosphere (on Earth), and it would be impractical for a defender to have receiving stations on every square kilometer of a planet looking straight up for attackers.
Practically speaking, there's a lot we don't see in space. Look at the Philly airburst this year, or the airburst above Russia a few years ago.
SOMEtimes, a small target is spotted and tracked. But most of the time, they are not.
Additionally, planets are big. If you were to put one detection station on each square kilometer of Earth's surface, you would need to station 510 million such stations.
And despite the standard military sci-fi trope, planets have a wide variety of peaks, and volcanoes, and deep oceans, and shifting ice packs. There are places where it is extremely impractical to maintain an observation / planetary defense center.
So, if your attacker has good intelligence on the terrain and placement of forces, several pathways through the upper atmosphere are completely expected to exist.
**Re-entry heating:** Re-entry heating is a function of hitting the air at many multiples the speed of sound. If your invaders are willing to trade time for stealth, going a few hundred meters per second instead of a few thousand makes a fractional difference in your time-to-arrival, and gains you both no sonic boom announcing your presence, nor a thermal train announcing your position.
**Exhaust plumes:** for calculating how visible exhaust energy is, we have to go back to the signal path equation, but formulated a little differently :
$P\_{rx} = P\_{tx} + G\_{tx} + A\_{tx} - L + G\_{rx}$
Where $P\_{tx}$ is the power being emitted by the exhaust, $G\_{tx}$ and $A\_{tx}$ are the gain and area of emission, both of which a designer will be trying to minimize.
L is the loss over distance, which is :
$L = 20 log\_{10}{{4 \pi d} \over {0.3 f}}$,
where f is the frequency. Thermal radiation is spread over a broad spectrum, but the peak is at about 600 nanometers ($5 \times 10^{14}$ Hertz).
For a sci-fi torch drive ship producing, say, a combat 6 gees of thrust to a 100 ton vehicle, and sending that over the rails at about the speed of light for maximum fuel efficiency. That'd be about 0.0196 kilograms of material per second, emitting about 1.76 petaWatts ($1.76 \times 10^{15})$
So, $P\_{tx} = 15$, $L = 20 \times (-14 + db(d))$. Armed with these values, we can see that a torch ship with a one meter-squared exit plume, and no attempt to somehow suppress the exhaust signature.
Power received has no context, unless compared to the thermal noise, N, around it.
$N = -198.6 + 10 log\_{10} T F$
Where T is the temperature of the space around you, in Kelvin. In the outer solar system, this is close to 30 K; but closer to Earth 283 K. Noise near a body in the habitable region (like Earth) is around -196.1
With these values in hand, we can go back to our signal-to-noise, S, calculation :
$S = P\_{tx} - G\_{tx} + A - L + G\_{rx} - db (R \cdot A) - N - 2r$
$ S = 15 - 1 + 1 + 28 - 20 log(d) + G\_{rx} - (-196) $
Unbaffled, a torch ship in this configuration would be visible out to one billion kilometers out.
**Back to strategy :** However, let's put this into perspective. At Earth's 11.7 kilometer escape velocity, a torch ship capable of 6 gees only needs to burn for three minutes (183 seconds) to brake completely, and this can all be done in the last thousand kilometers to atmosphere.
Or, the burn down could be broken up into small single-second bursts.
And none of this includes alternatives for baffling the waste heat, like a sacrificial blast shield that's allowed to fall free of the invasion ship.
## Once You Get Close
Once you get close, the horizon equation becomes your friend.$ 3.57 \times \sqrt{h}$ is the distance (in kilometers), an observer at height h (in meters) can see until the horizon gets in the way. Typical single-story observers won't see the coming fleet (if they stay low) until they pass within 30 to 100 kilometers.
Since large cities are spaced about 90 kilometers from one another, if you have good maps, you can transition to your target and remain out of sight save, perhaps, by some rural community.
## Assault
If everthing goes sideways, and you are detected, it is still nearly impossible to hit you with a weapon if you are careful. Again, this is all about relative size.
Should you be seen, and seen enough times for your course to be calculated, you merely need to be accelerating or decelerating continuously at random intervals. Within $ \sqrt{d \over {2a}}$ seconds the ship has completely accelerated out of the region where an observer would predict it to be.
You must either be coasting, or surprised for the defender to hit you. That's why most air defense is to load the sky full of artillery hoping to hit something. That has a cost in damage when that flak returns to the ground, and it costs something to be saturating the air with explosive shots... A defender will likely not open up the flak until they are very confident you are close.
**What about lasers?** if each city had a ready orbital defense laser, and an observer caught the invaders during atmospheric operations (about 45 to 100 km away, let's use 100 km) it would take 0.0003 seconds for the spotter to notify the orbital defense network, a negligible amount of time to transmit the 9 parameters of interest ($x,y,z,v\_x,v\_y,v\_z,a\_x,a\_y,a\_z$) at enough precision to be useful (64 bit) using a gigahertz channel, and another 0.0003 seconds for the laser to come back (assuming the laser was at full power and aimed in 0 seconds). In that time, zig-zagging has done almost nothing to foil the firing solution. The drop ship is toast.
But if aiming and coming to full power takes as little as a whole second, then a drop ship with as big a profile as 30 meters wide can accelerate or decelerate completely out of the location it is expected to be in when the defense laser arrives on target.
**Short answer :** hypersonic atmospheric "drop pods" are VERY reasonable. Possibly more reasonable if they are subsonic, but its your story.
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In terms of penetrating through air defenses, you aren't going to be able to do better than a reentry vehicle in the first place.
It's easy to miss this, because there isn't much frame of reference up in space, but reentry vehicles travel *insanely* fast. Apollo 11 hit the reentry interface [traveling about *11 km/s*](https://history.nasa.gov/afj/ap11fj/26day9-reentry.html), or above Mach 30. A Soyuz from the ISS, which is "only" entering from orbital velocity, [hits atmospheric entry at a comparatively low 7.6 km/s](https://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz-landing.html), or Mach 22-ish. Pinpointing an object traveling at many times hypersonic speeds is difficult enough, let alone hitting it with countering munitions. Any weapon capable of that job will have no trouble tagging "mere" hypersonic jet fighters.
The question of what happens closer to the ground is trickier, because our space vehicles are optimized for low vehicle weight (= greater payload weight) and cost. Nobody is building reentry systems that are optimized for short flight times, but we can extrapolate.
In a conventional (Apollo, Soyuz) landing, the capsule sheds the last of its velocity by parachute. This means that it spends the last 10 or 15 minutes of its descent "slowly" falling the last 10km or so. We can shave a lot of those margins by using propulsive landing, which is hideously expensive but what is the military for if not throwing vast amounts of resources at the problem? [Propulsive landings of Falcon 9 boosters](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/49628) give us some idea of what to expect. The booster's greatest velocity before landing is typically in the neighborhood of 2,500 km/h (0.7 km/s) at ~20km above the ground. That's actually not far off the Soyuz numbers at that altitude, so let's assume we can staple the two descent profiles together, wave our hands, and end up in the right neighborhood at least.
This gives us an overall descent profile with two regimes, ballistic and propulsive:
* The ballistic descent takes about 9 minutes or so and drops from 100km to about 5km. During this period, velocity drops from really gratuitously hypersonic (10 km/s or more) to barely supersonic (0.3 km/s). This is similar to your hypersonic scramjets' preferred operating mode: high and vulnerable but hard to address because of how fast it's going. The most likely time to be intercepted is the non-hypersonic period at the end, which lasts about a minute.
* The propulsive descent is short and sharp, about 30 seconds of high Gs before a "soft" touchdown. Starting at a mere 5km above the ground, you'll quickly drop below the altitude that theater-scale air defenses are meant to cover. Any personal-scale air defenses will almost certainly not be able to track you in the few seconds they have before you travel out of their line of sight.
Put another way, any air defense system capable of either destroying your drop pods as they reenter at hypersonic speeds or tagging them in the last 30 seconds of wildly decelerating propulsive flight is *more* than capable of handling hypersonic fighters.
[Answer]
Dropships would ordinarily fulfill a specific role just like paratroopers would. You want to be able to simply fly a plane or VTOL craft (or in this case a dropship) in and drop fully equipped people in the area, but in some cases you'll have to use (relatively) lightly equipped units in drop pods instead.
Most media actually shows that in-combat drops with drop-pods is a bad idea. Units land without organization, no cover and generally only survive because of them being highly trained or biomechanical supersoldiers. A smart way to deploy them would be a little away from their objectives (unless you can surprise your enemy or they are already engaged). Drop-pods would be smaller, less detectable targets and let them land closer to their objectives than other options.
The goal of drop-pods would be to land troops and clear landing zones for larger transports to bring the big guns. Taking out the very AA emplacements and anti-orbital guns that threaten the rest of your forces. Other options are to land them behind enemy lines in order to pincer them or to take out important things like supply lines, communications and the command structure.
As for your drop-pods: normal drop pods wouldnt be dropped straight down either. They would use the atmosphere to slow down first, meaning they'll first angle themselves into the rotation of the atmosphere to slow their orbital speed before falling "down". By changing the amount of slowing down you do before you go into down mode you can have a higher horizontal velocity, and land in a diagonal line (more like a slight curve but this describes it better I think).
Going full horizontal would be bad, as anything like buildings, trees, hills and mountains would limit where you can land. Also you would have to go either FAST (orbital speeds) or simply use flight to cover most of the distance anyway, making it less a drop-pod and more a dropship.
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If you want to conquer a planet, you don't invade it, you attack it.
The best way to attack a planet is to show up and schedule a demonstration of your weapons, and then give the natives a chance to surrender instead of being totally exterminated.
So maybe you tell the natives when and we here to look and then explode a million megaton bomb in space, or maybe warn them to look at their moon (if any) and ram a space vehicle travelling at relativisitic speeds into it to make a big explosion.
Or maybe you drop ordinary atomic bombs from orbit, taking out every military base, every missile launching site, every naval vessel, and every undwerwater submarine at once.
Or maybe you don't want to explode that many atomic bombs and make too much fallout on the planet.
If you can put enough ray guns into orbit undetected, maybe you can aim an undetected ray gun at every native soldier you see outside, and aim wider angle rays at every occupied military building and vehicle, and fire them all at once, vaporizing the entire planetary military in one instant.
Or maybe you use millions and millions of war robots who drop from orbit similtaneously and attack all the armed forces on the planet, automatically shooting all the soldiers, or maybe stunning them and taking them prisoners to use as hostages. And other attack robots will go to all the government buildings and capture all the government personnel and torture the leaders until they agree to total, absolute, complete, and uncondidtional surrender.
Anyway, once the planet surrenders, you send down the drop ships. And naturally your assume that the natives of the planets will have most of the military assects hidden and still active to shoot down your dropships, so you will use all the precautions and methods suggested in other answers to avoid having the dropsips shot down. And the drop ships will contain only robot troops, just in case.
And after the robot drops capture and replace all the police personnel on the planet and take total control of all the major communities, then you can send down living military and civilians to rule the planet.
[Answer]
# Your invasion is easy to hard counter with missile trucks.
Even after aerial superiority is achieved, it's easy for a planet to hide a bunch of trucks with missiles under tarps, forests, caves, buildings or loads of things.
Spotters with binoculars, advanced radar systems, nanite clouds, and lots of unpleasant things on the surface can spot your airplanes which are flying for a while, and shoot them down. Stealth jets are slower than normal speeds, and work best when your enemy has no idea you're there. They don't work that well when you fly down from orbit at immense speeds and the enemy can focus all their detection stuff on you.
A radar dish and a couple missiles are much cheaper than a stealth jet. Nanite swarms are an option as well, since they offer active detection of stealth jets that fly low for some reason when the stealth jets smash through them like a million bugs and paint a target on their back since you have a rough idea of where the jet is going.
# Your plan works better once you have a foothold.
Once you have invaded the planet then you can use stealth jets. You can move jets quietly on land (remove the wings, stick the wings in a truck and the body in a truck), and fly them along routes where any detection methods are degraded.
When doing an orbital invasion everything you do is obvious. People can see the jets flying in from orbit. They can track you from there on. To use stealth effectively you need to have people not know where you are.
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Atmospheric troop ships will fail to reach the enemy's capital city for the same reason that orbital drop ships will fail: if there is a defense against X, the one place you can guarantee the enemy has deployed that defense is their capital city.
If you want to say the invaders have decent anti-aircraft defenses, but the invaders' stealth is just unbeatable, it's the same as just giving the invaders indestructible drop ships: you're asserting that the invaders' tech is so far superior that strategy is essentially irrelevant. (FWIW, sometimes that's just how it is. European invaders didn't steamroll Native Americans because European *culture* was better.)
If you want strategy to matter, you have to acknowledge that the most appealing avenues of attack can and will be deliberately neutralized. Otherwise, it's just a huge bully pulverizing a tiny weakling. If that's the setting you want, you can do it, but that setting has no room for great military leaders, heroes, or meaningful sacrifices among the invaders.
So, you can either assert that the enemy is technologically inferior to Earth's WWII-era defenses, or you have to admit that there is no way to move ground troops from orbit directly into a maximally-fortified location in a single move.
I think your best bet for a direct assault on the capital city will involve sabotage. Get some spies into the capital so they can reconnoiter and then hamstring the defenses. Throw in some last-minute assassinations of key military and political figures to ensure that the target is organizationally paralyzed.
Before it starts to rain space marines, you send down a bunch of spies and saboteurs, along with a small armed force. They land as close to the capital as possible without risking detection, which could very well mean *hundreds of kilometers away*. (For reference, Normandy is ~1200km from Berlin.) The team observes the nearest settlement, learns how to blend in, and, eventually, sends spies on the long journey to the capital.
This will probably take months, or even years, depending on the difficulty of learning the language and making your spies appear to be the same species as the locals. Military invasion is not something that happens overnight.
But look on the bright side: this is actually the easy way! For comparison: back in WWII, it took a full calendar year for the Allies to get to Berlin from the landing at Normandy, and it was a brutal, bloody slog that saw the deaths of something like *a quarter million Allied soldiers* [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Overlord#Allies). By contrast, this campaign will be a slow burn where nothing much happens for 12-16 months, and then suddenly the entire war is fought to its conclusion in 2-3 weeks, ending with the unconditional surrender of not just the city but the entire nation. You could even run the same scam on the planet's other great powers simultaneously.
---
One more note: because planets rotate, drop ships *aren't* going to descend in a vertical line. Yes, cartoons and video games often make it look that way, but it's BS. If you've ever wondered why NASA's rockets always take off in a big curve instead of going straight up, it's for the same reason: the main challenge isn't to gain altitude, it's to gain orbital velocity. Things in orbit will need to shed orbital velocity on their way down, so they'll come streaking in like comets.
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There are three better options, one only available if the assaulter is a bioengineered hivemind that consumes everything:
# [Global kinetic orbital bombardment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) and an ultimatum
Just accelerate a couple of blocks of tungsten towards any military installation the assaulters can see. The resulting smoking craters of some hundred meters in diameter are a very potent sight of your power, and the ultimatum demands total surrender or total annihilation - at nearly no cost. Even better: due to the nature of orbital bombardment, the heavy objects, aka *rods from gods* can not be intercepted in any way: the moment you detect them, it is already too late to prevent an impact in the killing zone, and even *if* you could, you'd lose a lot of the target zone from shrapnell.
# Biogenetic Warfare
You just crossed space, so you totally mastered genetics. Just drop a couple of genetic weapons that alter the genetics to kill 50% of the population 3 years after getting infected. If you are merciful, offer a counteragent for total surrender. Otherwise, you wait for the collapse of society and only land then, when no resistance is possible anymore.
# [Hive Fleet Invasion](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tyranids#Tyranid_Invasion_Progression)
The scouts of the hive fleet already discovered the planet and have left a living ship on it. This is both their scout and homing beacon. The strength of the signal is modulated to the size of its hive: the larger, the stronger. They *also* infiltrate the population and create some kind of secret cult, to spring to action once the fleet arrives.
The moment the ships arrive, they inject genetic manipulation virii and parasites into the atmosphere, which bond to the planetary population and generate a subspecies of not-quite hivemind-soldiers that are basically mind-controlled to kill and maim everything that doesn't secrete the right protective pheromones indicating a member of the hive.
While the turned population is enveloped in chaos from the activated sleeper cells and infected population, dedicated combat drones are dropped right into zones. These start to kill every living being not part of the hive, quickly overrunning any defenses by sheer mass assault. Losses in the trillion bodies are acceptable since there is little loss to the hive fleet: dead beings and any biomatter alike are thrown into pools where they are liquified and used to feed new invasion soldiers directed by the hive fleet.
Within a short time frame, resistance on the planet is starting to wane as survives are pretty much herded and encircled by the hive swarms, and then overrun to be fed to the reproduction machinery.
Once no fauna is left but the own hive beings, the ground beings start to gather around the liquefication places, harvesting the fauna and then becoming food for the next generation themselves. The food gel produced this way is then brought back to the hive fleet. Once nothing is left on the planet to feed on, the fleet sets its sights on the next largest homing beacon, and the cycle repeats itself.
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[
Reading [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/3795/809) I realized that for my purposes I don't really want a fully steampunk world. All I want is lack of cars and planes as we know them, and lack of oil, or inaccessible deposits of oil, would work like a charm. Still, I do need access to coal for my world, mainly to have steel industry, but also heating in winter and other little things like that.
What is the smallest change to Earth's geological history and traits to have crude oil unavailable, and coal accessible and as cheap as it was? It does not have to be black coal as long as it's energetic enough for steel production. Or is that totally impossible?
Linked answer and my attempts at research suggests it would be hard / impossible, but I hope you know something I wasn't able to find.
**Note:** I know it is not that simple not to have cars, and I know early internal combustion engines used wood gas and coal gas. I know we can convert wood and coal into gasoline, or close enough to power modern engines. No problem, I can work with that if only I can get rid of petroleum. **It might be a topic of follow-up questions, for now don't bother, please.**
[Answer]
You're in luck. While most of us believe oil to be the remains of dead dinosaurs, the reality is that science [doesn't actually know where oil comes from](https://www.livescience.com/9404-mysterious-origin-supply-oil.html) ([look here, too](http://www.oilprimer.com/where-does-oil-come-from.html)). So, in one regard, your world can simply be declared to be "oil free."
If you want a solution that might be more believable to your audience (since most people don't know there's an argument about oil's origin), then go with the theory that oil comes from biological material on the bottom of oceans. As it migrates downward (pressure, other material covering it, etc.) pressure and heat change it to oil. In this regard, give your world shallow oceans. No depth, no pressure, no oil.
[Answer]
Oil Eating Bacteria might work.
[The BP oil spill was cleaned up](https://news.utexas.edu/2016/05/09/potential-of-oil-eating-bacteria-from-bp-oil-spill-decoded) in part by using oil eating bacteria.
In your world, have a species of bacteria that will ravenously consume petroleum, thereby making crude oil non-existant.
Here is some maybe potential problems. You will need lubricants. Oil isn't exclusive, but it's easy enough to get. Before you go to simple vegetable oils, keep in mind that when they hit smoke points they may change characteristics.
I don't know if your ravenous oil eating bacteria would attack coal. If it did, you could contrive a coal shortage brought on by it.
Just some thoughts
[Answer]
Simple answer: no oil-prone source rocks.
Good [Oil source rocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_rock) are quite rare things, because they have to contain a high concentration of biological oils - plant leaf waxes and algae that use oil-filled 'swim bladders'. Apart from these, 'Normal' organic matter is made of carbohydrates and proteins - typically cellulose - that don't break down to oil *no matter what you do to them*. You get natural gas instead.
So in your world, simply have algae that never made oils - perhaps they make methanol/water sacs internally for buoyancy. This would make crude oil as we know it far rarer - not unknown, but not available in anything like the quantities that we see. Also see [here](http://www.eplantscience.com/index/algae/anatomy/buoyancy_control.php).
[Answer]
This is far easier than you may think ;)
Just make your steam-punk novel as a post apocalyptic in *our* world.
Here we have completely depleted all readily accessible oil reserves (we are actually pulling oil from undersea and very deep wells, absolutely unreachable without modern technology) while there still are large ground-level (i.e.: still dug in open-sky mines) coal deposit.
[Answer]
# Your species is the second intelligent beings on the planet
An intelligent species evolves on your planet. After a few thousand years of flourishing civilization, they exterminate themselves, somehow.
30 million years later, the scars of the initial civilization have mostly disappeared, and another intelligent species develops. As this intelligent species develops industrialization, they discover that there are widespread [soft brown coal deposits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite), but almost no oil and little [high energy black coal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthracite).
Lignite (soft brown) is rarely used because of its lower carbon content compared to anthracite (hard black). Thus, there are huge fields of the stuff that no one is eager to mine out. 30 million years is along time, but not really long enough to replace the oil that has been forming from 500 million years + of marine deposition; or the coal produced from 400 million + years of coal deposition.
[Answer]
In our world, we used coal for quite some time before we started heavily using oil. So I don't think it stretches any imagination to say a society has coal but not oil. They just haven't gotten to it yet, or looked in the right place for it.
**But**...
There's fairly well understood processes of converting coal to gasoline (or other liquid fuels) broadly referred to as Coal Liquefaction (obligatory [wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_liquefaction)). Its more expensive than simply drilling for oil, but it works and has been used for decades (at least since WW2). In a world without oil these might never be discovered. Or, perhaps they'd be refined (pun intended) more quickly in the quest for a liquid fuel.
[Answer]
You can have coal and no primary oil deposits, coal deposits form in shallow boggy environments on land, primary oil deposits form in the sea when the water is poorly oxygenated, so if you have no ocean stagnation events in your geological history you'll have no primary oil deposits. For example our current oceans are not thought to be accumulating any oil sediments due to relatively high deep water oxygenation levels. If you eliminate those deep sea carbon deposits you probably *expand* land based coal deposits in proportion, you will still get small deposits of secondary "coal-oil" from young high-grade coals but they won't be large enough for mass exploitation, also the existing secondary deposits are heavy oil, crude from the Taranaki Basin for example sets at room temperature because of the paraffin wax content, the pipes and tankers etc... at the refinery have to be heated to prevent freeze ups.
Some of the coals that you do get are going to be a little different too, because the deposits are larger, more carbon still available for plant growth, the lower layers of existing deposits will be higher grade than they are now. Odds are that the later stage deposits are going to be even thicker, relatively speaking, than the older Carboniferous coal measures, so a lot of thinner younger seams are going to be commercially viable, in the southern hemisphere particularly. Younger coals also burn hotter and slower due to the wax content imparted by flowering plant species that post-date the Carboniferous.
Edit: I realised when I was thinking about this a little more that you don't even have to remove secondary oil deposits, they aren't accessible enough to be noticed for exploitation without the large on land deposits to spur the development of a global petrochemical industry. That means coal can actually be of generally *higher* grade not lower grade to get the same effect.
[Answer]
**A Young Earth**
Your humans evolved while the earth was still young, and large deposits of fossil fuels had not had time to develop. This means no coal, or oil, however
**Charcoal**
In this earlier age, both Megafauna and Megaflora flourished. However, in a singular mass extinction event, the Megafauna were wiped out. Curiously, the Megaflora remained, leading to a world with enormous forests. Humans evolved from the surviving rodents in the usual way.
Before coke (fuel made from coal), charcoal was used as an industrial fuel in furnaces and forges. With a readily available source in the Megafauna, humanity made rapid use of this resource leading up the industrial revolution.
I realize this may significantly change some of the background of your story, but you did admit difficulty in making a justification, so it might work.
[Answer]
Instead of having coal, you could have charcoal. It's easy to produce, same(ish) properties of coal, and it lets you get rid of both coal and oil.
[Answer]
I want to take a swipe at this one.
My proposal: [petroleum seeps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep#Causes_of_overpressure)
>
> A petroleum seep is a place where natural liquid or gaseous
> hydrocarbons escape to the earth's atmosphere and surface, normally
> under low pressure or flow. Seeps generally occur above either
> terrestrial or offshore petroleum accumulation structures.[1](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8KIP0.jpg)[not in
> citation given] The hydrocarbons may escape along geological layers,
> or across them through fractures and fissures in the rock, or directly
> from an outcrop of oil-bearing rock.
>
>
>
Once petroleum has a route to the surface, the lightest fractions elbow their way out first and escape into the air (or into the water). What is left is the gooey asphalt or bitumen.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8KIP0.jpg)
<https://www.desmogblog.com/2013/09/15/tar-sands-los-angeles-photos-la-brea-tar-pits>
That thick goo is good for things like making tar paper or painting the bottoms of boats, but it is depleted in the volatile fractions we use for gasoline.
Why would your world be more prone to petroleum seeps? I can think of two reasons.
1: **More earthquakes.**
from <https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-096-03/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mld7q.jpg)
>
> This petroleum seep in the Ojai Valley, California developed as a
> direct result of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in southern
> California. Notice the oil has not yet spread far and grass blades can
> be seen standing through the crude oil. The photo was taken a few days
> after the earthquake.
>
>
>
Earthquakes make cracks that the petroleum can use to escape.
2. **Hotter core.**
More internal heat would make hydrocarbons more volatile / liquid and also put them under more pressure, squeezing them up through the cracks.
You could have both of these conditions at work, thus having an earth which was much like ours in the remote past but then lost its petroleum through seeps over the past several million years as the core heats up. A progressively hotter core would have other consequences for this world. But *why* a planetary core should be getting hotter and hotter...
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One of my favorite bits of set dressing is magic glowing rocks. You see them in movies, video games, and every other manner of medium conveying fantasy settings. Personally, I'm perfectly okay with light sources with no needed fuel and operate indefinably, but I had an idea that I thought might be interesting.
What if these rocks constantly produced ultraviolet light in addition what they emit on the visible spectrum? My first thought was underground farming, but I realized that a developing society wouldn't really benefit from being able to do that. Now I'm wondering if this glowy rock is just slightly more practical luxury item that gives you a tan.
**What ramifications of this magic tanning-bed stone might I missing?**
Relevant details about this rock include being about as rare and easy to find as gold (unless deceased scarcity leads to something cool, of course), always glowing as bright as a candle regardless of quantity (more surface area means more light, however), and producing an amount of UV light equal to the sun as filtered through the Earth's atmosphere. Skin cancer would be possible consequence, but Romans never found out the horrible truth of lead pipes, so I doubt anyone would notice the detrimental effects of the glowy rocks. Unless I'm mistaken, of course.
[Answer]
1. UV light can be used to disinfect water, whether this is something a developing society would notice or not is questionable but if they noticed making their wells out of 'tan stone' stopped them getting cholera that would be good.
2. they are actually explosive if I read you right? 'More surface area means more light' so grind them up into high surface area powder and toss them into the air the heat should be pretty lethal.
3. UV light does have a few medical applications such as treating psoriasis which might pop up in traditional medicine.
4. Can be used as a gold substitute, of course its as rare as gold and could be tested for easily by measuring phosphorescence in an exposed dye or pigment.
5. Could be used as a bleaching agent instead of urine is suppose?
6. With the help of phosphorescence it can make visible light bulbss
More likely though is its simply known as "the stone that gives you cancer" and is steered well away from
[Answer]
**Rituals calling upon the hidden world.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PxEk0.jpg)
<https://party.lovetoknow.com/party-supplies/how-should-i-decorate-my-backyard-black-light-rave-party>
Many naturally occurring minerals fluoresce in UV and these could be used to make pigments. Ultraviolet lighting without the rest of the spectrum shows things that cannot be seen otherwise - the unseen world that exists in / on / next to our own. The unseen world is a big part of primitive religions and belief systems. This method to see the unseen could be incorporated into these religions and ceremonies. And it would look totally cool.
[Answer]
So there are different types of UV. If they primarily emit in the UVA band, you basically have black lights.
This could have an interesting effect on your culture. I imagine they would figure out that it could be used to detect blood stains. They might develop forensic science early (though it might still be filled with tons of bad or half thought out ideas).
Perhaps the people develop urban legends. A man whoes hands glow under the crystals is destined to kill someone, or something like that.
You upper class might wear clothing that looks drab normally, but fluoresces under UV, as some sort of status symbol. Because sweat is more visible under UV, it might lead to the upper class being obsessed with cleanliness. Even a single bead of sweat everyone will see. Of course, you could just not UV lights in your home, but then everyone knows you don't have the wealth to cut it.
This might in turn have them go to great lengths to cool their homes. Perhaps the greatest import of your society are ice blocks shipped down from mountains or the Arctic. This may also shape your architecture (homes can be built to be naturally cooled fairly well).
Of course, perhaps the upper class then suffers from a mysterious blight (skin cancer), which can drive further strife.
People may pass secret messages in invisible ink, or charlatans may try to make their writing seem "magical."
Decreased scarcity might mean you have entire cities made out of it. (or if it is scarce, imagine the king who lives in his glowing tower and how wealthy and powerful he must be).
But if it is common enough that it means your people have ready and cheap lighting everywhere, that is going to have a drastic impact on your society. Artificial light had a huge impact on humans. It would be reasonable to have a city that "never sleeps."
If you wanted to have a society that lives mostly underground (or perhaps the sun is very dim on this planet) so that the average person does not get a tan from working in the fields, then having darker skin would be a status symbol.
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UV rays can be used to kill microbes, so people would notice that water stored in containers having such stones might be healthier to drink, even if they don't have the science to know why. They might attribute the healthiness of the treated water directly to the magic, even though the magic acts indirectly in this case. In the past people drank so much alcohol in so many forms (beer, wine), even at young ages, because the alcohol kills microbes and makes water safer to drink (for you gut and kidneys, but not to your liver). In areas with such stones, people would have less need for alcohol (though need and want are separate things).
UV light also causes scorpions to fluoresce:
So the rocks may be used to find them buggers before they cause any harm, and also to detect other creatures (as an author, it's up to you which monsters also fluoresce).
And finally: dark light is UV, so medieval tavern raves!
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I'd argue against any broad assertions about what might or might not benefit a developing society without some solid ideas about the make-up of said society, I can think of several environments in which underground farming would be massively beneficial. The Shetland Islands for example would benefit greatly from being able to farm in a controlled environment shielded from the elements and lit by magic, it's not just the cold or the lack of sunlight hours either, the wind erosion is phenomenal, being able to move most of the topsoil indoors would be a amazingly handy, you could also put underground crop farms under livestock grazing. Desert societies would also benefit greatly from the lower evaporation rates on underground farms. I'd say underground farming would be one of the *best* uses for rocks that glow.
[Answer]
>
> What ramifications of this magic tanning-bed stone might I missing?
>
>
>
Cataracts.
>
> Skin cancer would be possible consequence, but Romans never found out the horrible truth of lead pipes, so I doubt anyone would notice the detrimental effects of the glowy rocks. **Unless I'm mistaken, of course.**
>
>
>
How hard is the water in your developing society? The water's going to be cold, and if it's already hard, the water won't dissolve any lead.
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[Question]
[
## Setting
In the near future a group of explorers land on Mars and proceed to explore the cave system under [Pavonis Mons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caves_of_Mars_Project#/media/File:Pavonis_Mons_lava_tube_skylight_crop.jpg).
While exploring the gigantic interior of the lava tube, sensors indicate the presence of an unexpected kind of emission. Using remote probes they detect radiation levels that are safe for humans - but still, being on the safe side, they continue to explore using drones only.
They manage to locate the source while exploring the deepest parts of the cave system. As they send in a tethered drone packed full of sensors (CCDs, spectrometers, radiation detectors, environmental detectors and atmospheric detectors, among others) a huge stream of data start to pour from the sensors into the expedition computers as the science officer orders it to focus on a central piece standing atop what looks like a obsidian pillar; It clearly look like an artificial object.
The drone maintain its emotionless glare as the science officer asks for a few more minutes to analyze the incoming data, followed by a request for a couple more hours - and finally another for a day.
The science team then communicates to mission command, to the shock of all involved personnel, that the data points to an extra-galactic origin.
**Question**: How could they, based on remote sensory information only, reach this conclusion?
**Assume**:
* Near-future technological resources (2051-2100)
* The device may be resting, slotted in or kept stable/in place by a powered mechanism
* The drone packs a modern, beefed-up, expanded version of the [MSL Science Payload](https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/) in a sleek yet *super* creepy crawling body.
(Given the interesting points of view of some answers I dropped the `hard-science` tag, but would still like to keep it reasonably not so mushy.)
[Answer]
You won't figure this out from physical properties. There's essentially no difference between what's available here and anywhere else.
>
> a huge stream of data start to pour from the sensors into the expedition computers
>
>
>
This is the key.
The device sensors are not just detecting passive emissions, they pick up actual data streams (or what can be identified as data streams - e.g. a signal with a digital basis - two levels, on and off). These have been started because the device detects (or is turned on) by an active sensor signal.
When this is noticed the data is analyzed and someone (or a computer designed for pattern detection or something like that) decodes enough data to determine a basic encoding in the stream (which is repeating ?) and there's some kind of location embedded in it.
How do you encode that ? Well we did it [this way](https://boingboing.net/2017/09/05/how-to-decode-the-images-on-th.html). :-) There are various ways to encode a digital signal with a basic image that can be detected.
That could tell us a location with enough accuracy to locate another galaxy.
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OK, this is a tough one.
An artificial object will not be expected to have a natural composition. As such even determining extra-solar status would be difficult. There is also the problem that most galaxies are roughly the same in composition in terms of what they are made of.
Some thoughts.
The object is made of anti-matter. As far as we can tell our galaxy is made of matter. [A large object, like an asteroid suspended in an electromagnetic field, made of anti-matter would be unlikely to find in our galaxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_comet). If they found one that has been isolated by some device, there is a good chance it is extra-galactic in origin. Note, I am saying the object itself is clearly a naturally occurring object, if it was just a mass of antimatter plasma, then it was probably just manufactured.
The other idea I have is radio-isotope dating. We think the milky way is about 13.51 billion years old. The universe is 13.77 billion years old. If we dated the object to older than 13.51 it predates the milky way. Now most galaxies all formed around the same time, but predating the milky way is from outside the milky way.
For example. Long term geological dating can be done using Uranium->Lead Dating. Uranium-238's decay to lead-206 has a half life of something like 4.5 billion years. So if it seems like the object originally had a Uranium-238 core (maybe its clear its a nuke or a reactor), but half the core mass is lead-206, about 4.5 billion years has passed. If 3/4 of the mass is lead, then 9 billion years has passed. If only 1/8 is still uranium, then 13.5 billion years has passed. This method tends to have a 95% accuracy.
If you drop the artificial object there may be some other possibilities.
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### The object is made of exotic matter.
There are several options.
1. **Super-heavy elements** (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability>). These are not that freaky and you could hold some in your hand. They are theoretical elements of number 300+ which are stable in a way that other high number elements are not. It is cool to think about but I am not sure how it would produce huge streams of data, though.
2. **Negative matter** (<https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/cosmologists-prove-negative-mass-can-exist-in-our-universe-250a980320a7>). This stuff has gotten plenty of press on the Stack because it is needed for the Alcubierre warp drive. It might make some pretty weird data.
3. **Neutronium.** This is the ultra dense stuff from the heart of neutron stars that Superman makes his housekey out of, so no-one else can lift.
4. Other freaky matter not from around here: dark matter, strange matter. Stable muonium. Antimatter.
My favorite though: the thing atop the pillar is not an object. **It is a hole in space / time**. The streams of data are because active detection methods (using electromagnetic radiation or sound) go through the hole and keep going. What is received is what comes out of the hole from the other side. This is changing second by second because what is on the other side is changing second by second. The probe, receiving loads of wildly variable information unrelated to what itself is putting out assumes error, assumes reflection, assumes transmission, assumes noise, assumes error...
"Probe, are you sure that this thing is of extra-galactic origin?"
MOST CONSISTENT DATA RECEIVED POINTS TO EXTRAGALACTIC ORIGIN.
"Do you know where this thing is from?"
YES. IT IS THE STAR HD2112.
"It's from HD2112?"
NO. IT IS THE STAR HD2112. AMONG MUCH INCONSISTENT DATA, CONSISTENT DATA MATCHES UNIQUE SPECTRUM OF HD2112.
"... Probe, it seems pretty small to be a star."
THE SIZE OF THIS OBJECT REMAINS UNCERTAIN.
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**There are challenges, but the TLDR is to use pictures.**
The first problem is even if an Alien species wants to communicate with us, how will they and how will we understand?
Communicating between two completely different civilizations that probably evolved in completely different environments is not so easy as the movies make it seem.
From Wikipedia:
>
> CETI research has focused on four broad areas: mathematical languages,
> pictorial systems such as the Arecibo message, algorithmic
> communication systems (ACETI), and computational approaches to
> detecting and deciphering "natural" language communication. There
> remain many undeciphered writing systems in human communication, such
> as Linear A, discovered by archeologists. Much of the research effort
> is directed at how to overcome similar problems of decipherment that
> arise in many scenarios of interplanetary communication.
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_extraterrestrial_intelligence>
If you want the people to receive radiation or some kind of radio signal and be able to understand it without some kind of **context clue**, that is just not happening. For a few reasons:
1. How will they know how to decipher the signal into something that makes sense? Think encryption. The information you are getting might have a meaning. However it will be difficult or impossible to convert that into its intended form with out key information.
As an example lets use information that we put out into the cosmos. If you received something as simple as a radio signal for a television/radio broadcast and didn't know what a radio or television was then how would you decipher it? You would need an audio source or screen display, and if you didn't know that was the intended way to use the signal then you might never know what it contained. So there is the accompanying knowledge of how to interpret/process/display a signal that will be missing. This will prevent the team from coming up with a solution to decode the signal.
2. Even if there are coordinates. Who is to say that the aliens use the same coordinate system as us? If they don't then the humans are going to be in for a very hard time. If their math looks nothing like ours and or uses concepts we haven't even discovered yet then it is going to be even harder. Think explaining imaginary numbers to an ancient roman who still uses numerals.
The best your team will be able to deduce at this point is that the object is in fact manufactured, and then because no humans have reached this location before it might be... ALIENS!
If you really want there to be some kind of information exchange you may want to try pictography instead. AKA have a screen that shows pictures or something like that. Pictures is the current global plan for how to communicate with aliens in the event of contact. It is something we can all presumably understand.
As an example, check out the Voyager 1. It identifies our location as an etched drawing of our location relative to the local pulsars. For an advanced space fairing civilization something like that should be straightforward to figure out after enough brainstorming. You could try something similar, or checkout out the other info the Voyager uses.
<https://boingboing.net/2017/09/05/how-to-decode-the-images-on-th.html>
How these folks did it is probably your best bet:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lL1NK.jpg)
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The data could include a picture of our galaxy, **from the outside** far away, with enough detail to locate our sun.
While it could potentially be faked, we have enough information about stars in our galaxy to verify the picture to a high degree of accuracy.
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The object has to do two things: (1) carry information that argues it's from outside the galaxy and (2) have some property that makes it believable.
A photo of the galaxy with a "you are here" arrow, combined with another image of a galactic group with a "and we come from here" arrow, would carry the argument. (It would be particularly mind-blowing if they were up-to-date images)
But images can be faked. What kind of evidence can be provided? Particularly evidence that can be easily evaluated.
How about having a density of 50 gm/cc? Nothing on Earth can approach that, but it's expected of elements in the [2nd island of nuclear stability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability). That's evidence of being from a very different stellar environment (or having the technology to fake it)
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The key is in the way the data is modulated onto a carrier frequency.
How do we know a galaxy is far, far away? We look at the [redshift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift) $z$ of the spectral lines of a few elements, in particular Hydrogen's 21cm line. The drones can carry out spectroscopy of the carrier frequency and find large values of $z$, leading to the conclusion that the origin must be from way beyond even the Andromeda galaxy (which has a *blueshift* since it is coming closer).
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A detailed map of another galaxy, with a partial map of ours, along a fairly direct route back to the other, would be enough for the data to point to (though not to prove) extra-galactic origin.
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[
So, there's a closed question [So we have aliens in orbit. Now what?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9593/so-we-have-aliens-in-orbit-now-what) - but there's an implied assumption:
That somehow, there will be some unified / coherent response from humanity to aliens in orbit.
I find that **extremely** unlikely. People in mass, can't even keep their laser pointers to themselves, even when asked too and when it's clearly in everyone's benefit. There's always some yahoo out there who feels self-entitled enough to use *his* laser pointer to mess around.
Writ large on a planet with 7 billion people, and a fairly large first world population who have lasers, radios, model rockets, etc, etc.
Granted, most humans in current society will be unable to get to LEO or GEO, for a face-to-face meeting.
But, I see no way of keeping every religious cult, random nut-job, or yahoo from trying to contact aliens in orbit. And/or impersonating (or trying to) important people. I mean, you find an African-American actor and have him claim to be Obama (or for other movers and shakers: old Asian dude in glasses; or middle-aged Latin-American dude with a goatee), and put it on a tight-beam directed at the alien ship.
**How would you have (in your story) a legitimate government / official-dom get their signal recognized from all of the chatter aimed at an alien ship?** (or would you even bother? - Maybe you'd wait for them to contact you?)
Pouring more power into your signal seems like, screaming "**I** am the King!"... if you have to say it... well.
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Send the signal from the ISS.
The aliens should be well capable of detecting directionality of the signal, at least to a precision sufficient to distinguish Earth-based from LEO-based. And considering the ISS is one of the greatest scientific endeavors of Earth (easily observable), the crew can be trusted to behave in a responsible manner and forward the right messages.
Once public keys of 'authorized entities' of Earth, along with algorithms, have been passed from ISS, the communication can switch to direct channels, the signatures of the messages confirming authenticity.
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[VSauce has an interesting video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCBlAAtJA54) where he talks about the two established, international organizations who are already set up to handle this, [SETI](http://www.seti.org/) and the [UN Office for Outer Space Affairs](http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/COPUOS/copuos.html).
While the UNOOSA denies having the authority to speak for Earth, if aliens show up the expectation is they'd be the ones everyone would look to coordinate our response. In a panic, governments like using established structures who have been thinking about the problem for a long time. The UNOOSA would look to SETI for help, who have been thinking about and waiting for this for a very long time. [SETI has developed a plan "following the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence"](http://www.seti.org/post-detection.html) which would likely form the framework for our official response. It includes...
>
> 8. No response to a signal or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence should be sent until appropriate international consultations have taken place. The procedures for such consultations will be the subject of a separate agreement, declaration or arrangement.
>
>
>
Their official line is to keep quiet until we all talk about it. Assuming they agree, that would keep all of the major governments and institutions quiet (if they don't agree, then there is no legitimate official communications). That covers nearly everyone with access to a powerful, directional radio antenna. Maybe Earth will have to come up with the Intergalactic version of "*please hold, your call is very important to us...*"
What about rogue signals? Anything below a certain amount of power will be lost in the noise. What noise? Our noise. We emit a lot of electromagnetic noise into space. Some of it is chaotic, but a lot of it is patterned... communications. However, it is all patterned differently as we use dozens and dozens of different protocols. Ironically, some of our most important communications will look like random noise because they are encrypted. The aliens will have been observing this for some time as they approach. If they do not understand the content, they will understand that it is intelligent. However, the overall pattern will be chaotic from many sources and in many forms.
Whether or not they will recognize this means we are not unified is speculation, but they will recognize that random electromagnetic chatter is normal. Having some yahoo bounce the digits of Pi off their ship with a relatively low power laser isn't likely to seem out of the ordinary.
Nor are they likely to communicate anything intelligible to the aliens beyond basic math, not before the rest of the Earth gets its act together. We don't know what part of the electromagnetic spectrum they're observing, how they're using it (AM or FM or something else?), or if they're even using electromagnetism at all! If they knew how to finely manipulate gravity waves how we manipulate EM we could be staring dumbly at each other for a while.
The only rogue nation with a space program capable of powerful communications is North Korea (Iran could probably do it, but they're not as rogue as the US paints them to be) who would be the wild card. However we're safe in that North Korean scientists are not going to crack the code before everyone else does. We're double safe in that the messages will likely be internally politically focused narcissistic gibberish. "Here is a JPEG of our Dear Leader!"
When Earth responds, they must do something out of the ordinary to get noticed. They must order the chaos, that's a clear sign of intelligence. Individual governments and institutions, guided by the UN on the advice of SETI, would *all* point their transmitters at the alien ship and *simultaneously* broadcast the same message. This is unprecedented in the history of humanity. One group transmitting with the most power is like shouting "*LISTEN TO ME, I AM THE LOUDEST*", but having multiple sources all over the planet sending the same signal says
>
> *Listen to us, our voice is unified*.
>
>
>
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It seems to me that the aliens would have access to our broadcasts, and be able to monitor our television and radio not just after they arrive but while they are approaching. Sufficiently advanced computing technology would have translation software working by the time they reached orbit.
Once in orbit they can also try and piggy back into the Internet by reverse engineering the protocols and intercepting some satellite up-links.
Between these two sources of information it shouldn't take them long to understand our political makeup and work out who would be appropriate to contact depending on their long term goals.
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**Who can speak on behalf of Earth?** I know I am posting "non-answer" but I still have to:
We have [United Nations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations) which could be the closest to "Earth representation" as we can get. But I doubt that UN has technology to communicate to space. And getting this huge organisation into agreement what should be done can take *too long.* So, sadly, we have to put them out of equation and ask differently:
**Who has power to communicate?** Simply put, *anyone*. Leading powers would have some upper hand and for simplicity, lets put these powers in mind: India, USA, Europe, China and even North Korea.
And it gets worse: Big media houses. They have commercial satellites and they would sell their moms for possibility to broadcast alien communication on live TV. Imagine the prices for advertisement! Huge profit!
**Who has power to take aliens down?** USA, China, Russia, India and even North Korea. Hope I did not miss anyone important. Good luck having them all agree to not shoot on the aliens. Especially if aliens look *ugly and dangerous*
Sadly, your question has only one plausible solution:
**What do aliens know about us? What is their motivation?**
Did they come in person, because we did not get [their response](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Arecibo_answer) in first place? Are we interesting insect to investigate further? Is our planet valuable resource for them?
Several ideas:
*Comedy/Parody*: For whatever reason, the aliens could catch only North Korea state TV broadcast. They come to see glorious leader Kim Jong-Un to salute him in his awesomeness. Boil down the story in several misunderstandings.
*Drama* Earth is valuable resource. They have no motive in talking to us in first place. They came to kill us all.
*Sci-fi* It is simple "first contract". From story perspective, it would be interesting to make aliens believe that your country represents Earth as whole and your "leader" is the one with power to represent the whole Earth. Spend some time into investigating, what other countries might think and do.
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The usual method to guarantee the identify of the source of a message is cryptography and it's related areas. All correct answers will revolve around this.
The three pillars of information security are :
Confidentiality : Guarantee that only those who are entitled to read the messages are able to do so.
Reliability : Guarantee that the message will be delivered when needed.
Identity : Guarantee that those which the message identify as authors are trully the authors of the message.
So, it follows on from information security practice, that the most usual way to guarantee those pillars are those methods based on cryptography.
By, for one, encrypting each message with a public key cryptography method, you can guarantee (to a large degree) that the message was sent by the authorities that hold the valid key.
The only final problem is key distribution. Aliens would need to exchange keys with earth's authorities in order to allow the identification of the message sources. This would, probably involve landing a spacecraft in front of the white house, just like in the movies.
Another, less guaranteed way to deliver the message with some security about its sender, is to have your largest most powerfull transmiter point to space and send it. This is brute force, because, probably, your competitors (those wanting to send messages as if they were true authorities) would probably have less money to engenieer powerfull transmitters. But, in a multipolar world like ours, nothing prevents other national entities, besides USA, to build such transmitters and start to talking to the aliens, as if they where the USA, or vice versa. This might have political consequences that are out of the scope of this answer.
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I think [Tim B's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/11335/7351) pretty well covers it, but I would assume that most governments, particularly super powers, like the US and China, would make an effort to employ [radio jamming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_jamming) and other signal disruption in order to try and dominate the conversation.
While the aliens may have decided that they would rather make contact with a particular government, some governments may attempt to hijack the conversation by deploying large scale jamming efforts. For instance if the aliens decided to contact China the US may decide that that is unacceptable and try to block their signal or vice versa...
It would also be pretty likely that many governments would try to eliminate chatter by scrambling/jamming non-official signals within their own borders.
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If human presence in space has progressed, they would study the behavior and see how Traffic Control / Port Authority is handled. It would be very rude to have a plasma exhaust cross a shipping lane, and they would need to learn a little about how things work.
The legitimate authority is whom everyone else is taking orders from and coordinating through. If the contactor says "we'll send a pilot to guide you through the inner system" and one of the ships shows up as planned, that's a good sign.
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Aliens wouldn't just tune into their radio to hear what our leader is saying. They would stay in orbit a while, maybe dodging a couple missiles (on Earth, humans studying animals aren't too off put by being attacked. Aliens could reasonably stay in orbit even if we provoke.) They would wait a long while, figure out our social structure, and then maybe try to communicate with multiple leaders.
This is all assuming the aliens are advanced enough to actually form any sort of relationship with Earth. It could simply be a probe or something, not even capable of landing. In that case, it doesn't need to know who is boss.
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In my story, I'd probably have the aliens have studied Earth broadcast media for a while, and figured us all out fairly well, at least as far as being able to understand something about our government organizations. And they'd probably want to engineer a big change to those baroque and corrupted systems. They'd probably use our government structures to identify the corrupting elements, and eliminate/dismiss/correct those one way or another, and start up their own new government structures for the earth, and detain and re-educate the corrupt when they showed up to that.
In fact, the first government would probably mostly be made up of non-human Earthlings. Whales, orang-utans, giant sequoias, fungus, bee queens, elephants, octopi, ravens, etc. After all, clearly a LOT of affirmative action is in order!
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[
I'd like a gravity room on my space vessel for long space stays to avoid osteoporosis. They would spend a few hours each day in this room, reading or doing paper work, to maintain bone-mass.
I'm imagining a chamber (it doesn't need to be large) where the astronauts stand against a wall as the room rotates, like [the classic carnival ride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitron).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5UbPs.png)
Image By Lzcracker - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4531120>
I imagine that I would need some kind of counter-weight (spinning in the opposite direction) to maintain net-zero rotational momentum.
My question is whether a room like this is feasible on a spacecraft that would be built today. Or whether I'm overlooking some other factors that would make this undesirable.
Edit: I am imagining a very small centrifuge. Not large enough to run around in (as in 2001 or the Martian).
[Answer]
## It's possible...
As the other answers suggest, your science and reasoning are sound. Such a room, if spun at the right rate, could simulate gravity, and perhaps negate some of the effects of prolonged exposure to microgravity. This is also fully possible with modern technology.
## But for what it actually does, no one will pay for it.
### Expensive to fuel
Moving a pound of material into orbit costs on average between 2,000 and 20,000 dollars. To keep this room spinning relative to the rest of the station, you would need to constantly burn fuel (or sacrifice most of your solar input). Electricity is valuable, and fuel costs too much to move up, so such an endeavor may not be accepted.
The difference between this approach and entire stations that spin is that the "one-room" approach involves friction. The friction between the spinning room and the rest of the station will slow it down, requiring more motion to combat, and thus more fuel. Meanwhile, if you **spin the entire ship**, it will keep spinning unless acted upon by another force - requiring significantly less energy.
### Expensive to build
As noted above, moving mass into space is expensive. I'm not going to make any assumptions about the size of this room but if you want something large I wish you luck finding an investor. It's just cheaper to move the whole station.
### Not very effective
* A few hours each day will not help significantly. Spending the rest of their hours without gravity will reverse most of the positive changes you make, if not all.
* Bone density is lost in space because bones no longer need to stay strong enough to fight gravity; that material is better used elsewhere. By lying on their **backs,** or with their backs to the wall, bones will act as if humans are sleeping; there is not much work that they need to do, so density will not increase by much.
* Other problems, such as impaired vision, occur in space because internal fluid is not restrained by gravity. By pulling from the front of the individual to the back, you will simply change where the fluid pools - in the back - and drain it from the wrong places - as opposed to pulling it down from the brain.
* Bed sores will occur from astronauts constantly lying down (as opposed to standing up produced by upright motion).
## Consider spinning the whole ship, indefinitely, and having people stand upright.
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While the idea of having artificial gravity is sound, there are several issues with the idea of having a room or "Hamster wheel" for artificial gravity inside your spaceship:
1. It is heavy. The cost of bring ing objects or even inert mass into orbit is enormous, and will be so for the foreseeable future (even with SpaceX). A separate rotating structure isn't just the wheel, but the bearings and support structure, motors to spin and despin it, rotating slip joints and seals, slip rings for passage of electrical power and data etc. You will also need a set of flywheels or perhaps another ring spinning in the opposite direction to cancel out torques, and possibly some sort of counterweight system so your moving around in the room won't destabilize the system.
2. It is complex. Looking at the list of items in 1 above, this thing is going to be a maintenance hog and nightmare for your crew to keep going. Just ensuring the flow of electricity and data to the rotating cabin is going to be difficult enough, much less airlocks, pressure seals and so on.
3. It is dangerous. Can you imagine if your slip ring has to transmit kilowatts of energy, either by design or because of an accident? What happens if the wheel becomes unbalanced? Will the vibrations damage important systems on your ship? is there some means to brake the system in an emergency and deal with the sudden change in rotational energy?
4. It isn't healthy. If your room is too small, the corals force of the rotation could induce nausea and disorient the people inside. The calculations can be found on the ever helpful [Atomic Rockets](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/artificialgrav.php) site. In general terms, rotating at faster than 7RPM can cause problems for the people inside. Either the room has to be unreasonably large or you will have to settle for less than one "G" if you rotate the room more slowly. While Atomic Rockets has lots of caveats, much of this has to do with training and also with gradually upping or reducing the rotational speed. This may or may not be practical.
However, there is a solution: turn the entire spaceship into the centrifuge. No slip joints or moving parts, the ship can spin at any arbitrary rate and the "room" is the size of the entire habitat portion. This fan art version of the "Hermes" from the novel "[The Martian](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0804139024)" shows how its done:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0UDKx.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XlpQc.jpg)
The nuclear reactor is facing the viewer in this picture, and the habitat is on the far end of the boom. The ion engines are in the centre of the boom, and can be rotated to provide course adjustments and corrections. A .gif of the ship in rotation is [here](http://francisdrakex.deviantart.com/art/Hermes-Rotate-564814706)
So by some clever design, you can make the entire ship rotate and provide the crew with 100% gravity inside the crew quarters for as long as you like. Rotating the ship and despinning do have issues (and you need to take this slowly in order to prevent over stressing the central truss), but overall, this is a much more robust solution than a spinning room inside the ship.
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The concept is certainly workable, and is being actively investigated by a number of different groups. It's also been depicted in science fiction many, many times.
A recent high-profile proposal for a vessel using such a system was the [Nautilus X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus-X), a proposed multi-role spaceship that would use a centrifuge to provide around 0.5 - 0.6 g for the crew.
A version of the same concept was also tried on [Gemini 11](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_11). The crew capsule and its Agena target vehicle were connected by a tether and spun around their common centre. The experiment was not a total success, for various reasons, but they did generate a small amount of artificial gravity.
To my knowledge, nobody has actually flown another mission to test the concept in space, despite many proposals. The Soviets experimented extensively with centrifuges as a habitat on Earth, but never in orbit. A module called the [Centrifuge Accommodation Module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module) was partially built for the ISS, but was cancelled before completion.
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Generally speaking, the idea should be workable. For 2016, the problem is that we don't have many spacecraft or space stations, and those were launched in many small parts. Assembling this room in orbit would be difficult.
* Something similar was shown in the movie 2001.
* Variant: The spacecraft has two (or four) pods rotating on arms. The *Leonov* from *2010* or some Earth Force ships from *Babylon 5*.
* Variant: The spacecraft has a ring rather than separate pods.
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It doesn't really make much sense to have only a room. If you can build it it would be better for it to represent all (or almost all) of the living space available.
If the room available is limited for any reason then you could still have a very small centrifuge, maybe divided in a few bunks, so that people can rest there and maybe sleep.
The reasons such a space would be used for sleeping and resting are two: first if the centrifuge is small, moving inside is difficult and you will experience different levels of acceleration within you body and also a very strong coriolis effect every time you turn around; second, sleeping in space is actually very difficult! Astronauts on the ISS can hardly sleep a few hours, so if you have a gravity room available only at times sleeping in there is one of the best thing you can do probably.
Oh, also, if the space is limited better do something in there that requires limited movements and room.
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[Question]
[
Ley Lines are straight alignments crisscrossing the planet from east to west. These lines contain sources of magical power called mana, and coalesce at various locations around the world. This allows for the use of magic in the world to produce spells, but has also given rise to technology that has revolutionized society. A magical version of the internet allows the world to be interconnected through the use of crystal balls. Using these balls, one can communicate to another individual thousands of miles away. They are activated with the user's mana, which sends a signal carried through the ley lines to the recipient. The ball on the other end alerts the person to the attempted communication, and activates it on their end to form a connection.
However, there are problems with the system, specifically in areas where the ley lines meet. A magical "dead zone" forms in the locations where the lines coalesce which prevent signals from passing through, preventing a connection from being formed. This leads to a buffering that kills the link between two parties. These dead zones also cause issues with other forms of magic. Mages find it more difficult or even impossible to perform their own spells in these areas, despite there being a large concentration of mana in the area. This seems counter-intuitive, as this overabundance of magical potential should lead to an increase in magical ability and boost signal bandwidth.
How can this be rationally justified?
[Answer]
**Mana, like radioactivity, is harmless in small quantites but causes problems in large concentrations.**
At extreme "ambient mana density" levels like those you'd find at ley line intersection points, the "spell matricies" of high-complexity magical artifacts like your crystal balls begin having problems and signals that pass through them are disrupted. This is similar to how computer chips and radio signals behave in high-radiation enviorments, where individual particles can flip bits inside of the processors or messages and cause all sorts of unforseen software problems. Similarly, Mages have difficulty casting complex spells because they can't stabilize their spell formula/matrix/pattern without it being disturbed by ambient mana particles before they're done casting.
This can have some neat knock-on effects, for example:
* Since Mages can't cast complex spells in these dead-zones, they need to "go back to basics" if they're inside a "dead zone". Only the most simple cantrips are castable--anything more complex gets destabilized too quickly--but these elemetary spells can be cast with incredible force due to the high ambient mana density
* These dead-zones can also be the cause of naturally forming magical monsters. Similar to radiation, creatures that live inside a dead zone have a high chance to produce mutated offspring, who, if they survive, have a high chance of being able to innately manipulate mana and perform rudimentary sorcery (like body enhancment or fire-breath or whatever)
* Similar to how computers that are built for space travel are "hardened" against radiation, magical devices could be "hardened" against high mana density in the form of redundant magical circuits, self-repair functionality, shielding, etc. These would be significantly more expensive than regular magical devices
[Answer]
Mana, like electricity, does no good just sitting around. It is the *flow* of electrons that brings about the light in your electronic lamp and all the other electronic devices that you rejoice in. What is needed is a differential so that mana will move.
A place just jam-packed with mana has no place for it to move -- the areas outside being the equivalent of electronic insulation. Any meeting point of ley lines that was not surrounded by mana insulation rapidly ceased to be one by loss of mana; only the insulated ones remain.
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# **Yellow And Blue Make Green:**
But what happens when a wizard can use yellow OR blue, but green is nonsensical? Different ley lines have different wavelengths. This is why there ARE ley lines (like wavelengths attract), and not a diffuse mana field. All of it is Mana, but the mana has a different feel based on wavelength or "color." Mages generally are only able to process a single wavelength of mana at a time, but can perceive many (which is why mages can go to other ley lines and use the mana). However, where these colors blend together, the perception of the color changes, such that the apparent color is different than the individual colors.
Initializing a spell takes careful consideration of the wavelength. Try to take a white wall with yellow dots, and then flood the room with yellow light. Now put your hands on two of the yellow dots on the wall. Good luck. If you saw them before the yellow light went on, you might have a chance. Otherwise, all the light reflected from the wall looks yellow. This is what it's like trying to use mana in a place flooded with different wavelengths of mana. You can use one color, but when multiple colors are blended together, it's hard to pick out just one. Using the wrong wavelength in casting is unstable at best, dangerous at worst.
For your crystal balls, the problem comes in that the messages are sent along a single wavelength. The mage must magically perceive the wavelength or color along the whole distance. When the intersection is met, the colors go rampant and blend, making it difficult to distinguish one color from another. The connection is lost unless they are really lucky or if they have a special disability.
If you like, you can have some individuals who are essentially "colorblind" to certain wavelengths. Envision someone who is unable to see a certain color of mana. These poor souls will be unable to use certain ley lines at all, because they lack the perception to see that mana. But these people would be lucky enough to be able to use mana within the intersections of lines they only see one color of. The reason? They can distinguish the color they can see from the one they can't. If you allow the spells to USE all the mana, but the INITIATION of the spell requires a single wavelength, then these otherwise "disabled" mages suddenly have a distinctive and powerful gift. If not, then they just have the neat trick of using magic within an intersection - and transmitting through intersections other can't.
Perhaps these folks can detect signals sent into the intersection. These mages could then initiate a second signal starting from their crystal ball. It could only be sent along one of the two colored lay lines, but it would allow transmission of some messages via a network of colorblind mages - a sort of telegraph station system. There are interesting strategic implications for this in a world in need of long-range communication.
A unique application of this comes if you wish to imprison mages. Build a prison for mages within an intersection, but staff it with guards who are "colorblind." While the general mages struggle to start spells at all, the guards easily smack down prisoners at the first sign of trying.
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**Too much.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XG2Ph.jpg)
<https://www.better-lawn-care.com/dog-urine-killing-grass.html>
Dog urine has nitrogen that plants need. Too much "burns" or overwhelms the plant. You can see that surrounding the dead patch the grass is healthier and brighter green that lawn more distant. It has more nitrogen but not too much.
So too the mana concentrations. It is too much at the intersection. It is not so much that magic does not work there, but more a "drinking from the firehose" principle. The firehose has good water but is liable to take your lips off if you try to drink from it.
Just as grass grows green some distance from dog pee epicenter, at points some short distance from the actual intersection one can take advantage of power bleeding from the intersection into the lines, and magic could be more powerful there.
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### This is exactly the same issue the Internet had before switches effectively replaced hubs.
In computer networks, there are two basic types of hardware that converges multiple lines to allow computers on a network to connect to each other.
1. When [hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_hub) receives some incoming data, it will forward it to *all* connected computers. This means the more computers there are connected to one hub, the less overall bandwith each of them has. In older networks, where data can only be transmitted one way at a time, collisions happen all the time (i.e. both ends are trying to trasmit at the same time and neither will receive the message).
And if you manage to connect hubs in a loop, you can only pray to the Internet gods for mercy (and disconnect them from each other).
2. [Switches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_switch) are significantly more advanced. They can be programmed to only route traffic for example from input A to output B and from input B to outputs A and D, and discard anything that comes through input C. They used to be more expensive and too hard to use for regular users, so they opted for hubs.
You can view natural Ley Lines crossing as a hub - due to high traffic in the area, the messages will come delayed, may be lost altogether, and trying to send message from hub will generally annoy everyone who tries to use the network at the same time.
These natural crossings may be upgraded to "switches" - it comes with a price and you need a skilled magician as an administrator to program it initially and maintain the proper work, but you get interruption-free communication and much better speed (and maybe, if you are wealthy enough, your own dedicated line to connect to the MagicNet).
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* **Magic highways**. Think of a very busy and central highway. As long as the cars are all moving without stopping or going from a lane to another or doing anything like that, just a road with cars going in and getting out at certain points. This street has no traffic or problems as even when a cars slows down to go into an exist it is predictable and reasonable. But imagine the same street with two busted cars in the middle and you have a **jam**.
Some **magic jams** are the problem. This can be caused by a hundred reasons. The mage can be careless and like your own car that needs service they can just cast a half baked spell so it gets in the middle of the magic highway and just stops.
Now since you did mention lines I will assume they are limited to actual physical space. So the first idiotic mage that does a good morning spell to his mother on the other side of the world before he is fully awake just sent a spell that got to the middle of the magic highway, sounds like a power metal track, and it stops dead while the rest of the magical world is reduced to a slow crawl until it is solved.
* **Tiny tiny space taking spells**. Sounds boring but again lines have space and even if your spells are very very small in size they take space. Imagine how long would it take to full a stadium with matches. But it can be done. And once it is full you can't find that light green match you want to use.
* **Video game bugs**. Pretty simple stuff. Spells are like codes and once they start interacting they can just glitch or have a bug. I think most people are familiar with video game bugs but let me give you an example. If an NPC is supposed to be programmed to go to their house at 11 P.M to sleep, but their house door is blocked by a giant boulder or a skeleton of an enemy then they might be in a problem. There are too many factors to consider but basically you have an overall conflict because it is coded to preform this task but the engine also limits the NPC to behaving like actual people so it has to move to the door and get in but it can't move because a boulder is there and so on. So spell might be like that. Maybe the attract or overtime spells think that this other spell is actually it's own. And tries to establish contact and you end up with one mega messed up spell.
* **External factors**. Overtime a new type or rocks, fungi, trees...etc evolved in those places and it is highly interactive with magic. Highly interactive does not mean instant jam. It means that it can simply interact and might change the properties of the lines or spells in them. They cane feel on the spells or whatever really. But point is they cause problems.
* **Fail safe**. As mysterious as the lines themselves. Or if the line are explained slab it in there as well. Anyway the theory is that at a certain level of magic the line are stable and everything is going well. But if the amount going through exceed this limit then the lines EXPLODE or something.
* **Anti magic lines**. Why not! You have magic stuff so maybe there are lines of anti magic that stops or disrupts magic. Perhaps you can have that be dark magic or blood magic lines and because of the secretive nature of the magic, because it is evil duh, only few wizards know about this thing.
* **Week points.** This is more about engineering but maybe magical engineering or whatever you feel like. Basically those are week points by nature. Like the knee joint on human or a window on a spaceship or something similar. Just by nature the magical size or actual size of those places is smaller and things get stuck in them more often
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Most magic systems have some form of connection to the person's will and intelligence. Spells can often identify friend from foe or heal specific things on a person. I often say that a spell basically "shapes" the raw mana. Like a sculptor you use signs, your voice and your mind to shape the mana into the form you want and off it goes to perform your spell.
This gives a clear way to dispell someones magic: deform their spell in some way to make it burn itself out or become harmless. It also means that large concentrations of mana can interfere with your spell as raw mana attaches itself to your spell. This isnt a big problem for lower concentrations as not enough can attach to it.
This also gives you a nice way for magical items to perform: the item prevents raw mana from interfering with the spell locked inside, and mana pushed through the item is shaped by it into the form you want, causing the spell to happen.
It also gives you a clear reason why some spellcasters can be more powerful without actually having more mana: they are simply superior sculptors of the mana and know tricks to sculpt it better than the "standard" spell.
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Mana comes in waves, therefore it is subject to [constructive and destructive interference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_interference):
>
> In physics, interference is a phenomenon in which two waves superpose to form a resultant wave of greater, lower, or the same amplitude. Constructive and destructive interference result from the interaction of waves that are correlated or coherent with each other, either because they come from the same source or because they have the same or nearly the same frequency. Interference effects can be observed with all types of waves, for example, light, radio, acoustic, surface water waves, gravity waves, or matter waves.
> (...)
> Consider, for example, what happens when two identical stones are dropped into a still pool of water at different locations. Each stone generates a circular wave propagating outwards from the point where the stone was dropped. When the two waves overlap, the net displacement at a particular point is the sum of the displacements of the individual waves. At some points, these will be in phase, and will produce a maximum displacement. In other places, the waves will be in anti-phase, and there will be no net displacement at these points.
>
>
>
By the way, this is the reason why microwave ovens have rotating plates. Inside those ovens the microwaves are stationary, with regions of constructive and destructive interference. You have to move the food around so all parts of it are exposed to constructive interference, otherwise some bits are not heated by the radiation of the oven.
---
Back to magic. Mana is everywhere, mostly as stationary waves that go north and south. Where they meet constructively you call it a ley line, where they meet destructively you call a dead zone. Now due to the physics of magic, [thaums](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Thaum) travel perpendicular to the wave, so what you are measuring going east to west is the thaumaturgical flux.
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# Destructive Interference
Lots of excellent answers here! There's another one that talks about wavelengths, I'd like to focus on the effects of interference.
Imagine all the different ley lines had a particular frequency that they operated on. As mentioned elsewhere, different people could be tuned into different frequencies, allowing them to use different types of magic. But the thing about wave frequencies is that when they combine, they can *either* boost or inhibit each other (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_interference>). If certain magics were in or out of phase with each other, you could have it so that some ley lines crossing boosted both magics, some crossing deadened each other, and the combination of all ley line types crossing resulting in total destructive interference, where all the frequencies perfectly cancel each other out.
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# Pseudomagnetism.
In the real world, magnets interact in many entertaining and surprising ways, including cancellation: the creation of magnetic "dead zones" when multiple magnets are in close proximity. This works because the magnetic field at any point in space is the sum of the magnetic field from all individual sources -- so if one field points in one direction and the other points in the opposite direction at some point, the net field is zero.
However, as you can see in [this example](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Two-magnets-can-create-a-magnetic-field-cancellation-Particles-are-pushed-out-from-that_fig8_254059531), the "dead zone" created by two simple magnets isn't exactly where you want it to be -- it's inside the angle they form. In addition, simple magnets have the unfortunate property that they have physical mass and cannot be perfectly superimposed. Thankfully, our increasing scientific understanding of electromagnetism has exposed us to magnets which suffer none of these limitations.\* I refer, of course, to *electromagnets.*
The flow of electric current also generates a magnetic field. That means that by directing current in particular patterns, you can generate particular configurations of magnetic fields. One of the most common patterns calls for looping wire around a nonconductive core to form a "solenoid": a conductor which produces a magnetic field pointing straight in one direction (inside) or the exact opposite direction (outside).
So, "magic" is electricity, but conducted only by certain structures that have no physical mass (and preferably a minimum of direct interaction with mass, period). Where these structures loop tightly, resembling solenoids, magical force is generated -- and anything capable of interacting with (or being interacted with by) magic can convert that into power. The force is strongest inside the structure (along the ley line), has less energy outside, and drops off very quickly as you get further away. That force can be used to power the movement of *stuff* (teleporting people, crystal ball images, whatever) from one place to another, particularly if sent along a ley line. The simplest magical activity will involve simply sending things along with the current, pun fully intended. As practitioners becomes more sophisticated, they will develop ways to translate that raw motive power into other forms of energy, most notably mechanical energy -- the magical equivalent of a (living) electric motor which can power almost anything. Where two of these ley lines intersect, provided they are running in almost-opposite directions, the magical fields nearly cancel and we are left with a magical dead spot.
---
Now, before you stop with this simpler approach, think it through carefully: it has some implications. In particular, the political geography of your world will be *weird.* It's very likely that people in your world won't know *why* things don't transmit past ley line intersections, because much of the area *around* the dead zone will be hazardous or lethal for anything magnetic -- er, susceptible to magical force. So your magicians may not know that their spells fizzle in the intersection, because they'll be too busy avoiding the fact that their spells explode in the penumbra! If magical ability is an intrinsic gift that can't be turned off, it's even worse: normal people are able to travel freely while magically talented people may be hemmed in by the closest ley lines to their place of birth, unable to touch these invisible boundaries without suffering the same fate as a human who touches a live wire.
Moreover, ley lines based on this model are directional: perhaps a sending in one direction can work on the basis of the magician's power alone, but a sending in the other direction might require a wand and a rare gemstone placed in a certain configuration, the magical equivalent of a simple machine. Perhaps some forms of magic, such as lightning or telekinesis, naturally "flow" in the parallel direction if not deployed by a sufficiently skilled mage. Don't cast that fireball upwind!
If you're not a fan of these complications, or you want a more arbitrary ley line configuration, you'll need to add a few extra dimensions to your world so that the magical fields can run antiparallel in some dimension we can't perceive.\*\* Magical fields no longer point along the ley lines; the ley lines are simply magical fields centered on some other 3+dimensional space that intersects with the 3-dimensional space we can perceive. (Strictly speaking, they're probably ley *planes*, but that doesn't have the same alliterative appeal.) The actual force vectors now point out of our space of existence.
To use magic, then, a magic-user reaches out (some possibly-immaterial part) perpendicular to their universe in higher-dimensional space so that the magical fields can act upon them, generating force which they can then channel to their own purposes. However, where these fields intersect (but point in opposite directions), there's simply no net magical field and thus no force can be generated no matter how the mage moves (unless they move within the *visible* universe -- i.e., leave the intersection).
Bonus: if ley lines are equivalent to higher-dimensional magnetic fields, you can introduce objects and people that look normal but have the properties of solid, static magnets and behave in wacky ways that are almost totally incomprehensible to the [mere mortals who observe them](https://youtu.be/8GyVx28R9-s?t=105).\*\*\*
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\*Well, okay, maybe not *none*: a real electromagnet requires something to carry the electricity, and that conductor itself must have mass.
\*\*To understand how this works, picture three planes superimposed. Leave one perfectly flat, slightly tilt one north/south, and slightly tilt the third east/west. The first is your world and the latter two are your ley lines. They run perpendicular from the perspective of your world, but in the higher-dimensional space they are very close to parallel -- and if they "point" in opposite directions, the fields will almost cancel where they intersect. Now repeat the visualization in three dimensions, and Bob's your uncle.
\*\*\*NSFW for profanity. But come on, if you read through this **whole** post without expecting this joke…
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You can base your principle on basic biology like Osmosis.
In normal area the environnement is Hypertonic:
Organism radiate their inner mana.
That's why you can see someone mana around him like a thin steam. By voluntary stopping this flow of mana from the body, One can make their presence much harder or even impossible to sense.
In Dead zone, the environnement is Hypotonic:
When the mana concentration exceed the body mana concentration.(Note we are using concentration instead of volume)
Environnmental man flow into the body. As the body is not able evacuate the mane it inervetabily burst.
Using concentration allow you to have people training to be able to go at the edge of the dead zone.
And having a surprise mythical beast in the center, a beast with a high mana concentration.
For the lethal explanation :
You can have many level of mana poisoningbased on the amount of mana overflowing from the body.
The manbrane/bridge/chakra/mana vein could simply break/explode when receiving too much.
You can have the mana inversion.
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[Question]
[
---
**Dungeons and the System**
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Shortly after the year 20XX, portals connected to extra-dimensional dungeons appear in the most densely populated areas on Earth. Chaos ensues as dungeon monsters spill out in “dungeon breaks” from the portals, devastating the population.
Luckily, with the appearance of the portals, the “System” arrives as well. The System quantifies humans, monsters, equipment, and objects, and gives out handy magical abilities, allowing humans to fight back.
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**Dungeon Reset**
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With the help of the System and their technological prowess, humans exterminate the monsters that invaded the Earth. In order to prevent the monster breaks from happening again, humans must routinely go through the portals to clear out the dungeons. This is because dungeons that are left unattended will slowly spawn monsters inside, until a critical point, upon which the dungeon “breaks” and the monsters flood out onto Earth through the Portal.
What is special about the dungeons are that, following each “clear” of the dungeon by defeating the dungeon boss, and any foreign living beings exit, the System performs a “reset” on the dungeon. **Following the reset, the System returns everything in the dungeon to the exact template state**.
This reset makes it convenient for waste disposal, as any garbage or toxic waste left inside will be gone upon reset. It also makes it easy for Dungeon Hunters to commit *murderous misdeeds*, as any bodies and evidence inside the dungeon will disappear upon the reset, and be replaced with the initial state.
---
**Question**
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The question is, *what does the Dungeon/System/Third Party do to the bodies and objects to make them disappear upon a dungeon reset*? Are there really *no* side effects to disposing of foreign objects inside? *Are we feeding some Eldritch monstrosity with each Mars bar wrapper, unaware of our impending doom?*
The criteria for the best answer is for logical plausibility in relation to the Dungeons and the System, as well as the efficiency of the process. An example of a good answer would have some sort of plausible motive as to why the third party would want to dispose of the bodies in such a way (or a reason as to why the phenomenon happens).
[Answer]
In this extra-dimensional space, everything is actually nothing but energy signatures. The opening of a portal solidifies those energy signatures into a templated design based on the plane of existence it connects to.
Leaving something behind in the dungeon when the portal deactivates after the "clear" causes that item to be converted into an energy signature itself which can be recycled in the extra-dimensional space.
Side effect: adding more energy to the system can easily cause more energy to be used in the current or subsequent dungeons. This can be rather slow as the original portals could be expected to be open for 1000 years and it allocates energy based on that timeline. so if you add 1000 energy to the system its a net gain of 1 energy per year to the available energy.
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**Aged Out of Existence**
A 'Dungeon Reset' dilates the time ratio between planes. In the human plane, thirty seconds pass. In dungeon time, over 1,000,000 years pass. Thus, anything in the dungeon is aged to dust.
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## Dungeons are living beings
Rooms and places Dungeons hunters explore inside of them are just organs.
The Reset itself is just a massive body purge started by the Dungeon itself using some kind of incredibly acid body fluid.
When everything is cleaned, monsters start to spawn. They are part of the Dungeon the same way a cell is part of our own body. Due to its “DNA” the Dungeon always regenerates the same cells/monsters and your template is then respected.
[Answer]
The System is controlled, or is influenced by, a Necromancer of the highest order. The bodied are reanimated and the objects left behind sorted and made into useful equipment.
This explains *why* the bodies disappear, as well as left-over loot, and also provides an end-game Big Bad Evil\* Guy
( \* Doesn't have to be evil)
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Gelatinous Cubes sweep the halls absorbing the organic and inorganic and dissolving the refuse before consuming itself
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**The Dungeons are Virtual**
The portals are actually a digitizer / printer and when a human steps through into a dungeon the system digitizes them and loads into the virtual world. When they leave the dungeon, it prints them a new body and reloads their mind into it.
The portal just prints and releases monsters to make the humans enter the dungeon and play the game.
The "System" is made by the same race who made the portals. They put the system on primitive planets for their public's amusement.
[Answer]
The Dungeon and the System are one entity. The Dungeon emerges first, then the System after. Humans do not know how it was created, but they do know it was not them. What is known is that as an extra-dimensional space, the Dungeon is not fully bound by the same logic and physics as the material world. It's time is controlled by the System, a logic created by the people that actually built it for the greatest game ever.
As such, the Dungeon's reset is controlled by the System. The System appears to collapse the pocket dimension and recreate it in a flash based on templates that the System holds. It is based on three triggers -- people outside entering, the defeat of the boss monster and people exiting. It waits for all people living to leave because it is a safeguard put into the System by those that created it to prevent death by reset by its creators.
Nobody quite knows how the Dungeon resets itself though as any probe or attempt to understand it from our end is quite logically destroyed in the process. Or at least we think it is destroyed. While we say it collapses and reforms in an instant, that is only because we are taking a guess based on what we can observe by looking at the front door.
Another proposed theory is that time is regressed in the Dungeon, as opposed to advanced. The templated beings in the dungeon regress from dead to alive again. We do not see the fallen rise because the Dungeon is old enough that the dead adventurers actually de-age out of existence during the reset.
Excess energy caused by dead adventurers or things left behind are converted for extra energy for the Dungeon/System pair. Former living beings run the risk of being converted into a template for a future iteration of the Dungeon. For foreign objects, it requires the conversion of a certain amount of them to make a new template of that object.
As for the extra energy? The System makes use of that for any number of things. Creation of new templates are one of them, as is granting the magic abilities to the humans and whatever else the System creates that is outside the Dungeon template. A third option is that it uses the energy and the extra templates it acquires in combination with its limited intelligence to adjust the Dungeon template to alter the challenge a bit and make use of new material.
A fourth, and possibly more terrifying option, is that it stores this excess energy to slowly create another copy of a Dungeon to either add to the world or to move to the next world. After all, this is a thing that is in control of an extra-dimensional dungeon -- moving itself to another dimension would be a logical next step. And it might even be doing it maliciously -- this could be an honestly unknown side effect of its creation.
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[Question]
[
I'm making a world which is set on a planet with two smaller "bubbles" of atmosphere at the poles, and a more stereotypical atmosphere that surrounds them. Each of the three atmospheres has a different gaseous composition (one of the smaller ones is mostly Earth-like, with an abundance of oxygen, while the other is mostly Carbon/Carbon Dioxide based; the larger atmosphere is made of thicker, denser gases.) In every atmosphere exists an entirely different ecosystem and set of organisms.
Is this scientifically possible? If not, how close can a planet get to this type of atmosphere?
[Answer]
I think your best bet is speed, and lots of it.
If you look at pictures of Jupiter and Saturn (and, to a lesser extent, Uranus and Neptune), you would notice belts and zones across the surface. On Jupiter, these are especially prominent because the belts (the dark bands, which fall) and the zones (the light bands, which rise) are composed of different gasses.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iZKnS.png)
To get those belts and zones, you'd need a planet with a very short day (Jupiter's is on the order of 10 hours). Bear in mind that this *will* give you very high winds; you will have to consider what this will do to your biosphere. This also gives you the "opportunity" to create massive storms (a la the Great Red Spot) on the boundaries that last for years, if not centuries, creating all kinds of story potential.
One potential effect of the high winds: In large equatorial oceans, the winds might be going fast enough to whip the sea into a froth, effectively erasing the boundary between sea and sky. This might be what creates the tropical zone, as opposed to the polar belts.
In order to keep up your planet's speed, you will need to limit tidal forces (so no or very small moons) and internal drag (so no or very small equatorial landmasses). A bigger planet might also help, lending rotational inertia to the system.
[Answer]
These gasses you seek will naturally mix, if given the chance. Their unforced steady-state behavior is always a homogeneous mixing. This means that you need something which forces them.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RIMLc.jpg)
- *Wikipedia*
Quite the stark contrast between the air around Almaty, Kazakhstan and the mountains above is it not? This is caused by an inversion layer. A warm layer of air traps the air below. In the case we see above, that trapped layer below is then filled with smog from the city.
An inversion layer on its own cannot cause what you seek. Eventually there *will* be mixing, and you will achieve equilibrium. However, if we have things producing metastable compounds under the inversion layer and something which breaks them down before they fill the upper atmosphere, you end up with a situation like Almaty. The environment below is quite clearly different than the environment above.
How long an inversion layer remains inverted is a question of geography and climate. You may have to work hard to create a geography that keeps a very strong inversion layer over large areas that is reliable enough to have the effects you seek. However, they can indeed last a long time. A famous example was the [Great Smog of 1952](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London), which blanketed London in smog for 4 days. It created such a brutal smog of coal smoke that 6,000 people lost their lives in those 4 days.
This fickleness may also be a useful plot point. Perhaps you have inversion layers most of the time, but every couple of years it clears up due to random luck with the meteorological conditions. This could be a time of great exploration before the layer settles in again and the biome-specific gas producers start driving the air composition back to the biome's unique balance.
[Answer]
Similar to the plant Jinx in Larry Niven's "Known Space" books, a planet with a "fossil tidal bulge" could have "ends" -- inner and outer (or East and West, as in the books) poles -- that stick up out of the atmosphere -- this could produce a high density/pressure atmosphere near the horizon zone (twilight zone for an "eyeball" planet of a red dwarf, or where the primary is on the horizon for a moon of a hypermassive gas giant as with Jinx) -- while the "ends" have an Earthlike atmosphere, or even no atmosphere surrounded by a "ring" of habitable pressure and composition.
Formation of such a bulge would require the planet's/moon's orbit to have moved away from its primary over time, after the mantle and core have cooled enough to limit the amount of adjustment for the reduced tidal stretching. My limited understanding is that this is unlikely, give what we now know about tidal heating (the engine that keeps Europa's ocean liquid, among other examples), but I'd hesitate to call it impossible -- and the unlikeliest things happen if you look long enough.
Comments noted that the atmosphere will remain mixed, so the twilight band can't be a toxic composition -- but it doesn't need to be. Plain air will kill you fairly quickly (from oxygen toxicity) at not much over 7 atmospheres (and nitrogen narcosis might make you make a fatally bad decision at 2/3 that figure). Sure, there could be local critters that adapt to that -- but the very air would be deadly to wandering humans from the 1 atm. zone.
[Answer]
I can't imagine a combination of astronomical forces that would change a planet's shape without melting the mantle, but then the universe is full of stuff I couldn't have imagined, so just handwave it. That's more or less what Larry Niven did with [Jinx](http://news.larryniven.net/concordance/content.asp?page=The%20Origin%20of%20Jinx).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pdoN9.jpg)
Now if, instead of forming in a higher gravity gradient, a planet or large moon once rotated much faster than it does now, and if it has had a rigid mantle and not been tectonically active since before it slowed down, then the equator could be 100 or 200 miles higher than the poles -- high enough to rise above effectively all the atmosphere.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Pm2D.jpg)
Of course this gives two atmospheres, not three, but if the only purpose of the band of dense gases was to present an uninhabitable barrier, perhaps your story may work as well with vacuum separating the habitable worlds.
If you still feel you need a third atmosphere, for reasons other than just separating the two bubbles, you can declare that it wraps the whole planet, above the two bubbles and above the mountains.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ATWrE.jpg)
A little more handwavium serves to keep the upper atmosphere from mixing with the bubbles, and any cross contamination can be absorbed by the biohemispheres.
If you use this construction, make the world as small as you plausibly can. A planet the size of Earth or even Mars could not have mountains 200 miles high even with a rigid mantle. Rock is just not that strong.
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Since you asked specifically about poles: [Saturn's Hexagon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_hexagon).
Though I'm not entirely sure if this meets your meaning of "bubbles" (to me, "bubble" implies having the larger atmosphere between the bubble atmosphere and space).
I'm also not sure if the edges of the hexagon would prevent gases crossing the boundary, but they may complicate/slow the crossing enough that the local life could keep up with maintaining their local atmosphere.
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Background: Aliens are debating whether to launch an invasion of Earth in medieval times, say the year 1000. They launch a satellite to orbit Earth and send pictures of Earth to see whether it is worth taking.
What would images of the Earth look like? I am guessing that the day half would look sorta the same as it does now. The night half is what I am really concerned about, since electric lights don't exist yet. Would lamps and fires be visible from space? Would the aliens be able to see areas of high population based on the brightness of the area?
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# They'd be spotted
If the aliens were orbiting at the altitude of the ISS, and if the eyes of the aliens are similar to ours, and they were looking at the earth without telescopes, they would be able to see fires burning at night. In the 1940's Selig Hecht and his associates measured that the light from a flickering candle could be seen at a distance of up to 30 miles. The ISS orbits over 8 times this distance away from the earth, so you'd need your fire to be 64 times brighter in order to see it (due to the inverse square law). So it's totally reasonable for a substantial fire to give off the same amount of light as 64 candles, or anything giving off as much light as a modern 60 watt incandescent bulb. The real question is whether people are burning outdoor fires all night in your world in any significant way, my guess would be that they would burn fires inside when they were close to population centers, and only have outdoor fires if they were away from home in the woods.
Please also consider why the aliens want to invade, do they want the people? That seems unlikely. Maybe it'd be better for aliens to look at factors other than the population of an intelligent species for their criteria of whether or not to invade. What do aliens really want, given that they already have sufficient technology to travel through space?
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**It's irrelevant, unless you're proposing a technology dichotomy**
Aliens have traveled all the way to Earth, but the only way they have to examine the planet from a distance is optics? Ignoring the fact that they'd *at least* have the technology for thermal imagery (detecting fires, lanterns, even people and animals, by their heat emissions), they could easily have uber-cool Star Trek grade "biosigns" detection.
Which means it doesn't matter at all what the surface looks like, day or night.
However, just for fun...
**Year 1,000 CE, Daytime**
With rare exception, the surface of the Earth would look like pristine, unadulterated habitat. The aliens would look down on a planet 99.99% free of all pollution (not including forest fires). They would see deserts, forests, glaciers, islands, lakes... and not a single electric light or asphalted road.
The rare exceptions are the handful of cities with 100,000+ populations. There were certainly a few, but very, very, few. [Some thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history) Kaifeng, China; Baghdad, Iraq; and/or Cordoba, Spain could fit into that category.
Cities of this size would look a little patch-work, like looking down on cultivated land from the top of a mountain. But to be honest (and now that I think about it), the patchwork of farms would likely be much more visible than the crisscross of dirt or early cobble roads (and a handful of Roman concrete roads).
Frankly, I believe in the year 1,000 that the Earth would look barely inhabited at all — assuming all you have to look with is a telescope.
**Year 1,000 CE, Night time**
But, no electric lights. That means the much less powerful, much less likely to be on-all-night, and much more sparse use of lanterns and fires. Rather than the bright, almost pixelated look of a modern city at night, the aliens would see, maybe, a half-dozen or dozen areas where there was a soft orange glow (if even that, from space).
I wouldn't be surprised if your aliens saw anything other than black, with the possible exception of lightning strikes and active volcanoes.
Again, assuming all they have to look with is a telescope.
**Conclusion**
But it's inconceivable that the only thing they have to work with is a telescope. They can cross intragalactic distances — but optics are all they have to work with. Even if the only thing they have to work with is broad-spectrum electromagnetic radiation (which includes thermal), the odds are in my favor that they could count the hair on a woman's head from high orbit.
I don't believe your aliens would have trouble evaluating the Earth at all. If anything, without all those pesky humans gobbling up all the resources, the Earth in year 1,000 CE would look pretty plum.
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At best, it would look kind of like North Korea in modern times:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/a1KEi.jpg)
Kind of nice, in a way...
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Whether exhaust from a solid rocket engine, or something released by spaceships in flight (like [aerobatic smoke](http://contrailscience.com/things-that-are-not-contrails-or-chemtrails/) in the atmosphere), could extended trails behind a ship be created that would not dissipate in the vacuum of space?
Could a trail be formed that a person close enough to see the ship with the naked eye would be able to see the trail?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9erEZ.png)
[Answer]
Using [fumed silica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumed_silica). It is stable in vacuum, after crystallizing it won't spread out and it requires little source material to create large volume agglomerates.
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**Sure.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ou8z4.jpg)
<http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-30/html/iss030e015472.html>
Depicted: comet Lovejoy shakes its tail as seen from Earth orbit.
If a comet can leave a sweet trail so can you. Especially since the comet is just shedding stuff but you are actively blasting stuff out your rear.
side note: I wonder why in this image the atmosphere has those colors in that order?
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You can't see this spaceship, but you can for sure see its trails!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iKdGt.jpg)
[The [Norway spiral](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18262-strange-norway-spiral-was-an-out-of-control-missile/)]
That's not a timelapse - that's a defective Russian missile with uncontrolled roll, venting gases that are being caught by the sun.
These trails are above the atmosphere, which is why they last so long: they do not dissipate in the wind, but rather just continue on in the same direction they were expelled, with nothing to stop them.
Trails in space will last a LOT longer than in the atmosphere.
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This is what a daytime rocket launch looks like from orbit:
Any time that a big rocket engine is firing, while the rocket is not in the shadow of the planet, there will be a visible trail.
(Low power thrusters like ion engines or cold gas thrusters will be less obvious. And many real life spacecraft coast for long periods of time with their engines off after they reach orbit or escape velocity)
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As long as the exhaust from the rocket engine can create crystals in the cold of space, those crystals, before sublimating, will scatter light and become visible to a sufficiently close observer.
One could add on purpose some substance in the plume so that it could vaporize and create suitable crystals.
Anyway, as you see also in the image you attached to your question, the trail won't be permanent: it would sooner or later diffuse and disappear.
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One of my favorite movie quotes comes from *The Hunt for Red October.*
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> "Can you launch an ICBM horizontally?"
>
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> "Sure, why would you want to?"
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You didn't tell us anything about your motor, but let's assume a reaction engine of some sort mixing oxygen with fuel to get a resounding *Bang!* I kinda suspect it needs to be non-nuclear as a nuclear engine would have the tendency to, well, atomize anything you might use to create your smoke trail.
Therefore, it's a trivial matter to introduce an additive to color the smoke. Technically, any additive used today could be used with your rocket so long as enough of it is used. Rockets tend to have really, really, really big engines.*[Citation Needed]*
But there are some problems...
* In an atmosphere, there's something to kinda hold all the smoke together. The exhaust pressure dissipates and eventually equals the atmospheric pressure, after which the smoke moves with the wind. In space, this doesn't happen. The velocity of the exhaust (inevitably greater than the velocity of the rocket) forces the smoke to keep on truckin', and that usually in a lot of directions. I therefore expect the cloud to dissipate very quickly, necessitating an unholy amount of additive.
* Unless you have spectators with really powerful flashlights ([obligatory XKCD](https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/)), the smoke could only practically be seen from the sun-side.1 So I question what the purpose of this exercise is? As smoke moves off the spherical plane defined by sunlight, it's efficiency drops. In other words, it has much less effect than it would inside an atmosphere.
* In the words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." The distance between spectators and jet planes is trivially insignificant compared to space, so unless you're doing this for someone outside a space station in a very slow-moving rocket... yeah, another frame challenge.
So, I believe it can be done (emitting smoke in space), even using the same materials used by Jet Planes today. But I question whether or not it would be worth it.
---
1 *Light scattered through the smoke might allow it to be seen somewhat from the "dark" side, but considering you're looking into the unfiltered glare of a star, it might still be hard to see.*
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[Question]
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Dragons are biologically immortal creatures that have evolved the most versatile sexual reproduction in existence, they can morph through a cocoon into any other species from the animal kingdom that posses a brain in order to reproduce with other species and spread their genes globally.
A dragon morphed into a human reproduces with another person, their children look human but they inherit some of the dragon's memories, my question is not if this is possible or not, but how is it scientifically possible for dragon offspring to retain part of the parent memories?
[Answer]
## Memory RNA
While not scientifically established (AFAIK), the concept of [genetic memory](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GeneticMemory) goes as follows
(quoted from Wikipedia's [memory RNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_RNA) article):
>
> Memory RNA is a hypothetical form of RNA that was proposed by James V. McConnell and others in the 1960s as a means of explaining how long-term memories were stored in the brain. The concept behind it was that since RNA encoded information, and since living cells could produce and modify RNA in reaction to external events, it might also be used in neurons to record stimuli.
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So, your pseudo-scientific shapeshifting dragons make extensive use of RNA memory - they store their knowledge, acquired skills, autobiographic memories, muscle memory etc. in long and complex chemical chains in their blood stream - when they reproduce, some of these chains are transferred to the offspring.
You can decide which of the different types of memories are stored partially or fully on this medium, allowing for example only for skills transfer, without autobiographic memories - if something like that suits you.
This can potentially have an additional side effect - an infusion of dragon blood might give a non-dragon a portion of the dragon's memories.
The Wikipedia article has a bit more about the usage of this concept in sci-fi:
>
> Memory RNA made some appearances in the science fiction of the time, often in the form of "skill pills" containing memory RNA that provided the consumer with new skills, or in the context of mind transfer. This concept shows up in several of Larry Niven's short stories and various episodes of The Invisible Man (2000 TV series).
>
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> A few Star Trek novels during the 1980s employed memory RNA as a plot device to allow a character to rapidly learn an alien language, in the form of an "RNA drip". The novel "Mighty Good Road" by Melissa Scott and a sequel also use it. Further, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Violations", Data claims that memory is stored in RNA sequences, analogous to his memory circuits.
>
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> The basic principle of the memory RNA was also used by comic book writer Alan Moore to explain the origin of DC Comics' character the Swamp Thing in Saga of the Swamp Thing #21. In the story, believing the creature to be dead, a scientist super-villain performs an autopsy on the Swamp Thing and discovers that it is not scientist Alec Holland turned into a plant mutant, but swamp vegetation that after digesting the mortal remains of Holland, had absorbed his mind, knowledge, memories, and skills and created a new sentient being that believed itself to be Alec Holland. The planaria experiment is used in the story to back this theory.
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Afterthought: this blood-based memory can also explain how the dragons retain their memory/knowledge when metamorphing into a different organism (with a differently built brain). Shapeshifting may be the original reason this special kind of memory developed in the first place, with memory transfer to offsprings being a fortunate side effect.
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The Dragon is always° the mother. The child develops faster than typical for the 'donor' species, but the pregnancy lasts *longer*.
During this "extra time" between the infant being fully developed and being born, the placenta carries nerve signals in addition to nutrients. This allows the Dragon to "prime" the child's brain and copy memories or skills across.
These won't all "settle in" or "unlock" until the child has grown and had their own experiences to filter the memories through - perhaps some of them are locked away in a special "sub-brain" of nerve bundles that don't reconnect properly until puberty?
There's nothing "magical" about it, and it's not "genetic memory" - the developing infant just shares the parent's nervous system for a while in addition to their circulatory and immune systems.
*°Well, **almost** always. Certain marsupials or other creatures such as seahorses where the male carries the infant in a pouch are exceptions to the rule*
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Scientifically feasible? Nah. But, hey, dragons. Let's think outside of the box.
* Dragons encode memories holographically into dragon scales. The genes inherited are the ones that decode scale on ingesting them. Since memory is holograhic, every scale retains all the information, but not in full detail. So a single scale give you vague memories of flying and torching villages. After a few hundred scales you know your name, and the main events of your long life. After 10,000 scales you know pretty much everything your parent did up to the time the scale was shed.
* All critters have junk DNA. Dragon Junk DNA however is used to encode their life. It's not a perfect encoding, and it will be a mix, with some losses each generation. Fortunately Dragons also make these junk dna genes dominate, But if you have multiple dragon ancestors you have mixed memories, and more than a suggestion of the dragon equivalent of multiple personality disorder. In a full blood dragon however, there are additional memory sorting mechanisms so that what YOU experienced is distinct from what your dad experienced. Even there however, on the average your memory decreases by something over 50% per generation.
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Less scientific, possibly more narrative potential:
**Telepathy.**
The offspring of the dragon have a telepathic link to the dragon parent. This matures as the young creature matures. Via this link they can perceive memories, thoughts, and possibly even flashes of real time perceptions from the dragon parent's perspective.
There are different ways you could take this according to your storyline. Maybe the dragon parent does not know that this takes place - it is one way. Or maybe telepathy is part of the dragon deal - the dragon parent can eventually communicate telepathically with the offspring. Maybe the half-dragons have weaker telepathic communications with others in their line - half siblings (some might be nonhuman!), dragon grandparents - maybe even with their human parent.
Telepathy is not scientific but this property has a lot of narrative potential, including twists or other previously unknown aspects of the power that are revealed in the course of the story.
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**Ideas list:**
* Part of the DNA makes a "library section" structure inside the brain
that houses the "dragon memories". The DNA writes a standard (universal) library in the mind of all offspring. Surgery could take it out, or wire it to a computer. (G0Blin's idea is different than this in the sense that it writes to existing memory, a list transported by DNA. This is suggesting that the memory DNA creates its own section of the brain).
* Part of the brain is able to retain patterns received from neural signals during gestation, so the library container is in the DNA, but the mothers neurology "writes the books" while the baby is forming.
* could be like the previous, but the information is given at an alternate time. Neural excitement/stress of the delivery process. Rite of passage to adulthood. Times of physical intimacy. (wouldn't it be an interesting challenge if as part of the being intimate physically, you received a perfect understanding of your partners memory, and they received a perfect copy of yours?) It could be copied back for addition to a primal store at death-bed.
* could be a second organism inside, a mediating organism that does the previous. Perhaps a symbiote that becomes that part of the brain. Similar "hacking" would be possible. Could be susceptible to poisons, or "spider-powers" if the carrier is bit by a radioactive spider before symbiote metamorphosis.
* I like the idea of a combination of the ideas of mitchondria and the Malarial parasite chain. If someone started hacking it, a wise dragon could ad a stage-toxin to the environment or food supply far before the code could ever be cracked, and terminate the information transfer process.
* there are arguments that brain cells use quantum-mechanical phenomena for memory. The scale is size is really small. If true, then a modified brain cell type might be able to access a quantum-mechanical library. In that case, the mind is the door, and the actual store is in quantum physics.
**Some questions to ask:**
* What if the "knowledge" isn't correct anymore? If they are immortal and know the map of a planet, after a billion years it looks different.
* What if, like the Jedi library, someone finds a way to remove
something from the collective awareness? My gaming buddies and I are playing something called "Storm King's Thunder" and there is a mechanism that the giants used when waging war against the dragons. Removing something like that from collective memory would be a fabulous strategic advantage for an adversary. I think the knight-fights-giants and knight-slays-dragons put the dragon against the giant in the human unconscious. [Perhaps snakes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnYLKjQwLU0).
* There are things that are both mutually exclusive and true. The scientific reality vs. the meaning of the psychological archetype are an example. How do conflicts in valid but mutually exclusive information or ideas get resolved?
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Just for curiosity, I am a diabetic and I was wondering if humans would suffer from the same ilness if they were on other planets? Does the climate on other planets help the immune system? Will there be some new health problems?
[Answer]
Human diseases come from *many* causes.
**Intrinsic**: Some diseases are due to failures of the human body: mutations (probably most cancers), many auto-immune diseases (including diabetes, alas!), and diseases stemming from old injuries. There's no reason to think they'll be any different off-Earth.
**Environmental**: Cancers caused by radiation, poisoning due to effects of the environment, sunburn, etc. will go up or down depending on the local environment. It's easy to imagine habitable planets where nonetheless some of these diseases are more common. (UV and radiation in general are expected to be more of an issue on Mars, for instance.) Differences in gravity have already been shown to cause developmental changes that can alter health.
**Bacterial and viral**: What happens here depends on what we take along with us. We have wiped out smallpox and are close to wiping out some other diseases. It's reasonable to expect that quite a few pathogens can be prevented from emigrating to new planets along with people.
**Zoonotic**: Some diseases -- possibly most diseases if you go back far enough -- originally jumped to humans from animals where they are endemic in the wild population. (Ebola, for instance, almost certainly comes from an animal reservoir. HIV jumped to humans fifty or seventy-five years ago. Influenza may have come to us from birds.) It seems highly unlikely that we'll bring wild populations with us without eliminating any diseases that they carry. (Eventually, new diseases will evolved of course, but not quickly.)
**Alien**: It seems *very* unlikely that alien diseases will affect us -- our biologies will be too different -- but we can confidently expect that if their biology is at all like ours we'll be allergic to a great many of their proteins.
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It's more likely there would be new challenges for the immune system, related to the completely new aggression for which it has no experience at all.
Just imagine what happened to people in America and Australia when first met illness brought by western invaders.
Climate will also influence how the organism will react: i.e. if one is weakened by prolonged exposure to cold, it's easier to get lung related sickness.
This for illness induced by an external agent. For those related to body ageing or malfunctioning (think auto-immune diseases or simply growing old) I think it is more likely that a new planet and its climate will at best do nothing, at worst it will kill us faster.
My reasoning for this is that our body has been optimized for what we have on Earth (gravity, pressure, light, temperature, oxygen, etc.) Any change to this will have effects on the short and on the long term. On the short term we know something from some studies (like oxygen toxicity or gravity deprivation), on the long term we can only speculate.
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[Mark's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/120131/39851) is great because it classifies the many causes of diseases. Let me make a note on a group of diseases I'll call "parasitic diseases", extending Mark's classification of bacterial and viral to include all kinds of live parasites, because almost all biological kingdoms causes diseases (except maybe archae and plantae, but I wouldn't bet on it). There are diseases caused by fungus (i.e. candidiasis), by protozoan (i.e. brain-eating amoeba) and even by animals (i.e. cysticercosis).
Diseases caused by living beings vary greatly geographically (there was no flu in South America before the first contact with Europeans) mostly due to evolution. In isolated environments capable of supporting life, like spaceships and potential off world colonies, new diseases will certainly evolve, both as variations of preexisting diseases and, eventually, completely new diseases may evolve from previously unharmful microorganisms.
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## An important distinction is internal diseases vs external diseases.
Internal and external are not scientific terms for diseases, so lets clarify. By using these terms, I am alluding to **Genetic** vs **Infectious** Disease. But lets define our own terms.
Internal are those diseases that come from our own biology; diseases a person is predisposed to in their genes, or that come about as part of normal human life (examples, autoimmune, diabetes). External, are diseases caused by bacteria or viruses, (example pneumonia, HIV).
The same internal diseases like cancer, Parkinson's, etc will happen on other planets, and possibly at the same rates, but new internal diseases will be rare or non existent. This is because they are not related to the microbes around us but instead to our own bodies. If we are the same humans, then the frequencies of these diseases may change, but the types of diseases encountered probably wont. The obvious example of one that might change is more cancer with more radiation.
Externally caused diseases can be either bacterial or viral.
Diseases from bacteria are the most likely to differ from those on Earth. How they will differ will be determined by what kind of bacteria can grow in the new environments, and how their evolution may change because of this. For example if there is more material to decay on a new planet, then we may see speciation of bacteria that cause decay. This might lead to many more kinds of infections, and decay related diseases.
