text
stringlengths 22
2.11M
|
|---|
[Question]
[
What thickness of atmosphere, and strength of magnetosphere, would I need for a planet to have a deadly daytime and a hospitable nighttime?
I'm wanting a planet in which humans can survive on as long as they come outside at night.
The Sun's UV light is lethal, and so no human can come out during the day; but the night is non-lethal.
The Sun in question is a main sequence G-type star, about 4.6/4.7 billion years old; and the orbit is close enough to an AU to say, essentially, an identical orbit to Earth.
Not the actual solar system, but very similar.
What would have to happen to magentosphere, ozone layer, air density and composition, etc?
[Answer]
## Mars: no magnetosphere required
Just to clarify concepts, the **Earth's magnetosphere** does not prevent sunrays from being "lethally radioactive" during daytime, but it does **protect the whole atmosphere from being eroded, including the ozone in the stratosphere**.
Ozone prevents UV rays from reaching the surface and provoking major mutations on DNA sequences. Such **mutations do not kill us instantaneously** but give us cancer and prevent DNA to be copied adequately to the offspring, so all multicellular life (with long DNA sequences) becomes unviable in few generations.
What you are looking for is a mix between the Earth and Mars. It seems that Mars was a hospitable place some billion years ago, with a warm atmosphere that could hold liquid water and microbial life. However, for several billion years, [the solar wind eroded the martian atmosphere](https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-mission-reveals-speed-of-solar-wind-stripping-martian-atmosphere) so Mars is now a desert. During this process, there must have been an **era in which the conditions for life started to disappear** slowly.
**Your planet could be situated in a similar era, when ozone in the atmosphere is being depleted at a dangerous rate so it is unsafe to expose oneself to sunlight.**
PD. I forgot to say that Mars --the same as Venus or the Moon-- does not have a [true magnetosphere](http://www.igpp.ucla.edu/public/mkivelso/Publications/299-Encyclopedia%20519-540.pdf).
>
> The nature of the interaction between an unmagnetized planet and the supersonic
> solar wind is determined principally by the electrical conductivity of the body. If conducting paths exist across the planet’s interior or ionosphere, then electric currents flow through the body and into the solar wind where they create
> forces that slow and divert the incident flow. The diverted solar wind flows around a region that is similar to a planetary magnetosphere (p. 523 in the link).
>
>
>
[Answer]
It could be the magnet property’s of the planet are weaker and the ozone is not existent, otherwise similar atmosphere to breath, it just allows dangerous levels of radiation through that plants have adapted to
[Answer]
For radioactivity (gamma rays) you need a neutron star. A normal star will not produce such high energy radiation.
A closer thing you can get with a 'normal' star is more neutrons colliding with molecules in the atmosphere and producing radioactive isotopes (similar to our Carbon 14, but that is not too radioactive due to a long half life).
Tritium is something which can be produced in similar ways. And an oxygen-rich atmosphere can capture the tritium atoms and rain them down as water. A sun which swallowed a lot of fissionable material from a nearby supernova could produce the needed neutrons. However, half life is 12 days, so it would be radioactive at night as well - except maybe in some places where the water rains down during the day but not at night.
Best would probably be to go without radioactivity and just with uv rays (radiation). That is quite easy: Just make the air thinner and the weather less humid (no oceans and no clouds during the day). A more extrem version of our deserts. Plants may survive off ground water and nightly rainfall. But those are quite harmless for humans: Clothing and sun blocker are enough to protect us from even very extreme levels.
Or we go with simple heat: Make the planet close enough to the sun, dry enough, and the atmosphere thin enough that daylight temperatures are above 100 Celsius. Add some wind for the heating effect. Plants adapted by storing their water underground. Humans could only survive this for more than a few minutes without heavy temperature controlled clothing - basically like a diving suit with an air conditioning system. Rain in the evening cools things down very quickly.
] |
[Question]
[
**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
Most works of fiction have quite imaginative views of time travel. Mighty machines that teleport in time instead of space. Gaping portals in space that take you to another time. Mystical beings with a special power to move freely in time, sometimes taking a mortal companion.
Physicists, on the other hand, sometimes have different ideas. Willem Stockum, for example, showed that general relativity is consistent with a type of time travel where you [walk in a circle and end up in the past](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve), no machines, portals, or mystical powers necessary. Okay, you might need to run depending on how big the closed time-like curve is. Gödel also studied this type of time travel.
My question is if a world's equator could be a closed time-like curve, making the first person to go around the world (via the equator) also the first time traveler.
[Answer]
As far as I'm aware, closed time-loops of the sort you suggest (taking a fixed path through space and arriving back at a location prior to your departure without using faster-than-light travel) have only been proved for orbits around rotating infinitely long cylinders of infinite mass.
Therefore closed time-like curves are not a plausible feature of any sane planet. Closed curves can only be accessed introducing specific, weird categories of singularities. Which is to say, you need to hang out near something as extreme as a black hole AND add an array of further weird constraints. These are incompatible with anything like a planet as we understand it.
] |
[Question]
[
On a tidally locked Earth-like planet a big part of long distance air routes would have to approach the hurricane eye and some may even benefit from it.
On Earth aircraft are able to save time and fuel by going along a jetstream. Realistically that mechanism should also work there. The question is what would be the limiting factor in using such routes? (Or maybe it's not worthy and going directly would be the best idea?)
**How much speed should I realistically add to an aircraft because of flying along such jetstreams around "eye" on tidally locked planet and what would be the main limiting factor?**
* speed of the wind?
* endurance of aircraft?
* endurance of passengers? (sickness bags)
* very hard to use reserve airports? (after all they are all built in area with permanently bad weather...)
* other?
EDIT: The planet circulates a dim red dwarf, one year is 9 days long.
[Answer]
A tidally locked planet does not rotate (well, it does, once every year), and its temperature gradients should be symmetrical facing its Sun.
So there isn't a mechanism to trigger a Earth-like hurricane; Coriolis force for example would be negligible, as the relevant distance would be that from near the axis *of the Sun*, not that of the planet.
There will be reasonably stable convection cells, though, with hot air being generated Sunward, cooling and precipitating beyond the terminator. All sorts of cyclical patterns are possible.
Pressure gradients would be caused by the underlying geography - perhaps a high mountain range with a deep chasm would cause a permanent localized outflow, and *that* could give rise to a "tornado alley" through [vortex shedding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_shedding).
Locally, one could surely use such currents for travel: rise high, ride the outgoing hot jetstream to go nightward, or the lower cold current going the other way. For all intents and purposes you get a reasonably predictable, continuous pattern of [trade winds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_winds).
[Answer]
I could go into a physics based answer, but I'll chose a more down to Earth approach.
The maximum airspeed of a 747 is somewhere around Mach 0.92 or 1,100km/hr (705 miles per hour). Your cruise speed is around 920km/hr (570 mph) (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747>).
Your category five cyclone comes in at usually just over 251 km/hr (74 miles per hour) (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone_scales>). Even multiplying this by four, it still just compares to the awesome speed of a 747. And even still, the maximum airspeed of a 747 is still only a few hundred km/hr above what the cruising speed is. The fortification to increase this would add weight, and reduce this further.
**So for a practical answer, the max speed you could add is the maximum airspeed less your standard cruising speed, plus maybe 60mph for "science fiction" added fortifications increasing max airspeed. *The reason why I haven't just added your cyclone speed to your cruising speed, is if you were to suddenly exit the jetstream, you could now be over speed (although this value is still coincidentally similar to the speed of a category 5, so little risk there).* So the |maximum| is somewhere around 280km/hr with minimal fuel cost assuming a massive high power category 5 cyclone.**
However, you not only decrease safety, but the speed increase in reality is negligible for the fuel costs you may save (vs the price spent fortifying an aircraft). It wouldn't be unthinkable that this could actually decrease your aircraft speed.
The only benifit could be fuel costs, but those are negated by safety.
If this is science fiction, you could work in gliders that run on minimal power, and focus on the fuel saving aspect rather than the speed benefit aspect. We already have conventional aircraft that travel unimaginably fast, with very little risk.
**But**
Enter the "AirPlane". It's not for travel, but it builds a thriving tourism industry! How?
Use the cyclone to whisk people around in a dome, like a theme park ride. You're tethered to the ground, and it's perfectly "safe", and people pay tons for the experience of riding the cyclone. Then re-invest the money in super sea cruisers and non-cyclone based aircraft.
] |
[Question]
[
The microbes reside in the rings around a gas giant, adhering to cosmic dust and feeding on sunlight and carbon minerals. While it seems there should be enough collisions to keep the microbes in circulation, I feel something a little more active will be necessary for an increase in complexity
My current idea would be for the microbes to evolve an electretic exoskeleton made of quartz. It seems that quartz is a good natural material for an electret, and certain bacteria are capable of creating quartz already. There are also electric organisms, including bacteria, which deal with electric charges, and that could adapt into organelles for creating electrets. Furthermore, there should be a lot of silicon/oxygen availible in the dust and rocks, which will provide resources for the electret
This electretic exoskeleton would attract dust to the meteoroids that these microbes reside on, thus increasing their resources and allowing for further complexity, or for survival in more resource-poor regions
Could this adaptation work as I've described within realistic biology and physics, or is there something I've overlooked here?
[Answer]
This is an interesting question. There are a few aspects that might matter.
1. The electrostatic forces on small particles are stronger than
gravity.
2. There is a tendency for charge neutrality, if the material is
polarized and has the same number of positive and negative
charges, and the electret is because of separation of charge
3. In the space environment you have a lot of charged particles in
solar wind, cosmic rays, etc.
The first point would impact how close and how easily the charged particles would get close to each other. It also can do things like order the particles into a line or a crystal depending on how the forces balance out.
The second point is perhaps important if the microbe is separating the charge and the little microbes become positive on one end and negative on the other end. But are other wise charge neutral. This would also impact how the might organize spatially of how close they could come together. In the presence of an electric field perhaps they could also change their orientation.
The third point is related to how the microbes might get charged up by the external radiation. e.g. solar wind. Satellite can have a problem with charge build up. Also depending where you are in space if you get too much charge, you can spark into a plasma.
For charged to be trapped, if the material is a good insulator like an oxide, it can be trapped for a long time, (although it may move and redistribute at slow times scales.
Another fun thing to think about is that the radiation can produce an ionization trail in the microbe, this is destructive to our DNA, but maybe the cosmic microbe could have some way to separate the holes and electrons and use it as an energy source.
[Answer]
No, a microbe cannot draw in dust using electric quartz. Electric quartz is a type of crystal that can create an electric field, which can be used to attract or repel charged particles. However, dust is made up of very small particles that are not electrically charged, so the electric field created by the electric quartz would not be able to attract or repel the dust.
] |
[Question]
[
I'm building a world that's essentially identical to Earth, except that it spins slower, making the days about 48 hours long. I'd like to know what the average temperature drop at night would be, and what the average raise in temperature during the days would be. I'm chiefly interested in data for the temperate regions (U.S. and Europe latitudinal areas).
[Answer]
[Worldbuildingpasta](https://worldbuildingpasta.blogspot.com/2023/06/climate-explorations-day-length.html) I know this ought to be a comment(ish) being a long time lurker on stack exchange in general, but you should check out worldbuildingpastas climate models. As this cannot be a comment however, I'll simply tell you the results using it as my source.
(Second draft) Two things would occur,fist off, the first being that day and night temprature would vary, but this would be mitigated, to an extent due to an a localclimate that is increasingly closer to the average climate. Such a planet would have a larger and slight colder equatorial zone, with temperatures becoming increasingly uniform across the planet up to a day length of roughly 360 hours, the local climate, and temperature of regions on the planet would become increasingly closer to the average temprature of the planet. This means as a result that while colder than most nights on earth, earth like plants and animals would have no trouble surviving on such a planet, with a steady temprature being present on the coasts,and rainforest, with the more extreme reigons ending up experiencing an extra 5 degrees celsius and less being closer to 2.5 celsius of temprature varation,so behaps slightly less in the way of arable areas.
] |
[Question]
[
Moronland, an island as big as New York, population at least 2 million had little natural resources no fresh water and no oil.
The locals worship Koalemos and they have a very strict law which states that anyone (excluding foreigner and tourist) with IQ higher than 90 must be exiled, and the ruler wishes to build important infrastructures for the people to live comfortably.
I am wondering how can such a small place experience very little to no recession for at least 10 years? As long as the people are happy morons and continue to worship their god anything goes.
[Answer]
*not going into the discussion on "does IQ really measure intelligence or not?"*
Putting in practice the word of Koalemos is deemed the highest honor in their society, therefore those with the lowest IQ are the most worthy to administer the IQ test and applying the ban.
Since they are not exactly the sharpest minds around, they either mess up with the evaluation or expulsion process, meaning that also normal and smart people manage to stay.
Add to this that an IQ of 90 is more than enough to realize that when overshooting a certain score in a test means you are punished, sandbagging that test is better than acing it.
And since the economy thrives, everybody is happy with this.
[Answer]
Offshore tax haven. The people running the tax haven don't even need to live or work there, they can work via phone as outsourced workers. The company only needs to have stability, which an isolated cult can likely manage. They could also run the tax haven themselves... it's really not that hard, once you learn how. They even have little mom and pop tax havens in the US which larger corporations help people to set up.
[Answer]
Also not getting into IQ and ableism.
About 25% of people have IQ < 90. That's not exactly stupid. Just a bit slow at times. They'll be fine, same as anyone else.
In fact since accidents and other issues could preferentially kill people who are less able to look after themselves, you'll end up with a strong tendency to a near-maximal IQ in the permitted range (ie mostly near 90).
Last, this problem:
How exactly are they administering that test anyway?
I mean, it sounds ideal to me. A whole island of people I can outthink, out manipulate.... I could be king for life! All I have to do is fool them on the testing....which won't be hard as I'm smart and they aren't.
The resulting dynamics sound.... interesting. I wonder who else here is a genius but locals don't know it! Ooh, almost everyone!
[Answer]
Lets go opposite to [L. Dutch](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/193945/233) answer, because why not and I am bored. We'll have to make bunch of assumptions and stretch some reality to make Moronland feasible.... But hey! In Multiverse it has to happen sooner or later!
1. Lets ignore problems of IQ vs intelligence vs wisdom etc.
2. Lets assume somehow your moron islanders can successfully exile
anyone capable of reading with closed mouth. Because island is full
of morons lets say Koalemos itself makes sure its favorite island of
cute dummies stays that way. Or maybe there is good reason to get away from that island.
3. Lets assume that somehow that island is capable of maintaining
independence and stability. Somehow no one wants to invade or
otherwise mess with it, who would want to deal with bunch of moronic
fanatics on a barren rock anyway?
4. Lets start early, because you have not specified era. Let's say morons got to their islands around 5000 BC, and for whatever reason they settled barren piece of rock instead of that green lush garden of Eden on horizon. Religion does not need to make sense.
Before GPD, you need food and water so...
* Islands are blessed by winds. Lots of short rainfalls provide water.
How much water? Just to sustain 2 million morons.
* Islands are blessed by sea. Make it in center of breeding ground (waters?) of fishes dumb and populous enough to be caught by bunch of morons with basic tools.
Then you need to regulate population, because it does not take morons to breed more than they can feed...
* Active volcanos. From time to time Great Cleansing Of Flames brings loyal believers into Koalemos blessed realm. Boom, splash, poof, sizzle. Barren, warm, island ready to repopulate.
* Several sources of Culling Of Unfaithful. Storms, tsunamis, pestilence, angry meteorites, etc.
Okay, we reached somewhat stable stone-age volcanic archipelago full of overbreeding morons.
Now the GPD. Islanders do not "produce". They fish, they eat, they breed, they die. But mostly worship Koalemos. Only thing they export are non-morons, and only thing they have is population. They need external assistance, which means that Moronland income has to be based on dispensable income of nearby nations. For that you need trade, for which you need neighbors...
So lets establish their neighbors.
* Bunch of non-volcanic islands with fresh water and greenery got inhabited by early exiled peps.
* Exiles, feeling superior to morons, establish opposite culture. They crave intelligence and are despite being feed up with religion decided to go neutral rather than negative toward Koalemos. After all morons just wants to sit on their islands for whatever reason.
* Neighbors, due to better brains and environment that won't wipe their progress each year, advance technologically. Farming, ships, some medicine etc.
* Turns out intelligence is not as inheritable as they wished to believe. Most of their children turns out to be Morons well fit for Moronland. Lest say 1 Brainiac out of 100 crotchgobblins.
* Brainiacs that want smart kid/servant/disciple/successor start to adopt new exiles, as they turn out to be superior source of offspring when compared to genetic roulette of fornications.
* What to do with dumb kids? Give 'em crate of potatoes and exile back to Moronland! You get to stroke your ego/morals by "returning them to their people" instead of inventing gas chambers.
* Now that you got to island where everyone is constantly fornicating because they got nothing better to do in-between volcano eruptions, and you need to wait for favorable winds anyway...
Fast forward few thousand years forward...
Moronland is effectively a fourth world country of religious fanatics with such high population... turnover... that despite low chance for smart kid they make up for it with quantity, of which exiled smart ones are primary export of Moronland.
Stability and independence, and containment, is guaranteed by coalition of nearby advanced nations that are too busy arguing about quark names and planet definition to engage in petty military conquest.
So the Morons breed and pray while their neighbors invest in infrastructure that improves crotchgobblin spawn rate while preserving pristine unsustainability of Moronland.
In meantime various groups use this neutral grounds for black market, sex holidays (aka STD import), testing new shampoo recipe on human subject, volcano bungee. Some might even pay premium for kid preorder of chosen characteristics.
[Answer]
Location, location, location.
Your island is located out in the middle of the ocean, far from any continent. Think something like [Midway Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Atoll). Planes and ships have trouble crossing the ocean in one shot, so your island has become a critical resupply point for trans-ocean voyages. Ships anchor in your port for shelter from storms, and you collect port usage fees. Your port and airfield provide fuel, food, and services to ocean-crossing vessels, and you collect a sizeable amount of taxes and fees from that. It doesn't even matter that your island doesn't have any resources to sell. Your country imports supplies from overseas and re-sells them. Since you're the only stopover point, companies from other countries are bending over backwards to get one of the limited import licenses for their goods. You'll end up with a steady flow of revenue from import license fees, sales taxes, and Disneyland-level markup on supplies. None of this requires any particular intellectual prowess. An IQ of 90 is plenty sufficient to construct a functional airfield and port. Levying taxes and fees is so simple, even a *government* can do it.
What about all those people passing through that have an IQ over 90? Your island isn't much of a destination, so very few of those foreigners actually stay on your island long enough to get tested. Many never even leave their ship or airplane and thus are never *technically* in your country. The few that stay long enough to get tested will indeed risk banishment, but that doesn't make much practical difference for them. They weren't planning on staying in the first place. Banishment would only mean that they would be denied entry if they returned in the future, but that requires your port authorities to be smart enough to enforce a complex system of identity verification and blacklists (the sort that modern governments still have trouble doing effectively). Ships that regularly stop at your island would likely hire several low-IQ crewmen to handle their on-shore business.
Similarly, your island will be the natural junction point for any trans-oceanic communication system (radio relay station, long-distance telephone cables, etc). You don't have to be smart enough to build such things. Foreign companies will build them, and you generate revenue by leasing the land to them, providing local labor for basic maintenance and security, providing utilities, and charging usage tariffs.
In a more belligerent world, your island could be between two opposing great powers. They're too far away to attack each other directly, but could successfully dispatch bombers from your airfield. An alliance between your country and one of the great powers would be enough aggression to trigger war. To prevent that, your island receives a steady stream of "foreign aid" money from one of the great powers on the condition that you refuse to enter an alliance with the other. Unbeknownst to them, the *other* great power is also doing the same thing.
[Answer]
**Guano**
Their island is almost completely covered in bird sh\*t. They build everything from it including their single storey dwellings.
Guano is their only export and seabirds and fish their only diet.
>
> The demand for guano spurred the human colonization of remote bird
> islands in many parts of the world, resulting in some of the first
> examples of U.S. colonialism and the expansion of the British Empire.
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano>
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/w6eZc.png)
[Answer]
You're describing something like 19th century New York.
The ***Flynn effect*** is a well-known phenomenon that has resulted in a sustained an significant increase in IQ scores over time. The average IQ score is always fixed at 100, but when new test subjects take old tests, the average score is usually above 100. A study of British students between 1942 and 2009 found that the average IQ score had risen by 14 points. By modern standards, most populations in the early 20th century would have had an average IQ in the mid-80s. The trend has only been studied for about a century, but you might find even lower average IQs by going further back in time. My point is, societies throughout history have functioned perfectly well despite the fact that they would be considered low-IQ by today's standards. You might have some farther-reaching effects of eliminating the intellectual elite from a society, but historically, eliminating IQ>90 individuals from a society (by modern standards) would only affect a few percent of the population.
Basically, human history is full of cases studies of successful societies, the vast majority of which would have had below-average IQ by modern standards. It hasn't stopped us in the past.
[Answer]
**Outside nations pay to receive the intelligent exiles.**
This is inspired by another answer that used the phrasing, "only thing they export are non-morons". Let's say this really is their export.
Outside nations are desirous of receiving highly-intelligent immigrants (compare to U.S. rules around "highly skilled immigrants"). Having identified such people, the outside nations might engage in bidding to receive such people (which could be analogous with job offers, depending on how you interpret that). If the island nation doesn't work with currency, then the payment could be in basic resources like food, water, construction materials, etc. (If outside nations don't bid on people in, e.g., the 90-110 IQ category, then maybe the people in IQ 110+ or so suffice to fund the country.)
This process would actually positively reinforce the "get rid of smart people" dogma -- it's not just a religion, it's also the nation's actual lifeline. And it would also bolster the validity of the testing, too -- scoring a high IQ gives a pathway to a better life in a welcoming, high-functioning society, so test-takers are incited to do as well as possible.
[Answer]
Well, the answer is a bit hilarious.
## Planned Economy
Moronland is a Marxist state with centralised planned economy. Business cycles are absent in this economy type, so no recession.
(Actually, locals praise Marx and maybe his followers (like Lenin, Mao Zedong etc.), but the local language has neither [rhotic consonants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotic_consonant) nor [consonant clusters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_cluster), so the name *Karl Marx* was adopted to local pronunciation and became *Koalemos*).
As for the smart people, they may either be smart enough to sandbag the tests by deliberately giving wrong answers (as in [L. Dutch's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/193945/233)) or even take control over the test-making and give the tests which are very easy to "pass" (i.e. ending up with a low score) for the smart people. However, those of them who want to leave the country do that readily by passing the test and obtaining a high score.
>
> "Living has become better, comrades. Living has become happier." Joseph Stalin (1935).
>
>
>
P.S. About positive GDP. The GDP is always positive (or zero) by definition, since it's the value of all the final goods and services produced in the country. (Of course, you've probably meant positive GDP **growth**, which is by no means the same.)
[Answer]
# Lots of Gambling
All that matters for GDP is that money exchanges hands a lot. If the culture of this island includes the compulsion to bet on every little thing that might happen in a day- to the point where the average citizen makes upwards of 50 bets per day, you can multiply an otherwise unproductive GDP by a considerable factor.
[Answer]
**You have a bigger problem, without fresh water everyone on your island will die**
This was originally a comment, but the comment received such positive reception that it might be a good idea to turn it into an answer. If Moronland has no fresh water you have a much bigger problem than maintaining a positive GDP. **Without fresh water everyone on your island is going to die**.
Fresh water is usually what made or broke island settlement throughout human history. Isolated island that did not have lakes or rivers were essentially uninhabitable and were passed over by most settlers, including the Polynesians. Part of the reason islands like the Galapagos never had permanent human habitation until relatively recently is because there was no fresh water that could support permanent human settlement. Even today islands without fresh water like the Galapagos or the Dry Tortugas have to be resupplied with water from external landmasses that have water.
[The only way humans have ever managed to survive on an island without fresh water is by being very, very clever.](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181009114946.htm) And even then they were struggling on the edge of existence with a hand-to-mouth lifestyle, and only adopted these strategies of getting water because Easter Island used to have fresh water and now doesn't except for some hard-to-reach lakes. And given that your country is comprised entirely of idiots, it doesn't seem likely that the people of Moronland are going to be smart enough to do something like this, or else they'd do something really stupid like draw in so much fresh water that it causes [saltwater intrusion](https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/saltwater-intrusion?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects) and contaminates their water supply.
[Answer]
The island's continental shelf is full of fossilfuellium, which is mined and exported. Since these are offshore platforms, immigrant workers there do not come under the IQ ban. And by keeping them on a short leash as non-citizens, they can keep the wages low and profits high. And since the mining is mostly controlled by foreign corporations, it is ruthlessly efficient and not mismanaged by lower cognitive capabilities of the citizens (nor by anything like pesky environmental issues or employee rights). Combined with an island cleptocracy elite (highly intelligent and sociopathic people who managed to cheat on the test, not that it is that difficult) lining their pockets "unofficially" with a small percentage of the profits, everyone is happy to keep the status quo (the leftovers are enough to pay for infrastructure, fresh water, healthcare and whatever hoi polloi require).
[Answer]
I'm not quite sure if this answers the question you wanted to ask:
GDP can be measured as (the value of) things produced. If the people on the island produce anything at all, the GDP is positive. Presumably they do, if they eat. For example, gathering fruits for food is production.
Recession is the lack of GDP growth. If everything else stays the same, GDP grows if the number of islanders grows over time. For example by having more children than people dying or leaving the island, or by immigration. GDP growth per capita requires increase in productivity or more time spent working or more people working, but that's a different thing. Low IQ presumably indicates low productivity, but that can be compensated for in various ways, for example by imported technology (e.g. power tools vs. hand tools).
The chief can wish for whatever he wants, but the islanders must either produce the things needed for the infrastructure, or buy the things with stuff or services they can produce, or steal, or receive in donations. This does not require GDP growth, just that a sufficient portion of GDP is allocated for building infrastructure. In other words, you can have a recession and still build infrastructure.
[Answer]
First off, an IQ score is relative to the rest of population.
It is not very clear if in the OP scenario it is calculated relative to the island population (pre- or post-culled?) or the entire world.
Depending on the specific recalibration procedures, the former can create an extreme pressure - only about a quarter of the tested will be below 90 if the calibration is done per batch of tested subjects.
So the first observation is that birth rates have to be extremely high to even sustain the population.
The second observation is that IQ tests can be manipulated by the subjects downwards. The other replied that it would mean the smart ones would always pick the wrong answers while not so smart ones would be picking a more randomized mix of answers, thus resulting in an artificially higher scores and expulsion of the less smart people. That hinges on the assumption that the smart ones actually want to stay - but why would they? There are no unique resources and there is a tyrannical regime to deal with - so a smart move would be to answer the test faithfully and be "exiled".
To answer the actual question - GDP is an artificial metric and it can be just defined in any way to make the ruling elite look good (as it more or less happens everywhere). As the population gradually becomes ever less capable of critical thinking, the GDP can be just pulled out of ... a hat by the high priests of the official statistics.
[Answer]
**The island is a spiritual retreat** for people with more money than sense. They pay inordinate amounts to sit overlooking the ocean, meditating about what the heck the purpose of their life is. Some of them even join the local religion, but only of course the ones who are stupid enough to believe in it. They will easily qualify for residency.
Of course the intelligent members of the ruling class are adept at **faking a low IQ** - it's easy enough to get answers wrong! Therefore they get to stay and exploit the 'dummies'.
---
P.S.
The newcomers also have to be dim enough to donate all their worldly wealth to the island's religion. This in itself proves their stupidity. There are plenty of precedents for this.
] |
[Question]
[
What are some ways that people in a culture where head shaving is common practice could protect themselves from sunburn and other natural elements?
[Answer]
They could wear a hat, or other head covering.
Hats are a nifty invention that can protect a head from the sun, or insulate it from the cold depending on construction and configuration. There are even specialized hats that can protect the head from falling debris or small arms fire.
A towel will work well enough in a pinch, which is why you should never leave home without one.
[Answer]
other ideas
**Parasol.**
[source](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/ea/49/bc/ea49bc8bf517b3af2f1a211883f3f1da.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EliEY.jpg)
**Live animal.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/diMAc.jpg)
**Stuff you need.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fvki6.jpg)
[Answer]
**Be Black**
By having an appropriate amount of melanin in their skin they can greatly reduce their vulnerability to sunburns.
Most other exposure issues are solvable by having enough to eat and drink. If you are squeamish about huddling, shivering and sweating:
**Have the sense to come in out of the rain**
Houses are a common invention to limit natural elements' intrusion into human lives. When combined with clothes we can live comfortably pretty much anywhere on Earth.
[Answer]
You don't specify level of technology or anything useful about this culture, so I can really only give a few basic answers that all predate the era of modern sunscreens.
1. **Hat.** Preferably broad brimmed, as this will also shade the eyes. A tall stovepipe hat can also be used to keep a small flask or perhaps a derringer. Never know when those might come in handy!
2. **Scarf / turban / kerchief.** Easy to use, plus they can be put to other uses as well.
3. **Wig.** A must at court. Looks dandy on the town!
4. **Sunscreen.** Non-permanent, but does leave the shaved head visible so you can walk like an Egyptian.
5. **Ancient resources.** Speaking of Egyptians, we moderns aren't the first to worry about sun exposure! They apparently used some concoction of rice and jasmine. Zinc oxide has also long been known to medicine and protects against UVA & B.
[Answer]
**Head tattoos paint**.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Eqz8H.jpg)
If you google for head tattoo, you will find many more
(and very beautiful) tattoos for the head. And yes,
if you use specific paint, the resistance against ultraviolet
radiation will increase drastically.
ADDITION: user151841 pointed out that tattoos cannot protect against sunburn
because a sunburn burns only the epidermis, the topmost layer of the skin which is continually shed. So the other option is using paint directly on the skin, but this means it must be renewed each day. Metallic paint should give a very good protection.
**Acclimatization**
You simply are most of the time out. The sun is normally **not**
burning like fire from one day after another, but increases strength
gradually. People get sunburn because they are inside buildings until
the sun is really strong and *then* go out and wonder why their skin
get burned.
**Siesta**
Simply avoid being outside when the sun is the strongest.
[Answer]
Answer: the Oxygen molecule O3, known as Ozone.
I live in New Zealand and between us and the Australians we have a high level of UV compared to other places in the world. I get sunburned through my clothes, and I can get sunburned on a cloudy day.
Some of this is because of the Ozone hole over the antarctic, allowing more ulta-violet in sunlight to come though.
So your planet could have a naturally higher level of ozone, or could be **actively adding ozone to the atmosphere** somehow.
Perhaps there are a lot of shorelines, because Ozone is generated by wave action. Or a heap of electrical activity, again oxygen is converted to ozone in proximity of electrical discharges.
Ozone is damaged by chloroflorocarbons, aka CFCs, that were used in spray cans for years, as well as refrigerents like Freon and fire suppressent like Halon. Your planet should never have any of this.
Links:
* More on Ozone at [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone)
* ENZ website, specifically [But How Pleasant Is The Sunshine?](https://www.enz.org/new-zealand-sunshine.html)
* [NZ has the highest skin cancer rates in the world](https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1329-nz-skin-cancer-statistics) and to quote "The strength of the UV radiation that New Zealand receives – our UV levels are 40% higher during summer than at corresponding latitudes in the northern hemisphere (NIWA research)." and "The low ozone levels – the ozone layer absorbs a good deal of UVB ultraviolet light from the Sun. Any decrease in the ozone layer (such as the ‘ozone hole’ over Antarctica) is expected to increase surface UVB levels. "
[Answer]
Well, you have many answers that say "hat" but it's silly to think that you didn't also come up with that one on your own. Nevertheless, those answers seem to be well received, huzzah! I'll put a hat on right now in celebration.
Provided below are a few more possibilities. These are a little more 'outside the box.' I will also include links, unlike many of the "hat" answers. I was previously advised to include links, after all, and am unsure if the hat answers are reliable as result.
I will warn you, it is possible that the links I provide may, some day, expire. I am not trying to go on and on, here, merely trying to find that perfect balance of an interesting answer, not too long, not too short, including links, but only the right *kinds* of links, and essential details.
With that said, finding the *correct answer* appears to be down to democracy and dealer's choice. Good thing you didn't ask about climate change. Here in the United States there is a 30% chance you would end up with something ridiculous.
On to the risk of sunburn (and skin cancer) for bald people.
**Answer 1.** They could evolve. This seems to be how many species have adapted to a lack of hats. [Here is a link](http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/140305_skincolor) on how evolution is thought to protect us against the sun. You did not specify the time length required in your question. Hats will help in the immediate moment, but evolution is a better long term fix.
**Answer 2.** They could stay in the shade, or only go out at night. [Here is a link](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3071354/) showing that those who work the night shift have a 15% reduced risk of melanoma. Not bad. Make your race nocturnal and bald. This would protect against sunburn as well.
**Answer 3.** They could convince their government to geoengineer the planet to reflect UV rays. [Here is a link](https://phys.org/news/2016-12-mitigating-geoengineering-aerosols-cool-planet.html) describing geoengineering to reflect sunlight, a similar concept, but not tailored to bald people. Still, you can adapt it to your scenario.
**Answer 4.** They could decide to walk with their hands on their heads. Sound silly? Perhaps. But you may remember when [the chicken dance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AslZqfnNJwY) was all the rage. If you can convince an auditorium full of human beings to do the chicken dance, I think you can convince bald human beings to walk with their hands on their heads. This particular answer also helps protect bald people's scalps from rain.
People also like pictures, so here is a nice hat:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qJvHU.png)
And lastly, please read the above as meant in good fun, and as a suggestion to not take anything on the internet too seriously.
[Answer]
Hardly a civilization-wide issue.
I have been shaving my head for many years. I am a Mediterranean white kind of person. My scalp enjoys some fresh air, but if the sun shines too brightly I put a hat on to prevent sunburn. Which is not a problem as I like hats very much and I live in an infamously sunlight-deprived country. Other people may have different preferences, or be blessed by lots of melanin in their skin.
Now, you know what could be interesting with reference to your world setting? What if hats were seen as immoral, sinful or illegal?
Update: TIL that ancient Egyptians used to shave their heads (beards) and put wigs on to cover their scalp (chin). This was a necessity in order to prevent lice infestations and a very common custom amongst the free, but not amongst the slaves, who were in fact forbidden from shaving.
[Answer]
Make the sun go out, or move the home planet away from the sun.
Or, hats. Am I just a grump today? This question seems pretty silly.
Or! A giant orbiting opaque structure that blocks sunlight (an "earth hat").
But: hats.
Ooo! Breed bats to hover over people who are out in the sun. Or hummingbirds. But then they'd need something to keep from getting covered with poo.
Ya know what rhymes with "bat"?
[Answer]
One answer not mentioned is to do what some animals do: roll through the mud, and protect your skin that way.
Whether that's going to be cultured acceptable in the world you're creating is up to you.
[Answer]
**Im going to aggregate some here:**
* **Hats:** obviously, from ball caps to stetsons to rice farmer hats. Straightforward logic; if your head is getting burned by the sun put something on it.
* **Wraps:** Heads getting burned, wrap it in cloth (turbens, hajibs, bandanas etc.)
* **Be Black:** could be a natural evolution that they evolve their skin to protect itself naturally.
* **Sunblocks:** either natural dirts/muds or concoctions of herbs and chemicals.
* **Dead Animal:** Neolithic humanoids would wear animal hides to protect against exposure, same concept.
* **Wigs!:** the ancient Egyptions actually did practice head shaving because of lice and would replace their hair with wigs which could be disposed of or cleansed of the lice.
Honestly its the unique environmental conditions that you didnt mention that would ultimately affect the outcome the most.
Like if it rains diamonds maybe a hard hat would be the outcome over say a scarf.
[Answer]
You don't mention what the setting is, but if you want to take it to an extreme everybody could live either underground or indoors in giant glass geodesic domes (like in Logan's Run) to give the feeling of being outside.
The glass should have UVA/UVB protection-- this is typical for any quality home window tint kit.
] |
[Question]
[
I am building a **medieval setting where resources are too scarce to allow an all-out war** between factions (more details on the setting in my previous questions [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/85901/medieval-political-hierarchy-with-an-elite-4-counsel-elected-based-on-score-poin) and [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/85925/medieval-political-hierarchy-with-an-elite-4-counsel-elected-based-on-score-poin) and [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/85971/medieval-political-hierarchy-with-an-elite-4-counsel-elected-based-on-score-poin?noredirect=1&lq=1))
So instead we have a specific **part of the military that is specialized in Arena duels** (think gladiators). The leader of the military class is an excellent lancer (spear user) and has not been defeated yet in the Arena.
The leader of the Inquisition is a **used-to-be military from the special duelist division** and a very good one. I want her to have a very specific fighting style **using a whip that is tied to her wrist and the handle of her sword** (a short double edged sword but you may change it).
The point is that the **short sword gives her the upper hand in close quarter** combat but if there is enough space (the Arena is a circular wide and plain field like a coliseum) she can also **use the whip to lash her sword from afar**.
**Would this style of fight be any good in 1 on 1 combat? Would it be enough to have her overcome the range difference against a very skilled spear user?**
---
About the user : Woman. age 26. Has been trained to fight since childhood. Fights thugs in back alleys on a weekly basis. Has a small healing factor so getting wounded often but not dramatically is not a big deal.
About the sword : Preferably double edged. The metal can be something modern (e.g: Carbon, Steel, etc...). It can be a bit heavy, she is trained to swing it around. I am originally thinking about something like a [Jian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jian)
The whip would be around 2 meters long.
The sword would actually be around 1kg
[Answer]
A sword with a whip attached to the handle is **strictly worse** than the same sword without. When you are using it as a sword you have the extra weight of the rope dangling from the handle, flopping about, and catching on things.
Swords have an edge. This is one of the key features of a sword. If the edge isn't aligned correctly you've effectively hit someone with a weirdly shaped club. As soon as you aren't holding a sword in your hand you have no control over edge alignment.
To effectively cut something you have to put some force behind the blow. When someone is holding a sword in their hand they can throw their body weight behind a strike to add more force to it. If you're swinging a sword around on a string you've only got the mass of the sword to provide force of the blow.
[Answer]
5-6kg is MASSIVE for a sword. A short sword would weigh .5 kg, even a two handed sword is little more than 1 kg. Of course you can make it heavier, but then that defeats your "scarse resource" premise. Plus, swinging a 5kg weight around, sharpened or not, is very difficult and requires a thick cord or chain.
Having a melee weapon attached by a lanyard is also problematic. For starters, the lanyard can get hung up on your own armor or be grabbed by an opponent. If it is long enough to allow for swinging the weapon (or throwing it and being pulled back) then it would be VERY long when held in the hand, definitely causing an entanglement problem unless there was some sort of retractable mechanism like a dog leash.
Swinging or throwing a sword isn't very practical either. Depending on the armor worn by the opponent, a thrown sword may not even be a threat at all (something like full plate armor). A sword being swung around has a very predictable and hard to alter orbital period, allowing the opponent to time the swing and rush in.
Not to say a chain based weapon can't be effective, especially against a spear if the chain can entangle the spear head and control it, allowing the chain wielder to get close and stab. The roman gladiator laqueatores used ropes with nooses kinda like this.
This fighting style would probably work better if the sword and "whip" were separate. Perhaps the whip has a hooked end that could be quickly attached to the sword pommel for impromptu swinging, but is mainly used to catch the opponents armor or weapon and pull them off balance or catch them across the face and blind them.
[Answer]
"Flexible weapons" are much more difficult to control than rigid weapons, thus require more practice, training and skill to master. Even then, they are still less "wieldy", and thus fall into the "exotic weapons" category.
That said there are several Chinese hybrids, most commonly [Three-Section Staff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-section_staff) and [Rope-Dart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_dart). [The Flying Guillotine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_guillotine) is a legendary hybrid that looms large in kung fu movie history, and which probably has some historical existence.
As someone who has studied Chinese and European fencing, a sword wielded by a flexible connector is quite unattractive, and not necessary. (Wielding a sharp sword is dangerous enough--people have been known to cut themselves accidentally--adding complexity to the vectors is asking for trouble.)
That said, in a fantasy world is can be a very compelling idea. Most notable is the early scene in [House of Flying Daggers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-nmfwQdkeM) where the heroine uses a long ribbon to "grasp" a sword, which she wields quite effectively at the end of the ribbon. [@3:53 in the linked video.]
It's also notable that contemporary Chinese straight-sword usually has a tassel attached to the pommel. This tassel, rejected by many "serious" practitioners as useless, does have defensive capability in distraction, and potentially redirecting a thrust or cut, or wrapping the wielder's or opponent's wrist. (It takes significantly more skill to wield a sword with a tassel, because the momentum of the tassel is distinct from that of the blade, and both must be managed perfectly for any given technique. The tassel string should never be fully taut.) There is even a long tassel sword, where the tassel is longer than the blade, but it is rarely practiced.
I have seen contemporary practitioners use the tassel to "launch" the sword, extending the range of the thrust by catching the end of the tassel. But it's a very risky technique, and would only be used in extremity, if at all.
**The way I personally like to use a tassel against a long weapon such as spear is to wrap the shaft of the long weapon, neutralizing the spear point and opening up the opponent's guard by controlling the spear before my cut. The wrapping action is precedes and sets up the cut.**
This is difficult to "guarantee", but definitely more reliable and practical than flailing a sword at the end of a whip.
---
Another interesting, loosely related idea is Gene Wolfe's executioner's sword in [The Book of the New Sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_the_Torturer) which has a liquid mercury core that increases the force of the cut. Here is a stack answer that explains the action of the blade, and the advantages of its particular capability: <https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/48679/37262>
[Answer]
While not a sword on a rope, a similar historical analogue might be the [Kusarigama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusarigama). While the Kusarigama is a sickle on a stick, it did develop it's own [martial art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusarigamajutsu). You can read a little more about it [Here](http://www.tameshigiri.ca/2014/04/14/a-quick-look-at-the-kusarigama-sickle-and-chain/), though I would venture to say that for the most part the Kusarigama was a self defense weapon for people who were unable to carry swords, so it wouldn't be a weapon you'd see on an open battle field.
Hope this helps at least a little.
[Answer]
I've seen a lot of nay-sayers here, so I want to offer some personal experience.
There is a technique in longsword fighting where you let go with your dominant hand. This essentially extends your reach by the length of the sword handle; it's a weak strike and puts you in danger if it's blocked, but it's ridiculously effective, to the point where I think it's banned in some tournaments and worth less points in others.
The reason it's an effective strike is twofold:
* It's usually aimed at the legs, which is not a common target (they're usually too far away and attacking them exposes your head for a counter-attack).
* The extra range you gain takes advantage of your opponent's estimation of your effective range.
In other words, you've hit them before they realized you were close enough, in a place they're not used to defending.
I think your whip-short-sword might work in a similar way. As long as you can quickly go from sword-mode to whip-mode (and back again), you should be able to score a couple of unexpected light hits. However, there are downsides:
* These hits will be light. They will most likely not end the fight, especially if the opponent is even lightly armored.
* If your opponent knows you use this attack, they will watch for it. It might still be difficult for them to rewire their brain to properly fight it, but like I said this attack is already risky.
* In 90% of cases, spear beats sword. It's just generally a better weapon (unless you have very large shields, in which case sword seems to be better).
Normally, the best thing you can do against a spear is get past the point, then stay past the point while you cover your opponent in holes. Something that I've seen people do effectively is grab a spear with an axe, hooking it and making it useless as they rush past the point and into striking range. I think it ***might*** be possible to use the whip-side of the sword as a hooking mechanism, binding the opponent's spear so you can get past. But that's something I'd have to test out.
As for the concerns over edge alignment, assuming your whip is rigid enough (and I think it should be somewhat rigid), as long as the whip is aligned the edge should be aligned too.
[Answer]
## Tricky, but possible.
Your idea somewhat resembles the style of fighting one would expect to see from the [urumi.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi) It is very hard to use properly and effectively in a fight. For most practical purposes a regular sword would be preferred by most warriors, but it's possible in concept.
[Answer]
Considering that, even though whip like swords are possible (Hyfnae's answer), their weak point against a lancier make them even weakier: once you try to hit, you have to call it back and you have basically no defense against the lancer who can now strike at ease after dodging.
If your goal is to limit the opponent mobility to enter his close range, you can better use something like bolas, to block his legs and get closer.
[Answer]
For an expert spear user; I don't think a swinging sword is that useful; an expert can time his throw so his spear passes immediately after the whip gets out of the way. Your girl cannot change the laws of physics and momentum, and a hard thrown spear will reach her before she can pull back her sword on a rope.
Presumably, the expert is allowed more than ONE spear, and if a marksman with that, could put a spear through the handle of her sword, or into the whip itself, or in a position near the sword-end of her whip to cause her sword & whip to wrap around his spear; defeating her weaponry entirely. On an unrelated primitive weapon (but this will be relevant); I have read that expert primitive slingers could hit a sparrow on a branch from a 100 feet distant. If they do that with practice, shouldn't your "best spear man in the world" be similarly accurate with his weapon? And surely your whip is not 100 feet long.
The longer the whip is, the longer it takes to make a circle, and the less effective it is against smart use of a spear; either thrown or held. Don't forget that spears typically have forged and sharpened heads; they are knives themselves, and an expert should be able to wield them as such. As that whipped sword comes flying around, expect your spear man to hit the ground with the high-carbon-steel sharp edge of his spear tip up and in the path of the whip. Watch that sword go flying across the arena to stick in the wall, and then your girl has a whip missing the last three feet to fight with.
IMO She'd be better off with her sword in hand, dodging, turning and deflecting spears. They don't fly that fast, with training she'd have a clear head. The whip could be a useful addition as a second weapon; but not attached to a sword.
[Answer]
# Not Very or Extremely - Your Choice!
Because you're the writer, you can actually choose whether or not you're going to make it extremely effective, or not very. Here are some reasons why or why not.
## Unusual
For a fighter to be effective, they need to be able to train against the moves and patterns of the enemy. You see this anywhere from our proxy warfare sportsball players to the military maneuvers and training that our nations' fighting forces go through. If you know exactly what someone else is capable of then you can train against it. If this weapon is ultra-rare and is capable of moves that are difficult to guard against, then your wielder can be super effective!
## Physically Demanding
It sounds like you're describing something like a rope dart or [meteor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00zVLJgFyjA) [hammer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_hammer). This is going to be physically demanding.
If you do really mean *whip*, then it's even more difficult. The reason and way that a whip works is that you impart inertia to the thicker end of the whip and all of that energy travels down the whip. But the mass of the moving part of the whip decreases and since F = m\*a, as you decrease the mass that's why you can break the sound barrier. But if you add a bunch of mass at the end of your whip all of the sudden it becomes maybe less useful. Unless you magic some kind of move where you use that acceleration to suddenly and surprisingly change the direction of the blade. Think a meteor hammer with a spinning blade on the end.
But flinging this weight around takes a *lot* of energy *and* skill/precision.
## Temporally and Spatially Challenging
The biggest challenge with whip weapons is that there is a very narrow field of effective range, and it is not very close to the body. That means that you have less range than an archer or someone throwing a spear, but if someone gets in close then you're fairly defenseless. And once you've launched something, you've got to wait for it to come back.
# Awesome Things You Can Do
So, if you can wave your hands and give your character extra skills and capabilities, here are some cool things that you could do with this weapon:
* Sword fight
* Throw the sword like one would throw a throwing knife. Then pull the rope/whip in such a way that the sword starts flipping back in the other direction - or continues in the same rotation. Something like a [chaos pendulum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U39RMUzCjiU), but a sword on the end.
* Throw the sword in one direction and use the whip/rope to circle it around
* Throw it past them and stab them in the back
* Throw it like a spear and then pull it out, either catching the sword or letting it fly past you with some rotation and stab/chop the person behind you.
[Answer]
Related to sphennings answer, what you'd really want with this idea is a broad, narrow, double-edged axe blade.
* The shape of the blade would stabilize as it travels through the air.
This could be used in a circular manner, swinging the axe-blade at the opponent at a level designed to forestall ducking or jumping to avoid the path of the blade.
* If they block, the whip circles the spear haft and the axe eventually contact's something, potentially the arms or hands.
* If they retreat, they have to close range after, giving her time to bring the blade around again.
The blade could even have a spike in the middle
* She could also use the blade for a straight strike, flinging it directly at the opponent in hope of piercing them with the spike.
In this case, the heavier blade is a bonus because it can have sufficient momentum to incapacitate the opponent.
This is similar to the type of advantage long blades such as the [Claymore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claymore) confer--the arc of the swing requires defenders to stay out of it's path and forestall closing quickly, even when the great sword wielder is temporarily oriented in a different direction, although it probably works best in conjunction with plate armor.
[Answer]
If you are interested in the reality check of your idea, such a weapon would be relatively uneffective.
As in such a weapon would be less effective than the same sword alone in close combat and also less effective than the whip alone in ranged combat.
Moving a sword at the end of a whip (or a rope, or a chain for that matter) is extremely hard if your goal is to hit moving persons trying to not get hit while trying to not be hit by these persons. Using a whip as a weapon is also hard to get right, as there is a lot to balance between aiming and how much strength to put in what direction during the whole movement. Combining both is a challenge of half a live.
Moreover, I assume that this weapon is supopsed to be assembled at any moment, or else it would be useless to have a hybrid weapon to begin with. You'll have to take into account that some parts of that weapon will be totally useless in certain contexts, making them huge hindrances.
Namely, the whip is compeletely useless when the sword is held in hand, except if you intend to use the whip with the other hand even if you'll be holding it by the wrong end. The sword's handle will also be useless while it will be spinning, since no hand will hold it. That's more weight you have to handle.
As others have mentionned, and even if that's pretty obvious, sword hits are effective only if you hit with the sharpened edge, or else you're just swinging an iron stick. Worse, even if swords are - supposed to be - pretty sharp, that's their weight and especialy the strength that you put behind it that make their power. Stop using it with your hands and it all works differently, which means that your wepaon is unadapted to your purpose.
A weapon of that kind and adapted to the usage you describe would be a way lighter and shorter blade without handle. Figure some kind of dagger without its handle. Its lightness would allow more agility, thus axpanding the set of moves available to your character, fastening their execution and decreasing the exhaustion it would cause to the character. But it would be of poor use in close combat.
If that last point bothers you, keep in mind that 2 meters isn't actually that long. It's enough to hold an opponent away but the distance is short enough for anything to happen. You could also make her to use a ranged weapon with her main hand and a close combat secondary weapon with her other hand, like a blocking dagger for instance.
Anyway, at the end of the day, it's your call and you can make notably anything work provided it's entertaining enough and you don't waste time - and credit - trying to explain it away. The video game Bloodborne lets us fight with a weapon composed of bound segments. These segments can either be stuck to each other and make a thick cane or set loose and only retained by their bonds, turning it into a whip. Other examples of that kind exist, some of them introducing segmented swords instead, it's all up to you to make your choice entertaining enough so that nobody will nitpick at it.
Good luck !
[Answer]
So what I was thinking of was a weapon halfway between an urumi and a traditional sword. There are two blades attached at the tip of the sword. The flexible side of the weapon snaps to the rigid side, with the edges faced outward so that she's running around with a double edged sword that you were mentioning before.
Now, if you're even considering a 5kg sword, she must be a fire giant. Therefore I feel comfortable mentioning that this sword has a collapsible hilt that allows the blades to release and have the flexible side flip out away from the rigid side and behave like a whip or perhaps more accurately a garrote. The hilt itself contains a steel cord which runs down the length of the entire weapon in a hollow channel. When the hilt is pulled fully outwards so that the total length is doubled to about a full meter, the blades release. This is ideally done as a part of a weapon attack, and will leave the opponent guessing whether the wielder of this sword will release the blade or not. Having the hilt extended with the hands about shoulder width apart will allow her as much control as she needs to control such a weapon.
An internal spring mechanism will cause the hilt to contract to the normal length for a longsword hilt (about a third-half meter). Since the hilt would need to be held in the extended position against considerable tension, the blade would probably spend most of its time in the longsword configuration and only be released as a bamboozlement to reach around the opponent's defenses or attack an opponent from medium range. If I were using the weapon I would also follow it up with a pummel with the bottom side of the hilt as the hand positioning would give her a lot of leverage. This would be reflected with a small, armor piercing claw as the end of the hilt.
Realistically, you asked this four months ago and probably already implemented your duelist character, but this could portray the other side of the medium ranged sword coin. What you're probably going for is making the sword into a thrown weapon that can be retrieved as a part of the same motion (throwing knives on a string would make more sense for that), whereas my idea would excel in bypassing an opponent's defenses. Both would ignore short amounts of distance and add a duelist aspect to the situation.
Something like this. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4evdr.png)
see also: <https://overwatch.gamepedia.com/Roadhog>
[Answer]
**No**, unless your woman was trained in the art of sword-whipping. Most reasons I have are covered here, but there's another one: If your woman swing her wrist and her sword missed her target, it could whip around and hit her. This sort of thing has happened to me (but, thankfully, without a sword on the end of the string).
[Answer]
What about something like the flexible bone sword in "Brotherhood of the wolfes"?
The sword was like a normal rigid longsword. (But made of bones).
With turning the handle you could separate the blade into segments that are connected with a wire or something.
In that mode you can swing it like a whip.
Of course it can also be receded into an rigid sword again.
<https://propstore.com/product/brotherhood-of-the-wolf/jean-fran-ois-de-morangias-vincent-cassel-hero-bone-sword/>
[Answer]
I cannot speak to the reference by Steloe to the flexible bone sword from the stated movie; however I could see a parallel to a razor chain whip type weapon.
In a mash up of fantasy and real; in an extended state it would serve as a reasonably effective (not to mention very cruel) ranged combat weapon that would hold a speared opponent also to a distant ranged form of combat.
As the range increases; it obviously favours the spear; but unless the tactic was to try for a kill and otherwise run away, few would seek to disarm themselves by throwing away their only means of defence.
In a retracted state, the razor barbs could pull together into a more traditional sword shape. This would be somewhat more flexible than a fixed sword but would serve much the same close combat purpose for attack, defence and bridging between differing ranges.
Appologies to Steloe; If I am off on a different tangent...
[Answer]
The urumi (a classification into which falls the Indian Steel Whip-Sword) is less sword and more fundamentally a whip or flog. Several examples have several blades extending i.e. The Sri Lankan version was said to have over 30 blades and were known to have been used in pairs.
Whilst undeniably both a defensive and offensive weapon; it would have a relatively fixed range of combat... some inventfullness and fantasy could resolve such things.
] |
[Question]
[
In an area in my world, people have discovered how to turn their aural constructs (magic stuff) into electrical supercapacitors, allowing for relatively advanced electrical technology.
Now that they have the ability to power their trains (and perhaps other vehicles) using electricity, is there any reason they would use electric boilers and steam power rather than directly powering electric motors?
The trains would be powered by on-board supercapacitors that could be exchanged or recharged at select points.
When I say steam-electric, I mean that the energy in the capacitors is run through resistors, heating water and turning it into steam which then moves the wheels using a piston, as opposed to steam being used to generate electricity which powers electric motors.
[Answer]
I only provide this answer because no-one else seems to have covered the point that such things have existed in real life; see [Wikipedia page on Electric-Steam Locomotives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric-steam_locomotive). The page notes that "This is a highly unusual type of locomotive that only makes economic sense under specific conditions."
Those conditions are:
* An existing fleet of coal-powered steam locomotives.
* A cheap source hydro-electricity.
* A shortage of coal.
Presumably the correct convergence of resource availability and shortages could lead to the rise of such technology (again).
In response to any argument that supercapacitors are likely not up to the task, such locomotives "...could run up to 20 minutes without power supply, like a fireless locomotive, once the boiler had been charged to full pressure."
[Answer]
For train locomotion, straight-electric is vastly superior to electrically-generated-steam in many circumstances.
* Electric locomotives are much lighter than comparable steam, making infrastructure lighter and cheaper.
* Electric traction makes distributed driving trucks (multiple-unit operation like subway trains without a locomotive) possible.
* Electric traction is mechanically simpler than comparable steam. It requires less maintenance.
* Electric traction is safer: The driver can sit in front with unobscured vision. No exploding boilers. No clouds of steam obscuring signals and fouled track ahead.
* Electric traction can much more easily match force application to wheel adhesion, preventing wheel-slip when accelerating (and braking, too).
* Steam traction requires approximately 150 gallons of water per mile ~ 350 litres of water per kilometer ([source](https://michigansteamtrain.com/equipment/)). The additional watering infrastructure --towers, wells, pumps-- and associated maintenance is unnecessary when using electric traction.
Electrically-generated steam does still have a place:
* Museums
* If electric motors are unavailable
* Certain hazardous industrial settings
[Answer]
## Lack of magnetic theory.
If you know about electricity but not about electromagnetism, using electricity to drive a heating element makes some sense.
Generally, it would be surprising if someone developed electrical infrastructure that could support something like trains without noticing that it has some side effects. In your case, it's actually fairly plausible. If magic can generate a big pile of electricity, and magic can bring that electricity to where you want it, most of what you're going to notice first is arcing, sparking, and the heating that accompanies them. So yes: your civ doesn't actually have a coherent electrical theory, they just have a few applications that look much more like lightning-on-demand than like modern electricity.
That probably means your electric lighting is electric arc lighting (fun), and most of the rest of your electric tech is really just steam, generated in a more distributed way than one might usually expect.
[Answer]
Nope, no conceivable reason.
## The conversion losses would be very bad
It's not the boiler - that would enjoy 100% efficiency, after all. It's the monkeyworks. Classic steam locomotives run around 4-10% efficient, and most of that *is not* losses in the boiler itself - they are hurt by
* It takes only 350 BTU to heat water from 62F to 412F, **but 970 BTU to make it boil**. This "latent heat of vaporization" is the lion's share (almost 3/4) of the energy, and it's largely wasted. Of course, water has a *very high* LHV compared to other liquids, so a substitute fluid might be an option; or even avoiding the LHV altogether by running it on compressed air. (though I haven't studied in earnest the efficiency of compressing air from battery).
* Lack of compounding: Efficiency gains require at least 2 stages of expansion, preferably 3 (e.g. the *USS Texas*'s triple expansion engine). That was done on *Mallet* steam locomotives, but the enormous second stage pistons greatly limit top speed, making it infeasible for other than bulk haulers. Such a slow engine would only "get in the way" on a modern railroad.
* Absolutely no condensers, so no vacuum being pulled on the low side of the pistons.
* Lack of *any* heat recovery to speak of.
* Poor pulling power performance at low speed, requiring them to keep full pressure steam on the piston face for much of its travel (unable to "notch/hook up"), with that sheer volume of steam largely thrown away.
Mind you, electric traction is nearly as old as railroading itself, surfacing in the 1870s (150 years ago) when railroading had only begun in earnest in 1820s (200 years ago). And traction motor are so ridiculously efficient that self-propelled cars like streetcars, subway and interurbans don't even bother with traction motor blowers. (Locomotives have that.)
## As far as batteries, we're almost there *today*
The supercapacitors would have to be truly magical, as they have profoundly poor energy density compared to batteries. However in *batteries*, this is practically a solved problem **today**. They can recharge pretty fast if liquid-cooled. Thin pouch-style batteries *particularly* lend themselves to liquid cooling, and weight's not a problem on the railroad.
Several light rail vehicles use battery propulsion so they can dispense with overhead wire where impracticable or unaesthetic. They recharge when able to get to wire, slot, or inductor. It's really taking off, since battery power is that good now. [Historic trolleys](https://www.gomaco.com/downloads/Birney.pdf) are doing it too.
Unfortunately in the rail industry you'll get a lot of QQ on the idea that a locomotive could ever be battery-electric; the overlap of "people who really grok railroad tech" and "people who really grok battery tech" is very tiny, so almost all commentary on the subject is *ill-informed* one way or the other. Also, they probably won't ever work for *every* application; batteries just can't compete with a 30%-efficient modern diesel sitting on top of a 4000 gallon fuel tank. But for many, absolutely. For "grain elevator" level switching locomotives I expect it to happen within the decade.
## *Wait a minute*: there's a chance.
You just need to use [a physics cheat code](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto).
OK, so where are you going to get all this heat? Just have arctic cold air blasting out the bottom of the tender? *Well, wasn't I just warning about all the utterly wasted heat leaving the steam cylinders?*
That normally goes up into the "smoke box" which is about the front 25% of the boiler! Well, the boiler can be a lot smaller when it's interchanging with freon instead of fire, and that leaves room for a smoke box absolutely stuffed to the gills with a multiple-stage heat exchanger.
Yeah. This can bandage virtually all of the above-discussed design faults of the classic steam locomotive, at the expense of maintaining a bunch of refrigeration plant running on a variety of different refrigerants.
And thanks to the magic of having the tender mysteriously blasting *freakishly cold air*, we can actually run all this plant somewhat *over-unity*. But that's *only over-unity **thermally***; there's no free lunch, and we can't beat traction motor efficiency from battery to drawbar. But we can at least recoup the vast majority of steam locomotive *wastage*, and maybe get close enough that cultural factors could influence the choice.
[Answer]
## Nobody in Your World Has Created a Good Electric Motor Yet
Perhaps nobody has invented an electric motor yet, or, if they have, they still have limitations that make them impractical or unsafe to use for these applications. Perhaps in your story world, they already have invented good electric heating elements that are already being used in other commercial equipment to power steam engines. Perhaps they’re even using steam turbines. Before the AC brushless motor invented by Nikola Tesla, competition between brushed motors and steam was actually still somewhat stiff, because brushed motors at the time had several limitations. (Also the power grid was still not very widespread yet). But that’s my answer for you, the electric motors in your world are still currently very limited, and can’t compete with steam power yet.
[Answer]
Conspicuous consumption and sexual competition.
The clouds of steam that the trains give off prove the magical ability of the person running it. These clouds can be made to have multiple colors further showing magical strength. Doing such a show attracts the females better and deters other males.
[Answer]
Given you're already talking about magitech, you're already shifting out of real world physics and economics. Others have pointed out that the basic efficiency of a steam engine isn't great, but you have some latitude to tweak things a little. Anyway, here's a few suggestions that may be initially plausible enough even if they wouldn't win in this world:
* The material components of an electric motor, such as rare earth metals for magnets, are rarer than they are on Earth, or indeed they're just as common but there's fiercer competition to use them in other applications.
* Magic makes electrical energy "too cheap to meter". This relates to the above, but basically we're suggesting that energy efficiency is no longer a core consideration compared to other costs.
* There are government incentives because of positive externalities. Most of the railway track runs through a natural desert and artificially dumping water into the sky is helpful for preventing the dunes from taking over again. You might think that irrigation pipes would do the same much more efficiently, but it's a larger infrastructure cost and wouldn't pay off until a future election cycle.
* There is a national security value in simplicity. The Fey may have generously provided the use of magic, but the government doesn't entirely trust them. It is therefore policy that, as rail is a key piece of militarily significant infrastructure, any engineer must be able to grab her wrench and an axe to turn a magitech train into a wood-fueled train should there be an unexpected diplomatic issue with the forest folk.
* In a similar vein and going back to short termist thinking, the infrastructure already exists. There is a monopoly which owns all the track and runs the trains. It's easier to retrofit a wood boiler based train into a magic boiler based train than into a magi-electric motor based train, and it helps with the profits for the next shareholder meeting. To make matters worse, a competitor holds a patent over the magi-electric motor and they do not want to negotiate favourably.
* Your magic is much better at creating chaotic energy than orderly energy. Perhaps it gives unpredicatable high frequency short terms bursts of electric energy, and the circuitry to regularize that energy cannot handle the power loads involved in driving a train. A big boiler which just wants heat is a very scalable system for using such chaotic inputs.
* It's a steam train, but not water steam. As Harper pointed out, water is a marvelous material but its latent heat of vaporization costs you a huge proportion of your energy. Purely for example, an Acetic acid (vinegar) train would have to contend with just one fifth of that. Of course you'd have to explain away why having hot acidic gas in your pipes doesn't destroy them and the surrounding countryside, or make it a plot point that it does! Alternatively, pick some other common-ish fluid. [This table](https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fluids-evaporation-latent-heat-d_147.html) may help.
As always, the key question is going to be what makes sense in your story and for your goal. If you were going for the aesthetic of steam train chimneys, you don't want something that recycles your vinegar instead of venting it. If you want a chaotic world, you don't want effective government intervention.
[Answer]
Regulatory compliance.
You think the real world is the only world with stupid regulatory requirements? There is no reason why a magic world shouldn't be the same. The steam engine companies, unions and operating companies are a vast lobby group with a lock on government, because of "safety", "economics", "nature" and "our traditional way of life".
CF "butter mountain", "Big Sugar", and "Interstate Commerce Commission"
[Answer]
**On steam-electric**
Steam-electric is what you'd call an electric motor powered by a steam engine (which isn't what the question is about, but it's still interesting to talk about that). This is based on diesel-electric trains, which are just that but with diesel.
Diesel-electric trains are the norm for diesel trains these days, they indeed run a diesel engine that powers electric motors. They're the norm because they're generally less complex. Primarily you don't have to transmit power mechanically and you don't need a complicated gearbox.
For a modern train, there's also the advantage of being compatible with a fully electric powertrain, and this allows bi-mode (what you'd call hybrid for a car) trains that can run on electricity or diesel relatively easily. Diesel-electric or bi-mode trains are quite useful in area that haven't been electrified.
Steam-electric trains would be an alternative in a world without diesel. And I insist on a "world without diesel" part, because steam was replaced by diesel for a reason: it's a lot more efficient. Not as much as purely electric (there's a reason diesel has been largely replaced by electricity), but certainly more than steam.
You would have steam-electric trains because **the rail network isn't completely electrified**, and some areas are particular hard to electrify (remote areas, mountains) or just not economic to electrify (low traffic). But wherever you have reliable electrified lines, they would likely be edged out by purely electric or bi-mode trains.
---
**On electric-steam**
Electric-steam I suppose is what you'd call a steam engine powered by electricity (which is what the question is about).
You could reverse the process to use electricity to boil water for your steam engine. Boiling water with electricity is common in home appliances for cooking or tea. However, doing it to power a steam engine is absurd.
Why? Steam engines aren't very efficient at all. Steam locomotives of yore usually had single-digit energy efficiency, and even modern steam turbines used in power plants today only reach about 40%. Comparatively, a good electric motor will have double that.
You would need **absurdly efficient steam engines and absurdly inefficient or inexistant electric motors** to justify electric-steam traction over steam-electric or electric traction.
---
**Electric traction + unrelated steam**
If electricy is magic and comes without power lines, there's not a good use case for anything but electric traction. If it comes from power lines, steam-electric might make sense for lines without reliable access to electricity.
Any other use case or electric-steam traction would generally be a waste of energy when you could just use the electricity directly.
The only reason to have a steam engine would be if you needed the steam for something else. Maybe you're running a luxury spa-train with steam rooms. I don't know what else you could use steam for (that electricity wouldn't do a better job at) on a train, but that's certainly one use.
Even then, the traction would still be fully electric, and you'd have a separate system that converts electricity into steam.
[Answer]
In a niche application, maybe.
In our world, some chemical plants - say, producing explosives, used [fireless locomotives](https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Fireless_locomotive). These periodically fill up their "boiler" with superheated water, which flashes to steam to produce power for several hours operation.
The filling operation (and the boiler, which could be electric or even a relatively efficient heat pump) is off site; then the locomotive works on site without the danger of fire ... or electric sparks ... igniting the product and destroying the neighbourhood.
But generally, outside [the writings](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59647.The_Best_of_Myles) of [Flann o'Brien](https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/going-loco-frank-mcnally-on-flann-o-brien-and-the-inchicore-railway-works-1.4875806) there is no other role for an electric heated steam locomotive. It's just too much waste of power.
[Answer]
It's a stretch, but
### The Wrong Kind of Electricity
---
Your magical batteries output electricity at a very high voltage, with alternating or unpredictable current. Your people lack the technology to rectify it into the few hundred volts DC preferred by traction motors, or they have it, but they cannot miniaturise it enough to be carried around on a train.
A heating element is just a coil of wire and won't much mind whatever weird electricity you throw at it. It may be hilariously inefficient, but it's still cheaper than coal.
[Answer]
# Rube Goldberg is the Emperor of the Universe
Per imperial decree, every mechanical device in your world must achieve its purpose in [the most complicated, convoluted, and indirect way possible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine).
As a result, the usual way to accomplish anything in your world looks like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TzB5I.png)
*(Source: The Incredible Machine, a classic game built around the idea)*
] |
[Question]
[
In my low-fantasy setting there is a civilization of blind people living in a very safe and isolated region of the world. Thinking about how this civilization could have developed throughout the centuries I realized that many alternative development paths not requiring sight involve very flammable materials. For example:
* Housing. Since development of metallurgy is hindered by the lack of sight, and this also means lacking the necessary tools for other types of advanced crafts (masonry included), they live inside buildings made of wood and animal skins and various types of fabric.
* Settlement mobility. How can they know what buildings are around them, where other people live, where to turn along the road? By having signs based not on a written language, but on a smell based language instead. And this means a lot of plants to grow the flowers needed for those smells.
* Indoor orientation. How can you move inside a closed space where having too many smells would be confusing? By being barefoot and following carpets made of different fabrics, related to some sort of touch-based convention.
Fire would be a disaster for most of these things, not only for the risk of everything catching fire, but also because of the smoke covering other smells. Then I realized that blind people have no need to use fire for one of its main uses: providing light. They would just need for heat. So, is there some alternative way to heat the buildings?
In my low-fantasy setting there is no magic way to do it. I thought that they could build settlements in places with geothermal activity, but geothermal energy comes with a strong smell of rotten egg that could create a lot of other issues for them. Any other ideas?
[Answer]
# Housebarn
Have you ever slept in a tent? When you wake up, the inside of the tent is warmer than the outside. Steam issues forth when you unzip the panel, and you go "AAaah!" when the chilly morning air hits your face.
This is because your body makes heat and a good tent traps the heat. The ancients understood this. But instead of piddly little human bodies to heat their homes, they used the mighty cow.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0l4hJ.jpg)
A cow puts out 600W of heat. So build your house with a barn room, and a human room. Bring the animals inside at night when it gets cold.
Make sure to put a divider so the cows do not scratch your varnished oak floor and plop all over your fine china. As an added bonus, your house now smells like farts!
[Answer]
# Frame Challenge: The blind can use fire perfectly well, and should
You are searching for a solution that itself is looking for a problem. Respectfully, everything listed is a non-issue.
* Housing: Native Americans made hide tents and wooden longhouses, and kept fires in them without issue.
* Mobility: The blind memorize directions and orient themselves without the need for signs. Feeling for a path (and "landmarks") with a cane is more than sufficient.
* Indoor navigation: Even easier than outdoors. Feel for walls and furniture, the same way a sighted person does in the dark. In a house you've lived in for years, I guarantee you can find the fridge without a light ;)
I'm not trying to shoot down the concept of your civilization, but rather save you from a rabbit hole. Use of fire is *required* for primitive civilization for *many*, ***many*** reasons besides domestic heating. Cooking food, preserving meat, creating tools, making ceramic vessels, purifying water, sanitizing bandages (via boiling), and making medicines just to name a handful. You need to explain a heck of a lot more if you insist this people group has no fire, and you still have plenty of interesting things to explore and explain without that wrinkle
[Answer]
### Your blind civilization has long moved underground, where heating is not an issue.
Sight is too big an advantage for surface dwellers. Your civilization would fall to predators or natural disasters. How do they hunt animals for their pelts? Are the animals blind too?
If they survived at all, they would need to at least neutralize their disadvantage. Therefore, moving underground makes a lot of sense. Deep inside caves, temperatures are rather stable. Creatures with sight need to either bring their own light sources or be at a severe disadvantage. Those who are blind from birth are better adapted to navigate dark places.
What you need then is to flesh out an underground ecosystem that allows them to fill their basic needs. Water, food, shelter, materials to craft with.
But since the scope of this question is only heating, there you go. Moving underground makes that a non-issue.
[Answer]
**Geothermal Heating**
So, this does require your world to have some specific pre-requisites around tectonic plates and volcanic activity - but not impossible - The Maori of New Zealand - and specifically those in Rotorua, Waiwera etc. used the hotspring water for all sorts of Cooking, Cleaning and yes - Heating.
[This is Whakarewarewa Village in NZ](https://whakarewarewa.com/) Although there are 'modern' houses built there, NZ houses are primarily Wooden in nature (Wooden frame, weatherboard exterior, plasterboard interior) so not too far off from the type of dwelling you describe.
Pre-Colonization, the Maori Marae (Meeting house) were entirely wood constructions (IIRC) and they used the Hot water to heat the house, cook food etc.
The only issue story-wise you may have is that these natural hotsprings (at least in NZ History) were **highly** prized and considered a Taonga (A Treasure - literally 'Obtained at the tip of the spear') - and so were fought over constantly. The Natural hotspring waters believed to have magical and curative powers.
[Answer]
**Yours is a civilization of master chemists**
Ignoring my concerns about the blind in my comment to your question, your problem is solved by making your people master chemists. There's a lot of ways to make heat. Fire, after all, is simply the result of a chemical reaction that produces a lot of heat. But it's not the only chemical reaction that generates heat. Such reactions are known as *exothermic reactions.*
In short, your problem isn't with fire per-se. It's with having too much heat in a somewhat uncontrolled circumstance. I say this because exercise could be used to heat a well-insulated house. (This underscores the statement in my comment about it being unlikely that they'd not know about fire....) The question is how to bring a useful amount of heat to bear safely.
BTW: [blind people today do that](https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-34186187).... Intelligent people solve problems. Lack of sight is just another problem to be solved.
[Answer]
You've got a bunch of problems here:
1. Scent-based navigation isn't going to work. What happens when the wind blows?
2. Instead, let's consider what China has done for blind people--paths for blind people are marked out in the sidewalk by using bricks with different textures. You can feel if you're on the path or not even without using a cane. It would be even more obvious to an experienced user of a blind-cane and more information could be conveyed. (A different texture is used to convey when a path is going to cross traffic, but the road surface isn't marked.)
3. Indoors an experienced blind person with intact hearing will normally know where the walls are without any assistance (a sighted person can learn this skill, but won't be nearly as good.) You can simply have a standard location for labels to be put, they'll be able to find them. (Note that normal age-related hearing loss will destroy this ability--I suggest having your people have superior ears.)
Outdoors, I suggest using the Chinese approach to path marking (but lay them out with lanes, the Chinese approach doesn't handle two blind people encountering each other too well) and a separate texture to say "sign here"--as with the indoor signs it's in a standard location.
As for heating--underground does wonders except for the drainage problem. Removing the water is going to be problematic at your tech level. Thus, instead, I suggest a pseudo-underground. Build against a hill--you pile a lot of material against the side of the house and you use the thickest, most insulating material available for the top. Additionally, you have a bunch of air ducts built into the fill material, these can be opened or closed based on the weather--when the air is warmer than the thermal mass you open them and let heat in.
Houses will be very labor intensive to build but can be built to last many generations so it's not utterly prohibitive.
[Answer]
**Composting Chamber**
At the back of the hut, there is a small door to a chamber sealed off from the front of the hut that they toss vegetable material to compost down. The composting material naturally generates heat to heat the hut.
The chamber could be easily made from mud brick like materials which give a good thermal mass.
Temperature is controlled adding or removing vegetable matter.
Built properly, you could place the beds on top of the chamber for a gentle heat throughout the night.
[Answer]
a. Warm region, heating is unnecessary.
b. Cold blooded species, heating is unnecessary.
These people evolved somehow. For vast majority of history of this species they were doing fine without buildings or heating. Heating clearly not a life or death matter for them.
Unless it is a major plot point somehow, there seem to be no reason to introduce this problem. I feel pity to them just from this short description, on top of evolution being extremely cruel to them they are also freezing. Sad.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 5 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/113974/edit)
My main character, and two other people are transported to a graveyard that they can’t escape from, at least not yet. No food was transported with them, but they do have these items
* A shovel
* Nail Remover (tool)
* A Barbecue grill
They are getting hungry, and so decide to eat the freshest corpses there, and they find one that was just buried an hour ago. My question is: would there be any health effects from their little “Corpse Cookout”?
The bodies are buried traditionally.
[Answer]
**The Bodies Are Toxic**
I am not sure what you mean by a "traditional" burial since the definition of a traditional burial varies from region to region. Within the USA and western Europe embalming is our traditional practice prior to burial. Embalmed bodies are pumped full of highly toxic chemicals prior to being interred within a cemetery and would not be remotely close to edible, no matter how recently buried. In addition when people die within even moderately developed nations they are typically doing so in a hospital and under heavy medication when they pass, there is a very real risk of exposure to substances like Fentanyl, chemo-therapy drugs, radioactive isotopes, heavy metals, and a host of other things you don't want to be eating.
For your story to make sense you will need to be in a graveyard in an undeveloped nation where embalming does not occur and people are not seeing a doctor when they become terminally ill or critically injured. Its a bit of an industry secret that these "peaceful deaths" you hear about from old age in a hospital bed are greatly assisted by massive doses of some really high grade dope. Grandma passed so peacefully because she was tripping out of her mind on barely safe levels of Fentanyl, industrial strength muscle relaxers, and heavy opiates. So yeah, a 3rd world nation is where you want to dig up and eat your recently buried corpses because you DO NOT Want to eat that. (Any more than one would ever want to eat another human.)
Assuming you have located a non-embalmed and non-medicated corpse then your biggest risk is that you could potentially catch whatever infectious disease the person may have died from, the next biggest danger is food poisoning since you are eating meat that was not ever intended for consumption and thus has not been stored or prepared properly. Intestinal parasites are also a very possible risk.
[Answer]
**As a Matter of Fact, You Can Survive in a Cemetery!**
Definitely don't eat the corpses, but...
You carry a blunt, heavy metal object. Cemeteries, especially in relatively urban areas, are frequented by mourners and kin. There was just a funeral an hour ago at the cemetery you're stranded in...
First order of business will be to stalk the place an keep on the lookout for a likely victim. Sneak up behind and while they're tidying the flowers on their loved one's grave, cosh the poor bugger with your nail puller. Make sure no one sees you when you do this!
Drag your fresh meat to some secluded place, like behind or between a couple of the big mausolems in an older part of the cemetery. Set your grill between the mausoleums and wait for dusk. Light a small fire there and grill away to your heart's content!
Be sure to clean up after yourself! Basic hygiene and all that: wash your hands at one of the water pumps after butchering & cooking and after disposing of the left-over inedible bits.
Be sure to hide away any valuables, money and good clothing for when you find a way to escape!
[Answer]
As humans are at the top of the food chain, they're toxic wherever you are in the world: full of pesticides, disease, parasites, embalming chemicals, ... so that method of feeding is out of the question. (They *died*, they weren't slaughtered and kept in a fridge!)
*However* you wouldn't die of starvation as there are lots of flowers, shrubs and other sorts of greenery which is perfect food for **rabbits!** In rural areas, *graveyards are full of them at night!*
If you don't believe me, drive to your local graveyard tonight, turn off the lights of your car, and look! Lots of yummy bunnies, and if you drop the barbecue grill form your story line, still creepy to:
* eat!
* raw!
* at night!
* in a graveyard!
**Note 1.** Alternatively, drive to the local graveyard, hide behind a grave and spend the night there: do some empirical research and add the research to the foreword of your story! **>:-)**
**Note 2:** You could get around this problem by locating your graveyard in the middle of a desert...
[Answer]
Some flowers found on graves such as roses would be edible as would some plants like nettles.
You'd start with that before contemplating eating corpses.
Water would be a bigger issue unless there is a fountain or a tap around there.
[Answer]
If I was stranded in a cemetery and looking for food, I'll probably start with dandelion (provided it hasn't been sprayed), but it's not tasty enough, is it?
Dig up a corpse, put it on display, kill and cook whatever scavenger comes to eat it. It would probably help if your cemetery has a [tower of silence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence) (raised structure where bodies are laid exposed to air to be devoured by carrion birds; part of Zoroastrian burial practice, among others), but I guess you cannot count on it. In north America or Europe, your characters will probably eat crows.
Vultures and Hyenas are endangered species, so make sure your characters pay due respect and help wildlife preservation after they are out of danger.
] |
[Question]
[
This is a story where two militaries are intensely fighting on extremely mountainous terrain, but both of them has developed technologies that is capable of intercepting a great range of signals; from radio to infrared signals, and also identify their location. In order to maintain secrecy of their main bases' locations, they have to avoid using any wireless technology and keep total radio silence.
Because of this, the militaries are forced to revert back to the WW1 era strategy sending a man with a letter to communicate with each other.
The question is: Is this really something the militaries have to do? Or is there another technology that cannot be intercepted that does not involve someone walking to another base to deliver information?
And it is also worth mentioning that scouts from both sides are sent, and if they spot something suspicious, they would run back to the nearest base to report.
[Answer]
Actually there were radios in WWI. And, more importantly, telegraph and telephone.
[Field telephones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_telephone) are somewhat getting out of fashion, but there should still be plenty in the depots unless one side or both sold them all as surplus. A more modern solution would be to use phone lines (or [fiberoptics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_cable)) for digital communications. In mountains, they might go for [wireless laser communication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_optical_communication), the only way to intercept those is to get between the transmitter and receiver.
[Answer]
>
> Or is there another technology that cannot be intercepted
>
>
>
Why does interception matter? Tracking down the source is obviously bad, for the source, but unless you've somehow got some magical way to break all encryption (and yes, it would have to be magic) then intercepting a signal is of limited use.
*Receiving* a signal is obviously safe. So, in order to transmit a message, you can record it in some suitable form, encrypt it, and load it on to a trasmitter drone. The drone isn't remote controlled (because the control source would be detected) but instead flies on a predetermined course and broadcasts the message at an appropriate moment. It will be detected, but that doesn't matter, because the true origin of the message and the destination of the message remain undetected.
The drone can then be crashed, or self-destruct, or even fly back home if it were suitably stealthy and impractical to track and follow once transmission was complete. No need for pre-radio nonsense.
[Answer]
# How to ruin radio communication
Many answers have said that you can't actually develop a technology to stop modern radio communications from being secure. I was one of them at first too, but having thought it over more, I realized that it is very much doable. So lets start off by explaining how technology that will overcome modern radio secrecy works.
## How Message/Locational Secrecy is Maintained Today
The question of how to hide radio communications in a warzone was solved decades ago. Ever wonder how an F-22 can be undetectable and still have the full benefits of radar and radio communications? The answer is satellites and directional transmitters (both directional radio and laser are options).
Troops trying to stay hidden send directional communications to a satellite which cant be intercepted because it does not broadcast in all directions, then the satellite does all the actual broadcasting and recon. Yes, everyone knows where every satellite is, but actually destroying something that high up is very challenging. Also, once the satellite receives a message, it knows where it came from, so it can also send directional communications back. So, yes you know the recon satellite is a recon satellite, but there is no tactical information to intercept without getting directly between the satellite and the ground target... which you cant do if you don't know where the ground target is.
Even if you could, it is encrypted. The kind of math behind encryption technology makes decryption technology advance exponentially slower than encryption. So, handwaving that some future tech makes breaking encryption more possible is actually very silly since all foreseeable advances in technology will only harden the relative effectiveness of encryption.
Another common means of communications is point-to-point. This could be wires or direct communication between ground based directional transmitters. By networking together a number of point-to-point connections, you can establish undetectable communications across a theater of operation.
## How to Break the Modern Chain of Secrecy
The weak link in satellite communications is the satellite itself. In a properly working military communications satellite, a message is encrypted on the ground, routed through the satellite, and then decrypted at its destination... but the satellite itself could be an agent for a Man-in-the-middle attack. Many military R&D projects these days involve multiple countries working together; so, if two countries are working on a shared satellite network, then it would behoove them to both try to sneak backdoors into the system to make sure that the other countries can't just lock them out.
The way a MitM attack works is you take a communication node between two points and instead of forwarding an encrypted message between the two, you establish separate encrypted connections with each party and decrypt the information from one, read it, then encrypt it again to send it on so that it just looks like end-to-end encryption, but really is not.
So, with both countries having backdoors and compromised encryption chains, when the fighting breaks out, both sides exploit their backdoors to read the other nations' communications. These back doors are built into the satellite's hardware; so, simply locking each other out proves much more impossible than either side expected... so, they are both stuck with insecure satellite networks... at least until they can develop and launch their own satellites, and update all their hardware to use the new networks.
Barring this, there is also the possibility of simply shooting down enemy satellites depriving them of communications all together.
What about point-to-point? This is in some ways even less secure than satellites. The number of options a hacker has when he gains physical access to a network goes up exponentially. Your point-to-point transmitters and wires are on the ground which means they are much easier to tamper with; so, while they may be secure "out-of-the-box", there are only so many good places to put them, especially in mountainous areas. The enemy only needs physical access to one transmitter to modify it with malicious intent. Once they take over 1 relay or tap into 1 line, they are inside your communications network and able to perform not just packet sniffing, but full cyber attacks against the whole network, and physically identify the location of other relays in your network.
# How to securely communicate with satellites and point-to-point compromised.
## Mission-type Tactics
First of all, every modern military needs a communications blackout plan. So before you even consider the technological part of the question, you should consider the military doctrine aspect. Mission-type tactics is a military doctrine widely used by westernized militaries that puts the job of assigning objectives in the hands of upper leadership, but leaves it to lesser field commanders to actually decide how to achieve those objectives. This means that even when communication becomes limited, that local units can continue to make important tactical choices in real time.
In contrast, militaries with a more authoritarian, centralized leadership model rely much more on constant communication for mission approval and orders.
So, by focusing on a Mission-Type Tactics military doctrine. A unit could receive orders by letter and have no problem figuring out everything they need to do for the next week before the next letter arrives because they are already trained to operate with minimal oversight.
## Alternative High Tech Methods
Even though modern militaries makes heavy use of satellite and point-to-point communications, there are also redundant systems in place just in case. Perhaps the most secure redundant system is underground fiber optics. Fiber optic cables are made from materials that can not be detected with metal detectors; so, when you bury them, they are virtually impossible to find; so, the only point of vulnerability are the actual military outposts themselves.
A normal communications network is made of many relay points that automatically switch traffic from one node to the next, but in a setting where networks are being compromised on a large scale, you can limit risk by air gapping communications. This means that each base is connected only to adjacent bases, and it is up to a human operator to receive and forward a message. While this slows down communication, it makes hacking an entire network from one seized base impossible.
Air-gapped fiber optic networks wont be the most efficient form of communications, but it will be way more efficient than sending people by vehicle to deliver messages and is incredibly resilient compared to other methods. So, instead of spending hours or days sending a letter 1000s of miles to communicate a change in orders, you could spend minutes bouncing a communication from station to station delivering it to (or at least near-to) the front-line.
You also need to consider civilian communications networks. Even if you compromise an enemy's military channels does not mean there are not also extensive civilian communications options. Cell phones don't have a very long range. So, the only place to detect cellphone traffic is if you are very close, and even if you are close, you could be in a country with a hundred million civilians communicating over dozens of independently secured apps and just a few thousand total combatants. Isolating civilian traffic would become an intractable problem... in fact what civilians have to say itself could even have military value. Russia learned this the hard way when invading Ukraine. A lot of the reason Ukrainian forces were able to out maneuver Russia in the early parts of the conflict was that civilians with cellphones where reporting Russian troop movements directly to the military. No fancy radar stations or recon teams, just lots of guys with eyes and internet access.
[Answer]
**Seismic communication**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_communication>
>
> Elephants
>
>
> In the late 1990s, Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell first argued that
> elephants communicate over long distances using low-pitched rumbles
> that are barely audible to humans... Further pioneering research in
> elephant infrasound communication was done by Katy Payne of the
> Elephant Listening Project[46] and detailed in her book Silent
> Thunder. This research is helping our understanding of behaviours such
> as how elephants can find distant potential mates and how social
> groups are able to coordinate their movements over extensive ranges.
> Elephants possess several adaptations suited for vibratory
> communication. The cushion pads of the feet contain cartilaginous
> nodes and have similarities to the acoustic fat (melon) found in
> marine mammals like toothed whales and sirenians. In addition, the
> annular muscle surrounding the ear canal can constrict the passageway,
> thereby dampening acoustic signals and allowing the animal to hear
> more seismic signals.[23]
>
>
> Elephants appear to use vibrational communication for a number of
> purposes. An elephant running or mock charging can create seismic
> signals that can be heard at great distances.[6] Vibrational waveforms
> produced by locomotion appear to travel at distances of up to 32 km
> (20 mi) while those from vocalizations travel 16 km (9.9 mi).
>
>
>
Your soldiers communicate using seismic communication. Transmission is done using a large metal stake planted deeply in the ground and played with a bow or sometimes struck with a rock. Reception of acoustic signals is done using drumlike receivers (below) as were tested in the linked Mythbusters episode. Persons at headquarters have very large receivers and transmitters because soldiers at the front have smaller versions of each. The rocky terrain in this area is well suited to transmit vibrations. Messages are of course coded. The origins are hard to locate.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9xVRR.png)
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0768465/>
If this was ever done in real life I cannot find it. I invented it as something interesting for your story.
[Answer]
Let me post a link for corroboration:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002>
"MC02" was a war game exercise simulating a war between the United States, and an Iran/Iraq-like Persian Gulf nation. In it, Gen. Paul Riper played the role of the Persian Gulf state, and he used motorbike couriers to send messages so that these could not be intercepted by the sophisticated electronic warfare systems of his opponent.
His tactics were sufficient to locate the entire fleet, and to coordinate a massive cruise missile strike that sunk 16 warships including an nuclear aircraft carrier. Shortly after (I assume this was minutes/hours, but can't find the details), using speedboats and other small boats, suicide attackers downed even more warships.
The defeat was so humiliating/off-script, that the people in charge of the war game decided to "refloat" the fleet and continue on as if nothing had happened. Riper was ordered to not use those tactics for the remainder of the game.
Though it has never been sufficiently acknowledged, there is an undercurrent of sentiment that the US military relies too heavily on technology, and that our inability to master older tactics could turn out to be an Achilles heel someday (the whole "boots on the ground" thing).
Sending men with letters can sink nuclear aircraft carriers. Think about that.
[Answer]
One common way this was done during WWII (and, I assume also during WWI) was [light signals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_lamp). This is basically just a special case of the directional signals that others have suggested.
During the Pacific theater of the war, giving away the position of your fleets was potentially very, very bad news for either side. Thus, when they didn't want to transmit radio signals (which would immediately give away their position,) the ships within a fleet sent messages to each other by flashing signal lamps at each other. Either flashes could have certain sequences for certain meanings or the flashes could encode something like Morse Code to send arbitrary messages.
The radio communications most commonly used back then could be detected from a hundred miles away or more (often much more, sometimes thousands.) Light signals, on the other hand, are only visible to the horizon (perhaps a dozen miles away) and only in the direction that the signal lamp is aimed.
A modulated laser is a more modern variation of this which is more directional and which supports much higher data rates.
[Answer]
## To answer your actual question: No, This Is Not Realistic.
There is quite a lot of spectrum. Jamming a small part of it is relatively easy, but you can still play games with using a lot more redundancy or power to punch through anyway (example: "GPS" as used by most people is just the quick-and-dirty signal used to bootstrap into the real GPS system. It is *hard* to jam real GPS, even for nation-states).
Jamming the full spectrum is ridiculously high-power, and you will not manage it. You could have it happen naturally from solar activity, because the sun is ridiculously powerful and unpredictable, but that's about as unlikely as having an earthquake coincidentally open a chasm between two opposing forces.
Here's the other thing about jammers: they are emitting a nice, noisy signal. And if they're big enough to matter, they're *expensive* enough to matter. Which makes them very attractive to something like a [HARM missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-88_HARM).
However, your scenario gets a lot more plausible if it's asymmetrical. If your guys are the underdog, they may be relying on walmart radios (which are very jammable), and may indeed have to worry about big ears in the sky listening for any signal.
You may also need to answer why they are fighting on the mountainous terrain in the first place. What is there that anyone wants, and why isn't one side or the other simply going around the mountains to get to whatever they actually care about?
[Answer]
If I'm understanding correctly, you want a plot justification for a military needing to use couriers to deliver messages.
I think you might be able to do this by positing an unexpected leap in quantum computing. The basic concept is, as I understand it, that the quantum world is capable of trying zillions of possible combinations in fractions of a second, and if you can harness that you can use it to break encryption with brute force. Currently it is **expected** that it will be years before we get to that point; but you're writing fiction, and you could have some genius who comes up with a brilliant short cut and suddenly decryption of everything is possible.
Since the armies haven't had a chance to update field communication systems to quantum-computing-proof tech, they have to fall back to human runners.
I'm not an expert in this stuff, you should definitely do more research on this, but this would be an avenue to explore.
[Answer]
In order to locate the source of a radio signal you have to triangulate it. That takes time and effort. You can foil attempts at triangulation by making your base mobile.
Or if you really want to be nasty and stealthy, the base connects to radio stations at faraway locations. Pinpointing the radio source does not pinpoint the base.
Finally, use decoys. The US Navy is able to deploy swarms of drones that can each individually mimic the radar signature of practically any other aircraft (a system known as NEMESIS, or "Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signatures against Integrated Sensors), making it very hard for enemy forces to figure out where any aircraft actually is during combat. You could take a page from this and make similar things for mobile bases.
[Answer]
# Quantum mechanics to the rescue!
A classic Sci-Fi thing that currently seems to be missing among the answers is the communication based on quantum mechanics. While it is typically used as a faster-than-light gizmo, one important property of a quantmech communicator (which we may or may not call [ansible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible)) is that nobody can intercept a communication with it. Such communication breaks, if intercepted.
I think that a classical "tangled particles" quantmech is not trackable, but it might be with the advances in physics. So, later in the story, the fact that people communicate over quantmech might be found out, but not the content of the communication.
This state is then ironically similar to the present state of the modern-world crypto. It should be impossible (at least as far as we publicly know) to decrypt modern encryption in reasonable time and resource usage. But it is quite easy to obtain meta-data; the fact that those two parties communicated in an encrypted manner, even if it is hard to figure out the content of the messages.
[Answer]
*Both sides have developed technologies that is capable of intercepting a great range of signals; from radio to infrared signals, and also identify their location.* - slightly edited from the OP
I see no fundamental problem here, only tactical requirements.
If both sides can detect most/all transmissions, then you have two options: radio silence or flooding the zone with noise
Radio silence is easy, he who doesn't transmit, isn't detected.
However, if you really need to transmit vital information, set up many transmitters in randomly selected otherwise empty locations and transmit you message. Thus, triangulation reveals a lot and at the same time nothing of value.
The problem of being overheard needs to be tackled by some sort of code, otherwise wireless comms would be limited to sounding alarms only.
An alternative to having many transmitters to avoid having bases located, would be to use only a single transmitter and follow the shoot-and-scoot tactic from the artillery. In order to avoid taking counter-battery fire, mobile artillery units will leave their firing position after sending a few salvos towards the target, since the ballistic trajectory of artillery shells reveals the location of the battery.
Furthermore, radio silence only applies until the first shots have been fired. Once the shooting starts, there is no more need to concealment of the active units, hence they can blast away on the radio spectrum, since they already revealed themselves to the opponent.
] |
[Question]
[
I know this is similar to [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3757/what-would-need-to-happen-to-history-to-make-a-21st-century-steampunk-world) but I'm not interested in suppressing 20th century tech to create 21st century steampunk, but in creating late 19th century steampunk with fantastic, Jules Verne-like tech, such as airships to the moon, submarines, time machines, all running on some combination of steam and other (probably fictional) power source(s). My premise is that this sort of world was the "original" timeline (if there is such a thing), history was accidentally changed by time travelers to create the world as it exists today, and another time traveler needs to change it back. Thanks.
[Answer]
## [Antoine Lavoisier should not have been executed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier#Final_days_and_execution)
>
> Lavoisier's importance to science was expressed by Lagrange who
> lamented the beheading by saying: "Il ne leur a fallu qu’un moment
> pour faire tomber cette tête, et cent années peut-être ne suffiront
> pas pour en reproduire une semblable." ("It took them only an instant
> to cut off this head, and one hundred years might not suffice to
> reproduce its like.")
>
>
>
While Lavoisier is known as one of the greatest scientists of his time, he was also a philanthropist and, more importantly, a competent administrator. Before the Revolution, he had been the manager of the Gunpowder Commission, and an excellent one at that. Anecdotally, he appears to have been of a great help to the founder of the DuPont company.
Alas, he was basically framed for the terrible fiscal and domestic policies of the government under the Terror, which made him a convenient scapegoat and gave a pretext for confiscating his fortune. He was summarily convicted with ballooned charges and executed.
And yes, I am *still* bitter about it.
Now, had he survived the Terror and made it to the quite scientist- and engineer-friendly Napoleonic regime, you can have him develop technologies early. The obvious ones are high-grade steel (that is, more modern blast furnaces) for high-pressure steam engine, smokeless powder/solid rocket propellant and rocketry, or [let's be crazy](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/141829/what-is-the-earliest-time-a-pulsejet-could-be-built/141835) pulsejets and later even maybe ramjets. He had already invented a way to produce hydrogen, and hydrogen balloons were becoming a thing, and he may further pursue the idea as well.
Avoid anything having to do with electricity, though - you want those technologies *not* developed early for steampunk to work. Ideally, you want them to take a backseat because other early tech are prioritized. So you can have rocket/ramjet supersonic planes without electricity, if you want.
Time travel is a bit harder to place on the tech tree, so you will have to use some handwave there.
A side-effect may be, even with a small technological edge, that Napoleon ultimately wins, or at least ends up with enough strength to impose an advantageous status quo. The Indian subcontinent will be very happy, Spain not so much. Geopolitical consequences are beyond the scope of the question, but at least this would change from the ubiquitous Steampunk British Empire.
[Answer]
# But we do all run on steam
All (non-renewable) power plants are steam driven. Even nuclear power is a glorified steam engine. What we don't do so much any more is drive directly using the steam, it's now a stage removed from the effect. The steam drives the turbines to generate electricity that drives your machines. As soon as you swap to an electric car, that will run primarily on steam (until wind/solar takes over).
We streamlined it, we hid the pipes and the smoke, toned down the brass and the grease, but it's still all steam powered.
[Answer]
You can't do it.
The reason that technology doesn't exist is because the world just doesn't work like that - we just didn't know that during Jules Verne's time.
Change the timeline as much as you like, the laws of the universe don't change.
[Answer]
Vhs or Betamax? QWERTY or Dvorak? MP3 or WAV? HTML or some long-forgotten alternative? Should we drive on the left or right side of the road? How wide should train tracks be?
All of these are example of cases where two possible ideas came along at or near to the same time. Some people made one choice, others the opposite choice. For the first four examples, one of the two arrived just enough earlier, or had better advertising, or was able to saturate the market faster, or some other small factor, as to become the "better" standard in the eyes of the buying public, and therefore killed off the competitor. In some cases, one can argue the losing choice carries clear advantages, but not enough to overcome the tidal wave of momentum gained by the ultimate winner.
This is all you need. An inventor with right gumption and determination, coupled with charisma, foresight, and so on, who gets steam ready at just the right time, gets it in the eyes and hearts of the public quicker, and makes it essential to life as they knew it. Now, gasoline and electric can come along and tout itself to the stars, but people won't care- they already have that machine in a steam version, which is cheaper, easier to find parts and service, and works just fine, thank you.
Come to think of it, this is exactly the situation electric cars are having right now. The infrastructure around gasoline is everywhere, and is comparatively cheap. They probably will make it, but they will struggle as they have been for several more years before they do.
[Answer]
What if Nikola Telsa had prevailed and Edison had not?
Telsa had promised the transmission of electrical power without wires. If this technology had not succeeded (perhaps Marconni's radio interfered with it's success? Or electricity itself was deemed to be too dangerous.) Then Telsa could have improved upon his orginal idea of a steam oscillating generator to supply local power where needed. Or perhaps he could colaborate with Madame Curie on to the possiblity of a small nuclear powered steam engine powering everything directly and electric powered devices would have stagnated.
Everyday people would just refer to these power plants as ‘dynamos’. Steam power could be transfered around the house by a series of leather belts, steam pipes or, in some cases, pistons. Most of the gadgets we use in modern life (other than personal electronic devices) could be powered by dynamos the size of a small furnace. Office machines, bench mounted tools and household appliances would operate as normal. They would just have to be grouped close together to conserve the kinetic energy or super-heated steam.
Imagine a steam-powered CERN super collider. Another source of motion is pneumatic tubes. If you can generate a strong enough vacuum you can move surprising amounts of weight. There was even a proposed subway system that was to be powered by clean efficient giant pneumatic vacuum tubes.
Basically you would have to supress electricity and greatly increase the efficiency of steam as a power source to create a truly steampunk world.
[Answer]
### Fashion, and little else
Let's look at the late 1890s to early 1900s.
Airships existed. They were powered by internal combustion engines, but lightweight (relatively!) steam engines existed which would have worked.
Internal combustion engines were taking over on cars, but steam cars still existed. (Fun fact - you could wheelie them.) Heavier transport - trucks and tractors - still used steam. And ships and railways still used steam and coal.
Electricity existed, but was not widespread. Lighting and heating was still mostly gas.
So what's technically different from steampunk? Simply the aesthetics. If someone could have made that look fashionable, in the same way that military-style outfits went through phases, then you'd have the whole package.
Of course not time machines or airships to the moon, but then we do still have the laws of physics.
[Answer]
A steampunk world only has Victorian science, but some people have lots more money to spend on ornate brass machines. Why would science have stopped? If any one country stopped research, others would quickly over-take it and the knowledge would spread anyway. Therefore I think that means that one state (obviously the British Empire ;-) must be running the whole world. Without competition and the threat of a scientifically advanced enemy, there's no need to invest in science research. Research might even be banned to make it harder for the masses to revolt.
In such a state, there would be a fabulously wealthy elite who demand unnecessary ornamentation to show off their status, and vast numbers of semi-slave people to build the machines and shine the brass.
So, no new physics but probably a powerful secret police to maintain the status-quo.
[Answer]
**A series of major solar storms** like the [Solar Storm of 1859](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859) hitting planet Earth just in time when the first electric networks were built.
Mankind decides that major electric networks are unreliable and a network of pipelines for oil, gas, steam, and warm water is established as the major means of power distribution. Energy is locally converted to power, light, or whatever is needed.
This world will have a lot of steam punk technology in it.
This technology is *less efficient* than the electricity based technology we have now, but given the circumstances considered more reliable.
EDIT: I just noticed the requirement that a time traveller should be able to arrange for the critical event—I have no idea other than handwaving it, a technology to control solar flares is far out of our current reach.
[Answer]
If combustion engine never happened, oil would mostly be worthless black sludge and personal automobiles would never have become every mans accessory equally fast if at all.
But if electricity still was developed then maybe we would have had electric rails in cities. Like trams and subways without steam inside cities. Steam trains between cities. Most power plants would still work as they still rely on steam or wind or water driving a turbine generating electricity. Even solar can be done this way, although probably very inefficient compared to geothermal alternatives. But it would be good enough for electrical lighting for everyone. Maybe not electrical cooking and heating..
It is difficult to say if automobilism would ever happen. Oil was the thing which made this revolution possible. Battery technology is still not quite there for electric driven automobiles today, ~150 years later. If airplanes were possible it would most likely be propeller driven planes. Jet engine we can forget if we don't have combustion engine.
[Answer]
Mostly it's a logistics problem. Most stereotypical steampunk stuff would be extremely inefficient and costly to produce and use. Think back to the Edison/Tesla situation: Edison wanted power plants on every block to produce power, while Tesla argued that central distribution plants with efficient distribution methods were better. Tesla won out because he was right about how important efficiency is to mass adoption.
Steampunk has the same problem: things powered by steam have to convert fuel into energy indirectly using the conversion of water to steam, as compared to electricity or internal combustion engines where the energy from the power source can be applied far more directly, with less big machinery. Steam engines tend to be big and inefficient and require a lot of fuel compared to devices powered by an electrical grid or directly by petroleum internal combustion. That fuel and the metal needed to produce them also makes them heavy and expensive as compared to more "modern" designs based on plastic, aluminum and electricity. Most steampunk concept art I've ever seen has always shown big, ornate machines made of iron and brass, with lots of wasted materials: the devices we tend to imagine as "steampunk" would be large, temperamental, heavy and expensive. A steam-powered airship to the moon would be prohibitively impractical because the amount of fuel needed to move an iron-and-brass monstrosity capable of withstanding vacuum conditions would be impossible to produce economically (especially since you'd also have to move all that fuel along with it).
Bottom line, steampunk isn't economically viable or physically practical for large-scale use, especially compared to more practical technologies we've developed since the days of the steam engine. If you want to make steampunk make sense, you'd have to create fictional resources to make such inefficient technology workable (things like the Ghost Rock super coal from Savage Worlds: Deadlands and the super-strong-and-light Rearden Metal from Atlas Shrugged), and you'd have to prevent things like electricity, petrol, plastic and high-strength alloys from ever being effectively developed.
Side note: you could argue that aluminum could be used to create stronger, lighter steampunk devices, but aluminum isn't really something that comes to mind when thinking of steampunk, and since aluminum wasn't really commercially viable until the very late 1800's, it might not make sense to use it for 19th century technology anyway. That would be up to you, but a story with aluminum steampunk gadgets would feel odd in my opinion. You could also argue that Rearden Metal is just a high-strength alloy, but since its composition and production process are never really explained, it has a mysterious, alchemical sort of feel that would work nicely in a steampunk story. Alloys based on real-world technology would stick out oddly in readers' minds in a steampunky, mad-science sort of story: if they can invent titanium alloy, why don't they have plastic yet? You could make it work, but you'll start to get into the only-this-and-not-that sort of game that makes readers think you're cherrypicking to make an illogical plot work.
[Answer]
# The Death of the Young John D. Rockefeller
**The only resource/technology that displaced coal as the major energy source, and thus "changed" history, was petroleum**. While it is true that most electricity comes from coal today, it is also true that petroleum revolutionized transportation. Without oil, there would be no aeronautic and automotive industries (as we know them), and navigation would be way slower. Commerce and war, among many other human activities, would be very different. Oil shaped the world, and more to the point, prevented coal technology from evolving further.
A few examples will suffice to prove the point:
1. World War I was the first fully mechanized war, with tanks, airplanes, cars and motorcycles playing a major role. In the sea, the UK had to switch from a coal-fueled fleet to gasoline in order to compete against the faster German fleet, even though there were important coal reserves in Great Britain but no oil at all (at the time). War would never be the same.
2. Urban planning in the US was centered on gasoline: highways, suburbs, shopping malls, etc. were designed so that every American would need a car. Oil demand met the oil supply and the oil industry became a key pillar in the economic expansion of the US.
From this angle, one **historical event that had to change to make steam technology possible would be the development of the oil industry**.
Despite its importance today, **in the nineteenth century, oil was not considered an energy source at all!** It was extracted to produce kerosene, a dirty substitute for sperm whale (cachalot) oil which was the finest illuminant available. Sperm whales were hunted near extinction and merchants started looking for substitutes coming from plants, coal and a disgusting dense liquid known as petroleum or oil rock.
**John D. Rockefeller made its fortune by selling refined oil** that met a standard composition suitable **to be used in kerosene lamps** without exploding or other life-threatening hazards (hence the name of his company, Standard Oil). He was a **key figure in the development of the oil industry** from a wild and unstable activity, subject to "oil fevers" that attracted fortune seekers, to an organized venture that integrated the whole production process, from geological exploration overseas to gasoline stations.
So one possibility is that, in the original timeline, Rockefeller dies in an accident in his refinery, coal-based electricity becomes widely available and the oil industry does not unfold further from a dubious venture restricted to sporadic, local bonanzas before falling into oblivion.
[Answer]
I've just marked the "correct" answer to my query but it's more complicated than that. Yes, steampunk "technology" is clearly impossible, but for the sake of my story and the conflict I'm creating, it was necessary to have two different ways for the universe to unfold post 1850 or so. I mined elements of most of the responses posted here so I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for participating. I appreciate your thoughtful comments. They really helped a lot.
[Answer]
The **Universal Physics Translation Event of 1804**, which never happened, **needs to have happened**, for much of that to be feasible and economical.
Otherwise:
Minor bits of Everything in the Big Bang, or possibly before.
On a smaller scale, maybe have the evolution of life on Earth take a different path, one that produces beings that can achieve some of that via different means: being more receptive to brass implants; capable of precise crafting by feeling and generating exact vibrations via decent tools; think in more dimensions like Dr Manhattan from The Watchmen; make (to us) implausible designs work by the power of sufficiently concentrated belief, à la the Ork Waaagh! from WH40k
But that would make all of those feats as mundane as staying solid is to us.
"Steampunk" covers a great lot of little things that are not possible even now. It's essentially magic.
**You may get better answers if you asked about a single specific accomplishment**, instead.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 4 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/151159/edit)
Some sort of cataclysm suddenly creates a territory full of deadly monsters and other dangers, but also valuable resources.
Trivial example: a magic volcano suddenly erupts and the mountain is now sprinkled with enchanted crystals and very angry elementals.
Normally, I believe, the majority of the exploration of such territory would be done by large teams of well-equipped professionals that were hired by governments, corporations, rich private individuals, etc.
What could make large teams ineffective, while encouraging lone adventurers and small groups?
Groups of 10+ should be very unlikely.
Most groups should be 6 or less (including single adventurers). Ideally less is better, though people might be afraid to go alone or take a greater risk for a chance to bring back more loot.
[Answer]
## Environment causes madness
The crystals that spewed forth caused the animals in the area to go mad. Even normally docile animals have an uncontrollable "fight or flight" response to any other warm blooded being they encounter. More likely "fight" than "flight".
The larger the party of adventurers, the more likely they will be overcome and turn on each other. The more you have built up trust with a specific person, the longer it would take for you to turn on them. An organization hiring a group of adventurers of any size that don't know each other would tear each other apart.
When the crystals (or other resource) are gathered, they must be kept in a specially designed magnetic pouch that can't be made much bigger than a backpack. YOu can't make it bigger because it would collapse on itself. More than one of these in a party causes them to attract to each other and all of them become useless. This means whatever fits in the pouch is all you can loot and you have to share everything that is in one pouch with everyone in the party you create. The more people in the party, the smaller the share.
[Answer]
Lord of the Rings is one of the works which explain this: if you want to pass unnoticed, the lesser the better.
A large party requires adequate logistic, preparation and support. Not ideal if you want to stay below the radar.
A small team, or even a single person, can more easily operate.
If your monsters have the capability to detect large vehicles and groups, this will make smaller groups more viable.
[Answer]
# Think of a Gold Rush.
Sane professionals will proceed slowly. Clear an area on the edge of the territory, exploit it, keep it cleared, rinse and repeat.
At the same time, the desperate and foolhardy go in deeper. Go in, dart around, grab something, run away. These people are not patient and organized enough to "play it safe." They want or need instant gratification, no need to share the riches they will surely find *next time, for certain.* They feel it in their veins, their luck will turn if they go there *one more time.* Why, Smelly Jim got himself a crystal to buy his own castle.
Read about [Klondike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush), [Nome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nome_Gold_Rush), [California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush).
[Answer]
The monsters are dangerous enough that numbers don't significantly increase the odds of a party's success.
If a fire elemental can kill a small army just as easily as it can kill 1 man, then the smart strategy is to split up into very small groups that you don't invest much backing into individually. If you send in 50 small groups knowing that only 40 will come back, you can form a business plan around using the survivors' profits to replace your losses, and go again. If you instead send in one really big group and it gets wiped, you lose your whole business.
[Answer]
Food and distance; any long expedition must eventually live off the land rather than supplies they bring with them. So if the area of devastation is wide, meaning that expeditions must travel far from the last base of supply, and edibles within the area relatively rare large caravans can't access the gem fields. They can't haul enough food to get there before they eat it all and neither can large parties, only small groups can live off the land and get in and out fast enough to succeed. This can also be done by restricting access to drinking water, which is often polluted by volcanic gases or chemicals leeched from a [volcanic ash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_ash) layer.
To a large degree this will be a temporary situation if the fields appear to be a longterm profitable venture. People will build infrastructure to exploit the site if it's worth it.
[Answer]
For your trivial example, geography would be an important enough factor on it's own. Maybe those mountain routes are too narrow in some places for large groups to keep fast pace. The people up ahead need to wait for the people down behind to catch up. A longer column would take more time to cross the same ground than a shorter column.
This goes for any other scenarios where there would be such "bottlenecks". For instance, a shallow river boat can only carry so many people at any one time. A cave with a few narrow passages can only fit so many people before they started getting in each others' ways. A frozen lake can only support the weight of so many people at the same time.
[Answer]
What if the dangers are not only monsters that can be fought, but plain weird? Think of cobwebs that kill anyone who touches them ... three weeks later. Think of an invisble vortex that pulls anyone who enter into the air, and kills them, but needs 20 minutes or so to "recharge". This means only those with intimate knowledge of the territory can navigate it, and they will be careful in with whom they share this knowledge.
Or some artifacts are rumored to be incredible powerful. Who would risk sending anyone but the most loyal follower on an expedition, when the expedition leader might gain the power to have one wish granted?
Or those who explore the terrain carry home a strange curse: Their children might be born with strange afflictions and suffer from mobbing throughout their lives. The ghost of their mother in law moves in with them. Those who spend significant time in this area will experience a haunting (or addiction) to always return. Quickly, this will be known or guessed at by everyone - so only those who are allready a little crazy will enter the territory, or let themselves be recruited.
None of the above ideas are mine, I lifted them all from the Strugatzky' brothers novel *Wayside Picknick* (which inspired the movie, and the games, Stalker).
[Answer]
If the terrain is inhospitable, a large force can be a major drawback
[As the romans found out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest)
If the people know the land, they can set all sorts of traps which will make your numbers count against you, making it impossible to split up, difficult to coordinate, and easily picked off by flinging thins into the crowd.
[Answer]
Perhaps human beings emit some sort of 'radiation', perhaps magical of origin that draws monsters towards them. One person or small groups, fewer than 10 or so might have limited problems as their energy signature is too difficult to make out from background radiation, but the moment really large groups try their hands at entering the lands they can expect to become monster magnets.
For example: Something like the grimm from RWBY. The grimm are attracted to negative emotions, the more negative emotions there are, the more grimm will come. More Grimm means more negative emotions (anger, fear,...) and the vicious cycle has begun. The main problem the people from Remnant have with Grimm is that once such a cycle starts, it's pretty difficult to break it on time.
You will need some sort of reason though for how monsters survive. The grimm are pretty simple. They exist out of darkness, so they don't need sleep, food or water. Only shelter, because in one of the World of Remnant videos, the one about Atlas we see Grimm freezing to death. Your elementals will have no problem, but if you want an actual living and breathing T-rex or something, you will need to explain how a T-rex gets sufficient food. Of course all these creatures could just feed off of the magical radiation of the land or something like that.
I hope this helps.
[Answer]
**Maybe the investors are cheap**
You might think someone rich who is sponsoring an expedition would fund it generously enough to have be able to take care of itself, but you might be wrong. Someone who doesn't really know what's involved might decide on the size and composition of an expedition on the basis of their own mistaken beliefs. And they're more likely to actually send the expedition if they believe it can be done cheaply.
**Or, think of really big anteaters**
A predator which eats prey much smaller than it is will eat large numbers of them. It might not bother to feed on a small party, but a line of a hundred little morsels would be worth stopping for.
This has the additional feature that large parties can fragment. A large party starts out, and something big shows up and starts eating people. What do the as-yet-uneaten people to? They scatter. And if they survive until morning, you have a number of small parties, all poorly equipped and with haphazard composition.
[Answer]
**Laws or Diplomacy**
Laws could restrict major corporations and state forces from entering the area. Maybe the surrounding states fear magical contamination from artifacts of the 'zone' or hold an anti-individualist credo that make them wary of the social disruption caused by returning 'nouveau rich' adventurers.
Alternatively, if more than one state borders on the territory they could come to an agreement not to exploit it. Perhaps the sudden potential of the 'zone' brought them to the brink of war and they agreed to stay out in order not to spark conflict.
In either scenario the territory would be avoided by state forces and 'respectable' businessmen who needed to work within the law. Instead exploration would be spearheaded by marginalised down and outs or by shady business concerns unconcerned with legality. Depending how seriously the laws/treaties were maintained you might also see plausibly deniable shadow actors such as privateers and government-backed mercenaries taking a cut for the governments that publicly banned exploration.
[Answer]
Logistics, mobility, discretion, sanitation, scarcity, Preservation of life
## Logistics
The bigger the group, the more food and equipment they will require. All of which will need to be carried. Even if you can scavenge food and potable water en route, the bigger a group you need to feed the harder this task becomes.
## Mobility
Again, a smaller group moves faster. You need less time to set up/drop camp for the night, and don't need to wait around as long for the rest of the party to cross obstacles.
## Discretion
If the area to be explored is full of dangers, you are more likely to be able to avoid them in a squad of 5 than 50. Especially if these dangers include other, hostile scouting parties. You may be less likely to survive such an encounter, but that's the balance.
## Sanitation
A small group can dig their own holes to poop in, or do as they please. Once your group gets bigger, you need to worry more about designated spaces or risk the spread of disease.
(Historically, diseases like Dysentery were huge problems for armies on the march)
## Scarcity
These resources, while valuable and accessible, aren't found that densely. It's simply not worth funding a large expedition to scour an area when a few individuals can get cover the same ground faster and achieve the same aims
## Preservation of life
You don't know what's out there, but you know fur sure it could kill you in seconds. Losing 5 people from your population after they are lost on expedition is not as big a blow as losing 50.
[Answer]
Or maybe you could orientate yourself on the anime/manga made in Abyss,
where there is the abyss where only a few people are able to withstand the so called curse of the abyss.
ypu can make it layered, like in the outskirts it's less dangerous and more people can go, but the farther from the middle the less precsious minerals, artifacts what ever.
but closer the mor valuable the more dangerous. and many people die, get injured just because they moved closer to the curse. Or Big groups could unwkwon worsen the curse.
Spoiler:
>
> The curse is a force field wiche gets stronger the close to the core, and the stronge the more severe the burden on body and soul.
>
>
>
[Answer]
I want to do a parallel on Roman history.
After conquest of Gaul, Roman secured eastern front with german tribes and bedded on Rhine river. why don't fight german tribes on east ? I mean with a full conquest?
Because there was nothing. No big cities, no roads, no infrastructure, nothing to conquest.
*So I have a question for you: who said these "new" territories are full of monsters, treasures ? Someone has to go ther and come back, right ?*
Let's say someone go ther and come back with stories of treasures and wonders.
Now what? Many dreamed these treasures, but it's hard and is not for everyone!
You have to be:
* prepared to survive in a land with no roads,
* no clues on geography: no maps. Where you find water? A shelter?
* no common language when you find humans,
* trained for combat (you mentioned monsters, right ? I will add lone people, maybe little bit crazy one? )
* trained for hunting
* resist to new diseases
* food for your horses (and water! and a shelter)
* motivated
In conclusion: I want to emphatize on motivation side. After one, two, three ( maybe a month) of exploring a land full of monsters, with no much food or water, no fun ( remember? night could be very long if you are in an unknow place every night..) is for sure stressful.. so small groups, highly motivated is right solution, for exploring
[Answer]
The simple fact is larger groups have a larger more detectable foot print than a smaller group.
First, just the noise levels and the vibrations on the ground that 50 people cause versus 1.
Then there the pollution, waste products, and smells. A large group disrupts a large portion of the forest as it goes through and is far more noticeable.
Cooking fire for 1 vs 50 is going to be way more massive, and the scent and smoke will travel everywhere. A single adventure might limit themselves to precooked food they can eat without starting a fire.
Everything is larger, bathrooms for 50 is going to generate tons of waste and probably emit a large amount of smell. Way easier for an animal(s) to track.
They will form a large camp which will be super easy to spot from a distance.
Our own body oils will ruby over everything we touch and brush up against,break branches, and etc, forming an easy path for animals to follow.
---
So your creatures are variable sensitive to sound,smell,and vibration depending on the group size you want to be attacked. Also it doesn't hurt if the animals are larger so they have a bigger appetite thus there hunger will be better satisfied by eating a group of 50 adventures vs 1 which isn't even a snack.
The biggest problem here is that more adventures will be better equipped to handle larger more vicious enemies. A party of 50 can have 20 machine gun operators, and 5 missile launchers.
I am thinking like in the movie "tremors" with the large hazardous earth worms that are sensitive to just the things we are looking for here. While its underground its pretty much safe from machine gun and missile attack. Otherwise we would just drop bombs on them from 2000 feet up where they can't reach us. Even if some of your animals can fly they can't keep up to a plane at 500+ mph.
] |
[Question]
[
Why would an alien convert to a religion that would make them subservient to humans?
Given a Galactic religion that sees humans as the "chosen" race, destined to rule.
Aliens that convert must swear to obey and respect humans.
They can only disobey orders that are:
1. Unlawful
2. Contradictory
3. Harmful
4. Impossible
They do get exemption from church tax, they benefit from universal health care and basic income, and can even take humans to court.
But:
They can not serve in any judicial, political, religious position or any post that would put them in power over a human.
Given their subordinate place, what is a reasonable physiological or sociological reason for a large number of aliens converting.
Note: wars of conquest are forbidden
Forced conversion are also forbidden
Note: assume the aliens have the same physiology as humans.
[Answer]
Because they are living in much worse situations before.
How many people of color have went to the Western world to earn money even though they know they would be discriminated by the white? From the Chinese laborer that died constructing US and Canadian railroads to the immigrants streaming across land and ocean to get to Europe and US, such things are not rare. Perhaps the homeworld of these aliens are under a poorly managed semi-feudal, semi-colonized system like the one at the end of Qing Dynasty in China/colonized by foreign power/under a coup that is supported by foreign power CIA style the way Central/South America had been, they will want to have a better life. (The bad-thing doer could be another alien power) And if Earth is a shining beacon of hope--at least, that is how the propaganda said, these aliens would want to go there. But Earth has a very strict immigration system that basically forbid not-human from even come. However, there is a loophole: by converting into this religion, you will get instant permanent resident status.
[Answer]
**1) If you are convinced that it is true.**
It's often said that truth is stranger than fiction, and there are already many religions whose philosophies "turn the world upside-down". Jesus told his disciples that in order to be great/powerful/leaders, they must be lowly...making themselves servants. If Jesus's disciples were willing to put themselves in a low place for the sake of following him, or monks (of many faiths) are willing to forego the pleasures and status of mundane life for the sake of some form of enlightenment, then why shouldn't aliens who are convinced of humanity's "chosen-ness" be willing to lower themselves in order to follow?
Or, on the other side of the coin...
**2) If you are faced with less pleasant consequences if you don't convert.**
History is also replete with examples of forced conversion - ranging from the medieval-esque "convert or die" that a recently conquered people might be offered at sword- or gun-point, to the more subtle (but still manipulative) loss of various protections or privileges that society only affords to the converted. While some may choose to defy an oppressive religious regime and face persecution, there are always those who are willing to duck their heads, convert, and feel safer.
[Answer]
## Parallel from human history
Women *flocked* (and still flock) to Christianity *in droves*, even though they were (and still are) taught, "Wives, *be subject* to your own husbands, as to the Lord ... the wives ought to be (subject) to their husbands in everything".
(To emphasize the point: **most early** Christian **converts** were **women**.)
Why, then? Because they're equal to their husbands **in the sight of God**, and men must "love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her".
IOW, there's not just *hierarchy of obedience*, but *obligation* that the higher **must** love and take care of those under him: Jesus loves and takes care of the church; likewise, the man loves and takes care of the wife. If he abuses her, **he sins in the sight of God**.
(Whether or not men lived -- and live -- up to their Godly duty is another -- and off-topic -- matter.)
As surprising at it sounds to our modern sensibilities, **that was a step up for women.**
See below for screenshot of abstract from [Sociology of Religion, Volume 56, Issue 3, Fall 1995, Pages 229–244, Reconstructing the Rise of Christianity: The Role of Women](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3711820)
## Your story
Replace "women" with "space aliens" and "men/husbands" with humans, and that's your answer.
It perfectly ties in with all your constraints: humans must *respect* and *take care of* "inferior space aliens" because to do so is a Grievous Sin.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dIENc.png)
[Answer]
**Reincarnation**
Human bodies are the housing for superior SOULS. By obeying the tenants of the Great God Terra you too can ascend upon your rebirth from your crude and unlovely forms to the Glorious Bipedal Ape shape that is mankind! Then YOU will have proved yourself worthy of all the benefits accrued to humans as stated in the Holy Book.
Getting out of paying Jizyah (the religious tax) and access to healthcare etc are perks to get you in. But once there you're part of the downtrodden masses that **Know** (because people tend to believe their own religions) that if they obey the rules as written, they will be rewarded with a better place (economically, socially, etc) in their next life. Historically this has been plenty to get people to convert/stay in religions where they are "lesser" and suffer in this life for it. It's very broadly analogous to the Hindu belief that the better the life you lead the better your next life will be.
Naturally your story doesn't need to confirm this religious belief is correct, but if it's a tenant of the faith it'd be a great way to keep the xenos following it.
[Answer]
### Because they taste really good
Humans crave these alien creatures as rare flavourful delicacies. Studies have shown that the creatures have only marginal intelligence - more than an ape, but substantially less than a human. And we eat apes already.
Nothing will stop humans harvesting them to eat. Except... Religion X grants sanctuary to any creature with just enough intelligence to subscribe to its teachings. And it has clerics with big sticks and guns, and lawyers if things get really bad. Its teachings are simple enough for these creatures to understand, and certainly they understand that they don't want to get eaten, so that's their way off the table.
Of course the tenets of that religion teach the superiority of humans, and everything else. It's profoundly abusive. But at least you don't get eaten.
[Answer]
>
> They do get exception of church tax, universal health care and basic income
>
>
>
There is your answer - many, many (contemporary, terran) people would convert on the spot if that means a few € saved on church tax. Not even speaking about universal health care, if you happen to live in a 3rd world country where an operation would ruin you. And an income that allows you careless (though modest) life? Many people would give an arm and a leg (or a kidney...) for that. Especially if (switching to aliens) humans are few and far away and a probability of actually meeting one is negligible (and I guess you can behave like many religious peple do, just disobey if you do not like the command(ment)).
[Answer]
There's a historical parallel for this situation - see [Black people and Mormonism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormonism).
>
> Over the past two centuries, the relationship between black people and Mormonism includes both official and unofficial discrimination. From the mid-1800s until 1978, the LDS Church prevented most men of black African descent from being ordained to the church's lay priesthood, barred black men and women from participating in the ordinances of its temples and opposed interracial marriage. Since black men of African descent could not receive the priesthood, they were excluded from holding leadership roles and performing these rituals. Temple ordinances such as the endowment and marriage sealings are necessary for the highest level of salvation. The church's first presidents, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, reasoned that black skin was the result of the Curse of Cain or the Curse of Ham.
>
>
>
So why did Black people become Mormons in the first place? I'm no expert, but Wikipedia has an article on [Black people and early Mormonism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_early_Mormonism) that might be of use. One of the people cited in that article is [Green Flake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Flake), whose conversion is described thus:
>
> Green Flake was born a slave on the Jordan Flake Plantation in Madsburr, Anson County, North Carolina. At the age of ten, Green was given to Jordan Flake's son James as a wedding present. James and Agnes Flake, their three-year-old son William, and Green (along with their other slaves) moved from North Carolina to Mississippi a few years later. In the winter of 1843–1844, a stranger knocked on the door of the Flake home. The visitor was Benjamin L. Clapp, a missionary from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Although skeptical at first, the Flakes were baptized a few weeks later. Their baptism brought immediate changes to the James Flake plantation ...
>
>
>
Based on the brief description, I would guess that the decision stems from believing the religion is true. If someone claims to be God, and performs miracles to prove it, would you convert to whatever religion that person preaches?
[Answer]
**They get power over non-humans**
So, they can't be better than humans. But, by being on the side of humans, they can place themselves above the other non-human creatures. Perhaps this is a de jura, explicit role where they are officially better, but that's far from the only way that it can happen. Perhaps they are simply looked more favourably upon by those with real power. Perhaps the only benefit they get is that they get to feel unbearably smug.
As long as they can be above someone, and afraid to be below, then a lot of people will be very keen on joining.
**Indoctrination**
A person raised from birth to believe something can believe almost anything. Especially if you make it an emotionally loaded belief, something that they believe that they are a better person for believing. Y'know, like a religion. Now you just need to get the children away from non-believing parents. Outright arresting the non-believing parents would certainly not be necessary, and probably violates the religious injunction against wars of conquest. But this is where the subtlety comes in. Don't make it illegal to be a non-believer, but show leniency for believers with draconian punishments for the non-believers. Keep it an open secret that regular church attendance will be good for you. Then the parents either take their children to church or get taken to jail, leaving the child up for adoption by the church.
If that is too extreme, then you can simply overwork the adults to the point that they'll need to rely on the church to provide childcare, with indoctrination involved of course.
**Genuine Belief**
The question is written as if the religion is, in the strictly factual sense, untrue, or at least not *obviously* true. This is a problem, but only if you intend to fight fairly. Cheat debates by having charismatic people on your side and awkward people on theirs. Make sure that no one can say the religion is wrong unchallenged, but no one raises a finger if you say the religion is true. Supply information on the glory and mercy of humanity, and omit from circulation information on their failures and cruelty. This won't be great at getting adults without really going after their emotions, but it's better than nothing.
[Answer]
**To get into heaven!**
You might have a subservient life during your limited time here on Earth (or whatever planet they're on), but if you serve as you are supposed to, you'll enjoy eternal paradise in the next life!
[Answer]
It's possible that an alien would consider that converting to that religion would put them in a position of safety, particularly if tensions between humans and aliens were high, or if humans had some kind of advantage over the aliens. By converting to this religion, an alien could possibly believe that they are gaining the support/protection of other members of the religion. It could also be that they agree with some of the teachings of that religion and are unbothered by the notion of not being allowed to have power over humans, or that they are of the mindset that they can simply stop being a part of the religion if they don't like it
[Answer]
>
> They do get exemption from church tax, they benefit from universal health care and basic income.
>
>
>
Enough said.
Too short for an answer? Let me say it with more words then. There are benefits there. Financial benefits.
When I was a catholic the only thing I ever got was a sip of wine and a thin piece of very bland bread once a week during the communion (I was underage, mins you). But I had to stay the whole mass for it, and I could make more than that by working one hour (and I was underage, mind you again). Now if going to the church Sunday would mean I get a sip of wine, a piece of bread, affordable access to doctors, income and a tax exemption to boost, I would totally convert again.
[Answer]
## The aliens really *are* inferior
They evolved millions of years ago. Their history is one of unceasing wars and dark ages. The handful of times they have invented space travel, they have invented orbital bombardment and destroyed their civilizations. Their literature is a litany of the impossibility of hope, the certainty of misery. It is the same for every species they have contacted. Until one brave, good species burst forth from its homeworld and reshaped the universe in under half a millennium.
The aliens *know* they should not rule. They *know* they should not disobey. They know only the worship of the human order can bring them a chance to progress and become something worthwhile.
The whole religion actually seems *very* plausible, except you have the humans and aliens mixed up.
[Answer]
## Because the Aliens don't already have Organized Religion
The aliens have never encountered anything like human religion before. Perhaps in their minds, there is only fiction and non-fiction, and when they see the "based on a true story" disclaimer, they believe it 100%. We humans have grown up in a world full of various aggressively domineering religions, and have subsequently had to learn how to work out the differences between cults, cons, and various possible explanations of reality.
As John points out in the comments, it is hard to imagine a species with the creativity to become technologically advanced without ever establishing a religion of thier own. The key here is not that they never thought of religion before, but that they don't have it. There are a lot of reasons this could happen:
**The aliens may be more comfortable with uncertainty.** So, when an alien doesn't know why something happens, they don't feel compelled to make something up to fill in the gaps or to fight to defend their made up assertions. So, when aliens see humans come along saying with absolute certainty that something is true, the aliens would take human certainty as strong evidence that it is true. Because in thier psyches, no one is ever that certain about anything that is not a fact.
**The aliens are a long-time secular society.** Missionaries of any religion often find it much easier to convert people who have never belonged to a religion than those who already worship something, or harder yet, people who were born into a religion and then decided to stop believing in it. In a world that has left all religions in thier mythology books, there would not be the since of guardedness about accepting a religion because it would be seen as a neutral, not hostile, ideology.
**The aliens believe in the simultaneous truth of all spirituality.** Rather than not believing in any religion, they believe in all religions simultaneously. They see all depictions of gods as either being different aspects of an infinitely complex god, or of many lesser gods. Since such people have no standard dogma, they can not exactly be explained as belonging to a religion. As you saw in ancient Rome, such kinds of spirituality can thrive as long as no dogma rises above others, but when un-organized religion meets organized religion, the organized variety tends to win.
**The aliens maintain thier society by other means.** Humans use religion as a way of controlling one another. Parents use religion to make thier children do what they are told. Leaders use religion to manipulate the feelings of thier subjects. For humans, our ability to conceive of and apply religion is not just about making stuff up, it is a necessary skill for creating a stronger more cohesive community. If your aliens have other more effective methods for manipulating the behaviors of a hierarchy, then religion would not be needed. Maybe they are telepathic, or use pheromones, or implant each other with mind-control parasites. Whatever it is, they have no practical need for religion.
Every major religion on Earth has in it some tannate that says you should do something to spread the faith. This in turn spreads the sphere of influence of that religion's leadership. If your aliens don't need religion for thier leaders to secure power, then there is a lot less pressure to spread your faith or care what others believe in. As such, your aliens could be just as prone to come up with religions as humans, but they would never spread the same way because members would not have reason to care if it spreads. This would make human religions uniquely pervasive in their communities because they would have never had to deal with a religion that says you must spread the religion.
[Answer]
**Subservience is their natural state.**
In the wild, these aliens live in small tribes ruled by the biggest ugliest alien in the tribe. This *Chief* is about twice the size of everyone else, with some extra colorful plumage and frills to boot, large enough to bully anyone else into taking his word as law.
If the *Chief* is a tyrant, the best a smaller alien can hope for is to flee into the tribe of a different *Chief* who offers better treatment.
Hence the aliens are already used to being subservient to a physically different leader, and swapping if necessary. Trading one tyrant for another is a win-win situation if it guarantees them better treatment and protection.
[Answer]
A very interesting question. I've seen religion facilitating oppressive systems intentionally or not in many settings before, but openly embracing and then going so far as to preach such beliefs is unique.
Many choose lives of servitude already, for their own varieties of reasons and in many various ways, such as those who choose to work the same job for their entire life or live as lifelong housekeepers for a family for example. This is very different, of course, but it shows that this can, theoretically, be at least partially consentual on the side of the servile population, though likely influenced by other social or societal factors. If these aliens already live under the authority of humanity and are raised in environments where proselytizers of this religion are widespread and communities where this faith is already embraced, these aliens adopting the faith despite its dogma is rather likely. I would write this as a phenomenon predominantly occuring mostly in the aliens that live in small communities of their own people, possibly lacking a community of their species at all, and in interstellar states with a human ruling majority. On a species' homeworld, where they have seen many chosen prophets and great empires and all the working parts of a history as well as a large and traditional population of the respective species, I do not see it as likely that this outworlder faith could easily find a large following. But in immigrant communities and among individuals flung across the stars, going to schools and work on other planets and eventually moving offworld as they integrate, conversion is far more likely.
Of course, this all assumes that these aliens have a similar psychology and sociology to neurotypical humans. Species that do not develop communal social patterns or have [the proper neurology to even facilitate appropriately humanlike religious behavior](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/belief-and-the-brain-s-god-spot-1641022.html), which is unique to the human species as far as is currently understood, could be respectively easier or more difficult to convert these aliens. I would see this as a uniquely opportunistic challenge if you choose to present it in your setting, though; what might the servitude of aliens demanded by this faith look like if they are literally physically incapable of grasping the concept? Would this just be outright chattel slavery, then? And in that case, your setting's mistreatment of these foreign aliens and the systems that oppress and converts them rapidly becomes, intentionally or otherwise, something of an allegory for the chattel slavery of Africans in the Colonial Era (which did use [religious justifications](https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/), at least in the United States), as well as its lasting legacy. Seeing this, you may want to research into these systems further, not only to see how it all operated but also its lasting effects on a society and individuals, should you choose to write communities or nations that have abandoned this horrible path or the stories of alien survivors of the oppression they have faced. You will also want to consider (assuming your setting's nations are mostly capitalist; I don't think space communism would take kindly to this faith but who knows) that aliens living in poverty and low income, likely as staff on spaceships and janitors and the like, are far more susceptible to being converted or choosing to convert than suffer a life free of slavery but burdened by debt and social immobility. Poverty and its struggles was a major push of real life slaves back into servitude after it was abolished in the United States, and this specifically is a concept that has been explored many times in many ways by authors; the idea of people willingly becoming slaves to avoid lives of social and political freedom, but so burdened by their economic status that they choose to become slaves. An example is the system of Imperial slavery in the Empire of Achenar in Elite: Dangerous, or the [real life examples throughout history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage#History), occuring especially during the Colonial Era but also at other points in the past [and the present](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage#Modern_practice).
This is a really fascinating question, and I really enjoyed looking into it! I hope my answer helped you come to your own conclusion, and I hope to see more of this incredibly interesting setting in the future. [:
[Answer]
For exactly the same reason anyone converts to a religion.
It's usually a pre-requisite for mating with one or more of its members, or at least for having a non-antagonistic relationship with their extended family.
Sure, I'll join your god club if means we can get jiggy wit it.
] |
[Question]
[
There is a popular high-stakes card game. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it's impossible to get out a new pack of cards for each round. The same cards must be used throughout.
This game would of course be ruined if marking cards were possible, so how can we make it so it's impossible?
Each 'card' must fulfill all of the following conditions:
* Each card is slim (not much more than twice as thick as a standard playing card)
* Each card is stackable
* Any marks that can feasibly be made by players unobtrusively during the game without special equipment have to be so unsubtle that the dealer can pick them out
* There are markings on the card that designate what is is (J, 2, A, etc.), that are easily and unambiguously deciphered (not something along the lines of morse code, notches, etc.)
* They all have identical backing.
Cost is no issue, in fact if it costs somewhere between a 10-pack of beer and a very cheap car to make one set, all the better.
[Answer]
Make the cards out of gold/silver/platinum and then use something like vapor deposition to give them a nice coating of diamond. This way they are strong, non-stick and scratch resistant.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_vapor_deposition>
>
> [T]he growth of diamond directly on a substrate allows the addition of many of diamond's important qualities to other materials .... Diamond films are being grown on valve rings, cutting tools, and other objects that benefit from diamond's hardness and exceedingly low wear rate .... Diamond's very high scratch resistance and thermal conductivity, combined with a lower coefficient of thermal expansion than Pyrex glass, a coefficient of friction close to that of Teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE) and strong lipophilicity would make it a nearly ideal non-stick coating for cookware if large substrate areas could be coated economically.
>
>
> By regulating the processing parameters—especially the gases introduced, but also including the pressure the system is operated under, the temperature of the diamond, and the method of generating plasma—many different materials that can be considered diamond can be made. Single crystal diamond can be made containing various dopants.[25] Polycrystalline diamond consisting of grain sizes from several nanometers to several micrometers can be grown.[23][26] Some polycrystalline diamond grains are surrounded by thin, non-diamond carbon, while others are not. These different factors affect the diamond's hardness, smoothness, conductivity, optical properties and more.
>
>
>
However, this may make them very hard to shuffle as they are rigid, but you only said they had to be stack-able, not bendable. In any case you could invent a special machine to shuffle them. This machine could polish up any finger prints, remove any dirt or marker ink, and even check the cards for defects. You may want to give them a matte finish instead of a high gloss one, that way they could hide fingerprints, or some other kind of coating that evaporates fingerprints, otherwise someone could just leave an oily print on a card to mark it. Of course this depends on the nature of the game and if cards are cycled between players without being reshuffled/cleaned.
I envision a shimmering card of transparent diamond, with a intricate pattern of precious metals on the back. Maybe even do different colored diamond layers for the colors.
Something like this this (just for examples sake, I just added the link for the sake of citing the image source)
<http://www.collectableplayingcards.com/bicycle-aurora-playing-cards-collectable-playing-cards-p-49478.html>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/X9JrHm.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gCeTWm.jpg)
Basically someone would describe them as mesmerizing and distracting to look at. Make them over the top opulent and extravagant. And who doesn't like cards of precious metal coated/plated with diamond. You could even throw in some holographic properties as well, so something like "foil cards" from some of those collectable card games like MTG or Pokemon (you know the ones).
I just wanted to go for the ridiculously fabulous and expensive answer :-p If it's a high profile high stakes game, part of the fun would be the exotic nature of the cards. So may them something special and flashy.
Preventing counterfeiting is pretty easy. It could be something as routine as the difficulty in making them and their intricate detail. Or you could make the cards worth more then the actual winnings of the game. This way it wouldn't be worth faking them ... ha ha.
* **slim** - Vapor deposition can be on the order of a few atoms thick, if you have the tech for it. The thickness would depend on how strong the underlying "backer" is. You could start with something like titanium, plate that with gold, silver, copper, platinum for the designs. Then cover it with the diamond. Like a lamination.
* **stackable** - check. Although they are not bendable.
* **marks** - they are basically diamond so with the high gloss any scratches would show easy. They are hard, so you would need something harder then diamond to even do the scratching. I'm not sure how hard it is to write on diamond, but if you added enough layers to give it depth, it would look like any marks float above the background, because you would have a under layer of background and several layers of "clear". Similar if you made them somewhat holographic, any marks would stand out like a sore thumb.
* **card types** - is a given and sort of out of the scope of the construction of the card, and more a matter of the specifics of the game.
* **identical backing** - see above.
[Answer]
The question boils down to: How can we make marking cards impossible?
The answer is simple, and Casinos have used this rule for a long time as well - don't let the players touch the cards directly.
If you want to go the complex route, you can even set up an interface where the players input commands or actions and a robotic hand does the actions far away.
If you set up the game to be digital, VR, or AR, this will also avoid the problem.
Don't over complicate the problem and make extra work for yourself.
[Answer]
A card isn't a card until it's dealt.
The cards are digital. The value is shown on a screen, like a mini-LED display. They are blank, until they go through a 'dealing' machine, which uses some form of, perhaps, RF to 'transfer' the randomly-generated card value into a chip embedded on each card. When they are collected, the values are completely erased until dealt again. Sort of like the concept behind video slot machines.
Thus, the face of every 'real' physical card will be different, every time it is dealt. Marking it will be of no use. The next time it is dealt, it will change value.
[Answer]
You need to have multiple-factor safety: I am assuming the players are not allowed to bring to the table any writing or cutting instruments, and also the dealer checks for alteration of the card shape (cutting, ripping, etc.)
If so, the cards can be made of [shape-memory polymers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape-memory_polymer).
>
> They are polymeric smart materials that have the ability to return from a deformed state (temporary shape) to their original (permanent) shape induced by an external stimulus (trigger), such as temperature change.
>
>
>
Whatever sign is made on the card altering its shape will be nullified by bringing the deck to the trigger temperature, and this can be achieved either by the dealer holding the card in their hands, or by setting the deck in a thermostatic holder.
[Answer]
Paint the back of the cards with a brittle, refracting white enamel.
When it's intact, it is perfectly white and very difficult to mark with a felt pen or ink without it being obvious (some kind of ultraviolet ink with suitable contact lenses, perhaps...).
The least scratch on the surface, and the enamel will crack, instantly generating a multicolored *craquelure* that is impossible to miss - a sort of 2D *Prince Rupert'ts Drop*'s effect.
With the appropriate solvent and another hand of enamel, the card can be repaired cheaply.
Several enamels already exhibit this property and actually have to be doped with softening and crack-stopping agents to prevent cracking from happening. The trick would be to add enough softener as to keep the card slightly bendable, but not enough that a scratch doesn't trigger the craquelure.
[Answer]
Take any set of cards (paper, metal, whatever). Put them into card sleeves, of which you can produce a lot of identical sets. Only let trusted experts change the card sleeves so the cards are not damaged. Requirements fulfilled.
[Answer]
Okay, so a comment sparked my imagination.
Use biology.
'Grow' the card structure so that it was self-healing. Make them 'living'.
Every time it was shuffled, make it so it grows a new skin, and sheds the old one.
Every deal, the cards would change their backing, and their 'look'.
Design it so that it screamed when cut or nicked. Maybe even bleed.
[Answer]
You could have a system where any marks on the cards would just be instantly detectable. for instance both glass <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/12/worlds-thinnest-glass_n_3915085.html> and something called a silver mirror <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I-y3I3VzM8> <http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=5857> can be made to be extremely thin. if you where to use thin glass sheets with silver deposited on them for a backing you could get it down to a few tens of microns thick (less than a sheet of paper, actually an entire deck would be pretty short i'd probably actually increase the thickness from the minimum to A. make it less fragile ,B.increase the intensity of colour you get on the pattern and C. make it cheaper to about the thickness of a sheet of paper)
how do you get an image on the glass? well by "staining" the glass, glass can be made to absorb different frequency of light by adding trace amounts of different metals. gold, copper and selenium make red. Iron and chromium make blue. silver, titanium and uranium make yellow. tin makes white etc... (since the glass is so thin i'd probably use a wide verity of metals per colour to ensure its as vibrant as possible. so when making red use gold and copper and selenium).
since producing thin yet strong glass is a difficult process to begin with and you presumably want specific well defined shapes i'd probably add theese metals afterwards with a small particle accelerator (which is yes quite expensive but not nearly as much as it sounds). this accelerator would add metal ions to the glass giving it colour and have its beam (or the card under the beam) moved to add them to specific places like an inkjet printer. this process would be done under vacuum but a lot processes are these days so that's nothing special.
as for appearance the card appears: from one side like a plain mirror . the other side however the mirror is seen through a small sheet of highly stained glass, giving it sort of semi-transparent markings. these markings would change in intensity depending on what angle you look at the card from (varying with sec of the angle between the perpendicular of the sheet and the incident light ray i think). looking at it straight on would make the markings appear weak like a water colour (you could probably actually just use the card as a mirror if you felt like it) and they would get more vibrant as the angle moved closer to edge on. This effect would be noticeable during a game especially by someone who's job is in part to notice it and so any markings on the glass would obviously not have it. it also helps that most things wipe off glass.
the price would be highly dependant on the technological aptitude of your civilisation but would probably fall between "ten pack of beer and small car". closer to the small car if this civilisation is more earth like and there aren't enough of these cards to warrant mass production closer to ten pack of beer if everyone has a deck and its the 2070's or so.
[Answer]
Don't give them anyplace to hide marks. The less a card has on it the harder it is to hide marks. most marking relies on hiding in the pattern on the card, no pattern no place to hide. Go with a flat white back or any solid color for that matter. Remember to work marks have not visible from a distance, the most subtle marks only work for the dealer becasue they require direct handling to feel.
You could even make most of the card transparant making it even harder to mark. Both make creases, marks, and scratches very obvious, clear ones also stop rubbing since they will stop being clear. There are even plastics that will change color when stressed, so even bending the card to curve it will make it turn from clear to white.
to stop counterfeiting you just use a plastic that can optically or chemically checked. works even better if you add the checking system into the shuffling machine. For more standard anti counterfeiting you can also make the face symbols complex and unique becasue marking that will not matter. A tougher plastic will also have the advantage of being difficult to mark in the first place, you cant scratch it away with your fingernail.
you could also combine this with Alfy's answer and give them completely blank unmarked transparent cards that just act as a stand in for a digitally tracked system combined with something like google glasses.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YysCS.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kb2hf.jpg)
[Answer]
How about you use a transparent armor for the cards?
The cards might be irreplaceable however you can protect them with sheets similar to those used on phones!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yXvbH.jpg)
What you see above is Gorila Glass! It is hard enough to stop most attempts to mark it! And in case it is scratched it can be replaced rather easily!
It might be hard to When two sheets are stuck together you can use magnetic sheets on both side and a special device to pull them apart.
I think it fills all the requirements:
* The cards are slim.
* You can stack the cards.
* Markings can be easily seen.
* They all have identical backing.
[Answer]
Prevent marking from giving an advantage;
If each player and the dealer has a privacy shield large enough to keep other players from being able to see their cards, while blocking the view of the others, there is no advantage in marked cards. Dealing the cards could be either put in a box / envelope or covered so players can't tell during transfer.
[Answer]
If your using physical cards it is simply impossible to prevent a determined cheat to get marked cards into the game or to effectively stop them from gaining some advantage by using some scheme to mark the cards during play.
Some marks are so subtle, fit so well into the cards that it can take experts days of study to figure out how it was done. It is almost impossible to confidentially secure a card game.
Electronic cards already exist, just go online nd play any card game and you will see them. They cannot be marked. However securing the identity of these cards to all but the intended player is a problem as complex and hard to solve as that of marked cards. So far in online poker everything from the shuffle with a PRNG to the packets used to deliver the cards to a player have been hit and compromised, and even with 20 years of online poker play behind us, there is no guarantee that other hacks are not coming.
Playing cards have been around for a number of centuries now, and nobody in all this time has been able to design a deck or a process that is secure. Not likely the question here has a good answer beyond it cannot be done with 100% confidence. About all one can do is increase the difficulty of cheating.
] |
[Question]
[
In my world, there is a species of human called *Homo hematophagus* (blood eating human).
Traditionally, these vampires are a cannibalistic race: In war they often drank the blood from their rivals' wounds. They have a blood drinking ritual after sacrificing animals.
Von Willebrand disease is a blood disorder where the blood does not clot properly. It is usually of genetic origin. The chromosome involved is chromosome 12. The symptoms include recurrent nosebleeds, bleeding gums, easy bruising, and menorrhagia.
Fortunately, vampires have an EXTREMELY high resistance to prions.
10 % of vampires have this genetic disease, compared to 1% of real world humans. I wonder if there is any selective evolutionary advantage for a mammalian species from the *Homo* genus to have such a high rate of von Willebrand disease?
[Answer]
### Natural anticoagulant
Reducing blood clotting is such a useful feature that we give anticoagulant medication to [substantial proportions](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1885167/) of the elderly population in long-lived Western societies. This is because the risk of blood clots (strokes, heart attacks etc.) outstrips the dangers of blood thinning (increased bleeding) in the elderly. You simply need to find a reason why this is even more of a concern for your species, such that thinner blood is on balance beneficial even to reproductive and pre-reproductive age individuals. For example:
* Their diet is really, really likely to encourage cardiovascular events - lardy cakes, high salt, HFCS, the delicious fatty bone marrow of their vanquished enemies, you name it
* The negative effects of bleeding are not as severe: menstruation is infrequent (so heavy periods are less of a problem), their dental hygiene is good (so their gums don't bleed in the first place), they have natural (non-platelet based) regenerative powers that offset the bruising and nosebleeds
* There are other genetic or environmental factors that increase the chance of early cardiovascular events, such as deep-vein thrombosis (which is a condition that is treated with blood thinners even in young people): they might have a tendency to congenital narrow veins in the limbs, or they may lie completely still for very long periods (say, for example, in a coffin) which is known to increase the chance of blood clots (this is why they encourage you to get up and walk in long-haul flights)
All in all, the degree to which blood clots is a balance between too little (excessive bleeding and bruising) and too much (clotting and strokes). Evolution has found a balance point for humans, and we call deviations from this point "diseases", like vW. Your vampires would have a different balance point, and may call "our" degree of blood clotting a hypercoagulation disease.
[Answer]
# They are a recovering species
The affliction isn't an advantage. The Homo Haematophagus is simply recovering from a large wipe out event. Afterwards the genetic diversity is so low that there is too little choice. The remaining population has Von Willebrand as a large genetic chance within themselves. Even when recovering to larger numbers the genetic diversity will take a long time to get large again. It is a genetic bottleneck that forces most offspring to have the affliction.
One example can be that Homo Haematophagus was hunted down in large quantities, while at the same time suffering from prions in their population. The remainder flees or hides. Of the remainder practically only the ones strong to prions survive, but many do have Von Willebrand. They hold their head down long enough to regain their numbers, most now afflicted with Von Willebrand.
Though not a full parallel we can see low genetic diversity in many species because of near extinction events. Iirc one of the big cats in Africa has suffered a near extinction event, causing most of the lineage to be traced back to a small number of the species. This includes genetic defects.
Do note that low genetic diversity can also wipe out the species. Genetic problems like Von Willebrand can more easily spread within the population and further mutations can make this worse. But if they survive, any genetic makeup will stay with them for a long time. Regardless whether it is good or bad.
[Answer]
## They smell GREAT
To other vampires, of course. You think gingival bleeding smells good to us?
No, the sweet scent of blood makes these vampires the equivalent of a girl with the genuinely great smelling perfume. Or maybe the girl who just piles it on but the young men like it even though it's actually rather pungent.
Vampire women, in their turn, are thrilled with a husband who spontaneously nosebleeds during intimate times.
Obviously blood tastes good too, and bruising is beautiful and alluring. Unwise vampires that use Instagram too much self harm in order to look hot. Which is vapid, but true to life.
[Answer]
# It doesn't substantially affect their survival:
A genetic disease is self-limiting if it has a significant effect on survival and reproduction. If the disease is likely to kill you before you have kids, the frequency goes down.
Mutations constantly affect every living thing. A gene that has zero effect on survival gradually acquires more and more mutations. These mutations eventually will cause the gene to be unable to perform the task it was originally evolved to do. This is why fish in caves have their eyes slowly degenerate. The genes for the eyes gradually acquired mutations, but these mutations didn't effect survival.
**Your vampires have a ready source of Von Willebrand factor** - human blood. High prion resistance allows their bodies to incorporate a wide variety of proteins (especially those free-floating in the circulation) directly from food. They absorb the intact protein directly from their food and incorporate it into their circulatory system. So while they may still have some of the superficial effects of the disease, the external doses of vWF prevent the more profound symptoms and allow those with the disease to survive.
# Advantages:
Advantages to having such a disease are not going to be direct. You need your blood, and it is harming you to lose it. But we can come up with some possible reasons that may or may not make sense in your setting.
* **Ritual:** You vampire society has blood-letting rituals that demonstrate self-control, faithfulness, or subservience. In these rituals, the individuals who bleed for the longest are considered to have some virtue - self control since they haven't fed on blood recently and bleed longer, faithfulness because a long ritual bleed is associated with holiness, or subservience since a long bleed fed on by a lord leaves the lord pleased with their servant. All these might potentially favor the survival or improved reproductive opportunities for individuals (especially since the disadvantages can be treated by drinking blood).
* **Overdosing**: [High levels of vWF](https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.STR.0000244767.39962.f7) can be associated with an increased risk of strokes. Since your vampires absorb vWF and other clotting factors from their prey, they are at risk for strokes if feeding frequently. Individuals with Von Willebrand's disease are less able to clot, and are thus less vulnerable from strokes due to overfeeding.
[Answer]
**A terrible plague has recently swept through the population**
A terrible, blood coagulating plauge has recently run through the Homo hematophagous population. Members of the population with Von Willebrand's disease, (or those who have one copy of the gene for it) are immune to the effects of this disease. For real world examples, see sickle cell gene carriers increased immunity to malaria.
This would provide a selective advantage that is likely to result in a considerably higher rate than in the base human population
[Answer]
**Clotting agent comes from the victims**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KmPms.png)
[Painting by Kam on Pinterest](https://www.pinterest.ie/pin/358528820340922945/)
10% prevalence of anything is no advantage for the species as a whole. More likely, the disease is simply less crippling for the vampires than for normal humans. This means it is not selected against.
Blood is not a good source of food for humans. Fortunately Vampires have a different metabolism. They recycle some of the components of the victims' blood into their own blood, instead of breaking them down and reassembling.
In particular they do not digest the von Willebrand clotting factor. They just move it from the stomach into their own bloodstream.
Even the other 90% of vampires don't produce a lot of clotting factor. They get it from their victims.
Not until the vampire goes a few weeks without drinking blood, does their von Willebrand disease become visible.
Historically this was not obvious since all vampires either drank blood regularly or died. It has become a problem in the modern age however, when vampires increased their population and moved to cities and started developing processed alternatives to blood.
[Answer]
You could pattern it after an actual human disease such as [sickle cell disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease). The gene which causes it is recessive, so you only get the disease if both parents carry the gene. But if you only get it from one parent, you get protection against Malaria which is definitely a selective evolutionary advantage.
[Answer]
**They had a natural predator and used to live substantially shorter lives**
A natural predator killed most of the population before/around reaching the age where VWB symptoms onset started to become a problem, and therefore there was never a natural selection reason for the population's DNA diversity to stray away from the genes.
[Answer]
There is if you want one; not if you don't.
This is your world and all its rules, including selective evolutionary advantage, are up to you to first define and then explain.
If it helps a mammalian species from the Homo genus to have a high rate of von Willebrand disease, why not show that - or at worst, state it - and support it with details?
What Von Willebrand disease is matters how?
] |
[Question]
[
How possible would it be to have guns & melee co-exist in a near future setting? In this setting genetic modification is possible but difficult to do to currently alive humans. Humans have spread around the solar system but 90% of anything worth something outside of raw mineral resources is on earth & a few very large space stations. Lasers, rail guns & other miscellaneous energy weaponry is relatively common but 80% of the ranged weaponry that melee units would face would be conventional, light gas gun & ETC firearms.
Edit: When i say "co-exist" i mean in the sense of firearms still being the primary method of warfare, with melee units being another component of combined arms. With Infantry/Armour/Artillery being replaced with Infantry/Armour/Artillery/Melee.
[Answer]
I can't believe no one else has said this yet. All you need is...
### Tight quarters
Mythbusters tested the whole "bring a knife to a gunfight" thing, and *under a certain distance*, the knife actually wins. Also:
* Melee weapons generally don't need ammunition.
* Melee weapons generally need little maintenance.
* In some situations, it can be *faster* to attack with a melee weapon than with a ranged weapon.
* Melee weapons can be very quiet. Firearms, even suppressed, are loud and will, at minimum, alert your enemy that *something* is going on.
* It may be easier to conceal a melee weapon.
* A sheathed knife is very safe but can be used almost instantly. A firearm that's ready to use might discharge unintentionally.
Basically, there are plenty of potential advantages to melee weapons *if* you will usually survive until you are close enough to use them. If you're facing an enemy across an open field, they're not a good choice. If you're constantly maneuvering through tight quarters with visibility rarely more than a few feet, a melee weapon might be a better choice. *Especially* if you're in tight spaces *and* trying to be stealthy.
[Answer]
Do you need melee-only units or units with additional melee weapons?
* **Safe use in space stations and artificial habitats.**
A bullet or laser beam that could go through body armor would also go through bulkheads. So all "multiple environment capable" troops are trained with their primary firearm or beam weapon and also with a secondary melee weapon like a bayonet, cutlass/machete, or axe.
* **Batons for riot control.**
When riot troops have rifles or handguns, the rioters might not *quite* believe that they'll be used -- until the troops fire. Which might not be in the interest of the troops, either. A rubber baton or a solid cudgel can be used to break bones without long body counts.
[Answer]
**Go Medieval.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4OP5g.png)
In several historical times and places, the average peon would not be allowed to own a weapon, and especially not a status symbol weapon like a sword.
However, agricultural tools would of course be legal, which means they were often used as weapons. Think sticks, flails, scythes, knifes, etc. This is why your typical manga ninja is proficient in the use of all sorts of cutting, bashing and dismembering implements that are somewhat impractical, but offer plausible deniability.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TTWQ8.jpg)
"Yes, Mr. Officer, this is actually a plasma cutter, for mining, absolutely. For cutting rocks, and occasionally tentacles. You know what happens on these asteroids."
Onboard a sci-fi spaceship, anything that can make holes in the hull, or in the reactor core or any other sensitive equipment... is bound to be highly regulated. Even if the security force carries guns, they would prefer to use stun batons or the like. So if there is a fight, it will probably be with weapons that don't make holes. And even if one side has guns, it would be in their interest to use them very carefully, which puts them at a disadvantage since it would force them to think a lot before firing, thus wasting time. They would probably use fragmenting slugs or space buckshot to make sure there is not too much overpenetration in walls. And armour piercing ammo would be extremely dangerous to us: if it makes holes in armor, it will also make holes in an oxygen pressure tank, for example. Explosives are also not a great idea.