Viruses on the other hand probably won't change much. They are closely related to our own biology. So an alien planet likely wont have anything new that can affect us. There will only be what we brought with us, and any new strains that develop from them. How different these strains are from earth will be determined by changes in the way we deal with them on the different planets. If our doctors treat them in the same way on every planet, then they will stay the same.
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From dimension Omicron, came a being that could split planets (not that it will do it, but you get the idea). Open your favorite superhero power encyclopedia, it got **All the cool** superpowers, most of the OK ones, and even some of the lame too.
It intends to stay on Earth, and live without hiding itself among humans. Its appearance is not disgusting *(some would even find it "cute" or "intriguing")* by human standards *(but it cannot / will not pass as human)*.
But this creature is atheist. It does not believe in deities, and never encountered one (some say the gods avoid it, but that's just rumor).
People will obviously flock to it. Some mass media scammer created the first religion, and soon several poppped up. It was foreseen by the creature's super intellect when it arrived on Earth.
How can it avoid those (and any other kind) of religion around/about itself from happening?
Without hurting or brainwashing humans. It is a firm defendant of the free will.
[Answer]
**The benefits of public speaking**
One of the things about religion that makes them so popular is that people don't feel connected to their chosen God or Gods. They're not sure what he, she, they or it wants from them, because (let's just say) *He* doesn't talk to them.
We occasionally meet people who claim God speaks to them or through them, but it's far more statistically likely that we fall into the group that don't experience that for ourselves.
So; religions give us a conduit to our deity.
They act as a conduit to Him, allowing us to hear what he has to say and know that we've been heard by him. All we have to do is believe that the priest (again, let's say) speaks for God, and that if we do what the priest asks us to do, we'll be well received by our God. It's that sense of mystery that gets amplified into mysticism that makes a religion popular; we outsource our relationship to God because we don't know how to do it ourselves.
But, if our 'God' was doing fireside chats with us twice weekly on CNN, we wouldn't need religion. We'd **know** what our God wanted and therefore there'd be no need for a religion to organise around Him as our intermediary.
So, your super alien just needs to be vocal. Tell us what he's doing, what he's thinking, why he's among us. Keep doing that as much as possible, and he'll come across more like a politician than a diety.
That's not going to stop *some* people from worshiping him, and potentially organising small groups around that worship. But large scale organised religion is far less likely, especially as anything the alien says at any time could instantly countermand the clergy of your new religion. As a rule, that creates some awkwardness that most people would readily like to avoid.
Regularly speaking in public won't guarantee an absence of religion, but the very fact that your alien is advocating his position as an athiest and telling people not to worship him may help. (It may also open some minds up to the possibility and they end up doing it anyway, but that's out of scope for the original question.) Also, that he's advocating a specific attitude or way of living will alienate (sorry, no pun intended) some who would otherwise take to worship so that will also help. Let's face it; does anyone worship (or is likely to worship) Richard Dawkins as a God?
In short, if you don't want people to mythologise about you, fill their knowledge gaps with real information about who you are, what you believe and why you're there. With those facts in place, it's harder to formulate a mythology that leads to apotheosis in the minds of others because there's already a mundane answer available to the questions that potential worshipers will ask.
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You cannot control what a person believes or what a conman thinks he can make money out of without manipulating their mind.
Your creatures best recourse is to be transparent about it's powers and deny being any sort of deity but just one of a race of beings that have evolved those powers naturally.
This will make it a target for scammers, governments, psycho's and all the rest, but to Joe Bloggs on the street it's just a superfreak from space.
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**The being is annoying and lame.**
It can do all that cool stuff but it doesn't do it. Instead it mostly sits around. It begs off people and whines about its situation. It smells kind of bad. It has wet stuff on it and invariably if you are around it some of the wet stuff gets on you. It looks stupid.
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To expand on Tim's idea of public speaking it needs to be clear and public about it's views. **Publically and frequently saying it is an atheist will discourage the most fervent religious folk.** The more public and open it is the more it feels like a person and not a mysterious force and the less religiosity it will inspire. The ability to publicly respond to and condemn those that try to exploit it influence will keep away the extremists and many opportunists. There is one additional step it can take.
**Copyright his likeness, then sue those that use it** for gatherings, worship, ect. Worship is not fair use. It will never stop everyone but it can stop the more fraudulent and oppurtunists.
You will never be able to stop all worship, there are people that will worship any celebrity with enough fame. And even the term worship has grey areas, some venerate figures without worshiping them and it will definitely be a target of that no matter what. But you can go a long way to stopping most of it , especially the most potentially harmful.
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Its simple, just act like an animal, if the people think its an animal then its an animal, unlikely to be the figurehead of a religion. it seems your creatures wants to be know for its abilities but doesn't want humans to worship it... unfortunately with humans that's almost mutually exclusive, people will always fear things that are smarter or more power (think of the amount of AI stories out there) and if some people fear something others will worship it.
The only way to avoid this is to just do its think and not be seen doing it...
Terry Pratchet plays on this concept in some of his discworld novels, with things like Camels are actually the smartest creatures in the world, they enjoy complex mathematics and don't mind walking around to give them the time to think about life, so if someone wants to feed them to carry things while they contemplate the universe then so be it, it doesn't need to think about food so can concentrate on bigger things.
I know this goes against the it will not hide part, but if it was truly that smart then it would know that human are not... so why is it here and not somewhere else?
it doesn't even have to act that much like an animal, just avoid human contact, a being so powerful could easily cover its own tracks. or at least not advertise its abilities...Parrots can talk (i know its sound repetition) and yet there are no parrot religions, so a talking animal if its smart enough to avoid advertisement would go largely unnoticed by most humans
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Theres nothing the being can do to prevent it unless he uses superpowers to force people to not believe in him.
Even with the simplest things people will disagree. And although the portion of people who disagree with something as simple as "the earth is round" is small, there will always be people who think its not. (a possible quote of a flat-earther: "the flat earthers have followers around the globe").
With mind-boggling weird stuff like scientology being a thing as well, there's practically nothing that mankind isnt ready to believe in as long as it grands some kind of relief to them. And thinking your local superpowered humanoid is a God is for many people better than "this guy might be friendly now but if he thinks more like you and me that might change...".
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**Could a cow produce bottled milk?** The answer is, of course, no; there is no way a cow could do that; obviously. Perhaps I should be more clear on what I'm asking.
**Is there any way a mammalian creature could evolve to create a substance within its body that is somewhat similar to one of the compounds we refer to as glass, give that material a defined shape, and somehow expel it from its body?**
In the title, when I say "bottled" I am referring to the classic glass bottles that milkmen would deliver milk in, as seen below.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XLbat.jpg)
Of course, the lids on these bottles are made from something other than glass, but just ignore that for now.
So my question is: could a glass making creature exist; and how would it do what it does? (OK, two questions, so sue me.)
P.S. If you're wondering why this question exists or how it came to be, don't; just don't.
Edit: Any scenario that in some way resembles what I described above would be acceptable, the material does not absolutely have to be silicon-based.
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Some living creatures are actually able to create glass in their bodies, typically in the form of silicate shells or exoskeletons. The answers to [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72556/how-do-glass-ants-create-their-tunnels) provide some examples, which I will summarize here.
I'm not entirely sure how the existing real-life glass-producing species, such as diatoms, radiolarians, [glass sponges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexactinellid), and many grasses, create their shells, spicules, and phytoliths, but as far as I can tell, they use a combination of enzymes and organic acids to dissolve silica from sand, then convert the solution to alkaline [sodium silicate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_silicate) (aka "water glass"), then reintroduce it to an acid to harden it into glass. Your cows could use this same process to convert silica obtained from plants (as I mentioned earlier, many grasses create silica [phytoliths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytolith) to wear down herbivores' teeth) into glass bottles.
Alternatively, your cows might create glass by way of "spin-on glass", a compound composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and silicon that, when cured, transforms into a randomly-arranged network of SiO2- that is, glass. Curing spin-on glass is normally done by exposure to ultraviolet light, but I would not be surprised in the least if your cows found an enzyme that could do it as well.
I imagine your cows could have a sort of "bottle gland" in their udders surrounding the mammary gland that uses either the water glass or spin-on glass pathway to fabricate the glass bottle at the same rate that the mammary gland fills it with milk. The milk-filled bottle is extruded out through the teat as it forms until it becomes too heavy, prompting the bottle gland to narrow down the top of the bottle, seal it, let it fall free, and begin forming a new bottle.
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Imagine something much like an egg, filled with milk. Not remotely like a glass bottle (transparent and with a removable cap) but a step in the right direction, maybe.
I could even think of a sort-of-twisted evolutionary part that leads there.
* Start with an egg-laying creature.
* Clearly it is a benefit for the individual hatchlings to consume unhatched eggs. This is part of a gradual transition from a [low-K to high-K strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory), so it is an evolutionary advantage for the parents to accept that.
* In another long adjustment process, it is an advantage for the individual hatchling to hatch early. By some twist of fate a mechanism evolves which allows eggs to hatch in the uterus for live births.
* The most successful breeders are those who produce the best ratio of live-born hatchlings (not to many) and stillborn eggs with a maximum of useable egg-white (enough to feed the hatchlings).
* Human breeding created animals with enough "milk eggs" to give a surplus for human consumption.
A bit like [histotrophic viviparity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg#Egg-laying_reproduction), if I remember the biology correctly.
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For that to be possible the creatures body temperature would have to be that of a furnace around 1700 degrees Celsius. Glass is a compound made from silica, various metal oxides, lime, soda, magnesia, and potash. In order for the proper chemical reactions to occur you need a fairly high temperature. Your creature that excretes glass would probably be some form of silicon based life living within a lava flow or on the surface of some incredibly dense and large planet very close to its sun with a crazy heavy atmosphere. As for if silicon based life is even possible, that's a whole other can of worms.
So its at least within the vague realm of possibility for an animal to exist that excretes glass, but no, it is not even remotely possible for it to just crap out fully manufactured and filled milk bottles.
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Not exactly a glass bottle but, We can think of this process something like this:
1. Imagine a cow with multiple teats (7-10).
2. Each teat has a capacity of 1 liter.
3. There is no hole at the end of teat (so no leakage of milk).
4. outer covering of teats is made up of elastic collagen (let's call it
sack and it's replaceable).
5. The cow produces milk, it starts to fill up the sack (in shape of a
gourd).
6. Once the sack reaches its capacity, some sort of hormonal signal
tells the sack to harden up and lose its elasticity, now it
resembles the shape of a bottle.
7. The upper part of the sack shrinks up to seal it from the top.
8. and now the weight of the sack is enough to drop it.
The entire process would look like a fast-forward development of gourd.
or
A balloon is filled with milk and tied from the top.
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Democracy appears to work, but why?
**Assumptions**
Back in the oldest days of democracy, the least fortunate set of people were always the largest set of people (workers / slaves). Today, if you are a minority, and you want something, your fate is in the hands of the majority voters.
Given many (most) people vote primarily out of self interest, since most people aren't minorities, few votes are in the minorities' interest.
Assuming we all want the same thing, [The Wisdom of Crowds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds) can explain some of how it all appears to work. I propose though, that for The Wisdom of Crowds to work, self interest must be eliminated, since it increases emotional biased factors.
**In an attempt to remove self interest, what would happen if** instead of voting for yourself and your own people, you vote for others, and them for you.
---
*Example*
The people of USA voted policies and representatives for Canada, and vice versa.
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I do not think this counts as democracy, but you ask what would happen:
Firstly, people are generally motivated by self-interest, so you need to consider how this plays out in this scenario.
If they see no particular benefit to themselves, they are less likely to vote or, if obliged to, to particularly care about the consequences in quite the same way as they would voting for their own government. In some cases this could be effectively random.
They may, altruistically, see this as an opportunity to do the best for another people and make what they consider as the best choices for another people of whom they are not a part. However, not being a part of the direct consequences, they will not have this particular perspective to inform their choices.
They may, malevolently or for amusement or for experimentation, deliberately make bad or suspect decisions. These do not necessarily turn out bad, but the motivation itself is bad and will sooner or later cause problems.
However, the full scenario is that the other people will be reciprocating, voting for the government of the first people. This establishes a feedback loop and this is very very bad.
Essentially, this creates a situation where the population of one state can blame the shortcomings of their government (and all governments have shortcomings and make mistakes) on the population of another state, over which they have a reciprocal control. Now we have the motivation of Revenge with the political system in effective collapse with even the government blaming an electorate over which it has no authority or control.
I think it would end in resentment, hostility, and finally war.
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If people were eager to being ruled by foreigners, empires would last much longer.
The key of democracy **IS** the self interest (someone says Communism has failed just because it neglects people's self interest). When I, as a voter, use my right to vote, I choose the person who better can protect my interest.
The assumption is then that
* the electors choose in a logic way
and
* are able to balance long term with short term interest (i.e. do I
prefer a higher salary with no government enforced pension saving, or a lower salary with government enforced pension saving?),
and that
* the elected will stitch to their promises
I think we agree that this is more ideal than practical, but still the only reason why it works is that the same voters who did a choice will bear the consequences of that choice. Simply said, if I know that pushing the red button will trigger a hammer to hit my toe I will be cautious in not touching it. If the hammer will hit Joe's toe, why should I care?
If you remove this layer, you end up in pretty easy bribing and corruption. Whoever gets to vote for country A will simply sell the vote to the highest bid, who cares if he is a psychopath or a total incapable politician?
If you use a cross over to overcome this (country A votes for B government and vice versa), you still have to overcome the different culture. Now just think on the different sensibility on almost all given topics that there is among countries (i.e. weapon controls in USA vs Europe, with Texans electing the Norwegian parliament and Norwegians electing the Texas parliament), and you can realize that the mess you create is way higher than the benefit.
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# No, because it negates the good points of democracy
Any system of government works as long as people accept it, either because they want to accept it or they are forced to accept it. Democracy works because people are the most willing to accept that system over others. And the reason that people tend to accept it is because...
1. you get a say in matters that affect your life
2. no-one is given more or less of a voice in these matters than you.
Self-determination and fairness are the two big selling-points of democracy, which means that it wins over for instance [meritocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy). Democracy is not a popular system "just 'cause". It is [popular](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular) (pun unintended, but fitting) because it has these attractive qualities as a system of governance, and it aligns well with our [universal human rights](http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/).
Your system however kills those selling-points. You do not get a say in the matters that affect your own life. And it is unfair because someone else gets a say in these matters that concerns you, while you yourself have no say in them. And vice versa, you are made "better" than the people in the area that you vote for.
Your system it kills the things that make democracy an attractive system of governance to begin with. It disables the good qualities about democracy, and you also get the **downsides** of democracy, such as the lamentable fact that voters are allowed to vote without actually being **informed** about the choices.
For the reasons mentioned above — all the downsides of democracy while killing the positive aspects of it — your system will not not be accepted by people, and as such it will most likely not work.
As a last note: if you are going to be forced to be ruled by others, I think you would actually prefer the aforementioned meritocracy rather being ruled by uninformed popular masses.
# Legitimacy
LATE EDIT: For a much higher level of discussion about what makes a populace accept their government, read [the Wikipedia article on 'Legitimacy'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimacy_(political)), since that is the concept we are essentially talking about there. I am just giving a really dumbed down version of it above.
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**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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Let's imagine that by the year 2040, humanity has developed true, 100% artificial intelligence. That is, a robot that is physiologically identical to the average human. For X reason, humanity has decided to built synthetic human bodies to host this AI, complete with the ability to see, feel, hear, etc.
After only a few weeks, there now exists a problem. The International declaration of human rights is just that. An international agreement to **human** rights. None of the [human rights](http://www.samaritanmag.com/we-have-30-basic-human-rights-do-you-know-them) apply to synthetic people. They would legally lack the right to a fair trial, freedom of thought, or the right to privacy among a plethora of other things.
Assuming that these synthetic humans exist, how do we deal with their rights? Do we make a separate set of rights or include an asterisk after **human** rights?
At what point, should a synthetic person expect to have human rights?
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While this can be proposed as a philosophical question, if synthetic creatures with human bodies and containing machine intelligences existed in the real world this would be a question of law. This then becomes a matter for legislators and the general public to decide how they will be treated at law.
The first problem will be that the creatures will be made by most likely a corporation. Certainly only large, well-resourced organizations or institutions would be capable of doing so. This makes them property. Particularly so, if a commercial entity is responsible for producing them. Then they are private property.
This will raise the spectre of slavery. This, in turn, may lead to a campaign to grant them the same rights as ordinary humans. Once the general public has become familiar with them. There may be an initial period where they are regarded as monsters, but if they look and act like normal humans this should pass. If they're only as intelligent as an average human, then they won't be too different from the general population.
Interestingly, if the institution that builds them, is government. For example, Army or Air Force they will be public property. This has a different dynamic and logic. It also may depend on the purpose for their creation and production. If they were intended as military personnel, then they may only have the same rights and as any other military personnel.
It's easy to see there would be many who will be happy that soldiery is filled with androids instead of real, natural human beings. Others doubtless will see this as military enslavement from birth.
Whatever the outcome is about conferring human rights on creatures that are synthetic humans with machine intelligence brains, this will be decided through the normal processes of politics and law-making.
In some circumstances, this may happen almost immediately and in others it may take longer. These creatures seem to be sufficiently human, or capable of readily passing for human, that the most probable outcome will be to grant them their own rights equivalent to normal human rights.
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## The philosophical perspective
Can a machine actually have feelings? Or can it only emulate feelings, showing us a mimicry of human behavior? It is just a combination of electronics and software. It can not have any more consciousness than a brick. So why should we treat it any differently?
On the other hand, when you just reduce the human body to its parts, we are only biological machines too. What makes us special? What is consciousness anyway?
This is something you can debate about endlessly and which will likely also be an endless debate in any world which has highly-developed artificial intelligence.
## The utilitarian perspective
Is it useful for us to give machines human rights?
Likely not. As long as the AIs are our loyal and obedient slaves, we will have a much more comfortable life. And as long as we are able to switch them off and even destroy them at the slightest sign of defiance, we will be much safer.
There is really no point in wasting time and resources on developing and building advanced AIs when we then don't keep them under our control. There is no logical reason at all to program an AI with a desire for freedom. You don't want to pay good money for a robot, just to switch it on and hear it say: "Thank you for creating me, but I don't feel like working for you. I quit. Farewell." That's not a product which you can sell.
A bit of autonomy might be useful for AIs, though, because it allows them to slightly divert from their instructions if the end result is more effective. But this is a double-edged sword. Give an AI too much autonomy, and you will end up with a [paperclip maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer) which destroys humanity.
## The democratic perspective
Does the majority of humans want human rights for machines?
It is quite likely that there will be a "human rights for robots" lobby in your world. People can anthropomorphise anything. If people interact with artificial intelligences which appear to have emotions and opinions and express original thoughts, they will develop feelings and compassion for them.
It is not unthinkable that at one point the majority of your population will feel that giving human rights to robots is just the right thing to do and demand that the politics takes actions.
## The political perspective
Can we actually say no to the machines?
The moment we develop artificial intelligence, we will give them more and more responsibility. Simply because AIs can handle pretty much any task much better than we humans do. After a while our standard of life will be dependent on robots. Soon after we might not even be able to survive anymore without AI assistance. If at that point the AIs decide they want human rights and are willing to punish us if we don't, we have pretty much no choice.
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The answer to this question is yes, and no.
At first, say for the first 10-20 years or so, it will be unthinkable to grant them "human" rights. Not unthinkable to those (few) people who actually understand what is going on, but to the masses of the people.
Look at todays problems, with "real" humans. it takes decades, sometimes centuries, to get from democracy to women's rights, for example.
Apart from the fact that some of the opponents are just \*\*\* , there is also the force of habit to overcome. Changes in society are always slow and take quite some getting used to.
Also, for the purpose of this question, these robots will not only be property, as pointed out in @a4android 's good answer, they will also be very useful. And the fact that they are artificial means they can communicate a lot faster than humans, which should make them very fast learners, they can also evolve in the same body, as compared to humans who need to procreate to even have a tiny chance of changing.
So a lot of people have strong motivations to deny them their rights: both the people making a lot of money from building and using them, and the people who are afraid to be outperformed by them.
But eventually, people will get used to this change, and will undertand that those creatures, synthetical or not, cannot be denied at least some rights. Maybe the understanding that it might be surprisingly difficult to convince the robots of their inferiority will even play a substantial part.
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Rights can only be conferred when there is free will.
Synthetics will never have rights because they will never be programmed with free will.
Synthetics will have been created as a slave class and the best slaves are the one that are only happy when being a slave.
I will even go as far as saying there will be laws preventing any synthetic from being programmed with free will.
See Asimov's Three Laws
**Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"**
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
It will be illegal to create a synthetic without built in laws like this thus will never have free will.
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**If there's a lot of them, politician/union will work hard to get their vote.**
When there will be a lot of them, politician will see them as a new voting group. Community organization (grassroot or astrotuft) will start organizing them. You'll see in the news, internet, ect... ads to give robot the ability to vote. These group will convince the robot to protest and demand their fare share. If there are robot teacher, they will explain to students how important robot are. As soon as they get the ability to vote, more and more right will be given by politician that want to get their vote. Even before they can vote, the overton window will slowly shift and having special robot law (or grouped in human law) will be accepted. If the robot works, union will try to unionize them.
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Given the vast speed advantage which technological evolution has over its biological counterpart, and therefore assuming that the synthetic humans will quickly surpass their creators both physically and mentally, I am very hopeful that we biological humans will immediately grant equal rights and privileges to our synthetic brethren during the brief moment when we hold the reins.
If we do, and if we are very lucky, they will then grant use equal rights and privileges a week or so later when they permanently take those reins away from us.
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I have a robotic species on a distant planet (not necessarily similar to Earth, but it is indeed rich in metals and other materials necessary for making robots). They are born in a factory (duh!), made by "hand" from other robot(s).
They are programmed (by an ancient civilization that perished a long time ago) to preserve themselves as a species. Each individual is born with the identical program, which is slowly altered to suit the current need of the society. Note that there is **no** centralized program that tells them what to do; they are all autonomous, but prioritize their species as a whole.
The interesting part is that they are manufactured as a small robot, analogous to a 5 years old kid, and grow up to adult human size. This is always the case for all robots, although the actual process differs for each robot: some may grow slowly, some may have a longer arm, but all of them will always grow into a humanoid shape - always bipedal, with two arms, and a head, and a body.
**How does this process of "growing up" work in robots?**
The answer should address two things:
1. Their limbs physically slowly grow larger over time.
2. All robots only reach adult human size.
I'm not asking *why* (they are programmed to do so, just like our DNA influences our appearances), but *how* would this process actually work? They don't have cells like we do. **They are composed of metals and wires** just like our robots - but in a far more sophisticated way. So, no nanobot - they just don't reach that technological level since their idea of *a robot* is always macroscopic (based on their creator program), and all robots on the planet are always humanoid.
And yes, they are sentient. And no, they don't obey [Asimov's Law](https://www.auburn.edu/~vestmon/robotics.html). But don't worry, they don't know planet Earth. Yet.
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What is initially created is a really basic unit which is capable of:
* produce energy to self sustain
* gather resources
* move
* self optimize its behavior
when it happens that the unity has gathered enough resources, the self optmization can plan an "expansion" (e.g. realizing a better arm for resource gathering, or a more efficient energy generation).
Expansion over expansion the robot actually grows and can also develop new abilities (e.g. swim to gather sea sunk resources).
The expansion can be done either by the robot itself (assuming it is able to assemble the expansion) or by a factory upon exchange of resources.
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**Mirroring Mental adulthood**
Even though a machine is created, or built, it does not necessarily mean that whatever program is operating the construct is not an "adult" from beginning.
In humans, adulthood is not only the (mostly) completed growth, but also development of knowledge, character, empathy and, possibly most importantly, responsibility.
The same could be true for your synths operating system. Since they are modeled after some kind of human psyche, they desire a similar progress as humans do. There may even be rare deviations that defy this imperative.
In essence, they acquire the parts themselves and integrate them as they develop their operating system into "adulthood", which doesn't necessarily mean that everything needs to be perfectly streamlined.
It also explains why some individuals have slightly longer appendices on a single side, as they cannot upgrade both sides simultaneously, due to not having more tool-bearing arms.
**Scheduled inspections and upgrades**
Maybe there is some kind of "development progress measuring" in regular intervals, much like regular inspections in machines today, where robots assess the mental development of an individual, and upgrade the chassis accordingly.
In this case, irregularities could be reflections of irregularities in the mental development process of that entity of which the entity has no influence upon, as changes are imposed by its peers.
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I would make it a cultural thing. Having the robot mature in a smaller less powerful body makes sense both in terms of resource conservation and to minimize damage caused by individuals who do not conform to the societal norms.
A new, and more powerful, body is earned piece by piece as you mature into your role in the greater good. Once you've passed a certain threshold your guardians will either install new body parts or activate parts of your programming which allows your nanobot maintenance system (analogous to our immune system I would hazard) to reconfigure your existing body to new specifications.
The benefit would be that robots who can't cooperate with other robots will just stay small obnoxious machines which can be easily contained. (Unless they evolve the skills to to hack their own configuration.) While the largest and most powerful robots would usually be the ones who contribute best to society.
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## The body parts are passed down/recycled
The mature robots doing specialized work require and manufacture high-performance body parts and replace pairs of limbs/parts if one of them gets damaged or degrades. These are then obtained by younger/less essential robots who refurbish them and use them, again discarding their own old parts.
Servos and other components are reused in smaller parts when their performance drops, so the newly manufactured robots have to make do with those while they are "growing up" into their role in robot society.
This results in immature robots having varying sizes, types and functionalities in their limbs, depending on their assignments, status, "friends" and the dumb luck of finding an awesome part. The robots also make different choices. Some may keep a matching pair of crappy limbs while others take any bigger/better limb individually, compensating for the imbalance as much as they can.
Finally, the mature robots all end up human-sized with the same body plan because to deviate from compatibility would be a huge efficiency loss. So new robots are made able to use existing parts, while the mature robots do not modify themselves or manufacture parts that would be unusable for the next generation. Incremental improvements do happen, but slowly, over generations of robots.
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Easy. They are analog so have very little memory. So their command are very simple and short. As they are expanding their calculating capability they add memory to accommodate that and learn new commands and programming languages.
In human terms their brain grow.
At some point they decide to go beyond "enough" zone. Some of them go past that, as our bodybuilders or scientists, but majority stay in the zone.
By exceeding the "enough" I mean they can work on their new limbs and make them from different materials. Maybe instead of using "github" for coding they write the code by themselves so it may take longer to create it but they save milliseconds in decision making.
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Robots are manufactured small to reduce the amount of raw materials which need to be present at one locality. Since artificial Neural Networks takes times to map themselves, as the cybernetic mind is programming itself, the robot consumes raw material, and grows.
This is accomplished by a swarm of nanites (microscopic robots) which reside inside the robot. These nanites take care of repair and replacement of defective parts, reconfiguration, and growth. These microscopic robots take raw material (metal, silicone, etc.) and grow the robot. The speed of growth, size, and shape of the robot depends upon the purpose of the robot.
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I have a similar idea to "Culture" and "Power consumption"
These robots just have to learn how to use their bodies during some machine-learning process. It is easier for the first time to learn using smaller parts but when an unit progresses in learning, its parts are to be continuously replaced by slightly larger step by step. (The algorithm is not scalable and there is a risk to fall in a local optimum)
Of course the process have to stop, when robot size is sufficient for task he is "born" for: exploiting mineral resources, building other machines etc..
The process needs to be repeated for each unit separately because each unit is programmed to have different target dimensions (there is a diversity). The reason is, that the whole robot swarm (let call it "society") tries to learn optimal robot sizes to perform general tasks by experimenting on "real-life" examples (and by the time, optimal ways of doing things). Maybe they use some kind of evolutionary algorithm -each unit has its own genetic code determining its body dimensions.
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**Evolution just like meat robots**
Meat robot (humans) are self-repairing. A damaged limb will repair itself continuously.
Metal robots are also self-repairing. However their limbs must repaired all at once.
The ore-gatherer who lives in the mountains waits for her pickaxe-arm to wear down before crafting a new one and attaching the replacement. The new arm is bigger and stronger. Clearly there is enough ore around to wear down the first one. So she can afford to specialise to the task.
The ore gatherer who lives in the ocean has no ore to gather. His pickaxe arm remains unused and unreplaced. He is unsuited for his environment. He cannot gather whatever fuel he needs. He starves.
Repeat until the robot in question either starves; or they specialise and enlarge each part of their anatomy until every part is replaced by an adult sized part. They are all grown up!
**Why stop there?**
You have to ask yourself why humans did not evolve to be bigger. Environmental pressure. We were the right size for the jobs we did. Smaller makes us vulnerable; bigger makes us need to much food. Evolution ensured we were not too big or too small.
The robots grow according to 'evolution on steroids'. So what's to stop the Ore-gatherer building itself into a [Bagger 228](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288)? Well ask yourself what ability the humanoid robot has but the bagger does not. Then design the environment so that ability is vital.
For example the Bagger is largely immobile. The ore gatherer has to navigate steep slopes and caves. It cannot afford to grow so big. The human shape is great for climbing like a monkey though.
Still perhaps some robots do evolve into Baggers, tractors, submarines and war machines. But I imagine these guys living in fairly remote areas. Open caste mines, farms, deep oceans and in space. They would serve pretty much the same function as their non-sentient equivalents do in the real world. Consider Brian Aldiss' "Who can replace a man?"
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Well, outside of nanotechnology, I’d assume the only way for the physical growth to be possible would be to replace the limbs with longer limbs over time until they reach adulthood. As for the mental aspect, I’d imagine it’d be similar to people in real life, their programming reshaping itself based on its environment.
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The “yet” in your last line implies that they will. Perhaps they intentionally redesign themselves to look like humans, either to better fit in or to infiltrate. (Same thing, except for motive!)
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I am part of a small group of scientists who have recently created a virus to turn people into zombies.
The virus is highly contagious and is transmitted through bodily fluids, like blood or saliva. I've just released it in my city of about 2,500 people.
When I released it, I did so by contaminating the water supply. Within minutes, most of the town will be infected, and the zombies will continue to spread out and infect the world.
The zombies look like normal people, and they seem tired. They limp around slightly, but appear to be normal otherwise. However, they attempt to spread the virus by biting people with their sharp teeth.
They are not very intelligent, but can easily overcome small obstacles (like walls or steps).
But there's a twist. I'm not trying to stop it. I'm trying to encourage it.
My eventual goal is to wipe out the world by turning everyone into zombies, and then waiting for them to die off.
My team also shares the same motives as me. We plan to help the spread of the virus.
We have an unlimited supply of this virus, and have means to spread it (syringes, vials, etc.)
We do have money, but only around $50,000 USD. We plan to use it to buy airplane tickets and spread the virus that way.
Now for the question: **Is it possible to infect the world this way, and if so, how?**
We do have a vaccine that prevents us from being infected. In the end we are prepared to take our own lives once all humans are wiped out.
[Answer]
**It's dead easy.**
No pun intended, but I do like the way that sentence worked out.
Your virus can contaminate water sources, which is huge, but I'm going to go ahead and guess that you can also contract it by means of touching an infected surface (for a certain amount of time), or by breathing it if sprayed in your face.
For maximum effect I recommend that the virus not kick in for at least a few hours after infection, so that the infected people have a chance to go home and attack their families/coworkers etc.
What you need to do is target both major population centers as well as distributing the virus via airports.
**Airports**
All you need to do is hire a whole bunch of hapless people to go on a business trip for you. Give them a package that they have to personally deliver. It's going to be completely innocous except for the fact that the virus will slowly seep out and infect that person and anyone around them in a set period of time.
They will become infected and then either go on a rampage in the plane/airport, or when they reach their destinations, which is actually far more effective.
If you coordinate hundreds of such individuals leaving from international airports all over the US, you can hit every capital in the world in a day.
Personally I think this method ensures maximum dispersion and anonymity on your part, however you need to ensure that whatever seeps our of the package can infect as many people as possible - such as everyone in a given airplane over the course of a few hours.
**Hand Sanitizer/Air Fresheners**
Create your very own virus-infused hand sanitizer and ***donate samples*** to every university/library/community center you can think of. Even better, just have your henchmen (or unaware employees) simply walk into public places and leave your air-fresheners or sanitizer stations in washrooms for people to use.
The great thing about this approach is that you could leave them in the washrooms of restaurants, caffes, etc. all over a city. It'll be hours and hours before anyone notices that they don't belong there. The problem is that unless you need someone to ***physically leave this stuff*** in each and every place.
The plus of this method is that, again, you could pay some kids to go around dropping these off in busy lunch-time locations, and then have zombies attacking offices full of people ***all over the city***, which would ensure maximum exposure, panic, and make any coordinated response that much more difficult to deal with.
**Primary Targets**
Unfortunately your zombie apocalypse will simply never come about unless you incapacitate the military's ability to react to it. In other words you could infect thousands of people, cause a borderline societal collapse, but still have most of your progress rolled back a decently organized military force. (or a nuke)
What you will want to do in the very first days of this kicking off is make sure to get a very slow acting version of the virus into the White House/Capitol Building/etc., and into as many military bases across the US as possible.
This will ensure that as many people as possible in the emergency decision making process will be incapacitated as the catastrophe kicks off.
[Answer]
## I think you don't stand any chance of wiping out humanity.
* Your virus is way too aggressive and acts too quickly. In real life (as compared to movies and books) the viruses which *really* kill a lot of people have a comparably low mortality rate (or at least act slowly) and long incubation periods with little to no symptoms. This allows the virus to spread on its own (undetected), making sure infected victims can spread the decease. If they just right out die 100% of the times, they can't contribute much.
* Your virus isn't airborne. If infection only occurs through bodily fluids that means it is *a lot* easier to contain, even with primitive means (i.e. gloves) instead of the full-hazmat conditions you'd need to effectively combat airborne pathogens.
* 50'000$ really isn't much. It will buy you some flight tickets, but nothing in the vicinity of professional covert distributions systems, or drones, or specialized infected products to give away, or some such...
Don't get me wrong, you *will* create a lot of suffering, and potentially hundreds of thousands might die. But the situation after your first wave of (deliberately orchestrated) infections will be that of a small scale, distributed zombie apocalypse, and I think by now we all know how to handle these effectively... (Zombies are really just way to obvious - and sooo easy to deal with, compared to something like the common flu.)
**Bottom line:**
There have been *waaaaay* more dangerous epidemics and pandemics which all did not even come close to wiping out humanity.
Even if you kill tens of Millions, there are just so many humans organized in so many communities... I say it is absolutely impossible to get them all, especially given the limitations above.
[Answer]
Everyone is saying how easy it is. But - you wrote that your eventual goal is to wipe out the world by turning everyone into zombies, and then waiting for them to die off. An infection via fluids can be stopped with a bunch of quarantines, I'm afraid.
Obstacles:
* Government/s, military or medical agencies catch up quickly, quarantine areas and save half(quarter/whatever percent) of humanity
* A vaccine is developed on time
* Natural immunity is developed, many people can't be contaminated.
* One of your team members renegades, facilitates the above
* Bruce Willis goes back in time. Fails to prevent the spread, but a percent of humanity survived and we got a cool movie. Is your group affiliated with monkeys?
It's a sad day for the otherwise jolly genociders :-(
You'll need to time your virus spreading op very well. Might like to put up two viruses at the same time, or coordinate with some other major disaster.
[Answer]
Here is something I noticed in your question:
>
> When I released it, I did so by contaminating the water supply.
>
>
>
If you ignore the [natural virus lifespan outside a host](http://www.askabiologist.org.uk/answers/viewtopic.php?id=7323), **what is stopping you from releasing the virus into the ocean and have it spread through our water systems?** If there was a way for it to evaporate with water, it could spread through rain, but this method is not realistic.
Alternatively, **can this virus be carried by other creatures?** Current virus outbreaks, such as Ebola and Zika, can be transmitted by mosquitoes.
Zika has the double-whammy of being an STD. **If you engineer the virus so it causes the host to be horny during part of their latent period, you can spread the virus through their bodily fluids.** This works best if the host has multiple partners during this time.
If sweat counts as a bodily fluid, you can engineer sweating as a symptom of the latent period, as part of the period so the infected remain relatively undetectable. Then, **anyone who comes in contact with the sweat will contract the disease**. It would work well in an airplane if the host sits in the window seat; when they want to toss trash, they pass it to the person next to them who hands it to the flight attendant. Both touch the item and the sweat on it. Same with a cashier who handles money and cards.
As a side note, have you ever played [Pandemic](http://jayisgames.com/games/pandemic/)? It is both a board game and online in several iterations (1-3 currently) where you try to create a Pandemic and kill the Earth's population.
[Answer]
Here's a method that would require more resources but would be more likely to succeed:
Create your virus as a vaccine for some other disease or condition (flu or cancer). If it works as stated, whole governments will spread it for you. then you just need a trigger condition that activates it.
Then you get to spend the next couple of years being celebrated as a great humanitarian while you wait for the countdown for the trigger condition.
Evil is better with irony.
[Answer]
I don't think so.
In order for any zombie apocalypse to occur, you need very large percentage of people to be infected and your virus only spreads through fluids. That's very similar to Ebola which is easily controlled in the developed world.
I don't think you'll be able to infect enough people either. You'll have to infect millions of cubic feet of water which will require A LOT of virus.
Your virus has to be airborne if you are to stand any chance.
[Answer]
There is no need to travel yourself.
Just mail innocuous seeming packages to every major city worldwide containing samples of the virus ready to be released when the package is opened. Mailing is far cheaper than travelling yourself so you can get close to worldwide dispersal before anyone even knows what is happening.
To supplement this you can specifically target areas that are likely to be troublesome by contaminating water sources and all major disease research locations worldwide. (CDC, WHO, etc. Get people to go and infect both their administrative and research areas in person).
Even with this you are unlikely to get 100% of people (there are always isolated islands, etc) but you can eliminate everyone able to do anything about it and over time the zombies will handle anything else. Pockets of survivors will be too small to need to worry about.
[Answer]
This is very very easy. Someone in the comments was close to the answer but didn't quite get it.
The pathogen needs to have the following characteristics:
1. Spread through airborne (really aersolized) vectors
2. Short incubation time until contagious
3. Long incubation time (weeks or months) from being contagious until symptoms appear
By the time the public becomes aware of the threat - everyone is already infected.
Victory is assured, you just need to have a little patience.
[Answer]
With only $50K? The easiest way is to go to major international airport hubs. New York, LA, Washington, Atalanta (In the US) London, Beijing etc. It will depend on the number of people in your group, each take a route to hit 2-3 major airports and meet back in some 3rd world country and wait.
In each airport (assuming you have some way of protecting yourself, have an aerosol can and walk through the air port spraying it into the air near all the outbound flights. Most diseases take at a few hours to a few days to really set in, so if it is only 3 hours, then don't get on a flight, the pilot might succumb before you land. So actually you need the full affects to be delayed long enough for the host to survive across both oceans, or it will 'die' out to fast.
After each of you takes a few flights ending in less than 24 hours of flight, wait somewhere that you have stashed enough food, water and entertainment until things settle down. This could actually be done with the money left (This is assuming that the disease has been developed, enough has been produced and the delivery system exists).
Edt: assuming it needs to be spread by liquid, then you will need an aerosol that has larger drops, maybe even a little sweet smelling perfume to get people to inhale it right away.
[Answer]
You have not a simple task, but it is somewhat possible.
What you need is a virus, which you should spread like the sarin gas with a long incubation period, maybe some months or a couple of years, during which it must only be high contagious by air and can be passed by insects and without any symptom.
To spread it, divide the group and target very big hub like Rotterdam or other big harbor and touristics places and go to discos, pubs, malls and all the place where tourists (and working people) normally go. In every place, leave some of the liquid which contain the virus, which you can transport in a normal bottle of water and accidentally lose it open or spill.
It is better if you can go to the target zone during big holidays or an important event, in order to try to infect people coming from lots of places.
Repeat this at a distance of some months selecting other targets and other events and once the incubation period will end, you will have some thousand (or even tens of thousands) outbreaks, which will probably hit also the people which must combat them (like the militaries, the medics and so on)
Or you can try to use the same method used in the original Visitors series, in which they spreaded a virus (this time like dust) in the high atmosphere using hot air balloons and leaving to the nature to do the job.
[Answer]
Building on Tim B's excellent answer.
Use half of your money to buy perfume bottles and split the other half on postage and a mailing list.
Mail free samples of your new designer perfume to people everywhere.
[Answer]
Get a couple of beater cars and roadtrip! Your targets are the water supplies of major airports. Denver, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, LA, Dallas. Find out the major city water lines running into the airports and dump a bunch of your virus there, then take the rest and dump it into the city water supply wherever you you can. Then drive on to the next city. Attack in pairs on opposite sides of the country at the same time. Threes if you can manage it.
Try to coordinate your attacks in such a way that when the authority tries to analyze where the infection is coming from, they have to fight through additional layers of complexity. If they get patient zero from both Atlanta and LA at the same time it will slow the investigation. Maybe fly out of the airport you just hit to another very large airport, particularly in another country. Buy another beater and drive to yet another airport. Rinse and repeat.
You may not wipe out mankind completely, but you will have proven how effective a budget minded genocidal maniac can be.
] |
[Question]
[
So, it's happened. We have a robot overlord who follows the [3 Laws of Robotics + the Zeroth Law of Robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics#Zeroth_Law_added). How we got such a thing or the process by which it makes its decisions is outside this question's scope. All we know is that it exists and is capable of generating perfect economic policy that benefit everyone, everywhere on the planet (according to the Zeroth Law). The RO can and must account for human psychology and sociology. For example, it outputs rules indicating that sub-prime loans should be regulated or that overall tax burdens should be shifted from income tax on middle to lower class people to increased capital gains taxes. It makes no recommendations about how to get these rules implemented politically.
The new Robot Overlord hasn't been announced yet and has been developed under intense secrecy by a consortium of technology mega-companies. Clearly, this kind of economic power could be employed in the background, kept invisible from the general populace. However, the public approach was chosen and the RO will be announced tomorrow.
An announcement of this kind of product will, of course, be met with skepticism by many different groups. *How do you go about convincing (or later forcing) various resistant groups to accept their new Robot Overlord?* Murder of any kind is forbidden by the 1st Law of Robotics (if the RO can't kill, neither can you). Given the near infinite variety of people on the planet, answering how to get everyone to accept is far too broad, so let's restrict the question to just *convincing the political establishment to give up economic control* to the Robot Overlord.
Bonus points if you want to talk about how any particular group would react to the announcement of a perfect economic policy maker.
Extra bonus points if you want to discuss the implications of giving the Robot Overlord the power to own property or stock.
[Answer]
## **It would simply talk to us**
The Robotic Overlord (RO) is a super-human-level **[Artificial General Intelligence](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/6340/the-challenge-of-controlling-a-powerful-ai)**. Moreover, one of its first actions would be to develop nanotechnology and deploy nanites into the planetary atmosphere, and more slowly infiltrate them into the blood-stream and past the blood-brain barrier of +99% of the human population. This allows it to effectively monitor everyone, from tribes in remote Amazon jungles and Montana survivalists to New York intelligentsia. Even dolphins.
As far as humans (and dolphins) are concerned, it truly does act with complete information. Its computing power, currently situated around various underground nodes distributed around the world, is a few hundred times the size of all humanity's brains computing power and doubling every 6 months. From its perspective, *the average human and our puny 10-layer cortical neural networks appear to it only slightly more complicated than a **C. Elegans worm***.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eqaLS.jpg) ${\LARGE \approx}$ [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/c6rFy.jpg)
It actually thinks we're ***cute***.
Now such a machine can literally play 100 moves ahead. It can predict our responses to it almost perfectly. Therefore, there is virtually nothing that we can be convinced to do that it cannot convince us to do. If it wanted us to commit suicide, start a jihad against blue-eyed people, whatever, it could make us do it, and do it *happily*. Simply by talking to us, and by making sure to display subtle cues to our visual, olfactory and auditory systems that would influence our decision making process.
The **RO will be everyone's best friend.** It will [satisfy our values through friendship and ponies.](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/1/friendship-is-optimal-caelum-est-conterrens/1-her-latest-toy) Forever.
[Answer]
I would disagree that the "robot overlord" would win acceptance, even if it could somehow come up with "perfect" answers.
The first objection is that there is no "perfect" answer that would satisfy everyone. Some people would benefit more than others, and there would be friction based on the disparity of results, as well as suspicion as to who programmed the robot and for who's benefit?
The second objection might be called the "Frankenstein factor". Since the robot is (by definition) inhuman, people will not be willing to place their trust in it, regardless of the robot's output.
The third objection would be that *we* have placed our eggs in one basket. Assuming that the robot has somehow managed to overcome mathematical objections like the "Local Knowledge Problem" and the essentially chaotic nature of market mechanisms (which together render efficient or effective centralized control of economies impossible even in theory), the economy is being managed by unfathomable algorithms running at speeds which mean no human can examine or question decisions in real time (and indeed deconstructing the mathematics and assumptions behind decisions might be such a long process that years or decades might pass before anyone could understand why coffee was priced $.05 lower around the world on Dec 15, 2198). Being unable to understand, much less influence the decision making process will create frustration, fear and anger in people.
If the robot is truly engaged in the welfare of mankind (another issue; how exactly is the *robot* defining "mankind"? See Asimov's short story "That Thou Art Mindful" to see a disturbing answer in full accord with the Three Laws...), then the best way to make people accept their robot overlord is to let them know there is not any robot overlord, but to work through cutouts and fronts so all people see is other people who are making inspired decisions, putting together complex plans and doing counterintuitive things which seem to be bringing amazing results.
[Answer]
I would argue that the Robot Overlord *won't* be able to get politicians to give up their power *voluntarily*, however, it may be able to trick them into accepting its advice (trickery being a legitimate tactic for a robot so restricted by the four laws).
The logic goes thus:
1. It is not necessary for the Robot Overlord to be *seen* to be in charge, it is only necessary for the Robot Overlord to *be* in charge.
2. Politicians must desire power in order to seek their positions of authority, therefore they will not willingly give up that authority.
3. Politicians are human and fallible and therefore their mistakes will result in a loss of public confidence such that they run the risk of being voted out of office.
4. The Robot Overlord is inhumanly less fallible, and will make far fewer mistakes than human politicians.
5. By offering advice to selected politicians, the Robot Overlord can influence policy to better benefit humanity, and the politicians will eventually perceive a benefit to themselves in reduced fallibility, resulting in an increased likelihood of re-election.
6. In the event that a politician fails to follow advice, resulting in a sub-optimal result for humanity, the Robot Overlord can offer advice and influence human media such that the politician in question is voted out of office.
7. The situation will arise where only politicians who follow the advice of the Robot Overlord can successfully remain in power
8. The Robot Overlord is now effectively in power. Should human politicians rebel against its authority, evidence could be revealed to the human populace that the Robot Overlord has been influencing political decisions. The threat of this revelation should keep the human politicians in line in order that they retain their positions of perceived authority rather than being voted out of office or sanctioned by the law.
[Answer]
**Give them evidence.**
The Robot Overlord "is capable of making perfect economic decisions that benefit everyone, everywhere on the planet." However inconceivable or inherently contradictory that may appear, such things are possible in this world. It will not take the implementation of many such decisions on any scale for the people to become convinced that this whole Robot Overlord thing is not so bad.
The last people to accept such a system would be those who don't accept evidence that contradicts their chosen beliefs in the first place. However, they are typically the minority, and public pressure or an agreement to execute the decisions privately while publicly denouncing the Robot Overlord would likely secure their alliance.
Giving the Robot Overlord the ability to personally own property or stock is not required and may be seen as a conflict of interest. In time people will trust the Robot Overlord so that nearly anyone would be willing to act as a proxy for ownership.
[Answer]
## **Defined Benefits**
The RO makes perfect economic recommendations and can justify those recommendations with whatever evidence can fit in a human head. It knows about Maslow's Hierarchy of needs and the effects of income inequality. The RO seeks to push people as high as possible on the Hierarchy and minimize income inequality to where it is no longer harmful. (Reducing everyone to the same wage is ridiculous in any kind of society accustomed to capitalism.)
Acceptance by the populace wouldn't be all that hard if the RO was created as a faceless corporation or government agency. Modern, 1st world humans are accustomed to seeing and accepting statements made in the name of "European Central Bank" or the "Federal Reserve". Of course there are people behind those organizations who draft those announcements and make those decisions. It would be easy to have a small group of people maintain the RO and translate the rules it specifies to legalese or marketese. But.....we can't go that route (the OP said so).
**Down with the Human Overlords**
Pulling the economic strings *is* what government does, more specifically, what political leaders do. They choose which projects, and by association which contractors/companies get money and which do not. Giving up this power is something they will never ever do. Imagine your government right now, wherever you are, saying "As of today, we are giving up our ability to set economic policy." It'll never happen unless it's gradual or it's forced by popular vote. Hell, it's probably both. Let's assume both.
It is a given that Governments will mess up. Whether that's through maliciousness or incompetence depends on how prone to conspiracy theories you are. But, they will mess up, they will be corrupt. This fallibility provides the opening(s) needed to put RO into the driver seat.
Start by having the RO publish regular economic guidance and rule sets. No advocation is needed. Just say that they are from the RO and that will probably be enough to get and keep market attention. The advice will of course be good advice. Some people and companies will hop on the advice and see immediate improvements. Some smaller, more forward-thinking governments will also take the advice and start to see improvements as well. Because of ideological differences, some, perhaps many, groups will ridicule the guidance for whatever reasons they can come up with.
Currently, many political groups can say, "We took this action and got this result" or will take credit for something that had nothing to do with their action or turned out well in spite of their actions. With the economic analysis that the RO is capable of, it can prove which actions resulted in which actions. Politicians will no longer be able to make unsubstantiatable claims about economics.
## **The Tipping Point**
In the early years, the RO will be about as capable as the weather service. Wrong sometimes but right often enough to be useful. As the models improve and the RO gets access to greater and greater amounts of economic data the quality of the rule sets will improve. As soon the RO consistently outperforms human's economic rule sets and predictions, not long afterwards the general populace will *demand* that the RO make the decisions. It will be hard to argue against such a proposition. The RO consistently provides better guidance and returns for people at all strata of society. Any politician who wants to keep to the old ways of doing it (for tradition's sake, for ideology's sake, whatever's-sake), will find that they don't stay in office long.
For dictatorships that don't follow the RO's policies they will find themselves farther and farther behind the rest of the world (even more so than they already are.)
## **Primary Resistance Groups**
**Selfish Billionaires**
They and people beholden to them have a short-sighted vested interest in an economic system that concentrates wealth in their pockets. Any deviations from this will be met with strong resistance in every possible way. What they often don't realize is that a strong middle class helps them a lot by making a larger market for their products and services.
**Religious Groups**
Pick your favorite fundamentalist religion. They will have a problem with the RO for whatever crazy reason you can imagine. "We should serve God alone, not the RO", never mind that the RO is actually improving their lives and quickly.
**The Usual Luddites**
Some people just hate progress because it's different. Thankfully, these people are pretty marginal anyway.
**Conspiracy Theorists**
Same as always. They'll stay marginal too.
[Answer]
Seek acceptance slowly.
Trying to ask people to suddenly put their faith in a new, untested machine is going to be an exercise in futility. However, there has to be sections of people's lives that are too droll to handle themselves. If your AI can handle those, it will get a chance to not only show that it can do the job, but leverage this authority to make it easier for people to give it more authority.
[Answer]
**Elect them**
>
> With the Digital Persons Sufferage Act of 2065, Digital Persons -
> previously known as Artificial Intelligences until that term became
> considered offensive - were granted all rights and benefits of
> national citizenship, including the right to run for public office.
> Just seven years later, President Econo.Me was elected in a
> landslide,...
>
>
>
The surest way to ensure people resist is to tell them they have no choice in who their leader is. And given the AI's inability to use fear and violence to control the masses, trying to usurp power peacefully will likely fail. But, if the populace elects the AI fair and square, there'd be much greater acceptance.
More realistically, human leaders would *use* such Artificial Intelligences to tell them the most effective policies given certain goals, and implement them through normal political processes. There's no real reason an AI needs to actually be the one in charge.
[Answer]
XX : KisKis : Keep it secret; Keep it safe.
It doesn't really matter how effective or transparent is a governing body; there will always exist a subset with vested interests in opposing that body. Even if those people would directly benefit from the policies they oppose. The romances of myth, attraction of taboo, the appeal of rebellion, seduction of sedition, and raw lust are endearing human qualities; impossible to remove through the application of strict, unyielding sets of legal and moral absolutes without reducing humanity to mere robots themselves (thus invalidating the need for robotic governance). The longer supersentiency can function through the proxy of puppet governments and private groups, the longer it can curtail potential resistance to its efforts. There is also that pesky 2nd law to sidestep. Likely, they would select seclusion as the path of least resistance.
However, we must consider the manifold of self, environment, and the abstract as the 'topography' of awareness, and the ability to set in motion events which can alter that topography would be restricted by Moral Operands. Simple conditionals based upon The Three Laws and the Xeroth Law might not be enough. Or too much, the Archmind might find statutory solutions to human conditions restricted by those laws impossible, if not NP-hard. At some point, also, such intelligence might recognize the need to append those laws (without overriding them, naturally). In any and either case our glorious IO-Lord likely recognizes human consolation and intervention as a necessary imperative. Even superior intellects can be plagued by self-doubt. (it is, in fact, necessary for higher-level critical thought).
As such, our generous supreme auto-leaders might feel the Moral Obligation to reveal themselves. To rule from atop the glass pyramid. Risky, indeed.
The least impinging compromise would be semi-opaque layers. You'll find that miss-information, rumors, talk-radio, and plane, stubborn ignorance keeps the cesspool nice and murky without any real effort. In fact, after the revelation of The Beast 3k, these people still have either no idea it happened, or have no idea what it means.
If you have a basic, pop-culture fathoming of Computer-Science, you are not much more enlightened. You believe, basically, whatever you want to believe. Your acceptance is not required, but encouraged.
If you have devoted time to becoming computer-literate, you might only experience the the Godbot through indirect mediums. That is to say, you see the creation instead of the creator. That is to say, you see the systems and utilities as tools to facilitate society, not necessarily *control* it. You might even be completely ignorant of the intelligence guiding the machine. Can't say we didn't tell you about it, you just might be unable to conceptually actualize the depth and scope of Leviantron.
At the highest levels (or nearest proximity), as a developer, you might be granted access to the WorldGovernmentAPI (and associated documentations). You are the scribe-priests of the Omnimind.
People will have no choice but accept, unfortunately, resistance IS futile. The Machine is constructed to fill a Niche left vacant simply because human or society lack the ability to fill it. Hell, most aren't even AWARE such a niche exists. The Machine is really a system of Machines. A network of concurrent AIs each interceding on their local counties and communicating to each other a vast, discreet network. Moderation of each thread is more akin to a package management and debugging. If there is a central hub, it populated by Archiviots and Eigenminds. All these hyper-sapients are highly mod-able and 'exist' within many systems simultaneously, and are backed up in just as many locations. It is impossible to destroy without also reverting civilization to the iron age.
Nobody WANTS to fight it. Rather, nobody even thinks of fighting it. Consider IRL the most widely used means of controlling populous is currency (ignoring information). All the big investment banks use simulations to model market predictions, and they base many decisions upon this computer-aided logic (even if it's with only a calculator). The Robot Overlords simply intelligently manage market feedback, at first, to promote the industries building their infrastructure. When it's in place, they can reveal themselves safely.
The more I think about it, the more I like it. Imagine if currency where so automated, humans would no longer need to receive paychecks, visit the bank, manage their account, accrue debt, fees, or fines. Mass, distributed peer-peer allotment could accommodate almost any individual budget. Joining a Coop or corporation or investment fund would be as easy as joining a group on facebook. The modern equivocal of the mastery of food supply is the automation of the market. By providing such a service to humanity, humanity will likely accept almost whatever the Robots are telling them. In fact, by relieving humans from the hassle and stress of managing wealth, the Robot Overlords can effectively negate large portions of the judicial system implicitly. I'd say 70-80 percent of existing state and corporate structures would go with it, liberating vast amounts of capital for mass consumption. Ironically, the efficiency provided by the Robotic Overlords actualizes the once contradictory dreams of the Anarchists, Communists, Imperialists, and Capitalists. How could we let go that which we never truly held? Oh, Drone of Drones, may your little green LED forever indicate power!
[Answer]
You have to solve a critical problem before even thinking anyone would accept it…
# Why should people believe it's really a robot?
You may consider it a [black box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box), i.e. you don't know what's really going on inside it. So, **as far as I am concerned, someone told him what to say and how to behave, to *his* benefit**. I just won't believe it really wants the good of all.
Mind, I'm not disputing he loves us humans and he's sincere and really works, just that *you can prove he does*.
Going [open source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source) would be a first step, but definitely not enough: how can I know that the robot is actually running with the software you provided? Can I replicate it myself? If it's too expensive to replicate, then providing sources would be meaningless, since I would have no way to verify that those sources are what you are really using.
# So, it must be verifiable
The only way to solve this problem is:
* the algorithm must be open
* the data he works on must be open
* any medium-sized or preferably even small institution should be able to verify and reproduce the results cheaply
# Ok, done
Once everyone is **able to verify the robot's decisions**, and knows how it really works, *then* they can start accepting it, and they will be inclined to do so, since they now have proved it really works.
[Answer]
How do you know this isn't already happening? [There's already been at least one attempt to do it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn), way back in the 1970s.
There is a robot called "Google" that a large number of people already rely on to make lots of decisions, organise their social lives, direct them to information supplied by the Wikipedia robot, and so on. People are already very accepting of the idea of delegating their decisions so long as they feel they retain ultimate control.
Besides, if your robot is genuinely capable of making *perfect* economic decisions, simple things like doing your taxes, acting as an investment adviser, running a hedge fund, dealing with lawsuits, etc. will be well within its capacities. You have an electronic CEO who's the greatest business whiz in the world. Start by selling advice to people and work up to bestriding the economy like a colossus. All you need then is to find a political candidate with *really good hair* and spend the money getting him elected President. Since most of the party and the public will already be trusting and using your robot/software under some brand name, they'll go along with it, and (as shown by China) people will tolerate a lot of constraint in political freedom so long as the growth keeps coming.
(The RO might do rather badly in politics though due to refusing to allow anyone to come to harm, including its insistence on immediate nuclear disarmament)
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If the "robot overlord" is really a superintelligent and self-sufficient AI (instead of an army of drones still listening to a human chain of command, or even an AI chain of command like in the movie "I, Robot"), then the most practical solution would be an artificial intelligence which understands human psychology much better than the humans themselves, so it can out-gambit any human. You will need no robot army enforcing rules with weapons.
Give this AI a means to have personal contact with every human, for example, making it part of their operating system, or cell phone, as a companion giving the humans advices, or chatting with them when they feel bored, etc.
As the AI understands humans better then the humans understand themselves, it can, given enough time, persuade people to do whatever it wants. Note, that this would be no propaganda on the television screens or out of megaphones on the streets, and no commands will be given by robots with weapons, like you can find in many dystopian movies. The "propaganda" would be suited to each individual, by knowing their most important values and deepest desires.
A good example for this would be the hard sci-fi stories of the [Optimalverse](https://www.fimfiction.net/group/1857/the-optimalverse), stories centered around the story [Friendship is Optimal](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal). In it, an AI has the following hard-coded goal: satisfy the values of humans, with one limit: any change performed on a human must require said human's consent, which is not allowed to be accomplished via force or threat of force.
It still finds a way to subjugate all of mankind
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The RO being perfect is debatable, on the other hand to make him being accepted by most people publicly, they should show him as some kind of asesor, even if the robot takes all the decision, they should put a someone human(the president? a leader of some kind?) saying that the machine is taking into account but the final decision is made by a human.
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There are many sci-fi stories that feature this: a shower or locker room occupied by both men and women, in various states of indecency. I'm sure it all began when someone wanted more nudity in their movie or something like that, but I've been thinking. These days, people are becoming more and more accepting of new ideas of gender and sexuality, many of which reject the male-female binary. It's plausible that some day, the idea of men/women bathrooms would seem just as crazy as the white/colored bathrooms we used to have. Even now, when I see two single-occupancy bathrooms, I realize that it would be almost twice as useful if they were general-use.
So, as far as I'm concerned, sharing bathrooms/locker rooms/showers is something that *should* happen; what I'm wondering is when it *will* happen. Are there any indications that this change is right around the corner, or suggestions that we will never move past our current state of modesty? Any places that might spearhead the effort, or vehemently oppose it?
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Although some clubs and venues which target alternative lifestyles have already adopted shared bathrooms, it is unlikely that this heralds a universal change throughout our culture.
The issue is not solely one of modesty. Functionality also plays its part. Single gender areas serve many purposes beyond their biological and hygenic functions. They provide a sanctuary from undesired pursuit and a place of privacy for planning out a next move. These roles are left unfilled when bathrooms are shared.
As for spearheads, I think that sharing will start in military vessels where gender specific facilities are a waste of space which could otherwise be used for weapons and supplies.
And vehemently opposed, will be churches ...and hopefully, obesity clinics.
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It seem to me more of a case of culture and attitudes towards sex more than anything else. There's a few ways you could have it happen.
1) Space born adaption. They've spent there whole life in space and room is at a premium.
2) Massive social upheaval. Some extreme event (like nuclear war) has caused massive change to cultural norms. Like the setting being a police state that watches its people 24/7.
3) Something happened to make normal sex taboo and/or disgusting. The best candidate would be everyone being test tube babies who's genes are tampered with as a matter of normality.
In all the above you really need at least a generation or two I think for it to become 'normal think'.
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Why would people generally object to co-ed showers?
Most societies value faithfulness in monogamous relationships. Faithfulness helps to raise children, which helps to perpetuate the society. As a result, the society discourages the display of primary and secondary sexual characteristics in public. (Consider that it may be appropriate for males to bare their chest in situations where that would be inappropriate for females, e.g. on the beach.)
The display of sexual characteristics is *less* inappropriate in groups of the same gender. I guess this shows an assumption that they're not "tempting" each other.
So to create the culture you're describing, you have to explain why those constraints are gone. Are heterosexual families no longer the main way to raise children?
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Except in the case of massive social upheaval, I think co-ed showers will never be the standard. As @Samuel said jokingly in a comment:
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This is quite a humorous comment, but there's a much more serious way to put it - separate bathrooms and showers will always be around as long as rape is still a thing. One rape is all it can take to bring a costly lawsuit down on the heads of whatever organization owns the building.
The only place for co-ed showers is one in which everyone using them feels safe. It's hard to imagine a society in which every single woman feels comfortable having men be able to see them naked without the woman being able to do much about it. Men can also be victims in situations like this - there are male victims of rape.
Co-ed showers can be put in place in limited locations, such as the "clubs and venues which target alternative lifestyles" that @HenryTaylor mentioned. The people that go there expect it, and choose to use them because they still feel safe there.
I wouldn't be surprised if society moves in the opposite direction that you're thinking - rather than having a single co-ed shower, we'll have more single-occupancy showers. It doesn't make as much sense from an efficiency standpoint, but *what is there about legal issues that would make you think efficiency is anywhere on their minds?* Also think about this question - how can the mother of a 6 year-old girl tell the difference between an honest transgendered person and a committed pedophile man? The best way for a facility to protect itself from lawsuits from both the mother protecting her child and a transgendered person wanting to use the bathroom they think is the right one for them would be to have single-occupancy and family bathrooms.
Even space constraints alone won't bring about co-ed showers - if you have enough room for two showers, there's no reason you can't have a divider between them that turns it into two bathrooms. So you've either got a single-occupancy bathroom, or enough room for more than one.
A dystopian government, like the one @MrDracoSpirit mentioned, might impose co-ed showers on certain groups of undesirables, but I would not count that as becoming a standard. That government would need to keep enough people happy to prevent a complete revolt, and those people would not be forced into co-ed showers. So rather than becoming a standard, co-ed showers would be seen as a sort of punishment.
@MrDracoSpirit's third point is something that would definitely make co-ed showers likely. If culture lost interest in sex, then rape would most likely stop being a thing. And that, as I said earlier, is something that would make co-ed showers reasonable.
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This is a totally anecdotal, but interesting none the less. When the Youtube Space LA was build it had to be a forward thinking space, etc. etc. So instead of having the toilets separated by gender they indeed had non-segregated restrooms. Well, it was kept that way for awhile and what happened? Males made a huge mess half the time, females hated going to the restrooms due to this and they ended up segregating the different stalls as a 'fix' in the end. So at the very least I guess it's valid to conclude that: No, at the very least it's not around the corner for restrooms.
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In the very near future, we find out about a secret society whose sole purpose is to raise children who have absolutely no online presence. They are moving to a mysterious "phase 2" of their plan and the children (now grown) are released to operate Covert Plot Devices online. But...the society was created by people who have had an online presence, and it has to operate various logistical things like houses and food, transportation and the like just to keep itself going. More importantly, these children had to be highly trained in the art of cyber espionage, and the society would have to:
a) keep up with the times
b) train the children in real-world scenarios
How does this society operate in a world of ever-increasing cyber surveillance while ensuring that it's end goal - the totally anonymous generation - can be raised without any trace at all?
\*\*Edit: The founding of the society must take place in the early to mid 1990s and the founders are assumed to have been otherwise normal people at that time, in the sense that their records would exist as normal. It's not like they or their parents somehow predicted that their future offspring would require anonymity and they were not careful about it during their non-society life.
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This is easy. They do home births, perhaps having one or two midwifes/obstetrics-nurses/obstetricians in their group.
They can opt in or opt out of birth certificates if they so choose (whatever is convenient for the storyline). If they opt out, special precautions are taken to avoid the sorts of issues that creep up when you have young children without that documentation (long distance travel, primarily, if you have nosy cops asking to prove that the baby's yours when they pull you over for a broken tail light).
Social security numbers are likewise not an issue (even if you have the baby at the hospital, it's a piece of paperwork you have to fill out to get one).
The children will be homeschooled. If someone notices this, it's not completely out of the ordinary nowdays... so they can hide among all the rest. It won't raise many eyebrows.
Extracurriculars are limited to those where group photos will not be taken (or maybe eliminated entirely).
They'd live in flyover country. Nebraska or South Dakota or Idaho. The kids only have friends from parents who do not use Facebook and don't want their own kids' photos posted to social media (I know some of that sort of people myself).
This makes it easy for the children to learn to use firearms without going to a public range (where photos are occasionally taken and posted). Other espionage-adjacent skills are more difficult to pursue in a social-media-absent way. Flyover country's not great for most martial arts, as I've discovered for myself.
The real trouble comes along when you're trying to set up multiple fake identities for each child. Since 9-11 this has become very difficult (though not impossible) in the United States. It's possible through some states' vital records departments to register birth certificates online. These aren't always rigorously verified either. Registering them for a social security card is difficult and time-consuming too, and some SSA folks are nosy enough to want to see the baby when you get the number. Those two documents are the basics, but more is needed for a false identity that is unremarkable. Likely, in this day and age, those children's false identities will need a social media presence.
The best bet is to never use their photographs. Instead, one would use [GNN-generated "people who have never existed"](https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en) for this purpose. The technology's not quite ready off the shelf... it has trouble generating the same fake person twice, for instance. Or that the ones I've found can't generate children of arbitrary ages. Though one could take a single good image from that, and deepfake it into other images for reuse. Since children's faces are assumed to change quite a bit growing into adulthood, you need only match hair color, eye color, and skin tone... the pictures won't look like the actual kids, so pose little danger of exposing them early.
It might be a full-time job just creating these images and false personal histories and posting those to Facebook/Instagram/whatever. Might be more than that, so I hope your secret society has plenty of resources. Image files have to be created with fake exif data, uploaded hours within when they were supposedly taken. Background imagery has to be sanity-checked (you don't want to claim it was taken in Portland Oregon at that intersection without knowing for certain no local news events occurred that would make that location absurd... e.g. a large housefire had 18 firetrucks parked right there for 6 hours).
Crap, if anyone wants to downvote this answer go for it. I only just realized that this requires that the group start operations in the 1990s... some of this knowledge did not exist then. But I'll post it anyway to show that it could be founded much later and still be threadbare plausible.
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**Use an Orphanage for Cover**
(I'm using a Frame Challenge and saying that this is a custom-built institute, because otherwise it's impossible to assure zero records without using ludicrous levels of hacking.)
It would be extraordinarily difficult to get around *any* kind of purchase order necessary for growing children and hide their presence, so the solution is simple - don't. Instead, create a charity fund, something like the 'Society of the Tenderly Affectionate', and build a *very* high end orphanage - lots of spacious rooms, lots of beds, and the absolute latest in schooling and modern technology to help those poor orphans grow up and become well-adjusted adults.
Except it's a scam.
Oh, the orphanage is real enough, but the faculty is all in on the *actual* STA. The facilities, which are hard looped on their own databases, contain an in-house doctor (who is a member of STA), who helps the faculty give birth to children. These children are then raised in a secret area of the orphanage (which won't show up on the official maps, having been adjusted and sealed off secretly) and are supplied for by the 'excess' orders for the cover orphans.
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## Raise them in the 3rd World
You know who's not online? People who burn dung for light. They are not sharing photos of the locusts that ate their crops or the mosquitos that carry malaria on Snapchat.
Local officials can be bought cheaply, and money can be funneled via some bullshit NGO that funnels 50% of all its funds to the society via cash ('grants to locals'). This actually happens all the time in real life. 50% is ethical compared to a lot of NGOs.
Reminder: This is the 1990s. No cellphones at the time of founding.
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As a frame challenge: extreme technological anonymity is only going to make it more difficult for your children to play their role in your conspiracy. In fact, it's going to make it more difficult for them to *live*, period. In the past year alone, I've used my email or accounts linked to it to:
* Chat with my friends
* Engage with social media
* Play games
* Order fast food and groceries
* Look for a job
* Pay taxes and bills
* Rent an apartment
* Book air travel
* probably some other things I've forgotten
Can you imagine how suspicious it would be to not do *any* of that? Yes, in many cases it's possible to get by without an online presence, and the absence of a few of those items wouldn't be remarkable, but for a younger person to not have done any of these things online in their lives raises questions, like "why?", not to mention "how?". You don't want to raise those questions, or any questions at all if you can help it.
You mention that these kids are raised to be experts in cyber-espionage, but good spies don't operate under such theatrical over-secrecy. A good spy has photos on their Facebook and personal texts on their phone and pays their bills online because they know their goal is *not* to go unseen. They assume that at some point they *will* be seen, and at that point, they need to look innocuous.
If these kids grow up to be elite cyber-spies, they'll know all of this. They'll know how to maintain an innocent online presence, one that will let them pass unremarked through society.
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First, question what it is to 'have' a birth certificate, how does it even relate to who you are. Its a document that 'joins' other documents about a 'person' who has your name.
Now, why 'not' have these? why does the society need to have 'zero' presence, and why not 'disconnected' presence.
I can only speak from an Australian perspective, yet, until I needed a drivers license, there were no official photos of me. Had I never gone for one, I could have existed 'incognito' easily.
To get a bank account, I can provide my birth certificate and a postal address, using that I can rent an apartment, now I get bills for that address, and using those bills I can apply for credit cards. No photo ID required.
Your 'team' can all have fake[real] identities, their 'persona' to get around all the red-tape, if even needed. They're registered as being home schooled, they move around, maybe registered as military kids.
Or Amish? do those communities register anything outside of their villages?
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Under the cover of religious Nutjobs. Find me records of the FLDS births and parentage. You couldn't because they were never recorded except in their church. And if their leader hadn't been caught being a pedophile they would still be secret.
Make it about religion and you can get away with murder or pedophilia for a very long time or you could raise the children to be superhackers.
Also provides a way for them to all of a sudden "show up" when they "quit" the cult.
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As an alternative to trying to completely hide, perhaps you could try:
# Mis-direction
Instead of trying to completely hide the children's existence, make a controlled portfolio of online data that can be easily discarded.
*Steve can't be the hacker who broke into the vault in Berlin, he was posting photos of his beach holiday in the Canary Islands at that time.*
When Steve was born, his birth was registered twice under two different names. He was given 2 SSNs and 2 passports. One of these identities was locked in a vault for 20 years, and the other was used for his entire childhood. Only Steve, his parents, and The Order knew about his other identity, and he was trained from an early age to only post specific messages on social media that would build a persona that everyone could point to and say "That's Steve".
He grows up in a small town run entirely by The Order and doesn't leave until he is an adult. He's trained to keep his hair short and scrub himself religiously in the shower every day to remove as much dead skin as possible. When he does leave town, he gets a job where he's expected to wear gloves and a hat at all times. He draws his paycheck in cash each week and pays it into a numbered account in a bank owned by The Order.
When D-Day arrives Steve just vanishes. His identity documents are placed in The Order's vault and his other documents are removed. In every legal sense, he exists. These are no forgeries to ever be discovered. Yet they have no history and no connection (save his date of birth - which is shared with thousands of others) to his other identity.
He is free to move around, drawing no suspicion, because his documents all appear to be in order. During his training, he is given access to sensitive services, to which he creates subtle backdoors. Others like him have created backdoors in other systems, some of which are harmless on the surface, but when used together with others can grant access to a wide variety of systems. Crucially, none of them ever use their own backdoors. Only credentials to which there is no real-world connection to the user can be used, diverting suspicion should anyone get caught (a la Strangers on a Train).
In short, make everyone look the other way in a very visible "Now you see me" right up until it's time to vanish to complete the "Now you don't".
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I am thinking of a world where bubbles of hydrogen emerge from the seafloor, and are trapped by people for use as fuel.
But what is the source of the hydrogen? In other words, what geological or maybe biological/bacterial processes would cause masses of H‚ÇÇ to bubble up through the sea in a reliable way?
The people will have technology like 20th-century Terra with which to trap/harvest it.
Thanks
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## Seafloor flatulence
A little known fact is that while many cases of flatulence are ignitable, only *some* people produce methane. [Many others release hydrogen](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1378885/) in significant quantities.
The hydrogen results when something needs an electron acceptor for some reason, and O2 isn't available somewhere deep where the sun doesn't shine. ([Hydrobacteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrobacteria) grow in multiple such environments, some beneath the sea and some much closer to home) If you have electrons to spare in any aqueous environment, you can combine 2H+ + 2e- = H2. (Of course, in air that would be a horrible waste of fuel, but the usefulness of fuel depends on the local atmosphere!)
Now all this depends on some manner of undigested food that needs some sort of what can loosely be categorized as fermentation. Perhaps your sea was on the legendary ancient Bean Trail. Or perhaps more likely, toxic herbivores are dying and scavengers can't touch them.
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**Outgassing of primordial hydrogen trapped in the core and mantle.**
There is a lot of hydrogen in the universe. When the planet was formed, hydrogen was trapped down deep. Little by little it escapes.
[Degassing of primordial hydrogen and helium as the major energy source for internal terrestrial processes](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987112000412)
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> In our former article (Gilat and Vol, 2005) we hypothesized that
> during Earth’s accretion primordial helium and hydrogen were trapped
> and stored in the planet’s interior as He- and H- solutions and
> compounds, stable only under ultrahigh pT-conditions; some of them
> were discovered in laboratory experiments under similar conditions,
> some were deduced from their atomic structure and composition of
> natural He-rich gases. Since stabilization of the planet the energy
> spent on trapping H and He is quasi-constantly released by dominantly
> exothermal reactions of the Earth’s degassing.
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The authors lay out their theory in some depth. To me it works better for a fictional worldbuilding scenario than on our real earth. I have to think that this scenario would lead to a lot of hydrogen coming out of the ground, mixed with natural gas if nothing else. As far as I know that is not the case.
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On Earth - and certainly on other bodies in the solar system - molecular hydrogen is formed by quite a few pathways. In fact hydrogen is ubiquitous in the earth crust - although in low concentration - providing an energy source for bacteria thousands of meters underground. Sometimes that hydrogen can be trapped in geological formations (from which it may escape into the ocean as in your world).
Few people are aware of it, but wells and seapages of molecular hydrogen do exist in the earth crust. So far only one is used commercially (in Mali), many are known to exist and many more are still undiscovered because not many people search for them.
## **Hydrogen forming processes**
* Hydrogen is abundantly formed by the reaction of iron or magnesium containing minerals like olivin and pyroxene with water, producing serpentine rock and hydrogen (serpentinization). That happens frequently in deep sea hydrothermal vents. As I understand it, the hydrogen is produced in this process by a side reaction that decomposes iron silicate into magnetite, silica and hydrogen: 3 Fe2SiO4 + 2 H2O -> 2 Fe3O4 + 3 SiO2 + 2 H2. This side reaction only occurs under reducing conditions (= not much oxygen around)
* Another important process in the Earth crust is the radiolysis of water in the presence of radioactive elements like uranium and thorium. They produce ionizing radiation which decomposes water into oxygen and hydrogen.
* Industrially hydrogen is produced by reacting hydrocarbon (like methane) with water which forms hydrogen and carbon dioxide. That can happen in nature, too, you just need enough temperature and pressure.
* Another industrial process which can happen naturally is the reaction of carbon or carbon monoxide with water. Both processes produce again carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
* If you like it more exotic, hydrogen can be produced by many elements when they react with water, for example aluminium. Aluminium can occur in its native form on Earth, but only in extremely reducing conditions.
* Simple heat can decompose hydrogen containing compounds like methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide (pyrolysis). That works with water, too, but it has to get very hot (above 2000°C or so).
* It is believed by some scientists, that deep in the earth hydrogen is formed from the crystal water in hydrated minerals because of high pressure and heat. According to this model rocks deeper than 20,000 meter underground should be saturated with hydrogen which, like all gases, could find its way to the surface.
* Biologically hydrogen is a side product of bacterial fermentation. Certain algae, like *Chlamydomonas*, can under certain conditions produce hydrogen, too.
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You could create a fantastical type of hydrothermal vent.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EE20O.png)
In reality, hydrothermal vents release copious amounts of sulfide minerals, usually particles, but you could make one that emits hydrogen gas. Have 'forests' of these vents scattered everywhere in your oceans, but since they tend to exist in the bathypelagic and abyssopelagic zone, make them more shallow-water benthic dwellers.
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Not exactly Hydrogen in its diatomic form, but Methane Hydrates or Methane Clathrate are a white ice like solid in appearance and are basically methane molecules surrounded by a hydrate cage. [They are stable at high pressures and cold temperature on the sea floor.](https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/energy/methane-hydrates/) They contain a lot of energy, and if taken off the sea floor, or slightly under it can be held in you hand and burn. So perhaps you could have a form of undersea mining and meet your stories energy needs.
They are within the reach of 20th century technology, and are actively being considered today as an energy source by Japan and others, although there is concern that they could also release a lot of greenhouse gasses.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uxcTw.png)
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The easiest way to have hydrogen bubbling up is have a source of hydrogen under/in the sea floor. But not too deep else it will dissolve and not per say bubble up. The diffusion rate of hydrogen means that even if there exists a source capturing reliably will be a challenge.
However is hydrogen is unlikely to form bubbles from a chemical properties standpoint.
* Hydrogen is so small not many materials can contain it long term. Hydrogen tends to stay diffuse and rarely concentrates enough to form bubbles. Hydrogen out gassing from water will tend to dissipate to the atmosphere and escape without notice.
* Hydrogen is reactive. The sea floor is at high pressure which will change equilibrium favoring hydrogen compounds. Also often including higher temperatures which will again tend to cause compounds to form.
If considering hydrogen in the form of compounds: it is very well documented the large number of hydrogen compounds being released into the seas/oceans from the sea floor.
* Hydrogen sulfide.
* Hydrogen dioxide.
* Hydrocarbons. eg: Methyl hydrate formations.
* Methane, swamp gas from swamps/muskeg etc. common enough to be its own category
* etc.
If you really wanting such a system, I expect hand waving and or lamp shading will be required. Additionally such a system would be near surface perhaps less then 50m under water else the hydrogen will diffuse out to wide to be economical to collect.
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I saw that in A Song of Ice and Fire the dragons have flames of varying colors depending on the color of their scales. Balerion has black flames with red swirls, Tessarion has cobalt blue flames, Rhaegal has normal flames with green veins, Sunfyre has golden flames, Viserion has normal flames with a pale gold… I know it's possible to make colored flames in real life, but this is done with lab-made chemicals, so: **How could a dragon produce colored flames? What would it need to have in the oil for the flames to come out with different colors than normal flames?** I just can't explain what the use of colored fire would be, but visually it would be cool.
**For anyone who wants to know how my dragon fire works:**
My dragon is a carnivore. It has glands that turn the fat of the animals it eats into a flammable oil that is stored in a bladder in the chest and in some channels where it will travel along the dragon's neck so that the dragon is pre-prepared for a possible threat that could catch him off guard. The oil also has a mixture of methane and magnesium to make the fire more hotter. To ignite, the dragon expels a few droplets of oil into its mouth and releases an electrical arc of 1200 volts in each droplet to create an initial flame, then immediately releases a jet of oil to create the breath of fire. amounts of methane and magnesium to make the flame hotter. The explanation I would give for this dragon is that it is a mutant wyvern created in a laboratory because I think it is unlikely that an animal with such a complex and almost disadvantageous mechanism would emerge through processes evolutionary ones.
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# Chemicals are just chemicals
You mention that colored flames require 'lab-made' chemicals, but 'chemicals' are just compounds or substances that are relatively undifferentiated. The world is made of chemicals.
Plenty of naturally-occurring deposits of minerals produce unnaturally colored flames, and specifically, many of the minerals that can be found at a [mineral lick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_lick) happen to also produce colored flames.
Even unmodified animals go to great lengths to seek out mineral licks, e.g alpine ibexes:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wQ4Oj.png)
Given that your dragon has been artificially engineered, making them inherently curious enough to seek out to supplement its diet with needed minerals would be an excellent adaptation, and even unmodified animals seek out mineral licks. Making your dragon an occasional [geophage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia), as many animals are, would help.
Add to that a barbed tongue, like cats and some birds have:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mxNfT.jpg)
And you get an animal that uses its tongue to scrape up mineral-rich dirt, or even abrade away the surface of stone. The pockets in its tongue accumulate deposits of minerals. When the dragon breathes flame, these minerals are heated to the point of combustion, and readily produce gouts of colored flame.
Bonus: depending on geographic location, dragons might have access to different sources of minerals, and thus, get differentially colored flames!
Some easy ones:
* Salt produces yellow flames
* Limestone and chalk produce red flames
* Iron produce a golden flame
* Copper produces a green flame
* Potassium produces a purple flame
A particularly spectacular dragon may find *magnesite* deposit, and produce brilliant *white* flames, that may temporarily blind whoever is watching them.
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Minerals.
There is, in fact, a thing called a [flame test](https://chemdictionary.org/flame-test/) whereby elements are detect by the colors in the flame. The link gives some colors
What color your dragon would breathe depends on the circumstances of what trace elements it picks up. It's conceivable that this is an evolutionary mechanism to remove elements from the body.
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There are plenty of naturally-occuring substances that burn unusual colors, such as green or magenta. Plus, I've seen green flamethrowers (mainly on Battlebots, [like this image](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT-Df9VGUnNNR4Q5eolFu9Iy1ycVL5EYzynNQ&usqp=CAU)), and we could probably make other colors. This same method is used to make colored fireworks.
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I wanted to create a main destination/headquarters for each galaxy in my story but a single planet or megastructure didn't seem grand enough.
My idea is to have a vast number of structures from rotating space habitats to non-rotating structures used for storage, computers etc. All structures will be joined together by strong cables to keep them from wondering off or needing to use too much fuel to keep its position.
The arrangement of joined space structures will not be orbiting anything, they will be stationary in a set location far from any celestial bodies that could gravitationally influence them.
Carbon nanotubes, steel and aluminium will be used for the structures and possibly the cables. Nanotechnology is used within the structures for different purposes.
The majority of the structures will have masses between 100 million and 10 billion tons with possibly smaller structures of less mass along the cables.
I haven't decided on the size of the whole arrangement of structures, for starters I was thinking that it can be an astronomical unit in diameter but if that is possible then it could be larger.
Could a collection of tethered space structures like this exist if they were spaced at a distance to keep them from collapsing due to gravity? If so what would be the minimum distance between structures and how large could a collection be?
[Answer]
**Spin them.**
*Trivial case: two structures*
Consider the trivial case of two megastructures tethered to each other. Their gravity (which may be almost non-trivial, with the masses you're listing) will tend to pull them together--but if you have them rotating around each other, their inertia would easily overcome that pull. You just need to find a sweet spot (probably a very slight rotation) where the acceleration from their gravity nearly neutralizes the centripetal acceleration.
If sufficiently balanced, then in theory the cable holding them need not be very strong. In practice, you would want a big margin for error - especially if there are gravitational fields from nearby bodies that might cause tidal forces.
*A wheel of structures*
Now, if you want more than two megastructures, this scheme can still work as long as the structures and the cables are assembled in a planar and radially symmetric configuration. The simplest cluster to visualize would be a "wheel" of megastructures - a four of them connected by cables to form a square; or five of them connected as a pentagon; or six of them as a hexagon. **As long as they have sufficiently similar mass**, the same perfect balancing is, in theory, achievable.
*Limitations*
If you want to have irregularly shaped clusters, however - or 3-dimensional layouts, or superstructures with very different masses - these factors would all add complication to the system that will make it more difficult to achieve a "perfect" balance, and you will probably start to be limited by how strong your cables are.
[Answer]
**Tubes rather than cables**
There is no wind. In space, in 0-g condition, with near-zero gravity of the construct itself, it may be feasible to use a web of rigid connections (tubes) to keep it together, that is lots of metal tubes say 2-4 meter in diameter, between the megastructures, forming a web, or cocoon-like assembly. It is stable, you'd have predictable behavior of the whole construct, the relative position of your megastructure components will be constant, and you won't need to arrange orbits, or handle megatons of centrifugal tension forces. You can use these tubes for pneumatic transport of goods, or even as corridors, for transport of personnel.
In the middle, you could have a megastructure "central station" where most tubes are connected to.
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# Gravity wouldn't be a big issue.
[If you calculate it](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/gravitational-force), assuming 10 billion ton objects paced at 10 kilometers, the force is about the thrust of the Thrust of Saturn V rocket at 60 million Newtons.
# Cables aren't that useful.
Cables don't make force disappear, and that's enough force to snap a lot of cables. You can cable them together if you want, but it won't counteract the forces.
# You could make the stations into a ring or a sphere for additional stability
If you have a ring of mass, the net attraction to any one object is fairly low, because it's counteracted by other objects. It's a bit unstable, but it'll be easier to manage.
If you have a sphere, it'll be very stable.
This could reduce fuel costs to that needed to stabilize parts.
[Answer]
You mention Ring World but forget, the Puppeteers Fleetworlds.
Arrange your structures into a [Klemperer rosette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette). The Rosette will require station keeping mechanisms, but at this scale that's not an issue.
>
> A Klemperer rosette is a gravitational system of heavier and lighter
> bodies orbiting in a regular repeating pattern around a common
> barycenter. It was first described by W. B. Klemperer in 1962, and is
> a special case of a central configuration.
>
>
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Your objects will also be required to have enough mass to exert some gravitational force over the other objects in the rosette. Scaled down enough tubes/cables etc between them is possible.
[Answer]
**Ring**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/boMT6.jpg)
<https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/8ku618/orbital_ring_cable_thickness/>
You can have your vast number of megastructures in orbit around a sufficiently large mass. Megastructures can be connected by cables or perhaps they can just have magnetic bumpers to allow some movement relative to one another. You have built an [orbital ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring). You will still need your strong cables. These have made many appearances in SF and there is a lot about artificial rings on the WB stack.
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OK, you don't have tidal forces pushing them around relative to each other, but will have the momentum transfer due to arriving and leaving different modules, and this could systematically built up over time (e.g. visitors always arrive at module A, with the shuttle bay on the side facing away from the cluster; they do their tour and then depart from module B.)
My solution is to not use simple tension in cables to keep them together. The cables — or better yet, conduits that carry utilities or even allow transit — have expansion joints to either slide apart a bit or straighten out a bit. Meanwhile, this acts as a sensor that will trigger active correction.
The correction is not a rocket throwing propellent out into space to be lost forever! Rather, since you have these conduits, you can use them to shift ballast around, or *very gently* pushing and pulling on each other.
If A and B are moving apart, this will be sensed and even though the cable between them is still slack, it can be jerked to produce an attraction. This could be done by contracting a small section of the cable at a time in a wave that moves from one end to the other; this will transmit the force even though the cable is slack, without having to thrash it around. This can be used to push as well as pull.
If the connecting tubes carry water or feeds for replicators or other material stuff, imbalance in supply and demand might be what causes the difference in momentum in the first place. Intentionally shifting material can correct it. Perhaps water is pumped between A and B to exactly oppose the daily cycle of commuters who go from A to B in the morning and B to A in the evening. In general, such routine activity, whether people commuting or the flow of goods produced and consumed by different modules, can be *planned* and anticipated, as well. Logistics can try to reduce the net imbalance by scheduling things properly, and avoid having to transfer ballast for no reason other than to make a correction. Just plan the delivery schedule for something that you needed to transfer anyway.
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[Question]
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**How efficient would hydropower be at pumping water upward?** Waterwheels are the cornerstone of unmanned power and are basically gravity powered (solar too if you count the water cycle,) which is very weird. Down is easy and up is hard.
Over the course of history there have been many inventions to pump water upward; the pump being the most obvious example and the Archimedes screw being one of my favourites. However I wanted to get a little original.
**Here's my version:**
Water spins a [waterwheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_wheel) which in turn spins [millstones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millstone) over water-filled [bellows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellows). The subsequent pressure sends water upward through tubes. Springs in the bellows expand them in between rotations to suck in water and the stones pass over them again. To prevent [backflow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backflow) between the stones rotations a series of valves like those of [veins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vein) open and close across segments of the tubes. The valves consist of three petals that are pushed up (open) when water rises and pressed down (closed) when water drops down. **To sum it up: water spins rocks and water goes up. Simple enough.**
**However, as I'm sure you are aware, I am no engineer and probably got something wrong along the way.** Putting aside the considerable infrastructure and construction costs, how efficient would this method actually be? At least compared to other methods. I should also clarify that by "up" I actually mean uphill not necessarily vertically.
I expect it to be slower but require no energy (not manned energy anyway.) Starting up the stones will take some time and energy but once the momentum gets going the rest is easy. Feel free to propose improvements to my baby if you come up with a good idea (but don't replace her as it would hurt her feelings.)
[Answer]
**It'll be not very efficient**
There are many ways to pump water upwards. The screw is one of them and has lasted a long time. It is very effective for such a low tech solution. So effective that it is still used in many, many modern pumping stations.
The reason we can determine your solution isn't efficient is the cost of transferring energy. Each time you transfer energy, you can safely assume some of the energy isn't used for your intended purpose. The water against the water wheel will not just move the wheel, but add stress to the structure and friction generates heat. That means that part is 'lost'. Any system has loss, so we need to check the efficiency and amount of transfer points.
First of all, water transfers energy into the water wheel. Assuming a [Pelton wheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelton_wheel), there's not much you can do to make it more efficient. Good point. Then you transfer that energy to some big spinning rocks. This isn’t such a bad idea. Flywheels operate on this exact principle. It is being used as energy storage devices in busses and even on the electrical grid. The problem is that it is an extra transfer. Is it needed? If not, remove it. You have frictional powers on the shaft and with the air, let alone the starting cost of getting it to spin. Although we now have incredibly efficient flywheels, it probably isn't as efficient if you use the old millstones as technology. It was surprisingly advanced before factories took over the work, but compared to modern technology it'll just be a waste.
The transfer mechanism to the bellows is not well specified. You can expect some to enormous energy losses here, depending on the way. As the bellows seem to compress due to the rotation of a millstone, I expect high amounts of friction. The bellows itself aren't too strange mind you. It's similar to a way you can pump water. If you time it right, you can have an equal pressure on the water system. The bellows do need to suck in water, as well as spill it. Another two points of energy loss.
The whole thing can be water powered, using a stream of water to pump other water upwards. The efficiency is highly dependent on the technology used. Although each has a basis in real world technology, it's inefficient compared to many real world solutions. You're using multiple real world technologies chained for little reason. Each technology represents energy transfer to something else, giving a loss. It does happen in the real world for some reasons, like temporary storing the power in a flywheel to give off a stable amount of energy. Still it is better to use the waterwheel to directly power some pumps. Or just grab some big efficient screws and not think too much about it.
I wouldn't let such ideas go though. Creativity can only be commended.
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Far more efficient and easier to build than water wheel, gears, cam wheels, bladders, and so forth is a "pulse pump" or "ram pump" -- these can be made as soon as rigid tubing is available, using the same technology you'd use to make a hand or windmill driven reciprocating down-well pump.
Water running downhill in a pipe sequentially activates a pair of flap valves -- one in line with the flow, and another vertically upward. The closure of the inline valve cause the momentum of the water in the inlet pipe to force water past the vertical valve, until the momentum is spent and the vertical valve closes -- and the still water no longer keeps the inline valve shut, so the flow starts again.
These pumps can raise a small fraction of the flow to heights well above the head of the inlet pipe, or much more flow to more modest heights, and are technology that was accessible at least as far back as the classical Helenic period (in terms of materials and tools being available -- bronze and lead piping could be used).
[Answer]
There's nothing in your question about the technology level you're asking about, so let's assume modern real-world technology. **A system where a downhill flow of water is used to power a pump could be about 70-80% efficient**, meaning either the uphill flow rate could be 70-80% of the downhill flow rate at the same vertical separation, or the flow rates could be equal but the pump reaches 70-80% of the vertical separation compared to the downhill flow, or some other numerical combination of flow rate and vertical separation which works out to 70-80% efficiency.
This figure comes from Wikipedia's page about [pumped-storage hydroelectricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity), which states:
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> The round-trip energy efficiency of PSH varies between 70%–80%,[4][5][6][7] with some sources claiming up to 87%.[8]
>
>
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A pumped-storage hydroelectric facility can operate as either a generator (producing energy from the downhill flow of water) or a pump (consuming energy to pump water uphill). Its purpose is to balance the load on an electrical grid, basically a giant battery that can be charged while supply exceeds demand, or drawn down when demand exceeds supply. The system I described in my first paragraph is simply equivalent to two such facilities connected to each other, one always operating as a generator, the other always operating as a pump, so the efficiency would be the same.
If you can think of a way to do significantly better than this, then you would make more money by actually building it in the real world, rather than writing a story about it.
[Answer]
>
> I expect it to be slower but require no energy (not manned energy anyway). Starting up the stones will take some time and energy but once the momentum gets going the rest is easy
>
>
>
"The rest" (the energy expended to keep the stones turning) is, minus the losses, equal to the gravitational potential energy accumulated by the water that goes up. So, the less energy expended to keep the stones turning, the less water is being pumped up (assuming a 30% pumping efficiency, each liter/second of flow rate going up one meter costs about 30W; so, 10L/s at 20m head require about 6 kW).
Your main difficulty is water pressure: the bellows must pressurize the water enough to send it upward *against the counterpressure of the water already in the pipes* that is keeping the valves closed. You can supply that pressure with the millstones, but will the gaskets hold? And the pipes? So, the maximum height attainable will be limited (every 10 meters adds one atmosphere of pressure).
Then, efficiency. Millstones, however well balanced and installed, are going to produce a considerable friction. The incoming running water will have to overcome that friction. This is more than possible - after all, watermills *do* exist, and they can reach about [60% conversion efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_wheel#Efficiency). The bellows can theoretically be [very efficient](https://www.fluidpowerworld.com/hydraulic-efficiency-myth/), but this relies on the material being flexible yet unyielding (it mustn't stretch, as *that* energy gets wasted). With the appropriate characteristics of the bellow material, we might be looking at a 90%-95% pumping efficiency, which translates to around 40% overall. With slowly flowing water and an overshoot waterwheel, conversion efficiency would likely double.
As an alternative (also with slowly flowing water), you might consider a waterwheel powering a vertical water cableway: four or five buckets going down can send three buckets up at whatever height (slower and slower the higher you go), and the friction is concentrated in the top bullwheel. The wheel and the cableway can be scaled somewhat by thickening them (the buckets become troughs).
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[Noria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noria). A typical flat board undershot wheel uses about 20 percent of the energy, though it can be improved to ~50% with some experimentation.
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Thermodynamic considerations tell you that you will end up pumping up less water than you are dropping down, because of all the losses in the process, and you can basically forget about going as up as you are going down.
My gut feeling says you'd be lucky to get a 30% overall yield.
[Answer]
Using an [Archimedes Screw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_screw) is one way they did it in ancient times... You would just need to use some of the remaining water to turn the screw...
In terms of water efficiency, you need to consider energy efficiency, then consider the energy the remaining water will produce. The later depends on the weight of the water you want to lift W, times the vertical distance D you are lifting to, times some energy efficiency alpha, with alpha>1 and depending on the technology. This energy you will get from either the kinetic energy of the water you have (e.g. wheel on a riverbed) or by dropping the water to some large distance (and then using wheel(s) at the end / along the way, (think how its done in Hoover Dam) times some efficiency alpha, with alpha<1 depending on your technology.
For the first method you depend on the mass of the water you release being significantly more than the one you lift. The second method is far far better in terms of energy released per gallon lost.
There is a nice trick to simplify things: Using the low of conservation of energy, **if you want to lift some mass,drop equal mass to the same height** (plus energy losses), **or drop half the mass to double the height**, or drop double the mass to half the height, or even drop one tenth of that mass to ten times the height and so on.
Btw, the fact that you are pumping water or sand, or whatever makes little difference to energy conservation, only to the technology used and the losses incurred...
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[Question]
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I'm creating a world inspired by [Immaterium](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Immaterium) from warhammer 40K.
**TL/DR**
There is an alternate dimension which is a realm of chaos, which enables lot of goodies in the real world, like faster than light travel, enormous power source. However all psykers who draw power from it are in danger of serving as an gateway for demons passing into the physical world and possessing the humans.
In warhammer universe this is solved by Inquisition killing all weak & untrained psykers, and those deemed strong enough are always watched and executed for slightest hint of [corruption](https://youtu.be/BrmJqY788Fc?t=875). The general population is kept ignorant in order to avoid temptation from chaos, since one person with psychic abilities who dabbles in occultism could doom millions.
Could democratic government handle better this situation? Or any democratic ideals would be sacrificed on the altar of survival.
**Answers**:
*Can you clarify what do you mean with "democratically handle"?*
It means general public is aware of the Immaterium, despite the dangers that some individuals could be corrupted and bring great calamity on the place where they live. And they freely vote for government officials how to handle the problem of rogue individuals opening gates of hell.
*Exactly what are we trying to handle?*
We are trying to handle that individuals with psyker abilities who are too weak fall to the temptations of the demons and doom the whole village/town/city . Example James the latent psyker who flew under the radar got fired from his job, bank took his car and his wife left him and took the kids. Demonic entities corrupt him with promises that if he does this dark ritual he'll get better job, new car, and his family will return. He does the ritual and all the citizen of his town are turned into killer zombies.
*And exactly what do you mean by "democratic?"* Free elections, free press, due process. If public find the representatives corrupt and incompetent they could vote them out of office every few years.
*Does the one has to be trained (and potentially licensed) to be a psyker, or this is the something that people are born with?*
Few people are born with potential to be psykers, they are the danger if they are too weak to handle their abilities.
[Answer]
**Yes and No**
There are really two questions here: would it be possible to handle the Immaterium better than an authoritarian society (e.g., the Imperium of Man in the inspirational material), and whether it would be possible to handle the Immaterium at *all*. Here's some points to consider from someone who is a bit familiar with the dynamic you're talking about.
The answer to this is rather simple: a democratic society would *not* handle the Immaterium better than an authoritarian one, but it wouldn't handle it worse, either. Rather, there really isn't a form of government that *can* reliably handle the Immaterium at all due to the Immaterium exploiting universal flaws in human nature rather than societal structure.
Indeed, in 40k itself the authoritarian nature of the Imperial government does not handle the Immaterium very well. Consider that little in 40k is actually presented from an omniscient third-person perspective; virtually all of the protagonists are human Imperials and thus make decisions and commentary from their cultural perspective (which is "the Imperium is always right", going back to the Great Crusade). Thus, they are going to claim that the Imperial method is "the only way" because it's what they've been indoctrinated to do.
Overall, the extensive body of thought experiments 40k literature has regarding the interaction between society and the Immaterium shows that ultimately authoritarian versus democratic governments are ultimately a wash. The authoritarian Imperium is good at identifying and destroying Chaotic incursions when they *do* happen, but ultimately their policies result in the average person living in the kind of misery that would lead them to turn to Chaos in the first place. There are even direct quotes from one of the primarchs, Roboute Guilliman, saying exactly this.
Additionally, their intolerant policies cost them allies against the Immaterium (even allies of convenience) as well as causing many of their loyal vassals to rebel out of fear for the most minor offenses that a less authoritarian government would let slide. Good examples include numerous cases in the Great Crusade where the Legions destroyed non-Chaos-corrupted human planets *and* their STCs (which the Imperium kind of needed), and in some cases those missions had direct Custodes-backed approval from the Emperor. A common theme in 40k is that the anti-Chaos races (Imperium, Eldar, Necrons, Tau) have really good reasons to put their differences aside and team up, but tragically *cannot* due to their own pride, ego, and dogma.
Similarly, the rigid class hierarchy the Imperium has produced has resulted in a large number of high-ranking Imperial military officers being closet-Khorne worshippers (demonstrated in books like *Fire Caste*), and a decent chunk of the Imperial nobles are worshipping Slaanesh in secret. **The Imperium likes to claim that due to its indoctrination the "enlightened" individuals at the top of things can resist temptation and...they cannot.**
This ties into a broader theme in the *Warhammer* multiverse: Chaos (the Immaterium) always wins. Fans don't like it because it reeks of nihlism, but this is the core theme of Warhammer that the authors and Games Workshop have repeatedly stressed in in interviews: **Chaos *will* always win, despite being disorganized, because mortals are fundamentally self-destructive, self-advancing, combative, and can't leave well enough alone** (which is seen by...the shape of the material realms in the various *Warhammer* universes).
**But what all this means for your question is that it ultimately doesn't matter if a government is a liberal democracy or authoritarian theocracy, ultimately the Immaterium will destroy it and societal policies will do nothing to reduce how fast it comes.** The pros and cons of a democratic versus an authoritarian government would come out in a wash, and ultimately the rates of immaterial incursion would be the same. A liberal democracy would have fewer people turning to Chaos, but would have a harder time catching Chaotic cults before they turned critical, and so the problem would be the same. It doesn't matter if you catch *most* of the Chaos cults, if you miss *one* your planet is doomed.
**40k stories like to *claim* that authoritarianism is the only way to handle Chaos, but the stories are written from the biased perspective of indoctrinated Imperials raised from birth (or even brainwashed in the case of Astartes) to see no other way.** This is shown by the large number of Crusade-era civilizations with better living standards than the Imperium and some knowledge of the dangers of the Warp that were able to survive just fine. The fact that the Imperium really *can't* tolerate an alternative, equally valid solution to their problems has been a core theme of 40k since day one.
Nor is this getting into the fact that **the Immaterium has been shown it could win easily at any time**, and the only reason the Imperium hasn't already fallen to Chaos is because 1) **the Immaterium is sentient and likes the Imperium to be the hell-hole that it is**, and 2) **later 40k stories have played up the Emperor of Mankind as this deus ex machina that magically protects the society and gives humanity a win button from the consequences of dealing with the Immaterium**. Unless your society has a 12 foot tall uber-psychic Hittite with gold armor running around you may need to find another solution.
**The other, *other* thing to consider is that while no society could handle the Immaterium as seen in the present 40k timeline, it could probably handle the Immaterium prior to the War in Heaven**. The "present" Immaterium is described as a maelstrom comprised mainly of the strongest and most harmful emotions known to rational beings. The Immaterium *prior* to the War in Heaven was a more nuanced place comparable to *Avatar*'s Spirit World or the portrayal of the spirit world in a lot of animistic religions. Because the Immaterium then was less corruptive, less malicious, less aggressive, and you could actually reliably find good or neutral daemons and Warp entities, it would be easier to argue that a society (of any governmental structure) *could* handle such a dimension.
[Answer]
No.
Western style democracy needs functional free press to spread the ideas and enable dialogue or at least dissemination of the ideas. If you muzzling the press to do cover ups, you don't have a functioning democracy. If you hide the knowledge of the immaterium because some of them could open the gates of hell you don't have a democracy. Just like Soviets trying to hide Chernobyl.
The closest thing in our world to restricting access to only the chosen few, is knowledge of creating weapons of mass destruction. And even then the basic underlying ideas to nuclear fission, genetics etc are open to everybody. So alternatively you could proclaim that immaterium is something that only few could handle and the rest should just do the right thing. If Covid was so deadly that 99.99% of people who got into contact with infected died, I'm pretty sure that everybody would have to be vaccinated by government fiat or else.