Add a layer of bureaucracy, red tapes and rules and you can easily get guns and ammunition that are either wimpy or totally impractical.
There are plenty of melee weapons that can not be made illegal, especially in a sci-fi setting where you won't be limited to the usual heavy wrench or crowbar: you could also have various high-tech tools for metalworking, mining, welding, etc.
Plasma is especially nice because it's AWESOME, it will cut and burn savagely at short range, and quickly dissipate in the air. So it would actually be pretty safe, except for whoever is on the receiving end. Also a plasma cutter has to be a melee weapon (unlike in Dead Space) because you need to strike the workpiece to spark the electric arc.
[Answer]
**BioArmor**
Advances in robotics and medicine have resulted in a bio-armor that can take care of the soldier wearing it. Modern medicine (including transplant of organs grown on pigs) has made that virtually any bullet that does not go through the brain or heart is survivable without that much trauma. The bio-armor is not only bulletproof (specially a small patch protecting the heart), it monitorizes the soldier's health and applies first-aid treatments and drugs. Its bulletproof capabilities mean that soldiers are virtually inmune to small calibers, so weapons have returned to old 7.62mm or bigger calibers.
The commonest ammo is 7.62 piercing, but the problem is piercing ammo, while it's able to pass through the armor, provokes small, straight, not too so lethal wounds. Bio-armor provides instant compression in the wound, powerfull painkillers and blood coagulants which allow the soldier to continue fighting for some minutes before requiring more serious treatment, so warfare doctrine has evolved to a close-quarters-combat-as-soon-as-possible which sees soldiers charging fiercely towards enemy positions, taking damage, then finishing their enemies in hand-to-hand combat, then being healed by the medical unit which follows them. While firearms are still useful, blades and hammers stop or kill your oponents in a much more efficient way.
**Cyborgs**
Modern soldiers are almost all cyborgs. With most organs replaced by redundant biological or mechanical systems, only the brain remains from its original human body (because we haven't figured out how to substitute it with microchips yet). As such, a sniper can still kill someone with a heavy piercing bullet across their armor-reinforced heads, but when battle rages on headshots are not that easy, and hitting any other part of the body is not that useful.
Grenades, rocket launchers and big hollow point bullets aim at destroyin part of their bodies while at range, but cutting their limbs or their necks with your blade, or smashing their skulls works just better.
[Answer]
To borrow from Dune, kinetic screens. Any object moving fast such as a bullet, get blocked, but slow moving blades can pass through the screen.
[Answer]
Superior protection to fire arms so it requires several hits to just injure someone let alone kill them and melee weapons with high enough power or capabilities to overcome that armor.
Normally when a better armor is introduced mankind increases the bullet size. Larger bullets means more kinetic energy and higher penetration. Large enough bullets can even break bones if they don't penetrate due to the forces involved. However larger bullets means less ammo and more weight (I'm ignoring recoil since your armor can apparently absorb the kinetic impact). If you have a melee weapon with properties great against that armor it might become more useful to bring that melee weapon instead of the bulky and short on ammo fire arms.
[Answer]
You could have a global organisations law, prohibiting weapons exceeding a certain caliber / damage potential because after horrible war number XX the UN of that time wanted to humanise warfare. If on the other hand, armor is not limited in technological development and melee too, there would be a scenario. You have to make up a plausible enforcement of the prohibition, maybe good controlled internet where weapon manufacturers leave traces or simply other illegal activity just generating much more money. Maybe even the organized crime is quite content with how things are because with no death sentence and no unprovoked lethal force by police, being a gangster and being alive for a long time is now possible so they don't dare to break this truce by providing strong weapons illegally.
[Answer]
Melee weapons would have a distinct advantage if your setting had explosives gases in the atmosphere (a mining station, for example). A conventional firearm is powered by combustion, which could ignite the air in the general vicinity of the operator. The heat from a powerful laser weapon could do the same. A projectile hitting a metal surface can generate sparks capable of igniting vapors.
A melee weapon could be made that was inherently safe for such an environment. A club made of wood or carbon fiber would pose no hazard, neither would a brass blade, brass knuckles, or a good old-fashioned sock full of nickels.
[Answer]
***Everlasting Fog***
This may seem somehow like @McTroopers answer, but it has a different twist.
The point being in this world you can't always see your enemy at range, so you cannot shoot at them.
@McTroopers focused on technological device, I focus on environment. Your world has a persistent fog that impedes vision at more than a few meters (at best) when outdoors.
This is global, so ranged weapons to be effectively used outdoors must be equipped with very expensive electronic targeting systems, that very few people could afford and the military can't deploy in vast amount (especially for handguns or rifles).
Moreover the perpetual fog creates problems with non hermetically sealed electronics, making targeting systems and other hypertech mcguffins extremely expensive. Common firearms are very prone to misfire and energy weapons beams are scattered wildly by the fog, even if targeted right, requiring much more energy to reach a certain range (and more expensive and larger batteries).
This makes melee weapons an economically viable alternative on a large scale, not only for special operations forces or killers.
You can justify this everlasting fog in various ways, depending on your settings: terminal pollution, wild world climate, weird tech gone boink in the past, some mysterious/pseudomagical thing. The point is, non foggy days (and nights) are so rare that the whole society and wildlife have adapted to this situation.
If this everlasting fog is too disrupting of your world-vision (pun not intended), you could make it non-perennial, but very impredictable: the fog could rise in a matter of minutes on a sunny day, without being possible to predict (vapor emissions from underground?) and lasting for hours, then disappearing.
Any armed troops is then forced to carry effective melee weapons as primary weapons, since any attack or defense plan cannot be carried out effectively relying only on ranged weapons (*Always prepare plan C, since plan B is always "Oh crap! The fog has risen"*).
[Answer]
The difference can be advanced ceramics and graphene, substances which would make light and rather bulletproof body armour. This way a man can be stunned/hurt/stopped by ranged weapons, but killing would require either large clunky high powered weapons, or advanced melee weapons from close range. In this type of cambat melee would mostly, but not exclusively, be to make sure people are dead.
[Answer]
Short distance teleportation, or as the grunts fondly call it, **blinking**.
With the laser daggers(expandable to long sword by thought) built into their blink suits, melee soldiers have actually, typically, become more effective than the average soldier with a rifle. While the suits are extremely expensive, a group of 10 typically wipes out a regiment of riflemen with ease.
You see the suits don't rely on the solider's reaction time, but the suits AI. It detects a projectile being fired up to a mile away (flat ground, clear visibility, real world results may very) and in the first 2ms of launch calculates its current speed and deceleration due to air resistance(wind included), gravity, Coriolis effect, etc and quickly blinks the soldier forward about a foot just in time for the bullet to miss.
It's a form of quantum teleportation, and gets into that sticky question of whether you're the same person because all your atoms were just converted to energy aka information, let a bullet pass through your energy cloud self, and were rematerialized as entirely new matter a foot or two from where you just were, but wow... is it effective. In most cases there's even very limited memory loss, and some soldiers have even asked to increase that 'negative side effect' after numerous tours as a blinker.
There are manual controls for the highly trained, most elite soldiers, but typically, the suits help keep the soldiers alive, and to get them to their target as quickly as possible.
For more extreme cases the suit can move a user up to 5ft any direction, even airborne at times it determines it's the only way to keep the user alive. There's only a 1ms delay between blinking, so its possible to string together to travel great distances shortly, but of course, the scaled nuclear reactors powering the suit have their limitations. More importantly, the disorientation of the user prevents the most extreme uses, again, unless its life or death for the user. This is another reason very very few are given manual control of their suits blink capability. A rogue blinker is very dangerous indeed.
Many people argue the blink suits are unnatural, lead to excessive death, and are a bastardization of technology for the worst of uses, but many also argue the standard method of teleporting to any side of an enemy, or above, and quickly severing the spinal cord with a laser knife is actually far more humane than the last several centuries of war. Whatever the case, the blinkers are more feared than most any other soldier on the modern battlefield.
[Answer]
With the caveat that this is difficult to imagine outside of specific special cases, here are some possible ideas.
**Cost**
If the cost of effective range weapons is too high, melee weapons could be employed. For this to make sense, standard armor must be able to defeat all ranged weapons that are at acceptable costs, making it prohibitively expensive to defeat the armor with ranged weapons. Such armor must also be vulnerable to melee weapons, cheap enough to deploy on a majority of soldiers, and cannot be layered with melee-defeating armor. Most often, this takes the form of an energy shield that deflects or absorbs high-powered projectiles but is vulnerable to slower, larger intrusions (like a blade). You could however come up with ablative armor or some other physical defense that doesn't require exotic energy shields.
**Space Safety**
A common enough "trope" is that any ranged weapon capable of penetrating armor is also going to penetrate bulkheads. This makes it a risky proposition to be shooting at anybody in space, for fear of hitting critical components on the ship or breaching the ship altogether, exposing everyone to vacuum.
**Space ship design**
Melee weapons such as knives have proven to be very effective at short ranges, like fifteen feet (5m) or less. If ships are designed such that most combat takes place in such short ranges, then melee weapons make sense. This means the majority of important areas on a ship need to be very small; no large, expansive Star Trek bridges, no sprawling Star Wars reactor cores, no long straight corridors. Take a look at modern submarines, which have very little open space. Now imagine those submarines are built to repel boarders (which is not really a consideration for modern subs), meaning there will be areas where defenders can take shelter from incoming fire. Melee weapons make sense in this context, though ranged weapons would still be used.
**Melee-only capabilities**
If firearms can kill a person, but melee weapons can take control of a person (think Borg assimilation), then you have a case for melee combat. Likewise, if soldiers are implanted with an AI that can control the host's body even after death, and that AI is distributed throughout the soldier's body, then a melee weapon which injects a nanovirus (or other hack) could be used to disrupt the AI's control once the soldier has received a mortal injury. Perhaps one faction has deadman switches installed, so if you shoot their soldiers, they explode. You need to incapacitate the soldier before you can disable the deadman switch, or use a melee-delivered hack/nanovirus/etc to prevent detonation. Perhaps soldiers have an implanted computer, or their armor does, which wipes itself upon the soldier's death; melee would then be important to gain access to data and intel before the soldier is killed and the data is lost.
The point with all of these ideas is that melee has to be capable of accomplishing something that firearms cannot.
[Answer]
A lot of really great stuff up there. I particularly like, and would also recommend these three:
1. scarcity of or cost of ammunition for ranged weapons
2. environment safety such that ranged weapons are dangerous for friend and foe alike
3. skill-based augmentations that can allow avoidance and faster approach such that melee is effective
In addition to allowing melee to "make sense", I think all three of those provide a logical way for dramatic combat and relatively novel action.
[Answer]
Actually, I will turn my comment into an answer, that only slightly pushes credulity.
Develop a field weapon generator that, in an area the size of a battlefield, within the range of the field, the Higgs Field is modified such that the Higgs Boson in mass acts exponentially to speed.
That is, the faster a large mass goes, the inertia is increased exponentially. Long distance weapons like bullets and shells could not exceed a specific speed least they not have enough energy to overcome the exponentially increased inertia. Think 'slime'. You can slowly push your finger through, but if you try to poke it quickly, it ls like poking a solid wall. The faster you try to poke, the harder the wall. The faster the bullet goes, the more it is like trying to move a ton of lead, and so it stops sooner due to friction, or just a loss of momentum.
Think **F=ma** or **a=F/m** where **m** becomes infinitely large as **a** becomes slightly larger. Sort of like a localized field that changes it to **F=m^a**
So the only hope of contact is for slow close-in combat with sharp penetrating weapons. Not even fast swords or striking weapons.
[Answer]
**The development of blinding devices**
In order to attack a target with a ranged hit, you need to see it, or at least have some cues about its position.
If on a battle field both factions could deploy a technology that allows to blind the soldiers (think of a kind of hyper persistent smoke screen, or even some light bending devices), ranged attacks would be almost useless.
Probably, shooting blind would still be done (as a way to keep enemy soldiers at bay on an open field), but the bulk of combat would still be done at close range, where the blinding devices have no effect and it is possibile to detect an enemy.
To face an enemy appearing suddenly at close range, melee weapons would probably be a better defense (and even offense) than ranged weapons (like rifles).
[Answer]
Now add to Rekesoft's answer that these soldiers are not just cyborgs but 'zomborgs'. Cyborgs with localized distributed processing of the external robotic extremities, and a 'hive mind' (external centralized command and control). Like a chicken with its head cut off, the processors in the limbs still work, to keep the headless body on its mission. Even if just a lower pelvic region and two legs are operational, the zomborg still relentlessly fights on. Just a hand left? No problem. The individual fingers are still functional, using localized distributed processing and external hive control. The zomborg 'goal' is to swarm the enemy and then detonate grenade-type devices, so the only way to destroy it is close-up high-voltage conducted power weapons applied to specific areas of the zomborg processors.
[Answer]
**Everyone can bullet time.**
Cybernetic augmentations and genetic augmentations are at such a level that dodging bullets at a range greater than 20 feet is relatively easy, and they can twist around lasers enough to lessen the heat damage.
You can make up for this with skill, especially powerful guns, or overwhelming firepower, but your enemies can exploit any lack of this by closing into melee and using the superior killing power of melee weapons.
Edit. Since this seems to be a serious worry of people, assume that they are also fast enough to dodge bullets. A firing rate of 600 bullets a minute doesn't matter, because they'll only be facing one bullet at a time every tenth of a second, which they can dodge.
[Answer]
Warhammer 40k solves this by having the knowledge and ability to create various weapons lost to time. While various alien armies make do with creating rudimentary ballistic and melee weaponry.
You could use some idea of this by saying that weapon manufacturing is difficult due to the atmosphere of new planets, or as you go out further from Earth the knowledge of creating complex weaponry is much harder to come by.
Another option depending on your story is to have these resource plants use their tools to fight. This is something that 40k does as well. One faction uses handheld saws and mining lasers, things that would be easily available to them.
[Answer]
Two solutions:
**Drone Swarms**
Drone swarms can't be destroyed by weapons carried by single humans. They would be some kind of minimal defense in areas that aren't very important, there to surveil and strike small targets.
Through the new muscle suit technology called 'cheetah', human infantry could travel faster than the drone swarms. Imagine a gigantic cheetah with a human head. Making the drones fast enough to catch the cheetahs would make them less energy efficient and decrease their range.
The best counter against the cheetahs would be larger drones with target seeking rockets, sound weapons and heavy machineguns. Airstrikes might not be efficient enough against a target that moves at over 100 mp/h on even surfaces, but AI's might be able to predict movement quite well, so I'm not sure if they'd be used.
Because it helps against all of their counters, cheetahs would be optimized for speed, which means they'd have no guns and no armor. Even if they had small calibre guns, their destructive power would be small compared to a kick to the body by a gigantic cheetah. Also, when traveling at high speeds in close quarters, aiming is very hard.
This might somehow lead to 'cheetah-suit vs human' in abandoned cities, which would be a form of melee vs ranged weapons.
**The 'perfect' Anti-Terror-System**
Weapons got cheaper, more diverse and more deadly. After the third civil world war, the survivors give up their power and set a System in charge of preventing the next civil war at any cost.
There are different kinds of drone swarms that search for any kind of weapon and destroy them. The System's AI surveils everything and can even map parts of the near future in advance. No other technology humanity has can outsmart or circumvent it. Spaceships, jets and cars all have to be built the way the System's protocols demand and let a foreign AI steer them as soon as they enter a protected area. No more kitchen knives, lawn mowers, batteries, etc.
In the protected areas what's left to fight with are very simple things that can't all be destroyed, like rocks and sticks, maybe weapons that can be built and destroyed quickly.
People could have a combo of iron bars, advanced grinding machines and a melting furnace. You'd have like 3 minutes or so before a drone swarm arrives, scan the weapon, evaluate who might be guilty and kill them. Until then you have to melt your blade to prevent the drones from finding and targeting you.
The same could be done with guns, but simply disassembling them wouldn't be enough to keep the drones from killing you and ammunition can't be produced as quickly, so it's a little more risky. Since guns are more deadly, the drones might also punish more people.
[Answer]
Firearms have a well-known problem: Even if you miss your target, the bullet will hit **something**.
On Earth, that something may be an innocent bystander (which is one reason police issue ammunition has high stopping power and little kill capacity).
But on a space station, or on a planetary habitat, that something can be the outside wall, and that's bad news. On planets, you can be lucky that the wall is thick enough to stop a bullet, or it may not. It's not a risk you really want very much. On a space station, you definitely do **not** want to punch a hole or several near your location. There's also pipes and other stuff to consider, as everything is paper-thin to save weight.
That's not even all. In space, the bullet won't fall to the ground even after going through a few walls. It will travel on, adding to orbital debris, another thing you'd prefer to avoid.
So at least on space stations, shooting weapons will be taser-like (a projectile tied to a string with minimal penetration power), and melee weapons are the more powerful option, for reasons of self-preservation.
[Answer]
I got two ideas that might help:
1. **Tradition**: it could be a matter of honor and tradition that swords and spears would still be used. "it is dishonorable to fight a lesser opponent with a gun". This might sound silly to us, and it must have finally sunk in to them too, but soldiers all over the world, even in modern warfare, still carried swords into battle (bayonets of course). You could get some mileage out male macho " I'm a better warrior than you are".
2. **Ammo shortages**: This is probably more realistic. What if during wartime ammo production becomes more difficult? You can come up with a reason for that, but Irl wartime shortages are a thing. So, swords, knives and spears become a thing again.
3. Both!
[Answer]
## (local) Overpopulation
Population grows fast and Earth is space limited. Moreover majority lives in cities, so space is scarity and population density is going insane. If you remember old japanese houses, they was literally just wooden skeleton and paper walls. Now it is like high-tech skeleton and cheap plastic walls, doors and floorings. The walls can be cut with sharp knife (sometime even jumped thru, if older and a lot of force is used) and fixed with a glue or tape or spare plastic. The floorings is double layered, so it is somehow more rigid, but still not fully. But hey, it is cheap and you will get acustomed. Such building may have many tens or few hundreds of floors (like WTC) each about few km^2 big and incorporate streets, shops, restaurants, everything. If you are poor (as majority is) then you live in some such building-city.
Cosmical traveling is possible, but expensive in term of energy (gravitation well), so while there is a lot of ships in space and they bring lot of materials, still there is need to so much Earth based work and only few people from millions will get out of Earth - the rest is working, so it is even possible. Need to say, that big space stations are overcrowded as well. (Also look for Apollo, how much space there was for crew).
So the result is, that there are many rich people and even more well doing and those lives in decent houses or even palaces.
But it is just drop in ocean of relatively poor masses. And those masses are not exactly happy and loyal, but thanks to many social engeneering are not (yet) directly hostile and rebelious. Mainly. There is none simple way to make everybody happy, so the powers try to keep status quo. There is massive police (and corporate armies, and security agencies) to keep some kind of order, but small misconductions are generally overlooked, so those overcrowed enclaves are (illegaly) modified, new doors, shop windows, ways etc. are made (and undocumented) on daily base, but fixing it would mean to imprisoned too many people and starting Rebelion now - so it is more or less tolerated. (anyway, who cares...).
There is a lot of rebelious types, who mainly call themself Resistance (but they are mainly local, each group with little different ideas, from global revolution to pub-talking and small sabotages/vandalism). People tolerate their actions mainly because the police is not able effectively stop it and nobody likes police. Also Resistance is komonly known for doing only small property damage to normal people and usually repair it later (like cutting thru walls on escape route and later bring lot of glue and whisky) as long, as nobody resist them. And they lives near and knows you, so you rather look other way, "I was scared, so I could not do nothing", "I do not remember nothing", "I did not seen them before" and so on,if the damned police asks you about them.
The police is ofcourse protected by relatively good armor (say like todays SWAT), which can stop one or two shots or knife and walk to enclaves in squats of at least 4-8 man, armed with anything they want. But riffle can kill bystander over 8 walls away, if it miss target and 2 walls away, if it hits unarmed target. And it is not good.
You kill too many civilian or some more popular and you are fighting few hundred relatives next moment and get slow killed just by being repeatedly hitted by crowbars, full bottles and any other mundane weapons, while other ten rebels are sitting on your hands and legs. (And then stripped from the armor and robbed of your guns.) On the other way the Resistance member may have some armor too (stolen or improvised from iron plates), so wall-safe ammo may not be able to hit them effectively.
So you have some buttons too, as it is relatively effective and safe to use - you see, who/what you are hitting and few scratches on innoncent does mean nothing with the courts on your side.
Problem is, that without armor you are vulnerable to anything (and some rebels may be armed) and with better armor you sacrifice mobility - and it targer get like 5-10 room distance, it is effectively lost and safe for today. So you will choose "adequate" armor, not the "best", even if you had money for that. And you choose handguns rather then automatic riffles, for your own safety - court may release you, but angry mass can kill you without court intervention. And soon you will have not only buttons to free your way and subdue opponents, but also swords, sabres or so, which aneable you to make fast "shortcuts" too and use killing force on armed enemy effectively, without risking too much collateral deaths.
The Resistance have similar problems - you do not want kill or hurt locals, because without their help (or at least tolerance) you are done. You need mobility more then armor, so you use only some light versions. But swords and other melee weapons are good for opening "shortcuts" eve thhere, where you do not know any and if you use civil clothes, you can avoid police at all, or at least approach them undetected, as part of usual street mass, if you want to attack. And the attack will probably take place from distance zero, with surprice, but with too much locals around, who you do not want hurt.
Sending military in make no sence, as there would be need too many of them, fight on full with and height of the megabuilding, most of Resistance would pretend normal people and those really wanted can literally cut their way not thru your units, but thru the walls, ceilings, technical sections ... and run away anyway. But after sending full military in you can expect the Revolution immediatelly and loose any legitimity, as you send army agains nearly all of your nation.
## Result
Ranged weapons and heavy armor are good for battle, but not for policing megacities (except few exceptions), melee weapons and light armors are much more practical for majority of internal forces.
If there would be war with other nation, tanks, bombers, cannons, snipers and all the rest of clasical army up to aircraft carriers is good for getting fields and strategical points, but to get megacities, you still need clasical light armor/melee weapon police and good propaganda. (Also any smaler unit could use melee weapons for getting pass thru civilian places to next military assignment - like secretly place sniper, or anticraft missiles on the roof, or eliminate enemy sniper placed there) And you need the population to work for you, after all. You fight for resources, money and control, not for national hatred/pride or something like that (regardless what you make media tell).
And the police would have way more man than army, so here you have your melee needs.
] |
[Question]
[
An alien species colonizes worlds across the galaxy, expanding its empire and propagating its race. However, it doesn't do this by subjugating the inhabitants through force, as its technology is too primitive to sustain an invasion. When a mothership reaches a planet, it releases spores into the atmosphere and infects the population like a virus. Over the preceding weeks, the spores slowly take over the body of the host, converting victim's DNA into the alien DNA of the species. When the conversion is complete, the human personality has been completely replaced by the alien mind. The creature then propagates its genes throughout the race, its offspring looking and acting human but having the mind and DNA of the alien race. In time, the entire planet will be taken over by the parasitic species, which then moves on to the next world on the motherships path.
The species has the desire to propagates itself as fast as possible to prevent itself from being discovered. It has come across Earth, where it begins its process of converting the human race. The most obvious group to infect would be human males and take advantage of their reproductive organs. The alien virus would be able to spread the alien genes far and wide in the easiest way. A human male produces millions of sperm a day, and can have hundreds or even thousands of children fairly quickly. However, it can only affect the female sex, as it has found the males to be inefficient in spreading itself. The female sex functions as a bottleneck, as they can only have a limited amount of children at once over long periods of time. This slows down the spread of the alien virus, risking its discovery before it can complete the conversion.
What would make the male reproductive system an unsuitable option to fulfill this purpose?
[Answer]
## There's a better way
The alien spores are complex haploid cells that (like many microorganisms) are hardened against desiccation and ultraviolet light to survive in the upper atmosphere. When humans and other animals breathe them in, they embed in the lungs. There the spores fuse with the human cells. They regulate the activity of the human cells to prevent immune recognition of alien antigens much like metastatic cancer cells, using mechanisms such as [PD-L1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PD-L1). Meanwhile, the alien genes and proteins have their own well-segregated metabolism which absorbs nutrients from the cell (and thereby the body) to duplicate its own nucleus. Though it is not hardened like the form for long-distance transmission, this duplicated nucleus and a bit of cytoplasm it envelops itself with acts as a spore, infecting another cell nearby.
When spores first infect a human cell, they produce a powerful paracrine hormone (perhaps a gas such as ethylene). The hormone self-regulates to prevent massive overproduction when many cells are being infected, so it is present at more or less constant levels. Until every cell in the local area, a few millimeters, is infected - then the level drops. Using this [quorum sensing mechanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing), the alien cells begin to produce a second hormone (perhaps another gas such as propene) that specifies formation of a special structure on an external or internal surface of the body, such as the skin or lungs, which is a small cone of a few extra human-alien fusion cells with an orifice. The hormone prevents other nearby sites from forming cones, so they are sparsely spaced all over the body. The cones are quite small and not noticeable without microscopic examination. However, they tap into as much nutrition from the body as they can, and use it to produce an endless supply of dry hardened hydrophobic (non-wettable) spores for long distance transmission. These are spread by coughing and casual contact, and can be picked up by the wind and brought high into the atmosphere.
In this way the alien spreads itself throughout many organisms all over the infected planet - any host that its specialized genome has evolved to be able to subvert. Internally, a vast library of antibody-like binding proteins can be found which can be spliced together to make any two proteins in the infected cell interact. Tying host proteins together in patterns of the alien's choosing controls the fused cell and cause changes in its regulatory pathways. The genius of the alien at the cellular level is that its cells are (a) able to experiment with changes and evaluate whether they improve or worsen their control over an infected organism's cells, and (b) they are able to record their results in special regions of DNA labelled with codes that specify the specific species infected at that time. The cells may not be sentient, but they are biologically evolved to be scientists in their own little field of research, namely turning your cells into slaves.
The spores occasionally attempt to infect the same cell. When this happens, they do not fight - they mate. They swap their alien genomes, including the notes they have made about organisms on many planets. One infects the cell and the other moves on at random, a 50% win for each spore. In this way, the alien spore community as a whole can contain a great deal more information than any one cell can hold individually, and keep it in circulation even if a species has killed all of its infected members and hidden itself away for years.
The spores are not released to bodily fluids for two reasons. #1: in general, spores that release to unknown bodily fluids are usually lost. If an organism is fully infected and their "cones" appear on the retina to release spores to vitreous humor, those spores are wasted. #2: the spores have no way to make notes of how effective a particular method of dispersal is. It is not a short term experiment to test changes in cellular conditions - the spore waits for days or months, on a stone path or in the upper atmosphere, in desiccated form. Put together, these things mean that simple natural selection, unaided by the alien spore's peculiar sort of 'intelligence', has prevented them from forming spores anywhere but on a surface exposed to the air.
[Answer]
The aliens have no game. Human women somehow have the uncanny ability to detect their desperation to mate. Protecting the purity of the human race, one rejection at a time.
[Answer]
>
> A human male produces millions of sperm a day, and can have hundreds
> or even thousands of children fairly quickly.
>
>
>
Yeah, no. For several reasons, the main one among them being that the number of men in the world (especially the modern world) who, without the aid of technology, could realistically get "hundreds or even thousands" of women pregnant would be approximately zero.
First, the biological: the majority of time, sex does not result in a fertilized egg, if for nothing else than hidden ovulation. Based on the evidence, the majority of the time a fertilized egg will not implant, which means repeated sexual acts are needed to ensure a pregnancy (yes, yes, everyone knows someone who was pregnant the very first time, but we're talking average here).
Let's say we're going for a nice round thousand births, ignoring mortality figures. For a woman under 35, the odds are about 15-20% in any given cycle if she's having sex during her fertile period. Since cycles vary in length, let's just call it a month. But fertilization can only take place a few days of that month. Let's call it 5. So, rounded out, if our alien-DNA altered man wants to knock a woman up, and he doesn't know and she's not telling, he has roughly a 1 in 6 chance of having sex with her when she's capable of being fertilized. But then you have to take into account that 15-20% probability of a pregnancy actually resulting.
So what does this mean? Our alien hybrid, randomly having sex with a woman, will *at best* have (0.1667 \* 0.2) about a 3.3% chance of getting her pregnant on a single act. So, for a thousand pregnancies, when 96.7% of the time a woman will *not* get pregnant, means our Casanovalien needs to have sex roughly 30,000 times. You, ah, see some of the logistical difficulties?
For a bit of reality, the record for most children is Sultan Ismail bin Sharif of Morocco, with approximately 1,171 children. He was born in 1645, became sultan in 1672, and ruled for 55 years until his death in 1727, at the age of 81 or 82. Based on some simulations, it would take 32 years, having sex twice a day, among a harem of 500 with synchonized periods (used in the modelling, whether or not it is real, thus improving the odds significantly) to pull it off. This would be 23,360 times copulating, so in the same ballpark as my estimate.
Now I'm a geologist by education, so 32 years can certainly seem quick, but in regular human terms, not really. And you said "thousand**s**", so yeah. No.
Now the sociological and cultural: Ismail bin Sharif isn't what you'd call a typical, or even an extraordinary, man. What he did wouldn't be considered acceptable these days as the Casanovalien faces another difficulty: women say no, and harems (Kindle Unlimited ebooks to the contrary) are not generally cheerfully accepted. Now, he might try and overlook that, but the more often he does it the more likely he'll wind up in prison or dead, either because of being a rapist or because inevitably pissing off other who isn't so keen on his behaviour.
So, tl;dr, just because a man produces millions of swimmers doesn't mean he can just go around getting hordes of women pregnant cheerfully and easily.
***EDIT***
Now, for a reason why it might not work at all: one cause of infertility in couples is because of the presence of antisperm antibodies, which obviously treat sperm as pathogens. ASA may develop in women (and men) when their immune system encounters sperm in a non-reproductive setting, so oral or anal sex. Given your proposed spread of spores, what might happen is that women become exposed to the spores through breathing or ingestion, their bodies react accordingly, and they develop antibodies. The modified sperm cells of Casanovalien share antigens with the spores, which the female body reacts to, pumping out antibodies to fight these invaders. A lot of antibodies.
End result? Casanovalien tries to use his wily alien skills to seduce a human woman. As soon as he starts leaking seminal fluid, she has a severe allergic reaction. Pretty much puts a damper on the festivities. And if she doesn't, the fertilized ovum itself may express these alien antigens and so doesn't implant either, being rejected by the uterine walls.
On the other hand, if the spores are targeted at the *female*, the alien DNA has more control over the process because it controls the environment fertilization takes place in and thus doesn't develop antisperm antibodies. And since the DNA of the mother has been modified already, it doesn't consider the alien DNA in the ovum to be an invader either, so implantation in the uterus can occur normally.
Perhaps the aliens haven't encountered this specific form of internal fertilization and reproduction before: maybe in some other intelligent species fertilization is external. Maybe others don't have the equivalent of a placenta and are ovoviviparous, so the fertilized ova develop as completely isolated from the mother, so implantation isn't needed. Maybe others were simply oviparous, so eggs outside the body. Perhaps others don't have the same sort of immune system mammals (and humans) have, and so on and so forth.
[Answer]
One of the most obvious reasons for the failure of these ambitious plans is social structures dominating human societies. There are very few males who can spread their seed far and wide. Most human societies, modern and historic, limit sexual interactions for both sexes. And while men have more freedom they still cannot impregnate thousands of women easily.
It is also possible that changes in personality due to alien DNA are big and impossible to hide. So, infected men will be noticed and sent to specialised facilities for treatment. If someone notices alien DNA mass-testing might be employed (at least in some countries).
Other reasons can be related to the mechanisms of [sexual attraction](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sexual_attraction). These are still not understood well, but it is possible that alien DNA causes some changes that make males unattractive. For example, changes in DNA can result in changes in body odour and human females will start to avoid infected males.
Yet another possibility is that alien DNA disturbs the process of [egg fertilisation](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Human_fertilization). For example, if sperm becomes unable to initiate [acrosome reaction](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Acrosome_reaction), fertilisation fails. Many other problems can occur since fertilisation relies on interactions of many proteins in sperm, egg, and surrounding environment. If alien DNA interferes with protein structure or synthesis fertilisation rates may plummet.
[Answer]
A simple option would be that some aspect of the alien mind inhabiting the male human body makes that human male impotent. That would be a significant barrier to the human male spreading their (now) alien genes.
[Answer]
This isn't answering your question, so I apologize, but there's another problem in your invasion plan.
Even if the aliens replaced all the DNA in all of our cells, we would still be us. The cells still need to function and keep up their own metabolisms. So the alien DNA couldn't interfere with any of that. But let's say that it's not removing anything that the cell currently does to stay alive, it's just augmenting it with alien stuff.
There is the problem of neuroanatomy and basic neuron function. Our minds (if you believe that our minds are a product of our brain's configuration, and I do) has far more information in it than DNA can hold. Our entire genome is about 1.5GB. Encoded in there is the ability to make a brain, but not by any stretch of the imagination is there enough to store the configuration of a brain. When we grow and live and learn, we're modifying our brain's structure, especially when we're young. Our DNA can give us some hints, like structures to make walking easy (left foot right foot), but all of that is shaped and refined by our environment.
The amount of information required to describe an adult human brain's "software" (ie. which neurons make which connections to which other neurons, how strong are those connections, what types of neurotransmitters are released, etc) is way more information than the DNA could hold. You would have to rewire the brain altogether independent of rewriting all the DNA to make that brain have a different person in it. So you would need a way of explaining how that happens in a slow or easy or sudden and undetectable way. The aliens would have to know the human brain hardware really well in order to hack our brains that well. And that's assuming the alien's understanding of minds, consciousness, neuroanatomy was astronomically more advanced than ours and could be miniaturized and weaponized into spores.
And if they were that good at making new minds, why both taking over a planet at all? Why not clone themselves into a deer or a lion over and over and attain immortality that way.
It's a leap! You would have your work cut out for you :) good luck!
[Answer]
**It's nothing to do with gametes**
The Alien Infection isn't based on sperm *or* eggs.
Instead, the infection takes place during pregnancy. The child develops normally, and when they're developed enough, they're infected by the alien rewrite and taken over.
It necessarily follows that the mother has to be the one infected in order to play host to this process.
The male's sex-genes aren't significantly involved in the process because the adult human/alien hybrid is effectively human. Their genetics are more or less human with a few extra functions on the X chromosome to develop the infective parts of the alien biology.
These extra functions rely on the human being having XX chromosomes, an XY chromosome simply won't work with the spores (maybe the aliens tailored their infection to some random person they abducted and they happened to pick up a woman instead of a man)
[Answer]
How about, alien DNA is passed only via attaching to human mitochondrial dna and thus passed only from mother to children.
[Answer]
You know who had a lot of kids?
>
> “The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them
> before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them
> bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.” ―
> Genghis Khan
>
>
>
How did he allegedly do it? Why, by eliminating the competition!
This is the flaw in this plan.
Who is going to be there to make sure the child is carried to term, and also not slaughtered by MILF loving horndogs? Right now population of men and women is about equal, so the biggest barrier to any one man doing his duty for the aliens, is the competition, right? And who is the competition? The infected, right? You are not going to die so Eugene "Moist" Pantywhistle can sire the alien horde, are you? Of course not, the aliens are hijacking your procreative urge, man, they are using *spores*.
**No wingmen!**
Thin out that foot traffic and then you can get a circuit going, do your rounds, except after the first few chrysalid kids show up, people are going to view this as a horrible venereal disease. Turns men into murderous rapists, and the kids they have are literally inhuman. People won't get infected. People won't conceive. People will abort. People will commit suicide. People will commit infanticide. Every time a strange guy steps outside, he's a target. Every kid is a target. This is brutal, but so is becoming an [axolotl tank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_in_the_Dune_universe#Axlotl_tank).
Healthy guys have exactly the same motivation to thin out the herd as the infected, except of course they'll be breeding true, so every kill increases their value. So you have a two part initial remedy. Some places will have access to post coital contraception. Getting pregnant with a real kid gets you off the assembly line.
Genghis knew his business. It's addition by subtraction.
Once that grim work is well begun now the aliens have a logistics problem.
How are the aliens going to stop the brutalized women from killing the wee alien bairns? They aint children! Feed them rat poison! Push them down the stairs! Give em some smokes! Hell, give em some pills!
So what is the actual practical benefit to infecting men?
* Healthy men will try to kill them.
* They'll try to kill each other.
* Women will surely use the crisis to cement reproductive control.
* The Patriarchy will be a thing of the past.
* With the focus on biology, how long before effective reprisals are carried out? You know their whole reproductive cycle, what's stopping us from using OUR biochem weapons?
* Women have agency, and won't just get bred by aliens. This is not a medieval society.
They would be far better served infecting a few people, entering the population, giving no sign of their plans and promising to share the secrets of spaceflight. Pretending they are human, and those kids are going to adventure across the universe. They get the same result without the resistance. All they need is to spore up a few out of the way villages.
[Answer]
>
> A human male produces millions of sperm a day, and can have hundreds
> or even thousands of children fairly quickly. However, it can only
> affect the female sex, as it has found the males to be inefficient in
> spreading itself. The female sex functions as a bottleneck, as they
> can only have a limited amount of children at once over long periods
> of time.
>
>
>
This "bottleneck" is your golden opportunity!
>
> What would make the male reproductive system an unsuitable option to fulfill this purpose?
>
>
>
The key is not "to make the male unsuitable," it is to modify the female system to supersede the male system.
Modify the female system to allow simultaneous fertilization of millions of eggs, and create a natural selection process which favors a select group. Then the male's production of millions of sperm becomes irrelevant; the natural selection occurs *after* fertilization.
A rudimentary form of this exists in real life; namely, the sperm bank. The male's prodigious production of sperm doesn't matter, because a lab tech with a microscope has replaced natural competition and selection.
[Answer]
The major reason is because the aliens do not see homo sapiens as possessing an order of intelligence comparable to theirs. Just like humans would use human armies, not ants or amoebas to colonise other places, aliens probably have never thought about using human males as an effective tool to take over the plant Earth.
And with higher level of intelligence comes deeper expression of conservation and compassion. (***Citation Added:*** <https://www.neurologylive.com/view/are-empathy-and-intellect-incompatible>) Just like humans would strive to take over rogue human regimes, none set forth to eliminate - but rather make efforts to preserve - the ant kingdoms and tribes that may co-exist with the human world on this planet.
[Answer]
...if the mechanism already relies on taking over the host's DNA and converting him into human-alike alien, then why the need for multi-generational process? Just infect and convert everyone, in one go, thus minimizing the chances of discovery and successful defense.
] |
[Question]
[
Let's say you live in a war-torn universe, with sub-FTL intertellar travel, big ships, big railguns and big ship-mounted railguns. At some point, people (read engineers) realized that fast moving red-hot lumps of [basically anything] are pretty easy to detect and dodge, if not fired at point blank range (let's assume this to be less that 10s of travel time to target) or anything capable of changing it's trajectory, really. (That means you can still use your shiny gun as a fire and forget bombardment device against, say, planets!)
For more somewhat up-to-date info on this universe, feel free to check the following:
* [Railgun launched nuclear warhead](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112853/railgun-launched-nuclear-warhead "Pew then boom")
* [Force field](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/113058/somewhat-realistic-force-field "turned out to be a stupid idea :(")
* [Multi staged railgun thingie](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/112971/multi-staged-relativistic-projectile-usable-in-hard-sci-fi-space-combat "stupid idea too")
Time to use some lasers. They can output at least 50TW continuously, but can be pulsed if needs be. We assume that since we have capacitor and cooling (read a big buffer) we can "safely" fire those for at least a minute before catastrophic failure, and no need to worry about energy consumption (unless you need to throw a star in your fusion reactor to make it work)
Now I want some armor to protect my ships against those mean photons the enemy vessel is throwing my way. I already have a [Whipple Shield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield) to help survive space rocks and maybe hostile projectiles, but I can't figure out if that would help against lasers. Actually I have to idea how to protect against this kind of weapon (and correct me if I'm wrong, but a mirror sounds like a Stupid Idea™)
So, **What is the best way to protect a ship against lasers?**
I'm looking for a suitable material, or a particular construction that's good at not castastrophically failing when fired upon with lasers, for a realtively light wheight (strapping 30m of [insert material here] onto the ship won't do for obvious reasons)
As previous questions, tech level is several centuries ahead of current tech, extrapolating known technology to the limits of physics is okay, and feel free to ask for precisions/clarifications if you need any.
Not a dupe of [how effective is a free electron laser in space combat](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/107134/how-effective-is-a-free-electron-laser-in-space-combat "Did you even bother reading my question") because I ask about ways to protect against lasers, and not about the effectiveness of said lasers (still not a dupe).
[Answer]
# By not being there
By far the best way to protect yourself from any direct line of sight firing weapon is to not be in line of sight. Options range from being behind a planet, asteroid or other large body, to not even being in the same solar system. This is where things like artillery, missiles and other "over the horizon" weapons systems come into play. All you have to do is make sure there's a horizon.
# Mass and passive heat sinking
Lasers work by heating a small area to failure. Sufficient mass and heat distribution around your vessel prevents the weapon from being directly effective. Of course in the long term if you don't have some way to vent this heat your ship turns into an oven and cooks everyone inside, but hopefully you've won the battle before that happens.
# Active heat distribution
If your ship is rotating, for gravity or just because you think it's cool, then the laser won't be hitting a point but a line. Ideally a line moving fast enough that the laser doesn't do much more than clean and polish the surface as it passes over. You could also actively fluid cool the surface, again distributing the heat around the vessel. Eventually this suffers the same fate as passive heat distribution though, slow baked crew.
Active fluid cooling systems could also force the heat to a specific heat sink location, this works until the heat sink exceeds tolerances and fails, at which point you're on you way to the oven again.
---
Avoid, Evade, Disperse, Deflect, Absorb, probably in that order of preference.
[Answer]
>
> mirror sounds like a Stupid Idea
>
>
>
Why?
You have an incoming energy flow due to the lasers being fired, then your only options are:
* Absorb it: this what would normally happen, turning your ships into a cloud of energized plasma
* Reflect it: make your ship really shiny, so that all the light is reflected back.
Mind that, even though you might have a reflectivity of 99.99%, you would be left with 0.001% of a TW, which is still a tens of MW.
At this point you need to be sure that you have pretty good cooling of your mirrors, if you want to tell your grandchildren some war stories.
Oh, if you have the technology to bend space-time like a large mass would do, you could locally distort the space time and bend the light away from your ship.
In this way there would be no interaction between the laser and your ship, preventing your from dealing with the heat management issues.
You could even turn the laser around by 180 degrees, firing back to your enemies. That would be a nice trick to play!
[Answer]
According to Atomic Rockets, just keep your distance: <http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php>
Lasers need a focal point, and when speaking of space distances lasers have trouble keeping the beam coherent. You need increasingly large focussing arrays for larger lasers and longer distances. So staying at distance reduces the amount of energy per meter and will eventually have most of the laser miss. Its one of the reasons why railguns and the like are considered the long-range options and lasers CIWS against missiles and the like. But considering your laser isnt cooking the entire ship after a minute of firing you might also want these lasers to remain accurate.
Mirrors are reflective, but too much energy will burn the mirror and reduce its reflectiveness and subsequently burn it faster. Mirrored surfaces would decrease the range where a laser is dangerous though.
Theres only two other ways I can think off to protect the ship. First is "simple" ablative layers that bleed off the heat by transforming to different states of matter, and using particular metamaterials that do this effectively. Not sure what kind of materials those could be.
The second is extreme heat conduction+cooling and radiating it away. Considering you can fire a multi-TW laser no problem for a minute your heat management is legendarily good. Use that to spread out and lose heat and reduce the effects on the armor. Possibly you could use a Graphene layer (can get a bit hotter than the surface of our Sun, great heat conduction, lightweight and strong enough for armor) for this and have an ablative layer underneath which you keep pusing up against the Graphene so it never reaches critical heat and shows no signs of heat-damage for ships to focus on. Ofcourse there would need to be some channels to get the ablated material out of the ship or the heat will keep rising anyway.
[Answer]
Stop the lazer before the ship by dumping dust where you expect the laser to be!
10TW heating your ship is bad, but 10 TW heating a cloud of dust (even if just meters away from your ship) can be safely ignored.
This of course means you have to survive the initial strike for a couple of seconds or so until you dumped enough dust in the direction of the laser.
(Or you just preemtively cloud the area between you and the enemy
EDIT: surviving the initial blast is pretty easy, thanks to nzaman's Ablative layer, which itself could already diffuse dust when heated, making the response immediately)
By having your lasers/sensors at the end of the ship (where you don't dump dust) you can still use your weaponry and detection, even if it means a small unprotected part of your ship.
Since the dust-cloud is pretty limited in size (and if the dust is magnetic you can dispel it easily) it won't mess with your sensors etc too much, and the energy requirement is close to zero.
Of course this would have consequences for prolonged or large battles where eventually both fleets are surrounded by an uncontrollable amount of dust, but that would be strategically acceptable imo.
[Bonus of this method that just occured to me: if you already have magnetic dust on board, this setup can also double as a measure to limit the enemy's sensor effectiveness (eg. make your ship appear massively bigger for the enemy or conceal where your ship is precisely, meaning that their non-laser weapons can only target your general location (= the dust cloud) instead of the ship itself, making them a little less reliable]
[Answer]
If you are hit by a 50 TW laser, it's like being hit by a Hiroshima-sized bomb, once a second or so. Dodge until you can get a planet or large asteroid between you and it.
On the other hand, if the attacker's laser is 50% efficient, he has a Hiroshima-sized bomb going off once a second inside his ship. Use whatever cooling system the enemy uses, only on the outside of your ship instead of the inside.
\*Edited after PcMan pointed out a $10^3$ error.
[Answer]
**Clouds**
Lasers aren't great through atmosphere. Armour your ship with big tanks of water\*\* - when punctured, a massive cloud envelops your ship and the laser is diffused over a harmless area.
\*\* There may be a better liquid than water for this, but hey, water is also useful for drinking.
[Answer]
## The Glass Ship
Nanomaterials are awesome! Build your ship entirely out of materials transparent to the wavelength of the TW-range lasers.
Works best for missions where you don't need to accommodate cargo or a carbon-based crew.
[Answer]
Deflect it, in time honoured tradition.
Multiple layers of shielding with slightly different refractive index gradually bend the light till it is discharged away from the ship's body.
The problem here is twofold: first the heat generated by the light will warp the semitransparent layers, changing both the shape of the surface and the refractive index of the material. Also of note is that a hit perpendicular to the surface goes straight through. Secondly, the refractive index changes with the frequency of the incident light, so all the enemy really have to do is change the colour of their laser.
Just to be safe, you'd want an ablative layer underneath the refractive layers just to make sure nothing gets through in under a minute.
[Answer]
# Many distant layers of whatever
No matter what you use, it'll inevitably evaporate. You may use mirrors hoping to reflect 99% of the energy, but they'll evaporate immediately. Even with 99.99% reflection rate, you'll be left with tens of MW, which is still too much to cool.
So let's let the shield evaporate. The vapors will absorb some energy and let some energy through. This is where the next layer comes into play. It must not be too close to the first layer so it doesn't get destroyed immediately by the heat of the vapors from the first layer. It'll be hit by a fraction of the laser energy and evaporate. The game continues.
For the last layer, you may want to use a cooled mirror, as it gets hit only by the $n$ times weakened beam and can survive. Or maybe not as two or three additional layers may be cheaper and equally effective.
So my design would be something like hundreds of tiny lightweight shields. Maybe aluminium foil layers spaced one meter from the next layer. They take quite some space (which is plentiful in space, isn't it?), but they're cheap and lightweight.
[Answer]
Assuming you *have* to close the distance and cannot just out range:
Extremely sloped armor can help tremendously by spreading the effective spot size. Add cooling and you can get closer. If the laser wavelength is extremely short, however, this becomes difficult as hard enough x-rays require grazing incidences. Also, if your very sloped armor is a cone, you can rotate to make it a lot easier to spread the heat out. This also only works against an individual laser source, or a very tight cluster.
Damage the laser's optics if possible. A rain of sand from missiles, mass driver launched canisters or [Macrons](http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/11/hypervelocity-macron-accelerators.html) from electrostatic accelerators can damage mirrors and lenses.
Damage the radiators of whatever is shooting the laser at you assuming they're not buried on the surface of a celestial body. Lasers and their power sources require cooling that should be a very easy to spot and target.
[Answer]
# Being far away
It is not possible to get a perfectly focused laser beam. Even the most advanced laser technology will have extremely minor deviations, multiplied over the vast distances of space combat. At close rangers, this un-focusing of the beams can be ignored, but if the distance between the ships is sufficient, the beam may be fully disintegrated.
**Verdict: Depends on how good the laser is.**
# Being really far away
If your ships are sufficiently far apart (i.e. a few light-hours, a stone's throw by cosmic standards), then it'll be very hard to hit a ship, especially if its size is not on the same order of magnitude as that of a large planet.
Assuming your ships are just one light-hour apart, it will take an hour for the laser to hit. And on the enemy ship, while they are targeting the victim, the "picture" of the ship (so to speak) will be an hour old, and by making minuscule (but sporadic, hard-to-predict) adjustments in course, it will make hitting the target quite hard.
Although it *is* hard to avoid something coming at you at the speed of light, it's harder to hit something really really far away that's moving around, especially when your beam's direction cannot be changed after firing. What might work, however, is intentionally defocusing your beam based on the range of the ship such that you have a large beam with lower energy. As stated in [this](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/107134/how-effective-is-a-free-electron-laser-in-space-combat) answer, a 1 MW laser can melt 2kg of steel per second. You have 50 TW, orders of magnitude more than the aformentioned steel-melting laser. You can spread those 50 TW into a larger beam, decreasing your required accuracy a lot.
**Verdict: Depends on how far away you are and how advanced targeting technologies are.**
# Mirrors
Mirrors are good at reflecting light. That's a bad thing, because if your weapon is reflected, it doesn't cause damage. The good thing is that mirrors are not 100% effective, and even assuming the enemy has their entire hull coated in 99% reflective material, 1% of 50 TW is still a hefty load (capable of causing quite a lot of damage). In addition, by tuning the laser to other frequencies, the mirrors will be rendered useless.
**Verdict: Only works if we're dealing with visible lasers/what your mirror reflects.**
# What might actually work
The laser needs to be focused. That is its undoing: By installing lenses to de-focus the laser, the energy of the beam can be quickly dissipated. While the lens must be positioned exactly where the laser beam strikes (which is nearly impossible to determine beforehand), coupled with other defense systems (like the mirrors), enough time can be bought to get the lens in place. The only issue is that the lens must be correctly aligned and capable of dissipating the beam enough that the ship isn't damaged.
# Spin around
Lasers work by heating a single region to the point of failure. To counter this, you can spin the ship, meaning that there is very little time for each spot to actually heat up and fail before the ship turns around. The faster you spin, the less the damage is.
# Clouds
[Answer]
**Fusion/Fission**
As a first layer, use the 50TW to power the fusion of elements that are heavier than iron, or power the fission of elements that are lighter than iron. That would be the most efficient way to use mass to absorb the energy. As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I see that a randomly chosen large atomic weapon produced about 63000 TJ. 63000 TJ / 50 TW means that it would take about 20 minutes to absorb enough energy to produce the atomic weapon. So it's certainly in the right ballpark.
For fusion, you'd need to keep the mass constrained in position to prevent it from just scattering and merely serving as ablative shielding. That seems pretty hard, and requires heavy elements anyway, so it seems like it would be a lot easier to use fission. Many of the lighter elements don't absorb much light normally, so perhaps spray out a lot of carbon?
Ironically, rather than reducing the intensity by defocusing the beam, it might be better to focus it on an even smaller point to properly trigger the fission. This also suggests a curious characteristic: higher power levels might be easier to defend against; the nastiest shot would be one that goes below the threshold of fission.
**Get Out Of The Way**
That's really, really handwavy, so I'll throw in an alternative suggestion: let's say there really isn't any way to block or deflect that much energy. Then the next natural solution would be to not be where it is striking. It would be pretty hard to outrace a laser, so don't try: as soon as a laser hit is detected, reconfigure the innards of your ship to move everything out of the way of the beam, allowing it to pass through causing no further damage. If there are enough self-healing partitions throughout the ship, they can automatically seal up and prevent the loss of air, water, and unhappy crew members.
**Pin Cushion Approach**
...though if you follow that line of reasoning to its natural conclusion, then it suggests that perhaps the best way to defend against a laser attack is: don't. Rather than a bunch of high-tech machinery that moves parts of your ship out of the way, just let the laser do it. Construct your ship out of material that burns through as quickly and cleanly as possible, without dumping a lot of explosive heat to nearby mass. Let them poke a few holes in you but keep fighting back. Massive redundancy would be helpful.
**Combo**
Though come to think of it, a combination of the last two approaches might work best. The big threat would not be the pinpoint holes, it would be where the laser moves and cuts a line due to the relative motion of your ship and the attacking ship. So you'd want to quickly detect the trajectory of that line and move things ahead of it out of the way. It could even be a reflex-like action; sensors nearby sensitive things would slam them out of the way in one direction or another; the only smarts would be that you'd wait for the 2nd detector to trigger to know what line the laser is moving in.
[Answer]
You could equip the ship with sheets of tiny dielectric laser mirrors with high reflectivity indexes mounted on the sides of the ship to deflect the photons (think sequins on a dress). I presume the technology for the fabrication of these has advanced enough to make them small and light enough, similar to sequins sown onto clothing. If the mirror can handle the inside of the laser, it should handle what comes out the business end as well. If you're worried about heat damage, stack the sheets to turn it into an ablative defense. If passive is not enough, vibrate the sheets to constantly change the position of the mirrors. In theory, if the mirrors are small enough, the pressure of the photons on the mirror might even be sufficient for passive deflection.
[Answer]
## SCS
Solar Panels do a "good enough" job of turning [photons into electricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics) to be used at an industrial level on earth. Assuming we have improvements in solar capability by the time star wars happens we can capture a lot of the excess power from the lasers. This leads to the development of SCS or [Solar Cell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell) Shielding.
This excess power can be used return fire at the enemy at a fraction of the cost or could be used to power expensive defense (read [electronic heat sink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_fluid_accelerator)). Whatever you use the power for, whoever fires the first shot is at the disadvantage in this fight.
The next big improvement is changing the wavelength for the laser being fired, which could mean decreased electric conversions for the solar cell shielding resulting in faster critical levels of heat. Making adjustable shielding is then key to accompany the adjustable photon frequencies being sent at ships.
This adjustable shielding would then make good invisibility cloaks outside of combat as they could absorb or reflect background electromagnetic radiation based on it's surroundings.
[Answer]
In addition to building reflective layers and dumping particle screens (water, dust, whatever), if possible keep your ship rotating about an axis perpendicular to the beam. Damage is nonlinearly dependent on dwell time, so by rotating you reduce the duty cycle on any given spot. (technique is actually proposed for current-year Terran missiles to defend against DEWs)
[Answer]
Use a lot of very small [retroreflectors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector) on your hull.
A retroreflector is a special type of construct that enables incoming light to be sent back to the overall direction of the source with minimal scaterring.
If your enemy fires a laser into your direction and it hits a retroreflector, he is firing back into his own laser cannon - he will do some damage to you in the process, sure, but in the end his weapons will be taken out of comission in a very explosive way almost at the same instant they fire it.
This has the advantage of instant retribution - hopefully, his lasers won't be able to fire long enough to damage your hull but will fire long enough to destroy themselves. Lasers are delicate things, and probably won't withstand the extra energy being pumped back at them in this sudden manner.
[Answer]
Along with my answer here:
**[In a future where lasers are the weapon of choice, why not wear mirrors?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96890/in-a-future-where-lasers-are-the-weapon-of-choice-why-not-wear-mirrors/96905#96905)**, you will want to consider the wavelength of the lasers, as different materials react to different wavelengths differently.
Mirrors can be reflective to just visible light, just UV, or probably a variety of other ranges of light. The material of the reflective portion of a mirror is also critical. When using my 80 watt CO2 laser cutter, I can't etch the reflective side of a mirror, but I can etch the back of the mirror to remove the reflective material, but only for some types of mirrors.
At the bottom of my linked answer, I did some testing of potential "armor" materials and posted the video to YouTube: <https://youtu.be/WkOQffTjsC8>.
I would suggest Googling "laser safe materials", then depending on what type of laser you're facing, don't use those materials. Often times, a list of laser safe materials will list materials that aren't safe, too. This unsafe list might also tell you why it's unsafe. For a CO2 laser, metals are unsafe up to a certain wattage of laser due to reflection. PVC, on the other hand, is unsafe because it releases chlorine gas at any wattage able to vaporize the material.
You might even have different laser systems depending on the material of the opponent ship. This could have the effect of your captain asking a science officer what the material makeup of the ship is before firing on them.
The makerspace I use the laser cutter at has their own list: <http://wiki.qccolab.com/index.php?title=LC6090#Approved_Materials>. This is specific to CO2 laser cutters. If you're using solid state or other lasers, you'll need different lists.
In my linked answer, I also have a list for different protection methods that could be adapted to "space lasers of TW" power. It includes all kind of safety goggles, windows, and other documentation.
<http://www.lasersafetyindustries.com/Selecting_Laser_Safety_Glasses_Goggles_and_Protection_s/55.htm>
As far as mass and heat sinks are concerned, industrial lasers of the KW range can cut 1" (25.4mm) thick steel and thicker with relative ease. Rotating, changing direction, or anything so "the laser won't be hitting a point but a line" will effectively be cutting your hull, or even your ship, into multiple pieces. A few punctures are much easier to deal with than gouges or a massive amount of punctures. Just ask the Titanic crew and designer.
Solar panels only work with certain waves lengths, only convert a fraction of the light to electricity, and have a maximum amount of light they can deal with.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency>
As far as the "glass ship" is concerned, what about the organics within? They'll get the full blast of the laser instead of your ship, so will any wiring and anything else that can't be made transparent.
Using water as clouds, coolant, or other materials for the same all take mass that a ship would have to accelerate, which there's a point at which this becomes detrimental to your space fight. What is more important, maneuverability or attempting to deal with the laser directly?
A "space laser" would attempt to be a perfectly collimated beam, so that it would have the same effect at 1 AU as it is at 0.1 AU, as well as 10 AU. Current technology doesn't allow that to happen, but future tech could bring that much closer to ideal. This means that simple distance may not be an option.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimated_light>
As for "not be there", it's pretty hard to avoid something that travels at the speed of light. You have no way to detect a laser in time, then move out of it's way unless they miss and you see dust vaporizing in it's path or you have precognition. Even if this happens, the sniper/bombardier/targeting specialist/computer/whatever will be able to re-aim the laser faster than your ship can get out of the way.
Getting behind a planet is a decent idea, but how long is it going to take to do that? And is your opponent going to be following you there? How will you fire your laser back?
**What might work** is a lens to de-focus the laser. A laser cutter works with a collimated beam of laser, then passes it through a lens to focus it at the surface of the material you are trying to cut. If you do the reverse, it'll spread the laser light to be much less effective over a much larger area. You can move a "small" lens of 12" (304.8mm) (or whatever size you need) and it's framework faster than you can a 1 million ton spaceship.
In a laser cutter, you have to clean the lens on occasion. I've accidentally put the lens in backwards, and then it has next to no cutting power. Even the collimated beam has more cutting power than the light going "backwards" through the focusing lens.
Also, a lens that bends the light to a different angle, like a prism, would help, if you can get it to bend far enough to avoid your hull entirely. Something like fiber optic cable, at a massively enlarged scale, might work. Optic cable has a minimum bending radius, but if you keep that in mind, you could shoot the laser right back, without using mirrors.
<http://www.fiber-optic-transceiver-module.com/is-bend-radius-really-a-concern.html>
As a reminder, this question has a "science-based" tag, not "hard-science", so please remember this when making comments. I do not pretend to have all the answers, just the ones I wrote down. Unfortunately, with all the answers I wrote down, it would be pretty easy to think I am pretending to have all the answers. ;-)
[Answer]
It's possible to cancel out light waves using other waves 180 degrees out of phase. How about a defensive laser or light turret that calibrates to match incoming laser fire with 180 degree phase difference to cancel out the attack? It wouldn't be perfect and would take a moment to calibrate, which adds a bit of drama and means lasers would still be dangerous.
[Answer]
I think we should consider refractive meta materials, these are entirely manmade materials that refract light around the object without absorption, current designs include similar materials like a teflon substrate with ceramic cylinders, but this can only be designed to defend against one frequency at a time. In the future we may have a material that could refract all or most frequencies.
[Answer]
# Jinking, Fairy Dust and Plasma Mirrors
Terawatt lasers requires presence of mind, but even this cannot beat the **absence of body**. Never be whenever the shooter is aiming at. You do this by taking care never to come too close to potential threat sources, and never following a straight line. Granted, this means you're spending a lot of reaction mass. On the other hand, the ship could be equipped with a secondary tethered ballast ship, and travel in sync with that. By rotating around a common center of gravity and paying out and reeling in at random the connecting tether, you can achieve efficient repositioning *and* save something on artificial gravity.
Releasing small amounts of fairy dust whenever the local density of cosmic dust is not sufficient allows to easily and safely detect laser beams through Tyndall refraction (those beams that don't hit; those that hit are self-detecting).
Finally, the surface of the ship could be covered with a layer of low-temperature melting metal (gallium or Wood's metal or...). When heated, the metal melts and forms a highly reflective surface; it also vaporizes, creating a local plasma shield that disrupts the incoming beam.
For better performances you can add external electrodes and create a *plasma mirror* around the ship; this would be ruinously expensive unless you get energy for free, but if you do, it can be made thick enough and dense enough to reflect even higher-powered lasers. Actually, plasma mirrors are being [studied for that very purpose](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/aa74ec/meta) - to contain the energies required to ignite nuclear fusion in frozen fuel pellets (1018 W is ***one million* terawatt**).
[Answer]
As noted. there are many problems lasers should have, that said:
Reflective / Refractive **Ice**
It does not need to be water made. It should have high reflection. It is cheap and can be used for many other problems. As an additional benefit, when the laser hit, it will create gas that will further absorb/distort the laser and hide you.
You might want to have multiple layers for [different wavelengths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflectance) / a way to adjust depending on the wavelength used.
As an additional benefit, your ship would end up looking like a [comet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet) when hit ;)
Edit based on comments:
No counter-measure is perfect, any medium glass, nano or what have you would absorb some energy and as a result of the process, the layers of ice/metal/??? reflective material will become vapour. Before that, it will have reflected an amount of energy that has to do with how fast it will deteriorate. This vapour will be standing in the way. As you write, no mirror is 100% effective, and even if it was, it would have to be kept completely dust free. So the thinking is lets sacrifice quality and go for quantity... After some (micro? mili? nano? seconds, the first layer of ice will be peeled in a massive explosion consuming lots of energy. In the milli seconds scale, chunks of ice would be lunched. Long before any of that, more energy will heat the material - think going to plasma form. Also part of the energy will not be absorbed going deeper, part of it also reflected, though a lot absorbed. As opposed to a closed container, most of the force and gasses will be allowed to escape) It is therefore important to have some really massive layer. Good think that you used a cheap material... Often the army will use sandbags to stop bullets, it is not because it is the most effective (though it is pretty effective) but because it can be cheap and easy to deploy and even (re)build on the spot / fixed after the explosions and dealing with casualties etc... You can even trim down your armour before very long trips and enlarge it when you arrive. A laser that big probably is more like what an RPG is to a bullet, so you need a pretty big sandbag :)
] |
[Question]
[
So a nascent interstellar civilization is exploring the local stellar neighborhood when they encounter an earth-like inhabited planet with a developing medieval civilization. The Arcadians are roughly at a 15-16th century level of development.
Both factions are humans, only separated by unknown means for tens of thousands of years.
The Arcadians are divided into various city states, kingdoms, empires and fiefdoms.
The Colonists meanwhile don't have a prime directive, but they have some restrictions keeping them from just conquering and colonizing the world. Or brute forcing their economic domination by flooding markets with mass manufactured goods and asteroid mined gold.
As well as various overseers keeping an eye on their shoulder to make sure their existing trade adheres to the spirit of existing restrictions.
So instead they decide to take things slowly, with one priority being tying the Arcadian economy to their own advanced and expansive financial apparatus.
However the Arcadians are familiar only with commodity based currencies such as gold, silver and platinum. How would you get a medieval economy to take trading in slips of carefully designed paper seriously?
[Answer]
**Limited purposes at first.**
Medieval societies did accept and use 'paper money' for specific purposes. In a way, there is a step between specie and fiat currency. Say that first, you had silver. At the end, you had a piece of paper. In between, you had a piece of paper saying 'I promise to pay you a pound of silver.'
A pilgrim could deposit money with the [Knights Templar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar#Rise) in the home country, get a letter of credit, and redeem that during the voyage. These letters were not standard amounts and not for consumer-to-consumer trades. (Being personalized was a feature, not a bug.) Roughly that time, banks developed as well. Both applications required customers who did have faith into the trustworthiness and logevity of the institutions issuing the paper -- not the sovereign, in both cases.
So what your colonists would need to do is to **develop a reputation** for honoring these slips of paper. Modern printing technologies would also make them forgery-proof. Once people who use money at all (i.e. not the peasants, if the setting is 'properly medieval') learn that the paper is good, it becomes money.
Over time, if they can control inflation, there will be an understanding that paper is *better* than the local specie (which may be debased at the whim of a monarch).
[Answer]
If you want to change the whole economy then it can't be done without also taking over the economy. But if it's just in terms of trading with them then it's just a voucher. Merchants have used these for millenia.
You purchase whatever you want paying in vouchers (no different from coinage), they buy from you using the vouchers. The convenience is that they can purchase at any of your stores using a voucher they can hide or put in their pouch instead of lugging along cartloads of goods to trade and worrying about bandits etc,. Or they can onsell the voucher.
The important bit is that they trust you to redeem the voucher when it's presented.
[Answer]
I'd recommend checking out David Graeber's [Debt: The First 5,000 Years](https://davidgraeber.org/books/debt-the-first-5000-years/). It directly addresses this question of how monetary systems developed, and challenges the notion that the progression went from barter to money to elaborate credit systems; historical data suggest the progression often went the other way. One historical example included in the book is:
1. Form a state army and pay them in "money".
2. You'll need to quarter the army somewhere, so direct army members to pay community members "money" to stay in their homes.
3. Institute a tax that community members must pay to the state in "money".
So #1 creates the "money", #2 gets it to the community members, and #3 gives community members a reason to want "money" and trade goods for it (because if they don't have it, they can't pay the tax and will get in trouble with the state).
[Answer]
Is "medieval" in the question restricted to Europe in the Middle Ages between about AD 500 and about AD 1500? Or can if refer to Mesoamerica, India, Persia, China, Egypt, Japan, etc. during the period of about AD 500 to 1500?
Since your "medieval" culture in the title is supposed to be on another planet, and since your question says the Acadians are mostly at a 15th-16th century (1401-1600) level of development, I tis my opinion that "medieval" can mean like any civilized culture on Earth during the late Medieval or Renaissance period of 1401 to 1600.
>
> How would you get a medieval economy to take trading in slips of carefully designed paper seriously?
>
>
>
The first paper money appeared in China about a thousand years ago, and thus was used by a medieval economy without any effort by extra terrestrials thousands of years more advanced to promote its use.
>
> Jiaozi (Chinese: 交子) was a form of promissory note which appeared around the 11th century in the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, China. Numismatists regard it as the first paper money in history, a development of the Chinese Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE).
>
>
>
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiaozi\_(currency)#:~:text=Jiaozi%20(Chinese%3A%20%E4%BA%A4%E5%AD%90),(960%E2%80%931279%20CE).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiaozi_(currency)#:%7E:text=Jiaozi%20(Chinese%3A%20%E4%BA%A4%E5%AD%90),(960%E2%80%931279%20CE).)
>
> The Huizi (simplified Chinese: 会子; traditional Chinese: 會子; pinyin: huì zi), issued in the year 1160, was the official banknote of the Chinese Southern Song dynasty. It has the highest amount of issuance among various banknote types during the Song dynasty. Huizi notes came on three-colour printed paper and their usage was heavily promoted by the government of the Southern Song dynasty, the Huizi were backed by 280,000 guàn of copper cash coins.[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiaozi_(currency)#:%7E:text=Jiaozi%20(Chinese%3A%20%E4%BA%A4%E5%AD%90),(960%E2%80%931279%20CE).)
>
>
> Other than the Huizi issued by the central government regional varieties existed such as get Hubei Huizi (湖北會子) which was produced in a volume of 7,000,000 mín but only came in the denominations 500 mín and 1000 mín, the Iron-cash Huizi (鐵錢會子) came in denominations of 100 wén, 200 wén, and 300 wén and circulated only in Jinyang, the Silver Huizi (銀會子) of Sichuan was introduced in 1137 and was denominated in 1 qián and 1.5 qián. Other variants include the Zhibian Huizi (直便會子) and the Huguang Huizi (湖廣會子).
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huizi_(currency)>
>
> The Yuan Government revolutionised the economy by introducing paper currency as the predominant circulating medium.[citation needed] The founder of the Yuan dynasty, Kublai Khan, issued paper money known as Chao in his reign. Chinese paper money was guaranteed by the State and not by the private merchant or private banker. The concept of banknotes was not brought up in the world ever since until during the 13th century in Europe, with proper banknotes appearing in the 17th century. The original notes during the Yuan dynasty were restricted in area and duration as in the Song dynasty, but in the later course of the dynasty, facing massive shortages of specie to fund their ruling in China, began printing paper money without restrictions on duration. Chinese paper money was therefore guaranteed by the State and not by the private merchant or private banker.
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_before_1912#Yuan_dynasty_(1271%E2%80%931368)>
>
> In addition to small base-metal coins, the Ming issued fiat paper currency as the standard currency from the beginning of the reign until 1450, by which point – like its predecessors – it was suffering from hyperinflation and rampant counterfeiting. (In 1425, Ming notes were trading at about 0.014% of its original value under the Hongwu Emperor.)[206]
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_before_1912#Ming_commerce_and_currency>
Thus there is an example on Earth of a country where paper money was used for about 600 years before the end of the period (AD 1401-1600) that you say the Acadian civilization is as advanced as. And that was without people from the sky who were thousands of years more technologically advanced advocating the use of paper money.
In the last few decades many advanced anti-counterfeiting features have been added to paper money in the USA and other countries which the natives would not be able to copy with late Medieval technology.
Of course interstellar travelers would be centuries or millennia more advanced than early 21st century Earth. Thus if they gave their paper money the ability to talk in local languages that might be considered a rather low tech anti-counterfeiting method with their technological level.
And possibly for transactions involving a small number of high denomination bills both parties would have to say aloud in the presence of the bills that they were being paid from one to the other, and mention the serial numbers of the bills being paid. Thus each bill would know who it currently belonged to and if a thief tried to pay with it voice recognition software might enable it to say aloud that the thief was not the rightful owner.
[Answer]
Make the currency both useful and extremely difficult to reproduce. Gauge slips made out of hard/tough steel alloy for small amounts, inch/foot/yard standard rods for larger amounts (realistically, 25/250/1000mm but still something to which humans can relate), and mass standards for the really high-denomination stuff.
The side-effect of that will be that everybody will fairly rapidly agree on the relative value of things, since there will really be very little opportunity for somebody to sell short-measure. And it shouldn't be too difficult to get them to realise that that's because of the standards of both amount and currency with which they've been provided.
And always remember that [http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf](http://www.princeton.edu/%7Epkrugman/interstellar.pdf), written by "oppressed assistant professor to cheer himself up", will serve to level the playing field.
[Answer]
The Brazilian economy had a long history of inflation, and lack of faith in the currency unit. In 1994 the new Real was linked to the [Unit of Value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidade_real_de_valor) which was linked to the cost of living index. The idea was that the cost of food could not inflate because the cost of living was based on the cost of food.
This is not really a fiat currency, but the bank does not store food to back its issue of banknotes. However, the concept would be familiar to Medieval people, who would have donated a tenth ('tithe') of their crop, or the equivalent for some other trades to the Church, which stored it in the tithe barn. The titles were used to maintain the church buildings, pay for the priests and administration, and provide for the poor of the parish, and the education of children.
It seems likely that you could issue a unit of currency that was based on whatever was deemed to be of equivalent value. This would probably not be livestock, where the price goes up and down during the year, and goes down in times of famine. This is how the UN often monitors conditions: if people sell their cow, the price of cows goes down, and this means things are bad. Something like corn should be stable provided there is something in the barn.
If you can issue vouchers or coins based on the right staple good, and apparently backed by the mass of real goods in the tithe barn, then I think people would have confidence in it.
The Medieval period (and in England up until 1826) produced a matching set of reciepts by splitting a [tally stick](https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/estatehistory/from-the-parliamentary-collections/fire-of-westminster/tallysticks/). The Exchequer kept one half, and you kept the other half. If there was a dispute, the two halves were fetched and fitted together. The grain and the notches the formed the record should match. There was a wave of forgeries and fakes when tally sticks were replaced by paper documents.
I would imagine you could make a sophisticated value exchange system using tally sticks and a stable unit of value.
[Answer]
## Step 1: Disguise your Fiat Currency as a Bullion Currency
While it is not strictly necessary to do this, it will speed up the processes if you can make the locals trust the intrinsic value of your money. Historically, paper money was the basis of fiat currency, but it was distrusted and failed the first few times we tried it because people KNEW that paper was not worth the value printed on it. That said, there are tons of materials an advanced civilization can use that carry no bias from the local perspective such that the locals can use it like a bullion currency, even if it is a fiat currency to the Colonists.
Take plastic for example. If a medieval person saw plastic, they would not know that it is "cheap". It was also not uncommon in the mediaeval period for different cultures to prefer certain metals based on if they were gold or silver standard; so, it would not be strange if your Colonials said, "We use the plastic standard here, you need plastic coins if you want me to give you a good deal."
And when they ask why one plastic coin is stamped with 1\$ and another is 20\$ just say because the 20\$ coin is made out of a valuable green plastic where as the 1\$ one is a cheap grey plastic. This will make since to them the same way that copper was often used in gold and silver standard states for lower denominations. You just have to be careful not to sell them any plastic goods in the same color as any currency coins.
## Step 2: Use your superior technology to manipulate the market
Because of technology, your Colonial Merchants can produce things way cheaper than Arcadians. It might take an Arcadian 10 days of work to earn 10 silver coins to buy a shirt, but Colonists can produce 1000 shirts of a much higher quality for the same effort. So what you do is you also sell your shirts for 10 silver coins... OR 10 Colonial Dollars. Now you've fixed the purchasing power of the Colonial Dollar to the value of a silver coin. What you then do next is you start hiring the Arcadians for things and offer to pay them in either 1 silver coin a day or 10 Colonial Dollars.
This means that they can earn thier next shirt in 10 days or just 1 day! Any half smart Arcadian will accept the pay rate of 10 Colonial Dollars a day because it gives them a huge competitive advantage when buying from Colonials, as long as the colonials sell enough variety and regularity of goods that the Arcadians can live off of plastic money. Over time the demand to be paid in plastic will drive down the value of other currencies until it becomes generally true that a silver coin is actually only worth 1/10th of a day's labor. Once the monetary value of gold and silver drops bellow its actual trade value, locals will just melt down all thier old coins and sell them as commodities and only trade in plastic moving forward.
[Answer]
## Establish reliability over generations
The key to a fiat currency is that its value is determined by the market of goods that can be purchased by it. Nobody will accept currency if they can't later trade that currency for goods and services.
This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg conundrum, but it can be kick-started.
Reserve currency is a method of kick-starting such a thing because, in the absence of goods to purchase, you could instead trade the currency for whatever gold/silver/etc. is stored in the reserve. Note that the term "reserve currency" has shifted. It used to mean a currency that was backed by a reserve system, but now it means one that people have accepted as having a reasonably reliable value.
For your use case, you would establish a reserve system based on a commodity that is reliably marketable in the world you describe. You produce notes that can't be duplicated with their technology, but are readily recognizable. The notes will be preferentially traded and stored because they're easier to transport than the commodity.
Various attempts at this have been made, but they have all failed because they were supported by a reserve that was held by an unstable government. "Unstable" meant that the country's treasury was subject to ransacking by hostile entities like other governments. This form of ransacking was the real goal for most military actions.
Fiat currency didn't become viable prior to England's world supremacy. We didn't even figure out that it was possible until the early 20th century, after the US and England survived the first world war.
Thus, you would have to establish reliable exchange and maintain it for 2-3 generations until the people accepted that your currency wouldn't devaluate or collapse.
[Answer]
>
> Or brute forcing their economic domination by flooding markets with mass manufactured goods and asteroid mined gold.
>
>
>
By *not* doing so. But rather trading goods and services in *only* fiat currency. If these services are valuable enough there's going to be demand for it. Now, getting this currency *to* the less developed planet - would be by trading for local goods with a mix of fiat currency and manufactured goods of 'equal' value to the more advanced culture.
Say nicknacks and local crafts for a mix of tools that they can't easily make themselves, or 'low' value items - (kind of like in [Turtledove's Gunpowder Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Empire)) - or better yet things that need *maintenance*, like a tractor - with *some* customers getting paid in fiat + items. Keep supply low and *restrict* fiat currency trade to some customers and not others. Then when someone needs their tractor looked over, or the batteries changed on their quartz watch, and they *don't* have fiat currency, they'll need to trade *locally* for it, which gives it value. Over time, people get used to the fiat currency having utility, and start using it internally and bob's your umcle.
[Answer]
This is quite similar to how modern society, familiar with fiat currency, accepted cryptocurrency. Although the concept is not understood by all, the herd mentality and the "benefits" of using it compelled people to subscribe to this new form of currency. Above answers are brilliant, I just wanted to point out this parallel.
[Answer]
If you dig into what was going on in the Mediaeval period (and before and after as well) you'll find that the colonists will simply fit right in and merely need to develop a reputation for honoring their debts.
Basically the currency situation was more complex than you might think. Minting coinage is actually pretty expensive, and most kings at the time tended to do it as little as possible. And yet recognizable coinage of known purity and weight makes trading outside of the local area so very, very much easier...
So there ended up being quite a lot of stuff in use. Gold was a good way to transport money over long distance due to its very high value per unit size and weight. At the same time though, it's so very valuable that using it for everyday transactions would require some very precise measuring equipment.
So there ended up being quite a bit of silver coinage as well. It's bulkier for a given amount of value, but that makes it easier to count for small transactions.
But... The minting process is expensive. So the king (and occasionally some merchants) tended to mint enough gold and silver for their own purposes, and that was it. It wasn't really enough to conduct day-to-day trade for everyone.
Which is where a lot of the copper coinage came from. Copper is even bigger and bulker per value than silver, but there are also a lot more copper mines, and if you're mining and smelting the stuff anyway that significantly reduces the cost of striking some portion of it into coinage. So copper tended to be locally struck in areas with copper mines, and how far it spread from there depended largely on the reputation of the people doing the minting. (Which is the same as for the king's gold and silver. Yes, they could debase their currency, but if they debased it too much more than their rival kingdoms people tended to figure it out and would trade the debased coinage at a discount to match.)
But what if you weren't near a copper mine? Well, metal isn't the only thing with value. Various non-perishable or, at least, long-lived foodstuffs also make decent money. But they're even bulkier than copper, and easier to damage, so nobody really wants to carry them around all the time.
But it's also far more efficient to build one, giant granary that's sealed well enough to keep the vermin and moisture out than it is for everyone to build their own, tiny one. So when the farmer brings his harvest in, it's just going to get poured in with everyone else's and he'll be given a chit for how much he's allowed to withdraw. (There were a number of ways to do this depending on the literacy level in the area and the expensiveness of various types of bookkeeping materials.) It was not uncommon for these chits to become recognized as currency and used for trading in the local area. So the idea of tokens that *represent* value rather than *being* value is something the natives will already be used to.
The part where you're going to run into trouble trying to introduce chits that don't have a fixed backing is trust. If a chit is worth a certain amount of grain or gold or silver or salt or whatever, that makes it *really* easy to tell if the person issuing them is cheating you. And the standard penalty in the mediaeval era for fraud was to draw and quarter the perpetrator. Obviously this didn't generally apply to the king, but even he had to be careful or his political rivals would use it to gather support, and that could end very badly indeed...
So the fiat currency you're trying to introduce will be accepted so long as the prices of the goods the natives want to buy from you remain relatively stable. But the number one reason governments want fiat currency instead of commodity currency is so that they can arbitrarily create and spend as much of it as they like... Which leads to unstable prices... And then they use threats of violence to force people to keep using it anyway. Since you've stated that that kind of methodology is off the table for use with the natives, you either effectively bind the value of your "fiat" to the commodities you're trading, or else the natives will simply quit holding it in their cash reserves. They'll just spend it immediately for durable goods or commodities that they can trade using their own money (or potentially will become their own money) and the cost of any inflating the colonists' distant, central government does of the fiat supply will be borne solely by the colonists...
Which... Historically that kind of crap ends up being grounds for a revolt since it's effectively a hidden tax...
In short, the advantages of "fiat" money are not the same as, and do not benefit the same people as, the advantages of "paper" money. And the natives of a world with a fractured, feudal society are not as abstracted from their money supply as we are today. So while convincing them to accept the latter would be relatively easy, convincing them to accept the former would be -- at the very least -- a generations long process. But it could also give rise to interesting plot points for your story.
If you want to make currency a central point in your story I'd suggest reading the sections of "Human Action" by Von Mises which relate to the different traits and attributes of money and the effects of credit expansion and currency manipulation. This will give you a good grounding for sorting out how the clash of the two cultures will sort itself out.
[Answer]
**Via corvee labour**
This might require more force than your colonists are willing to use but corvee labour seems like an easy way to go.
Pass a law that every citizen has to work for the state unpaid for two weeks every year. This was more widely used in ancient times but perhaps still within the realm of possibility for a fantasy mediaeval society.
Then, modify that so that each citizen must provide, say, 6,000 tokens to the state each year and that the only way to acquire such a tokens is via two weeks of otherwise unpaid labour. Each token represents about a minute of labour. You make the tokens tradable. Or rather, you do nothing to prevent people from trading the tokens, you only make them hard to forge. So the wealthier citizens start paying for people to work for them.
Quite quickly, you will get a full-time government workforce and the rest of the population paying for it via taxation. You will have to manage the money supply carefully because there will be additional demand for money as the system matures. People will want to start using the token as medium of exchange or for savings. But you have to manage fiat systems carefully in any case. An independent central bank is the usual, although not always effective, solution.
People complain about real-world fiat currencies not being backed by anything but they are wrong. They are not backed by a good (gold) but by a service (not going to jail for tax evasion). As such, you have to have the threat of force somewhere in the system to make them valuable. People in the USA use the US dollar as money because that is what their taxes are due in. So you will need to start taxing your populace to make fiat work. Since many people don't have much in the way of physical goods (taking a pig might cause them to starve) you will have to tax their time and bootstrap from there.
[Answer]
## The same way ancient China got people to accept it way before the medieval period.
The government issues it to pay debts and ALWAYS accepts it to pay debts to the government. Some of the first paper currency was issued in 6-900s China as representative money and fiat currency in 1200's. It started as a representative of coinage, basically a check, but evolved into full fiat currency. The trick with fiat currency is always keeping the government from printing more than circulation can support and devaluing it. You need the representative middle step to get the populace to accept it to give the government time to build up trust that the value will be stable.
keep in mind there are other options besides commodity money OR fiat currency, generally there is a representative money middle step.
] |
[Question]
[
In a country of a typical dictatorship, the government has planted within each person an obedience chip. This chip has a kill switch that could be triggered if the government wanted a particular person to die.
A long story short, a typical rebel group was intending to overthrow the government for freedom and their own interest. A certain evil person inside of the group decided that to kill off a major part of population would be a great idea. Sure enough, the group did; more than 100 million people died, leaving only around 2 million people to take care of the bodies.
Without a government left, the rebel group succeed and become the government. They assured the remaining population that they are not the ones who did that, rather "a stupid spy snuck out and accidentally killed of everyone". Now they are promising to their folks and other governments that they are going to find a way to dispose of the dead bodies as quickly as possible.
My question is:
How can you quickly dispose of the bodies of **that** many people?
[Answer]
**Not a priority problem for the survivors**
Let's be clear, this is a straightforward apocalypse scenario. If a society loses 5-10% of its population unexpectedly then civilisation will collapse. If it suddenly loses over 98% of its population then there's nothing left - the survivors will be desperately looting all stockpiles for enough essential supplies to survive the next few days. Fortunately, this is just one country, so the populace have other countries to flee to and with less than 2% of the original population they should easily be able to find enough food to get there. Dealing with the bodies will be a problem for the countries that decide to move in and occupy the vacant land.
In the unlikely event that this country is so isolated that there is nowhere to go, the survivors will need to pick a few small towns and try to secure them - towns that are close to power plants and agricultural areas are preferred. Initially the priority will be to clear bodies out of the locations with critical infrastructure - power plants, communications nodes, fuel depots, hospitals and so on - so that these areas can be used. Whatever is done will be the absolute minimum effort to get things functioning again - there will not be the manpower available to undertake even basic graves registration procedures, most likely is to pick a flammable, non-critical building with a good firebreak around it and dump them in there, then ignite it on a day where a light wind is blowing away from the buildings occupied by the living.
Once the immediate needs of the survivors are taken care of - enough housing available, clean water, sewerage, power and minimal communications restored, remaining food and medical stores consolidated - the only viable way for the country to survive in the short term will be to cannibalise the wealth (not the bodies) of the previous population. I would guess that while roughly half the *able-bodied* population maintain infrastructure (and hopefully start growing food for when the canned supplies run out) that the rest will be sent out in parties to secure what wealth remains. This will include:
* Stripping unused vehicles for parts to keep the required 2% running.
* Scavenging fuel and lubricants from all vehicles, household garages and businesses.
* "Government approved" looting of valuables for trading with other countries for key supplies.
* Surveying locations of stockpiles of resources - everything from bricks and timber to plumbing supplies to stationery to diagnostic imaging devices. In particular, find as much plastic sheeting/garbage bags and disinfectant as possible.
As areas are surveyed, looted and cleared the bodies will need to be dealt with. Without extraordinarily cold weather conditions, by this time all bodies will have decayed and suffered significant consumption by insects and rodents, as well as possibly larger animals. As previously, the priority will be to expend minimal effort, resources and time dealing with the bodies. There are good reasons that burial and cremation have been the most common methods of disposing of bodies in history. Incineration requires a lot of fuel per body, so it would be more sensible to use bulldozers and backhoes to dig trenches for mass graves, especially as there is plenty of land to go around with 98% of the population gone.
This would be extraordinarily traumatic work. A long time ago I spoke with a soldier from [INTERFET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Force_East_Timor) who had to recover the bodies of civilians, including children, who were killed and dumped down a well in East Timor. Without going into details, dealing with badly decomposed bodies that come apart when you try to move them, day after day, will psychologically scar the scavenging parties. It would become much easier both physically and psychologically after more time when the bodies are reduced to being mostly skeletons with a minimum of mummified flesh remaining.
While there theoretically are other ways of dealing with the bodies - such as turning them into fertiliser - I cannot envisage such alternatives being considered given the psychological aspects.
In summary - short term, put bodies in an expendable, inflammable building and set fire to it when the wind conditions are as good as they are going to get. Long term, dig trenches for mass graves as it will require less resources.
[Answer]
Frame challenge, your proportions are way off.
2% of the population remaining means no critical tasks are getting taken care of. The government as such would not exist. The #1 priority of the survivors would be to survive. They wouldn't care about who's in charge at a national level because no nation exists anymore.
I would change it to 2% of the population is killed, mainly party elites/former government heads, plus a subset of co-conspirators to make it look like a fight instead of a straight up coup.
[Answer]
Time would be critical. The bodies would start to decay immediately after death. Within days they will start to smell. The stench of 10 million corpses would be intolerable.
On average, every survivor would need to dispose of 50 corpses.
Mass burial using heavy earth moving equipment would be needed to excavate mass burial pits, move the corpses into the pits and then to cover the corpses with soil sufficiently deep to reduce the stench and to minimize the possibility of animals exposing some of the corpses.
Finding the land for such a scale of burial would be difficult.
Mass cremation would be difficult because of the energy requirements to burn everything, but also it would produce a huge amount of air pollution and its own stench.
For those who died along coastlines it might be possible to encapsulate some with plaster, if enough plaster existed, and then to dispose of those corpses at sea. Packing corpses into boats and then sinking the boats would be a way to dispose of some of the corpses.
I don't think it would be possible to use only one method to dispose of some many corpses.
[Answer]
Wolves.
Lions, Tigers, and Bears.
Vultures.
Maggots.
Nature is full of animals the would be happy to eat dead human corpses. Indeed, one historical real world religious tradition (which still has some adherents in South Asia and was traditionally common in what is now Iran), called "Sky Burial" disposes of human corpses precisely by welcoming vultures to eat the remains.
It would smell horrible for a while, but natural decomposers solve that problem rather quickly, and the smell would be gone before anyone would have time to dispose of the bodies.
[Answer]
As @KerrAvon2055 explained survivors would be busy to put together the basic supplies to go on. But on the other hand they must get rid quickly of the corpses because when they'll begin to decompose they would make the whole place impossible to live in.
One quick solution would be to find disused tunnels, mines and other underground places. Fill them with the corpses and seal them. Later when they'll have reorganised their lives they could open some holes and vent the gases created by the decomposition and treat them in some way.
After some years spent just venting the burial places they would be able to reopen them one by one and dispose what is left in some other way. There would be a lot of land available at that point, they could bury them and replant some forests over the burials.
[Answer]
# Goodbye Society!
Did you know that it only takes a plague that kills 10% of the population to result in the total collapse of society? That is one in 10.
Let's do some thought experiments: Go to a typical school and count teachers. Then remove 10% of them. A typical elementary school with 12 classes has some 30-ish teachers. Now ask the headmaster how they can ensure schooling if 3 teachers are missing at the same time. The answer will be "we try to scrape by, with 3 missing we can just about work with. Any more at one time and we need to combine classes."
Go to a typical hospital. Count nurses employed. Then look at how many are currently working and how many are on call or have free days. Typically about a third of the nurses are in the mandatory free days, and the stations are at times barely staffed because one nurse needs to cover two positions. Now remove the 10% and... oops! suddenly there are stations that can't be filled at all.
Just those two items show that society will collapse already with 10% death toll. Now you propose 980% times that death toll. See what you did:
Hospitals? GONE! Police? GONE! Fire Services? GONE! Military? GONE! Electric Services? GONE! Waste Disposal? GONE!
Within minutes, the survivors face cities burning down because cooks died and hang over their gas stoves - and nobody is there to stop it. Hours later, the classic powerplants start to blow up or go out as nobody can check the settings or feeds the engines, meaning that within about a week there is no electricity left but for where nuclear power is available. But then vast areas can get irradiated as the nuclear power plant operators died on the controls and the reactors might go into meltdown.
# What to do?!
The survivors have clearly bigger troubles than trying to get rid of the corpses... like fleeing their burning cities to get to a different safe country.
[Answer]
The Nazis used furnaces to incinerate people. I'm sure that your rebels can cremate the remains of these 100 million people and send their cremains to the families of the victims.
A morbid answer, yes, but, if I recall correctly, there aren't many other such instances in history where millions of mass-murdered bodies were destroyed, so it's probably your best bet.
[Answer]
**TL;DR**
Bold of you to assume that I would obey the rebel group that killed my family for no good reason but left me alive.
---
**Realistically**
You let nature do what nature does best.
You don't have to look much farther than the Covid pandemic to realize that 100 million deaths would bring things to a socioeconomical standstill and immediate regression.
<https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/07/us/new-york-coronavirus-victims-refrigerated-trucks>
---
**Utopian cognitive dissonance answer**
Per <https://crimeclean-up.com/blog/human-decomp-without-embalming>
>
> **3 hours postmortem:** stiffening of the muscles — aka rigor mortis — sets in.
>
>
> **24-72 hours postmortem:** internal organs begin to decompose due to cell death; the body begins to emit pungent odors; rigor mortis subsides.
>
>
> **3-5 days postmortem:** as organs continue to decompose, bodily fluids leak from orifices; the skin turns a greenish color.
>
>
> **8-10 days postmortem:** the body turns from green to red as blood decomposes and gases accumulate.
>
>
> **2+ weeks postmortem:** teeth and nails fall out.
>
>
> **1+ month postmortem:** the corpse begins to liquefy into a dark sludge.
>
>
>
Ignoring the unrealistic expectation that 2 million people spread across a country are concerned with "properly" disposing of 100 million bodies I'll just answer the following question at face value:
>
> How do 2 million people dispose of 100 million bodies?
>
>
>
If the logistics were perfect then they would ideally dump the bodies in the ocean.
But alas, the bodies are not conveniently located at the shoreline. Bodies will be in all sorts of places such as homes, cars, fields, 150-story buildings, etc... which will require time and effort to reach let alone dispose of.
Realistically, they cannot thoroughly clean up the mess. You would need to reach every body by day 5 because after day 5 you need a hazmat suit or else you unnecessarily endanger the survivors.
The only immediate effort is to get bodies out of the fresh water drinking supply and out of desirable dwellings/buildings so that they remain usable.
It will be a smelly year but nature will take care of things on the streets. Maybe after a year or so there would be an effort to clean up the leftover bones and clothes.
[Answer]
In fact, you do not understand what's the main problem is.
The main problem is that there's likely some age at which the mind probe is installed. I would argue that it's 6~14 years old.
That means your 2% would also face an immediate problem that another 5% of the population, little children, are now alive but fully surrounded by dead men. That's where your operation will be spearheaded, not corpses.
Also, make it a (northern/continental) winter. Most of corpses will only go bad in a spring, which is 2-3 months ahead.
[Answer]
Most of the country will no longer be inhabited so you don't need to care about corpses. Imagine a large city after the event - its public transit is dead, its malls and office spaces of no use, its roads empty or blocked by crashed cars.
Life would really continue in one or two suburbs close to some vital objects such as military base, power plant, industrial zone. These will need to be cleaned but the ratio of dead to alive would be 1:2 instead of 50:1. The rest of the landscape will be left as is. Then specially trained people would handle specific buildings or cars which need a new owner, on demand basis.
[Answer]
**Food**.
The now much smaller population will find it much harder to feed itself, given a smaller labor force, and infrastructure designed to be run by a larger populace for a larger populace.
Those dead will be in remarkably good condition, since they died without any physical trauma, or from ant disease, contagious or otherwise.
Thus the obvious, and truly necessary thing, is to feed the people. They probably won't like this, so you'll need some way to make the food appear like their regular diet. Easy if they like meat, not so much if they are vegan. Speaking of vegan, modern culinary science can easily make food look like what its not, so that may not be a problem. It is likely that the infrastructure for the necessary processes may already be in place, depending on how much your dictatorship is like the modern world. If it isn't, then clearly there are no vegans, and thus you have no problem.
Also, cheap steak is a great way to show the remnants how your rule is better than the previous one.
You still may need to explain what happened to those dead, and the best explanation for those dead is to say they didn't die, but that may be too late. The chips may help with this, but you don't state if they have any purpose beyond killing people.
[Answer]
Use dichotomy:
Don't kill them all at once.
Kill half the people first and let the other half deal with their bodies
Kill another half of the survivors
so cycle
So why are these people willing to deal with dead bodies:
Those involved in disposing of the corpse will be ranked by points, from the first to the 101 million
Every kill kills half backwards from the list
In the end, the remaining 10 million people can survive
[Answer]
## The United States planned for this
The morbid answer is that this is something the US government actually planned for as part of civil defense during a nuclear war. If you have earthmoving equipment, dig long trenches and place the bodies in there lengthwise. (head-to-toe)
Note that even this planning assumes a larger percentage of survivors.
From the excellent blog [Restricted Data](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/02/29/weekly-document-16-mortuary-services-in-civil-defense-1956/):
>
> Mortuary and burial areas selected should have space to accommodate
> about 25 percent more than the maximum expected number of bodies. … A
> method of rapid, mechanical grave digging and filling will be needed
> for the large number of graves required. … If conditions permit,
> mechanically dug continuous trenches offer the best solution to the
> burial problem. If the machines available are capable only of digging
> narrow trenches, bodies can be placed head to foot instead of side by
> side.
>
>
>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4cWv.jpg)
And the [original source](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/1956-Mortuary-Services-in-Civil-Defense.pdf) (PDF scan of an original document)
[Answer]
# Mobile crematoriums.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/i1EIh.jpg)
You just stick some in trucks and you can drive them around from town to town. Cities would make their own crematoriums of course, but the trucks could service overwhelmed cities, towns, and villages. Give a small bounty of food or supplies for anyone who delivers a corpse and you can quickly get all the corpses.
# Do some wartime propaganda about the corpses being tainted to get rid of them faster.
Express worry that the killswitches may include a nanite plague, and people need to get rid of them as fast as possible. That way people will feel better about disposing of the bodies.
[Answer]
2 million survivors?? No, most of these are just not dead yet. Let's look at what happens after the event:
98% of one-person-control vehicles are now driverless. Deadman systems will stop the trains, but everything else under manual control crashes, taking with it any surviving passengers. Level 3 vehicles might possibly stop themselves but can still be taken out by others. Level 4/5 will stop themselves but still have the risk of being taken out. Vehicles are the most common way we put our lives in other's hands, but it happens in other situations, also.
Note that the vehicle crashes will start some fires--and nobody will be fighting those fires. Likewise, you'll have a lot of other fires where controlled fire became uncontrolled fire. (For example, 98% of lit torches fall to the ground, some will find something flammable.) Those supplies you were going to salvage will mostly burn up.
Note, also, that the roads are blocked with wrecks, even if you have a car you can't drive away. A motorcycle might be able to if the terrain isn't too rough--but can you reach the border with the fuel you have? It's unlikely you'll be able to salvage any after the fires.
[Answer]
## Meat factories
Meat factories nowadays are highly automated complexes where pigs, cows and other human-sized mammals are killed and turn into easy-to-transport pieces of meat.
A cow meat factory can process 4000 cows a day.
A pig meat factory can process 1000 pigs **an hour**.
The US has about ~850 slaughter houses. We can safely assume your +100 million-people country has about a third of that -- let's say 300 factories.
Assuming a uniform rate of 1000 human corpses per hour, 300 meat factories functioning 24/7 could turn **100 million dead humans into grinded meat in a bit less than 2 weeks**.
This meat can then be easily fed to animals (or other humans!), tossed into the ocean, used as fertilizer, buried, burned or whatever.
Whether 2 weeks is quickly enough is up to you.
(The rebel government promised to "dispose of the dead bodies as quickly as possible". They didn't say anything about burials, families or whatever.)
[Answer]
Why not annexing an island far enough from the coastline, dumping all the corpses there and waiting for them to decay naturally under the crushing sun?
] |
[Question]
[
Tungsten is a very dense and robust metal that has the highest melting point and boiling point of any metal. This makes it very resilient in certain situations but also makes it hard to craft stuff with in a forge.
Let's say that in 1300 AD, every kingdom gains access to a magic wand. This wand can turn a steel weapon or steel armor into pure single-crystalline tungsten. The tungsten will be in the same shape as the steel was in. Will tungsten weapons and armors prove superior to steel ones now that production isn't an issue?
[Answer]
**Crack!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/v1tiI.png)
Tungsten is more brittle than iron or steel. [The iron ring deformed nicely under 100kg of weight.](https://www.youtube.com/embed/PwoRpcpEbek?start=120&end=153) [The Tungsten ring of the same thickness (more that twice the weight)](https://www.youtube.com/embed/PwoRpcpEbek?start=247&end=312) started cracking under the same weight. [Tungsten carbide rings just explode](https://www.youtube.com/embed/yHsrUdmbj-w?start=323&end=360).
The effect will be more pronounced with thin sheets of armor. I suspect a blow that would deform iron or steel armor will crack a hole in tungsten armor. Even worse, your tungsten plate is less than half as thick as the steel plate. Tungsten is heavy stuff.
The [titanium rings](https://www.youtube.com/embed/PwoRpcpEbek?start=398&end=414) do about as well as the iron or stainless steel rings under the hydraulic press. One difference is the more brittle stainless steel ring splits after getting flattened.
It seems Titanium might just work for armor. If only you can figure out how to work the dang stuff.
>
> This wand can turn a steel weapon or steel armor into **pure single-crystalline tungsten.**
>
>
>
While not a great metal, this pure single-crystalline hocus-pocus might still be better than a sword made of impure iron or one that is poorly-forged.
I would line up five hundred apprentice blacksmiths. Whenever one makes a sword of inferior quality I would use the wand to correct their work.
It will be a very heavy sword. There is no way around that.
[Answer]
## Yes, as a cannonball or trebuchet counterweight
As other commenters here have noted, it's too dense and brittle for handheld weapons or armour. But a cannonball? Or even a trebuchet counterweight? That density is suddenly wonderful.
[Answer]
Use those magic wands themselves on the battlefield, on the armor and weapons the enemy is using. With these suddenly weighing ~2.4 times as much, it will be relatively easy to defeat them.
Pure single-crystal tungsten is more ductile and less brittle than normal polycrystalline tungsten, but the density means that armor of the same weight will need to be very thin, thin enough that it may not actually provide as much protection as the same weight of good steel, especially if they have difficulty consistently making the original "template" armor to the required tolerances before transforming it into tungsten. Bladed weapons would face similar issues, and might be too prone to bending and losing their edges. It would be very good for weapons like hammers, axes, or maces, though.
[Answer]
Tungsten is a terrible material for making weapons. If you have ever handled a filament lightbulb, you should know that any vigorous shaking would break the filament, because tungsten is very brittle.
Having a sword or an armor which shatters at the first blow is the dream of every warrior who wants to die ingloriously on the battle field.
[Answer]
As others have said, pure tungsten is not the best metal for weapons. But it could be used for arrow-points. There the brittleness wouldn't pose such an issue, and hardness would help with armor penetration. And since it is heavier than iron, you would need less iron to make arrow-points, as your magic wand would increase it's weight (which is needed for a proper arrow balance).
But if you could get a magic wand to turn other stuff into tungsten, things could get interesting. Castle walls made out of tungsten would be something to watch for.
[Answer]
**Use the wand sparingly.** Then melt down the first 'pure' tungsten sword you produce (if you can) and add the % of tungsten required to your next batch of steel (about 10% ?? \* Note: the exact % will vary depending on the intended end use in a modern context) to make a good tungsten/steel alloy. That way you get much more bang for each use of the wand.
The only problem? You'll also need molybdenum, chromium, vanadium, and cobalt wands because for the best results they need to be added to the alloy as well. So order those wands asap.
[Answer]
Tungsten is dense. That makes it useful for blunt weapons. So for example a mace with a tungsten core and a steel shell should work pretty well. Similarly, a morning star or warhammer with tungsten cores should deal a lot of damage.
[Answer]
You got a mass-changing device??
Seems pretty game-changing to me. A tungsten weight can lift a steel weight twice the size. Then the newly-converted 2x weight can lift a steel weight 4x the size (of the original), and so on. You've got infinite energy. Nice.
Now you can have artillery (think trebuchet), and the only constraint is how much force the machinery can handle before it breaks.
You can also build your cities at the top of mountains, since it's very easy to make a elevators with (somewhat) infinite lifting capability. Picture a fortress at the top of the dolomites. Can't get better defence than sheer unreachability.
As for weapons, a mace with a tungsten core could be fun (basically a smaller headed mace with the same weight), but other than that not so useful. As others have pointed out, magicking a bunch of mounted knights to have their armor suddenly weigh 2.5x as much would be a good strategy. To counter, nobody would fight in steel anymore, maybe back to leather or bronze.
[Answer]
### Arrowheads with a tungsten core sheathed in more durable steel are going to penetrate quite well if you can find a way to shoot them.
] |
[Question]
[
The more I compare fictional military vehicles and tactics with real-life ones, the more it seems like aircraft are near-omnipotent in the battlefield (operating word here being **near**). As such, it's a particularly awful barrier for any sort of superweapon (say, a land battleship or a floating fortress) to be any credible; it's just that much of a game-breaker. It's hard to reliably make them imposing when you can just effortlessly kill them with a few well-placed bombing runs.
So seeing how bad this problem is, and how much we love seeing giant vehicles and the like, how do we prevent aircraft from being combat-viable (as in, being any significant threat to our superweapons). I'm currently thinking about enforcing a WW1-Interwar tech level (bombers were still quite inefficient at that time, if I'm correct), but I suppose there are other methods of pulling it off.
[Answer]
In real life, aircraft haven't proven all that omnipotent. They have been used to great effect against nations advanced enough to have mechanized armies, but not integrated air defenses. However, once faced with several layers of radars and SAM, aircraft can suffer heavy losses, and they're expensive to replace.
Try playing or setting a fighter in DCS:World or Command:MO (they're games, but their game is modeling reality) against a modest but competent navy, and getting an airplane close through the barrage of missiles becomes next to impossible. Take off, climb, drop dead. In real life, one of the strongest air forces stays largely grounded due to air defenses they've built themselves.
Of course, their achilles' heel is missiles, which are themselves small single-use aircraft. You could speed up computer development ahead of aerospace engineering. If guided missiles arrive early enough, manned aircraft might never become a thing... but they'll kill your superweapons even more effectively.
To make aircraft less viable in a modern tech setting, you could do one or more of the following. These will all play together very well, with synergistic effect.
1. No small guidance computers. Producing chips is challenging as it is - you need ultra-pure materials and perfect cleanrooms; only a few countries in the world can manage it. Without chips, ships will have targeting computers and advanced radars, but aircraft will be limited to analog technology. Analog guidance can also be powerful, but it requires you to see the target, at least on radar, and it's more vulnerable to jamming.
2. Severe electromagnetic storms, a natural space phenomenon Earth's been spared thanks to our magnetosphere, or [extreme lightning activity](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/93181/why-cant-the-sukhoi-superjet-withstand-lightning) can also [mess with avionics](https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/22612-superjet-100-accident-can-lightning-cause-a-crash). This way you can build a world where chips do work, but only if encased in a solid and well-grounded case. Radios would have to stay basic and vacuum tubes required to survive the EMP storms.
Aircraft can't ground themselves, and they fly at height and through the clouds. Cars will have to be less digital. But ships are grounded by the sea. You can even have home electronics, just with armored cables that look like shower hoses.
3. Just in case, remove stealth. Let's say Ufimtsev never came up with his Theory of Edge Diffraction... Without that freak discovery, it's possible that stealth would've been believed impossible and never pursued. By the time someone else discovers it, non-RADAR sensors (IRST, LIDAR, spy sats) might evolve too far anyway to have a hope of hiding.
4. Keep steel metallurgy well ahead of other alloys and composites. Steel is perhaps the most versatile engineering material, but aerospace isn't its strong suit. Jet engines run too hot for steel, and need nickel-based superalloys to advance far past early post-WWII state. Fast jet airframes need low-density materials to stay rigid, such as titanium and high-strength aluminum alloys. If these don't get developed, it becomes harder to build light high-performance airplanes. [Steel honeycombs do work](https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/195731/xb-70-honeycomb/), but they're delicate and expensive.
5. Improve guns. Modern guns are at a fraction of what they could have been, because missiles made them obsolete so early. Electrothermal guns [can be](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/244624/modern-era-with-magic-that-will-stop-gunpowder-from-igniting-what-weapons-are-u/244651#244651) more powerful than firearms. Modern tank guns run at twice the pressure of anything else, just because tanks need it. [Combustion light gas guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion_light-gas_gun), while they take lots of space, are something a battleship could use to shoot down aircraft at a longer range.
6. Thin down the atmosphere. It's a big change, but thinner air requires larger wings to take off and land, hurting speed and payload. It also makes laser weapons much more viable - lasers can hurt aircraft much more than thick-skinned land and sea vehicles. This also helps optical sensors, high-velocity guns, and shell fragments retain their velocity. Unfortunately it also helps rocket-powered missiles, so you have to avoid computers.
7. Pilot shortage. In our world, flying a jet fighter is the very definition of cool. Only space is cooler, but most get there through a pilot job. It's so cool that the USN gets to pick [one out of 300 applicants](https://sofrep.com/fightersweep/ask-a-fighter-pilot-what-are-my-chances-of-making-it/) to fly their jets. If people in your world don't want to fly... it's not an easy job, it takes high ability and extreme discipline and commitment to do it well.
All seven will let aircraft remain a useful tool, but more for recon than for directly attacking battleships. Three or four will let battleships defends themselves.
But really you should start with the superweapon in question. What makes it not work? It won't always be the threat of aircraft. For instance, a single space EMP blast can [destroy electronics across a continent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse), but the presence of nuclear weapons makes big superweapons naturally vulnerable. And on the upside, ask yourself, what is it that the superweapon can do that nothing else can?
Electromagnetic and lightning storms are perhaps the least intrusive options, which can keep the world largely as it is, with the exception of aircraft that can't ground themselves. Making the flying profession less desirable is also a non-intrusive option - but beware unmanned missiles.
[Answer]
As a bit of an Aviation Nerd, this feels right in my wheelhouse.
Depending on how much you want to 'alter' your alternate world, you have a few options.
That said, you indicated the interwar period (1920s-1930s) but reading between the lines, it sounds like you want as modern as you can get away with, whilst rendering aircraft ineffective.
Before I answer - we need to lay out a few reasons why aircraft are so damn terrifying (this may give you other insights as to how to deal with them):
* Humans can't hide in the sky. I know this seems trite, but aircraft can escape to somewhere a human cannot go. Tanks can be flanked and ambushed by infantry. A ship can be assaulted by frogmen swimming - but humans cannot get airborne without an aircraft.
* Aircraft are fast. Partly due to the requirements of flight, partly due to friction - regardless - aircraft are faster than humans, ships and land vehicles. This means that if an aircraft finds itself against something it can't fight - it **always** has the option of disengaging and withdrawing.
* Aircraft can use gravity and altitude to attack from far away and difficult to defend against directions. This is why dive bombers against the mighty battleship were effective, it's why the bunker buster in Desert Storm was effective.
* Aircraft are nimble. This, combined with speed, means that dumb munitions (shells, bullets, unguided rockets) are relatively easy for an aircraft to dodge. A shot fired at an aircraft from a range of 1 km takes 3 seconds to get to target. Assuming for all scenarios the shot is seen via a muzzle flash: a human can dive to cover and live, a tank might be able to move a bit, going from a fatal hit to just a critical hit, a ship is dead, but an aircraft can just pull back on the stick and that shot misses.
* Aircraft are *relatively* small - compared to a ship or even a tank - and their speed means that when they are close enough to spot them with the naked eye, your time to react is realistically measured in minutes or even seconds.
Potential solutions I'm **not** going to use:
* Special material that would make superweapons more resilient - if it's light/strong/other - it can be used both on an aircraft or as the casing for a weapon.
* Messing with physics or world parameters - e.g. making the air too dense for flight or making the gravity much stronger or making steel heavier.
That said, I am going to need a little (a lot of) artistic license.
1: Radar. We think of Radar as a modern technology and we might think of the crude systems of WW2 - however, successful experiments in finding aircraft were done in 1915. So let's use a little interpretation that in your world Radar was identified as a significant technology and was heavily researched and could reliably detect incoming aircraft at BVR (Beyond Visual Range) and accurately track their course, altitude and speed.
2: High velocity firearms/guns - by high velocity, I mean capable of firing a projectile at significantly higher speeds than current firearms. A .303 British round (the service round in WW1 and WW2) has an initial muzzle velocity of ~700 m/s - just over Mach 2 if I've done my head maths right. Even the high-velocity 88mm cannon was only doing ~900 m/s. We are going to need firearms capable of firing a projectile at around 3000 m/s. Not *quite* railgun territory - Mach 9 I think. How you achieve this - I'd suggest some special form of high-velocity gunpowder. You might have to break the rule about special material.
3: Computer controlled firing systems. 'Oh but I want interwar tech!' - I didn't say *digital* computer, did I? The Iowa-class battleship has a mechanical firing computer - there's an entire video on it here: [It's seriously cool - go watch it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4) Combine this with having the aforementioned radar system continuously feed targeting information (remember - vourse, altitude and speed) and with high-velocity guns - you now have the basis of an effective anti-aircraft firing system. Granted such a computer is big and bulky - but you want massive land superweapons, so they are going to have space for something like this.
4: Proximity/VT Fuzes - Okay, so this *is* a WW2 tech, but again - the experiments were done in the early 1930s - therefore artistic licence. This is what turned flak from an ineffective aerial denial weapon, requiring the firing of tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition to down an aircraft to something that was estimated to increase lethality by 5-10 times.
Stick those all together and you have a high velocity gun, that fires proximity fuzed ammunition, that is controlled by a fire control analog computer, slaved to a radar system. Such a system would be big and bulky - but again, you want super-weapons. This would provide a fairly significant deterrent to a range of about 4-5 KM around your superweapon - getting more and more dangerous the closer you get. It doesn't make aircraft completely ineffective - it does however mean that it's not a one-sided fight like it was at the start of WW2.
[Answer]
# Wind
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yga0j.gif)
To nerf aircraft, add extra wind so it is hard to fly a plane. Takeoffs and landings are a nightmare, as well as hitting anything with your bombs.
[Answer]
Here are ways to make aircraft less useful in combat during the 1920s and 1930s era that you specified:
* More clouds.
* More rain.
* More night combat.
* More below-freezing conditions in the air.
* More atmospheric turbulence, more and stronger wind, more unexpected wind shear.
* More magnetic anomalies (disrupt navigation).
* Delay the introduction of on-board radio.
* Treaties prohibiting armed aircraft.
* Treaties prohibiting naval aircraft carriers.
* Limited/much-higher-priced fuel.
* Reduce range using heavier components or smaller fuel tanks.
* Have a Pilots' Guild with influential pacifist leadership.
* No parachutes.
Moving into the 1940s:
* Delay radio advancements; make radios too heavy or too short-range for small aircraft use.
* Have a chronic fuel shortage.
* Let ground defenders have early forms of radar (and coordination) to prevent surprises from the air.
* Have slower, lower, heavier military aircraft due to lack of earlier experience.
* Pilot shortage.
* Early, poorly-developed parachutes.
[Answer]
**Lasers**
Aircraft are good because they can operate in a huge area and have some pretty high firepower. They can fly above your troops without them noticing, and can fly around a lot of traditional defences.
And that's where Lasers come in. Big freaking Lasers. If a plane comes in range of your Super Weapon, the Laser defence system activates and vaporises the aircraft. Coupled with an AI and some magical all powerful scanner, any airborne threats, including Missiles and Artillery bombardments are gone.
Even better, to counter a laser like this, you would need your own Super Weapon. Something that is large enough to absorb and dissipate the energy in the Laser beam and counter with its own attack.
[Answer]
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7gE6I.png)
Coming in a bit late, so:
## Space mounted weapons that negate aircraft
These things shoot a big beam of energy at planes.
Maybe they are an abandoned planetary defence system. The Altered Carbon series did this. The instant a plane goes too high, it's vaporised. This forces planes to stay lower and thus more vulnerable.
Or maybe big ground vehicles and bases are capable of generating powerful enough shields to protect them but aircraft are not. The Lensman series did various riffs on this, and featured 'bigger and heavier is often better'.
## High Gravity
Set your world up to have 5 or 10g gravity. Lifeforms will fully adapt, ground vehicles will fully adapt, but planes will always be more niche.
## Force shields in general
Providing they need big, heavy generators, it's going to skew all war machines towards big and heavy. These could be spliced into an otherwise lower tech setting by a good author.
[Answer]
Depending on how much you're willing to change about your world, you can do a lot to make combat aircraft implausible or even impossible. I'm talking about changing the gravity on the world or changing the atmosphere or changing the metallurgy and characteristics of the elements available. You can even invoke magic or deities to make aerial combat forbidden.
If you don't want to change the fundamentals of your world to stop bomber aircraft, other posters made some good answers here. If you want to make land battleships or floating fortresses viable however in a mostly realistic setting; they have far larger issues than being an aircraft target. Issues like costing a lot of time and money and manpower to use and operate, or not being able to travel over bridges, or being vulnerable to other weapons like artillery.
[Answer]
Without wandering into science fiction, there are two developments that rendered aircraft much less of a menace:
* [Proximity fuzes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze): as already mentioned above, detonate automatically when nearing an aircraft. Practically destroyed the German Luftwaffe as seen in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0SgC78YFPc).
* [Flak towers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_tower): on the other side, the Nazis built these monsters which were practically impervious to aviation attacks. The areas around them were pretty much untouched. Plus they had super-cool computer-controlled artillery.
There is no reason why both could not have developed in the 30s. Together they would present a formidable enemy for aviation.
[Answer]
**Vortexes**
The only advantage for giant vehicles that survives criticism here is stability. More mass means more energy required to move. Imagine a battleship and a tin boat entering hurricane waters.
I think your best bet is constant violent turbulence. It doesn't even need to be a storm per se. Just invisible, unpredictable and extremely common vortexes that never reach the ground but apply monumental stress to any vehicle 200m or higher. Small aircraft are ripped to shreds, so mankind had to build bigger.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hw9Zx.jpg)
The vortexes have the added benefit of preventing precision strikes on the giant airbourne fortresses. Shells fly into the air only to spin wildly off their intended path. The fortresses can strike the ground by lowering to below 200m and firing straight down, then elevating again when ground forces try to strike back. This advantage makes them extremely desirable, while making combat aircraft a useless counter.
The only way to take these things down is to use your own airbourne fortress and get really close, like old sail ships firing broadsides pointblank.
[Answer]
If aircraft seem omnipotent, it's only because you're looking at recent, high profile wars where there was a huge technology asymmetry between the two sides. In contrast, if you look at the recent conflict in Ukraine, you have two sides with relatively equal technology capabilities. The aerial environment is so high risk that both sides effectively do not fly regular aircraft (not drones) unless they absolutely have to.
This trend is not restricted to aerial combat. In the Gulf War and in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, the USA had similar technology superiority in their infantry and tank/armored formations as well. Tanks could make use of breakthrough technologies, most notably great optics and thermal optics, and were essentially invincible on the battlefield. The US forces destroyed close to 4,500 Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles, and lost a total of 9 tanks themselves. Of those nine, seven were destroyed by friendly fire and two were damaged and destroyed by their own crews to prevent capture by enemy forces. A further 16 US tanks were damaged.
It turns out that War is a lot more like Rock / Paper / Scissors than you would think. If you have a scissors, and your enemy has a rock, then they just win all of the time. As in Ukraine, it's dumb to throw anyone's life away, so you just don't do it, so they just don't fly airplanes.
To answer your question: look at modern air defense systems, such as IADS. You have radars and other active and passive sensors that detect aircraft well ahead of your superweapon. Then you have anti-aircraft missiles or artillery positioned after that. You can also dispatch your own aircraft to intercept. Any hostile aircraft are tracked, fired upon, and dead long before they even see the superweapon.
If you want WW1-level technology specifically, just use WW2-level technology a little ahead of schedule. The WW1-era biplanes and balloons were slow and flew extremely low. The weapons from WW2 would absolutely obliterate them, including WW2 aircraft. On the ground, something like the M45 quad mount .50 caliber would shred the low, slow flying aircraft of WW1, to say nothing of the proximity-fuzed flak cannons and autocannons. The Sopwith Camel had a max speed of 113 mph and a flight ceiling of 19,000 feet. The P-51 Mustang, a solidly mid-war fighter, had a max speed of 440 mph and a ceiling of 42,000 feet.
[Answer]
# Different technology boom
In 1832 the first (not yet practical) implementation of an electric vehicle was made. In 1886 the first patent for a gas powered was applied. Technology can be pushed for many reasons. It is thought the electric car had a good chance to rise when powered vehicles started to become popular, but got bought out by oil companies and intentionally failed. All for profit. The battery hasn't really changed until electric cars became popular again. All that time research in batteries was slow and uninteresting.
If the prospects of powered transport was already understood earlier, or the electric car was economically/politically favoured, the electric car could expand to the de-facto power of transport. The ramifications are huge. If oil isn't the prime source of energy, at least for vehicles, it would be much less profitable and relatively expensive to extract. It has a huge knockdown effect for many technologies. In return,manynother technologies for electricity would rise.
Practical planes could then be in danger. They can still be invented, but being powered by batteries would be difficult. They are too heavy. Not to mention being shot in a battery can be worse to your plane than being shot in one of yiur gas tanks. Because the research in oil and related engines would be lacking, things like kerosene and powerful engines are out of reach or simply too expensive and impractical. The advent of fast planes would be later, or be risky endeavours.
The battlefield would then be mostly electrically powered. Problems you and I see now with battery powered vehicles would be solved, mitigated or lived with. In many ways it can be better, as many old tanks were health hazards just because they used gas, as well as wasy to detect as they were loud. Planes would be non-existent, or impractical and relatively slow.
[Answer]
### Frame challenge: crawlers aren't superweapons.
There's a slight frame challenge, because a giant land/sea/air cruiser is extremely useless in combat. There were ideas floating for giant tanks, giant boats, or giant planes, some were even prototyped, and they all proved impractical with no real use cases.
But it's okay, because your land cruiser doesn't have to be a "superweapon" by design. Instead, it can be the extreme logical conclusion to a nomadic lifestyle. Nomads use horses to move their tents around, from place to place, season after season. Instead of horses and tents, your nomadic tribes could use dieselpunk crawlers that carry shacks and the necessary infrastructure to mine and refine fuel.
And the side effect of a nomadic lifestyle is it limits development. You're limited to what your crawler can carry in terms of heavy industry, which makes the development of planes and other sophisticated war machines rather complicated. You can build makeshit buggies and gunships from scrap, which can be used to explore, trade, and fight other tribes, but you just can't make jet fighters.
Of course, if tribes were to stop, settle, and put their resources together, they could quickly develop an unstoppable army, so the simple answer there is just don't. Since time immemorial they've been nomads, and that's the only conceivable way of life for them.
Your crawlers aren't purpose-built superweapons, they're mobile villages that have become armed and armoured to defend themselves against hostile tribes. They wouldn't be overwhelmingly armed and armoured though, because that's weight you have to carry everywhere you go, but it would be enough to balance against the primitive aircraft they are able to build.
This would be very compatible with a WWI/Interwar sort of dieselpunk tech level.
[Answer]
All Radars are large and *very very good* - and there's no real viable way to detect them on an aircraft.
Basically devices too large to fit on an aircraft, *but* your land based ones could tell you the inseam size of the pilot, and your naval systems are just as good
You also have extremely well developed and low cost air defences.Even though you don't have active or semi active radar guided missile systems alternatives exist that work efficiently
Between extremely precise tracking of objects as small as a anti aircraft missile, and the development of extremely accurate wire guided and infrared anti aircraft missiles, the lifespan of any reasonably sized combat aircraft is measured in minutes or seconds rendering them unusable.
This also makes cruise missiles and rocketry less efficent. You're ending up either with mass barrages of rockets and 'classic' artillery and naval guns being more sensible. While CIWS type systems are impractical, you can still take down rockets and missiles with a wall of lead in the general direction
[Answer]
We already have a suggestion of lowering atmospheric pressure to make flight harder. I'm going to propose the reverse--raise atmospheric pressure considerably: flight is easy, going fast is hard. Planes become very vulnerable to ground fire.
And a more general nerf: lower oxygen content. This influences all air-breathing combustion power sources but especially jets. Note that life does not care--our lungs care about the partial pressure of oxygen. Total pressure only matters at the ends--at very low pressures the vapor pressure of water evaporating in the lungs limits the minimum pressure and at high pressures it's the effects of the stuff other than oxygen. (And a critter that evolved to the world won't have this problem with high pressure.)
[Answer]
You could use birds, imagine a world that has large flocks of birds similar to passenger pigeons but all the time. bird flocks so thick they blot out the sun, any plane trying to fly will see its engine wrecked in short order. You can still have planes but the tech will not advance as fast AND even when you have them you will find them hard to use.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9L6n3.png)
[Answer]
Your only real option is to simply declare aircraft impossible. Do so without any explanation of why this is. The explanation won't make any sense, so no good will come from drawing attention to it.
Now you can get on with telling your story.
*The story isn't about the lack of aircraft, right?*
Fun fact - in WWI, what we call tanks were originally called landships. The British developed them to cross no-man's land and assault German trenches.
edit - to the downvoter: Pick any change to physics you want to, but once you make it so the gravity is more, or the planet is covered in perpetual storms, or some alternate technology makes air defenses impenetrable, then you have similarly difficult questions about why other technologies haven't been improved/used/ etc etc.
The OP might as well start with "there are no aircraft" and never mention it again.
] |
[Question]
[
**This question already has answers here**:
[Plausible reason why my time machine can only go back a certain amount of time?](/questions/119611/plausible-reason-why-my-time-machine-can-only-go-back-a-certain-amount-of-time)
(46 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
Set in the distant future humanity has successfully developed working time machines which can allow user to go back in time, but no further back than the year 1900 A.D. Nowadays companies are making models that can send batches of people and non-animated objects into the past. However, the time rift becomes exponentially unstable around the year 1899 and earlier. This prevents time travel to times earlier than the year AD 1900. If it wasn't an engineering challenge, what could be the reason for the restriction?
Note: please use magic sparingly and there is no grandfather paradox because new timelines fork every time a time rift occurs.
Edit: the time machine when activated will fall through a temporal rift and reappear in the past timeline, any attempt to change history will cause that timeline to split.
[Answer]
Y1900 problem. Time machine software has a bug that prevents it from correctly handling years before 1900. Despite all efforts, people still think it's a hardware issue.
[Answer]
This is a bit strange, but maybe time starts in the year 1900.
For some reason, the universe began in the year 1900, and everything that appeared to happen before that actually didn't. Since you can't time travel to where there was no time, you hit a barrier at the year 1900.
[Answer]
**It uses a nickel-iron signature as a lock-on to stabilize**
Time machines don't really exist, handwavium all around to justify them. The real question here is just how to justify picking any given year and using it as a backstop for the time machine. So I did some digging, and the nickel-iron battery was invented in 1899 by Waldemar Jugner, later improved by Thomas Edison in 1901. So all you need to do is conjure a suitable technobabble. Here, I'll take a crack at it.
>
> **Time Travel**
>
>
> When Professor Sylvester McMonkey McBean invented his fantastic time machine, he quickly discovered a pressing concern. You see, the fourth dimensional wormhole caused by the newly discovered Sneetch Effect requires the presence of nickel(III) oxide-hydroxide on both ends of the wormhole to stabilize, or else it is subject to Yertle Syndrome, and *no one* wishes for it to be subject to Yertle Syndrome. Fortunately, as this is a time machine rather than a space machine, so long as the *when* has the presence of enough nickel(III) oxide-hydroxide, it matters not where the *where* is. Unfortunately, nickel(III) oxide-hydroxide was only used in batteries starting in 1899, and there just wasn't enough until the early 1900.
>
>
> Time travelers are recommended to, at all costs, *never* travel before 1899 and the presence of sufficient nickel(III) oxide-hydroxide, because then you *will* be subject to Yertle Syndrome, which had no known cures.
>
>
> -*excerpt from 'A Beginner's Guide to Time Travel'*
>
>
>
[Answer]
**Time Machines are Electrical in Nature, and timelines can't be breached by technology exotic to the time.**
It IS possible for a time machine to go back in time, but there is a catch; the time machine cannot carry materials or devices that could not have existed in that time. So, for example, your time travellers can't wear polyester clothing if they want to [travel any further back than 1941](https://quatr.us/modern-europe/where-did-polyester-come-from.htm). It causes a vibration in the machine that tears it to pieces if it contains a molecular substance in a form that does not exist anywhere on the planet (time machines are at least a little localised in that regard) outside the machine at the same time.
So, why does that block ALL time machines from going back further than 1900? Well, the first form of rechargeable battery was a [Nickel Zinc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93zinc_battery) battery and it was invented in 1900 by Thomas Edison. He got the patent on it a year later, in 1901. Prior to that, even if the substances existed (which they would have) they would not have existed in the same form of configuration, making the flight of the time machine unstable at best.
So your time machines have to use their battery store to go back, then find a way to recharge in the local timeline so that they can come back. They all use Nickel Zinc batteries simply because that way they can go as far back as 1900, but no further. This effect also acts as a physical barrier to major changes in technology in the time line as it stops you taking (say) LED TV screens to 1910 (or any date before 1962) and expecting them to proliferate. You can take back information, but you CAN'T take back actual materials.
Ironically, this effect could actually explain why our technological development has accelerated in the last 100 years or so; we take back ideas to explain how to do things better and what practical uses technology may have, but we still have to invent it on our own before we can take back a better example of it. That means that as we discover new things, our ability to improve on them and make them better accelerates, but not the rate of discovery itself.
[Answer]
**They don't know**
In theory they should be able to but anyone who tries fails to return. Automated testing time machines also fail to return. There is no sign of them ever arriving. The scientific community is stumped.
**The first time machine went back to the year 1900AD**
Since then, no machine has been able to go back earlier. Scientists suspect the universe forked off into two universes at this point for the first time and time machines can no longer go back any further.
**A Temporal Ban**
A very far distant time travel policing agency blocked off any earlier for "public safety" reasons. In reality, a cabal made up of the heads of the world's major religions sealed off earlier times to prevent the public from discovering that all the religions are fictional.
[Answer]
Nuclear class explosions cause ripples\markings in space time that the time machine uses for targeting. [The Tunguska event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event) is the oldest explosion we know enough about to target.
[Answer]
The classical answer is that time machines cannot go back any further in time than when they were started, but this leads to the interesting question as to why the time machine you built in 2500 AD can go back to 1900 at all.
The most plausible method of time travel using physics as we understand it is "frame dragging" using enormous masses (i.e. stellar masses) moving at relativistic speeds, such as the ["T" machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipler_cylinder).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wJiUy.gif)
*Frame Dragging using a T machine*
Since this is rather speculative, there are a few handwaves possible for you as the author:
1. The T machine is pointing light cones at "other whens", but due to the limited size and power can only point the light cone to an alternate history 1900. This isn't real time travel the way we think of it, but for story purposes it can do
2. The T machine built on Earth or in the Solar System is interacting with another T machine built by alien technologies and activated in 1900 in our frame of reference
3. Avoiding the aliens, there is a natural T machine created by the rotation of a neutron star, which also corresponds to 1900 in our frame of reference. We did not see a Supernova because it is actually ancient, it is just passing through space close enough to interact with the human T machine. If this isn't understood, time travelers will be stranded once the neutron star passes out of range.
Since time travel is already a very questionable proposition with our understanding of physics, the addition of a few extra handwaves should not cause much of a problem.
[Answer]
Your time machine creates, in effect, a bridge between times. It needs something to support it on the other end to move large objects like humans across the "bridge". What it needs is an electrical generator, or preferably mains power, to hook into to stabilize the bridge. Therefore, you can't (practically) travel back into time before electrical power was available. In theory you could, if you had a truly absurd amount of power in the present, but the engineering requirements make it infeasible.
[Answer]
# Microsoft Excel
The calculations needed to perform a time jump are all handled inside a big monstruous .xlsx file with a bunch of Microsoft Excel formulas. The reason it was done in Excel is because it has the wonderful power of holding in a lot of data in its spreadsheets and do a lot wonders of calculations. All time machines comes with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Excel installed.
Someone tried to make engineers and physicists learn actual programming. The result was that some of them were able to learn VBA and used it to write macros in Microsoft Excel. After that, they considered that they already know enough of programming and have no spare time with playing with those boring `If...End If` and `For...Next` toys any further because they already have too much actual hard work to do with physics and engineering.
Engineers and physicists are people that never even heard about the existence of a [RDBMS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDBMS). If they ever hear someday about the existence of a thing called RDBMS, then they will never have a clue about what it is or what it is the purpose. If in some full moon night at Friday 13th, they get it, then they would never be willing to learn it because knowing Microsoft Excel is already enough. If they learn about RDBMS, they will always keep still using Excel because they'll never be able to decode that strange alien language called SQL. If they eventually learn SQL, they will try to use SQL with Microsoft Access as a thing to input data into Excel spreadsheets and never feel any need to go any further with this. If they eventually realize what is the purpose of a RDBMS, how to use proper SQL and how to correctly wire it to a software system and what is the benefits of that design, then they immediately suffer a simultaneous hearth attack and stroke and die.
Someone proposes the idea of calling some actual software developers to give a look onto that. After seeing a lot of incomprehensible gibberish in a big mess of Excel formulas salted and peppered with some VBA macros, all of them quickly resigned their jobs and went work in some other jobs which was paying much higher salaries for actual programming in Java, C#, Pyhton, PHP, Node.JS or anything else, as long as it has nothing to do with Excel nor VBA.
So, the sad conclusion is that it is impossible to create a time machine without using Microsoft Excel.
Dates in Microsoft Excel starts at January 1st, 1900. Negative dates are used as a hack to travel to the future instead of going to the past. This could perhaps be changed, but nobody know for certain where in the sea of Excel formulas and VBA macros that sort of thing is handled.
Someone also had the idea of going to [February 29, 1900](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/wrongly-assumes-1900-is-leap-year). That person landed [here](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Glitch_City).
[Answer]
**The time machine was invented in 1900**
The time machine can only transport a person to the past of the machine itself. Much like how a train can only get you as far as the tracks go, some iteration of the machine was first constructed in the year of your epoch date. It would have been an early version, probably not functional at all, but the core remains there and it serves as a "rail" on which your time machine can transport people.
Going further in the past means going to a point in time before that device existed, meaning there is no place to "land" in time. You either cannot do it, or you end up in deep space or in the planet's core or at some other incredibly inconvenient location.
[Answer]
**Using too much power could damage the machine**
With the current V1 Delorian time machine, the further back in time you go, the more power/fuel is required.
1.21 gigawatts will take you back 350 years or so (which right now is around 1900).
Using more power than that could risk burning out the flux capacitor, making it a one way trip if you go back any further.
You'll be stuck in 1885 for quite some time...
[Answer]
**Carrington Event**
If you are a little flexible about the year you could make a connection to the massive solar flare known as the Carrington Event which happened in 1859.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859>
Perhaps in the story, that event wasn't really a solar flare, but an electromagnetic time disruption caused by an early botched attempt at time travel.
This attempt left the timeline damaged in some way (residual harmonic temporal fluctuations) preventing travel to around that time zone or before.
[Answer]
For years the scientists and technicians could not determine why they could not go back beyond the year 1900 - it just seemed like they had hit a "hard block". But obviously the time machine didn't know nor care what year we decided to call it, so there must be something else, something in the timeline that was preventing passage past that date. Gradually, all their formulaes and theories seemed to coalesce around a central fact: Something (or someone) was preventing them from crossing this boundary - there was no other physical or other barrier that could be determined. Upon further investigation, it was postulated that possibly members from a future time-line had put up a hard barrier at just that date. But why? For years historians and others tried to delve into exactly why this hard barrier existed. Gradually, all the science and mathematical formulas pointed to one fact- on Sep 8, 1900, in Galveston, Texas, a hurricane killed between 6000 and 12,000 people. This was the central reason that the block existed. But they still did not know why - was it because someone in the future time-line had came back, altered history to ensure someone born in the late 1800s, living in Texas, did not live to do what they would have done? Or was it because they had already tried to save the thousands of lives and discovered that someone they had saved had turned out to be a monster? And if so, what kind of a monster could justify condemning all the others in that devastating hurricane to death? Or was it another reason? There was only one way to figure this out - try to communicate with those that had put this hard block in place.
[Answer]
**Time machines use the position of some exotic particles which were first fabricated in 1900 as a map of time**
Basically in 1900 somebody fabricated some sort of exotic mater/particle/material which later formed a basis for time machines to orientated them self's in time and land at the correct point. And since the particles didn't exist before 1900 no time machine can map the time prior to 1900 and can't pinpoint a target to land at.
Similar to KeizerHarms solution of the time machine being inveted in 1900
[Answer]
The machine uses electrical fields to pinpoint points in time and before 1900 there just wasn't enough electrical generation/use. you can see [here](https://ourworldindata.org/energy) approximately how much power was use in 1900 which is roughly **12.1 PetaWatt hours** or **43.56 Exajoules**
note: as a bonus, if you need excuses to go further back but only to specific dates you can say there was a some sort of mega thunderstorm/volcanic eruption that lets you lock onto that point in time
[Answer]
**Fuel**
If the time machine uses some kind of resource to operate. There should be a theoretical limit of how much fuel you can carry, thus making limits of such an advance. Also, if you travel to a year before the time machine was born, you can't re-fuel, because no one can make more at that time.
[Answer]
The time machine uses a worm-hole (or something similar) as a bridge - one end of this is in 1900... it just happens to be when it popped into existence. However, scientists are looking for other "bridges"...
[Answer]
One of the first prototypes was sent back to 1899 to a cave just recently discorvered. The plan was to send it back and reclaiming it there to get testdata of long time travels.
The thing is, the experiment failed causing an explosion in the fabrics of time itself - not noticeable for humans, but impossible to traverse in future timetravels.
[Answer]
Related to the ideas mentioning Microsoft Excel is the problem of **February 29th, 1900.** This day did not exist, but one of the calculations involved in the calibration of the time machine assumed that 1900 was a leap year. These equations are so difficult and the only person who was able to solve them has died, so they nobody has been able to correct them. Because of this inconsistency, any attempt to return to **February 28th, 1900** results in different components of the time machine working inconsistently (with some parts correctly aiming for one day before March 1st and others, which relied on this calculation, incorrectly aiming for two days before), with a similar effect for any earlier date. In fact, if the equations assume that every year that is divisible by 100 is a leap year, the discrepancy increases to two days for dates before March 1st, 1800, three days before March 1st, 1700, four days before March 1st, 1500 (1600 was indeed a leap year) and so on.
[Answer]
Stealing directly from the [Ars Paradoxica podcast](https://www.whisperforge.org/arsparadoxica).
**All time travel is actually time travel *to* 1900.
But some people get off the bus early.**
Time travel works by unmoring yourself from the present time,
and then you are naturally sucked backwards in time to 1900.
Some event in 1900 created some kind of time-attactor that does this.
A special point in space-time that just sucks things towards it.
Maybe it is the only one that ever has happenned.
Maybe it is one of many and you get sucked towards the nearest (or nearest in the past?)
or maybe with many you can do some kind of leaverage/manvovering to navigate fairly freely but 1900 is the first so can't get beyond it, because it sucks towards it.
There have been several options already posted for what that event could have been,
or what it was misinterpretted as.
] |
[Question]
[
In the near future we may find cargo ships fleeing space pirates!
Given that...
* It's a small cargo ship carrying 10 metric tons of wheat (cargo volume, approximately [13 m3](https://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/weight-to-volume)). Total volume: 100 m3. Total mass (loaded): 30 metric tons.
* Thruster technology is such that the ship can successfully maneuver through Sol's asteroid belt at an average velocity of 1,000 Km/s.
* It's near-future, so there's no magical intertial dampening systems. Flight pressure suits we have today are OK. Any other dampening systems known and operative today or conceivably within the next 25 years are OK.
* Knowing that today we believe all the mass in the remarkably large asteroid belt [wouldn't make a body bigger than our moon](https://space-facts.com/asteroid-belt/)...
* And assuming at 1,000 Km/s even a baseball-sized impact would have serious consequences1...
**Question:** Could our astronaut survive two hours of space flight (a run of 7,200,000 Km or 180X the circumference of the Earth) [inside the asteroid belt](https://youtu.be/KvJDItC6tE0?t=1m53s) without dying from the maneuvers necessary to avoid impacts?
*After two hours the pirates make a mistake, take an impact dead center of the windshield, and due to the force of explosive decompression, find themselves hurtling deeper into the belt like little human torpedoes. Our hero can slow down and avoid all future impacts.*
---
1 *[Obligatory XKCD](https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/), not completely relevant, but the end result gives us an idea of the urgency of the situation.*
[Answer]
Yes they could. *Very Easily.*
Contrary to myth, the asteroid belt is very nearly empty. (See <https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26712/what-is-the-average-distance-between-objects-in-our-asteroid-belt> for a related discussion.)
Planners for the Dawn mission, which spent many years moving through the asteroid belt, visiting both Vesta and Ceres (and which is still in orbit around Ceres), estimated that during that entire time, the closest it ever came to a cataloged asteroid is about a million kilometers -- over twice the distance to the Moon. *Space is really, really big.*
Basically, there's nothing around that's big enough to see before it's too late to maneuver to miss it. The issue will probably turn out to be devising effective micrometeor shields. (There's a good chance that the technology we use today will work even with hypervelocity impacts. Basically, there's a thin outer aluminium skin, then an air gap (well, vacuum gap!) then a very thin, very strong composite layer, then another gap then the actual hull. A small, fast projectile vaporizes on hitting the outer skin, the gasses spread and hit the middle skin which stops nearly everything and vaporizes the rest, and the hull is not touched by anything solid.
[Answer]
**If you expect to hit another asteroid, you have to work at it.**
What did Alan Stern, [New Horizons](https://twitter.com/NASANewHorizons?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) principle investigator, [have to say](http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_Horizons_Crosses_The_Asteroid_Belt.html)?
>
> Fortunately, the asteroid belt is so huge that, despite its large
> population of small bodies, the chance of running into one is almost
> vanishingly small - far less than one in a billion. That means if you
> want to come close enough to an asteroid to make detailed studies of
> it, you have to aim for one.
>
>
>
Given a 2 hour journey, vs. with months required for the New Horizons probe to traverse the belt, your chance of problems is more likely closer to 1 in trillion.
You are far more likely to die of a unsuspected heart attack when in "perfect health" during any given 2-hour period.
Don't base your expectations on collision chances based on the [advice of a golden-hued protocol droid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPB6AlNRRtQ).
[Answer]
# Lets do math and assumptions
Assume the [asteroid belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Characteristics) is $3\times10^{21}$ kg. Now assume that the asteroid belt is entirely composed of [100 g ball bearings](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/123670/could-deliberately-induced-kessler-syndrome-stop-icbms/123686#123686), the smallest objects that can penetrate your Whipple shield and kill your spacecraft. The asteroid belt then consists of $3\times10^{22}$ tiny ship killers.
The asteroid belt is roughly a torus, extending from 2.3 to 3.3 AU from the sun. That means the 'torus' has a radius of 0.5 AU. At a distance of 2.8 AU, this 0.5 AU distance is $\arcsin{\frac{0.5}{2.8}} = 10.3$ degrees above the plane of rotation. Looking at [this graphic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Main_belt_i_vs_a.png), you can see that is an underestimate of the actual vertical separation of asteroids. So the following volume estimate is an under-estimatation of the space that the asteroid belt occupies.
The volume of a [torus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus) with radius 2.8 AU, and tube radius 0.5 AU is
$$2\pi^2 (2.8)(0.5)^2 = 13.8 AU^3.$$ More usefully, that is $4.6\times10^{25} \text{ km}^3$. This means the particle density of these ball bearings is 0.00065 km$^{-3}$. That means, there is one ball bearing every 1530 km$^3$.
If your spaceship has a cross section of 100 m$^2$ and needs to move a distance of 1 AU to cross the asteroid belt, then the volume of its path is 14960 km$^3$. Given the particle density above, this means there are about 10 ship killers in the average path through the heart of the asteroid belt.
At 1000 kilometers per second, you would traverse the asteroid belt in about 42 hours, so you would have to avoid one object every 4 hours. You would only have to deviate your course by less than 100 meters to miss each object, since the average distance between objects in the ball bearing scenario is around 23 km. Changing your course by 100 meters every 14,440,000 km is...well the angle isn't really important. Vibration can get you off course by that much, the thrust needed for a course change is trivial.
# Conclusion
If the mass of an asteroid belt were deployed as a minefield, then it would require a small number of course corrections of nearly negligible angle to avoid hitting the mines. But the asteroid belt is not a minefield, and there are far less than $3\times10^{22}$ objects to avoid. If you drop the number of objects by an order of magnitude, you need to make one course correction on average. If you drop it by two more orders of magnitude, then you have 1% change of striking anything, etc.
I don't have a count of objects of ship-endangering size available. But based on the worse case estimate, we can see that the density of such objects is very low. In the actual asteroid belt, a path plotted straight through is very unlikely to hit something.
[Answer]
You bring up a bunch of issues, so this answer has multiple parts.
>
> Could an astronaut in a near-future space ship survive transit through our asteroid belt?
>
>
>
The image of a field full of rock is an out and out myth. [The Asteroid Belt is mostly empty space.](https://www.universetoday.com/110276/why-the-asteroid-belt-doesnt-threaten-spacecraft/)
It is 4% of the Moon's mass spread over 50 trillion trillion cubic km. Of that mass, most is locked up within only a handful of objects. About one third is accounted for by [Ceres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)), while [Vesta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Vesta), [Pallas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Pallas), and [Hygiea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Hygiea) make up 9%, 7%, and 3% (respectively). That leaves just under half of the Asteroid Belt's mass (1.9% of the Moon's mass) for the rest of that 50 trillion trillion cubic km.
There are only an estimated 800 trillion asteroids larger than a metre within the Belt. That may sound like a lot at first blush, but 800 trillion asteroids divided by 50 trillion trillion cubic km is just under one asteroid per 50 billion cubic km.
Worrying about hitting one of those while traveling through the Belt would be akin to driving over salt flats the area of the United States with only 2000 people scattered across them and worrying about hitting someone.
You could well say "what about smaller objects?", but the situation doesn't change very much. 4% of the Moon's mass over 50 trillion trillion cubic km is only 60 mg per cubic km (60 picograms per cubic metre). There is no worst case distribution where there'll always be something dangerous to hit, and since most of that mass is actually concentrated in large objects, which themselves tend to be concentrated in several orbital groups, it's extremely easy to not hit anything in the Asteroid Belt.
This shouldn't be shocking. If there was any significant concentration of mass scattered throughout the Belt, it would quickly collapse into a planet. That's why much of what little mass is there collapsed into Ceres.
TL;DR: In fiction, ships traveling through the Belt must swerve around asteroids. In reality, the many space probes we've sent through the Belt paid minimal attention to collision risks. This won't change much even with higher speed travel.
>
> In the near future we may find cargo ships fleeing space pirates!
>
>
> ...
>
>
> Thruster technology is such that the ship can successfully maneuver through Sol's asteroid belt at an average velocity of 1,000 Km/s.
>
>
>
Keep in mind that ships traveling at a constant velocity, by definition, aren't using their engines/thrusters. In space, you don't need to push to stay in motion. You only need to push to speed up and to slow down.
A single Merlin engine (currently used on SpaceX rockets) can already generate nearly 1000 kN of thrust. That means 8 or 9 modern engines could accelerate 30 metric tons (30000 kg) to 1000 km/s if fuel wasn't the problem that it currently is. Unless people in your near future setting are still struggling with fuel mass and power sources like we are today, there's no reason to imagine any ship in your universe would need more than minutes to get up to speed. In other words, the vast majority of their travel time should be unpowered.
1. This raises a problem for pirates. How do they detect ships with no drive plumes in a region (literally) many trillions of times larger than the volume of the Earth? Hell, even if the ships ran hot for their entire journeys, spotting them in such a large zone would still be next to impossible without high powered ground-based tracking.
* If pirates can see cargo ships over these distances, why wouldn't the cargo ships be able to see those pirate ships. Remember, they'll have to burn towards the cargo ship after spotting it. That would give the cargo ship plenty of warning (and time to start increasing their own speed). I mean it's not like pirate ships can just sit next to "shipping lanes" and wait. (There's no sitting in space. There's only falling around the Sun, planets, moons, etc.) The only way to stay in a lane is to actually travel along its orbital path. What's worse, the paths cargo ships must take change as the planets orbit the Sun. Even worse than that, the lane for any given orbital configuration is highly speed dependent. That means one ship traveling at 950 km/s would have a vastly different "shipping lane" from a ship traveling at 1300 km/s. So, there's no easy way for a pirate to travel along a shipping lane at a slower pace and wait for other ships to catch up.
2. If a ship requires no power to stay at 1000 km/s, of course it can maneuver at that speed. You have to define what kind of course correction constitutes "successful". Success is only a matter of warning time and a ship's ability to accelerate. If you're saying that these ships are able to detect obstacles with enough lead time to briefly use their engines for course corrections, then you've already answered your own question.
>
> Question: Could our astronaut survive two hours of space flight (a run of 7,200,000 Km or 180X the circumference of the Earth) inside the asteroid belt without dying from the maneuvers necessary to avoid impacts?
>
>
>
Given that the odds of needing to maneuver are nearly non-existent, the astronaut wouldn't have to worry. However, even when maneuvers are needed, unless you've somehow accidentally ended up right on top of a planet, minor nudges are all that will be required.
>
> After two hours the pirates make a mistake, take an impact dead center of the windshield, and due to the force of explosive decompression, find themselves hurtling deeper into the belt like little human torpedoes. Our hero can slow down and avoid all future impacts.
>
>
>
Maybe you want to set this in Saturn's rings? That is the only location in the Solar System with the kind of debris density you're imagining. Of course, you'd have to find a reason for two ships to want to stay inside the rings for so long.
*I'm sorry.* I don't mean to rip holes throughout your entire idea. Things in space just don't work like things on Earth. If you want input based on the facts, than the fact is that most traditional forms of conflict don't work in space.
* Fuel dictates travel speed, not travel distance.
* The speeds you can get up to and slow down from determine what destinations you can travel to.
* The visitability of destinations (for your speed capabilities) depends on orbit and mass.
* Space is big and bumping into people or things is hard.
* If you are close enough to see other people, everyone can see everyone else.
* Running after ships (or running away) is like shooting a gun. You can have a significant effect in the short term, but you can't do it for very long. In the case of space ships, you'll run out of fuel.
* Etc, etc.
[Answer]
My gut feeling is that, as stated in other answers, your astronaut is more likely to die from boredom than from an impact.
However, to back up the gut feeling with some math, let's try the approach of the average free path, like your astronaut and the asteroid belt were a gas.
We have that
$\lambda =$$ 1 \over \sqrt{2}\pi\sigma ^2 n$
where $\lambda$ is the average free path, $\sigma$ the collision diameter, twice the particle size (astronaut being about 2 meters), which we can round up to 5 meters or $5 \times 10^{-3} km$, and $n$ the number of particles per unit volume, for which we can reuse [kingledion's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/123841/30492) value of 0.00065 $km^{-3}$
Putting those values in the formula above, we get $\lambda = 14 \times 10^6 km $, which is about double the distance you expect to travel in those two hours.
Which confirm my gut feeling, and gives your astronaut the reasonable safety to just worry about slowing down.
[Answer]
In addition to the answers posted by others (the asteroid belt is almost entirely empty space), the entire asteroid belt is moving at pretty close to the same speed, in the same direction.
If the astronaut is also travelling at the same speed, in the same orbit, the entire asteroid belt would appear (almost) stationary. This gives lots of time to react, as well as low impact speeds.
[Answer]
You can probably get away with trusting in luck, since (as mentioned by others) the asteroid belt is mostly empty space.
That aside, there are a few more pieces of information we need to answer this:
1. Since you are travelling "fast" compared to the asteroid belt, the volume of your ship is irrelevant. All your impacts are going to be on the front of your ship. You would need to specify (or decide) the surface area of the front of your ship. A ship with a front surface of 10m x 10m, 1m long, would have 100 times the chances of hitting an asteroid than one 1mx1m front surface, 100m long (both are 100 cubic meters).
2. You need to specify how far ahead you can see a potentially damaging object.
3. You need to specify how fast you can change course. Sure, a couple of G (for short periods, in life-and-death situations) would probably be ok, but what is your sensor response time, reaction time, warning time (for people to strap in)? Does your ship need to turn, then boost, or can it move laterally? Despite what space opera tells us, it will almost certainly be done by a computer. It is not complicated - if you're going to hit something, move in any direction.
4. You mention moving at 1000km/s, but don't forget that to the occupant, actual speed is meaningless - it's just acceleration/deceleration that they can tell. At 1000km/s, occupants will think they are floating. If you have enough reaction mass, the quickest way from A to B is usually to accelerate at maximum power, for exactly half the time, flip the ship around, then decelerate at maximum power for the the rest of the trip.
For example, if you have a front surface area of 1 square meter, and you can see a minimum-dangerous object at a range of 1000KM, and you are travelling at 1000KM/s, you would have as little as 1 second to move up to half a meter (assuming a circular front surface) + the width of the object.
Conversely, if you can detect the minimum dangerous object at 1 AU (the width of the belt), and it takes 2 hours to traverse the belt, then you would have 2 hours to react & turn.
I suspect that, all else being equal, an object twice the surface area would be seen twice as far away, and would require less than twice as far to turn; turning earlier also means you have to turn less. Based on this, the larger the object is, the easier it is to miss.
] |
[Question]
[
The story I’m currently writing, is in a fantasy desert setting. It’s gonna be focused on world and city building so obviously the army is gonna play a big role. The technology of the world is based on that of the 13th century, so still largely melee based armies with cavalry, infantry, archers, slingers etc.
However my issue is coming up with a good mount idea for the cavalry, as horses don’t have the ability to survive in such extreme desert conditions like camels do. Their hooves are also very poorly suited
for sand as opposed to camels, but obviously camels won’t work either because they lack the speed and maneuverability of horses.
I have gone through some polls for desert mounts used mainly for traveling, but I don’t think lizards (which is the most commonly suggested would work). My reasoning is that they, at least in the suggestions I read and ideas I thought of, would be built like regular lizards. Which means they run with that side to side shake, making a charge with momentum like cavalry soldiers do, less effective. They also wouldn’t have the same blunt force effect of a cavalry horse as it smashed into enemy soldiers, which is why I ruled out the idea of lizards.
So some suggestions on good cavalry mounts for such a desert setting would be appreciated. To have the utility and maneuverability of horses but be able to function in a desert climate as well and if you think of a way some type of lizard could overcome these issues, feel free to comment as well.
[Answer]
>
> obviously camels won’t work either because they lack the speed and maneuverability of horses.
>
>
>
No.
You always use whatever transportation is best for the environment you're going to. You don't discard the option of using a jet-ski on water just because it won't work on a road.
Just the same, modern armies still use camels while on deserts.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fl14N.jpg)
Source for the image above: [Wikipedia article on camel cavalries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_cavalry)
Quoting the Wikipedia article:
>
> The first recorded use of the camel as a military animal was by the **Arab king** Gindibu, who is claimed to have employed as many as **1000 camels** at the Battle of Qarqar in **853 BC**. A later instance occurred in the Battle of Thymbra in 547 BC, fought between Cyrus the Great of Persia and Croesus of Lydia.
>
>
>
And a picture of Old School camel cavalry from WW1:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5KDcc.jpg)
[Answer]
## Desert elephants
**Capable of surviving in the desert? Check.**
>
> [Desert elephants](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_elephant) or desert-adapted elephants are not a distinct species of elephant but are African bush elephants (Loxodonta africana) that have made their homes in the Namib and Sahara deserts in Africa.
>
>
>
**Speed and strength? Check.**
>
> A [war elephant](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_elephant) was an elephant that was trained and guided by humans for combat. The war elephant's main use was to charge the enemy, break their ranks and instill terror and fear. Elephantry is a term for specific military units using elephant-mounted troops.
>
>
>
**Existed in the 13th century? Check.**
Elephants have been used as mounts in war since ancient times.
>
> War elephants played a critical role in several key battles in antiquity, especially in Ancient India… During classical antiquity they were also used in ancient Persia and in the Mediterranean world within armies of Macedon, Hellenistic Greek states, the Roman Republic and later Empire, and Carthage in North Africa. In some regions they maintained a firm presence on the battlefield throughout the Middle Ages.
>
>
>
**Works well with archers/slingers? Check.**
The Greeks would have their archers fight on elephant-back to give them an advantage in war. Great vantage point and extremely difficult targets.
**Bonus: Tough to kill? Check.**
Elephants are extremely hard to kill. You would need to run underneath them with a spear while they charge and stab them up through the heart. Basically a suicide mission as you would then be crushed by the falling elephant - and no guarantee you will strike true.
[Answer]
First you have to decide what you need your cavalry for.
If you want heavy cavalry, you have a few problems. Most important one: armor. Heavy cavalry - the kind of cavalry people first think about when hearing the word, relies on heavily armored riders charging into and breaking infantry formations. And that heavy armor is a bit problematic in a desert heat. Not only would it result in a frequent heat strokes, your mounts wouldn't really appreciate an extra weight. I just don't see heavy cavalry being a big thing in a desert setting.
If you want light cavalry on the other hand, well then there is nothing really wrong with camels. Or giant lizards for that matter. Or specially bred ostriches as someone else suggested. Or giant worms! Can't go wrong with that classic! For scouting (and mounted archery) you don't really need the maneuverability of horses. As long as the animal is faster then mark 1 legs, and can actually function fine in a desert, it should be fine.
But mind that in a desert there is a distinct lack of food for your mounts. So the benefits of cavalry is drastically reduced compared to other settings. Mongol-like hordes of mounted raiders just cannot function in a desert, as there is nothing to sustain them. And by introducing required logistics to feed such an army you lose all the benefits that kind of army actually have. So all-mounted armies are even less plausible in a desert (with the exception of small raiding parties) then heavy cavalry.
[Answer]
## Sail Wagons
This is a frame challenge of sorts: what you're trying to do is move long distances across a big desert, carrying lots of gear, and maybe fight from a mobile platform.
Lets say that for whatever reason you don't like camels or elephants, and that giant lizards, eagles, ants, worms, etc aren't an option.
The best option may be [sail wagons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_sailing). These are basically wind powered boats on wheels.
Historically, the Chinese were their champions for most of history. They made many small sail wagons, but even made ones that carried up to 30 people! Later on, in the 19th century, the technology was competitive enough with horses in parts of the USA that quite a few people used them.
Some things to consider:
## Reliable winds:
If you don't have reliable wind, this either won't work, or soldiers will need to carefully plot routes between oases or rivers / transport lots of water. Getting stranded in the middle of the desert just because the wind stops blowing...blows.
From an author's point of view, though, it's a useful way to favour or disfavour characters or nations.
The wind direction is important; ships upwind have more options in terms of speed and directions than ships downwind; all the dynamics of the high seas get replicated on land.
Whikes (i.e. wagons with pedals) are possible.
## Combat:
Logistics alone will justify such a technology. But there is also the possibility of combat!
If so, you are no longer looking at sail wagons, but at land ships!
Land navies!
Land frigates!
Land pirates!
Imagine two small ships full of medieval Chinese warring soldiers encountering one another. The crews fire bolts from their chu ko nus or other repeating crossbows as fast as they are humanly able. The upwind ship is winning and rams the other, resulting in a desperate hand to hand struggle. The rammed ship's crew fight bravely but are gradually cut down until one heroic soldier among them manages to shoot down both the captain and mate of the boarders with a single crossbow barrage, before slicing down another and rallying them for an amazing, come-from-behind victory.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s1blE.jpg)
[Answer]
In terms of cavalry that can be used in the desert, I feel like ostriches would be a good option. Although you do seldom hear about ostriches in the desert, they are godly fast. They also can go several days without water, which is another perk. Ostriches are also quite strong and knowing the time period your story is set in, would be great to use with spears.
] |
[Question]
[
**Nostrils accomplish two things:**
* **They filter out impurities and particles in the air.** Thanks to the mucous membrane and hairs which act as a maze for the air to pass through. Snot is later drawn in to be digested or expelled.
* **They identify said particles for us to smell.** Since they catch particles so easily they are the best place for sensory organs. The jacobson's organ (primary organ for chemoreception) is an essential survival tool for most animals.
Now the question is why a creature have multiple sets of nostrils?
In arid or cold conditions animals opt to have larger noses instead, which is where the difficulty lies in this question.
[Answer]
Vocalization.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cs6yj.png)
That's an [Indian bamboo flute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Indian_bamboo_flute.jpg), but the principle can be extended to a whole range of musical instruments which use resonance and flowing air.
Why go to all of the trouble of evolving a [larynx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larynx) or [syrinx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrinx_(bird_anatomy)) when you can have a much more simple system that works like a flute or a recorder or bagpipes?