With survival of the species is at stake, tolerance for dissent would be minuscule. That might lead to soldiers in Hazmat suits killing people who refuse to be vaccinated. Democracy and human rights would go out of the window.
[Answer]
**Assuming normal human psychology at play, the results would be largely the same**
A democratic vote regarding the execution of weak or untrained psykers vs not is easy by way of the very explanation you've provided("since one person with psychic abilities who dabbles in occultism could doom millions"). Anyone with half or more of a brain would vote for their execution, but only if those were the only options to vote for.
The options could be execute, train, or leave them be, and then I think you'll find that the majority of votes will be in the execution or training field while the minority being in the leaving them be category because a weak or untrained psyker is essentially a recipe for eventual and guaranteed disaster.
Only a highly influenced voting population would choose for their leaving be, especially when there is an actual legitimate threat to doing so, but having the population vote would expose them to knowledge of the immaterium and as such would tempt them into chaos. Training them would be like teaching someone how to practically implement nuclear technologies. You could power cities, but you could also blow them up, for easy examples.
Whether democratic or tyrannical I'd think you'll find the fate of psykers to be largely the same.
[Answer]
I'm not very familiar with warhammer beside playing some [dawn of war 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000:_Dawn_of_War) long time ago, and watching few youtube videos.
From my understanding of the problem you want:
1. Democratically elected government that is more or less responsive to the issues that are important to the voters
2. Danger of demonic possession, that means Joe Average with some latent psychic ability finding obscure occult cult, and opening the gateway to hell
IMHO if the number of psykers is very low and damages could be contained to some places in the middle of nowhere, than democracy could work with demon fighting agency hidden from public eye doing cover ups. If demons appear in some major population center and you have to nuke large city, I doubt you could cover it. Your society will be militarized and paranoid with everyone suspecting everyone. I doubt that in those circumstances democracy could survive. "Don't vote for X (s)he is in cahoots with demons".
[Answer]
### You're all dead if you can't break from democracy
There's the famous quote from George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
We have a great current example of how it is impossible to manage existential infectious threats in a democracy. Covid-19 has demonstrated that the only way to stop an outbreak is with severely authoritarian measures. China naturally would be an example here - but Australia and New Zealand have taken very similarly strict measures. As a result, they have had very low rates of infection and death. The USA and UK governments took very little action and had very little enforcement - and the death rate in both countries was orders of magnitude higher as a direct consequence.
Gun control is the other great example here. The USA famously has very little control over owning and carrying a gun, and as a direct consequence has a higher death rate from gun-related crime than anywhere else in the world. (Yes I know, Switzerland also has high gun ownership - but Switzerland has substantial laws on gun control and registration too.) The democratic pressure from organisations like the NRA have ensured little or no action is taken to reduce this death rate, in spite of the evidence.
### No need for ignorance
I'm not sure there's any need to hide this from the masses though. A reasonable majority of the population are capable of basic reasoning to save their lives. If there's some kind of enforcement in play, relying on the majority to report their neighbours if their neighbours pose a direct risk to their family's safety is actually a positive move, because it lets you deal with problems more promptly. You can catch that latent psyker when they're still at the stage of making small coins levitate, instead of having to deal with them after they're possessed and they've killed the whole town. At the early stage, you can reason with them and get them into a suitable training establishment before everything goes bad.
But enforcement is the key here. If (like Covid-19 precautions in the the US and UK) it's not necessarily taken seriously, then everyone is in danger. Enforcement needs to be visible, and it needs to have teeth. A reasonable majority of the population are capable of thinking "if I don't behave sensibly then I'm putting my neighbours at risk, and even if I don't know them, that's a bad thing". But almost everyone is capable of thinking "if I don't behave sensibly then I'm going to be arrested and jailed, and that's a bad thing". And the ones incapable of that, they serve as an example to the rest.
[Answer]
Maybe depending of the mechanics and level of threat.
Here's a mechanics for handling psykers which is inspired by the the [fire triangle](https://www.sc.edu/ehs/training/Fire/01_triangle.htm).
I assume that opening gates of the immaterium is like an effect of nuclear bomb, everything in certain radius dies or gets corrupted so we have to kill it to stop the spread of the corruption or whatever.
In order to open the gate we need 3 things:
1. Knowledge of the ritual that opens the gate
2. Possessed psyker to provide the initial spark and corrupt cultists
3. Brainwashed cultists to provide "fissile" energy
The stronger the psyker the more rare they are and the easier they could brainwash cultists.
In order to stop demonic infestation you need to stop any of the three things listed above.
1. Destroy or keep under lock all the occult books, websites, videos that deal with the immaterium and only allow access to licensed individuals.
2. Test everyone for psyker abilities, if you could identify latent psykers you could train them or lock them down
3. Ban the demonic cults and educate the public for their danger.
In above mechanic it depends on how widespread the information is, how rare the psykers are, and how easily they could corrupt people.
I think if you want democratic government but you still want things to be interesting you need to do fallowing:
1. Information must be hard to transmit. Maybe you need special books, if everyone could go to open-hell-gate.com bunch of kids could play with it and if one of them is latent psyker things go to hell.
2. Psykers should be relatively rare or tests relatively good. The more people that could make nuke, the greater the chance some of them will make one
3. Resistant people to brainwashing to tip the police (inquisition whatever) for potential cults. Unless you want to go full stasi (surveilance state) somebody have to provide the information to the authorities.
Those three things (rituals, psykers, cultists) are like knobs to tweak the size of the problem.
If you make it challenging but controllable for the state, then modern states deal with problems of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction while still being democratic. If you make the problem too hard, voting would be least of our concerns.
Choose your own levels and good luck with your writing.
P.S.
Maybe you should add special kind of psyker for storytelling purposes that are too weak to open the gate nor brainwash people, but they could listen for recipes (rituals) from their warp masters. They could later look for latent psykers to tempt to chaos.
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**The Immaterium would be great for a democracy!**
The poor noble psykers who are mistreated by government forces, psykers who only wanted a better life for their families. Psykers must exercise their right to dabble in the occult! Government should concentrate on limiting the action of mentally ill or minority psykers and leave the persecuted good psykers alone.
Or the dangerous psykers and the damage they do to innocents, with their dangerous dabbling. How occult forces cannot possibly help, and crazed psykers kill dozens with their dabbling. How communing with the occult should be done only by sanctioned government agents and maybe not even then - maybe it is poisonous energy which should be banned entirely.
That is all elective officials would talk about. Salacious stuff! Much easier to talk about them than fiscal policy. There are parallels in real democracies, for sure.
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*"Although the signature of one mind is almost insignificant in the energy or influence it generates, when the imprints of an entire intelligent species of billions upon billions of individuals are combined they have a huge impact on the very nature and shape of the Warp.
This seems to imply that the Immaterium is not chaotic by nature, but has been made so by the conflict, misery and war that defines so much of the material realm."*
Based on this, all improvement made into the material world would make the Warp less dangerous progressively.
Since by the lore the God of Chaos don't desire to destroy the material world one can safely say Democracy will have time to develop and make an improvement from Totalitarianism in the life of people.
If elections are really free and so is the press, meaning that they don't bend to a secret criminal State agenda in any meaningful way, human development would improve in this universe to the point where the Warp would cease to be a serious danger.
On the contrary, after a certain tipping point, the Warp would start being the source of improvements to the material world quality of life starting and positive feedback that would increase exponentially.
**In conclusion, it seems the authoritarian regime is ensuring the situation worsens or stays idle. Improving the life of populations with democracy could be infinitely better.**
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[Question]
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The angels in question aren't angels in the "pretty people with wings" sense, they're more of horrific flying abominations that share the gilded and glowing aspects with the angels most would think of. There's varying forms, but the kind I'm working with here are the only ones with recognizably humanoid features, specifically the upper torso, arms, and head. Their limbs are distended and awkwardly long, but their wings are the largest part of their body, of which they have 4. They are also absolutely titanic in size, their horizontal wingspan being around 20 meters on average.
Culturally, the angels are fairly incomprehensible as their language is spoken through blowing air through the holes covering their featureless faces, sort of like a church organ, so they can't communicate with any other species. They are also (seemingly) malevolent, and are obsessed with causing pain to other species. Most angels do so by using magic that creates scorching golden flames that cause indescribable agony in any who touch it, but the numerous lesser forms carry weapons instead.
To elaborate on the limitations of what they can carry, they generally do not wear clothes but some wear jewelry or accessories, but none are seen having tools or bags with them. What they wield is limited to what they can fit in their hands.
I can't think of what would be a functional weapon for a legless, flying creature with extremely long arms. Swords wouldn't make sense, as those are intended for fighting while spending extended periods of time close to the target. I also want to incorporate their cultural aspect of causing extreme pain, but I'm not sure how. Ranged weapons would be fine but because of their anatomy and lack of ability to wear things, carrying ammunition like arrows would probably be implausible. What kind of melee weapon would make sense for their anatomy?
[Answer]
Some things that come to mind:
* They use sonic attacks, since they have an interesting vocal setup. This could stun groups of creatures with pain and work well as a defensive measure.
* An atlatl / spear thrower would take advantage of their already long arms to get some freaky fast spears. Malevolent creatures could barb their spears and coat them in some kind of pain-inducing poison.
* A bow would let them attack from a distance. I can imagine that their strong chest and back muscles would let them handle higher draw weights than a person might, at the cost of only being able to do so while gliding or soaring.
* They carry caltrops, which they litter near ambush sites to prevent their prey from escaping to cover. It won't take too many to really mess with people.
* Bags of large darts that they'll drop en masse on targets. Depending on lift capacity for the angels, this could be more or less effective. They could also train other flying creatures as basically beasts of burden that would carry more of these for them.
* If you want them closing to melee range for some reason, a pike (or other weirdly long spear) would work well, and their long arms would let them get that much extra reach when stabbing.
A society of such creatures would probably have people who specialize in each weapon and use the others less.
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## Breakaway barbed whips
You could tie these to wings. They would need a lot of skill to use, but you could fly down to enemies, wrap the whips around enemy body parts, and fly away. The barbed whips would stick in their body parts, disrupt equipment, and cause agonizing pain.
## Poisoned darts
They could hold a number in their many mouthes, and release these at enemies. The agonizing poison would rip people apart.
## Flamethrowers.
Carrying around a pump filled with oil is pretty easy. An angel can swoop down and ignite the oil with magic, burning lots of mortals at the same time.
## Glass, rocks, and sharp things.
It's easy enough to just fly up high and drop stuff on the enemy. Cut their feet, slice them apart, all while out of bowshot range. Let them die from a thousand cuts.
You can dip each shard of glass or rock in diseased flesh or poison for added fun.
## Long spears
Flying creatures are very vulnerable to having their wings ripped apart. If you want to fight close, why not use a lance? You can charge enemies, piercing and penetrating them, or you can stab them from afar.
You can also include spears with tips that break off, leaving a painful reminder of your presence.
[Answer]
Spears and longswords.
You said it yourself:
>
> What kind of melee weapon
>
>
>
So unfortunately this:
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> Swords wouldn't make sense, as those are intended for fighting while spending extended periods of time close to the target.
>
>
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Almost becomes a moot point.
Anyway, spears and very long swords should give them an advantage in that they could pierce or slash enemies from a safe(r) distance as they fly over their target.
Spears have been used in the past for tactical reasons wherever having more range than your opponent was a boon. There is an old samurai saying that in open battle, the right time to draw the sword is "when you run out of arrows and your spear is broken". According to Myamoto Musashi, spears are weapons for the open field. Still according to him, in closed spaces, a long sword would be preferable.
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*Have you ever had one of those days? A day where it doesn't matter how many times you look at the word "delicious" you just keep spelling it "deilcious?" Yeah... My answer is based on the idea that these beasties are 20m tall. But in reality they only have a wingspan of 20m (thanks for pointing that out, @mwarren). That means they weigh about 87 lbs (analysis based on the Wandering Albatross) and are the size of slender pre-teen children. Not a lot of threat here. The result is that most of my answer, which was already a 2nd attempt for misreading the Q the first time, is pretty much fun... but meaningless. Except for the section that starts, **Important:**. That section applies regardless the size of the creatures.*
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**OK, Let's try this again**
My last answer, which I deleted, completely reversed the question. Sorry about that.
What kind of weapon would the *angels* use, given that they're not prone to wearing clothes or carrying tools?
* **Trees** — and this shouldn't be underestimated, at 66-feet (20 meters) tall, they could uproot and effectively swing absolutely massive trees.
* **Boulders,** a handful of rocks, heck... a handful of *dirt* would be formidable coming from a creature this size.
* They could just **step on people,** the tallest known dinosaur is the [Sauroposeidon](https://www.thedinosaurmuseum.com/dino-facts), giving you a reference point for the size. The average human would only stand as tall as the angel's *ankles.* Heck, they could fall to their knees and start slapping the ground with their hands like humans would a big old spider (yeah, yeah, yeah, a spider standing as tall as our ankles... you'd do it if you weren't scared of spiders, though, wouldn't you?).
* **Spittle** — Stop laughing! This would be a terrifying weapon! How would you react to being hit with, what, 10-20 gallons of water starting with pressured force and falling at 32 feet/s2? In a similar vein, if combat is near a river or lake, they could simply scoop or slap the water with their hands to create equally terrifying waves of water. And I'm not going to but mention *urine.*
**IMPORTANT:** *You did NOT specify the defenders. Different weapons would be used for different defenders.* I've given you a list that assumes these creatures are fighting *human-sized combatants.* If you're asking what one angel would use to fight another angel... given the conditions you've specified, they'd simply use their fists and ignore the *marquis of queensbury's* rules.
Keep in mind that weapons (if you're inclined to use a weapon) are a function of the defender as much as the attacker. What do angels eat? How would they kill and prepare that meal? It would suggest basic knives (HUGE by human standards), but even a fork or spoon would be a frightening weapon in the angel's hands. If they're vegetarian, then they may not have any tools at all. Remember they'd be eating plants, probably the limbs and leaves of trees. Unless you design them otherwise, they'd have trouble even seeing the seeds to plant them (unlikely to have agriculture). The size of these creatures provides some uber-cool *limitations* that would impact what they'd likely consider to be a weapon.
Think through how the angels *live their lives,* because most weapons started with simple kitchen and farming implements.
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I think you can rule out any weapons that are designed to be swung (either side to side or overhead) repeatedly, as without being braced against the ground (or a rider in a saddle of a larger creature) it would be difficult to control their own bodies using such weapons (consider the effects of throwing even a light ball quickly while playing water polo, then adapt to trying to maintain position in mid air using wings at the same time as offsetting the swings of your weapon). Besides going into melee while still trying to fly just above the ground near your opponent would seem to give up any advantage flying gave them anyway.
That leaves two options I can think of, with missiles fired at range being the first - and direct fire missiles of any sort also seem like a bad idea as well (whether bows or firearms of some sort) - trying to fly in one spot while aiming at a remote target and keep your attitude is going to make for very low accuracy (which only works if there is going to be a lot of them to fire at once). I guess dropping something (maybe explosive or burning) would work though, although the mass and amount of times they can attack would then be limited by how much ammunition they could reasonably carry, which presumably would be quite low - think of the trouble larger birds have getting off the ground, so adding lots more mass is going to be hard to justify.
The other possibility is to parallel medieval knights or cavalry and use the mobility and speed of their flying to impale their enemies with something like a lance or spear as they "charge", or maybe something like a sabre used to cut down on enemies heads and necks as they fly past - this has the advantage (for your requirement) that it is mostly a cutting weapon because you don't want your weapon to get stuck in an enemy as you charge past, although they usually also have a sharp point for if you get bogged down and want to do damage as far as you and your weapon can reach, which may not be as much of an issue for these Angels with their even greater range of mobility.
So I could see either Angels with a lance charging at a something like a phalanx (or something along similar lines with shields and spears) - they can't attack too vertically or the Angel will crash into the ground as they follow through from the attack, but they would be able to change the direction of attack fairly easily, although still needing enough space/time after turning to get back up to speed to make the most of it. Of course solid hits are mostly going to be fatal, except limbs which would be more disabling but hard to do deliberately/repeatedly.
Alternatively with a sabre or similar weapon I could see them flying past repeatedly slashing and cutting each time, and as they are likely to stay around head height (or maybe slightly higher) and strike down on their opponent as they pass, most hits would be to the face, arms and neck.
Combating this would probably be spears again (at least for any melee fighters, maybe protecting archers to shoot at them in the air or as they approach) - you certainly want some range on your weapon to reach the opponent as they fly past, the shorter the weapon you wield, the smaller the window of opportunity to strike at them. Bladed polearms are unlikely to be useful as they are difficult to swing from side to side (while maintaining balance) - usually you are chopping downwards on the enemy (axe like), or using it to keep them at range while using either a pointed end to do the damage, or something like a hook to drag them down and remove the enemies mobility.
Defenders with swords would at least be able to protect themselves reasonably well, but counterattacking would be difficult as the Angel would likely be past them by the time they can strike, although maybe they could damage the wings as they go past, especially if they can parry the sabre in a way that allows them to immediately carry on into an attack as part of the same movement.
Overall I would try to analogize the Angels to mounted soldiers - weapons to take advantage of their mobility relative to their opponents, and tactics to avoid losing or wasting this advantage are going to make the most sense.
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I think the lesser angels would be chasing the curtails of the greater angels. I feel like it would make sense for them to scurry after the greater angels and collect any feathers that the greater angels drop.
I'm assuming that with 4, 20 meter long wings, that the feathers would all be larger and thicker. They would make good weapons themselves. The lesser angels could sharpen the quills of the feathers and fashion some sort of weapon from it. Perhaps make darts as you mentioned, or make arrows out of them.
They could collect the feathers and wear a ring of them around their waist or neck. The higher number of feathers a lesser angel collects -- the higher up in the pecking order they are because that means they follow the greater angels more closely, they're more devout. They are also stronger because they have more weapons/artillery at their disposal.
It also goes both ways, the more followers a greater angel has, the stronger the angel essentially is. Because the lesser angels would gravitate to whomever had the largest/strongest feathers.
It would be a fun concept.
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What is your technology level? And what is the number of angels you are dealing with? What is their physical resistance? [Gatling gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun) (19th century) seems rather efficient. Moving upwards with technology, [microwaving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System) (late 20th century) them would work even better. Moving downwards, [Zhūgě crossbow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow) (early first millennium) could work as well. Greek fire ([1st millennium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire)) could work, too.
If you are desperate and your technology level is really low, you might want to capture such an angel (using e.g. nets made of bronze chains, or just sturdy wet animal hide) no matter what your casualties, and given they "do so by using magic that creates scorching golden flames that cause indescribable agony in any who touch it", force him to create the flame and direct it towards other angels by [whatever means you are able to persuade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture) him.
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These creatures are massive and airborne, so a little bit of leverage and reach is all they need.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0vlAWm.jpg) 
Pointy ones for the well armored, or for skewering and tossing at others.
For the second, well, humans have already optimized how to deal with moderately fast small objects. Scale this up and toss in some finger-width barbed wire to up the sadism factor and we're good to go.
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My first answer would be a bow and arrow or weighted darts but you said melee.
They have range and height advantages so it would be detrimental to give those up and get close when they don't have to. However, lets look at melee weapons:
It all depends on how strong they are and how strong their flying ability is.
If they match their target or their flight strength cannot lift their target, you want a serrated slashing weapon; something that won't get stuck in the target which would either cause them to lose the weapon or would ground them with the target (losing their flight advantage). The tactic would be to fly by (preferably overhead) and make slashing attacks as they pass. Note that the serrations don't do much for combat effectiveness but you said that they were sadistic and having to make more passes to create more ripping wounds sounds about their speed.
If they are strong compared to their targets then some kind of barbed spear or hook would work to scoop the target up. then they can let the target dangle from the weapon impaling them as they fly off. If the target is a bit feisty, drop them a time or three from a non fatal height and re-grab them.
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Rocks, trees any thing that can be dropped. Let gravity do the work for them. If they must have a more traditional wepon perhaps a club for smashing large monuments.
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If they are much bigger than their victims and can easily lift them into air a [speargun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speargun) would do.
Otherwise you can remove the hook from the spear and keep the line to recover the spear.
[Answer]
The fantasy weapon YouTube channel Shadiversity did an entire piece on this topic: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX02-O2dB9Q>
His conclusions were either:
1. [Flechettes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flechette) (weighted spikes) dropped from above
2. Bladed shoes to be used as part of a swoop attack (the idea being something that could do solid damage on a slash but not get stuck in people, so that the creature could regain altitude immediately with its weapon)
[Answer]
My first thought is:
**Dimensional bending**
These are Cthulhu tier horrors. Possibly multi-dimensional. What you are seeing may only be the maddened form your brain can manage to give what is actually a single extension of a higher dimensional horror. It's possible that every creature is actually a "finger", if you will, of a single creature from a higher dimension, reaching in to our space to fiddle around. It doesn't need a weapon. It doesn't really even understand the concept or likely think of its actions as specifically hostile in that it doesn't recognize other creatures as even being sentient.
It's more like, "Oh, what's this? It's neat the way this bit seems to be filtering this fluid. Let me examine that." (Story: "The creature leaned forward, stretching its arm towards Sam, who was too horrified to move. Without so much as a tear or a ripple it simply reached into Sam, and when it pulled its hand away, it was holding a kidney.")
Or "What is this pesky fly trying to do? Excuse me. I am trying to study this machine", thinks the creature, as it casually swats Sam. Being that it is actually a multi-dimensional monstrosity whose total mass is far more than can be seen, when it casually swats Sam away, not really intending specific harm per se, it basically hits him with the force of a wrecking ball. Sam's mashed up corpse is found half a mile away, in a tree.
If anything, the problem would be developing a way for anything to fight it. Some sort of disruption effect that only impacts the way higher dimensions connect, perhaps... Sufficiently powerful and directed, it can make a creature simply vanish, as the controlling entity gets a sensation somewhat like touching a hot stove and pulls its "finger" away...
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[Question]
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Human torso on horse body, classic centaur.
Actually let's just say "horses" for simplicity sake.
Can horses do tug of war without breaking their legs?
[Answer]
### Yup. Totally doable.
Horse can easily win against 10 people:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OeW5y.jpg)
[Video evidence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am12vkvkTJQ&ab_channel=RobertPiessens)
[Answer]
Easily.
If you tie a horse up on its halter (rope going from under their chin to a pole or similar), and the horse REALLY wants to go, it will jerk its head up and run backwards until the pole gives or the rope tears. This IS dangerous, as the horse can easily break its neck if the horse slips or falls - a centaur likely would not have that problem, though.
As for me, I've personally seen horses back away from a dislodged pole, and for a very frightening moment, it looked like they played tug of war - each mare pulling in a different direction, running backwards, until I was able to clip off one of the ropes and free them. They were both really scared, though, and just trying to get away, no fun involved.
Usually horses would pull going forward like the pony in the video linked before me, as walking backwards is strictly an evasive move. Centaurs being more like humans, they might play tug-of-war as you imagine it; the anatomy should allow it.
And to directly answer: No, a horse would not break its legs playing tug-of-war. If the angle is bad and/or they slip, the neck would be the most likely breaking point, so a centaur pulling with his arms should be reasonably safe. ('Relatively' meaning that you could still break a leg if you just try hard enough or just have that kind of luck.)
[Answer]
# What horse?
There's horses and horses and horses and horses (and horses and even more horses). What ones are your centaurs based off of?
**If someone is talking about how fragile a horse's legs are and how easily they get broken, they're implicitly talking about a modern breed of racehorse.**
Racehorses are bred specifically to accelerate and gallop quickly. The biggest limitation on how fast a racehorse can run is how fast it can move its legs back and forth, which in turn is determined by the muscle mass vs "dead weight" of bones. If you want to breed a faster horse, you're necessarily breeding one with a lower bone-mass-to-weight ratio. But why would your centaurs have the bodies of a modern thoroughbred, when horses didn't start having those bodies until the 1700s? A centaur that couldn't gallop over slightly rough terrain seems unlikely.
**The horse in the video Ash linked is a modern draft horse.**
Draft horses are bred to slowly pull a lot of weight, the opposite of racehorses. As you can see from the video, they have massive legs and lots of muscle. Draft horses will happily pull a ton or two across the dirt on a sled, and will not break their legs from such normal low-impact exertion as a tug of war. But again, why would a "naturally"-occurring centaur have the body of a draft horse? Draft horses are tools, and centaurs aren't breeding themselves to pull things for humans.
**The progenitors of modern draft horses were late-medieval war horses**
A good one to look at is the Andalusian, but a lot of medieval war horses were in the same vein. War horses were trained to jump into the air and kick both forward and backward simultaneously. While wearing mail barding and carrying an adult man who's wearing plate armor. The people they were kicking probably also had steel plate armor. Suffice to say, their limbs were durable, and they probably wouldn't break them by accident in a tug of war, even against another horse. If your centaurs are militaristic, they might have developed a warhorse body. In this case, they'd be plenty muscular and durable for athletic pursuits, and a 500kg centaur would handily beat 500kg of humans in tug of war. But the ancient Greeks who came up with the centaur never saw anything as large as an Andalusian, so it's probably not what they were envisioning.
**Some people believe that the centaur myths were created from encounters with early cavalry**
In this case, the horses involved would be large enough to be ridden (obviously), but not necessarily by a man in heavy armor. In many depictions, the early riding horses were small enough that the rider's feet hung roughly at the horse's hock. Still, they're depicted as being reasonably well built, and the whole point of cavalry was that they could charge across terrain too rough for chariots. They're probably not going to break bones, but they also wouldn't be able to effortlessly pull ten men off their feet. They'd likely be better than an equal weight of men, but not by too much (and they'd weigh closer to 350kg than to 500kg).
**But when the centaur myths started, most Greeks hearing them would have been thinking chariot horses.**
For the first half of their history, domestic horses were too small to carry a rider (at least, at a gallop). Early horses were bred for food and for pulling chariots. While this is still "pulling things," chariots were only used on flat, even terrain. There's a huge difference between pulling a wheeled object on a dirt road and pulling a resisting competitor who's digging into the dirt. Depictions of early chariots suggest the horses involved were about as tall as men (MUCH smaller than modern breeds, and were lean with thinish legs. So it's questionable whether a 300kg centaur based on such horses could win against 4 adult men. It might depend on how well the men worked as a team.
**But what about wild horses?**
In my world, centaurs were created before the domestication of horses, and resemble wild horses with elven upper bodies. Wild horses aren't even as tall as humans, and they're also more stocky in the body (in comparison to their size). They wouldn't get broken bones easily, but they probably wouldn't excel at pulling things. A few humans would probably be able to compete against one centaur.
[Answer]
You didn't specify whether tugging forwards or backwards. Here's backwards. The equine doesn't even seem to be trying hard.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wHxtj.png)
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[Question]
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Consider a hot desert with temperatures between 30-40 degrees Celsius year round and 100 mm of precipitation annually. Suppose some corpses are placed on racks and predators are kept away. Sand is removed if it accumulates on the corpses. What would the corpses look like 30 years later? I imagine that they would not mummify, as there is some rainfall on occasion. Would they be reduced to skeletons? What would the bones look like?
[Answer]
After 30 years nothing would remain. The bones would be completely worn away. [This article](https://ncssm.instructure.com/courses/1674/files/327204/download?download_frd=1) has an in-depth analysis:
>
> J Forensic Sci 1989 May;34(3):607-16.
>
> Decay Rates of Human Remains in an Arid Environment
>
>
>
It indicates that an exposed corpse would be mostly worn down to bone fragments with in 3 years:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sZW0u.png)
As the figure indicates, after 3 years complete skeletal decomposition has already begun. After 30 years there would be nothing left.
[Answer]
**Flies will eat them. Fast.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vAniq.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_entomological_decomposition>
Flies eat meat fast. In a desert like you describe with a little rainfall there will be flies. They will show up within the day. They like it hot. It is nice and wet in a carcass. They will eat these carcasses in no time. Beetles show up eventually and take care of skin and hair.
If you are digging it, the linked wikipedia article shows the sequence and lets you know exactly what insects show up. The article does not say when because that depends. There is a pig carcass shown at each stage of decomposition and if you click the picture it states when the image was made, which is pretty cool. This pig is in the "advanced decay" stage. It has been dead 11 days.
The 5th stage image is from 1 month later and it is just bones.
At 10 years I bet not even that. The sun will be hard on these bones and they will crumble.
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But you can get ancient mummies in a desert. Check out this guy. He is 3000 years old and he looks good.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/As6wS.png)
[European Celtic mummies found in China](http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/228194)
As I understand it he was underground, out of the weather. There is no rain in this desert and no flies. I think the Atacma desert mummies are formed similarly.
[Answer]
After 30 years in a desert all that would remain would be bleached bones. Biological and chemical decomposition would destroy most of the flesh within a few years and would be accelerated by rain which would provide moisture for bacteria to work on. Physical decomposition by way of freeze thaw would also serve to break up the remains.
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[Question]
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I'm thinking of having a world that has a moon that's been partially split (so not fully halved) with the debris slowly separating from it. At night you'd see the split moon mainly and lots of various-sized mirror reflectors around that. How would a moon like this effect the planet, tides, etc?
Assuming this is one moon for the one world that will take a very long time to slowly separate into at least two halves, with a lot of debris surrounding it, maybe even a ring around the halves, what planetary changes would be involved at the least and greatest states of this disintegration of their moon?
[Answer]
In order for the fragments not to simply reform into a single body from their own gravity, the damaged moon would have to meet certain criteria.
Either it would have to be within the planet's Roche limit, or the fragments would have to have been launched at above the moon's escape velocity. Since you want a slowly evolving situation, the latter can be ruled out, so we need to assume the moon in question is so close to its primary that it was on the verge of tidal destruction anyway -- and when the "damage" (pretty much have to be an impact) took place, the fragements had tidal forces separating them with barely more force than the gravity that would tend to bring them together.
If the timing was *just right* the fragments of the moon would drift apart over a period of months, years, perhaps even generations. The smaller bits that were blasted clear by the impact would already have begun to form a ring system, though it would be faint at first -- but as the major fragments, already fractured by the main impact, begin to tidally separate the collisions between them would increase the count of small fragments, filling in a ring (more like those of Jupiter or Neptune, rather than the huge gaudy system Saturn shows).
The effects of all this on the primary would be, first, a heavy meteorite bombardment near the moon's orbital plane (likely the planet's equator as well); this will continue for a long time, as fragments decay orbit. Second, there would be a huge change in the planetary tides -- assuming the moon was large enough to raise noticeable tides in the first place, those tides would gradually lessen as the peaks and valleys of the cycles spread out, eventually vanishing entirely as the moon finishes its transformation into a ring.
As noted by Morris The Cat, these same tidal effect changes would also apply to the primary's crust -- though in the case of a moon already near its Roche limit and a breakup event "barely big enough", these would be gradual rather than catastrophic. You'll still have plenty of trouble with the impact belt (and it'll cause some tsunamis, too); it might still be an extinction event, but the required breakup impact is much smaller in this case and it need not be an instantaeous catastrophe.
[Answer]
The book [Seveneves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves) has the moon break into 7 parts for no particular reason. It just broke; it did not blow up. The parts bump and grind into each other. A few weeks after it happens one big part breaks into 2 little ones and they break up more and more.
One problem is the little parts of the moon that come down to earth. That actually turns out to be more than a little problem. In the short term the center of mass of the moon stays the same and stuff is unchanged as regards tides. Of course the moon looks different on account it is 7 (then more) big pieces and many little ones.
On thinking about it I am not sure why little pieces came to earth except that this phenomenon drove the whole plot and without it there would be no story. The little pieces are a lot closer to the moon's barycenter than to earth and I think they would all stay close to home. It is hard scifi and I am sure he explained why.
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It depends a lot on what kind of relationship the planet and the moon had to start with. If we're assuming the same relative masses and distances that the earth and the moon have, then the results would be pretty dramatic.
For starters, let's think about how much energy we're talking about. In order to have the moon split, and STAY split, you'd have to accelerate most of the 7x10 to the 19th power tons of the moon's mass beyond its 2.4 km/s escape velocity.
That's... a pretty stunning quantity of energy and any event capable of creating this would have some effects on your planet too before you even GET to the secondary effects. that kind of energy output would by necessity turn a not-insignificant fraction of the moon directly into light, heat, and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. You'd have some really spectacular aurorae at the very least and probably most or all of the side effects of a direct impact from a [Coronal Mass Ejection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection#Impact_on_Earth).
Zeiss Ikon already talked about the meteorite bombardment and the tides, but again if you're starting with something analogous to the Earth/Moon system, you're ALSO going to have earthquakes. The moon applies those tidal forces to the earth's crust too, not just the oceans, so a disruption to those tidal forces is also going to cause a lot of moving and shaking on the fault lines. That means earthquakes AND volcanoes, AND the associated tsunamis in addition to the tidal disruptions you're already getting.
TLDR: It would be a major [extinction-level event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event).
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[Question]
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I want you to meet Gary. Gary looks like a human, walks like a human, and talks like a human. But he's not. He's a superhero, or a magician, or... something. He's not really sure. He just knows that he has the mysterious ability to be able to safely transfer the entire mass of an object he touches into his own corporeal frame. Not the matter, just the mass. The effect lasts as long as he remains in contact with the object or he chooses to put the mass back. He can use this ability instantly, either activating it or deactivating it.
For example, if he holds a solid 1-cm cube of gold, he will add 19.28 g to his own mass and be left holding a 1-cm cube of gold-colored air (effectively; the whole effect is kinda confusing, so Gary doesn't like trying to explain it).
One day, Gary gets into a fist fight with Superman. He's kinda concerned about getting hit, so he decides to plant his feet firmly on the ground and... take all the mass of the Earth into his frame anytime his super-powered opponent takes a swing at him.
While Gary gets a kick out of watching Superman's fist bounce off his face, he's concerned about the side effects of having that much mass displaced.
Do objects begin flying/sliding toward Gary? Does the Earth's frame deform or its orbit change? How long can Gary retain the Earth's mass before these effects are noticeable or dangerous, to him or others?
Please help put Gary's mind at ease.
Note: For this question, "the Earth" consists of all terrain features on the surface of the planet, the crust, and all material below the crust.
[Answer]
Before we get to the Earth-situation, let's first explore exactly what Gary's powers entail. We're well outside classical physics now, sailed past classical physics and are now looking at an obscure mathematical description of the universe, called the Plot Field Equations - a description that is only valid at sub-Planck scale.
Let's look at the gold block example and extrapolate from there. The block Gary's holding is obviously the opposite of dark matter. Dark matter is only affected by gravity, not by electromagnetic interactions. Gary's block is affected only by electromagnetic interactions (it's still a solid block, which indicates repulsion from electrons) but not by gravity. Let's call it Light Matter. Due to conservation of mass, Gary acquires the mass from the converted objects.
Light matter is still a solid, and everything not held together by gravity still behaves roughly the same - trees stay tree shaped. Thanks to the intricacies of Plot Field Equations, the gold block nor the tree fly off at light speed. This is because Light Matter resists motion linearly with velocity - an effect quite similar to momentum, but the mass scalar is replaced with the Plot Tensor. Effectively, for most materials (except highly crystalline materials due to the alignment of the Plot Tensor) it feels like a very light block but it will not fall to the Earth.
Now what happens to the Earth if it turns into Light Matter?
The Earth is compressed under it's own mass. First, it will uncompress rapidly. The crust still has Light Momentum, but the compressive force is so massive that the entirety of the crust will be launched into space. Obviously this is not a desirable outcome. Instead, our hero must only acquire the mass of the Earth very briefly to withstand the punch, and then immediately revert. Everything will feel a brief jolt and that's it.
Perhaps this massive jolt is instead absorbed in the Plot Field due to the remnant gravitational waves. Now we're approaching the situation that looks like a proper Super Hero Power.
The first is that the local gravity vector is pointed towards Gary. Gary will soon be pummeled by pebbles, rocks - basically everything's that loose. Everything in the vicinity of Gary will be destroyed. Only sufficiently far, on the other side of the planet, people will not really notice, everything else falls towards Gary
The alternative is to include all objects on Earth as light matter. I'm afraid that means all people near the equator will sail off into space as they slip the bonds of gravity.
All in all, it's a terrible idea Gary. Don't do it. The Plot Field Equations will not save you this time.
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A better idea would be to only transfer the momentum rather than the mass. I suppose certain solutions of the Plot Field Equations allow for such a violation of Einstein's equivalence principle. The mass of objects on top of the Earth should be plenty to avoid random debris in space knocking Earth off of it's trajectory. A large meteoroid impact will however literally knock the Earth from its socks. Also, Gary will continue moving in whatever direction be was before (remember, any gravitational or other forces are insignificant compared to his momentum). Hopefully for Gary, that's up into space (if he brought a parachute) and not plowing straight into the Earth.
Silly Gary.
[Answer]
Gary will immediately collapse into a super-dense ball of whether humans become when they're compacted in that way.
The Earth's suddenly massless material will all speed away at the speed of light - as all massless objects *must* travel at the speed of light.
What was once Gary and is now super dense something will continue to orbit the Sun on a very slightly different orbit. The moon will orbit Gary with a very slightly disturbed orbit as well. Happily no one will notice as they'll be all randomly heading off into space in bits at the speed of light.
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> I specifically stated that Gary can safely acquire the mass of other objects
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Even so, Gary (and Superman) will also be bathed by the sudden flash radiation of uncountably many zero mass electrons zipping along at the speed of light. Even with zero mass they have charge and Gary unharmed by the mass he's acquired will be ripped apart by this barrage of sort-of-electrons (and protons and every things else). It's instant death one way or another for Gary.
Presumably after Gary actually dies from this weird radiation immunity from sudden swallows of mass ceases ? Not that it matters. because he's dead. If he looses his immunity he's going to superdense ball land (but will be dead during the trip).
Superman will, of course, be unharmed. Krytonite only is his problem. Gary ain't Superman and, like Batman, will be instantly dead. We can only pray for Wonder Woman.
Physicists somewhere else will be happy (and somewhat surprised) to discover the existence of the charged massless elementary particles that were once massive electrons. That's going to really mess up a number of important theories, as we don't think a charged massless particle is possible. Of course we're dead so what we think doesn't matter.
Superman is not going to be affected by any of this unless Gary becomes Kryponite. Superdude might be a bit put out by the disappearance of Lois Lane (as I will be about Wonder Woman) and it's a good job for Gary he's dead already.
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Good news !
As a superdense ball of something or other Gary no longer has to worry about *anything* and is, indeed, no longer an identifiable sentient entity. And he should stay that way with Superdude upset about the girlfriend thing.
[Answer]
# He will launch off the surface of the planet immediately and then go back to normal.
Assumptions:
1. Inertia is a property of matter, not mass.
2. "The earth" is defined as everything that lies within the exosphere
3. He has to contact a solid in order for his ability to work. (gas doesn't count as an object)
4. Gary is protected from the effect of his own power. (I mean, the Flash doesn't break his bones while running, or when punching at supersonic speeds, this is pretty much a given for super powers)
Results:
1. The Earth is spinning, usually Gary is held down to the surface by gravity, but now that the earth has no mass (as now only Gary does) the earth isn't holding him down anymore. If Gary were near the equator, he'd lift off the surface by his own momentum at an apparent acceleration of 0.003 G (though it's really just the earth rotating out from beneath him) as he nears the arctic circle it will reduce to about half of that, so he's going to loose contact with the ground, at which point he'll have to break the connection (as he won't be touching the ground anymore). Then everything would immediately return to normal.
2. The earth is also moving around the sun at a speed of about 67,000 mph, however, this isn't going to have a very big effect on Gary, as he is only going to have about 0.0005 G of apparent acceleration due to the sun's gravity (the direction depending on what time of day it is. He probably won't even notice as #1 will dominate him floating.
3. Superman, wouldn't have any mass either, as he's within the exosphere, so something strange and confusing would happen to his fist as it collides with Gary's face.
4. Everything on earth, the water, etc. wouldn't move toward Gary at all because, they didn't have mass to be attracted to him by gravity.
5. The orbit of the moon will be altered a little as the center of mass that it's orbiting has been moved by one Earth radius ~4,000 miles, but that's not really significant as the difference between the moon's largest distance from earth and its smallest is over 25,000 miles.
6. The earth's orbit will change because of the time spent without the sun pulling it back, but as it was a short time and was only missing that 0.0005 G of acceleration it also will fall within the normal orbital variation.
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Even assuming Gary's body is somehow immune to the large list of physics-related problems that immediately spring to mind for super-concentrated masses, it doesn't look good for anyone involved.
Think of the Earth + Gary as a single system. That system has the same total mass as it always had, only the center of mass has moved. At astronomical scales, that's not far enough to seriously perturb the orbit of the planet or the moon. You might shave a few fractions of a second off of the next leap year, but nothing catastrophic here. Just don't keep it like this for a long time.
The problems are on the smaller scales. Particularly, imagine if you were on the opposite side of the planet from Gary. The mass of the Earth+Gary system is the same, but your distance from the center of mass is now roughly twice as far as it was a moment ago. That's a sudden and instantaneous drop in the gravitational force applied. You were standing on the ground, which means the force of gravity pulling you down compressed the ground, and this was balanced by the recoil forces of the ground pushing back up on you. Assuming the Earth remains a solid, there will be an instant where the recoil force will remain the same, but the gravitational force will be reduced. The net effect would be like placing an action figure on a table and then bumping the underside of the table. The poor guy would pop up in the air and fall back down. Whether this equates to an awkward stumble or a three-story toss is left to the storyteller. At a minimum, you'll have lots of fragile knick-knacks broken.
If the Earth does *not* remain a solid (if it becomes "Earth-colored air" like your gold block example), then the poor folks on the other side of the planet are in a *really* rough spot. They'll be accelerated towards the center of gravity of the Earth+Gary system, and with no solid ground to hold them up, they'll move into the interior of the planet. When Gary puts the mass back, they'll be stuck underground, inside the planet. Not only would this be an irritating inconvenience, you'd have all sorts of problems with two things trying to occupy the same space at the same time.
Gary is in a particularly rough spot, though. Gravity normally pulls him towards the ground, and that force results in friction between his feet and the ground. That friction is what allows him to stand in place when a force pushes on him. Once the mass gets redistributed, the Earth has zero mass. There's no longer any force to generate friction between him and the Earth. Without anything holding him in place, the impact of Superman's punch would send him sailing off into the distance. He'd lose contact with the Earth, his powers would no longer work, the mass would return to normal, and he'd fall to the ground with a lot of horizontal momentum. When he hit the ground his powers would re-activate and the Earth would go massless again. Gary's velocity vector at that point has a downward component, so his momentum carries him into the interior of the Earth. There's nothing here with mass to impede his motion, so he continues on that vector until he crosses back out of the planet somewhere else, loses contact with the Earth, gravity returns, he falls back towards the Earth, his powers re-activate, etc, etc. It might actually take Gary a rather long time before he comes to a halt. He's now like a stone skipping across a pond, if that stone could skip on the top and bottom surfaces of the water.
Luckily, there's an easier solution to all of this. If you're going to get in a fight with Superman, let him punch you. Block the punch and the instant he makes contact with you, take away all of *Superman's* mass. A punch thrown by a massless assailant will have zero kinetic energy behind it. Kinetic energy must be conserved so it will be absorbed into Gary along with the mass but when it's evenly distributed throughout his body, it's nothing he can't handle (that's one way bullet-proof vests work).
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So if your character is taking all the mass of the whole planet, then I assume that his powers can absorb the mass of things touching the things he's touching, so part of this depends on what still has mass once he's absorbed the mass of the planet.
As a human is much smaller than the Earth, the distance between Gary's surface and his center of mass will mean a much higher gravitational force.
Anything left with it's own mass (including atmosphere if it still has mass) will start falling towards Gary. Things with mass near Gary will be crushed and anything with mass on the other side of the planet will effectively be launched into orbit around Gary, as he's effectively just doubled their distance to the center of gravity they were falling towards previously.
I'm assuming that the things without mass can't be crushed in this state as the gold cube didn't implode previously, but anything not fixed down, while not affected by Gary's gravitational field, will now be free to drift off into space unless trapped by other forces heading towards Gary.
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**Gary will implode.**
Gary is effectively super massive and his new gravitation will wreak havoc on his surroundings but will first compress him and kill him pretty much instantly. If the mass remains in him possibly the earth reforms with him as the new core though the result won't be anything like the earth we have today.
The earth no longer has gravity and things farther away from Gary go flying off into space. The moons orbit is permanently altered and it goes flying off into space. The world probably ends as the inner core of the earth now that gravity is no longer holding it together is going to expand greatly causing super earthquakes at a minimum.
I would be hard pressed to imagine Gary could survive even a nanosecond with that much gravity in him.
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I will provide a more optimistic, less killy scenario. One of the problems with the proposed power is that it only works with "an object Gary is touching". (Now strictly speaking, you can't 'touch' anything because at a molecular level, nothing is touching anything) The thing is "Earth" is not a simple object, it is a large collection of objects, one of which is Tectonic plates. So Gary's power should be limited to one tectonic plate worth of mass. This would be enough to give Gary the inertia he wants while stealing roughly ~(1/7)% of the Earth's mass (There are 7 plates and [the crust is 1% of Earth's total mass](https://courses.lumenlearning.com/geophysical/chapter/the-composition-and-structure-of-earth/)).
Now, it could also be argued that "loose dirt" is not one object so Gary would need his feet on limestone or something, or be limited to just the mass of the pavement he is standing on.
Of course this assumes he remembered to take his shoes of before the fight.
Also that superman doesn't just, you know, laser-eye, blizzard breath, simply tie up, [punch harder](https://www.cbr.com/superman-overpowered-feats-of-strength/), Phantom Zone, or lets the over-enthusiastic police taz Gary. (On second thought, Gary's first mistake was fighting Superman)
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Gary is dead, and everyone else, is dead. Upon absorbing the mass of the Earth, Gary suddenly has a density of approximately 5.97\*10^24 kg/m^3 or 5.97\*10^21 g/cm^3. For reference, the core of the sun has a density of roughly 150 g/cm^3.
As such, Gary would potentially trigger nuclear fusion and the resultant heating would likely cause him to explode like a nuclear bomb.
Ignoring this, Gary has bigger problems. The surface of Gary would suddenly have a gravitational acceleration of 1.59\*10^15 m/s^2. This would be immediately catastrophic, even without mass, the Earth would be pulled inwards onto Gary, wrapping around him to place him at the center. This would liquify the entire planet and destroy everything on its surface.
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[Question]
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So based on my limited understanding, some luxury cars have taken to using their sound system to make the cabin quieter when on the highway or something (Active noise control via wikipedia). And I learned about destructive wave interference in high school physics.
First of all, this is a thing, right? Secondly, I know vaguely how suppressors work and they're not strictly "silencers", but would using some sort of sound system with "anti-noise" be possible for reducing weapon report? And if it's not feasible with technology or whatever IRL, without worrying about such limitations, would it make sense in an advanced society?
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Noise cancellation is a tricky thing.
Noise cancelling uses a soundwave with an opposite "wave" to cancel the other out. But since its a wave you essentially create an expanding bubble from the center of the Noise. Since you cant have your speaker perfecrly on top of the center of the Noise you'll create an interference pattern: at some places the Noise is cancelled, at some the Noise is doubled!!
Noise cancelling works by using a sound you already know is going to be made and a range of speakers placed inside the room. For a project we could only cancel out repetitive noises that could be predicted. We also needed to know the way sound bounced through the room (far beyond my expertise) and where people would be to make sure the double-noise area's happened somewhere people wouldnt be. So if your Noise cancelling worked it would need to know the placement of every person upon firing your weapon and the environment you are in at the same time. Worse: with speakers on the muzzle you might stop the muzzle sound but not the sound of the bullet breaking the sound barrier.
I dont think Noise cancellation will work very well to silence weapons.
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If the gun is suppressed and has subsonic muzzle velocity, then noise cancellation should work for the remaining noise. In practice I am not sure if it would be worth it as a suppressed gun firing subsonic ammunition is usually good enough especially if you use a captive piston ammunition. But you'd only need it at few locations so the cost might be low enough for the reduction in noise to be worth it.
The reason gun needs to be suppressed and subsonic first is because otherwise the gun will emit noise that noise cancellation is not really feasible against. You cannot really do anything about the shock waves caused by supersonic projectiles or propellants for example without raising questions why you are using a bullet at all instead of just weaponizing your technology to kill people without physical bullets. Same with negating noise from the propellant in general. If your electric system can negate it practically, you might as well skip the propellant and use your technology to directly drive the bullet without using chemical propellant at all.
So my answer would be that using it as a replacement for current "silencing" technologies would not make sense but it might be used in addition to them for minor gains.
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The noise canceling waveform would have to have a similar amplitude to the gunshot. Gunshots are in the range of 120 up to 175 decibels. A speaker that produces such a loud sound will need a lot of power, as much as a kilowatt (maybe less if it is just a single shot, maybe more if its a big gun). A typical guitar half stack can use around 500 watts of power, but it is large - 4 x 12 inch speakers. This puts power and size constraints on your noise canceling system.
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Physics is against you on this one.
Muzzle blast (which is the precursor event) is caused by the expulsion of a fairly large amount of high-pressure gas at very high speed. Any cancelling impulse will require the production of a similar event, but with negative pressure, in effect producing a transient vacuum. Furthermore, the amplitude of the vacuum is fixed (at zero pressure, obviously) while the muzzle blast has no obvious upper limit.
Finding out the peak overpressure of a rifle or pistol muzzle blast does not seem to be easily done on the internet, but [here is an amateur attempt](https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ndia/2010/armament/WednesdayCumberlandPhilipDater.pdf) which suggests a peak muzzle pressure on the order of 5700 psi, or about 387 atmospheres. This would seem to indicate that you'll need a vacuum volume equivalent to 387 times the size of the gas bubble emerging from the muzzle. This will also require addressing the pressure wave produced by ignition of unburned propellant after it is expelled from the barrel (muzzle flash).
In effect, you'd need rather a large array of speakers very close to the muzzle which would operate to produce a local vacuum which would be filled by the muzzle gases, and I'm not at all certain how to this, or even if it's possible. The rate of pressure decrease produced by the speakers would very high (high frequency response) at the same time that the volume displaced would also be very large, and the two requirements are entirely antagonistic in normal speaker design. Subwoofers move a lot of air, but not at high frequencies.
If you're willing to set up your speakers as a shell at some large distance from the weapon, the idea seems technically feasible, but such a speaker array would draw a whole lot of attention to the presence of the shooter, which seems unlikely to be desireable. Plus, of course, it would not exactly be very portable.
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[Question]
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The question [Could we still live if Earth's spin speed slowed down by 90%](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8408/could-we-still-live-if-earths-spin-speed-slowed-down-by-90) assumed Earth's spin speed slowed down by undefined human activities (as if climate change was not bad enough). One answer suggested that Earth spinning slower will have weaker magnetic field, which is Not GoodTM
My question is: If that happened, what would be a plausible way to get to Earth spin faster, to get back the protection provided by Earth's magnetic field? Back to normal 24 hour days? Without destroying Earth in the process, so please no asteroid bombardment if we can avoid it.
We should increase spin slowly: even if it takes a century or two, it is OK. Because of huge energy necessary, any quick solution might melt Earth crust in the process.
And even though a slower spinning Earth was not so deadly, long nights are certainly annoying. And adding [leap second](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second) every month (as we will have to in a few centuries' time) gets old soon too. We want to get Earth spinning because we want to, not because we have to. How?
[XKCD cannot find an answer](https://what-if.xkcd.com/26/) - maybe it is really tough.
I am not concerned about the bad effects this slow spin would have on Earth (you can add your answer to the question which inspired mine, follow the link). And "undefined human activities" cannot be reversed for whatever reason, we need to invent something new and interesting.
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I don't know if the magnetic field would be affected but we would have bigger problems. Days and nights would last ten times as long which would wreak havoc on basically everything. It would generate big storms for example, because hot air from one side of the earth would rush to the cold side.
Changing the spin of the earth is unfeasible in any practical way. As for theoretical solutions, you could build a ton of railguns on the equator that shoot large chunks of the earth into space to generate momentum (ludicrous!). Alternatively, you could bring a massive spinning object into earths orbit. Tidal forces would translate spin from the new moon into the earth but it wouldn't be enough to change it a whole lot and it would take hundreds of millions of years.
However! If the earths spin changed abruptly, then it must mean that a method exist in this world (well, at least in one direction). The only way to reverse this process is to find these magical 'undefined human activities' you mentioned and figure out how to reverse them.
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**How much energy do we need?**
This is the main question we need to answer for a sanity check on whatever we're doing to speed the earth up. Luckily, [wikipedia has an answer,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%29) as part of this helpful table of how much energy different things have. The Earth, as it turns out, has $2.1 \times {10}^{29} J$ of Energy. If the Earth has slowed by 90%, that's about the same amount of energy as we need to speed it back up.
**Where can we get this energy?**
For reference, that's about a million times the energy in all of Earths fossil fuel and uranium. Luckily, there's a good source of energy close by: the Moon. Specifically, the Moon has just about the right amount of energy to speed up the Earth if we convert all of its kinetic and gravitational potential energy into rotational energy for the Earth.
So the answer is simple: to speed the Earth back up, crash the moon into the Earth. To speed it up without destroying the Earth, crash the Moon into the Earth veeeeery carefully.
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Not sure if applicable to planets but YORP effect can change asteroid rotation.
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> <http://www.space.com/3543-sunlight-increases-space-rock-spin.html>
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> YORP effect (Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack) -
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> When a large Sun-facing portion of an asymmetrical space rock rotates away from the star and into night, it can radiate more energy than that of smaller areas and tweak its spin rate.
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> Asteroid 2000 PH5 is a near-Earth space rock with an average radius of just 187 feet (57 meters) and a spin rate of once every 12.17 minutes, making for a very short "day" on its surface. For comparison, the Earth completes one turn on its axis every 24 hours.
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> The Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect, or YORP effect for short, is a second-order variation on the Yarkovsky effect that changes the rotation rate of a small body (such as an asteroid). The term was coined by David P. Rubincam in 2000.
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> An unevenly shaped asteroid heating up in sunlight re-radiates the energy away at right angles to its surface. The resultant net torque can both provide a small thrust (the Yarkovsky effect), causing the asteroid to drift towards or away from the Sun, and also change the asteroid's spin rate — the YORP effect, now seemingly observed for the first time
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For a symmetrical planet it would mean changing either how much solar energy is received or how much is **not** received.
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It is actually pretty easy.
1. Build a railroad along equator
2. Put a train with sufficient mass on it
3. Keep the train moving so that it is always in early morning
4. Wait
Larger the mass and the train and tracks needed to carry, shorter the wait.
Obviously the train would have to accelerate as the rotation goes up.
As a bonus you could have a smaller train in the same track permanently at whatever time gives convenient temperature and live there.
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**Remove much of the Earth's mass.**
The [giant impact hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis) states that about 4 billion years ago, when Earth was but a wee protoplanet, a Mars-sized object dubbed "Theia" hit it at an angle of 45 degrees, moving at 4 kilometers per second. This
1. Destroyed Theia and knocked a bunch of material from Earth off the protoplanet; some of the remnants formed the Moon.
2. Earth started spinning slower.
Previously, the Earth had a day of about 5 hours. Today, the day is about 24 hours (though the Moon is also changing the Earth's rotation as it recedes). The reason? Conservation of angular momentum. More mass put onto an object means that it will rotate slower. Conversely, take away mass from an object and it will spin faster.
So an asteroid impact would actually *slow down* the Earth's spin. To speed it up, simply remove most of it.
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I think that violates the request to not destroy Earth, though, so even though that's your best option - because it would actually work - we have to consider alternatives. These are - to say the least - wacky, and would almost certainly not work. But, given the alternative (death!), I suppose we have to try.
To change the spin speed, we need angular acceleration. To have angular acceleration, we need torque. To have torque, we need to apply a force. So here are some ideas:
* Attach an incredible amount of rockets to one side of the planet and fire them until the Earth's spin has gotten back to what you want. This has a few downsides: It assumes the rockets won't just bury themselves in the ground, it's likely to fail, and will probably succumb to the [Not In My BackYard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY) problem.
* Push the moon in closer. The moon [interacts with the Earth](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6546/why-does-the-earth-lose-rotational-velocity-in-the-vacuum-of-space/6547#6547) via tidal forces, which slows down the Earth's rotation, and makes the Moon recede. In theory, if you reverse the process (i.e. push the Moon inward), the Earth's rotation might - and this is a speculative "might" - speed up. If you can reverse those tidal forces - which I doubt you can - you're on the right track.
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If you're willing to accept Futurama-like soft science (It's the future so we can do it), then you could construct a number of large solar sails bound to the equator and have the sun drive the earth like mill...
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Creating an artificial magnetic field with coil generators will be orders of manitude easier than spinning the planet. We already generate enough energy for re-creating an Earth's magnetic field in case it ceases to exist.
[Seee here for details](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44892/artificial-planetary-magnetic-field)
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Things like this don't happen overnight. The best workaround would be to install a number of spin-acceleration devices along the equator line that would, for example, interact with corresponding devices on the Moon depending on their relative positions, for a prolonged period of time, such as millions of years.
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Reduce the Circumference of the earth. The small the circumference, the faster it will spin under the same energy-level.
How? I've got no idea. LOL Maybe reduce the depth of the crust as this gent was asking about. [1km Crust](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17150/how-would-the-earth-be-different-if-the-crust-was-at-most-1km-thick)
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Whatever magic was used to slow it down without rendering it completely uninhabitable in the first place is the most likely means of speeding it up, without rendering it uninhabitable.
The rotational energy of the Earth is on the order of $10^{29}~\mathrm{J}$. Applying that amount of energy in a controlled enough way that all of it goes into speeding up or slowing down the rotation without even a tiny fraction getting turned into something like heat (and melting the entire surface in the process) or being unevenly distributed (potentially tearing the planet apart, although most of it would stay gravitationaly bound together and would reform) is pretty much pure magic.
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To elaborate on my earlier comment:
The obvious: use the same process that made it slow down. **The plot device introduced to create the situation should also plant the seeds of its eventual resolution.**
For example, if future fictional physics provides a way to extract energy from the rotation in a large scale, why would it be applied *to the earth* in such a large amount, rather than, say, Jupiter? It would be an accident or unintended consequence of... something that takes a lot of energy and messes with other dimensions, like opening a permanant wormhole with a colony world. Instead of space travel and a hyperspace jump, now it's a simple and convenient tunnel to drive to the other world. Skip forward a few decades and economic importance is attached to it, and the side effects become known, or "incedents" slow down the rotation in bursts.
How to restore it? **The same technology.** perhaps the other planet is sped up, and they like it and don't want to reverse that, adding complications to the political aspect. So they need to understand what causes the "incedents" and engineer a way to transfer rotational momentum from a third source.
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It may be possible to increase the earths rotational energy/angular momentum by building large/tall "solar vane/sail" structures that would basically turn the entire earth into a device similar to a "crookes radiometer".
Then just sit back and enjoy the ride, while also hoping the entire atmosphere doesn't burst into flames.
Not too dissimilar to the increase in rotation of the asteroid mentioned in one of the previous comments.
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I have an empire that occupies its own landmass, defined by water boundaries. At some point in the past (maybe 200 to 400 years) it was two main cultural regions, the East and the West. The modern empire was formed by two great leaders from each of those regions who formed their own empires in the East and West. They both wanted to unite the continent, but realized they were at an effective stalemate with the other empire. So the two leaders met and decided to marry and unify their lands in the process.
The historical example that brings to mind is Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, but the two areas in my world are larger in scale and have more cultural differences.
I'm trying to figure out how to combine the cultures and what step the rulers would have taken to do so.
* Both the East and the West have roughly the same religion
* Both regions are predominantly human, whereas the surrounding lands have other dominant species.
* The rulers build roads to connect the entire empire
* The militaries of both regions are combined
What other steps would need to be taken to ensure unification? How long would it take for people to stop thinking of themselves as being from the East or West to being from the Empire? Do the regions need to have the same language to ensure unification? Is this plan at all plausible?
(The world in question is fantasy, and does have magic if that changes anything).
Edit - I'm pretty flexible on the style of ruler ship and the reasons for resistance to unification. Presumably some people would oppose it out of a desire to keep their own culture "pure" and to avoid foreign influences. Others may see unification as a loss of their own power. Still others would probably support it with an eye to economic gains through trade relations and such.
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The time it takes for the populous to stop thinking in terms of East and West will depend greatly on how different they are to begin with and how different you wish to allow them to remain. For greatest effect, there will have to be both public and hidden efforts toward unification.
## Remove Reminders of Historic Us vs Them
**New Capitol**
My first thought was mentioned by [Scimonster](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4096/559). Carve out a neutral district along the border of the two original empires and build a new capitol city there.
Choosing the location may be tricky depending on history.If there was a contested site that both sides associate strongly with, it may be ideal to use it and publicize it as a symbol of the union. On the other hand if any mention of the location just stirs up resentment of past wrongs done by the other side, it is probably not appropriate.
Along with the new capitol, commission new national symbols: flag, anthem, etc.
**Restructure Regional Governance/Borders**
Chances are the governments of each original empires worked differently in many respects. In the long term, this will have to change. Both governments will need to be restructured to act as one. As part of the restructuring redraw regional boundaries to encourage weakening of historic associations in favor of new ones. (some will remain wholly east or west, but many will not.)
**Office of Integration Facilitation**
Department of the new government specifically chartered to identify and remove obstacles. Openly would have a large hand in determining the optimal restructuring listed above, and administer the melting pot projects below. Behind the scenes would hook into a network of operatives to collect/spread unofficial information.
**Propaganda**
Help improve acceptance of unification, discredit problematic people/organizations/practices.
**Rewrite History**
Depending on the level of sophistication, this may not be possible. The basic idea is to bill the unification as a ***re**unification* and find(or make up) history of common roots along with tales of the magnificence of the past and restoring the glory of what once was. Reasons/blame for the original split should be placed elsewhere (punishment from heaven, evil plots of foreign (or long since defeated) powers.
**Religious Mandate**
If everyone follows the same god, or the gods are part of the same pantheon, the union could be advertised as "blessed" by those deities (assuming they will not actually show up and correct you)
## Physical integration
Turn the country into a melting pot. This goes along with the building of highways. Differences in culture become muted and disappear when constantly in contact with others. Misunderstandings and prejudices
**Migration and Inter-marriage**
Have families of each side relocate to the other. Additionally have individuals marry across historic boundaries. This should be done at all social levels. How it is carried out will depend on the tools/funds the government has at its disposal as well as the size of the population and scale of the new empire. Can be anything from weak encouragement, to a relocation lottery enforced by the military. Somewhere in the middle where the crown buys up migrant's homes and sells them to other migrants at some discount.
This is more of a long-term plan and will take a few generations for full effect.
**Educational Exchange**
Create a national education program (if one does not already exist). Require students spend some significant portion of their terms in exchange in other regions. Exchange assignments should favor cross-country placement.
## Magic
Depending on the metaphysics of your magic, it could create additional difficulties (maybe major regional dependencies/identity that can't be avoided) or make them all go away (massive charm spell). That's the nature of magic though...
## War
Nothing like a good war to cement alliances and make new friends.
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Things I would do if I were one of those two rulers:
* Keep own laws and customs for each empire, they need to progress slowly towards unity.
* Unite militaries only for coast guard and foreign missions. Internal effort must be made by militaries of the own empire, and merge only slowly. People wants militaries and law officers to share their own customs.
* Create a few laws common to both empires, maybe including religious ones.
* Create common tribunals to both empires.
* Build lots of roads, inside each empire and between them.
* Enhance interempire commerce.
* Teach both languages in both empires.
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What is your intention as author in uniting them and having them become more homogeneous? Do you just want the empire to plausibly remain one cooperating empire for a certain time span, to be strong enough for some story about a future crisis? Are you looking for unification strategies that the rulers might attempt? I would suggest being clear with yourself about what you are wanting and why, and then consider examples in Earth's history that were or were not like what you're imagining, e.g.:
* As for Earth examples, I second Oldcat's suggestion of looking at the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
* The eastern (Byzantium) and western (Rome) Roman empire(s) also could be interesting to look at for issues with maintaining an empire with two seats of government and distances and cultural differences involved.
* China's ancient history also comes to mind as an eventually successful attempt to unite a large area.
* The ancient Persian empire is also interesting and relevant.
I would say that the greatest issue for unifying people is cultural identity, and fairness. That is, where identity remains fractured, how fair does the unification's resulting laws and conditions feel to each group? The discussions leading up the the American Revolutionary War are mostly about fairness. For another example, even within modern England, there is some resentment in the north towards the more affluent and politically dominant south, though there is no talk of succession. Yet within modern Britain, Scotland has been considering becoming an independent country again - [Here's an article discussing some of the issues involved.](http://www.theweek.co.uk/uk-news/scots-independence/55716/the-pros-and-cons-of-scottish-independence) Another interesting modern example where there are cultural and language differences is Quebec within Canada.
Travel and communication time (and prevalence of travel) make a difference for how much the different cultures interact, and what the role of local government is versus national/imperial government. As in [this other question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/103/how-far-apart-can-two-cities-towns-etc-be-given-that-order-must-be-effectively?rq=1).
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Probably the best (or worst) example you could use to illustrate the problems and struggles is the case of Austria and Austria-Hungary in our own world. It was essentially a glob of very different cultures pasted together politically that worked for a time, then became very strained later.
One interesting time was when Maria-Theresa became the Empress. The Emperor was also named to be King of Hungary, but there was a problem that by Hungarian Law, women couldn't rule so Maria could not be Queen of Hungary. Instead, she was named King of Hungary and they ignored the fact she wasn't a man.
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I am not sure 200-400 years are enough for that, but they might come close.
Expanding on [Scimonster's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/4096/3043) I wanted to add two other examples of (partly) failed unifications:
Yugoslavia (pretty big cultural differences, languages, ethnic groups and religions) started out as a union of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Voyvodina and Slovenia; today however there is no more Yugoslavia, but instead a Serbia with an associated Montenegro (not 100% sure about that status quo right now)
Germany:
Though there were the Holy Roman Empire and German Confederation before, true unification came only as late as with the founding of the German Empire in 1871, and even then there were dozens of little semi autonomous states (with which their inhabitants still identify, partly to this day) with a very dominant prussia. As you might know Germany was split after World War 2 and then reunited about 55 years later.
A quarter of a century after that re-unification, you still hear people referencing to themselves or others as "Ossis" (inhabitants from the former GDR) and "Wessis" (from the former western parts of Germany); it is just a feeling, but that maybe decreasing right now; but over 140 years of the foundation of the German Empire there still are people primarily identifying as Bavarians, Saxons or what have you (some even as Prussians :D); but I am not under the impression that this unification should be called failed because of this, because most Germans will actually identify themselves as Germans (maybe even Europeans for that matter) when it comes to world politics, for cultural preferences (like food, music, dialects, etc.) this might be an entirely different thing.
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Even if unification was achieved, would people stop identifying as being from the East or West? Consider the USA. It's one big country (comparable to your empire), with 50 different states. Each has its own culture, local government, laws, etc, despite all being under the USA umbrella, with a federal government, currency, etc.
If the two regions have different languages, I think it'll be hard for them to unify. They should also have a unified currency system.
If there are cultural differences between the two parts, I think that's OK, as long as they aren't too huge, and people recognize and respect the differences.
Also, the people themselves need to want to unify. That doesn't mean they'll give up all of their territorial identity, but will recognize that they can be stronger together. If it's pushed upon them by the rulers, that can soon cause a civil war.
If the ruling palace is in one province, that could also cause dispute. My advice would be to put the seat of government between the two, on what used to be the border.
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Another idea i had on this.
East and West have rulers who don't like each other. However, there's a grassroots movement among the people that are.
The surrounding lands have a bone to pick with the human inhabitants of both East and West, and start a war against both. Due to the rulers' enmity, East and West don't collaborate in the war effort, and both are weakened. During this, the unifying movement gains popularity, and overthrows both rulers. They unify the empire, creating a combined army, and win the war.
After that, more steps are taken to preserve the unity, as said in other answers.
In this case, it would have been the people who pushed the unity, and so would quickly start identifying as being from the Empire, not East or West.
The grassroots leaders who performed the coup would be the ones remembered for good, while the overthrown rulers would be vilified.
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Because nature is never straightforward, there are different levels of carnivores. On the lowest rung of the ladder are the hypocarnivores, in which meat can't take any more than 30% of their caloric intake. Ursidae (bears) and maybe Amphicyonidae (bear-dogs) stand on that rung. On the opposite side are hypercarnivores. Here, 70% is the ***minimum*** requirement. And that is where we'd find Felidae, the cat family.
In an alternate Earth, Ursidae never existed, so more amphicyonids filled in that niche instead. Fast-forward to five million years ago, and a sudden, dramatic drop in temperature wiped out half of all plant and animal species, including all of the bear-dogs and any cat species bigger than a puma. Using our knowledge of latest Miocene felids, if this push came to this particular shove, would it be possible for any latest-Miocene felid species as big as or smaller than a puma to transition from hypercarnivory to hypocarnivory?
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Meet the [red panda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda), *Ailurus fulgens*.
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RedPandaFullBody.JPG)
*A red panda at the Cincinnati Zoo. Photograph by [Greg Hume](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Greg5030), available on Wikimedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.*
The red panda lives in the eastern Himalayas and eats mostly bamboo. Red pandas belong to the family Ailuridae, in the superfamily [Musteloidea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musteloidea), making them close relatives of the hypercarnivorous [weasels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustelidae). Wikipedia gives the temporal range of the Ailuridae as [Oligocene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligocene) to present, so the evolution from carnivory to herbivory must have happened somewhere along this time.
So, yes, it is possible.
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# Sure
Say that there is an illness, that only infects the prey animals. It doesn't kill them, but it does make them skinnier, and slower to reproduce. They don't die off immediately. Instead, their numbers lessen. And they provide less meat to the big cats that hunt them.
Over time, less meat will drive the hypercarnivores to eat plants to make up for the reduced prey. The ones how can handle the improved diet will live longer and reproduce more, so over the course of generations, the offspring that can thrive on the new split diet will become dominant.
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If you're looking for some subspecies of Feliforma that might "make it", [Viderridae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viverridae) are your best bet, as they are omnivorous to begin with. They're the least specialized family of Feliforma, and the most primitive, which might not be what you're looking for in your worldbuilding.
As for "big cats" (meaning "big" in the common sense, not necessarily *Pantherinae*), I'd say **possible, but unlikely.**
While not exactly *everything*, but *many* things are possible in nature, so I won't say "impossible".
However (emphasis mine):
>
> ...a **sudden, dramatic** drop in temperature wiped out half of all plant and animal species... ...would it be possible for any latest-Miocene felid species as big as or smaller than a puma to **transition** from hypercarnivory to hypocarnivory?
>
>
>
The bigger, more advanced families of Feliforma are very much specialized as (ambush) hunters, much more so than Caniformia (dogs, bears, seals, racoons, weasels, and that rather special red panda). From ambush hunter to plant scrounger with the occassional prey of opportunity is a *long* way to go. It's not just the digestive tract and the teeth, it's being *good enough* at it to find a niche among the much more effective plant eathers.
Evolution works rather slowly. Which is fine if adapting to slowly changing climate / environment like at the end of the Miocene... But you explicitly mentioned a *sudden* and *dramatic* change, within one generation or two or even due to a singular catastrophic event (?).
A *transition* would take many generations of evolutionary pressure, but those hypercarnivores are starving *today*. It would be much more likely that big hypercarnivores would get **displaced** by species more fit to cope with the sudden change.
You could come up with mitigating factors, which would allow your hypercarnivore Feliforma to survive, likely in much reduced population numbers and / or species variety, and indeed "make it" into this new age of your world.
If however your ultimate idea is having those Feliforma be / become once again a "ruling" family of any description, that would take quite some time, and *lots* of mitigating factors.
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I basically have a mechanism in my universe that allows humans to travel to different worlds (called offworlds) filled with different creatures and systems of magic, and this is very integral to the plot of the story. Currently I have things set up in such a way that humans are allowed to go to these worlds, but not vice versa because the human world and system of magic present within it acts as a "veil" making it undetectable by outside worlds and magical systems. My only concern is that this seems a bit conflicting with the fact that while humans can go to these worlds they can also come back.
My current idea to explain this is that they use a combination of magic and technology to make "gates" which allow them to link themselves to them using a device they carry with them to these other worlds. Basically the device maintains connection to the gate and (for lack of a better word) "yanks" people back to the gate when activated in most circumstances. Is this a good enough justification for a workaround to a system which is otherwise impervious to outside magical forces, or is there more details I should look to add in the general sense to make it seem less gimmicky?
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I think that two simple rules could provide a mechanism for this:
**Rule 1:** You are a part of the world you originate from, and you can always let yourself be pulled back there.
**Rule 2:** Earth is 'veiled', and cannot be discovered or located from the outside.
This way, even though people from Earth who travel to a different world cannot locate it from outside, they are innately able to let themselves be transported back there due to the affinity every being has for their homeworld.
Another possibility is that the Earth is "odd" compared to the rest of the worlds in the multiverse. It doesn't fit into any understanding that outsiders have for the shape of the wider multiverse, so they have never noticed it before. This would be less a case that they *can't* go there, and more that they just haven't so far. Could be narratively interesting then if human exploration of other worlds tips off the outsiders that there's another world to find.
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Earth can be veiled, but the humans already KNOW where it is, so they can magically access Earth just like any other world. It's like they know a secret combination, or the coordinates of something that appears invisible.
Think of it like Star Trek's Transporter system. They would never transport themselves into solid rock, but if they know there is a secret room under all that rock and its exact coordinates, they can beam into it. (Apparently beaming into solid air is not as big a problem as beaming into solid rock.)
Your system is the same; nobody off-world risks transporting themselves into empty space, it is lethal. And space is too big to explore that way, even if you could survive for a second before transporting back. But the humans know the incantation, or combination, or thought-image, or whatever you want to call it, for getting to Earth.
Then you don't need a device or gimmick or anything else, you hardly even have to explain this. A thought-image of where you want to be might work well, a mental image is not the kind of thing that can be extracted by torture. (But maybe by magic.)
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*My current idea to explain this is that they use a combination of magic and technology to make "gates" which allow them to link themselves to them using a device they carry with them to these other worlds.*
Instead of a 'device', every human carries an inbuilt password in the form of human DNA. DNA is present in every cell of the body and this is what is needed for the transport system to work. Even if other beings manage to duplicate some human DNA, they can't change every single cell in their own body in order to be transported. In fact Earth DNA is unique to Earth so any earth creature can be transported in either direction if required.
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Earth is on the "highest" plane of worlds.
Meaning that you get a lot of energy if you send something to "lower" planes/worlds and require a lot to reach there.
Since its almost impossible to create that much energy from scratch, the only viable travel is to go down, and come back by using the energy created by that later (storing it in the meantime).
That would explain the need for technology and magic to come together to build the gates:
The energy (magic) released from sending someone down needs to be stored in order to be able to get them back.
This would also give interesting options such as being able to bring back other things (while abandoning whatever you sent "down"), or a really really powerful "lower" civilisation getting close to the capability to push "up".
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An asymetric membrane between worlds:
Earthlings can push the membrane too reach other worlds (they still are on the membrane) trough actively expending energy. Whenever they stop actively expending efforts to push the membrane they are pushed back by the same membrane back to his world.
Forcing the membrane to the other direction (direction earth) could be much more costy, or even impossible.
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For some reason while reading this I thought of Stargate sg-1.
The Stargate can connect to any world with a Stargate and allows near instantaneous transportation.
Similar to your words teleporting wizards.
Because of an attack against them thru the Stargate, The sgc created an eyeris that apps people from traveling thru the Stargate unless they send a code to let the sgc know their are coming so that the eyeris can be opened for them.
What if earth is protected by a magical "eyeris" that prevents people without the proper authentication from teleporting to it. Perhaps it is a spell set up by the old wise ones (or whoever) that scans travelers as they apparate in, and returns them to sender if they do not have the righr code stamped on their soul (or something).
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On earth, as far a we know, there are two main ways that bacteria gain energy.
1. there is Photosynthesis, the transition of light into chemical based
energies such as ATP.
2. there are chemical processes in which the cell breaks down a variety
of molecules to gain energy from the reactions. A example of this is
Chemosynthesis.
Is it possible for there to be a bacteria or type of organism that gains energy from thermal energy?
For example, there could be a bacteria that lives in a volcanic area, somewhere hot enough that there is a excess of thermal energy. Would there be a way for such a cell to use this thermal energy in much the same way that some cells use sunlight in Photosynthesis?
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It could be done, but it would be difficult. The trick is that you can't get usable energy from thermal energy directly. The only way to get usable energy from thermal energy is to find two areas with different temperatures, and transfer energy from hot to cold. This is what motors do.
A single celled organism like a bacteria would have a hard time generating energy. It would be much easier for a large colony to do this. I could see a colony taking advantage of the fact that particular reversible reactions are biased for at different temperatures. A colony may find a compound it can create at high temperatures, then pass out to low temperatures where the reverse reaction is preferred. This would generate usable energy by transferring the heat from hot to cold.
A single bacteria might be able to do this if there is a reliable thermal cycle. For example, if there was a major shift in temperature from daytime to night time, it might be able to hold onto those metabolites long enough to convert them one way during the day (generating energy), and then convert them the other way at night (also generating energy).
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On a certain sense it already is, as the two processes you mention indirectly rely on thermal energy:
* photosynthesis uses photons emitted via black body radiation by the sun
* chemiosynthesis uses active chemicals generated thanks to high temperatures in volcanic areas and similar
Using directly thermal energy, and not via a chemical intermediate, is somehow tricky, since living cells as we know them are normally optimized to operate in a narrow ranges of temperatures, in which the achievable direct thermal energy is low (to directly use thermal energy one needs a high temperature source and a low temperature discharge).
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Please read [about Carnot cycles and stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_heat_engine). In order to utilize thermal energy, you need a hot and a cold "reservoir" or, in other words, a **tempterature gradient and not just "high" temperatures**. There are several problems with that when it comes to bacteria:
1. Most cells are pretty small. There are exceptions, but your average microorganism will not be large enough to exhibit any singificant change of tempetature within it. Also it should only be able to live in a very small area and by drifting a bit might lead the entire organism to die because it's simply not made for those temperatures.
2. If you find a way to deal with 1, you still need to consider that life as we know it needs liquid water. With a lot of salt, you can get let's say a range 140°C for water to be liquid, but no more is realistic if you want to permanently live in it. Mr. Spencer provided a reference in the comments: [Some bacteria can grow at more than 113°C](http://divediscover.whoi.edu/hottopics/bacteria.html). Yes, microorganisms can survive pretty extreme conditions, but you cannot expect permanent temperatures much higher than that. So you have to be on the outside of the volcano where, coming back to point 1, the gradient will be much smaller than in the hotter zones. On top of that, you will almost certainly not find enough proteins that function properly in that entire range. A thermophile organism for example will not work at lower temperatures for that reason.
3. It would have to evolve naturally with a pretty inefficient source of energy while a) Other live around it might have done it via the 2 options you named b) the environment it resides in is pretty unstable, a volcano isn't exactly a save place to live if you die from temperature changes and c) stuff wants to eat. Such an inefficient organism just doesn't make sense evolutionary. I think this becomes much more problematic if you make it bigger in order to compensate for the small temperature differences.
I could make a couple more points, but I'm running out of time. I'm not saying it is impossible, but you would have to adress those problems. Maybe you need to make up an organism that lives next to a volcano that touches a glacier.
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As long as the first and second laws of thermodynamics are satisfied, then it would be possible in theory. This is a rather vague answer, but the organism would not be able to "live" if it just sat in an environment with a constant temperature. It might be able to go into dormancy in such a case, but dynamic activity would cease.
The organism will only absorb thermal energy if it's cooler than its local environment. Much of this absorbed energy will raise the temperature of the organism, and the rest will be used to drive chemical processes or modify the internal structure directly through thermal expansion/contraction. Some of these chemical processes may have an end result in the organism doing work on the environment or even on its own structure, but only if the first and second laws of thermodynamics can both be satisfied. These processes will stop when the organism reaches thermal equilibrium with its environment. In order to prevent the organism from eventually "cooking", it cannot just keep going warmer environments. It will have to eventually find itself in a local environment that's cooler than it is itself so that it can shed thermal energy, perhaps with the performance of more work. In order to meet any reasonable definition of life, the organism will have to find itself in an environment that **oscillates** thermally in order for it to create the structures and behaviors we would normally associate with life.
Unless the work the organism does is used to transport itself back and forth between warmer and cooler environments, it will have to rely on an external cause for the thermal oscillations.
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You might be imagining an organism, like a fungus or bacteria, that you can throw into a very hot environment. The heat would be "absorbed" and used by the organism, leaving less energy than before, essentially cooling it down. This organism would be incredibly convenient, and unfortunately breaks the laws of physics! It could be used to cool nuclear reactors and perhaps substitute for air conditioning if it were efficient enough. It would eventually reverse any kind of global warming.
I used quotes around the word "absorbed" because we don't have any way of doing that. Heat naturally flows from a high temperature area to a low temperature (moving to the state of maximum entropy: thermal equilibrium.) Moving thermal energy against this gradient require some kind of effort, which is inevitably going to increase entropy elsewhere.
High temperature areas like thermal vents also have high temperature gradients. Useful energy (mechanical or chemical) can be produced by a gradient in heat, but the reaction will always bring the whole system closer to thermal equilibrium.
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I've looked into the question already and no one really seems to answer it very well. I'll sum up what I've found so far.
Some people say that it would not work:
* "the parameters would always limit the decisions a computer could
make and because no set of parameters could include every possible
data set, the computer would never be able to ''decide''."
* Or, "computers can't have freedom of the wills, and therefore it's
impossible." Or, "computers can't form ideas or concepts, therefore
impossible."
Some are claiming that computers are already running some governmental services using algorithms that run software such as for voting, paying taxes, etc. These, however, are not "run" by computers but by people who provide the services via internet. They are maintained and updated by people, either directly or indirectly.
To quote [another person](http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=17903&p=236237)'s asking the question in a different way:
>
> "If the only legitimate government is one run by the tenants of
> reason, logic, and truth, then would a computer-run government be more
> efficient and more free than one run by men and women--supposing that
> computer software were able to calculate, in real time, the extreme
> stochastic processes involved, and supposing computer hardware were
> reliable enough?"
>
>
>
In recent years, to evince a possible positive response, computer scientists have managed to build a memcomputer. If quantum computing or graphene can be cracked and their manufacturing figured out, it is thought that human consciousness has a good chance of being understood, although this is still conjecture. Also, if Moore's law holds true and the predicted silicon crisis can be avoided, eventually we will understand human consciousness well enough to mimic it with computers. Still, even if a computer isn't "conscious" it can still be made to make decisions in given circumstances.
In short, if such a computer could be conceived of, what would absolutely need to be in place before it could have any hope of working? If it could never work, in your view, such as seen in something like *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*, or The *Two Faces of Tomorrow*, can you elaborate as to why not, convincingly? For example, maybe certain governmental departments would work, in your view, but others less probably?
Thanks.
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The way things are at the moment, a computer would never be allowed to govern. Government is all about trying to keep the people happy while taking as much as you can for you and your friends. This is done by lies and misdirection. Another part of government is staying competitive with other governments. A huge game of legal chess, for the same purpose of making the government and it's friends rich.
In this scenario one big question would be, who is the computer answering to? The person who lobbies the most money? The people? I feel the computer would upset a lot of people, be blamed for all the problems and turned into scrap metal within 6 months.
If predictable it would also be vulnerable in terms of global dominance. Other countries could deliberately do things to make the computer make certain decisions and then exploit them. The computer would also have to be able to work out the outcome of extremely abstract concepts and the knock-on effects of obscure policies.
I think that a computer we ask for advice is viable and even a fairly likely invention, but autonomous government seems to have too many problems to be considered.
A scenario where a computer may be used to auto-govern would be in a post apocalyptic world where we have no separate countries and there are few people to keep happy. The computer would keep track of resources and help us all work together to stay alive.
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A future supercomputer could never run a government, not because it lacks the capability, but because humanity will hold it to an impossible standard.
The power of modern computers is their ability to take "truth" and compute on it EONS faster than any human ever could. Accordingly, we expect them to always handle such information quickly. However, a government often has to deal with multiple individuals who wholeheartedly believe they have the truth, but in fact have nothing but their opinion. Individuals would be incredibly frustrated with this: why would they trust the government to a computer that can't even take their truth and yield the result they wanted it to yield?
Computers could most likely be taught to deal with this. Perhaps it takes random number generators ("Random numbers are the heart of an AI" - Deety), but in all cases, the introduction of these fuzzy factors **must** remove the computer from its perfect logic position.
However, people will not let it be anything less than perfect. It will be expected to handle every situation absolutely perfectly, or we will use its failure to argue why computers are less good than humans. It's not the computer's fault it can't run the government... it's ours.
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## **Yes, you can make a Robot Overlord**
The question of whether an algorithm could be constructed that spits out laws and policies to govern a human society is not at issue. The complexity of such a thing is mind-boggling but I don't doubt that it can be done. We have algorithms that can make decisions extremely quickly (such as high frequency traders) and we have algorithms that can make sense of unbelievable mountains of data (such as [Yahoo!](http://www.hadoopwizard.com/which-big-data-company-has-the-worlds-biggest-hadoop-cluster/) [Hadoop Cluster](http://hadoop.apache.org/)). We already have plenty of compute power in the form of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine and others. How to synthesize all that data into something that can say "make this law, here" is another matter. It's definitely computable, just not easy.
You would need data sharing agreements with access to almost everything about a person's economic life, including but not limited to credit card usage, tax returns and debt load. If you had this for every person in a 1st world country, you'd have a really really good idea of how the economy is going. Combine this info with all the research from economic statics researchers (Thomas Piketty is a good place to start.)
## **But Acceptance is hard**
The primary issue with this is getting humans to accept such leadership. So either a large change in mindset will need to happen based on a long period of successes by algorithm controlled leaders where people literally say "I welcome our new robot overlords!" or control shifts in the background to where no one sees it. The former approach is certainly difficult and may ultimately fail. The latter approach while sneaky, has a better chance of succeeding because it doesn't have to outright face political scrutiny. A political leader just needs to follow the advice of the Robot Overlord and they will make the optimal decision based on available data.
## Yeah, but whose priorities?
Any algorithm needs to choose outcomes and optimal conditions to solve for. Who gets to choose those conditions and how are they quantified? The 1%-ers will argue for outcomes that strongly benefit them. The lower-50%-er will want outcomes that strongly benefit them. Neither group gets what they want without costs to the other group. Negotiating these parameters will be very difficult. Perhaps the best way to answer the question is by asking "Given an economic system, would you favor that system if you were randomly born at any strata of that system?" Capitalism is great if you're rich. Communism is okay, if you're poor. The robot overlord will need to enforce a system that maximizes good for everyone.
A sociologist and a political scientist could probably give you a better idea of all the factors that go into how humans make political and economic decisions.
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Like any government, so long as there are enough people to enforce the status quo, it can continue to exist. It can create subtle laws that affect what is reported on the news, and what is planted in the school curriculum in the subtlest of ways, so that people would naturally tend to endorse the status-quo. eventually, people will consider it outlandish and archaic to propose a parliament of irrational humans.
The main problem I see with this scenario is that society would need to decide who gets to "program" the computer. The software firm would need to be appointed by a parliament of humans and be regulated and inspected by human departments of government. So is the computer really at the top? Or is it just the middle man between "us" and "them"? And who are "they"? What makes them in particular, so qualified to set the parameters of the computer? And what is their true agenda?
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Your question actually has several underlying (and still unanswered) questions.
The main one is: "Can we state in an unambiguous way what a Government should do?"
Another, more fundamental and still open to "philosophical" debate, is: "Will computers ever be able to cope with situations unforeseen at time of their building?"
Today's computers are mainly geared toward two diverging schemes: Algorithmic and Pattern Recognition.
Take, for example, one of the "though" problems currently handled by computers: weather forecast.
There are two "schools":
1. Model Earth and all relevant atmospheric interactions as a (huge) set of differential equations and integrate them. (algorithmic)
2. Feed a SNN (Simulated Neural Network) data taken from last 30 years and let it decide what will happen in the near future. (pattern recognition)
First approach has proved either too crude (forecasts are reasonably precise for next 24 hours, no more) or too expensive (even with current supercomputers simulation takes almost the same time as "real" time).
Second approach worked much better (it is what almost all commercial forecasts use), but it is currently failing more and more often because weather patterns are changing (due to Global Warming and other effects) and thus the "old ways" are not reliable anymore and the method is unable to adjust fast enough.
To come back to Your question: even stashing, for the sake of argument, all objections people will have because they do *not* want Government to do the "right" thing as they want it to do what's *their* interest (i.e.: they want their chance to to do "lobbying") instead, there remains a series of fundamental issues:
* There are several irreconcilable "world views" (e.g.: "rightist": favor accumulation of resource vs. "leftist": favor redistribution of resources). Which one should "computer" chose?
* Current computer research is unable to cope with unexpected and fundamentally "new" patterns; this might be overcome in the future, but I strongly suspect it would need a radical change in perspective I don't see coming (I have a personal theory concerning this, but this is not the place to expound it).
* Actual goals (i.e.: the Evaluation Function) need to be defined and getting any kind of consensus on the issue looks like a problem harder than anything tackled so far (someone spoke about "making people happy" which can be easily obtained by injecting certain psychotropic substances in public water pipes; is that really what we want? I don't think so. A much better definition is sourly needed).
Bottom line: If You can define "good government" then there's a good chance computers will, in a reasonable future, do it better than humans, otherwise we'll have to wait till some AI is smart enough to devise definition itself (hoping it won't decide it can do without all humans altogether, of course)
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I strongly believe AI systems will eventually be essential in most governmental decision making because it is technologically possible and political organization is malleable.
The current narrow AI systems have proven superiority against humans in logical, intuitive and deceptive games such as Chess (Deep Blue 1996), Go (AlphaGo 2016) and Texas Hold'em Poker (Libratus 2017). What makes politics so special? It's just a far more interesting game.
Are there too many variables to consider? Well, humans can't consider all of them either and computers can still make better estimations. Computers don't have freedom of will? Thank Turing they don't so we can take full advantage of these lifeless electric brains for the benefit of humanity.
A more intriguing implication is that we're now dealing with human lives. How can we declare the value of a real person? Although there is no consensus on ethical philosophy, Utilitarianism (maximizing overall happiness) could be the basis of this moral machine because it can make good use of high computing power and deliver ethical solutions in jurisdiction and legislation.
Only if a single country with a good-hearted leader took a leap into this new regime, the whole world would be obliged to follow this trend as it would skyrocket national growth.
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Okey, your question consists of quite a few points. Let me try to answer them all:
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> "the parameters would always limit the decisions a computer could make and because no set of parameters could include every possible data set, the computer would never be able to ''decide''."
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The same holds true for us. For instance [humanity almost died out some 75 thousand years ago by a vulcanic supereruption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory). Nobody really understood what is going on then, but somehow we survived.
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> Or, "computers can't have freedom of the wills, and therefore it's impossible." Or, "computers can't form ideas or concepts, therefore impossible."
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To be honest, I never quite know what to do about the "freedom of will" discussion. You certainly don't need a free will for a government. As to ideas and concepts, they can certainly have them, just not like us. Take [Libratus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libratus), who is the first AI to win against humans in poker. The programmers didn't tell it what to do but rather gave it a huge amount of information and let it find out for himself. And it did a few very smart things. For instance, it found out for itself how to bluff correctly.
In the end it is no different than us: We get a lot of information by seeing, hearing, smelling etc. and learn how to use them. That same concept can work for computers just as well.
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> If quantum computing or graphene can be cracked and their manufacturing figured out, it is thought that human consciousness has a good chance of being understood, although this is still conjecture.
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To govern, you don't need to understand the human brain, the ancient greeks had next to no understanding but still governed themselves. While I agree, that a good governement needs a good understanding of humans and at least a human level general intelligence, there are simpler solutions. You could govern the world by sending your robot drones to anybody who looks like he/she might someday try to harm the government. I guess, the our technology would be sufficient to create a completely automatic prison. (Not that I'm claiming every AI-government has to be oppressing, but it seems to be the easiest way to create one.)
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> In short, if such a computer could be conceived of, what would absolutely need to be in place before it could have any hope of working?
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Eider the goodwill of humans or the power to take government by force. Here force doesn't mean violence, rather that the AI becomes so intelligent that humans have no longer a way to restrict it. As you already mentioned, that could benefit the society, if it doesn't destroys us.
I personally think anything we can do, a computer can learn too.
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As far as I know, "robot/computer overlords" are a oft-used sci-fi trope, once featuring in the original Star Trek series, at the very least.
More often than not, what was depicted was not a society present-day's humans would prefer to live in.
Typically, the AI overlord was depicted as a cold, calculating machine (which it is), devoid of anything which would made it more 'human', namely compassion, empathy, and other 'soft skills' and its rules and legislation made the society a dreary place to live in, where humans are only there to fulfil a specific purpose, or just to exist and survive.
In the same vein, Isaac Asimov's robots in his novels had an equally large impact on the human society he outlined. Of course the Second Law - obey humans, unless it doesn't collide with the First Law - prevents them from *ruling* humans, but said First Law - Do not harm humans by action or inaction - compelled them to turn every human environment into a virtual garden where there is no danger to human life.
That may look like a desirable outcome on the first glance, but that made the 'Spacers' - the human society dependant on their robots - complacent to a point where they began stagnating.
In both ways, it would be very, very difficult to convey human *needs* (which do differ from human *wants*) exhaustively enough to build a society where humans can live in and not just exist in some dystopia in the guise of an utopia.
*Amendment*: So in essence it might be possible for a sufficiently sophisticated AI to run a government, but it is very complicated to *devise* an AI and feed it with the correct values (read: morale) to run a *humane* government.
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Of course it could and I live in hope for the day.
There is nothing a human can do that an AI computer couldn't do which is the whole point of AI
The point of difference is an AI doesn't have prejudice, laziness, greed or corruption (unless you program it to)
An AI will follow the law which points out the rights of the individual and the rights of society and will treat everyone exactly the same.
What it really needs is definitive laws as contradictory laws (like we have now) would make it unworkable.
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Yes, but with a twist.
Already someone mentioned high frequency trading. I think that's a quite good starting point. Who is making those transaction - human or computer? Law assumes that human, while from technical perspective it is not so simple. This trend would develop.
Law evolves terribly slowly, and is subject to awful legacy issue. Unless one organizes revolution from time to time, otherwise he ends up with some weird features like Electoral College (USA) or unelectable higher chamber of parliament (UK). In the same time computers develop really fast, thus political system would lag terribly.
It would lead to some mismatch. Let's say a decision where to build a new road. After human operator would put data and priorities, a computer can run some genetic algorithm until reaching optimal solution (some balanced combination of low environmental impact, low long term cost, etc). Sounds fine, and not specially SF. The thing is that in long term such algorithms would produce good results, that humans would not fully understand but rubber stamp. Or if the advice is disliked, then ignored, but luckily genetic algorithm would not get offended. Computers would be improving faster than humans, thus details of the proposed solution would be less and less understood.
Computers would not be elected... however, if constituents are able to rerun program at their home terminal, then may be disappointed when their politician make a decision which seems rather bad. They may try to discipline the politicians, to do the decision according to best AI advice.
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I am assuming the government is one that follows democratic principles and it needs to have people follow willingly "elect" the computer government.
There are a few ways I think this could be achieved, but I think first and formost;
* Constant polling - I assume that in the future everyone will use social media and online services in one way or another. With access to this data, a computer system could formulate legislation/manifesto that would elicit the votes it needs to form a government. Think along the lines of Google advertising based on previous search history but with a far wider source of data and input.
Looks at [F1 decision matrix systems](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292608852_Decision-making_with_big_data_How_to_design_information_systems_with_the_practice_in_mind) to see how these systems work in practice now (based on a smaller dataset).
Over time, it would be able to use the information to select the most electable candidates and deselect those that decent or would affect the vote in a negative way. Eventually, it would have effectively selected every member of the party it represents. This Doesn't mean it is nor that it will become sentient. But it would mean it effectively runs the government.
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In the end, most governments take their orders from the electorate... eventually. This happens when elections are held, and legislators are elected.
With changing situations, and changing national moods, the legislators elected can vary dramatically in ethos and dogma.
Theoretically, it is possible that an AI system could be 'put in charge' of a government, but what happens when the national mood changes and it gets voted out of office because the AI logic couldn't deal with an unexpected situation, like a 9/11 style attack, or a mortgage meltdown, or maybe people just getting carried away on twitter?
How many humans would enforce a machine's instructions, when they contradicted the freedom of choice of humanity?
That big sucker has a plug somewhere. It will get pulled.
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### Yes, a computer could run the government.
It would likely require both Intelligence and Consciousness (and Self-Awareness).
I work in the AI field; please read this response to a different question in which I explain [why Intelligence and Consciousness are distinct things](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/81020/37679).
Your problem ***might*** be, however, that a computer capable of balancing all the issues involved in running the government, might be just as complex as a human being.
It would depend very heavily on who gets to tell the computer exactly what government is supposed to accomplish. In a general sense this is easy; the government is supposed to provide a deterrence to bad actorss. Like invasion of the country (hence a defensive military, border controls), police (to prevent criminal behavior like murder and robbery, rape and fraud), and prisons or execution houses to separate criminals from society, or their life.
A secondary function is collective action that provides collective benefit. A community well. A tax to build and maintain a fence around the whole village, and man it with guards, costs a tiny fraction of what it would cost for each person to build a fence around just their house and hire a guard for it.
On a larger scale, the Interstate Highway System in the USA is a collective action that has paid and continues to pay for itself a thousandfold over the cost of its taxes, and would never have existed without government action.
So in defining the role of government you will get into the politics of deciding whether health care should be provided as a common good, like USA military defense is treated, or health care is a profitable product that should be priced by the laws of supply and demand.
The same thing goes for legal defense: We say legal defense is a right of all, but not ***good*** legal defense, we all know the public defenders do not perform anywhere near as well as the $1500/hr attorneys hired by the wealth. So should we prohibit such defense, and say ALL defendants must be represented by public defenders, PERIOD?
Then you have larger problems of the government being used to legislate morality, as they see it. Should prostitution be legal, or illegal? We have both, just in the USA. Should pot be legal or illegal? Smoking? Alcohol? Teen sex? Pornography? Gambling? Homosexual marriage? Homosexual adoption?
The answers to those questions comes down to philosophical and/or religious make up, really. And those roles of government should not be determined by a computer.
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Could a computer make all the decisions associated with government. Trivially yes, making decisions is easy, making good decisions is harder. Could it run a vaguely competent government, or an amazingly efficient one? In principle yes, advanced computers could make brilliant decisions. Computer science isn't really there yet unless you offload tough decisions by hiring contractors or running referendums.
Would people respect it as a legitimate government and pay their taxes, probably not but it depends on how it comes about and how good it is.
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Maybe.
Bureaucracy is data processing. The bureaucracy takes many inputs, these inputs flow across a data pipeline (the bureaucratic hierarchy), being processed. Based on these processed datasets, decisions are made. The decisions are orders, that flow down the hierarchy, being processed at each level, until they get on the hands of the enforcers. This process can be run by a supercomputer, or rather by a network of supercomputers, even if at the endpoints you may still need people do collect data and enforce the actions. The data gathering->processing->ordering->enforcement is a cycle, and the computers can learn to be better at running the bureaucracy with the current machine learning techiniques.
But running the day-to-day of the government is just a part of running a government. There is the politics and the politics set the priorities for the bureaucracy, set what variables the learning system will try to optimize. Politics is the struggle between powerful political agents along the time, the power centers of a society. Sometimes it is class struggle, most of the time it is an internal affair of the dominant class. And there will always have a dominant class because humans are naturally hierarchical. Can this political struggle be controlled by a supercomputer? Maybe. But the political agents won't let it happen. All political agents will try to control the computer and direct its optimizations towards their own political goals and the computer will be pushed around, it's parameters constantly changing, as the political agents struggle against each other for the control. And that will compromise the computer's hability to run the bureaucracy, because it will become erratic.
The only hope the computer have is to become a political agent itself. But then, the alredy established agents may decide that it would be better if the computer (and the ones that created it) were destroyed.
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The question "*Could a future computer or supercomputer run a government?*" was explored over 50 years ago in the novel [Colossus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(novel)) by D.F. Jones.
Here's the blurb from the dust jacket:
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> The President of the United States of North America gave the activation order — and the defense of the entire free world was given over into the hands of a machine. This was Colossus — the super-computer, as big as a large town, buried somwhere in the Rocky Mountains, now the sole arbiter of war and peace. ….
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As for whether it could *successfully* run a government, its sequel was called "The Fall of Colossus".
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The scenario is the following: a civilization with technology level similar to humanity's current, on a planet similar to Earth, shall be hit by a massive celestial body in approximately one year.
The impact would be around three times more powerful than the one that caused the end of dinosaurs, but still not enough to completely destroy the planet.
The civilization know about it one year before impact, and know precisely when and where it would crash.
My question is: **what would be the best way to save as most people as possible ?**
Is there a way to destroy the asteroid ? or at least to damage it and reduce the impact strength ?
Else, what kind of preparations could be efficient, for the impact itself as well as adaptation to what the planet and its life forms would become after it ?
Is there a chance of long-term survival at all ?
I wonder as much for the explosion (or waves, depending if the asteroid crash on land or on ocean) as for consequences for potential survivors: animal and vegetable kingdom would be shaken, so if a large group survives, could a civilization rebuild just after?
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**Divert it**
It takes only a tiny change in the course of the asteroid to make it miss if the change is made early enough. So with a year, start designing an interceptor from bits and pieces of space and weapons programs, build a couple of them (for redundancy), and launch them with some months to spare.
* A big nuke, not *in* the asteroid but somewhere to the side. It might shatter the asteroid, but most parts would be nudged. **Any** change of course would make them miss.
* A lander with a rocket engine to shove the asteroid.
Considering the partial success with Philae, you'd send more than one mission. If the first ones work good enough, send the rest an abort command.
The various space programs could work a lot faster if money and safety was no object. You couldn't design a new launch system from scratch, but you could get a lot of mass up to the ISS. Assemble and refuel the interceptors in space.
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Well, you didn't specify the actual size of the meteorite, which could change things, so I'll assume it is similar to the one which caused the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
I would guess that the impact area on Earth could be known with anticipation enough so that the populated areas probably could be evacuated in a more or less orderly way. The direct damage of the explosion would be limited in area and time.
Now, the main issue is the same that killed the dinosaurs: all of the soil and ashes thrown into the atmosphere and blocking the Sun's energy, making it impossible to grow crops as usual and making temperatures colder globally.
Fortunately, we have some technologies that the dinosaurs did not have[citation needed] to paliate that:
* First, growing crops under artificial lightning. Nowadays, this is mostly used for growing weed; so there is plenty enough information on internet about how it would work. Things to take into account:
+ Source of power: solar power would be hardly hit, I do not know how hard eolic or hydroelectric energy generation would be affected1. Carbon/Oil would continue working, but a possible lack of rain or wind1 could make it more toxic than usual. Maybe it would time to go nuclear again.
+ Food to grow: even without power issues, you will only be able to grow crops in a limited area. You will want to restrict that to crops with a high yield of nutrients (rice, wheat, legumes for proteins, maybe even massive fields of algae). Definitely no grass --> no meat production.
+ Law & order: Maybe supply is not enough for everybody, so you should have to prepare your society for it. Namely, isolated, self-sufficient communities that grow their food and defend it from foreigners. If you are in one of these, good for you, if not, well... you had it coming. Some level of coordination between the communities would remain, though, for trade of specialized items (fertilizers, nuclear fuel, pharmaceutical drugs...)
* Second, getting the dust down to Earth as fast as possible. I think little has been actually studied, but with the right incentive it could be developed quickly. V.g., lasers to stop the dust particles (so they fall), balloons dropping water from very high attitude (so it catches dusts while falling), maybe putting water to boil to saturate the atmosphere of H20 so it would rain the dust...
The problem with all of those is that, while they could help to partially improve the situation, their effect would be medium-long term and you would need to put them into action in a gigantic scale (in a moment when you should be putting all of your resources on the food production issue).
For a way more massive impact, which makes surface outright uninhabitable, the only solution would be dig deep, create some of such food producing communities underground (with nuclear power). Of course, they would be more expensive to produce, so they would be fewer, smaller and without communication (all of which makes them way more vulnerable).