Maybe the animal uses its tongue to selectively close the whistle-holes in its bill or snout, or maybe it has special muscular flaps like the nostrils of marine mammals. Whatever the specific mechanism, it can whistle melodiously through its many nostrils for the purposes of attracting mates, threatening rivals or whatever else takes its fancy, assuming it has one.
[Answer]
**Evolutionary Leftovers**
A creature that originally had spiracles, like an insect, will have had multiple air inlet/outlet openings. Spiracles, howevr, don't offer enough oxygen transfer area to support a body larger than a few tens of grams (see largest beetles and spiders).
So, in order to grow larger, the air passages that the spiracles connect to have evolved into lungs -- air-filled, highly convolute (for large area in a compact volume), sacs with muscular connection to expand and contract them -- but instead of just two lungs like most vertebrates, your former insectoids have one lung for each spiracle. Then, when they switch from exoskeleton to endoskeleton to allow them to get even bigger (than a rat, say), those spiracles become a row of nostrils, each with its own independent lung. They might or might not breathe in unison -- there are advantages either way -- and will most likely have some level of voluntary control.
Species of this line found in dry or cold climates may have extended nostrils, like tiny elephant trunks, to provide better moisture retention and heat exchange, and such extended nostrils (as with elephants) might become auxiliary manipulators.
[Answer]
**Keep Bugs Out**
Warning: image of centipede crawling up nose.
>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WheJ1.jpg)
>
>
>
Large noses are better for smelling and breathing. Your species needs to smell and breath well.
Unfortunately a large nose is attractive to small burrowing insects. There is not a gadfly or centipede alive who does not relish the thought of flying or crawling into that schnoz and settling down for the winter.
The nose is a great place to live. It is warm and humid and there is a never ending source of food, provided you have the mouth parts to feed on blood. You are also near the brain, which is always good, in case you get bored.
Since there were too many bugs trying this, your species evolved to have many small nostrils rather than two big ones. This keeps the larger bugs out.
[Answer]
## Three dimensional smell
Suppose you'd have two noses, and a relatively large, broad head. Like our two eyes do, the noses could provide a 3-dimensional "stereo smell image", the brain then being able to sense the position of the origin of a scent.
Why would it exist ? This creature could be a blind predator, or a night predator. These animals will gain an evolutionary advantage to competitors, because they can locate their prey in the dark.
[Answer]
Each set of nostril is specialized for a different environment, in a way that makes the use of single set less efficient than the multi-nostrils approach.
For example a set of nostrils for when the animal is on dry land and breathing air, another set for when the animal is underwater and air is not available, yet sensing is still important.
[Answer]
They could have evolved different nostrils for different smells. So one set might be like ours now, and the other for something specific, such as pheromones.
They might also have different purposes altogether, such as one set for air with closeable flaps, and one set to act as gills, able to filter oxygen from liquid.
[Answer]
## Different placements for different environments
[A Cetacean's nostril](https://researchblog.duke.edu/2021/08/12/two-ways-to-weird-how-whale-noses-moved-to-the-top-of-their-head/) is on the top of its head to allow it to breathe while remaining mostly submerged. [Alligators have upward-facing nostrils](https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/american-alligator) for a similar reason. For a being that routinely finds itself in different positions for long periods of time where much of the body is sunk into an area where oxygen is not readily available, it makes sense to have multiple sets of nostrils in different places so as to be able to continue to breathe in different orientations.
[Answer]
**This already exists**
Most fishes, specifically all ray-finned fishes and most of the non-tetrapod lobe-finned fishes like coelocanths and lungfishes, have multiple sets of nostrils.
## [enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UZ8g0.jpg)
*Image from n1outdoors.com*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TTElI.jpg)
*Image from <https://alphynix.tumblr.com/>*
It's also thought that [some of the extinct marine reptiles had multiple nostrils as well](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/ancient-marine-reptiles-had-absurd-complex-nostrils/#:%7E:text=Those%20weird%2C%20weird%20nostrils&text=One%20is%20that%20they%27re,opening%20into%20two%20distinct%20sections.), though it's not entirely clear.
I'm not entirely sure why fishes have multiple sets of nostrils, but the explanation I usually hear is that it has something to do with how smell works in water. Namely that as the fish (or marine reptile) swims forward water is forced into the first pair of nostrils and then exists the nose via the second pair of nostrils. That way there is always water flowing over the sensory organs of the nose and the fish is constantly smelling its environment as it swims forward.
This works in fishes because unlike tetrapods, the nasal cavities of fishes generally do not link up with the digestive trace. In fact in tetrapods the rear set of nostrils ends up migrating into the mouth cavity over the course of evolution to eventually become the openings on top of our palate (choanae) that let us breathe through our nose.
[Answer]
# Redundancy.
Having multiple sets of nostrils lets you keep smelling even if one set gets clogged or inflammed.
You said this:
>
> In arid or cold conditions animals opt to have larger noses instead, which is where the difficulty lies in this question.
>
>
>
But "opt" isn't really the right word. It's simply that these animals' ancestors tended to have larger noses, which provided them with an advantage in their environment, so they became more likely to pass their genes along. It isn't inevitable that that would happen; it simply happens to be what *did* happen in this case.
In other words, it's entirely possible that creatures which happened to develop extra sets of nostrils did better in their environments, allowing them to pass along those extra-nostril genes, propagating the trait. This would have taken many thousands if not millions of years, but it's plausible.
[Answer]
# Swimming
A whale has only one blowhole, and doesn't even really breathe through it's mouth (apparently). The blowhole is located on top of its body because it usually swims with that part up. In contrast, your critter may have two or more swimming modes, e.g.: travel, predatory, hiding(?).
In any event, in each swimming mode it has a different part of its body nearest to the surface of the water, which can allow it to conveniently breathe even while mostly submerged in that mode. Perhaps
1. in **travel** the nostrils are dorsally located (like the whale's blowhole), for easy swimming,
2. for **predation** the nostrils are on the feet or butt (to enable the critter to peer down in the water looking for game), and
3. for **concealment** the nostrils are right next to their eyes (like humans), so that they can look up above the water to see when the coast is clear, leaving only their nose exposed above the surface.
[Answer]
Your species has an incredibly sensitive sense of smell. One set of nostrils contains these scent receptors, tied very strongly to multiple parts of the brain. You can concentrate on a scent and experience the olfactory version of hyperfocus; your other sensory input fades into the background and the bulk of your brainpower is used for processing the scent.
The other set of nostrils has only the most basic scent receptors. This set is more like a horse's nose, designed to efficiently scoop in large amounts of air to fuel the body's aerobic processes while running or otherwise exerting yourself.
The body's default state is for the much smaller scent nostrils to be closed. You can consciously open them when you want to use them, but their intense sensory input can be overwhelming or distracting so they're "off" by default. You reflexively keep them closed when running, otherwise they'll be taking in so much air and generating so much sensory input that you can get disoriented.
Alternatively, your creature could be specialized for tracking, with two noses for differential scent analysis. It breathes in the scent of its prey with one nose, then closes that nose's nostrils to keep the scent in place. It can then track its prey using the other nose, with the brain cross-referencing against the reference sample for more accurate matching.
[Answer]
**Low-oxygen atmosphere**
If the atmosphere has little oxygen (or, almost-equivalently, if the atmosphere is normal but the creature has exceptional oxygen needs due to muscular effort), extra nostrils could provide an adequate supply of air.
[Answer]
This question has the same answer as why most animals have two nostrils.
Having two nostrils allows for the smelling of left and right, for the same reason some reptiles have forked tongues.
However, not all creatures exist in a 3 dimensional space, and of those that do, not all reside on a planar(or non-euclidean planar) surface. Some may need to be able to smell in more directions then just two, for the same reason that some sound systems have two speakers, left and right, while others have multiple, for surround sound(in this case, surround smell).
There may be a need for 4 nostrils, in order to smell up, down, left, and right.
A total of 6 is needed for all three dimensions.
But what if your species needs to smell forwards in time and backwards in time? Well that's eight nostrils at least...
Combined with the other answers to this question, with multiple sets for each direction(for redundancy), and any musical needs of the species, although those might be better done by internal pipes, see [here](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-parasaurolophus-set-the-mood-94657740/), that's a whole lot of nostrils.
Also many animals breathe through there skin, and all of those pores could be seen as nostrils.
] |
[Question]
[
Witchcraft in this world is practiced openly by witches and is exclusively female. Magic works through long, complicated rituals that require multiple components. The most powerful of these demand human sacrifice, in which an individual is killed and their mana (life energy) is used to fuel a spell. Mana is continuously produced by the body in order to keep a person alive and functional. It exists in various quantities in different places, such as the heart, blood, intestines, liver, etc. Certain rituals require certain parts to be used (burned, eaten, etc) in order to release the mana that resides there and fuel a spell. Some examples would be cutting out the heart of a person and devouring it in order to add their mana to yours and temporarily increase your strength before going to war, or hundreds of people would be burned in a pit to fuel a battalion of soldiers. Sacrificial victims could be criminals, prisoners of war, and other undesirables that society deem fit to be killed. This would depend on the state and their laws and customs.
Witches who are sentenced to die for whatever reason are routinely just killed with no special circumstances. Again, depending on the policy, this could be brutal or humane. Males, however, are regarded as better components for these kind of spells. Why would this be the case?
[Answer]
>
> their mana (life energy) is used to fuel a spell. [...] Males, however, are regarded as better components for these kind of spells. Why would this be the case?
>
>
>
Males have higher level of testosterone, resulting in higher metabolism. Mana production is also related to metabolism, so it makes sense that males are preferred, having higher mana levels.
[Answer]
>
> witchcraft in this world is practiced openly by witches is exclusively female
>
>
>
&
>
> Mana is continuously produced by the body in order to keep a person alive and functional.
>
>
>
Males can't use magic therefore they can't spend the mana their bodies produce. This results in more mana stored in the organs that can be transferred to the witch.
Females are revered as the noble gender, and non-witches cannot be sacrificed in rituals for two reasons.
1. They could perform very powerful magic involuntarily like in HP universe (due to large amount of unused mana).
2. The person being sacrificed consumes a portion of the mana involuntarily in order to heal, this portion is large enough even in the absence of mana channels and pathways (present in females) that can spend mana more quickly making the sacrifice even more difficult and mana wasting.
[Answer]
>
> Males, however, are regarded as better components for these kind of spells. Why would this be the case?
>
>
>
Because they're -- statistically speaking -- bigger, stronger and more aggressive than women. That means they have more mana.
>
> Certain rituals require certain parts to be used (burned, eaten, etc) in order to release the mana that resides there and fuel a spell.
>
>
>
The phallus -- being the *symbol* of that power -- and testicles -- being the *source* of that power (via testosterone) are the most valuable.
[Answer]
Women's bodies are (biologically speaking) built to have children. Its likely no different in the supernatural world. After puberty, women's bodies naturally dedicate some small portion of their mana every month to jump-start the life-force a embryo would require to be conceived. This constantly drains their body of mana over the course of their lives, meaning men have higher background mana.
[Answer]
A Witch used as a sacrifice can alter the spell being cast.
Usually, you get careful when using magic, but if you’re being burn alive, you can as well go all out, and make that spell you’re literally dying for fail with extreme prejudice. (Warriors feeling so strong they rush into the enemy lines a la Leeroy Jenkins, “augmented” troops going insane and leveling the town they were sworn to protect)
Some even say that witches can booby-trap their own organs before one can use them. We don’t know if it’s true, or what they can do, but no one is willing to take a chance.
[Answer]
It is simply :)
Only female may be witches. Only witches are killed straight, mans are used as mana sources. So I conclude, that the mana of witches is already warped by their witchery (as a virtue) and cannot be used as frealy as unwarped mana of mans (who have no witchery in them).
Side-effect - women, which are NOT witches could be used as well as mans as their mana is not warped.
* but maybe all women are witches, so this is just theory
* or maybe it is hard to say, if any particular woman is NOT a (latent) witch, until its mana is tested (and that can be hard to do reliably and take lot of time/ingredients/risc, so it is probabley more economical kill ANY woman (ande lose possible mana source), than to rics using warped mana (and lose much more in ongoing accident)
[Answer]
>
> Witchcraft in this world is practiced openly by witches and is exclusively female.
>
>
>
Witches have power, and this would also mean *political* power.
>
> Witches who are sentenced to die for whatever reason are routinely just killed with no special circumstances. Again, depending on the policy, this could be brutal or humane.
>
>
>
*She* who holds power, decides how stuff gets done ! :-)
A group of politically (and actually magically) powerful women certainly won't want to encourage the notion that they're an acceptable target for disassembly into components.
Likewise that same group isn't remotely interested in encouraging the idea that one of their own can be killed without their own group's consent. And killing them in nasty ways is certainly going to make them very angry. The expression "that could be me" is one that focuses the mind a great deal.
>
> Males, however, are regarded as better components for these kind of spells. Why would this be the case?
>
>
>
They have less power both politically and magically. They're a lot more expendable.
Over a long time ( generations ) what starts as a political expediency (can't do anything to annoy the witches) ends up as *custom* and *accepted social norm* and a social taboo. Rationalizations will be made to why men being sacrificed in this way is "glorious", "holy", "duty" (and other nonsense). If there's a religion involved this becomes even more likely. If there are lawyers involved it starts becoming actual written down law and almost harder to avoid.
So the usual reasons why a social group without power ends up being first used because it's convenient, then used because it's socially normal, then because it's a religious dogma and finally because it's written in law.
[Answer]
When you kill a woman, you are killing a potential or confirmed caster. That is a loss to the magic community as a whole.
Men, however, are useless in that aspect. Therefore no big loss is felt when one is sacrificed.
[Answer]
Some ideas:
* It is possible do the harvesting without killing the man right away. A woman usually dies before the extraction process is complete, wasting the mana.
* The witches, being all women, lack the masculine mana needed to complete their powers. They supply their own feminine mana.
* Masculine mana brings focus, dedication and the ability to target spells. Feminine mana is more of an area effect weapon, you can't really target anyone with it.
* A woman's mana, when harvested, fights back, whereas, a man's mana can be "seduced" and bent to the witches' will. (A woman who **can** be seduced by another woman is probably a rare trophy, and a man who **can't** be seduced by a woman for whatever reason is useless, so that's probably why witches try to seduce their victims first, to appraise their potential in this regard.)
[Answer]
**Root Chakra**
The primary male organ is centered upon a primal eddy of accumulated life-energy and is thought to regulate life-forces associated with instinct and survival. It is easier to harvest and combine and makes for a more effective spell.
[Answer]
**Solution**
In your worldbuilding, create a causation relationship between Testosterone and Mana production.
**Further Explination**
Testosterone is an important signalling hormone in a mana production pathway within adult males. Physically large and athletic young men produce the most Testosterone. Mana builds up over time and can be boosted before harvesting after a testosterone spike. Conduct your witchy rituals it after a sacrificial dance, joust, or orgy (a la Ahmad ibn Fadlan's Viking Funeral).
**Further Worldbuilding**
Enforce a physically hypercompetetive society or adjust beauty preferences. Give women a closely associated Estrogen system but allow them to leverage their own mana. This option is extra-reasonable due to the connection to a real-life Sexual Characteristic. It would certainly affect gender politics and could lead to a believable Matriarchy where the magical edge towers over the physical and reproduction power disadvantage.
] |
[Question]
[
I recently started to wonder what a tree would be like on an alien world, and one thing that popped in mind for these trees was their color. The hosts star and environment would have a effect on said tree, such as its color.
So, let’s assume their is an earth-like planet-it has water, plants, animals, and other things that would be associated with earth. The only major difference would be the color of the tree. Its leaves and bark would be a light shade of red, and some are even capable of growing on rocks, like some trees on earth have.
**What environmental factors would be required to form a red tree?**
[Answer]
As others have already noted, there are already trees on Earth that have red leaves. So, clearly, Earthlike environmental factors are sufficient to produce trees with red leaves.
But, you want red to be the *default* color, not just a thing that shows up sometimes. Well, there are a couple of whole other branches of the tree of life on Earth for which red *is* the default: [red algae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_algae) (rhodophytes) and purple bacteria. Red algae use the pigment phycoerythrin to absorb blue light, which allows them to get more energy under water, which strongly absorbs red wavelengths. Purple sulfur bacteria use bacteriochlorophyll a or b in conjunction with various carotenoids (the same compounds that make carrots orange and give plant leaves different colors in fall), which give them colors ranging between purple, red, brown, and orange. Plants evolved later than either of these groups, via endosymbiosis with green algae (which became chloroplasts)... which *may* have evolved to be green precisely to take advantage of the red parts of the spectrum which were under-utilized by red and purple photosynthesizers, and thus still available in shaded environments already dominated by those organisms.
Now, in our world, green algae, and by extension green plants, figured out oxygenic photosynthesis using over-abundant water as an electron acceptor, and both algae and plants figured out multicellularity which gave them a huge advantage over bacteria, and so green photosynthesizers have come to dominate our world. But that may very well have been largely a matter of pure chance. If red or purple photosynthesizers figured out oxygen photosynthesis first (which really should be easier for red photosynthesizers, since they'll have access to more energy in the yellow-green spectral range), and/or if red or purple photosynthesizers happen to undergo endosymbiosis to produce more complex and specialized eukaryotic organisms, then you could easily get a world that is otherwise identical to Earth in gross astrophysical and geochemical characteristics, but *just happens* to be dominated by red plant-analogues instead of green.
[Answer]
Urban planners are quite fond of decorative trees with reddish-purple leaves, mostly cultivars of [*Prunus cerasifera*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_plum) (cherry plum-tree).
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prunus_pisardii.jpg)
(Purple-leaved *Prunus cerasifera* var. *pisardii*. Photo by Arturo Reina Sánchez, [available on Wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prunus_pisardii.jpg) under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.)
Those trees exist on Earth are quite common in European cities.
[Answer]
There is a Sherlock Holmes story called "the Copper Beeches", referring to the color of the trees and not what they are made of. A tree that I often saw at the Demuth Tobacco Shop at 114-116 East King Street, Lancaster, Pennsylvania was called a copper beech.
*Fagus sylvatica purpurea* is a variety called the copper beech or purple beech.
>
> leaves purple, in many selections turning deep spinach green by mid-summer.
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_sylvatica>[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_sylvatica)
Here is a link to a photo of a copper beech in spring:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_sylvatica#/media/File:M%C3%B8lleparken_(maj_02).jpg>[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_sylvatica#/media/File:M%C3%B8lleparken_(maj_02).jpg)
Then there is the Summer Red Maple:
>
> An outstanding shade tree with burgundy red new foliage that matures to dark purplish green; in autumn, older leaves turn yellow while younger ones turn orange or purple; a dense broad tree that provides welcome summer shade.
>
>
>
<https://www.calloways.com/summer-red-red-maple/>[3](https://www.calloways.com/summer-red-red-maple/)
>
> For red color from spring through fall, plant a "Bloodgood" Japanese maple (Acer palmatum "Bloodgood"). This 20-foot-tall tree thrives in partially to fully shaded sites in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 6 to 8. Its palmate leaves emerge red in spring and deepen over the growing season. Another 20-foot tree, the tricolor dogwood (Cornus florida "Welchii") has red, pink and green foliage. This deciduous tree is hardy in USDA zones 5 to 8 and thrives in shady sites with acidic, moist soil. The tricolor dogwood blooms with pink-white spring flowers, followed by red fruits.
>
>
> In spring, the "Royal Purple" smoke tree (Cotinus coggygria "Royal Purple") buds with red-purple leaves that keep their color through the growing season. In summer, red and purple blossoms add even more color. This 25-foot-tall tree is hardy in USDA zones 5 to 8, where it grows best in sunny exposures with well-draining soil. The "Newport" purple leaf plum (Prunus cerasifera "Newport") also has red-purple foliage. Reaching heights of 25 feet, this colorful tree also blooms with showy pink flowers in late winter, before the red-purple new growth appears in spring. Hardy in USDA zones 5 to 9, this plum tree grows well in moist soil.
>
>
> For red spring leaves with a hint of copper, plant a bronze dracaena (Cordyline australis "Atropurpurea"). This evergreen has red-copper foliage that's offset by its fragrant, white spring flowers. Hardy in USDA zones 10 and 11, the bronze dracaena grows to 35 feet tall and tolerates drought, dry soil and alkaline pH. Also reaching heights of 35 feet, the "Rubylace" locust (Gleditsia triacanthos var. inermis "Rubylace") has red, purple and green leaves that turn yellow in fall. This spreading tree grows well in a variety of soil types, sun exposures and pH levels, but it doesn't tolerate salt spray. "Rubylace" is hardy in USDA zones 3 to 7.
>
>
> The "Tricolor" European beech (Fagus sylvatica "Tricolor") has red, green and white leaves that darken to bronze in autumn. This deciduous tree grows to 45 feet tall and has a conical shape. It's hardy in USDA zones 5 to 7 and grows best in moist, acidic soil. Fill a large space in the landscape with a Chinese sweetgum (Liquidambar formosana). Reaching heights of 65 feet, this spreading tree has red-purple new growth that darkens to green, then turns red and yellow in fall. The Chinese sweetgum is hardy in USDA zones 7 to 9 and grows best in moist, acidic soil.
>
>
>
<https://living.thebump.com/kind-tree-red-leaves-spring-6634.html>[4](https://living.thebump.com/kind-tree-red-leaves-spring-6634.html)
So some Earth trees do have red leaves in seasons other than fall. To create a world where every species of tree everywhere has red leaves in every season you would have to replace chlorophyll with some other chemical for photosynthyesis; but if characters only visit one region on that world there might be only a few closely related species of trees there which all have red or reddish leaves in spring and/or summer, even if most trees in most regions of the planet have green leaves in spring or soummer.
>
> ..and some are even capable of growing on rocks..."
>
>
>
suggests that region of the planet might be rockier and have poorer soil than most regions of it.
As for bark, apparently a lot of tree species have red or reddish bark.
One of the most famous such trees is the coast redwood, *Sequoia sempervirens*:
>
> The bark can be very thick, up to 1-foot (30 cm), and quite soft and fibrous, with a bright red-brown color when freshly exposed (hence the name redwood), weathering darker.
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens>[5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens)
And some trees have much redder bark - here is a link to a photo of a much redder tree trunk:
<https://pacificnurseries.com/make-your-installation-a-success-with-uncommon-trees/>[6](https://pacificnurseries.com/make-your-installation-a-success-with-uncommon-trees/)
[Answer]
Just spitballing, but one idea could be parasitic plants, which are sometimes red in color. One such plant on Earth is the snowplant, which subsists not off of photosynthesis via sunlight + chlorophyll, but instead leverages microrhizzal fungi that are associated with other nearby plants. This doesn't completely match your idea though as these photosynthetic plants are certainly not 'trees' with large trunks / canopy structures.
More generally, chlorphyll is responsible for green plant color. So if you can come up with another pigment that reflects red light, you can have red trees!
[Answer]
The manzanita tree in Arizona has a beautiful red bark: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzanita>
[Answer]
The main reason why plants are mostly green on Earth is that it's the sweet spot of energy: The perfectioning of photosynthesis is an optimization between the energy that's gained, and the energy it costs to repair the damage it causes on the way in. Our sun gives plants a significant amount of energy, such that this optimization ends up rather on the low-production end. With a similar star, red would be more high-production, so create environmental factors that reduce the energy coming down on the leaf. For instance, you could increase the photodensity of outer atmosphere layers (or inner ones, but make sure to still have an air compound that can sustain life) or make fog and clouds significantly more common. (The reasons behind photosynthesis colors are a summary of what I personally find most compelling out of everything I've read on this site so far.)
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/132742/edit).
Closed 5 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/132742/edit)
In my current fictional fantasy-ish endeavor, I have a world with a great war. This war is vast and encompasses all of the known land. Due to magical means, soldiers for the war are 'summoned' from other worlds and times, thus negating the drain on population which would otherwise occur due to the war. However, there are difficulties:
These soldiers do not return to their worlds or times, but remain in my fantasy world, using up its valuable resources with everyone else. To make matters worse, through magical means **there are no permanent casualties of war** (Think WoW-style resurrections). The per capita consumption of resources will outweigh the per capita natural production of resources by the world. (Aka, too many people, not enough food.)
I can't have this happen. I need a world with infinite resources, or at least a world where the resources are replenished faster than they can be used up. **Is such a world possible?** If so, how? Details are below:
* Technology level is that of Ancient Rome. Battles are fought with swords, shield, arrows, and the like. Farming and other resource harvesting also have this technology level.
* 'Resources' refer mainly to food, both grown and animal. However, lumber for housing and metal for warfare should also be considered.
* 'Infinite' resources simply means that the rate at which the resources are supplied per capita outpaces the rate at which they are used per capita. If a man requires X amount of grain in one year, X amount of grain needs to have been regrown and ready for consumption by the next year.
* Magic should not be considered.
* That being said, due to magic, only people can be 'summoned'. Resources cannot.
Working along the assumption that everyone has sufficient resources (not starving, but not necessarily getting in three square meals a day either), is it possible for a world to have infinite resources, and if so, how?
[Answer]
There are a couple ways you could handwave this away.
The most obvious is the simple "Magic". How does food production keep up? Druids. How do we keep making swords? Transfiguration. Whenever you are met with some kind of deficiency get a corresponding magic form. This makes pretty much every resource entirely magic produced.
Another good magic one is to say they come from the same place as the soldiers. When fresh soldiers are summoned so is food iron and whatever else you need. With this kind of setting you can make a theme around the perpetual consumption of more and more worlds to fuel this forever war.
One that is a bit less magical would be constant asteroid strikes delivering fresh war materials. Either naturally for whatever reason or summoned. You would still need to explain food production with "its magic" but this could be fresh building materials and metals.
Finally you could use the worlds metaphysics to explain it. Your world simply creates and eats land in a treadmill like way. Let's say your world is a circular disk where the outer edge is a "creation line where new land pushes in towards the middle. The center is a "destruction line" where a black hole like structure eats everything.
[Answer]
You have created a horrible problem. There does not exist a way within known physics to make an infinite amount of something from a finite amount of it. Unless your people are smart enough to limit their summoning to fit within resources (*hint hint hint*), they can always summon more mouths to feed than there are food.
100% of resources (meaning "things you and I might possibly consider to be resources") have energy to them. Conservation of energy along will ruin this plot.
But all is not lost. Consider that you haven't answered the question I'd ask immediately: what happens if these newly summoned warriors *don't* consume food?
What if, after your WoW style resurrection, we simply push them all into a pit, where they aren't given food or water or resources of any kind? Eventually the pit might fill up, which would be a problem, but it'd be a start.
The real problem is resurrection. When life itself has limited value due to the implicit guarantees of resurrection, pretty much everything else shifts around to fit. The summoning isn't actually the problem. It could even be a solution: summoning people and stripping them of their resources may be a valid solution, but if they resurrect as a new mouth to feed, there's still a problem.
Myself, if I were a warring leader in your world, I would invest tremendous resources into understanding the specifics of this ressurection mechanism. You mention that they can only die of natural deaths... let's explore what "natural death" actually means. Really really means. Like if you say "a heart attack is a natural death," I'm going to start with a snake venom which coagulates your blood, and see if you ressurect.
The leader who understands this mechanism will have a virtually boundless advantage over all other leaders who don't. Anyone worthy of leading a great war should be trying to game your system almost instantly... probably even before the war starts. Assume that every leader in your war is *your* enemy, and by that I mean you as a worldbuilder. Assume they are actively trying to exploit every tiny little crack in your world, because that's exactly what leaders of warring nations do.
We exploited a corner case in the stability of an atomic nucleus to end WWII. That exploit has caused considerable consternation since then.
[Answer]
Your world is a simulation. Just that world in particular though. It could exist as a planet sized super computer, an old arcade in the future, or even within the dreams of an android. The why of it poses a rather interesting question.
[Answer]
To access infinite resources, you merely need an infinite world! As @Willk mentioned, that was the practical situation for a decent chunk of our own history, before the world was fully mapped. But in your world, it won't just be temporarily effectively infinite, but really, truly infinite.
First, suppose that the world is an infinite flat plane. You'll have to figure out how, e.g., the sun works in such a radically different cosmology, but hey, magic (and there are plenty of existing questions & answers on related topics). If you run out of grain here, where the war is going on, you just have to travel into the as-yet-unexplored regions beyond your borders to find an unending supply of more fields.
Of course, that doesn't completely solve your problem. If you have to travel prohibitively far to *get* those infinite resources, the fact that infinite resources *exist* is academic. For practical purposes, you only have the finite resources within your finite sphere of influence, and your ability to bring in new resources is limited by a border length for your civilization that grows more slowly than the people-holding area.
In order to solve the geometry problem, we'll simply change your world's geometry. It's not an infinite Euclidean plane--it's a *hyperbolic* plane, which can fit *a lot* more area within the same small travel radius than a spherical planet or even a Euclidean plane can! Just pick your curvature parameter so that things remain normal-enough looking on whatever scale you need. If, e.g., you merely need things to be close-to-Euclidean within the scale of a single city at a time, you could still easily fit a whole Earth's worth of area into a radius of only a few hundred miles. Now, your border still grows more slowly that your area in such a scenario, if you expand everywhere equally... but *would* you expand everywhere equally? Probably not--in such a world, people are likely to occupy a network of individually-close-to-Euclidean communities, with *huge* unexplored expanses sitting in between population centers that are nevertheless still a mere day's walk or less in shortest-path distance from each other, leaving plenty of space to be explored for additional resource extraction well within the nominal extreme radius of your civilization.
[Answer]
Casualties are not resurrected immediately. Rather, you are put on the back of a FIFO log of people to resurrect, maintaining a more or less constant pool of "alive" people.
Sure, it might take hundreds (and it will take longer and longer as more people join the world) of years before you resurrect; but it will happen eventually.
This has interesting side effects:
* People can pay each other to die/stay dead longer in exchange of money
* All policies/politics are extremely future oriented
* Lots of Romeo and Juliet style love stories. Otherwise, suicide is seen as a "solution"
* Banks are extremely important (you don't want to resurrect poor).
* People try to cheat the system.
[Answer]
If only people can be summoned with magic, then you can make infinite amount of food from humans. Soylent Green Ancient Rome edition.
[Answer]
As others mentioned, it's scientifically impossible to generate "infinite resources" for your "infinite troops". However, perhaps some world "quirks" could help alleviate said resources running out.
Space-time cracks: Your fantasy world has been summoning people from other worlds and times. This has caused the entire world's space-time to be unstable (Or could be the very reason why you can summon people in the world in the first place. These cracks appear randomly anywhere in the world, either spewing out random resources, or destroying whatever it contacts with.
"Broken evolution": With the ongoing war spanning for eons(?), creatures have evolved to rapidly reproduce and grow at astonishing rates. Even with limited resources, it can grow to an adult within days, ready to reproduce even more. This in turn, makes it very easy for an unlimited number of people to be fed.
White Hole: Theorized to be true, but never seen, it's basically an opposite of a black hole, spewing out matter and information. This is a similar concept of @Evelyn's Disk world, but instead the White hole would be the center of the planet.
As the war goes on, ravaging all lands, mining out resources underground extensively, the crust of the planet has been depleted already. However, the white hole in the center keeps spewing out more resources that can be dugged up years and years ahead. Though this questions physics as the planet will undoubtedly keep on growing and growing and everyone would probably die from the ever-increasing gravity or something..
[Answer]
/This war is vast and encompasses all of the known land./
**Your world is vaster, and almost all of it remains unknown.**
When they are done fighting, persons so inclined (I hope they bring in male and female soldiers in equal proportion) go out to settle new lands. Yours is a hospitable world with pleasant weather, grassy fields, ample rainfall, and few dangerous creatures. The world is very big, and people are small. Like minded pioneers go out together into the wilds and find a place with running water and good sites for fields. They settle. They grow crops, raise animals, make things, have weddings, make babies, hold funerals and do all the things people do when no-one is making them fight.
This is how it worked in our world for a long, long time. For all intents and purposes, up until about 200 years ago the resources of the Earth were infinite.
[Answer]
Renewable resources such as food and wood can be explained by a good farming and replantation system, if the soldiers figting the war are from another world, you have an entire population to run the economy.
The bigger problem would be non-renewable resources like iron. You could re-smelt broken swords and armor from fallen soldiers, which would create some interesting situations, for example, you would be more concered about losing your *equipment* when you lose a fight, rather that losing your soldiers.
Of course you will still have nations that will summon more soldiers than they can feed, hoping that they can take some land with the advantage and therefore have enough resources to feed them after the victory, but that just adds another layer to the avaliable strategies.
Another option would be that the summoned soldiers come with armor and weapons already.
[Answer]
Your primary constraint is providing enough food for the soldiers but what if *they didn't have to eat*. Instead they use either photosynthesis or absorb energy coming from the planet's core. This energy source, like our sun, would be nuclear and therefore nearly infinite, eliminating the need to provide a stream of physically tangible food products to the infinite armies.
This doesn't necessarily solve the need for war products, so each soldier could be sent over to the planet already wearing armor and wielding their own weapon, as in kajacx's answer. All of the soldier's armor and weapons could be metal or otherwise fully recyclable meaning that the supply would increase 1:1 for each new soldier even as it becomes damaged.
[Answer]
Make your magical means of maintaining and increasing the population require something like water.
Water is a renewable resource, significantly difficult (per the monetary cost) to obtain, which we require. After we use it, it returns to the common resource pool from which everyone draws. However, despite being renewable ("infinite"), we can only use so much at a time.
One thing that's almost like water in this way is **time**. If each summon/resurrection requires a lead time, and that time grows with the population, we get a "sweet spot" of summon time and population that's impossible to escape because of the race to summon as fast as possible.
Depending on your preference, you could instead do the same thing with other resources, such as special facilities (which are high-value strategic targets), materials, or energy.
[Answer]
It is possible to have a world with infinite resources. The trick is that you don't need a world where resources are *physically* infinite, merely one in which they are *economically* infinite. Which means you need a mechanism that limits consumption based upon the available supply (meaning, the amount that human beings have access to right now) and demand of any given resource.
Many places have such a system for doing this in the real world today, and it can be implemented regardless of your level of technology with no magic whatsoever. It's called the **price system**.
Specifically, you need a price system where prices emerge naturally as the result of transactions between buyers and sellers of resources. When a resource is scarce, the price will go up, which will discourage potential buyers from using that resource for frivolous things, encourage sellers to find more of the resource, and entrepreneurs to offer alternatives that can be used for the same purposes. When there's lots of a resource, the price will go down, which will let lots of people buy it, and sellers could still make a lot of money and therefore keep making more of it.
This is a very crude explanation, and is glossing over a lot of details. It also doesn't work for everything and everywhere. You need a few things for it to work:
1. You need to be able to have "a market" for these resources. That means there has to be people who clearly own the thing and can sell it to somebody, and it has to be possible for these people to meet and do this in predictable, safe ways. Which means you need to have a civil society that has laws and minimum amount of trust. Maybe you need money.
2. The resources in question need to be "ownable." It's very easy to own a farms, or a herd of domesticated cattle or big piles of iron and wood. When somebody owns something, they can set a price for it, and prevent other people from overusing it. It's very hard to own clean air, or wildlife, or the ocean, which is why these things tend to get overused.
3. You need the prices to reflect reality, so you need them to emerge naturally from transactions between buyers and sellers. If you have someone who isn't a buyer or a seller set the price at some arbitrary value, then the prices won't change in response to relative scarcity, so you'll always end up with less than you would have had, either because people can't buy it (the price is too high or it's banned, which is like having an infinite price), or people buy too much of it (the price is too low, so it's all gone and it's not worth it to find more).
The price system works really, really well when you're able to use it. All of the resources you describe here can be used with the price system without issue, and will ensure you have the maximum amount of any given resource that is possible.
[Answer]
An interesting solution might be a world that experiences an unnatural amount of meteor showers and therefore constant influxes of readily accessible metals.
As for foodstuffs, you could have an ecological system dominated by large prey animals, though this would require other considerations, such as how do they eat enough to sustain their size and how do they procreate fast enough to be a viable food source. Of course, the demands of the world could have easily forced developments in this area of technology, making them more advanced than their Earth counterparts.
Either way, you may have to use a bit of handwavium on this one. The simple question of why two civilizations would even be at war in the first place if resources were so abundant as to be essentially infinite, would have to be satisfactorily answered.
[Answer]
Only talking about the food part here, not the metal, or wood or anything, but have you considered eating yourself ?
If you are resurrected as a whole even when your arm gets cut off, just cut off your arm, suicide, eat your arm. You're good to go for the day.
You here already have an infinite resource : bodies.
Also, if you have infinite bodies, you can have infinite energy (kind of) by burning them, same thing goes with tools that can be made out of bones instead of wood or metal whenever it is possible to do so.
[Answer]
If we talk about energy, it's possible. We use very little of renewing energy (solar, winds, ocean waves, geothermal...), and oil/gas/coal could be used no more if humanity will switch to this energy.
] |
[Question]
[
In a specific city in my D&D setting, necromancy is incredibly commonplace. Undead are generally very common; however, skeletons are favored by the government of the city as soldiers, and by the general populace as being less discomforting than the undead, who are rotting or still might have faces or other obvious remnants of who they once were in life.
Is there any way to render a body down into a skeleton that would be less labor intensive than manually removing everything, but that takes less time than letting everything rot? Ideally, the method shouldn’t damage the bones all that much, and probably shouldn’t visibly disfigure them.
Acid comes to mind, but I don’t know if it would actually be convenient, as it would have to be some sort of acid that didn’t dissolve the bones, and it would raise the question of where all of the acid was coming from as well. The technology in the setting is ~late 15th century to early 16th, so anything super advanced is off limits in terms of production.
[Answer]
# ANTS
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NuIaX.gif)
Ants can skeletonise a corpse in hours. The only downside is the ants might be too effective, and eat the ligaments with the flesh, so the skeleton cannot stand up straight.
To prevent this, you must ensorcel great uncle Jerry with the correct wards before dumping him on the anthill.
Thanks ants.
[Thants.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jtU9BbReQk)
[Answer]
# [Dermestes maculatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermestes_maculatus)
From the wiki article:
>
> Dermestes maculatus is the species of carrion beetle typically used by universities and museums to remove the flesh from bones in skeleton preparation. Human and animal skeletons are prepared using this method and the practice has been in use for over 150 years. The beetles are especially useful for small animals with delicate bones.
>
>
>
Known also for their use on the forensic anthropology TV show, [Bones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bones_(TV_series)).
[Answer]
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uYFjx.jpg)
## You need to make them look nice and not stink. You need burial, followed by NaOH solution, followed by H2O2 and bleaching in the sun.
My mum assembles bones out of dead animals as a hobby. Really. It's called bonebuilding (or skeleton articulation), and it's a moderately popular hobby, with forums online.
This is the process she uses for whatever unfortunate seagull/ferret/seal/weka she processes:
1. Burial. Her town is basically a giant anthill, with very high numbers of both normal and Argentine ants. A shallow grave results in both rotting and consumption of the flesh by ants. This takes two to six weeks.
2. NaOH prep for mammals: For mammals, burial results in a brown, *very* smelly skeleton with little bits of flesh on it. The skeleton is placed in a cold, dilute NaOH solution and the flesh removed after a day by rubbing by hand or with a toothbrush. Bird skeletons don't survive NaOH.
3. The skeleton is disassembled at this point.
4. Disassembly and peroxide bleaching: At this point the skeleton is basically clean but is brown and smells of decay. A 1% hydrogen peroxide solution (or fictional equivalent thereof) for 1 to 7 days makes the skeleton white and clean.
5. Bleach in the sun: For something particularly smelly, like a seal head or a whale vertebra, the bone is then left in a dry spot that catches sun.
The end result is a nice white skeleton that doesn't stink.
Yes, it gets weird when I ask her if she had a nice day sometimes.
[Answer]
There are some insects whose [larvae feed on corpse](https://entomologytoday.org/2017/10/03/the-flies-and-beetles-that-turn-death-into-dinner/), like blow flies and carrion beetles:
>
> Blow flies arrive on a body or any other type of organic decomposing matter, taste it with their sponging proboscis, and, once they feel it is a suitable place to lay eggs, oviposit clusters of eggs in natural orifices, so that the eggs are moist and protected. From these eggs, after a time that depends on the species of fly, season, temperature, weather conditions, relative humidity, and several other variables, little first instar larvae emerge. These tiny worm-like creatures are incredibly voracious and start immediately to consume the body. They molt twice, respectively into second instar and third instar, and their size increases significantly throughout their larval development.
>
>
> Once the maggots have fed enough, they leave the body, which at this point probably has little left to offer, and migrate toward a dry place where they pupate.
>
>
>
These insects are already used in cases where the skeleton has to be quickly cleaned from the flesh.
In the past, defleshing the body was often done by boiling it so that the flesh would be easier to separate from the bones.
[Answer]
### Waste Not Want Not
The single best way to remove meat from any skeleton is the tried and true method of the Auntimoanian 72 Hour Barbecue! No fooling! And we at Auntie Wang's know just how to do the job right! Just skin the carcass as per normal, remove the innards, prepare the meat with Uncle Wompas's *Twenty Five Spice Barbecue Rub* and let that meat ride the over night train to Flavourtown!
Hoo wee! Once the former citizen has spent a few days in the smoker, I guarantee that the results will be tongue tickling, tooth taunting, flavourific fall-off-the-bone goodness! Just let our meat pickers separate the meat from the bones, box em up and send em on to your necromancers'
bone builders.
There's no good reason to waste all that delectability on a nest of ants! Put it to good use! At fourpence a pound, not only will your Orckish and Ogrish families jump at the bargain, but other, more finnicky buyers will come to market looking to snap up the deal of the day!
MMMM-MMMM! Fresh from the hangman to your family's dinner bowl! Aunti Wang's Seventy Two Hour Auntimoanian Barbecue! ***NOW THAT'S GOOD EATIN!!***
[Answer]
### Magic, or the lazy wizard's solution
You want to use bodies for animated skeleton creation, but need to get rid of everything that's not the skeleton itself? Have the necromancy magic itself do it for you!
No matter the solution, it's bound to take more time, more steps, and probably more money as well. Integrating the body's "treatment" to the undeath spell will reduce the number of steps to create undeads, overall making the whole process much smoother.
If you have spells that allow to create undead skeleton guards from bodies, it doesn't seem too far-fetched to have variants of that magic which also gets rid of the body's non-skeleton matter.
And if that spell doesn't exist, you can bet someone out there will be working on creating it. As a side note, this could work as a plot hook for your story.
[Answer]
*A search for "easiest way to remove flesh from bones" revealed the following:*
>
> MACERATION: The easiest way to remove soft tissue from bones is to cover them in room-temperature water and let them soak. Using a crockpot or boiling them will very likely damage the bones – I don’t recommend it. Maceration will be the smelliest part of the process. **Do not attempt it in your home or in your lab – make sure you have a garage, museum facility or backyard that you can use, or you will react to your life choices with a [predictable amount of despair](https://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ive-made-a-huge-mistake-gob-arrested-development.gif).** You’ll want to change the water every few days or so at the beginning of the process, and you’ll likely find a lot of grease and fat accumulating on the surface of the water that you can skim off. Once most of the flesh has started to dislodge, add a little bit of dish soap to the mix to help speed things along. The amount of time this will take varies from about a week to much longer, depending on how much soft tissue is left on your animal and how big it is. ([Source](https://bonebroke.org/resources-for-prepping-animal-skeletons/))
>
>
>
It would also help to research butchering. A knife is still the fastest way to get the bulk of flesh off the bones.
[Answer]
## It's about more than just removing the meat
The ideal skeleton guard should meet 3 criteria:
1. They should look (and smell) as unoffensive as possible.
2. The process should be relatively quick, cheap, and feasible with available tech.
3. The bones should be left as strong as possible when done. Bones made weaker in preparation don't make for ideal guards after all.
To achieve these goals, the first step should be to manually remove most of the skin, organs, and meat with a knife. A skilled butcher can do in minutes what would take decomposers or chemical baths weeks to accomplish. Removing the skin is especially important since a lot of decomposers can't actually get into the body until after the skin breaks down. In a necromancer society, there is probably also other uses for the excess meat and organs; so, fleshcrafters might pay top dollar for you left overs.
Next you want to use insects to decompose the remains. There are already a lot of good examples of this in other answers, so no need to get more detailed. But, by removing the flesh manually first, you can reduce this from a several weak process to something that will only take between a few days and a few hours depending on the number and type of bugs you are working with.
Lastly, you want to bleach the bones. Humans, as a general rule, perceive bleached things as less offensive than natural darker colors: we blech our eggs, linens, papers, etc. just because we like the "clean" look of bleached things. It also removes unpleasant odors as well. But... the downside of bleaching is that most techniques that exist either require modern chemistry or damage the bones, so you have to be very particular about what method you choose. For this I would suggest steaming the bones with a mixture of boiled sulfur and salt water. This bleaching technique has been well known for thousands of years (it's how the Romans bleached thier togas) and it can be done with materials that would be highly available to a medieval society. But more important than just making the bones whiter and less smelly, hydrogen sulphite actually reinforces the bones while it bleaches them meaning that you actually get stronger skeletons out of the process than if you left the bones untreated.
Since this last step makes your guards tougher, even the least squeamish of city officials could be convinced to spare the extra expense of "skeletonizing" your guards for the practical advantages in confers.
] |
[Question]
[
Atomic and nuclear weapons are certainly the most destructive weapons Earth has in modern times, able to rupture cities. In the present, while we have the **NPT** (*Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons*) that desires nuclear disarmament, some countries still have nuclear weapons for the defensive in the form of **ICBM**s (*Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles*), some refuse to join this treaty, and some countries *might still be making more*.
However, for my story, I want to imagine a scenario on an alternate Earth, a scenario so terrible and something that happened due to the atomic and nuclear weapons, that prompted all countries across the globe, to finally agree that they must never be used again, and all pre-existing atomic and nuclear weapons have to be disarmed and disabled immediately. In other words, *global disarmament*. Just what scenario could this be?
[Answer]
# Nuclear blasts open portals to hell
Every time you use a nuke, you open a portal to another dimension and creatures from it are able to invade Earth. These creatures are not intimidated by the Square Cube Law and are therefore insanely big and strong. They don't communicate with humans and simply commit genocide whenever they come.
Now that could be weaponized - you could simply nuke an enemy and let the aliens wipe out any survivors anyway. But that doesn't work because the portals move over the surface of the Earth - you could bomb some place 12 time zones away from you and still have some kaijus stomping on your capital.
---
Alternatively, if you think everything will be ok as long as no one shoots first, make it so that the mere presence of nuclear weapons opens up those portals.
[Answer]
## There is something better around.
Nuclear weapons are much better than conventional bombs at smashing cities or army logistics bases. One bomber with one nuke can have more effect than a dozen [thousand bomber raids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand-bomber_raids).
Nuclear weapons are **not** all that much better at smashing armored divisions in the field or carrier battle groups at sea. Yes, a nuclear cruise missile will ruin a carrier's day, but so will a big conventional warhead. A tactical nuclear weapon doesn't need a direct hit to kill a tank, but how many tanks will be caught in the radius of effect? So against armies, modern [precision-guided munitions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision-guided_munition) could be more effective when all the costs of a nuclear weapon are taken into account, from building the centrifuges to disposing the nuclear waste. If you could send a dozen conventional missiles against that carrier for the cost of one nuclear missiles, if you could send a hundred air-to-ground missiles for the cost of one nuclear bomb, which one is the more rational choice?
We're probably not there yet, but governments all over the world worry about the American [Prompt Global Strike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike), and what it will do to the military balance.
[Answer]
### Unexplained increasing instability
In the beginning it was hardly noticeable, but more and more instances are slowly realising that something weird is going on with their radio active materials. It seems to be.... agitated. It's becoming more and more difficult to keep the materials stable, predictable and 'safe'. And the enriched materials are destabilizing faster!
At one point someone said "ehm, don't we have nuclear *bombs* becoming more unstable?!". The owners of the bombs are becoming aware that their 'great tactical advantage' is slowly turning into a time bomb on their own soil! If they don't dismantle them, they might explode in their own backyard!
---
The 'why' they become more unstable might be handwaved, or some plot hook. Could be some scientist wanted to get rid of nuclear bomb, whatever the cost. Or some weird radiation from space from an exploding star arriving at earth.
[Answer]
My feeling is that voluntary dismissal of nuclear weapon is nothing more than wishful thinking.
The atrocities caused by chemical weapons during WWI have led to a stop of their usage by most of the combatants afterwards, though some continue to produce them.
The atrocities caused by nukes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki haven't stopped their improvement, and the treaties have just stopped their proliferation.
The only "feasible" way I foresee for an actual stop to the nuclear weapons is that we run out of materials to make them: we are not able to synthesize Uranium, and being it radioactive it will inevitably decade into non usable elements. Without Uranium we won't be able to produce Plutonium, which will also decade.
Once we are out of Uranium and Plutonium we won't also be able to ignite fusion weapon. At that point the leaders of all nuclear powers on Earth will brag about how much they love peace and how they decide to dismantle their nuclear arsenal.
"Small" caveat: Uranium-235 has an half life of 700 million years. Any president who wants the Nobel prize for peace merits using the above method will need to plan something so that humanity can survive that long.
[Answer]
**One world wide country**
>
> I want to imagine a scenario on an alternate Earth, a scenario so terrible and something that happened due to the atomic and nuclear weapons, that prompted all countries across the globe, to finally agree that they must never be used again, and all pre-existing atomic and nuclear weapons have to be disarmed and disabled immediately
>
>
>
The end result of the war was the global understanding that all mankind shares the same little, fragile, ball of dirt suspended in hostile void. We all share the same problems and therefore a global government is the most sensible solution.
The European Union is the real world example. No matter it's current limits and shortcomings the basic idea still stands. Common problems need shared solutions which can only come from unified government. From the ashes of WW2 political thinkers brought forward the need for a better way to handle issues than battling each other.
This process of unification has proceeded with civilization. **The more interconnected the world becomes the more it is felt to have a shared government for effective management.**
So. Why would you keep a nuclear arsenal if your own country encompasses the whole world?
Yes, since this is still the real world and not fairy land there will still be discontent in some places, sometime riots, even guerrilla and terrorist activities. But none of these threats to the State are going to be solved with nukes.
Building nuclear weapons is expensive. You need a solid reason to invest into it.
Even more so if you don't have fission reactors anymore because you have moved on to more cost effective ways to generate energy.
Without the need fissile material would have better uses for civilian applications.
Given that nukes are not of any use anymore on Earth could they be employed in space?
Not really. A future world spanning civilization is most likely to be able to track all bodies in the solar system that could pose a real threat and track their orbit for the future. With hundreds of years advance warning methods of nudging the incoming asteroid would be feasible.
Last option: a possible alien invasion? Depends on your story. No efficient real-world government would waste money for this reason unless there are proofs of existence of alien civilizations.
Of course a more corrupt government could set up mock aliens as existential threat to rally the people together, suffocate dissent and justify large governmental spending into the military/industrial complex owned by the members of government themselves or their overlords.
[Answer]
**Destruction of everything**
When the CFC in spray cans destroyed the ozone layer, the world knew immediately what to do. *Ban them all*. Otherwise, we'd all be dead quite quickly.
Nuclear weapons can have such side effects. If the oxygen in the atmosphere would possibly ignite, which they thought could become a chain reaction that would burn the atmosphere. This proved to be false, but *what if*. If they see this could happen and we lucked out so far, they would instantly remove all such weapons, as a single bomb killing all life on the Earth is simply not worth it. It could still be used as a deterrent, meaning no-one would dare attacking someone with a bomb too much, much like it is currently done. Only the consequences could be greater. Only one bomb per country (or with some redundancy a few) is needed to scare off most countries.
Alternatively they do something similar to CFC. Destroy something vital that in short or long term can have huge consequences *for everyone*. That would remove the benefit of using a bomb. Destroying a city or army just isn't advantageous enough if for example all fertiliser in the world is reduced, or a large amount of sealife dies, or if the radiation sweeps the planet, killing and poisoning indiscriminately. If a military weapon like a nuke also hits yourself to such a degree, there is no real use of using the terrifying power of a nuke.
[Answer]
# Supers
It turn out that there is a new mutation in Human genome, and it is spreading. The mutation isn't initially noticed, until an accident or a bomb drops. But afterwards it becomes apparent that Humans with this mutation aren't hurt by radiation. Rather, their bodies absorb it and grow stronger as a result.
Maybe their powers are low end; increased strength, toughness, healing, and senses. Everyone effectively becomes Captain (insert country). They can kill a normal person with a single punch punch, but can't throw a car. They can outrun a cheetah, but not a racecar. They only get bruised by small caliber bullets, but larger/faster/AP rounds can still take them out.
Or maybe they get heat vision, or lightning breath, or telepathy. Unique and actually super powers.
Either way, unless they are close enough to the blast to be killed outright by the shock wave or heat, a nuke is going to make them stronger. And probably very angry.
At this point, nukes become a liability. You attack your enemy with a nuke, you may kill a large portion of the populous. But you ultimately make them stronger.
And that's assuming your enemy can control the new supers, and not those people decide to take over. To use the nukes to become more powerful and find more people like them.
[Answer]
# The world no longer likes it
I recently attended a talk given by one of the members of the Nobel Peace Prize winning campaign *The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons* ([ICAN](https://cities.icanw.org/appealtext)), Dr Margaret Beavis. Dr Beavis mentioned in her talk that the way to abolish the use of Nuclear weapons was to create a stigma around them[[1]](https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/ican/pages/355/attachments/original/1580986913/ICAN_Cities_Appeal.pdf?1580986913), showing the governments and leaders that 'we do not *accept* the use of nuclear weapons' - in a similar manner to the way that Landmines are treated now[[2]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty).
The theory is, if every locale, then state, then country was to ratify this agreement that "nuclear weapons are bad", then the use of them would be abolished as well; it would fall into disfavour.
You really don't need to way for a doomsday to achieve this outcome, just start now.
[Answer]
# Solutions to stockpiling (as opposed to use)
There is a difference in what would cause a nation to decide to either A) commit to not using nuclear weapons, or B) disarm, dismantle and never rearm with nuclear weapons ever again.
Since others have spoken about reasons for scenario A to apply, I'll take scenario B.
Hypothetical new research in your world has uncovered evidence that suggests massive consequences for the storage of nuclear weapons:
## New form of 'radiation'
Newly discovered 'epsilon' radiation emanates from parts essential to nuclear weapons, such as the fissile or fusion material itself, even when stored in an unprepared state (to discourage 'bone-yard' stockpiling of materials that can be built into weapons quickly on request). This epsilon radiation has severe long-term consequences that have only now been discovered, and can affect a geographically large area. Pick from: mental health impacts, reproduction potency, cancer viability in the populace, etc (stuff that is damaging to the economy enough that nukes as a last resort aren't economically viable).
## Unintended consequences
There are still realms of the world we live in that are still undiscovered (much in the same way that electromagnetic radiation was only discovered in the last howsoever many years). However, in nations that have built nuclear weapons or stockpiled nuclear materials for the purpose of use as weapons there is a pattern. A pattern of severe incidents that affect the leadership of that nation, or the (military) organisation that oversees the nuclear weapon stockpiling/manufacturing. Any causal connection is as of yet unclear, but the pattern is undeniable, and fearing for their lives, the leadership have elected to suffer the possibility of invasion over succumbing to the 'pattern'.
## A new counter
A newly discovered form of radiation (hang on, keep reading) that emanates from nuclear material at a great distance has been discovered that has enabled defensive weapons manufacturers to create hard counters to nuclear weapons, rendering them completely ineffective.
A) Radiation facilitates detection during attempts of smuggling to a target or attack via supersonic delivery e.g. ICBM or similar.
B) 'Counter-radiation' can be emitted at the radiation source as it gets close to the defending nation, cheaply and accurately, disabling the fissile/fusion material while it is receiving the counter radiation.
C) Such detection and disabling devices are cheap and easy to construct relative to their offensive counterparts.
As a consequence, military leaders have given up on nuclear weapons for offensive or defensive purposes due their inability to block the radiation or counter-radiation.
[Answer]
### Everyone had it in WWII, and everyone used it
Another answer referenced the use of gas in WWI. The key reason why gas was banned after WWI was that every single combatant had seen the effects of it, and many non-combatants saw the after-effects on their friends and relatives. Any military thereafter who intended to deploy gas in the years after the war would have faced a mass mutiny, and any government who intended to roll out gas to their military would have faced a landslide defeat starting within their own party. Even the generals had had personal experience of it and did not want to face it again.
This still held true in WWII. Although all sides had substantial stocks, they mostly did not use them because the prospect of retaliation in kind was too horrific to consider.
So why didn't we have the same horror of nuclear weapons? ***Because it happened elsewhere.*** To this day, Japan is the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack. As awful as the newsreel footage showed it to be, it simply didn't impinge on the consciousness of anyone else in the world, because it didn't happen to their friends and relatives. There was also a large element of "they deserved it" because of how the Japanese military had treated civilians and POWs.
This leads us to a natural conclusion. Had nuclear research been 5-10 years further ahead at the start of the war, all sides would have had nuclear weapons. And in a total war environment where cities were routinely firebombed by all sides to kill civilians, all sides would have used them. Whatever the outcome of the war, it seems very likely that all survivors would have vowed "never again" in the same way as they did with gas.
[Answer]
Christopher Anvil wrote some science fiction short stories that featured a machine called an "asterator". It was supposed to make highly efficient, easy-to-control, safe nuclear power. It worked, but the effect turned out to be impossible to control...
This text is from the story "Doc's Legacy" which can be found in *Prescription for Chaos*, a collection of Christopher Anvil stories published by Baen Books:
---
"The asterator has a number of reaction chambers. Each chamber emits a narrow beam. Just as glass is transparent to light, ordinary matter is transparent to the asterator beam. The beams can focus on a common target. In a target containing unstable nuclei, the nuclei decompose."
"The significance of this--?"
"Nuclear weapons and reactors contain a lot of unstable nuclei. If an asterator focuses on them, the weapon or reactor blows up."
Allen nodded. "And the political effect?"
"Not long ago, the major powers had arsenals of nuclear weapons. Then Doc Griswell invented the asterator. Suddenly a nuclear weapon was more dangerous to its possessor than to anyone else. The result was rapid voluntary nuclear disarmament, which is still going on."
---
The asterator effect travels in a straight line, not attenuated by matter; it could literally travel through the Earth and explode a nuclear warhead or a nuclear fission power plant on the other side of the globe. Once this was discovered, every government realized that nuclear warheads and nuclear fission plants were now too dangerous.
Thus a device intended to make nuclear power safe made it so blackly dangerous that nobody dares to use it.
P.S. I also remember reading some kind of science fiction story where there was some sort of super-powered person who would personally travel around the world destroying nuclear weapons. After a short time, countries began using spies to identify any hidden caches of weapons in other countries, and would send information to this super-powered person so that he/she could destroy the weapons. Thus the only countries that had nukes were countries that had them hidden so well that spies couldn't figure out where they were, and after a while that meant no country had any nukes. I dimly remember that in the book this was called something like "the war of spies" or something like that, but that's all I remember. Hmm, maybe I should ask for a story identification on the science fiction StackExchange.
[Answer]
**All-out nuclear war**
The U.S.A. and Russia (or U.S.S.R. if in the past) used hundreds to thousands of nukes on each other, with colossal death, destruction and suffering. Optionally, other nuclear powers were involved, maybe all of them. Optionally, nuclear winter or other very severe worldwide environmental issues followed.
Everyone else was motivated to avoid a repeat.
This requires no magic, and can depart from real history at any point between the 1960's and the near future.
[Answer]
I am not sure I understand the thrust of your question. Do you still want a socciety that is as hateful and mistrusting as our society, but just without nuclar weapons? Like a return back to the zeitgeist of the early 20th century? Or are you after a society in which nuclear weapons are an unnecessary tool because war itself is not a consideration?
If it is the former, then there will always be newer and better ways for mass destruction, and nuclear weapons will become as obsolete as the cannon. You will not have eliminated the likelihood of humans causing mass genocide, you will simply be changing the method. As long as there are opposing armies, there will always be increasingly more lethal ways to kill.
If your goal is the latter, then the solution rests in a global resource chain. Every country is dependent on other countries for their economic survival. Under such a scenario, the solution is simple - every country simply just stops manucacturing and maintaining nukes, as they are a useless and wasteful expenditure of money and resources. The goal would become economic strength, not military strength. Building military capacity that will in all likelyhood never be used before it is scrapped would become a drag on the economy. *'EDIT' What adds more GDP to the economy, building an air-force-use-only mega airport and facitility, or spending the same money to build a commercial airport that will add to the GDP through increased business and trade?*
But THAT would require a change in Western thinking - from a win-lose winner-take-all strategy to a win-win strategy, where winners share the winnings. It all depends on Western governments, if their leadership can stop being paranoid and narcissistic.
However, if you are an American-centric writer, I am sure this is something that is completely inconceiveable to your audience and would never win a large readership base. No conflict, no story. America always has to win and dominate, everyone else has to lose, and you are stuck with SOMEONE having nukes.
[Answer]
Something is making the bombs either unreliable or unstable.
Imagine if bombs can be disabled over time, or can be forced to explode while in storage. Maybe you've found a way to deliver nanobots to them or some other means to do this and no one has figured it out. Would you spend millions in nuclear warheads that are likely duds or explode suddenly while in storage? Keep in mind these warheads need to be checked, serviced and sometimes replaced, each time they risk getting exposed to your shenanigans.
Alternatively, nukes are expensive to build and need rather intricate methods of delivery. ICBM's arent cheap and things like stealth bombers are complicated weapons as well. Now imagine someone being able to detect radiative sources like that from space and have a cheap and reliable method of intercepting them. Now your expensive nukes arent that useful anymore.
The only way for making nukes obsolete for everyone is to make sure they arent cost-effective or too dangerous for the user. Otherwise you get the same situation as with chemical weapons: some villainous ruling body will claim it as necessary for their nation's superiority, and will use it against any opposition regardless of that opposition being external military or internal civilian strife.
[Answer]
**It's all a simulation after all.**
The entire universe really is a simulation being run by an alien species just to see what happens in a universe with our starting assumptions (theirs is, of course, different, with different rules and outcomes). Ours (well, the alternative "ours", anyway) being the most interesting planet it has become the focus of their studies and is monitored intensely.
Up until now, everything has been ticking along as if the universe was around 14 billion years old, as originally planned, but now they have noticed that, flying in the face of all the planted "evidence", some people are still insisting that world (and indeed universe) is only 6,000 years old, so they decide to play along and tweak the parameters of the simulation so that everything that exists really is no more than 6,000 years old. One of the big changes is that fissile materials that were decaying slowly over a multi-billion year period have now reached their current state in a tiny fraction of that time and are decaying furiously, uncontrollably and very unpredictably. Putting great chunks of these materials together in a configuration that is *supposed* to go bang under certain, now unknown, circumstances, no longer seems such a good idea to anyone.
Solution: dismantle all nukes, spread the fissiles far and wide and spend all your time, energy and money trying to figure out what on "Earth" is going to go wrong next in this aging-accelerated world.
[Answer]
It's never going to happen, for the simple reason that there always has been and always will be people who would do **anything** for power and these people tend to end up leading countries simply because of their willingness to do anything to get there.
Then, when they're in power in one country, the only way for them to get more power is by increasing the power of their country relative to other countries. And one of the best ways of doing that is to have a greater military might, which makes them able to threaten/bully other countries into obedience.
Having nuclear weapons is a great tool for threatening other countries. If they summon monsters, all the better; that just means more threatening leverage. These people don't give a damn if millions die as long as they get more power. Thus, they would get nukes regardless.
[Answer]
The fuel used in nuclear weapons undergoes a chain reaction. One atom splits and releases high-energy particles, which collide with other atoms and cause *them* to split, etc etc. This process accelerates in a runaway manner until energy is being released so rapidly that it destroys everything around it.
In your world, these chain reactions are a bit more dangerous. The easily-fissile materials in your world (uranium and friends) have undergone quantum entanglement in a manner your scientists cannot remotely comprehend. During a runaway chain reaction, the extreme energy produced can also cause *entangled* atoms to split, even at a distance. This entanglement happened long ago in the planet's distant geological past, so uranium samples from opposite sides of the modern world may have been close enough together to become entangled a billion years ago (there's no way to know for sure).
This makes nuclear weapons prohibitively dangerous. If a chain reaction can spread unpredictably to other fissile material at a distance, using a nuclear weapon carries a real threat of accidentally detonating your own nuclear stockpile. Nuking the enemy can result in you nuking yourself or an ally. Not only are nuclear weapons too dangerous to use, they're too dangerous to even *have* since they could uncontrollably detonate at any moment. The only safe option is to leave the uranium ore where it is, unrefined, so that it's not concentrated enough to start a runaway chain reaction.
[Answer]
**Intervention From a More Advanced Power**
This is a classic from cold-war era sci-fi, with perhaps the best know example being 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'. The confluence of the development of nuclear arms and space travel triggers an intervention from a previously unknown alien race. The earth has reached a point where the are determined to be a hazard not only to themselves but to the galactic community at large. As such the earth must make a choice: disarm or they will be treated as hostile and dealt with accordingly. The consequences for failing to comply can vary from simple 'containment' where humanity is prevented from leaving the atmosphere to complete eradication.
If you have your story set far enough after the original event takes place, it opens up some interesting potential conflicts. If the aliens simply leave with no further contact, the temptation to backslide will grow with every passing generation. You now have the potential for conflict between those who want to maintain the disarmament and those who want to rebuild the nuclear arsenal out of fear that others may be doing the same.
[Answer]
## Nuclear intercontinental warfare
The human race has destroyed multiple world-leading countries, the goal of the war is lost over time due to the destruction of said nations.
Many are against the continuation of the war and advertise it. This later becomes a religion of sorts that spreads around the globe. They become influential enough to bring about total decommission and discontinuation of weapons of mass destruction *in public*.
Meanwhile, the nations that kept their weapons were branded as enemies of peace. To rid themselves of this title, they grudgingly agreed to dismantle their WMDs.
The people then formed the Global House, and the Ministry of Duty. The first was the government mass consisting of the council and the protectors, the council passes laws and the protectors enforce them, they do not use force or weapons, they simply outnumber beyond reason. Of course, the protectors are regulated, otherwise...
The Ministry of Duty assigns jobs to the general population. They regulate income, awarding more to those who provide more effort, like working hard on a job or studying for years before to prepare.
All in all, the establishment provides protection to the global population and all are thankful for it. But alas, we are only human.
[Answer]
I suspect that many countries (or the leaders thereof) would be in favor of global disarmament. The problem of course, is guaranteeing that everyone else complies. If we had an extremely reliable way of ensuring that everyone was complying, I think this would become a much more plausible route. I might consider some kind of radar-like technology that can detect even the beginnings of a nuclear weapon very well.
Any other factors that mitigated one rule breaker from taking advantage of the situation and going nuclear would help. For instance, lasers that could shoot down nukes would probably put everyone's mind further at ease. Cheaper and more easily mass produced blast resistant bunkers would help. The key point is that nuclear weapons are so unbelievably destructive that there almost can't be a nuclear war in the usual sense of the word war - it would be over too quickly. Anything that mitigates that reality would make it more like any other weapon.
Edit: Apparently this wasn't clear and I can't add comments:
My answer is that global disarmament is most likely if you can verify that everyone is complying. In addition, a nation's ability to defend against nuclear weapons would probably ease its fears about giving up its own weapons since it would still have a fighting chance should any other nation violate the disarmament agreement. No individual nation is going to want to be suckered into giving up an irresistible weapon. The first point lessens the odds of being suckered, and the second makes the weapons less irresistible.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/116649/edit).
Closed 5 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/116649/edit)
Setting Background:
Our boring, magicless Earth.
Character Concept: Sarah can read minds. The longer and closer she's with someone the "deeper" she reads them. This starts from basic surface thoughts to the deep, dark recesses of someone's mind. She's learned to shut this off when she's with large groups of people, but for the most part, it's always running.
Plot: There are some inconsistencies in what Sarah reveals. Such as saying that people told her things, despite them never saying such things out loud. These inconsistencies have led some people to believe that she is both a gossiper and an eavesdropper.
In our world, what might be some reasons why someone might want to keep quiet about this?
[Answer]
## Trauma
I think one way that wasn't brought, and is more probable that potential criminal organizations rivaling to hire Sarah, is the good old psycological trauma. And, it makes for really dark settings.
First of all, a mind reader has probably a high empathy level. While she can read someone's mind, she can also read their emotions. And she can feel their emotions **while she says to them she can read there mind.** Do you feel scared at a mind reader? She feels it, and knows she is the cause of it. How can she not be depressed?
Maybe she tried saying it to someone in the past. It is probable that she only disclosed this precious information with someone she was close to, and was really trusting. Probably a long time relationship. And it got ugly, *quick*. She could feel their sudden horror, and she could read their train of thought, the implacable doom of ending this beloved relationship, and feeling their disgust toward her, as if it was her own disgust.
Not only does she have a pretty serious trauma from that experience, but she is often reminded of it when people are surprised or doubtful of her slips.
Hiding from trauma is a really often used strategy.
## **Growing up**
From your wording, I get the impression that Sarah always had that ability, since she was born. And that can lead to more traumatic and dreadful experiences.
Where did she grew up? Was it a loving and positive family, that was fully comprehensive of her unique ability? Or (more probably in this case) an autoritarian, or violent family?
If she was constantly grounded or beaten by her parents from pretended eavesdropping and lying about it, she has some good psychological reason not to talk about her ability to people.
And of course, *growing up* reading other people's mind can be itself traumatic. Not only is today's "boring" world quite traumatic to girls. But Sarah in that case not only got to hear or see some traumatic sexual experiences, she could read the adult's mind. And a 10 years old is not prepared to some of the nasty stuff going on in some minds.
[Answer]
## Because she doesn't want to be a subject of experiment
Gosh, mind-reading, do you imagine how interesting this is for scientists? For governments? For media (if it's known)?
She doesn't want to be an experiment. Even if she is well treated, she doesn't want to. She's happy with her life, and doesn't want anything to change.
## Because she's afraid of the consequences
There are some ethical problems related to such a superpower. Maybe she thinks it's too dangerous for a government to control this superpower, so she doesn't want it to be known.
## She would lose a lot of friends
Do you really want to be friends with someone that read your minds? At every moment? Even if you don't have negative thoughts about Sarah, your mind is one of the most inner things you have. You don't want to share **all** your thoughts with Sarah, and stop being friends with Sarah. Sarah doesn't want this to happen.
[Answer]
**No sane person wants their mind to be read.** As easy as this.
Having your mind read is a big disadvantage in everyday interactions.
First, the obvious: People think nasty thoughts and if someone was able to read them, well, who would want that? I suspect that the reaction would be a lot of suspicion ("Have you read that thought?"), people being very careful around you and even people being scared or feeling threatened.
I could elaborate more, if you don't get this point, please state so in a comment, I hope this is enough.
Second, think of the implications for any sort of negotiation or communication effort. Just imagine, you can instantly know the maximum price of
someone willing to buy a car from you. That's huge. What an advantage. Think of the implications for the business world.
Bluffing is a thing we do all the time. Perhaps you don't realize it, but it's there. We have learned to interact with people that can't read our minds, a mind reader would have to be approached completely different with different rules of interaction and we don't know how because there are no mind readers. This could result in people simply not wanting to engage with her for example - a great opportunity lost.
It's best not to let them know that their minds are being read or you lose a lot of potential advantage. You can easily think about more situations where this applies, think where people are not completely open, bluff or lie to gain an advantage (negotiations, interrogations, poker ...)
In short: People will hate her for being able to do that. It's better to do what most people do all day: Bluff. It's not only a big advantage for her then, it also makes it even possible for people around to treat her like a normal human being.
[Answer]
## **For her own sake, of course**
If Sarah discloses her ability to the public and is believed, she immediately paints a giant bullseye on herself. For starters, I'm sure plenty of ordinary people mind having her mind what's literally on their mind. She might be actively trying to not read their minds, but how would a non-psychic pleb know that? She'd have mobs of regular folk baying for her blood wherever she goes. Here's a non-exhaustive list on who else would be interested in getting their hands on her:
-Religious groups, especially the 'extremist' ones would paint Sarah as a witch/demon/Antichrist/etc and organise a witch hunt, with their desired endgame being a livestreamed public execution. Nothing quite like a witch burning to draw the crowds to your church/temple/mosque/etc
-Organised crime 'families' would try and coerce her to use her talents for their purposes
-Law enforcement would also do the same as the above, as would other government bodies like the various intelligence services.
-Politicians would be split between having her killed, and abducting her for use as a human weapon. I reckon some would off her just to save themselves the trouble of having to rewrite GDPR to factor her abilities in.
-Some scientists would want to kill her so they can literally pick apart her brain in hopes of duplicating her abilities
-Worst case scenario, she rubs a large enough number of powerful people the wrong way, such that the UN itself declares her a threat to world peace. Sarah is now the new Osama Bin Laden. A multinational coalition would be formed to take her in dead or alive. Once they've succeeded, the previously mentioned groups would then fight each other over possession of her living or dead body. If they somehow fail to bag her, fear and desperation will drive them to use increasingly extreme measures to deal with her permanently, including nuclear/biological/chemical weapons.
If she *isn't* believed, she's not off the hook either. Any number of the above might investigate her claims in further detail just to make sure. 'Investigation' can include being dissected in a lab.
[Answer]
Because she learned that it makes her look weird, at best.
Imagine the situation: she, as little girl, is playing with some friends, and Colette thinks "oh, I hate how little Susy behaves, I wish she was not invited to play with us" to which Sarah innocently responds "but Susy is my best friend, I want her to play with us!". Colette would freak out and leave screaming. Soon Sarah's class mates know she is and acts kind of weird.
She then learns how to switch that thing off, and to act "normal" when people are around, which is all the time.
Growing up she realizes that she can use that skill to her advantage, but it is better if she hold the competitive advantage by not disclosing it. Just imagine how it is to be a teen and being able to help your friends with all their crushes: "hey, you have no hopes with Tom, he is fallen for Jacqueline, but Andrew looks more interested into you".
As an adult, that ability will be really useful in some jobs, but again is better not to disclose the full details.
People are usually scared of what they do not understand.
[Answer]
The government / NSA / spy agency would black bag her and make her vanish and use her abilities for themselves
Any government would be terrified of mind reader if they knew they existed and they weren't being controlled.
It's the perfect spy skill, interrogator ability or spy hunter skill.
If they couldn't control her, they would kill her because she is too dangerous to let wander around.
Let also not forget the option of human lab rat. If you can replicate the ability, it's worth even more.
I'm pretty sure she doesn't want to be a prisoner, slave or experiment.....
[Answer]
I remember an episode of the original "Twilight Zone" series, in which an eployee suddenly gains the power of mind-reading. After some exciting attempts at his new ability, he appens to read a clerk who is planning in details a robbery at his own bank. Our hero, without explaining how he came to learn about it, goes to the Director and warns him...and, eventually, it is discovered that the clerk was actually a nice guy with no criminal intents at all, just fantasizing about robbing the bank.
Sarah would have the same problem, but tenfold. To her, the world would be like an endlessly crowd chatting at a loud voice. How could she be able, always, to distinguish a fleeting thought from one that precedes an action? How could she stand that layer of primitive responses we give even to the most trivial problem? She could even mistake a friendly greeting for the lusting threat of a stalker...
No wonder she needs to shut off everyone! She could work only with a very selected handful of persons she already is in regular touch with, between family, friends and colleagues. And even among those selected few, she'd have to select a very restricted number to whom to confide this secret -since no one would like to be, literally, an open book down to the most intimate layer of himself/herself
[Answer]
Obvious one first: She will become an outcast/captured/experimented on etc. You have one human in the entire world who has some special ability. If they were to tell anyone:
* They would come off as crazy.
* If proven its possible, would you be comfortable around someone who could read your thoughts? Friends and family start to distance themseleves
* Government or whoever hears about this and wants to use her, what a great interrogator she could be
* Scientists would want to understand how she could do it. Maybe not very nicely either
[Answer]
Maybe she isn't fully aware or convinced she can read other people's minds.
How does she perceive the details of what she is reading from someone else? Does she see images or hear a voice? If she hears a voice she may believe or have convinced herself that it is an auditory hallucination because reading someone's mind is "impossible" or a "circus trick".
It would also be problematic to confirm she was reading minds without making the other person suspicious.
So, she is left with two options:
1) She is having auditory hallucinations and revealing that would mean people would treat her differently.
2) She can read minds and revealing that would mean people would treat her differently.
[Answer]
**A Web of lies**
Sarah may have used her mind reading skills to get ahead in life in many subtle ways:
* At work she has all the best ideas, because she steals them before colleagues have got round to sharing them.
* She is the teacher/boss's pet, always saying exactly what they want to hear.
* In relationships she always appears wonderfully sensitive, because she knows what people want before they say it.
* She has learned she can control people, as she has instant feedback on the effects her thoughts and actions have on people.
While she may be able to succeed in life using her power openly and honestly she has so far kept it secret. She does not want to lose the power she has over people, and is afraid that the relationships she has built on false pretenses will not survive a revelation of the truth.
[Answer]
Other answers pointed out she would do it to protect herself from spy agencies and mad scientists, I'd like to add that she might also do it for other people's comfort.
Telling friends that you found out something embarrassing about them can be vexing for them. So, for the same reason you might not tell a friend that you caught them doing something embarrassing (i.e picking their nose), you wouldn't want to tell them you caught one of their embarrassing thoughts. The only way to do that would be to not disclose your ability to read their thoughts.
] |
[Question]
[
This is akin to [Why do my monster minions all have obvious weak points that instantly kill them?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/213951/why-do-my-monster-minions-all-have-obvious-weak-points-that-instantly-kill-them), but with one important difference: these monsters developed more or less naturally, they're animals that came into their present forms over years of Chaos Energy-induced mutation and natural selection.
Furthermore, small, relatively weak monsters (like Plops and Goblins) don't have weak points, it's only the big ones like, y'know, your typical dragon.
To make this even weirder, some powerful monsters don't have weak spots; things like boss-level ghosts and evil wizards. Most of these monsters are humanoids; in fact, chances are if a monster is related to or once was a member of humanity, they won't exhibit weak points. The few other monsters that don't exhibit weak points are things like Plopup, which lack a physiological weak point on their body but *do* have a single critical weakness (Plopup don't do fire, they don't regenerate when burned).
**So, in essence, my question is: Why Do Naturally Developed, Powerful Monsters Have Obvious Weak Points? and *only* concerns those monsters that have these weak points.**
In order for monsters to even have weak points, they should probably have some sort of advantage, or not affect one's chances of survival. The monsters who don't have weak points either lack a physiological weak point or don't, for whatever reason, ever develop obvious indicators of such weak points.
**Basically, if magic is a natural energy cells can harness, why would it lead to magic-heavy creatures having glowing markings to indicate where their bodies are vulnerable?** In other words, I'm asking *why* those monsters that have weak points would have them, when taking natural selection into account, as weak points would seem to impair one's chances of survival.
**Going off this, please note that** natural selection will likely affect weak points; they could end up in hard-to-reach points of the body, have some sort of protection that must be destroyed, removed, or worked around, or else be a relatively large vulnerable area instead of one crippling weak point. Also, monsters will be preyed on both by other monsters and adventurers, **and this should be taken into consideration when answering the question.**
[Answer]
>
> The Square-Cube Law essentially states that if something, be it a chair or a person or whatever, were made twice as tall, twice as wide, and twice as deep, its volume and mass would increase by a factor of eight, but its ability to support that mass, its cross sectional area, would only increase by a factor of four.
>
>
>
<https://kottke.org/15/10/scaling-laws-and-the-speed-of-animals>
A creature as large as an adult dragon simply cannot exist without falling victim to the square-cube law and collapsing under it's own bulk. Unless, that is, it has a means of reinforcing its body using magic, which allows the laws of physics to be sidestepped.
The "weak point" is a specialised organ common in large monsters that taps the ambient magical field and passively provides a variety of magical effects required to support a large monster. Reinforcement of the bones and organs, an effect that allows the skin to remain tough but flexible (and a low-level passive healing ability to prevent pressure sores), perhaps a limited form of anti-gravity to relieve some of the mass... leading scientists and thaumaturges are uncertain about the exact mechanism, but adventurers know that if you can damage it enough the field will give out and the creature will have its lungs and organs crushed by its own bulk. This also explains the rarity of boss monster pelts, bones, etc. - most of it is damaged beyond use when the creature dies, and it is... challenging to skin and debone a live (and somewhat irate) dragon.
For your other creatures which are more reasonable in size, you might just say that some creatures are naturally so affected by chaos energies that they need a dedicated organ similar to the above that provides a significant natural healing or anti-magic effect just to "break even" (no or very mild passive healing so you can still hurt them, most of the organ's effort is simply put into not dying) and not be torn asunder by their own natural magic. Maybe this chaos energy builds up in the body over time, so older, more dangerous monsters have larger weak points to compensate.
I can think of a few reasons why the the "weak point" organ cannot be embedded inside the body - it needs to interface externally to absorb magical energy, or maybe it would work fine inside the body but the effects would not apply to the skin - the creature would be able to survive but immobile, or maybe it simply generates a lot of waste heat, and if it was entirely contained within the body it would cause burns (or some sort of nasty magical damage).
[Answer]
## Evolution is not about the survival of one individual - but rather the survival of its genes
The common thread that applies not just to 'monsters' but to all life is that the [genetic structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics) of an organism, not its individual strength, is what establishes progression.
This is why we have sacrificial plants that expend all their energy into a final 'flower', only to then be destroyed. Why? Because the act of pollination is more important than survival. Why do [bees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee) live sexless lives and die when they deliver only one sting? Because their sacrifice continues their genetic line in the form of their Queen.
It is posited even, that limits of our life span are intentional - ie. even our lifespan is limited to promote our genes, for what use to a genome is an organism that lives forever and does not allow the genome to continue to improve?
So it is easily conceivable for your monsters to have 'weak points':
* it may have been past reproductive age and can be (and should be) sacrificed.
* it may not have a reproductive role, like a bee drone, and thus concentrate all efforts on offence (such as a bee sting) and tasks, but not on survivability
* it uses the weakness to procreate (much like your example of a one that has no resistance to fire, much like some plants that use the fire as a collective signal to germinate)
* signal theory - ie. the monster 'looks' like a monster with an obvious flaw, or feature, that its mate sees as desirable due to signal theory
In the end, a 'monster' is simply another life form, and succumbs to the same pressures, evolutionary quirks and signal theories that all life must contend with.
[Answer]
**Runaway sexual selection**
The point of a peacock's tail is that it is extravagant and wasteful. "Hey, look at me, girls! I can carry around this stupid thing, and *not get eaten*."
Likewise, the weak points are obvious to other monsters of its kind. This makes them more sexually attractive, because they can survive despite them.
Evolution being what it is, random factors prevented them from arising in all creatures. Some of these are particularly powerful for the lack. Others may have had a beginning, but those got picked off because they were weak.
[Answer]
Because natural evolution is a balance between results and efforts.
On one side you cannot have a creature which has a contermeasure to any possible threat, because those are potentially infinite, and as a natural creature you have to deal with finite resources. At a certain point the benefit of adding protections is uneconomical. Think of an animal which can be resistant to some crushing impacts: it can resist a wolf bite, a crocodile bite and going up, but it would still be crushable by something, and if it wants to become uncrushable it would have to deal with threat like a meteor impact and so on, becoming unfit for living.
Additionally, some weaknesses are a consequence of the particular evolutionary path taken by the creature: land organisms took the path of breathing in the atmosphere, resulting in the "weakness" that they drown if submerged in water for long enough times, while water breathing creatures suffocate if left outside of water for long times.
[Answer]
**Specialization**
Evolution, in many cases, develops very specialized traits that make them highly adapted to the environment they live in. Both predictor and prey do this, in a sort of biological arms race.
These creatures' body plans expend a lot of energy and time refining traits that improve their success in the environment. However, this does tend to allow other traits to atrophy. Example, a creature develops protective traits, building a massive shell and thick skin. This creature's speed and agility will suffer greatly, but it's protected. A prey animal would want speed and agility, so it has a thin skin and sleek body plan, not adapt to taking a blow.
This plopup you talk about focused on its traits to attack and consume its prey, using a body chemistry that is highly vulnerable to fire. Its genetics chose a body plan that worked well in its environment, not in a rare situation like being set a blaze.
Humanoid creature do tend to be fairly generalized. Not very strong or fast or have fantastical claws and spikes, but they also do not have these highly specialized traits that hinder their other traits.
Now, many of these highly specialized creatures do tend to be the first to go extinct when changing environmental pressures are encountered. They are highly adapted to survive in the here and now. When exposed to situations that do not normally exist in their environment, they will probably not adapt very well.
[Answer]
Magic is like a disease.
Magic isn't natural to anyone, and anyone not very smart will have it grow in a single, glowing spot to power their abilities. Wizards and smarter monsters can learn to hide it, but the magic doesn't want to be hidden, so generally it isn't.
This glowing spot, when dislodged with swords or guns or claws, will then be available to infest another organism which is stronger. This is as the evolution of magic optimized.
[Answer]
## The Weak Point is a "Magic Lung"
*I am assuming you are referring to weak points equal or similar to the "Obvious weak points" of the [original question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/213951/why-do-my-monster-minions-all-have-obvious-weak-points-that-instantly-kill-them), i.e.: instant-killing, colorful, bright, light-emitting.*
All those monsters either evolve from a common ancestor or have achieved the same organ via [convergent evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution). This organ is really useful in a magic-rich environment: is an organ that allows them to absorb magic from its surroundings. This magic absorption is now inherent to how the body feeds and obtains energy, and allows this monsters to be so powerful like, for example, being physics-defyingly big.
The deeper it is into the creature's insides, the more inefficient it is, because the creature's own body blocks the magic from reaching the organ. As a consequence, most of them are located in or near the body's surface.
As a side effect of the magic absorption, part of the magic is "lost" and is irradiated as energy (magic and not), which is, unfortunately, visible for most of the creatures, including humans.
Losing this organ is fatal, just as losing the lungs is, as the creature could not "breathe" magic without it. Some mechanisms the creatures have developed to fight this vulnerability are:
* Developing multiple organs, so losing one can be (crippling but) survivable.
* Placing it in hardly accesible regions of the body, such as belly, under the tail, armpits... etc.
* Placing it under a hard skin, sacrificing efficiency for resistance.
* Placing it inside some sort of mouth (or the mouth itself), so it can be protected by closing it. This mouth still has to open to "breathe".
[Answer]
**If the monsters aren't intrinsically magical, then they're only 'monstrous' based on their biology. And biology only has a limited tool kit to work with.**
To put it another way, if your monster's are biological creatures then they're simply 'monstrous' in the sense that nature has taken normal physiological characteristics possessed by other animals and evolved them to extreme lengths.
So a creature becomes 'monstrous' when it becomes far larger, faster, more poisonous, more heavily armored, perhaps smarter etc and therefore far more DANGEROUS than all the other run of the mill creatures in its environment. Your monsters are the T-Rexs, great white sharks, stone fish, Triceratops, giant camouflaged spider etc of their local environments. All equipped by nature with a particular set of traits that make them deadly.
Two key points to remember though. **The first point is that evolution is about compromise**. Your 'monsters' can be giant fast predators, but they cant also be heavily armored and horned, they can be highly venomous and well camouflaged but won't be able to speed through the water like a mako shark. To excel at one set of traits, other traits have to be given up.
Its the same thing with humans BTW (apart from our brains). Humans are generalists, we can swim, run, and climb etc but we aren't particular 'good' at any of them compared to other animals of the same size. Same thing for our senses, we've got good color vision and hearing but our sense of small is way less developed than other species).
**The second point? The term 'Monster' is one of perspective.** It's a term humans apportion to creatures not necessarily something implicit to their nature. If they're not magical in any way then all you monsters are just potentially highly dangerous animals. The apex predators of their niche.
[Answer]
Three reasons working together:
# The weakpoints haven't impacted survival
There are plenty of animals in nature with obvious weaknesses that would perhaps even be easy to exploit. But if the species still exists, it must mean that these weaknesses are not critical: even if one, two or twenty specimens end up crippled or dead because of the weakness, the situation is such that the species is able to go on: the damage happens sporadically enough that enough members are able to carry on the genes to the next generation.
Perhaps the weakpoints they have are not exploited by the fauna of their environment: evolution wouldn't "notice" something that doesn't threaten survival systematically. If the weakpoints are exploited, it doesn't happen on a large enough scale to matter.
# Evolution is always ongoing
Evolution is not ever a settled matter: species evolve continuously, and over very long periods of time. Perhaps what makes the weaknesses weaknesses is a relatively new danger, introduced to the environment too little time ago to have any impact on evolution yet. Perhaps the weakpoints will be gone eventually, or perhaps they will not matter enough to be ever gone. Relying on evolution is not a good short-term survival strategy: perhaps the species will be wiped out far before the weakness could be eliminated by evolution.
**Large creatures** have significantly more cells, many orders of magnitude more than small ones. This makes natural evolution slower, **especially if they are hard to kill**: the less advantageous genes are not disadvantageous enough to allow or trigger a cull, and so they carry on.
Exposure to magic could accelerate mutation: that accelerates evolution, but, similarly to radiation, it's random and has no will of its own: no interest in creating mutations that are "good" or "useful": some could be weaknesses. Large creatures are more resistant to averse random mutation because their larger number of cells makes sure the probability of something bad being developed are much lower, but this is also true for positive things.
# The weakness balances the species' population
Being able to reproduce without any hindrance is not an unconditionally good thing for a species: when too many individuals cohexist at the same time in the same place, resources become scarce, and this can lead to extinction if the lifespan of the creatures is long enough that there would be no time for the environment to recover by the time the surplus starves.
**This is especially true for apex predators and very large creatures,** since their survival depends on, respectively (but not exclusively), a healthy population of prey and very large amounts of resources.
A critical weakness that menaces in the environment can only exploit occasionally would help reduce population in the short-term, helping the environment resist the foraging by the large creatures enough that all can survive.
**Disclaimer:** I just like the topic, I'm not a biologist and I reported facts and expectations as I remember them and as they make sense to me, but my assumptions could very well be wrong.
[Answer]
The monsters are very good at fighting other animals once they get relatively close, but especially the very big ones are very heavy and need to spend a lot of energy to move around. On the other hand, they also need to eat a lot, but chasing the pray would be too expensive. Therefore they try to get their prey to come to them.
Originally the only individuals which were approached by other predators were individuals which had some apparent exploitable weakness and therefore these could prey on the predators without having to go on extensive hunts, giving them a evolutionary advantage. In contrast, the disadvantage of being vulnerable wasn't significant since everything coming close enough to exploit the weakness barely had a chance to fight the monster anyway.
Of course, since these points are basically used as a lure, it makes sense to make them as visible as possible, e.g. via magical lights.
[Answer]
If I may add something. I would say that a flaw/weakness may be present because it was at the beginning of the evolution, and in the current environment, nothing made it evolve.
See : we squishy male humans have a weak spot in our groin : hitting it will make us defenseless.
But our environment did not prompt us to evolve a protection for that.
I hope I make sense.
[Answer]
**All your monsters have both weak spots and more defended places.**
Humans hunting them have only taken note of those that proved beneficial to hit. For the smaller ones you can just hit them wherever. Humans are strong enough that what armour they have is trivial to pierce. For the massive ones. Their weak spots are armoured enough that humans have difficulty abusing them. Leaving only the in-between open to actually have enough armour in some parts to resist most of the damage a human can do. Whist still having weak points that are useful to exploit.
Plate armour that humans make has obvious weak spots near the joints. Natural evolved armour will have a similar construction. Creating weak points at places that need to move. Then for those monsters that have no obvious weak spot. then you may be looking at it in the wrong way. For those monsters everything is a weak spot. Just failing to notice any difference between parts of a body does not mean a lack of weak spots.
[Answer]
**Extreme Biology**
The biology of your world includes a variety of more.. esoteric capabilities that aren't generally common to ours and these typically require large external nodes which are both vulnerable to damage and signs of the creature's powerful nature in one go.
Imagine a creature with Flame-breath like a dragon, it needs a fuel-tank, because its glands can't generate enough fuel at a high enough rate to actually be useful.
So it has a sort of expanded Craw in its throat like some birds that serves as containment for volatile incendiary chemicals. (The caustic nature of the fuel represents a problem similar in some respects to stomach-acid, with similar solutions)
Such a fuel-tank is obviously a major hazard if ruptured, so it has some armour plates to protect it, and generally hunches around it to keep the swipes of rival creature's claws from tearing it open.
It may also use the fuel-tank rather like the expansive inflatable throat of a bullfrog, lighting it up with phosphorescence, or colouring it with vibrant skin-pigments as a mating display.
For another creature, they may well have huge engorged glands on their body that serve to pump regenerative substances into their blood in and after combat.
Allowing a creature the size of a bus to re-grow lost limbs, heal mortal injuries and generally be more indestructible.
Such glands are naturally rather vulnerable and will be protected vigorously, but cannot be kept inside the body because of temperature-control reasons, similar to human testicles.
They may even need to be destroyed in order to kill the creature without massive extreme overkill.
As a side-note, such glandular secretions may have amazing medical properties if harvested..
[Answer]
Many real-world creatures have obvious "weak points" that aren't much of a hazard to them in practice because they are well-defended otherwise, one way or another. Humans sometimes represent an unusual threat to such creatures because we devise means of intensively exploiting these "weak points" that other animals might not engage in. It could well be in this setting that the monsters evolved glowing weak points long ago, but are too threatening/large/armored/etc. for them to matter, except when it comes to skilled human adventurers or what have you.
As an example, consider the right whale. Right whales are nearly extinct in the Northern Hemisphere, mainly due to intensive hunting. This is because right whales move slowly, tend to stay near the surface of the water, and float when killed due to their high blubber content. This makes them accessible and attractive prey for their only two known predators, humans and orcas. However, they can be over 60 feet long and can weigh 100 tons, making them difficult for any animal alive to hunt without using a sophisticated social strategy; as a result, there wasn't much pressure on them for most of their history to develop more robust defenses against predation beyond their size.
In your setting, it could be that all the non-humanoid monsters have a common ancestor that first developed the ability to use magic. Perhaps this was facilitated by a special glowing magic organ which was located near the skin/exoskeleton, making it visible from the outside. It could be that over time this species became reliant on magic to stay alive, and thus could easily be killed in theory if this organ was badly injured, but had other adaptations that made it very hard to prey on. If this species was very successful and this happened a long time ago, you could well have a situation where there is now a whole family of species all with an organ like this that are not much subject to predation on the whole on account of their natural defenses.
It could be that the humans in your setting have only recently developed the ability to hunt these monsters; some sort of new technology that allows their magic organ to be targeted has emerged, and monster-hunting types have seized upon it. Suddenly monster hunting is a new, dangerous, glamorous sort of profession that many daring people have decided to take up. Perhaps the potent stores of magical chaos energy concentrated in these monsters can be harvested from their carcasses and used as a resource to power things or increase the potency of human-cast spells—that would definitely generate intense interest in exploiting them if it could be done. A whole industry would develop before long.
If you wanted to dramatize this in the plot, you could have the organs become more robust or deeply internal (and thus less visible) or whatnot over time due to selective pressure exerted by large-scale monster hunting, if the monsters breed rapidly. This might lead to an "arms race" akin to the dynamics around pesticides or antibiotics, with hunters trying to develop novel strategies and new technologies being developed to target their magic organs despite their new adaptations. If they don't breed rapidly, then humans might quickly deplete their populations once hunting them has become commonplace, which might precipitate a crisis if the magic energy harvested from them is being widely used. You could even have both happening at once for different species, if the monsters are sufficiently diverse.
[Answer]
**Constraints**
You can't grow thick armour everywhere.
Real animals have vulnerable throats even when they might have thick armor plating on their backs.
**Evolution only selects for resistance to threats your ancestors encountered**
Real organisms that grew in the darkness of deepwater vents may be entirely incapable of coping with changes in pressure and light may burn their skin.
We, as humans, cannot detect when we're in a nitrogen atmosphere because our lungs detect high CO2, not low oxygen. We just fall over and die without panic. Because pure-nitrogen atmospheres are rare in nature.
If a creatures ancestors always lived somewhere hot they may have no system for surviving cold shocks.
**Magic**
When it comes to magical creatures, organs that allow powerful creatures to absorb Mana, by their nature, may need to be free from armor if they're to allow the creature to absorb mana. Maybe the nature of that organ and the mana it absorbs makes the thin skin **glow.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/L4mY8.png)
Cover the magic-absorbing organ with thick skin or armour and it "suffocates" for lack of magic.
And it may need serious blood supplies to that organ such that wounds to that area are extra-deadly.
Smaller creatures or those not physically dependant on fast mana regen may not need such an organ. Much like how insects don't need lungs where larger creatures like humans do in order to get enough oxygen.
But a big powerful elemental beast? it might be able to shield it's mana-lung for a time but eventually it will need to "breath" mana, particularly after it's tired itself out from magical attacks, which means exposing it to the air.
[Answer]
I'm be no means biologist but kinda like evolution and have couple of free flowing ideas that you might incorporate, nothing very concrete but I hope it might be inspirational.
It really depends how you define weak point, if you go on more holistic route like your Plopup and fire.
When you really think about every animal has that kind of weak point such reliance on oxygen content, pressure, temperature (especially cold blooded), exhaustion, starvation (small animal can literally die when they stop eating for few hours especially herbivores), sunlight/darkness, lack or too much reliance on single sense think (echolocation into middle of rock concert).
Although I admit that most of these weakness are either relatively slow and agonizing or unavoidable, instant. Neither is as fun for a plot as say critical spot or vulnerability to silver or something.
Apart from sexual selection that can lead to detrimental features, like infamous peacock tail. There is another rule that you might use ie. honest signals are expensive and they must be expensive, otherwise they could easily be copied by fraudulent individuals, making whole signal useless.
I can't think of any super concrete example but some critical spots that might be indicator that particular individual is highly resistant to disease, some kind of magic, harsh conditions or otherwise has some desirable trait.
There might also be another system in play albeit slightly far-fetched, their ancestors evolved some trait that used to be desired but now is detrimental and it's extremely difficult to evolve out of it usually applies to extremely basic traits like (4 limbs of tetrapod, or bilateral symmetry) or they some monsters had no time to do so.
Small animals usually reproduce faster so those pesky goblins could already evolve to at least cover traces of the weak point while ogres are on their way. Similarly small animals might be more pressured to cover it to survive while apex predators don't have that much of a pressure to do so so their rate is even slower.
] |
[Question]
[
I am playing a campaign where my character (with the help of multiple experienced craftsmen and an artificer) is essentially working to bring about an industrial revolution to a world where such technology is very early (around 2 or 3 centuries). The DM has allowed this on the condition that everything the character comes up with could be feasibly made in the late 15th century (and allowing me to push the boundaries of what would actually "work" due to not actually being able to build and test my creations IRL).
So far I have worked out some basic engines using hot bulbs connected to furnaces, but that won’t work for more advanced engines, so I need to come up with an alternative to gasoline or any crude oil products, with resources that could be collected in the 14/1500’s (or with simple industrial technology).
I am looking for fuels for vehicles, specifically cars and planes - the fuel would be used as a more portable source of energy for engines than hauling coal or wood.
[Answer]
Alcohol works perfectly well - indeed, it's arguably better because it allows higher compression without the need for a bunch of octane-boosting additives. Model T Fords and other early cars will run on it, if you take care to replace a few parts like gaskets and carb floats that might be adversely affected.
Likewise various forms of biodiesel, including used cooking oil, will run in diesel engines with at most fairly minor adjustments.
[Answer]
Believe it or not, the industrial revolution wasn't built on gasoline and the internal combustion engine. The industrial revolution was built on steam generators — aka *external* combustion engines — which used (primarily) coal to heat water and create steam pressure to drives pistons. Steam power requires:
1. A sufficiently concentrated heat source: coal, lots of wood, 'natural' oils in sufficient quantity, etc.
2. Metallurgy capable of withstanding extremely high pressures
The second is the restricting factor. By the 15th century there was rolled iron and steel plate that could be shaped without a seam, allowing boilers that could withstand significant pressure. Seams, rivets, or other weak points could burst, with catastrophic (and lethal) results. Earlier than that, the available bronze, 'soft' cast iron, and pieced steel were too weak to sustain pressures needed for any significant power generation.
Internal combustion engines need even higher qualities of steel to contain the continuous heat and explosive pressures involved...
I'm not sure how you're going to bring 15th century metallurgy into 2nd-3rd century history. Smelting steel requires temperatures that were pragmatically inaccessible before the first millennium (usually achieved later by pouring copious amounts of coal into specially constructed furnaces). But as they say, imagination is more important than knowledge...
[Answer]
## Wood
An interesting example of fuel for cars is wood - during periods of fuel scarcity, for example during WW2, many ICE vehicles were modified to run on [wood gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas) by adding a relatively simple gasifier device, which allowed the modified cars and tractors to run on firewood. It's much less convenient than gas, but it's possible, as illustrated by more than half a million vehicles that did so.
[Answer]
There are internal combustion engines that use gaseous fuels: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_engine> . A common real-world example of this type of ICE can be found in commercially available tri-fuel generators that run on gasoline, propane, and natural gas. Options for fuel that should be available given the tech era of the 14th/15th century include natural gas, methane, and coal gas (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas>). The last is particularly useful in your scenario since it produces coke as well, which is used as the fuel for the production of steel which you will need for engines and vehicles anyway.
Pure ethanol/methanol is also an option for internal combustion engines, though it requires modifications to the design, and can be produced from fermentation of grain or other agricultural products. [EDIT] However, given the low agricultural tech of that era, there probably isn't enough excess farm output to create significant amounts of fuel from.
[Answer]
Check out the [Pyréolophore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyr%C3%A9olophore), which ran on
>
> "controlled dust explosions" of various experimental fuels. The fuels included mixtures of Lycopodium powder (the spores of Lycopodium, or clubmoss), finely crushed coal dust, and resin.
>
>
>
The Pyréolophore was invented by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and his brother Claude, and a patent was granted in 1807. Nicéphore went on to take [the first photograph ever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_from_the_Window_at_Le_Gras) in 1826.
[Answer]
The combustion engine was developed to use gasoline simply because it was widely available as lamp oil. Later the [Diesel engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine) was developed to use vegetable oil, but it turned out that it could burn a lot of different vegetable, mineral or animal oils.
In your setting the Diesel engine itself might be too sophisticated, but if you accept a lower efficiency you can use any type of combustible oil and many different designs, from piston engines to primitive turbines to steam engines using oil instead of coal.
Considering only vegetable oils you already have a lot of choice, just have a look at this [table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_biofuel_crop_yields)
[Answer]
Woodgas is very useable alternative that is relatively easy to make and can run in an internal combustion engine with very few modifications. Here is a link to a video that shows a guy converting a small bike to run on it, complete with an onboard combustion chamber made from a bee hive smoker. This channel has a decent series of videos that explain how to make, store, and use it.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522BaxM0Jnk>
[Answer]
During WW2 fuel shortages, agricultural vehicles were run on 'wood gas' often produced on the vehicle by a crude gasifier mounted on the vehicle, so that might be something to look into, especially if fired with charcoal as a water gas reactor they are not horrible from an efficiency perspective, and are low pressure devices that can feed an IC engine.
Precision in manufacturing is going to be your big problem with internal combustion (That and peak pressure), the early Newcomen atmospheric engines (1712) for example had piston clearances measured in significant fractions of an inch which is marginal in an atmospheric engine pumping a tin mine, but is not going to fly in an aero engine.
The steam engine as kicking off the industrial revolution is only actually sort of true, it was initially water power far more then steam that did it.
Public (and especially, goods) transport was far more rail then road up until at least post WW1, and rail works just fine burning wood or coal. I would pass on aircraft until your metallurgy takes some huge leaps, but steam powered ships are very much on, and a steamer Vs sailing ships is no kind of contest at all simply because the steamer does not have to consider the weather in quite the same way.
[Answer]
**Diesel Engines**
Well before your time period people had developed a fire-starting tool called a "[fire piston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_piston)". It was a tube with an air-tight piston. You put kindling or some other flammable material in it, put in the piston, and rapidly pushed the piston, compressing the air. The air gets hot enough to burn your kindling, and you use that to light your fire. It was small, portable, and very useful.
Rudolf Diesel realized that the same principle could be used for an engine: If you inject something flammable into the tube while it was highly compressed, it would burn, heat up the air, and force the piston out with a strong force that could be used to do work. While we associate Diesel engines today with kerosene (a petroleum product) Diesel's original intent was to use vegetable oil as the fuel.
In the 1500's, Europe had gunpowder and cannon. It is not inconceivable that a cannoneer or arquebusier may have witnessed an accident involving a clogged touchhole and a tight ramrod. Gunpower was put in the cannon/arquebus, and the ramrod was rammed home as normal, but because the cannon barrel was air-tight because of the clogged touchhole and tight ramrod, the air heated up and ignited the gunpower. The ramrod shot out, killing the cannoneer using it.
More likely, it took the hand off the arquebusier, since the force needed to ram home an air-tight piston 3 inches in diameter to a compression ratio of 15:1 would be about 1500 pounds. For an arquebus with a 1/2" bore, it would only be about 50 pounds.
If you take that cannon, connect the ramrod to a crank on a fly-wheel so it can move but is confined to being in the barrel, and provide a way to let out exhaust gasses (holes drilled into the barrel near the open end, exposed when the piston is near "bottom dead center") and in fresh air (a valved bellows near the closed end, powered by the fly-wheel), and a way to squirt in the fuel (a small piston-pump pushing olive oil through the touchhole), you have a Diesel engine, similar to Rudolf Diesel's early versions.
It could be done in 1500. If you gave Leonardo da Vinci a fire piston and said "build me a vehicle powered by something like this", you may very well have had meticulously-drawn plans within a decade.
[Answer]
The Brayton Cycle (best known as the working principle of the jet engine) potentially lends itself to solid fuel because it allows continuous combustion.
If you look at a jet engine you'll see (1) a big air compressor at the front, (2) a continuous fire in the combustion chamber, which adds energy to the compressed air, but crucially, no further increase in pressure(\*), only an increase in volume (aka isobaric expansion), and (3) a way of recovering enough energy in a turbine to drive the compressor.
(\*) If the combustion stage does add pressure, the compressor stops working efficiently : this is called a "compressor stall", so the art of running a Brayton engine is to stay in the sweet spot between "flameout" and "compressor stall" which was a real problem for WW2 jet pilots, requiring careful manual throttle control especially on takeoff.
Any energy left over can be used as you want - thrust in the rapidly moving hot exhaust in an aircraft [(or bizarrely, ship!)](http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/lucyasht/lucyasht.htm), or use a bigger turbine at (3) and use its excess shaft power to drive a propeller, mill, pump, generator or whatever.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qEnzD.jpg)
(photo of the Lucy Ashton, built 1887, converted from steam to jet power 1951)
Hypothetically, because of the continuous combustion stage, you could apply solid fuel such as wood, coal [or even peat](https://appletye.org/2018/12/16/paper-trail-1954-by-joanne-b-kaar/). The latter was [developed in Caithness, Scotland in the 1950s](https://wickiheats.wordpress.com/4-2/), alongside sodium-cooled fast breeder reactors.
If you don't have the machining ability to create sufficiently efficient fan or centrifugal compressor and turbine, these can be implemented as piston and cylinder, as per [George Brayton's original Ready Motor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brayton_cycle#History) though this used gas or oil as fuel.
The fast reactors were more successful... I can find [very little information on this scheme](https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1955-06-22/debates/c4c88318-b8b8-4728-bdbf-7d391e5e949c/PowerStationAltnabreac(Peat-BurningTurbines)) or the reasons for its failure : possibly the abrasive nature of ash content in the exhaust caused problems for the turbine; it would certainly be problematic for piston wear.
[Answer]
I'd imagine that ethanol and acetone (both easily acquired through the fermentation process) would be able to be used by just about any civilization. Along those lines, you could say that if you had electricity (totally ignoring the existence of electric motors here for argument's sake), you could separate the hydrogen from water and use that as a combustible source too.
[Answer]
No need to speculate. From the wikipedia article on [Whale Oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_oil)
>
> The beginning industrial societies used whale oil in oil lamps and to make soap. In the 20th century it was made into margarine. With the commercial development of the petroleum industry and vegetable oils, the use of whale oils declined considerably from its peak in the 19th century into the 20th century. This is said to have saved whales from extinction. In the 21st century, with most countries having banned whaling, the sale and use of whale oil has practically ceased.
>
>
>
A quick reading of the wiki article suggests that there are many different types of whale, and some oils are high in waxes and esters, and other stuff not compatible with running through an engine.
However, if you saw crude petroleum oil as it comes out of the ground, you would despair of using it as a mobile fuel, it would be better suited to surface your road.
However, when the need is there, technology arrives to refine the product. Simple distillation is all that's needed to split crude oil into light and heavy fractions suitable for moving your vehicle and surfacing the road respectively. The same would be done for the fractions in whale oil.
[Answer]
Several ideas people gave are great. I think "Ted Wrigley" answer pick all the problems with internal combustion motors before the 1500's.
But if you insist on follow the idea that is possible creating such machines far back in time I could to suggest one more option: "biodigesters":
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion>
>
> Anaerobic digestion is widely used as a source of renewable energy. The process produces a biogas, consisting of methane, carbon dioxide, and traces of other 'contaminant' gases.[1] This biogas can be used directly as fuel, in combined heat and power gas engines[9] or upgraded to natural gas-quality biomethane. The nutrient-rich digestate also produced can be used as fertilizer.
>
>
>
I know a guy who products electricity to his small farm using such apparatus.
If you have pigs you are done.
And if want to see how a biodigester works you can ever get a god time watching a classic movie:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max_Beyond_Thunderdome>
It is not the best Mad Max but it is a good movie by today freak standards.
The Master/Blaster character(s) is memorable. If you read some old news/political magazines of the 80's/90's you can find mentions to Master/Blaster associated to some politicians.
And there is a vegan version that does not make use of animal dung.
] |
[Question]
[
Set in the near future, robots and mankind coexist amicably due to the great technological advancement in robotics and artificial intelligence. They are everywhere and some took a human form. All of them are hardwired to obey the robot version of penal code which keeps updating. I kept wondering, since we are good at recognising patterns but not interpreting them, which is why awkwardness exists between people, why even bother giving robot facial expressions? They definitely don't need them for talking to another robot, plus it will undoubtedly be awkward for us too, I suppose, because we all know they are fake!
To clarify I'm not referring to particular group of people with a specific syndrome, I'm talking about human in general as I believe we have no problem identifying pattern in nature or perhaps arguably one of the best species ever in history hooray however the actual meaning the same pattern is trying to convey differs among different people. This could lead to misunderstanding and tragedy especially when comes to AI a very complex machine.
[Answer]
Humans are actually very good at recognizing facial expressions and body language.
While it's true that large numbers of people are terrible at it, it's only in comparison to the average human. Assuming unimpaired vision and intelligence, humans use facial expressions to tell who among a group of people is talking, what or whom the person is referring to (because of their gaze)...at least a good guess, and many other things.
Maybe you don't know if someone is slightly annoyed vs upset, or maybe you can't tell if someone is joking, but that's as much word-choice and tone of voice as it is facial expressions. The number of things that people pick up from other people, or from animals, is much larger than you might think. If you're not sure of that, talk to someone who is blind. Or compare conversations on the phone or online with in-person ones.
Another way to look at facial expressions is as a subset of the larger set of non-verbal communication of body language and signaling.
From [*Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles*](https://jnd.org/chapter_11_turn_signals_are_the_facial_expressions_of_automobiles/) by Donald Norman.
>
> Social cooperation requires signals, ways of letting others know one's
> actions and intentions. Moreover, it is useful to know reactions to
> actions: how do others perceive them? The most powerful method of
> signaling, of course, is through language. Emotions, especially the
> outward signaling of emotions, play equally important roles. Emotional
> and facial expressions are simple signal systems that allow us to
> communicate to others our own internal states. In fact, emotions can
> act as a communication medium within an individual, helping bridge the
> gap between internal, subconscious states and conscious ones.
>
>
> As I study the interaction of people with technology, I am not happy
> with what I see. In some sense, you might say, my goal is to socialize
> technology. Right now, technology lacks social graces. The machine
> sits there, placid, demanding. It tends to interact only in order to
> demand attention, not to communicate, not to interact gracefully.
> People and social animals have evolved a wide range of signaling
> systems, the better to make their interactions pleasant and
> productive. One way to understand the deficiencies of today's
> technologies and to see how they might improve is to examine the route
> that natural evolution has taken. You know the old saying that history
> repeats itself, that those that who fail to study the lessons of
> history are doomed to repeat its failures? Well, I think the analogous
> statement applies to evolution and technology: those who are unaware
> of the lessons of biological evolution are doomed to repeat its
> failures.
>
>
>
So, yes, robots need facial expressions. They need external signals in addition to spoken or written or signed language. But they don't have to mimic human expressions. You're right that it is jarring to see fake expressions. If done right, however, they wouldn't be fake, they'd just be specific to a robot. If they are just different enough that they're obviously not human, but not so different that you can't pick up on them right away, you've hit the sweet spot.
[Answer]
Humans are some of the most advanced pattern recognition and actionary machines that have ever existed. So capable in fact that they have theories of matter (physics/chemistry/geology/...) and theories of what matters (psychology/religion/philosophy/...).
Given that it takes nearly 30 years to train most specimens to be expert recognizers in a given field of endeavor, should underline the difficulty of actually grouping various states of the universe into manageable and actionable patterns.
In your world robots act as autonomous embodied entities. They are capable of communicating at speed with other similar entities using a range of network technologies. This allows them to communicate fairly clearly about a range of topics but they too hit limitations.
* Radiowaves have limited bandwidth and everyone can hear them
* lasers require line of sight, and dust can cause errors
* network cables are high bandwidth but tether the robot to a specific vicinity
This places an upper limit on the ability of these entities to communicate effectively. Also there are entities out there that are not robots. It might pay to be able to communicate with those too.
If the robot was the size of a butterfly, aside from having limited mind/communication space, its likely that birds will treat it as food. The robot probably has the ability to shock the bird, but it might pay to communicate to the bird before it tries that **eating the robot is a bad idea**. Being a bright iridescent red/yellow is the general approach used by poisonous caterpillars, and generally birds respect that. After all the robot might actually be running low on power when the bird shows up.
Scale this up and there are a wide variety of organisms running around where it might pay better to communicate with than ignore. Particularly those two-legged simians, there are a few of them, they are pretty inventive, and quite happy to do boring repetitive tasks. Perhaps if the communication happened well enough they might be put to use inventing, and dealing with irritations?
Even without all of these other organisms hanging around, the simple fact that these technologies have bandwidth limitations is a problem - Communication is insanely important if you desire to reduce the frequency and severity of problems encountered while existing. There are a few more technological channels that would be useful, but it is relatively simple to adopt proven modes of communication:
* colouration (i am poisonous, i don't care if you recognise me/I'm not good news)
* hearing (locate movement, location, as well as conceptual information)
* vocalisation/stridulation (location as well as conceptual information, ready to fight, ready to mate, ready to serve)
* dance/movement displays (are you willing to invest energy into demonstrating capability, should I press the point to the next level?)
* faces
+ eyes (what are you interested in/looking at?)
+ eyebrows (are you exploring/frustrated/contented?)
+ teeth (are you indicating dominance/subservience, will you challenge me?)
* posture/stance (are you ready? what are you ready to do?)
Obviously no two robots need to have the full or even the same range of communication methods. Many creatures even in the same species have varied capacities. An obvious example is red/green colour blindness in humans.
So do robots need faces? *No.*
Would robots significantly benefit from having faces? *Yes.*
[Answer]
You say that humans, in general, are poor at recognizing facial expressions. As a person with both autism and a brain injury, I beg to differ. I ***am*** poor at both recognizing and using facial expressions (I even have a doctor's note!), and the differences are observable to an outsider.
A few years back, before the brain injury and before we knew I was autistic, my family used to play with the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). For those not familiar with the SCA, think of them as adults playing dressup in medieval garb, who get together to gossip, drink beer, and beat on each other with big sticks. For the Brits out there, think of stereotypical rugby players dressing up as King Arthur's knights, then playing rugby with swords (that event was called "Blood of Heroes", by the way, emulating a very bad movie of the same name).
Naturally, there is a lot of banter in such a group, and a lot of good natured roughhousing. They can find a week's worth of innuendo in the world innuendo. Shortly after we moved on to other hobbies, my wife told me that I used to scare them because, on the rare occasions I did join the banter, they couldn't tell whether I was serious or joking.
Post brain injury, it is much worse. Recent;y, when being introduced to a new business partner, they were trying to be friendly and informally ask me about myself. Unfortunately, they asked "What gets you out of bed in the morning?". A *metaphorical* question about *emotional* state with *social* cues, it effectively and awkwardly put an end to the conversation because it exactly hit places I physically lack the machinery to process efficiently.
My wife has learned to be very careful with the use of sarcasm and metaphors around me because, without the social cues that go with them, I tend to take them literally. "Why did you (some action) ?" "You Told me to." "I didn't mean for you to really do that!" "Sorry."
A robot mimicking humanoid characteristics to the point they were indistinguishable from humans, without emotional/social emulation of some sort, would tend to make people feel uneasy and awkward, or as my son would say "it would creep them out".
Worse than not mimicking emotions, would be mimicking them badly. A smile whose timing is off by 1/4 second is perceived as deceptive, for example. In contrast, obviously different emotional responses that are specific to the species (robots) can be learned by humans. I used to keep crustaceans in my aquarium, and it is amazing how expressive crabs and crayfish be without flexible faces.
For a good idea of the issues you might run into, watch the first season of Ninjago and the team's interactions with Zane, before anyone knows he is a robot.
[Answer]
Humans teach other humans in formal positions to use facial expressions when communicating. When someone is representing an organization or group, the message or information they are speaking more often than not has no connection to their personal opinion. As a result we teach humans in these positions to use a facial expression that communicates the "emotive" part of the message the organization/group wants to get across.
Well if we think that's appropriate for humans, we certainly will do it for robots if we can.
>
> They definitely don't need them for talking to another robot
>
>
>
I suspect it could be used as part of robot-robot interaction as well. There are environments where it would be too loud to use audio, too problematic to use e.g. radio based communications and all you may have is the visual. It might be better to implement a custom set of robot-robot expressions for some comms.
>
> plus it will undoubtedly be awkward for us too, I suppose, because we all know they are fake!
>
>
>
I know the smile on the sales person's face is fake too, but it had better be there or no sale ! We expect facial and body language to match words and we treat inconsistencies as suspicious. That's how humans work and why good communicators spend a lot of time learning to make it all look natural, even when it isn't.
The other side of this is that humans need facial expressions to match what they expect. A robot which has a hardwired smile or scowl would give a very disconcerting feeling to a human in the wrong context.
"I hope you enjoyed your stay with us ?" is going to feel very creepy to a human coming from a robot with a scowl or sneer (or something that could be read that way by a human) than from something with a pattern that's more easily interpreted as friendly.
So the human-like expressions would be useful to humans, avoiding emotional dissonance that would put us off.
We even treat animals like this - we learn to interpret their expressions and body language and "map" human meaning onto them. It's an important part of how we interpret interactions with the world. We do extend this to in-animate objects - signs, logos, advertising.
So facial expressions we can read easily would be there to make humans comfortable and make communications more effective.
[Answer]
Even if we're terrible at interpreting facial expressions, their absence would be extremely disconcerting. Therefore, in order to avoid being unsettling, you'd want the robots to mimic human behaviour, just like we'd do for speech patterns, avoiding monotone, etc.
[Answer]
Look for "mentalists" and you will find lots of info about them! They are talented to start with (compared to the average as someone said) and they are sufficiently trained to successfully trick you to think that they can read your mind. They too learn your facial expressions, tone of speech and think ahead of you in choosing a random number. Uri Geller, a famous example is just a first-year student in comparison. Look for two Israeli mentalists like Nimrod Har'el and Hezi Dean:
<http://www.nimrodharel.co.il>
<http://www.hezidean.co.il/ENGLISH/>
I think mentalists would have failed if they did not study body language.
Those trained persons would be valuable to AI programmers in training a robot to read your body language. Nobody mentipned that the robots may be sufficiently trained to search for suspects in a crowd.
[Answer]
You raise a very good point.
In many demonstrations, it has been established that robot faces that display really accurate human emotions freak people out. It is very disconcerting to have an inanimate but artificially intelligent object to mimic what is the most basic human attribute - emotion. Rather than trust the robot more, it actually leads to greater mistrust and discomfort.
Personally, I would regard a robot smiling at me with exactly the same trepidation as that of a used car salesperson giving me the 'trust me' smile, or of the clown with that unsettling painted-on grin.
It was much easier to trust the answers from Data of Star Trek fame because they were delivered by a very impartial, non-emotional robotic characterization.
In the movie 'I, Robot' the human connection of Sunny was much more believable BECAUSE he did not display artificial emotions. In fact, Sunny's face was so neutral that the human observer could superimpose their OWN image of emotional expression, that somehow was more appealing than to have Sunny display the emotion. That is, we saw what we believed to be there, not what the artificial intelligence wanted us to see.
Add to this, the fact that these robots will have a hard time being accepted in the first place, and there would already be an element of mistrust, any false impressions that one got from misreading an artificial expression that is dissonant with the message or intent would lead to even greater mistrust and mental tension from cognitive dissonance.
The research into voice responses from our cars, devices, and other voice response technology supports this notion. They all have a bland, neutral tone for the same reasons. People don't WANT a bubbly, upbeat, almost laughing Siri. They don't want any kind of tone or inflection that indicates or that could be interpreted as indicating judgement or acceptance or agreement/disagreement. They want 'just the facts, ma'am' with just enough inflection to make it sound natural.
My bet would be to go with robots having completely neutral expressions, with just the right design that lets the human observer imply their own expected emotion onto the face.
[Answer]
Why bother creating AI when the biological machine is sufficient?
Expressions one could say are also a congantive function of self identity and self awareness. The very thing AI programmers delve volume of topics to unravel. The idea of a fully functioning brain requires all the parts and mechanisms that go along with it. Facial expressions and gestures for example have over thousands of receptors telling our millions of neurons what we are doing with our indvidual muscles. This simple thing like cracking a smile follows a very deep set of instructions if you think about it.
] |
[Question]
[
Suppose the setting is a small coastal island with only three towns in it. (I imagine it's roughly the size of the Isle of Man, perhaps a little bit bigger.) Technology level is roughly around the 1810's. Would it be possible to build giant boilers, fill them with seawater, and then boil them to produce fresh water?
Assuming this is possible, and assuming someone periodically cleans out the boilers, how profitable would it be to sell the resulting salt? Assume nobody else is currently producing salt this way en masse.
[Answer]
I'm from Brazil, a former colony of Portugal. In history classes we learn about this.
In centuries past salt was very valuable. The word salary comes from that. Portugal had been exploring [salt pans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_pan_(geology)) as one of its chief exports before becoming a country - and that was in the 11th century! Seems like the first ones were in the Aveiro region, with a surge in the commerce of salt in the 16th century.
Around that time the colonization of Brazil was starting, and since we got more sunlight than Europe throughout the year (as well as very salty seas) lots of seawater salt extraction happened here. It was one of the most important economic activities around the end of the 18th century.
As for how it was done centuries ago, there is a whole Wikipedia page just about the process: [open-pan salt making](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-pan_salt_making). It is quite lengthy and elaborate. But in short:
1. Pump the water (using mills) to deep decanters. Some evaporation happens there.
2. Pump the resulting water to shallow evaporators. Further evaporation happens.
3. Remove calcium sulfate from the water. This was one of the sub-products of the salt industry, and was used in masonry work.
4. Take the remaining water to crystallizers, which are the [shallow, colorful ponds that come to mind when you think about salt pans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_evaporation_pond#/media/File:Salt_ponds_SF_Bay_(dro!d).jpg).
5. Here salt starts precipitating in the water. Have some people push it to the side of the crystallizer with shovels to accelerate the process and ensure the salt is grainy (you'll have some really large grains, some as big as corn kernels). Once the water is all evaporated you can just shovel the salt into piles for further processing.
Look at the image below. The white cones are salt shoved manually. The piles closer to the workers are small because they are still shoveling on shallow water, whereas the larger piles in the background (which can be taller than a house) are ready to be shoveled onto trucks. The picture is from 1967 but the process back then wasn't much different from what they did in the 16th century.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AlBZu.jpg)
Source: the Portuguese Wikipedia article for salt extraction from ponds. [This is the original URL for the image.](https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficheiro:Aveiro-Marais_salants-1967_07_29_29.jpg)
---
You won't get potable water in this process though. All the water is evaporated to the atmosphere. If you tried to get that water with 18th century equipment you'd probably have some heavy metal poisoning on the long run, due to the equipment you'd need to obtain water this way in industrial amounts and the chemistry and biology knowledge of the time. For potable water you do need to find a river in your island.
[Answer]
Distillation was well known long before the 18th century (it was one of the main tools of the alchemist, dating from the 1100s or earlier in Europe, and was known in Asia and Africa long before then). This will do both, as long as there's a source of heat to boil the sea water.
Boiling off the water will concentrate the salt; at some level, the boiling point of the water will rise the point you can't keep the distillation going, and you have brine. Some salt will crystallize as it cools, or you can continue to boil the brine to drive off the water and then dry the salt left in the pot.
The vapor from the boiling is captured and cooled, and produces nearly pure water (if the boiling is too vigorous, the resulting liquid may need another distillation to be drinkable, but this is unlikely in an early 19th century tech level setting.
[Answer]
Sure. Stills have been known for hundreds of years. Depending on the location it might also be possible to build solar stills just powered by sunlight.
However I suspect that sea water would produce some corrosion in a conventional early nineteenth century boiler and might not produce very good quality salt. It would probably be better to produce the salt in air dried pans as I doubt they would need huge quantities anyway with just three villages.
[Answer]
## Solar stills
The Square-Cube Law already has a great answer for how to get salt. I am going to tell you how to get potable water. Your people will need a lot of glass to make solar stills, but they don't have tp be a single sheet of glass, lots of small sheets works almost as well. And they can do it, thousands of commercial greenhouses were built during the 17-1800's and this was the high end of things they could build from glass in the 1800's.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/H9MY7.png)
This is the Palm House in England.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BTWU6.jpg)
solar stills are well within their capabilities.
There are several designs you can work with. the glass need to be clear\* but not necessarily smooth which is well within 1800 technology. They are slow but free energy wise. As a bonus the brine produced can be fed to your salt making fields. The steeper you can make the ceiling the better (better collection efficiency) but it also requires more glass. Single sided is the most common just because it is the easiest to build, fill, and maintain, but with a few pipes you can build all the designs using material from the times. If they are clever they will also collect rain water off the buildings as well as other buildings.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/URKkC.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YCZFl.png)
A solar still of 4 square meters (about the size of a king sized mattress) can produce about 0.8 liters of purified water per sun-hour. So figure out how much water you want and just do a little math.
\*it doesn't *have* to be clear but it works a lot better.
[Answer]
**Have a Volcanic Island**
In addition to what Slarty said, you can have your island be volcanic so that they can build the still on a thermal vent. That way there isn't a problem of importing coal to fuel the furnace. The main reason saltwater extraction is so expensive is the energy cost, so by having a free renewable form of energy on the island it becomes much more economically feasible to produce salt.
[Answer]
Technologically, yes: Put a solar still over an ocean salt mining operation.
Feasible: I seriously doubt it, you don't have plastic sheeting, that's going to be an awful lot of glass in your solar still.
[Answer]
[Condensing fresh water form saline water](http://museum.wa.gov.au/explore/wa-goldfields/water-arid-land/condensing) from salt lakes, via boilers, was done during the initial gold rush era in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, from the mid 1890s until supply of water via a 600 km long [pipeline](http://museum.wa.gov.au/explore/wa-goldfields/water-arid-land/building-pipeline) from [the coast](https://www.goldenpipeline.com.au/explore/) in 1903. Such plants also produced salt as a waste product.
Vast amounts of timber were used to fuel the boilers.
Building something similar on an ocean coast would have been possible.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Syul2.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gWiGe.jpg)
[Answer]
This is an addition to aspects raised in a range of answers and comments.
How to produce water vapour has been well covered.
The all important "How to turn the vapour back into liquid water" has been less dealt with.
It has been generally demonstrated that in the time period and specific conditions stated:
* Evaporation of water for distillation would be "reasonably doable"
* Condensation of the water vapour would be the larger challenge.
For condensation what is required is a water vapour impermeable barrier that allows heat transfer between the vapour and a cooler external environment. The external "coolth" source may be active coolant, such as water \*potable or otherwise) or a "tunnel" which is protected from external heating.
One method would be the provision of a thin "leather" or similar material membrane which is cooler on the outside and which allows water to condense. Where available glass does this well enough. In the context given fish should be a readily available resource and "fish leather" would be an unusual but viable option. There is a vast amount of information on web re [fish leather](https://www.google.com/search?q=fish+leather&rlz=1C1CHBF_enNZ834NZ839&oq=fish+leather&aqs=chrome..69i57j46j0l2j0i395l2j0i395i457j0i395.3998j1j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) its creation, use and properties.
While it is something that many people are aware of it is "very much a thing" and would serve this purpose well.
Another solution is a "cooled tunnel" that water vapour is channelled through. This could be rock or glazed clay or any other material that will remove heat. Wood would work but not as well as some other materials. Even discharging water valour into a cave would work.
The aim is to reduce temperature to below the dew point at current humidity - lower temperature will remove more water from the air.
[Answer]
Copper and lead has been easy to obtain since Roman times, lead piping could be used for condensers, indeed the smelting of lead actually used condensers long stone tunnels running uphill to chimneys where the lead vapour evaporating from the furnace would condense on the stone walls.
You could have done this into Roman times without too much difficulty. Using sea water for cooling as well as the source of the water.
[Answer]
Depending on the latitude, take a metal drum (sheet metal folded into a cylinder and welded, with a circular bottom welded on). Paint the outside a dark colour, fill with water and leave in the sun.
Dig a deep hole in the ground (2+ metres)and put in a large earthenware pot of similar volume to the drum. Make a lid for the drum with a hole fitted with a pipe connected to the pot.
By the end of the day, with a 50 litre drum, you should have 10-20 litres of water in the pot, more the more airtight the system is. The drum will have a concentrated salt solution, which can be poured out into a salt pan to get crystalline salt. No further water can be extracted from the concentrated brine.
You will need to replace the drum frequently, as the brine will corrode it within a month.
[Answer]
A really, really good read on the topic, written in 1862, compares several methods of obtaining salt through evaporation, and even gives the yield per acre of evaporating ponds.
[How to Make Salt from Sea-Water:](https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/lecontej/leconte.html)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ztls3.jpg)
Transcribed into digital format. Much too extensive to duplicate here, but it covers a great number of methods for evaporating sea water to obtain salt.
] |
[Question]
[
I’m building a D&D world for a game, and one of the major details I really want to include in this world is the Evil Mage and their tower. The tower is a light blue, 3 stories tall, intricately carved, and translucent/partially transparent. I don’t want to change the boxed text I have for it (reproduced here in case it helps), but I want to know if there is a plausible material useable to build it.
The description I will tell the players is:
>
> As you approach the blue structure, you begin to see more details. The tower raises high into the air, taller than the tiny huts surrounding it. Against the gray landscape, it’s almost an impossibly bright shade of blue, just lighter than [one of the characters who has blue hair]’s hair. When you get closer, you can see faint outlines of creatures moving behind the walls. Light passes through easily, but the intricate carvings of dragons on the walls prevent you from seeing too much detail.
>
>
>
I wanted to know, given that it is a setting where magic is limited (but not impossible, because D&D), whether some substance that lets light through, but is strong enough to make a several story tall building, could exist. Specifically, a good answer here should minimize the amount of magical hand waving; I’m perfectly willing to say “magic carved it”, but “magic made it all” is not plausible in the setting (homebrew world, low magic, modern tech), and I would especially like something plausible in the real world if there is such a thing. The technology level is relatively similar to our own world, probably equivalent to 2010 technology or so.
**What material could make such a tower?**
[Answer]
Glass and Perspex are possible, however they need structure to make it work. Ice is possible but will melt in summer. If you want to do the entire building out of one material which is transparent blue, may I propose
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YSiBd.jpg)
[**SLA Resin**](https://www.anycubic.com/collections/uv-resin/products/translucent-uv-resin-for-photon-series)
It's translucent and can be tinted with dyes, (That manufacturer has clear and transparent green in stock atm, but other colours are possible). Neon blue dyes can be [found on ebay](https://www.ebay.com.au/i/162227220646).
Strengths vary by manufacturer but 55MPa seems to be a common tensile and compression strength. Concrete varies from 10 MPa for your garden path up to 70MPa for skyscrapers. 55 is right in this ballpark.
It hardens and cures under UV light. So if you don't have a tower-sized 3D printer, you can use the day-night cycle to "print" the tower, just like a 3d SLA printer will do.
Create cross sections of the tower (say every 2mm) in a stencil on a plastic sheet. At night, stretch the stencil out over your site, pour a layer of resin, spread it equally using squeegees, wipe off any excess not in the gaps in the stencil, wait for sunrise, the layer hardens during the day. The next night, lay the next stencil down, and repeat up. It'll take 500 days to build 1m, and you'll need scaffolding, and some temporary structure for supporting the ceilings while they cure, but you should get a nice translucent blue tower at the end.
As it's exposed long term to UV from the sun, it will become less transparent, but never become completely opaque.
[Answer]
**it's made of Ice**
Ice is cheap, strong, transparent, light blue, and easily carve-and-sculpt-able. Regular craftspeople even without magic can create long-lasting and intricate carvings in ice provided the right temperatures. Furthermore, keeping an ice structure frozen and maintained isn't impossible so long as the climate fits (or a magical cooling spell helps). Furthermore, while it is presumably within a magic-user's domain to cast a "create ice" or "freeze water" spell, building an ice-tower is completely within the capabilities of mundane workers.
Here are some example ice structures.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ybRX0.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ckj2H.jpg)
[Answer]
## I would build using standard office building techniques - steel/concrete and glass.
The reason is that there is no reason why you can't build a composite structure. No building is built only out of 1 material.
Some materials are brittle and cannot span as far as steel could, nor could they take much compression load. Buildings today [use steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-beam) or [timber to span long distances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_framing), [concrete columns to take compression loads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforced_concrete#Use_in_construction) and gain height, and [glass to allow light in](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glazing_(window)). By separating structure from facade, it allows you to be able to do anything you want with the material on the outside.
So your glass facade (which you can mould to different patterns, carving-like shapes etc.) could be connected to a steel substructure that is thin and recessed (hidden from view).
We build our glass skyscrapers like this today, using a 'curtain wall' system. This is basically an aluminium subframe that the glass connects to, which in turn connects to a steel one, which may then be supported by concrete. The columns that form the main supports for the structure are away from the facade, hidden inside close to the building core.
Le Corbusier, one of the founders of modern architecture, summarised this new form of construction succinctly in one of his drawings:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vZzxy.png)
Here you could see that the facade can be any material you want, as there would be no structural function required, allowing for 'glass towers'.
[Answer]
**Jade.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nO1mS.jpg)
<https://www.gia.edu/jade-quality-factor>
Jade is real. It is translucent. It is strong. Usually it is green but there are bluish varieties. People carve it into all sorts of shapes. I envision every surface being carved into reliefs showing stories of all sorts - like [Trajan's Column](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Trajans-Column) or some of the Hindu temples.
A single clear piece of jade large enough to make into a tower is definitely the stuff of fantasy but to my surprise I could not find any images! I am positive there was something like this in one of the Conan books. I like the idea that it is said to be the tooth of a dragon.
[Answer]
**Glass**
Glass is pretty strong, especially if you make the walls two or three feet thick. Perhaps a group of thugs with magic axes or clubs could bash a hole in it. However, they would get hurt from all the glass shrapnel thrown into the air by the pounding.
**Magic**
I would hope that in a high magical world, somebody would have figured out how to make a spell to make glass as strong as steel or stone, or maybe change it into transparent aluminum.
I'm not sure I'd want to live in a glass building, but each to his own, I say.
[Answer]
Ordinary glass block should work perfectly\* well for a mere three stories, and is readily available in a multitude of colors, e.g. <https://glassblockwarehouse.com/product-category/shop-by-colors/blue> Took under a minute to find that site (one of many) and navigate to the requested color.
\*As long as you don't have to deal with earthquake resistant building codes and so on.
[Answer]
[Cobalt glass](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_glass), while not particularly stronger than standard glass (which is [remarkably stronger](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_of_glass#:%7E:text=Glass%20typically%20has%20a%20tensile,decrease%20the%20strength%20of%20glass.) than most people think), does match up to your remarkably blue, transparent building material. It also has the added benefit of being able to partially obscure bright light to some degree, hence its use in [flame tests](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_test#:%7E:text=The%20test%20flame%20is%20often,viewing%20of%20other%20metal%20ions.) to filter out sulfurous yellows.
It's quite a heat-resistent material, hence its practical use in [furnace observation](https://www.phillips-safety.com/2013/11/furnace-observation-cobalt-blue-glass/) — a property which is especially true as it gets thicker, and consequently more blue — and has been historically quite decorative. But [glass as a building material](https://gharpedia.com/blog/advantages-disadvantages-glass-building-material/) has some distinct disadvantages, particularly how brittle it can be, and that high-quality cobalt glass — most certainly necessary for building larger structures — can be especially difficult to find in large quantities.
[Answer]
**Blue Light**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gF6wi.png)
<https://invention.si.edu/twin-towers-living-light>
A four-mile high tower of light can't fail to impress your adventurers. You can see through it and indeed walk through it. The actual tower can be pure white and inside the perimeter of the lights that form a circle around it.
The top of the solid tower could project in such a way as to stop the light going on indefinitely. The dragons could be actual white stone dragons on the walls of the solid tower.
[Answer]
This is close to the look gothic churches were going for: The arches allowed a relativ slender wall construction to fit huge windows. If you change the classical coloured glass panes for clear glass, you are halfway there.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ayjmf.png)
This is 14th century, the Kölner Dom, no magic involved. Note how much of the area is dedicated to windows, and how little to structural supports.
For your tower I would suggest an octagon ground plan of arches to form the walls, with area within the arches as glass windows. As you are in a fantasy setting, you can handwave a few things. The only problem I see is the puny three stories, how is that impressing anyone?
[Answer]
**Sapphire**.
It's (usually) blue, and it's almost as hard as diamond, so it should be able to support a fair amount of weight.
It's too rare to use as a building material in our world, but in your world, it can be as common as you want. Or, since it's basically aluminum oxide with a little bit of other metal, it could be manufactured in large quantities by some quasi-magical process.
Because of its hardness, you'd probably have to use diamond tools to carve it.
[Answer]
Consider the purpose of the tower - why is it blue and translucent? If it's a magic flex, then I'd push the magic component as far as possible strictly because it's unique, but you don't have to say it was simply conjured. Combinations of magic and science described above work great, but you can also grow a synthetic crystal (aided by magic to account for size) and carve it. If you want the flex to be more "OMG this guy is frickin' loaded!" go with cut quartz, cordierite, or apatite blocks, built and carved by expert masons to be nearly seamless. You will still need some magic to explain the color.
Your major limiting factor is actually the light passing through easily. No natural material that can be carved into recognizable shapes and also has the strength to be used as a functional wall for a 3 story building will allow that much light through it.
You COULD just go with glass if you can pass off the optics (if there are no distortions it may as well be 100% magic). At 3 feet thick it would still allow a measurable amount of light through, and you could arguably use 1.5 to 2 feet for functional support in concert with a strong metal framework - being mindful of the fact that crystalline structures are NOT very useful when it comes to load-bearing, which is why you find transparent material, even those mentioned as examples above, predominantly used as curtain walls rather than supportive material.
Since in this case the transparency is only useful as an aesthetic, I'd go with a magic flex.
[Answer]
I see four categories:
1. Without any magic.
2. Magically created, but functional without.
3. Magically supported or suspended (e.g. ice + cooling)
4. Illusions.
That said here are my solutions:
1. Multilayered glas with rhomboid steel supports:
In a glas stack of 15-20 cm you can easily hide steel frames that are 10cm deep and 3cm wide, as long as one of the outside layers is frosted. The flat angles provoke a total reflection and thus make it difficult to see the steel. You'd have to look at the wall under a rather flat angle, but then soon the reflection of the wall make things difficult to see. Glass is much tougher than people assume, but the toughness is kind-of concentrated in the surface. High-strength glass therefore often is [laminated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminated_glass).
2. Fused crushed glas with thin steel supports:
If you crush glas and fuse it, you get a translucent material that is not completely clear and has a very 'frozen-lake'-like icey look to it. The same rules on hiding steel frames apply, except that it is much easier to hide, and thus could also be round steel, etc. Depending on crumb-size and amount of sintering, you can also gradually vary the clearness, allowing for the wall to become a window in some places. Bonus on stability: Since the wall allready consists of sintered broken glass, on impact the original shards will lead the cracks, so only small shards will spray off. Also it is a bit more flexible, which in turn will make it much harder to get in deep. (Think of it as "ablative shock absorption"). The look might be similar to [this](https://morganica.com/shards-of-tempered-glass-the-shards-series/) (especially the second and the last images).
3. Simple glass brick:
Building bricks for glass-sections in buildings were common in the 30s to 60s for staircase-walls. Usually hollow and not load-bearing, but they can be filled with crushed glass (half-bearing), or be massive (load bearing).
4. colophony/rosin and polymers:
Many modern polymers are translucent or transparent. If you have access to them, you can build the tower from them, with glas dust as filler (fiberglass would also be an option). Otherwhise you can use plant-based substances like plum-sap residue (a clear rubber), some kind of cauchuck or latex, or colophony/rosin (boiled plant resin, goes from white over yellow, red to brown).
5. Transparent stone:
If you can get transparent stones like quarz or similar, that's a way, of course, but asuming you've got limestone or sand stone, your mage could just glassify parts of it, passing it through like fibers. The result would be simmilar to [transparent concrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translucent_concrete), even with rather [high transparency](https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/futur_material_10.jpg), but you can of course design it to be coarser or make it look like crystal-layers.
6. Conjured organic matter:
A pair of semi-transparent substance are [Fluorapatite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorapatite) and [Hydroxylapatite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyapatite), which range from white over gray, greenish, yellowish to brown (no blue, sorry). They build the backbone of all hard substances in your body (spare for horn, which is not really hard). The hard part of your teeth ([enamel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_enamel)) is indeed made out of them by 96%. Your wizzard could conjure up a tower of tooth enamel, which you could shape acordingly if you want to. If your wizzard is a necromancer or something weird, this may fit perfectly. Otherwhise, it might be interesting to use [horn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_(anatomy)), which indeed is also transparent and can go from almost clear whitish to slightly greanish over all states of yellow, red and brown down to black. Horn is made from [creatin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keratin) and is usually not that clear, but hey, your mage might conjure up rather clear horn. You can see examples of natural clear horn (2.5mm thick) [here](https://www.timber-tones.com/ekmps/shops/timbertones/images/Jazz-Tones-Clear-Horn-1-Guitar-Pick-%5B2%5D-206-p.jpg), [here](https://www.timber-tones.com/ekmps/shops/timbertones/images/Flexi-Tones-Jumbo-Style-1-Guitar-Pick-%5B3%5D-1384-p.jpg), [here](https://www.timber-tones.com/ekmps/shops/timbertones/images/Flexi-Tones-Gypsy-Style-1-Guitar-Pick-%5B4%5D-1387-p.jpg) or [here](https://www.dictum.com/en/horn-cb/cow-horn-plate-flat-transparent-831089). It would surely make for a sick building that could also work for a friendly/nature-loving conjurer. (Horn substance is stronger than most woods, so you could easily build the tower from that.)
7. Cooled Ice:
Casting an freezing spell would allow to maintain an ice building. Adding plant fibers makes it less clear, but tougher to destroy. (see Pycrete, which melts much slower than ice and can reach strengths near to concrete)
8. Illusion:
A transparancy spell, some kind of modified invisibility spell or some kind of projection spell onto normal building materials would do it. This spell would falter once the caster is dead, or the taumic source is depleted.
Personally I'd go with either the crushed-sintered-glass or the horn aproach and colorize that. I guess that [looking like this](https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/futur_material_10.jpg) transparent stone would also be plausible style, eventhough it wouldn#t be bright blue (on its own at least, but it could be painted).
If you don't care about clearness, so diffuse shadows are enough, and can take a cooling charm, you could use pycrete.
Keep in mind it took [three hot summers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk) to melt a Pycrete prototype ship the canadians had built.
[Answer]
There is a way to make Aluminum clear as Glas. It is difficult but wiht magic... integrate some particels for the blue look and you have a very solid blue Glas, that is not Glas.
>
> "Aluminium oxynitride or ALON is a ceramic composed of aluminium,
> oxygen and nitrogen. It is marketed under the name ALON by Surmet
> Corporation.[3] ALON is optically transparent (≥80%) in the
> near-ultraviolet, visible and midwave-infrared regions of the
> electromagnetic spectrum. It is four times harder than fused silica
> glass, 85% as hard as sapphire, and nearly 15% harder than magnesium
> aluminate spinel. Since it has a cubic spinel structure, it can be
> fabricated to transparent windows, plates, domes, rods, tubes and
> other forms using conventional ceramic powder processing techniques.
> ALON is the hardest polycrystalline transparent ceramic available
> commercially.[2] Its combination of optical and mechanical properties
> makes this material a leading candidate for lightweight
> high-performance transparent armor applications such as bulletproof
> and blast-resistant windows and for many military infrared
> optoelectronics.[4] ALON-based armor has been shown to stop multiple
> armor-piercing projectiles of up to .50 BMG cal.[5] It is commercially
> available in sizes as large as 18 by 35 inches (460 mm × 890 mm)
> monolithic windows.[6] "
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride>
[Answer]
There are translucent concrete projects in the works, with the Japanese being the leaders in this research, I believe. Similarly, some Japanese are the leaders in aquarium and deep-sea diving glass-incredibly thick yet perfectly translucent glass. Some aquarium glass is many meters thick. wall of such glass could easily stand for some time under immense (self)load.
] |
[Question]
[
I'm creating a parallel world inspired by [migration period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period) in the dark ages.
I have a tribe that has a something akin to standing army consisting of
* infantry
* cavalry
* rangers
Wealthier clan leaders provide permanent leadership being like officers. Wisent clan leader or one of his brothers/sons/friend leads the warband. Some of them have experience working as mercenaries for the wealthier more civilized states in the south.
The bulk of the army is made of tribal boys who must serve few years before being recognized as man and allowed to marry.
Those who could afford horses serve in the cavalry, those who could afford ponies in the rangers, and the rest in the infantry.
There is some equipment in the tribal armory, shields, spears, recurve self-bows maybe few helmets, but most of the weapons and armor depends on the warrior themselves. Wealthiest own full suit of mail, good horse, plus lance sword, poorest have shield, spear and axe.
Is it plausible for a tribe to have a standing army?
[Answer]
# **War *IS* the tribe's business:**
In ancient times, everyone knew how to fight if they could afford weapons. The standing army part is the hard one to swallow, as labor is wasted if you're just standing around. Unless standing around as an army is the point.
The best way to justify tribal people having a standing army is if the business of your tribe is warfare. The other questions allude to this. You tribe consists of mercenaries, and the army is at the beck and call of whoever pays them. The old men are trained professionals, and teach the young boys how to be soldiers. When your tribe isn't employed, they are bandits and raiders, usually of their former employers. This creates a strong incentive for your employers to keep you employed.
Read about the role of tribal mercenaries in the late Roman period. [Varangian mercenaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard), for example, were sought after by the Eastern Roman emperors because they were loyal to the emperor and didn't have a separate political goal than getting paid. Generations of men went off, earned money, and went home better equipped and trained, with money to establish themselves.
So it's not exactly a standing army, but it's justification for your tribe to have a large body of professional soldiers and skilled leaders without spending all their time fighting each other or their neighbors. I hope this is what you're looking for.
[Answer]
It's difficult, because of the math. Think of the effort it takes to feed one person--say the average tribesman spends 10 hours a day doing directly survival-related tasks like gathering food or repairing shelters. That means if you have one person who isn't working on these survival-tasks, someone else has to take up their slack. If you have a 1000 person tribe and 500 of them are in the standing army (who only train and drill), the 500 non-soldiers need to work twice as hard, ie 20 hours a day, to provide for them.
A tribal technology level simply can't support this. The primitive technology simply isn't efficient enough to generate a food (and 'survival') surplus. The little surplus that does exist goes to the children and elderly that the tribe support, since they don't directly help with survival in a concrete manner.
Because of this, to have a standing army in your tribe you could:
* Increase the technology level so one man-hour of work yields more
* Artificially induce consistent abundance of food
* Give the standing army a purpose (looting, raiding, mercenary work, etc)
[Answer]
Maybe if your tribe has a lot of cattle that needs protecting. Even than you have to do a lot of hand-waving.
>
> Domesticated herds were the perfect article of plunder. They could easily be captured, moved, and absorbed into the plunderer’s herd. And from the other side, once people’s herds were stolen, they themselves would die off unless they in turn raided and stole from their neighbours. In this way a cyclical sequence of population density increase, plunder of cattle, and counter- plunder were set in motion in a given pastoral region.
> These waves of warfare and counter-warfare expanded into tidal waves of total warfare, massive genocide, and frantic migration. And with ever desperate migration, new waves of total warfare and genocide precipitated further migrations ... and so it went.
> Under such desperate condition it is no wonder that military organization was developed to its utmost extent and that the herders were to develop into the most militarized and military minded societies that the world had ever seen. And so, not only did warfare become a constant threat and a constant obsession, but, in contrast to the situation of the horticulturalists, no defense against warfare was possible for the herders. For most herders lived on open pastureland where there were no forests to hide in. And since the herders were nomadic, they could not build permanent walled settlements. Thus, possessing no walls, they erected a military structure that could ring them as effectively as the walls of the horticulturalists. They organize the entire male society into age-graded regi- ments, which would fight locked together in phalanxes as stones were locked together in walls, and would fight to the death as they were pledged to each other in life.
>
>
>
R.M. Glassman, [The Origins of Democracy in Tribes, City-States and Nation-States,](https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319516936)
So make your tribe having very little land suitable for agriculture, maybe just land by the river is worth tilling since you could irrigate it, say something like 10%.
60% is a steppe where it rains 3 time a year and you could only keep cattle, camels, or giant elands take your pick.
The remaining 30% are steep mountains where you could do only [forest gardening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening) but you can't do any tilling. [Terraces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrace_(earthworks)) being unknown technology to your tribe.
Then you have a organizational problem of making egalitarian tribes into hierarchical organization. Maybe the wars with neighboring tribes wasn't going so well so they put some of their mercenaries as a war chief to reorganize their warriors in manners of whatever Romans/Parthians/Chinese were doing. Taking in account local circumstances. Tribes don't have much surplus to have much of professional warriors so semi-professionals will have to do.
How he is gonna make egalitarian tribesman to do military drills and that they should listen to their "officers" is a good story all in itself. However pending doom is a good incentive for culture to change.
Plus some kind of laws for punishing undisciplined tribesman both those who are shirking and those overeager who want personal glory. Perhaps taking their good land by the river or their cattle and redistributing it to those who served with honor & discipline.
All in all plausible but unlikely.
[Answer]
Improbable.
A standing army -- by definition full time soldiers -- requires that the culture be so wealthy that they can afford a large number of young men -- in their most productive years -- be out of the productive labor force for several years. In your structure, you are positing that ALL of them are thus in the army.
You may be able to have a culture in which all men below a certain age are considered on call for the army at all times, and in which drilling for your position in the army is done regularly, but at times when the labor is not needed, and even one in which being thus available for several years is required to be a fully adult man.
[Answer]
**Your standing army is composed entirely of men too old to work on the farm.**
The young men are needed to do the work of survival. Farming is hard. Fit women are on the farm and/or pregnant, and old women are in charge of the kids.
That leaves the old men. They are bent and sore from a lifetime of hardship. But in this tribe men's minds stay sharp, and these old men have had a lifetime to develop their guile. Your knees do not need to be strong if you are astride a young horse. Your sword arm does not need to be strong if your bow can put out an eye at 50 yards.
Your standing army of grandfathers (and great grandfathers) is wily and they fight with their brains. Also, their work is done and they are dispensable.
[Answer]
Ok, this is going to be a long one. I come from tribal culture. My tribe name is Cuce. And I am Serb, Europe, Balkan peninsula.
We were under the rule of Ottoman Turks for centuries and my ancestors had a miniature free enclave in the empire (it remained mostly by being a minor nuisance than a real threat to the empire).
That being said, here is about the tribal culture:
1. Tribe is all. There is no other allegiance but to the tribe. No nation or religion comes before the tribe.
2. Laws are cruel but fair. And no one is above the tribal law.
3. Duty to the tribe is paramount. Every able bodied male is a warrior. Units are based on near family->extended family->tribe. Every unit has a leader who is democratically chosen among the warriors. You only obey vertically, not laterally. (you can only have 3 officers in line to command you, one is your father/uncle, second is family leader and at the end a tribe leader)
4. Duty to the tribe is paramount. Every woman is to be a mother and bear new generation of warriors. That guarantees tribe survival. Male children are more desired because men die young. If you have one daughter she will live long enough to have children. If you have 5 sons you have a guarantee that one will live long enough to have 5 sons.
5. Everyone has a power of making a decisions in their area of duty. Men make decision regarding things outside of house, women regarding things inside the house. For instance, new bride is chosen by oldest woman in the family, since woman will have to live with her. (Men are mostly not inside or around the house, it is their duty to provide.)
6. Age of manhood/womanhood is 15 years. Men start practicing with weapons at the age of 7, sometimes even earlier.
7. Tribe doesn't have multiple types of units, since it is family based. They are all same kind (horsemen, infantry).
8. Their tech is of same level as their enemies but of lesser quality and numbers (since every family is arming themselves). So no canons or artillery.
9. Their attacks are quick, brutal, devastating and very personal (eye to eye). If they don't win on the first attack, they retreat. Never give opponent the opportunity.
10. Catching them of guard is not possible, someone is always watching.
11. Women are collecting the dead and wounded. Also bring food for warriors if they are defending.
12. when defending, they dig in and do not retreat. They only defend their homes not the conquered lands. Those they just leave and return later.
These are some rules that you can use to build the tribal culture. Stoicism is also prevalent way of thinking about life.
This is taken from history of my people but from what i have read it is generally applicable to most tribal cultures.
If you want to learn more i can write about some aspects of daily life you may be interested in. Or tactics used by my ancestors (these may not be applicable since it involves a local geography and specific weapons and armor)
[Answer]
Tribal societies are characterized by constant warfare among, well, the tribes. There are limited resources, and there is limited production(value addition). Almost all the production(meat from the herd etc.) is spent in subsistence. Hence, warfare is a natural outlet to the desire to get wealthy. You sense weakness in a neighbour, you raid them. They sense weakness in you, you have to defend your tribe from their raid. Warfare is as much a part of survival processes as, say, food procurement. Hence, every healthy male in a tribe naturally fights.
Once the scarcity starts to ease up as production and productivity increases, specialisation starts to develop, and the "tribe" starts to become a part of cultural identity, and less of a *way of life*. Eventually "tribe" becomes irrelevant, and the polity becomes an early feudal state.
So yeah, it is plausible that every fit adult male of the tribe goes into battle. But it is not plausible that these people do nothing except sit and wait for battle when not on campaign. There simply isn't enough surplus to support them. (Unless they are running a protection racket, like the Mongols).
It took European *settled* states until the 30 Years War(1600s) to start having standing armies.
[Answer]
**Depends on the Tribe and it’s Economy**
If your tribe’s economy is based on nomadic pastoralism than having a standing army would be completely normal within human history. Steppe tribes would regularly employ the majority of their men as raiders and warriors when their sedentary rivals could barely muster 5% of their men to fight. Nomadic pastoralists had a looser schedule and looser labor requirements to ensure an adequate food supply in comparison to farmers. Furthermore, nomadic pastoralists often had skills that directly correlated to warfare, the most iconic of these being mounted archery.
Since you stated that you were basing this tribe of of Migration Period Germanic Tribes, consider researching the Ostrogoths, who had considerable contact with the Pontic Steppe tribes
] |
[Question]
[
I'm currently in the phase of planning a time system for my world and I am starting to run into logistical issues.
My world essentially is an island in an endless ocean. No universe, no rotation of sun nor planet (there is no planet, it's essentially a flat endless plane).
I have a pretty solid explanation for days (god of light, human punishment, lore blah blah blah) but I want to have a better time keeping system than just counting days (Saying day 1086312 obviously would be a pain).
However I can't think of a plausible way to have a year system, as there is really no marker to base it off of. Is it plausible that someone just decided to mark a year every 360 days, or would there be a better solution?
**Edit:** I should probably note that there is often no change between days, and so time-keeping based on weather, temperature, tide, wind, or anything along those lines would not make sense as they are the exact same every day.
[Answer]
Frame Challenge: Why do you need a year / calendar system? Perhaps your people don't care about time? What are they measuring time *for*? [Aron](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/2842/aron) says that for us:
>
> The calendar was invented due to the need to plan agriculture.
>
>
>
Is that a concern in your world?
But for a actual calendar method, how about:
And smaller timescales than the multiple decades of a ruler's rule could be split into [fortnights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnight) or something, so instead of saying 1086312 days, you could say... 72420 fortnights?
But if the numeral system is in 10s, you could use powers of ten as your week, "month", "year" notation. 1086312 is 1086 "years", 3 "months", 1 week and 2 days.
[Answer]
You ask if it is plausible to develop the concept of a year. Calendars were made because there's a need to keep track of time due to argicultral, astronomical or religious reasons.
As you said in your edit, your world has no stars and planets, no seasons and everyday is the same, but there is religion (God of Light, punishment for humans).
Then you can have a calendar related to relgious ideas. A week is 10 days because that's how long God took to create the world, 1200 days after creation of the world, God defeated the Devil and that's why it is celebreated as 1 year, etc.
[Answer]
2 forms of options come to mind, natural cycles or manmade cycles.
**Natural Cycles**
Several common timings (years, days) com from natural phenomena. Rotation around the sun and the rotation of the earth. But these phenomena don't exist in your world, instead if the most common crop has a regular period (going from seed to harvest) then this could develop into a timing cycle. Any other natural process that forms a cycle could also be used for timing.
**Manmade Cycles**
There are several possible origins for manmade timing cycles, and they are adaptable to what ever time frame you need. Simplest I could think of depends on what [base number system](https://www.cuemath.com/numbers/base/) (like binary) they use, and you get "weeks" from when the number of days forms an interesting number. for example if they use base 10 (normal numbers) then you get "weeks" every 10 days.
This works better if you use a higher base system, for example if they use base 60 like the [babylonians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_cuneiform_numerals), which is where we get 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a hour. Then when express the number of days (in base 60) you could have the first digit as being number of days the second digit as being number of months... using this system you would be able to express an entire 7 billion years in 7 digits (less digits than our date/time format, *dd/mm/yyyy*)
But that system doesn't work as well for shorter times, also you have to have 60 different digits, a better system could be using base 16. In this system the number of days is the first digit the second digit is roughly the number of fortnights. The third digit is roughly the number of years, the fourth digit is the number of decades, fifth is the number of centuries.
You would only need a number 5 digits long to express the current date in this form.
And like how we would respond to "how old are you", "60", instead it would be "I'm 15 hundred", where the implied units are days instead of years.
hope fully that helps
[Answer]
This is a tricky one, but perhaps a year based on the passing of the generations? A new year could start when the first born child of the ruling/head/royal family is born/passes initiation into adulthood/etc and the year ends when the next generation reaches the same period, perhaps with some intercalary time (during the period of initiation for example).
I think menstrual cycles as suggested in the comments are a good idea as well, you could surely change the length if you wanted a longer year. If that's a mildly taboo subject for you, you could invent some other biological cycle, maybe the beings go through periods of salt-accumulation in their tissue followed by a period of purging.