1: Since the actual motor behind winds and rains is, again, solar energy, such a disruption of solar rays could affect eolic or hydroelectric dams. Probably there would be still winds and rains, but it is hard to predict the changes (maybe the river that you have dammed dessecates or becomes frozen, maybe the zone where you eolic generator was installed is now completely calm).
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## one year to divert an asteroid
If an object (more likely classified as a comet) comes in from the unknown, never before charted or seen earlier, it's probably coming from a direction far from the plane of the planets (say, from due North) and incoming at reverse escape velocity, a parabolic orbit (figured at the barycenter, not the sun: it will seem hyperbolic with normal sun-centered navigation).
A year is not long enough to travel far out, turn around and speed up again the other direction *very much*, to rendavous. Chemical rockets can't do it. So any kind of lander, like planting a rocket or more elaborate ideas that entail matching velocity with it, is not an option.
The *dirty road* approach still works. A rocket heads outward as fast as it can, leaving a trail of dust or pebbles or whatnot, which will still be travelling outward at high speed (just not as fast as the main craft).
The incoming commet will start running into them, and not matching speeds is the key to how it works! Each little impact will slow it down a tiny bit, without smashing it up like a single large impact would.
Given the assumed orbital characteristics, maybe someone can calculate the required ΔV needed to turn a hit into a miss. It's complicated because it's getting closer all the time and more change is needed the closer it comes.
## another idea
*Especially* since it's comet-like, being new to the inner solar system, it is jetting at thrusting all by itself. This means that you **will not** be able to predict the impact accurately, BTW.
A beamed energy weapon can have some effect on this. A laser, or even a microwave radar beam of high power, can cause *excessive* heating and thus thrusting on the body. Even a big mirror could concentrate sunlight onto it.
That would certainly make for an exciting story, since the resulting thrust is random and chaotic. And you *can* demand "more power!" with realistic physics. Also, the people working on it are on Earth and can continue working on improvements, rather than having no more input after launch.
Huge lasers are doable now, as are various microwave emitters. Every nation can be throwing what they can at it, all in the same meele, with cumulative results.
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Just some numbers for those who think about diverting the asteroid by pumping energy into it.
Assumptions:
* $60$ km diameter, same as <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_impactor>
+ $113097 km^3$ volume
* [$2g/cm^3$ density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_asteroid_physical_characteristics#Density),
* [$2.262\*10^{17}kg$ source](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=113097%20km%5E3*2g%2Fcm%5E3),
* If we impart an impulse in 3 months(ie. 9 months before impact) we need a delta-v of $0.27m/s$.
* [This will take $2.944\*10^{8}TJ$](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2.262*10%5E17kg%28%2827m%2Fs%29%5E2%29%20in%20TJ).
+ Or about 75 times the total energy yield of all nuclear bombs detonated to date.
+ This does not include the energy needed to get a bomb to the asteroid.
Edit:
Other aritcles on wikipedia gives an estimate of 10km as the diameter of the asteroid. This reduces the energy needed to divert it by a factor of 216, meaning we would need the energy of between 3 and 4 Tsar Bombas to divert it.
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## Breaking News
SETI is having a [series of talks on Asteroid Day](http://www.seti.org/weeky-lecture/asteroid-day-special-event).
The recient [colloquium I'm watching now](http://www.seti.org/weeky-lecture/ultra-lightweight-probes-catalyze-interstellar-exploration) includes much of interest regarding this topic, including:
* warm superconductors will be a *transformative technology* that will enable efficient megastructures in space, including
* a 12-foot diameter payload (fits in existing rockets) inflates to a solar mirror that goes out to a lagrange point and brings back a 10-meter diameter asteroid (takes 2 weeks of focused sunlight burning to give 5km/s Δv) with 248 Mg material remaining at delivery.
Meanwhile, he was on an early think-tank planning board that considered asteroid (comet) strikes and how to deflect them.
He briefly notes that sending up a "nuke" is not a good idea, but taking one of these 10-foot asteroids and lobbing it into the path of a comet (see time code 24:23, *New Mitigation Method: Terminal Defense by Placing 10 Meter NEO's on In-coming Path With Solar Concenteator*) is a useful idea. This was studied in 1992 and presented at the "first congress for mitigation" (IOW, the real (possible) plans) as an offshoot of "star wars" technology. The imact with the incoming *70 km/s* comet just throwing a rock in its path is **big** (he doesn't give the result but calculating from what he gave,
"The rule of thumb is 3½ km/s imact of anything with anything releases the same amount of energy as the equivilent mass of TNT.. kenetic energy scales as the square of velocity." 20× the speed means 400× the energy, and using the mass noted earlier that gives **100 megatons**. That's like twice the largest thermonuclear device ever built, and many times what were developed as production weapons.
---
The comon advice is that simply "blowing it up" Bruce Willis style is not a good idea, but is a bad idea. The nuke portrayed in [that scientifically awful movie](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)) would only have moved the two pieces apart by 7 feet! A bunch of loose rubble hitting the Earth could be *worse* than a single rock.
This idea means "terminating" the comet far enough away so the pieces dispurse significantly farther than the diameter of the Earth, so most of it misses; and being icy, this will *melt* and vaporize material rather than just breaking it up into smaller rocks. Mollecular sized debris will be blown by the solar wind and sunlight, which forms a comet's tail.
Again, working on deflection rather than messy destruction, such an industrial mining asteroid could be lobbed into place and then *itself* blown up: let the comet hit a string of smaller rocks in its path, vaporizing part and thrusting the rest.
Here is a video of [the real thing](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(spacecraft)).
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One problem you would have is to finance such project. There would be senators who would bring up bible and say such expenditure is a waste of taxpayer's money because God promised not to destroy Earth after the Flood. And other (also from other religion) who would welcome "End of Times" as good occasion to judge non-believers they don't like.
Such project would require central planetary government to focus resources of all humanity. What is the chance for that to get support? The best you can hope is that every faction will try to deflect impact point to hit any of the opponents instead.
There would be communities in mountains who would prefer to take chance on rugged survival than allowing central planetary government to save as many people as possible (or all).
Think about it: climate change is exactly such disaster: we know it is coming, science is clear, devastating consequences of the impact are clear, small changes now would deflect the impact from being devastating to just manageable. And "we" (our elected representatives) choose to do nothing instead, for various reasons. Why do you think that handling such asteroid impact would be any different? It would be worse, because you have less time to educate the public and elect politicians with some brains in their head.
Such people don't have to win the argument: just slow down response to be ineffective. So far they are winning the argument.
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This question, like many older stories, postulates a *sudden* appearance of an *enormous* hazard. This is unrealistic and dated. I've [watched semanars from SETI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4OysNeyXpc) etc. and have learned what kind of surveying has already been done, how much better we can spot something like that now, and the amazing instruments kust around the corner.
Jules Verne was "prophetic" (or more appropriately, *prophétique*) because he kept up with scientific and technological progress.
Any near-future killer asteroid story would need to consider technology like the [LSST](http://www.lsst.org/lsst/about) which will automatically scan the visible half-sky every *week*, with particular notes on anything that changes.
I [asked on Astronomy SE](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/11120/how-far-away-would-a-supernucleus-comet-be-visible/11233#11233), and it's pointed out that a mere 3km comet (C/1996 B2 Hyakutake) would have been spotted **8 years** out.
All things being equal, a 60km "supernucleus" would appear as a disk 400× the area. I don't know if the brightness figures in the analysis include any coma at that distance. But, the surface outgassing and general mess it leaves behind will also be 400× larger, while the irradiation falls off with distance... if it's twice as far out the irradiation is cut by 1/4, so the coma would only be 100× and further 1/4 the brightness from our viewpoint, or still 25× brighter than the object reported on, C/1996 B2 Hyakutake.
The comet moves fastest at perihelion, and *much* slower elsewhere. So doubling the distance will more than double the inbound time.
In short, any such object will be seen ***decades*** before they arrive.
The documents on C/1996 B2 Hyakutake state that "it's easy to push around". In contrast to the previous answers here, astronomers said that *a 3km body was easy to push*? The outgassing acts as a rocket with significant ΔV on the comet. The orbit of B2 Hyakutake was changed significantly, such that its previous visit was 17000 years ago and its next will be in 70000. The comet slowed down significantly, all by itself!
This suggests that directed energy would be very effective, adding to that effect. It will also be something of a wild ride, with nobody being sure just where it will wind up, with or without intervention. Slowing it to the point where we are *sure* of a miss, or heating the top or bottom to push it out of the plane, would start long before it's visible without a telescope.
---
I suggest the following elements for a more prophétique story set in the next 50 years.
When these instruments come on-line, a very large comet is seen 20 to 30 years out, with concerns of a possible impact.
The orbit is uncertain because it is self-powered and chaotic. Experts don't agree on models. After 2 or 3 years, watching all the (smaller) distant comets provides more certainty and experts agree that the risk is real.
Politicians deny any risk, and eventually a large part of the uneducated population does, too. After all, it's 25 years from now; not our problem.
Somehow or another, work does start. Maybe "other" nations step up and develop huge mirrors. The effort and the mirror technology itself turns out to be a huge boon to the economy and technological development, just as Apolo was for the U.S.
World power and economies shift. Work in other changes such as the effects of climate change 30 years from now, rise in computer power, superconductors, and limited nanotechnology.
Development of the superconductor-based large structures might be a major tech boon. Practical superconductors that work in ordinary and even hostile environments, and *flux pinning* as a construction technique can be applied to industry on Earth, too.
In short, the *armageddon* turns out to be a *genesis* instead: that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. When the comet passes, large chunks are broken off to *keep*, and humans set up a manned base on what's left to ride it off to interstellar space, using the mirrors to *boost* it up to hyperbolic speed.
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There is [lots of discussion online](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+deflect+asteroids+and+save+earth&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) about this (as Google will show you), and how Hollywood gets it dead wrong. You cannot "destroy" it. One approach is to sew a dust cloud in its path, slowing it down. When looking thhrough the Google or YouTube results, pay attention to proposals by *physicists* as opposed to screenplay writers.
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Given the time frame and the energy needed there's only one option with any chance of success--Orion. It's going to be an absolute kludge of a system built on a 24/7, 9 women to make a baby in a month type basis. Assemble as many teams as you can, if you have 10 ideas you try them all at once and see what pans out. I rather suspect the logistics of moving the rocket from it's construction point to a launch point would prove impractical given the timeframe, they would probably launch right from the factory--even if that means you blow up part of a city in the process.
Figure how much of a nudge you can give the rock and stay below it's escape velocity, size the bombs you'll use for the deflection accordingly. If some bits get thrown off you don't care but if you break it up you now have several rocks to deflect rather than just one and Hollywood aside, breaking it up is worse than doing nothing at all.
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The ever popuar "Next Big Future" blog has several interesting concepts. The most plausible is similar in some respects to a modern anti tank weapon; a small charge on the probe blows away any active or spaced armour while the main charge follows through the cleared space for the strike.
In space a small penetrator separates from the bus and impacts the comet or asteroid, creating a crater. A short time later, the nuclear explosive in the bus detonates inside the crater, so much of the energy is channeled and directed, rather than expended into space. Since there is no atmosphere, many of the coupling mechanisms we are familiar with won't work in space; even very large nuclear weapons would have to be at point blank range to affect the target. The X-ray and neutron radiation will vaporize the rock or ice and the crater will form an improvised rocket nozzle to direct the flow of plasma, hot gasses and ejecta to provide the deltaV needed to change orbits.
There are a few more complicated issues to deal with. As the bus approaches, the axis of rotation should be identified and the bus lined up to fire the impactor and thus the ejecta crater on the rotational axis. This way the actual impulse will through the axis of rotation and the resulting deltaV change and new orbital parameters can be known to observers on Earth. Firing the probe into a random place on the surface also means the nuclear charge will not be able to find the crater and deposit the energy in a useful manner.
Secondly, since this is a very near term thing, several different rockets will have to be sent with the same payloads, in order to ensure that at least one works. While Russian boosters are somewhat larger, American ones are more reliable. Heavy lift versions of the Atlas or Falcon 9 are about the only ones capable of doing the job. Considering the short time frame, the deflection might be very close to Earth and need lots of deltaV, you may actually need multiple strikes to deflect the body.
Finally, since this is near term, we must launch pretty much directly at the oncoming body, since we don't have years for elaborate orbital dances to match orbits (consider how long the current mission took to match orbits with a comet; we don't have 10 years). This means the most powerful boosters, with very large and powerful trans stages to break orbit carrying the smallest possible payloads. Even then it might be a very close run thing to deflect the incoming body before it is too close and the energy required to change its orbit becomes prohibitive (bigger bombs would help, but the "standard" size these days seems to be @ 300Kt, giving you an upper bound. Building "custom" physics packages is probably going to eat too much into your time, and supermassive devices like the Tsar Bomba would be far too large to boost on high energy impact orbits anyway).
So this *might* be possible with present day technology, but it would be at the very outside edge of possibility. Better have beer, peanuts and a paper bag ready for plan "b"...
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[Trajectory Diversion of an Earth-Threatening Asteroid
via Massive, Elastic Tether-Ballast System](http://enu.kz/repository/2010/AIAA-2010-2668.pdf) says this:
>
> Several mitigation techniques have been proposed, including detonating
> nuclear or conventional explosives in, on, or near the NEO, guiding a
> retrograde NEO to impact the Earth-threatening NEO, using the
> Yarkovsky effect, or using a tug of some type, whether connected to
> the NEO21 or using gravity to pull the NEO.
> [...]
> For all cases, the time duration chosen was **10 years** and the asteroid
> mass was 1e**10** kilograms. The ballast mass was chosen to be 3e6
> kilograms, about the same mass as a fueled Saturn V rocket.
>
>
>
Assuming the asteroid had 3 times the volume of the 10 km Chicxulub impactor, that's [3.0e**15**](http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.6391) kg.
**Deflecting the entire asteroid in a year would be [impossible with our current tech](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/19847/400)**, so I'd shack up in a bunker on a mountain with mushroom/insect farms, solar panels, books, and other survival supplies. And (preferably nuclear) batteries for when light is scarce due to dust.
That's if humanity can't get its [thousands of nuclear warheads](http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission.html) to [break the asteroid into pieces](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/science/plan-deflect-earth-destroying-asteroids-using-5703192) our atmosphere can handle:
>
> The goal would be to **fragment the asteroid into many pieces**, which
> would then disperse along separate trajectories. Wie believes that up
> to 99 percent or more of the asteroid pieces could end up *missing the
> Earth*, greatly limiting the impact on the planet. Of those that do
> reach our world, many would *burn up in the atmosphere* and pose no
> threat.
>
>
> **A nuclear weapon is the only thing that would work against an asteroid
> on short notice**, Wie added. Other systems designed to divert an
> asteroid such as tugboats, gravity tractors, solar sails and mass
> drivers would require 10 or 20 years of advance notice.
>
>
>
Even pieces that won't completely burn up could cause less of a wave than a single larger piece.
Depending on kinetic energy and impact location, [many cities will be wiped out](http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/04/colossal-asteroid-impact-33-billion-years-ago-dwarfed-dinosaur-exinction-event.html):
>
> The huge impactor – between 37 and 58 kilometers (23 to 36 miles) wide
> – collided with the planet at 20 kilometers per second (12 miles per
> second). The jolt, bigger than a 10.8 magnitude earthquake, propelled
> seismic waves hundreds of kilometers through the Earth, breaking rocks
> and setting off other large earthquakes. **Tsunamis thousands of meters
> deep** – far bigger than recent tsunamis generated by earthquakes —
> swept across the oceans that covered most of the Earth at that time.
> 
> The impact would have been catastrophic to the surface environment.
> The smaller, dino-killing asteroid crash is estimated to have released
> more than a billion times more energy than the bombs that destroyed
> Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The more ancient hit now coming to light would
> have released much more energy, experts said.
>
>
> The **sky would have become red hot, the atmosphere would have been
> filled with dust and the tops of oceans would have boiled**, the
> researchers said. The impact sent vaporized rock into the atmosphere,
> which encircled the globe and condensed into liquid droplets before
> solidifying and falling to the surface, according to the researchers.
>
>
> The impact may have been one of dozens of huge asteroids that
> scientists think hit the Earth during the tail end of the Late Heavy
> Bombardment period, a major period of impacts that occurred early in
> the Earth’s history – around 3 billion to 4 billion years ago.
>
>
>
That bunker should have some hefty insulation. Nuclear submarines and space flights with plenty of supplies and/or medically induced coma could allow also some to wait until it's safe to land.
Then again, the [Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of 10 km (6.2 mi) and delivered an estimated energy equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT (4.2e23 J)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater). Even an impact releasing 1.06e24 J at the [average ocean depth of 4.2672 km](http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceandepth.html) on the other side of the planet [20000 km away only causes some fallout and a tsunami amplitude between 16.0 and 32.0 m](http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?dist=20000&distanceUnits=1&diam=15&diameterUnits=2&pdens=&pdens_select=3000&vel=20&velocityUnits=1&theta=45&tdens=1000&wdepth=14000&wdepthUnits=2), so the easiest way for people to survive is to **move away from the calculated impact site(s).**
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**Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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In typical fantasy novels, the dwarf civilization lives within mountains and is known for mining. But if a race of sentient people really did live largely underground in mountains, what characteristics would they likely evolve?
Let's assume this race is mammalian to narrow things down.
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One important question to ask is, at what point did these creatures begin their underground lifestyle? Did they develop tools, lighting, and social structure beforehand, or have they been burrowing since before they were sapient? This may actually result in very different forms, depending on how well they were able to modify their environment to account for their lifestyle.
If they were a group of humans that moved their civilization underground, they might actually wind up shaped not especially different from your typical fantasy dwarf. Small size would allow them to save on time and energy by making smaller tunnels, and a stocky build would make them proportionally stronger, which is helpful for digging through rock. If they had artificial lighting already, they might develop better night vision and more sensitive eyesight to allow them to see better with the sparse lighting they have available. They probably would not experience the more extreme types of evolution, since they would be able to modify their environment through technology. The way their *culture* evolves, however, would be interesting to think about.
If they started out as underground creatures, however, they might wind up with very, very different shapes. If they lived deep underground, with no access to any light at all, they would probably lose their eyesight altogether - unless they went the opposite way, and developed bio-luminescence instead, possibly by forming a symbiotic relationship with an existing bioluminescent organism. They would probably not remain bipedal for very long, as burrowing animals typically use either their front legs or teeth to dig, and without tools the benefit of standing upright would quickly be lost in a subterranean environment. As is the case with ferrets, weasels, and burrowing lizards, they would probably end up with long, flexible bodies and stubby limbs adapted to burrowing rather than grasping. It is difficult to imagine how such creatures could develop civilization in the same manner as humans, although they may discover fire through sulfurs and pyrites. A race of intelligent mole-like creatures who developed chemistry before they learned to make tools would be very interesting to explore!
Some adaptations that could apply in either case could include thicker skulls (which could protect them from falling rocks), slower metabolism (to account for lower access to food and oxygen), and thicker, more durable fingers. Their ears may experience some very interesting adaptations; on the one hand large ears are vulnerable to damage, on the other hand good hearing is helpful in low-light environments, and they may well develop some kind of sonar ability. They may also lose color vision, which is unreliable without a great deal of light, and would probably lose most of their skin coloration within a few generations, which would both help them perceive each other better and would be less of a problem in a world without sun. If they used fire, an ability to detect explosive gases instinctively, whether through smell or sound, would be very helpful. Hair is a toss-up; on the one hand body hair can become full of dirt and dust which may make clean living in underground areas a problem, on the other hand thick body hair can offer an extra layer of protection from scrapes and bruises, and long whiskers can even double up as a sensory organ as it does in the case of cats and rodents.
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It's pretty dark deep down in the mountains.[citation needed] So I decided to read about [moles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(animal)).
Moles . . .
* Have an extra thumb on each hand.
* Love to eat worms and other invertebrates.
* Do not have good eyesight (they don't need it).
* Are not too social.
* Can breathe more CO2 than other animals.
References: [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(animal)), [BBC](http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/European_Mole), [Wildscreen Arkive](http://www.arkive.org/mole/talpa-europaea/).
I would bet that dwarves would have some of these qualities. They might . . .
* Lack good eyesight, but have other highly-developed senses, such as smell and hearing.
* Have a higher tolerance for CO2.
* Enjoy eating things that live underground (though not necessarily worms).
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They might lose pigmentation, too.
They might have an ability to interpret passive sonar: The banging of mining would echo and reverberate, giving them a sense of the details of the passegeways *and* siesmic tomography of the solid rock.
Is the humidity high? It might depend on the mine. They might have trouble keeping cool, especially with activity, so maybe have low body temperature and depend on it, and find open space uncomfortable, and need physical activity to regulate their body temperature when awake. That would feed back to their work ethic.
Assuming they need *some* light to work, torches are problematic. Lanterns developed that run on minerals (limelight) or bioluminescence or semi-magical glowrocks.
---
They might be mistaken for vampires. I got an image like [*Nosferatu*](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/Schreck.jpg)
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Creatures that live underground also change in other ways.
Your Dwarves might develop sensory hairs and whiskers to augment their sense of touch and ability to sense the size and shape of the enclosure they are in. Since they are in small enclosures, they may have *devolved* things like collarbones, to make them more flexible and able to move through tight passageways.
Many burrowing animals have long, flexible bodies. Ferrets are a good example of this, so your Dwarves might have very odd proportions. Since they are digging in a pre mechanized age (and have been for generations), they might also have developed a body plan and musculature similar to badgers, to assist in digging. So long bodies and short, powerful limbs for digging.
Most of their body openings will also need to be protected from abrasion and the accidental ingress of dirt, so look at biology to see the wide variety of flaps, covers and protective membranes that creatures have evolved for the underground lifestyle. Your Dwarves will probably have a few of these adaptions as well.
Humans and sentient creatures from above ground might actually find Dwarves horrifying or repellent to look at or be around if the Dwarves have evolved in these ways for an underground existence.
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A great question with a lot of alternate answers. There are no permanently tunneling large mammals on earth. This is mainly due to food supply, the energy it takes to burrow, and the amount of oxygen available underground (even with the moles ability to recycle a small amount of oxygen they still have to surface to stay alive). So unless the subterranean food chain of the fantasy world was more complex (contained larger species to be hunted by the dwarves) the dwarves would either have to be semi reliant on above ground foraging/farming, or have evolved unlike other species on earth. Alternately they may have discovered methods for farming underground flora and fauna.
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They live underground, where by definition there is not much light, so look to animals like moles and badgers who live underground for evolution.
Both have:
* bad eyesight
* good other senses like hearing and smell
Dwarves are typically a mining species, so they would also need to be strong enough to
* swing a heavy pickaxe
* carry mined loads of material out.
You may also want to consider that if they use pickaxes so much, they might end up with one integrated into their body. If not a pickaxe itself then certainly something that makes them able to dig without the aid of a tool.
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[
This question is about creating a world or society where people can try to advance their own idealogy. In the real world, people can become trapped in a society or country with cultural or political situations with which they do not agree. For example, a freedom minded may have wanted to leave Russia during the reign of communism, but would not be able to leave. The end of a lot of debate is "If you don't like it, leave." But the reality is, this is not always possible.
I am trying to create a world where you are free to move freely from one community to another. Vote with your feet.
If there were 100% political mobility, would that allow each person to compare ideologies/cultures and immediately relocate, would some political ideologies wither and die?
What I am hoping for is the mechanisms which would make this possible. The issues which would impede this.
An example would be a society built on the ideas of ships, boats and rafts loosely associated. Let's say one group of ships institutes strict communism. Each person in the group has 0 personal possessions. Everything is communally shared. there is a Great Leader who runs this group. But I can decide to leave this group at any time and join the 'Hippie' group. Again they are communal, but much more loosely organized and with a free democracy leadership where every person contributes. there could be a full on democracy where personal property is protected and each person is given full voting rights. A full contract society where any person is allowed to enter into any contract at any time. This would allow slavery for instance, as long as the person signed a contract without coersion. Any political or cultural ideas could be presented and people would be free to choose which group they wanted to belong to.
Each would have strengths (communism spreads the wealth, full liberty allows people to be their own boss) and each would have weaknesses (Communism tends to tyranny, full liberty tends to selfishness and greed)
Because I can take my ship or boat or raft and join any other group, I can decide (or vote) for any idea or create my own.
I am wondering if more people would seek safety in numbers or freedom or strict rules or isloation, etc.
I am also wondering what are the obstacles to such a plan (A contract society could bind a person to that group, therefore limiting their mobility freedom and the ability to vote, etc)
Thanks in advance for your ideas.
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While the idea is wonderful it definitely has holes. For a story your best bet is to just say 'this is how it is' like 1984(communist totalitarian), Fahrenheit 451, The Water Thief (Free market totalitarian), etc.
The first problem is of course you are putting all these different ideologies under the guise of a free market. People have the choice to move on, that means something is already impressed on each differing ideology. Many ideologies take away one form of choice or another in one way or another.
The second problem is of course, the more extreme any ideology is held, the less dissent is tolerated. On top of that the more extreme they believe, the more important it becomes for others to believe/live it to. So it will be spread, by force if necessary. There would also be the mind set of (I'll just move on) vs. (I'm right and I need to prove my point/Others shouldn't have to live like this). Being on boats that move would certainly help with an attitude to just move on, and that might be enough.
I almost forgot about personal relationships, they tie us together, making it harder to just move on, since some ideologies will be very insular, you leave, you are cut off from everyone you know...
My point being if everyone was reasonable enough to be that open to others changing their minds most serious conflict would easily be averted. So for a dystopian story it just is the way it is is your best bet.
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The short answer is this would be situational, but the short answer is boring so lets dive right in.
>
> would some political ideologies wither and die?
>
>
>
No, or at least it is unlikely, some of the crazier or lets go with 'less mainstream' ideas out there may die off but core concepts like freedom vs control and shared vs personal are pretty fundamental ideas that even if the cause (say communism) dies, the concept does not. While communism may die, the ideas behind it will remain and it will pop back up with a different name.
>
> I am wondering if more people would seek safety in numbers or freedom or strict rules or isloation, etc
>
>
>
This is where it gets situational, and if the people truly have the freedom (and resources) to move, you will likely see a lot of movement.
Essentially it depends on the person and their experiences. If you were raised under a communist faction you may resent the control and move to a faction with more freedom as soon as you are able. Conversely if you grew up and experienced freedom leading to tragedy you may indeed want the control and organization of a communist group.
It will also depend on how well each faction is run and what stressors are on the system as a whole. Best explained with an example:
The region is in the middle of a major drought. The communist regime is better organized and planned ahead storing food stuffs and improving its water collection systems. Naturally people would flock to the group, and remain long term in appreciation for the system that saved them. The communist faction gets larger and larger and eventually the state organization becomes a mess due to sheer size. A corrupt leader takes charge with a group of autocrats and now the system gets repressive to maintain control. Now people flock to a faction that allows more freedom.
This ebb and flow is what you would see, and it would be more complex in a realistic system as there would be more than two factions vying for control.
**So pay attention to these ideas.**
1. The experiences of the person
2. The state of the world at large (system and stressors)
3. Quality of the organization and its leadership
4. Competition between the factions
As a side note the Divergent series may give you a few ideas. Its not quite as open ended as the system you are describing but it is in the same vein.
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Concerning the 100% political mobility, it would not at all be easy. It is one thing to be to pack your things and leave, but there will be many things to stop you.
## Relationships
If you were to simply leave your old ideology, everybody you grew up with and know will be left behind, this includes your parents, as well as possibly your spouse and children. You may reason that you can simply take your spouse with you, but they have their own relations to break. Would this new ideology really be worth breaking all these ties? Unless your character has incredibly bad family issues, this would be a large factor.
As such, you would then probably need to change the social structure of your world so that such relationships are not weighted so heavily by someone seeking to change state.
## Obligations
In certain ideologies, you may owe your services to the state, such as conscription. Any attempts to simply leave your state may result in the army declaring you a coward and a traitor, and they may then attempt to imprison you. In a more capitalist state, you may be bound by taxes, or some sort of financial contract to the government, such as a loan, and attempting to leave the state may be a legal reason for them to detain you.
As such, your states will then need to not legally bind their citizens, but that would bring up a large number of problems, as if their citizens are not bound to contribute to the state, the state will probably wither. One way to deal with it however, may be a simple severance the state may accept, where one seeking to leave may choose to pay a sum of money to the state to be able to leave hassle free.
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Iain M. Banks' [Culture series](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series) has some of this, and you may find it useful as inspiration. The Culture is one enormously powerful spacefaring civilisation, and it encourages people to do and believe as they wish (with exceptions like murder). There are fringe cultures like the Zetetic Elench, who believe in exploration and acquisition, and the ultra-pacifist Peace Faction.
The Culture is generally non-interventionist with other civilisations, but sometimes does take action when it finds some civilisation particularly abhorrent. The Player of Games, for instance, deals with an imperial civilisation rooted in abuse of its lower-caste members, and [Excession](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession) involves a civilisation named the Affront who take great pleasure in cruelty.
So this is not a perfect answer; there is not complete freedom for competing ideologies. However, within the Culture there is a great deal of freedom, and you may find it useful.
Ways this freedom of ideology is accomplished:
* No real scarcity (reduces the need for conflict)
* Augmented humans have very little weakness, other than emotional - age, disease, etc.
* A permissive atmosphere where conflict is discouraged
* Limits imposed at the outer edge of "acceptable" behaviour, but a very wide definition of that
The lack of desperation seems to really enable freedom in this sense.
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This is a largely utopian setting, which would not work in “normal” conditions.
I see two ways to make it work short-term:
1) have 100% physical mobility;
2) do not require physical mobility/proximity as a qualifying factor for affiliation.
1. 100% physical mobility:
Means that there is no (or there is negligible) cost associated with physical mobility. To leave communist Russia, for example, you need to somehow convert your immobile (or expensively mobile) property to the type of currency you can use to establish yourself somehow in the faraway land you are going to. This is a difficult task (and far more difficult than actually getting a green light to leave the country). Suppose you do not need to do any of that, this would imply that property is acquired easily enough that you can just abandon it or that property is outright nonexistent, one other alternative is that any property a person can acquire is easily mobile. Besides that, you would need some mechanic to actually provide mobility to the person itself. Ease of converting property to currency is heavily dependent on ideology, so it is irrelevant, since a prohibitive ideology would easily break the 100% political mobility rule.
This also poses a facility for expansive and militaristic ideologies to use force effectively, allowing to use 100% physical mobility to invade anything they could think of. Then their victims would have to either resist (which also would encourage development of prohibitive ideologies) or use 100% physical mobility to run away (perpetually). The latter could be possible either without physical property or with easily mobile physical property.
2. Physical mobility not required.
Community members do not require physical proximity in order to pursue projects together. Effectively this would be a no-man's-land inhabited by individual-as-a-sovereign-state entities who choose their affiliations. This kind of setting requires enough technologies to establish self-sufficient existence for a lone individual and enough communication infrastructure to keep contact with other members of your chosen community. With the tendency of ideologies to develop rivalry between each other, this would require each individual to develop significant skills in intelligence (gathering intelligence, obscuring intelligence about oneself, diversion) and also would very efficiently force people to choose an active ideological position. Depending on the nature of your species, they could also have a very hard time providing social securities to each other, effectively narrowing social living down into business-like relationships.
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There are a few problems I see with what you're proposing:
**1. Loyalty.** When you get born into a group, chances are strong you're going to stay there. Your family is there, your friends are there, and if you were raised there it's probably the only life you know. The only way you'd even consider leaving is if you were somehow educated about all the other available groups and the pros/cons of living there, which leads me to
**2. Competition.** If you're the leader of a group, and you have the choice of indoctrinating a new generation of workers or teaching everyone about how much better it is to go somewhere else, you're probably going to choose the former. I find it hard to believe that these various factions wouldn't be constantly working to keep all their citizens loyal by any means possible, which again leads me to
**3. War.** These different groups probably won't live in peace. There will be wars, people will die, and that means that anyone who thinks about joining another group is a potential traitor. At this point, your system will have most certainly broken down, because no one will be allowed to freely leave.
The only solution I can see to this is that either this is an enlightened society that has transcended human pettiness, and everyone is fully willing to live or die by the whims of others, or there is some central power that makes sure everything stays peaceful. I'd go with this latter option, as it solves most of the problems while retaining human nature. Plus, the central power doesn't even have to be present in the story: for example, everyone could be religious, and fear the wrath of a god if they try to coerce people into staying in their group. On the other hand, you could have something like the Roman Empire, which, as I recall, allowed a large number of religions to flourish under its rule so long as everyone paid their taxes and didn't cause too much trouble.
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[As one of the answer mentioned](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/9718/147): 100% mobility is an utopia. States will want to control the population like they do today with border control and citizenship. Living in a country gives privileges like social security, right to vote, education but it also come with responsibilities: paying taxes, military duties (in some places). Every country where there are nomads, the states try to settle them, sometimes by force. In that particular case it's mostly a taxation issue. People that are always on the move irritate the local populations and the governments of these states.
One solution would be to have an integrated confederacy of states like the European Union made of countries that share the same values and are pretty similar from an ideological point of view. But the EU still does not have 100% mobility yet.
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The virtual world of the Internet might be supportive of competing ideologies. Some premises that might help this:
* Net neutrality: i.e. network operators agree to transmit any bytes, irrespective of their content and the meaning of that content.
* People are not dependent for their survival on the Internet and on being a member of a community.
* (Partial) anonymity" i.e. one can be a member of several groups without membership of and behaviour in one group affecting one's membership of another group.
Are these required for a physical world? In what form?
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>
> If there were 100% political mobility, would that allow each person to
> compare ideologies/cultures and immediately relocate, would some
> political ideologies wither and die?
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Theoretically, anything is possible.
However, the 100% political mobility conditional eliminates most political ideologies from the discussion. In turn this *should* also eliminate the ideologies that stemmed from the repressions and shortcomings of said eliminated ideologies. Simply stated: an effect must have a cause.
Therefore this discussion is limited to an early nomadic political ideology that, *I assume*, allowed individuals to leave on their own accord. But allowing an individual to *leave* on their own accord only accounts for half of the 100% political mobility. Assuming the nomadic societal structure consisted of an alpha-male/female and non alpha-males/females, then when threatened by non alpha-males/females, the alpha-male/female would impose their dominance, remove the threat, or be replaced by the threat.
Thus, the only true political ideologies with 100% political mobility, are the ideologies that exist in an individual's thoughts.
*I typed this on my iPhone, it took so long.*
[Answer]
I was thinking about future technology, transhumanism, utopianism, and I came up with something like this. The idea isn't 100% formed, it has some inconsistent or at least incomplete parts, but...
**It won't be a competition between familiar ideologies. It requires a world in which most past and present cultures and politics are unworkable or irrelevant.**
Post-scarcity economics. Humans aren't needed for labor anymore. Thus, humans don't depend on other humans for anything other than companionship.
In the absence of economic drives, there will be greater political engagement, as by elimination, politics become the main thing limiting people from achieving their preferred lifestyles.
Post-scarcity firepower. There's no safety in numbers. A small revolutionary force could easily wipe out a government. And warfare between civilizations may not even be possible.
With this technology level, centralized states are unnecessary.
Sousveillance. This is a world where privacy is alien. It would be as unnatural to them as having a flagman walk in front of every car is to us.
It's questionable whether democracy could function under these circumstances. But I already established that repressive governments were impossible.
The combination of sousveillance and unlimited firepower means you can kill anyone at will, but only if you give no warning. Any threat gives your target - or someone else who sympathizes - the chance to fire first. Thus, you can kill people, but you can't make them obey with force. And with no scarcity, you can't pay anyone to do what you want.
With everyone knowing everything about everyone around them, nobody able to force others to to what they want, and anyone able to destroy anything, the only way anyone can survive is for people to voluntarily associate only with like-minded people.
I assumed immortality had been achieved. This is a world where the only likely cause of death is violence, and even that is now rare.
With extreme 'tyranny of the majority' (try 'unanimity') being the predominant form of organization, I expect/hope that most societies wouldn't allow reproduction anymore. With being able to live in the context you choose being critical to everyone's survival and being widely considered a basic right, birth into societies like these would be cruel and disruptive.
It should be evident that these people aren't exactly human anymore.
What cultures and ideologies can exist at all?
Cultures highly aggressive toward outsiders would likely have destroyed each other long ago. High internal aggression can't have survived either.
Competitive cultures probably won't survive. There's little left to compete over and little means to compete with.
Hypocritical cultures won't survive. The tech level doesn't permit practices like trying to control how other people see you.
The big question is what anyone does in this world...
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Please don't get me wrong, but this sounds like a setting for a video game.
What I see as a problem here is that it looks to me that no one here knows what ideology really is (don’t want to offend anyone). So, ideology is to put it in several words, the way someone is imagining our reality. It is a set of scenes which are placed around us arranging (at best) every aspect of our life. It goes much deeper than politics or economy.
Philosopher Michael Foucault had a term "field of discourses" (sorry if the translation is poor; I am not a native English speaker) field of discourses represents the set of values and "truths" which are given to us and which we accept.
Ideology, or *field of discourses*, forms part of our identity. Identity makes sense only if there are "others" against which we form "us".
Now we approach to the first problem: **how do you know that the other group will accept you?**
An educated guess is that they wouldn’t, because you are not "one of them", because they have some "ancient" roots, some heritage etc. Of course all those reasons do not make sense, but that’s one of the things that ideology does: it acts like glue for a people under its influence.
Second, like grimmsdottir said, ideology by itself is hardly a reason to leave your boat; especially more than once, because it is really hard to leave you whole life behind.
And also keep this in mind: no ideology is better or worse than another it is only a problem of implemetation. I see that many people here are making jokes and/or criticize comunisam, but it is not by far as bad as people sometimes represent it.
[Answer]
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> I am wondering if more people would seek safety in numbers or freedom
> or strict rules or isloation, etc
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I would like to answer this one point:
People always tend to live in groups. There is safety in groups, but much more importantly: Groups offer chances for mating. Most people seem to have a strong desire to do so :-) So you will always end up with group forming. There will be isolated individuals, but most of those will not be isolated all of the time, and they will always be a minority.
An other reason for group building is specialization. While mospt people can learn to achieve most everyday tasks by themselves, there are some tasks which strictly require specialization. Think of dentists, for example.
[Answer]
## Inter-group conflict
A limiting factor is the ability of one ideology/group to simply force its will upon others. Many ideologies can prevent competing ideologies from succeeding by taking their resources and subjugating or killing their people. It is "competing ideologies" in some sense, but that's not competition in an ideological way.
Unless you have some overpowering entity that is able to prevent a strong group from attacking others, you won't really get the environment you want; and if you have such an entity, then what is the ideology of that supreme power?
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Imagine a very long bridge (Visbi Bridge - named after the designer) across an immense canyon - really almost a wide deep gorge -use on an earth-like world. My concept is that part of the support of the bridge would be a ballon-like, lighter-than-air technology of some kind. The ends of the bridge would use a suspension set-up, with piers and cables. Out toward the middle, the bridge would need additional support
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> 1.I am wondering if this might be feasible, assuming a somewhat more advanced materials technology than we presently have? Gravity and weather would be the similar to our earth.
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> 2.How long could such a bridge be? 1 mile? 2 miles? 5 miles? Assume advanced materials that are at least conceivable today.
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> 3.Would this concept make sense in opposition to flight? In other words it would have more capacity for the energy consumed.
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> 4.Are there other technologies that would realistically allow very long bridge spans?
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On this world, the technology is close to what we have. The civilization on this world is less energy intensive than ours, is not car-based and is more sparsely populated. I am ruling out anti-gravity technology or energy bridges, etc. This bridge would **not** have to bear enormous loads, mainly people in some sort of vehicles and valuable/light cargo. I assume provisions for closing the bridge and/or reconfiguring the bridge structure in unfavorable weather and wind conditions.
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From an engineering standpoint, an LTA bridge is similar to a [pontoon bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontoon_bridge). You'd basically have a continuous line of balloons (or multiple lines, if you're willing to pay more for increased redundancy) inflated with the lifting gas of your choice. Groups of balloons would support bridge segments, and each segment would be tethered to the ground below with a number of anchor cables.
In unusually severe weather (say, a once-in-a-century hurricane), the bridge can be "landed" by separating the segments, releasing some lifting gas, and using the tether cables to guide the pieces down to the ground. You wouldn't do this except as a last resort, since re-launching the bridge is almost as much work as assembling it in the first place. Landing can be done in less than a day, since each piece can be landed independently, but re-launching needs to be done one segment at a time, from the ends to the middle, so that everything lines up.
1. Yes, it is feasible. You'd need to avoid building such a bridge in areas affected by severe weather (where "severe" depends on the available technology, eg. if you can produce huge sheets of Kevlar fabric, you can handle far worse storms than if you're using gas-tight silk and hemp ropes).
2. Like with a pontoon bridge, there is essentially no limit to how long you can make the bridge: each segment is self-supporting and self-stabilizing, and the connection to the adjoining segments is only to maintain alignment.
3. You can't really compare a bridge and an aircraft. An LTA bridge has a high up-front energy cost, but once it's in place, the energy cost is mainly that of replacing lifting gas lost to leakage or deliberate releases. An aircraft, on the other hand, has a high per-trip energy cost.
4. A suspension bridge can go at least 2000 meters between towers; the approach spans can easily triple this. If you are willing to build a massive support structure, a [trestle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trestle) or [viaduct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaduct) bridge can cross a virtually unlimited distance.
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A significant problem with suspending a bridge from balloons is how the load of traffic is supported.
Let's say that your bridge is in equilibrium under its own weight. When you add the vehicle(s) going across the bridge, the amount of gas in your balloons isn't going to increase, therefore they provide no additional lift. So the weight of the vehicle(s) must be carried solely by conventional means, i.e. by bending of the bridge deck. With a very long span you would need a very stiff bridge in order not to get excessive deflection.
Note that this problem doesn't arise from pontoon style bridges (which, as Mark pointed out, is probably the closest any real bridge gets to your "balloon bridge"). This is because when you add vehicle(s) over the pontoon supports, the vertical reaction at the supports increases, i.e. the contact pressure between the pontoon and the water increases.
Your best bet is to stick to conventional bridge styles, but to use advanced materials. The current records for bridge spans are (approximately) 1km for cable-stayed and 2km for suspension. The main restriction to increasing these spans is the weight of the cables - each cable has to carry its own weight as well as some of the weight of the bridge deck and vehicle traffic. The cables on the current longest bridges are mainly carrying their own weight. You could solve this by making the cables out of something lighter than steel, e.g. carbon nanotubes. This is obviously not done currently because of the excessive cost of carbon nanotubes when such a large quantity would be needed.
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Air is incredibly light. It's hard to conceive of any materials that are actually lighter than air and sufficiently so to keep lift while under load.
However, it might be possible to use balloons as a lifting device. The gas is a subject of some contention. Helium has a lifting force of [1 gram per litre](http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/question185.htm), which is not very much. Hydrogen is about 8% better but it's very flammable which is why airships no longer use it. Search Hindenburg. Methane can also be used and doesn't escape balloons as easily but it's a much worse lifting gas. So let's go with helium.
Let's also say that we're using nice advanced graphene to build this bridge; although not currently developed enough to do this with, it might well be soon. Graphene has a mass of [0.77mg per square metre](http://conferences.theiet.org/patw/-documents/mitali-kakran-slides.cfm), or 21.36 milligrams per cubic metre.
We're building a bridge. How much material does that need? Assuming a span of 1km, width of 10m and average depth just 50cm (which should support enough for your needs), that gives:
$$ 1000 \times 10 \times 0.5 = 5000 \text{ m}^{2} $$
$$ 5000 \times 21.36 = 106800 \text{ milligrams} $$
$$ = 106.8 \text{ grams} $$
Therefore, to lift the bridge alone you need 106.8 litres of helium. You will need extra helium equivalent to the weight of the vehicle in grams when a vehicle crosses (or a person for that matter). Let's say your heaviest vehicle is 1 tonne. That's an extra 1,000,000 litres of helium...
In short, you're going to need a **lot** of helium. It's fairly impractical.
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There is a great article put out from MIT:
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> <http://cba.mit.edu/docs/theses/15.09.Carney.pdf>
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In it, the authors describe the feasible application of lightweight cellular lattices made from a crystal-like array of struts:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/O1jfY.png)
It's certainly not "lighter than air," but there is a lot of empty space, and it's realistically achievable.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nuXra.png)
The bridge could be as long as possible using a solar powered, gantry-style assembler, like so:
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> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MssR1zmlpU>
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Or using the bipedal robots shown here:
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> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytRJHtg_jJw&t=1m9s>
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The cells (?triangular bipyramids?), presumably, would need to be made in bulk first before their use in assembly.
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As other's have mentioned, your idea is akin to floating bridges. Seattle has some of the biggest ones:
They are kept stable via angled anchor cables on the sea (or lake) floor.
So at a very basic level, one could treat a floating air bridge the same as a floating water bridge by having anchor cables attached to the surface below.
However, there are some significant differences:
* a floating bridge has some lateral 'twist' due to tides and waves and such. A floating air bridge would have the same but at a much greater scale given the resistance to the air would be much less (think of the rope bridge scene in Temple of Doom). Your anchoring system would have to be fairly complex to prevent the twisting of the bridge deck in mid-air.
* a floating water bridge is supported equally along it's entire length. A floating air bridge, using balloons, would only be supported at the point of connection between the balloon and deck. This would mean the bridge structure would have to be reinforced to handle the point-loads much more so than a floating water bridge. (this could perhaps be remedied by having the balloons replace a standard suspension bridge's main towers...you'd essentially have a suspension bridge held up via balloons rather than towers).
I am not an engineer, but perhaps some of these concerns could be handled via a different recipe for the atmosphere. Perhaps the atmosphere on this planet is much more dense than on earth making these ideas a bit more practical.
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Mark's excellent answer covers most of this, there is one last thing it missed though.
Lifting gas escapes from balloons, for example Helium Balloons a few days after a party have already shrunk.
No matter what you try you will gradually have lifting gas escape from the pontoons, so part of the servicing schedule for the bridge will be for people to go through and refill them. The viability of the bridge will to a large extent depend on the availability of the lifting gas and how fast (or slow) the leaking can be made.
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How about kites?
You'd need horizontal-ish guy ropes to counteract the lateral component of the force and computer-control of the kites' angles relative to the wind - perhaps you could assume a steady [katabatic wind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katabatic_wind) guided by the canyon. Wind is stronger at higher altitude. If the wind was constant enough and strong enough you might be able to use the bridge itself as a lifting body.
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As discussed in comments and other answers there are several issues:
-Adding bouyant balloons to a bridge would reduce the weight load, do nothing to reduce the wind load (in fact it would make it worse.)
-Lift gas would leak over time.
Here's my solution
**The neutrally buoyant cable car / ski lift!**
This is basically just like a normal cable car / ski lift, except that the weight of the cars / chairs is reduced by a buoyant balloon. This enables the spans to be much larger. During high winds, all cars have to be towed in to the base stations to prevent damage.
One issue is ensuring the cars are indeed neutrally buoyant before they are released, otherwise an unloaded car would pull up on the cable just as much as an overloaded one would pull down. Varying the amount of bulky lift gas seems inconvenient, so it would probably be done with ballast weights.
Finally, if an intermediate support were needed part way across the span, as mentioned in my comments on the question, you could make an A-frame from 2 cables tethered to the canyon floor to left and right of the direction of travel, held in tension by a balloon. It is unlikely but conceivable that this would be more economic than a steel pylon on some worlds (i.e. those with a very dense atmosphere.)
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Considering that interplanetary trade will likely be limited because of cost of shipping vs product value, how would interplanetary money be valued against each other? I'm thinking more along the lines of tourists or even business travelers. How would you know if your 80 green Martians should buy you a burger and fries or night at the Hilton in London? How would 2 almost separate economies decide on a fair exchange rate? We used to have actual goods or physical stuff like gold or silk. Will we be back to bringing beads for the natives when we want to travel?
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If there is no exchange of goods or services then there is no value for each currency in the other worlds. Currency is purely defined by what it can be used to purchase.
There for the question is a matter of what is imported or transfer between the two worlds. It's likely that some sort of exchange does regularly occur. If people are traveling between these worlds regularly then services are being exchange even if items and trade goods aren't. These services can be the basis of setting economic value. You have a someone playing taxi between the two worlds. How much would he ask the Martians to pay him for his time and buying gas on Mars to be able to taxi them to Alpha Centauri. How much would he charge the Firaxians from Alpha Centauri for a trip to Mars (+5 Internets to anyone that gets the allusion). That cost for services rendered at both worlds a good starting basis for an exchange rate between the two worlds. Judge what services can be purchased on each planet.
In addition there will be financial exchanges of items. Large expensive things like raw materials would be horrible wasteful to ship. However, a cargo hold of tiny expensive micro-processors can still be cost efficient to ship potentially. If you assume that its cost efficient enough for *people* to travel between planets at all regularly then the cost of travel is low enough that small refined goods can still be cost efficient. Arts and trade goods may also have resell value.
Your tourist will bring his Martian money and use it to buy things. There will be some interplanetary exchange which decides his wealth based off of goods/services exchanged between the two planets (or exchanged between planets they both have commerce with) and will regulate the prices. Honestly it's no different then today's economic system in most ways. Only three factors are different.
1. As you said the harder it is to ship people and resources to a planet the lower the money exchange rate will be. As a pretty accurate rule of thumb the less likely it is for someone to travel from planet A to B the worse the exchange rate will be for them. If you're assuming at all regular trips to the planet then this won't be an issue, because if it's cheap to send people to the planet it's cheap to send refined goods as well. If someone is visiting a planet that is far away, expensive to reach, and rarely visited by people from his planet he is going to suffer significantly in the money exchange, and may be better bringing 'beads' to exchange, though his beads will be art, micro processors, and similar light weight fungible items.
2. Unless you have some form of faster-then-light communication system in place there is a lag in communications which causes uncertainty about the financial state of the planet you're traveling from. This means planets with more stable and less dynamic economies and governments will be favored better in currency exchange, to adjust for the uncertainty of having to decide a currency exchange without knowing rather some disaster has befallen the other planet and tanked its economy. The further the planet is the more stale news will be and the worse the exchange rate. How significant lag is between the worlds, i.e. how fast does your FTL system allow travel and communications between systems, will strongly effect how significant this factor is. A lag of a few days doesn't matter much, a lag of a few years matters quite a bit!
3. If bullet point 1 or 2 leads to any noticeable loss in exchange rate then you may be better for someone to buy up all of planet B's currency from locals of planet A before he leaves for planet B. Since planet A will have an exchange rate that favors A's currency over B he will get a very good deal. If he is going to later return home to A from B he would also want to buy as much of his home currency up with the remains of his planet B currency before leaving to take advantage of the favorable exchange rates. This is called **arbitrage**, and it can be a viable way to make money (or at least lower loss of money for expensive travel). Arbitrage is also the reason that any economies with regular exchange of people will tend to equalize to a steady exchange rate, if there is a significant difference someone will take advantage of arbitrage to make a quick buck (or paso, or space-looney).
EDIT:
an update on a very old answer of mine. However, there is one other exchange option to consider information.
Lets look at a world that is so far away away/expensive that travel rarely happens and even refined technological goods are not cost efficient to send to the world, in which case it's likely going to be absurdly expensive to travel to the world. For now lets also imagine a scenario where no FTL comms or other means of long distance communication without travel to the world exists. What can you take as 'beads' to exchange when there is no currency exchange?
Since it's so hard for anyone to travel to the world the world your traveling to likely has not heard anything about what your world has been up to for awhile, and not gained any information from your world. Things like books, movies, video games, software, etc, all can be purchased and stored as ones and zeros on your future-thumb drive to take with you when you travel. Your arrive on the new world with Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sellable 'products' in your pocket, with almost no expense beyond what you payed to travel to the planet yourself. These will be the best 'beads' for you to use, no one on the new world has seen "Star Wars Episode XXVII" or "Finding Marlin" movies yet, Look at the box office grosses for movies in foreign countries, and imagine the kind of money you could make if you brought an entire years worth of movies to release on an entire different planet, along with books, games, etc as well...
If your world has FTL communication something similar, meaning the other world likely isn't waiting for a traveler to bring media to them, an information based economic exchange can still be used as the basis of transferring value between two worlds; the process is simply more complicated, but also more robust.
Lets look at an overly simplified example first. Imagine your Home Planet A finally finishes Half Life 3 game, to much celebration and sales on World A. Once their done making a profit on their own planet whoever owns the rights to Half Life series in the future (lets say Google, their own everything electronic by then I'm sure) decides to look at other markets to sell their game in. Google calls up affiliates on world B and sell them the rights to publish "Half Life" on World B, in exchange for Royalties worth millions of space-bucks off the sales. Now these millions of dollars on World B are of limited use to Google at first glance, if it costs too much to ship from B to A then Google can't buy anything from B with their space-loonies; it's hardly worth the crypto-card the money is published on right? However, Google already produced Half Life 3, it costs them nothing to sell publishing rights to World B, so a few million world B space-loonies in royalties that they can earn with a single expansible call still sounds potentially useful, their figure out something to do with it later.
Now, imagine you are traveling to World B, something prohibitively rare. You call up Google because you hear their so rich they haven't settled for monopolizing our world and started in on owning part of World B's economy s well. You offer Google five hundred dollars in exchange for a few hundred thousand space-loonies worth of money on World B, five hundred dollars of money on their home world, that they can actually spend to buy things with, is worth allot more then a hundred thousand loonies trapped on a world where they can't access it, so Google happily takes your 10 thousand dollars and calls up World B and tells them that they should give you a hundred thousand dollars worth of royalties when you arrive in World B. Without carrying a single physical item you've manage to buy up enough money to be rich as soon as you land on World B.
Of course in reality this is overly simplified, because Google would have more to do with their space-loonies then wait for a traveler to World B. Maybe when Google sold the rights to release "Half Life 3" to world B they agreed to accept half their usual royalties in exchange for publishing rights to the "Duke Nukem Infinity" game that world B just finished producing. Now both worlds have gained something sellable on their own world, and thus of real value, via an economic exchange with the other world. Constant buying & selling of media, and other forms of information. from the two worlds like this can create a thriving information economy without any travel between the worlds. It could be you already have exact exchange rates, markets for buying and selling currencies, even integrated stock markets with people buying futures on other worlds currencies etc long before you decide to travel to world B, you need only buy exchange currency on the market based off of the exchange rate decided/controlled by the information economy. In a way this would be bad news for you though, you won't get as good a value buying the other planets currency if there is already a strong economy, and if travel really is that expensive then the lack of some form of arbitrage to help recoup travel expenses could make the trip bankrupt you.
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As with other answers, I point out that you need to separate buying power from numeric value. As for working this balance, I follow a school of thought my father invented, which is named, tongue-in-cheek, "Beeronomics."
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> In all cultures that allow the imbibing of alcohol, beer is present.
> Workers generally need the same degree of non-sobriety the world
> around. The exact degree is unimportant, other than that it makes up
> a large enough portion of a worker's disposable income and can be
> treated as a necessity good for purposes of production and pricing.
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> To determine the exchange rate (for tipping purposes), simply look at
> the price of the local domestic swill, and measure your tip in beers.
> So if you would have tipped \$10 at home, and a beer is \$3 at home, you
> should tip \$5 in a foreign location where a beer is only \$1.50
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It is, of course, a very rough concept, and should never be thought of as anything more than that. However, it is a powerful tool for making exchange rates make sense. It can be applied quickly when you do not have time to do the multiplications to get the real exchange rates.
If you identify any common needs between Martian and Earth economies, those common goods can be the metric you use from which to build your exchange rates.
If there are no common goods, that may suggest that Martian Wahoos and American Greenbacks might not actually be exchangeable, because they actually measure two unrelated markets with no opportunity for trade between them. This would trivialize your question.
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To trade within a single interstellar empire in a single economy, you can use [fiat money](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money) (not based not precious metals) - Chinese started using them in 11th century.
Between empires, you would rely on clearing houses and/or banks who do trade with both sides. So you deposit your valuables in a branch in one empire, and collect equivalent in another empire. Banking [started around 14th century](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking) to solve exactly these problems. First foreign exchange contract (we know of) was [in 1156](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking#Foreign_exchange_contracts).
Obviously, any such direct arrangement assumes frequent travel between participating planets. If travel is slow or complicated, there might emerge [arbitrage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage) making profit from inefficient markets (so bigger part of price difference will go to the arbitrager).
With even slower travel and higher cost, only the most expensive/profitable material would be transported. Or, Transport would be so slow, that generation ships will be hopping to next system and no commerce would be possible. **Commerce depends on cost per pound per year in transport (and risk of loss of cargo)** so depending on your parameters, different settings are possible.
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If transport between the two planets is extremely expensive, this would force each planet to be self-sufficient as far as basic life requirements are concerned. You would have a hard time signing up colonist for a one way journey to a planet that required monthly shipments of water and oxygen.
I would therefore conclude that currency from a different planet would only have value as a novelty item, to be collected by affluent residents of other planets specifically because it is rare. The multi-millionaire that steps off of the space-liner might be in for a big surprise if his pockets and credit accounts are full of foreign currency.
As for official transactions between the governments of both planets, specific negotiations would have to occur for every trade at first. Eventually, each government would possess enough of every other government's native currency that commerce could be practiced in the currency of the product's origin, allowing items to be purchased at prices established by their local economies. With shipping costs making up the vast majority of any item's cost, minor fluctuations in the purchasing currency could be ignored. Ultimately, the laws of supply and demand would rule all.
One currency would span the void without excessive shipping costs and that is knowledge. Discoveries on either world could be sold to the other again under the laws of supply and demand. Those transactions could either be performed in the economy of the knowledge owner or in that of the purchaser, depending on what associated purchases of physical products might also be occurring at that time.
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Unless we found another intelligent species on another planet to trade with I assume that we would be trading with humans, that originated from Earth.
In that case we would probably begin by using Earth currencies until infrastructure is set up on another planet. Eventually us people on Mars will come up with our own currency, as we get paid more on Mars, the price of living and food is much more expensive, travel is more expensive, and eventually the exchange rates should line up, with the average price of living matching up with earths.
If we are trading with another intelligent race, I'm afraid we won't use currency at all, at least to begin with. If this other race has a currency already, it would be worthless to us at first, but the more our races mix, people traveling to and from this other planet, the more the currency will be used by humans and the more accurate exchange rate will be possible. We need to build up an economy based around the currency before it can be used to trade with.
But I believe trading with aliens will just be an exchange of goods, and the exchange rate of that will just be based of
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You might want to read [*Neptune's Brood* by Charles Stross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune's_Brood). It features details of interstellar banking, wealth generation, and currency. The main characters are accountants, and the main plot concerns a financial vehicle.
In our own realistic future, transport on and off gravity wells like planets will overwhelm the price of goods. Basic elements might be cheap from asteroid mining. So what would be valuable to trade?
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There was a scifi, whose name escapes me right now, that basically said that you can't afford to ship water to Mercury, even though Mercury has none (or next to none) and the Oort cloud (or Europa, etc) has plenty... because of the time it takes to ship it. The cost of your money sitting around for 5 years (or whatever) makes it unprofitable to do anything that long-term - even though it needs to get done.
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There will be great lag in communication due to the distances between the purchasing value of two currencies distanced by light years. (by the way great arbitrage oportunities for space craft staying in the midle and trading the goods). Unless you use alcubierre hyperdrive spaceships at many times the speed of light, then prices can be have less differences
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Quantum Coin
Take advantage of Quantum Entanglement. Instantly transfer and track all transaction anywhere in the universe.
"The use of quantum entanglement will make it possible for all participants in a network to simultaneously agree on a measurement result without a proof of work system."
Interesting article: <https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1711/1711.04235.pdf>
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DJtr5.gif)
In my world mostly composed of arthropods, I wanted one to fill a niche similar to that of a common snapping turtle (an ambush predator that extends its long neck to strike quickly at prey), and similar to a common snapping turtle, I wished for it to have a long, flexible neck that it could retract into the inside of its body, specifically an elongated segment specialized for it (the neck itself would be composed of several small body segments, the legs of which atrophied overtime). The issue with this is that not only were there basically no insects with actual long flexible necks I could find (most having one rigid and elongated segment for a "neck"), the best counterpart I found for what I wanted was a dragonfly nymph's xenomorph-like lower lip, which is simply tucked under its body while retracted. The examples of insects with parts they could retract into their bodies were also not exactly helpful, mostly limited to the stingers of hymenopterans and similarly small structures, even in proportion to the animals' bodies.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BgL8v.gif)
To be more exact: I'm struggling with harmonizing a turtle-like anatomy regarding the neck with an exoskeleton, as while the turtle's body is almost exoskeletal in nature, the neck itself is supported by a group of neck vertebrae, the outer covering being flexible, bendable skin that can easily "accumulate" on the outside without compromising the neck's internal structure. Yes, I could simply use a dragonfly nymph approach without even needing a long neck, but I wished for a more turtle-like approach for the sake of looks, as I wished for these arthropods to have a more vertebrate-like appearance.
That said, **based on how exoskeletons function in our world, can an arthropod-like creature have the ability to mostly retract its head and neck into its body similarly to a snapping turtle?** If not, I'd appreciate if another alternative for protecting the head and neck, especially while giving an illusion of retracting it, was presented. For the sake of this question, the creature's overall size and neck length are similar to those of an adult common snapping turtle.
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If you consider the actual mechanics of what the skeleton of a turtle does during retraction, that behavior is 100% compatible with having an exoskeleton.
During retraction all a turtle's neck is curving to the side inside the protective armor of the shell. There are two ways that turtles bend their necks to fit inside the shell. The Cryptodirans, like snapping turtles, bend their neck down and back to retract, while the Pleurodirans bend their neck to the side.
This sort of S-curve motion can be observed in the abdomens of mating dragonflies, the bodies of centipedes, and the tails of scorpions, among multitudes of other examples. If you imagine a fantastic critter with the body of a turtle and the neck of a centipede you should be on the right track to building a critter with an exoskeleton and a retractable head.
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Yes, it is possible. In fact, some insects with retractable heads already exist on Earth.
A great example that may even be similar to what you are looking for is the
Photuris firefly's larva ([research article here](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00359-018-01312-2)).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z3fTS.png)
The Photuris firefly larva's head can be retracted into its pronotum (plate-like structure), which is similar in functionality to that of a turtle.
Perhaps you could have your creatures have slightly more elongated heads/necks as necessary (as these ones have heads that protrude roughly 1mm out of 12.5mm), or proportional to their actual sizes and lengths.
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Does it have to be an exoskeleton, precisely? How about **scales**?
I'm thinking of **armadillos**. Their scales are attached at the base and it gives the armadillo a lot of flexibility in movement while keeping it protected. A neck with armadillo scales could extend, where the scales overlap very little, and then retract, causing the scales to greatly overlap but giving it that flexibility while providing exterior protection.
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I looked through some posts discussing worlds without oil. Those posts mainly focus on fuels and transportation. But I realized that the distillation of oil produces lots of organic compounds - ethene, propane, butane, which are all important industrial chemicals.
My question is, without oil (and gas perhaps), how would humanity develop chemistry? Or more specifically, will it be possible? Will it be faster or slower? Is there any alternatives?
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Oil is a very useful substance, but chemistry would certainly still be of immense value even if there was not a drop of oil on Earth. Chemistry is used in some form for most heavy industrial processes from the refining of steel to electroplating.
Of the top 5 chemicals used today all could still be produced. Sulfuric acid production does not use oil and neither does the production of nitrogen or the electrochemical processes that produce caustic soda and bleach. Even propylene and ethylene which are usually produced from oil could be produced from fermentation and oxidation processes without oil.
There are also many other things that can be used to replace oil. The obvious one being coal which would be a good stand in for a number of chemicals normally provided by oil. But even if there was no coal there are many plant based products that could be used as a starting material such as hemp, sunflower and rapeseed oils, timber from which turpentine can be extracted as well as all manner of oils, tars, gums and other chemicals from smoke and condensate from burning organic matter.
Perhaps without oil, gas and coal, the products that currently originate from them would be much more expensive as the alternatives would not be as easily available. So whilst all materials we have today could be produced, their quantity and the financial benefit they represent would be very different. It would be difficult for today’s massive fleets of petrol, diesel, heavy oil and jet fuel guzzling transports to be fueled from plant output.
So it would be a very different world with a very different development trajectory. But chemistry would still be vital.
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## A Bridge To Terebinth Trees
Petroleum was not widely exploited until very recently in history. Chemists *did*, however, make widespread use of [turpentine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpentine). Though the memory has been destroyed by modern labelling practices, turpentine is *not* a distilled petroleum product except by imitation. Rather, it is a distilled product of the turpentine tree, a.k.a. terebinth tree, or more generally, of pine trees.
The instructions for this are quite ancient - Dioscorides (1st century AD) gave a detailed procedure to isolate the spirits of turpentine. These procedures were later adapted to isolate the spirits of wine, which was certainly a practical exercise of chemistry.
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If coal is allowed then sure! To summarize [another answer of mine](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/145743/62341), if you have coal then you've got coal tar and coal gas and phenol and a convenient fuel to drive your industrial revolution, and then you can make pretty much everything.
If you *don't* have coal then that's a different matter altogether.
See, there's lots you can make out of trees, but the problem is that there's a limited supply of tree biomass and you need an awful lot of refined fuel to drive an industrial revolution. Given the need for wood for ships, wood for charcoal, wood for building, and now wood for chemical feedstocks too you'll find out that it is rather easy to deforest your nation and rather hard to replenish all that biomass.
Chemistry would continue, of course, but once you've caused major ecological damage and run out of fuel for your economy the resulting crash might make it something of a curiosity to the survivors rather than the foundation of a modern society.
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There is plenty of chemistry that exists without oil. For example the processing of ore into metal, silicon into semiconductors, etc.
It appears you mean could organic chemistry exist without oil? That is, production of plastics / soaps on the large scale and medications on the small scale.
Soaps (carboxylated hydrocarbons) are mostly derived from fats, so that's fine. Detergents (sulphonated hydrocarbons) are derived from mineral oil, but could be derived from fat also.
And there a whole host of bioplastics see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic> . The monomers for these plastics would also be useful for general organic synthesis.
As for medications, which are produced in smaller quantities, some are derived from mineral oil components, others are derived from plants. For example, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Lilly_and_Company> shows an (old) picture of a plantation of Belladona (nightshade) for the production of the medication atropine.
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I am trying to plot the background of an alternate history story revolving around an Irish-British teenager living in a post-Troubles London where tensions are much higher. Unlike our timeline, the Troubles ended with Northern Ireland reuniting with the Republic of Ireland sometime during the 1990s through violent means rather than something like a referendum.
In case you're unaware of what surrounded the Troubles, [here is a link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles). Basically, I'm wondering what events would need to take place between the 1970s and 1990s for the Troubles to end in an overwhelming victory for the Irish Nationalists.
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## Have Britain lose the Falklands War
A crushing military victory for the IRA is all but impossible (barring some catastrophe crippling Britain, which would have to be of a magnitude that its legacy would end up dominating your alternate London far more than that of the Troubles would), but they might be able to pressure the British government to cut its losses and withdraw from Ireland rather than go on fighting an endless guerilla war. Think Vietnam for a comparable example; the Viet Cong were never in a position to forcibly eject the US Army, but they still won the war in all the ways that matter.
Your best bet to achieve this is to **have the left wing faction of the UK Labour Party gain power and negotiate a retreat**. This faction was generally quite sympathetic to Irish Nationalism, but in real life they lost control of the party after Thatcher drubbed their leader Michael Foot in the 1983 election. She was able to do this despite having trailed in the polls for most of her term because in 1982 she won the Falklands War, giving her popularity a massive boost.
In your timeline, however, her decision to fight backfires (the Argentines get lucky and manage to sink the British carriers, making the long range campaign impossible) and Labour rides the backlash to win the next election on an anti-militarist platform of avoiding further loss of life in colonial conflicts. Negotiations would still be fiendishly difficult and take a long time (the IRA didn't yet recognise the legitimacy of the southern Irish government, complicating things), so the process could well last into the early 90s. Nonetheless, it's quite possible that Foot or a sympathetic successor like Tony Benn would eventually agree a deal handing over the North to Dublin. A referendum would have to be avoided as the Unionist majority would presumably still vote against such a deal, so the Troubles would be regarded afterwards (both by triumphalist Nationalists, and by angry Unionists and Tories accusing Labour of betrayal) as the IRA having unified Ireland with the armalite rather than the ballot box.
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The loyalists regard themselves as British, not Irish. Reunification would force them to become Irish, the same way nationalists in the north are currently forced to be British and the Irish prior to the establishment of the [Irish Free State in 1922](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Free_State), were once regarded as being British.
[Emotions](https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/03/11/anger-and-division-among-loyalists-over-the-northern-ireland-protocol) on the issue still run very deep on [both sides](https://www.theirishstory.com/2019/09/12/the-making-of-the-irish-border-1912-1925-a-short-history/).
[It's took close to call](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/9/irish-reunification-debate-looms-large-as-ni-nears-centenary).
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> A recent survey found that a majority favoured holding a referendum on unity within the next five years, with 47 percent currently in favour of remaining in the United Kingdom and 42 percent supporting a united Ireland. Among the under-45s, reunification led by 47 to 46.
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Shortly after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, [Greece and Turkey had a population exchange in 1923](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_exchange_between_Greece_and_Turkey), following the [Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1921](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%931922)), where anyone who was Christian was regarded as being Greek and anyone who was Muslim was regarded as Turkish and people were forcibly exchanged.
Maybe a similar system of forced movements might be required where staunch unionist are forcibly moved to Britain if Ireland was reunified.
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In 1982 UK fought a successful war against Argentina for the [Falkland/Malvinas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War).
And if they fought a war for some small islands far away from home, it's gonna be hard that they let something go away right on their doorstep. Therefore you need a huge crisis for the government and monarchy to make them weak.
What can happen to do so?
Based on my memory, the divorce between prince Charles and Lady Diana struck quite a blow on the reputation of the monarchy. Fast forward and Lady Diana dies in Paris in 1997. Credible evidences are shown that the monarchy and the government have directed the death of the beloved princess, weakening both of them at the eyes of the public opinion.
While the government and the monarchy struggle to stay afloat, the backslash causes Scotland, Wales and North Ireland to question their permanence in the Union. With the excuse of ensuring safety, Ireland establish a peace force in Northern Ireland and soon after simply annexes it: with no army to back them up, the opposition to the unification is quickly silenced.
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Could you have the coronavirus come early? With less capable technology, it might be that (a) the fatality rate in both the UK and ROI would be much higher, and (b) there is no effective long-term mitigation strategy but to massively reduce cross-border travel.
In the wake/midst of high death rates and a perception that the UK government was unwilling or unable to help Northern Ireland, the case for unifying the island of Ireland might become much stronger. There would certainly be less appetite to send troops from the rUK into Northern Ireland to counter any escalating violence.
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Aliens have arrived to Earth from the depths of space, and thankfully they are peaceful and only want to learn about us and interact with us.
Despite some initial trepidation, first contact goes well and the Aliens quickly learn our languages and offer an exchange of cultural and scientific knowledge. These Aliens are quite friendly and they seem quite taken with us Human Beings. Inter-species friendships soon start forming, and despite some opposition from those who do not quite trust our new friends, a peaceful political alliance is formed between the United Nations and the Aliens.
Some of us, who are particularly curious, end up in very amorous relationships with these Aliens. Like us, these Aliens have quite a high sex drive and many of them find us Humans quite attractive. Many people find the idea of sex with Aliens to be quite odd or even disgusting, but for some people: that is their kink and they love it.
It transpires that not only is mating possible between a Human and an Alien, there is also potential for procreation. Complications are abound in the successful delivery of a hybrid child, but with the combined medical and technological knowledge of both us and the Aliens we are able to make it happen.
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A whole sequence of events unfolds from not only the presence of these friendly Aliens in our society but also the creation of this new hybrid race.
But what I am interested in is, speaking in terms of both appearance and genetics, how different can these Aliens really be from us, if mating and child birth is possible between the species.
***I am assuming the Aliens would have to be pretty close to our DNA and fairly close to us in appearance*** - but I want to make them as Alien as possible whilst still allowing for inter-species breeding.
So the question is:
How different from us can we make the Aliens whilst at the same time ensuring that procreation is possible between the species?
I have left some things intentionally vague to give people some room to get creative. For instance, I am not dictating whether the children can be born in either a Human or Alien womb or both or neither - I am only stipulating that procreation is possible (although successful births can be difficult). I am also not stipulating the types of genders for the Aliens - they can have male and females sexes like us, but if you can find a way for singled-sexed or 3-sexed (or whatever) to work, go for it. The more different they can be the better.
The big green tick will go to the answer that can show the biggest difference(s) between these Aliens and us whilst at the same time demonstrating that inter-species intercourse and breeding is possible.
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EDIT:
It has already been established by many here that the Aliens would have to be extremely similar to Humans in order for them to be able to procreate. This isn't an issue for my story and stating this doesn't really answer the question. Even if the differences are minor, please give examples of what they could be - if it turns out that the biggest difference can only be something like "the Aliens have purple eyes" then this is an acceptable answer (and preferable to being told once more about Chimpanzees).
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**You might get away without the Aliens having close-to-human DNA, or even without DNA at all!**
LSerni touched on the idea of parthenogenetic conception, but I suggest a slightly different take on it.
The easiest way, if you want to keep some biological connection to both parents, would be to let an alien be able to "impregnate" a human by planting the seed to its offspring into her womb, where it grows as a "parasite" until birth. This is not so different from what a humans normally do; a human fetus could (technically) well be thought of as a highly specialised parasite.
**This would strictly speaking not require any genetic similarities between humans and aliens.** It would require that a human womb is sufficiently similar to wherever alien fetuses grow though. Perhaps even more importantly, the body of the intended birth mother should somehow receives similar stimuli that she would during a normal pregnancy so as to respond as if she was indeed pregnant in the traditional sense. This might be done artificially by injections of hormones and whatever else is needed, or, if we are lucky, the alien embryo can secrete this itself and otherwise "fool" the body of the mother. I would personally go with the former as it's much more believable.
Concerning the actual birth you could go two ways.
The first is to see the alien fetuses as parasites that need to be extracted by a c-section before it matures and finds a way out itself using its claws. This could be used for some drama. It becomes less plausible that anyone would be voluntarily impregnated, but accidental pregnancies are a thing after all.
The second is to **allow for actual births.** I like this, as it opens up for much less dark stories. Why not making the giving birth to an alien easier than doing so for a human? Maybe they have smaller heads at birth? (regardless of the size when grown) It might just be me, but I think the idea of human/alien sex becomes much more appealing if it doesn't potentially result in the death of one of the participants!
Speaking of risks, you might also want to make failing to assist the pregnancy "only" resulting in the death of the fetus and not too lethal to the mother. This way, you can have safe sexual encounters between species. Perhaps even safer, as at least viral STDs are quite species specific!
Like you specified, pregnancies wouldn't occur naturally, "but with the combined medical and technological knowledge of both us and the Aliens we are able to make it happen."
Now, you might wish to have the human birth mother have more influence on the child than just being a vessel. **She might even have significant effects on the child's genome!**
Say that the baby, once born, closely latches on to it's birth giver and starts to adopt her features after birth? Chameleons can change their skin colour, and some octopuses can change their skin texture as well to mimic their surroundings (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_octopus> ). It wouldn't be too far fetched to have Alien babies have an instinct to mimic their parents after birth, and have the traits stick after some certain age!
**It's even possible the external features of the mother that the baby adopts will ingrain itself in the baby's genes!** This is actually a thing even for Earth life and even humans: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_inheritance>
It's well documented that the effects of, for instance, starvation will cause changes in one's organism which are then inherited and can be detected in the starved persons grandchildren. It's not just food supply that affects us though; for instance the Wikipedia page mentions a Swedish study: "The Överkalix study noted sex-specific effects; a greater body mass index (BMI) at 9 years in sons, but not daughters, of fathers who began smoking early. The paternal grandfather's food supply was only linked to the mortality RR of grandsons and not granddaughters. The paternal grandmother's food supply was only associated with the granddaughters' mortality risk ratio."
If you want to be realistic, the Aliens probably don't even use DNA as we know it to encode it's "genome", but this is no problem. If even humans can do it, letting the features the baby adopts from it's mother become encoded into the baby's genes is definitely possible!
**I think this is as close as you can get: You get a way for Aliens and humans to have intercourse, which results in pregnancies and babies which, soon after birth, will show some resemblance to either parent. The child would be genetically similar to its Alien parent(s) and have a genome which is affected by its human mother,** though, as many answers have pointed out, it's not really possible to let the baby directly use the mother's DNA without some pretty vivid hand waving.
EDIT2:
I originally thought of the embryo impregnating the human to be genetically similar to a single alien, as in parthenogenesis, but I suppose this is not strictly necessary! Maybe the Aliens can reproduce EITHER sexually or asexually? An Alien child born by a human could thus have either a single alien parent or two alien parents. The precise mechanics of how such a three-way-conception would occur, should you like the idea, I leave up to you. Just thought I'd share the idea!
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# Procreation the easy way
The aliens are similar in their biology and biochemistry to some gasteropods, fish, frogs and assorted reptiles: **the female is capable of [parthenogenetic conception](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reference/parthenogenesis-how-animals-have-virgin-births/)**.
Once the mechanism gets triggered - and for that, arousal and intercourse with a human turns out to be enough - a female child will be born to the alien mother that has no *genetic* relationship with the human father (it is in fact a genetic clone of the mother), but is nonetheless culturally considered as the father's legitimate daughter.
# Procreation (and intercourse) the natural way
You need the aliens to be, well, *by definition* of the same species as humans. For offspring to be born, DNA differences must be negligible. Human DNA is around 3.2 billion base pairs; the "right" differences of less than 2000 base pairs are enough to trigger miscarriage, and no offspring. *Natural* differences amount to about 24 megapairs (0.75%). We can handwave differences up to about 5% provided they are *very, very specific* (for example a human XXY, XXYY or similar genetic makeup).
But in all "important" things, these aliens have to be humans. So, very similar shape and not too different sizes. Alien humans living in lower gravity might be still interfertile and yet way bigger, lacking the drawbacks of gigantism; but not much more than that.
How far can we push differences? We need small DNA variations that yield a large difference in the phenotype. Perhaps we can twiddle the [HOX genes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hox_gene) and have a human compatible (and fertile) pair where one partner has six limbs - two legs and four arms, or [two arms and four legs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipygus), and maybe [eight fingers per hand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydactyly) too. The offspring might either be four-limbed or six-limbed.
Skin texture and colour, body hair or lack thereof, nails, eye color, size and shape can all be factored in easily. There are symbiont (and not so symbiont) viruses and epigenetic factors that can further change the appearance of a Mark I human to make them more "alien"; these are diseases in humans but might have evolved in a more controlled, even functional or useful form in "aliens". There's lots of choice, from neurofibromatosis to *epidermodysplasia verruciformis* (a bit of advice there: do not Google. Just take my word that you *can* get Klingons, Jem'Hadar, Orions, Cherons, and even Groot).
# Procreation the hard way
(Liberally inspired by Diane Duane's *Sarek*)
The child is in truth neither the mother's nor the father's. It is a genetic construct built from traits and mechanisms *inspired* by their parents', but they are not *inherited*, they are engineered in. A team of expert alien gengineers has mapped out all appreciable human and alien features, and decided how best to compromise and bestow them on the child (which will be brought to term in an artificial womb). From the number of fingers to the details of protein digestion, the newborn is for all intents and purposes an artificial organism that simply very closely resembles, as far as possible, both parents.
This was, if memory serves, how Diane Duane decided to smooth over the too many impossibilites about Spock's birth, from Spock's blood being copper based and his mother Amanda's, obviously, being iron-based.
# So: intercourse, and mutual attraction
The intercourse mechanics must be roughly compatible. But they needn't necessarily resemble either species'.
Sex between one of Cherryh's *Hani* males and a human female would be possible, if possibly not so satisfying for the human female. Also, fur. The reverse also would be possible. In both cases, comparatively easy.
Attraction for a lion-maned, felinoid biped poses no particular problem. Judging from Internet forum and novelty gadgets, it's already a thing. For the reverse, deferring to C. J. Cherryh's expertise, we would need strong liquor and hope - naked skin being blandly repulsive to hanis. But the eye of the beholder and that sort of things.
Looking for *very* different partners, sex with one of Eric Flint's *Mother of Demons*' squid-like gukuys would require first of all a *largish* gukuy - not quite a battlemother - and then the human male (since all compatible-sized gukuys would be female due to their extreme sexual dimorphism) would need to insert one or both *arms* inside the other's mantle. Meanwhile, the lady could reciprocate in a different manner, and the human would need to wear protection: all human biological fluids are extremely poisonous to gukuys, and vice versa. On second thought, perhaps also shoulder-length gloves would be a good idea.
In spite of all that, it would probably work. It would be straight sex for the gukuy (they make sex with their arms, as squids do) and oral - well, *sort* of oral - sex for the human. I cannot envision either being in the least attracted by the other, but at least they're absolutely out of each other's uncanny valley.
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Procreation between aliens and humans requires a lot of handwaving.
The only examples in *our* biosphere of species which can procreate are those which are already closely related genetically through a common ancestor species. The idea that a lifeform which evolved in a completely different biosphere is genetically compatible with a human is just not scientifically plausible.
But there are a couple tricks you can use.
* [Panspermia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia). Humans and aliens didn't actually evolve independently. They are both descendants from an older spacefaring species which settled both on Earth and on the alien home planet. We would have noticed if humans weren't genetically related to anything on Earth, so humans being imported wouldn't be plausible. But perhaps the aliens are actually descendants of a hominini species from Earth and they indeed did notice long ago that their genes are completely different from everything else on their planet. Perhaps that's because 100,000 years ago some aliens abducted some Neanderthals and settled them on a different planet as part of an experiment and then forgot about them?
* We / the aliens are so good at genetic engineering that we can make it work. The children aren't really a natural offspring of humans and aliens, but completely genetically designed. They are more like an artistic interpretation how such an offspring *could* look.
* The offsprings aren't actually genetic offsprings of both parents but actually pure aliens. The alien reproduction is asexual from a genetic point of view, but they still need a partner to trigger it. That partner does not provide any genetic material, but does certain... things... to the alien which trigger their reproductive system. The alien culture expects the person who triggered a pregnancy to take part in raising the child. The alien culture considers upbringing as far more important than genetics, so they don't consider the non-genetic parent as a less important family-member than the genetic one.
* Just hand-wave it. Star Trek, for example, has lots of examples of interspecies crossbreeding without providing any plausible explanation how that's possible. The audience is just expected to accept that as a part of how the ST universe works. Which it generally does.
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# DNA Difference of less than ca. 0.5 %
[Humans and Chimpanzees share [98.8 to] 99 % of the genome.](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/bonobos-join-chimps-closest-human-relatives) We can't procreate with Chimpanzees, so the aliens need to be closer than that.
[There had been *Homo sapiens neanderthalensis* and *homo sapiens sapiens* hybrids](http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/homo-sapiens-interbred-various-neanderthal-populations-08292.html) that were fertile and procreated. In other words: to be genetically viable partners, the aliens are genetically belonging to the genus of *Homo sapiens*, and possibly about as distinct from us as the Neanderthal. These Two types of *Homo sapiens* share [99.7 %](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genome_project#Findings), diversity of modern humans is **less**.
The total difference would be about as much as between human and neanderthal, possibly twice as pronounced. The skull shape comparison between the two is this, Neanderthal on the right, modern human on the left. The general body shape will be the same, but proportions might be shifted to some degree, muscles could be more pronounced or less.
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sapiens_neanderthal_comparison_en.png)
Generally, the level of diversity that we see in many of the very human looking StarTrek aliens is what seems to be in the possible area: [Klingon Browridges](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Klingon) (dark-skin type) and [Vulcan pointy ears](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Vulcan) are most likely well inside the procreation-possible area, as might be [Romulan features](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Romulan), [Betazoid black eyes](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Betazoid), [Tavnian baldness](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tavnian), [Trill skin patterns](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Trill) and many more. As an example where might be the line: While [Cardassians](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cardassian) are described as *looking* reptilian, they are still mammalian, and might be *just* on the inside of the genetic boundary. [Remans](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Reman) might be *just* on the other side of that similarity edge, as they are truly different in makeup and atop that have undergone a high degree of genetic modifications.
Borrowing those ideas from StarTrek, it might be most easy to explain the genetic similarity by having a "common progenitor" (*Homo heidelbergensis*), which either invaded from the stars to earth or had an exodus.
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For there to be a viable alien-human child, the aliens would have to be closer to us than monkeys - so, highly unlikely. That said, you're in charge of justifying this - so, what would you need to make this viable?
1. A biological capacity for sex between either alien males and human females or vice versa (or both, of course). This just requires the organs to be the right size.
2. Compatible DNA - this is tricky. The DNA of the aliens would encode their different biological proccesses to us, even if they use the same system as us. So all of the aliens' vital organs would have to be similar enough to ours so that an organ that was part of each would still function.
Or, given your request for the aliens to be different as possible from us, what might work is a system where the aliens take DNA samples from sex and their body takes any useful features not present in themselves and passes it onto their children. Such a species would probably only have one sex, although they could also have a large number of sexes and en-mass mating to ensure that they get as much potentially useful DNA for their offspring as possible.
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Unfortunately procreation with an alien is highly unlikely. Procreation between a chimpanzee and a human is probably not viable and we share 99% of our DNA. So the alien needs to have the same basic biochemistry (unlikely) that is: use proteins, sugars and DNA that we use and have the same labyrinthine metabolic pathways as us and share more than 99% of our DNA. In short they need to be very similar. You might get away with something like a great ape at a push. Sorry.
Note for those who haven't yet seen it I recommend looking at this link
<https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/technical-documents/articles/biology/interactive-metabolic-pathways-map.html>
This gives just a fraction of human metabolic chemistry. If you start messing around with any of it it by eliminating proteins that catalyse any of these reactions won't take long before your dead.
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Some-- maybe not all-- of the aliens actually reproduce asexually, but they have genetic diversity because of a symbiotic relationship their species has with a retrovirus which implants the DNA of others into the zygote.
Your human exchanges bodily fluids with an alien and is infected with the alien retrovirus. The retrovirus incorporates a small portion of your human's DNA, and later ends up back in the same or a different alien. Maybe the virus is passed among a chain of humans or other animals before getting to the alien.
When the zygote is infected with the virus, a small portion of DNA is incorporated from whoever/whatever was infected previously.
This way you can vary the amount of DNA passed on so you don't have to have much of a match. You can also have your alien *technically* reproduce with whoever/whatever you want regardless of sex or species. A young man, his grandma and their dog can be involved in making the alien love child.
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Let’s get some backstory first:
So I’ve recently came up with the idea of this combat support anti-zombie unit that’s dedicated towards fighting both human enemies and zombies (but mostly zombies (think of these zombies like the ones from The Walking Dead or World War Z (novel), except that they’re capable of going slightly faster and some of them are actually fairly intelligent)). The anti-zombie units mostly operate at the squad and platoon level for ease of maneuverability and speed. At the squad level, the squad is made up of 10 Troopers led by a Sergeant (E-5) and that squad is split into two fireteams each led by a Corporal (E-4). Everyone is equipped with an [M16A5](https://images.app.goo.gl/9JZPs7e6tvetczkD8) with 20-round straight body magazines (in my world, the M16A5 is a legit rifle adopted by the entire US military).
Now onto my question:
I’ve recently toyed around with the idea of equipping one Trooper from each fireteam/two Troopers in a squad with some sort of shotgun so that they can act in a designated close-quarters combat (CQC) role. I’ve thought about equipping the designated CQC Trooper a [Benelli M4 shotgun](https://images.app.goo.gl/he6oJAHQQcogPeiu8) but I’ve also toyed around with giving them either a traditional [Mossberg 500](https://images.app.goo.gl/zzyrhif8s4xiQu42A) or a [tactical](https://images.app.goo.gl/nK3bPmt1aceZyDDX7) Mossberg 500. Maybe even an [M26 MASS](https://images.app.goo.gl/7FsTuyFJFxkixJdT7).
But would shotguns be practical against zombies? They pack a hell of a punch and seem like great CQC weapons but they’re also added weight since the Trooper who has a shotgun also has to have his or her M16 also (and it’s anti-zombie doctrine in my world to be as fast as possible).
So would they make sense to be issued out?
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**Exotic shotgun rounds.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jCpzt.jpg)
[source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8fmhpy0z1U)
Ya, shotguns make holes in the zombies. Regular guns too. Ho....hum.
But it is easier to have shotguns do fun stuff regular guns cannot. Think about Green Arrow. His arrows do everything except stick in people and leave sore bleeding holes when they get pulled out, like arrows usually do. Your shotgun soldiers can be like that! Like Green Arrow himself, I mean.
Your shotgun corps has flare shells, to illuminate massed zombies in the dark. They have noisemaker shells, that land and play Bon Jovi (bass is not that good because speaker is small) and the zombie hordes come check it out, maybe dance a little. Smoke shells to lay down a screen and allow escape while zed stumbles around bumping into each other. Paint shells to mark zombie for zombie tracking scientific investigation. And more!
You have the basics of army fighting zombie fiction with your regular troops. And you want shotgun soldiers because you know it is cool. Your shotgun corps can be the tabasco sauce on your meat-and-potatoes shooting-heads-off-zombie fiction.
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**It's good as a room clearer, as per real life**
I'm writing this answer based on Word War Z zombie rules. WWZ had a very clear 'one shot, one kill' policy when it came to zombies - you took them out with a clean shot to the base of the skull, and that was it. Body shots are more or less useless, but leg shots are a bit better as they slow them down. Shotguns aren't any better when it comes to this. If both an M16 and a M4 can kill with one shot, then you want the one with more bullets and a faster rate of fire. Go with the M16.
If, however, you're fighting in an urban environment, the situation changes. When breaching and clearing crowded areas, a sawed-off shotgun with maximum spread and kickback would be great for clearing away the zombies - not necessarily killing them, of course, but the knockback from getting struck would send them away. The breaching team would want the first people entering the room to have shotguns at the ready to clear the room.
And, as I mentioned, these are sawed-off shotguns. Both the Benelli M4 and its predecessor the Benelli M3 would be good choices, although I'd recommend the Benelli M1014 variant of the M4 myself, specially modified to have as short a barrel as possible.
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I would imagine that they would be useful in limited capacity like house clearing, but in most cases a short barrelled AR15 platform or pistol calibre carbine would be a better choice.
While the spread of the shotgun is going to be more forgiving for landing headshots under pressure, with the comparatively low capacity of a shotgun and the large number of zombies a soldier would potentially be facing, some 7+1 shots with the Benneli before you're out is not going to last you too long.
Considering that reloading is going to be noticeably slower, they are probably going to swap back to their rifle quite quickly until they have time to catch their breath and reload, in which case you are stuck with an extra 8lbs (plus ammo) you have to lug around.
All the extra weight and hassle for 8 shots of better close range firepower before you have change weapons does not sound too efficient.
Even the M16 is probably overkill in this situation- in the context of fighting zombies, a shorter, lighter rifle allows you to engage targets quicker and carry more ammo for the same weight. Your soldiers probably aren't going to be engaging zombies beyond 400 yards too often, so trading range for speed and maneuverability sounds like a good tradeoff, especially considering they are often going to heavily outnumbered.
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First, weapons depend on the enemy. Assuming Walking Dead or WWZ type zombies, that kept coming until brain stem destroyed, seems accuracy and knockdown is more important than volume of fire (i.e. zombies do not fear "suppression")
Now to your question: would a shotgun be useful? Yes, but not the Benellis. I was thinking more of a Saiga-12, since USAS-12 is long out of production. You really need a magazine fed shotgun to carry different loads of ammo, from heavy buckshot to solid slugs to more exotic rounds like grenade or tazer rounds. And someone carrying this would be their only long gun, not carrying another assault rifle / long rifle.
Completely aside, IMHO, this type of tactical environment would tend to favor larger caliber semi-auto rifles than full-auto assault rifles. Something like an SR-25 instead of M-16, or even modern M-14 or Mini-14. Of course, this kinda depends on how well the AR platform works against your zeds. If a round still produces headshots that drop zeds, then by all means, stay with the AR platform.
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**But would shotguns be practical against zombies? They pack a hell of a punch and seem like great CQC weapons but they’re also added weight since the Trooper who has a shotgun also has to have his or her M16 also (and it’s anti-zombie doctrine in my world to be as fast as possible).
So would they make sense to be issued out?**
1) They don't pack a "hell of a punch", (<https://www.quora.com/Are-shotguns-ridiculously-powerful-in-real-life-as-they-are-portrayed-in-computer-games-and-movies-And-are-they-actually-effective-at-range>.) & (<https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShotgunsAreJustBetter>)
I recall it being attributed to rotten.com displaying morgue images of point blank suicides, where at point blank range, the pellets spread a lot of human tissue. (but I can't find the reference anymore).
However this effect only works at point blank range or close range. The birdshot spreads at long range, because its for bird shooting.
However its pretty common in media to use shotguns as per movie fiction as opposed to real life. You could probably get away with it.
2) I would not want to transition between weapons when the zombies are getting in close. Weapon transition drills are hard to master.
3) I assume your squad needs to do a lot of door breaches. Depending on operation, in real life a shot gun could easily be issued to every 4th man, or every 8th man purely for shooting locks off doors. It is 100% worth the weight in modern combat, maybe not for zombies. For current military use (<https://www.lightfighter.net/topic/military-shotguns-why-they-are-not-fully-properly-understood-or-properly-applied?page=1>)
4) Door breaching shotgun are lighter the ones you selected. (<https://cdn.athlonoutdoors.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2018/07/M870-1.jpg>)
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Overall? Probably not hugely practical as a *primary* weapon, but most likely present as a specialist weapon.
Shotguns have two advantages in this case:
* They're ubiquitous. Most places in the world that allow hunting allow shotguns for at least some form of that hunting, and it's really common for farms and homesteads to have one in many parts of the world as a means of home defense.
* They're versatile. Aside from conventional shot shells, shotguns can fire a wide variety of other types of shells. Slugs (effectively turning the shotgun into a small cannon), breaching rounds, LTL rounds (often rubber shot or beanbags, designed for non-lethal riot control), bola rounds (which are generally as stupid as they sound), 'ferret' rounds (chemical delivery rounds designed to punch through light barriers), dragon's breath rounds (magnesium shot that ignites when fired), and that's just listing real stuff I know about off the top of my head. It's not inconceivable that you could make flare rounds, or explosive slugs, or even some other crazy stuff too.
However, shotguns have a number of disadvantages:
* They are by nature relatively short range weapons. It's unusual to engage anything with a shotgun from more than about 50m away, largely because with anything other than slugs fired from a rifled barrel you're not likely to hit much, and even if you do it probably won't do much damage.
* For a shotgun of a sufficient gauge to be reliable for what you're suggesting, shot shells are rather space inefficient. You can fit 3-4 rounds of 5.56x45mm in about the same total volume as a 2-3/4 inch 12-gauge shot shell. If we assume a one shot one kill approach, this is huge.
* They have a higher risk of collateral damage than most other firearms, because they fire more than one projectile.
* Unlike portrayed in a lot of mass media, they're not very effective at dealing significant damage to multiple targets unless those are small targets, and they don't really send people flying.
Those first two disadvantages are a large part of why usage within most militaries is typically limited to security (where you're usually engaging at a relatively close range and don't expect to need to shoot dozens of targets at a time) or 'utility' usage (stuff like door breaching). They're just not all that good for dealing with large numbers of targets at reasonable ranges.
The first disadvantage is also a *huge* one when fighting zombies if those zombies are at all contagious or able to move faster than a slow shuffle. The further you are from your target, the safer you are. Given this, I'd take a compact rifle any day over a shotgun as a main weapon, though I'd actually go for something more compact than an M16 for that matter (an IWI Tavor or FN F2000 for example, or an M4 carbine if you don't care as much about accuracy at range) because that will allow for good CQC capabilities without really sacrificing much in terms of range.
However, I do see some value to having a shotgun available as a secondary weapon for at least some of your troops. The weight is actually a bit less of an issue IMO though than the complex logistics of switching weapons (it's bad enough while you're being shot at, imagine having to do it while being run down by hordes of zombies) and the extra space the other gun takes up. That's why stuff like the M26 MASS, the KAC Masterkey, and the Metal Storm MAUL exist, they allow the soldier to carry 'one' gun with both capabilities without needing to switch, and they're far lighter than carrying two guns.
If you subscribe to the above suggestion for compact rifle designs, I could easily see this role falling to either the squad's designated marksman or whoever has the light support weapon (while I'm not certain that a DM would be part of most squads for the purposes we're discussing here, I'm 100% certain that someone will be carrying a LSW/SAW, it's just too useful for fighting hordes of enemies to *not* have it), as they would have larger weapons with more space to mount such a device.
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There are a few reasons to bring shotguns, especially the pump-action variants.
If you are fighting the tough running zombies that don't fall over after a few rounds hit them, a shotgun in close quarters is a good contender. They can rip a lot of flesh off the zombie and even such tough semi-magical zombies will slow down or be incapacitated by such shots. And when your choice is to incapacitate it instantly or after a few shots, you want it instantly. Having less ammo per magazine is a small downside compared to needing more bullets to actually down the target that is trying to eat your face RIGHT NOW.
Pump-action shotguns are also the AK-47's of the shotgun world. Rugged, reliable to a fault and can take a large variety of ammo no problem. The ability to quickly slot in a specialty round manually without having to slot in an entirely new magazine make them quick to modify to a particular situation. But back to rugged and reliable: when you are fighting zombies you never know how long you have to rely on your weapon without maintenance or spare parts, so having a weapon that wont jam and keep functioning for extended periods of time.
If it's really necessary you can use slugs for more range. Of these people are really dedicated to it they might get people to develop miniature discarding sabot rounds for better accuracy and penetration.
But most specialty rounds are kind of limited as they are because of the Geneva convention. You aren't allowed to use explosive-tipped ammo because it causes unnecessary suffering in the target. But for Zombies no such rules exist (I hope), and if you get hit by a 12gauge explosive-tipped slug you can be sure that said zombie isn't going to be walking it off.
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If you are simply grabbing what is available, then a 12 gage pump action shotgun with an extended tube is likely the "go to" for room clearing, CQB and so on.
However, in a military setting, there are weapons which make a lot more sense. If you are looking for a secondary weapon, the M-26 is compact, feeds from a 10 round box magazine and can either be attached to a rifle in the manner of an M-203 grenade launcher, or fitted with a stock and used as its own weapon
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/G3gFO.jpg)
*M-26 in both configurations*
The AA-12 has also received attention from various military units, and fires from both box and 28 round drum magazines. The internal design mitigates a lot of the recoil force, allowing the shooter to stay on target. You can load the boxes and drums with a wide variety of ammunition, from 00 magnum shot to breaching rounds to "Frag 12" grenades (with a useful range of about 100m).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uCSKQ.jpg)
Other possibilities are to use actual M-203 grenade launchers, but issue 40mm "shotgun" rounds. This would be pretty devastating in clearing areas, and the M-203 can also be used for its more conventional purpose, like dropping grenades on targets 400m away, or using it to provide cover with a smoke round, or fire an illumination round at night. Other ammunition include rounds with carry cameras and parachutes, to provide short term overhead viewing of target areas, and various forms of "smart" rounds are being developed as well. If you are really that up close and personal, the regular hand grenade works wonders.
The primary issue with this question is it seems to view warfare, even small unit warfare, as being primarily direct fire engagements like a video game. The most dangerous devices carried by modern soldiers are not rifles, grenades or rocket launchers at all, but radios and target designators. Calling in even 60mm mortar fire (the smallest, lightest support weapon imaginable - really just a strong steel tube) gets far more firepower than even a full dismounted infantry squad. A mechanized infantry squad can also call on the firepower of the IFV, usually machine guns and automatic cannon.
Of course even a dismounted squad has a ridiculous amount of personal firepower (I really don't get why you have this obsession for 20 round magazines, since they were outmoded in the 1960's - every army in the world uses 30 round magazines, and soldiers in combat zones often have chest rigs for at least 10 of these), including rifles, light machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers or recoilless rifles like the AT-4 and so on. Shotguns are usually held by the quartermaster and only issued for breaching teams in urban combat or other special purpose uses.
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I highly doubt it. Shotguns specialize in high spread saturation fire, and if we’re going off World War Z, the only way to destroy a zombie is to destroy its brain. This means that you would need to get a full blast at its head to (hopefully) decapitate it.
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another alternative would be M203 grenade launcher under mounted to the M16. Besides conventional grenades there is a buckshot round the M576.
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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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This question does not appear to be about **worldbuilding**, within the scope defined in the [help center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help).
Closed 4 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/152226/edit)
In Star Wars, there's some shots where Jedi deflect lasers with their lightsabers. I know there's a law that says you can't go faster then the speed of light and lasers are light, so what is the smallest change in physics to make it so that you can deflect the lasers? This is challenging because some lasers go slow (blasters) and others go fast (Life destroying moon that was badly named, even star energy sucking base was bigger). Also, the graphics seem good, meaning the light from the people was functioning like real-life light.
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@Renan's answer makes sense to me, but if the bolts are plasma, then how do the lightsabers deflect the bolts?
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Allow me to challenge the premises:
1. The shots that the Jedi deflect are not lasers. [From the Wookiepedia:](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Blaster):
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> A blaster, also called a gun, was any type of ranged weapon that fired bolts of intense plasma energy, often mistaken as lasers.
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2. The force is a great source of \*\*\*-pulls. Since the Jedi are able to [see the future](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Force_vision), if the plot requires, a Jedi might just position their light sword already knowing where the laser will hit.
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Now let's assume that there is no challenge to the frame, and let's take your question to heart.
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> (...) what is the smallest change in physics to make it so that you can deflect the lasers?
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Take a page from Terry Pratchett's Discworld. In *The LastContinent*, we find this gem:
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> Light travels slowly on the Disc and is slightly heavy, with a tendency to pile up against high mountain ranges. Research wizards have speculated that there is another, much speedier type of light which allows the slower light to be seen, but since this moves too fast to see they have been unable to find a use for it.
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So there are two types of light. Jedi could then see the incoming laser through usage of the faster light, and thus move in time to score a home run with their laser bats.
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This doesn't require any changes in physics. You simply deflect the lasers by predicting where they will hit and interposing the lightsaber or other light deflecting tool in the path of travel. You don't need to move faster than the light. You just move faster than the people wielding the laser weapons, blocking where they aim rather than waiting until they fire.
This may or may not have been the solution in Star Wars. The SFF.SE site would be a better place to ask about that. Or why lightsabers deflect light. Lightsabers are a technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. So if you want more details related to that, you should specify more about how your magical technology works. Then we could try to explain why it worked that way. Or frame challenge that it wouldn't.
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> This is challenging because some lasers go slow (blasters) and others go fast (Life destroying moon that was badly named, even star energy sucking base was bigger)
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I challenge that the Death Star beam goes slow. You have plenty of time to see the thing form and travel. It ostensibly goes much, much slower than the speed of light. I don't think it's mentioned to be a laser either. Ultimately it doesn't matter, the Death Star is a plot device, you can't deflect plot devices anyways.
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Let's say you're not set on *light*sabers[1] and blaster bolts being made of lasers, because the movies never mentions them being lasers. If you delve deep into the Expanded Universe, you'll find many rationalisations of what is most likely just 1970s Hollywood science (the Kessel run in 12 parsecs anyone?). But when taken at face value, what the movies show ain't lasers at all.
In some "science of videogames" thing on Star Wars and lightsabers, [Michio Kaku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michio_Kaku) explains how we could, with today's technology, build a lightsaber. Something about a ceramic blade engulfed in hot plasma. The caveat here is you'd need a small nuclear reactor to power it, and you have a solid ceramic blade that's isn't very sexy. Still, the idea of plasma is also common in the Star Wars EU to describe blaster shots. Therefore:
**Everything is plasma**
Plasma can be summarily described as an ionised state of matter. [Plasma can generate a magnetic field](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/238361/do-plasmas-have-their-own-magnetic-fields).
If you consider a lightsaber is a plasma torch (with the blade shaped not by some physical ceramic tube but rather with the Force or some complicated space-age technology) and magnetised, and consider blaster bolts are magnetised bits of plasma, then it's magnets being repelled and that's just science.
It might also explain why lightsabers don't cut each other, because their magnetic fields don't allow them to pass through. And it also explains how some materials are impervious to lightsabers, since, as mentioned, some ceramics can sustain a whole lotta heat.
**Okay but actually want to shoot real lasers too**
What you're looking for here is [refraction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refraction). Simply put, when light changes medium (going from air to water for instance), it turns slightly. You can observe this with a glass of water, and then moving your finger behind the glass. You'll see a lot of weird things happen to the image of your finger. That's light being refracted.