I thought also perhaps random-periodic weather events, for example if there are roughly storms every 1-3 months, perhaps after 5 or 6 storms the elder/timewatcher/youngest child decides that a year has passed. You could also end your years after ended by major events like wars or migrations or whatever. This would cause problems if your world isn't big or centralised though.
[Answer]
# Convergences of independent cycles
In the real world, there are some species of cicadas that have evolved to [only emerge after a prime number of years](https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2001/11/27/421251.htm). As the article points out, species that emerge every 13 years and species that emerge every 17 years only emerge at the same time once every 221 years.
The basic concept can be adapted for this world, albeit altered to be on a more comfortable time scale. Let's say that there's some creature that hibernates underground for most of its life and only emerges every 13th or 17th day, depending on the subspecies.
Let's also say that these creatures are considered a delicacy and are highly sought-after, yet hard-to-find. While there would be groups foraging for them every 13th and 17th day, that rare occurrence every 221 days when the two cycles happen to coincide is an important day since you're twice as likely to find them, leading to a tradition where large parties of people would roam through the forests and fields in search of them, followed by a festival where the day's bounty is shared in the community.
While this *specific* example might be unsuitable, some event like this - where two or more otherwise frequent things happen to overlap - may be a cause for celebration or at the very least be notable. If that rare but regular event is also a convenient span of time, it may also be a useful yardstick for measuring longer time scales.
[Answer]
You would be unlikely to have a 365 day division. That's the direct result of our planet's orbit. It is probable that you'd have some larger units for grouping days into sets of uniform size.
Weeks are an example of an arbitrary grouping of days into sets of uniform size. Early Roman's used an 8 day division before eventually adopting the 7 day week. While revolutionary France experimented with a 10 day grouping.
Similarly larger groupings are also useful and can be of arbitrary size. As an example for ease of subdivision 6, 10 day segments could be composed together to create a 60 day pseudo-month. Then a handful of 60 day periods can make something yearlike.
Importantly remember that we matched our groupings of time to the motion if the planet for convenience. **It is entirely arbitrary how time is subdivided**. If we didn't use a base 10 number system we wouldn't have centuries.
[Answer]
Without natural cycles to base periods of time on, humans would simply use multiples, and/or man-made events. Humans love order and categorization, and in fact our survival depends on it; I suspect this would likely be the case for any sentient civilized species.
[Weeks primarily exist because of celestial observations](https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/why-are-there-seven-days-in-a-week):
>
> The Babylonians, who lived in modern-day Iraq, were astute observers and interpreters of the heavens, and it is largely thanks to them that our weeks are seven days long. The reason they adopted the number seven was that they observed seven celestial bodies — the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
>
>
>
### Simply use multiples
Without these, humans would probably lump days into groups of five or ten (because 5 fingers on a hand or 10 fingers on both make base-5 and base-10 relatively intuitive systems for us). Similarly, "years" might be groups of 10 weeks (so you'd have 100 days to the "year"). Beyond this you'd have decades, centuries, and millennia. If you had a different sentient species that had a different number of digits, their base system would likely somehow be based on that.
### Man-made demarcations of time
Alternatively, if the government of your island is a single nation under a hereditary governmental system, perhaps each ruler's reign, and for larger epochs, a given dynasty: so "in the 15th year of Hamaz Magnus" would be understood to indicate the period of time ~1500-1600 days after the coronation of Hamaz Magnus in the Magnus Dynasty. Dynasties tend to rise and fall (revolutions, coups, lack of familial heirs, etc) so they will be irregular – you might have some where a given dynasty only has a single regent: if Hamaz Magnus was appointed the next heir by the childless Damek Brevel, but was in turn overthrown by his military advisor Jeupor Muron, the "Magnus Dynasty" would still be understood to be between the Brevel and Muron dynasties.
Of course, when speaking or writing more casually, no one will say "on the third day of the tenth week in the fifteenth year of Hamaz Magnus"; there will probably be some (at least quasi-)standard abbreviated notation, like "MagHa-15-10-3" or perhaps just "MagHa-15-33" ‚Äì with only 100 days to the year, a year-day notation isn't horribly complex. To anyone used to this system, it's clearly Dynastic Name, Ruler Name, year, and day. Note that "MH" might be too ambiguous, especially if Jeupor's granddaughter were named Hicias in this example, so they'd probably include a few letters to disambiguate. Of course people being people, poor Hamaz might lose his surname and just get lumped in at the beginning of the Muron dynasty üòÇ
[Answer]
It sounds like you need at least one thing that’s constantly in a looping rotation, that way people could keep time by that. If you don’t want to have anything in a loop *outside* of the planet, you could try having them look to a certain type of animal that comes around yearly, a giant bird that travels around the earth in a constant pattern, etc. there are a lot of possibilities, but you need a bigger loop than just day to day.
[Answer]
If those living on this place are human or humanoids, they could end up with a decimal grouping for time, or any other numerical base:
* 1 day
* 10 days = 1 decade
* 10 decades = 1 month
* ad libitum
[Answer]
## Communicating Time Intervals is Important for Cooperation
If people have to coordinate their activities, you need to measure time passage and be able to place events in time. You need to be able to say "The project will start on xxx date", or "We will all work on this for xxx hours". And there needs to be some way for everyone to synchronize their 'clocks' to a universal source.
What you didn't need to do (or can do) is base this time on astronomical synchronization. So you need to ask, "What are the important time intervals the people in my world will need?"
For example, we can start with the shortest interval that makes sense for coordination - maybe the smallest increment people can perceive and react to. Intermediate times would involve sleep cycles, eating cycles, etc. Longer time intervals would be needed for long-range planning, and the longest time intervals would be generational or lifespan.
For example:
1 Perceptron - 300 ms. Limit of perception. Smallest unit in a non-tech society.
100 Perceptrons = 1 Mintron. 30 seconds - smallest unit of useful measurable work, maybe.
100 Mintrons = 1 Plantron - 50 minutes, Smallest schedulable time period.
10 Plantrons - 1 Cycletron - a normal sleep cycle, or 1/3 of a 'day'
And so on. You also need a calendar to be able to place events in time. Without any external planetary or solar sources to place events in time, you need something else. Perhaps a known radioactive source where decay can be measured over time? 'Count 3280' was the time when measurement of the radiation of the holy source was 3280. This is an exponential rather than linear, so date calculations would be ugly. Perhaps there's a better, linear source for determining a date in the past or future. The resolution of the radioactive method would depend on the half life of the material used.
The main takeaway is that humans need to coordinate activity, so base your time on human needs rather than the movement of planets.
One other thing to consider: Coordination and synchrony is a big part of the natural world as well. Even wild animals and plants coordinate activity. So perhaps there is some natural timebase you could base your 'years' on. Maybe the transition from one year to the next happens every time the mass release of fungus spores occurs, which lights the sky red with particles that disperse blue light. Make it a holiday, and increment the 'year' when it happens. Record the exact radiation count of the holy source at the time to identify the specific year.
[Answer]
# Every season
Instead of every 360 something days, you could do it based on seasons. I’ll use conventional seasons for ease of explaining.
We have winter, spring, summer, fall as our seasons. Every time winter starts, a new year starts. Therefore, we have season cycle (year) X, season X, day X.
[Answer]
I'll add on to the menstrual cycle (as a 'month'), a 'year' based on a typical pregnancy or the closest approximation of months, so their year may be nine months.
While this gives you a period (no pun intended), it doesn't give you a common start date, and may not even be consistent between communities.
[Answer]
By reigns of some big wig. Be it emperor, king, political or religious leader. Or on scale their families like Chinese dynasties. So long term would consist one of these which is variable length an intermediary period possibly and then some administrative cycles inside these reigns. How does the government work with taxation for example?
[Answer]
In the real world some people measure distance in feet. But when they get to larger distances that lead to inconveniently large numbers of feet, they switch to using yards or miles (or less commonly now: furlongs, leagues, etc). And of course it's easier to talk about inches than small fractions of a foot, etc.
There's no "natural cycle of distance" dictating these units, but people wanted to be able to easily talk about distances on various scales and simply invented different terms to make that easier, for no other reason than **convenince**.
The only reason in our world "a year" is pretty close to universal amongst human cultures is because it's *so* useful and obvious a cycle to measure. Even then we have "weeks" and "months" in modern English that are essentially arbitrary. People just developed and used those terms because it was convenient to have units that are around that length.
We've even decided that having "a month" be a vaguely-defined amount of time that keeps in sync with our-arbitrary calendar is **more** convenient than having "a month" correspond with the observable lunar cycle! So your people in their world really don't **need** to align their larger time units to an observable natural cycle. They'll still want terms vaguely similar to weeks, months, years.
So if you're going for "realism" they'll probably have different divisions of time than we do, but still some that perform the rough functions of "week", "month", "year", "decade", etc. But of course if you're going to invent your own system of units for time that's something your audience is going to have to comprehend to make sense of your characters talking about their world. It would be perfectly reasonable to just use "years" in your work *anyway*, on the understanding that this is a translation for the audience's benefit. After all, a "realistic" fictional world is unlikely to develop the exact systems we use for weight, distance, etc anyway so you're presumably translating those (not to mention the English language!).
] |
[Question]
[
First off, assume faster-than-light communication exists and has enough bandwidth to do video conferencing. This question wouldn't even be relevant without faster-than-light communication since it takes 3-22 minutes for a message to transmit at the speed of light between Earth and Mars and you can't have a coherent meeting with that kind of latency.
The problem here is that the Martian Sol is 37 minutes longer than it is on Earth. While they *could* simply go by Earth time\*, and probably would keep an Earth clock if they needed to coordinate with Earthlings, many of the people prefer local time since it better matches natural sleep cycles and have adopted local time because the majority of people there don't interact much with Earth. As a result, Martian time essentially behaves like a timezone which shifts in and out of sync with Earth time.
This makes coordinating meetings across planets troublesome, to say the least. A meeting held during reasonable business hours on a weekday one week (assuming both operate on 7-day weeks) might be during breakfast for the Martians next week. After roughly 4 weeks on Earth, Mars is a whole day behind Earth, so Earth is trying to hold a Monday meeting while Mars is enjoying a lazy Sunday.
How do I, the CEO of Megacorp Industries, hold meetings with my Martian executives?
\*Obviously, the problem is pretty much irrelevant if people go by Earth time, which would be reasonable to expect if they lived in controlled environments. The "Just use Earth time" also isn't necessarily going to make sense if this concept were to be generalized to some distant planet that is naturally habitable.
[Answer]
**The same way we do now.**
I work for a multinational company, with colleagues distributed across a dozen time zones. When I need to schedule a meeting with many people, I simply open Outlook, and look at their calendar to find a free time that is within normal working hours for everyone. I don't need to do any mental calculation of what time it is where, the program already shows me free/busy/nonworking hours for everyone, and I can even have it pick the next available time automatically. This will really be no different - you may need to wait several days or weeks for the Earth/Mars day cycles to line up, but you can simply have the scheduling program find a time that works for everyone.
Recurring meetings will be a bit trickier, as a recurrence cycle that kept the meeting at the same time/day in both places would be prohibitively long (nearly 9 months), but there's no reason a scheduling program couldn't handle that as well - simply pick the next amenable time that's close to your target recurring cycle. Recurring cycles of 39 days may be convenient in some cases, since that will offset the Mars schedule by one day each cycle, while keeping the meeting at nearly the same local time on both Earth and Mars.
[Answer]
Don't. At least, not more than you strictly have to.
For day to day operations, your input should not be necessary. If it is, fire the person at the head of the Martian org chart and get someone more reliable. If you're a large enough company to consider opening a satellite office *on another planet* you're large enough to find someone competent to put in charge of it.
Of course, you can and should demand accountability from your Martian subsidiary, in the form of automatically-generated data points leavened with written or recorded reports. Only if those reports are wildly out of line with your expectations would you need to get on the space-phone with your trusted Martian lieutenants, and being woken up by an angry phone call from your boss is simply an occupational hazard of being an (underperforming) executive.
The key is to run your Earth and Mars offices less as branches of the same company, that might have any number of reasons to talk all the time, and more like what they are: two subsidiaries of the same conglomerate, whose operations are physically separated (by a vast margin) and don't need such careful coordination.
[Answer]
The same way meetings are scheduled now: whenever the boss wants to have it. Doesn't matter if you're a night owl and work until after midnight, if the boss isn't, s/he will still schedule breakfast meetings. (Don't ask me how I know this, as I will be unable to resist the temptation to use impolite language.)
Things can get even worse when you're running on Pacific time, and most of the team is based in Europe.
[Answer]
>
> The problem here is that the Martian Sol is 37 minutes longer than it is on Earth.
>
>
>
It's extremely commonplace in sci-fi stories/worlds that, humans just ignore the local "rotation time of the body they are living on" and adopt usual Earth time.\*\*
I would point out to you that IF you have the Martian dwellers for some reason decide to suffer through a different length-day ... that would be so strange you'd have to **explain why that is the case.**
(A completely random idea for example - they are highly agricultural "in tune with nature" types so, no matter how hard on their bodies, they use a weird local time.)
BTW, Google have this completely sorted out in their pre-search linguistics. Just ask ...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cytQw.png)
---
\**(Often some specific city - actually for example in Star Trek doesn't everyone run on SF time?)*
[Answer]
>
> First off, assume faster-than-light communication exists
>
>
>
If FTL communication exists, then backwards-in-time communication can be achieved. Dedicate your effort to that. When you're finished, ask the Martians when the meeting *would have been* convenient, and schedule it for then.
] |
[Question]
[
*Edit: To clarify, the Title is simply the title, the actual question is stated below.*
It is a fantasy world where Magic has been fading away for a millennium and a half.
Lead naturally disrupts magic, such as ending/negating Mage Armour (D&D) when struck.
Mercury is discovered to create extremely effective Dragon slaying qualities when combined with Lead.
Assuming an Italian renaissance level of scientific understanding and technology (if specifics are needed, imagine Leonardo Da Vinci attempting to make it), and with no magical processes:
Would a Lead+Mercury weapon be possible to forge (albeit incredibly heavy and worth less than garbage against steel), *and/or* be bonded to create a steel (or other metal) alloy for an actual effective weapon?
Tl;Dr
Do I need to make up some fake science/magic excuse for lead and mercury forged weapons?
[Answer]
## Inlays
Does the lead and/or mercury need to be the actual material doing the cutting? If it's just contact that's required, then you could take a normal steel sword, engrave some channels into the blade, and fill those with lead amalgam. Done properly, the steel will hold the amalgam in place through mechanical strength alone with no chemical or adhesive bonding required. Then as long as the sword cuts or stabs deeply enough, the lead-mercury inlays will make contact and have their effect.
[Answer]
## Make it a mace
As others have pointed out, lead doesn't hold a blade very well, but it would be very effective as a blunt weapon due to its weight. This could be as simple as a large chunk of lead on the end of a handle made from wood or some lighter metal. It's possible the head of the mace would deform with excessive use, but this doesn't lessen its effectiveness as a weapon, since you really only need it to be a heavy thing on the end of a stick. A chain mace or morning star would also work.
Heck, a lead pipe is even one of the weapon choices in Clue. Really any long heavy thing will work as a blunt weapon. Not as glamorous as a sword, but certainly effective.
[Answer]
## Lead is fine, it does not "alloy" but you can make lead iron weapons.
>
> While lead is often added to steel alloys, it is actually not an
> alloying element itself. When added to steel, lead does not join with
> the carbon, iron, and other elements. Lead is actually not soluble in
> steel. Rather, lead remains in the steel in the form of inclusions.
> Lead also has almost no impact on the mechanical properties of the
> steel, but improves the machinability of the steel because it acts as
> a lubricant between the cutting tool and the steel.
>
>
>
<https://www.metalsupermarkets.com/5-more-common-alloying-elements/>
**Mercury is more of a problem**, mercury steel alloy is not chemically stable, you can force the two to mix but the mercury is pushed out of the iron as it cools.
[Answer]
**It's called Leadamalgam.**
([No, really.](http://webmineral.com/data/Leadamalgam.shtml#.XYBHwihKhPY))
And it occurs naturally! I mean, you have to extract it from rocks of crushed ore, but you can just use magic for that (I believe the 4th level spell Transmute would be helpful in that regard.)
As a weapon, it's bad. Really bad. It's a 1.5 on the Mohs scale of hardness, which, just for comparison, means you can chisel and shape the stuff with your fingernails. Weapons made from it can literally be shattered by a wooden staff, let alone an iron sword. So, no, you don't have to make excuses to justify it's existence because it naturally exists, but it's a terrible weapon.
[Answer]
Oddly, it's been done.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumbata>
They were essentially 6th century BC lawn darts made out of lead.
[Answer]
How about lead-tipped arrows? You could make them lead-tipped, with a hollow tip that also contains mercury. When the arrow strikes its victim the tip compresses, injecting mercury into the wound. Should be fairly simple to create.
[Answer]
Antimony and tin allow alloying with lead to be made that is hard enough to use in [printing presses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_metal) which may make it suitable for some weapon applications, certainly arrowheads, spearheads and armour spurs for example
] |
[Question]
[
I've been wondering if it would be possible to simulate gravity utilizing nothing but large fans constantly blowing air downwards? This is obviously not an ideal setup for a gravity generator, but is it possible? If not, what issues would arise?
[Answer]
Something similar is already done in [indoor skydiving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_wind_tunnel), though in the opposite direction
>
> A recreational wind tunnel enables human beings to experience the sensation of flight without planes or parachutes, through the force of wind being generated vertically. Air moves upwards at approximately 195 km/h (120 mph or 55 m/s), the terminal velocity of a falling human body belly-downwards.
>
>
>
I hope you agree with me that a wind exceeding 195 km/h (If you want to stand it has to be faster than that) to get a feeling of your own weight it's rather uncomfortable, to put it mildly:
* you would need to wear protective goggles all the time
* loose clothing would become a slapping no no
* turbulence behind anything standing in the flow, including your limbs, would become an hassle
* communication would be almost impossible without proper equipment, the roaring noise would become annoying pretty soon
* eating, drinking, handling anything not sturdy enough would turn into a perennial slapstick comedy
* etc. etc.
[Answer]
Simulate gravity for what purpose?
If you have a space station or a space ship, and things floating in the middle of the cabin are a problem for you (for atmosphere control, cleaning, working, etc.), then having a permanent fan or suction system might help a little. Certainly air circulation **would** be a problem without fans.
But that wouldn't be gravity. The health problems of zero-G would still persist. Directing a fan at the soup bowl would not help to keep the food on the table. As soon as something or somebody blocks the air current, the effect would cease.
So on balance, velcro slippers are a much better idea, or if the structure is large enough, spin gravity.
[Answer]
It would not prevent any of the health effects associated with micro-gravity which is the most important reason for artificial gravity. Gravity pulls down on your internal organs and fluids directly. Blowing air does not. This is also the issue with something like magnetic boots, or even shoulder-mounted weights attracted to the floor via magnets: None of them can reach inside your body and act directly on all internal organs and fluids like gravity can.
[Answer]
**Yes... and no...**
The problem is that gravity pulls down on every atom (for all intent and purpose) equally. A fan is pushing down only on the skin. From a practical perspective, you're not simulating gravity... you're simulating being at floor level. This means that some muscles (like your heart) will still atrophy.
Does this mean it's a bad idea? Absolutely not! I'm the first to admit I've never heard anyone suggest this solution before. Sometimes being *novel* is more important than being *factual.*
**Benefits**
* You're required to circulate air anyway. Might as well be to pushing things down.
* Ignoring the liabilities, it does give you something to stand up or push against.
* It's adjustable.
**Liabilities**
* There will never be a reason to use a comb.
* Wind is chaotic in nature (gravity isn't, in this context). This means that a force great enough to hold you against the floor is also strong enough to push the rest of you to the floor. Standing up straight will be a problem. Walking straight will be a problem. Keeping cargo in one spot without tying it down will be a problem.
* And the more mass something has, the more air is needed to keep it on the floor. Little lady weighing a buck-ten requires less air than a big dude weighing a solid two-fifty. The force needed to keep that dude on the floor might send the lady sailing.
* Dropping your handkerchief in gravity means it floats gently to the ground near you. Dropping your handkerchief in wind means you probably can't get it back as it'll run around everywhere and finally get sucked into the proverbial cold air return vent.
* More seriously, your character might be forced to wear goggles constantly to avoid both impact damage to the eyes and drying the eyes out.
*However, +1 for a novel idea.* Besides, [sometimes oddball ideas work](https://www.someecards.com/news/news/16-people-dumb-solutions-problems-tried-actually-worked/).
[Answer]
This won't be mistaken for gravity by anyone:
* Lighter objects and those oriented to block more of the wind will feel more of the force. Gravity doesn't care about orientation or density.
* The "wind tunnel" / "indoor skydiving" analogy only simulates a fall at terminal velocity. You still feel gravity in the usual direction if you place a weighty object on your body blocked by the fan. True antigravity (or a spinning habitat) would remove that weight of that object.
* Fluids (like water or bowls of soup), string, and strips of paper will be batted about by the turbulence from the wind. Gravity won't do such a thing.
* There will be no pressure difference between the blood in your head and feet, as there is when standing against gravity.
* The air blown by the fans has to go somewhere. If you've got inward fans in one place, you'd need outward fans somewhere else - or the air will build up pressure until it's leaking out at the same rate the fans blow it in.
* The wind and effect of the fans would be blocked and redirected by walls, corridors, objects, people, etc. Gravity can't be block or redirected so easily.
[Answer]
### No, because the forces are completely different and everything works differently
I've done a reasonable amount of indoor skydiving, in a vertical wind tunnel. I'm competent at front flying (the traditional skydiving posture), and working on back flying (flying on your back, as the name suggests).
All the techniques of skydiving rely on the fact that the force on any part of your body is dependent on how it faces the wind. On the most basic level, you can radically reduce the force by curling yourself into a ball and fall out of the air, or you can spread your arms and legs wide and get way more force on you. You can walk around, standing vertically, and feel almost no vertical pressure on you, or you can stretch your arms out and take off.
All of this also applies for your concept (in reverse, of course). Essentially your "weight" would become an order of magnitude higher when you're lying down compared to being stood up. I think you'd notice that!
But even before that, you'd notice an even bigger problem. The force you experience isn't simply up and down - the angle of the force depends entirely on the angle of the body surface relative to the air flow. Angle any part of your body at 45 degrees to the air flow, and now the force on that part of your body is 100% sideways. There isn't the slightest possibility that it could resemble gravity under any conditions whatsoever.
And the reason I say "before that" is that these forces are the first thing you're going to notice. Balancing in airflow requires you to be minutely aware of the angles relative to the airflow of all parts of your body. Simply having an elbow or knee extended slightly more on one side than the other will spin you around uncontrollably. You wouldn't even get to the point of noticing the differences in vertical forces, because the first thing you'll experience is sideways forces throwing you around in all sorts of directions.
[Answer]
Gravity pulls on your entire body and your body is designed to push back on the ground through your feet and legs.
Fans would be applying the force to your head and shoulders to force you to the floor. Your average head is not designed to handle that. If your goal is a 1G environment, I can imagine that would be very uncomfortable having all that force on your head and shoulders...worse than wearing a heavy backpack all day. And it would affect everyone differently based on size, and whether you are laying or standing, etc. Maybe a 0.1G environment would work.
The real question is, **how would you take a dump in that environment**? You would probably still need all the complex equipment that astronauts use today because the wind gravity won't work very well for that. You are going to need some pretty strong toilet suction to counter the vortexes the wind gravity is generating, and I'm not sure I would want my man parts near that.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
This question does not appear to be about **worldbuilding**, within the scope defined in the [help center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help).
Closed 1 year ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/237180/edit)
In *Die Hard 2*, there is an infamous scene where the protagonist talks about the fictional Glock 7 that was used against him. Apparently, it was a porcelain gun made in ~~Austria~~ Germany that didn't appear on metal detectors or X-rays. It is also very expensive.
To gun nuts, this sounds silly. However it got me thinking, is it actually possible to make a firearm with modern technology that is:
1. Concealable (it can't be a huge rifle or machine gun, more like a handgun).
2. Can't be detected by metal detectors
A non-metallic gun seems like an obvious solution but good luck making a viable firearm that isn't made out of metal. You can also try using non-conducive metals but they also generally make poor choices for firearms. Also remember, not only does the gun have to be immune to detection but the bullets as well; which just compounds the issue.
[Answer]
It comes down to what counts as "detectable".
We already have 3D printed guns, but you need a few metal parts: The bullet, the cartridge, the primer and what hits the primer. Let's see what we can do with these:
1. Bullet. There's not really anything we can do here, anything that will be an effective bullet will be dense metal. However, note that it's non-ferrous metal, a bullet itself isn't going to set off a typical security metal detector.
2. Cartridge. Guns existed before cartridges existed, we don't need them. When you're printing your gun you block the barrel with a very thin layer across the barrel. 3D printed guns are basically single-shot anyway, this isn't a big problem.
3. Primer. We will have to sacrifice a bit of safety here. Without protecting the primer it will be easier to fire it by accident.
4. Striker. Let's carry this very openly--print your gun to use a key as it's striker. Put the key on your keyring. Security will see it but not recognize it.
Note that while this will get past typical metal detectors this will **not** get past modern x-ray. It will show as a large mass of organic material and that will be checked to ensure it's not explosives. A 3D printed gun is big enough that you will normally have to send it through the x-ray rather than carry it through the metal detector.
[Answer]
# You can [3-D print guns](https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/03/this-is-the-worlds-first-entirely-3d-printed-gun-photos/)
We use metal for a reason, plastic can't handle gunfire very well, but you can 3-D print a plastic gun. It'll probably if you're lucky handle a few shots before breaking.
# You'll need to conceal the plastic in other plastic
Consider inserting it into the wall of a suitcase. X-Rays can detect density, and can detect guns. You want it to not look too gun like.
[Answer]
Don't hide it; disguise it. Instead of having a gun that doesn't ping a metal detector or show up on an X-ray, have a gun that doesn't attract any suspicion despite being seen and known to have metal parts. Your gun (or the metal parts of it, if you can assemble the gun after the security checkpoint) could be made to look like a walking cane or crutches, a musical instrument, sports equipment, or a workman's tools. The bullets could be made to look like jewellery, electronic components, or machine parts.
This won't work if you need these guns to be common in your world, because security staff will know about it and learn to be suspicious of things which guns are commonly disguised as. But if your story only needs one or a small group of clever characters to get their guns past security, then it's more plausible.
[Answer]
If it can be a small caliber, single-shot pistol, and the scenario is that such guns are rare (i.e. cops aren't on the lookout for them), then the guns could be custom-made... in steel or whatever is the standard metal for firearms.
Yep, super obvious and it's going to trigger all metal detectors and x-rays.
However, the gun comes encased in a precision-cut slab of the exactly same metal. The slab matches the gun's profile perfectly, leaving no voids when the gun is inside. So, from the outside, the slab is just... a small iron slab.
The slab is, however, designed with intricate carvings and since the gun hidden inside is so small, you can tell the TSA it's a paper weight or a family heirloom or something. The carvings however also serve to distract from the ever-so-slight seams. Once you're past security, a complex series of pushing, pulling and twisting causes the slab to come cleanly undone, granting access to the weapon within.
Now, might the TSA wonder why you're carrying a pretty steel slab around with you? Sure, they might. But then again, they're the TSA. They're used to dealing with the weirdest of the weird, some wacko carrying a small hunk of steel around will be the most normal thing they've seen all day.
[Answer]
# Stainless Steel guns
Unfortunately this *can* be detected by metal detectors but sometimes it won't, so it might be a viable choice. Stainless steel has very low electrical conductivity and low magnetic properties.
However if the metal detector is not configured correctly it usually can't detect this.
[Answer]
* **Metal Detectors or X-Rays?**
It is hard to imagine something like a firearm that does not show up on x-ray. The barrel and the bullet need some reasonable density, and that will show up.
* **How many shots, how reliably?**
A decade ago ago, a German IT magazine teamed up with a gunsmith to test 3D-printed guns. Back then, their conclusion was "impractical." First it did jam, then some adjustments, jammed again, more adjustments, finally it fired, then it was worn out. Since then, printers have become better.
* **How much custom gunsmithing?**
A ceramic (or dense plastic) bullet, in a plastic cartridge, with a ceramic firing pin hit by a plastic hammer. Possibly a [derringer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derringer)-like construction with one shot per barrel.
* **How little metal can be detected?**
If some wires and batteries are in the cards, [electronically fired](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_firing) [superposed loads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposed_load) might be an option.
The first bullet point will be decisive, unless the character knows that **only metal detectors** are used.
[Answer]
A perfectly concealed weapon would be a non-metallic, roughly dildo-sized gun inserted in your anus. It is undetectable by any means short of a cavity search.
It would be triggered by tightening the sphincter muscle around a contact when bent over, after squeezing it out a bit, like a turd (it will cause a desire to defecate anyway).
The recoil is limited so that it does not rupture your lower intestine when shot. The device can have some mass, limiting its recoil, so the projectile should have enough energy to kill someone.
After firing the gun you'll run around with an embarrassing hole in your pants and underpants but that will likely be the least of your problems.
[Answer]
What about a toy gun? There are very realistic toys on sale. It should be custom made and it should be able to fire like a standard nerf gun. But, at the same time, it could be made to fire a small caliber bullet through a second small muzzle which is an ornament for the main one. Someone brings that gun and someone else on the plane brings two or three bullets. To disguise it better, they should package it as a gift for a kid whose picture is supposed to be in the wallet of the gunman.
[Answer]
In the movie "In the Line of Fire", the assassin had made an undetectable gun (see [replica](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH2UqXZ6yOk)). Basically, used springs from ink pens and plastic for the gun. He hid the two bullets inside a lucky rabbit's foot on his keychain. With modern 3d printing and the innocuous nature of the key chain and pen, it seems like a completely viable way to circumvent metal detectors. The keys don't even go through the metal detector nor the pen(s); no one would likely bat an eye at either item.
[Answer]
If firing a single bullet is enough, a reasonable gun and bullet can be made out of glass.
A thick enough glass cylinder will withstand the pressure. Glass can be ground to air tight tolerances as is regularly done with laboratory equipment.
A glass bullet will not be as dense as a metal bullet would be, but at close range enough energy can be delivered. When the bullet shatters on impact, the shards will increase damage caused.
If a mixture of flammable gas and oxygen is used instead of gunpowder, the glass container will appear empty. It could be disguised as an extra robust [gas syringe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_syringe) or some medical device.
[Answer]
I would suggest making a plastic pistol that uses elasticity to propel the bullet. The plastic could be used for the stock and other parts of the gun. However, the problem is power. Such a gun wouldn't be able to have a large impetus behind the bullet. However, some elastic materials can have lots of potential energy, which means that it can send a plastic bullet traveling very fast. Make the plastic bullet sharp, and it will pierce flesh. Again, it won't have the power to go through bullet proof vests, but it will work well for assassinations. The plastic should be hard and strong. If your character can make such a gun, then it will be concealable but still somewhat lethal.
[Answer]
# Plastics as strong as steel
Plastics are incredibly versatile. Though they have polymers as a base, it is incredibly diverse. So diverse it is actually a bit weird putting them under a single umbrella. You can have plastic that is great at moving a current surrounded by plastic great at insulating the electric wire.
In that vein you have plastics that are as strong as steel. I do not know of they show up on scanners, but one or two were promising in at least being much lighter than steel. This kind of compound seems difficult to make and mistakes easily lead to weak materials, but technology advances to reduce it to next to zero. And even if these are picked up by scanners we can use different plastics. If those aren't available you can add a replaceable tube that needs to be changed every x shots.
It doesn't seem a stretch to then just make very expensive plastic guns. Having them as plastic already eliminates the scanners, sort of. If you look at scanners you'll notice you can also identify a lot of other stuff that isn't metal. So unless you find a way to keep it on your person it might still be detected. So you need to change the shape to something inauspicious, or have it blocked ny something. Like putting it into a thick laptop where battery and electronics hide the true nature.
Do note that if you keep it on your person they can still check you on items. Many scanners show areas where there is something weird. I've been searched more than once just for having an extra layers of clothing that was positioned strangely. I'm guessing it has to do with tightness of clothing. A gun can stand out.
## Simply do not get scanned
Why make a weapon that is undetectable and go through security? You run the risk of being picked out just from your behaviour, random check or sheer bad luck. At the airport I used to work even the employees need to go through a security gate. It is a little more relaxed, but still very thorough. That being said there are ways known not to get scanned and still get behind the gates. If you do it right you can walk into an airfield armed like rambo with rocket launchers, heavy machine guns and grenades without ever seeing a security gate. I'm not saying it is easy, but it is certainly possible.
## Make weapons beyond the gate
It is interesting how they prevent weapons from coming through, but you can make weapons from stuff you can buy beyond the gate. They even sell things that unmodified can be used as weapons for stabbing or slashing, not to mention to just club someone. But someone once tried to prove a point you can go beyond this, making a bow and iirc even a crude crossbow from stuff available in the shops.
So if you want to ultimate concealed weapon, have *none*. You can be nervous, picked out of a line, random security checks and a freak disaster leaves you naked with the contents of your suitcase all over the floor. They won't find anything as you don't have anything. As long as you have your credit card you can build a weapon beyond the gate and do whatever.
[Answer]
**Composites.**
Carbon fiber is stronger than steel. If you wrap it around the outside of a plastic "bullet" then you get a plastic object that has a primer in it. The size visual footprint is about half the size of a bb, and any human doesn't have a cognitive hook to catch.
Whiskers are much stronger than bulk materials. Consider titanium or tungsten whiskers in your composite. Perhaps in a cermet.
**MetaMaterials/Stealth.**
X-rays tend to be harder to steer, but they can be steered. The RF/Microwave wand used for metal detection, is nearly trivial to steer. So you make it not see, not see much, or have it cause the waves to self-interfere.
**Comment.**
I remember how [Speed(1984)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111257/) predated the prevalent bus-bombings of the second Intifada. While I can think of 20 ways to solve the problem, posting those in a public forum like this is uncomfortable, and ethically problematic.
Don't kill people. Murder is a sin. A man can say it has no consequence, but if you soul knows its wrong, then do not do it even on pain of death; every man who speaks only for himself and wants a religious audience claims (falsely) to speak for God, while only a few speaking actually for the will of God make such a claim. Question those who say it is good. Examine them carefully.
[Answer]
What else could you conceivably carry that could be detected but not set the TSA into worry mode? Batteries to me seem a good possibility... nice metal case, full of X-ray dense stuff. Customise a radio that uses (for instance) two AA batteries to carry an extra 2 AA batteries that are not part of the original circuitry. Make the caps of the batteries removable such that the two tubes can screw together for a barrel, build the trigger mechanism so it fits on one battery body and ammunition (single shot... maybe two shots) in the other. And once you assemble it you've got a 3V supply as well for electrical firing so the trigger could be as small as a simple push switch. And if you need extra disguise... the two 'real' AA batteries that prove to the TSA it's just a radio... and it turns on... could be heavier gauge shells with AAA cells inside so they look similar to X-ray to the gun parts
[Answer]
**High-tech ceramics?**
I don't actually know whether this is feasible. High-tech ceramic materials can be astonishingly tough, but all ceramics do tend to be brittle. However, Piklington glass once made a commercial in which a glass hammer was used to hammer in a nail and them (more remarkably to myself) to claw it out again. And that was just toughened glass, not anything really exotic. Jet turbine blades have been made of ceramics. (Maybe still are, that'll be classified info. What little I know says metal "superalloys" now rule that roost).
Intrinsic brittleness aside, ceramics are non-metallic, tolerant of high temperatures, extremely strong in compression. As with metal alloys there is an almost infinite number of possible compositions. If one can make a ceramic gun barrel that doesn't explode when a bullet is fired down it, it's your answer.
For fiction, it won't require much suspension of disbelief. If a real ceramic gun barrel does exist, it may be classified information here in the real world.
Note that a ceramic item will be very easily detected by X-rays. Just not by a metal detector that works on electrical conductivity.
] |
[Question]
[
I am looking for an end-result where one would not be able to differentiate between land and horizon. And I want it in a desert. So either some new, exotic material has to make-up the sand. Or it has to be mirage everywhere in the distance instead of some spots in the distance.
This is in a desert on a tidally locked planet where I want this 'transparency/mirror' effect. However, from what I know, sand has impurities and hence is not transparent.
1. Are there materials that can be used to create near transparent sand / dust?
2. Or can I increase the temperature so much that the entire desert is in a state of a constant mirage from any point of view so that you always see water on the surface which gives the illusion of transparency/mirror effect?
[Answer]
It's not just a matter of impurities, it's the physical properties of the material making up the sand. The most obvious one is the refractive index. At first it doesn't seem like that big a deal because water (1.33) doesn't seem that different from clear silica (1.52), and silica is used for optical glass, but the important thing to remember is that the refractive index kicks in when light transitions from one material to another. When you look through a body of water, you're only looking at one location where the light is "bent", namely the interface between the body of water and the surface. But if you weren't looking through a single interface, then things become a lot more complicated.
For instance, look at this image:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MUynC.jpg)
You can't see through relatively thin layers of water making up the waterfalls and rapids because you aren't looking at one transition where light gets refracted, but many as water and air are mixed and any given light ray transitions between water and air and back again many times, effectively scattering it. The total combined refraction means the material becomes opaque.
Here's another example from underwater:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xHRQC.png)
Notice how the mass of bubbles completely hide what's behind them. It's not a matter of the bubbles individually being hard to see through; after all, they're composed simply of air which, in the total amount present, would be totally transparent. It's all the refraction between individual bubbles and the water which causes the scattering of light which makes the whole thing opaque.
The same thing would happen if you had a bowl of optical-grade glass grains. Even if each grain was optically transparent by itself, the total refraction of all the transitions between glass and air would combine to make the material in the bowl opaque.
In fact, here's a picture of that very thing:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LH313.jpg)
And the smaller you make the glass particles, thus creating more and more surfaces light is refracting through, the more and more opaque the material becomes:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2qSfY.jpg)
Eventually, finely ground glass looks like a plain white powder like salt, sugar, or talc.
The only way your desert could appear transparent is if the material making it up has a refractive index *exactly* identical to the air, fluid, and any other material that may be between the grains, which all have to be the *exactly* the same as each other as well.
**ADDENDUM**
Even given the above, just because you have materials with the same optical properties doesn't guarantee transparency because you need near atomic-level matching perfection at the interfaces. Any kind of imperfection *will* result in diffraction and scattering. For an example, consider automobile safety glass.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9QoBJ.png)
The exact same material as perfectly clear glass, only now it has fractures in it, and those fractures cause interfaces within the material itself where diffraction happens even though the material on both sides of the fracture is exactly the same. The result? Harder to see through. Enough fractures in three dimensions and on a small enough scale and you can't see through it at all, even though the fragments are right against each other. Internal fracturing is why, for instance, otherwise perfectly pure silica, calcite, or salt crystals can look cloudy.
Long story short, not only would all those materials making up the desert have to have the exact same optical properties, each would have to have homogeneous *internal* structure as well. So yeah, good luck with that.
[Answer]
**Temporary mirror**
If you want a temporary mirror you can look at Salar de Uyuni. This is the largest salt flat on the Earth. It looks like a white flat plains with hexagonal lines on top. It is exceptionally flat for nature's terms.
The magic happens after rain. A thin layer can sit on top and be practically still. Then the whole salt desert is transformed into a 129km (80mi) in diameter mirror. Pictures there are amazing, as the sky and the ground seem to merge into one.
It might be possible to increase the time it looks like a mirror. To achieve this you need a steady supply of water, which is calm when it is added to the salt flats. It then must evaporate, never taking any salt with it. My best guess would be many springs in the earth slowly pushing up water. The springs are fed by a large underground river, or cave systems pressurised by sea water and heat. Or the like. The problem with anything except rain is the movement. Moving water can transport and erode the salt layers. Still it might be possible to have long periods if time on a large scale a visually practically flat mirror. But if you only need it to be a mirror sometimes the Salar de Uyuni is your best bet.
[Answer]
"I am looking for an end-result where one would not be able to differentiate between land and horizon"
I believe that a warm and very flat desert ought to be enough (the same can be obtained with a thin layer of water), but if you have clouds in the sky, then you will be able to differentiate very easily even if, technically, the horizon border itself isn't (easily) distinguishable:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wj8S5.png)
Alternatively, and probably more easily obtained, you can use **dust** to obscure the farther details:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vB3cv.png)
Finally, what I call the "Mesklin trick" (described in Hal Clement's *Mission of Gravity*): if the air density gradient is **exactly right** due to its composition and temperature at all heights - actually the first 400-500 meters is enough - then you can have the illusion of the horizon being at an infinite distance. Light attenuation and extinction will then obscure that same horizon (it will disappear in a bluish-white haze due to scattering), making it impossible to tell exactly where land and sky meet; that might also appear to happen at a higher altitude than the viewer, wherever they are, as if they were at the bottom of a bowl (which is why Mesklinites believe the world is a bowl with them at the bottom).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FNjr4.png)
The Mesklin effect appears identical to a reversed Fata Morgana, **but** it obscures everything below those 400-500 mt of height (Fata Morgana on Earth is limited to a few meters at most: "above" that limit, things return visible).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Kummp.png)
[Answer]
>
> "Do you know of materials that can be used to create near transparent sand / dust?"
>
>
>
Fill the gaps between the grains with a liquid that has the same refractive index. The liquid doesn't have to be water. It could be some biological goo, or a clear oil. If the match isn't perfect, you would likely get something translucent, like slush (ice crystals in liquid water). If you get a perfect match, the solid can seem to [disappear entirely](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTtdNQVADSI).
You would still be able to see the horizon, though. It would look like a lake.
Or sometimes, the simplest approach is best. Instead of sand or dust, simply fill a valley with a lake of once-molten glass. (Long-term volcanic activity melted the sand, or something.)
>
> "EDIT: to clarify further, I am looking for an end-result where one would not be able to differentiate between land and horizon. And I want it in a desert."
>
>
>
That's much easier! If you can't make the ground look like the sky, then make the sky look like the ground. A constant dust storm raising a 'fog' can make it impossible to see long distances, and hide the horizon. It's a common problem in snow blizzards.
[Answer]
# Table salt
Some regions of the world are covered in meters of a salt crust due to ancient lakes evaporating and geology being a cruel mistress. The evaporation process also makes these places uncannily flat.
The most famous salt flat in the world is [Salar de Uyuni](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni). Some parts of it look like what you ask in your requirement no. 2:
>
> Or can I increase the temperature so much that the entire desert is in a state of a constant mirage from the pov of viewer so that the viewer always sees water on the surface which gives the illusion of transparency?
>
>
>
Notice that at a 3,656m elevation above sea level (~12,000 ft), the salar is rather cold than hot.
In these places you can tell where the horizon is by tracking the clouds. But if you have a planet that is all salt plains, like a water world that evaporated, you will have no clouds and hence it will be very HARD to tell where the horizon is. Ground far from you will just look like sky.
[Answer]
As Keith Morrison explain in his answer, even if you have a transparent material, it can't be transparent if you have a lot of interfaces with air. Therefore, sand won't be transparent even if individual grains of sand are.
For an actually transparent desert, you need to fuse the material in a single piece, which will look more like a pond of glass than a sand desert. Definitively, that would be a desert, because no plant is going to grow in a solid glass surface, and a cool place.
To explain such a glass desert you need:
* The right composition: That's the easier part (in Wordbuilding), because optical glass is just made of mineral components, you can have them in the same place. In fact, some accounts of how glass was discovered involve some natural sand having the necessary components together.
* Fusing the sand into glass: You need a lot of heat rather incompatible with conditions in an habitable planet (you want your planet to be inhabited, don't you?). A past volcanic event could have melted the sand, or the star on your planet could have gone supernova in the past and melted the planet surface long ago - now it's a white dwarf. How to get back an atmosphere could be a separate but solvable question.
* Finishing the surface: Not all processes leading to glass leave an smooth surface. If you want your desert to be truly transparent, erosion might have played a role finishing the surface.
Btw, a transparent desert might be even cooler if there were something interesting to see through it. Embedded gems or fossil sandworms would look great.
] |
[Question]
[
We are in a far future. Humanity has widely abandoned technology, and effectively reached medieval level (so things need not be true to an actual medieval setting).
We are in a larger town. In that town lives a man who served in the military and lost an arm. Since he was given a dishonourable discharge, he won't get any veteran payment, so he needs to earn his living.
What realistic options does he have in that setting to earn his living?
Ideally it should be something where he doesn't need more than casual contact with other people, because he is very introverted.
**Clarification:** Like I already wrote in the comments, “medieval level” above refers to the technological level. So in first approximation, a technology exists if it existed at some point in medieval time.
Another commonality to medieval time is the presence of a powerful religious organization (actually, two competing branches of it), roughly comparable to the Catholic Church.
But everything else isn't fixed yet, and need not be the same as in the actual medieval time, unless dictated by the two conditions above. For example, I currently don't plan a medieval-style inherited nobility. Rather, the non-religious ruling is based on a meritocracy (but restricted by the religious organization). But that's not set in stone; apart from the technology level and the religious organization, almost everything can still be changed at this point.
[Answer]
There is a book that is commonly referenced for medieval life questions called Life in a Medieval Village by Frances and Joseph Gies. If you're interested in realism you should be able to draw a lot of inspiration from it.
The book focuses on a English village called Elton around the 13th century. Among the manorial court records there are references to at least the following occupations:
"Miller, Smith, Shoemaker, Carter, Carpenter, Chapelyn, Comber, Cooper, Dyer, Webster (weaver), Chapman (merchant), Shepherd, Tanner, Walker, Woolmonger, Baxter (baker), Tailor, Painter, Freeman [freelance labor], Hayward, and Beadle."
Your character could be successful with a number of these but in particular I believe the last one, Beadle. That's not the beadle related to church functions but rather they were essentially the keepers and guards of the seed stock for a manor. They also served as deputies to the manor reeves (which serves as the root for the word sheriff -- shire-reeve). So the job was part law enforcement and part administration and hard labor is not necessarily required. That's not unlike the kind of occupation that modern-day handicapped veterans are particularly suited for.
[Answer]
He could do many jobs but with military training and very scarce contact with people, he could be a **trapper**, hunting small game for furs and meat.
He would find good places to place traps (which he could do with one arm, feet and teeth, as lassos used for rabbits don't require a lot of strength) and he could use dogs, ferrets or similar animals to help him in the chase or inside the burrows.
He would only need to sell the meat from time to time (not very often if he smoked and/or salted it himself) and the furs every couple of months or so. And during closed season he could live in the outskirts, taking care of the woods (organized woods are Ancient inventions), preventing fires and even exploring in search of sources of water or minerals.
[Answer]
# Anything he wants
I worked with a hardware store manager who had one arm. He could lift anything. Move anything. Manipulate any tool. He wasn't held back at all.
Missing one arm is incredibly inconvenient. Certainly a disability. It means things are *more difficult.* But it wouldn't stop anybody from doing almost anything. (I'm actually having trouble thinking of any job that absolutely requires two arms....)
One leg, on the other hand...
[Answer]
If you look at historical stories of miracles, those often have good portrayals of the disabled. Religion is wrote about in detail, and disabled people are normally not written about but when some miraculous healing is given that is an excuse to write of them.
For example, the miracles of St. Bertin tell of a man who was not able to see outside well enough to do manual labour but could see close up quite well, and so did embroidery and weaving with the women all day. Your hero could do some activity like that, or writing if they have some skill with words.
Many of the disabled relied on family. There are many stories of mothers dressing their adult sons and families taking their disabled children to shrines. If he has family there they may support him.
Likewise, there are tales of disabled beggers dragging themselves to shrines on crutches. Being a beggar is likewise a possible career choice.
Gleaning was commonly picked as a career of choice for the disabled, picking up the leftovers from fields. It is not especially physically demanding, and often the children, elderly and disabled did it.
[Answer]
Ok, according with things we know about the "medieval", meaning ~1000 years of time, it was pretty common to have some physical defect.
Poliomyelitis, poor medicine skills, poor hygienic conditions, terrible birth procedures, and more, made really hard to create individuals like a modern person would consider "healthy".
Sure, most of population was more or less "healthy" and well formed, the trick here is "more or less". The spectrum of "healthy" was little larger than today.
So, unless you had a very hard impairment, just having a single arm working wasn't sufficient to make you a plain clochard.
Remember that, in the medieval european time, there was a plague who killed lot of people, and finding workforce was hard. Is very unlikely they dumped you completely.
First, you could have joined some religious order. Plus, you could work as a home servant in many fields, where two hands aren't 100% necessary: actually people with one arm are capable to do lot of stuffs.
So I don't think in medieval time this was such a big problem. Sure it was a problem, but since it was pretty common to have physical defects, it was a common problem.
You would have been able to survive: sure not the most paid artisan , but very unlikely to die of starving.
[Answer]
According to oral history (sorry for not providing proper sources) after WW2 in my country (Austria), veterans with disabilities (e.g. a lost arm or leg) were given preferential treatment in regards to physically not-demanding jobs, i.e. opening a kiosk for tobacco or newspapers, or opening a cinema.
[Answer]
One arm is all you need to be a scribe.
And any sort of management, overseeing or inspection job doesn't require a lot of arms.
With his military background though, maybe he would be a good night watchman? Minimal interaction with people, all he needs are sharp eyes and a bell to ring if there's trouble. Also, even one-armed he's probably a match for most evildoers.
[Answer]
>
> Since he was given a dishonourable discharge, he won't get any veteran payment, so he needs to earn his living.
>
>
>
He needs to *find* a living, but not necessarily *earn* it. It seems to me that as a disgraced ex-soldier, the natural thing would be for him to become an outlaw, hiding in the forest and scraping together his food by gathering nuts and berries, hunting, trapping, and robbing incautious pedestrians on the roads through the forest.
[Answer]
I honestly don't see this individual as being severely disabled in all honesty. He has two working legs and one arm. If socialization is the largest issue, I can immediately see him being a herder or ranch-hand of some sort, either of sheep, goats or pigs. This is including riding horseback to carry out his tasks. Writing from personal experience, you largely steer a horse with pressure from the legs, heels and your weight forward and back in the saddle, the bridle is just for fine-tuning any maneuvers (watch dressage, no real rein movements should be seen in a good run).
Working for someone who owns a rabbitry, poultry or other type of small-animal keeping system would also be worth-while. Mucking underneath hutches can be done one-handed with a shovel, or the hutches themselves are mobile as a form of rotating manure fertilizing plan.
If that's still too rural, there is also the option of scribe/messenger for this person. Having two hands makes writing easier, but so does a clipboard. You didn't mention educational level, but if he is literate and that's out of the norm, he could write down/deliver messages for other people. While human interaction is involved, it's of the impersonal sort, and that might be enough to stave off loneliness for your person, without getting them embroiled in actual relationships as seems to be the goal with the introversion trait.
Accounting or money-changing is also another occupation you can consider, as you don't need two hands to operate a scale.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/229331/edit).
Closed 1 year ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/229331/edit)
I have created a race of naturally mutated humans called the *Homo Tenibris* that destroy everything they touch(with any part of their body).
The speed at which the object is destroyed is dependent on its size. The mutated race is living on the earth so the earth is being destroyed by them, but due to its size, it is destroyed slowly. It takes longer to destroy something living than non-living. A human-sized statue would be destroyed in 30 seconds while a human would take 3 minutes.
There are no exceptions and so no substances that cannot be destroyed.
They are a hated race and hunted down and killed. They would need to look like everyone else.
I was initially thinking about an exoskeleton but it would need to look like natural clothing.
The object being destroyed would experience accelerated ageing.
Any ideas?
[Answer]
/They would need to look like everyone else./
**Wear their own hair as clothes!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Mhxk.png)
<https://nypost.com/2016/08/10/this-girls-hair-is-so-long-that-she-can-wear-it-as-a-shirt/>
Your monsters look like everyone else. That means they have hair. That means they can grow their hair out and wear it as clothes. The linked woman did not spend a lot of time getting her hair to look like an actual piece of clothing because most of the time she wears it as hair. But your monsters spend lots of time doing that; weaving and braiding the hair into artistic and nuanced clothing designs.
It helps that their hair grows super fast, everywhere they have it. And they have it everywere, in abundance.
[Answer]
# They would wear air
No, seriously, those guys would be nudists.
This should not a problem - just look at the monsters in Attack on Titan. They are deformed and naked all the time, and it just adds to how frightening they are.
Your creatures being humanoid and nude will give them a place in the uncanny valley which will make them better (or worse?) villains.
[Answer]
A specially concocted Bacterial Barrier allows them to wear clothes.
I know you said no exceptions, and I think this respects that. Its not that the bacteria are immune, but rather that they have evolved to work constant death by contact into their lifespan.
Here's the concept - all living things have countless microbes living in and on them. These often play very important roles in vital processes like digestion, immune systems, sexual selection, and so on. So, Homo Tenibris will have some kind of bacterial colony.
Now, obviously, these bacteria are constantly dying. But that's not actually going to stop them. One of the engines of evolution in bacterial life is a process called HGT or Horizontal Gene Transfer, which means that, unlike multicellular organisms who only inherit genetic information vertically, passed from a parent down to a child, bacteria can pass genetic information back and forth between individuals in the same generation. One of the ways this is done is by consuming the dead remains of another bacteria and incorporating strains of its DNA.
So, if the Homo Tenibris is constantly killing the bacteria that try to live on and in them, they aren't necessarily removing those bacterial strains from the gene pool. Instead, they are creating the perfect conditions for an accelerated evolutionary process. The pressure of nearly instant death would push towards bacterial strains with faster and faster life cycles.
At equilibrium, these specially evolved bacteria wouldn't have much of an effect on the Tenibris' abilities. But suppose a kindly scientist who wanted to protect/preserve tenibris sampled these bacteria and found a way to cultivate them or just to encourage their growth. A treatment is developed, probably in the form of a spray, that a tenibris can treat themselves with on a semi regular basis that builds up the bacterial field to intense levels. A thick layer of these bacteria forms an invisible barrier on the surface of the skin, soaking up the destructive forces, allowing clothes to lay atop the skin without being affected.
This would not make them less dangerous - in fact, it may add new dangers. If these bacteria moved off of the homo tenibris and onto normal humans, they would likely become invasive. So it would still be dangerous for Tenibris to touch others even when their buffers were active, and it might be dangerous even to let others handle their clothes.
[Answer]
You've painted yourself in a corner a bit, with the zero exceptions rule.
>
> The object being destroyed would experience accelerated ageing.
>
>
>
This means non-rusting metals e.g. gold chainmail could be a thing. Certainly wouldn't look common though.
The other option is through illusion. Maybe their skin can camouflage like a chameleon, so from a distance it looks like they are wearing clothing.
[Answer]
>
> ...while a human would take 3 minutes
>
>
>
They wouldn't need to wear anything, because they would have an average lifespan of about 3 minutes. Why? Because at all times, they are always in contact with themselves -- their skin is in contact with their subcutaneous layers of tissue, their blood is always running through their veins, ... Following from this logic, they would also be extinct unless they had an *exceptionally* quick reproductive cycle.
But... if you wanted to argue that they possess some trait that make themselves particularly resistant to their own effects of accelerated aging, then one solution could be to wear clothes made out of the leather of their brethren.
[Answer]
**Soaked to the Skin**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jI6tkm.png)
Clothes absorb water. Throw a wet piece of fabric on the fire and it will not burn. The moisture will steam off before the fabric catches fire. Due to latent heat the steaming phase might take longer than the burning phase.
Likewise If a Dark Human is wearing wet clothes, the destruction effect prioritises the moisture -- which steams off or disappears -- before the fabric is damaged.
Dark Humans can wear clothes provided they make sure to keep them wet at all times.
Maybe in hot places Dark Humans waste all their destructive power sweating and then boiling off their own sweat. So they wear thick clothes in hot places to generate a huge amount of sweat which they then destroy.
[Answer]
## Special pigment cells or controllable chromatophores
They have special pigment-containing cells or controllable chromatophore organs controlled by muscles like some cephalopods (octopus, squid, cuttlefish). They can change their color in such a way that it looks like they are wearing clothes. It can help them to camouflage into their surroundings also to avoid being hunted.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bi7iG.jpg)
[Answer]
Arrgh! I lost an answer which I worked on for a long time. Here I go again.
Shart Answer: It is my recommendation that the members of *Homo tenebris* be cyborgs with super advanced scientific machines implanted in bodies to perform all the almost totally impossible things they do.
LOng Answer in ten Parts:
Part One: Falling.
How would they avoid sinking into the Earth while sleeping, and how could they get out of their pits after they wake up?
And when the sides of the pits collapse and fall on them, they could suffocate for lack of air or be killed by rocks falling on their heads. So to avoid those types of deaths, they would have to disintegrate rock and dirt very fast.
But to avoid sinking to the center of the Earth whenever they stood or lay down in one place, they would have to disintegrate rock and soil very slow.
I don't think that those two speeds of destrying rock and soil can be consistent.
Part Two: A Clothing Problem.
How can *Homo tenebris* wear clothing that won't rapidly vanish. Gabriel Pierce's answer suggest wearing living plants which grow faster than they vanish or at the same rate. Do the plants get all the nourishment they need from air? Do members of wear flowerpots in their clothing?
Part Three: Getting Stuff In and Out.
How can *Homo tenebris* breathe, drink, or eat? Their destructive properites will make no problem with excreting wastes, since those wastes may be destroyed in the process of being expelled from their bodies. But how do they eat, drink, and breathe?
They could lie on their backs and have terrified slaves pour a nourishing soup down their throats. But why wouldn't the nourishing soup vanish as as soon as it touches their insides? Why wouldn't the air vanish as soon as it touches the insides of their lungs?
Part Four: An Outer Covering of Micro Black Holes.
One possible method for them to destory everything which they touch or which touches them would be if they project a forcefield that extends a short distance from their body, and the edge of that force field holds firmly in place gazillions of micro black holes. The force field keeps the micro black holes from escape, from merging with each other, and from contacting their body.
Thus, depending on the radii of the event horizons and the spaces between the event horizons, a *Homo tenebris* might be totally visible to people outside, or else totally blocked from sight by light absorbing event horizons, or somewhere in between. The same may be said for the ability of a *Homo tenebris* to see the outside world.
And the radii of the event horizons and the spaces between them would determine how rapidly subatomic particles, entire atoms, or entire molecules enter the blackholes and thus how rapidly objects are absorbed by the layer of mini black holes around the *Homo tenebris*.
Since the actual body of the *Homo tenebris* does not destroy matter, they could be fed by terrified normal slaves. They would lie on their back and the slaves would pour liquid nourishment into their mouths. The radii of the event horizons and the spaces between them would determine how much of the poured nourishment reached their mouths & digestive systems and would keep them alive and how much entered the event horizons.
To be continued.
Part Five: Wormhole Mouths.
Another possibility would be that the *Homo tenebris* might be surrounded by many tiny and closely spaced wormhole mouths, with sizes and spacing roughly equivalent to those of the black hole event horizons suggested above. Thus matter which contacted the wormhole mouths would pass through the wormholes to other times and/or spaces and seem to observers to be destroyed.
Part Six: Turning Ordinary Matter into exotic Matter.
Another possibility would be that the *Homo tenebris* might be surrounded by some sort of force that does not touch its body but does turn every bit of matter which touces the force into some exotic type of matter, such as mirror matter, which does not interact with light and doesn't interact with normal matter except through gravity. So all the matter transformed into that type of exotic matter would be invisible and intangible and would seem to have disappeared, even though it was still where it used to be.
Part Seven: The Clothing Again.
So what type of clothing could the members of *Homo tenebris* wear while they are surroundeded by black hole event horizons, or by wormhole mouths, or by some "mysterious unknown force" that turns all matter that it touches into some time of undetectable exotic matter?
They could wear clothing of any type at all, so long as that clothing hugs their skin and stays between their skin and the zone where matter is destroyed or appears to be destroyed. What they couldn't do would be to put such clothing on or take it off. Putting the clothing on or taking if off would make the clothing pass through the layer or zone of destruction around them.
So they would have to stay naked all the time.
Unless they could somehow turn on and off the process which destroys all matter which approaches too close to them - or at least appears to destroy that matter. And I think that being able to turn on and off that process would be even more fantastically implausible than having it on all the time.
Part Eight: Homo tenebris\* Cyborgs.
And the thought has occurred to me that those the members of *Homo tenebris* might not be any sort of natural mutants, nor the results of atomic war, but possibly cyborgs created by an advanced civilization implanting super advanced machines into their bodies for some unspecified by me (but obviously nefarious) purpose.
So one device or set of devices implanted in a cyborg member of *Homo tenebris* might generate the forces that might hold gazillions of micro black hole event horizons in position a small distance from their skin.
Or maybe that device\*s) might generate gazillions of artificial wormholes with their mouths held in position a short distance from their skin.
Or maybe that device(s) might emitt forces which strike all matter that is a short distance from their skin and turn that matter into some exotic form of matter which can no longer be detected and thus appears to have been destroyed by contact with their body.
Part Nne: Other Cyborg Implants.
And possibly those cyborg members of *Homo tenebris* might thave other devices implanted in their bodies. Perhaps machines that generate wormhole mouths for sending geses, liquids,and solid food into their bodies, and for sending gaseous, liquid, and solid waste out of their bodies to somewher else.
And another cyborg implant might be an antigravity generator to keep them from falling toward the center of the Earth whenever they stay in one place for long.
And with all those machines inplanted in their bodies the members of *Homo tenebris* might start to seem like Obi-wan described Darth Vader, "more machine than man". They almost might as well be robots.
So some writers might want to depict members of *Homo tenebris* as cyborgs with machine implants to do all the scientifically implausible activities, and other writers might think that they might as well be some sort of robots. But I doubt whether any writers who care at all about scientific plausibility would want to make members of *Homo tenebris* pure biological beings.
Because however doubtful and implausible it might be for them to have small machines implanted in their bodies to generate micro blackholes or wormholes, it would be gazilliions of times less pausible for any organs made of protoplasm to be able to do that.
Part Ten: The Scale of Hardness.
Posssibly someone might wonder where a story with members of such as I have described would fit on the famous Sliding Scale of Science Fiction hardness, where the higher the score the more plausible and realistic the story would be.
<https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness>
My guess is that most science fiction experts would put the cyborgs I describe at the lowest levels on the scale, 1 or 2, considering them to be very implausible.
But if the members of *Homo tenebris* were described as being 100 percent biological, with their force fields, antigavity, black holes, and wormholes being created by organs of protoplasm, then the score of the story would be much lower, perhaps minus 10.
Of course in a fantasy story if the members of *Homo tenebris* were described as being cyborgs with superadvanced machines implanted in them, or if a character speculated that was the cause of their strange atributes, readers might think that the writer was going the extra mile to minimize the magical and fantasy element and make their story more plausible.
PS It is Homo tenebris\*, not Homo Tenebris\*. In binomial nomenclature the second word is not capitalized.
[Answer]
Mind Control:
They can strut around *au naturale*, while telepathically controlling those around them to believe they look normal.
Somewhat nerfed option:
The observer is unable to "see" them, as such, but instead sees a projection of his own unconscious.
[Answer]
Wear large clothes that are destroyed at the same rate as or slower than the individual approaches death
This works because you said large things are destroyed at a disproportionately slower rate.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/u0HTIl.jpg)
] |
[Question]
[
I want to use a handwavium gravity field generator on my spaceships, but this has several problems.
Generating gravitational fields of peculiar shapes is not a difficult thing to do in this setting. We have graviton generators and space-time sheet modulators to create gravity fields of all shapes and sizes. So that's not the problem.
I also don't want to use "Spin-Gravity" or artificial gravity from thrust for reasons I won't go into here.
But, by generating a field of gravity, even if it only affects everything *within* the ship, all that mass being accelerated downwards will cause the ship to be pushed down, taking them off course.
If I wanted to counteract this, what would be the best way to do it?
---
Notes:
* Superintelligent AI is *not* available.
* This needs to be as
believable as possible within the established tech.
* Established tech includes exotic matter, anti-matter, plenty of power generation, (hydrogen, helium, deuterium and other forms of) fusion, superconductors, advanced carbon allotropes, high content-batteries, and kugelblitzes.
* Resources are not a problem, but the cheaper the better.
* Low gravity is fine, as long as the ship doesn't go off course and the characters and their stuff will "feel" gravity.
[Answer]
Have two gravity generators, running along the middle of the ship.
From someone outside the ship, looking in, it would appear that that there is Artificial Gravity pulling items from the bottom of the ship to the middle, and from the top of the ship to the middle.
From the point-of-view of people inside the ship, it won't really matter which half of the ship they are in, except that it makes defining the 'port' and 'starboard' of the ship more interesting.
To cross between the two halves, there could be a a tube with a gravity-free zone in the middle. Persons crossing would take a lift across, at the half way point they would be free-floating. The lift would stop here, the people would turn head-about-feet, and then the lift would resume. When they enter the Artificial Gravity zone on the other side, they would again feel gravity pulling them feet-wards.
[Answer]
Unless you plan to suspend Newton's Third Law (with an enormous dose of wandwavium) or you will have the Gravity Generator pulled in the opposite direction of ship internals, with exactly the same force. Net effect should be null (otherwise you could use this effect to accelerate the ship without reaction mass).
If you have the G.Generator solidly fixed to spaceship You won't have any course deflection as the two pulls will even out.
[Answer]
Change the meaning of "down".
Artificial gravity allows you to arbitrarily define where down lies. What seems to be in your head is the Star TrekWars ship definition of down. There's no reason down shouldn't be towards the bow, stern or even some point or plane in the middle decks. The orientation of your decks is also free to change as you see fit relative to your current convenience.
Building a small spherical ship with down in the centre, or even on the outside, will mess with your head (and with the engineers) but it's as valid as any other setup under artificial gravity.
What this means in practice is that for a long distance bulk carrier down should be forward. For a combat vessel, down should only be used to counter acceleration effects from maneuvering with a possible low basic setting to stop things floating away.
[Answer]
Put your mystical gravitation machine (you said wizards, right?) in the center of the ship. It pushes things away, rather than pulling them toward itself. Thereby creating a gravity-esque force on the "underside" of the floors and the inside of the hull. It would balance out as the force is equal in all directions.
[Answer]
When you put gravity on a room, it's possible to calculate the thrust generated according to the room mass.
So, since you can shape the gravity field as you like, it's possible to equilibrate the thrust alternating up and down gravity on different room.
Thereby, one part of the ship would have a 'normal' gravity and the other part would have a 'upside down' gravity.
This solution would require only a calibration of graviton generator in a zero-G environment.
[Answer]
It's not a problem because forces, even handwavium forces don't act that way. The reason is in the artifical gravity field, the bodies aren't actually accelerating
A person is in a room with artifical gravity. He is pulled towards the "floor" His weight pushes down on the floor, and (by Newton's third law) the floor pushes back on him. The two forces are exactly balanced.
If you could get your ship to accelerate by turning on the anti-gravity field, well done! You have just invented a reaction free propulsion device. It can push a ship without a rocket shooting stuff the opposite direction. Reaction free propulsion breaks the law of conservation of momentum so it doens't exist.
So an antigravity device won't be able to cause the ship to accelerate in any direction, because it isn't actually accerating anything.
[Answer]
The feeling of gravity doesn't come from being pulled down, it comes from the floor pushing you back up.
Whether the gravity generator is moving the ship or not, it well feel like Earth gravity as long as the amount it accelerates the ship's chassis is different to the amount it accelerates the crew's bodies by 9.8m/s/s.
If the gravity generator is cheap enough to leave on for comfort when you're not moving, people would use it as a drive too, unless your universe's physics has a conservation law that says the generator has to push something up with the exact same force that it pushes stuff down. Which would be a very plausible law to have. Even with that law, people might want to investigate whether it's economical to use a gravity generator to drop propellant out of the ship instead of using a thermal rocket engine or an ion drive.
[Answer]
Gravitoelectromagnetism might be a interesting avenue for consideration. Some high order effects of this phenomenon allow you to theoretically generate gravity fields or equivalent effects. For example two wheels connected to the same axis will experience stronger gravitational attraction to each other if those wheels are spun in opposite directions. This is an expression of gravitoelectromagnetic attraction, if the wheels are spun in the same direction the opposite is true and a repulsive gravitoelectromagnetic effect is generated.
[Answer]
Once you have artificial gravity you sort of throw out the laws of physics... that being said let's see what you think about this:
There's the crew, and there's the floor of the ship. Newton's third law says that any force has an equal and opposite reaction force. So let's imagine a gravity generator in the floor that pulls 'down' on a 200 pound crewman.
We want the crewman to feel a 200 lb force down, *towards the floor*. Then we have:
if (crewmanForce = 200 lb):
then:
reactionForce = 200 lb
and
if (crewmanForceDirection = down):
then:
reactionForceDirection = up
That's the logic of Newton's third law. What's the reaction force? Well the *floor* will feel a force up, *towards the crewman*. That's the reaction force here. Since these two forces cancel out, there is no external force that can pull your ship off-course.
This can be extended to the entire crew, and the entire ship. Newton's third law saves your navigation issue automatically.
That being said, think about how much of a physics lesson your readers are actually looking for. It might be better to keep that stuff in the background, depending on the audience.
] |
[Question]
[
Set a hundred years into the future, an alien mothership antimatter engine has malfunctioned and to prevent a disaster they decided to eject the byproduct, a micro blackhole as massive as an empire state building towards Earth. Let's not speculate what the alien are thinking or what exactly they are scheming, I like to know how on earth can we notice our impending demise since the micro blackhole trajectory allows it to avoid collision until impact unless we can help it?
[Answer]
Dont do anything.
1: a BH of that size would evaporate in 129 years (which surprised me I thought it would be shorter). This makes my point of it evaporating in microseconds moot so ignore point 1.
2: a BH is tiny. At the mass of the empire state building it is smaller than atoms, and its questionable it will actually hit anything as it passes through the earth. If the BH didnt evaporate you could shoot someone through the head and they wouldn't even be damaged. Facepalming would be more dangerous.
Edit: as Jason Goemaat points out in the comments, the gravity at a few mm distance from the BH would still rip a small hole through your body. The point of the example was to illustrate the small size of the BH: At the mass of the Empire state building (365000 tons) a BH is 5.4×10-19 meters in size. An atom is on the order of 1×10-10 meters in size. A difference of 9 magnitudes!
3: the small size and evaporation create a seeming paradox: the BH is almost impossible to feed. Because its so small only a few atoms could be pushed inside at a time, assuming the atoms dont push off against each other enough not to fall in. On top of that the BH's evaporation pushes out harder than the BH pulls things in, you need neutron star pressure or a very specific particle accelerator to keep it fed.
Edit: for some information on BH's check something like this: <https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiation-calculator>
[Answer]
# We'd definitely notice.
A 365000 tonne black hole has a luminosity of $2.6\*10^{15}$ watts. On the K-scale of civilizations this is about 0.95.
1.0 is roughly consuming all of the energy the Sun deposits on the Earth.
Even an advanced Earth-based civilization cannot pass, and practically cannot reach, 1.0 -- before 1.0, you literally cook the biosphere, as you are using more energy than we can radiate off into space. A Dyson-swarm scale civilization can pass 1.0 without cooking itself, but in such a civilization Earth is an energy backwater.
So this thing is putting out more power than all of human civilization on Earth is, and doing so with ridiculously high frequency photons. That ain't gonna be hard to spot; it will be hard to ignore really.
Its gravitational effects are quite limited; within a mm we are talking 2400 earth-Gs of gravity, and a cm away there is 24 Gs, but the raw outpouring of energy from its evaporation outpaces it: **Nothing** is getting within a mm of this black hole, except the Hawking Radiation it emits (and things interacting with that radiation).
Despite how bright it is, it lasts over 100 years. Its final evaporation -- from blue-whale sized to nothing -- happens at the end of the 100-odd years, and puts out as much energy as a magnitude 11 Earthquake in a second. Power output is non-linear, so much before that point it isn't putting out geological event power levels.
A magnitude 11 Earthquake is nuts. Luckily, if that Earthquake happened, it would happen near the core (if the Earth captures it, it means it slows it down in a single pass enough that by the time 100 years have passed, the black hole is captured by the Earth's core).
As it falls through the atmosphere, it lets off enough energy to match that of a decent sized nuclear bomb. Nothing world-shattering, but definitely noticeable. (take $10^{15}$ W times 100 seconds; we get $10^{17}$ J. A megaton nuke is $5\*10^{15}$ J; this thing is like a medium-small sized nuclear bomb going off every second. But at 11 km/s, it will pass from relatively far away in outer space to inside the planet in mere seconds; and it will burrow through the Earth so fast, that the surface effects will be modest (on a nuclear bomb scale definition of modest))
If it exits the Earth (see below), it does the same thing at the exit point. So a nuclear bomb crater, fried electronics in a hemisphere, etc.
The energy it deposits as it goes through the Earth is not enough to trigger anything geological in scale, like cataclysmic Earthquakes or a Volcano. Geological event power levels are simply insane.
(If it hung around for longer, it would be enough to make above-hurricane-scale climate disruptions; but it is either going to end up deep in the Earth, or flying out in space, so that won't happen.)
# Now, will the Earth capture it?
So as the black hole enters the Earth, it is going to cook everything nearby. You'll end up with a high pressure plasma wave surrounding it. Now basically none of this matter will reach the black hole -- the Hawking radiation pressure is much too high for that -- but good old newton's law means that all force the black hole applies is applied back on the black hole. And there is going to be some asymmetry caused by burrowing through solid rock.
The black hole will act like a larger object in how it interacts with the Earth. How much larger is an important question.
Based on the Newtonian Impactor math -- basically, that objects stop when they push aside roughly as much mass as their own mass when penetrating another object -- if the black hole "acts like" a 10 cm diameter or larger object when flying through the Earth, it is going to slow down and be captured by the Earth. If it acts smaller, it passes right through.
So I don't know if the Earth with capture it. That is above my pay grade in a number of areas of physics. I'd argue it is plausible it passes through the Earth, and it is plausible that there is enough 'drag' to stop it.
# If it is captured, are we doomed?
First, will it turn the Earth into a black hole? No, the surface pressure of a black hole this size or smaller is so large that nothing the Earth can do can prevent it from evaporating. You'd have to shoot it into a Neutron Star or something equally exotic for it to grow; infalling matter has to outpace the Hawking radiation pressure.
The other possibility is that it will destroy the Earth through its evaporation. But the final explosion is going to be strong, but even a modestly strong explosion at the center of the Earth isn't going to cause apocalyptic damage on the surface.
Lastly, will it cook us? I mean, it is 0.95 K-scale; if it hung around on the surface of the planet, it would risk cooking the biosphere. But the planet core has a lot more heat capacity: the total energy is releases is enough to heat up the Earth by a tiny faction of a degree (doesn't matter which units). Even the core won't change much. The final explosion will be enough to be heard around the world, and maybe the effect might be big enough to mess with Earth's Magnetic field (the power output of Earth's magnetic field is under 1000 kW; on the other hand, the dynamo driving it is probably ridiculously bigger).
The energy density of the black hole might do exotic things to nuclear chemistry, like creating strange isotopes; but I'd suspect the amount would be small, and the isotopes light. So there could be some danger in creating toxic particles; the transit of the atmosphere is short however, and most of the radioactive element danger from nuclear bombs is from fission by-products, not produced by the explosion. So I doubt this will be a large concern.
# What we can do
We could just ignore it. Unless Earth has a massive population increase, much of the world isn't all that occupied. It would take a crazy lucky strike to hit an area where we'd care all that much (most likely, some fish would die; if not, it would make a couple of craters in a place like Siberia or the Sahara desert; failing that, a rural area with a few 1000 fatalities; it would suck, but not that much).
But if we want it so miss, gravity-based nudging of trajectory is plausible. Making your craft capable of surviving the energy output at a close enough distance is hard, but interplanetary trajectories are really easy to make them miss a target. It requires ridiculous pin-point accuracy in order to hit a planet at interplanetary ranges.
A ridiculously tiny nudge would move it.
If you can move asteroids with any speed, you can just shoot an asteroid to get as close as you can to the target. Even if it is destroyed or just does a flyby, it will move the trajectory of the micro black hole. And a tiny nudge is pretty good. The direction of the nudge will be somewhat randomized; as the asteroid approaches the mini black hole, it will start being destroyed by the radiation coming off the black hole, and that destruction will change its trajectory.
But space is really really empty, so a randomized trajectory will almost certainly miss. Hitting a planet is a lot like making a hole in one by hitting a golf ball, when you are in New York and your target is in California. A random push on that trajectory and it won't be making a hole in one anymore with a near total certainty.
[Answer]
If the BH was massive enough to be a danger to Earth.... not a lot you can do. You can't really move the Earth out of the way. So the best you could do is send as many people as you could to colonies on Mars or the Moon.
As for when people would notice, that depends on the size of the black hole. As it gets closer, we'll start to notice distortions in light. Of course, it isn't clear how fast the BH is approaching Earth. If it is moving faster than light via alien tech, you wouldn't be able to see it coming at all.
If it's moving slower, and has been travelling millennia or whichever... note that the odds of it hitting Earth, or the sun, would be basically none, if it was shot out by chance, there's so much space for things to go, the aliens would basically have to try to hit Earth's solar system in order to hit it.
Of course, if it's too close or fast, there won't be time to react.
[Answer]
Answers regarding what it will do have already covered the effects as it sheds mass as energy. That also covers how quickly we'll notice it since it will be blatantly obvious. However, you also asked how to stop it.
From the tone of your question, it sounds like impact is very soon. In that case, it's too late and all you can do is clean up the mess. However, if you detect it far enough away or it's approaching slowly, you could try to redirect it. How much force would you need to deliver? The more time until impact, that's less force you need to apply to change the trajectory... so it depends.
Even if you have time to spare, the problem will be how can you apply that force? Hitting it with a large mass isn't going work, because it would zip right through any material that you throw at it. However, if you could hit that moving point with absolute precision, then high-speed particles or even lasers could apply force.
As a nifty story, another concept is not to poke at it, but instead shepherd it away. In other words, put an even larger mass near the same position and velocity and then use the gravity of that new mass to pull it onto another course. For the rule of cool, you could redirect it to and "give it back" to those pesky aliens.
] |
[Question]
[
The year is 2121, it has been only six months since we made contact with alien race **A**, we don't know very much about them except these things:
1. They have many military spaceships made of technology unknown to mankind.
2. They always wear space armor, so we don't know how they look like, except they are humanoid.
3. They came from another galaxy.
And now they are asking for our help to wage war against alien race **B** in the same galaxy, they want:
1. Our resources : water, food, minerals, natural gas, petroleum and much more.
2. Our men and women to reinforce their fleet: they will be given a special
training, weapons and armors.
And of course they will reward us with:
1. Access to their cutting edge alien technology.
2. Alien engineers to build high-tech based services on earth: advanced hospitals, factories, ...etc.
Bear in mind that we don't know the true intentions of alien race **A** (whether they are good or bad) and we also know absolutely nothing about alien race **B**, why should we help them or why should we refuse ?
[Answer]
If I was in charge of formulating Earth's response, I'd be highly suspicious why an alien species seemingly more advanced than us would need our resources and personnel. For resources, they ought to be able to get most inorganic stuff from asteroids and gas giants. Organic stuff one would expect them to be able to synthesize. As for staff, what kind of military work would not be more reliably automated than handed off to a comparably primitive client species like us, involving not just time-intensive training, but particularly the risk that eventually those primitives might use the weapons against their masters.
Thus, I would suspect that they have serious issues with logistics and their supply chain - considering they came from another galaxy, this might not be surprising, depending on what abilities of travel and transport they have.
So I would ask them for demonstrations of their military might, arguing that understandably we would not want to become entangled in a war on the losing side.
As we are talking space war, supposably the demonstration would involve at least one of their ships. I would try to aim for a very specific demonstration. Perhaps have them destroy Pluto in the presence of human observers (obviously scientists and military people amongst them).
The purpose of this exercise would be to first check whether they are really quite as powerful as it seems, but also to give us a chance to get more data about their technology before committing to a decision. Even just from watching their ship approach, pick up our team of observers, getting them to Pluto, we could infer quite a bit about their transport system, their source of energy, material science etc. From watching them destroy Pluto something about their military technology.