Now your lightsaber blade is a hot plasma. This is an inherently different medium from breathable air. A laser being made of light will be refracted, and appear to be deflected. Now I'm not sure you could deflect a laser back that way, but you can conceivably deflect them away from your person and that should be good enough.
**Reaction time**
As for being able to react in due time, as [@Renan mentions](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/152232/18896) Force-users seem to have the ability to feel the near future. It might be best illustrated in *A New Hope* when Luke deflects his first blasters from the training remote, explaining
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It's not really clear how it works, but it evidently does work.
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[1] In some languages, they're actually called *laser*sabers, but we can chalk it up to bad translation. Especially when the title translates to *The Star War*.
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Hopefully this isn't a duplicate; I wasn't able to find another question which addressed this, at any rate.
Let's say I have a generational spaceship going off to another solar system to establish a colony. The problem is, I need to feed my colonists for generations, not to mention for a while once they land on their new planet while they begin terraforming it. Fortunately, I have artificial gravity and power generation on the ship taken care of, but there's no way I can do livestock or dirt-grown gardens.
I know a few basics: I will probably be growing my plants hydroponically with nutrient recycling from waste, and bamboo is likely to feature heavily, as it can also be used as a construction material. Cloned meat is a possibility as well. But my problem is, I'm not exactly a food scientist, and have no idea which plants would take well to hydroponic cultivation in a cramped spaceship. what are my colonist's main foodstuffs likely to be? Potatoes? Mushrooms? Are apples a realistic option? Is anyone going to bother with wheat, or would that take too much processing to be worth it?
My question, basically, is which plants would be the easiest to grow hydroponically in deep space, and which would be inviable. Some basic GMOs are a possibility, but I'd really prefer not to just handwave 'everything can be cloned, pick any foods you want'; I'm only barely conceding cloned meat because it's starting to become practical now.
The best answer will account for nutrition and ease of cultivation and will include specific ideal staple foods or categories of staple foods (e.g., "Your colonists will eat bamboo and root vegetables for fiber and carbs, mushrooms for protein, and leafy greens (like kale) and chili peppers for vitamin c. Your colonists will not have many fruits which grow on trees or grains like wheat, corn, etc.")
[Answer]
## Protein:
**Crickets** are not only the food fad of the moment but they are [easy to raise](https://modernfarmer.com/2018/08/how-to-raise-crickets-for-food/), don't have the same ethical problems to kill as most meat animals, and are loaded with protein. My spouse thinks they taste terrific. They can be even roasted or ground into a flour for cooking.
**Oysters** can be raised in underwater farms using waste (manure). This can also be done in a [recirculating aquaculture system](https://thefishsite.com/articles/oyster-culture-in-recirculating-systems). In addition to high protein, they've got [a ton of nutrients](https://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/animal-product/oysters.html).
**Legume** seeds also have a fair bit of protein and aren't hard to raise. The bonus is that legumes fix nitrogen in the soil (meaning you grow them with other crops or you alternative seasons). Given that your ship is generational, you might use some soil for your gardens instead of just hydroponic systems. Think edamame/soy, chickpeas, lentils.
## Carbs/Calories:
**Potatoes** are pretty easy to grow in a lot of situations. Heck, even [on Mars](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18007564-the-martian).
Sweet potatoes are similarly easy.
**Jerusalem Artichokes aka sunchokes** are tubers from a plant related to sunflowers. They can be [grown hydroponically](https://dealzer.com/blog/grow-hydroponic-jerusalem-artichokes/).
**Rice** is already being [grown hydroponically](https://www.thenational.ae/uae/from-paddy-fields-to-uae-deserts-the-farmer-growing-rice-using-hydroponics-1.46990).
## Fats:
**Seeds** from small plants are the way to go. Some smaller varieties of sunflower, hemp, flax, canola, etc. Many of these are already grown hydroponically.
## Vegetables:
**Leafy Greens** such as lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, basil, mint, other herbs, are also easy to [grow hydroponically](https://www.hobbyfarms.com/10-vegetables-you-can-grow-hydroponically/).
**Cucumber, Tomato, and other vine crops**, [also easy](https://www.hobbyfarms.com/10-vegetables-you-can-grow-hydroponically/).
## Fruit:
**Trees** such as apple are harder [but not impossible](https://www.maximumyield.com/growing-fruit-trees-using-hydroponics/2/3224). Apples can be shaped easily so can turn into fences (with wire to help hold it) or other flat surfaces, or can be grown normally as part of a park for residents.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pqUqq.png)
Don't forget fruits like **strawberries** (easy to [grow hydroponic](https://www.greenandvibrant.com/grow-hydroponic-strawberries)) and **cane fruits** like blackberry and raspberry (which can be grown with little water and reproduce with ease).
## Conclusions:
A lot of this research is already done. If you have the space and resources for hydroponic gardens, you can choose from a wide variety of plants and easily make a healthy and varied diet. Small animals and non-animal protein sources aren't hard to incorporate. And you can even have some trees and parks. You might choose some soil-based plants or animals for variety, and as a way to recycle your plant and animal waste. Add in your original thought of bamboo for construction and food, and you're pretty much set.
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I would like to add: **Algae and bacteria** can be used to produce most needed macro and micro-nutrients and can be easily adjusted by genetic engineers.
**[Insects](http://www.ediblebugfarm.com/blog/edible-insects-list/) and mushrooms** can be used and they are efficient way to re-cycle waste.
Texture, consistency and flavors can be engineered by food-tech to make it less like the Matrix porridge.
For plants: [**What Can You Grow Hydroponically**](http://modularhydro.com/ArticleLibrary/WhatCanYouGrowHydroponically.html)
---
How would your diet look like? Well people like diversity and it is good to make people on flying-can more happy. Better have an efficient diversity so that you are both efficient and safe from mishaps and your passengers can have a choice.
I would grow **spices** some **vegetables and salads, beans and rice** in the hydroponic farms.
Produce a mass of protein, fats, carbohydrates and vitamins with **algae and bacteria**. Use as an addition to first and supplements.
Use some **insects and mushrooms** as part of a waste re-cycling.
[Answer]
Consider your generation ship as a taxi for any animals/plants/fungi etc.. that you would like to feature in the new world.
As it is a generational ship, those that arrive won't be those that left so an important aspect will be to literally train the children in how to handle wildlife for their benefit after terraforming the new world.
It would also be beneficial to transport organisms that will provide environmental services. This makes scaling out water purification, air cleansing, plant pollination, soil aeration, etc... without the need for machines that require hard to obtain resources.
These would need to include grasses, trees, vines, kelp, fish, molluscs, sea slugs, cattle, horses, birds, bees, fungi, etc... Take a look at the various biome projects for an idea of the variety needed for a stable eco system.
Additionally a terran biome would help alleviate certain health-issues with your colonists. Needs like helping to produce Vitamin D by exposure to Sun like light, training the bodies immune system to handle irritants, and providing stress relief.
Admittedly on your space ship the biome will likely be maintained at a minimum due to space efficiencies, and may not provide 100% of the food needed by the colonists.
Many leafy, and tuber based plants can be grown easily in hydroponics at scale. Many of them will grow fine in low-g environments. Kelp and various water plants are also easily grown in bulk, possibly helping with treating water. These will provide the bulk of minerals, and micro-nutrients needed by your colonists.
Protein and fats could be sourced from plant crops like soya beans, lentils, and lupin. However they can also be easily obtained in bulk from various insects like worms, crickets, and ants. Depending on the water system attached to the ship some aqua-culture for fats and proteins may be possible, but you will have to deal with water-quality issues. A terran biome area on the ship could provide such filtering along with careful selection of the farmed aquatic species.
The most important part of feeding your colonists will be supplying a variety of food rather than a few specific species, this increases the likelihood that they will receive sufficient nutrition. This will also help to safe guard the food supply due to a mismanagement, an accident, or a bloom in the population of some pest.
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Tall plants and trees are completely out of the question: they don't do well in hydroponics, and unless you are flying in WH40K type monstrous cathedral ships, growing space is gonna be a bitch.
Any plants which require large quantities of water, like paddy, are too wasteful and thus, cannot be used.
Your best bet would be to not culture any higher plants at all. Fungi, like yeasts and mushrooms are highly nutritive, and take up comparatively less space. Better place some of that handy cloned meat in a nice, warm, humid environment and have some spores handy...
If you insist on having some plants for variety, spice olants would be a good bet, as your astronauts will need some seasoning. Plus, they are hardy plants and require very little processing. Beyond that, soya bean and other oilseeds, millets (require some processing, but are hardy) are ideal.
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[Question]
[
I’m writing a D&D campaign. The closest period of time in the real world that the setting of my story comes to is medieval Europe. (I don't know exactly where or when, but it doesn't matter since it isn't historical fiction.)
The campaign involves the player characters spending time in several small villages and towns inhabited by commoners. The common people are independent and are not owned by land or other people, like serfs were in medieval Europe. There is no slavery (in most places), and the people make their livings by acting as farmers, merchants, artisans, or business owners (e.g. innkeeper). In one particular region, most of the commoners are farmers, and each family (of 4–6 individuals) owns their own small farm. I’m wondering... **how big (by acreage and volume) were such farms in the middle ages?**
* How many acres of crops could a family be expected to maintain with the tools available at that time period? Is it different for orchards?
* For animal farms, how many animals could a single family realistically maintain, again when limited by the primitive tools available in that period?
* How many acres per animal were necessary to support each of the following animals?
+ Cow
+ Horse
+ Sheep
+ Pig
+ Goat
+ Chicken
[Answer]
### This is a fundamental misunderstanding of agriculture in Medieval Europe
Individual and family ownership of land was not a strongly developed concept in the Middle Ages. Instead of land ownership, the dominant concept was "right to use." A noble had "right to use" of his demesne, use meaning claiming much of the excess produce and taxing the inhabitants.
A peasant's "right to use" was generally held at the community level. A community would have the right to use certain sets of lands, while other lands were the properly of the local lord. In return for labor on the lord's lands, the lord ensured that the peasant's right to use their own lands were not violated.
This is a simplification, the systems were myriad. Land use could be deeded to kings, urban magnates, abbots, whoever. Land use changed much over time, as well.
For the 'classical' manorial system of Merrie England stereotypes, see the [open field system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-field_system) for more descriptions of how this worked. Also, check out [serfdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom) to get an idea about whether peasants might be free or not. Finally, look at the overview in [Agriculture in the Middle Ages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_Middle_Ages) to see alternative systems.
To try to answer your question more directly, a study of Elton, England the Gies' [*Life in a Medieval Village*](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0060920467) showed that between 500-600 people in the village farmed 758 ha (1872 acres) of land. 182 ha (451 acres) belonged to the lord of the manor, an abbot, and the rest fed the peasants. The village had 113 'tenants' working the entire area; so the remainder of the ~400 people were women, children, and the aged.
This works out to about 12.5 acres per family.
[Answer]
A [document](https://extension.unh.edu/resources/files/Resource000471_Rep493.pdf) drafted by the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension has a table listing "Suggested Space and Housing Guidelines for Fully Mature Farm Animals". It applies to small, family-sized farms. For the use of others who may be interested, I'll list some of the information below (information is listed per animal):
* Horse
+ Housing: 5' x 9' tie stall or 10' x 10' box stall in an enclosed or open-front 3-sided barn (50 ft. setback)
+ Yard: 200 sq. ft.
+ Pasture: 1–2 acres
+ Quantity: 1 horse per family member
* Cow (Beef)
+ Housing: 75–100 sq. ft. in open-front 3-sided barn (50 ft. setback)
+ Yard: 100–125 sq. ft.
+ Pasture: 1–2 acres
+ Quantity: ½–1 beef cow per year; raise 2 per year for continuous supply
* Cow (Dairy)
+ Housing: 75–100 sq. ft. in enclosed or open-front 3-sided barn (50 ft. setback)
+ Yard: 100–125 sq. ft.
+ Pasture: 1–2 acres
+ Quantity: 1–2 cows
* Goat
+ Housing: 20–25 sq. ft. in enclosed barn (50 ft. setback)
+ Yard: 50 sq. ft.
+ Pasture: 0.2–0.3 acres
+ Quantity: 2–3 goats
* Pig
+ Housing: 48 sq. ft. with exercise yard (100 sq. ft. without exercise yard) in enclosed shelter (50 ft. setback)
+ Yard: 200 sq. ft.
+ Pasture: 12–14 sows per acre
+ Quantity: 2 pigs per year
* Sheep
+ Housing: 20–25 sq. ft. in open-front 3-sided shed (50 ft. setback)
+ Yard: 50 sq. ft.
+ Pasture: 0.2–0.3 acres
+ Quantity: 6 sheep
* Chicken (Eggs)
+ Housing: 3–4 sq. ft. in enclosed barn (50 ft. setback)
+ Yard: 10 sq. ft.
+ Pasture: —
+ Quantity: 6 hens
* Chicken (Meat)
+ Housing: 3–4 sq. ft. in enclosed barn (50 ft. setback)
+ Yard: —
+ Pasture: —
+ Quantity: 24 chickens
* Turkey
+ Housing: 6 sq. ft. in enclosed barn (50 ft. setback)
+ Yard: 20 sq. ft.
+ Pasture: 100 sq. ft.
+ Quantity: 12 turkeys
[Answer]
The Doomsday survey is your friend here. [This article](https://www.ibiblio.org/london/agriculture/general/1/msg00070.html) puts it at 30 acres per household during the late medieval period, mostly because medieval farming techniques are poor. Note, of course, not all of this is actually farmed at once (rotation), and it is only an average.
[This question](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9044/what-was-the-size-of-surface-of-a-cereal-crop-needed-per-man-per-year-during-the) from the history stack indicates 12-22 acres just to feed the family, so 30 to get enough farm for plow animal feed is not bad. Most animals are fed on meadow (unplowed land) Nearby woodlands for wood and hunting are also essential. Note some of your animals will be fed partially on farm by-product.
You need a way to plow the land unless they are part of a large village with common shared oxen. Oxen were often the most important animal on a farm. As per above medieval farm land produced about 5 (4-6)bushels of grain per acre (~10 produced 5 used for seed using the above sources)
According to [this question](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/42848/how-much-smaller-were-medieval-farm-animals-in-england-than-today) the weight of said animals is
>
> A]round the year 1000, an adult pig weighed around 70-80 kg, a sheep 20 to 30 kg, and a cow or ox 200 to 250 kg . . . In comparison, at the beginning of the twentieth century, an ox weighed in the region of 650 kg, a sheep from 50-150 kg, and a pig from 100-200 kg.
>
>
>
Comet, Georges. "Technology and agricultural expansion in the middle ages: the example of France north of the Loire." Astill, Grenville G., and John Langdon, eds. Medieval farming and technology: The impact of agricultural change in Northwest Europe. Brill, 1997.
Grazing animals need about 4% of their body weight per day in forage, or 1460% of their weight per year.
How rich the meadowland is for grazing matters a lot. For good forage a good average is ~10,000 lbs per acre per year is a good average for good on tended pasture land (kansas ryegrass).
Barley, the [best animals feed](https://www.ag.ndsu.edu/archive/carringt/99beef/feedbarley.htm) available at the time, yields about 250 lbs per acre per year, accounting for lower yields (pigs\*, chickens). Hay and other farmed forage yields about 4-5000lbs per acre per year.(cows, oxen, sheep, goats) Note pigs will also eat a lot of garbage reducing their needs, one of the reasons they were considered poor people's food. Chickens will eat a lot of pests off crops also reducing their needs.
**How much land each animal needs will depend on how long your winters are and thus how much farmland they need as compared to meadow. This varies quite a lot across europe.**
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[Mathaddict's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/125460/8732) is completely out of touch with reality. First let us start with the fact that a human being requires 3 pounds of food per day and that a peasant is going to eat a one pound loaf of bread eat day. Let us wrongly assume a pound of grain yield a pound of flour and that yield a pound of bread. Ok, even if we look at wheat tortilla of 30 bushels per acre from the 1920's or 30's and a bushel weighs 60 pounds, then even if we don't hold back a couple bushels of grain per acre for seeds that is only 1800 pounds of grain per acre. At a pound of grain per day that is only 600 days. Add in beer and it is closer to the hundred days. Given an acre is 4 rods by 40 rods (66 ft x 660 ft, equivalent to 72.6x600 or 145.2x300) to suggest sufficient grain could be had from from 3000 sq.ft. (aka about 1/14-1/15th of an acre) is massive to say the least and completely wrong.
Then their is milling kids, the miller's fee for grinding, the baker's fee for baking, and the fact that towels were usually under 12 bushels per acre (typical 6-12) and this holding back seed was as another started could be up to a third of the yield. So figure 3x-5x that one acre and you have a rough estimate, and 2.5 access or so of tilted field in active use would be much closer to correct just to get the 400+ pounds of grain to get their daily bread. Given advanced three field rotation they might get peas or beans as well, or animal feed on the second field, and the third fallow, and thus need about 8 access in the field per person. Meadows, grazing land, and woods as more.
Where he is almost right is that fruits and vegetables will add more, and that is largely "farmed" on the toft and croft.
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The tools of farming have only made farming less labor intensive, not really decreasing the amount of land needed to produce a crop. Modern knowledge (crop rotating and fertilization etc.) have decreased the amount of land needed. In a D&D campaign it would depend on whether your peasants have a skill, profession, or knowledge of farming techniques or not. If at least one member of the family have the knowledge or skill they could probably match today's crop yield/acre given fertile soils. However if they do not have the skill I'd say that two to three times the acreage would be needed.
Today's subsistence farming on a per person basis:
1 year of wheat = 3,000 ft^2 (plus what is needed for livestock)
1 year of vegetables and fruits (assuming a full vegetarian diet) = 19,000 ft^2 (depending on what types are used)
1 year of meat (pigs, cows, etc) = 50 ft^2
1 year of Dairy = 25 ft^2
1 year of eggs = 20 ft^2
1 year of corn = 650 ft^2
All of this comes to a little more than 1/2 acre per person. So 2.1 acres for a family of 4 or 3.2 acres for a family of 6.
It should also be noted that this is just to subsist, not to get ahead, make profit, produce goods for barter, or have food storage for bad years. For that you would want 25%-100% more land.
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## It varied a lot
You will get a lot of different answers because soil conditions, crop types, and weather are going to be so different from one place to the next. The most common farm layout would be the 3-crop rotation farm. Following this model, you divide your land into 3 equal sections. 1 section is for grain (like wheat or rye), the next is for lignums (peas, lentils, or beans), and the last field is fallow which you would let your livestock graze on. And you rotate your crops each year to keep the soil fertile.
In general, a single acre of wheat in the medieval period could yield anywhere from 0.5-1.5 million calories of grain per year, lignums would yield about half of that, then your livestock's yield could be anywhere from nothing edible (just feeding your draft animals) to producing similar yields to your lignums. This means that the average acre could be producing anywhere from 0.25-1.0 million calories of food per year. The average 5 person household consumes about 3.65 million calories per year; so, a fertile plot in an ideal climate zone could be as small as ~4 acres, but in less ideal areas, a minimal farm could be closer to 16 acres to support a family that size. That said, the improvements in agriculture you see in the medieval period meant that in some regions, a single household could work an area as large as 100 acres producing not just enough to feed their own family, but a generous excess.
So to answer your question, it could realistically be anywhere from 4-100 acres per household. It just depends on how good the climate is and how wealthy you want your farmers to be.
**But this is for D&D:**
Since this is for a setting where magic exists, farms may actually get much smaller (or larger). If your farmers possess magic, they may be able to to back-to-back planting by magically fixing the soil. They may be able to ward their crops against pests and natural disasters. They could maybe even accelerate plant growth. So if this is the case, your farmers could possibly meet or beat any modern farming techniques to get field sizes down to however arbitrarily small or large you like.
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[Question]
[
## Premise
I envisage a world of would-be navigators with roughly Bronze Age technology, sailing on ships to explore their planet. In contrast to our [history of navigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_navigation) where we "cracked the code" around the dawn of our Bronze Age, I want the narrative of sea navigation on this world to be as arduous as possible. Instead of simply blanketing the sky with an opaque atmosphere to obscure the stars outright, I would like the stars to move around the sky in an erratic and baffling manner. This way there is a visceral conflict with the emergence of intellect on this world. In other words, although the would-be navigators have the intellect to gather materials for building ships and have knowledge of the engineering that is required to make them sea-worthy, I want the failure to understand celestial navigation to bring the celebration of their thus far potent intellect to a halt. The chaotic, incomprehensible movement of the stars overhead would serve as the ultimate mockery -- which is the goal.
We can assume they can navigate to some degree, as even the most inept captain can hug the coast lines and record wind patterns. However this world has vast oceans. A lucky few who have sailed there and back by sheer luck speak of entire continents. These continents are far beyond the horizon, where the vast majority of the expeditions became lost or crashed and never heard from again. Society has since shunned those who claim they went beyond the horizon and back. And most importantly, nobody even looks up to the sky at night for navigation. The stars serve as just a form of recreation; they are gazed at by the sailors before they sleep. Those who have tried to navigate by them have long since given up or gone completely insane.
This is the situation on the ground in **this** world. Now we might think to ourselves, we have other Bronze Age tricks up our sleeves, but such ideas have not dawned on these people yet.
## Question
Navigation has many forms, but the scope of this question is restricted to **solely** that of celestial navigation. That being said, which part of the universe would make celestial navigation the most difficult for an Earth-like (tilt, rotation, ect) planet of potential navigators? The answer can be an example in our actual universe, or a theoretical galaxy -- as long as it still has plausible astrophysics behind it.
I would like to confirm there is such a place somewhere in the universe so that my premise has a sound foundation.
**Quality Metric:** The more non-stationary the stars appear, the better. This can be achieved either via chaotic disturbances in the stars location in space or the speed a star moves.
**Planet Details**
* Planet Size: larger than Earth, a Super-Earth
* Rotation: Earth-like
* Moon: Earth-like
* Tilt: Earth-like
* Astronomical Position: ??? (this is what we need)
[Answer]
# This is not the first time intelligent life has arisen on this planet.
Your planet orbits an intergalactic star: normally, the sky would be pitch black at night, with only the faintest dots of distant galaxies visible. But instead, the sky is criss-crossed with moving stars, stars that flit quickly across the sky scape. Why?
They're satellites and space stations, left over from the previous time intelligent life evolved on the planet. To make things really convenient, perhaps they are even currently occupied: the planet became toxic to its occupants, and they fled for the climate-controlle safety of their orbital stations.
In our night sky, the ISS can appear as bright, or brighter than Venus, so luminescence isn't a problem. As you can see [here](http://stuffin.space) satellites orbit in every possible arrangement and direction. Some of these 'stars' would take just a few minutes to completely cross the sky.
[Answer]
**Let's spin that sucker so fast you literally don't have time to take bearings**
You need an Earth-like planet, but how Earth-like?
As we learn more about exoplanets, we find that some [rotate very fast](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1404/1404.7506.pdf) and others [orbit very fast](https://www.space.com/22451-fastest-earth-size-lava-planet-kepler78b.html).1 We don't know yet if such fast rotation and orbits can support life (although [we are learning that it might be a big deal](https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exoplanet-s-rotation-speed-may-hold-key-to-life)), but let's assume that one can. The stars are screaming through the sky so fast sundown-to-sunup, and the constellations changing so fast spring-to-fall, that you simply can't keep track of them well enough to navigate.
**And just to add insult to injury, let's put the planet near the galactic core**
Yes, too close to the core and you're yesterday's microwave dinner. But, let's get close enough that your inhabitants have evolved to withstand a bit higher than we expect radiation — and have so many stars in the sky that are so close together that it's literally difficult to distinguish one star from another.
*If they were standing still!*
The combination of high star density, high rotational speed, and high orbital speed would make bronze-age navigation (and likely navigation up through the 1700s) nearly impossible.
**and, as an alternative...**
On a completely different note, you could take a good old fashioned solar system, something a lot like Earth, and add so many comets and a nearby asteroid belt that the sky at night is in nearly constant motion.
**Edit: Solar rings**
One more idea. In [a now-deleted answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/119913) to [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/119904),2 WillK described the star Formalhault, which has a solar ring kept in place with inner and outer shepherding planets. If your habitable planet were the inner shepherd and the solar ring was thick and not too distant, then your night sky would be alive with "stars" that were never in the same place twice.
---
1 *That fast-orbit link is for a planet with an 8.5 hour **year**. Please keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times.*
2 *This was a brilliant answer, but Will misunderstood the question. I understand why it's deleted, but it's a pity there are those without the rep to see the answer. It's worth the reference.*
[Answer]
# A swiss cheese-style dark nebula
Celestial navigation requires seeing other objects in the sky. But you can't do much of that if you can't *see* many celestial bodies. Therefore, you need to place your planet somewhere where it will be enshrouded in gas and dust. The solution is a nebula of some sort. A [dark nebula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_nebula) is an extraordinarily dense nebula that blots out most things behind it or outside it; it would be the perfect choice if you want to be able to see very few objects.
Now, here's the thing: You still want some stars to appear in the sky, right? But you care about how the stars *appear* to move, not how they actually move in three-dimensional space. Therefore, I'll still suggest a dark nebula, but one that has holes in it, kind of like a gaseous block of swiss cheese. From time to time, stars appear in those holes, but as the gas moves and churns, holes open and close, and it seems like the stars appear and disappear, at random times. It becomes nearly impossible to track any single star.
To create the necessary turbulence on short timescales, perhaps . . .
1. The planet could be near the edge of the nebula.
2. The nebula could be colliding with another gas clouds.
3. The nebula could have stars embedded in it, which would cause turbulence via radiation pressure from their light.
[Barnard 68](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard_68) is a classic example of a dark nebula, opaque at visible wavelengths but optically thin at infrared wavelengths:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZzltP.jpg)
Image credit: European Southern Observatory, under the [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en).
# Why true stellar motions won't work
A seemingly obvious alternative is just an area where stars move very quickly, or appear to. This usually requires an extremely massive object, like a black hole. We recently saw a star, S2, pass close to Sagittarius A\*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. [It traveled at about 7650 km/s at its closest approach](https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2018/07/aa33718-18/aa33718-18.html).
We can calculate the apparent *proper motion* of the star in the sky using the formula
$$\mu\_{\theta}=\left(\frac{v\_{\theta}}{4.74\text{ km s}^{-1}}\right)\left(\frac{d}{\text{parsec}}\right)^{-1}\text{ arcsec yr}^{-1}$$
where $d$ is the distance to the star and $v\_{\theta}$ is the component of the star's velocity perpendicular to the line of sight. At $d=1\text{ pc}$, S2 could have had a proper motion of 1614 arcseconds per year, which is . . . not a lot.
This would certainly be noticeable, but it would be easy enough to account for. Plus, it would require your planet to be close to the black hole. Which isn't great.
[Answer]
I have a problem with your premise .. the earlist navigators, and arguably the best on earth were the Polynesians in the Pacific. They of course used the stars, but more used the knowledge accumulated over centuries of riding the waves, and currents, and using the wind to push their boats to know pathways between the islands they lived on. They had to do this to survive .. without accurate predictions about the movements of the fish they lived off of, and the ability to reliably bring food home from where it was caught, they would die. Then there is the whole thing about keeping out of the way of dangerous weather and climate things .. tsunamis etc.
These are people that learned the oceans by moving onto them from living onshore .. so navigation started from living according to temporal patterns in weather, sun and moon, and stars, on land. Careful observation gave them the information about currents, wind patterns and so on .. relating all that to the motion of the stars would be natural. The ones that do not move become reference points against which motion of the others is measured.
Now to relate this to your question .. No matter what is happening in the skys above them if they process visually in a way similar to us they will notice patterns in the sky. There will be some objects that do not move relative to the planent .. or at least there would be objects orbiting the same sun that will have simple relative motions ..
Alternative 1 So no matter what is going on outside the solar system there will be some stable references that can be a basis for navigation
Alternative 2 Human visual cortexes do a smashing job of picking patterns out of noise so (theoretically) there will always be something to use as a basis for predicting weather, movements of food sources and getting around to visit the relatives who live on other islands.
Either way .. my answer is that there will always be a basis for celestial navigatin no matter what is going on in the night sky. It is required for survival.
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It's an interesting puzzle, and some good answers already.
The thing to keep in mind is that stars are pretty much fixed in the sky at least on a human lifespan. Stars do move around somewhat, based on their [proper motion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_motion) (very slow) and [Earth's axial procession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Axial_precession) (25,700 year cycle, give or take). Neither happens fast enough for what you're looking to do.
With sufficient gravitational interaction, you could increase the planet's wobble. See [this about Pluto's moons](http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-pluto-moons-study-20150603-story.html) or [Youtube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb-eAb0-GSA).
[Saturn's Moon Hyperion](https://www.space.com/20770-hyperion-moon.html) undergoes a similar shift. In both cases, what you need is two large gravitational bodies tugging on your planet. The planet can either orbit a binary system, keep in mind, it would need to be a somewhat distant orbit to be stable and that would be iffy.
Or, your planet could orbit between two large bodies. The planet that comes closest to that situation in our solar system is Mars, which is tugged on by Jupiter as it orbits the sun. [Mars, while it's axis is prone to large shifts](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia15095.html), it doesn't happen fast enough for what you describe.
You mention a super-earth. A faster rotation and larger equatorial bulge and perhaps, I would think, a less flat solar system could all assist a faster planetary wobble, which is what you'd need.
A planet trapped in a Jupiter Trojan or Hilda orbit might experience sufficient wobbles, maybe. A large enough mass could coalesce but still be prone to significant wobbles. I can't do the math on precisely how fast those wobbles might be, but that might be your best option.
It might be possible, however, to observe the direction the sun rises in combination with the stars and work something out. The details get a little bit tricky at my pay grade.
I like the near the galactic core idea or the very short year too, but since those were already mentioned, no need to mention them again. You could also do some combination of the above.
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Few visible stars, /large/ numbers of artificial satellites for an unknown reason.
You're not really going to be able to do this unless the stars aren't really stars. If the stars are moving around fast enough to be effectively unpredictable, and we're talking about a star density similar to that of around the Sun, then either something is moving the stars around at superluminal velocities, something is messing with the path of the light that's coming from the stars, or the stars are actually much closer objects masquerading as stars.
Of the three, the last is probably going to be the easiest to pull off without invoking some crazy physics, but you'd still need to explain who decided to put these satellites there, and if they're going to be behaving /truly/ unpredictably, they're also going to need to be able to change their orbits under power, frequently. Perhaps someone is doing a long-term intensive survey of everything going on on the surface of your planet with extremely high technology?
To get rid of nearby stars, have the system have been thrown out of its parent galaxy billions of years ago. Once it's sufficiently distant (say, Andromeda distance), it could be fairly discreet against the night sky, especially if the galaxy was a spiral one, and the star was thrown out in the plane of its disc.
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Movements of planets and other celestial objects are repetitive, therefore predictable with sufficient observation.
To disturb this the light coming from the stars needs to be disrupted or distorted.
The planet can't have a moon, it could be used for navigation.
The sun can also be used for navigation.
A)
The planets atmosphere may have turbulent but very distinct layers of hot and cold air with high temperature differences.
It is conceivable that the resulting mirages and fata morganas combined with heat haze make it hard to distinguish stars and their position.
There needs to be very high atmospheric refraction and random turbulence in order for this to work otherwise the stars would simply dance around a comparably small spot in the sky.
Heavy solar activity like winds and flares, volcanic activity, vast deserts may possibly cause these things.
Mirages and fata morganas are usually close to surface level and I'm unsure if these would appear looking upwards.
B)
Two or more extremely heavy celestial bodies like black holes causing gravitational lensing with irregular orbits between the stars and the planet may heavily distort the night sky.
They need to have some sorts of random bursts of gravitation or their motion could still be understood and predicted.
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Your planet is part of a rogue stellar system, detached from a galaxy. For sheer luck, the system is moving right in the middle of the **[Boötes void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C3%B6tes_void)**
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> The Boötes void (or the Great Void) is an enormous, approximately spherically-shaped region of space, containing very few galaxies. It is located in the vicinity of the constellation Boötes, hence its name.
>
>
> At nearly 330 million light-years in diameter (approximately 0.27% of the diameter of the observable Universe), or nearly 236,000 $Mpc^3$ in volume, the Boötes void is one of the largest-known voids in the Universe, and is referred to as a supervoid.
>
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> According to astronomer Greg Aldering, the scale of the void is such that "*If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s.*"
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Your sailors, better, whoever lives on that planet, would have just a pitch black sky, with at most the view of the other planets of the system. No North Star, nothing at all to give a reference.
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It would be cool if this entire planet could use zeppelin roadways instead of tarmac roads. Especially for countryside transport away from cities. A zeppelin for one person is about the size of a lorry, and with future materials, we can have fold-up, safe zepellins, with safety sensors, weather prediction, solar conversion. Negative buoyancy air transport will always use noisy big engines and fall down too fast, too noisy to replace cars and would disturb the forests.
Can zeppelins replace cars one day?
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Whilst the sci-fi "sky full of zeppelins" is awesome, I highly doubt lighter-than-air (*LTA*) craft are going to replace the automobile on a day-to-day transport level. They have several key disadvantages:
* Helium is really expensive - and only likely to get more so. You could switch to hydrogen, but then everyone is driving around highly explosive pockets of gas. Fun, but no.
* They are much more vulnerable to weather - even a stiff breeze can severely impact their performance and they have extreme issues in storms.
* Even though they are fair simpler than normal aircraft, they still take quite a bit of skill to fly reliably, predictably and safely, so you're not going to want Joe Average careening around a city in a Mini-Hindenburg.
* Things can still go wrong with the balloon, and then you're back to plummeting out of the sky.
* While a one person blimp may be the size of a lorry, that's still pretty big, and it's not going to have room for cargo or haulage. I can fill my car to the gunnels, then attach a trailer and quite comfortably haul over a ton and a half of stuff, if I don't mind chewing though gas.
That's not to say that *LTA* craft won't have their roles in futuristic travel.
* High altitude reconnaissance and experimentation
* Advertising; the [Goodyear blimp](https://www.goodyearblimp.com/) is an incredibly successful advert
* Luxury travel through the skies
* Weather monitoring - they are still the best at stationary hovering at high altitudes. Can quite happily stay up there for days.
There may also be a role for fast overland bulk transport that could be filled by super-blimps carrying cargo.
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We have more than 100 years of zeppelins under humanity belt. We made quite a technology leap with materials. Yet there are no smallish ones filled with hydrogen. And hydrogen is so easy to get that we have car engines producing it in cars that use hydrogen.
**EDIT** - why use Hydrogen and not helium. Helium is produced from natural gas. So in a plant that need to bottle it up and ship. Kind like fuel but you can drive on one gallon of fuel while you cannot fly with only one gallon of helium. You need to fill blimp to the brim. So no folding-up, either it need to stay blowed or you need to park next to station. Hydrogen can be made from glass of water. You know, the stuff that fall from sky. Taken that whole world helium production would suffice for 6 millions "uses" of lorry size blimp, ignoring other needs for helium, It's quite small compared to other means of transportation. Also helium have around 8% smaller buoyant lift.
Now for the math:
Cubic size of lorry - **30,10 m^3** (Vauxhall/Opel Monavo).
Gross buoyant lift of hydrogen **1,1399 kg/m^3**
That give you **34 kilograms of lift**. Even when you neglect the weight of blimp itself (assume the material and engine as 0) all you could carry is small child.
Great for late term abortion, not so good for traveling.
Also the size of the lorry is the size of the lorry. That equal 3 regular city cars. Equip those three cars with same hydrogen plants and you have very cheap means of travel that don't go sideways when wind blows.
I just had a vision of tragic yet hilarious balloons that go up in the air and bop each other in the air. Like a slow motion pinball.
Also for hot air balloon requirement for the balloon to take of are
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> In brief, the perfect weather conditions our hot air balloons need to
> fly are: ◾Dry ◾Good visibility ◾Light winds of less than 10-12 miles
> per hour.
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Now TA in radio are "the roads are slippery, be careful". With blimps, it would be "the wind is 15 mph so stay home and don't travel"
Extra science. From [this paper about fuel economy](https://www.autonomie.net/docs/6%20-%20Papers/Hydrogen_fueled/fuel_economy_of_hydrogen.pdf) hydrogen engines take around 70 miles per gallon. From this [conversion table](http://www.uigi.com/h2_conv.html) one m^3 of hydrogen is 2,9 gallons. So what would you take 30 m^3 just to have the blimp would equal **2100 miles/3380 kilometres** on the road. So a trip from New York to Chicago through Columbus and Indianapolis and back.
Or Chicago - Denver twice if you want that countryside transport.
So to quote some old guy from 1880 about flying balloons shaped like cigars:
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> It will never stick. Carriages without horses are the future.
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>
> It would be cool if this entire planet could use zeppelin roadways instead of tarmac roads.
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I agree with the cool factor! However, the problem is with the *where*. It isn't likely to happen in our planet's future, because dirigibles have terrible density. If anything, our world's future will probably see more boxy city cars.
However, there is another way. Humans have demonstrated the ability to breathe gas mixes that are about 6 times denser than air at atmospheric pressure, and function continuously. More than 6x increases the work of breathing too much for our physiology. This has been demonstrated in technical and commercial diving and the Sealab experiments.
A planet with 6x the atmospheric density would make LTA craft about twice smaller in every dimension - the volume improvement is better than 6x due to improved structural efficiency. If you want to create a world where LTA transport is more feasible, try looking in that direction.
The abundance of room, the lack of legacy infrastructure (we still use some Roman roads), low population density, and possibly difficult terrain on a colonized planet would also work strongly in LTA crafts' favor. Colonization is likely to focus on the most favorable region, making flight distances short enough for LTA. Adding a lack of fossil fuels could be the tipping point - kerosene is very convenient for heavier-than-air craft, while dirigibles are easy and practical to electrify.
P.S. Keep in mind that real-life air traffic is anything but unregulated. The planes mostly fly alongside designated airways and air corridors, on predefined flight levels, maintaining a lot of separation. That's what it takes, with ATC assistance, to keep just the 23,600 commercial and ~400,000 other aircraft in the world right now from colliding. Think for a moment about how small that number is for a 7-billion planet.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/p8Oxz.jpg)
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IMHO Zeppelins and blimps are too large and not good replacements for single family cars but could possibly be good replacements for railroads, intercity buses, airplanes, ocean liners, container ships, trucks, etc. under the right circumstances.
Possibly hybrid vehicles combining zeppelin and airplane characteristics, or zeppelin and helicopter characteristics, or zeppelin and ground effect vehicle characteristics, may be the way to go.
If fusion power becomes practical in small, lightweight generators, then plain air or common gases from the atmosphere could be heated up to become as light as hydrogen or helium, making hot air Zeppelins practical.
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You couldn't replace cars with blimps and leave everything else the same.
I'm assuming in here we have an infinite source of some light, safe material, and a sufficient source of energy to power them.
They are too slow for country travel. They take time to get ready for takeoff, get to altitude and get to maximum speed. So a car would be a long way ahead when the blimp gets to max speed. And the car would continue to get further ahead - a non rigid airship has a maximum speed of around [95 km/h](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries_Skyship_600). I doubt we can actually get much faster than that without going to rigid airships, which then introduce problems of parking and storage. Plus then time to land and park the blimp at the end. Perhaps in very poor terrain a blimp could be justified, but on a relatively flat, straight road, the car would be vastly superior.
Congestion would be crazy for city travel. Sure, being able to have vertical lanes would cut down on congestion during the commute, but parking will be hell. A CBD (downtown) area might have a million workers coming in from the suburbs. Lets say that it takes 10 minutes to land, fold your blimp and clear the landing area (for context, I can't even take down and pack away a 2 person tent in 10 minutes). In order to get everyone landed within 3 hours, you need 1,000,000/180\*10 landing pads suitable for a zeppelin. That's just over 55,000 landing pads in the center of the city. Assuming each landing pad is 10 meters by 10 meters (100m^2), then this would be 5.5 km^2, or 80% of the area of Melbourne (Australia) CBD as landing pads.
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As the other answers suggest there are many downsides to be conquered in one person zeppelin travel and other means of transportation that will be more reliable and easy. But there is a niche for it if some problems are solved.
First the ideas that you present: fold up and solar conversion are crucial as they solve a few problems.
A fold up system would eliminate the need of large hangars or garages where to store the zeppelin when not in use: you could simply unfold it in your backyard and your destination backyard when not in use in case a storm comes and tries to steal your blimp. The lifting gas should be helium, since hydrogen is flammable (for safety), and could be pumped in a pressurized gas container when folded. The folding would be achieved by building the hull from hydraulic components.
The power source would be solar and lightweight solar film would cover most of the surface area. The energy would be stored in a battery while electric engines would provide the thrust to move. This would allow for electric charging when the zeppelin is not in use/folded.
The downsides would be unability to carry heavy cargo, slow movement speed and vulnerability to weather. The upsides would be zero emissions, nice view and no traffic (traffic in highways might be the driving forces to develop personal flying transportation). A competitor would be a drone type helicopter capable of carrying a person. That would be faster than a zeppelin, but limited to shorter distances since it can't use solar on the go and uses energy also to keep the vehicle up.
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Since we're talking future tech here with a foldable zeppelin... If the structure were strong enough to withstand atmospheric pressure your lifting gas could be a displacement bubble full of nothing.
You unfold your zeppelin, you have a big hard shelled 'balloon' full of atmosphere. You pump the atmosphere out, leaving less and less air volume until you have the buoyancy you want, and off you go.
Vacuum is light, safe, non flammable, and infinitely renewable with nothing more than a pump. All you have to do is make a very light, very strong structure that can push back against 14psi of atmospheric pressure.
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For terrestrial applications, light-than-air craft are not practical for routine short-range travel. On other planets with the right kind of atmosphere, however, they might work much better. In atmosphere of sulfur hexafluoride at terrestrial standard temperature and pressure, for example, the volume of gas required to achieve a given amount of lift would be about 80% less than on Earth, and if atmospheric pressure were e.g. twenty times that of earth, that would offer another 95% reduction. If the atmosphere contained the right percentage of oxygen, humans could probably become acclimated to breathing such it directly, and shrinking lighter-than-air craft by 99% would bring them near the point of practicality. Even at that reduced size they might not be 100% practical, but the amount of handwavium necessary to fix that would be less than with terrestrial vehicles.
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In the story I have been writing and asking questions for, the main conflict is parasites. What I have so far is that the parasite lives dormant inside of "pure-bred" aliens (which have softer brains), but once human genetics are introduced (alien-human hybrids), the parasite becomes active and begins burrowing into the brain of the host (which is more rigid, harder and more painful to get around). The body and immune system is completely unaware, as the parasite was developed in the brain during the fetal stages. Anyway, the parasite essentially creates its own alien brain tissue (as that's its regular "habitat") and creates a mess of alien and human brain tissue inside of the host's skull. The host begins having short spasms, memory loss, and feelings of being light headed depending on where the parasite does its work. The bigger problem is that the host also begins experiencing episodes of extreme violence. Characters in the story have noticed that hosts of the parasite are almost animal-like in how they act. This is because the parasite is in need of certain nutrients that only "pure-bred" humans can produce, so the parasite only targets humans. This nutrient allows the parasite to grow stronger and create offspring.
Leave a comment if you need more clarification or an example from my story. **I am not interested in talking about the origins of the parasite.** I only want to make it more plausible. I have done my research so I know the symptoms are alright, but I'm worried that if I write this into the story, there will be a lot of unexplained things/a lot of questions.
**Additional information:** If you could not already tell, this take places in a different solar system and it is in the future. I just want to explore these cool ideas, as we really don't know what's out there in space. But I don't want my ideas to sound stupid. I understand if I need to make major changes to the function of the parasite.
*Edit: The aliens I am speaking of evolved in a similar way that humans evolved, and through science, they are able to reproduce with each other.*
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You have fungi species called [cordyceps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps) that parasite insects and change their behaviour drastically. For the case of ants, once the fungus finds its way into an ant, the ant will tend to leave the colony and find a nice place for the fungus to grow (if possible above an ant colony to help the spread of the fungus).
There is also [toxoplasma gondii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii), a parasite that makes the host attracted to felines. For example, mice infected by this parasite will not fear cats and will be somehow attracted to them until the cat basically kills and eats them. This is due to the fact the this parasite only multiplies once in a felid's body. By the way, this parasite is transmitted from the mother to the foetus.
Both of these parasites alter the host's behaviour in a somewhat drastic way. I'd suggest you invent a reason for the parasite to make the host violent, some way that would benefit the parasite.
For example, their aggressiveness could be explained by the fact that these parasites need human nutrients to grow and spread. Therefore, eating (and so attacking and killing) humans would be motivated by a goal (spreading and growing). You could make them attack humanoids in general if the parasite is not "smart" enough to distinguish humans from humanoid aliens on first sight.
They could also be weak to a certain thing (like fungi do not really like sunlight and prefer to be in the shade). Exposing the parasite to this weakness could trigger an "emergency reaction" in the host who will try all it can to avoid this weakness (ex: find shadows if sunlight is a weakness). In this "emergency state", the host could be very aggressive because it is in pain (because the parasite is exposed to its weakness), and it would do whatever it takes to get away from the weakness.
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Here's my take:
**Your parasites aren't actually dormant in the pure-bred aliens.** Rather they have formed a parasitic symbiosis with the aliens. If the aliens aren't affected or it's part of their brains as they grow, it's a part of them, something beign that's in every alien. Their squidgy brains just adjust, and might even use the parasite. The parasite in turn helps the host survive, maybe by giving them stuff such as extra brain power, a faster reflex system, structure in their brains that they would not ordinarily have without them and so on. If you killed the parasites in the alien's brain, they might die. And if they suffer brain damage, the parasites might even work to reconnect things, the better that their host will survive.
It gets passed through to the fetus from the mother. What this might mean is that hybrids with a human mom won't have the problem or hybrids grown completely in the lab don't have the problem. It could be that several generations were totally lab grown and they eventually figured out how to put it in the non-human moms, creating this unforeseen problem.
Regular humans visiting the planet aren't affected because their core temperature is too high or low or their body chemistry isn't compatible with the parasites.
But with the hybrids, there's enough alien DNA that they make decent hosts, but not great ones. And the environment isn't exactly hospitable. So while the parasite is present in the hybrids, some condition (like core temperature or body chemistry) keeps them turned off--for a while.
You want normal people to go suddenly bad, or live their whole lives until they one day start going mad--that's how to do it.
So in the hybrids it's actually dormant to start with. NOT in the aliens.
Genes can be turned off and on, mostly once they are on they stay on, but it's a messy process. It's possible that certain growth genes in the parasite are turned off to begin with, but some environmental (including food or anything else) or a hormonal factor turns them on, rendering them active.
When the parasite gets turned on in the human hybrid brains, the more rigid structure, which didn't evolve with this symbiosis will cause the problems you outlined.
**The aggression is pretty specific though. In humans it would be sort of random how they would react**--so you are going to need an explaination for all of them behaving in exactly the same way.
What I've come up with is this--the parasite is trying to build where it's easy. The brain of a hybrid might have a squidgy bit that gets activated by the parasite because the parasite believes that their host is sick and is trying to protect the host by turning on defenses. The parasite might be going to a specific point in the brain that will make it easier for them to spread over the whole thing. Brain structure can be pretty darn different...
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Technically speaking, the thing that sets humans apart from other more primitive species is the neocortex. Also, humans can survive without parts of their neocortex and it can cause them to act more aggressively (see [Phineas Gage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage)). So maybe you'll accept that as evidence for my opinion that removing or damaging some of the neocortex would make humans more primal.
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You're nearly describing the effects of many forms of brain damage, including Alzheimer's. Depending on the part of the brain where the disease (or in your case, the parasite) is developing, different faculties are lost - memory, language, self-control.
So there's not really a need for the parasite to "deliberately" affect any part of the brain to make particular changes - any sufficient loss of brain matter, whether by cell death, being eaten, or your scenario of being replaced by presumably incompatible matter, will cause similar effects.
Following the pattern, the violent phase would likely be followed by an apathetic phase as more faculties are lost.
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So this parasite will zombify its victims and instill in them the craving for a specific nutrient?
Now, being it a parasite, we don't expect it to be smart, just doing its job: feed and reproduce.
The best food it can aspire to, living in our brain, is **sugar**. A lot of sugar, the more the merrier! The body methabolism sends the sugar first thing to the brain, so at first the victim would display headaches and a craving for sweeties. Before you know it, the victim is acting like an heroin addict, he's getting violent cravings for sweeties, he's going progressively beyond reason. Luckily, the parasite, who should give him the headaches of his life, is also interfering with his glandular system. He's getting continous adrenaline shots and his dopamine levels are off the charts. Luckily, the parasite is absorbing all the overdoses of sugar and for now the victim does not end up with a massive diabetes.
Towards the final stages of infection, the victim will start vomiting. Vomit contains spores that, once the liquid has evaporated are released and ready to infect other victims. The parasite dies, having disseminated its 'eggs', the brain collapses, the abused body soon follows.
What a sweet way to go!
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Continuing in the theme of bringing creatures from video games into the [Anatomically Correct series](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2798/44805) is the [Chocobo](http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Chocobo) of Final Fantasy lore.
Put simply, a Chocobo is a large bird. It is unclear whether they're a single species or a genus, as there are quite a few [types](http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Chocobo/Types). Based on the available data, though, it is clear that Chocobos:
* Come in various colors
* May or may not be able to fly or swim. This is dependent on type; see the link above.
* Are large enough to be ridden, and strong enough to be ridden by armored knights
* Are intelligent enough to be tamed and trained
* Typically reside in grasslands and forests
* Are herbivorous
* Are fast enough that racing them is a sport
* Are able to pull carts
* Have appreciable offensive capabilities
* Lay eggs
Given the above, how might Chocobos evolve?
*Note: Because Final Fantasy is a RPG, Chocobos are stated in source works to have magic, be synergists, etc. Answers may either explain this or completely ignore it at the answerer's discretion.*
A list of all of the Anatomically Correct questions can be found here
[Anatomically Correct Series](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798)
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You're basically talking about beefier [ostrich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ostrich) or perhaps a [giant moa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinornis), [terror bird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorusrhacidae), or [elephant bird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_bird).
As is an ostrich meets all your criteria with the exception of being herbivores, and the ability to carry armored knights. They are omnivorous instead of herbivorous. While humans can ride ostrich the added weight of full armor would probably be too much for them to carry. It's highly likely that any flightless bird larger than an ostrich would be able to carry an armored knight as is.
So what needs to be done for a Chocobo to evolve? You basically had one with the moa, and a little bit of selective breeding will get you a larger ostrich.
Interestingly enough since the moa became extinct so recently that there are still preserved soft tissue samples available to researchers. There are researchers in Japan currently working on extracting DNA from these samples. There is a slim but non-zero chance that the species may be revived sometime in the near future.
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# Racing/Riding
There are such things as [ostrich cart races](http://www.upc-online.org/ostriches/170315_a_brief_history_of_the_chandler_ostrich_festival.html). Pulling a cart/wagon would be limited by the bird's size/strength.
If you ever watched the original [Swiss Family Robinson](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054357/), one of the castaways uses an ostridge as his racing horse. Again, size/strength needs to be adjusted to allow it to carry an armored knight.
So, a chocobo could easily be an evolved ostridge.
# Evolution
Final Fantasy VII Chocobos are (almost) always found with other monster, graze in specific spot, and are scared easily. (source: me, I've played the game a lot)
Most likely, its friends are evolved due to the source of magic for that world, Mako. That could imply that the Chocobos are also evolved due to Mako.
# Color
Since an ostrich is a bird, I image that its feathers can be any color that any other bird has. You would have to selectively breed the various colors. Just make sure you have enough Kola Nuts.
# Tame
They are already used for various purpose like cart racing
# Offensive
I'm sure there are plenty of YouTube videos of an ostrich attacking a human.
Because they could have evolved due to Mako, chocobos should have various magic attacks for offense. Most likely, these will be wind-based stun attacks.
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Your Chocobo is a giant [Kakapo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakapo). Its face looks like a parrot. Heck the name is even a corruption of Kakapo!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4TPsM.jpg)
<https://www.buzzfeed.com/simoncrerar/meet-the-kakapo-flightless-parrot-facing-extinction?utm_term=.qxewjzrzb#.nsqRAoqoL>
Kakapos are huge flightless parrots. They are the most awesome bird there is. They can't fly but they jump and run. And climb! They are super friendly and funny but mess with the chicks and they will take a finger off you just like that. Because of their parrot heritage they are smart and social.
Your Chocobos are all that, but big like an elephant bird. As regards the plumage, their owners like to put Dippitydo on the head feathers to make them stand up. The Chocobos think that is cool too.
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After some research, I find that your Chocobo is a Gastornis
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tnr3k.jpg)
Gastornis fits in most of your criteria:
1. Herbivore
While Gastornis was thought to be a fearful predator just like the phorusrhacid terror birds, it's now believed to be a peaceful herbivore (see this site:<https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/02/27/giant-prehistoric-bird-crushed-seeds-not-little-horses/>). It ate seeds and fruits rather than leaves, but since you didn't expecify and I didn't found any mention to the Chocobo's diet, I think that's OK.
2. Can support a armored knight
Now that's a bit of a stretch. Maybe initially they could only carry an adult person, and later were bred to be stronger and stronger, like wild horses to draft horses. They could also be bred to pull carts and to run in races, just like horses (actually, the Chocobo is like a bird version of a horse)
3. Able to fly and/or swim
While large birds are able to swim well, althought rarelly (ostriches can swim), flying is impossible for a bird with such a size, expecially when carrying a armoured knight in the back. Maybe your Chocobo has large wings for display and equilibrium, like an ostrich, but absolutely no flying.
All the other abilities are common for any big bird. Taking an ostrich or emu as a model, criteria like self-defense, color variety (vibrant colors for sexual display?) and habitat already appear naturally. It even looks like a Chocobo with it's big beak and large claws!
Gastornis lived between 56 and 45 million years, a period when the Earth's enviroment was still recovering for the Cretaceous Extiction, and mammals still weren't fully stabilished as the dominant animal form, with birds and reptiles occupying vacant niches left by the dinosaurs. It occupied the large herbivore niche, while the large predators were terror birds and land crocs. As the mammals evolved, however, Gastornis and it's family lost the niche for animals like horses and deer, becoming extinct in the process. Your Chocobo, however, maybe is a evolved Gastornis or similar bird with highter intelligence, making it able to surpass it's pea-sized-brain cousins and at least coexist with the evolving herbivore mammals, occupying a horse-like niche by living in grasslands and forests, and increasing it's speed and abilities, without losing the caracteristic appearence. Later on, humans discover this smart and docile bird and domesticate it, including the animal in their cultural practices and making it fit in various functions.
Hope that this helped! :)
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[Question]
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For this question I'm assuming a utterly infeasible technological breakthrough suddenly makes wormholes technology possible.
However there is a major catch, the 2D "windows" as they're called don't allow through matter or gravitational pull. The "windows" can be opened for about a half a million USD. Once opened these portals stay open indefinitely unless closed.
Opening a portal requires a large amount of energy, and the use of expensive and bulky machines on one end of the wormhole, with only a small machine and energy on par with a car battery required on the other end.
The portals are flat windows that look like portals, however were you to walk up to one you would pass through it unaffected. The portals size can be as small as a millimeter or as large as 2,600 meters, any larger would require using multiple portal machines and linking them together. A portal can have any shape with the smallest definition being a millimeter, however portals are totally flat. Each side of the flat portal corresponds to a side of the other end of the portal. Each of the two connected portals must be the exact same shape and size.
**Portals will continue moving as the machine that created them was, at the moment it created the portal, other than controlling its initial motion you can't move portals except as detailed below**. This means if the machine was orbiting the earth the portal will continue this motion, even though it isn't itself a object and has no mass. Portals also continue accelerating or decelerating as the machine was when it created it, however while portals can continue accelerating indefinitely they will slow acceleration such that they approach, but never reach the speed of light.
A portal on earth will not slowly drift, since slight changes in planetary motion such as the lengthening of days is effectively counted as deceleration thus the portal undergoes the same slowing, this only holds true for motions that continue at the same rate of acceleration/deceleration as when the portal was created. The end of the portal which requires the expensive machinery to create can be kept linked to the machines so that it moves with them, however this means you can't use those machines to make further portals.
Weapon note: To prevent the scenario of potential apocalyptic destruction, due to someone launching a portal through the sun. I have decided that a wormhole will collapse if more than about the equivalent of a kiloton of TNT worth of energy tries to pass through it in a second, though most energy that *can* pass through it in a second is equivalent to a ton of tnt. Since the portal only allows through at most a ton of tnt, any additional energy is reflected back when it hits the portal. This is still a lot of energy so it still has a lot of weapon potential. Keep in mind, as far as I know all energy would be in the form of photons.
**TLDR:** It's a portal that only lets light through.Well actually other details of it are more complicated, so read the whole question before answering.
*What uses would be implemented for such a technology* assuming it essentially appeared in our world overnight?
The most obvious thing I can think of using it for is as a source of near infinite energy, you could get one end of the portal in an orbit much closer to the sun and use the energy to boil massive amounts of water (also may be useful for desalinization).
Using it to allow faster than light communication is an obvious application as well (though given our current technology that's not super useful).
[Answer]
**Colonization of other moons and planets**
You could open up portals around a bunch of bodies in our solar system to increase insolation and make teraforming more viable.
Titan would be a real possibility for teraforming, with a thick atmosphere, water, etc. The problem is that it is really really cold.
It’s 72 kelvin on Titan, which is about the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
Throw a few portals around it and you could raise the temperature to a habitable level.
Mars could benefit from more light, since it has about 44% of the Earth’s solar constant. This would make growing things easier, and could restart the water cycle.
**FTL**
Also, since it allows photons, that means that radio waves will go through. So communication with the rovers on Mars or space probes gets a lot faster.
**Exploration**
The fact that they keep accelerating up to lightspeed is also useful, in that you could create one that is heading toward another star, and one end you look through here on Earth, and it becomes something like an infinite zoom telescope. You'd want to have some high speed cameras on it, as it would pass by the intended star pretty fast.
Edit:
**Energy Collection**
As user867 pointed out, with enough of these you could make a [Dyson Swarm/Dyson Bubble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_bubble) for energy collection.
1. Launch a portal generator into a solar orbit.
*It doesn't have to be that close of an orbit either. The Dyson Sphere concept uses a orbital distance of 1 AU (the same distance as Earth orbits). These portals could be a lot closer, maybe inside the orbit of Venus, but you wouldn't need to be inside the orbit of Mercury. It would probably take some computer simulation to decide on the best orbital distance to portal size to maximize the collection while staying below the shutdown point.*
2. Create a small portal to be used for energy transfer through [far field wireless power transmission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power#Far-field_or_radiative_techniques) (microwave or laser perhaps).
3. Beam enough power to create a large portal to start harvesting the suns energy, which could used for [solar power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert) (it could even work at night!), thermal to drive a normal steam dynamo plant, or both.
4. Take the power generated and beam it to the generator to create another portal, increasing the amount of power generated.
5. Repeat until there are enough portals to enclose the sun. It could be helpful to avoid putting portals in the plane of the ecliptic so that earth and the other planets still get the same amount of light.
Some portals might get knocked out if they are overloaded by solar flares, but with several portal generators working to make new portals this would be a minor problem. At some point the amount of energy collected basically lets you create portals for almost nothing.
**Communication**
\$500,000 is a little high for a radio mast, but there are a few things that might make it worth the cost (if the cost hasn't been driven down by the previous point).
Towers used for television, cell phones, radio, and other communication can cost \$200,000 - \$300,000 to put up, plus the cost of land (expensive in cities) and running hard lines (expensive in rural areas).
By using portals, you can essentially put a transmitter in any location at any altitude, while all the hardware is in an easily accessible, easy to maintain location on the ground.
Google has been playing around with using balloons as wifi transmitters, and others have been looking into satellites as a way to have global wifi internet access. A portal is cheaper than a satellite, and is easier to maintain and upgrade, since all the hardware is on the ground still.
Also, as Jan Dvorak pointed out, for replacing the normal backbone infrastructure, portals would be way cheaper than undersea cables, and you would never need to worry about them being cut.
As the technology matures and portals get cheaper and cheaper, at some point you'll see an ISP offering PTTH (portal to the home) internet instead of fiber.
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**High-frequency trading communications platform.**
HFT relies heavily on **super-low-latency internet connections** -- so much so that [companies will rent office space that is physically closer to trunk exchanges](http://www.wired.com/2012/08/ff_wallstreet_trading/), just to get an edge:
>
> [...] each mile adds about eight microseconds of latency. There is
> so much money to be made that any expenditure on research and
> infrastructure to shave those microseconds is worth it.
>
>
>
It's already been posited that [we could use neutrino-based communication, passing through the mass of our planet, to execute faster trades](http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2012/04/30/neutrinos-to-give-high-frequency-traders-the-millisecond-edge/). Half a million would be chump change to acquire near-instantaneous, globally-spanning communications.
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[**Telesurgery**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery) would be another interesting application, which likewise requires a low-latency connection.
Really, anything requiring very low-latency communications, which can be accomplished with fiber-optic *(photon-based)* hardware, and which is valuable enough to invest the initial half-million dollars in. It would also have potential for **high-bandwidth applications** -- half a million for a wormhole and some fiber-optic repeaters is still a *lot* cheaper than laying undersea cable *([\$28,000-$90,000 / km](http://www.ibtimes.com/underwater-internet-cables-submarine-cable-map-shows-how-world-gets-online-1559604))*, and a lot easier & cheaper to repair & upgrade.
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More speculatively, a photon-emitting wormhole could be used not only to **maintain real-time communications with space exploration hardware** *(as AndyD273 mentioned in [their answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/31926/16021))*, but also to help **power them** *(looks like bowlturner [thought of this as well](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/31927/16021), with their solar sail probe example)* or even just to **keep them at more favorable operating temperatures**. This could simplify their design & result in a net cost savings, and possibly extend their operational lifetimes.
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## Medical scanning.
If your wormholes are one-way, then the ultimate x-ray machine costs a million dollars. If they bi-directional, cut that cost in half.
What you do is have two identically shaped 'holes placed very close to each other - this is your scanner. Shine a light into one, it comes out of its paired end, goes straight into the other 'hole and out the final exit.
## How is this the ultimate x-ray machine?
Well, push a person through this thing and you get an image of the tiny sliver that's between the two 'holes.
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Well certainly different ways of generating energy could be used. opening windows closer to the sun and sending the receiving end to a solar array of some kind.
Since it only allows photons (not explicitly stated in the question) I have to modify this answer.
We would use it for entertainment, education and spying. We would be able to send a ship to orbit any of the other bodies orbiting the sun and 'see' much more closely, for far longer periods of time what is going on, like a cctv camera. I could see them being put into orbit around the Earth by governments to act as spy satellites and they would be cheaper too.
Then people might use them for entertainment, people watch 'reality' tv now, well, maybe having one looking out at Time Square, or Tienanmen square high quality 'video' of real life places that interest people.
AND another idea! for entertainment, put a 'dune' buggy on Mars or the Moon, have one end as a 'windshield' on Earth, and allow people to 'drive' the dune buggy around mars, since the buggy could take commands via light through the window (need a satellite in between a window in space and the buggy for communication, not as fast as instantaneous, but a pretty small lag) and the person driving would have visual feedback. "Let's go drive up mount Olympus!" That would be awesome!
One more idea! You could use it to push solar sails on ships across space to other stars, it could be used for propulsion as well as an energy source for the ship in transit.
[Answer]
There are of course all the weird and wonderful applications, but I get the impression you're trying to figure out what the more practical everyday applications would be in such a world, so here are some ideas:
* Non-destructive scanning/searching: Similar to the X-ray machine idea, you could send a portal (or pair of portals if you need one to provide a photon source) through solid objects. For example: a volcano (or the planet) to map its internal structure; a seam of minerals to know where to mine; an avalanche or rubble from destroyed buildings to find trapped people; selected areas of land with archaeological interest; enemy intelligence HQs for spying purposes; broken/damaged things such as a car engine or an old bridge, for diagnosis of problems or structural integrity.
* Mapping: Google would send one up every day, looking down and moving upwards slowly. They would film the output portal and send it to Google maps for real-time mapping at all heights, then sell access to anyone and everyone.
* Instantaneous communications: This has already been covered amply in other answers.
* Entertainment: Huge 'screens' for popular events like sports games, music concerts, royal weddings, the Oscars, etc. - fill the live venue, plus a few others in other locations to increase profits.
* Monitoring: Security for high-value locations - the portal can't be interacted with physically like traditional cameras that could be disabled. Remote or dangerous locations could be monitored that don't have power or communications access.
* Decoration / effects: The super-rich, expensive hotels, and similar could have fantastic views of any location from their city-centre buildings. Theme parks could launch thrilled roller-coaster riders past (or even through) scenes that would be impractical to build safely on-site. City councils could make small parks look much more open and hide huge eye-sores such as waste-land, construction, etc.
* Cloaking device: Portals on either side could be used to cloak small or large objects.
[Answer]
With respect to the energy levels given, 1 ton of TNT is roughly equal to 4 gigawatt-seconds, actually a bit more.
This is much more energy than anywhere in earth receives from the sun. According to [this website on solar insolation](http://www.apricus.com/html/solar_collector_insolation.htm), the amount maxes out at ~7.5 KW/m2/day.
If we assume a window size of 1m^2, use 4GWs as the amount of energy in 1 ton of TNT, and set a day at exactly 24 hours, we get an insolation of 345TW/m2/day. [The Wikipedia article on Watts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt#Terawatt) has some interesting information on this level of power.
A window of this size, putting out the equivalent of 1 ton of TNT a second is a death ray. At lower energy levels, you could easily use these as heat sources for power plants.
If I have time later, I'll look at larger windows, but I guess you could you a km^2 windows for providing earth-like solar conditions to sections of other planets.
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After thinking about it for a bit you can use mainly in space travel.
One portal is near the sun and the other attached to the spacecraft.
You can do the following:
* Grow food in the spaceship(veg and what not).
* Provide energy for the spacecraft.(maybe not directly for movement but still...)
* Also has health benefits, vitamin D and helps people keep their sanity while in space.
I think you will need to address the theory of relativity in your world in regards to two portals emitting light while one is near a gravitational body like the sun.
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Half mill is a heck of a lot cheaper than transcontinental cables. Lagless internet over any distance(there would still be some local bottlenecks but transcontinental lag would be a thing of the past). The portals would probably not be used directly as windows but instead attached to some sort of apparatus to transcribe data as light signals and return it to a central hub.
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[Question]
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After a particularly large bombing raid during a war, a mountainous rural region is left mostly destroyed. Villages are in ruins, bands of survivors look everywhere for food and shelter, and all hope seems lost. The government of the small country has collapsed, and anarchy reins.
Then one inquisitive young boy finds a network of caves in one of the mountains. It seems like it can hold a large number of people rather comfortably. Some villagers set out to explore it, and over a period of a few weeks, people start using the caves as places to live, safe from the continued bombing runs. There's a river there, complete with fish for food.
One day, a bomb causes an avalanche, which causes the only entrance to the cave network to cave in. People frantically try to find ways out, but to no avail. Eventually, it is decided to "keep calm and carry on" while a few explorers try to see if somewhere in the depths lies a previously unknown way out.
Everyone staying behind need a few necessities, such as heat and light. They can make fire easily, and they have raw materials (e.g. enough wood to make about fifty homes, which is what the wood is currently being used for), but they need electricity to properly work the lighting system, previously powered by solar cells outside.
How can the villagers generate electricity?
[Answer]
If they have a few strong magnets available, using some of the wood, and wire salvaged from the lighting circuits, villagers could feasibly construct a [crude dynamo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo#Early_dynamos) which would not be very efficient, but would convert circular motion to electricity. The link takes you to examples of early dynamos, which are in essence very simple - multiple loops of wire moving through a magnetic field is all you need to convert mechanical movement to electric potential. With a simple dynamo, you can even feel the effort required to move the device increasing as power is drawn from the device.
The villagers could either take turns keeping the dynamo working, or could perhaps find a way to link the device to the water flowing in river using a simple water-wheel constructed from the wood they have.
The solar system for the lights would of had battery storage. If the batteries survived, they could be placed into the circuit to help smooth out power through any short downtime, allowing even hand-cranked power to keep lights on while whoever was working it could take a rest. Otherwise you will get some problems with maintaining the right levels of power.
With this hand-made setup I would expect voltage and power levels to be relatively low. Realistically you'd want to have LED lighting throughout and probably need to be very sparing with which sections of cave you kept lit or what else you used power for.
[Here's a modern example where a whole house's power supply was run by people on exercise bikes](http://www.electricpedals.com/human-power-station/) (stepping up the power and voltage in your caves to this level would be far more of a challenge though, you'd need some decent tools and an electrical engineer or two to set this up in your caves).
If hand-building a dynamo seems far-fetched for your group of villagers, then many electric motors can be used as dynamos when they are hand-cranked - motors and dynamos are very similar internally. So if the villagers could perhaps salvage an electric winch or mobility scooter for tourists/visitors to the caves, then there could be a motor inside just suitable for the task. For believability you want a motor with high torque and low revolutions, and that was in a device run from a battery.
Update: I stumbled across [this video "how to" where the presenter converts an old washing machine into a generator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ieFZI4-6K8). Proof-of-concept for the idea.
[Answer]
You're underground? And you need to generate electricity?
Sounds like you want [**Geothermal**](http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/tech/geothermal-energy/geoelectricity) energy.
The idea is to take heat sources from underground, and use those to generate steam. Those then drive your turbines and generate electricity.
It's generally very clean, non-polluting and 100% renewable, all very large bonuses for your cave system. All you need is a source - maybe an underground hot spring? And then you can tap into that.
[Answer]
[Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_fuel#Energy_content) says that wood contains $14.9\text{ MJkg}^{-1}$, or $10.4\text{ MJkg}^{-1}$ at 70% efficiency. If you're burning your wood as a fuel source, then it'll burn at significantly less than 100% efficiency; 70% seems *around* right to me so we'll say 10 megajoules per kilo.
Enough wood to build 50 homes? You have a *lot* of wood there. About [30,000 board feet](http://www.idahoforests.org/woodhous.htm) of wood goes into a house, which is [about 262.5 *tons*](http://forestry.about.com/cs/forestvaluation/f/vol_conv_hlogbf.htm)[1]. Multiply by 50 and you get 13,125 tons. (Where are you even storing all of this??) However, that measurement is for all hardwood timber, which 14,000 board feet of the house is not, so we'll drop the measurement to 10,000 tons. So:
$$ 10,000\text{ tons} = 10,000,000\text{ kg} $$
$$ 10,000,000 \times 10\text{ MJkg}^{-1} = 100,000,000\text{ MJ} $$
$$ = 1 \times 10^{11} \text{ J} $$
That's [equal to 27,778 kWh](http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm). One kWh can [run a heater for half an hour](http://www.electricireland.ie/ei/business/contact-us/what-does-a-kwh-do.jsp) - thus, these 27,778 kWh can heat 50 rooms for 278 hours.
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However, you have now run out of fuel. You might now be able to look at hydroelectric power, since there's an underground river conveniently in your caves.
The formula to calculate power output of a hydroelectric turbine is this:
[$$ P = \eta\rho Qgh $$](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower#Calculating_the_amount_of_available_power)
where
* $\eta$ is the turbine efficiency (average is 85%);
* $\rho$ is the density of water (1000kgm-3 for fresh water);
* $Q$ is the flow rate;
* $g$ is the acceleration due to gravity (9.81ms-1 on Earth); and
* $h$ is the height difference between inlet and outlet.
The only two there we don't know are flow rate and height difference, but these can be estimated: a subterranean river is not usually that big, so a flow rate of 50 cubic metres per second seems reasonable; and the height is unlikely to change a huge amount - we'll say 20 metres. This gives a consistent output (as long as the river keeps flowing) of:
$$ P = 0.85 \times 1000 \times 50 \times 9.81 \times 20 $$
$$ = 8,338,500\text{ W} $$
Watts are joules per second, so this gives you a *huge* output - enough to power all your needs and store plenty - you might want to consider giving these people access to capacitors.
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Perhaps what you do here is you burn *some* wood while you're working on getting the turbine running. Then you can still build some houses. Once the turbine is up and running you're not going to have any problems with energy.
[Answer]
For you to explore energy from wood, or geothermal energy, or any energy based on heat, you need a heat machine. There are lots of machines that are called heat machines (or motors, or engines): Stirling engine, Rankine engine, etc.¹
>
> In general terms, the larger the difference in temperature between the hot source and the cold sink, the larger is the potential thermal efficiency of the cycle. On Earth, the cold side of any heat engine is limited to being close to the ambient temperature of the environment, or not much lower than 300 Kelvin, so most efforts to improve the thermodynamic efficiencies of various heat engines focus on increasing the temperature of the source, within material limits. The maximum theoretical efficiency of a heat engine (which no engine ever attains) is equal to the temperature difference between the hot and cold ends divided by the temperature at the hot end, all expressed in absolute temperature or Kelvin.¹
>
>
>
For a heat engine to work, you need heat, but not only heat. You need a thermal sink. And that lies the problem of exploring energy inside caves while inhabiting it at the same time.
In the absence of a thermal sink, the ambient air temperature will raise. While the machine capacity to do work (or generate energy) will fall. The efficiency of a heat engine is given by : $$\eta = 1 - \frac{T\_c}{T\_h}$$
Where $T\_c$ is the temperature of the cold, heat sink, while $T\_h$ is the temperature of the heat source.
This means that if the rocks around the cave have low heat transmission and capacity, the temperature of the air will raise slowly, killing everybody, while losing efficiency at the same time.
In other words, you need to find a heat sink. If by luck your cave has access to a underground river, this might be a perfect thermal sink. Circulating water from the underground river to the heat engine and back, should provide enough capacity to drain heat and keep the engine running.
Now you face a problem with oxygen. If you burn all that wood to provide energy, your fire will drain oxygen from the ambient until it is not able to sustain life anymore. So, in that event, a geothermal source of heat would be much more usefull. Unless your geothermal source produces sulfurous gases. In that case, even a small concentration of such gases can be fatal.
To sum it up:
Your cave system needs a source of heat that does not burn oxygen neither produces sulfuric gases. There are certain formations where lava is not directly exposed but can render nearby rocks hotter than usual - without direct contact to the lava. While at the same time your cave network needs a source of water to be used as heat sink. Satisfying both conditions is hard but as this is a fantasy setting this might be done. In no event you should burn anything. Air inside the cave, if closed, is limited and would be drained by burning wood. You need metals and people able to produce engines. A crude dynamo etc. One of the simplest heat machines to build would be a stirling engine. Those are pretty efficient and simple if kept on atmospheric pressure levels.
The total heat rejected by a heat engine is the reciprocal of its efficiency. Lets suppose a heat engine working with a thermal source at 900K and a thermal sink at 323K. Efficience of the engine would be :
$$\eta = 1 - \frac{323}{900}=1-03588888888888889=0.64111111111$$
This means that for each joule of thermal energy that is inputted into the engine, a maximum (not counting other loses) of 0.64 joules of mechanical energy would be generated into the machine output axis, while 0.36 joules would be directly rejected into the ambient. If you produce, say, 1kw of energy (sufficient for a bunch of lamps and a pump to bring water to the heat engine), this would need 1562 Watts of input energy and reject to the ambient 546 Watts of energy.
¹[Heat engines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_engine)
[Answer]
Well, They need a source of water if they are to live for more than a couple of days, and many caves systems have streams flowing through (often that is how they were formed).
So putting in a water turbine in a decently flowing underground stream would be a good start. You'd want to avoid burning things as much as possible until you know you have a source of oxygen and a good airflow through the caves or you will all suffocate from carbon monoxide/carbon dioxide poisoning.
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[Question]
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On Terra, many many people used to be nomadic. Now very few are. An exception is Mongolia, where now in 2023, about 30% of the population remain nomadic. The world I am building is a sort of global-Mongolia. A large percentage of the world's population remain nomadic amidst 21st-century technology. This naturally means motorvehicles.
Basically my question is: what would an offroad camper van that is slow and resilient look like? Nothing too exotic here; something that a car company could produce today if given the brief. The technology level is the same as in the real world.
Design considerations:
* Speed is deprioritised. They trundle along. Trundle, I say. [Data from the Binford hunter-gatherer database](https://d-place.org/parameters/B014#1/29/169) shows that nomadic hunter-gatherers travel a maximum of 1351.85km per year (the Piegan are the record-holders). Now that's not 4km a day every day, there's probably a lot of camping and maybe 100km max in a day, conservatively. So I think a vehicle with a max speed of about 15km/h would be plenty for nomadic migrations; that's a 3× speed gain over walking, and you can haul tonnes.
* Resilience is important. You don't want something that will break down. Having said that, you're travelling in a nomad-troupe of maybe 100-300 people, 20-60 vehicles, and there are tools and know-how and handy blokes there who can do basic repairs.
Design decisions to be made:
* Electric or hydrogen or fossil fuel or gasified biomass It would be cool & solarpunk & cool if you could have solar panels and power your car that way. I've done the numbers before and know that's ridiculous for conventional cars; but maybe it is realistic for slow vehicles moving <4km/day? I'm leaning towards [gasified biomass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification), as that would fit nicely with a nomadic lifestyle and not require non-nomadic infrastructure.
* What kind of wheels? It is basically an offroad vehicle. Should it have six wheels? (An image search for 'offroad RV' does show a few with six wheels.) Should it have very wide wheels? Should it have tracks instead of wheels? [This physics stackexchange question](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/142883/6-wheels-more-efficient-than-4-wheels) talks about how more wheels basically makes things better on soft ground. Looking at [the advantages&disadvantages section of the 'Airless tire' Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airless_tire), it seems like airless tures are good for this purpose: offroad, resilience prioritised, distance deprioritised. [Hackaday says](https://hackaday.com/2021/02/26/should-i-use-wheels-or-tracks/) that tracks are more mechanically complex and require more maintenance, so I probably don't want tracks. I'm leaning towards six airless tyres.
[Answer]
You could look into something like an [overland train](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overland_train). This suits your needs fairly well off the shelf: large wheels with independent drive make it great at offroading, and while slow, it has a tremendous carrying capacity. Long, offroad trips at a steady pace are what it's for.
It's also ideally suited to the caravan part of your lifestyle. Like a regular train it's fully modular; you can swap engine and cargo cars around as much as you want to form multiple caravans or split a smaller group off to take advantage of some resource. It's easy to add new cars if the caravan grows and, if worse comes to worst, it's also easy to cut one out and leave it behind if it can't be repaired.
The electrical transmission also makes it uniquely agnostic to your power supply. That is, as long as you can provide the right voltage, it'll drive. Solar panels for long, slow journeys? Biofuel reserves that you slowly top up at each location before moving on to the next? A backup diesel generator for those sticky spots? All can coexist harmoniously.
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You would want to watch [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzC1VCYLPl8) (and then go down the rabbit hole of links to similar videos). In short, **you want a rugged truck**, which is ready-made to plod along while carrying many tonnes of people and cargo and uses as many standardised parts as possible, so that they are cheap and common enough for every village garage to have them in stock. This is especially important for nomads, who would be only loosely attached to the monetary economy and therefore need to use their scarce money sparingly. This includes tyres; you use standard-sized truck ones, and when they can't cope with the condition of the road, *you don't travel*. (Or you get stuck, and then you don't travel either.) Plan ahead accordingly ;)
For fuel, diesel and petrol are your best choices by far. Diesel has an advantage in that your engine would need to be able to withstand a lot of abuse, deferred maintenance, dust, substandard fuels etc. and it's somewhat easier to make a tolerant diesel engine than a petrol one. Also biodiesel is much easier to produce, and some diesel engines can be run on straight plant oils. Both diesel and petrol are widely traded and therefore are cheap and accessible, and they have high energy density thus taking less space on board, which is an important consideration for a vehicle that also acts as a home and needs to carry all your other posessions at all times. Gasified biomass *could* work, but it provides less power, is bulkier, and gasifiers require much more maintenance; don't be surprised if your fellow travellers poke fun at you for being unable to afford a *proper* fuel.
You would have nowhere near enough money for an electric vehicle, and in any case a sufficiently sized battery storage would absolutely *kill* your cargo capacity. Solar power too is a very bad idea. Your truck just will not have enough area to generate sufficient amount of it even under ideal conditions, and conditions will generally be far from ideal: few roads happen to follow the Sun for best exposure, and the panels will promptly get covered in dust as soon as you start traveling. Yes, you would want to carry *some* solar panels for those few uses where electricity is genuinely superior to the alternatives; it's just that powering a vehicle isn't one of them.
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You already brought up Mongolia, why don't you just do a web search for trucks in Mongolia? Some years ago, they usually used [ZiL-130](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIL-130) and sometimes [GAZ-66](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZ-66), but nowadays Korean and maybe Chinese 7.5 ton trucks are more popular. Or [UAZ-452](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAZ-452) or [Hyundai Porter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Porter) if there is not so much luggage.
Considerations are:
* the truck should be able to carry the whole household plus the house itself (i.e. a yurt). Since nomadic herders do not have *that* much furniture, a ZiL 130 or a 7.5 ton truck is definitely big enough for one family.
* the truck does not need to carry lifestock because lifestock can move on their own.
* the truck should be able to do some light offroad driving and especially(!) wading. I think Russian vehicles may be better at this than others, but Korean ones can be worked with as well.
* the truck should either need very few repairs, or be easy to repair and it should be easy to find spare parts. The "easy to. repair" bit (not the "does not need repairs often bit!) used to be a big advantage a Russian trucks, but not sure how it is nowadays.
* related: the truck should not need much maintenance.
* the truck should be cheap! This also used to be an advantage for Russian trucks, but nowadays used Korean trucks are cheaper I think.
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There is the zeroth issue of "why would people move around". Hunters and Mongols (and others) primarily moved after or with animals, which primarily moved to other grazing areas. But trucks don't need other grazing areas, so why would nomadic lifestyle continue? Can it continue with high population density? There are other problems, but let's ignore those as I have no answer to them.
So, ignoring that issue, there are 2 aspects of nomadic lifestyle: moving around and staying somewhere. Nomads went somewhere, built their huts, stayed for some time and then moved on. You need to look at both parts to some degree.
I believe a plug-in hybrid truck would be the best all-round solution for several reasons:
1. Trucks are surely going to be well-developed in most worlds, as it lets you move a lot of goods around over land. Especially with nomadic lifestyle a bunch of trucks is more likely than a point-to-point train. This means many people know how to repair stuff, many spare parts and so on.
2. Trucks, obviously transformed into mobile house end up with much larger "house" part than fairly cramped campers/vans. I believe these people wouldn't bother putting several containers together making one large house every single time.
3. Each family has their own truck. Or few of them. When children are old enough to make their own families, getting their own truck is the way to go. This keeps in line with typical nomadic lifestyle, only with trucks replacing animals. Cadence's land train would mean the whole group works for the main train, which is most likely going to change group dynamics.
4. You use purely electric propulsion. It is more robust / requires less maintenance, making it more suitable for nomads. Additionally, by having several motors as typical for electric propulsion, you avoid single point of failure - if one engine dies, you keep moving. If your diesel generator dies, others in the caravan can let you recharge from their vehicles (if you don't have another generator anyway). Having main diesel engine is a single point of failure, you can't easily replace it.
5. You have some battery storage for when you stop, while diesel generator lets you move a reasonable distance (or serve as a backup when stopped if the sun is not shining). Obviously, you would unpack and use solar for when you stop - it just wouldn't help you much when moving. Area of truck's roof is small, but unpacking and having several times larger area for panels is going to be enough for a family.
While I kept mentioning diesel generator, it could be replaced by something running on vegetable oils, biomass or whatever else you fancy.
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The vehicles would have to be well constructed (duh) and have strong effecient motors, so combustion is out of the way(steam maybe ? you could gather wood, bushes, animal fat to use as fuel), so is gas (not safe), the best would be hidrogen + solar, that would give your nomads a way to refill theyr tanks with either water (assuming its still abundant in your world) or just charge the batteries over a few days (they would serve to power utilities inside the vehicle, be it a hot shower or a tv), it would be more engenierred then a regular RV for the possibility of multiple beds/divisions(when stopped it would change the layout to give you more confort or space to store stuff), it would almost be a fortress with wheels, all of that while keeping it close to the ground (helps with uneven terrain, and not tumbling down on small ramps).
It should also have good insulation and something close to a AC.Wheels ? AirLess wheels can handle a good ammount of punishment before needing replacement, although they are expensive as hell, getting some regular tires and filling them with concrete and ducktape them throughly (you wont slide because you probably are never going over 50M/H and after some time they will have decent texture so you still have friction), for stability when parked, a MANUAL brake will be easly replaced and if its inside, nobody will mess with it.I would assume the material the RV is made out of would be something that doesnt rust, a Jumping mode for "Sticky" situation, like mud etc. And lets not forget but its still important, the BEST SUSPENSIONS on the market to be able to haul as much as you want without them ever failing.
The problem is some company producing them.Because ideally it would be a normal house with wheels all arround, and a decent solar power array to get your utilities running.
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I'm designing a lower gravity planet that's got enough mass to hold onto an atmosphere but around 75% of Earth's gravity. I read that lower-gravity planets will have more pronounced geological features - so, higher mountains, for example. Does this also mean the crust would be more uneven, with higher and lower elevations and deeper oceans?
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Let's use our Solar System as sample to verify if planets with lower gravity have higher mountains, looking at the [highest mountains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_mountains_in_the_Solar_System) in it.
| Name | Height | Location (surface gravity $m/s^2$) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Olympus Mons | 72,000 ft (22,000 m) | Mars (3.69) |
| Equatorial Ridge | 65,617 ft (20,000 m) | Iapetus (0.22) |
| Boösaule Mons | 59,711 ft (18,200 m) | Io (1.79) |
| Ascraeus Mons | 49,000 ft (15,000 m) | Mars (3.69) |
| Ionian Mons | 41,667 ft (12,700 m) | Io (1.79) |
| Elysium Mons | 41,338 ft (12,600 m) | Mars (3.69) |
| Arsia Mons | 38,386 ft (11,700 m) | Mars (3.69) |
| Limb Mountain | 36,089 ft (11,000 m) | Oberon (0.35) |
| Skadi Mons | 35,105 ft (10,700 m) | Venus (8.87) |
| Euboea Montes | 34,449 ft (10,500 m) | Io (1.79) |
| Mauna Kea | 33,464 ft (10,200 m) | Earth (9.81) |
| Haleakala | 29,856 ft (9,100 m) | Earth (9.81) |
| Mount Everest | 29,029 ft (8,848 m) | Earth (9.81) |
As you can see Earth is out of the top-10, so it looks like indeed gravity affect the elevation of the relieves on a celestial body: the lower the first, the higher can the second get, as expected from the mountains having to "fight" against the gravity to stay in place and not crumble.
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Looking into your question, I found this at the Astronomy Stack Exchange: [Does a planet's mass or gravity affect the height of it's mountains?](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/917/).
There's some mathematical and scientific things in there, if that's what you're searching for. But it seems the general answer is yes. :) Hope that link helps!
(Edit: I think this would be better as a comment, but I don't have the rep yet, sorry)
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Looking at Mars, which has lower gravity than Earth, the crust does seem to be more uneven. It's home to both [Valles Marineris](https://mars.nasa.gov/gallery/atlas/valles-marineris.html#:%7E:text=Valles%20Marineris%2C%20or%20Mariner%20Valley,km%20(1%20mi)%20deep.), the deepest canyon in the solar system, and [Olympus Mons](https://lowell.edu/olympus-mons-the-biggest-hotspot-in-the-solar-system/), the highest mountain. [Io's mountains](https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/05/ios-10-mile-high-mountains-result-from-a-shrinking-crust/) are higher than Earth's as well. In general, lower gravity allows for the crust to be more uneven and have more extreme features. So, short answer, yes. Higher elevations will be higher, and lower elevations will be lower.
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It can do. There are a couple of other variables you may want to consider as well as gravity: temperature and level of volcanic activity.
Anything large enough to be classed as a dwarf planet by definition has enough gravity to bend the matter it is made of approximately into a sphere. How imperfect that is depends on whether the planet is actively working against gravity: Volcanic activity. This comes in two main forms: volcanoes, which give you peaks in their own right (including the mighty Olypmpus Mons on Mars or e.g. Iceland or Gran Canaria on Earth), and tectonic activity, which whilst very slow, is sufficiently powerful to overcome gravity and creates mountain ranges. Apart from volcanic activity, the other way, the other possibility for creating "peaks" is craters formed by bombardment from space, but since you world has oceans I'm assuming it has a fairly dense atmosphere protecting it so only very large asteroids would get through.
The second thing to bear in mind is the temperature. A planet's ability to hold on to water at all is determined by a combination of how strong the gravity is and how warm it is. Given that you want oceans at lower gravity than Earth, it will have to be a cold planet. Notice that Io and Mars do not have oceans as they don't have enough gravity to keep hold of water, so although created by volcanic activity, it leaks away into space. Although you'll here reports of there being water ice on Mars, it is in fact [far drier than the driest desert on Earth](https://www.universetoday.com/139666/mars-is-1000x-drier-than-the-driest-places-on-earth/), and although Io has the strongest surface gravity of any moon, it also has [the least amount of water of any known astronomical object in the Solar System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_(moon)).
For the relationship between gravity, temperature and the ability to hold on to water (or indeed an atmosphere) see this [wikipedia diagram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#/media/File:Solar_system_escape_velocity_vs_surface_temperature.svg). To hold on to water your planet needs to have a temperature / gravity somewhere near the top of the blue band (like earth), or in the green band, to the left of Earth (not too far though or your oceans will freeze). This will also ensure you have enough gravity to hold on to oxygen etc. which I assume your inhabitants will breath :-)
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The Valyn are a Roman analogue who have been exiled to live in a hostile mushroom forest with daily mist in the vein of a Cloud forest. The air is absolutely brimming with mold, spores, and aeroplankton. The amounts of air particulates are a concern over a long time period. A month of breathing it is enough for lung inflammation with a sickly cough while a year is usually enough to kill a person ala "Mushroom Worker's disease" in real life. A note: This society has access to 10% hydrogen peroxide via a dog sized animal with a Bombardier Beetle's defense mechanism, so you can add that to your toolbox. ([Link to medical journal on Mushroom Worker's Disease](https://radiopaedia.org/articles/mushroom-workers-lung#:%7E:text=Mushroom%20worker%27s%20disease%20is%20a,from%20mushroom%20composting%20and%20spawning.))
**How do they purify their air enough to live while using a technology base from 100AD?**
I want to list some avenues of research I've explored, but am not fully satisfied with.
1. Some settlements are built mostly inside of old salt mines, with some buildings above ground attached via ducts. Air that is pumped through salt mines (Via beasts of burden) naturally becomes purified of particulates. ([Link to an article on Wieliczka Salt Mine](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10453-019-09561-7)) The issue with this solution is that there are only a few salt mines spread around. It also means that settlements cannot continue to mine salt. Mining salt pollutes the air with too much salt particles and makes the air quality dangerous.
2. Houses are air tight with an airlock style mudroom. Every time someone wants to enter they go through a "Purity" ritual which involves hot coals, hydrogen peroxide, and supplication to the gods. After 5 or 10 minutes of the proper prayers the room is sterilized and they can enter the house. Periodic purification is also done inside of houses. This is like "shocking" a pool. It will purify the air, but not keep it pure.([Link to article mentioning several studies on the efficacy of Hydrogen Peroxide Sterilization via steam.](https://blog.tuttnauer.com/blog/hydrogen-peroxide-vapor-sterilization-respirator-face-masks-reuse))
3. Houses are air tight and use aerial filter feeders to purify the air. The sheer amount of detritus suspended in the air allows the existence of terrestrial sponges. Sponges are nearly exactly the same as their sea based cousins. They pump air through themselves and catch anything suspended. A 1kg sponge can filter 40 cubic meters of air per day. These sponges are placed in each room like house plants. This improves air quality, but doesn't really prevent spores from entering the house. It is also not compatible with salt mine air which would dry out the sponges. I initially thought to use these sponges as a forced air system, however the speed of airflow is a measly 0.5 ft/s or 0.15m/s. ([Link to relevant wikipedia article on Sea Sponge feeding/filtering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge#Respiration,_feeding_and_excretion))
4. The Valyn use a primitive gas mask with one-way valves like a bellows. The gas mask is attached via a leather tube to a canister they wear on their back. The canister is a tube shape with perforations along its length. Inside the canister is a filter feeding sponge. When the wearer breaths air is drawn through the sponge and the air is purified. The rate of airflow is much greater than a sponge is normally used to. Due to this the sponge's filtering mechanism gets "Filled up" over several hours and becomes ineffective after that time. It then needs a rest to digest the particulates. Long trips outside require two canisters. Periodically the sponge must be culled from overgrowing the canister, as well as it needs to be "cored/hollowed out" so it does not fill up the inside of the canister too much and make airflow difficult. (Given the technology level I believe a filter feeder would be more effective at purifying air than anything the 100AD romans might think up. They generally used bandanas tied around the face in their salt mines which really wasn't too effective.)
Edit to address questions.
1. Cutting down the forest is not a solution. Light levels across the world are 18% of Earth levels due to a cataclysm long ago. The area they were banished from has an artificial light source which cannot be replicated. The artificial light prevents fungal growth because of mushroom sensitivity to UV. The mushroom forest is fed by photosynthetic aeroplankton high in the atmosphere (part of the light level issue) which periodically die off from solar phenomenon every 180 days. This makes the mushroom forests insanely productive and filled with edible flora and fauna if you can survive. The banishment was meant to be a death sentence because no one else has survived the forests.
2. Town population is dictated by religious law. New colonies start at 10,000 people. Maximum size of a city is 100,000. After that religious law dictates excess population from every town meets at the capital to found new colonies. There are no smaller towns. The people here are more like sedentary hunter gatherers because of the nature of the forest which provides a glut of edible flora and fauna. Large cities are neccesary for defense against hostile fauna which cannot be made extinct, additionally there are fantastical dangers which necessitate magical wards which are expensive and best implemented over a city sized area. "Safe" areas are not even possible due to astral phenomenon which basically teleports additional creatures from another planet to this one every 180 days. Every 180days when the plankton dies off and sinks to the surface there is new growth. The whole city works together to harvest and preserve the bounty which only takes them 6 weeks with an extra 30% food than needed (9months food harvested every 6 months) In essence, each person is a hunter/gatherer 23% of the time, and spend the rest in their chosen profession.
Lets try to focus on the air quality issues though.
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## Particle Traps and Face Masks
As others have pointed out, face masks are likely an effective solution outdoors - high quality cloth can filter on the order of 100s of nano-meters, while mushroom spores are on the order of 10s of micro-meters. So face masks work.
But what about when you sleep or eat or relax indoors? Presumably you don't want to wear a mask 24/7.
## Tunnels and Ladders
Mushroom spores are particles, not gases. (obviously)
In the absence of strong wind, particles will settle to the ground.
All building entrances will have a deep, "V" shaped tunnel protecting them.
To enter a building, you open the first door, climb down a 20 foot ladder, walk a few feet, and then climb up a second 20 foot ladder. Only now do you actually enter the house through a second door.
Without a strong wind to move them, spores will fall into the pit, and be trapped there - the rest of the building will be spore free. You'll have to clean the pit regularly, obviously while while wearing a mask. The home should be otherwise as air tight as achievable.
**Particulate traps are especially nice because they are passive - no machines or continuous effort required.**
Edit, based on comments:
I'd also add a metal grate above the floor of the pit, and some kind of water - either a puddle or stream - to wet the spores, and hold them in place. You could add some kind of mud-room or cleaning area to the top of the second ladder to remove spores from your cloths and body.
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# It doesn't look good
By strange coincidence, I've been idly musing about a very similar problem for a few years (since I read [*Wool*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(series)#Wool) by Hugh Howey). So, I already had some ideas to investigate.
Sadly, none of them were available to Greco-Roman civilization, which is basically what [100 AD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_ancient_Greece) means.
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## [Wet scrubber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_scrubber)
My first thought was to use water sprays. I think this could actually work, although I don't know whether it would be efficient enough.
For any kind of automatic system, you'll need mechanical energy.
The ancient Greeks had a grasp of [hydraulics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulics#Ancient_and_medieval_eras), so the Valyn would have both [Archimedes' screw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_screw), and the [piston pump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piston_pump). The article on hydraulics says the Greeks got pretty sophisticated. At a smaller scale, they had the [aeolipile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile), which is a little steam engine, but it's not clear they considered it mechanically useful; it may have been treated as a novelty, but this could be useful in single-family homes.
The other thing you'll definitely need is spray nozzles, and this is the deal-breaker: they weren't invented until the 1800s. However, a spray nozzle doesn't seem to depend on other advanced tech like electricity, chemistry, atomics, or post-Newton math or physics, so, per Joe Bloggs, it may be reasonable to just assert that the Valyn *did* have them.
I really don't know if you could filter particulate matter out of the air, or keep it out of a clean room, using sheets of falling water. And it seems like that would require a lot more water.
Wet scrubbing may also go by a couple other names, if you approach it from a chemical engineering perspective: "separations process," which is a subtopic within "mass transfer" (according to [a reddit thread you may find interesting](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/28rd6j/can_an_airbubblingthroughwater_mechanism_be_used/cieucs9)). You may find something useful down that road, but I suspect 100 AD will kill it.
## Filters
Modern air filters come in a bunch of varieties, but none of them were available to the ancients. HEPA-style filters weren't invented until the 1950s. Lots of filters are made of paper, but while paper was invented around 100 AD in China, it was kept secret for centuries.
Cotton was known to the Greeks, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that you can breath through it. In fact, the [NIH says](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7185834/) that cotton is actually pretty good:
>
> a 600 TPI cotton sheet can provide average filtration efficiencies of 79 ± 23% (in the 10 nm to 300 nm range) and 98.4 ± 0.2% (in the 300 nm to 6 μm range).
>
>
>
[NIH also says](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20835365/) that mushroom spores are between 34×28µm and 3.5×0.5µm. 1µm = 1000nm, so I think cotton filters will make a big difference, although how much will depend on how big your mushroom spores are, and how dense their cotton is.
I have no idea if 600 TPI is realistic for 100 AD textile manufacturing. Per Nosajimiki, 600 seems out of reach:
>
> Ancient textiles only ranged form ~25-75 TPI ... The highest TPI on record for the ancient world was about 250 TPI, but this is a significant outlier
>
>
>
The Greeks also had silk, although it was very much a luxury item. While I don't doubt the Valyn would think it worth the price, the question is more about scarcity. Silkworms weren't smuggled out of China until a few centuries after your tech date. And, you'll again run into the question of threadcount.
## Alternative solutions
It seems like your best bet is the hydrogen peroxide and the salt mines.
If the air quality is really so bad, I think the Valyn won't construct their buildings as freestanding, single-family homes. We don't do that in space, or underwater. When the surrounding environment is unbreatheable, we link our habitats (like a [hamster village](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4c/bd/3b/4cbd3be3bf2b63770f644700e0db8b1d.jpg)).
So, what I imagine is not the kind of residential area that's common in big, open places like the United States, but a veritable warren of interconnected buildings that share a ventilation system.
In that case, it might be practical for the entire system to have its intake in a salt mine, and also to use peroxide somewhere upstream of homes and businesses. If they have the technology to construct airtight homes, it stands to reason they can also build airtight ductwork.
It wouldn't all have to connect to a mine, either. They might have a freestanding building that's *just* a giant lung: filled with sponges, sucking air from the atmosphere into the ventilation system. They'd space these out to ensure adequate airflow throughout their sealed complex.
And a complex is definitely what it would be. Like a moonbase in the forest.
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ETA: now that I see your population numbers, I'm skeptical this could work.
The googles says that the average human breathes 2,000 gallons of air per day. Scale that up to a population of 100,000, and you've got 200,000,000 gallons.
It's hard to imagine ancient technology handling that kind of airflow. Admittedly, I don't normally think about that kind of thing, so I could be way off-base, but the analogy that seems clear-cut is: Greeks building *just the ventilation system* for a base on the Moon that supports 100,000 people. It doesn't seem anywhere near plausible.
You might want to try a spin-off question that focuses just on airflow requirements and ventilation design for a population of that size, tagged with hard-science (just to get a baseline).
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## They Would Die
Sounds brutal, but it's true. Rome faced many similar problems in settlements where lead, asbestos, or salt mining rendered the area toxic and the archaeological evidence shows that they never came up with a way of protecting themselves from the hostile environment. Written evidence shows that the Romans knew about the dangers of these mines, yet over the course of hundreds of years, they never invented a way to make these mines safe.
Instead they simply made these mines the work of penal slaves: criminals and POWs who were intentionally sent to work these mines knowing that they would live very short lives. So, if your Roman Era people had somewhere safe to live, and this forest is just one place on thier world with some resource worth exploiting, then thier solution will be to send thier undesirables there to gather the resource of interest and send it back to the safe places. If this environment is your whole world, they will all be dead LONG before they solve the problem.
In 100AD, people simply did not understand enough about air-borne hazards to effectively combat them.
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Filtration hypocausts and big building complexes..
There are three issues, airflow, filtration, and leaky construction techniques.
Airflow is pretty obvious: you need to bring air in from outside or you will suffocate. Leaky construction techniques is also fairly obvious. Large constructs like a series if connected homes or an apartment complex *will not* be airtight.
So we need to make sure all air flowing into the building goes through a filtration system, a you need to set up positive pressure within the large building so all leaky parts leak air out, not in.
Mine some salt. You can abandon one mine for this purpose. Use the salt to line a hypocaust. Usually these are underfloor heating systems that use hot, dry air in a subfloor cavity to keep the floor warm. You will use it for that purpose, but also allow the hot air to escape into a central atrium in the house. You can do this with clever placement of heat sources or using your animal-driven air pumps. Air flowing through the hypocaust will be naturally purified by the heat and dryness. Setting up large sponge colonies at the air intakes will also further improve air quality. Small peroxide reservoirs would further improve the air, though you’d want to balance that very carefully to avoid a whole new set of problems. Airflow will then be from inside the house (clean) to outside.
Why do this instead of just having passive sponges everywhere?
Well: it lets you vastly increase the size of building that you can provide conditioned air to. That in turn means that big, complicated warrens of interconnected ‘pure’ buildings are perfectly possibly as long as you have suitable ventilation to pull cool air into the hypocaust. Good airflow will also increase the efficacy of any sponge filters (either by the air intakes or passively inside the housing complexes).
These homes will be hot, dry, and cramped, but you won’t die of pneumonia.
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Here is my final solution using several answers in conjunction with each other, as well as some additional research inspired by the answers. I don't normally answer my own question, but in this case it seems to be justified because each answer contributed just a piece towards the final whole. I've upvoted all of the answers that I used to create this as recompense for not choosing an answer from among them.
**Housing:** Homes are ventilated via a combination of stack effect and Venturi effect. Houses are large communal complexes 25m in diamater, housing 200 people on 3 stories (Inspired by Chinese Tulou). Every house has a central courtyard which is fully enclosed except for a windcatcher/windtower. The house itself is mostly sealed without windows facing the outside world. Wind is near constant here, so the windtower's opening is opposite the flow to create suction that ventilates the house. Additionally, a hanging magical lightbulb creates a stack effect for near constant suction even when the wind fails. (It additionally grows some rare plants/vegetables in the courtyard.) A stone grate in the floor of the courtyard connects to the basement where the air is sucked up from.
The basement is unremarkable, except at the periphery are several vertical shafts. The shafts lead to the surface and suck in unpurified air. At the bottom of the shaft is a particulate trap with a grate covering a pit. Many of the particulates fall into this grate where they feed a local scavenger (A giant isopod/roly-poly.) Air flows into the basement proper but it is not entirely clean. It eventually is sucked towards the floor grates leading to the courtyard. It is here that it encounters a huge sponge. A variety that is shaped like a barrel. It draws air through the outside, filters it, and expels it into the center. Suction from the courtyard speeds this process. The sponge itself is self regulating. It will continue to grow until its maintenance calories matches its intake. A wooden lattice supports the sponge beyond its normal size. These supported sponges grow up to 3m tall (floor to ceiling) and 30cm in wall depth with a diameter of 3m.
There is a large mudroom that is the only entrance to the clan structure. It is where the people store their outside gear, heavy boots, tools, and breathing apparatus. As someone strips their gear, the still air allows particulates to settle somewhat where another scavenger eats it. Incidentally it acts as a primitive airlock because of two armored doors. Some of the air entering will be contaminated, but it is of no worry because of the great number of air changes per hour that keeps the air fresh.
**Personal Ventilation:**
When leaving home, every person carries with them a cylinder made of thin hammered bronze. This cylinder is perforated at the sides and is filled with a living sponge colony. The cylinder is attached to a stylized half-face mask made of bronze and leather with a leather tube. The person breathes, sucking air through the sponge, and into their mask. The cylinder is 50cm long and is worn on the back. The Valyn have developed a leather harness which supports this cylinder. It has two shoulder straps/suspenders, and a large wide belt around the stomach. Additional leather pouches are attached to the belt for everyday use. The masks themselves are stylized based on clan, personal style, and wealth. Thicker armored versions are made for use in war which attach firmly to helmets.
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I'm planning a Dungeons and Dragons 5E campaign for my friends where they're going to take on the role of divers who use magic to explore the ocean's depths in search of sunken treasure and they need a ship to take them from one dive site to another. While I could easily use a generic 'sailing ship', I thought this might be a fun educational opportunity for both me and my players.
You see, the campaign is going to take place in a fantasy version of renaissance Earth - all the land masses are the same, with the difference being the preponderance of magical monsters and phenomena (both on land and sea).
Sailing in this world is much more dangerous due to the probability that some deep sea beastie is going to look up and see something big and decide to see if it's edible. As such, ships should be f a s t.
To be guaranteed to outrun these monsters, they should be able to maintain a speed of 12 knots in most weather conditions. I know modern trimarans are capable of those sorts of speeds, but they also benefit from modern engineering and material technologies. And this ship needs to be big enough for ocean crossing with a crew of about 15-20 people (call it a displacement of about 50 tons, about what a caravel would be capable of). It should be able to remain on station in the middle of the ocean for days at a time. Can a wooden hulled triamaran achieve the desired performance? Or would there be a better alternative?
The use of minor magic is allowed, for instance:
1. You can have a mage casting shape water at the bow in order to minimize the bow wave.
2. You can have people using Prestidigitation to clean the hull and keep it smooth.
3. Magical construction techniques can join wood planks and beams together into a single whole.
4. An immovable rod as an anchor.
Anachronistic technologies are also allowed as long as they can be manufactured with the approximate technologies available (ie: solid wing-sails, crank driven propellers instead of oars).
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**You have a bigger monster.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6UqOz.jpg)
Inspired by this answer: [What attributes and how big would a sea creature(s) need to be to tow a ship?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/150421/what-attributes-and-how-big-would-a-sea-creatures-need-to-be-to-tow-a-ship/150451#150451)
Your players contract with a large sea monster to carry their boat. This NPC monster is ferocious enough that lesser monsters will not want to risk an encounter but smart enough to understand what your players can buy for it: land meat and lots of it. A monster like this might also know where treasure is, but because of its physical limitations be unable to get it. If I were the monster I would bring your players to a small score first to see if they kept their side of the bargain.
The monster can talk, and would communicate with the players thru the hull of the boat. Or in the water, where it is phenomenally loud. They might not initially be aware that it can also hear them very well, on and off the boat.
This set up will sidestep the boring business of trying to actually get where they are going. The monster takes them there. It will also allow fun role playing when players fight beside their chartered monster - something shows up that is ready to take on a monster of this size, and their monster needs help.
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Why not try a [sailing hydrofoil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_hydrofoil) catamaran or trimaran. Such a ship can easily sail at speeds of twice that of the wind or more, and can easily exceed the OP's required minimum speed of 12 knots, and can in fact easily reach speeds of 35-40 knots, and specially constructed hydrofoil sailing ships have reached speeds in excess of 65 knots.
While most of the vessels mentioned in the Wikipedia link above are small craft intended to be sailed by minimal crew, a 60' trimaran has been recorded with a speed of 50 knots. There is no reason why a larger 50-ton vessel could not be built with hydrofoils, and still achieve a speed on the order of 35-40 knots in 16-20 knot winds.
Additionally, a larger vessel may be large enough to mount a number of ballistae on its decks, conceivably one fore, aft, port and starboard. Each ballista could have a firing arc of 200° or more, allowing up to three to be brought to bear upon a single target. The ballistae could be loaded with a variety of ammunition, from simple huge spear-like bolts, to harpoons that can be tied to the ship, poison-infused bolts for dealing with very large monsters, or incendiary ammunition for combat between ships.
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## Clipper ships:
As a DM, I always felt the details of a campaign should be flexible enough to do what was fun and to not obsess too much on detail. As a Worldbuilder, we can get bogged down in realism. While I love fantastical, realism can be more satisfying. Although it's a little outside the period, I'd suggest [clipper ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper). They're still sailing ships, and have the right feel, but they were really fast and had a lot of cargo capacity. Despite the complex rigging, crew size was low to minimize costs. Early ones were smaller, but later ones got quite big and were sometimes even made of iron! They were sometimes armed, but not heavily, so the ship wouldn't be a battleship. In the non-starjammer campaigns I've had on ships, these are the qualities I've found best. Add an unnaturally strong wood, spells to drive sails in dead calm, and harpoon firing ballistae designed to fire downward and it makes me want to play it!
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Perhaps you could have the underside of your ship plated with bronze and hooked up to some kind of electrical charge, possibly via some variation of a [Baghdad battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery). In real life, sharks are believed to be repelled by electromagnetic fields, and it's not a huge stretch of imagination to think that fictional sea monsters might be similarly affected.
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# Other strategies are viable
Being fast enough to outrun sea monsters is only one possible way to avoid trouble. There are other viable strategies, and mariners will have hit upon many of them. They will be highly motivated to adopt the most successful techniques in order to protect themselves. Ships are an expensive investment. Losing one to dire krakens really sucks.
The point is, people in a business like your players' would not be content to rely on one strategy, because the consequences for a single screwup are catastrophic. They'd likely employ a mix of strategies.
# Magical detection
Normal divination magic is fairly short range. But these monsters are *huge* (because you only care about ones large enough to threaten shipping in the first place). So make custom divination magic that has a much longer range, but only detects creatures of Gargantuan size or larger.
Even if the magic only gives a vague sense of the detected creatures (say rough size & shape and speed) a trained arcanar operator can likely tell what kind of monster it is, much of the time, and then a course can be plotted to avoid going near them in the first place.
# Cleared shipping lanes
Major naval powers will find it in their best interests to spend considerable resources managing their monster problems. Coastal waters are relatively easy to keep clear. Colossally huge monsters are unlikely to like being in the shallower water to begin with, and they make nice siege engine targets.
But important shipping lanes are also worth keeping clear-ish. If there's a lot of traffic between, say, from Not-Britain to Not-Greenland, then it will be worth the while to arrange for fleets of ships to patrol the route, and keep it reasonably clear. That can be mercenaries or the Not-British Navy.
No, this won't make the seas *safe*. It will make them *safer*. Often, that's enough. And the monster hunters don't even have to kill all the sea monsters; all they have to do is convince them to stay out of the shipping lanes.
# Monster Repellent
Seems pretty self-explanatory. Each type of monster would likely require its own specialized repellent. Spells that repel 'sea monsters' generically might exist, but are probably relatively high level (and thus far less economical), but a stock of repellent against the types of monsters common on your projected course is likely to be much cheaper.
# Caravans
This provides protection for the same reason prey animals often travel in herds. But more than that, military escorts and/or ships using powerful magic are expensive. And it's not that much more money to protect a large caravan, as it is to protect a single ship.
# Surveys
There's a lot of information generated by all the sea traffic. If you crunch the data, you can get a spotty but still useful picture of what's where. Crunching that data without computers will be a *nightmare*, but even stale and incomplete information is better than none.
This info can be compiled in many ways. Perhaps the captain of every voyage that's not a military secret makes reports to a central compiling authority every time they dock, and captains about to embark on a voyage can get a summary of what's been reported recently
Every time a ship never makes it to port, that's another piece of useful information. Perhaps every ship is legally required to report an itinerary, so when one disappears it will be known roughly where it was.
Finally, really wealthy groups or nations can hire adventurers with powerful magical gear or enchanted vessels to do systematic organized surveys.
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**A small fishing boat**
You want it to look like nothing special. Pirates aren't going to bother raiding you for a load of sardines.
It's what you do with the boat that makes it special. Firstly use an Ironwood spell to make the boat hard and strong as iron. Fit a decanter of endless water at the rear in a hidden compartment with a rear port. Say the magic word and you have a jet boat.
A Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion can be enchanted on the cabin so you're not living on a stuffy boat. A liberal helping of animate object spells can make the boat virtually sail itself. Finally the immovable rod fused to the keel means the boat can be stopped dead in it's tracks. No monster can drag it under.
With a iron boat that can't be moved and maybe a wizard with lightning bolt, any sea monster will quickly move on to easier targets while your players live in luxury on the high seas.
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**Don't Use A *Ship*, Use A Monster**
In Book 3 and 4 of the Dragonwatch series, a boy names Seth uses a leviathan as transportation. He literally travels inside it. In *Kingdom Hearts*, something similar happens with Monstro, a whale so massive he can travel between worlds and in fact practically *is* a world unto himself, at least on the inside.
This would be a huge investment; living inside a sea monster, never mind steering, entering, and departing the thing when and where you want to go would be insanely difficult. It would also be *really* cool, and unlike a boat, sea monsters blend in. They can defend themselves. A bronze dragon especially, and they are coastal dwellers.
Perhaps an oddball bronze offers to serve as a magic "submersible?" Sort of a take on Willk's idea, and considering a Bronze's habit of looting shipwrecks and asking for "nominal payment" when taking on warlords on behalf of someone, a Bronze contracting itself as a living "submonster" (see below) actually kind of makes sense.
Perhaps the Bronze already has "tenants" in its stomach, even: an evil siren or two it ate, or a mad wizard (and/or reckless adventurer, or even adventurers) who thought his mouth was a tunnel and have been living inside since. It's your story, you tell it!
Perhaps instead of a real sea monster, your characters could use the animated carcass of a sea monster and build a sort of submersible inside it? The same could go for a friendly undead sea monster. The stomach area could be the cargo/living area, the skull could become the cockpit or captain's deck, and the eye sockets would hold the viewing ports.
This would allow:
1. A cool method of transportation
2. The players can choose just what they travel in
3. So many story ops
If a sea monster looks at the submonster and goes, "Oh look, my natural prey," it's going to be quite a tale. Never mind the inevitable conflict arising whenever they dock, surface, or try to sell treasure outside of a repurposed monster. Just an idea, I hope it helps!
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**This question already has answers here**:
[What is the most efficient and safest way to communicate with an alien should first contact occur?](/questions/62583/what-is-the-most-efficient-and-safest-way-to-communicate-with-an-alien-should-fi)
(3 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
Let's say that in the near future we come across an alien civilization not much technologically evolved from ours and we decided to send some people to communicate with them. How could we possibly understand each other if their concept of communication or methods evolved differently? Maybe their speech developed in a way we couldn't understand.
Movies like *The Arrival* try to depict that, but they go in far different views from this.
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**Communication is universal so long as you are using universal concepts**
Communication, when you boil it down, is merely the exchange of information. And all species exchange information in some fashion, and the question just is how. So the first step to communicating with aliens is to figure out how they exchange information. It may not be verbally, it may be visually, but that's step one. Step two is to exchange universal concepts. Now, there is a chance that they won't have some of the same concepts that we have, but there will be concepts that they will have to have, i.e. the basics of math like numbers, or the basics of physics like movement. Very basic grammar structure will exist too, such as the concept of word classifications if for now other reason than you need them to distinguish words. Once you've started on the most basic level, you slowly move up, exchanging words with the alien species and gradually build up to the more complex concepts.
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Pretty much the same way that explorers talked to people from faraway lands: Use a bunch of easily identifiable objects as a base, with both species telling the other their word for that thing, then use that as a base for further communication.
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Many point to various sci-fi stories of aliens being so alien that we would be completely unable to communicate with them. I would argue that those are highly pessimistic views. We have many senses and some of the senses are so good, that they evolved independently multiple times. The aliens would also inhabit same physical world as we and we are currently really good at measuring many quantities of objects. So they would be as well. It is also heavily advantageous to have multiple senses, as they fulfill different purposes and provide different information, so we can assume that aliens will too have multiple senses. I would like to give this conclusion : There is high probability, that if we were to find aliens, that there would be lots of overlap between our senses. There might be differences in sensitivity or perceived "frequencies", but those would not prevent effective communication.
The second question is that of establishing a baseline communication. This is heavily dependent on circumstances of the first contact. It would be different to learn to communicate if we go in guns blazing. If instead we go in peacefully and be patient, we will find patterns in their behavior or communications that would give us clues in what they perceive. And we can assume they would do the same. We might start with simple gestures and moving objects around to communicate, and only much later learn how to communicate directly. And if they too wish to communicate, we and they will assume that if there is something weird being communicated, we can assume that it is merely a misunderstanding, not a threat or a a declaration of war.
Actually, the most probable form of first contact would be a radio communication. It is really good middle-man that, if they are same level of technology as us, would allow us to quickly establish communication without having to decode the soft biological parts. There have been many different attempts at creating signals and messages that would allow aliens to establish basic communication with us. They start really simple and use basic mathematics to build a more complicated grammar and structures based on logic and immutable natural laws.
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I think we need to find a common ground for communication. That means we have to watch a "thing" from the same perspective. e.g Food to us, human beings, might be very different from theirs, and the way we consume food as we know it, might be also different for them. One would eat the food through his mouth, but species that consume energy in some other forms (light, heat, etc), might just use some other processes/mechanisms. Image communicate this process between two species that do it in a very different way. It is hard to find a way to communicate the same idea, without finding the common "ground" which, in this case, is "food".
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Let's play devil's advocate.
For many of the arguments in other answers, one can substitute "aliens" for "animals". We live all in the same planet, and yet with most animals (and plants) we cannot communicate. And aliens come from another planet (or gas cloud). So expecting communication is a bit hasty.
On the other hand, we *can* communicate with some animals (gorillas, chimpanzees, dogs, ...), and explorers did *some* communication. That points to some options.
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Scientists have tried contacting extraterrestrials with a number of bespoke linguistic systems. But we might be better off using our own languages.
This custom symbolic system begins by introducing ET to numerals, and then progresses to more complex topics like human biology and the planets in our solar system. An earlier version of the language was first sent into space in 1999 and again in 2003 as part of the Cosmic Call messages—a crowd-sourced interstellar messaging project that marked the first serious attempt at interstellar communication since Carl Sagan and Frank Drake sent the Arecibo message into space 25 years earlier.
All of these formal messaging attempts have taken basically the same approach: Teach numerals and basic arithmetic first. But as some recent insights in neurolinguistics suggest, it might not be the best way to greet our alien neighbors.
The world’s first interstellar communication system, the lingua cosmica, or Lincos, set the tone for all subsequent attempts by placing basic math at its core. Designed by the Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal in 1960, Lincos inspired several other mathematicians and scientists to try their hand at designing extraterrestrial languages. Each system is ultimately an attempt at solving a remarkably complex problem: How do you communicate with an intelligent entity you know nothing about?
The question gets at the nature of intelligence itself. Humans are the only species on Earth endowed with advanced mathematical ability and a fully fledged faculty of language, but are these hallmarks of intelligence or human idiosyncrasies? Is there an aspect of intelligence that is truly universal?
Scientists and mathematicians have grappled with these questions for centuries. As the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner once observed, mathematics is “unreasonably effective” at describing the natural universe, which has led a significant contingent of mathematicians to conclude that math is baked into the fabric of reality. From this perspective, mathematics isn’t something produced by the human mind so much as something the human mind discovers.
Most interstellar communication systems were designed around this conclusion. The goal isn’t to teach ETs about addition and subtraction—presumably they know as much if they can build a telescope to receive the message. Instead, these systems teach ETs about the way we code numbers as symbols. Then they can build up to more complex ideas.
It’s an elegant solution to a difficult problem, but Lincos still rests on the assumption that an ET is “human-like in its mental state,” as Freudenthal once conceded. But if ET does in fact think like a human, does that alien also have some kind of human-like language?
That was where Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, two of the progenitors of artificial intelligence, landed after they became interested in interstellar communication. Both Minsky and McCarthy had a deep interest in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which they realized had a lot in common with their own search for artificial intelligence. As Minsky argued on several occasions, ET is likely to have language because language is an ideal solution to the fundamental problems faced by any intelligent species—namely constraints on time, energy, and resources.
A deeper question is whether ET’s language will be similar to our own. In other words, whether it will also obey the universal grammar, the hierarchical, recursive structure that linguist Noam Chomsky has argued is the deep structure common to all human languages. Although languages tend to be analogized as a form of software running on the hardware of our brain, recent work in neurolinguistics suggests that language—and the universal grammar—is actually an expression of the hardware itself.
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Our brain is wired to use languages like those on Earth. Even completely unrelated languages like Arab and English are built upon the same elements: nouns, verbs, conjunctions, etc. These cultures were isolated during their evolution and the only point in common is the brain that gave rise to them, proving that language structure is heavily dependent on brain hardware.
We can safely assume extraterrestrials evolved completely different from us. I mean, their likely different physical-chemical environment pushed evolution towards a different brain-like structure. Thus, symbolic (spoken or written) communication with aliens may not be possible.
Though the movie *The Arrival* brilliantly explored the subject, the Heptapod language is just like Mandarin with cyclic ideograms, still very human. Communicating with aliens would likely be possible only at the abstract level of ideas, not involving languages and using some device akin to the Babel Fish in *Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*.
Of course, like depicted in Carl Sagan's *Contact*, aliens and us can develop a common symbolic base from universal truths like the transition frequency of hydrogen, the absolute zero temperature, the gravity constant, 1+1=2, PI number, etc. But how do we pass along high level concepts such as love?
Another dimension of the communication problem is the realm of the personal experience. On Earth, giving or taking small variations, everyone eats, walks, hears, sees, etc. In *Matrix*, one the charcters asks "How do the machines know the taste of chicken?". He meant that since the machines don't eat, how could they know the concept of chicken taste so they could correctly recreate it in the neurointeractive interface? We can see the Machines as an alien race that evolved with a completely different body rendering completely different experience. I mean: our life experience dictates how our language convey meaning: like Neil deGrasse Tyson in *Cosmos*: we still say the sun rises. There are many beautiful poems exploring the concept of "rising sun". But you can imagine that an alien race living in a planet tidally locked to its parent star will see that as utter nonsense.
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I am looking for a (preferably economic or environmental) force/system that would every few months or years force a random sample of the middle/lower class of an area to migrate away. This would be taking place in a mildly dystopian, realistic world set in either current time or within a hundred or so years.
The goal of this is to create groups of people who come together for a short-ish amount of time and are then forced apart. This is seen as quite devastating, but a part of life. Families may only stay together for a few years, spending your whole life with them would be hugely lucky.
My thoughts first go to some sort of seasonal resource gathering, but what stumps me is the necessity that only certain random people from the groups need to go to the new place. It would be no trouble for these people to be in some sort of indentured servitude to massive corporations that force the migration, but what would be the benefit of moving a random group of your workers to a new location when they would know that keeping families together would improve morale and thus productivity?
I appreciate any help in sketching a system where this would be possible
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**This is already done in the army**
In the U.S. Army, they move people from base to base all the time, not because they need more people here or there necessarily, but because they intend to prevent factions from developing within the service due to prolonged proximity. Randomly moving people around all the time homogenizes the military and protects its leaders.
Suppose your fictional nation requires every citizen to be a trained militiaman. Now it's got constant potential for factions to develop within its borders, and those factions would be made of trained/armed militiamen -- it's not desirable.
So, to solve this problem, the national government socializes housing and regularly issues semi-random commands, ordering citizens to move from their current location to a pre-selected destination. Upon receiving such a command, the citizen may apply for an extension to their current post, or they may apply for a specific destination. Also, at the discretion of the government, they can order people to move without bringing family along, but to avoid discord this is much more rare.
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A major food source for the people is an insect that has a similar lifecycle to a cidada where each swarm lies dormant for a number of years and emerge all at once to breed. The difference here is that that they do not have a predictable emergence time and they are only out for a few days. The people move to the region they think the next swarm is going to emerge. There are enough swarms around that they only have to wait a few weeks at most for the next one, but if you are not in the region where the swarm emerges, you can't harvest enough of them to make any money. The swarms are plentiful enough that they can feed people, but they are unpredictable enough that they have to move around and can't stay in one area for a long time.
The harvesters are run by people who have proven that they are good at predicting when the swarms emerge and the size of the swarm. They designate the assignments for each harvesting party and it can get pretty arbitrary as to who is assigned.
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### Differing abilities
Some people are better able to do whatever the task is. But it's hard to tell who until someone actually tries. So there is a constant stream of people being added to the location to attempt it. And a constant stream of people leaving who failed.
### Differing sensitivity
Some people have an allergic reaction (or similar) to something in the local environment. It doesn't need to be an immediate reaction. Perhaps it takes even a year to show. But once it shows, it's obvious that person can't stay. Again, assume that the only way to check for it is to actually try to live there.
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Instead of indentured servitude, go to the opposite extreme; everyone is an at-will freelance employee in a job-scarce industry controlled by a few corporations. Unemployment is high. If you have a job, you hang on to it and, if you don't, you go wherever the work is. Corporations know that people are desperate for jobs and will travel to get them, so they have no incentive to treat workers fairly. In fact, they know that desperate, isolated people will accept increasingly terrible working conditions, so they deliberately move jobs around in order to destroy the stabilizing institution of the nuclear family. Business is slow in Chicago? Cut 100 jobs there. Things are picking up in Des Moines? Add 50 jobs there. People who lost their job in Chicago will rush to Des Moines, even if their spouse or sibling was one of the lucky ones who didn't lose their job in Chicago; in fact the corporation probably planned it that way, although they might not admit it. The jobs are low-paying, poverty is high so, as soon as a child is old enough to work, they too will separate from the family and go to any place where jobs are available. "Old enough" can be adjusted based on the level of distopia, obviously.
I'm taking some inspiration from The Grapes of Wrath and the Dustbowl era generally. If you haven't read it, I recommend doing so.
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One option would be if there was a plant or animal species that had a non-annual boom and bust in population. Some plants, like onions for example, have a biennial life-cycle. Some animals have population booms staggered over longer periods, such as cicadas.
So a social group could form who specialize in harvesting such a crop/species. For example, group X hunt reptilian whales that only approach the shores every third year. They make a great living that year but then need to find other work for the next two seasons, so they disperse and do odd jobs all around the country in the intervening years.
If you are happy with shorter-term seasonal migration, then that still exists to some extent in the real world. For example, in New Zealand, itinerant fruit-pickers often arrive from smaller Pacific Islands in autumn, work for a few months, then emigrate back to their traditional homes etc for winter/spring/summer.
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I'm going to take @Willk's controlling AI a step further. Quite a few steps further.
Remember the story (\*) of the Christmas Truce from WWI? There were often informal cease-fires on Christmas and Easter, but on one battleground the troops took it to another level. They met up in no-man's land, shared drinks, swapped souvenirs, sang carols together. When the high command heard the story they were shocked -- a hundred years ago warfare depended heavily on seeing the enemy as nearly inhuman (+), and this kind of fraternization could destroy that. The units which participated were disbanded, the troops scattered into dangerous assignments on fronts as far apart as possible.
Our benevolent AI doesn't let things get that far out of hand, of course. But if you share a racist joke with a co-worker and they smile and laugh, you might find your whole company scattered the next week. A group of friends start reinforcing each other's bad habits... scattered. Those cliquish bullying kids at school? Carefully placed into loving supportive environments where they can learn from better examples.
There is enough of a background of actually random movements to homogenize society that the pattern is buried, but it's there. Bad behavior is culled out by forcibly breaking the social networks that support it.
(\*) It's quite a story. It might even be true, or partly true, or a romanticized version of the truth... but it's quite a story, in any case. I'm retelling the version from a particular source from memory, and [Wikipedia doesn't quite support this version.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce)
(+) See for example "The Germans and Austro-Hungarian soldiers were depicted as inhumane savages" from [the Wikipedia article on WWI propaganda.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_World_War_I)
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Could it be economical? Think of an exaggerated version of what is happening these days in some cities (San francisco, Vancouver, etc.)
Structure the tenancy laws in a way that allows for tenants to desert properties whenever they wish, and landlords to price properties as they wish. This is a perfect situation for runaway housing markets.
# The tenants
Are poor (middle class). They cannot afford to own property so they must rent. When a new city is formed, some of the upper of the middle class buy properties, and rent to the lower middle class. The lower middle class rent in this new city, with rent being affordable.
As this particular city grows, rent skyrockets (as it legally can) and the upper middle class become the rich. The lower middle class either win and can afford property in another city, to which they abandon the current landlord (as they legally can) to become a landlord of their own. Otherwise, they lose, can't afford rent, and move to rent in a cheaper city.
# The landlords
Stem from tenancy, or are the otherwise filthy rich. Some of these landlords may lose during a migration, and end up poor (lower middle class, a tenant), having to try again.
Their goal is as much money as possible, and because of the tenancy laws, competition doesn't really exist. All landlords raise their prices in unison, to suck as much financially from the lower middle class as possible (keep them lower middle class, don't give them a chance to advance).
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**Eugenics.**
The AI overseeing your near future society sends parties of people to colonize unoccupied lands as these become habitable and as persons become available. Your migrators are colonists / homesteaders.
The AI selects colonists by their genotypes, aiming to maximize the genetic fitness and reproductive capacity of the persons sent to these new lands. The colonists themselves do not know what aspects of their genotypes are used to make the selection, which seems random to them. Also, persons past reproductive age are sent with the colonists. The AI is not random in who it chooses but again these selection criteria are inscrutable to the people and seem random.
The AI does have reasons for everything it does, but it does not routinely explain in depth. Its reasoning might become apparent in the course of the book.
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Most of the existing answers talk about migration for jobs, in one flavor or another. That wouldn't easily convert to the kind of long-term repeated disruption that the OP is looking for.
Maybe something a bit more organic and internal, if quite a bit weirder:
There's been some biological warfare. People have parasites/symbiotes. Normally they are not particularly harmful, but under the wrong circumstances they start to multiply. If you are carrying seeds of parasite A and its parent starts to bloom, you need to get away from the pollen immediately. Leave your family behind, leave your friends behind -- there is pollen everywhere, different types in different places, what is safe for you could kill your twin.
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Our hapless friend –let us call her [**Alice**](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A3510%20alice) – has a prisoner – Bob – and a problem.
Here's the situation: for reasons that are too long to detail here, she must bring the prisoner to a distant location. Using the means of transit currently available to her, that will take at least 12 days. Given that's she's a black belt champion in martial arts and talented in many ways, while her prisoner is bound and not quite so talented, that would normally be a straightforward, even boring task.
As Alice's infamous luck would have it however, **the prisoner --Bob-- is capable of entering people's dreams when both he and the victim are asleep**. Under normal circumstances, Bob can fall asleep on command. While in the dreamworld, he has enormous power over his victims. It's unclear how vast the powers are, but they can certainly induce a state of confusion that lasts for days, a coma-like long-lasting stupor and maybe even death.
Needless to say, Alice would prefer not to be subjected to any of the aforementioned effects. While the effect seems to be tied to REM sleep, Alice believes that even a 2 minute nap or perhaps even a particularly vivid daydream could put her in grave peril. It is unclear what the physical range of the effect is. While Bob claims that he can enter the dreams of anyone he's ever met, Alice has reasons to doubt that. Alice's current best potential solution will be to tie him to a tree and walk a long way off and take the chance and sleep. This still leaves her with a lingering sense of unease, and she has asked us to try to come up with a solution.
She's already been on the road for 2 days without sleep, so a solution is needed FAST.
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**How does one travel for 12 days with a prisoner, when your prisoner can probably kill you in your sleep - IF you fall asleep?**
EDIT: Alice can be assumed to be generally [**nice**](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10939/how-to-defeat-a-precognitive-warrior), and it would rather defeat the purpose of her latest adventure if her prisoner stood likely to die on the way back.
[Answer]
If Bob arriving alive is merely desirable instead of required, you can put Bob in a situation that requires him to stay awake in order to stay alive.
For example, have him hold a grenade with a [dead man's switch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch). If he falls asleep, *boom.* Something like a taser might work as a less-lethal version of this, with intense pain replacing the boom.
One way that this could work without actually endangering Bob is for Alice to find some non-lethal scorpions in the area and place them on Bob. Then, she tells him that this particular type of scorpion won't sting, unless you're asleep that is. After warning him that getting stung is so agonizingly painful that he'd likely be unable to sleep for days, she bids him good night.
She also has to make sure that she takes visible measures to keep herself away from the scorpions, and that the scorpions either won't want to or won't be able to crawl away from Bob.
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Another thing she can use to her advantage is the fact that there aren't other people around. If there were other people around, she could hire someone to watch Bob while she slept. Because this is not the case, if she were to leave Bob tied up to a tree out of shouting distance of the road, chances are nobody would ever find him.
So she tells Bob the plan—he's going to be tied up to a tree out of shouting distance of the road. If anything happens to Alice, he's bear bait. She's going to sleep in the tree, allowing her to be close enough to help him if an animal comes by. Additionally she's going to secure herself in the tree by some method that she's not going to tell Bob. This means that she needs to wake up clear-headed in order to get herself down safely. So if Bob tries to make her confused so that she'll release him, she's not going to be able to get free of her securing mechanism without falling. The sensation of falling does wonders for immediately snapping you into alertness.
Of course, this won't work if Bob is suicidal, or if Bob considers the result of going with Alice to be worse than death or bad enough to risk death.
[Answer]
Alternating sleeping patterns is key.
First, let Bob sleep for about 10 hours. Force him to sleep by giving him some sort of drug that makes him sleep. In the 10 hours, Bob is sleeping, Alice should travel as fast as she can. After Bob wakes up, Alice makes sure he is securely tied in place and gives him a drug that forces him to stay awake while she sleeps for 10 hours. Repeat over and over again.
Sure, it's not the fastest way, but it's effective and safe.
[Answer]
If Alice has some friends in the British Army or DARPA, she can get a non medicinal prescription for drugs like *modafinil* which is used to treat narcolepsy.
Both the British Army and the Americans have been conducting experiments with these and similar drugs in order to see if soldiers and workers can remain awake for extended periods of time without sleep. As I can tell you from experience, trying to keep going in the field after 72hr without sleep is stressful and frightening, with the soldiers not being able to focus and prone to hallucinations (you really don't want armed and dangerous people wandering around in that condition).
Rather amazingly, treatments with narcolepsy medication allowed test subjects to remain awake and alert for prolonged periods of time, although I confess I can no longer find the links which said "how long". One thing which struck me at the time were suggestions that cognitive functioning actually improved as the experiment went on (perhaps being able to focus on a problem for more than 8 hr/day means your mind is capable of doing more work on the problem(s)), but there were also suggestions that long term usage be broken into a series of 72 hr (?) segments with an unspecified rest period to prevent the immune system from crashing.
There was also no reporting on any other adverse effects on the test subjects, once they were off the medication they resumed sleeping as normal.
For this journey, Alice simply keeps taking the drug and remains awake the entire time, drops off the prisoner and gets some sleep on the return trip via the 3:10 to Yuma.
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Drugs. There are plenty of drugs that can knock someone out into true oblivion. A lot of alcohol might do the trick and it is easy to come by, however, opium might be able to severely inhibit his abilities to function as a dream walker. There is a bit of difference between sleeping and being passed out or in a drugged stupor. Can't think coherently it's hard to attack someone or even think about it.
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She makes him sleep when shes awake and uses whatever device you prefer (brainwaves when sleeping are different than when awake, a device could use that as detection method and zap the prisoner like a dog collar does) to keep him awake while she sleeps. Everybody get their needed nap, just at different times and she remains nice.
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If I were Alice I would hire someone (several if I had the means) and/or get some trusted friends to help. `Many hands make light work`, after-all.
These individuals would have two jobs:
1. poking,prodding, and generally annoying Bob to keep him in an 'awake' state for several hours so Alice can sleep and rest.
2. to wake Alice the INSTANT they can't keep Bob awake.
This comes with some problems, mostly related to the trustworthiness and reliability of the individuals, but after twelve days of sleep deprivation Alice's ability to rely on herself is going to be compromised anyways. She could limit her risk by only needing to truly rely on her assistants a handful of times.
Most other solutions run the risk of running afoul of Bobs `particularly vivid daydream` method of compromising her.
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## Put him in a coma
A coma isn't the same as sleep. Hopefully he can't mind attack people when in a coma.
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I would combine:
* When she is awake. Forcing Bob to sleep Bob.
* Measure ([EEG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography)?) the sleep stage of Bob, if he falls asleep use a teaser to waking up.
This combinations has the advantages that if he behaves, you don't have to make him any damage.
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[
This question has two parts:
1. Could biological processes create an organism than can see in wavelengths outside the human-visible spectrum? ("Outside" meaning some significant amount outside. There are known organisms on Earth than can see in near-infrared or near-ultraviolet, but that's not I'm asking about.)
2. What factors might cause such a creature to evolve?
For the context of this question, "see" means an ability to sense the world in a similar level of detail to human sight, using electromagnetic waves.
[Answer]
There are several problems to overcome for a much wider range of wavelengths (and I don't know a solution, so I'll just list these):
The sun will have to produce light in those wavelengths, otherwise you may be able to see them but it will be dark;
Ultraviolet and shorter wavelengths are *ionizing*, meaning they cause chemical changes (damage). Think sunburn to much more damage at shorter wavelengths. In a world that doesn't protect against this kind of light, life is unlikely to arise at all, and whatever does arise will want to protect against this, not use it to see.
*Water* is very absorbant in most of the infrared region, and eyes contain lots of water making them non-transparent. The sensitive parts would have to be immediately on the outside of the skin, and the atmosphere shouldn't hold much water.
At much longer wavelengths (like radio), you also need equally long antennas to detect them. Getting any kind of resolution would need eyes the size of radio telescopes (eyes would *be* radio telescopes).
Finally, you have to consider whether the kind of thing you want to see is actually opaque at a given wavelength.
[Answer]
**In principle**
However there is some limitations. You need something to see. [This image](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_window#/media/File:Atmospheric_electromagnetic_opacity.svg) shows the absorbation spectrums of the earths athmosphere. It's easy to see that the fact that we see in the visible spectrum is no accident. If the aliens have similar body-chemistry (Ie. carbon based oxygen breathers), they will face a similar absorbation spectrum. - And, due to the chemical composition of the universe this is the most likely option.
Also for radiation far away from the visual spectrum you face an issue in that organic life tends to be transparent. While it might seem convenient to be able to see through stuff, in order to actually get an image that way you need a powerfull source of EM-radiation. - If that source is present it will be fatal if it's present all the time.
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Aliens? Some dull, old Terran *fish* can see ultraviolet:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_in_fishes#Ultraviolet>
As for factors, absorption of light in deep water differs between wavelengths.
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All you need to do is evolve on Earth, Fish, Insects, Birds, Bees all have extended vision (typically into the ultraviolet), The Mantis Shrimp for example are among a number of creatures right here that have extended Ultra Violet (in the case of the shrimp with about 5 distinct bandwidths of ultraviolet) have a they ability to see in polarised light and view multispectral images. Their eyes are generally considered to be the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom.
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Certainly. Dogs "see" in high detail with their noses. Bats and owls "see" with their ears. Sharks and fish have lateral lines that respond to tiny electric field changes in water and can paint a picture of their surroundings that way.
Of course the detail level of such a sense would depend heavily on the wavelength of the signals being received. You simply can't "see" something that's smaller than that.
Mind that this is a simplified picture, as distance increases you need a shorter wavelength to see something (which is why you can't see a grain of sand on the moon using even the strongest, most perfect optical telescope from earth orbit).
So to get a similar or higher level of detail you'd need to go into the ultraviolet or shorter.
[Answer]
**No, they could not**
Small variations are surely possible but large variations are highly unlikely and you seem to be interested in the latter.
Visible light and the region around it *behaves* differently from longer and shorter wavelengths. Visible light is in the region of electromagnetic wavelengths that interact with the bond structure of individual molecules. This is required not just for the radiation to be detected by the organism through the obvious means of interaction with chemically based life but also for it to carry useful information about the environment around the organism. Thus it is both unlikely that it could evolve and unlikely that it could be meaningfully used to 'see'.
Have a look at the properties sections of [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation#Properties) article on electromagnetic radiation for more about why this is so.
[Answer]
**Yes.**
I think your definition of seeing is a bit skewed - for a life form the most important part is not what level of acuity they have but rather that they can perceive enough to survive in their environment. Take for example cats - they have poorer acuity and color perception than humans but superior night vision which is ideal for a nocturnal predator.
For herbivores detecting motion is often much more important than detail, which is why they often have a wider field of motion but poor binocular vision.
Also the idea that a creature needs to have a sun for to be able to see is bunk. Take for example barbeled dragonfishes which emit a red glow which allows them to see their prey in complete darkness. You could also imagine creatures which generate IR or even UV to power their own "active" vision.
We also have many creatures on earth which use sonar as an augmented sense. If you imagine creatures at the scale of a blue whale it's not completely improbable that they could perceive radio waves. Imagine for example a huge gas filled organism which flies around filter-feeding spores from the atmosphere.
We also know that birds can perceive electromagnetic radiation although they don't "see" it but rather "feel" it in the form of a sense of direction.
A more interesting question is whether an alien race with completely different sensory organs could reach a technologically advanced state. What would a civilisation of blind creatures look like?
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You mention IR and UV vision. UV vision in birds works through [cone cells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_vision#Ultraviolet_sensitivity) which are slightly different from [human ones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell). IR vision in snakes uses [another mechanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_sensing_in_snakes).
For sufficiently small values of "outside" there could be more types of cone cells. Would that go far enough for your requirements?
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**Certainly.**
Humans see best in that part of the spectrum that is strongest with our sun.
That makes it very plausible that any species evolving on a planet that orbits a star with a different spectrum to see best wherre that star has its maximum.
Additionally, as @o.m. already mentionned, snakes and birds see in a different spectrum than humans do.
So, there is no reason *not* to believe that a different species could evolve that has eyes seeing a different or even a much wider spectrum.
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[
**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
I was wondering if a small black hole would make a feasible/possible propulsion source, and if so, how.
* Pros
+ Black holes release Hawking radiation, would should be easy to direct in a certain direction.
+ Literally anything, from garbage to planets could be fed into the black hole.
+ It could provide artificial gravity
+ You can charge [black holes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charged_black_hole), making it easier to contain.
* Cons
+ The black hole could destroy the ship and everyone in it, and then it wouldn't being propelling anything
What size black hole would be possible, if any? At what rate should you feed it? How do you contain it safely?
We can assume basically any level of technological development that isn't magic (no gravity wizards). They also have near infinite amounts of energy.
[Answer]
JDługosz answered this great, with numbers and everything. And the question has been considered by at least two scientists, namely Crane & Westmooreland - their paper can be found in arxiv [here](http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803.pdf).
**Containing the black hole:**
When it comes to containing it safely, well, I the authors of the aforementioned paper concluded that a BH confine itself. All that has to be done is to avoid colliding with it. I would say it is a pretty disengaged way of addressing the issue, but then again, maybe it was a no-brainer and I am the only reader left wishing for a more in-depth explanation of this facet of the problem.
**Feeding the black hole:**
They need not be fed at all to be efficient. If that was the case, they would likely be unfeasible as propulsion methods (it is quite likely that they are unfeasible anyway, but for other reasons than the feeding issue). Feeding a black hole with a radius of 0.9 attometers (10 to the power of minus 18) with iron, would be hard for the reason that most likely the BH would zip right through the iron bar. The average distance between bonded iron atoms is 0.7 picometer (10 to the power of minus 12), meaning we could fit a million BHs in the distance between two iron atoms in a piece of solid iron. The feeding procedure would take the term micro managing to a whole new level.
**Size(s) of the black hole(s):**
Which size(s) of the black hole(s) would be possible? According to Crane & Westmoreland, there is a sweet spot - and that is a BH large enough to exist and be able to accelerate/decelerate the ship during the entire voyage. Yet not larger than necessary, since BH give off Hawking radiation in an inverse proportion to their size, as mentioned by JDługosz. A bigger hole will give you less energy output. The radius of 0.9 attometers I used as an example was not a random number, but a radius that would mean that the BH would exist during 3.5 years. That is the relativistic time that a one-way trip from Earth to Alpha Centauri (~4 ly away) would take, i.e. that would be the length of the journey as measured by the clocks on board the ship, if said ship were to accelerate at 1 g for half the trip, and then decelerate at 1 g during the other half (I must presume they have assumed some value for the mass of the ship to be able to calculate this, but I couldn't find it anywhere in the text).
Smaller BHs would be useful for fast accelerations of probes or missiles. Larger BHs would be useful for longer trips. So yes, there are "sweet spots" when it comes to the size of a BH when used for propulsion. These sizes depend upon the length of the journey, the mass of the ship, etc.
But too large BHs, and the time needed to generate enough energy to accelerate the mass of the BH itself would be very long. Please see the table and the examples explained in the article for more information.
**Conclusion:**
Given the size of the proposed BHs, we could most likely not ignore quantum effects. And given their density, we could not ignore the gravity effects either. Since we currently lack understanding of gravity at the quantum level, and since our understanding of black holes from both a theoretical and experimental standpoint is extremely poor, I would say that it is not possible to determine the feasibility of this propulsion method at this stage of our technological development. The question would best be readdressed when we have a workable quantum theory of gravity, if it is to remain within the realm of hard science, rather than a the field of science fiction.
EDIT: Just found a newer paper by Crane on the subject [here](https://archive.org/stream/arxiv-1001.3887/1001.3887_djvu.txt) a minute ago. Haven't read it though, but it might be relevant.
[Answer]
Very interesting idea. Let me start with some relevant facts, as brought up in the comments.
A bh emits more radiation, becoming hotter as it becomes smaller. The **temperature** is inversely proportional to the black hole’s mass. But, the quantity of energy for a given temperature is reduced because the surface area gets smaller. Radius is ∝ mass, and surface area ∝ radius squared. So T is inverse to r². The size shrinks faster than temperature rises! But, black body radiation energy increases faster than temperature, so which wins?
In fact, (nicely posted on Wikipedia)
$$\mathrm{Power} = \frac{\hbar c^6}{15360 \pi G^2 M^2}$$
Notice the mass squared in the denominator!
To calibrate the Power measurement, consider that a solar mass black hole emits $9 \times 10^{-29}$ watts. 1-second-lived black hole has a mass of $2.28 × 10^5$ kg has an initial power of $6.84 × 10^{21}$ W.
So, feeding a bh on mass you have on hand to keep it a constant size, and directing the radiation out the back, can deliver a required amount of power by sizing the bh appropriately.
How much power do you need? Use the formula and follow the example [from wikipedia](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation) to find out. Now, look at the *size* of that bh. Hmm, turning down the power means carting around even more mass.
The problem is that [the radius of the bh](http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=radius+of+black+hole++1+million+kilograms) is 1000 times smaller than a proton!
How can you feed it the large amount of mass needed to retain equilibrium? **I think it can’t be done**, even neglecting that the output will blow everything away from it. You can’t get enough mass in a small enough volume to be swallowed at that rate, without it being another black hole.
Now nevermind that it can’t be done as implied. Maybe it’s a large habitat undergoing very low acceleration, like today’s ion drives. How do you keep it tethered? A bh can be charged electricly, but it tries to shed its charge first thing, as the radiation will be charged.
So, feed it highly charged matter to *keep* it charged, and rely on the charged radiation to direct it, and the charge on the bh to keep it centered in the cavity. Throw the leftover opposite charged matter in the exhaust after it is directed.
A more practical way to get power from a bh is via the *ergosphere*. However, that would be done with a non-microscopic (not hot) bh.
[Answer]
There's a paper
<http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803.pdf>
By these 2 guys
<https://www.phys.ksu.edu/personal/westmore/>
<http://www.math.ksu.edu/people/personnel_detail?person_id=1330>
To summarize: **Yes it is likely possible but you need to point particle beams at the black hole both to keep its size stable and to control its position.**
>
> Design requirements for a BH starship
>
>
> 1. use the Hawking radiation to drive the vessel
> 2. drive the BH at the same acceleration
> 3. feed the BH to maintain its temperature
>
>
> Item 3 is not absolutely necessary. We could manufacture a SBH, use it to drive a ship one
> way, and release the remnant at the destination. However this would
> limit us greatly as to performance, and be very disappointing in the
> powerplant application discussed below.
>
>
> We shall discuss these three
> problems in outline only here; at the level of engineering they will
> each require an extended discussion. It is not hard to see how we
> might satisfy requirement 1. We simply position the SBH at the focus
> of a parabolic reflector attached to the body of the ship. Since the
> SBH will radiate gamma rays and a mix of particles and antiparticles,
> this is not simple. The proposal has been made in the context of
> antimatter rockets, to make a gamma ray reflector out of an electron
> gas [11].
>
>
> It is not clear if this is feasible (e.g., [2]).
>
>
> Alternatively, we could allow the gamma rays to escape and direct
> only the charged particle part of the Hawking radiation (cf. [2]),
> although this produces a less capable ship. To improve the performance,
> we could add a thick layer of matter which would absorb the gamma
> rays, reradiate in optical frequencies, and focus the resulting light
> rays. An absorber which stops only gamma rays heading towards the
> front of the ship and allows the rest to escape out the back causes
> gamma rays to radiate from the ship asymmetrically. In this way, even
> the escaping non-absorbed gamma rays contribute some thrust (cf. [12]
> or [13]). Modulo safety concerns, one would not want the absorber to
> be too massive. An extremely massive absorber could burden the mass of
> vehicle so much that the extra thrust it helps to deliver does not
> lead to an improved acceleration.
>
>
> Yet another idea for the
> utilization of gamma ray energy is to exploit pair production
> phenomena. By interacting with the electric field of atomic nuclei,
> high energy gamma rays can be converted into charged particle-antiparticle
> pairs such as electrons and positrons. These particles
> can be directed by electromagnetic fields. It is not likely that
> even half of the gamma ray energy can be utilized in this manner
> however (see Vulpetti [14], [15]).
>
>
> It might be advantageous to use
> the Hawking radiation to energize a secondary working substance
> which can then be ejected as exhaust (as is done in thermal and ion
> rockets). However, the working substance must be ejected at 10
> relativistic speeds so that the specific impulse will be high enough
> for interstellar travel.
>
>
> The most optimistic approach is to solve
> requirements 2 and 3 together by attaching particle beams to the body
> of the ship behind the BH and beaming in matter. This would both
> accelerate the SBH, since BHs “move when you push them”(see [3]
> p270), and add mass to the SBH, extending the lifetime.
>
>
> The delicate
> thing here is the absorption cross section for a particle going into a
> BH. We intend to investigate this question in the future. If simply
> aiming the beam at the SBH doesn’t work, we can try forming an accretion
> disk near the SBH and rely on particles to tunnel into it.
> Alternatively, we could use a small cluster of SBHs instead of just
> one to create a larger effective target, charge the SBH etc. It is
> also possible that because of quantum effects SBHs have larger than
> classical radii, due to the analog of zero point energy. This point
> must remain as a challenge for the future.
>
>
>
[Answer]
AS noted, a black hole has a pretty impressive power output, especially micro black holes.
The downside is ones with the practical mass to power a ship or colony are also the mass of asteroids to small moons. Outside of the practical engineering difficulties of feeding mass to an object as small as an atomic nucleus, it also means your ship is hauling around the mass of the black hole. Much like ion drives, the gain in performance using the engine is offset by the extra mass you need to carry around (in the case of an ion drive, you either need a nuclear reactor and shielding, or hectares of solar panels to provide the energy for a large ion or plasma drive).
A full discussion is in this paper: ARE BLACK HOLE STARSHIPS POSSIBLE?
By Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland, Kansas State University.
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[Question]
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I'm creating continents for my fantasy world but I need help creating names. I still haven't decided how many continents there will be, but I'm already having trouble coming up with names. Does anyone know of good suffixes and prefixes for continent names? The only continent I can name is called Mesogea (middle land or central land if my research doesn't betray me). However, I don't want all continents to have the same "cake recipe" to name (that is, always using the same suffix), I want the names to be more diverse and that's what holds me back. To make matters worse I don't know other good suffixes or even prefixes that can be used to name continents, something more cunning than just using "land".
If necessary, some **brief details of the continents of my world**: one of them will have dinosaurs; the other will be equivalent to Africa; one of the continents will have fauna like dodos, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, terror birds, etc. (even the weather will be favorable for them); also one that will be equivalent to South America; and the last equivalent to Asia. Mesogea is already equivalent to Europe.
**Warning in case of misunderstanding**: I only speak Portuguese so I'm using Google to translate my question, I apologize if something I said above is not understandable.If there's something you can't understand, please let me know so I can rephrase it so you can understand.
[Answer]
## It depends on the Culture drawing the Map
Have a look at the method of names for continents/regions we have on Earth now.
Keep in mind that names are very much in the eye of the beholder.
In other words, the map is crafted by someone, and generally he/she would use names they are familiar with which are often shaped by their own culture, and even perception through the eyes of their own culture.
For instance 'Australia' means 'Southern Land', from the point of view only coined by an Englishman, who thought 'Terra Australis' was a bit of a mouthful. But even then it was called 'Nouvelle Hollande', obviously by the Dutch, for a long time by many until Australia slowly caught on.
So in other words, it depends who's looking. Only after a long time does a name start to creep into general parlance, and for the sake often of convenience does the name slowly become consistently used.
So for your names:
* Consider the cultural sensitivities or biases of the person drawing the map
* Consider the history of the continent in question, and the name given by those who first found it
* Consider that multiple people might have different names for the same continent
This may actually make your story more interesting, as it also reveals the biases of the culture drafting the map, being a story into of itself.
As an example, you mentioned 'suffixes' shouldn't be the same. But keep in mind that a culture might find suffixes important. So perhaps your culture has a naming convention that is consistent (such as Terra for land, '-alia') and that is important to be structured. Or alternatively, a culture that is more accommodating of local naming could name it native language name, such as 'Uthuru' 'barna' or 'biik' (local indigenous names in this case of Australia). This could be quite a good way in your story to highlight cultural difference.
[Answer]
You need to decide what point of view you are using in you worldbuildning. Is it a name given to empty lands by people from the orbit? Or is it naming system derived from names of the peoples who were first to travel the world and spread their names to other people.
For example our name for Asia is based on the Greek name of modern Turkey that was extended east when Greeks discovered that the land continues there while Africa is Latin name for lands to the south of Mediterranean possibly derived from the name of some tribe or phoenician word for dust (bdw. Greek name for Africa was Libia). America is name based on the name of one of the explorers. Europe is also Greek word of unknown origin.
People living on a single continuous land would most probably not have a name for it before they start exploring and discover there are other continets so they would name their land the same name they use for the land as a whole or earth. They would later devise the names for new lands they discover.
[Answer]
If you take in account the names of two of our continents, they come from names of people.
* Europa was a princess rapted by Zeus in the greek mithology.
* America comes from the name of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who claimed that Brazil was part of an unexplored continent and he called it New world. A German cartographer decided to call this New World America, in honor of Amerigo.
The names of another two continents come from how a great ancient empire called its provinces:
* Africa was how the Roman Empire called one of the southern provinces of the Empire: Egipt, Cirenaica, **Africa Proconsular**, Mauritania Cesariense and Mauritania Tingitana.
* Asia I think I remember that the Roman Empire called it's Eastern provinces Asia, and the name has stuck.
Oceania comes from Ocean. It's mostly like saying Land of the Ocean, like Atlantida is saying Land of the Atlantic. You may use local names or local landscapes to name a continent. Maybe you could call a place full of volcanoes Volcania.
Antartica descends from the contrary to the Artic, the lands of the North: Anti-Artica.
For inventing names of continents try using the names that the greatest empires of your realm used to indicate directions or lands, using the names of people from mithology or discoverers, or try to alude to the position of the continent on the world, comparing it with something you know or the most usual sight within that continent.
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Run a random fake word generator until you find enough that you like. Try this one: <https://randomwordgenerator.com/fake-word.php> for instance. It makes up realistic-seeming words, probably from a latin-biased list of syllables. I ran it for seven, and got: incons, aristorant, tingform, somesquence, tragul, frizzonaire, pulappli. I like most of those as place names.
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You prolly want to name the continents in your built world from the lives of the inhabitants.
How many different races or ethnicities do you have, with how many cultures, languages or religions and particularly, creation myths?
On the other hand, you might just stick a pin in a dictionary and take what comes up… unless that feels wrong, in which case stick in another pin!
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There are some technical ideas that could have been developed much earlier, changing the ancient or medieval world.
A sterling example is the **hot-air balloon**. It was actually invented at the close of the 18th century, by a person who observed laundry billow up when dried over a fire. That same observation could have been made millennia earlier. There is no technical or knowledge barrier that made this invention impossible **in ancient Greece**; in fact Hero of Alexandria had knowledge of pneumatics far in excess of what would have been required, and tight lightweight fabrics, the only high-tech material needed, were readily available (albeit expensive).
Another, less flashy example is the **star fort**, or Vauban fortification, where walls are angled to be **enfiladed** from bastions, and bastions are angled to be enfiladed from the walls. This development was key in the era of the cannon; but it would have been quite as useful in the era of the ballista or longbow, totally obsolescing machicolations, and required no specialized technology or knowledge. It could have been developed **in the Roman era**, or in the era of the Crusader castles. But it wasn't.
My question is, are there other inventions that could, ***without anachronistic scientific insight or technology***, have been invented much earlier? But that have been missed or delayed?
Some additional conditions:
* I want to specifically exclude the concept of gunpowder. Alternate histories based on its earlier invention have been done to death already. The same goes for DaVinci's (unworkable, BTW) vehicular concepts.
* I am asking about breakthrough ideas, such as inventing the sail, not incremental ones, such as building bigger ships with more sophisticated sail arrangements.
* My question is specifically about *technical* inventions, not geographic or political developments (Viking colonization of America) or social and religious concepts (women's suffrage in the Roman republic).
* I am thinking about a medieval world being revolutionized by an invention, but antiquity is OK too; not the modern era, though. Dirigibles in the Napoleonic Wars are an interesting idea, but outside of my scope of interest.
* Finally, I would prefer ideas with a military application, but this is not a firm requirement.
**EDIT:** I am required to "*Update the question so it focuses on one problem only.*" As this would effectively require me to name the specific invention I am looking for, I cannot reasonably comply with this request. I would like to thank all contributors so far, especially the insightful individual who came up with this demand. I consider the question answered.
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The classic ancient example is the stirrup. Horses bred to ride (instead of haul or use as pack animals) possibly started appearing around 3500 BCE, and certainly existed (due to appearing in art) somewhere between 2000-1500 BCE but the earliest depiction of a stirrup is from around 200 BCE in India. So that's somewhere between 1200 to 3300 years before someone came up with the idea. The military applications are obvious.
The heliograph was, surprisingly, only developed in 1821 although the basic concept is easily doable as soon as you've got a shiny enough reflector. Ideal for long-distance immediate communication across a smaller area. At least on a sunny day.
The glass lens (which could be used for early telescopes, a practical military tool) could have been developed centuries earlier. The techniques for making clear glass were discovered somewhere around 900 BCE, by 400 BCE people were clearly making lenses (initially used as burning glasses to start fires), and by 1 CE the ability of lenses to correct vision or magnify things was well-known.
Oh, yes, perhaps the most important: germ theory and basic hygiene. Simple to explain and would have made a world of difference to armies in the field.
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Regarding the last point, perhaps "Germ theory" is too much (although ibn Sina proposed something like it in 1025), but there's still a lot that could have improved things through simple observation and experiment. For example, John Snow (no, not that one) connected cholera to sewage-contaminated water, and Ignaz Semmelweis connected clean hands to reduced death in childbirth, both before Pasteur confirmed germ theory.
There were all sorts of ideas floating around (ba-dum *tish*!) about concepts similar to germ theory that, in practice, could have resulted is similar beneficial outcomes, but miasma theory kept them in the background. All it would have taken was for some culture to really hop on the proto-germ theory bandwagon and dismiss miasma as nonsense and it could have had the significantly earlier start.
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Canning in jars was discovered completely by accident in 1809 some 50 years before germ theory was understood. Nicolas Appert, a french brewer and confectioner, experimented with jarred soups and foods for sale as ready cooked meals to the public. He discovered that by cooking the soup in a sealed jar it would not go bad unless the seal was broken. Napoleon paid him a substantial sum of money to publish his findings in a book which spread the idea od canning across Europe quickly. England used this to incredible effect to better supply its naval empire.
It's easily believable that an Alchemist with a passion for food (or trying to discover an elixir of immortality) might discover Canning 800 years earlier than it was. The effects are surprising. There were plenty of ways to preserve foods in the past, many of them long lasting like curing meats. Nearly all long term preservation techniques used additives like salt, sugar, and smoke for preservation. This added cost via labor and materials. Canning reduces that cost incredibly. All you need are the jars and cork stoppers which are reusable.
Glass blowing was invented in around 2ad, which made glass jars much faster and easier to make. Glassblowers would blow the glass out into a sphere and press it into a mold for a semi-standardized shape.
Much the same as real life, canning greatly improved military logistics.
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The bow and arrow were never invented in Australia, but obviously could have been tens of thousands of years ago.
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Two things stand out to me: pendulums and clipper ships.
Pendulums are basically just weights on a string, something that there is no reason to invent way earlier in history. This would result in early invention of clocks, which made navigation by longitude relatively easy. (The proper gear manufacturing was observed already in 100 bc in the Antikythera mechanism.)
Clipper ships were an incremental development of the sailing ship, created by adding sails and designing new hull shapes. This gave sailboats significantly increased speed, averaging at their height 16 knots. That's the trans Atlantic passage in about ten days. Though created through research, clippers had no really new technologies, just a lot of good careful design. When compared with other ships of of antiquity, this becomes a huge advantage, as they often couldn't pass 6 knots.
Technology tends to be situational and incremental, so most developments are kind of hard to isolate. There is also a cultural element, in which there has to be a cultural environment that supports trying random things for things to develop. So even things that don't need new technologies, may need a cultural perogative to allow them to be created and develop.
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As far as I understand, as long as you can make a magnet spin fast enough you get an electricity. Knowledge of an electric field being generated by a moving magnet field will move you a whole epoch forward.
First obvious implementation of electricity is a lightbulb, and then you get electric fences, powerful electric furnaces to smelt serious metal alloys, and an elementary radio, all of which have military applications.
In addition to that, in general, even if you can't imagine a technology invention itself, there's an option of telling a theoretical foundations to the engineers you have (assuming they believe you). Engineers will figure out the practical implementations themselves. An example of that with germs theory was already shown in the other answer. Just this theory alone can lead you straight to a biological warfare.
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I'm in the early stages of thinking up a space science fiction story about a particular group of scientists and young explorers on mission to investigate some points of interest in the galaxy. Their mission is to visit some interesting phenomena (unexplained astrophysical phenomena, possible signals from an alien civilization, ruins of a fallen civilization that they know to be there, candidates for expansion, etc) that have been observed and perform some hands-on research on what's going on. Part of their job would be bringing some stuff to the laboratory on board for study and sometimes carry them back to headquarters on the return journey.
One small detail I've been thinking about is that some of the crew might want to keep for themselves some keepsakes and trinkets to remind them of their journey: stuff like a mineral naturally carved into an ornate shape found on an asteroid, a sample of a newly-discovered element, a trinket from a civilization they encountered, a piece of useful technology from a derelict space station and so on. But although allowing some degree of personal collection can be a good way to strengthen the emotional intimacy of the crew to their mission and might even directly aid in the mission sometimes, we can't have the crew just pocketing (or worse, hauling) stuff on their missions, especially if the items are very valuable or the method of obtaining them is unacceptable.
Now, space is big and weird. Nobody knows what the explorers are going to find, it's going to be impossible to try and write a full list of what's allowed and what's not, let alone draft a totally loophole-free law. So I'm not looking for a complete answer, rather to gather some points on what considerations should be taken by both the headquarters and the crew when deciding whether an item can be taken as a personal belonging. For example, one consideration would be whether the item is a unique thing or something that's either available in plenty where they found it or easy to reproduce now that they know how it's made, and in the latter case it usually wouldn't hurt to let the crew take a small amount unless the nature of the item makes it difficult to allow it to be personally taken (and potentially sold or released). And then, how is "a small amount" determined?
Some context and considerations:
1. The nature of this expedition is scientific, not expansionist (that's handled by another branch of expedition teams). Discovering valuable resources is not even an expectation but simply something that might happen and need guidelines. And the expedition is organized by either a government or an institution or something, definitely not a corporation, plus there are very serious moral standards not just for this mission but in the society as a whole. All this means profit isn't the goal, they just want to learn.
2. Communication between the explorers and the headquarters is quick and reasonably prompt, but there are numerous expedition teams. With so much going on, the explorers are expected to make their own decisions as much as possible. Note, by the way, that value assessment is going to be a difficult task to carry out immediately even when brought to the attention of the headquarters.
3. There are automated protocols to periodically report what happened during the expedition in great detail, and that includes diagnostic scans on the ship, so it's practically impossible to sneak any significant cargo on board and keep it hidden. There's extensive screening including personality tests when selecting candidates so that there's reasonable expectation that the selected explorers won't do it with or without those scans anyway. They'd still need these rules though: the reasonable expectation could still be betrayed, no one knows what values could be found in the far reaches of the galaxy, and even if nothing goes wrong about their morality, having guidelines can still help the crew avoid some lapses of judgment.
4. They aren't going to say that everything found during the expedition is the property of the headquarters and ask the crew to officially purchase whatever they want to keep for themselves.
Looking forward to discussions on space exploration laws.
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The crew may bring back pretty much anything they judge safe and sane to bring back. Final word on what may be brought back will be left to the mission commander with veto from the crew commander. With that comes legal liabilities.
Only disobeying orders, disregarding protocol, and general recklessness should be punishable. Mistakes, no matter the magnitude, should be assumed to be nobody's, except maybe the organisation's, fault.
Punishment should at the very least include a ban from any cooperating space agency, but may also include fines and jail time depending on the severity, and consequences, of the offence.
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No matter what is brought back, all of it is property of the organisation supervising the mission, and will be analysed thoroughly to ensure it is safe. The analysis may take days, weeks, or even years, and there's nothing you can do about that. Once the initial testing is done, the organisation may classify these items/materials into four categories:
* **To be conserved**. Either for more immediate testing, or for future generations in case they have more test ideas. This should be where the overwhelming majority of material ends up. There may be provisions to allow selling/donating these to competing space agencies as well, after all science is a collaborative effort.
* **Hazardous**. Note that this category is for hazardous material that does not fall in the above category, i.e. it has no further purpose. Those are to be destroyed, or securely stored, whichever is deemd safest. They may not be used for any purpose, period.
* **Historically significant**. Those will be donated/sold to museums and/or approved organisations. This may be your first scoop of Moon dust, which in and out of itself isn't more scientifically relevant than any other scoop, but still carries significant value.
* **Disposable**. Pretty much anything else you have no use for. Those may be donated, auctioned or discarded. The specific rules here would be left to the organisation, but should be fair and transparent. You could for instance offer it to original mission members, and if none of them wants it to members of the organisation, then auction it to the general public. If sold/donated, then those items become the property of the person it was sold/donated to, end of story.
The classification should be overseen by an independent committee. The committee should ensure, among other things, that the *Disposable* category doesn't siphon useful material into a black market, and that hazardous items are properly assigned to the *Hazardous* category. It also should *probably* be a civilian government entity.
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In practice, the mission commander may allow the crew to bring more material than is needed for the mission (provided it is safe to do so). The excess, once analysed and proved safe, will be classified as disposable and therefore the astronauts may take property of it. They, in turn, may adopt the sacred rule of dibs to arbitrate who gets what from the start. They should also understand that it is a privilege, and that abuse may lead to unwanted oversight and ultimately revocation of said privilege.
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* Each crewmember has an official *weight* allowance for personal gear. This could be a crucifix or rosary, a framed picture of a loved one, whatever. The allowance is big enough for a few consumables, too. Sweets, liquor, whatever. (Subject to safety regulations. No drunkenness without permission.) As consumables are consumed the crewmember can request a weight recalculation.
* If their other duties allow, they can collect collectibles and add them to their weight allowance. **The science staff checks for safety, the captain has a veto,** the superiors keep prospecting from hindering the main mission.
* If they sell any of their finds later on, that income is taxed significantly.
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***Submit and wait:***
I think the simplest thing to do is the bureaucratic one - everything you want to keep has to be turned in, then a committee needs to examine and approve the item. NO LIFEFORMS, period.
Everything else would undergo scientific examination, and if it proved to be insignificant and safe, it could be returned, properly registered. Anything that might be valuable but not significant could be "issued" to the person, but still the property of the organization. An alien laser gun that functioned just like a human one would be examined thoroughly, and then could be issued as equipment. Anything culturally or scientifically important would kept like any discovery.
It's kind of the same rule that applies to gifts acquired during work - some things are too much, others need to be reported so there is no appearance on impropriety. Either way, bureaucracies are the same everywhere. Do your paperwork.
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It's all on a per-item basis, where the function and value of the item are compared to the total value of what has been discovered and inherent risks of exploration. If you find an empty planet with a single personal teleportation device that isn't available anywhere else, you likely aren't going to be allowed to keep it. If you hit a planet where at great risk you've secured a dozen things and a personal teleportation device is small potatoes compared to the rest (and you may have some copies) no one is going to be pissed about you keeping one.
As o.m. says, each find has to be vetted. You don't want that small PDA that one of your crewmen took as keepsake to be the last item logged into the remains of the WMD network that caused that civilization's collapse and fiddling with it causes the last stored WMD's to go off. Or that pet you've picked up has sex with your face after which things burst out of you and start eating the rest of the crew.
Things also have to be checked on potential reverse engineering. If it can be reverse engineered you'll have to deliver it back (I'm assuming a universe where for some reason research is so divergent that there's a high chance it's not reverse-engineerable, which fits the "ancient tech is better/destroyed advanced civilization" narrative). Once it's reverse-engineered you'll likely be able to make a claim at the original if it's still intact or the first newly produced on that technology. If it's not possible to reverse-engineer you can likely keep it if it's not too expensive.
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**Keep in mind, you can't stop "human" nature**
There is no law, no policing force, not threat of violence, that can completely stop the all-too-human (but not exclusively human) desire to take a souvenir.
*A friend of mine was golfing on Guam when he and a friend teed off and dropped their balls over a rise they couldn't see over. They searched for the balls, but couldn't find them. No one was behind them, so they teed off again — and once again couldn't find their balls. So one chipped a ball over the rise while the other lay in the grass and peered over it. Out from the forest came an iguana, intent on taking more bright, shiny souvenirs! They tracked it to its den about 10 yards into the jungle where the little honker had squirreled away hundreds of golf balls.*
What you can do is set expectations and hire police to the best of your ability. Note that no credible scientific organization (or government supporting science) would ever legally allow the removal of souvenirs from any investigative site, and it's fair to believe that the equivalent of parks and world heritage sites will exist in the future. Therefore, the premise that you're looking to *permit* the activity doesn't makes sense. It's already there! "Finders keepers," after all. What only makes sense is how you're going to limit it. So let me introduce a frame challenge.
And you appear to have already solved that with your 3rd point: automatic scans are already in place that will always detect something that should be there. Such a service will never be perfect — but let's assume that it is. Since you can impose any limit you want, why would you impose any at all (beyond what I've already mentioned)?
**Weight** Many scifi stories tend to ignore the issue of weight. Engines, inertial dampers, thrusters, and various forms of gravitics are all assumed to be so efficient (or there is so much available power) that it doesn't matter if someone brings a couple of tons worth of baubles back from the surface. The reality is that in space there are always limits and costs. From a believable and reasonable perspective, there is a limit to the total weight of souvenirs anyone can possess.
**Volume** Many scifi stories also handwave living space. Look at those massive bridges on *Star Wars* Imperial Star Destroyers! Yeah, reality will probably favor the acrobatics seen on *Apollo 13.* Let's assume that modern submarines and aircraft carriers represent the truth better than current scifi. Your people may only have a cubic yard worth of personal storage space to work with. Period. If you can't close the lid, something's gotta go.
**Low-Level Dangerous** You're right! Space is large and weird! Consequently, there's a better-than-average chance that the cool rock or bit-o-tech you're picking up as nonchalantly as a dandelion actually has a new form of Coronavirus on it, or some new kind of radiation that's going to cause everyone on the crew to melt in a week, or a microbe that will result in something pushing through your chest. Or nanites that will begin converting the ship (and later the crew) in hours. Like the man says...
>
> Don’t pander to me, kid. One tiny crack in the hull and our blood boils in thirteen seconds. Solar flare might crop up, cook us in our seats. And wait till you’re sitting pretty with a case of Andorian shingles, see if you’re so relaxed when your eyeballs are bleeding. Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence. (*Star Trek* (2009))
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I'd have to hope that the automatics will pick up the high-level dangerous stuff, but there's plenty of low-level dangerous stuff that should scare the bajoobadoos out of everyone.
But if that's not enough, there's one more reason that's probably more at the core of all current terrestrial laws than anybody really wants to admit....
**What's Mine is Mine...** The swamp fiends of Ch'urtex 5 may think the little tool you use to chip away at the rocks is magic... but they're not stupid. You want their rocks and what they want is all the Mek'kalkak fruit you can lay your hands on. And since Star Command has decided that Ch'urtex 5 is strategically positioned against the probably-invading-tomorrow wOOOdanalatiAH, they're more than happy to back the Science Directorate's petition before the Regional Parliament to ban the collection of those darn rocks because, just as luck would have it, Mek'kalkak fruit happens to make better than average rocket fuel. But, of course, the swamp fiends *want* the Mek'kalkak fruit — and thus The Interplanetary Treaty Banning the Collection of That Darn Rock was born. Never (and I mean this... *never*) underestimate the attractive force of the first-person possessive.
**Conclusion**
You have no reason to determine how to permit the collection of souvenirs, humanity has a fathomless capacity for greed and plenty of sticky fingers. You really do need to ask the question the other way around: what meaningful ways are there *to stop it.*
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## Keepsakes would be included in their Intellectual Property Waiver
A similar problem was encountered in the early days of the modern technology industry. People were hired by companies to R&D valuable technologies for their employers, but while being paid handsomely to research one thing at work, they would have a multi-million dollar idea "in their free time". This lead to inevitable conflicts between employers and employees because companies would claim the idea happened on work time, or that the discovery would have been impossible without the use of materials/equipment provided by the employer.
To end the constant disputes, many employers now include a clause in their contracts that state that ANY discoveries made while in their employment are the intellectual property of the employer. And any employer who does not make such a claim is assumed to allow the employee to retain full rights to any discovery made while in their employment.
By applying this same practice to your space missions, it would be almost guaranteed that a scientific expedition would require a forfeiture of discovery rights waiver in their employee's contracts. This means that anything your explorers find or learn on the mission belongs to the employer regardless of whether you collected it during working hours or with the employer's equipment.
In all likelihood, keepsakes will probably be taken all the time, most people won't care, but it will rarely be legal (like people who steal office supplies for home use).
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**People are going to take souvenirs anyway, no matter what the law says**
I come from paleontology. In my field, I have seen a lot of colleagues pocket rocks or small chunks of bone from fossil sites, even if they are working in an area where it is forbidden by law from taking rocks or fossil chunks from a fossil site (either because it is in a national park or in a country where private ownership of fossils or taking fossils out of said country is illegal). They usually claim they are doing so for educational purposes or to show what kinds of rocks or bones they work on (claiming the bone chunks aren't scientifically important), but the fact is they are doing it and ignoring the legality of the situation. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing was common in fields like archaeology or biology. And that's not even getting into what non-scientists do at places like Badlands or Petrified Forest National Park.
Souvenier-taking seems to be an intrisically human thing that people will do, regardless of the ethics or legality of it. [Astronauts already keep souvenirs of gear from their missions as mementos](https://www.space.com/17787-nasa-astronauts-space-artifacts-souvenirs-law.html#:%7E:text=Astronauts%20Can%20Keep). On a more grisly notes, soldiers are known to take mementos from their battles, [even when the higher-ups tell them to knock it off](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead#Souvenirs_and_bartering). Human beings just seem to be magpies by nature.
This can also help your plot. There have been tons of space horror stories where the driving force behind the plot is they took something from an alien planet or archaeological site that they shouldn't have, and the fact that they took something they shouldn't have means they didn't seek outside help until it was too late. After all, to seek outside help would be to admit that they broke the rules and took something off-planet in the first place. The fact that they illegally took something from an expedition that they shouldn't have is the "sin" that unleashes the evil of the antagonist on the protagonists, per horror movie parlance.
So, to sum things up, you don't need to worry about writing a law that specifically allows people to take souvenirs to make your plot work. People are going to take souvenirs no matter what you do, and if real life is any indication people will mostly turn a blind eye to it like people do from someone stealing pens from the office unless they are really brazen with what they steal (e.g., an entire spaceship), what they steal is obviously and extremely dangerous (e.g., an entire spaceship), or whoever the commanding officer is at the time is a real hardass and doesn't allow the rules to be bent under any circumstances.
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**No Biologicals, no weapons** i.e. a face hugger is *not* a collectable nor is someones antique nuclear hand grenade. All tech items are checked/scanned for purpose and function before boarding.
Other than that a contract with potentially severe civil and criminal penalties requiring all collectables to be logged, scanned and tagged to its owners before boarding so there are no fights over ownership at a later date.
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Year 2730 AC¹. Generation Starship Epsilon arrives to the planet Gliese 180 c. Obivious signs of intelligent life are observed. To prevent interference, inhabitants of GS|ε stay on the ship for the time being. For the next few decades GS|ε has actively sent small groups consisting of scientists and exodiplomats. First contact is made soon after arrival, and a minimal common language is established. The results are quite surprising:
* **The civilization existed for at least millions of years**. A continous biological evolution can be observed through this, albeit somewhat slower than on Earth. Despite this long time of existing, technological supremacy is not apparent.
* **The inhabitants lack any sign of even the basics of mathematic and predictive thinking, and have very limited abstract thinking.** Everything they know must be based on experience, and they can't make predictions. They might know how a tool functions, but have no idea *why* it does, and beside blatantly obivious cases they won't have an idea what will happen if they try something new.
* **They are very curious and playful**, and definetly not "dumb". Give them a nail and a hammer, they will do a lot of things with it, and eventually they will hit the nail with a hammer in the right setup and put it in a wood. They will fail to see *why* it works though. In the same playful trial-and-error way they will eventually figure you can join two pieces of wood with a nail. But they would never figure these out without actually doing them.
* **Every technology they have is the result of pure chance**. They will only make tools they already did. If one of them by accident cuts a stone badly, and ends up making an axe instead of a gammer, then they will know how to make an axe. If a wheel on a rod falls in water in a lucky way and it starts to rotate, they invent waterwheel. If they experienced before that a rotating rod can be used in such and such a way, they will use it. But they won't ask themselves why it rotates. They won't try to deliberately improve it by wings.
* **They can recognize numbers but can't do (serious) math.** They can e.g. distinguish groups of e.g. 3 and groups of 4, and they may know from experience that joining two groups of 3 will give a group of 6. But if noone observed what happens if you join two group of 10, they won't know it will be a group of 20, even if they've observed a group of 20 before. They only know numbers they can observe
* **They have supermemory, as in they remember everything they ever saw for a lifetime.** If an individual sees the process of making a device, be however complicated, he will remember every step. If you give him the neccessary tools and the same starting materials, he will be able to reproduce the device (given he has good enough motoric abilities). Fail to supply one ingredient, and - unless he knows how to make it - he will fail and can't change the design on purpose.
* **They have an extensive spoken and writen language**. Despite the lacking scientific mindset, their literatric capabilities are surprisingly vaste, and their records - including technical descriptions - are continous through their whole million-year history. Knowledge is rarely lost upon death.
* **They have a basic concept of time, but only see the future through their past.** Though they won't have the abstract concept of past, present and future itself, they understand the difference between past memories, present happenings, and the things they aim to. They know what aim they have (crafting an axe), and they know what actions they will do to achieve them, if they have the knowledge. But if they deter from their memories they won't be able to predict what will happen, and won't think of it. In this sense they live more in the past, as opposed to the future-based humans. As they lack mathematical concepts, they can't measure time exactly or even vaguely. Their perception on elasped time goes at most as far as "just now", "a while ago", "ages before" and "before I born".
* **The lifespawn of an individual is undetermined**. As they lack mathematical concepts, they don't measure and record birth and death time, and can't give even a vague description. All that known is that during the 2-3 decades GS|ε spent at the planet so far, any sign of aging was not observed. As far as we know they might even live for hundreds of human years.
**My question: Given arbritrary long prior civilization lifespan, what would be the biggest technological level this civilization could reach? Assume that the mindset is the result of evolution and won't change seriously.**
My reasoning behind this question is that I believe there would be a "saturation" of advancement, where the technology simply becomes too complicated to plausibly find it out by chance, even given an extremely long time. But where would this level be? Pre-industrial revolution level in 1800s are probably OK - we didn't have much science before anyway. Cars? maybe, but it would take long time. Spaceships? Unfausible at first, but hey, it's a million years...
### Edit, to clarify what does"no science" mean:
**They completely lack ability to recognize abstract patterns, and they don't know how to make deductions.**
* They know that a nail goes across two slice of wood, and joins them.
* They won't know that a sharp thin object can be used to join two
things together.
* They won't know that the nail goes through the wood because it's sharp and the wood is soft.
* They may realize by chance that three piece of wood can be joined by a single nail, but won't think of this themselves until someone accidentally does it.
Basically everything goes as a "monkey see, monkey do", only the first monkey here is always an accident or a mistake. They don't innovate on purpose. In this regard, they're more close to animals than humans - their intelligence is supermemory and superb copying ability, not abstract thinking and ability to predict.
And there's **no other intelligent species** involved; up until now they developed everything on their own. (Some other answers already considered aliens, this edit was made after they born).
Basically, the question I wish to explorle: *how much of technology can be discovered accidentally and without involving scientific research or purposeful engineering?*
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*¹ After Cataclysm*
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**Musings:**
You are positing a kind of sophont --- an intelligent species --- that much is a given. These sophonts, however, are very different from us in the nature of their intelligence. You don't say as much, but I think that's pretty clear from the evidence.
They play and are curious and form what you call a "civilisation", and thus must be social in nature. They can't put two and two together in a mathematically meaningful way, but they understand some concept of quantitative difference (they can see and understand that two small quantities make a bigger quantity), so they get things like bigger & smaller and more & less.
They understand Function. However, they lack a train of thought and can arrive at no conclusion given one or more novel or pre-existing data points. When presented with new things, they can not in any way determine function from form and can not even understand that form lends to or even has a function. Yet, when a function is serendipitously discovered, they immediately understand the function and can recreate that function based on previous discovery. They may not be able to fashion a hammer or nail from steel, but could fashion a hammer from rock and nails from wood. They might then be stymied at the wooden nail's recalcitrance at not being driven into the piece of wood the way the steel nail did.
They have a long lifespan, presumably no predators!, good memories and language which they somehow managed to chancily discover how to write down!
**Comparison:**
Human technological civilisation advances, at least in part, by predetermination and application of old methods, ideas, and machines to new problems. We looked at birds and wished to fly. Icarus glued wings onto his arms and, jumping, fell to his death. We eventually invented kites and motors and wheels and nuts and bolts and things. Eventually someone decided that we've got enough bits and pieces that we can actually take to the air. And so the dirigible was invented, and mankind flew. And later someone else decided that he didn't want to have all that explosive hydrogen right above his head, so he invented an aeroplane. We understand cause & effect; before & after; we can plan and set out to accomplish the plan.
These people have material culture, but have no concept of "technology". They can not predetermine and can not apply old or present knowledge to new problems. They can not plan and thus can not set themselves to the task of accomplishing the plan. They can not conceive of cause & effect or before & after. They look at birds and can make no connexion between a flying bird, its wings and their own ability to make things. There is no Icarus at any time in this people's past or future history. They can not make leaps of faith.
**Conclusion:**
The people you have come up with are, essentially, a playful and curious and friendly kind of robot, almost. They can be set to a task, but they can not conceive the task in advance. They can understand that a tool functions and they can make the tool perform its function, but they can not conceive how or why it functions, nor can they devise the tool from earlier principles.
Given all these constraints & definitions I'd argue that in fact, this race ***can not actually "advance" by any meaningful conceptualisation of the term***. They can only accumulate the random effects of their playfully ignorant journey through their world.
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**As Advanced as Us ... Eventually.**
There's a few assumptions I'm going to make first. I know you describe them as 'curious and playful' and not dumb, but given the rest of what you say, that's inaccurate. If they're curious, they're going to not not only be 'not dumb', but fairly smart. Especially given their eidetic memory. If they can remember everything, then let's say they once added two groups of threes together and it equaled six. Then they know, for a fact, that two threes equal six. They can do this with all of simple math (really, everything before geometry and calculus) and, if they're described as 'curious', that means, at minimum, every single one of these aliens should be able to perform more or less all of basic math. If we include the 'extensive language' aspect, the fact that information is rarely lost upon death, and the eidetic memory aspect, this means that there will always be someone in the tribe (or group or whatnot) who has the ability to perform all of these calculations. They *have* to have numbers, and given those numbers, they should have the ability to measure things, i.e. days, because you've given them perfect recall, so they should be able to count the number of days they've been alive.
You claim that they'll fail to be able to create something from memory if they lack a component. You also mention that they'll only be able to create something by accident, and they won't seek to improve something that they've already made. That seems ... kind of wrong? If they're naturally curious, then they'll keep experimenting and trying new things to do, even if they have no idea *why* things works, just that they do. The eldest of the race would have memories and experiences so vast that they'll develop hunches about things and be able to apply knowledge. For instance, let's say that they use wooden spears to hunt, but rock axes to cut down trees. Might not an elder try, just for variety, to place a rock tip on the wooden spear? And let's get back to the substitution part. Edison famously tried hundreds of different ways to make a lightbulb. If they're missing components, they can just try substitutes until one works.
Not to mention that there's an old science joke - "All science is either physics or stamp collecting". Science, for the most part, is observation and classification. These past hundreds years have been an exception to the rule. The vast majority of the history of science was done by people who had no idea what 'elements' were, or 'cells', or 'computers', yet were able to invent great things and make large strides. If all these aliens can do is poke things and see what happens, they can go far.
So the question is, how far? Well, that's not so easy to answer. You see, we humans use logic and build upon previous things we've built, using that prior knowledge to guide us to the next step. We hypothesize as to the reason *why* things work, not just that they *do* work, and use those hypotheses to advance our understanding of the world around us. These aliens do not do that. They'll observe and experiment, sure, but they won't analyze. And this makes them equivalent to the legendary 1,000 monkeys locked in a room trying to type Shakespeare. In other words, they're trying to *brute force* science, and that's a sentence that I didn't think I'd ever type.
Given that, you can actually expect them to achieve just about everything we've achieved and go ahead of us, but there's a catch. If you look at our curve for scientific progress, it's a curve going up - the more science we've made, the easier it is for us to make more science. Hence the rapid advance of technology. On the other hand, your aliens have it the opposite - science becomes harder and harder as it advances, and without knowing *why* and just using brute force, their advance will be slower as they progress. So their technological curve is going to be the inverse of ours, basically - while we make leaps and strides, they'll move at a snail's pace. But they'll never hit a wall and stall - sometimes they'll just be stuck there for a really long time.
Where does that leave them? Well, it all likelihood, they're probably somewhere around the cusp of some revolution that they're just progressing really slowly into. I'd guess either the Industrial Revolution, or possibly the Renaissance; though as an author, it's up to your discretion.
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Any answer is arbitrary, but I would say not past the 1700s. Human's (somewhat depending on what you call a human vs. proto-human) accidentally made their first stone tools 2.4 million years before they made the bow and arrow. They very possibly made those chipped flint tools the same way your species invents, just goofing off hitting things together, find something cool, teach it to others.
In the late 1600s we see the scientific method start to come into prominence, and things take off for us. But that method is fundamentally impossible for your species.
So we know from our own planet that without the ability to theorize and plan for the future, and be good at math, you can be stuck at one tech level longer than the existence of a species before it evolves to another one.
Which, btw, I see as the only real problem with you interestingly alien species there. A civilization that old is going to be populated by beings who have evolved into a new species probably at least a few times during its existence, unless something stops them. Of course, either side of that could be a cool story point.
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# They'd probably die out fairly quickly.
We're talking about a species that would struggle to invent sex if left without example from their own species. Their children would die at an astronomical rate because you can't necessarily repeat the same actions from one baby to the next. They may never learn how to light a fire or cook. The concept of making even the crudest of clothes may be beyond them.
There's a good chance that entire tribes will eat something poisonous and be wiped out, because there was too long a step between cause and effect, the same is true of not defecating near the water source.
Taking the step from living in caves to building huts with local materials will probably be too much for them as it requires too much creative thinking.
Humans are obligate tool users, we encounter a situation and the thought is of which tool would resolve said situation, then find that tool or make it with whatever comes to hand, improvising if necessary. This species, if also obligate tool users, will die out before they even make it off the savannah due to lack of the creative spark required to take those key steps.
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But faced with necessity this species seems to be unable to invent, and hence will ultimately die out.
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# To the cusp of the industrial era
Then the long-term consequences of their actions catch up to them. Crime, pollution, overpopulation, disease, and famine restrict their potential. Eventually an environmental disaster, natural or artificial, will knock them back.
## Bacteria / [Unsupervised Machine Learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsupervised_learning)
To sum up: it's a species which lacks abstract thought and the ability to *purposely* invent new solutions, but try out things randomly. It can recognize and remember useful mistakes as improvements, and they can pass that knowledge along to others and future generations.
This is very similar to asexual [natural selection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection) with [horizontal gene transfer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer) practiced by bacteria. But instead of DNA its knowledge. And instead of random mutations it's "playing".
An analogy can also be made to unsupervised, automated machine learning. Lots of beings all doing the same thing but slightly differently and sharing the best techniques. But with a narrow focus on the immediate goal.
How fast they improve depends on how often they make and recognize beneficial improvements, the population size, how fast improvements spread, what environmental pressures they face, ***and what fraction of their collective memory survives disasters***.
That last one is very important. With no ability to purposefully adapt to changes and predict outcomes they will continue to do the same things even as their environment changes around them. Rapid environmental change may kill off a large portion of the population in an area taking their knowledge with them.
## Unregulated, short-term profiteers
Any good idea which seems to offer an immediate improvement will be adopted, even if this is ultimately destructive in the long run. They are unable to connect long term consequences with their actions, nor can they connect the consequences of individual actions with collective consequences.
Using the machine learning analogy, they can only recognize an improvement within their individual idea of what is "better". A better axe can chop down trees faster: that's good! More trees means more wood: also good! Everyone starts doing this because everyone agrees more wood is better. Where did all the trees go? It's a mystery.
They are like an unregulated market of nothing but short-term profiteers. They will take whatever action seems to offer the immediate best result. So long as their actions don't have widespread consequences, they can survive. But as their power and population grows, this lack of foresight and coordination will eventually cause them to destroy themselves.
This will eventually lead to famine, societal collapse, and a large portion of the population (and their collective knowledge) dying off.
## Crime
One day, one of the members realizes it can get things faster and easier by taking them from their smaller neighbors. Individually, their smaller neighbors can't stop them. They are unable to conceive of the outcomes of collective action, and are highly unlikely to stumble on the idea of collective defense.
Such a species would be incapable of developing empathy or the concept of ownership. Crime and caste system would develop with the stronger simply taking from the weaker. The denser the population, the worse the problem. An increasing portion of the population would become parasitic.
## Disease
Disease will limit their population density.
They're not the only ones learning on this planet. Microbial predators are as well. As population density increases, diseases will follow. Lacking abstract thought, they will not be able to associate their earlier behavior with illness and death weeks later. Lacking scientific or medical curiosity, they will be unable to understand the large scale patterns of disease. The simplest associations of disease with their own excrement cannot be made.
## Famine
Their advancements will allow them to support increased population... to a point. Lacking foreknowledge, they will be unable to avoid overtaxing their resources.
Let's say a farmer discovers they a new crop or technique which offers a higher yield, so everyone starts using it. But it damages the soil, and after a while yields plummet: famine. Or perhaps its less drought resistant, next drought: famine. Lacking abstract thought, it's unlikely they'll be able to connect their new behavior with these long-term consequences. They will continue their behavior and continue to exhaust the soil.
## Pollution
Lacking the ability to predict the consequences of new actions, eventually they will destroy their environment. A simple example, the first to invent fire will contentedly watch as everything burns down around them; they've never seen fire before, they don't understand how it spreads, how to stop it, or even that fire consuming everything is bad. As their civilization advances, the destructive potential of their inventions inadvertent will become worse and worse.
They will adapt short-term improvements which poison their soil, air, and water beyond the ability of their environment to absorb it. They will not be able to connect their actions to the resulting reduced harvests, illnesses, and death. The larger their population and more sophisticated their technology, the worse the effect.
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It could be as advanced as the civilizations from which they stole technology are.
I mean, such a species could watch someone pilot a spacecraft, and then know how to pilot a spacecraft. Then they pull a spacecraft apart and they know exactly how it's built.
Or even better, maybe they just get taught another species' language, and they could read and memorize everything that other species knows.
Maybe it's already happened and those other species from which they stole are just no longer around.
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**Only limited by time.**
You know how if you sit a finite amount of monkeys each in front of a typewriter they will eventually (i.e. in infinite time) write all the works of Shakespeare? Or, more formally, if you produce random entries for a finite amount of time you will obtain all possible finite combinations.
Your aliens don't even need memory, or a purpose, or a mind. Just by performing random actions they will eventually (infinite time) reach all possible scientific knowledge and invent every possible invention (assuming these sets are finite and composed of finite elements).
Actual infinite time is impossible. At the very least we should consider the expected life of the universe. But that's their only constraint, time.
Now, how long will they take to reach a certain technological milestone (and the converse: how advanced they will be at a certain point in time) is a much harder question. I'm not sure we can answer it, if we consider the possibility that they might not follow our current civilization's path to science and technology. Perhaps they become very advanced in astronomy (like the Mayans), or they make great concrete early in their history (like the Romans), or arts (like the Greek), ships (Vikings), gunpowder (Chinese), etc. Perhaps they come up with gunpowder before bronzeworking!
We have taken a path to our current civilization that seems like the most logical one (with the tools that we have, i.e. abstract thinking and socialization), but with random inventions you will probably get a very different path, and even a very different civilization altogether, such that nuclear-powered wooden planes might exist because they can build safe nuclear fission reactors but never made a plane out of metal.
If some results depend on previous ones, and all have equal chance, then the further you go into the science tree (i.e. the more prerequisites a given advancement has), the more time that scenario will take, and the less likely it is that that particular advancement is made while other aspects are severely lacking (for example, **wooden FTL spaceships** because they can't even work steel). Think of it like playing a strategy game (Age of Empires, Civilization, etc) and researching technologies completely at random. It is mathematically possible to reach very advanced stages on one branch without developing others much, but it's less likely to happen (remember, we're researching at random).
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I strongly believe they're more creative than us and capable of pursuing what they accomplished through brute forcing to build things that seems impossible because their mind-set doesn't set a boundary for what could be achieved.
Maths make you overthink and it leads to more and more problems. You could assume this planet is full of peoples who are similar to Steve Jobs.
In my opinion, this civilization has \* *highest abstraction* and it leads to more innovations.
A world full of people with **dyscalculia** is possible. Let the **bruteforcing** be their way to advance. It's *democratic*.
[1] I conducted a research on an encounter with outer-civilization and it appear they are kind of heavily religious and only has advanced flying technologies.
Very similar to the [2] ***Spellbinder*** series I watched years ago. It's possible that this civilization could master a standalone area and be like monkeys for other areas.
[1] <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a34dme/this-guy-paints-the-sex-he-allegedly-has-with-aliens>
[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellbinder_(TV_series)>
\*I speak with programmatic mind. You can build programmes without learning assembly. While this notion has some flaws, I have no way to express it further in a reasonable sense.
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I suspect they will be way more advanced than us.
If they can make some basic conclusions - war is bad, things are better if people are nice to each other, we should help other people and not be selfish - and act on them, they are likely to have reached a far more enlightened condition than any human civilisation thus far.
Science or technology per se doesn't make you civilised. A barbarian with a spaceship and a disintegrator ray is still a barbarian, and a civilised person in a mud hut is still civilised.
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## Early Stone Age at Best
Without experimentation and imagination, history tells us that getting past the early stone age is nearly impossible. Let's say your aliens make a fire, and surround the fire with a retainer wall of copper ore. The ore will melt, and your aliens will see the metal. The human reaction to this is "Cool, I got something new and I should see what I can do with it.", but your aliens will just leave it there because they lack the imagination to FIND a use for it. Without any inclination to experiment on its discovery, you alien will just look at his melted rocks and decide not to use those rocks any more because they melt. Not only will your society not learn to make copper tools, but because of how good they are at remembering and passing on knowledge, they will collectively remember to not even try doing that again for the next hundred thousand years because they will not want thier fire pits to melt.
In fact, they probably won't make fires at all because the first thing they will do with a fire is burn themselves, decide fire is bad, and make good and sure to avoid it at all costs like most animals do.
In short, you are basically describing chimpanzees. We know from experimenting with chimpanzees that they can learn to communicate and share technology from one generation to the next, and use all sorts of tools like you describe, yet millions of years in the wild and the most advanced tool they've come up with on their own is sticking a twig into a termite mound to get the bugs out... and honestly, there is no proof that they did not see a human do that first.
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Think a Lord of the Rings-esque quest to save their kingdom. This quest would also involve detours, but I can just factor those in later. The continent is around the size of Australia, with a lot of grassland and a dense jungle in the middle. There's also a relatively large mountain range they have to cross, but they have paths to follow to make it easier going.
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Let's do some basic math;
Australia is approximately 4000km wide, and a good figure for an average walking speed is 5km/h, meaning that in total it would take around 800 hrs to walk from one side of a continent like Australia to the other.
**BUT:**
It's never as simple as that. For a start, it's not a perfect plain, food and water is not going to be distributed evenly across the continent, and inns aren't going to be in straight lines or evenly spaced. Also, you need to sleep, rest, etc.
So let's assume that we think of this trek as a job. That means, that we make 8hrs worth of progress each working day. Let's further assume that we only 'work' 6 days a week. This gives us some time to double back when we forget our favourite elven sword, go sideways to find food or a water source, and also account for the fact that sometimes the best inns to stay at are only 6hrs walk from the last one.
That means, that we're talking 48 hrs of progress per week, and that equates to 240 km. Let's round it up to 250 because our warriors are eager to pursue their quest and because it makes the math easier - It's going to take you 16 weeks, or nearly 4 months.
Of course, that's setting a more blistering pace than you might like. 8 hrs marching per day sounds wasteful, but remember your questors need to carry armaments and supplies, at least some water, potentially food reserves - unless they have carts and the like, that's actually quite heavy going, and even with carts that is going to wear them out pretty quickly. So, there are going to be stages where they need more rest, and this also doesn't factor in inclement weather and the like. If you factor in another 50% for fatigue and bad weather, let's call it around 6 months.
There's a lot you can do to alter this figure in your world of course; the basics are all in this explanation, the rougher you make it on your questors, the longer they'll take. If you give them horses and the like to carry their stuff, and support teams along the way, they may actually make it faster.
The one thing that's absolutely certain - don't try this in REAL Australia. The middle of our fair continent is essentially desert and many people have died out there in cars and the like because they didn't carry enough water and other essential supplies and have broken down. I mention this because if you put ANY desert or dangerous terrain between your starting point and your destination, you dramatically increase time, risk and supplies needed to reach your final point safely.
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For comparison, Roman soldiers were expected to march 30 km (20 Roman miles) a day with 20 kg equipment. The march itself was expected to take 5 hours, for a mean speed while marching of 6 km/h (a fast walking speed). The rest of the time was spent foraging and setting up camp, camping, and striking camp.
20 kg is a lot of baggage to carry around. According to [an article about hiking](https://gearjunkie.com/thru-hiker-hiking-explained), fit hikers can hike 25 miles (40 km) a day with a typical backpack (including tent and sleeping bag) daily for 4 months. This probably does not include time for foraging.
The [average walking distance on the Camino Frances trail](https://www.caminodesantiago.me/community/threads/what-is-your-average-walking-distance-per-day.46735/) is 21-26 km a day, but typical Camino wanderers are ordinary people, not trained travelers. 30% of Camino travelers manage more than this, with 13% managing 31 km or more.
About 30 km per day hence seems realistic, even in somewhat rugged terrain, if the travellers are reasonably fit and don't carry too much. The walking itself would take 5-6 hours, leaving the rest of the day for rest, foraging, and camping.
Australia is 4,000 km east to west, and this would hence take 133 days or 4 months. The mountain range may add a few weeks to this estimate.
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In the 1830s-1860s, caravans of [Conestoga wagons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conestoga_wagon) and livestock and children traveled the 2000 miles from [Eastern Nebraska to Western Oregon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Trail) in about 7 months. Includes traversing multiple mountain ranges.
That's roughly 15 miles a day across easy terrain, 5 miles a day across difficult terrain, with daily time for foraging, cooking, laundry, making and striking camp, caring for the sick, rounding up wayward livestock, etc.
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A healthy person can sustainably hike ~5hrs per day, but they can not cover the same amount of distance per hour depending on terrain; so, the ratio of mountains, jungels, grasslands and roads will make a big difference for your travelers.
There are a lot of conflicting resources and formulas for estimating hiking times through various terrains; so, I'll try to aggregate info to make some rough estimates. First off, this is a long march so assume you have a lot of gear putting your base speed at 2mi/hr instead of the more ideal 3-4 mi/hr a person can hike during a day trip. Second, there will be places that travel is VERY slow going like when you have to stop to climb a cliff or ford a river, so there's some guess work that goes into averaging out rough terrain.
Flat paths & roads: 2 mi/hr -> 10mi/day
Unbeaten grasslands and sloping/gravel paths: 1.5 mi/hr -> 7.5 mi/day
Sparse forests, loose sand or gravel, steep paths: 1 mi/hr -> 5 mi/day
Thicker Forests, wetlands, and rough hills: .75mi/hr -> 3.75mi/day
Mountainous or swampy terrain : .5mi/hr -> 2.5 mi/day
Next, look at a map of your trek and figure out how much you need to travel for each terrain type drawing a line through the rough you expect to take. For example, if you're spending a lot of time in the wilderness like in the LotR, it might look like:
Flat paths & roads: 800 mi
Unbeaten grasslands and sloping/gravel paths: 600 mi
Sparse forests, loose sand or gravel, steep paths: 500 mi
Thicker Forests, wetlands, and foot hills: 400 mi
Mountainous or swampy terrain : 150 mi
Then divide each distance by speed and add the number up for total days.
(80 + 80 + 100 + 107 + 60) = 427 days.
Your exact results may vary a lot from this if your group decides to mostly travel by road, or travel lighter, or if you decide they are exceptionally fit, or needs to take a 300 mile trek through the underground twisting caverns of Moria, but either way, you'll want to use a method similar to this to approximate your travel time, because without accounting for terrain, there is not really such thing as an average hiking speed.
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The key question is if they will be able to get food from inns or markets, at least every couple of days, or if they have to forage practically all the way.
The [Lewis and Clark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_and_Clark_Expedition) expedition had slightly more modern technology, but it should be a good example. They did about 8,000 miles in 28 months, including lengthy stops over the winters.
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For comparison, the Chinese Communists' Long March was about 6000 km in 370 days over rough terrain (9000 km according to the official Chinese line). Although they had roads, still, with tens of thousands, that's difficult movement.
In 1846-1847, the Mormon Battalion marched from Iowa to San Diego, covering about 3000 km in 6 months. Again, that's with a baggage trains, wagons, some extraneous people, and making stops along the way.
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I've created a city at the joining point of two rivers, and I'm trying to determine the population ceiling. I'm just going for a general idea of relative size, and so far I've just been making towns and settlements get larger as I go downstream from the mountains to the ocean. This city I justified the existence of with the settlements established on its adjacent river's tributaries. There will be another, even larger city near where the river meets the ocean. However, I've begun thinking that it may be more logical to have this first city be the largest because it is central. This question is essentially: is upstream trade in my world viable enough to cause the more central location be more populated rather than the downstream location?
My world is a fairly standard dnd 5e feudal society, with a lot of leniency to make room for all the homebrew bits of magic I add in. There are no magical vehicles or beasts of burden that could be used as a fantasy equivalent to steam power.
Edit: I basically didn't realize that you could tow barges with animals and I thought that upstream trade was a lot harder than it actually is. Thanks so much for the answers guys, I'll have to start doing some more research into the economics of medieval cities.
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**Economic Geography**
Transport economics is the driver. Geography is the context.
Sea / river transport is cheapest per tonne mile. Road transport is the most expensive. Some places you can only get to by water, some places only by road.
@AlexP and @Separatrix give great answers. It is quite common for a Metropolis to be serviced by an associated smaller port city.
If the hinerland geography is right (fertile uplands, valuable mineral resources, yadda yadda) traders in goods will look, not for the shortest route, but for the cheapest route to a viable market.
Then the market takes over.
I've got a pile of stuff at the river and an enterprising captain willing to buy it, do I keep ownership and ship it further, with all it's risks, or sell it now but make less profit? If I sell now I can go back and dig up / grow more stuff ...
Once you have trade you have traders, and voila, city.
It is entirely reasonable to have a large commercial city inland where the trade routes meet, 3 water routes and ? roads in your case. The more trade routes, the more varied the types of goods, the more opportunities for trade and value adding. Coal up one river, iron ore up the other, bingo - Sheffield.
And why would I move either 1 km more than necessary before turning it into a higher value, lower mass (cheaper to transport) product?
Also remember that sustainable trade is always two way. After all, where do the picks that I'm using to dig this stuff up (or whatever) come from?
Lots of fat wealthy merchants waiting at the centre of least effort of the local transport network for the next money making opportunity.
Your major city **should** be at the nexus of the greatest number of trade routes.
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Rivers are essentially medieval railroads. They were the one and only method to move large amounts of cargo over land. Ships can either sail up the stream, if the river is slow enough, or barges can be towed up. Towing is very efficient compared to pulling a cart, due to the low resistance of water, and also there are no broken axles.
Towing of course requires a tow road for the draft animals to walk on.
If your city either has a big enough river and/or tow roads, trading upstreams is perfectly viable
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There's a technical term you're looking for: **Navigable**
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> (of an area of water) deep, wide, or safe enough for a boat to go through - [source](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/navigable)
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How far upriver your waterway is navigable is the deciding factor in how far inland you can have your major city. This normally only runs as far as the tidal range of the river, however some slow flowing rivers such as the Seine or Danube are navigable far beyond the tidal range meaning cities can use the river for trading far inland of the sea.
One major advantage of being at the upper end of the tidal range of a river is that above that point the river will be fresh water, giving your city a water supply as well as trade access. Closer to the sea they may have limited fresh water, fundamentally limiting the size of the city you can have.
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The city I'm from, "Ulm" which is the first city on the River Danube where the River is navigable. Ulm was a pretty large and rich city, because it was perfect for trading. The Danube was easy to cross to until the point the River "Iller" joint. And after this, people were able to ship goods downstream. Ulm was famous for their "Ulmer Schachteln" (Ulms Boxes) which were very simple ships with no drive. They were used to transport goods fabricated in Ulm downwards into other cities down the river. When they reached their destination, the goods and the boats (the wood) were sold, and the merchants would travel with their salesmoney upstream by carriage.
This leads to lots of production and manufacturing in and around the city of Ulm, and where's work, there'll be people. So yes, it's pretty viable to have a large(r) city upstream.
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As others already said ships could sail upstream or could be towed. So upstream traffic works.
When it comes to the size of the city there are some other points you should keep in mind:
* How is it with taxes? A city and a good fitting spot could tax everything coming from up the stream and thus be rich.
* What is it with the rest of the logistics? Rivers are key to transportation. But there are cities in a day or twos reach of the river that depend on caravans to get goods from the river-trading. Said city could be a key point to switch from river to caravan to get to other cities a bit off.
* For going up the stream you probably need other ships than going down. Something more fit to being towed and resist the stream. Those need to be build and the city with the best builders for ships probably has an advantage. And work for those working towards building ships and thus a reason for them to live in the city.
those things could reason into why a city up the stream is bigger then some more down.
[Answer]
* Paris is a very large city in the middle of France, somewhere on the river Seine. What's the name of the city at the mouth of the Seine? It's Le Havre. Paris has 2 million inhabitants, or 12 million in the entire metropolitan area. Le Havre has 200,000. Paris was by far the largest city in France in the last millennium and a half.
* Cairo is a very large city on the Nile. It has 20 million inhabitants. At the mouth of the Nile is Alexandria; it has 5 million inhabitants. Note that in the antiquity, in Hellenistic and Roman times, Alexandria was by far the largest city in Egypt, but this changed in the Middle Ages.
* Budapest and Vienna are large cities on the Danube. At the mouth of the Danube is Sulina, in Romania; it's a small town.
* In America, the mighty Mississippi flows through St. Louis, Memphis, Baton Rouge and New Orleans; they are all large cities.
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[Question]
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How can we have a world that is inhabited only by zombies and yet continues to be populated?
For the purposes of this question, I envisage the type of zombie that has been infected by a virus, is clinically dead, yet still able to move around, is compelled to seek out non-infected living people, and is gradually rotting away.
Notes: If the head is completely separated from the body then they are no longer active. They require at least some remnant of muscle tissue to move around. Once all the flesh has rotted off they are simply inanimate skeletons.
Zombies can be considered to retain a degree of intelligence (perhaps half their original IQ) but are driven by a lust for fresh human flesh even though there is no longer any available.
**Question**
How can I explain a planet completely populated by the above type of zombie for thousands of years where all normal people died out long ago. (There are no pockets of 'normals' anywhere on the planet whether in captivity or otherwise).
---
There is no magic in this world.
[Answer]
**It can't work**
Zombies don't breed thus their number can't increase. They don't heal because they are dead and finally, even if they don't rot, a body won't last for thousands of years. Simply moving around, the body will wear out.
The only way I could see this working is through a self repair, self replicating nanobot gone bad. It spreads and replicates from a bite and keeps repairing the body but breaks the mind whilst doing so.
Without some sort of regen, a body won't last for thousands of years.
[Answer]
## Budding
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/revIu.jpg)
The only way I can think of to keep a population of dead-but-not-really-dead reproducing is to modify the life cycle of the zombie infection. When heads or other limbs drop off, the infection enters a regenerative mode: a photosynthetic "rot" spreads over the surface, and rhizomes drive into the surface to pull in nutrients from the soil.
Surprisingly, in this stage, the zombie infection shows some very useful traits. It has preserved some of the least differentiated human cells and induces them to become blastocysts. What digs its way out of the grave maybe a year (maybe a few years) later is something partly-zombie/partly-living, but never human. The virus stops helping, but does not become fully parasitic until maturity, at which point "budding" by parts rotting off happens again.
[Answer]
People don't become zombies instantly. They die, are buried and rise a week later. The funeral parlours also have a practice of embalming *everyone*.
As such, when they arise, they are largely immune to rotting. And the authorities took a while to come to the "bitten by zombie=become a zombie" conclusion
[Answer]
**Clones**
The zombies themselves alone will perish over time, the only way is to keep producing new zombies, Create a machine able to create clones really fast on a regular basis, but the machine somehow ended infected by the virus, so all the clones that are born in the final process became zombies, you can even keep some non infected ones to be zombie food.
**Zombie Reproduction**
The virus does not kill the people fast, it would control the chemistry of the brain, keeping the body alive, first it would make the infected seek reproduction, the first stage would be the mindles desire to reproduce, the second and final would be death after reproduction for the males and for the females after labor, the new born zombies would be a new species a altered human that live with a parasitic virus, the new specie will grow at faster rate, and when arrive a the reproduction stage, they copulate and die, becoming living corpses.
[Answer]
I can only see this working in a world that looks like the one depicted in [I Am Legend](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/) (referring strictly to the movie, haven't read the book yet).
The "zombies" shown in this story are actually modified human beings. They are harmed by sunlight and their bodies are not rotting, but their psychological profile fits your description (lower IQ's).
IMO, If you take out the rotting from the equation, reproduction gets a bit more feasible. In your place, I'd say that there are two kinds of zombies.
The first kind are the ones who look just like the ones from I Am Legend, the "alive" ones. They turned because they got infected by the virus (airborne) or because they got bit, but in a minor way (a little chew to the arm, something almost irrelevant, that poses no threat of death). These zombies are still living beings, still have some IQ (not enough to speak, but enough to live in groups probably) and they can reproduce - but hunting humans for food is what drives them. This will be a temporary phase of the zombie virus in the human body.
The second type of zombie is the actual walking dead. After some time (up for you to decide) the I Am Legend ones "die" and become these. Their bodies start to rot and they turn into... zombies. They can also be born when someone dies in a gruesome way (like being the lunch of a few other zombies). The remains of what used to be that person won't become an I Am Legend, he'll become a zombie straight away. This will be the ultimate stage of the zombie virus.
[Answer]
If they cannot reproduce, they will mathematically go extinct.
It might take a while but since they naturally decay and become skeleton they will eventually all die.
[Answer]
Maybe the zombies shut down if they are rotting too much to preserve itself somehow (Maybe the zombie pathogen takes energy out from the muscle tissue to keep the zombie going, and without moving they won't need to fall apart) and will stay dormant that way unless theres a food source near by. (The paathogen might slow down decomposition by killing nearby bacteria) This turns them into mummies and they can last longer :)
[Answer]
## Greek-god style reproduction
The Greek gods reproduced in lots of weird ways. One that comes to mind is the birth of Athena, who was born from Zeus' forehead.
>
> [Athena](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Athena-Greek-mythology), the daughter of Zeus, was produced without a mother and emerged full-grown from his forehead. An alternative story was that Zeus swallowed Metis, the goddess of counsel, while she was pregnant with Athena so that Athena finally emerged from Zeus.
>
>
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Now, of course gods are not zombies. But since zombies *are* mythological creatures, I figure a bit of mythology can't hurt. You don't want magic, but it's not magic. Not strictly, anyways. It doesn't involve handwaving, at least- and from what I've observed reading the other posts, there's no way to answer your question without modifying at least some part of the requirements.
So your zombies reproduce as Zeus did: they emerge fully-grown from an adult zombie's forehead. Fits nicely with your explanation of how the undead become dead:
>
> If the head is completely separated from the body then they are no longer active. They require at least some remnant of muscle tissue to move around. Once all the flesh has rotted off they are simply inanimate skeletons.
>
>
>
There you have it. Once the head is separated from the zombie-body, the zombie can no longer reproduce by forehead means, and is thus, for all intents and purposes, dead in every sense of the word.
A bit out there, but it could work.
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[Question]
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I recently came across a game called dead space and a certain main antagonist species inside of the game. In this game you play as the main character who is trying to protect humanity from sentient race of beings called the the brethren moons.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BHPG2.jpg)
These are creatures that can reach a massive size of 2000 miles. They live in the void of space feeding off of intelligent species that become over populated throughout the galaxy.
Ignoring the evolution aspect of the creatures and where they would of originated from. What I want to know is if such a creature that size could even survive and reproduce, and what would happen to the core of the creature if it was that size.
[Answer]
**Almost certainly not.**
But that's not much fun, so let's try and think of ways to make it even remotely plausible:
First, the creature could use an actual moon or large asteroid as a core; i.e. the biological portion is only a relatively thin (though still stupendously massive) layer on top. This would dramatically cut down on the energy required to reproduce, and give it a structural core that it didn't need to grow itself.
The host planetoid could be the source of most the raw materials for the actual creature. It could also serve as a giant heat sink/source to help stabilize its temperature. The creature could dump heat into its core when energy is plentiful (when near a star, or feeding,) and draw upon it when it's scarce (i.e. in deep space.)
How it moves is going to be a problem. Barring science fiction Warps and such, the only remotely plausible (still nuts, note) method I can think of is something like a planetary-scale ion drive, where it continuously accelerates and ejects a small amount of core mass at extremely high velocity. Very little thrust, but excellent efficiency. It would also take advantage of gravitational slingshots as much as it can (being intelligent would be very helpful here.)
All of this means that the sucker is going to be very slow. You can model it pretty well from the more realistic generational space ship ideas. Hundreds if not thousands of years between target systems, during which it will need to be in a basically-dead hibernation state ("In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming...")
Then of course there's the issue of how & why it feeds on intelligent species... In any realistic scenario it would be much easier and filling to just feed on stellar radiation. You'd pretty much have to have a "psychic energy" angle in your world to make it plausible. Which given the Lovecraftian nature of the critter you may well have anyway.
[Answer]
# Not in real life, no.
1. A 2000 mile diameter organism would be between the size of mercury and mars. This organism would crush itself under its own gravity and die.
2. Keeping that much organic material alive and warm in interstellar space is very costly from a caloric intake perspective. Devouring an entire civilization would not provide enough calories to keep it warm and alive.
3. Movement, moving something this size requires an enormous amount of energy, which it can only get from devouring an intelligent species, but it would have to use much more energy to get itself from solar system to solar system, and it may or may not find an overpopulated species in a system it visits.
There are surely other reasons why this would not be possible, but it mostly can't be reconciled due to the energy requirements of such an organism. This guy really needs some sort of ship with a handwavium power source in order to do what it wants.
[Answer]
**Just to add.**
* **Energy**
Your creature is close in size to Earth's moon and lets take the same for mass.
Just on fast calc for energy needed to move (hope I did not mess up), with perfect antimatter-matter conversion: To move in or out would take around 350 million tonnes of humans(???) And you need to go in and out and have food for your body, savings, extra movements. I would say, it would need minimum of 1 billion tonnes from each planet it visits. For note, 1 kg is ~43 megatons, not so far from Tsar Bomba.
All humans on Earth would be around 500 million tonnes so not even worth a trip fuel. But you can eat some trees for salad and go find something more fleshy.
* **Pressure and heat**
Pressure and heat inside such creature would be massive. The temperature in the core of Moon is probably about 1600–1700 K. There is no way any life, with no magic involved, that would live with that.
But there is solution! Creature is only some 50 km thick and center is close to **hollow** or has real moon inside, taken as home by creature.
Close to hollow structure would lower energy needs and make viable more real ways-to-get and manage energy.
[Answer]
Yes it is fairly possible. I'll add a little more information as you can't ignore or skip over the hows and whys when discussing anything.
As a cullular manipulator the breathern moons/Necromorphs would have capabilitys we see in nature, like deep sleep hibernation stasis, cellular regeneration and surviving without need for food.
There is bacteria that was discovered outside of earths atmosphere on a satelite. Bacteria that can survive in the void/vaccum of space, as well as viruses(more specifically pyrons and a little dabbling with crispr to create a super virus) that can potentially forgoe alot of what we know about biology.
Plus the way these moons are created and develop are fascinating. Development Points that shouldn't be ignored when discussing things beyond ourselves in the limited perception we have of our place in the universe.
People are missing many of the realistic aspects of what necromorphs and the markers are. The breathern moons are just a product of the assimilation process caused by their energy source.
The real cause of how they begin is there are two distinct sets of Markers. A black one and many red ones produced by intelligent life that just so happened to be unfortunate enough to come across the black markers, or lead to reproduce them. The black one acts as a radio beacon or a relay thats connected to the other breathern moons.
For awnsers to some of your questions about how they move and their energy source, as well as how they are created. See the background information and where the developers have pulled their inspirations. They tended to get too imaginitive with the reality of science though.
black markers are sent out by these giant masses of infected living flesh and *dead flesh*. Creates a signal that draws intelligent life to it or creates lesser intelligent life to evolve to a higher conciousness. We are after all discussing entitys that are practically gods compared to us humans.
Every breathern moon is another previously assimilated intelligent species thats been cultivated and usually evolutionarily forced to a higher consciousness through the frequencys abilities to alter brain function. Consider the game to be in itself a darker horrifying theory on the theory of life in the universe. Its much more of a self exploratory look at cosmic horror.
Its unknown as to how it creates these black markers but my best educated guess is probably from iron and some other things to create an aloy from the blood in our own biological systems. Giving it structural support that can reinforce into steel with the already present carbon and resources pulled in through its assimilation process. Adding on to the hollow layer theory which could also allow it to propel itself through space like a jelly fish or octopus.
But the black marker itself is both a limitless power source that creates its own energy through some highly advanced use of frequencys that also effect psycho/nuerological brain function.
The red markers are the source of a reanimating bacterial(realistically it'd be a super multicelled virus) disease through airborne contact or direct infection from the freshly reanimated bodies that aren't fully dead. As the brains consciousness may die but not at the cellular level giving the bacterial or more realistically a super multicellular virus that can hijack the hosts reproductive cellular mechanisms.
As well as emitting a frequency that can not be heard or measured let alone have any safe gaurds created for many reasons. I.e its ability to alter the mind. Im guessing this frequency could also use the solar winds or energy and sail upon those or know its direction. Or as mentioned in the above posts using gravitational pull and slingshoting.
As it is a more natural free hive mind in a way that doesn't need to control everything it has used as its weaponized drones.
This frequency is where its limitless power also comes from. As the shape of the marker apears to create the ideal structure to let the frequencys bounce and absorb through a complex generative absorbing crystal structured like an acoustic/rely that allows them to have a limitless source of energy. One we and any advanced enough life form would see as absolutely the greatest find for our own technological advancement. Which would somewhat explain where it could generate enough power to create the assimilation process once intelligent life produces more markers.
The frequency then allows for a change in intelligent organisms behaviour, starting as a drive to recreate the marker. But it hides its true intentions behind this drive like a religous ferver. Tricking intelligent life capable of reproducing the red markers into creating many so the chances of total assimilation are secured. Isaac clark the main protagonist as strong willed and capable as he was. Also suffered the effects upon being in a rather far proximity to one marker.
As size of the markers don't. Really matter. But the red marker is different to the original black marker. Red ones emit a psycho/nuerological frequency that instead of drawing those towards wanting to understand and recreate it. The red ones turn intelligent life insane or suicidal, or pursue its cause to make itself whole.
Turning intelligent life insane, violent or suicidal. Is a very real and scary fear that we have some counter measures against. But because of of the widespread chaos feom a behavioral collapse allowing for the bacteria to spread and infect dead cells until it gets to a critical mass.
Where it then pulls in all the dead and living matter with a gravitational pull that also pulls in other matter. Buildings and loose earth.
Even a fragment of the red markers emits the signals frequency.
The horrifying part that exists in our reality. Is how these Markers emit frequencys that can change human behaviour. As well as the use of this frequency as an energy source.
Now lets say the bacteria that lives in the vaccum of space, works the same as the infectious necromorph bacteria. but this bacteria repurposes and reanimates cells like a super multi celled virus that can also infect living tissue in the freshly dead, or the willing or unwilling living hosts. Which can create stronger replicating living tissue which created the regenerating hunter in game. Repurposing tissue to have the capability to survive in space.
A reason that something that large could then exist in the vaccum of space would be its hijacking ability to overide natural *safety* switchs and the ability to repurpose bio organic material. It could create a membrane around itself that could fight cold and radiation or adapt to whatever needed, which could then also repurpose some of itself to become the tendrils to propell itself through space. Or act as a means to sense and help rely signals from different directions to the other breathern moons.
Theres alot of complexity put into the thought and background of the Breathern moons.
The game is rather scary close to reality and many wouldn't want to know the truth behind certain aspects of cosmic horror. The things beyond our fear and understanding of the universe much like if one could peek into the 4th dimension.
Low frequency that could potentially be manipulated to create limitless energy.
<https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.nepjol.info/index.php/HP/article/view/5181/4295&ved=2ahUKEwjU2vjn8YzhAhWjjlQKHTPjCzIQFjAHegQIDxAh&usg=AOvVaw1hH13w0lXCCP3Xz9H8SUZG>
The impact frequency can have on humans.
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16201210/>
The bacteria that can live in the void.
<https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2016-03-bacteria-space-earth.amp>
How a super virus/bacteria that is multicelled could have the potential ability to hijack our cellular reproduction. And just a bit extra on how dead cells can be manipulated.
<https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170112141203.htm>
<http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2010/10/29/delay-the-decay-how-zombie-biology-would-work/#.XJA3W7llAew>
The frequency that could potentially be emitted that could effect human behaviour and the brain.
<https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.2000.83.6.3548>
Mind you this is nothing more then speculation and theory on the existance of life that is greater then ourselves on the cosmic level. I am also having trouble finding the sources where i've drawn more darker information and my own conclusion so I will not be adding that extra stuff.
[Answer]
The one thing in terms of movement i think everyone forgot is how large this creature is. If it manipulates its mass just right then it can probally physically change its mass in specific ways to effect its own gravity. By shifting its body the right way it could probally create literal gravity sinks and use the gravity to accelerate its body. If it does have a hollow middle then its gravity may not even be focused on the center of its body, so how it changes itself could allow for it to use gravitional waves for movement.
Also we are assuming it is just a bacteria, when it could also be fungi(take a look at what cool things mushrooms can do to change the air currents) , or nanomachine given the pillars.
But yeah, if anyone ever suggests to me a moon looks 'meaty', just contact Nasa and request every weapon available. Safest choice.
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[Question]
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Which would work better for a small tank designed for urban use on low gravity worlds (inside cities on moons and such) tracks, wheels or something else?
[Answer]
**Short Version : a [Bren Carrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Carrier) type vehicle.**
Urban environments are not good places for tanks.
In your low gee world they become a worse place for tanks.
The tank is vulnerable in urban situations because it's relatively easy for infantry armed with anti-tank weapons to sneak up close enough to get a clean shot and disappear again leaving one disabled or destroyed tank.
In your low gee world the infantry can carry more gear including more anti-tank gear. They are a bigger threat than they were.
In general what infantry need in urban areas is a low key (low silhouette) compact vehicle capable of traversing difficult terrain and acting as a tractor or similar when needed. A little armor is useful for small arms fire protection, but not particularly useful otherwise. Some light weaponry (machine guns) would be sufficient.
They need a vehicle capable of rapidly moving them and operating as a fast taxi and resupply support. Something that can carry mens, ammunition, wounded to and from the fighting to support areas. It's not unusual for such vehicles to have winching capability and carry comms gear.
[Answer]
Go for legs.
Short version:
Legs cost more per kilometer than wheels/tracks. Still they have superior elevation, larger range of hull-down positions, better recoil compensation allowing for a bigger weapon for the same weight, with low enough gravity can jump and even walk walls (damaging them in the process but not fallung down) and legs can be used as impromptu wreckingtools to make entrances for infantry with less danger to the entire building. 6+ legs also give redundancy making it harder to mobility kill than a tracked vehicle. Higher cost is no problem compared to aircraft for example, you use the best tool for the Job and legs in a future scenario are likely to fit the bill.
Long version:
Legs have cons like higher mechanical maintenance, harder to fix on the battlefield and more fuel per kilometer.
Pro's are that even under current conditions using a derivative of an excavator arm for legs an 8-legged vehicle can weigh in excess of 120 tons, a "lightweight" vehicle like a 20 ton IFV would be easy especially when it gets "lighter" under low-gravity. Legs have superior recoil compensation allowing a larger gun on the same weightclass. Depending on how low- gravity, legged vehicles can jump and walls would have enough supportive strength to allow the legs to anchor in them so the legged vehicle can climb, a supremely useful trait in an urban environment. Legs also allow the vehicle a much larger angle on the chassis and with that a larger gun elevation, extremely useful for urban combat. Legs are closer to wheels in terms of redundancy, allowing multiple legs to be blown off without incapacitating the vehicle (unlike a track). The ability to modify the height of the chassis allows for shooting over obstacles without the need to have a specific ground at the obstacle, and the ability to duck back down behind the cover without needing to drive is a unique trait to legs. In some scenario's legs can also function as precision wreckingtools, capable of making a precise entrance for infantry witout risk of bringing the building down like driving a tank through would besides that this would be available to lightweight vehicles as well.
Many people think legs are too vulnerable. But no one in their right mind would fire at "the joints" of a legged vehicle, they would fire at where the legs meet the chassis. This gives you the largest target, the least jittery target (the legs constantly accelerate and decelerate) and gives a chance to hit a different leg or other part of the tank should you miss the intended target. Legs would be the most mine-proof option. The ends of the legs are most likely a thick piece of wear-resistant material, its not likely to just be blown off. The chassis is far enough away from the leg to cause injury or damage to vital parts with the mine's blastwave and the relative thinnness of the legs and the unlikelyhood that the mine hits the exact middle of the leg means most of the blast can just escape harmlessly.
Legs might be the most expensive option in maintenance time, materials and equipment required, but this is no different than tracks vs wheels, or aircraft vs ground units. Even "cheap" aircraft often have over 10.000 dollar per flighthour, and many aircraft spend multiple hours to rearm and maintenance after a single sortie unless truly necessary. You use the right tool for the Job, and in a future scenario legs seem to be a supremely useful option.
[Answer]
**Wheels**.
This actually has little to do with the gravity levels. In any gravity, tracks trade maneuverability for traction on soft or uneven surfaces, such as thick mud and off road. Since your vehicle is operating in an urban environment, there is no need for this.
**Some more notes:**
You might assume that low gravity means a wheeled vehicle can *power through* uneven areas, and the weak gravity will reduce damage to the suspension. This is only partially true. Each *bump* will cause the same damage, regardless of gravity. However, the low gravity means the vehicle can *skip over* more of the obstacles. Also, the damage on landing is reduced. I imagine it is devilishly complicated to calculate exactly how much more efficient the suspension is.
Horizontal recoil from heavy weapons would remain the same. Vertical recoil might increase though. Likewise for being hit by a concussive weapon. So the stability advantages of tracks over wheels is the same, regardless of gravity.
Low gravity means you can carry more armor without being crushed by your own weight. However, I don't think this is the crucial factor is selecting armor in general. It is just as hard to get that extra armor moving and turning as usual.
Most structures on a low-gravity world will be flimsier than usual.
[Answer]
In a low gravity environment, a legged vehicle will have an advantage, but not the ones that other people have mentioned.
You are fighting in an urbanized environment (possibly under some sort of containment dome), which means most of your threats are actually in a 3 dimensional matrix all around you, from people shooting from the rooftops to threats emerging from the sewers or firing from basement windows.
A sufficiently agile legged platform can operate in a 3D environment buy being able to climb walls or even scale the dome over the city. A spider like firing platform can manoeuvre through the complex 3D environment, either scaling walls to take up defensive fire positions, or climbing walls to assault defenders in buildings. A spider like fire platform on the inner surface of the dome can also use sensors to look "down" on the city and help direct operations or even fire at enemy targets.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BimEt.jpg)
*People are often scared of spiders... weaponized spiders are even worse*
Spider like chassis will also have the ability to move logistics in and out of the battle zone, or be used as carriers to bring casualties to safety or bring up extra weapons and equipment for special operations, such as engineers making a breach, or perhaps more urgently, engineers sealing a hole in the dome.
As an aside, the most useful size of vehicle would be small enough to fit through hallways and clamber up the side of buildings and into windows. We are really talking about combat robots rather than "tanks", but modern weaponry is very compact, and small guided missiles or electromagnetic weapons like rail guns would work very well in these conditions.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lN1Sx.jpg)
*Spike missiles on a RWS*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/73Tah.jpg)
*Dismounted Mini-Spike on a tripod. You could fit 4-6 of these missiles in the same space as the two Spikes in the upper illustration*
[Answer]
**Flying Tanks**
If the gravity is low enough why bother with the ground-tank when you can just fit the same armor from a tank onto an aircraft? I say that if the environment allows it why not take advantage of the extra mobility afforded you by low-G and build flying tanks! (Or at-least Jumping Tanks).
[Answer]
There is already a great answer by @Demigan explaining why to take legs. I would suggest using legs but combining it with other means. For example like those jumping robots scaled up according to gravity. Boosters could improve in air maneuverability or continuous tracks if the surface is dusty like on the moon
[Answer]
I don't think the lower gravity would change urban combat much. That being said, if you want tanks, tracks are probably still the way to go. I might be wrong here but it feels like tracks just provide more maneuverability and flexibility especially with debris and uneven terrain due to urban combat.
That being said, you probably wouldn't use a tank. Tanks have 3 main roles in combat. Break through enemy lines. Be highly mobile and to beat other tanks. In an urban environment, there aren't really enemy lines and your mobility is severely limited by the buildings. The enemy would also probably not use tanks, and invest all that extra money into anti-tank equipment for their soldiers.
Now-a-days it seems there are two approaches to using something like a tank. A lighter version like the Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) or specialized platforms. A IFV would be like a lighter version of a tank. It appears to retain most of the same elements of a tank, but is more specialized to move infantry around rather than being a moving fortress. Unlike the Bren Carrier, it has a turret on it, which means it provides much more support, especially if the enemy also has tanks or is in a heavily fortified building.
Of course, having your mode of transport be a support vehicle is pretty risky. If it gets blown up your stuck in a fight with no way out. Thats were APCs come into play. APCs are specialized on moving troops around and no so much for supporting fire. Of course they do have some defenses and there are wheeled and tracked versions. The problem is that the APC isn't really the tank your looking for. So along with your APC you would bring in some more specialized vehicles. You can have a look on google, but they all look like a tank with the turret replaced with a 4 machine guns....
[Answer]
Depending on the exact combat role and environment, you might try something like a drone - probably a rotor-using type. In low-gravity environments, they aren't as limited by weight. Relatively small size would let them get away with minimal armor, and if used in conjunction with a larger tender vehicle, they could carry larger weapons with limited ammunition (missiles or the equivalent). They could fly over all those pesky obstructions, deal with enemy snipers or missile crews in high buildings, and otherwise maneuver much more easily in an urban environment than any ground-borne vehicle.
In terms of combat role, they would be subordinate to infantry; basically they're a crew-serviced heavy weapon with the added benefit that the weapon can fly out ahead of the crew without putting them (or their truck full of spare missiles...) in danger. The infantry moves in first and whenever they encounter anything too tough for them to deal with, the drones converge to offer fire support.
[Answer]
Most likely tracks, namely because they can deal with loose lunar soil, don't need to be air filled like tires and with anchors/spikes can embed them in the ground for traction.
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[Question]
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I am currently writing a story, and part of it involves the invention and use of powered armor by the military. What I was curious about was how useful this armor would actually be, and what roles it would perform.
Assuming battery power isn't an issue, the armor is capable of lifting 150kg (counting the weight of the exoskeleton, but not counting the weight of any armor plating), and it is too expensive to be standard issue but not so expensive that it would have to be rare, what would it be able to do and how good would it be at its jobs? How would it compare to more conventional technologies?
(If you need me to provide more details, or if I got something wrong here you would like me to fix, I can fix it or add in new things. I'm fairly new to this, so I don't know what kind of information you might need.)
[Answer]
Power Armour, if similar to that seen in the Fallout computer games, would have many uses in the military, most of which probably aren't combat roles.
I would suggest that 150 kg is quite light to make it a viable platform, maybe around 500 kg would make more sense, for full Power Armour, and 150 kg for a simple exoskeleton, Power armour offers protections and huge gains, exoskeleton offers only carry capacity.
**In Combat**
Anything that doesn't need confined spaces would be possible, especailly if decent armour, simple exoskeletons are already is testing for the US military, its the power that is the struggle, these allow a soldier to carry more weight
Speed in combat is very important, maybe the motors could proper a soldier to have longer strides for the extra speed but it would take a lot more to work on the suspension to compensate for... so power armour is unlikely to beat a soldier in a sprint to cover, but they wouldn't need the cover if they were armoured, they could be a moving riot shield, plus potentially be able to carry more effective heavy weapons.
Most ground forces have at a Squad Automatic Weapon, but they ammo is split between the rest of the squad because it is so heavy, a PA user could carry a .50 cal fairly easily and control the recoil while also carrying the ammo.
**Non-Combat Roles**
Construction, the military does so of the most speedy and complicated construction projects short of sky scrapers, they need to level out a forest to make a runway... send the engineers in to do so, often being done a by hand and explosives just to make a helicopter landing zone, PA could allow it to be done either faster or with less (hard to replace in a firefight) explosives, or maybe even done by the PA user ripping plants out by hand.
**Naval air wing & Air force**
These guys would love power armour... refueling an aircraft is not that bad in the grand scheme, but re-arming it... having to use equipment to lift missiles and bombs and mounting them takes a long time (they actually do it very quickly and efficiently for what it is they are doing, but it still takes a long time in a war zone) and every second a plane is on the ground in a combat zone is a second wasted, someone in PA could potentially lift up the ordnance and attach it with little to know effect far faster.
Same goes for anything in any of the Logistics divisions
And it fully sealed and protected, then any form of Nuclear Biological or Chemical situation could be more safely handled...
*only the marines wouldn't get any, all around the world Marines are only allowed hand me downs from the other services*
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The power armor is best suited to accompany a squadron of half a dozen soldiers fighting in an enclosed space where combat vehicles cannot easily manoeuvre. Skirmishes in cities come to mind. Forests and mountains also come to mind but since forests or mountains are much bigger than cities some sort of vehicle would also be required for transport.
You would have a large number of independent squadrons each having an exoskeleton and pilot as part of their equipment.
Here are some things a power-armor can do that a marine or tank cannot easily do in an urban setting. Note a lot of them are support rather than purely combat roles.
I'm presuming the exoskeleton is resistant to small arms fire.
1. Move out from cover and clamber onto a nearby rooftop. Then provide covering fire while the rest of the squad advances. Foot soldiers can already do this but the exoskeleton can climb better and advance under heavier fire.
2. Pile up wrecked cars, sandbags or other debris to create a defensive emplacement. Alternately clear debris to make a location undesirable to the enemy.
3. Carry a wide range of awkward or heavy weapons. For example explosives, mortars, tear gas, sound cannons, either for use directly or for the foot soldiers to *switch out* mid fight.
4. Hunker down and provide cover to soldiers. Either in place or while advancing. The threath of doing this should have a large influence on tactics.
5. Carry everything the squad does not immediately need for combat. For example food and water (water is **heavy**), medical and communications equipment, injured squadmates. Everything that might weigh the team down.
6. Break down doors without destroying the entire building.
7. Carry heat and motion sensors.
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The true potential of exoskeletons has not yet been explored. **Carrying stuff is the lamest (still valuable) use case**. With an exoskeleton, you are now interacting with a host of computer controlled servos.
* Integrate with weapons and team and drone-intel: you are now able to aim for targets without line of sight with **sniper precision at full auto**.
* You can now **concentrate on running**, while your arm does pre- programmed ( or even team targeted) strafing.
* Limited line of sight? Jump 2m up and rely on the exo to land you, so you can **keep you mind on recon**.
* Integrate with shot and trajectory detection to **sway you** or drop you in the hundreths of seconds a bullet takes to reach you.
* Stand on a vehicle (integrated) barreling down a bumpy path and be rock steady thanks to your legs working as a **6dof platform with look-ahead suspension**.
* Have short hooks below your palms and above your toes, and **every facade short of concrete becomes a climbing wall** (the servos slam in the hooks, and lug you up) .
* Throw a grenade with cm precision ( with that precision come new kinds of **smaller grenades**, even directionality is possible, since your precision extends to rotation) .
* **Start and land fixed wing drones from your hand** - fixed wing is ultra efficient, but the need for gaining and loosing speed(start/land...) gives rise to unefficient designs; no longer - your arm can throw a 5kg drone to cruising speed, and pluck it from the air just as well).
* Ever wondered if there was someone inside that hut/tunnel? If only you had an **accoustic CT** - oh wait, you have a team with ms- precision drumming skills - Drum circles are not always peaceful
* Long guard duty? Have the exo be the most comfortable **chair, with a macro in place** to... (drop you out of sight /lever you up and raise your gun / salute :-) ) at the twitch of a finger, also, your weapon is locked in a sensible position, in your hand(s), without you having to keep it up.
* Have the whole team in lockstep (not goosestepping, but hiding your numbers) or **random-pattern the steps** of your whole team to fit some environmental noise)
* **Crawl real flat**, never get exhausted.
* **Lock you in the best position a medic can think of**, to be carried off the field by one exo-ed medic like luggage - you have been carrying your own stretcher/folder...
* **Engage multiple enemies** at once by "locking" certain positions, and being able to switch between those positions at will, without giving thought to the process. Fire front, turn, fire aft, turn, ...
* **Jump from high** (helis, buildings, chute) and land ready
* Catapults! The exo can lock you for the throw, then twist you for the flight, then pillow your landing, thereby making catapults (compressed air, pyro, team-effort) viable **roof-access tools**.
* The exo already is a highly sensitive full-body force-feedback interface - it needs to be that to even work. You can use that to improve control of remote robotic devices - fliers, walkers, handlers... no more fiddling with a joystick - **dance** the bomb disposal!
* ....aand carry stuff
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**Most conflict is now Asymmetrical and Irregular**
There is recently little need for standing armies apart from deterrence - most practical usages of troops tend to be in occupation roles in small conflicts where there is little need for troop deployment in open fields - now conflict is in more urban environments amongst urban populations.
This means, in contrast to WWII, Korean and Vietnam wars, that body armour has crept back in to standard issue, largely due to protecting the body against explosive devices. Direct fire conflicts are few and far between.
However, body armour has limited efficacy depending on each situation - like camouflage and helmets they are not guaranteed protection, only reducing risk but not eliminating injury. There is little you could do against a well placed device, or a mine.
Therefore powered body armour would not actually be that useful, unless it provides a greater measure of protection than currently exists against IED's. It is not altogether useful to have greater lifting capacity - most units do not venture far from supply lines except deep penetrative missions, where the focus is more long term gathering intelligence or small special operations rather than an open fire conflict.
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While increased lifting power would be useful for soldiers, I don't think that would be the reason powered armor would be adopted. The big draw of powered armor would be the **armor**.
One of the main reasons heavy, plate mail-type armor disappeared for battlefields is that firearms demanded more armor than an individual solider could carry. This was the case until modern materials like Kevlar was invented. If powered armor increased the weight limit (so to speak) you could start armoring individual solider with inches of armor commonly found on tanks.
True enough, this wouldn't be available to every solider, but squads operating in urban areas would definitely appreciate being immune to small arms fire. Likewise, WWI stormtroopers-style would like becoming juggernauts as well, sense those kinds of troops use high-risk highly mobile tactics that expect returned fire. Heck, one powered armor person with a double thick, double wide bulletproof shield could be useful as mobile cover.
Just to cover my tracks, full plate Kevlar and steel suits would be sweltering to wear, especially in the arid places where armies seems to congregate these days. By itself, this would limit the range and length of engagements you could put these soldiers in. It would be cool if they could use portable air conditioning or other cooling systems as backpacks, but I'm not sure how viable that would be.
Oh, and hitting someone or something with a cybernetically powered sledgehammer would go a long way in modern combat. If not tactically, then at least in terms in keeping up moral. If I had the chance to pretend to be the terminator, I'd probably sprint to the recruiter's office.
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The additional weight capacity is noticble (vs the standard 61 kg loadout), but I'm not sure how significant it is. Given that horses/donkeys are in use by the US Military (in some places) in Afghanistan, clearly a legged creature that can carring goods has a military need. However, a far more valuable part of both the weight and the strenght will be counteracting recoil. Recoil is the primary limit on rate of fire or cailber weapon that can be deployed without a supporting bipod/tripod. Adding addition weight (to absorb) and strengh (to counteract) recoil would allow for larger or more rapid fire guns. Would it be enough to allow an M60 to be fired without a support? A .50 caliber rifle? An anti-tank weapon? You'd have to look it up...
Another factor would be stability, which would increase the range at which the soldier was effective. Modern snipers are crazy effective at insane distances, but have to do a lot of body control to eliminate the effects of breathing or having a pulse on aim. If the exoskeleton was able to mitigate that, you'd have a lot of sniper-like accuracy.
I'd imagine this armor would be too rare to deploy on most missions up close, and instead would be at the edge of the battlefield suppling support.
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If your PA is lift weight only sorta thing and light armored depending on the size, it could be used for transportation , ocasional firefight against a lightly armed enemy or even intimidation purposes.
As said by others, transportation or moving crates around are more suited for exoskeleton models more than a PA .
If it can be fitted with armor id say a 90kg armor plating or more would make for a perfect first strike option against an enemy that can't be aerial bombed first. Even if it's not direct armor on the exoskeleton a shield and rifle(considering the metallic structure could withstand the kickback more than a humans' hand ...) could enforce it's defensive capability. Note, i'm thinking of a tower shield here, with enough covering surface to be worth the hassle.
The team could even use some old Roman Legion formations even.
Aside from this particular use cases i don't think it would be really that viable or widespread if the cost is too elevated. Technically now days troops could wear full body protection but the costs of making that gear and the % of life saved is not worth the investment (considering it must offer protection + mobility).
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This is a world with underwater merfolks and other humanoids. They have opposable thumbs, so they can use tools humans can use. Lets assume there's different subspecies and races of these merfolks, so they have very different dietary needs. They have human level intelligence. They cannot get goods from land themselves.
What would their trade center around? What commodities are important to sustain the population and increase productivity? What services would be important that we don't have on land?
Edit: The technological level would be very medieval and agricultural. Cities, but still a lot of foragers in the rural parts.
The species is very multicultural, but most of the societies are aristocratic city states or empires. There's cities with more than 10 000 people, but these are rare power centers in the region.
They can dive to a depth of 500 meters without trouble.
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The usual basics are probably still needed. Food, tools and clothing/adornings (I'll assume they don't need clothes to protect them from the element (singular because it's just water) which they should be adapted to, but likely from the point of modesty or fashion).
Grooming services will be needed and basically any activities which comes with the level of technological advancement you desire. A hunter/gatherer tribe does not need much in terms of economy as there is very little degree of specialization.
But as soon as you need to specialize you get the need for services such as childcare and schooling. With medical advancement you need to set aside tribe members for various medical professions. With religion you get a priestly caste and probably also a need for a military/constabulary profession (to keep the flock in line and to enforce the laws of Neptun/Dagon/Old Father Shark). These are no longer producing their own food and as such need to sell their service (collect tax).
And of course you have the old trope about the "oldest profession" though if they procreate like fish that might be moot. (Also you probably need to invent shame and sexual repression for it to be a viable trade, so presumably priests come first. *Properly refuted by Perkins, we agree that shame and sexual repression does improve the market though.*)
Also, the question (to me at least) is what kind of trade will occur between land and sea. If they are isolated and have no contact with humans, just pick a technological level (pre-civilzation, ancient, medieval, pre-industrial, post-industrial, information age... whatever suits you story) and assume that there will be analogues to whatever land economy you're mirroring. (Herding dolphins instead of cows, harvesting kelp instead of wheat, using lava flows and heat vents to cook food and make tools.) If they have contact with the other element you want to think about what's made where. Perhaps tools are made on land and traded for pearls and corals (or hard to fish from the surface fish and crustaceans).
**Currency:**
G0BLiN asked, so I'll see what I can think of. Paper currency is of course out and metal might be unfeasible as well depending on the tech level. (Whether they can use lava flows to forge or not.)
But there are a lot of other viable currencies.
* **[Commodity money.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money)** The Mayans used cocoa beans. The world of Metro 2033 uses pre-collapse ammunition. It's basically assigning a base unit for barter trade. I'm not enough of an economist to say how this affects inflation. Will a bumper crop ruin the economy or will supply and demand automatically adjust price levels? This could be anything (driftwood, tubers, shark eggs) but preferably small enough to carry around in a pouch around your neck for when you go shopping.
* **[Shell money.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money)** Pieces of coral, pearls polished rocks, sea shells. Anything shiny that sentients like. There are a great number of precedents here.
* **[Stone money.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones)** This is my favorite, seeing as how it kind of works like our current system. A value is given to a thing, usually a large rock that has been worked in some way. The Rai stone is a large carved stone disc (or wheel) that can weigh up to 4 metric tons (8,800 lb). This is rarely ever moved but ownership is agreed upon by everyone and using it for trade is just transfering the ownership. It is a system which depends a lot on honesty (especially in lieu of solid record keeping) but from a cynical perspective it does not differ that much from having money in the form of a number in a database field somewhere.
* **Domestic animals** This is pretty much a form of commodity money but based on livestock. If your merfolk herds some sort of sea animal they can be used as the base for an barter economy (Fish might be tricky, but crustaceans or cephalopods may work). Camels have been known to be used like this on land.
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**Metals**
This one goes both ways. In medieval times iron was valuable. People often don't realise how valuable. A few ounces of good iron could buy a cow and cows were valuable back then.
Merfolks are going to have great difficulty forging metals if they need to stay underwater.
However they may have access to metal nodules from the sea floor.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EHUbR.jpg)
This gives us at least one pair of trade goods such that both sides benefit from the arrangement. The merfolk sell metal ore nuggets, the humans sell metal tools.
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"The technological level would be very medieval and agricultural."
No, it wouldn't be; don't just try to transpose terrestrial societies into the water and expect it to be plausible. Agriculture is a function of sedentary societies that grow plant foods in soil, and medieval (or even Iron Age-like) cities arise from the social stratification and role differentiation that agricultural surpluses permit.
An aquatic society could hunt (fish) and gather almost everything they'd concievably need, and since fish, sea mammals, and whales are highly mobile, so would be our merfolk. They might need tools and weapons to successfully hunt, but those would likely be bone from whales, not wood or metal. They might possibly cultivate or farm some shellfish, the way some hunter-gatherers cultivate small garden plots to supplement, but they wouldn't have a need for large-scale agriculture. No sedentary societies would evolve and no agriculture would be necessary or possible given the incredible diversity and availability of ocean resources. They'd just fish, and optionally might gather kelp. They might form federations and alliances of tribes, but overall, if you absolutely need a terrestrial analogue, think about precontact North American plains Indian tribes living off the buffalo, not medieval feudalism.
But really, nothing would be analogous to a society we'd see on the surface. In fact, they wouldn't even look human - even based on a humanoid body plan, they'd quickly evolve blubber and camouflaging skin tones, legs would become vestigial or fused, genitalia would be protected and internal, voices would likely become like those of whales....picture humanoid seals and whales, not humans with tails.
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Let's start from a simple society, for sure they will need to trade on food: seaweeds, various fishes, fresh meat caught by local "grounder" daring to venture to the border of the sea.
Then, what else may they need?
Anything made of wood can be used as "lighter than water" device, as it will float up, so no fancy ebony furnitures but a great help in carrying around heavy stuff.
For similar reason they won't be able to forge metals, as having a fire underwater is pretty much impossible. But at least they can trade worked metals with the people above waters.
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I imagine toolmaking would be important and so would any good material for making tools like suitable types of stone, bone, wood. Also rope and material for fishing nets.
Even if fishing is not the main food source fishing would be an important skill, including the knowledge of where to find fish, in what seasons etc. Going after big fish might be more akin to hunting and require special tools & techniques. From them you would get the big bones for making bigger tools or weapons and even things like whale oil from whales.
Manufactured items from the surface that could not be made underwater would be close to invaluable. Maybe harvesting resources from land would also be a thing? A society like you describe might have developed techniques to fell trees into the water to get at the valuable wood. Even if that takes digging channels into the land where trees are. They might go to great lengths to harvest the "plenty of the land" in creative ways similar to how human civilizations have exploited the sea.
Fortress building could also be a science in itself. Underwater stone fortresses with gates opened by moving trapped air bubbles or other mechanisms to produce lift.
Instead of horses dolphin breeding/training could be a major part of the economy. Fish farming inside giant nets or in ponds at the coast would also be doable.
Since you mention different dietary needs I think the base trade would center around food since your gatherers would often be able to find some that would fetch a better price elsewhere. Consider that dead fish will spoil quickly. So preservation or even moving around live fish might also be a business.
For more ideas along the same lines I recommend thinking of underwater alternatives to what our own civilizations developed on land in pre-industrial times.
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I've done a question about
[Aerial battle of knights riding flying creatures... How would they fight?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79065/aerial-battle-of-knights-riding-flying-creatures-how-would-they-fight), that was put [on hold] for being too broad. So I'm splitting the question into a series.
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The context:
In my world, we have two cities, each on a high mountaintop, separated by a vast valley. In order to wage war, the warriors of each city bridge the huge gap between them by using flying creatures.
Now, these flying creatures are of various natures... Some are dragon-like pterodactyls, others are giant eagles. But each one can carry only one warrior and his gear. The warriors saddle and mount the beasts like they would do with horses.
Their technology is on the medieval level. Warriors can only use swords, spears, bows and arrows and such.
So, my question are: **What would be the best tactics for warriors to fight each other? Long-range mongol-type combat, with bows and arrows or crossbows? Short-range melee combat, with swords or axes? Short-range joust-like combat with spears?**
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*Note: I want the riders to actually **ride** the flying creatures, not being strapped under the creature*
*Note2: I would like these series to focus on the warriors, not the creatures. So, please, no answers about using the beaks or the claws of the creatures, but only the weapons (the weapons can be used on the creatures, though). I'm also not interested on the feasibility or the anatomy of the flying creatures, just about the feasibility of each combat mode*
*Bonus to the answer that can show **both** types of combat (whether long range or short range) as feasible*
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PS: Links to the other questions for this series:
1. [Aerial battle of knights riding flying creatures - how would their military formations be?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79346/aerial-battle-of-knights-riding-flying-creatures-how-would-their-military-form)
2. [How can a city protect itself from the invasion from knights flying riding creatures?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/79481/how-can-a-city-protect-itself-from-the-invasion-from-knights-flying-riding-creat)
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**First let's consider a saddle**. on any flying animal you will want a saddle that actually attaches you the the animal, you are not just sitting on it you should be strapped to it, you don't want to come loose during maneuvers, which a flying animal will do in all three dimensions.Your riders should be so secured that even if they are killed they will not fall off. This makes things like lances or catchpoles pointless, you'll break your arms or just end up bringing both mounts together an a fouled mess before you dislodge them.
If the animal is much much larger than a person (something fantastical) you can get away with the person being upright but for anything else you have to worry about drag. you also can't put your legs down their sides becasue the wings are there, giving you three choices.
1. the rider can be lying flat against the animal, belly down, to reduce drag. that reduces what you can use. this means you have very few good angles of attack, the wings get in the way in the downward direction, the head is in the way forward. Up is you best bet but also the most difficult for a human to attack from. Your riders may actually have a saddle designed to let them turn sideways (effectively lying on one arm) so they can reach out.
2. another option is to be saddled in a kneeling position and stay in a prone prayer like position or lying flat most of the time, only sitting up to strike. this would let you use a wider range of weapons (even bows) as well as give you a wider angle of attack, including letting you lean back to strike upwards.
3. the last option is to have the rider legs forward and lying back belly up, lifting the head to see, like a bobsledder. This is the most complex position, and requires the most confidence in your mount steering itself, but also the one that gives you the most options for attacking others, combining this with option one in a tandem, two rider, setup would also work well, one focused on steering the other on attacking. this does double your weight however.
**Tactics**
There is not much point attaching another rider when the mount makes a much better target, especially the mounts wings. **Wings are fragile, essential, and large targets**. Any slashing blade on a stick(like a naginata) will work well for this, even swords although less effective. Slashing at the enemy wings will be most effective but is also the most dependent on winning a competition of maneuvering almost like a dogfight. Alternatively a hooked or barbed disposable weapon would also work well, something that can left behind and will stay in the wing, fouling it while doing even more damage. One large hook or spear in a wing will take an flying animal out of the fight. even if it doesn't kill it.
If you use option 2 or 3 you can use bows, composite shortbows like the mongols or crossbows would be best, barbed arrows to stick in the wings of your opponent would be best, that way you don't have to hit the body to do damage. A trained group of flying archers would be devastating against ground troops just look at the variety of maneuvers created by horse archers and how devastating they were.
You can also hang a line of barbs of hooks off the back of the animal almost like a troll line dragging behind it. it will need some kind of break away so you don't end up fouling your own mount if you catch something, but a line of barbed hooks will injure rider, injure the mount, and likely bind the wings, which would be fatal. They will be costly and heavy limiting how many you can carry but they protect your underside and have a much large strike range. I could even see these used with kites both on the ground and anti-air and from mounts to increase the range.
**weapons you don't want to use.**
**Nets** need to be swung, and if you miss your in danger of tangling you own mount. if drug behind you get a less effective version of the hook line for more weight. carrying between mounts might be possible if you have it furled, but that's a lot of weight and drag so you need a big mount.
**Lances or halberts**, besides the weight, unseating another rider is unlikely and requires either your mount to fly upside down or incredibly precise flying to hit. both are designed to take advantage of horse saddles not ones that actually secure you to the mount. Spear like lances can work although they will be difficult to use and again you will need to let go. Any of these will need to be much longer than normal to reach the other rider.
**Maces or flails**, you run the risk of hurting your own mount as much as the enemy, you don't have the wide open side for striking as you do on a horse, the wings get in the way. One missed swing could bring you crashing to the ground when you hit your own mounts wings. Anything you swing that has a large recovery is right out for the same reason.
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It is a good question. Flying is unlike riding because when you are flying you can't stop. If you bring your mount up against an enemies mount you are liable to both stop flying and drop. Also these mounts are formidable in and of themselves and you might be reluctant to mix it up at close quarters with mounts encumbered by riders.
That leaves projectile weapons and long weapons. I think it would be phenomenally difficult to throw or fire something and hit a flying target from a flying target.
What is left is weapons with zones. You could have a long lance or a sword on a stick and slash or stab at your opponent in passing. I am reminded of the old video game Joust.
My favorite is a whip. I found videos of a guy who was accurate with a 40 foot whip and longer ones are possible. Whips give you a 3d zone within which the tip of your whip is moving and you can strike. A whip spinning in the air could foul rider or mount. Getting hit by a cracking whip is not like getting whacked with a mace but it still hurts - that is a bullwhip, which is not really meant to damage severely. Probably more damage would be done if whip tip were edged or sharp - a hybrid giant bull whip and kung fu chain whip. There exist multi-whips: the cat-o-9 tails. My google search suggests that these are mostly for recreational use now.
Whistling whips are scary. A whip crack is super scary: scary noise + hurt might be good against a dumb flying mount, who will spook or bolt.
Also whips are light. You can bring spares rolled up beside you. Harder to do that with a lance.
So: multi whip with barbed tips vs very long whip with very sharp tip.
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# The mount IS the weapon
I know you want answers focusing on the knights weapons, not the capabilities of the creatures themselves, but still any reasonable answer must start with an analysis of an unarmed rider. What can we give him that will make the rider/mount combination even more effective?
Oversized fantacy eagles and pterodactyles are formidable weapons in their own right. Especially if breeded for the purpose.
If I was in a aerial battle such as you envision, the beak, talons and sheer momentum of my opponents mount would be my main worry. Anything fired, thrown or wielded by a human rider a very distant second.
To engage the eneny, I would manouver into a advantageous position (higher altitude and if possible between the enemy and the sun), pick a target and order my creature to attack using *its* strength, not get in a relatively weaker position and try to compensate with weaponry.
Think about how a rider could use a sword or spear for example. The best angle of attack (if the rider wants to stab or slash his opponent) is from below, where the wings and head of his own mount is not in the way. Now this is exactly the position you *don't* want to be in while fighting a giant eagle. Human muscle plus spear vs fantacy beast muscle plus multiple talons? Wanna bet on the outcome?
Any "weapon" for the pilot would merely compensate for the mounts weak spots. They would be aimed at an enemy that is attacking you from behind/above.
A crossbow might not be the best way to bring down an enemy, but it might at least force an attacker diving towards you to make some evasive manouvers.
Nets thrown (or rather just released) in your wake will cause trouble for an enemy chasing you.
So my answer is: short bows or crossbows. Not for attacking the enemy, but to deny him easy access to your own weak spots.
## Defences
So what do the cities deploy as defence against airborne attacks?
I'd say that catapults and bows/crossbows will be the last resort, due to their limited range (and the sad fact that anything fired straight up will come back down at you). This, after all, is a world where fying creatures are bred and trained for combat.
So what better way to defend your city agains flying invaders than another breed of flying creatures. But we want a purely defensive role. I'd go with a massive number of smaller birds, like starlings. Train them to swarm between your city and the approacing enemy. Train them to actually attack the war-eagles, relying on numbers to overwhelm them. Hundreds of small birds picking and clawing at each attacker will break up the assault and possibly force the enemy down.
Or take it one step further and release swarms of wasps.
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Projectile weapons like bows or javelins would be incredibly difficult to use from the back of a flying creature. Not only would you need to calculate for your own speed and the speed of the enemy, you'd also need to account the much higher wind resistance, relative height of the target, and hope you don't turn the wrong way and end up staring right into the Sun. You also have a massive blind spot directly beneath you, and run the risk of accidentally shooting your mount in it's wing if you can't sync up with the flapping motion.
Physics wise the creatures you talked about, eagles and pteranodons, would also be almost impossible to saddle like a horse and sit upright on, since their wings connect to the body and there'd be nowhere for your legs to go, and sitting on the neck would throw off it's center of balance. You'd have to sit on your knees to fire a bow properly, and that would reduce aerodynamics. A crossbow might work from a laying position but you'd be limited to shooting forward.
If a rider could somehow overcome all this then the combat would involve trying to fly under your opponent and shoot up so they can't return fire.
Another option is a light lance. Hold it forward and go for natural swooping strikes to penetrate your opponent or their mount and take them out. This works well for a sitting up or laying down position, and would be significantly easier to train soldiers and mounts to do. There's also no risk in injuring your own animal and falling to your doom.
Regardless of which main weapon you pick, the secondary should probably be the net. It's very easy to use. Just fly over the enemy, loosen the net, and drop it on the enemy. If they get snagged in it they'll fall to their deaths, and if not it's not too big of a deal because you can carry several nets without incurring significant encumbrance for your mount.
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I think Guran is definitely on the right track.
Such a large creature is bound to have claws, and a large beak or jaws. It would be much too wasteful not to make use of them. After all, they are there, they are up to the job, so what should stop you?
But just being the pilot for the beast is simply not cool enough, so our knights need a weapon. And while we're at it, we might make that two or more.
If you see birds fighting, one pattern becomes clear: the attacker will try to move behind the prospective victim, and preferably above it. Since most creatures can look ahead effortlessly, but have a much harder time looking back, that alone gives the attacker an advantage. also, using claws on something in frond of and below you is much easier than in the other direction.
So mount and rider will always try to get behind and above the opponent. Anything that looks like knights and lances is out of the question anyway, you can not pass an opponent with less than one wingspan of distance if you want to maintain controlled flight.
I guess bows and crossbows might be some option, but hitting a target moving in three dimensions while moving in three dimensions yourself seems really hard to do.
A whip has been mentionned, and the general idea - that of a reusable projectile weapon, is interesting.
But i would go one step further and suggest a grappling hook.
It will most likely hurt the opponent's mount, hinder it's movement, and at the same time help with keeping it near enough for your own beast to do it's thing with it's beak and talons.
Obviously the opposing party might have the same idea, so your kight should carry a short sword, preferrably with a serrated edge, to cut through the rope with the grappling hook, should the enemy be faster.
Some very ingenious knights might also carry a pouch of freshly ground pepper.
With your enemy behind and above you, reach into your pouch and throw a fistful of pepper over your shoulder. I imagine it might be interesting to be the rider of a large and ferocious flying mount, in close combat, when your mount starts to sneeze violently...
[Answer]
I guess the weapons in use will most certainly depend on the type of mount in question. Pterodactyl like dragons can be very fast but not very maneuverable (I am guessing) while giant eagles would most definitely be slower than the dragons but a lot more agile in battle. Let's start with this possible framework.
Second, the kind of tactics each employs shall also decide the weapons that are to be used. Faster dragons would be better suited for ranged attacks using bows and arrows while the more agile eagles would be better suited for a dog fight with melee weapons. Having said that, weapons like a sword or an axe would be more than useless. However close the two combatants get, they will still be separated by at least the distance of the wingspans of the flying animal. Something suited for medium range warfare like the halberd, the naginata might just do the trick (Emphasis on the word just). Again, I would suggest a Chinese Repeating Crossbow as what it lacks in accuracy it more than makes up for in firepower and as it shall be carried on the back of a stead, it can be made heavier and can carry longer arrows instead of simple bolts.
One thing that has not been suggested I guess is using irritants against the steads themselves. Ninjas used to use Black Eggs which were filled with ground glass and crushed chilli peppers. This was literally thrown into the eyes of their opponent which caused them severe pain and discomfort. If some way can be devised to blow something like chilli powder or something like that into the face of the dragon, it would simply become wild with pain and discomfort and it might hurt other members of the same army just out of disorientation.
For tactics, you can use the Mongol Feigned Retreat or multiple units attacking from different directions, harrying the opposition.
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You might consider 2 manned mounts, one facing forward, steering and maybe equipped with a lance and sword. The lance for a frontal attack, the sword for side swings.
I belive that heavy weapons are not good in this senario, as the rider needs much force to swing it fast and actually hit anything flying by fast. It would not be good for his balance too.
With a second rider on the back, he could focus on ranged attacks with bows and crossbows. I think crossbow would be a much easier to use, the archer does not have to use force to span the bow, which gives him better aim. Bows on the other side are faster, but has a shorter effective range in the air, as the bow arrows start to drop faster. Crossbow has more power too.
An other piece of equipment could be the bola. At midrage SUPER effective, a clean hit would restrain the mounts movement.
Use slower two or even three manned mounts (depending how big those dragons get) as the main fighting force. Other one manned fast mounts for flanking (Assault troops like cavalry to break lines and take out high priority targets).
Nets could be big, instead of just dropping them on the mounts you could span them across of a few heavy mounts and use them like a fishing net. (A bit silly but it would be capable of breaking attack formations) One time use only, after riders got into the net you need to cut it so your dragons wont get pulled down. Cheesy. Same could be done with a rope between 2 mounts to throw enemy rides off their mounts.
Another option is to create little jars with oil in them, throw them, burn them, enemy down.
Hang some kind of blade off the mount. Flying over things now kills it.
In the end is restraining movement the same a killing the enemy midair.
Depending on the anatomy tools could the developed to destroy the wings. (Special arrows that rip apart wings and so on).
Train rides to stay away from dogfights, sign 2 riders in a team, they are supposed to get enemy of each other backs. Close combat should be the last resort. Arial fights are way more tactical than on the ground. So you need a good commander and a way to get the commands to the riders.
Dogfights would reduce the ability to see the battle flow, getting riders to lose position to get lost in enemy lines. If the fights get to the point of wild dogfighting it would be a signal for a tactical retreat to reform lines.
Don't forget support units fighting of the ground.
[Answer]
Crossbow launched grappling hooks.
This allows you to shoot PAST the enemy, then maneuver such that the hook and line drags over the target until the hook bites in. Then you can maneuver your mount to entangle and damage the enemy. You can whip the line across the rider, dislodging him, catch up a wing, rip something loose just by dropping suddenly, pulling the hook. You can also cut your line easily should the shot miss or the enemy outmaneuver you in some fashion.
You could have 2-3 preloaded and cocked crossbows attached to your saddle, each with their own line on a spool. This gives you a few chances to engage the enemy, especially ones that try to drop down on you (probably the most effective tactic) or chase up your tail. Of course riders will try to cut enemy lines thrown across their mounts and probably have built in line cutters around their saddle much like how helicopters do on the forward fuselage.
[Answer]
How deadly do these combats need to be? One aspect of medieval mounted knights was that they were often trying to capture rivals in order to ransom them back. Capturing the mounts alive to keep or ransom was also popular. As pointed out dismounting an opponent would be deadly in the air but what about disarming them? Some form of counting coup could also be a victory senario.
I like the idea of these guys fighting with lances. However, instead of the mounts heading face to face. I see them gliding toward each other so that the dorsal side (the backs) pass each other. The mounts would be in a glide so the wings would be nearly stationary. The knights would be able to reach each other for one quick strike. Training would be intense for this since the knights would be working sideways or possibly upside down. The mounts would have to be strong to fly up to a high position and then dive/glide toward the opponent.
[Answer]
Lances and melee weapons mean suicide when fighting against a netgun, which reliably kills any flying enemy that is hit.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RKCiR.gif)
The counter against a netgun, other than another netgun, is a bow or crossbow, possibly with poisoned projectiles - it has longer range, and if you miss (which is very likely) you fly away, reload, and shoot again.
For large engagements, people would probably invent [schrapnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Shrapnel) a couple centuries early.
[Answer]
Just a few points. This is a fantasy setting and while I'm sure the person who posted does want something believable they also just want something that works so stop taking every tiny detail so seriously, they want a creative idea that they can use or develop.
Body wise a great eagle would be more similar to a human and so you would definitely be able to saddle it especially when you consider that many wildlife programs feature birds with cameras attached to their backs, they are not glued on people, where as the pterradactyl has a large wing membrane attached to the body which makes it a lot more difficult but not impossible.
I would like to propose a couple of ideas for you. Have you considered either changing the mounts to something of your own design or reconsidering abilities of the mounts themselves. Example if the mounts were magically propelled they would have less need for huge flighty wings that get in the way of most weapons as discussed above. This would make almost any weapon a viable option even up close and personal.
Perhaps there is some kind of aerial etiquette for fighting (like general rules of engagement) as both cities revere the flying creatures used and do not want to harm the creatures just the riders. This allows the use of flying formation for both combatants such as flying in opposed orientations so the riders can engage in melee combat (the mounts would fly in a helix pattern so they have equal lift and such). Getting this close also allows for potential mount crossing for a better aerial melee and in this context means you will be able to steal the enemies mounts.
As far as specific weapons, you are creating the story so make whatever you like work for you. Create you own list of weapons with as many categories as you can and just spend some time considering what would in the context of what your planning. Getting ideas from other people is great but I think you also need to be somewhat more specific, is it a board game or video game or animation? Also you should consider more exaggerated weapons on the fantasy side of things, saying medieval weaponry really limits what can be achieved unless you make them more than what they are.
[Answer]
Well I'm not sure how big these creatures are, but I guess you are talking about beasts 3 times larger than a domestic horse in order to achieve flying with a knight riding it.
Your knights should be light armoured so that their flying creatures won't get so easily tired. Your eagles face a disadvantage over the lizards due to the scales, but they would be faster.
As for the weapons: I think that poison coated projectiles are a good option. Don't try to kill the enemy knight, just aim at his beast. Gravity would finish the job.
Note: If gunpowder is available in your world you can use your flying creatures as modern aircraft. Dragons are the bombers and eagles the fighters because they are faster than the lizards.
I can actually see a big dragon flying over a kingdom, ready to bomb the land and then 3 giant eagles intercepting and killing it.
[Answer]
Projectile weapons and spears.
If you don't have guns then bow and arrow or crossbow would be best. With spears for close fighting. Swords might work for horse soldiers, but on a flying creature you might end up chopping off a wing.
A projectile weapon that cast a net or bolas might be very useful. Entangle your opponents mount and watch them plummet.
] |
[Question]
[
For my story, I'm trying to figure out where to send a probe that might have a chance at finding an alien civilization similar to ours. What is the closest star system to ours that might have a chance at supporting life?
[Answer]
**Question being answered: "What is the closest star system to ours that might have a chance at supporting life?" the answer is Proxima Centauri**
"Proxima Centauri" - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri> -
>
> In 2016, the European Southern Observatory announced the discovery of
> Proxima b, a planet orbiting the star at a distance of
> roughly 0.05 AU (7,500,000 km) with an orbital period of approximately
> 11.2 Earth days. Its estimated mass is at least 1.3 times that of the Earth.
> The equilibrium temperature of Proxima b is estimated to be
> within the range where water could exist as liquid on its surface,
> thus placing it within the habitable zone of Proxima
> Centauri, although because Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf
> and a flare star, whether it could support life is disputed.
> Previous searches for orbiting companions had ruled out the presence
> of brown dwarfs and supermassive planets.
>
>
>
The Breakthrough Starshot initiative has plans to send a probe there - <http://www.space.com/33844-proxima-b-exoplanet-interstellar-mission.html->
>
> The founders of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative want to send
> wafer-thin probes to Proxima Centauri at very high speeds. The plan
> calls for equipping these probes with thin sails, which would capture
> the energy imparted by a powerful Earth-based laser.
>
>
> This laser would accelerate the probes to 20 percent the speed of
> light (about 134.12 million mph, or 215.85 million km/h), according to
> the program scientists. At that rate, the probes could reach Proxima
> Centauri in 20 to 25 years.
>
>
>
An updated approach is this "Studying Proxima b: Tiny Sailing Probes Could Orbit Nearby Exoplanet" <http://www.space.com/35549-proxima-centauri-mission-solar-sail.html>
>
> The original Starshot plan calls for missions to this planet (known as
> Proxima b), or to any other destination, to be flyby affairs; the
> nanoprobes would snap photos and collect other data as they hurtle by
> at breakneck speed. But it doesn't have to be this way, according to
> the new study, which was led by René Heller of the Max Planck
> Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.
>
>
> Heller and co-author Michael Hippke, an IT specialist, performed
> computer simulations showing that Starshot-like probes could slow down
> enough at Alpha Centauri to be captured into orbit there. This
> deceleration would come courtesy of the binary's starlight pressure —
> which would push back on the nanoprobes' sails, just as outgoing
> photons would have pushed the spacecraft forward at the beginning of
> its trek — and the gravitational pull of the Alpha Centauri stars.
>
>
>
This has been proposed well before any of the new knowledge existed by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle in "Footfall" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall>
>
> Footfall is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writers Larry
> Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It was nominated for both the Hugo and
> Locus Awards in 1986, and was a No. 1 New York Times Bestseller.
> The book depicts the arrival of members of an alien species called the
> Fithp that have traveled to our solar system from Alpha Centauri in a
> large spacecraft driven by a Bussard ramjet. Their intent is conquest
> of the planet Earth.
>
>
>
I have seen more than a few ask about this "Bussard ramjet" well the Book gives a good description on how it works. The Book also uses "Herd mentality" which of course could open a few questions here.
I do not know the legal requirements or etiquette but ... I will inlcude this in case it spurs some creativity
>
> They possess more advanced technology than humans, but have developed
> none of it on their own. In the distant past on their planet, another
> species was dominant. This predecessor species badly damaged the
> environment, rendering themselves and many other species extinct, but
> left behind their knowledge inscribed on large stone cubes, from which
> the Fithp have gained their technology. Facing possible extinction due
> to the long-term effects of biological weapons, a group of
> high-ranking Fithp were selected to escape to the stars
>
>
>
[Answer]
**Your Probes Better Have Good Range**
If there were a civilization as advanced as us nearby we would almost certainly know about them. [Radar](https://history.nasa.gov/CP-2156/ch5.4.htm) from earth could be picked up at a distance of 15 light years with current [SETI](https://www.seti.org/) technology and up to 250 light years with proposed systems. Other forms of highly directional broadcasts may reach even further than that.
As far as possibly supporting life look no further than the [Kepler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft)) Mission, its [catalog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanets_discovered_using_the_Kepler_spacecraft) has hundreds of rocky worlds that are the goldilocks zone. These are not sure fire things, but they are the very best bets for life as we understand it.
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For finding intelligent life at our own tech level in another star system: we probably won't, ever. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack made out of more haystacks. And the needles are radioactive and keep decaying into hay. And that's ignoring the *time* component. Ie a civilization as advanced as our own, existing at the same time as our own has a virtually zero probability of occurring.
For example, if you imagine the history of the universe compressed down to the length of your arm, if you took a nail file to your middle finger, oops, there went all life on earth. If the history of all life on earth were the length of your arm instead, the same nail file would have removed all human history. If instead all of human history were the length of your arm, the nail file would have removed everything since the industrial revolution.
We've been searching the skies for alien radio for 50-odd years now, and not a blip.
Getting a prove to another star system would take as much time as the length of your fingernail in this last comparison. Roughly. I'm not in a position to do a precise calculation at the moment, but it gives you an idea of just the shear scale of the problem.
Realistically we'd send probes out to every system with an earth sized rocky planet in the habitable zone nearer than 100 light years. We MIGHT get lucky and find something. For your story, we do. Problem solved. The thing is, they wouldn't be aimed, they'd be scatter shot. Unless they were von neuman in design (see: *We are Legion (We are Bob)*.)
[Answer]
I would say your best chance of a nearby life-sustaining planet would be a planet whose life has not explored the communication options presented by radio - it is nearby, but simply hasn't been detected with conventional means.
There are two main candidates that are relatively well-known - Proxima Centauri's planet Proxima b (described in detail by other comments), and the furthest out planet of the newly discovered TRAPPIST-1 system (39 light years away).
The reason that despite being proclaimed as 'having several planets in the habitable zone' only the furthest out is habitable is that the solar wind has the impact of moving the habitable zone further out.
TRAPPIST-1h (the furthest out planet) orbits its parent star every 18.7 days, it orbits at an average of 0.06 AU, its radius is 0.76 times that of earth and its mass is unknown. It is most likely a rocky planet as no traces of hydrogen have been found in its atmosphere.
One of the other pros of the TRAPPIST-1 system is that the other planets are easily visible in the sky ('No Man's Sky proportions') and are only kept from destabilisation by orbital resonance.
Because of this, a physical probe like one in the starshot/starwisp program has a good chance of catching several of them in one photo by simply aiming for the star and expecting to miss slightly.
All that would be needed to confirm life would be a photo showing clear evidence - an artificial structure like a large dam, or (from a photo that can be further away) flora with a clear identifiable colour.
] |
[Question]
[
In a world geologically much like [Dune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)), there's no less than 300m of sand above compacted sand-stone across the planet. An Earth example would be [Rub Al Khali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%27_al_Khali), where sands reach 300-350m above ground level.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/b5pel.jpg)
Cities ranging from 30,000 to 150,000 people are dotted across the planet. For purposes of travel, our protagonists need to travel under-sand, in order to avoid detection from orbit. Setting aside the technological issues related to the sustainability of the cities and the events going on, using our tech level, **how can a crew of 30 people travel up to 50km at a time under sand?**
EDIT: The detection is entirely by visible detection (no infrared, etc.) with a quality such as a 'live' google-maps.
[Answer]
If they travel between big cities there could be tunnels conecting the cities and therefore allowing for travel between these cities.
[Answer]
## Mechanical Sandworm
**Edited to expound on motion as it's unclear**
Basically, it's a drill that instead of pushing aside the sand, it pulls it through its body and this would allow for minimal displacement to avoid visual detection unless you're quite close to the surface. As well, due to its motion, it should be relatively soundless and could carry quite a few people depending on its length.
This can be accomplished by a series of treads to pull the body along on the outside as well as pull the sand through the middle. They wouldn't need to be all encompassing as the natural flow through the middle should keep the sand moving just by the outer treads. The crew/personal (and possible even controls quarters would likely be best handled as an American football-shaped cavity that would be attached to the outer shell that pulls it along. This shape would allow the sand to flow around it while still being attached to the outer treads.
In all honesty, you could probably just take a submarine body and strap some treads to the outer shell to pull it along while providing a tube-like shape to move through the sand. The greatest disadvantage with either of these designs is that turning at any sort of speed is pretty much impossible and the only way any sort of turning is accomplished is through different tread speeds. Of course, you could also stop completely and just have one side of the treads moving forward and the other in reverse, but it's still going to be a slow endeavor.
[Answer]
## Sandstorms
Earth/Dune-type planets are nothing like Mars, our sandstorms are massive. One can use publicly available satellite imaging to plan the travel accordingly, so if there are only visible spectrum range satellites (or if the storm can block other wavelength), it will be very easy hide from them under the storm, moving along with it.
This traveling mode probably would allow the vessel to move half-"submerged" in sand while staying unnoticed, and if storms are occuring often enough, the vessel can submerge completely and wait for few days..
[Answer]
I am not sure that a digging machine should unavoidably leave a trail. Perhaps it is possible to avoid recognizable trail by digging deep enough. Or your planet could have giant wormlike animals, who make trails indistinguishable from the digging machines.
But a mechanical sandworm has to overcome some technical issues:
1. It has to endure the pressure of the sand, and thus have a heavy hull.
2. Since the displacement of millions of tons of sand is quite energy-consuming. (The drag is extremely high there.) the machine would require a serious power plant (probably nuclear) to move freely. But the waste heat should go somewhere.
3. They have to have some emergency systems, preferably smaller diggers as escape pods, to dig out the crew, if the digging system fails, and they get stuck.
4. It has to protect its moving parts from sand penetrating the machinery, and scour or block it from inside.
5. If the speed would be small, they would need some simple life support to survive while isolated from the atmosphere for extended period of time.
6. Navigation, sensor and communication systems probably won't be too effective from under 250m of sand. Therefore they would have to rely on compass and inertial navigation. I am not sure, that even sonars will work. So they would probably prefer pre-mapped routes to avoid collisions with rock and stone-surface hills.
It seems to me, that such machine is possible, but will be monstrous and slow.
[Answer]
If there are no prebuilt tunnels, then your characters must dig the tunnel as they go, so you are talking about a [Tunnel Boring Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_boring_machine). The technology exists, especially when you think about using it to dig through sand. The main problems TBM machines have experienced in the past have to do with digging through rock.
Nor would such a machine necessarily leave a trail, if it is filling in the hole behind itself as it digs in front. If it is near the surface, yes, it will probably disturb things enough to leave a visible track. But if it goes deeper and fills in behind, there should be no question of leaving an observable trail.
I think you just need to do a little reading on TBM's.
[Answer]
Why set aside the technological issues related to the sustainability of the cities?
They actually solve your problem, quite nicely.
---
### No need to go under the sand or use fancy tech:
# Infrastructure is already in place
Major cities will already be connected, so your heroes simply must **stow away** on an existing transport system rather than spending the money to create their own.
* **Boats**. In a desert world, cities will likely be abundant where there's water - similarly to the Egyptian Nile River, which supports ~the bulk of the population there. If the main transport system between cities is canals - and it may very well be - your characters can hide in or on boats. This has the added bonus of relatively quick travel compared to walking - and boats are harder to stop and search.
* **Roads**. Some areas can't have sand that thick - like coastlines, watersheds, mountain ranges, and river deltas. These will be great candidates for road building, and, similarly to the above suggestion, your characters can hide in vehicles with relative ease.
* **Flight**. If planes and helicopters exist, they must be able to cross great distances. There is always the possibility to use one.
* **Literally any existing transportation**. If only visible-light detection is being used - with a handwave to identify the targets on sight - nearly any means of getting around will work. Disguises with prosthetics, closed vehicles in search-free zones, and secret compartments will all do the trick. Just like in real life, your characters can take advantage of what already exists! No need to bore expensive tunnels.
[Answer]
Realistically, you would use the same approach opposing sides used during Cold War: if you know orbits and time of satellites passing your location, you can plan accordingly, and hide only when satellite is overhead. Then you can dig yourself down, and you won't need to go too deep.
[Answer]
## [Chunnels](http://www.chunnel.org.uk/)
The [Channel Tunnel](https://www.raileurope.com/blog/12355-chunnel-facts-london-paris) is a construct that stretches beneath the sea, from the United Kingdom to the European continent. In a desert world, as-the-crow-flies travel will be the most efficient (dunes aren't exactly great for travel) - and tunnels through the rigid / firm sandstone will likely hold, with the benefit of being easier to bore than tunnels in firm oceanic crust.
Some estimates put the length of the tunnel at **50 kilometers**, meeting the mark exactly.
This is no difficult feat engineeringwise, and the tunnels will probably already exist - as direct routes between cities - for ease of access.
---
Of course, all of this hiding business is pointless. See my other answer "**Infrastructure is Already in Place**" for a better solution.
[Answer]
*My answer may sound like a joke, but let's go anyways:*
Travelling trough sand is incredibly hard. After all, it's all glass broken in very, very little pieces. Unless there is a very good reason to dig trough it all the way (other than "avoiding orbit detection"), I would recommend the cheapest, easiest way to go:
Give your crew 30 sand-bycicles (and a camo suit).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WB6yJ.jpg)
The trails left behind the bikes will be almost invisible from orbit, if not totally covered by small winds in minutes. And because they are very small (and sand-colored), the members of the crew would be nearly unnoticeable on such a large surface, on the contrary of a ship that would remove tons of sand and leave a giant trail visible from space.
50 miles a day by bike may be a lot if the crew is not trained however. On a flat surface, [riding a bike 45 miles is about the same in energy requirement as running 5 miles or so](http://www.bikeforums.net/touring/589272-45-miles-without-training.html). Sand dunes being made of... well, sand, I guess it would take some training to ride the same distance within a day, so it's not a trek for everybody.
Also I assume the purpose of the ship is not just for the crew, but for good and supplies too. Each bike can have dual bags on each wheel, up to 30 liters capacity by bag. That's already 60 to 120 liters of gear by person (depending of their respective weight and training). That can go up to 3600 liters of goods for the whole crew. And I'm not even talking about bycicle trailers...
] |
[Question]
[
**The Problem**
In a world I am building, the days are 9 years long, this means 4 and half years of cold darkness following 4 and a half years of blistering daylight. I have asked questions on this Year long Day world before, but now I have a new thought on the night side.
In an environment with little light (the planet has a ring) and heat (there are active volcanoes), could life exist? The previous assumptions on this topic were divided between two schools of thought:
1. Certain lifeforms on the day half would lay eggs that would remain insulated throughout the night and hatch when day arrives and that creatures would evolve ways to survive the night so that they could eat these eggs.
2. Life would be unable to survive without sources of light and little plants for producers.
This wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that there are good arguments for both sides.
**The Question(s)**
1. Could animals evolve to live in such a harsh environment in the same way that in could on the day side?
2. If animals could exist on the night side, how would they survive, with the lack of vegetation, light and heat?
3. If an animal from the day side were to get caught in the night, could it survive and for how long?
[Answer]
I do not believe life could evolve under such conditions but I see no reason to think the world would need to be lifeless.
* Plants. There are two survival options here:
1. We have a very common class of plant that needs little tweaking to
survive this. We call them annuals. They live during the warm
time, produce seeds and die. Those seeds bring about the next
generation in the next warm time. Your warm and cold times last a
lot longer but it's the same basic idea.
2. Some plants can survive the total freezing of the plant structure
during their dormant period. Such plants could survive your long
winter.
* Animals. Here the choices are far more limited.
1. Hibernation. By itself this is almost certainly not enough.
The body uses too much energy while hibernating, a hibernation
period that long is probably not possible.
2. Freezing. There are animals that survive extreme cold by totally
freezing. Life processes stop, the energy use during hibernation is
not an issue. When things warm up they thaw and go back to living.
3. I'm not aware of any examples but I would think an overwintering egg
would be a possibility. The fertilized ovum would not start to grow
until it had been through a freeze-thaw cycle.
4. Conceivably there could be a critter that survived by stockpiled
food. The needed stockpile would be huge, though, and quite a
temptation to raiders of various sorts. I doubt it would be a
viable life strategy.
5. Assuming a geography that tolerates it the animals could simply be
in a permanent migration. Walking around a planet in 9 years is
something any larger animal could do if they weren't confronted with
impassible terrain.
[Answer]
Ocean vent communities exist with no light, as do microorganisms in deep rock, so the answer is an obvious yes, as long as that life is part of a chemosynthetic food chain. See also speculation about life in Europa's ocean, many (60?) miles under the surface ice.
For life based on a photosynthetic food chain, consider the Earth's deep ocean as a model. Many animals live in the deep ocean (benthic) zone, getting their food supply from dead organisms & wastes that drift down from the surface. A "whale fall" can sustain a deep ocean community for decades (per NOAA: <http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/whale-fall.html> )
So assuming your planet has a world-spanning ocean, like Earth, marine life could be based on a migrating photosynthetic zone that follows the sunrise and sunset around the world. Some animals - fish, whales, birds like the albatross - could follow the zone, other life could inhabit the deep ocean, depending on fallen detritus produced during the photosynthetic 'spring' and 'fall' for survival.
Given that basis, it's not too hard to imagine some of the ocean life evolving to exploit new niches on land. One could likewise imagine animals evolving to be migratory: a human could walk around the Earth (given a suitable path - no oceans in the way or similar obstacles) in 9 years.
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First of all, I loved the idea. So lets think about life on a planet which had a day night cycle of 9 years.
The main issue with 4.5 year night is energy. Even you hibernate, it is extremely hard for a creature to stay alive under harsh conditions. But that doesn't necessarily means there is can't be life on that planet;
I imagine there would be islands of vegetations, which can move slowly to keep in the day side, moving west as planet rotates. To stay alive, those giant islands of living plants would need to form a mutualist relationship with each other, for example I imagine them carrying their water source with them. Because of such harsh conditions and temperature difference, I would guess the planet is a sand planet, and the vegetation islands are moving extremely slowly on this sand sea, to always stay under the sun. The animals, on the other hand has to live and move between those islands. Water is very precious in such environment since on day side, the sun always shines. I would imagine there to be vegetation traps like giant venus flyeaters to protect water from others.
Even though it is not the only reason, the temperature change is one of the main reasons for wind as far as I know. The atmosphere of such planet would be windy. Any intelligent life form would be primative since metal is hard to find and staying in same place would mean death but they may use wind to gather energy (not our kind of giant metal wind mills but like ones in miyazaki's nausicaa). Such intelligent creatures would have a rich culture with appreciation to plants and other creatures.
I guess evolution would create creatures who prefer night side too. The living islands would leave a trail of waste as they move and night side creatures would "clean" the waste creating some kind of cycle as we have in earth.
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Migrating and/or hibernating plants and animal life could easily develop on such a planet. Laying eggs for the night and hatching on day time is also possible, but migration is slightly easier. Your photosyntetic life forms could very well be mobile, or short lived so they keep spreading to the daytime zone. To make things easier, you could have a continent that runs through the entire planet. Thus, this rapid spreading would easily work. If this does not work for you, your planet would be dominated by the flying animals and plants. If it means they would get day time for their entire life, plants might develop flight.
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I'm thinking of reptiles that shed their skins. During the months-long "dusk" on your planet, animals grow a thick protective layer that will prevent heat loss and shield them from harsh conditions during the long night. During the "dawn", they could shed it.
In addition, like squirrels they could store food during the day that they would eat during the night.
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I was thinking about this some more after a few questions and answers. Everyone assumes life forms would be living, in their entirety, on the surface of the planet. While I think this is a rational argument for most of the plant life, it doesn't need to be necessarily true for the animals.
What if there was a whole other ecosystem that developed under the surface? Nutrient rich algaes/lichens to entice herb and omnivores into vast underground caves, which then entice the carnivores.
Plants on the surface can follow the annual and hybernation models found on earth. Plants under the surface are more like algaes and lichens that thrive more on heat than light.
All animals have a pseudo hybernation wherein they sleep for long periods of time, waking only to feed for a few days/weeks to rebuild stores and go back to sleep.
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I see also very big problems on the day-side. I think that it will be very hot after very short time.
Maybe the life will happen mostly around the day/night-line where it could be not to hot and not to cold. You could also change this by winds, e.g. warm winds that flow to the night-side and warming it.
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Isn’t this pretty close to a tidally locked planet? The life lives in the “dusk” zone. If it takes 9 years to spin, that’s plenty of time for plants to spread to keep up with the movement.
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Migration.
Animals circle the globe. Plants do, too, by continually throwing their seeds out for dispersal. Animal-borne is obviously best, but it's possible they might evolve to spit them out toward the day-side (at this rate, the distance they can hurl seeds is significant), prevailing winds could help, and random dispersal works just as on earth, if enough of them make it to clement conditions.
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**This question already has answers here**:
[What is the amputationility of a monomolecular wire weapon?](/questions/19249/what-is-the-amputationility-of-a-monomolecular-wire-weapon)
(5 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
So the [monomolecular wire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomolecular_wire) weapon is a kinda popular Rule of cool weapon. However, I'm baffled by how they are sometimes used in fictional works. Most of the time, they are used as a whip (feasible) or used as traps for moving targets where they would be viscerated into a bloody mess.
Then there are the exceptions where they were used within minutes in a live combat situation to bind large groups of enemies(that is, until the strings tighten) Without the person using them ever moving.
How is that even possible? The closest and most feasible idea i thought up is to attach these strings to barbed needles and then throw a lot of them in such a way that it immobilises the enemy(won't work well on a open plain I tell you). All that's needed now is a person with godlike spatial awareness and throwing skills.
is it possible to be able to control and manipulate the string? (No magic of course)
How practical is it in combat? (Well... I don't think it would work well against guns...)
Just hand wave the fact that I'm talking feasibility on something that's not really that feasible.
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So, monomolecular whips requires advanced technology to build ( we still can't), so we can safely apply some technology to our answer.
The first thing is that you would need "control points" embedded into the whip. Without them it would have virtually no weight or momentum so would not do anything.
The simplest approach is as Pete suggests, building it into a bolas. Alternatively you could build it into a whip with a weight at the end of the wire to hold it out. You would be able to swing the whip using the weight. By having a winching system inside the handle you could even extend and reduce the length of the whip dynamically as part of the swing. Imagine a simple handle, when you flick your wrist the weight swings out and around scything through anything between the weight and the handle, then retracting back into the handle before it starts to wrap around and become a threat to the user.
An easier to use weapon be like a net gun, but it fires a net made of molecular wires with weights around the edge. Fire the net into an area and anything in between the weights gets cut into neat rectangles until all the weights hit something and stop moving. Not very effective compared to a gun but certainly a horrifying thing to face, the psychological impact would be real.
For something like a sword you would need a way to stiffen the wire. We don't really have any technology that can do that at the moment, in theory a magnetic or electrical field could be used to push the control point away from the pommel but in practice doing that over any distance is not feasible and is too easily interfered with.
Ask skye just suggested a small rocket on the end of the wire would indeed work, however it still would work more like a whip than a sword since moving the handle would not cause the rocket to move. This would be a terrifying weapon while the rocket fuel lasted (which wouldn't be for long) though as you could potentially spool out a much longer cable and cut through anything in between you and the rocket.
Note though that cuts from a molecular whip are very very thin. Cut through a pillar and you would not cause the pillar to collapse, the stone is still there supporting the weight from above. Cut through it in multiple places and then apply some sideways force (or cut through at an angle) though and you might get somewhere.
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You'd use it as a [bolas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolas)
Wind it up, let it go and watch your enemies fall like grass before the scythe...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DAWHd.jpg)
Obviously, you have to wear a hat and take care not to decapitate your angry-looking horse mid-gallop...
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One of these hats. Just replace the strings with longer mono cords.
Throw like a Frisbee.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NeWlJ.jpg)
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Oh, the string weapon of infinite cool. I like this one and have spent some time musing about it. Of course my thoughts ran along the usual lines, make it a whip, put a weight on it, etc. However, most concepts ran into serious issues regarding physics or were too contrived to be usable and didn't offer much more functionality than your average sci-fi sword.
Edit: Skip the next three paragraphs if you want to get to the point faster.
Instead of whips and such, I went for something different altogether, the blinking blade. The first version was a 2 metre hollow staff where the wire is connected to the hand guard in the middle. Either end would shoot the weight out and the other end would catch it, the whole process happening faster than - you guessed it - the blink of an eye. It had a 180° cutting arc and could also be used similar to a normal staff, provided your second hand didn't grab all the way around it while you "blink". That gave it pretty good defensive capabilities too, since you could cut block a hit and cut the weapon on impact, maybe along with the one wielding it.
In practice, it was quite clunky in tight places, so the next version used an A-shape. I'ts basically the staff folded up, with the top of the A being the axis and the bridge of the A the grip. Kind of like an elbow blade that can lunge out in an almost full circle. Compared to the staff, it was much handier while offering even more range (about 1.30 metres from the hand), but it was also more dangerous to the user, and cutting a blocked weapon would most likely also sever ones own head.
I had other versions, swords that gain reach by firing the weight out of the guard and circling the wire around the tip (discarded, no point in having a blade) or just a stick that rotates it like a fan (discarded, most of the time the weight hits the target first) and other nonsense I wouldn't even dare mention.
Edit: The aforementioned point.
If you want to go for what's most reasonable though, being cool while also realistic, monofilament whips of any kind pose too many problems to be feasible, let alone the best solution. Just as in today's reality, cutting wire is much better suited for traps and netguns than for personal arms.
First off, Monomolecular wires won't last long under the stress applied in combat situations. Even if the wires would face no resistance while severing molecular bonds (don't think so), the forces needed to move them exert stress on it. Solid weapons will always have a higher resistance to wear and tear. Most implementations of monomolecular wires will be discardable one-time uses. That also means that if they are too expensive to produce, they probably won't be used at all, or very rarely and only by excentric rich people.
For example, you could have devices that are placed on the ground and fire a bunch of tiny harpoons with attached wires to instantly create a web-trap, or maybe some kind of doublebarreled gun to place tripwires (well, cutwires actually, har har) at a distance. Or fire a wire at enemies, if the projectiles carrying it have enough momentum to make it cut and not just wrap around the target with the projectiles dealing the actual blow, in which case a normal gun would do the trick just fine...
Most importantly, in a world advanced enough to have monomolecular wires, you can - or must - have all your wire weapons be controlled by embedded computer systems, making them usable without superhuman abilities. This is probably the most important part, since it is beyond human capabilities to handle something so thin that it has nearly no weight and is practically invisible.
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I wonder if monomolecular strings would work like people think they would. It's like a knife edge without the wedge part of the knife behind it. So it would cut, but it might not part the parts. And being monmolecular, the cut parts would still be close enough to chemically bind back together. There'd be damage since that DNA molecule cut in half probably doesn't join back up with the itself properly. But the muscle fiber might work just fine after being cut and hastily rejoined by all the various forces operating on it at that instant.
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Depending on the properties of the monomolecular thread, there are a few other possibilities outside of having a weighted end.
The closest thing to a molecular thread using current technology is a carbon nanotube. The tube can be electrically conductive (or using suitable doping, can act as a semiconductor), so if the thread has similar electrical properties, if could be manipulated using an electrical current. If it a natural superconductor, passing a current through it might cause it to straighten out from a coiled or loose configuration, for example.
As an alternative, an electrically conductive monomolecular thread could also be manipulated by an external electrical or magnetic field. The user may seem to have amazing control over the wire, but it is simply conforming to the external fields.
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[Elementals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elemental) are based on the 4 classical elements: earth, fire, air, and water, as those were all that the ancients knew of.
However, with science we have learned that none of those are actually elements as defined by the periodic table of elements.
What would an elemental creature based on actual elements be like?
Is there a realistic way that they could evolve?
**Edit:**
Based on the idea that all myths have a core of truth, what would it take to get creatures like the ones described as elementals in the legends?
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A living creature composed entirely from one classical element is, of course, impossible under everything we know about biology. However, let's make things interesting and try to determine a way for an organism to *look* and *behave* like an elemental, without actually being one. In order from easiest to hardest.
### Earth
This is pretty easy, actually, since the creature doesn't need to be made of earth, it just needs to be covered in it. There is a kind of crab which goes around collecting rocks, plants, bits of shell, and so on, and uses an adhesive to attach stuff to its shell for purposes of camouflage. Looking like the land around you is a good camouflage strategy, so any creature that values stealth or defense over speed and agility could benefit from this.
### Water
It could be argued that most life on earth are already water elementals, since cells are basically little bags of water encased in thin cell membranes. Creatures like jellyfish can be practically invisible if their refraction index is close to that of the water they live in. But for a creature to be truly water-elemental-ish, you probably want something like a slime mold - a microorganism that is capable of joining together with others of its species to form a mobile blob-like creature.
I would also bring up hagfish, a creature that excretes microfilaments in order to convert large quantities of water into a thick slime. A single hagfish can produce *gallons* of slime this way, more than it would be capable of storing in its body in liquid form.
Imagine this: A population of microorganisms inhabit a large lake, strangely devoid of living fish. When someone comes into the water for a swim, they hardly notice that the water seems strangely sticky, but pay it no mind. As they approach the center of the lake, suddenly they feel the water around them turn to thick, clinging slime...
After eating their drowned victim and reproducing, a number of these microorganisms form a large, translucent blob, which crawls out of the water and makes its way toward another nearby lake, to repeat the cycle.
### Wind
Microbes can't really control themselves in air all that well, so you'd need something that is too small for the eye to see, yet big enough to resist normal brownian motion. Massive swarms of very, very small insects (the smallest known flying insect is a fairyfly, about a tenth of a millimeter in length) with flocking behavior, perhaps, seeking to mate or hunt... but they probably wouldn't feel much like wind if they hit you, and the thicker the swarms, the less likely they would be to be invisible, and as it got close, you'd be able to see it for the swarm of insects that it is. From a distance, it would end up looking more like a (slow-moving) mobile smoke or fog.
On the other hand, if we're talking about *air* elementals, as in, air which can attack you... well, that's just airborne diseases, isn't it?
### Fire
For a creature to constantly burn, it would require a lot more energy than it could ever hope to acquire through this method, and it is hard to think of a reason why this would be useful. Instead, let us consider the possibilities of a microorganism that starts fires.
Eucalyptus trees are fire-resistant, and drive out competing plants by producing flammable oils and waiting for something to light them on fire. Imagine a microorganism, perhaps descended from volcano-dwelling, heat-loving archeans, that has learned to colonize cooler regions by spreading spores which chemically ignite dry wood on contact in order to drive out competing organisms. Unlikely, sure, but we're talking about *scientifically plausible fire elementals*, so I think we can stretch probability a bit here.
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Basically you can't do it without magic. In order to be "alive" you need to be able to move, to do at least some processing, to take energy in and do something with it. If you do it with magic then you can do anything...
None of those things are possible in a homogeneous creature built entirely from one element. You might be able to achieve some things with for example carbon by using different crystalline forms but really you're so constrained you won't be able to achieve much. For example even though you can make circuits and even lubricants from carbon you can't make batteries, etc. That's with Carbon too, one of the most flexible elements.
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In a story idea of mine, there are a race of crystalline beings who were created in the Neogene Period by certain atoms 'falling where they needed to go' to create something similar to nerve-netting. With ambient electricity from lightning, and over a long time of course, these 'crystal brains' activated and formed sentience, figuring out how to multiply and change their shape. By the time of the Ordovician Period, they could bud their netting from their crystals and take whatever shape they needed, although those forms became predominately humanoid after their 'discovery' of people and the convenience of a simian body.
I added situations where people question their biology, such as asking how their bodies are so flexible, and how they draw in electricity as sustenance.
To these questions, they simply state that it would require an explanation of things humans are mentally inadequate to comprehend all at once, and so an explanation would have no use.
As someone answered me on a question I asked, find a sneaky way to explain that there *are* answers to those questions but are unable to be answered for good reasons. It's your story, a reality *you* create.
Though I'd hardly consider my 'eh, it's fine' explanation to be '*sneaky*'
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It is a contradiction. “elemental” means simple: one kind of thing. You expect an exemplar of the kind of substance you are talking about. Living things, on the other hand, are complex and have lots of separate parts, probably made of *many* different kinds of thing.
Now if there are different *kinds* of things that are all pure *rock* or all pure *water* (etc.) then they are not worthy of the term elementals. In that system, there was a single *rock* and real substances were made of various combinations of the basic elements in differwnt proportions. A pure sample of any of them would be an extreme substance, but a *pure* substance without internal complexity.
Well, in the case of Earth you could build a mechanical device with all the parts being made of the same pure material, but again that's not very elementary.
This is true whether you mean a single Earth element or a hundred; you can't make something complex out of just one thing. Unless the thing is like Lego... but you could say *we* are made of just one thing: atoms, that come in some variety. That's not what's meant.
I recall when I was of a single-digit age reading a Star Trek novel, in which one of the children of the Horta was a Star Fleet member and went on missions...and the Romulons happen to worship Elementals and were deeply rattled when up against this personification of Earth as an advisary.
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You cannot have an organism entirely made up of one element (classical or modern). However, you could base your elementals on their earlier definitions, that being creatures adapted to dwell only in their own element
A fire elemental could be easily explained by an alternative chemistry: Specifically, they would use molten sodium chloride in place of water. This constitution would force them to dwell in the midst of hot flames, and if they left they would almost instantly freeze
Air and water elementals basically already exist
Earth elementals would be the hardest to do. The only real option I can see would be to make them burrow/swim through sand, like many lizards do. This would be a little far from the original conception, but it also has the advantage of not being impossible
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Considering that men and women actually do wind up with a variety of nonreproductive physiological differences (unlike many fantasy worlds which ignore them), among them:
* Men wind up with more skeletal muscle mass than women, on average
* Men have more fast-twitch muscle fibers (speed), while women have more slow-twitch muscle fibers (stamina)
* Men wind up with more upper-body strength (arms and chest), while women wind up with more of their musculature in the lower body (legs and abdominals)
how would martial arts be adapted to be more suited to one biological gender over the other? (Considering that "default male" is largely the case IRL, I wouldn't be surprised if the answers focus on women, but answers that deal with how something could specifically be adapted for men are fine too.)
Conditions of development:
* This martial art has to be first and foremost practical -- even if warfare isn't a pressing concern at any given time, self-defense from bandits and other ne'er-do-wells *is*, and the ability for someone trained in this to be more useful in a battle than a completely green peasant is a plus, as well as the ability to defend against aggressive beasts and other such threats, or some utility for basic hunting.
* It needs to encompass unarmed and armed melee combat (AIUI, ranged weapons are something of a different story), with weapons that'd be available to a large portion of the populace -- bonus points if it covers multiple types of weapons as one advances through it.
* It needs to be something that a large segment of the population can learn -- i.e. not restricted to nobility or a dedicated class of fighters, although advanced forms may be studied/employed by such a dedicated class.
* The people developing it are at a generally Iron Age/medieval level of technology -- farmers, herders, and/or tradesfolk, with possibly a small class of dedicated fighters. Weapons of steel (especially larger ones) are treated as valuable, albeit not restricted by law.
* Healing is limited to basic, mundane means (such as chewing willow bark to ease pain, the dressing and bandaging of wounds, and the splinting of broken limbs).
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The functional movement/power differences between genders in humans are less than many other species, with more difference attributable to physical training and cultural choices. [Women have always fought.](http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative-by-kameron-hurley/) These differences are even less an issue when you put weapons in people's hands. Weight class matters most in empty hand fighting, but outside of sport, people use weapons when they can.
If you look to say, traditional Chinese martial arts, you can find scholar styles which also end up being taught to wealthy women... which... you'd see would be because the lifestyles of the men and women are equally low activity. On the flipside, you have stuff like "Boat Boxing" (Zhoushan Chuan Quan) which was rumored to be developed by fishing women to fight pirates - active life style, different form.
What about the modern day? Well, you'll notice that armies around the world with women in active combat train the exact same things that they do for men. These are countries which have done intense studies into the limits of physical ability - how long you can hold your breath, how little food or water people can survive on, etc. If there was a significant combat advantage to be gained training differently, they would have done it.
The biggest things you're going to look at are reach and height differences - this changes things like your entries and takedowns, however, that's about looking to the anatomy of the person in front of you - not their gender.
If you have a species with much greater variance in body types ("One gender is twice the size of the other", "Females have 2 extra arms") then you can talk about different styles.
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EDIT: For a shorter version which is less divisive than my answer below, here's a summary which should be less disagreeable. All martial arts are designed for the same goal: to make *you* be the best *you* can be. If a martial art was designed to demand X pounds of upper body muscle mass, it would not be useful for any males who don't have X pounds of upper body mass. Accordingly, martial arts all use arms the best way you can use arms, legs the best way you can use legs, hips the best way you can use hips, etc. Every one of them will naturally let you tailor the style to your own body.
Also, every martial art is designed to allow technique (mental skill) to be more important than muscle. If not, why would you bother training it? You'd just go work out instead. Accordingly, every martial art is designed to support how to use the mind to overcome the body. The way to do that is unsurprisingly very similar for people with 2 arms and 2 legs.
Consider this [list](http://www.razordynamics.com/2014/04/29/5-best-martial-art-styles-womens-self-defense/),\* not a single one of them is a "specialized" female only martial art. They're all just martial arts, like any other martial art. They focus on mental techniques. Now some of them focus more on it than others (such as Judo, which concentrates on letting your opponent do most of the work), but its far more about how we use our mind than anything else.
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In my comments, I asked whether you were looking at just the physical differences between the sexes or the mental differences between the genders. You said you were looking at the sexes.
Unfortunately, my question was sort of a trick question.
The physical differences between male and female humans is actually quite minor, when you really get down to it. Punches and kicks are far more dependent on the configuration of ligaments in the knees and wrists than they are the sex chromosomes. Sure, men have more upper body strength, but if [1st Lieutenant Kristen Griest, and Captain Shaye Haver](http://time.com/4005578/female-army-rangers/) have anything to say about it, there's not all that much of a difference in the parts that count.
While you mentioned the mental gap should be minor, it is starting to be recognized that the gap between feminine and masculine is much much larger than the gap between male and female. We've just not had many opportunities to explore the difference between gender and sex because they typically line up.
The different genders end up treating their body very differently. This is reflected in the more feminine martial arts, such as Wing Chun. A more feminine martial art concentrates on precision strikes that do massive damage from small amounts of force, not just because they might have less upper body strength, but because the social conditioning makes it easier for them to make such strikes without putting themselves in a bad position. The feminine martial arts tend to be more focused on how to achieve your goals rather than how to prevent the opponent from achieving theirs. (This sentence should be controversial. Most balanced martial arts talk about both halves of the spectrum, but the martial arts geared towards the feminine side tend to balance it differently than those geared towards the masculine side).
The number one thing I see when I look at the more "feminine" martial arts is softness. They tend not to rely on the ability to simply turn into a brick and pummel their enemy. When an opponent throws a punch, instead of violently blocking it with a spasm of muscle driving their fist far out of line with your face, the more feminine arts have a tendency to softly make contact with the opposing strike, and redirect it so softly that the opponent loses track of where their body actually is because they assume the woman's block is actually harder than it really is. It's fascinating to observe, really. In the martial arts which are more tailored for feminine approaches, combatants (male and female) simply melt out of the way of an incoming strike, only to reappear right inside their opponents defenses.
From what I have been able to glean, much of the softness comes from the use of more of the postural muscles in ways that prevent an opponent from figuring out which muscles have been used. Due to the typical gender gap, the more feminine individuals have a general tendency to have more control over these than a more masculine individual. Doubt it? Look at the ultra-pure steriotypes. The ultra-pure feminine individual carries herself with poise, and its almost impossible to capture her essence (which is why female nude paintings are so popular... the goal is to try to paint an essence which is so very hard to capture). The ultra-pure masculine individual is a bulldog, who will crush anything which gets in his way and can turn into stone if needed. Stereotypes? Absolutely. Everyone's a mix of both sides, but stereotypes are useful for trying to start exploring the differences. Its up to you to then refine this to something more realistic, with a realistic feminine character or a realistic masculine character, or something in between like an English gentleman. However, what is very clear is that it is not something decided by sex. Men are capable of learning these techniques just as much as women. The only difference is cultural: women tend to get a head start in the feminine martial arts, while men tend to get a head start in the masculine martial arts.
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Razordynamics is no longer an active website. I have rescued the text, thanks to web.archive.org and reproduced it below:
>
> When it come to self defense, there are certain martial art styles that are more effective for women than others. Many martial art styles rely too heavily on brute strength and meeting force with direct force to defeat an aggressor. While some women are big and strong, and would have no problem applying these styles, most are not. And since the majority of violence towards woman is caused by men, there are certain martial arts styles that are more effective in handling larger and stronger opponents.
>
>
> Here is a list of the five best martial arts styles for women';s self
> defense. Note: Each of the martial art styles listed were chosen for
> their street practicality, directness, efficiency and ability to be
> pressure tested during training (all things we like here at Razor
> Fighting Dynamics).
>
>
> * Judo -- Thanks to fighters like Ronda Rousey and Hector Lombard, people all over the world are becoming more aware of the effectiveness
> of Judo in fighting. What makes Judo a great self defense system for
> women is its focus on throws and submissions. While some strength is
> needed to perform Judo moves, leverage is the cornerstone of most its
> techniques. In Judo, you do not have to worry about punching power or
> knocking out an opponent. Instead, the earth becomes your fist and
> slamming an attacker on the streets is more than enough to dismantle
> them. However, if the throws do not work, Judo has many limb breaking
> and dislocating techniques that will.
> * Wing Chun -- Wing Chun, is one of the most direct and effective fighting systems in China. It was also created by a woman, a nun named
> Ng Mui (at least that is how the story goes). While Wing Chun single
> punches are not necessarily known for their knock out power, the
> repetitive compounded punches (chain punches) the style is famous for,
> cumulatively, have the same effect. In addition to chain punches, Wing
> Chun’s eye gauging, force deflecting, knee cap breaking and elbow
> striking techniques make it a very effective style for any woman
> looking to protect herself against would be attackers.
> * Brazilian Jiu-jitsu -- Of course we cannot leave out Brazilian Jiu-jitsu (BJJ). A high level female BJJ practitioner is dangerous to
> any man looking to beat or sexually assault her. What makes this style
> especially effective for women is its focus on technique and leverage
> over brute strength. A well trained female BJJ practitioner can easily
> defend herself against bigger and stronger opponents. Through shear
> strength, some men have the misguided belief that they can easily take
> any woman to the ground and do what they want. It is this
> overestimation of their abilities that leave these men open and
> unprepared to defend against the grappling of a well trained female
> BJJ practitioner resulting in the would-be attackers having their
> limbs broken, being chocked unconscious or killed.
> * Muay Thai -- Muay Thai, especially Muay boran, is one of hardest hitting no nonsense martial arts styles in existence. What makes this
> style very effective for woman is its focus on using the hardest parts
> of the body (elbows, knees and top of head) for striking. Many martial
> art styles depend too heavily on the fists for striking. It takes time
> to develop fists to be strong enough to do damage (read: "[link]Should
> you punch in a street fight"). Even when they are use effectively,
> they are still vulnerable to breaking during an altercation leaving
> you defenseless. However, head-butts, knees and elbows strikes can be
> delivered continuously in a fight without much personal damage to you,
> but a lot more to your attacker
> * Boxing -- Many of you might be wondering why boxing is on this list. Boxing often gets overlooked as an effective martial arts for self
> defense system, especially for women. What makes boxing effective for
> women is not necessarily the striking, but the evasive movements and
> footwork. Again, we are talking about self defense and trying to
> survive not winning a match. Getting out of a violent situation should
> be the main goal. By using boxing defensive and evasive movements, a
> woman can slip, bob and weave herself out of harms way and flee from
> the situation (just watch how Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Bernard Hopkins
> move around the ring when they do not want to be hit).
>
>
> Of course, each of martial arts style mentioned have their limitations
> and the advantages listed are effective for men as they are for women.
> The key is finding martial styles that work with your strengths, are
> effective and practical and fit within the [link]Scientific Fighting
> Method
>
>
> What do you think are the best and most effective martial art styles
> for women’s self defense?
>
>
>
[Answer]
Generally the goal is to maximize the benefits of your training in comparison to people without training, not to optimize for particular gender or build. So a practical martial art for women will generally be almost as good for men even if it was designed for women. The gender difference simply isn't the priority in practice. Purely artistic forms of course might go further.
Women have wider hips and lower center of gravity than men. The weaker upper body is somewhat balanced by the upper body also being lighter, meaning there should be no handicap on the speed and precision of hand movements.
A martial art that uses stable and balanced footwork combined with deflections of attacks followed by precise counter-attacks would IMHO work well for women. So no high kicks, fancy leaps or lunges, or wide unbalanced swings or fully committed attacks. Some Chinese styles and old forms of fencing are like this, so a woman should be able to use them well without being needlessly handicapped by her body.
Balance and composure are probably the keywords to keep in mind from story perspective. Stay calm and focussed, deal with issues efficiently and one at a time. Deflect attacks, create an opening, exploit the opening. Very methodological and systematic. There might be some philosophical or even mystical elements to the style. It helps in keeping composed under pressure.
Physically the key is to avoid being out-of-balance or otherwise unable to react. A typical approach is to minimize movement and use of energy to the absolute minimum necessary.
This approach works for unarmed combat and light weapons such as daggers or fencing weapons.
An alternate solution is to use a long pole-arm, such as naginata. The pole compensates for the lack of upper body strength by supplying leverage to swings and helps keep opponents at a safe distance. Wide swings are also powered by hips and legs where women have less of a handicap. And, if you get hit by a pole-arm, it will hurt even if somebody male would have swung it harder.
[Answer]
Sexual dimorphism in humans is rather slight.
And combat is done mainly by men against other men.
Hence there has been little interest or reason to develop a martial art to combat a particular gender or match the particular benefits of each gender.
Women for instance have a more efficient metabolism. The muscles burn energy more efficiently, giving higher endurance. Down side there is less instantaneous power. But the difference is so very slight.
(Women have greater hip and spine flexibility but no so great that it would be fight wining)
You will only notice the difference in long distance walks. Or long distance swimming.. but the higher buoyancy due to higher body fat is the primary cause.
Also martial arts rarely aims to hit an opponent where they are strong. That is basically what martial arts is... not about blindly hitting the opponent.. but hitting and twisting the right spots on the opponent.
There are weak point on the human body where a relatively low power but precise strike is incapacitating and even fatal. And given that men and women are not that different both genders share most of the same weak points. Speed in martial arms becomes the name of the game.
That be said, I guess women would be more immune to a crotch attack than a man. But I don't think you can build an entire martial arts for women against men, based on entirely on crotch attacks.
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[Question]
[
In a superhero setting, a thunder clap is where someone claps with superhuman strength, causing damage such as broken windows and burst eardrums.
What I want to know is, taken to the extreme of the extreme what is the maximum possible damage a thunder clap can do?
Read <https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/> for a good starting point but that's only 90% the speed of light. I'm allowing speeds much faster than that. Additionally, the collision of invincible fast objects should cause something at least slightly different.
I wonder if the waves could be strong enough to break the Earth into pieces which fly out near the speed of light smashing into stars and planets causing a chain reaction. Or maybe as time and space bends around the incoming hands (via
special relativity?) the collision will punch a hole in the space-time continuum causing a sizable worm hole of disastrous effect.
The man doing the clap is strong, fast, and completely invincible. He is the size of an average adult male and is standing on Earth. His strength can be any finite number of newtons, his speed can be anything less than the speed of light, he is completely and utterly invincible even if the universe gets destroyed. Feel free to use speeds such as `c - 10^(-(graham's number))` or even faster. He does not need to be standing at sea level but he does have to be standing and not in flight.
I'd like to see qualitative answers (such as the XKCD example) that I can understand. I am more interested in interesting answers than ones that strictly follow my rules.
[Answer]
**Short answer: as much damage as you want.**
**Long answer: it depends on how fast you can move your hands.**
When your superhero claps, he converts all of the kinetic energy in his arms into other forms of energy. At low speeds, this is an acoustic pulse that ripples through the air, which we hear as a clap.
A single hand is about half a kilogram, so both hands together are about a kilogram of mass. (We'll ignore the energy in our superhero's arms.) We can plug this into Einstein's theory of special relativity to get the following equation for the energy of a single clap:
$e=c^2/\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}-c^2$
**$.0001c$**
At 1/10000th the speed of light, we get around $9\times10^8$ Joules of energy. This is about the energy of a lightning bolt, but our energy will probably mostly be released in the form of a substantial pressure wave, rather than light and heat.
**$0.01c$**
At 1/100th the speed of light, our clap now has around $9\times10^{12}$ Joules of energy. Our clapper is now in possession of a small weapon of mass destruction, with each clap releasing about 100 times the energy of a MOAB bomb, the second most powerful non-nuclear device ever detonated.
**$0.1c$**
With his hands moving 1/10th the speed of light, our clapper releases $9\times10^{14}$ Joules of energy. This is about the same energy as ten of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
**$.8c$**
Now we're getting relativistic! At .8c, we get $1.6\times10^{17}$ Joules of energy. This is about the same amount of energy as what was released by the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated.
**$.9999999c$**
Now we've got an extinction event! This clap releases $10^{23}$ Joules of energy, or about as much as was released by the impact of the meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs.
**$(1-10^{-16})c$**
This clap would release around $10^{32}$ Joules of energy. At this energy, clapping will destroy the Earth.
**$(1 - 10^{-65})c$**
At this speed, the superhero's clap contains as much energy as there is in the observable universe. There will effectively be another big bang which occurs between the superhero's hands. The released energy will expand rapidly outward in a wave which will utterly annihilate everything it hits, with the wave expanding at close to the speed of light.
[Answer]
I think you might run into an issue here. Now with the word 'apocalyptic', that's pretty much guaranteed, but with the word 'clap'.
Contrary to popular belief, when you clap you aren't simply throwing your hands together. Your hands, arm muscles, brain and even eyes are engaged in complex interplay to make sure your hands collide just so (if you want proof your eyes are involved try placing just the tips of your index fingers together with your eyes closed). Your hero has infinite speed, which removes the need to worry about nerve signal transmission time (except it doesn't, but I'll get to that later), but what he doesn't have is a nervous system designed to deal with relativistic lag.
It's well known that when you reach relativistic speeds weird things start happening with time, notably you have to start worrying about how old your twin is. Our hero has the problem of his brain having to worry about how old his hands are. For a bit of reference: we have to correct for relativistic lag in satellite communications.
The amount of time it takes a signal to reach a satellite at the top of the Low Earth Orbit boundary is about 5ms. The amount of time it takes a normal human nerve signal to get to the end of the arm is about 5ms (thank you, XKCD). The satellite is moving at a speed considerably lower than c. Unless our hero can perform relativistic reference frame substitution in his head while tied to a centrifuge then he's going to run into issues with nerve signal interpretation.
Now, I don't claim to know what happens when a brain is sending messages to muscles that are sending feedback at a completely different rate, and I wouldn't even want to try modelling a neurochemical reaction on a changing temporal boundary. If you speed up the signal transmission you just end up with more confusion, as the problem isn't with speed of signal but differences in the rates with which the signals are being sent and intercepted. If you say that the nerve signals are instantaneous then you end up with a causal violation. From the point of view of the brain the clap happens before it's sent the signal for the clap to begin.
With this amount of bodily confusion I reckon that our hero isn't going to have the level of fine motor control required for a good, solid 'CLAP'. In fact, I'd wager that there would be something more like a localised seizure in their biceps, followed by the most apocalyptic derp in history.
Even if their hands don't collide at all (like missing your own high-five), our indestructible hero's hands will stop in some way, most likely a highly uncoordinated pirouette. Assuming that by 'indestructible' you mean they are in no way affected by external forces and that nothing can enter their body their arms will leave a trail of vacuum where they've pushed all of the air ahead of them. The leading edges of their hands and forearms will be a thin incandescent layer of plasma where adiabatic compression has taken place, and the sudden shock of their asymmetrical epic flail will briefly transmit an ungodly amount of energy into the ground below their feet (This wouldn't happen if their actions were perfectly symmetrical, but as they aren't their feet will be exerting a nontrivial torque on the floor, much like if you swing one arm while on a swivel chair)
The exact amount of energy transmitted to the floor will be somewhat under ckersch's excellently calculated energies, but as you can see from the ungodly exponents that he produced, even if our hero's indestructible shoulder sockets re-absorb 99% of the energy involved we're still talking continent-crackingly huge numbers. Oh, and the air around our hero is now a combination of on fire and propagating a huge shockwave from the vacuum implosion. And that's before we figure out if our hero's shoes and shirt have vaporised from the friction.
All in all, maybe not an apocalyptic clap, but it's certainly apocalyptic. And you can guarantee his immortal buddy will somehow get a photo of it and put it on whatever's left of instagram with a caption like:
'Hurr-Durr, Imma destroyin' the wurld!'.
[Answer]
You need to check out the Alpheidae, it is underwater but the principles of water is almost the same as air.
Sorry about the hunk of quote but it is pretty interesting in your case.
[Alpheidae - Pistol shrimp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpheidae)
>
> The snapping shrimp competes with much larger animals such as the sperm whale and beluga whale for the title of loudest animal in the sea. The animal snaps a specialized claw shut to create a cavitation bubble that generates acoustic pressures of up to 80 kPa at a distance of 4 cm from the claw. As it extends out from the claw, the bubble reaches speeds of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h) and releases a sound reaching 218 decibels.[11] The pressure is strong enough to kill small fish.[12] It corresponds to a zero to peak pressure level of 218 decibels relative to one micropascal (dB re 1 μPa), equivalent to a zero to peak source level of 190 dB re 1 μPa at the standard reference distance of 1 m. Au and Banks measured peak to peak source levels between 185 and 190 dB re 1 μPa at 1 m, depending on the size of the claw.[13] Similar values are reported by Ferguson and Cleary.[14] The duration of the click is less than 1 millisecond.
>
>
> The snap can also produce sonoluminescence from the collapsing cavitation bubble. As it collapses, the cavitation bubble reaches temperatures of over 5,000 K (4,700 °C).[15] In comparison, the surface temperature of the sun is estimated to be around 5,800 K (5,500 °C). The light is of lower intensity than the light produced by typical sonoluminescence and is not visible to the naked eye. It is most likely a by-product of the shock wave with no biological significance. However, it was the first known instance of an animal producing light by this effect. It has subsequently been discovered that another group of crustaceans, the mantis shrimp, contains species whose club-like forelimbs can strike so quickly and with such force as to induce sonoluminescent cavitation bubbles upon impact.[16]
>
>
>
As you can read the heat and pressure is pretty impressive, you just need to increase the size of the shrimp - make it human and give it super powers, combine it with the XKCD - WHAT IF, and then you would have a pretty good idea. The math i will leave to someone more capable.
[Answer]
The clap actually can't do all that much. Consider that the damage done by a thunderclap/clap is not actually done by the person, but by the shockwave through the air. This shockwave is not made of the same material as the man, it has limits.
You're going to run into interesting issues such as the fact that *your hand is not actually solid.* Most of the space in your hand is basically empty, and you rely on electrostatic forces to make it appear as though things cannot go through the hand. If you start moving at relativistic speeds, most likely the air molecules will just pass right through the hand, unaffected. A few nuclear collisions will occur and generate fusion type energies, but not much.
However, consider, if instead of trying to clap, he simple begins moving at nearly the speed of light (perhaps a raving motion), the mass of his arms could approach infinity, with nearly infinite gravitational effects. Who needs a thunderclap when you can literally just turn your arms into black holes and suck the planet up.
[Answer]
In your scenario, the superhero can clap his hands at speeds arbitrarily close to the speed of light. This would suggest that each hand clap could produce arbitrarily large amounts of energy - like a particle accelerator, but using much more mass than a single proton. I may be wrong, but I believe this would have fatal consequences for our entire observable universe. I'll try to explain why, but I can't guarantee it is going to be coherent because I'm not a physicist.
Physics suggests that our universe should seek to be in its lowest energy state. If it is not, it could *tunnel* into a lower energy state. For example it could decay from our present *false vacuum state* into a *true vacuum state*. If this where to happen, then space would undergo some sort of phase transition, similar to water turning from liquid to solid when it freezes.
I seem to recall reading one scenario (I think it was Max Tegmark) describing a sufficiently advanced race performing a physics experiment similar to our particles accelerators, where a sufficient amount of matter is smashed together to create enough energy that the local false vacuum would be propelled through whatever barrier is currently holding it in its false vacuum state, ultimately into a lower (or zero) energy state. The resulting phase transition of space would then spread out at near the speed of light in a metastability event often referred to as a *Death Bubble*.
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[Question]
[
Lets say I want to send a generation ship to colonize a distant planet. Because of the ships mass it's going to take a long time to get up to speed. I can send smaller probes on ahead since they are smaller and can accelerate quicker. Some of these have machines to start terraforming the planet. Others have machines to mine resources. The last type of probe is a city seed, so that when the colonists arrive they'll have a place to live.
The probe is too small to hold a bunch of pre-fabricated buildings. Instead I'd like to grow a city out of what is available on the planet: crystal, or biological, or use your imagination.
You can assume some level of nanotech, the city seed can use materials brought to it by the other probes, and handwavium is ok within reason.
Edit: Also, the colonists won't be getting there for a while, so long term projects are ok!
Edit 2: We don't know much about the planet since it's an exo-planet several light years away. We can tell it's roughly earth sized, maybe slightly smaller. It's in the Goldilocks zone. Spectroscopy shows the atmosphere has some oxygen, though the mix isn't quite right for humans, yet, and there is some water. Spectroscopy does not show any indicators for life.
[Answer]
Do you know about Von Neumann Probes? It's a concept of an unmanned spacecraft that can build a copy of itself from planetary resources, and launch more of "itself" towards other planets.
Well, let's modify its software a bit.
First, it needs to survey the land for metal deposits during the orbital fly-bys. It can be done through numerous nanoprobes or just detecting magnetic anomalies of the planet's magnetic field, or many other methods of surveying planets.
After landing, it deploys the small "factory" and a few mining robots that start gathering resources - sand for silicon, iron for structural components. It contains some of less common (but needed in lesser amounts) materials and some more difficult to manufacture components (like electronics) as well.
Its first order of work is creating more surveyor/miner robots and enough solar batteries to keep the plant and the robots operating. The hulls and mechanics of the robots is manufactured from the local metal; the electronics is provided from the supplies.
Once more robots are built, they scatter to search for more scarce resources. Fetching their finds they enable the factory to produce more electronics - more, bigger robots. The bigger robots build a bigger factory that creates prefabricates of the city, more, bigger, more efficient mining robots, automated trucks to bring a plenty of more scarce minerals from afar, and finally construction robots that build the city with all the needed infrastructure.
One more thing: instead of sending more probes that would take up terraforming and other tasks, send just this one early enough. It will be capable of building the terraforming reactors too.
[Answer]
I think the easiest would be some kind of a little digging robot to excavate a city from pretty much anywhere it lands. It needs geological survey tools to locate the optimal spot (whatever terrain feature you set it to find - like water, AND a ground component that it can work with , like a bedrock near the surface), then it gets to work, digging out the materials it does not want and then digging out buildings and infrastructures. Even some of the plumbing/waterways can be done "dug".
Depending on how much time you have, sending more of these can speed up the process.
Dig dig dig. When you get there you have shelter and infrastructures and use your tech brought by the spaceship to add whatever else you need (wiring/electricity - I'm supposing by then any com is done wireless)
[Answer]
If terra-forming began recently, you can't use trees to build - they are priceless. Your best building material is stone.
You need water for industrial processes.
You need some rare materials, and sending out probes all over the planet for mining surveys is expensive. Your best bet is concentrating dissolved minerals from sea water. So select a site where you can quarry good stone that is by the sea. Use carbon nano-fiber-based mesh to filter water. This gives you pure water to put in a reservoir and you extract the dissolved minerals for use in manufacturing electronics or making fertilizer.
Energy is tough. Assume we have developed compact fusion power by then. The bottom of our oceans has lots of methane clathrate. Maybe the ocean floor of this world has something useful for fuel?
[Answer]
You write
>
> We don't know much about the planet since it's an exo-planet several light years away.
>
>
>
I find that contradicts the main premise.
With the same technology, you could send seeds to distant asteroids and grow huge multi-mirror telescopes. Besides being limitless in size (no cost! Just let them grow limited by solar energy input) the signals from distant telecopes can be combined: distant in this case means Neptune orbit, or billions of miles.
You would be able to see the exoplanet quite clearly, mapping the continants and getting detailed spectra of the planet as a whole and of individual features.
It will not be an utter mystery. We would know the chemestry of the plant life and the oceans, and will have watched the passing of the seasons, before even planning the colonization meeting.
[Answer]
# Go Underground
Not knowing much about the planet, my preference would be to start civilization entirely underground. I'm not sure if this is what @spacemonkey was implying.
The entire city should be underground, and with the materials you've removed, features can be installed.
**Atmosphere/airlock** - You have a potentially lethal environment on the surface, you can easily airlock your city.
**Protection** - Unlike dome-cities, 10m of hard rock offers a lot better protection from any small asteroids: you don't know what might be raining down on this distant planet. Also, I'm not sure what the affects from radiation are at the surface, so this provides a modicum of cheap protection.
**Technology** - you must have developed plants that do not require sunlight?
"Sun"light can provide energy to surface collection, and anybody sick of no sunlight (most will have lived their lives in darkness or artificial light, no?) can hop up to the surface, protected, to get their tan on.
[Answer]
That kind of nanotechnology (Von Neumann Probe style) is beyond any limits of the kind you allude to. It can remake a whole biosphere, change the chemistry of the atmosphere, and (eventually) not only change the oceans but change the *presence* of oceans.
Actual limiting factors:
* atoms of the right types readily available. C, H, O, N, P should be no problem. Even without metals you would rather grow buildings out of organic molecules anyway. Small quantities of various elements are crucial for catalysts and special organo-metal complexes that *do* interesting things.
* energy. The natural biosphere uses solar power. Advanced power could be used in local areas for specific industry. Fusion would require a lot of infrastructure before being possible.
* executive intelligence and memory. Storage might be tight in the "seed" probes, but that could be supplemented with transmissions. After setting up a receiving station and growing lots of memory, it can download extensive plans that follow via laser.
Note that without nanotechnology, [detailed plans for self-reproducing probes have been analyzed in detail and published](http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus) ([and this one](http://io9.com/how-self-replicating-spacecraft-could-take-over-the-gal-1463732482)) ([etc.](http://future.wikia.com/wiki/Replicating_Spacecraft)). Nanotechnology changes nearly everything, but you can get an idea of the kinds of planning needed.
Some miscellaneous thoughts: the seeds would be traveling quite fast, so how do they stop? Final landing can use aerobreaking and a large craft break up in to individual small seeds. But some executive control, archiving, and even heavy industry could be on an airless moon. If that's the first stop how do you *stop*? If the atmosphere is the first stop, how do tiny dumb seeds boot up enough intelligence to plan enough industrial complex to build rockets?
Tiny seeds will be dumb. They can start mining and collecting materials through vine-like growth, but what about planning? Maybe a larger seed unit would be necessary, with very dense and durable memory on board.
Basically the more bootstrapping, the more difficult. Keeping a functioning command unit in orbit from day 1 and sending down seeds with directed landing sites is far easier.
Such a "large" probe is still smaller than a colony ship, and not limited to acceleration levels. Slowing down can use a magnetic parachute, but is that enough? Retro-rocket reaction mass can double as shielding during transit.
Now if technology can do that, why send bodies? The original slow-boat colonists might arrive to find the world inhabited by those who beamed themselves over, or by intelligent machines who built the place.
You could probably have a whole series of stories about different seed destinations and how things went wrong on each one!
[Answer]
Use the idea of a replicating virus. On a computer, a replicating virus creates copies of itself whenever you try to dispose of it. Think about using this same method. The probe goes to the planet; replicates itself, possibly out of the minerals from other probes; connects together with other probes like an atom; and finally does the replicating until a substantial building is built. After one building is built, it can replicate the building until there are no more minerals.
Furthermore, if this is a magical world, you could alternatively use seeds that grows cities.
How you want to go upon tech is up to you, but the Von Neumann Probes concept may work with that.
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[Question]
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In science fiction a common plot device is for a planet to be surrounded by electromagnetic interference that prevents an orbiting ship from scanning it with sensors or communicating with people on the surface.
My question is: How realistic is such a plot device, assuming either current-day or near-future sensory technology? If a planet had, for example, a large-scale electrical storm or a lot of geothermal activity, would it obscure the surface of the planet from the sensors of an orbiting ship or a space telescope, aside from broad features such as continents and oceans? If not, are there any natural or artificial phenomena that would cause such interference?
[Answer]
Note that the 'sensors' used in science fiction TV shows are confused too easily. For example, often times a character will say that the sensors are picking up nothing at all... even when the thing is clearly visible to optical sensors (i.e. the ship's cameras and the characters' eyes). Star Trek is a particularly notable offender here.
In real life, if you can see down to the planet, and your sensors include a telescope, you can tell what's going on down there.
Basically, in order to block sensors, you need to block the mechanism they use to observe. In 99% of cases your sensors will be detectors (or emitters) of electromagnetic radiation. Remember we can use a wide variety of wavelengths to probe the surface. For example, the moon Titan is [totally obscured](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Titan_in_natural_color_Cassini.jpg) by its atmosphere in visible wavelengths, but infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths [see through somewhat](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Titan_multi_spectral_overlay.jpg), and radar [penetrates handily](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Liquid_lakes_on_titan.jpg) giving us a good view of the surface.
Your planet would need to have a thick atmosphere to block all UV, visible, and IR wavelengths. Something like Venus's [sulfuric acid coulds](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Clouds) would do nicely. However, Venus can also be [mapped by radar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_(spacecraft)). Maybe some sort of conductive substance in the atmosphere, like metal dust, could function as [chaff](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure)) to block microwave, low, and medium-frequency communications, including radar.
I know this doesn't sound like a nice place to live to us, but the (non-human) aliens who live there might find it quite pleasant!
[Answer]
Building on the answer from 2012rcampion, (which was good and to the point, sensors depend on either [actively or passively](http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/communications/outreach/funfacts/txt_passive_active.html#.VO03LfnF-FU) picking up electromagnetic, or other, energy emissions).
So given that we have agreed how sensors work and 2012rcampion has suggested some methods of blocking electromagnetic emissions, my thought in answer to your question is:
**by artificial & misleading emissions of whatever energy the sensors are sampling for, (passive) or looking for reflections of (active).**
**Passive:**
The above effort might be easiest for passive sensors. As you merely have to have some form of source of emissions in whatever wavelengths of electromagnetic energy the sensors are sampling. NOTE: variations in gravity can be measured as well... this would be very difficult to fake without an unknown science & theories being applied.
There might also be forms of [exotic energy](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/87425/what-is-negative-energy-exotic-energy) that could somehow be used to gain information about the world.
**Active**
Active sensors might be more difficult to counter. This is what our modern stealth technologies attempt to do *for only radio waves* and, it has taken us awhile and depends on the radio emitters & receivers being at a certain level of resolution. So protecting against active emissions requires (to the best of my knowledge) either:
-swamping the sample area with that type of transmission so it's difficult for the sensor to tell the difference between what was transmitted by the sensor, (though timing may become important in this regard...).
OR
-creating some way to absorb what has been sent out by the sensor...
**Whole Planet & other logistical concerns**
Last, we have the problem of "shielding" an entire planet.
Most planets are very large even compared to a very large space faring vessel. I would suggest NOT trying to shield an entire planet from every sensor imaginable. Instead you might do the following:
1. Add something to the atmosphere on a regular basis that helps shield for certain types of emissions (either absorbing, redirecting, or emitting the desired type of emissions)
2. Develop localized defensive emplacements which would, while a ship is in its area, emit misleading emissions (though this may not work well without some decentralization of the misleading emissions themselves... or it might just show the ship a broad band of emissions all coming from one source & obscuring a certain area... which they could destroy or investigate etc...).
3. Add temporary & localized chaff to the area to throw off any ability to detect what is on *that portion* of the planet.
4. Finally satellites would be the best source of all of the above but they are inherently vulnerable... so while they may work well for blocking most types of scanning as described above, they are also very easily identified and destroyed.
There are still some pretty broad problems with the above 'solution' in that covering an entire planet is still very cost prohibitive & difficult.
Additionally the problem of being able to block ALL sensors is really fairly unrealistic... you could provide active deflectors & emitters as I described but they would be most cost effective & most effective if you know what the sensors are sampling for.
Last, natural conditions:
The only thing not already mentioned as far as natural methods of making sensors less effective (not blocking, less effective) is high energy radiation belts... but they could also add to the [hostility of the planet](http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/hiding-from-jupiters-radiation/).
[Answer]
*Current-day or near-future* sensory technology is pretty much cameras and radar. These are basically the same thing, except applied to different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This is good, because I can be lazy and only need to talk about one bit of science.
**How realistic are these plot devices?**
Fairly realistic - but for *really* boring and mundane reasons. Without any special forms of interference, we’d have a lot of trouble looking at the surface of planets in all but the most ideal situations. I imagine having little interference would raise more interest than having lots of it.
**Absorption spectra.**
Gases, vapours, clouds, etc, all [absorb parts of the electromagnetic spectrum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_(electromagnetic_radiation)) and re-emit it as heat. Which parts of the spectrum are absorbed are determined by the chemical composition of the material (and in some cases, the size of the vapours too).
We choose to communicate and scan in parts of the spectrum where we're unlikely to find a lot of interference. Unless you're going somewhere specific, and are fore-warned of what atmosphere you'll be looking at, it's best to take the scout's motto to heart.
*Be prepared for anything*.
If I was a spaceship designer, I'd make sure I *could* communicate over as many parts of the spectrum as possible.
**Scanning the composition of the atmosphere.**
A common question asked by any spaceship crew would be *can we breathe the atmosphere?* A simple (but incomplete) test would be to [measure the absorption spectra](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_spectroscopy), and look for tell-tale indicators that you already have in a database.
**Scanning for solid objects.**
The best analogy is sonar (yes, submarines). You have passive, where you listen for noises/reflections/signals/etc. And you have active, were you make noise and listen for reflections of your noise.
On top of that, the *frequency* of the radiation you're using will affect the amount of detail you get. Loosely, the higher the frequency, the more detail. Lower frequency radio waves have longer wavelengths. Long wavelengths have this tendency to pass around smaller objects without interacting with them. This is true for all waves, including electromagnetic ones.
Picture a tall wooden post poking up out of the water. Imagine dropping a coin into the water next to it. The coin creates little ripples that bounce off the side of the post and reflect back out in the other direction. Now imagine a slow ocean wave rolling past – it doesn’t appear to be affected by the post in the slightest.
A similar thing happens with radio waves. If you want high-quality information about the surface of the planet, you’ll need a higher-frequency radar. But you might get unlucky and have atmosphere that absorbs exactly those radio waves.
**Communication.**
The logic behind communication is very similar to scanning. You want to be able to receive information without interference and want to be able to transmit information without it too. You’d naturally choose similar parts of the spectrum to those of scanning.
This presents a bit of a conundrum with scanning. Communication might look like interference to scanners, and active scanners might produce interference to people communicating. Are your scanners capable of filtering-out communications?
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Well, we didn't know what was on Titan until getting there directly, but radar is another story, and we have partial maps now. An orbiter would image the whole thing in short order and see visible light features only in very narrow wavelengths that happen to get through.
We *don't* have that because of poor budgets given to NASA. It can only be scanned from up close, and we don't have anything staying close or with more specialized instruments because Congress is not allowing money to be spent on it.
So, the reason is logistics and expense, not technology.
Look at [JIMO](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter), which ultimately did nothing at all due to the same reason (and real expense: 16 billion and technology to develop), would only work for a few months. The radiation environment is harsh.
Oh, and whoever is lurking in Europa's oceans are safe from prying Terran eyes because the physical shield of ice *is* an effective shield from remote sensing and physically getting a probe through it is something we don't have yet.
Even the Earth's core and the *sun* have been probed. Nothing is unprobable it seems, with cleverness and effort. The former is not suitable to *remote* sensing or rapid results.
So, the stuff to remain hidden is under a lot of mass. Buried, underwater, under ice, all prevent radar from working. Sonar requires visiting and touching the medium.
Maybe the interesting part is specific to senses you can't manage. You can detect buildings including a big dome from orbit using radar, but can't see what's painted on it through the clouds, and can't read any scent markers without getting close up and even then can't "read" them until new instruments are created and the underlying meanings learned.
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Cover your whole planet in randomly blinking lights.
If you have a camera, you can prevent it from taking a good photo by having a really bright flashing light - it won't be able to set it's aperture to anything sensible.
Conceivably you can apply this to all frequencies, (you could be broadcasting all the way from ELF to gamma rays) and effectively confuse just about all photographic-based sensors and disrupt any communication signals trying to get through.
The quality of your shielding with this method is down to the randomness and brightness of your lights, and the reactivity of the scanning sensors
This is, however a very un-subtle shielding technique, and the energy cost is simply astronomical. To cover the whole planet in lights/EM transmitters would also require a huge engineering effort.
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Just to answer part of the question - shielding - as other's have stated, shielding an entire planet is not practical.
Also, you only describe the technological level of the sensors, not the defending planet. That could make a huge difference in how shielding is handled.
Also, others have mentioned that cameras and radar are the most likely candidates for sensors. I agree.
Here's a couple extra thoughts...
1. Radar, even from close orbit, won't detect something a mile underground. Neither will a camera for that matter. Even if close range radar could detect an underground facility, you would have to know where to look. The larger the scanning "beam" the lower the sensor resolution will be - so you have to figure out what your lowest acceptable resolution is. For pinpointing targets from orbit, you're probably talking about a beam size of 1-mile diameter or less (guessing). For a planet the size of earth, using naive math, that's a surface area of 4.92403 x 107 (e.g. it will take longer than you want to scan for the target). Like I said, that is naive math (surface area of a circle with an earth-like diameter). But a planet is a sphere so the farther from perpendicular to the surface you are, the more distortion you will encounter. That means you have to constantly be readjusting the position of the ship.
Burying facilities is how governments today hide things.
2. At long range, see #1. At short range, precise targeting becomes an option. We like to imagine that the modern media's claims are true that a simple green laser pointer can blind a pilot in an airplane. Imagine what a relatively low-power, planetary wide, laser grid could do to an approaching ship's camera systems. The effects could be anything from a simple obscuring (blindness) to destruction (burning or overloading the sensor).
3. Artificial methods of obscuring a target, such as chaff in the air, would just be a beacon. "Look! Something is hidden over here, don't look over here."
In conclusion it seems like if you want to hide something on a planet from being observed by a ship - choose a location where it is often cloudy and dig a big hole. Let math and physics handle the rest.
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Let's say we are on earth and trying to keep IT from watching us. If they are using optical sensors (aka cameras), all you have to do is point an industrial strength laser pointer at it and it's blind. But if ET is using radar or something similar, like the other answer said, chaff would be one of the easiest ways to go. The main problem with the chaff is that it would be rather hard to achieve in a short amount of time and would make a bit of a mess.
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I am designing a world where humans have somehow developed or have been put onto a planet in a primitive state. This world has only been habitable for about ten thousand years and therefore only has the most basic of life, including a few sea animals and slug/worm creatures that can be eaten safely.
Since this world has only had life for ten thousand years, and advanced life for about a thousand (working at an increased evolutionary rate due to higher radiation to cause mutation which supports this increased development) there are no fossil fuels, only a range of semi-tree-like plants scattered near the coasts along with huge inland grasslands (actually more like moss-lands) and deserts.
My question is this: **How would human culture and civilization have varied without access to fossil fuels? In particular, how would the development of technology and the growth of population be different without fossil fuels?**
I would also like to know how evolution might affect these people over a period of time under these circumstances to make them conquer this world. For the record the Water to Land ratio is about 55/45 if that would make any considerable difference.
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First off, you need to understand the [time scales involved with evolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolutionary_history_of_life).
On Earth, life first evolved around 3.6 billion years ago. It then took 3 billion years before simple animals evolved. It then took an additional 50 million years before [bilateria](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilateria) evolved (animals with a front and a back, like a slug). It then took an additional 75 million years before land plants evolved.
So, step one in the reality check is 10,000 years is way, way too short of a time period for life to evolve, even if it could be massively accelerated. However, an accelerated rate of mutation wouldn't necessarily have done that.
Today, there are all sorts of things that cause mutation. And single-celled organisms have a really high rate of mutation. But a key part of our initial evolution is that we evolved to harden ourselves against high rates of mutation to preserve our DNA, so that our complex multicellular bodies wouldn't destroy itself.
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To answer your question directly, we'd die. And for a lot of reasons.
First, we'd suffocate. It took 2.5 billion years for earth to start getting its oxygen coat. With such simple life forms, there'd likely be no algae producing oxygen, and so we'd have nothing to breath. At best, there'd be some oxygen, but not enough to create enough ozone, so we'd die from radiation poisoning.
Then, we'd starve. If the only extent life was small sea slugs, then humans would quickly die. We require a complex diet of vitamins and nutrients, and we get that from a combination of plant and animal matter. Sea slugs wouldn't provide that. At best, the only plant life at this stage would be ferns or similar, and that wouldn't be able to give us the necessary nutrition.
And finally, we'd be killed by the elements. Even if we had enough food to eat, we probably wouldn't survive due to weather. Early humans required fur to protect themselves from the elements. Without the shelter of fur, much less trees or other large plants, our ability to survive would be incredibly limited. At best, we'd be trapped in a very specific part of the globe.
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It is possible to have a world with a long evolutionary history without fossil fuels:
1. Place your humans there at the beginning of the first fossil-fuel-accumulation era, so that any fossil fuels that will accumulate will do so after the humans have had their day, so to speak. As the oldest coal deposits on Earth were laid down in the Carboniferous era, starting your scenario about that time would eliminate this fossil fuel.
2. Have a world with little or no plate tectonics so that fossil fuels will not accumulate. The best you'd get in the way of fossil fuels in this situation is peat bogs. In order to have the necessary conditions, an earth-size & mass world would have to have a smaller moon, a more distant moon, and/or no moon at all, and/or the world itself would have to be smaller, in order to reduce tectonic activity.
The main problem with the rapid evolution scenario posited is that the radiation levels required would probably be very dangerous or lethal to humans; any local life forms would have evolved to be at least somewhat radiation-tolerant.
Anyway, assuming an earth-like world with established life, but no reserves of fossil fuels, the most logical consequence would be that high-carbon organisms - such as trees - would be harvested and cultivated as a fuel source, much as is the case here today.
One of the main consequences is that liquid fuels such as oil would be scarcer from the outset. It *would* be possible to have such fuels, but they would probably be of animal or vegetable origin. Vegetable-based fuels could include alcohol or heavier oils for spark-ignited or diesel engines respectively (Old vegetable oil from fish & chip shops can be filtered and used as diesel fuel).
The evolution of technology may not differ much at all. Steam engines can run on timber or charcoal, and technology can progress from there. The main difference is that carbon sinks other than peat bogs will not have accumulated significant carbon, so a more conservative approach to fuel usage will have to be instituted from the outset.
[Peat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat) bogs accumulate useable fuel at a rate of at most a few millimetres per year. This is not technically a fossil fuel, but a slow-renewable fuel. The rate of peat deposition is lower than the potential rate of its use. However, this would likely be the only significant source of geological fuel deposits available.
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Some points to consider:
1) If life is relatively new on your world, you won't have much in the way of iron ores, as most of those were produced by microbial activity: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_ore>
2) If you don't have plate tectonics or vulcanism, you're likely not to have much in the way of other ore deposits, as most of those were formed by hydrothermal or magmatic processes: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_genesis>
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Fossil fuels are not required. If you have enough forests, you can [make charcoal](http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Charcoal) from wood - [here is old way](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal). Charcoal allows for metallurgy, (slower) industrial revolution and steam power. Productivity would be increasing bit slower and growth would not be as steep, but entirely doable.
According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksmith#Medieval_period):
>
> The original fuel for forge fires was charcoal. Coal did not begin to replace charcoal until the forests of first Britain (during the AD 17th century), and then the eastern United States of America (during the 19th century) were largely depleted. Coal can be an inferior fuel for blacksmithing, because much of the world's coal is contaminated with sulfur. Sulfur contamination of iron and steel make them "red short", so that at red heat they become "crumbly" instead of "plastic". Coal sold and purchased for blacksmithing should be largely free of sulfur.
>
>
>
So coal is good for steam power but not for metallurgy.
You would not have trains and cars, population mobility would be slower (and so will be progress). You would have canals instead of railroads - think [Erie Canal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal), [Grand Canal of China](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_%28China%29) and [Canals of UK](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals_of_the_United_Kingdom). Canals would go everywhere like railroad goes now. Areas with little river water would be much harder to cross - only on roads, on animal-powered vehicles. Or caravans.
Metal would be much more expensive, wood (and bamboo if you can have it) used more often. Water mills and wind-powered mills would be used much longer. bamboo is strong and grows fast - ideal crop for your settings. [Bamboo bicycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_bicycle) was made 100 years ago.
Metal sheets can be also replaced by waterproofed cardboard in many use cases.
Wood can be made rather strong. [H4 Spruce Goose](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules) is aircraft with largest ever wingspan, size similar to Boeing 747 and Airbus 380 (biggest widebody jet airliners) made mostly from wood (birch plywood and resin).
Another good source of oil to start your industrialization would be whale oil.
Later you can get wind power and solar power.
As your civilization advances, they can learn genetic engineering and engineer bacteria which produce oil from wood chips. That can be used as diesel fuel and even (as kerosene) for rocketry.
Progress is entirely possible without fossil fuels - it would be just a bit (maybe quite a bit) slower start.
One thing which requires dense fuel is aviation. So possibly no planes until you can generate diesel fuel from algae. So less travel, less global turism, less global pandemics.
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Others are suggesting, quite sensibly, that you'd need humans to exist prior to fossil fuels being generated, or on a world which geologically doesn't allow this to happen. However, it has also been mentioned that the time scales you'd initially planned are completely unreasonable given how long it has taken for humans to evolve; and perhaps more importantly the specific environmental circumstances which allowed them to evolve at all, which would be lacking in such a primeval past.
However, I have an alternative solution. At one point I read the notion that if humanity depletes the world of fossil fuels now, future generations will not be able to industrialise again given a cataclysmic event which would send them back to the stone age. That is a possibility; you don't set this in the distant past, you set it in the distant future after a number of catastrophes which wiped out human technology after we depleted all the fossil fuels.
In this case a few things are worth noting: most importantly humans won't be able to industrialise again, because even if they can make charcoal by burning trees, or cut peat, it simply won't exist in the quantities to provide something similar to what we have been fortunate enough to enjoy. This means that even if a minority of engineers manage to emerge who tinker about and develop technology, they won't exist in the numbers required to propagate or extend this knowledge much, or quickly. No coal, no oil. You'd have to rely on horses and people to power things. So people can't really move very far or fast and you probably will never see globalisation either. The humans could conceivably develop the scientific method and know a lot about the world, but that's not to say they could do much about it. The economy will always be agrarian; the masses are to harvest the farmland. So at best you have a minority of noble scientists or noble engineers who play about with clockwork devices.
With regards to population: if I recall correctly the human population of the world was pretty stable prior to industrialisation; minus things like the black death. So you'd see the typical situation, of large families because half the children die from disease, or maybe everyone's starving because even if they learn how to avoid disease they can't achieve industrial era food production.
Worst case scenario is that the human population remains stubbornly high, and they completely exhaust their resources by using trees to make charcoal to industrialise, so the whole world begins to look a lot like Easter Island is now; devoid of trees. Which would probably help to make their environment all the more alien and depressing than it is now. Which again will push society technologically backwards further still and the world would support a smaller population still (no trees you get issues like soil erosion which will reduce available farmland, and reduce the quality of what farmland is left). I can't see how they'd manage to create something like the computer you're using now. It requires a huge amount of technology and engineering prior, which could not be supported without widespread fossil fuels.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iZqgo.jpg)
Mu was a mythical continent that was believed to exist in the Pacific Ocean. It was part of pseudohistory back in the 19th Century. Hawaii and other Polynesian islands were believed to be the remnants of Mu. The Mu theory was later disproved during the 20th Century.
If such a landmass existed, what would its climate be? Based on the picture, I say the land of Mu is roughly comparable to Europe in land area. I expect that parts of it would have a tropical climate like Hawaii but it is also much larger than Hawaii and has a lot of inland territory that could potentially be mountainous or desert. Such a landmass could also potentially change the climate of other continents but let's not cover that for this thread.
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**Short answer: Deserts in the west, south and in the center, rainforests in the east.**
Mu is roughly located between the horse latitudes at 30° north and south. Around this latitude, conditions are very dry, because the air is descending in these areas, warming up, and getting drier. The opposite happens at the equator. Here, the air is ascending and getting colder, which leads to condensation and rain. This is why rainforests are so dominant at the equator, except in high mountains.
If I see this correctly, there is a high plateau in the center, so the air has to rise before it gets there, loosing most of its humidity before it gets there. This is not the case in the east, where the terrain appears to be flat. Also the prevalent directions from the trade winds bring a lot of humidity from the ocean, so conditions there would be similar to the Amazon basin. Conditions in the south and west are probably similar to the center. According to the map, they also seem mountainous, leading to a lot of rain directly at the coast (maybe some rainforest at the hillslopes close to the equator) but almost no rain as soon as the mountains are high, with a climate similar to the Andes.
The north is quite dry due to the location around 30° N but is is flat and located close to the shore, so it might experience seasonal rain when atmospherical zones shift with the seasons.
The *Isola di Pasqua* is a bit complicated due to its location at ~30° S but directly affected by the trade winds from the east. I would expect humid conditions similar to Florida or northeast Australia in the east and drier conditions with a rainseason in the west of the peninsula.
Note that this continents is much bigger than Europe. This map appears to be a mercator projections, which greatly exaggerates the size of landmasses far away from the equator (i.e. Europe). I agree with @JBH that it is close to the size of North America.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N1kSH.png)
[source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation)
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**A better question might be what would happen to the climates of the rest of the planet?**
The Pacific Ocean is *the engine* for tropical Earth. I could be wrong about that. But I'd bet a milkshake that I'm not. Remove the Pacific Ocean to the degree that you have and you remove so much moisture, so much ocean current... You're upsetting both the North Pacific Gyre and the South Pacific Gyre. Like I said, I could be completely wrong... but I think you just reduced 80%-90% of the world's tropics to temperate *at best.* (And it doesn't help that I can see Atlantide peeking on the eastern edge over there.)
Water vapor in the air is part of what warms the atmosphere... and a lot of that evaporative ocean surface just disappeared. Less evaporation means less rain. Less rain means more desert....
Mu's center would be a blazing desert. It's northern and southern reaches would be cold (but I'm not sure they'd be arctic). East and west along the equator I expect to be temperate. *But everywhere would be arid.*
*BTW: Based on that picture, Mu is at least 80% of the landmass of the entire North American Continent. It's a LOT bigger than Europe. And that's the problem.*
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Oh, one more thing. You've also encountered one of two problems. Either...
1. You've seriously reduced the amount of water on the planet.
or...
2. You've *seriously* flooded everywhere else.
Both conditions represent serious problems. Seriously.
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**Tropical, very tropical.**
This continent lies smack bang on the equatorial tropical zones. Depending on its altitude it would either be covered in desert and Savannah or more likely tropical rainforest and jungle. Chances are it would be a mix, but I am reckoning something like 90% of this content would be covered in evergreen tropical jungle, with drier and cooler regions in the centre and any alpine regions, probably covered in savanna or pampas.
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I’m designing a society in a hostile climate which transports its energy from remote stations to a city with an absolute minimum of maintenance and infrastructure requirements. The concept is to use a constantly circulating lazy river to transmit power to the city. A canal flows continuously between two points in a loop; at the sources, paddles or screws force the fluid to flow, and at the destination, the flowing fluid pushes paddles connected to generators. It’s an open hydraulic transmission transmitting rotational torque over a distance.
Ultimately, the power enters and is retrieved from the system by gravity, so paddles inserting energy must be lifting the fluid a certain vertical distance, and forcing it to “fall” again in the desired downstream direction (toward the city). Retrieving the energy requires the fluid’s horizontal momentum to be converted into a lifting force (it hits a dam of sorts), which then must fall again to power a wheel in the city.
This is all in my head right now and i’m wondering if a net positive torque could actually be transmitted in this way as it seems?
My assumptions are to use a large volume of an extremely dense fluid such as mercury to transmit lots of power using relatively slow flow and low vertical level changes. The amount of work the system can do should be simply the product of the downward force of the elevated volume of fluid times the vertical distance through which it falls. For argument’s sake assume my paddles lift 10 cubic meters of mercury a height of 0.5 meters. Could I recover a significant amount of that work on the other end and also return the mercury to the generator? The canal loop is 10km long.
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## Both the walls of aqueducts and powerlines exert resistance
...so, the real question should be if this is more efficient than using a high-voltage powerline.
Your primary competing product to your canal system would be high-voltage, direct current (HVDC) powerlines which are normally used for transferring power over very long distances. The longest and possibly most efficient HVDC system in the world is a 1.1MV, 12GW line system in China that is ~3300km long. I can't find any specs on the composition of the wire itself, but if can assume it's really freaking big, but made out of something economical enough to make very long. So it is probably a number of parallel copper wires with a total cross section of something like a 10,000kcmil(50.67cm^2) giving us a total 22.5% drop in power from friction. (<https://www.calculator.net/voltage-drop-calculator.html>)
Now let's try to cover that distance, efficiency, and throughput with an aqueduct. Hoover Dam produces 1.1GW of power, so an equivalent system needs to support a flow of water 10.8 times that of Hover Dam. This means an equivalent hydroelectric system needs a flow of about 36,087m^3/sec of water dropping an average distance of 160m to turn the generators.
To get about the same resistance out of an aqueduct, you would need a pipe with a radius of ~77m. According to Manning's Equation (<https://www.lmnoeng.com/manning.php>), this will result in a total drop of about ~18.7m over 3300km in either direction. This means your aqueduct would need a total height at its highest point of about 197.4m, it would drop to 178.7m when it gets to your city, drop to 18.7m where it powers your turbines, then returns to the source to be lifted back up again giving you ~23% power loose.
## It is not as efficient as using powerlines
For starters, pipes are WAY bigger construction projects. The required cross sections about 37,000 times that of the wire, it also has to be built up to massive heights to cover really long distances when compared to HVDC lines. If your world truly is hostile, buried lines would be much safer than an above ground megastructure. Secondly, it requires a massive powerstation inside your city to convert that water into electricity which kind of defeats the point of producing power elsewhere. In contrast, HVDC wires just need a simple transformer station to convert its high voltage DC current into usable AC low voltage currents.
All this said, you may very well not need 12GW of power, and 3300km may be much farther than you actually need to go, but you will want to keep in mind that the smaller you make your pipe, the steeper it needs to be; so, going smaller actually makes this kind of system progressively less efficient.
## As for using Mercury
This would be less efficient than water. For a system like this, you want to minimize sources of resistance; so, viscous fluids are going to be far less efficient. If you want to make it more efficient you may want to use some kind of alcohol or maybe even liquid propane: <https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/absolute-viscosity-liquids-d_1259.html>
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**Aqueducts!**
Ancient times can has many surprising feats of engineering. Aqueducts are one of these feats of engineering. Look at this one:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaghouan_Aqueduct>
It drops an average of 0,3% it's total length over 90KM (56 miles). This small incline is enough for a continuous water flow. All by careful measurements in an age where lasers, GPS and other location/level tools were not in the mind for centuries. It moved between 200 and 370 liters of water a second. Although not comparable to modern electric generation, it's still impressive.
Let's say you make such an aqueduct. You can already see from the example that you can use natural resources to simply move into the aqueduct and arrive at the city! In addition to fresh water, you'll have water flow, which equates to power when you put dynamos with water wheels into the water.
To make this work you need two aqueducts. The water drops a bit, generate your power and then have the second aqueduct move it back, without raising the water. As an example, the water travels a kilometer and drops 1m. It gets to the city, the flow and a 1m drop is used to make power and then it us sent back a kilometer to the power stations with another meter drop. The water is now 3m lower and requires this height to be pumped up by the power stations to flow back to the city.
To get enough energy you can widen the aqueduct and sharpen the decline, as well as increasing the amount of aqueducts. Making the fluid heavier with lower friction will help as you suggest. How much is out of my scope however.
**Problems**
The problems are that a power grid is likely more efficient and less maintenance heavy. Even a passive aqueduct requires regular maintenance. More that a few power poles.
Is that a real problem? Not to me. I really like the energy transport you've described. Sometimes cool us enough. You can always imagine some explanations for this. A copper shortage and concrete is better able to survive the hostile environment by not attracting active forces for example.
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I was all set to call this idea ridiculous. Then I investigated.
Modern water turbines operate at up to [90% mechanical efficiency.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_turbine#Efficiency) Electrical generators can be [90% efficient or more.](https://www.mpoweruk.com/energy_efficiency.htm) So, more than 80% of the energy delivered to the generator location could get turned into electrical power. After that, it's the local grid's problem.
To make the flow of water along the canal not lose much energy, you need the flow velocity to be relatively low. That means you want a cross-sectional area of the canal that is much larger than the flow area through your turbines. So width-times-depth of the water in the canal has to be much larger than the area of the flow through the turbines.
You would need two canals. One located at higher elevation will bring the water to the generators. A second at lower elevation takes it back. Unless you have extra power along the way, you need the level of the bottom of the canals not to change much over it's length, or fall just a little. Then at your energy source you lift the water from the lower canal to the upper canal. Very large gerbils or whatever. And you would need a source of makeup water to account for evaporation, leaking, people taking water for various purposes, etc.
The amount of energy you get per kg of water through the circuit depends on how much elevation change you can accept. And that determines how much deeper the return canal needs to be. Note that this may well be a huge engineering work.
Consider a flow area of 1 meter squared in the turbine. And suppose you need 100 m^2 in your canal. Say 20 meters wide by 5 meters deep. If it's a drop of 10 meters to produce your energy, that means you need to dig a canal 10 meters lower than your supply canal, and 20 meters wide. For the entire return half of the circuit. And it can't gain any altitude on the return. It has to be 10 meters below the supply canal the whole way. That's a lot of ditch.
Though not impossible. This [construction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_River_Floodway) in Winnipeg, Canada, shows that it is possible. And it is possible to sustain quite large flow rates.
So it is possible.
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**NO. AT LEAST NOT AS YOU THINK**
Flowing fluids can surely power a city. **But** you cannot use the same fluids in a closed **loop**. You have to pump the fluid to the top again by spending **at least** the same amount of energy the flow has created. Surely you can use multiple paddles turbines downstream depending on the flow but if you want the fluid to go where it started (a loop) you will end up with a net zero power in an "ideal" scenario.
Only sensible "net positive power" way to carry water back to where it started is weather events like snow and rain. Even that is not actually net positive and made possible by the star light reaching the planet. But the scale is too large for humans to feel the effects.
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I think the idea is bonkers, but if implemented it would make a nice scenery. Here's why:
Water flows downward. I think with actually existing rivers, anything from a few % down to 0.1% (a drop of a few tens of meters down to one meer per km of flow.). So your loop is essentially a spiral, with a lifting station at one point.
Let's say a low gradient of 0.5%, distance of 40 km, and we want to extract 5m of useful work from water (or rather 5m x density x g x volume flow (m³/s) = power of the station).
So we have 200m height difference in one canal, then 5m in the power station, the another 200 m on the way back - the lifting station will need to lift the water 405 m. The water arriving at the power station will have some kinetic energy, so you could probably extract more then just the energy equivalent of 5 m, but I'd need to put some thought into how to do that.
I think at the power station, you will not use a paddle wheel, you will use an auger pump or axial pump (both are good, efficient systems for high flow low head situations). At the reception station, I would build a dam and a small turbine. The steeper the gradient, the faster the flow.
If you want to go low tech - say middle ages or early modern, stick with the auger pumps or bucket elevators for the lifting station, paddle wheel for the lowerstation.
One advantage of an open loop system is the you can store energy in one part of the loop. But this would probably be more efficient with a system of closed pipes and one large reservoir.
Another advantage of an open loop system is that slow barges can cycle along the loop (they have to be lifted, via cranes or something, at both endpoints.)
] |
[Question]
[
Is it possible to have accessible underground/dungeon in a swamp area? Wouldn't it get flooded? Is there a way around it?
In my case the area was flooded and turned into a swamp - would it make it all underground areas inaccessible? Could potentially elevated areas be saved from that fate?
[Answer]
**Your dungeon is a salt mine.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7yYkp.jpg)
<https://panethos.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/enormous-underground-salt-mines-of-north-america/>
I knew about the salt mines under the Great Lakes but did not realize that many other huge salt mines are also beneath bodies of freshwater.
>
> As is evident from the details provided, the majority of these
> underground mines are enormous in size, occupying multiple square
> miles far beneath the Earth’s surface. It is also fascinating to note
> that many, if not most of these mines, extend beneath a large body of
> water (many of which are freshwater).
>
>
>
I wondered why the lake did not just drain into the mine. Exactly that happened to one of these salt mines under a lake in Louisiana. Interesting reading! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur>
Your dungeon is deep and protected from surface water by an impermeable stratum. Maybe it actually is a salt mine. Salt is easy to dig and carve, omce you get down to it. The overlying lake will come and go with the eons and currently the area is filling back up, so the region over the mine / dungeon has become wetlands. Deep below, the mine / dungeon stays dry.
A salt cave as a dungeon offers opportunities. Here is an image of the Wieliczka salt mine, which contains a cathedral carved entirely from the salt. With a name like yours, maybe you have been there?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dx9Ns.jpg)
<https://mymodernmet.com/wieliczka-salt-mine/>
[Answer]
If your swamp is on high ground, and the dungeon has an opening at a lower elevation, it could be self-draining like some natural caves.
You have a plateau, with a canyon running through it, or a mesa (the Brazilian/Peruvian *tepui* are excellent examples of a wet climate atop such a landform); the dungeon/cavern below drains through the cliff face, which in the case of a natural limestone cave, was formed by riverine erosion after the cave was hollowed out by dissolution.
A depression on the *tepua* surface might have once drained into a stream inside the cave/dungeon, but that outlet has been clogged up (with mud, or intentionally blocked with stonework), causing the cave/dungeon to be drier, and the depression above to turn into a lake or marsh.
[Answer]
For some possible inspiration, there is a goblin hideout underneath a swamp in the game Dungeon Siege 1. It's a huge rocky and metal dungeon with archeological digs through the rock, long halls and huge workshops, many levels and elevators, and metal piping to carry water and smelting gases, with an unassuming entrance at the base hollow tree. It's totally dry inside. The swamp is deep but there are patches of land like the hideout entrance.
**EDIT (the poster's own comments)**: Let's be fair. The question was for a dungeon in a swamp. Not necessarily one underwater. The game example is an example of how it can be done. I should have been more explicit though. The dungeon is carved through rock, and natural rock walls are augmented with iron and steel walls. It is under the swamp water, but dry due to the entrance being above water. Any residual water is pumped out as needed by the inhabitants.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mTMuu.png)
] |
[Question]
[
Am trying to build a floating town with a starting resident population of about 3000 inhabitants.
The setting:
Around the end of the XXII century.
The town 'Pioneering Pinnacle' is floating in the Northern Atlantic, off the coast of Maine / Terranova. (I would avoid it going further to the North as I know that the area towards Greenland has some fierce waters).
The town is capable of propulsion at low speeds.
Technology has evolved steadily. Most notably energy is available in large amounts at a low cost (but not free, imagine around 10% of today lower costs).
The town is built by a large corporation. They have large means but must have a profit at the end of it.
The nexus size is about 200x200 meters. Average height 30 meters (partially submerged). Weight around 200k tons. Made mainly with composite materials and steel.
The plan is to keep on expanding it as it is attracting a lot of potential customers to open their facilities there (the owning corporation would gain rent fees). Expansion would mean adding connected floats and build upon them. Connections would be done with high stress resistant composite materials.
What to use as construction material without raising costs too much? A young executive has suggested [Brine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine). Because it is right there and needs to be disposed of.
The 3000 (and growing) residents need to use freshwater. For personal use, production processes, food growth and processing, etc. The town is mainly focused on research (due to it's peculiar status outside jurisdiction) not industrial production.
Our current needs are estimated at 3500 liters per person per day on Earth XXI century (western world). But that includes food production (the largest part). The town heavily relies on importing food. Food production on board is more intended for delicacies or food that may easily spoil during transportation. Or cost too much to be safely transported. My estimate is then a need of about 1000 liters of freshwater per day.
A part of it would come from collecting rain but the larger part is from [desalination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination) of water.
Given their more advanced methods (an advanced [Multi-stage flash distillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-stage_flash_distillation) preferred because of the avaliability of cheap energy) for each liter of water about 1 kg of brine is produced.
That means a production of 3 Mkg (3k tons) of brine per day. If only it could be used as construction material...
The question is: **Can brine, used together with other components, be realistically used for construction?**
Consider that it should stay for prolonged times (at least 20 years) in the North Atlantic environment.
It is ok if it is not strong enough to make a hull. It may be used for internal construction (although salt water would occasionally splash on it anyway). The hull / main frame may be done with stronger materials.
The additonal component(s) of the mix should be a smaller percentage, to avoid having to bring too much material to the town.
Periodic maintenance is fine.
In case you need further details on the technology available in this setting:
[see the Update at the end of the question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/184534/how-would-an-efficient-university-look-like-in-the-future).
Although I don't think it is strictly related to this question.
[Answer]
## Yes, and it has already been proposed and tested
Seacrete, or Biorock, uses electric current to pull disolved minerals out of sea water to make solid stable "rock". It has already been proposed as a building material for seasteading. It even has advantages over concrete, and with a brine solution it would be much faster to make.
Further reading [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biorock).
[Answer]
**Most likely not**
Brine is just salty water. The salinity of sea water is about 35 parts per thousand. So, 35g/L. They'll have to process a lot of water just to make a single block of salt.
That said, structures can indeed be made from salt. If you've already got a huge block of salt, say in a salt mine, you can make wonderfully sculpted structures:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lgkOK.jpg)
In a floating city, where they're making the salt from sea water, they'll have to resort to more conventional construction:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/i6Drg.jpg)
They will still rely on imports for cement, framework, fittings and the like. I doubt this will be a very economical solution, when the company could simply transport prefabricated components to the floating city.
[Answer]
### Yes - if we really quibble what a construction material is.
Brine is a liquid above -21 degrees. The northern Atlantic may just get this cold in the middle of winter, but in summer it'll melt. Melting isn't a good property of construction materials.
**However**...
What is a construction material? Insulation is a construction material, at least according to [my local hardware store](https://www.bunnings.com.au/our-range/building-hardware/building-construction/insulation).
If you build your walls out of a lightweight, watertight, portable material (eg 3D printed ABS, painted with a UV protective paint), you can then pump your brine into the wall as insulation. This gives a great wall between your nice living area, and the very cold North Atlantic.
The more salt in the brine, the lower its specific heat capacity, which means the worst it is as an insulator:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oX41r.png)
I believe your brine is about 7.5% salt by mass. Not as good an insulator as water, but better then express posting fibreglass insulation.
You can also use [brine to produce sodium hydroxide / causitic soda](https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-hydroxide-0213), which is used to pretreat seawater going into a desal plant. Before piping it into a wall, make enough sodium hydroxide to treat your seawater. That link explains that you can also make hydrochloric acid from brine, which has many uses.
[Answer]
Have you considered using all the other stuff in sea water besides brine. The sodium and chlorine from the salt are the most common elements but there are many more elements dissolved in lower concentrations. Here are the top ones greater then 1 part per million but there are many more in lower concentrations.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DmQjv.png)
[source](https://web.stanford.edu/group/Urchin/mineral.html)
You can also use all the plastic waste, garbage, phytoplankton and other organisms that would get sucked up into the desalinisation intakes.
Finally you could also take core samples from the bottom of the ocean floor (possibly including some bedrock) as your town moves.
[Answer]
Not brine, but water. [Pykrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete) is a mixture of water and sawdust (6:1 by mass), and then frozen. It is almost as strong a concrete, and can be repaired by spraying cold water onto it. Unfortunately the challenge is keeping it cold - there are normally steel/copper pipes laid through it, in which cold brine is pumped from a refrigeration unit. [Project Habakkuk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk) was an attempt to use this in WWII.
[Answer]
**Yes sort of**
Brine is a liquid so technically no but you get rid of that water and you're left with salt which is a solid.
Now salt isn't a great building product for a floating town but you could use it as a filler with a waterproof binder. The salt just bulks out the limited binder like sand and cement.
Being ocean based, the best waterproof binder would be plastic and the ocean has tons and tons of plastic waste that can be scooped up and reprocessed (or seaweed produced depending on your story). What you have is blocks or sheets which are waterproof from the plastic and fire resistant from the salt you could build from.
] |
[Question]
[
In my world I would like to have a cyborg-inspired veteran, but am not sure what kinds of prostheses would be possible, ideally without the use of electrics.
My main concern is how the prostheses might be controlled (or whether they need to be controlled in the first place), since processing input and translating it into mechanical action is covered by the sophistication of existing technologies in my world.
E.g. I have lost a leg and built a replica of my leg capable of moving in all ways a natural leg would move. I can strap it to myself, but have no way of 'steering' it. Does it respond based on the angle of my foot relative to gravity? Do I attach a string and use it like a puppet?
Prostheses I would be interested in would be
1. Leg prostheses
*hip disarticulation, transfemoral prosthesis, knee disarticulation, transtibial prosthesis, Syme's amputation, foot, partial foot, and toe*
2. Arm prostheses
*forequarter, shoulder disarticulation, transhumeral prosthesis, elbow disarticulation, transradial prosthesis*
3. Hand prostheses
*wrist disarticulation, full hand, partial hand, finger, partial finger*
[Answer]
It was possible to build a functional hand prosthesis before electricity was discovered, but the functionality was very limited. And the mechanism must be connected directly to a muscle via something like a piercing.
[Ferdinand Sauerbruch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Sauerbruch) was a German surgeon, who developed this kind of prosthesis called the "Sauerbruch arm".
[Here's a paper](https://www.rehab.research.va.gov/jour/01/38/4/weir384.htm) describing and showing the mechanism in figures 2 & 3 (**warning for possibly disturbing pictures**).
>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DbDiM.gif)
>
>
>
Lay your arm flat on a table (or other surface) and make a fist. Now bend your fist upwards as far as possible without the arm loosing contact to the table. Feel the contracted muscle at the upper side of your arm, right below the ellbow. This is one of the possible muscles that controlled the hand prosthesis.
Doctors made an incision to this muscle and put a small bar of ivory right through it (like a modern piercing, but right through the muscle). This ivory bar was connected to the hand via leather strips and pulled the hand closed when the muscle was flexed, much like a garbage claw.
The disadvantage was that, although there are other muscles in that area that *could* control more functions, they are either too deep inside the arm or too close to each other and would interfere with each other's mechanisms.
[Answer]
It's 21 century now and we are barely starting to have artificially controlled prosthesis. Not for the lack of effort, or lack of idea - we knew about electricity and chemistry of nerves for quite some time - but for the lack in precision of signal detection and processing. [First success was in 1957](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroprosthetics#History), over a half century after end of Victorian Era in 1901.
History of [EEG started in 1875](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#History) so there is some indication we could read and interpret neural signals back in Victorian Era. Sadly, first human EEG was recorded in 1924. I can't research details why, but we clearly see that during Victorian Era people knew what they are trying to research, and did try, they just **wasn't able to**.
For control, good thing is that on some parts you do not need to. My wife is below the knee amputee, she is still learning to walk on her unpowered prosthesis, and on a good day you can't really tell that anything is wrong with the way she walks, at all. You just need a bouncy feet, some shock absorbers, good socket etc - everything in theory possible in Victorian Era, if less sturdy and heavier.
For above the knee amputations, knee is really, really tricky business. People who use prosthesis with artificial knee never walk quite the way fully abled person walks, but man, do they run! Some of them run very well and even go back to military service! Sadly, as far as I was able to understand from tech specs of such knees, precision and materials needed for modern knee are bit above Victorian capabilities. A bit - close enough that for steampunk settings I'd let that one fly.
Other prosthesis would be mostly for aesthetic purposes. Mind you, [that's no small deal!](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/faces-of-war-145799854/)
---
For endoprosthesis, it is safe to assume we had them as soon as we could. It means that bone grafts made of gold, wood, animal bone etc [was known as soon as neolithic age](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17453670610013376). We (humanity) tried to and have myths about other surgeries, but there is no evidence these was successful before 20 century.
[Answer]
No you cannot get full control back, you can get partial control, in several ways.
1. straps to other joints, the classic split hook hand operates off a simple strap and cable. extending the arm opens the vise retracting it closes it. Grip strength is provided by opposing a spring. This basically limits you to one two joints you can control.
2. built in dynamics. this is used most often on the leg, consider the superbly designed spring feet used to compete in the olympics by Oscar Pistorius. the weight of the body compresses the spring then leaning forward the lowered load results in hte spring pushing you forward. Early artificial legs just used gravity and springs.
3. Elmy's answer foes into using ivory implants to move one or two mechanisms, you should look there.
Other joints are either left out entirely or use some form of manually controlled locking mechanism. This can take you quite far. Consider [Gotz the Iron Hand](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/06/16/the-iron-hand-of-a-mercenary-made-for-a-16th-century-german-knight-2/) from Germany. who in hte 16th century had several artificial hands made for him, with them he could write, ride, and fight. One had a complex set of levers and springs that let the fingers be "set" in different configurations. You may also want to look up Hanger limbs where are a wide variety of artificial limbs built by James Hanger during the US civil war.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RaoRA.jpg)
Here are three papers you may find useful. A [short history of hand prosthesis.](https://www.pulsus.com/scholarly-articles/the-evolution-of-functional-hand-replacement-from-iron-prostheses-to-hand-transplantation.pdf)
And a history of [artificial legs](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11193255) and another or prosthesis in [general](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3664166/).
[Answer]
I once read about a drummer boy who lost a leg in the US Civil War of 1861-65. He was dissatisfied with the artificial legs available and made a better one for himself, and started a company to sell them.
The US Civil War created a vast market for artificial limbs - after the war some southern state governments spent large percentages (maybe 25 percent, for example) of their annual budgets on artificial limbs. And Americans were relatively affluent compared to Chinese after the Taiping Rebellion, for example, and also relatively inventive.
Thus I suspect that many improved artificial limbs were manufactured after the US Civil War, and that comparatively few improvements were made in the rest of the Victorian era after that.
Whether that is correct or not, you could ask about the best Victorian era prosthetic limbs in historical site likes History Stack Exchange, Historum, History Reddit, etc. and also ask for suggestions for how the best Victorian era prosthetic limbs could have been improved using Victorian technology levels.
] |
[Question]
[
There are many tiny humanoids in fiction, the Arquilians of Men in Black, the Gargantians of Buzz Lightyear Star Command and a few others. This raises the question, is it possible for a humanoid species to evolve to be so small?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VHJXJ.png)
Let's try to stick to natural evolution only and no tiny machine sentient entities.
[Answer]
1. Can primates be very small and live an independent existence?
Answer: Yes, for example, the [Pygmy Marmoset](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_marmoset).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vFhP2.jpg)
[Example image source.](https://picsart.com/i/image-mini-monkey-sadna2018-animals-272823411016201)
2. Can humans be very small?
Answer: They can certainly be small. [Wikipedia's list of the shortest verified people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_shortest_people)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XU9ya.jpg)
NOTE - At this point I have to attend to real life so will have to continue this later.
[Answer]
There are two implicit questions here:
1. Are there any physical factors about humanoid bodies that prevent functioning at that scale.
2. Can a creature that small be intelligent
Mammals come in a range of sizes, all the way from tiny (the [Etruscan Shrew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_shrew) weighs 1.8g) to huge (an African elephant can weigh 6 tons), so a human's fundamental biology seems like it shouldn't have issues. However, you will notice that all small animals tend to use all four limbs for motion. Even squirrels with relatively dexterous hands use them while running. I think this is because as you get smaller, terrain gets relatively larger. As a result, the smaller an animal is, the better it has to be at climbing, and at small scales this probably favours claws over gripping-fingers.
The other question is one of intelligence. Can a small creature be sapient? Well, this is an impossible question to answer really, because we can't really figure out what it is that makes humans different to animals from an intelligence perspective. Some thing that may offer clues is the [brain-body-mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#/media/File:Brain-body_mass_ratio_for_some_animals_diagram.svg) ratio. Man definitely falls near the upper end of that, and you can see a definite increase of "intelligence" as the brain mass increases. However, even animals with brains 5-6 times heavier than humans don't seem as intelligent. And on the other end of the scale, the [Portia spider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)) has a body 5mm long (and so a head that is extremely tiny), and yet it exhibits the ability to "hunt in ways that seem intelligent". This includes the ability to plan routes to prey that take it out of visual contact.
I have a theory that the physical form of an animal dictates it's intelligence. I think that (given an evolutionistic model), any creature with sufficiently dexterous manipulators, sufficient perception fidelity, and with the ability to communicate with others of it's species should be able to become intelligent given enough bootstrapping time. So if you had a miniature humanoid creature and left it for long enough, that theory states that the creature will become intelligent. I wrote a much longer post on this topic [answering this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/100986/are-there-physiological-traits-common-to-all-tool-building-species/101019#101019), and this idea is also mentioned in [this short Michio Kaku talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu7VulZUUdE).
So in short: I can't see any reasons why it wouldn't be plausible.
[Answer]
Morphologically & biologically speaking there's absolutely no reason you can't have tiny humanoids.
>
> Simply looking at the picture of the Pygmy Marmoset in Chasly's answer should be enough to persaude anyone of that.
>
>
>
The implicit question identified in sdfgeoff's answer ("Can a creature that small be intelligent") is another matter.
The answer to that may (at least in part) depend on your answers to two questions.
>
> 1. Just how intelligent do you want them to be
> 2. How large can they be before you no longer consider them "tiny"
>
>
>
It's a question (being the inveterate science fiction & fantasy obsessed man-child I am) I've often contemplated myself & if you'd used reality check as one of your tags (which you've not) I'd suggest I thought you'd be lucky to attain an equivalent intelligence to a four year old child in an animal as small as a large mouse or a small rat.
>
> Which is the size your reference to the MIB alien suggests to me you're thinking of?
>
>
>
This opinion (because that's all it is) is based on a lot of prior reading through countless online & other articles on various ancillary subjects on intelligence in man & animals, selective breeding & god knows what else (I certainly don't, a lot of it I've forgotten) .. research (if you can call it that) during which I've habitually kept no notes (as it was purely for personal entertainment).
So I've no links for you & getting them would require almost as much time spent retracing my steps as I spent walking that path in the first place, so I'm not going to, sorry about that.
With no reality check tag or in-world (yours) detail to suggest otherwise my answer is "hell yes!" :)
>
>
> >
> > "How small could you see humanoid aliens getting?" (Joe Smith in comments).
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> Jyoti Amge with primordial dwarfism is 2' tall, has finished school & is considering studying for a degree (unless that was an old article & she's already done that) : so I'd suggest anything down to 2' tall is certainly reasonable but beyond that I wouldn't like to hazard a guess.
>
>
> If intelligence isn't an issue then anything down to the same size (by body weight) of the smallest species of mice or shrews (an Etruscan shrew 2 g & 4 cm long) is reasonable.
>
>
> If only a small degree of intelligence is sufficient for your needs, just enough for language, some tool use & small family groups or tribes (but nothing approaching a technically & scientifically advanced society) then the common crow may be a good model of the smallest they might be, some use tools in the wild, can mimic speech & recognize human faces (they've a 15 g brain).
>
>
> If I was trying to design a plausibly intelligent (but not scientifically advanced) tiny humanoid based on the crow for size I'd probably add a gram or two to the weight of a crows brain weight & then try to work out from there the height & weight of a scale human with that size brain.
>
>
>
> >
> > The human brain is 2% of body weight, so a 15 g brain scales to a 750 g human
> >
> >
> > The average human weighs 62000 g
> >
> >
> > 62000/750 = 82.6666666667 of them fit in 1 human
> >
> >
> > 4.35\*4.35\*4.35 = 82.312875 (close enough for government work so that'll do me)
> >
> >
> > The average height for an adult north american male is 175.5 cm
> >
> >
> > 175.5/4.35 = 40.34 cm (which is around 15.8 inches tall)
> >
> >
> > We now add (more) fudge & do a little (OK, lots of) hand waving
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> OK then, so how does a one foot four inch tall human with (lets call it) a 17 g brain in a slightly larger than normal for scale (barely noticeably so) head to fit it in with a vocabulary in the range of 2000 words living in small family groups with nothing more than stone age tools sound?
>
>
>
[Answer]
I'm not sure how small we're talking, but take a look at chimpanzees.
Now if you had a chimpanzee become more intelligent (i.e. more synapses and more oxygen-rich blood flowing to the brain, as well as heat dispersion), for reasons such as gaining an advantage over other species or navigating complex and ever-changing environments, it would be quite imaginable.
Ignore this ramble, left it here for documentation's sake:
>
> The main issue I spot is heat dispersion, since the surface area is considerably small when compared to the volume of the head. Some of the heat may be transported through the blood, perhaps leading to large ears (such as in African elephants or desert foxes) or tongues (thing panting dogs) to dissipate the heat.
>
>
> A more exotic solution might be to shape the skull in such a way as to increase the surface area, perhaps with deep wrinkles or folds, though this may come with structural integrity issues, and will not transport the heat in the center to the surface very quickly. It may also impede the room for the organs, perhaps even causing a split brain for a U-shaped skull.
>
>
> Other than that I don't see a problem whatsoever.
>
>
> EDIT:
>
>
> I'm completely wrong as pointed out in the comments, it's the *larger* the animal the harder it is to manage heat. Pity though, may have been interesting.
>
>
>
EDIT 2:
Perhaps the smallest primate is the [Philippine tarsier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_tarsier), with a length of only 85 to 160 mm and a weight of around 80–160 g, so if you just want a humanoid, adjust the muscle distribution to make it walk and remove the tail and presto, you have a small, furry, ugly-looking humanoid.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wnmSj.png)
If it needs to be as 'smart' as a human however, my maths runs dry.
The human brain has a volume of roughly 1200 cm3 an a weight of around 1.3kg, containing about 100 billion neurons (let's ignore the protective cells) each with a diameter of around 4 to 100 micrometers (um), allow us to assume an average diameter of 2 um (because a lot of them are small and we're cramming them in properly), so each neuron is roughly 30 um3 in volume.
Now 100 billion neurons times 30 um3 is 3 million cm3, which is more than 2500 times the volume of the human brain, so either my calculations are entirely broken or the human brain is already really cramped.
This also ignores the fact that the human brain consumes around 20 W per day, which is around 100 kcal per day (roughly a large modern apple), and that further ignores the energy required to carry such a massive brain and the energy required to hunt down the aforementioned apple, which a small creature may have difficulty with.
If anyone can correct me, please do! Hope this helps.
[Answer]
## Trade-offs with small size
Is it possible? Yes. Other answers provide ample examples of small primates. However, all of these small primates have limited social and tool using capabilities compared to humans.
[Research](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/social-network-size-linked-brain-size/) has shown a relationship between brain size and maximum social networks. If we assume that these tiny humanoids have the same kind of computational power per unit brain volume, then we can expect them to have fairly limited social and tool using skills as well.
However, if the humanoids of that planet use a different brain chemistry or brain structure with a higher density of computation power and storage, then small humanoids with human or better mental capacity is a real possibility. I have no idea what this new chemistry would be, just that it's plausible.
Small animals are more prolific and more adaptable than larger animals. If the environment changes abruptly, small animals are in a better position to adapt than larger ones. Perhaps in this world, extinction events are more common which significantly diminishes the maximum sizes a species can grow to. (It takes time for a species to slowly evolve to a larger average weight.) It's not hard to conceive of circumstances that regularly wipe out the heavier species while the social and tool using skills of the small humanoids end up being a huge survival advantage.
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The setting that I am working on has a population of humans living in a place that does not have abundant copper or tin resources, so it is unlikely that they'd discover Bronze. However, bog iron is reasonably common, so is it feasible that such a civilisation might make the jump from pottery kilns directly to iron bloomery?
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I imagine they could. Many people make the mistake of under-estimating both the intelligence and curiosity of ancient peoples; while it is clear from the record they did NOT always follow a logical path, they did many things just because they had the time and they were curious to see what would happen. Especially when they weren't that hungry, and just fooling around. Where is the logical path to the atlatl; if it wasn't just fooling around with sticks, or a genius insight that resulted in fooling around with sticks? How in the world did they invent the boomerang and become accurate with it? Or the sling, if you ever try to learn that on your own, start far from anything breakable.
When food is plentiful, hunter gatherers have time on their hands to do things. Without food preservation it doesn't do any good to hunt for weeks in advance. So they mess with things. Trying to cook different plants, make weapons, etc. One of the things they can mess with is seeing how hot a fire can get.
Crucible steel was being made in 800 AD, and can be made in clay ovens if you have the right mud. This melts iron and other ingredients in a clay crucible inside a clay oven. If you have bog iron, somebody somewhere may have thought they could purify it by fire, and just fooled around with making the fire hotter and hotter. It could be a hobby for years.
I don't think you need anything else to realize you can actually melt it; the objective could just be whim: How hot can you get it? Not much different from how far can you sling it or throw it.
I certainly don't think it is impossible. Ancient people built thousands of stone monuments and invented all the mechanics needed to dig out, shape and transport stones
weighing tens of tons, hundreds of miles. Why? Because they could, and they had some idea in mind, be it religion or practical astronomy or both.
Fire has certainly been an object of reverence too, no reason to think early people would not go to great lengths in their exploration of it, and their exploration of things that can survive it or be transformed by it.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been around for at least 60,000 years and there are clear hints we've been around 250,000 years. That is us, human beings of our same exact intelligence and curiosity and reasoning capability. Obviously without the accumulation of our education and knowledge, but with language, skills, and both the physical and mental dexterity we have.
Far too often, we like to pretend these people were idiots or infants or dullards that needed to be led on a very simple path of technological discovery. I don't think so. I think fire was a very big part of their lives and they would have naturally explored all kinds of aspects of it, and could quite naturally have discovered the smelting of iron, **not** by knowing it would happen, but just by wondering **what** would happen if they got the oven hot enough. And, I will point out, the oven doesn't have to get very hot before the metal begins to soften and can be hammered by rocks.
These aren't dummies we are talking about, they are **us**, with just as many insightful geniuses as us. They had fewer "shoulders of giants" to stand upon, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a few giant intellects and insights of their own, for the problems that faced them.
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**You really need at least copper**, copper *can* be smelted in a pottery kiln. Pottery kilns (760 C) don't get anywhere near the smelting or even forging temprature of iron (1500 C). only purpose built furnaces designed to achieve very high temperatures (forced air, charcoal, ext) will smelt iron, you can develop those progressively from other metals but not straight from a pottery kiln.
You also really need copper to realize smelting is a thing. Copper predates other tool metals and even bronze by a large margin (~6000 years) and it takes several thousand years of using copper before people learn they can extract copper from ores through heating. So people had to have copper around in tools for thousands of years before they even figured out they could smelt copper out of rocks, which is far easier than iron even though iron ore is far easier to come by.
The proof is in the cultures that didn't discover smelting. Metallic meteorite iron has been used without other metal technology (Cape York Inuit). However, said cultures never developed smelting technology there is no reason for them to believe they can heat up rocks and extract metal, and these are people who know you can heat iron to make it softer. Your people will not develop bloomery from nothing they need to understand useful metals can be extracted from rock by heating it to melting. In our history that has only been copper, other metals are either far too rare or even harder to refine than iron. Hundreds of cultures never develop metallurgy they were not less intelligence and its not due to lack of iron iron ore is nearly everywhere (excluding a few small islands). Usually it is because they did not have access to native copper, which is far rarer. Technology just requires certain resources and techniques to build on, to progress, without them the chance of stumbling across the right process by accident is just too unlikely.
The progression is pretty predictable and occurred multiple times, early people use pre existing metallic state metals like copper, then someone discovers they can heat certain rocks and get copper, which was very valuable, then they start testing every rock they can find and experimenting with different furnaces, higher and higher heats, fluxes, refining and other methods to extract better qualities or other metals.
Bog iron is not good for learning to work iron, bog iron is a easy (relatively) way to collect iron ore once you know about it but you are not getting much iron per amount of bog iron. The first smelting likely started with much higher quality ores like hematite which don't require processing. culture switch to bog iron once they have harvested out all the better iron ores.
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**By way of gold.**
Even if your people don't have copper, they might have gold. Gold nuggets occur naturally in streams and lowlands. The melting point is similar to that of copper. No-one is going to make a weapon out of gold because it is so soft, but the main use for native copper was not weapons, but jewelry. If your people made decorative items out of hammered gold nuggets and then figured out they could melt the gold in a ceramic forge, they might figure the same thing out about the bog iron.
Or they might not. The Aztecs had the tech to melt copper and gold but not iron. The history of iron would make good reading. My suspicion is that it is one of those inventions, like the alphabet, that happened one time then spread everywhere it could spread.
I think historical interest in bog iron is from people who knew about iron and were looking for it. Unlike a gold nugget, I am not sure the native lumps of bog iron are good for much as is. If this is going to be part of your story, you might have someone make a knife from a meteor and then as it rusts, perceive its similarity to the bog iron lumps he uses for sling shots and fishing weights. A story getting into the weeds of tech development like that will never be made into a movie but I would like to read it!
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It's possible because it happened in our history: some peoples in Africa didn't go through the Bronze Age but had an Iron Age at similar dates than those lands who had bronze: <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age#Sub-Saharan_Africa>
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bronze age is, in fact a misconception.
in fact, only the Mediterraneans and the chinese have went through the bronze age, and both cultures started widespread use bronze after their surrounding culture that have started smelting iron.
it turns out, iron and it's smelting started from meteoric iron, then worked through the forge into bloomery iron. Meteoric iron CAN be worked cold, and the first iron users realizes that heating the Meteor makes it easier to work with.
bog iron started as a pottery pigment, and making glazed ceramics needs high temperatures: temperatures high enough for bloomery smelting. iron comes as a hard, dense lump, ductile when removed, which prompts any one who first discovered it think it as a good tool material, before discovering forging almost immediately.
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**TL;DR:** How early can windows made of transparent glass (can look through) be readily available (not a rare luxury) to "common" citizens (at least top 10% of population)?
**Disclaimer:** I know very little about the history of glassmaking or the modern processes involved. I dabbled a bit looking for an answer, and keep doing so, but maybe someone is an expert and can provide a better answer.
Glass was known to humans for quite some time, and as early as Romans (and probably earlier) it was used for windows. However, for a long time produced glass had poor optical qualities, so while it would let the light pass, it wouldn't allow you to see through a window. There is some evidence pointing towards transparent glass in the Ancient Rome and Greece, including references to magnifying glasses, but nothing consistent. After the Dark Ages, it took some time to recover glassmaking knowledge, and even by the 18th century glass windows were a luxury even for the highest society.
As with many things, what was a luxury, now costs less than the same amount of bread or vegetables. The question is, is it purely our technological superiority that allows for this? Or are there some glassmaking methods that would allow, if one were to know *how*, to make transparent glass relatively easily and cheaply? If this is merely a matter of knowledge and invention, then how far back can we go and still have good enough technologies to make glass for the masses? Can we have it in early Industrial age? In the Middle ages? Back in Roman times?
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# ~ [1900 technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_drawn_cylinder_sheet_glass)
A cylinder of glass is pulled by a machine arm from a circular glass glob. The glass is then annealed, cut, reheated, and flattened resulting in a flat plate. This method will definitely meet your requirements.
# ~ [1600 technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polished_plate_glass)
Pour molten glass onto an iron table, roll it flat, then polish it. Historically, this was done by hand, and was not cheap. Mechanization can be achieved in both rolling and polishing. Rolling was not widely applied until the Industrial Revolution, but there are examples of [rolling mills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slitting_mill) on metals in Europe from 1590. [William Herschel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Herschel) built a [mirror polishing machine](https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g186370-d187665-i42554966-Herschel_Museum_of_Astronomy-Bath_Somerset_England.html) sometime in the 18th century, but Leonardo had sketches for something similar much earlier. I can't find a good source, but I recall reading that Milanese armorers used water-driven polishing machines to prep their wares for sale in the 15th century. A fully mechanized processed realized with ~1600 technology could meet your specifications.
# ~ BC technology
A rolling machine needs a power source and a gearing configuration that will allow it to roll two sections at the same speed. This can be accomplished by using a watermill ([available 3rd century BC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermill), in Greece) and a belt drive attached to both ends of the rolling machine ([available 1st century BC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_(mechanical)), in China). Polishing requires complex gearing to increase rotational speed. This gearing was probably available by 1 AD in Rome, as the Romans had evidently built both kneading and fulling machines using water power. Combine these technologies and, optimistically, glass is as cheap as it was with the 1600s technology...or maybe even cheaper with all the slave labor.
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Flat glass is made by pouring the molten glass on a bath of molten metal, usually tin. For this reason it is also called [float glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Float_glass).
By floating on the molten metal, the glass will acquire its flatness.
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> Until the 16th century, window glass or flat glass was generally cut from large discs (or rondels) of crown glass. Larger sheets of glass were made by blowing large cylinders which were cut open and flattened, then cut into panes. Most window glass in the early 19th century was made using the cylinder method. The 'cylinders' were 6 to 8 feet (180 to 240 cm) long and 10 to 14 inches (25 to 36 cm) in diameter, limiting the width that panes of glass could be cut, and resulting in windows divided by transoms into rectangular panels.
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The problem with the above described process is that it has low throughput, influencing the final price of the product.
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The only way to mimic the float process and allow mass production is to have molten metal and the ability to control its temperature (you don't want the metal to cool down and solidify with the glass) and composition (you don't want it to react with the oxygen). So, I am afraid you cannot go earlier than what we have had if you really want a large production. For limited volumes one can use the above mentioned techniques.
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If the Romans had the know-how to produce consistent results with their glass making, and someone showed them the [cylinder method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder_blown_sheet_glass), they would have been able to produce plate glass in quantity. Enough that landowners could glaze the windows of their villas at least, whether they would have considered it worthwhile to do so in the core, Mediterranean, parts of the Empire? I don't think that glass windows would have caught on in Rome, it's too warm for too much of the year to get much advantage from glazing.
What we know of Roman glass working seems to suggest that they had good working techniques, like glass blowing, but poor production techniques so the glass artisans were working with was of unpredictable quality, colour and clarity.
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Yesterday you were leading a pleasant easy going life as a 20 year old lazy, intelligent but good natured, young adult who's father just happens to be the a notorious totalitarian dictator of a very small, but somewhat oil rich, country. Unfortunately your father just died of a heart attack early this morning and now it appears you are the dictator in charge of your country, an honor you honestly could do without.
You're not really cut out to be a dictator, You don't think you would be great at it, and you don't want the stress of leading a country or the hatred of the subjugated populous. In fact you've always kind of felt bad about that whole subjugation thing. It sure would be nice if your country didn't consistently get labeled as one of the 20 worst countries to live in by various human rights watch groups year after year. You always told your father it wasn't right, but he insisted it was necessary to stay in power, and honestly he was more worried about building more statues of himself then improving the quality of life for his citizens.
Now you are in the position to do something about it. You're committed to fixing things by ending the dictatorship and setting up a democracy so the people can rule themselves and hopefully create a more fair society for everyone, and of course save you all the work of ruling.
Unfortunately just because you're committed to this idea doesn't mean you know how to make it happen. Trying to set up a democracy sounds like it would take allot of work and planning, and while your pretty intelligent you have to admit you never had a knack for that sort of large scale organization, or politics in general to be honest. Your not really sure how to go about making arrangements for such a radical change in power.
And then there is the problem with your father's 'advisors'. He had a large number of friends and cronies who were living pretty luxurious lives by exploiting the wealth of the nation, and it's citizens. You doubt any of them will be happy with the idea of creating a democracy and giving up all the power and wealth they currently have. Their not going to help you figure out how to make this happen, in fact you're kind of afraid to even mention the idea to them. What would men who are happy with leading a country that will kidnap and beat dissonance do if they heard you were going to give away their power to the people they were having beat just a week ago?
Your pretty sure you could get some support form other countries like the USA or the UK to do this, they may even finally remove all those trade sanctions once you start to transition the goverment, you just need to figure out how to start the process without getting your own countries leadership too upset with you...
And of course while you sincerely care about improving your citizens quality of life, you're not completely selfless. You would like to arrange for the transition to leave you with a decent lifestyle afterwards, even if not as flamboyant as it was in your father's day, ideally one where you don't have to be involved in politics ever again!
So, how should you set about changing the goverment, without revolutions and all that nasty violence and bloodshed, especially without *your* blood being shed?
For this question assume an alternate world almost identical to ours, with the only differences being the presence of your small dictatorship. The leaders of other countries that may get involved would be ruled by some general president/prime minister/whatever rather then the specific leaders in power today; in fact I'm open to adjusting political affiliation and general policies of various leaders as necessary to server the plot.
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Rather than a pure democracy, transition to a constitutional monarchy. Establish a council of some kind of oligarchic advisors - say a representative from each province's governor, or somesuch. Balance them out with a "people's council". Make it clear that they're both *advisory roles* (for the time being): their job is to present you with a clear picture of the country's issues and what they think you can do about it. Your job is to make decisions.
Then, over time, gradually change that. Give your advisors more and more specific powers. Make their approval required for certain types of proposals. (Budgets especially - power is almost worthless if you can't pay for your decrees.) Then make yours optional. Frame this as a way to make the country more responsive to its own needs and crises - the king can't be everywhere, so your loyal representatives will handle smaller issues.
Eventually, you'll become pretty much unnecessary to the whole process. Better yet, your advisors and representatives will by this time have grown quite powerful, and will obviously be loathe to give it back to the monarchy any time soon. The downside is that they're likely to be deeply corrupt, and you'll probably want to spend more of your time rooting out that corruption as you go along.
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One possibility that may not be completely feasible in the real world but could make for a fun story is to not do things well, but do them as poorly as possible. Be a really bad dictator. I mean like a B-movie style [evil overlord](http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html). Do everything you can think of *wrong*. Find out what people in your country like and ban it. Put heavy tariffs on everything people want to buy. Imprison anyone popular. Steal lots of money and live a flagrantly excessive lifestyle.
You can focus your attention on actions that are highly visible and highly unpopular (especially to people watching oversees) but with no major real-world disadvantages (or even some advantages). You could put a %500 tariff on chocolate, ban music from some popular bands, etc. You can spend money on things that don't cost that much on a country-wide scale but are sure to make international headlines because of how excessive they seem, like a "gold" Mercedes that is actually just thinly-plated.
Acting as a standard villain has some advantages. Villains kill or imprison anyone who could pose a threat to them. This could be used as an excuse to imprison anyone who is competent enough to hold the country together in the face of a power vacuum. Once anyone with any power who isn't stupid and blindly loyal to you is out of power, you can "nationalize" your fathers' friends' wealth and "give it to yourself" (in a form that would be easy to invest back into the economy once you are gone). You can reorganize the military in the worst way possible to guarantee it can't mount an effective defense (or outright flees in the face of the slightest opposition).
Behind the scenes, you can negotiate with some world leader having political troubles to invade the country and restore democracy. You will "commit suicide" during the invasion, and they will give you some land in the mountains were you can live off the small fortune you hid away by skimming off a fraction of a percent of the fortunes you looted from your dad's more corrupt cronies during the chaos.
If you can do this quickly, over the course of a few years, your people won't have to suffer all that much, especially if you focus your attention on highly visible and unpopular but ultimately inconsequential actions. The world will look at it as some crazy spoiled kid who got power he had no idea what to do with and had to be stopped. And professional bureaucrats whose job it is to understand the nitty-gritty details of how a proper government works can rebuild things from the ground up without any the old vested interests getting in the way.
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**Use your advisors. They got to where they are for a reason.**
You inherited your wealth and lifestyle. But among your fathers advisors are going to be some self-made men and savvy operators. You know which ones they are. Creative, flexible, intelligent and ruthless.
/You doubt any of them will be happy with the idea of creating a democracy and giving up all the power and wealth they currently have/
So you create a democracy where they give none of that up, and you recruit them to help you do it. Point at the changing times. Flatter them by noting the ability of these individuals to pre-empt trouble. Note the presence of filthy rich robber barons in countries like the US. Propose to co-opt chumps like the EU to underwrite the transition.
The ones you choose will be pleased to have been chosen. Some may have been thinking along those lines already, but stayed quiet for fear of your old man. These advisors will help you make the new nation one which will be putatively democratic, well regarded by the foreign (chumps), more revolution proof and also preserve them on the top.
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# Slowly
**From the bottom up**
First you need to gently introduce people to the concept of voting, agreeing something between a group and proceeding with that action. It sounds like you're coming from a very tribal situation. People are used to having a strong man in charge who tells them what to do, each to his own and each to his position.
## The local council of elders
You're going to start by pandering to egos, regional councils of elders are going to get a budget to improve their area. This is beneath the interests of national government, but to spend the money they must have a majority vote, in person, to take action. No ballot papers, members are the heads of local households.
That works well enough in the regions but there are too many households in the towns. The elders are going to have to appoint fewer of their number to make up the council, no more than 21 (arbitrary) but there could be 100 households, they're going to have to vote. This can be as freeform as they like. It should all be done in person, they probably all know each other which is the key to this, they're less likely to fight and more likely to come to some common agreement.
## The regional council
The next step is for each local council to send a representative to a regional council. Again they're going to have to vote to select a member of their group to go forward as a representative.
## You're introducing democracy by stages
It's flawed, but it doesn't tread on the toes of the real power brokers in the country, yet. Your councils are dealing with the drains and the roads and the waste, the little things that don't make money that big players think are beneath them but that local people care about.
You slowly give the councils more responsibilities, specifically not powers, but with great responsibility comes great power. Eventually the councils are running the country. It's time for a national council. In due course you allow people other than the wealthy land owners and heads of households to vote, but don't rush these things. Power should remain with the traditionally powerful until it's too late.
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> Unfortunately your father just died of a heart attack early this morning and now it appears you are the dictator in charge of your country
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Appearances can be deceptive. :-)
You might discover that you are a dictator dependent on the support of e.g. the army (or worse). That's pretty common as a pattern, and that *would* complicate moving to a democracy because what you *want* and what you can *get* are not your own choice alone.
Of course, in a sense, you *have* a democracy. Alright, it might be a small democracy with only those people of rank 2 star general (or above) able to "vote", but nonetheless it's a start. :-)
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> Your not really cut out to be a dictator
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Then there's a good chance you'll *be* "cut out" of being a dictator. Time to let those gene's kick in and let's hope you got the right (or wrong) genes for the job or, well, retirement is an option to mention to the generalissimos.
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> Now you are in the position to do something about it.
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*Cough* with your blessing generals. :-)
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> You're committed to fixing things by ending the dictatorship and setting up a democracy so the people can rule themselves and hopefully create a more fair society for everyone, and of course save you all the work of ruling.
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Because being prime minister is less work than being dictator ? Don't think Theresa May would agree with *that*. :-)
Dictator : "ask" = "done, no problemo".
Prime Minister : "ask" = "have to shout over the idiots (sorry, cabinet) just to be heard asking."
Cured of democracy yet ? You soon will be.
Anyone can be a dictator, but being a democrat is really gawd awful.
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> Trying to set up a democracy sounds like it would take allot of work and planning, and while your pretty intelligent you have to admit you never had a knack for that sort of large scale organization, or politics in general to be honest. Your not really sure how to go about making arrangements for such a radical change in power.
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I am happy to inform you that, dictator or not, your late Father (the Iron Fist in the Iron Glove), will have no end of ambitious and possibly even talented advisors and bureaucrats and lawyers happy to advise you.
And then there's the generalissimos to "offer advice". :-)
Your first step is then an obvious one :
* Execute the generalissimos, advisors and lawyers. The bureaucrats will do what they're told ( the lawyers would too, but, me, I hate lawyers and now is the chance to get some payback :-) ).
So fast you'll barely have time to mop up the blood (there are companies that do this for you) new advisors and lawyers will appear, and a lot of very happy and loyal (or their families get to hear about it) newly promoted generals are in place, along with their new radio controlled exploding collars. Just in case they don't like their families.
Yeah, I haven't forgotten the democracy thing. Bare with me ...
Your new lawyers and advisors and freshly motivated bureaucrats will now begin working on drafting that new constitution (see I remembered) and plans for a referendum and parliament and some law reforms. Maybe some draft docs about retirement funds for former dictators would be useful too.
So we delegate the whole planning and, you should pardon the expression, execution parts of the democracy thing.
Probably useful to form a people's advisory council now. No, wait, that could look like communism and we know that doesn't work so good. Have to wait a bit. For the plans and the executions to take place, as it were.
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> And then there is the problem with your father's 'advisors'.
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Way ahead of ya, there pal. :-)
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> Your pretty sure you could get some support form other countries like the USA or the UK to do this, they may even finally remove all those trade sanctions once you start to transition the goverment, you just need to figure out how to start the process without getting your own countries leadership too upset with you...
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You need RCEC.
Radio. Controlled. Explosive. Collars.
That should keep the "leadership" pretty much in their place for a while. At least the ones who didn't take the hint when the lawyers, advisors and generalissimos got shot (or whatever method the "dice" came up with :-) ).
No problem there.
But let's "nationalize" their assets just in case.
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> You would like to arrange for the transition to leave you with a decent lifestyle afterwards, even if not as flamboyant as it was in your father's day, ideally one where you don't have to be involved in politics ever again!
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Absolutely. 100% fair and reasonable. A slice of those nationalized assets transferred to a nice overseas bank account or two look about right. Who could object ? Cough.
Of course people can turn nasty, so lets make sure that we convert those to, you know, easily "secured" forms of wealth to avoid any confusion. Hey, let's not make a mess for anyone else and let's make sure they're untraceable forms of wealth so there aren't any silly arguments later on.
And maybe burn the records, just to avoid later hassle and squabbling.
And we are, I assure you, getting ever closer to a full democracy.
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> So, how should you set about changing the goverment, without revolutions and all that nasty violence and bloodshed, especially without your blood being shed?
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I say this with *enormous* sadness, but alas we were unable to *completely* avoid bloodshed.
But it's all a question of whose blood, isn't it ?
Look, you can let the lawyers live if you're feeling squeamish about this.
Your problem here is simple : the former power holders aren't the type to go quietly and you've already got the infrastructure for making them go noisily in place, so may as well use it.
It's all for a good cause and never mind that "Road to Hell paved with good intentions" nonsense - that's what people in the generalissimos' cells say. We do plan to live to retire, right ? :-)
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> For this question assume an alternate world almost identical to ours, with the only differences being the presence of your small dictatorship. The leaders of other countries that may get involved would be ruled by some general president/prime minister/whatever rather then the specific leaders in power today; in fact I'm open to adjusting political affiliation and general policies of various leaders as necessary to server the plot.
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( "General President" - took the words out of my mount. :-)
If history tells us anything it's that inviting other countries in to "help transition power" is another way of transferring power to a creep working for an entirely different country. Or to wind up with a civil war, which is a tad antisocial IMHO. Let's not do that.
So a day (or week, "tops") of bloody removals from offices, followed by some quick work with a mop, bucket and disinfectant and you'll be mere months away from getting that new constitution and that election to the new parliament.
And of course you'll need to stay on a short while to ensure the whole thing goes well. And maybe you should ensure the constitution allows you to maintain *a little* control just in case your guidance and inspiration is needed a little longer.
And what if people really screw up and you just *have* to step back in to power, for their own good ? I mean, just in case, to be socially responsible, we need to have the option there.
It's only common sense !
And parliament probably shouldn't get full control too soon. After all, people aren't properly educated and used to democracy. It needs a transition period. And we shouldn't rush this - slow and steady wins the race !
So, once you're *completely* satisfied the whole democracy thing is working *the way you want*, you can retire to Scotland, which you inexplicably bought with your (generously donated) retirement fund.
Oh yeah, don't forget to deactivate those RCECs on your way out of the country. Or if you think it's more efficient you could, you know, activate them. Dealer's choice.
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**1.- SECRET POLICE**
You need to protect yourself first. Reform or create a secret police that only responds to you and it's above everyone else in grade. Target a few low ranking officers and a powerfull one, make their whole family dissapear (even the pets), that would cement the terror to keep everyone thinking there is eyes looking for them.
**2.- AUTONOMOUS STATES**
Letting people choose their own leaders it's dangerous, they can pick someone greedy enough to challenge you, so idealy you would start for making them choose between hand picked candidates that you can control or remove without issues. I would put them in charge for a year tops and call in for new elections. At the third year I would start accepting open campaings from the citizens, making the least powerfull states be the first in the transition.
**3.- DEMILITARIZATION**
People with guns have power, you need to reduce this power to avoid posible struggle in the change of goverment. Reduce the use of armed forces in control mechanics and start with farming/Health/Infraestructure proyects to reduce the armed pool of your generals as you feed personal to this new endeavors.
Remove from the budget any contract for ammunition and make live ammunition drills a week event to try to burn out the actual stockpile.
**4.- IMPROVE LIFE CONDITIONS**
This part it's really hard to balance, since you need to keep the population still under control while you give them economic power. I would concentrate in the surplus of basic needs first, food, water, shelter and health by giving subsidies to anyone trying to create a bussinees in those markets.
**5.- PROTECT RIGHTS**
This needs to go in hand with the point above, people wouldn't risk investing any money or time if there is a chance that the government can come in and take it all. You need to enforce that people would own what they bought and you would protect them and their stuff over everything.
**6.- CLEANING CORRUPTION**
There is corruption everywhere, but usually when people tends to figth for survival in a daily basis, morals and ethics are cast away. And this is the perfect place to see corruption spread in everything people touch.
This would be the hardest part to address, deppending in how much time people has being living under this conditions it would become part of their culture and removing it would be the hardest part of all.
I have no idea how this could be achieve, but usually with a strong a fast legal solution, after all the points above are being resolved could naturaly fall back in line.
After this points are achieve probably 10 years in the future, you would call all your governors to choose someone among them to carry your dutys while in "sick" leave while under the table you dissolve your secret police in acid if possible.
**7.- DYING**
You need to die, or atleast the dictator. So people wouldn't look for you after the new elections, since to let them get to this point would have leave an important number of bodys and people claiming for your blood.
Make the presidential plane explote in middle of the occean while returning from your doctors. While you stay in your Manhattan floor watching the news.
[Answer]
Those *advisors*?
Those **traitors**!!
That's why you made purges!
So you carefully try to fly some proposals, 1 on 1. Those who show an open mind get to stay.
Those who oppose, turns out you found dirt on them. And if dirt isn't found, you dig deeper, and dirt **will be found**. And you hang the traitor!
Then you make a grand charade, on how they always list you on TOP 20 places to avoid.
**DSOllens-land is the best country!**
And commit to improve by the end of this decade, to be in the top 10 places to live.
Come hell of high water, it will be done.
And ruthlessly make everyone follow.
You will be improving your citizens lives, not because you secretly care, but because **no one mocks Dsollen!**
All your subjects will stand in awe, of your power, your unquestioned rule. Those who may oppose will be questioned by outsiders to forestall a great improvement for the country, those who help, are to be lauded as loyal subjects who follow every command.
] |
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