Only after would I decide, and even then I'd try to stall. I'd also make it a condition right from the start for them to have a permanent delegation on Earth, in a location of our choosing. Again, this would give us opportunity to watch them and learn - even if they have some sort of fantastic energy shield completely opaque to our instruments around their embassy, the mere existence of this shield would teach us something. Besides, I would insist on personal meetings for any sort of negotiation, quoting cultural bias as a reason. That way, they'd be forced to either leave their compound or let humans enter regularly - in either case, at least for small windows of time that fantastic shield/screen would open a hole, allowing us to once more try to gain more data.
In all of this, I would constantly act like a car salesman who knows their customer really needs a car really urgent and also knows that the customer knows that he knows. Because in essence, we are in just such a situation - they obviously need us and they obviously cannot get what they want by force (if they could, they'd just do it, considering they are obviously not against violence on principle).
[Answer]
I'd like to submit my take on this situation:
These aliens presumably have the weaponry to blow us to bits and then ***take*** our resources. Or work out a deal with say .. China .. and destroy the rest of the world, leaving behind a single population with which they are partners (or the masters of)
Instead however, they offer us technology and an alliance in exchange for resources and military personnel, whom they are willing to support (read train, clothe, arm, etc.)
This sounds like a very generous deal, and while your initial reaction might be that ***"it's too good to be true"***, and to wait for the other shoe to drop, I'd like to point out that if these aliens had magic-like mind control tech, or wanted to otherwise screw with us they could do it without announcing it to the world before hand.
And so, I think their offer is genuine. They may not be saints, but the fact that their first reaction is to offer to trade with us, not simply enslave mankind and take what they want is telling.
I think they are demonstrating honorable behavior, and can be trusted.
[Answer]
In this situation I think we would have little choice. They are technologically superior and so far ahead of us that we would not be able to stand against them.
What we would do is start using our internal divisions on earth as an excuse to do the minimum possible to help race A while at the same time trying to gain their technology and work out how to defend ourselves.
In the meantime we would investigate race B and try to work out which side (if any) we actually want to be on in this war.
Note that quiet a few of your premises seem...strange. Galaxies are a long way apart, that's a lot of distance to take a few soldiers. Additionally human soldiers are already becoming obsolete, what would an advanced alien race with far superior tech ever want them for?
[Answer]
I think a lot of answers are flawed in that they consider what the entire Earth's response will be, and not what certain Earthlings responses will be. We are, after all, a group of individuals, not a collective.
The first step is to think about what aliens might want from us. As JDLugosz points out, they probably don't want our resources, since those you can find anywhere. And they probably don't want our technology, since they came from outside the galaxy to find us. And they probably don't want something undefined like our 'potential' since I assume they want to win the war now and not wait until we transcend into something better than what we are now. So that means, they want us for our species' biology.
There are many options for what could be so unique and useful about us, especially if intelligent spacefaring species are vanishingly rate. If there are are only a few dozen civilizations in the space era in the galaxy, that makes it relatively likely that our extra-galactic visitors decide we are the best placed to help them. What we will not be useful for is any sort of space combat. But what if their biology is poisoned by oxygen and they want to invade and occupy the homeworlds of a species that lives in an oxygen atmosphere? What if they or their enemies are evolved to 'see' in the infra-red or ultraviolet spectrum, and there is some tactical advantage to being able to see in the 'visible' light spectrum? What if, as opposed to the big alien theory, all aliens really are little green men of varying sorts, and big mean violence prone humans have a huge advantage in combat.
Here on earth, there are plenty of advanced weapons to be found, yet in the record of (near-constant) wars over the last 20 years, in Syria, Congo, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and more, almost none of these weapons were used. AEGIS destroyers never took on fleets of cruise missiles, submarines and airfraft carriers never played hide-and-seek, F-22s never went head to head with SU-30s, and certainly no-one has nuked anyone else in while. Instead, almost all the killing is being done with technology at least 100 years old, semi-automatic rifles, mortars and light artillery, and the odd machete. Maybe this is the war these transcendantly technological aliens are fighting, and they need some real backwards violence prone hillbilly/jihadi/Albanian gangster species to get into it.
In conclusion, if aliens want help in war, they need us because of our physical characteristics, backwardness, and propensity for violence. If that is the case, they absolutely do not need to come asking the UN for permission. They need mercenaries, and those are easy to find on this planet. Since they will be able to offer pay that simply cannot be found on Earth, volunteers will be everywhere. Think of how easy it was for the colonial powers on earth to enlist poor Indians/Africans/others into colonial armies, then multiply that by a thousand. Hell, if they asked younger me 10 years ago (around the time I dropped out of college and got shipped off to Marine boot camp about 6 days later) I would most certainly have said yes. They'll get their mercenaries.
[Answer]
# Idea 1: Alien Romans
Simple, the aliens are in the same sort of situation the Romans were in during the collapse of their empire. For those of you who do not know, for various reasons, the Western Romans conscripted barbarian tribes into their armies. These tribes usually lived on the border between the Empire and the regions controlled by even more barbarous tribes. While Rome spent her own citizen armies fighting civil wars, the Barbarians became simultaneously more powerful and treated worse. Eventually they got fed up with it and invaded the Empire under chieftans such as Alaric of the Goths and divvied up the western empire into rival kingdoms.
Now, this alien empire is fighting a space-equivalent of a "barbaric race", and has decided that Humanity, having made it this long without destroying itself with nuclear capabilities and having very strong martial traditions from millenia of warfare between rival states, would make a great client species and an adequate buffer between themselves and the even worse "barbarian" aliens.
They[the "Roman" aliens] present this to our diplomats, and while somewhat insulted, key officials agree to the conditions in the hopes of taking advantage of the collapsing empire, grabbing as much tech and technology they can before the inevitable collapse that is soon to come. After we have their military technology, we do not need to remain beholden to the aliens, and can take control of the ships with humans aboard and become the most powerful race in this galaxy.
# Idea 2: Alien supply lines
While the benevolent Graxoblox have the ability to take our world by force, they have not become a multi-galaxy empire via military conquest alone. Most of their "empire" is comprised of client species that have signed treaties with them for technology. These species are very gradually integrated into the Imperium over millenia. They have recently established a foothold colony in our galaxy, and have encountered several species hostile to this agreement. The time and energy required to travel between the expanding void between galaxies is prohibitive to military encounters, and the vanguard of the force needs somewhere to resupply.
The Groxblox diplomats make it clear to us that we can either A.) Support the Groxblox Imperium as a client species, keep much of our independence, and recieve technology and other rewards for our allegiance, or B.) They will find another species who will, then they will come back to wreak revenge on us once they have been resupplied and place us under the rule of said other species. They would, in this case, also have to provide some sort of proof of their power as other answers have stated.
# Idea 3: Alien race B is a danger to all life in the unverse and A can prove it.
The age old enemy that everyone shares. Think of the Flood in Halo, a parasitic race that will devour all carbon-based(presumably) intelligent life in the galaxy. Alien race A does not have enough forces in this cluster to guard all the races threatened by the "Flood". Alien race A views itself as a guardian race, and cannot abandon us to the scourge, but it cannot protect us. They would have to prove that this species is a threat to us, possibly by bringing a sample for us to examine. The aliens might be planning to use us to man our portion of our galaxy as we are a numerous, warlike species that has acquired nuclear technology and not blown itself to kingdom come.
[Answer]
So, assuming that this is legitimately a choice, and not a veiled threat:
**Why we should refuse:** Because it's an incredibly shady deal...everything about it sounds like a lie.
Their request for raw resources (water, food, minerals, etc) in particular sounds like misdirection. As in "Hey, we really need to buy resources from you, and if you could spare some people also, that'd be great". They'd be able to tell from monitoring our radio transitions that we are a species well accustomed to bartering, so trading goods for information would not be unusual to us.
The problem is that there's absolutely no reason for them to come all the way to another galaxy to get things like water or minerals (these could be easily claimed from literally billions of uninhabited worlds, or even asteroids).
That leaves one thing: people. They came to an entirely different galaxy and came to Earth in particular to get *humans*.
**Why we would accept:**
Because, when it comes to humanity, there is no "we". Multiple nations would make deals with the aliens to prevent their competitors (even allies) from gaining unilateral access to literally superhuman technology.
Even within nations which absolutely refuse to deal with the aliens, there could be corporations who make secret arrangements to secure unique technology.
At the lowest level, we're just a mob of individuals, and the aliens would get at least *some* volunteers. Some would be thrill-seekers, or soldiers of fortune, or scientists, or those who feel there's nothing left for them on Earth.
**In the end:**
Even if the volunteers were to return one day, and confirm that everything the aliens said was true...how could we know that the people who returned are the same ones who left, rather than clones or other simulacra? How could we know that their minds and memories still their own?
Humans, as a species, would probably never wholly trust the aliens until we gained power over them--it's just how Natural Selection made us.
[Answer]
Now this is an unusual scenario, but the closest parallel that I can think of is the Krogans of Mass Effect. It's complex, but the whole gist of things is that the rest of the alien races weren't strong enough to fight the Rachni (bugs from Starship Troopers). Why?
**Salarians**
These guys are extremely intelligent, amphibian people who have made large leaps and advances in the natural sciences and biology. Unfortunately, they are physically squishy, have short lifespans and aren't really that great at waging war since most of their people are intellectual types. Your PHD in neurobiology and nice guns isn't going to help you survive harsh conditions and grievous injuries.
**Asari**
Space elves with long lifespans that have powerful biotic powers, but also have an incredibly low reproduction rate and a culture that's more focused on the arts and humanities. Magical powers are cool, but the lack of heavy ordinance and a large regular army stops them from fighting a conventional conflict.
**Turians**
Collectivist bird like warriors that invest most of their resources into waging war. Their soldiers are mobile, relatively durable and possess the resources to field support vehicles. They're about on par with humans, so most of their might comes down to tactics and technology as well. Unfortunately, they still don't have the physical durability to wage an extended war on ground against a horde of space insects.
**Krogans**
A technologically primitive but physically strong race of alligator like reptiles. These guys can take large amounts of damage, they're extremely strong and can carry a lot of ordinance, and they're aggressive. All they need is some alien tech to get in the fight against those nasty space bugs.
**Why would aliens need humans?**
Maybe those aliens have some physical limitations that stops them from fighting a prolonged conflict. Being technologically advanced does not ensure that they are also physically fit to fight a war. Every conflict is won by putting boots on the ground.
[Answer]
The main reason to accept this deal is that, even considering the excellent reasons others have posted that explain why we should be skeptical, refuse, etc., the bottom line is that gaining intergalactic space travel, or weapons/technologies that push us much closer towards a viable interplanetary, interstellar, or intergalactic society, is such a huge incentive for humanity as a whole and world leaders specifically, that it'd almost be impossible for at least one nation to resist making a deal. The best outcome for humanity is that, in an effort to avoid creating serious imbalances in power, the world would unite at least partially, and send a number of soldiers from each military as a "Human Expeditionary and Exploratory Force" or something along those lines, and have had the opportunity to train with and adapt to the alien technology provided. This would in some senses be similar to the U.N.; countries that send soldiers to act as Peacekeepers are paid extra, outfitted by the U.N., and then get to take that equipment home with them once their service is complete.
Second, the aliens' need for our resources could prove extremely profitable for our planet. Instead of harvesting our own planet for these resources, we could demand some unarmed space ships, then jointly create a corporation that mines and harvests many of these resources (except for food) from other planets in our solar system. Those proceeds could then be directed towards creating a multinational government and accompanying military which has the explicit purpose of providing a legitimate human political entity with which to interact with this alien species, and to further explore and colonize our solar system and surrounding ones.
The arrival of a technologically advanced race that is part of an intergalactic community in which conflict clearly is present would also likely force humanity's hand because, like it or not, one way or another we are now known to that community as a whole and thus in sudden and desperate need of leveling the playing field to an extent.
I think that it's unlikely that this alien race would need resources from humans, because intergalactic travel strongly implies that they also have the ability to easily extract resources from planets, asteroids, etc. I would like to offer some other possible explanations that they would need human military support, however.
* This alien race could, in the vein of the Romans, consider humans as potentially useful and valuable auxiliaries, with compensation in the form of citizenship/trade/etc.
* Similar to the Krogans cited above, they may be in need of help on the ground
* perhaps they're fighting a primarily ground-based, urban war, when they're used to fighting mostly in space, and after stumbling upon us, they concluded that our knowledge of infantry combat could be valuable as trainers/advisors/shock troops
* the war they're fighting is at a stalemate and they're trying to find a way, any way, to break it, and view humanity as providing some kind of advantage, minor or major
[Answer]
Some great answers, but I notice that nearly all of them focus on judging whether the Race A aliens are *sincere*. Um, even if they are totally sincere, joining an interspecies war is not the sort of decision you want to make lightly. Race B could be innocent victims whom Race A want to exterminate because of their completely sincere belief that anyone with more than four limbs is an abomination. Or Race B could be powerful and ruthless beings whose response to being bothered by a lesser race is to squash its planet as we would destroy a wasps' nest (Race A sincerely think that racial extinction while fighting against impossible odds is an honour that those nice humans would love to share).
All in all, I think we'd best be a little bit circumspect on this one. Tell Race A that we'll be right back to them with our decision just as soon as the U.N. committee containing representatives from every nation that we've set up to discuss the question comes to unanimous agreement.
[Answer]
## We are a sizable force
Are you familiar with the [Big Alien theory?](http://www.thebigalientheory.com/) Basically it says that aliens are likely bigger than us, live on smaller worlds and exist in smaller groups.
**How can we know this?** Well, mathematics says that if a person does not know what group they fall in, we are likely to fall in a common one. There are four steps here;
**Step 1:** Consider the following sentence;
>
> "I am more likely to have a common blood type than a rare one"
>
>
>
Does this seem reasonable? If you disagree with this statement: Gather some of your personal data and compare it with the global population. These can include country of birth; blood type; hair colour; and so on. Do you find yourself falling into the higher population categories? This data should lead you to conclude that you are an ordinary human - your properties reflect the global distribution.
**STEP 2:** Imagine you have woken up with amnesia and have forgotten where you are from.
>
> "I am more likely to have been born in a high population country than
> a low population country"
>
>
>
This follows from the blood test statement in Step 1. Imagine a new sensitive blood test which identifies your country of birth. The countries will small populations ike Andorra are the rare blood types, while the larger countries - any which have a population over 10 million - are the common blood types.
**STEP 3:** Now imagine humans have already colonised other planets such as Mars. These colonies are just like new countries, except a little further away. So in line with step 2, we must conclude that:
>
> "I am more likely to have been born in a high population planet then a
> low population planet"
>
>
>
**STEP 4:** What if those colonies on other planets had not travelled from the Earth, but had evolved there?
If we reach the same end result via a different route, why should our beliefs differ? These steps bring us to the conclusion that, if other sentient species exist, we should expect ours to have an unusually high population. Take a look at the pie charts below to get an idea of just how different we may be.
---
If we reach the same end result via a different route, why should our beliefs differ? These steps bring us to the conclusion that, if other sentient species exist, we should expect ours to have an unusually high population. Take a look at the pie charts below to get an idea of just how different we may be.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8SguT.png)
On the left we see the different populations of all the countries in the world. Most are less then ten million. On the right we see exactly the same data from a very different perspective: the distribution of population sizes if you were to interview everyone and ask their nationalities. The larger countries are counted much more often, so now most are over 100 million. You will very rarely meet someone from a country with a population of under 1 million. The same applies to population of aliens;
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N4BMf.png)
magine that planet populations are distributed in the same pattern that the countries on Earth are, just with a higher average value. If our population sits roughly mid-way through the right hand chart, then that is what an individual should to experience. In terms of citizenship among intelligent individuals, we are oridinary. But in that case, most planets will have a very much smaller population. In this simplistic example, most intelligent species have populations of under 60 million.
---
Using some simple physics and fancy mathmatics, which you can read on their site, we can assume the likelihood of the following sizes;
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hn2Pr.png)
Knowing that species with smaller sizes have a larger population density, we can assume aliens live on smaller worlds and exist in smaller groups, due to the fact that being larger is more likely.
---
What does this have to do with war? Well, using this theory, we know we exist as a species with a larger population than most. By this logic, we are the ants and aliens are the beetles and the spiders, they can kill dozens of us, but as a whole we have strength in numbers, making us a powerful force for an alien military.
[Answer]
To me this seems more like a test. Since traveling from another galaxy is generally a fantasy even among visionaries of worm holes and ultra warp drives.
So you have an alien race that comes from another **GALAXY** asking ***US*** for help when we can barely get off of our own ball of dirt, and have 1 space craft just leaving our solar system.
What could we POSSIBLY offer such a race other than shock troops to die as front liners or allow them to 'bypass' some treaty without breaking the letter of it?
So either they are testing us to see if we are ready to join a wider existence in inter-galactic affairs, or they need us as a species for their cause. Which could be a new species in their voting block, or one that hasn't agreed to some treaty and thus are exempt or as some kind of soldier sacrifice that means something more than droid ships but aren't their own people.
They are bribing us pretty heavily so no mater our qualms we would likely agree. And on top of that. They pose a huge threat, proof merely by showing up here from another galaxy in a time frame that allows for back and forth in a 'reasonable' manner. Otherwise they wouldn't 'need' our help. So we say yes, from both the bribe and the threat and try to learn what we have gotten ourselves into.
[Answer]
## Why Humans Support The A
Humans are likely to side with Alien race A who we know, like and trust, against the reprehensible and totally alien B's, whom we have never met and only have A's propaganda as evidence. The unpatriotic pacifists will object and will be dealt with via government censure or public relations protocol depending on the regime of their local nation.
I suspect one world federal government would follow a few years after first contact, especially if The A don't want to deal with multiple competing countries leaders.
However, if The A are truly from another *galaxy* (not solar system) then we are truly doomed (assuming intergalactic travel is harder than interstellar travel the way interstellar is harder than solar-system travel).
Regardless of origin, The A's technological superiority means all scientific inquiry on Earth stagnates and ceases within a generation of first contact unless The A's are actively sharing knowledge. See Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End for detail on why. But the summary is that if your technology allows you to make fire and don't yet have a wheel, gunpowder and aircraft are unattainable in your lifetime and insufficient new scholars take up the field. Earth becomes a cargo cult.
Let us assume Humans like the "advanced civilisation" that The A offer. It could be like the Fuegians taken to Europe on the First Voyage of the Beagle - the *savages* saw no use for European culture.
Assume also humans have the capacity to learn the advanced mathematics, physics and engineering required to become equal citizens in the interstellar community. We will sign an alliance with A in return for their help in advancing human (or national) knowledge. Otherwise we become a cargo cult or suffer as all indigenous people have from colonial contact.
If there are some resources that are valuable enough to extract from Earth we'd share them. We'd have to take the A's word that they need the resources and were not just putting on a show (like the original series of "V"). Probably the only reason to harvest resources on Earth is that they are here and it is convenient as opposed to mining the asteroid belt and Jupiter's moons.
## The War
Assume that inter-galactic war is affordable and prosecutable i.e. possible.
## Human Troops
Now why would human troops be useful to The A in a war? Again we'd have to take The A's word on this.
### What Intergalactic War Can't Have
* The war must not be fought with autonomous drones (AI or programmed) or robots.
* *Manpower* must matter on some level, so *boots on ground wins the peace* doctrine.
* Faster-than-Light travel is convenient, practical, fast and cheap.
* Faster-than-Travel communications is possible.
## Possible Reasons for Human Troops
### Population
The A and The B have small populations, which probably means they are long lived and slow reproducing. They may have vassal/ancillary forces that are more numerous to make up numbers. And for some reason drones and machines can't fill out the numbers.
### War on a massive distance/time scale
The war is so massive that it doesn't matter how many troops you have, you always need more. Time/Distance scale is endless. Technological advances make this tricky.
### Interstellar Civilisation is wide and anarchaic
Everybody is taking care of Number 1 and there is no or very weak centralised authority or organisation. So this is more of a recruiting drive for the British East India company than *The Few. The Proud. The Marines.* Most of the war would be skirmishing.
### The A or The B as Insurgents
A more modern take on this tale has either The A being an insurgency or responding to The B's insurgency. Rinse & repeat. Either way more troops are needed for suicide or policing.
### Evolution and Psychology
What if humans were among the rare "intelligent" species still capable of aggression against sentient species? What if the normal evolutionary path to civilisation meant warring civilisations normally annihilated themselves before first contact. The A may not be psychologically able to pull a trigger in organised warfare. This is the Humans Are Warriors trope.
[Answer]
Plenty of examples in our own history of countries making alliances with a stronger country against others just because they seemed to have the better hand. Look at WWII and after. Obviously we are getting something material from them in return but more importantly we know nothing about race B. The only things we would know is what comes from race A. If they portray race B as the biggest evil in the galaxy and themselves as the only good thing that stands between us and them, we would help race A. People have done that plenty of times. Even more if, true or not, they make it seems like they are winning the war and our help would end it faster. we would be on the winning side. Simply put we would be the flea that feels stronger just because its on the back of the bigger dog. What seems weird to me is why would they want our resources, specially petroleum, when they travel through space and have a whole galaxy to use...should be a red flag.
[Answer]
**On A Condition**
They could be easily putting up a scam to get free resources.
1.Ask them to give you the weapons before you give the resources. At least you could defend yourself. If these are made from earth materials and not dark matter(eg. a highly concentrated laser) get a team of advanced scientists to replicate it.
2. How many aliens do they have? Did the war just start or are they in the middle of one. If the latter, they may have been ambushed and a colony of a couple hundred thousand may have escaped on a pod, and they would have picked up our radio signals(real thing) and tried to locate the source.
Then it may be a responsible agreement, assuming Earth followed rule No 1.
[Answer]
# reality-check fails
* They came from another galaxy.
* They want our resources : water, food, minerals, natural gas, petroleum…
Earth is an insignificant spec compared to a galaxy of hundreds of billions of worlds. Even within our own solar system you can find more water on Jupiter’s moons.
We will be searching off-world for resources ourselves! Why would someone come here *for* them?
See [Can an interstellar war be remunerative from an economic point of view?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/32813/885), and [Resources to justify long-distance space mining missions](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15364/resources-to-justify-long-distance-space-mining-missions) among others already discussed here.
[Answer]
The thing people aren't considering in this is the hidden price. Race A isn't asking for just people and resources. It's asking for humanity to *add itself to Race B's shitlist*. The very fact they are asking for humanity's help shows that they are uncertain of victory, so without knowing anything about B, joining the war is madness.
The historical analogy here is of Aristagoras enlisting the Athenians in helping his revolt against the Persian Empire. A decision that almost ended in the total destruction of the Greeks.
[Answer]
No.
Why?
They want our resources and our people to fight. Meaning
* their technology isn't good enough to work without our resources. It might be better than ours, but not million years better if they are jumping worlds to gather more.
* their population numbers are low (probably because they have exhausted their resources).
[Answer]
It’s simple. Like mercenaries who ever gives us the most whether it be tech of any kind or specialized training and advancement of any kind will likely sway people. Whether people want to admit it or not we are a warring species. We are capable of great good in many ways, but when it comes down to it inherent in all of us is a primal notion of self preservation which transfers into war. Even if one is not taught violence when in confrontation great violence will occur.
We are as useful to the aliens needing soldiers as they are for our advancement. Like it or not humans are built for war. I think any alien species would recognize that even if the other species were advanced warriors themselves. If they did not wipe us out, we overcome, adapt, and conquer humans are extremely versatile and, within war, learn quickly. The A or B aliens it’s going to come down to intel and circumstances. We could go to wipe out B and realize A played us and then go on to destroy A after we have already been trained.
Who knows, that’s just my 2 cents.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/97310/edit).
Closed 6 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/97310/edit)
In my world there are several different times of magic, however divine magic is the most easily learned and post powerful and doesn't require energy from the magic user.
Other types of magic require anywhere from a couple years to a decade of training. And use it can drain your life energy resulting in you passing out or even dying if you use too much magic.
With this in mind what could prevent divine magic users from becoming a dominate force in society?
Technological level is early Renaissance.
[Answer]
**TL;DR -- Sometimes, some places, they will**
Here's the deal ... it's a big, wide world. In some societies, in some communities, the clergy *will* take over. In others, they won't, because there are factors which inhibit it. Here are some possible factors:
**It's ... against their religion ;D**
There are likely many religions out there, with different gods. These gods will have *different goals*. Might be ministering to the poor. Might be training warriors. Might be blessing the crops. Point being, clerics in this type of setting are *granted* their powers *as gifts* from their divinities. If the clerics go against their patron's interests/commands/style, they lose their power. So, in a community where the dominant religion is worship of a love goddess, the clergy is unlikely to strive for political dominance.
**There are multiple different religions**
There are likely many religions out there, with different gods. These gods will have *different goals*. Meaning that the clergies of different religions might well spend a lot of time and effort opposing one another (and proselytizing!), which leaves them less time for Taking Over.
**There are angry secularists with crossbows**
Like it says on the tin. There may be non-religious factions who also desire power, and are willing to fight for it. Their desire for power may be much stronger than the local clergy's, so much so that the clergy decides that fighting for dominance isn't worth it. After all, running the city is probably not their #1 priority anyway.
**They're too busy!**
The clergy may be too busy ministering/blessing/smiting-evil to bother with "mere" political power.
**All that said...**
In some country there might well be a God of Will-to-Power. His followers' mission **is** to seize control of their local city-state. I'd lay pretty good odds on them...
[Answer]
All divine magic comes from one single source, ***a benevolent human-friendly deity***, that objects to power hunt and violence. Every time a person uses the divine magic they come in touch with the Deity's consciousness, which overrides their own not so benevolent motives, if any.
In this world, it is possible for a person to try to use the divine magic with some not so honourable intentions. However, the spell will always end up doing something good. For example, if a magic user targets someone with a fire spell to kill them, this someone gets cured of their diseases instead. The user will not be punished, but they will be unable to inflict any harm. Moreover, as they use the divine magic, their personality changes to resemble the Deity's attitudes. So, all active practitioners of the divine magic eventually become 'good samaritans'.
This approach can work both with or without an organised religion. No organised religion might even work better with this kind of benevolent deity since churches tend to participate in power struggles.
[Answer]
The clerics can only use magical powers after they have paid the price, namely renunciation of all worldly goods and desires, much like existing religious orders. Except, IRL, we don't have magical enforcement of those vows. If the clerics in your world break their vows, they lose all their powers until they have done their penance,which takes years. Most people who would want that kind of power for their own ambitions decide it isn't worth it.
[Answer]
In our real world the Catholic Church rose to be a major dominant power and they didn't even have magic at all. You'll have to place some kind of restriction if you want to prevent them to being the rulers of your world - but, esentially that's what you're asking here for.
**Reduced numbers**
Clerical magic is the easiest to learn and the most powerful... but it requires faith. They are outnumbered by other magic users and/or even non-magical warriors. Divine magic users always wins against any of them, but not against three/four/twenty of them.
**Non-weaponizable magic**
Divine magic is the most powerful, but it's not suitable for combat. Maybe its powers take way too much time to cast - you need hours-long prayers - or maybe its effects are not easily used in battle - growing forests or freezing seas are tremendous displays of power, but its use in war is limited to logistics and movement. While this is a major advantage in war - you can get your army through impassable defenses while preventing your enemy to do the same - you still need an army to actually fight the battles, thus making sword-wielding soldiers a key player.
[Answer]
One answer is that the more experienced and skilled you become in divine magic (and the arcane world) , the more disillusioned and disinterested you become with wealth, power, fame or even physical pleasure (the profane world).
This leads the world to an equilibrium: The price of magic is the interest in the world.
So, you may have a super-rich magician - but her interest in wealth is cursory and incidental, and she has no attachment to it whatsoever...
[Answer]
Very little it would seem. The obvious thing to do would be to join the clergy. Get with the strength. Divine magic obviously has all over other forms of magic. Why fight the gods and the universe?
However, the OP hasn't specified how effective magic is in this fictional world. For example, if takes several hours to power up even a divine magic spell, then chaps with swords in their hoary hands can make quick work of uppity divine magicians. Also, they can act as protectors and guardians of divine magicians prepared to work collaboratively with the local authorities. The usual job lot of lords, earls, princes, kings and all the common or garden aristocratic riffraff. In this case or similar, divine magic users won't be ruling the roost they will be fellow travellers.
Of course, one of the problems with churches and religions generally is this tendency for people to form their own ideas of divine will and what's it all about, Alfred. For example, this Year of Our Lord 2017 marks the five hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Movement. Martin Luther and his thesis of complaints against Roman Catholicism. It might not be too much to expect that the various practitioners of divine magic and the religions they belong too will rapidly undergo their own schisms and doctrinal disagreements.
The various schools and churches of divine magic may in which case neutralize their others potential ascension to dominance because they are too busy fighting among themselves to establish hegemony over the world in general. Furthermore practitioners of those lesser and more dangerous forms of magic might be able to sabotage the divine magicians and they might be looked upon as a safer option for consultation and having magical work done by the population and by those charged with governance of the realm.
But to raise this issue to a higher level, or dare we say a Higher Level, perhaps the gods themselves might actually object to their divine powers being abused and misused by a venal clergy only interested in the acquisition of temporal power and glorifying themselves above ordinary mortals. The possibility of divine retribution might be more than sufficient to stay the hand of any divine magic user contemplating a dalliance with domination.
In summary, there three possible reasons why divine magic users don't dominate. Firstly, divine amgic itself might be effective enough to do the job. Secondly, the divine magic users might be fighting each other for dominance for them to achieve dominance over society. Thirdly, the gods might allow their divine magic to be used for domination and are prepared to punish those who do.
[Answer]
Individual power and political power are two separate things. The most powerful people would be the ones the clerics accept as legal authority. This could be a council of clerics or a supreme religious leader, but it doesn't need to be.
Traditionally Kings have ruled by the grace of Gods or with celestial mandate or due to being actually descended from Gods. In a world where divine magic works these all could be literally true. So a cleric who tried to use his divine magic against the King might have a serious problem. The King might even have access to more powerful divine magic than the clerics do.
Also it is fairly common for the political leader to have some ceremonial position in religious hierarchy. This would solve your issue nicely as if the King (or whatever) is the nominal head of all major religious organizations then he would have more divine magic at his disposal than any cleric.
Also this divine magic would be just another weapon. Its use and teaching would be limited to people who the powers that be give that right. If the King had the divine mandate, then divine power might simply be inaccessible to people not loyal to the King. If not the kingdom will have fewer clerics than it might and the Holy Inquisition will have heretics to root out.
[Answer]
## Divine Magic could require a time commitment
Lots of good answers but another one is that Divine Magic TM could require a lot of time, energy, or resources (gifts) to the divine. First this would limit the number of people with that power and not everyone would be willing to put the time in. Second it means that the people with the greatest Divine Magic would not have a lot of spare time to do things like actually be in charge.
("I will now rule you all ... except, wait a minute, I have to spend 7 hours a day communing with my divine to get a better understanding of it and I will be off on a pilgrimage for the next two years")
This answer could stack with other answers.
[Answer]
Sooo many options ...
1. The clerics dont want to rule.
Whether dedicating their lives to a very specific cause, or believing it is not their place to rule, there are many possible explanations.
2. Some clerics want to rule but other clerics dont want them to.
Regardless of the gods they pray to, they still may have different convictions.
3. The clerics want to rule but something else denies them.
And again, there are many different possibilities.
Clerics actions may have been so harmful, that the rest of the world has implemented a purge of anything holy at any cost.
Clerics may generally be well received but still face some adversary, from a secret cult poisoning any power hungry cleric, to demons being lured in by the residual holy magic, to some ancient dragon god taking offense in worshipping youngsters.
4. Clerics do not have the power to rule due to some unavoidable limitation balancing the advantages.
Any number of restrictions could be in effect: time (opportunity, duration), place, competition (gods powers divided between clerics), tasks (demanded by their god), ...
[Answer]
Is this for a game or a story?
In a game, you want to have balance in everything, so there needs to be a downside to clerical magic. Typical downsides of clerical magic that I know from fantasy books, roleplaying games or LARP:
1. it is unreliable - sometimes your god grants your wish, sometimes not
2. it is only available to true believers (and not every priest or religious person is a **true** believer)
3. it only works in holy places, or it doesn't work in unholy places. This gives the GM or author an option to "disable" clerical magic in cases where the characters should solve a problem without.
4. it takes more time to cast a spell. While an arcane wizard mutters a command phrase and can cast a spell in a second, a clerical priest recites a litany and can take ten times or more as much for spellcasting. This gives arcane magic the edge in battle, and clerical magic the edge in most other cases.
[Answer]
I think “most powerful” is too vague a term. If divine magic is the most powerful in everything, I see no other way than reducing the users, as @Rekesoft already suggested. But looking at the real world we observe members of various cults don’t take kindly to your following any cult but theirs.
I therefore propose a number of rivalising gods, each forbidding or discouraging the worship of others and granting powers in specific fields only. Any of these cults will have to ally to secular powers and secular magicians for access to a broader spectrum of magic. Assuming secular magic has a broader field of application. This kind of factionalism can help you build a complex and interesting web of interaction, perhaps with a twist due to an unexpected alliance?
[Answer]
The answer to your question can be found within the "real" world as it actually is. In reality, there are other forms of magic, but divine magic is the easiest and the most powerful. So why is it that clerics don't rule the earth like petty tyrants?
They don't because divine magic doesn't work that way.
Divine magic (in the real world) draws its power from love. To love something is to accept and appreciate it. One cannot seek to dominate and control something, and accept and appreciate it at the same time. The closer one comes to being able to use divine magic to dominate something, the less one desires this outcome. So, the more powerful divine magic becomes, the less able the practitioner is to assert dominance and control over the beloved object.
In an imaginary world where ego-centric desires could co-exist with divine magic, there would be, truly, no way to keep clerics from becoming ruthless tyrants. But in the real world, divine magic automatically incorporates a kind of supernatural internal governor that makes empire-building impossible. You cannot truly love a thing and bring it to heel. Sorry, dog trainers!
] |
[Question]
[
In this Earth-like world, gunpowder was invented just recently. After a secret lab exploded while trying to create a bigger bomb, an apparently very angry titan suddenly rose from the rubble. Luckily, he (or she) has no legs (that we can see) and never tries to walk anywhere. He (or she) has been content just sitting there wailing and spewing lava constantly for the last 5 years.
Last month, however, he suddenly changed tactics. He somehow molded lava into big, very dense rocks and threw them all over the world. His throw could easily destroy a town a continent away. Yes, his throwing skill is very awesome.
Maybe some heroes, or some armies, one day could vanquish him (or it). Today, however, we civilians only want to survive. How would we adapt to living with this monstrosity? Not all of us could move to a far, far away continent.
Info: the titan is a little smaller than Mount Fuji. The technology level is about the same with Earth when we first invented bomb.
**Edit**:
By titan, I mean a huge rock giant, spewing lava through his mouth. By molding, I mean he spit lava to his hands (yes, disgusting) and somehow make it dense, then throw at anything that move, or if no target in sight, just aim randomly. His throw rate is about 1.5 a day, a bit slow, but he is huge, and the rock is really big.
In the 5 years that he was crying, the whole area around him was destroyed. All people dead. The further ones count themselves lucky. The current state of the area around the mountain is similar to Mordor.
[Answer]
**Move outside the Titan's visual range.**
If the Titan has eyes on the top of his body, and we assume that is 12,000 feet (just below the height of Mount Fuji), [he could only see about 134 miles or 215 km](http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm) (with some variation for geography).
Even in a low-technology era, it should be easy for people to migrate out of the Titan's sight.
I suspect the Titan would be far less interested in throwing rocks when he couldn't see any targets.
But let's suppose he continues:
**Live with the risk of dying from random rocks.**
The Titan can throw rocks "all over the world". Let's assume that he distributes them randomly.
Let's assume that he can destroy an area of four square miles / 10 square km with each rock.
How often can he throw them? Making a super dense, huge lava rock seems difficult, as does throwing it thousands of miles. But let's assume it's little more than making a snowball to him, and he can throw one once a minute, 24 hours a day.
With these very generous assumptions, and if he never hits the same spot twice, this would enable him to destroy 1% of the earth's surface every year. (He would, however, have to hit the same place again sometimes, otherwise people could just move into the areas he had already hit. So he would be able to target slightly less area than that).
This is a non-trivial risk, but it is not a level of risk that would destroy humanity. Titan rock lobs wouldn't even be the biggest cause of death in a pre-modern context.
(This also assumes an unending supply of lava. I suppose it is possible that he is fed by underground magma that never stops flowing, but it seems more likely that he will run out, or at least have to slow the rate of throwing, eventually).
[Answer]
Titans are gods, and gods can be placated with sacrifice.
So instead of getting your steaks from the supermarket we all head down to the local abattoir, and honour the gods properly. You get your steak and along with it you get some bones and fat (please remember to pay the priest on the way out) In front of the abattoir there is the fire pit for burning the fat and bones. Try to fold the fat around the bone so it burns well. Remember to grovel a bit (gods like a bit of "I'm not worthy") and remind the titan that there are lots of other places to throw stones, like the next city just over there.
Or, if you are feeling bolder, you could direct your prayers at one of the Olympians. They have form in dealing with this kind of thing.
[Answer]
Some ideas :
1. Abandon cities, live far away from each other : if one of this rocks just fall, then it'll kill less people, and thus will reduce the risk of being killed by that Titan
2. Build your cities on the flank of some mountains. Your titan can't move, thus there are some locations on earth that he can't reach with his rock I guess. Should you place
a mountain between you and your city, the rock it throws would just crash on that mountain, probably causing some damages, but not destroying whole cities.
3. Build underground towns. It would be quite hard I admit, but living in caves is still better than being crushed by giant rocks. Your society would look like what dwarves are
in most fantasy games, living underground, and just like in point 2 to survive they could just create farms behind mountains, to protect their food supply from being destroyed by
big rocks.
4. If your giant can't move perhaps he can't turn too ? In such case you could just build cities behind him, and by that I mean outside its 180° arc of vision.
5. Become nomadic, if you constantly moves then the chances the titan will hit something is tiny, he will just never be able to aim at something moving, even slowly.
Unfortunately with such a low technology level there are not many ideas. On the other end, if your universe is a bit steam-punk like, there could be plenty other possibilities.
[Answer]
I have been thinking about this and if the Titan actually aims and throws accurately and is actually hopefully quite dumb.
Then all all we need to do is hide behind a mountain. Provided he can't throw it linearly so that it goes across the world and hits us from behind
A: his only offense is rocks, with an obstacle in the way. What will happen then is that in his attempt to kill you, he will continuously lob giant rocks at you. Fortunately for you, this rocks are gonna pile up becoming a shield that grows bigger and bigger over time.
B: Operation Typhon. Provided your fine losing a large amount of lives for the sake of humanity. Start building the biggest stone wall that encloses the Titan inside[Since the Great Wall of china was built back then, I'm sure we can build this right?]. Even if he lobs rocks at you, it only serves to build the wall higher. As the wall gets higher, he will either keep lobbing rocks at the wall or lob rocks high up to land on the wall, this means the amount of space between him and wall gets smaller and smaller. In this sense, we are building him a pseudo volcano that chucks rocks instead of lava. One day when humanity builds a mountain 3,500 m tall or higher, the Titan has nowhere to chuck rocks and can only throw them up. Resulting in his own rocks dropping on him and burying him underneath. From then on, the legend of the Titan under the mountain of man was passed on as a legendary feat of humanity.
C: Project Poseidon. Build a man made canal from the sea that extends to the Titan, cooling down the lava and depriving him of his rocks. Tho this might be a lil difficult if his rocks actually block the canal. Now considering that he his somehow spewing magma, this should mean that either he sits on converging continental and oceanic plates unless his in the middle of somewhere or under the sea. Which in theory means his relatively close to the sea. Hopefully... But this method is highly unreccomended.
[Answer]
You haven't mentioned whether the titan is aiming his rocks or just throwing them randomly.
If it's random, the odds of hitting a town would be tiny. The most important change would be to stay away from coastal areas or build high dykes against the risk of a big splash wave.
If the titan is aiming at humans and their buildings, it might be possible to build wooden decoys and/or ride around bearing torches to keep it occupied, especially if the rate of making and throwing boulders is low. A lot of that depends on how acute the titan's vision is and how smart it is. If it learns quickly not to waste rocks on decoys, there will be little choice except to hide behind other mountains, out of view of the titan. Even that may not work for long if it figures out where the humans probably went and starts lobbing the rocks with a high arc, hitting the backs of the mountains.
[Answer]
**Divert the lava**
The titan's source of power is the lava coming from underground. If this has been flowing for 5 years, either the original explosion happened high on a mountain, or the titan is lifting himself up as the lava builds up around him.
Either way, digging into the mountainside and diverting the lava through a lower man-made side vent will rob the titan of ammunition.
This digging is dangerous, and once the digging team breaks into the main conduit, there will definitely be casualties. Perhaps these offered in sacrifice will be enough to appease the titan back to sleep.
[Answer]
Assuming when you say:
>
> when we first invented bomb.
>
>
>
you mean explosives (China and its fireworks :P), that would put the era you describe somewhere after the 10th century.
Religion played a huge part of peoples lives at that time, so, most would assume it's Judgement day and either despair or repent.
Some might take up satanism assuming that the titan is satan and requires sacrifices and maybe even inform him of where to aim or take it upon themselves to kill people in cities assuming its what the titan wants.
I think people would not be very organised and successful till the titan gives up it's rant and perhaps falls back into dormancy.
I also think people would learn to figure out or detect the titan's toss by either hearing or some kind of communication network (fireworks or smoke signals). They might live on cliff off hangs with ropes so housing and people could have a chance of surviving the impact.
In terms of lifestyle they may be like the native americans. Lifestyle based on spirituality.
With other less adaptive animals dying off I would think they would take to surviving off of the sea.
Seaweed and fish.
Monkeys might become the main animal to walk the land as I would think they are the next most adaptable species in the world.
[Answer]
Trick the giant into throwing one rock into an orbit
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Newton_Cannon.svg)
around earth so that he would hit himself.
] |
[Question]
[
These dragons are as big as double decker with wing span approaching 20m measuring from tip to tip, they migrate in large numbers and fly at an altitude between 10,000m to 20,000m above sea level. They are covered in special kind of mucus that prevents moisture and ice to form, the heat from the sun as well as it is less cloudy at such height keeps them dry during flight. I like to know how do they prevent being blinded by sunlight directly overhead as well as reflection from large body of water below? They tends to be very social and adopt a V formation in the sky to help those dragons with weak muscle, hence it is important for them to pay attention to every audio and visual cues at all times for safety.
[Answer]
**Don't worry about it.**
What you describe is the cruising height of a passenger airliner. If you have ever looked out the window of such a plane you will know the light is often bright but not blindingly so.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gJEz3.jpg)
Perhaps it would hurt the human eyes if exposed for too long. But humans are designed to live on the ground and not the sky.
It is entirely believable that an animal designed to live in the sky is better adapted to bright light. In fact such an animal exists. Check out these guys:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U5job.jpg)
It's called a goose! They fly almost as high as your proposed dragon. They even fly in a V-formation like you said. And after all that flying they can still see! Wowsers!
The dragons should be fine, without further explanation, unless they look directly at the sun. Even then they might be fine. That is, of course, if sunlight counts as fire damage. Someone once told me dragons are immune to fire damage. . . .
[Answer]
Let us see how other animals protect their eyes from sun.
* Meerkats have **dark rings** to reduce the glare of the bright desert
sun.
* Camels' **lashes** angle downward, to protect from desert sand and sun.
* Camels have an **extra protective eyelid** that acts as a nictitating
membrane.
* Polar bears have **nictitating membrane** to prevent snow blindness and
filter UV light.
Your dragon can use more than one of these methods.
[Answer]
**Several possible solutions**
First, it may be that their perception of light is different from ours, so that bright light doesn't blind them. They could for instance have different light receptors for different degrees of brightness, the way we have for different colors. The low-light and medium-light receptors would then still work in bright light, because they don't register bright light and hence can't be blinded by it. Or there may simply be a cut-off brightness where additional brightness doesn't register.
Second, they could have double eyelids, where a semi-transparent inner lid reflexively closes when they look towards bright light - sort of like putting sunglasses on. Many Earth animals have double eyelids for this or other purposes. Heavy eyelashes could have a similar function.
Third, their eyes could be polarized, so that light coming from above or below doesn't filter very well through, while light coming from the front or the sides gets through unobstructed.
[Answer]
I think they just close their eyes during the day.
They would definitely have other senses they depend upon at that height. What would their sight even be doing? They're flying over most of the clouds at that point, right? They'd need extremely specialized eyes to be able to see much at those altitudes, and that level of specialization would be disadvantageous while on land.
So what are their other senses? To get up that high safely in the first place, they would need sensitivity to barometric pressures. While in the air, they would use that to notice and dodge storms. To keep themselves flying in a line, they would probably have some level of magnetism, letting them know where they are in terms of distance from the poles. You mention they are social, so they need to be able to 'talk' to one another, meaning that sound is important. This would also help in avoiding storms if it was low level sound.
So, once they feel themselves hitting the right altitudes, they close their eyes and fly by their internal compass. The group sounds out to one another in order to keep themselves on track, to warn of any needed corrections, and to check in on weaker individuals. Prompted by communication, they would open their eyes for short spans if they needed to switch up positions in the formation or if they were ready to go down to lower altitudes.
If you want them to be flying for long journeys, they might open their eyes at night and actually navigate by the stars, or at least, use them to course correct.
[Answer]
(frame challenge)
## Dragon wings are too small to fly over 10000 meters
The *record* *altitude* birds can reach: vulture, crane, swan.. they reach 11300, 10000 and 8800 meters, respectively. Common for large birds like Condor is an altitude of 5000-7000 meters. Condors have a giant wing span compared to their weight, your 20m dragon does not. So a dragon will fly lower than a Condor.
The reason for this: animals have flapping wings. Low air resistance cannot provide enough lift, at high altitudes. The altitude you would like your dragon to fly is commercial air traffic, which also has a relatively small wingspan.. but they have jet propulsion!
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_by_flight_heights>
Actually, the "flying" of dragons is often disputed here: [square cube law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law) dictates a large (and thus very heavy) animal needs more than proportional wingspan. Looking at most images of dragons, their wings are much too small. A double decker wing span won't do.
] |
[Question]
[
Against the backdrop of man-driven deforestation pushing some species to extinction, my world needs a viable basis for the survival and thriving of tigers after an apocalypse. It would seem counter-intuitive given large predators are often the most vulnerable due to large territory needs and a slow reproductive cycle (making it more difficult to pass on the genes for a better chance at desirable adaptations).
In our version of Earth, poaching and deforestation appear to be serious challenges to the survival of the tiger species. However, the thriving of the tigers cannot come at the expense of killing off all humans.
So, instead of all of humanity suddenly died from a lethal human-only virus, or nanobot gray ooze, I want to maximize the amount of humans in this world so that the emphasis is on what needs to happen to tigers to survive in urban environments indefinitely.
**The immutable constants:**
* No forests left (all of earth's land is a metropolis)
* Tigers have to survive
* Many humans still exist
**Basic world summary:**
* Concentration of human populations (size of societies): sparse
* Level of technology (must assume there was once modern civilization):
answer configurable
* Some level of plant life (can assume there is some plant-life to keep
ecosystem going, but don't think giant forests)
I can accept that there are no givens, but I definitely need to maximize the tiger's chances in a post-deforestation world. This means I'll need an evolutionary narrative, including but not limited to: new adaptations, new hunting strategies and other behavioral modifications.
## Question
What evolutionary narrative would satisfy the stated requirement of having tigers survive indefinitely in a post-deforestation world?
[Answer]
If all the world is a metropolis but human population is scarce, it means part of this world is not inhabited by humans.
We have seen that, when human presence fades, nature is quick to take over. Just look at Chernobyl and Pripyat. Even the COVID lockdown was sufficient to allow sight like dolphins in Venice or wolves and deers roaming through mountain villages or even cities.
So many areas of this world of yours are actually ruins with vegetation creeping through remains of buildings, which is an ideal habitat for a predator like a tiger. Imagine how convenient it is for a hunter to be able to wait on a raised floor, something like a balcony, that an herbivore passes below it. Top it with easily available shelters.
[Answer]
## Urban Parks
In the Indian city of Mumbai there is an urban park/green space that supports a small population of leopards. I believe their chief 'prey' are the local feral dog population.
I suppose the same thing could occur with tigers but it would need to be a much, much larger green space to be viable and some larger kind of animal (feral cows/sheep?)would be required as a prey species. Still a pretty bleak future to contemplate though.
[Answer]
## Adapt Or Die:
To make this work, your tigers need a long period of messiness where they can evolve new traits that allow them to survive in an urban environment. Then, they need to have a new survival strategy that allows them to thrive in an environment filled with quirky, highly intelligent hominids. So you need to figure out how they will need to change and what environments would provide them a niche to live in.
* **Domestication**: You might not want this idea, but reasonably if tigers are living amongst humans, it's because humans find them useful. The most likely scenario is that tigers are domesticated and trained to carry out security duties like really big, powerful guard dogs. They might also be used for hunting recreationally or eliminating some kind of high-end pest (like giant Sumatran rats).
* **Population control**: The number of humans are so overwhelming (and given an altered climate, "too many" people may be a lot less than you think) that they work to kill as many other humans as possible to reduce competition or as some kind of strange environmental ethic. If people have an ethic against killing other humans, this may provide a perverse way to reduce population. So people allow tigers to roam free, killing and eating humans of rival tribes or communities, or simply letting them kill whomever they please. The rich and powerful support this while building tiger-proof compounds. The poor are eaten, and when they complain or try to stop the tigers, they are arrested.
* **Religious reasons**: Humans nearly wiped out large predators, but now those that survived are considered sacred. Like cows in India, the tigers are fed and pampered. If a tiger should maul or kill you, or eat your livestock, it's considered a blessing or favorable sign for your family. There may even be elaborate ceremonies where people try to pet or get close to the tigers - imagine if no one is considered a man until they've vaulted over a tiger and not gotten killed. Really problematic tigers might get taken out by priest-hunters, but they are otherwise left unmolested.
* **Mimicry**: If you have domestic tigers, then perhaps wild tigers ACT like trained tiger around humans, behaving like they are following someone's orders. Then, they are able to live amongst humans while still being wild. They would scavenge, hunt livestock and rats, but likely avoid eating actual humans. While this SOUNDS more like intelligent behavior, a species can certainly adapt with enough time to have some quite complex behaviors (especially if the wild tigers are descended/interbred with the domestic ones).
* **New lifestyles**: If tigers get smaller, have some kind of adaptive appearance, live nocturnal lives, are very quiet, and very careful how they interact with people (if ever), then they will look increasingly like other species that get along with humans (like coyotes). It's tough being big, aggressive and powerful around the apex primates.
* **Get Smart**: If tigers are significantly smarter than they are now, then the options expand. They may even be able to achieve a more symbiotic or community-based relationship with humans. If once humans meddled with tiger DNA to make smarter tigers, you might not need millions of years of evolution to justify this.
[Answer]
## **Not sure how feasable it is with how humans work**
So, I tried really, really hard to think of a way to make this work. One thing is that a highly confined, "urban jungle" environment could create enough complex three-dimensional space for tigers to be able to hunt. The only problem is this would only work in an environment where the cities are mostly depopulated in some fashion. If I'm reading your question right you want a highly populated world covered in metropolises *and* has tigers still running around in some fashion.
This relates to a broader ecological problem: **large predators and humans are really just not compatible in close proximity and large numbers**. The way human beings function as a species is we often, deliberately or not, wipe out all of the large apex predators near our dwellings and territory. The reason for this is simple: humans are very bad at melee combat, our offspring and livestock are very vulnerable, and we function best when we can plan ahead or attack predators from range. Keeping a very large space between us and any potential predators is a good idea.
**Humans just plain don't tolerate living around apex predators well.** Even though apex predators will generally avoid humans as "not worth it", some individuals will end up becoming man-eaters or livestock predators by sheer chance, and humans will end up hunting them down. Over long enough time frames the low reproductive rates of most large carnivores will result in them being whittled down to extinction. This, incidentally, is why we probably don't have saber-tooths anymore.
Even with modern apex predators that live somewhat near humans (e.g., tigers in Siberia, wolves and bears in Yellowstone, lions in Kenya), the modern predators mostly survive because the area isn't very densely populated and they can easily get away from human activity or spend most of their lives not coming into conflict with humans. As human density increases human-wildlife conflicts increases as well. You can see this in historical time how bears and wolves are driven to extinction across much of Europe, and lions are driven to extinction in Greece roughly correlating with the expansion of larger cities (and with lions disappearing first from highly populated regions like the Peloponnese and only later disappearing from more remote regions with more wild spaces like Macedonia and western Thrace).
**The other issue you face is** ***what do your tigers eat***. The whole reason why tigers became heavily persecuted in India and much of Asia in general was that deer, gaur, and pig populations were overhunted, causing a drop in available food, which caused tigers to experiment with new food sources to survive: i.e., humans and their livestock. The general lack of available prey for tigers *other* than livestock and people due to local hunting for game is an issue for many conservationists trying to preserve the species in the wild. **In a complex, urban environment with high population densities and little wilderness, the most common prey is going to be *humans*, and a tiger will be forced to eat humans (or, more charitably, their livestock) to survive. Unlike bears, tigers can't survive off of food rubbish from humans (due to being obligate carnivores). This will cause the tigers to frequently come into conflict with humans, and the humans will band together, hunt the tigers down, and drive them to extinction.**
[Answer]
**Tiger King to the Rescue**
it basically boils down to this:
**There are More Tigers in Captivity Than in the Wild** [source](https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/13/us/tigers-captive-us-wild-trnd/index.html)
Some in zoos, but most in private ownership or roadside attractions, so even if every inch of their habitat on earth vanished tomorrow thousands of tigers would survive. Their numbers in captivity may even increase, as people attempt to "save" the species in a more coherent big-science/government way. As you have lots of human survivors in your setting, you presumably have an Apocalypse Event that moves specifically/slowly enough for people to react to it. Some people make... bad decisions in such cases. The Book *Dies the Fire* by S.M. Sterling (part of his Emberverse series) populates the US with tigers and lions based on their owners/zookeepers simply "throwing open the doors" when the apocalypse comes. The human population goes through a sharp decline due to famine/general shenanigans. The Big Cat population goes through a boom, as the cats prey on humans during the period of chaos directly surrounding the apocalypse. After a few years the Tiger population stabilizes as humans get more wary and the Tigers learn to hunt things like wild boar (which can get huge in the US) as well as other wild animals.
This could easily be your situation, especially if you can get things like wild pigs/boar to exist in your ruined metropolises. The tigers hunt those, and do a sideline in man eating. The lower the tech-level the better in these conditions though. A society that still has automatic rifles may well kill off all the tigers/reduce them below sustainment level during the apocalypse. Or get together and go "look its us or them lets exterminate all large predators" and be able to actually do it post-apocalypse. However if firearms are rare/nonexistent it'll be pretty hard to totally eradicate them. Not impossible, but with enough other existential threats Big Cats that only occasionally catch the unwary may not be worth your civilization's time.
I should point out that "more tigers exist in captivate than in the wild" only takes into account the 5,000-odd in the US. Many of whom are in large groups which would make procreation easy in terms of finding a mate. But if you're looking to have a tiger population in Mumbai or London or Sydney it would work less-well. At the very least, there's no firm numbers on if there's enough that releasing them would lead to the same results. But if you want a US-based post-apocalypse there's plenty of room for Big Cats.
[Answer]
Frame challenge warning...
### No forests left - not realistic long-term
Plants are *ridiculously* good at self-seeding, and can make a home in places where it seems improbable that they'd get enough water or nutrients. In all English cities, you will regularly see self-seeded buddleias growing out of the side of the brickwork of railway bridges. In Detroit in the early 2000s, the centre was so deserted that there were substantial trees growing out of ruined shops, houses and parking lots. And some plants (Japanese knotweed, for example) are notorious for being almost impossible to kill. Roots can spread and thrive almost indefinitely underground, and then burrow to the surface at random intervals.
Unless humanity has literally poisoned every inch of soil, there will still be plant life around. So when $APOCALYPTIC\_EVENT occurs, that plant life will slowly but surely regrow. The previous year's plants will form humus to grow the next year's plants, everything blows around, and sooner or later it all spreads out. Meantime the paved surfaces crack without maintenance, providing more footholds for the plants and access to the soil below.
Exactly what form your new green environment takes will depend on what plants manage to self-propagate. They may not be originally-native species (think buddleia or kudzu), but *something* will grow and thrive.
### "urban environments" - not long-term
All urban environments, without exception, only stay urban through continuous maintenance. After $APOCALYPTIC\_EVENT with a sparse human population, that maintenance will only happen where people are living and where people have the time, resources and inclination to carry out maintenance. It may temporarily be an urban environment, for a few decades, but it won't take long to become another Chichen Itza or Angkor Wat. You wouldn't describe either of those ruins as "urban" at the time they were discovered.
### Tigers surviving - questionable
With the destruction of their habitats pre-$APOCALYPYTIC\_EVENT, all animals (even down to domesticated species) could only survive either as pets or in zoos. All large domesticated (or domesticatable) herbivores need land which excludes anyone keeping them as pets. And any other animals large enough to pose an immediate threat to humans even when only playing are not suitable as pets. Dogs, cats, miniature horses, maybe sheep and goats - OK. Tigers - nope.
So we're looking at zoos as a route to survival post-$APOCALYPYTIC\_EVENT. Most zoos do not have enough of any species to ensure proper genetic diversity solely from the population within the zoo. This doesn't mean tigers can't survive, but it reduces their chances because they'll be stuck with genetic predispositions to certain problems.
On the other hand, prey probably isn't a problem. There will be escaped prey animals from the zoos too, as well as feral populations of pet animals. (And sparse collections of humans.) And of course insects and birds, which aren't going away.
Since plants will exist (see above), a food chain will re-establish itself. Populations may well spike and crash depending on the availability of food, but that's how nature works.
### Change of habits - not required
Predators simply need to be able to sneak up on prey. It doesn't matter whether that's sneaking up around a rock, a tree or a wall. They're *already* equipped to survive in a hostile environment, because that's what nature is.
[Answer]
Your tiger need to eat meat other than humans -> unless they learn to use the street protein dispensers, they need prey species that are roughly in a similar size than they eat now (or more caloric). They would starve eating rabbits or rats, and might not be able to fit in the ranging areas of the rodents.
=> Keep the vegetation in check with sparse humans: This assumes a significant portion of the megacity that is covered with a roof that is turned into a garden, or a significant portion of the roofs are accessible by tigers and their prey.
-> Automated gardening. The humans have set loose a bunch of robots that garden the roofs of the megacity and keep vegetation from being higher than a certain height on top of the megacity. The original planning included keeping herds of grazers to minimize the grass cutting energy expenditure and get some "free" organic fertilizer. (Where does the oxygen come from in your setting?)
=> Infinite roaming tigers:
* Some the tigers evolved stripes that make them look invisible or look like grazers to the robot-gardeners recognizers, so the robot herders ignore the tigers or mistake them for grazers and keep them in the herds
* The programming of some robots has degraded and some robots keep the original plan of an infinite maze of French gardens, some others only kept a part of the programming and have a savannah going on in their assigned area (used by tigers as homegrounds while they hunt in the other well kept areas) The no vegetation higher than 2 meters directive is hardcoded in the robots or a different set of robot that do the tree-trimming regularly)
* The robots were never programmed with regards to tigers (an oversight from the humans as there were no wilds left so no need to program against that)
The humans have stopped visiting the roof gardens so there are no or less collision between the tigers and the humans.
* The tigers that attacked humans were all eliminated at the first offence so only the skittish ones survived.
(You need to add a constraint on your tiger population size otherwise they eat all the preys and die out as well or start attacking the olny proteins left: your humans)
[Answer]
A predator the size of modern tiger is simply not going to survive in an urban environment.
However, you could have a species of tiger that went through a period of insular dwarfism, and significantly reduced their maximum size. So perhaps the size of a mountain lion, or even a large bobcat.
A tiger the size of a mountain lion, would still need larger prey, like large pets, or livestock (or deer, if there are large parks). This size will be on the outskirt or suburb areas of the urban areas.
A smaller tiger may be able to primarily target the rats that will always exist in urban environments. If the rats have developed into larger sizes, then the smaller tiger's size can be correspondingly larger.
[Answer]
Humans can build thousands of massive vertical green houses to preserve forests and maintain wild-life. You would need something like a wildlife loving religion to spread throughout humanity, in order to muster the will to expend the resources required.
Better would be for humans to urbanize the oceans, where there's more room to spread out, leaving the land masses mostly alone. Oceans cover twice as much area as land, but you wouldn't be able to cover it all, without collapsing that ecosystem. Your cities would have to be thousands of kilometers from any land masses, to leave the coastal areas as unaffected as possible, and you'd probably only be able to safely cover less than a third of the remaining ocean surface, but it would still be orders of magnitude more urban area than we cover today.
] |
[Question]
[
In my fantasy novel, I have elves. Unlike most elves, these do not use magic. The architecture of elves is usually depicted as trees that have been flowingly shaped into houses and graceful structures. Without magic, this is not the case. Also, my elves are significantly weaker than humans, and as such, are not the greatest at stone quarries.
At the same time, these are elves, and as such, they appreciate nature and would rather not chop it down to make houses. Because of that, 'tree-forming' and lumber production are not options, and stone is limited. What can my elves use to build their villages and cities?
EDIT: I've marked the answer by Will Martin as I think it supplied the most options, but all of the answers here gave me great ideas, and I think the answer to my specific issue is a combonation. I think sod houses would be a good place to start. (Where they get them from can later be turned into farm land. Yes, my elves farm.) Clay/Mud bricks can be used on the interior and exterior to add waterproofing (nothing saying the elves can't burn dead wood in a furnace to speed the process up).
Pleaching of tree branches into the walls could help with support, though in the long term it could create some problems as the trees naturally expand into the house. Alternatively, bamboo could be used, or some other plant that expands exclusively upwards. Eventually, the sod would wash away, leaving bricks with flora growing on them for a very Elven feel. All that would be seen would be a mound of grass. Animal hides could be used as doors, to separate rooms, and as blankets. Additionally, large animal bones could be used to support the walls.
[Answer]
If they are in a stereotypical elven forest but do not want to kill/shape trees, have them work exclusively with naturally fallen wood. Collect natural deadfalls and bind them together, then cover them with some kind of sealant. Think wattle and daub. This would also suggest some neat cultural stuff -- any time there's a windstorm, everyone goes out the next day looking for freshly fallen branches and trees so they can repair their houses. A good marriage gift would be enough loose branches to get a start on a house for the new couple. And so on.
If they are in a dry climate, adobe houses are dead simple to make out of mud bricks baked in the sun.
If they are in the plains, they could build houses out of straw. Specifically, tightly bound straw bales stacked and/or shaped in the wall shape, then covered with a good, thick layer of some kind of shell material: plaster, stucco, concrete if they have it. A properly built straw-bale structure can last quite a while, and provides surprisingly good insulation.
If they are in a cold, barren climate, look for peat bogs. The peat can be cut into essentially bricks and used to make walls.
Pretty much anywhere with large amounts of small, loose stones you can make a clochán, or similar, by simply collecting a bunch of loose stone and carefully wedging them together.
For other non-quarry type stone buildings, look to the Inca -- most of their stonework was done without mortar, and a lot of it used quite small stones such as might be had without quarrying.
[Answer]
Settlers of the North American Great Plains had a similar quandary. Open grassland isn't exactly known for a plethora of quarries or forests. To deal with this, they constructed [houses out of sod](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sod_house) by cutting and stacking sections of the local turf. However, such constructions were hard to maintain, especially during rain.
Further back, countless cultures relied on sun-baked mud. This material is commonly referred to as [adobe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe) and has been used the world over.
---
In response to the OP's comment regarding a rainier environment, I did some digging and came across [a fantastic resource](http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/good_wood/nont_bld.htm) for construction materials. For a tropical region with bogs, gley can be used to seal walls, or create the walls. Hollowed logs or tree stumps can be turned into houses. Materials such as lime, reeds, wood, or concrete could be used to stabilize a sod house. See the linked site for a more complete list.
[Answer]
Actually some pretty impressive things can be done in the tree shaping field without any magic. It wouldn't be beyond a group with enough patience, and forethought, to make the basis of a village from planting and shaping and maintaining trees.
There are always dead-falls and branches to be had, the leaves, or needles, and other detritus from the ground could be used to form bricks, or stiffen other mud/clay projects.
If something like reed or bamboo is available you have a very versatile grass to make lots of stuff from. Keeping the debris on the forest floor all tidy will also reduce wildfires.
[Answer]
I think this is a question I would have to answer with another: what options are there? You want these elves to not ravage the land, so where can they get renewable building materials from?
Strength isn't an option, and therefore no stone quarries. Stone isn't exactly a building material I would associate with elves, so it's no major loss. So let's look at other options.
Digging a hole in the earth, then using that earth as a base material for blocks (mud blocks, or clay if it's rich in that). This offers an 'at one with our environment' look and feel, but is susceptible to heavy rainfall (because their homes would be below groundlevel and therefore flood easily).
Hunting for food, and using the animal pelts to make teepees, like Native Americans. This also has drawbacks, given they are heavy and therefore difficult to continuously travel with. Also, it doesn't mean the homes are going to be livable year round, depending on the climate. Add to that that teepees are notorious for still being wet inside from rainfall (you can't completely waterproof it, either because you lack the knowhow to properly treat the material, or because you cannot make the entire teepee construction waterproof, i.e. hole in the top, sides, or where the pelts meet). And the negates the need for another structure to attach the pelts to (most commonly sicks/branches were used).
Caves are also an option, but this has its own drawbacks. First off is the implications of it. 'Cave-dweller' isn't a compliment in most societies, last I checked. Though that might well be the look and/or feel you want. Another option is 'living caves' like in China (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaodong>), but this also has it's aesthetic implications for the elves.
Another option, which is pretty common in some circles (old construction stories here in the Caribbean) is using small rocks, sand, and a 'glue' to keep it together. Think limestone, or something of that nature. This doesn't give you the most 'stable' building, but it's one that will keep you dry and warm (almost too warm in the summer months).
The thing is, you need to know what is around. What climate do these dwellings need to protect the elves from? And most importantly, what does that say about your elves?
Hope this helps.
[Answer]
A couple ideas come to mind:
* Earthen houses similar to the Native American Wigwam
* Cave dwellings
* Tents made from animal fibers or skins like a Yurt or Teepee
* Hollow tree trunks
[Answer]
Trees don't need magic to grow -- you can just [weave living trees together](http://inhabitat.com/grow-your-own-treehouse/) and make a house from that. Takes a while to wait until the house is grown enough to actually inhabit, but elves are supposed to live longer than humans anyway. And if the parents start growing their kid's house at their birth, they'll surely be ready to move in when they're twenty :)
[Answer]
Hmmmmm.....
Don't compromise. There are any number of ways to make homes that fit into nature and are kind of scummy: adobe, clay, tree shaping, sod, etc. You are looking for a way to make homes that are grand, comfortable, and awe inspiring.
I could see doing a lot with weaving, as did some poorly documented South American civilizations. Think of creating mats of woven vines, possibly grown that way. The macrame look is popular in Kindergarten, but real elves have farms growing slabs looking more like spun fiber (cubicle walls), upholstery, and spray on structural fiberglass. A house might be created as a set of tendrils that grow and dry until the walls can repel cannon fire and look as fine as painted walls.
This leads to fun ideas of houses 'grown' from models of houses, with plants that solidify and fix in place when expiring: sweeping ceilings, sprial starcases with no center poles. Easy shipping via Amazon; you just hook the model into the life line of the house until it grows to the right size.
[Answer]
Baked earth. If they don't burn anything organic (like say, wood) then, you know, it would have to be sun baked. That would take a long time and a lot of space and would depend very much on the climate. Can work in deserts, or dry plains but wouldn't work in a place with more moisture in the air. And trees can be shaped little by little without magic, it just takes a very long time to do (if elves have a longer lifespan, then they could do it). It's not something that could happen fast, they'd have to have very large trees (like California Redwoods), a low birthrate and live in very small spaces. Likely a max of two people per tree, with maybe a toddler.
There's a certain impracticality to living without having any impact on the life around you. Things die so that you may live. That's the way of things. That's the cycle. If they eat meat (which they may or may not) then they would use every part of the animal, curing the hide to make housing and buildings. They wouldn't be like regular buildings, but you could make fantastic, huge buildings out of hide and tallow--basically giant tent buildings. If, in a large society, every time something was killed, it was used completely, this would be possible. You said no to killing trees, but building out of bones isn't off limits either.
Edit Clarification: Bones could be the bones of what they eat, or of their own dead. Also, I think that you may have to make each city/area unique because it's all about what's at hand locally and what each environ provides. Keep in mind that fire is important in most building processes--and that--sorry, mainly involves burning wood (you can burn poop too but that's not going to smell very good) unless you have some abundant non-organic stuff they can harvest to burn.
[Answer]
I'm suggesting water, taking the classic depiction of elves as close to nature. Non-magical elves could instead be fantastic engineers of nature, using streams to carve mines, canals (or other advanced waterways), irrigation, large scale mud casting (Pueblo style), etc for them over many generations.
Throwing cold climates (ice elves!!) into the mix, you can go beyond igloos to self-repairing and even active structures. Skyscrapers from artificial waterfalls, inventive scaffolds, bridges, defense, you name it.
[Answer]
I really liked [Frostfyre's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/47809/18562) -
If we do not have wood or (much) stone to use, what do we have?
**Dirt**
People have been building dirt structures for ages. Frostfyre mentions [sod](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sod_house) and [adobe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe), which are archaic building materials which remind me of something **we still use all the time today:**
**[Brick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick)**
It is relatively easy to make bricks; you more-or-less just need mud and straw (or mud and a furnace), and they last basically forever. The linked wikipedia page shows many pictures of very impressive buildings that were constructed from brick; the elves' buildings don't have to be tiny.
---
As an afterthought, [cement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement#Alternatives_to_cement_used_in_antiquity) could also work, but requires more specialized materials than simple bricks. It could also be used as a mortar (although well-made bricks wouldn't have to require mortar).
[Answer]
One consideration I don't think I've seen in many of the answers is what dangers are there to this elven population? If they're physically weaker than humans and have no access to magic, that means they're more vulnerable than a human population?
If this is fantasy it *usually* means that the big bad nasty things are bigger, badder and nastier. In a situation like that I would see a weak elven population as a migrant culture that is almost constantly on the move. If they're living in some kind of primordial boreal forest (I'm thinking of like the US Pacific Northwest with giant redwoods) or perhaps a jungle (more arboreal predators in jungles though) then they may carry ropes woven from plants (you could probably make a rope out of braided ivy, or hair. In a jungle you might be able to directly use some dried vines) and set up a tree city for days, weeks or months before moving on, either staying ahead of or following behind the predators (you can check the migration patterns in Serengeti if you want more info on how that works on Earth).
Their main accommodation could be some water proof/resistant tarp-like object with hammocks for sleeping. Families would take over a tree to live in and their ropes would allow them passage between trees in the community. Stone or metal tools could be used to carve or expand hollows in large trees to allow for cooking in the trees, if they cook their food.
If your elves are being given some control or influence over natural animals, that reduces the dangers to them and perhaps they would live on the forest floor. Should they do that even with dangers, maybe they have a symbiotic relationship with one or two nasties or utilize dead pieces of nasties to make it appear as though their land is inhabited by one (take bear claws and mark trees every now and then, for example)
A final consideration is the elven lifespan. As others have noted, you can do a lot to shape plants when you have a long enough time frame. While you may not be able to turn a single tree into a mansion, you may be able to cluster and weave trees to achieve the effect of a modestly sized cottage. That would mean each community would need one or more full-time "tree-shapers" whose only job is to maintain the current houses and be growing new houses for future expansion, all the time. They wouldn't use magic, but the ability to live for so long allow for the appearance of magic. Some humans have done some cool stuff with growing trees together, imagine what they would've done with a 500-5,000 year lifespan. Along with this idea, there may be special cultivation methods they know of to get plants to bear fruits they would not otherwise (perhaps two flowers that look totally different are actually the male + female of the same plant and the organism that previously assisted in their pollination died so the only way they ever produce fruit is by accident or intention)
[Answer]
As materials IRL also was used:
* Dried and pressed vegetation, even hay.
* Bones, ropes, hide.
* Wickerwork.
* Clay.
* Dirt.
* Turf.
* Ice.
Indeed, it was anything from the near landscape, even sand.
Considering it's a fantasy elves:
* Mushrooms, other plants, not even chopped or cutted, just grown to be a house.
* Various metals (produced without wood-fire).
* Growing crystals.
* Glass.
Magically modified natural resources can behave as modern ones.
Add here natural dwellings and caves systems (in rock or as in Vietnam).
[Answer]
Maybe they just don't sleep? Elves aren't just pointy eared tree-loving humans, they're a completely different species, i.e. maybe they can eat plants that would kill a human but are physically incapable of eating meat?
[Answer]
"Appreciating nature" is all very well, but trees don't last forever. If you truly appreciate nature, you manage your woodlands. That means pruning/coppicing/pollarding, keeping the underbrush cleared to minimise fire risk, and so on. And that means a plentiful supply of timber for firewood and for building.
As far as your tree-shaping goes, there's absolutely no reason you need magic for this. [Pleaching](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=pleaching&tbm=isch&imgil=UnGvudv4KsEN8M%253A%253BwZlMpMIAv6jxlM%253Bhttps%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.pinterest.com%25252Fpin%25252F233272455669234701%25252F&source=iu&pf=m&fir=UnGvudv4KsEN8M%253A%252CwZlMpMIAv6jxlM%252C_&usg=__6rKVI1m_4_3vt45XAd0Wk0DbCmA%3D&biw=1166&bih=706&ved=0ahUKEwi_6JK6-YHOAhVJDsAKHZWGDdwQyjcIUw&ei=4WGPV__zBMmcgAaVjbbgDQ#imgrc=UnGvudv4KsEN8M%3A) is a very standard technique, is fairly easy to do with a bit of practise, and has been known for a very long time.
] |
[Question]
[
Mummies are widely considered to be one of the most iconic undead monsters, but are often overshadowed by their vampire & zombie brethren.
Furthermore, while the vampire has a bevy of supernatural abilities aside from their bloodsucking repertoire, and zombies can eat the brains of living creatures to make more of their own via biological pathogens or magick hexes, the mummy has never been able to compete against them what with their fragility (desiccation, flammability, heat/cold weakness) without the aid of some vague 'magick'. One can't help but feel that the mummies' quantifiable existence & reproduction in reality has more or less come to encompass their 'curse' in this regard.
The only example of "mummy danger" that didn't come from vengeful spirits or magick (e.g., *The Mummy* franchise) I know of is:
>
> El Dorado in *Uncharted: Drake's Fortune* where the sarcophagus its mummy is sealed in contained an extremely-infectious, immediately-debilitating virus presumably infecting the mummy.
>
>
>
While this works on its own, I feel it only doubles-down on the supremacy of the zombie camp.
Various cultures throughout history have used various materials (Egyptian papyri/linen wrappings, Han dynasty jade suits, layers of heavy cloth of the Incas or other Andean peoples) to insulate the body from natural phenomena which could exacerbate decay. Whereas others have specific methods (Inca refrigeration, Kabayan fire mummies) to the same ends. Moreover, an extra step of preservation - post-embalming or not - is established by encasing the body in a storage medium (Egyptian sarcophagi, Chachapoyas purunmachu) with a hermetic seal or vacuum even provided in some circumstances (Rosalia Lombardo, Vladimir Lenin, incorruptible saints).
If we humans have used embalming & preservation on our dead since antiquity - if not for the veneration of the specific dead and/or the comfort of their admired - then what exactly is the practicality of separating our dead from our living with as many 'layers' as necessary? ***If a vampire would start drinking human/animal/medical blood (and creating more vampires) if one went loose today, what could a mummy do to pose an active danger to the living & society if let loose today? How & why?***
The best reason(s) for the unique threat of the mummy don't require any specific materials, methods, or climates to work - use as many of them as you want! The best answer shouldn't require viral or magick agents as a requirement of the danger.
[Answer]
**It could rule.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jlMP1.jpg)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II>
Your nation is a shadow of what it was. Foreigners walk your streets and command your kings. The ancient pharaohs conquered many lands and made monuments that have stood 1000 years. Could one of the rulers of old return to restore the glory that once was?
Zombies are mindless horrors. Vampires are evil predators. Mummies were great and revered persons, carefully preserved so that in need, they could once again take up their bodies and do what they did before.
The danger of a mummy is that its like is no longer on the earth. It could be shrewd, ruthless, farsighted, ferocious, benevolent and loved by the masses. Again.
[Answer]
# It Knows Too Much
Whatever culture created this mummy has a means of making someone literally immortal. Even if the mummy themselves doesn't know the mechanism - though, under the conditions of your question, we can assume they do - they would know where to look to rediscover it. They know the right magic words/the right alchemical processes/the right gods to pray to to make it so that a recipient won't die for real/forever.
Wars have been fought over (much, much) less.
Moreover, while this immortality has its downsides, unlike vampirism, the mummy doesn't need a supply of blood to stay alive, nor is it a thrall to its creator, and unlike a zombie, it also keeps its intelligence. On top of all that, unlike *either*, a mummy can die of natural causes and *then* be resurrected, allowing it to live out a human life *first*.
A former monarch - or other important person - is going to be canny, and is going to realize the value this knowledge holds in a world that has lost it. And then the danger simply lies in someone having something worth literal fortunes, and being willing to provide it to people in exchange for favours, treasure, or both. Even if they didn't have a globe-spanning empire on the first go-round, they certainly will this time!
## Addendum - Why Fragile?
Many media (Dungeons and Dragons, for one) portray mummies as being incredibly strong and durable, even if fire is a bit more of a weakness to them than it is to say, me. Superhuman strength and unlimited endurance are definite upsides. Unless you're determined that your mummies be fragile things that crumble to dust on impact, they can have superhero/villain properties on top of the *One Weird Trick That Morticians Hate!*
[Answer]
**The Mummy is a regional variation of Vampire**
An immortal, nigh-unkillable creature with the intelligence of a human and vaguely defined magical powers?
Notably, resides in, and rises from, a tomb..
Known to drain victims of their life-force to sustain and repair itself?
Yup, sounds like a Vampire to me!
The bandages serve the purpose of protecting the Vamp/Mummy from the elements before it feeds enough to lose the fragility of eons of entombment and starvation.
They also provide limited protection from the sun, allowing the Mummy some mobility in daylight hours in the middle of the shadowless desert.
The Mummy's chief distinction is its total lack of familiarity with the present day, its regional flavour of magic, and its initial vulnerabilities due to long starvation.
Once it finds its feet (and possibly reattaches them) it will be essentially a regular vampire with added headdress and pointy beard.
[Answer]
Microbial and fungal spores that can infect animals and plants, ranging from anthrax to plague to wheat rust.
[Answer]
Now, there are two answers to this question. To which, I will answer with both. Feel free to choose any or all of them.
## **Intelligence**
Now, while vampires also possess this, a mummy uses it in a bit of a different way. Vampires think small, to put it simply. Mummies raise **armies**. They used to be a leader, a pharaoh, so why shouldn't they have a kingdom? However, mummies are cowardly. They are quite weak, so they end up simply hiding behind their forces and running away from battle frequently. This counteracts the obvious bonus of having a military force.
## **Magic**
Now, vampires, at least I assume, can do any sort of magic a human can, while zombies can replicate themselves using magic. So what do mummies have? Plague magic. They can summon any sort of disease or pestilence, from locusts to crop blight. Mummies can end up being a huge problem, as when they arise, they end up causing pandemics and famine wherever they go. They detest physical combat, instead simply keeping at a distance and killing their enemies with all kinds of sicknesses.
## Conclusion
Mummies will end up being a monster you want to keep in check, as if they are allowed to get a foothold, they end up being quite a hard monster to kill. However, we can set a gradient of mummy power. You see, the mummies that have the aforementioned abilities are rare, as there's not that many pharaohs. The less standing a mummy had in life, the less intelligent and powerful it is. So you have very few smart, powerful pharaoh mummies and a lot of lesser mummies that can't summon much more than a dung beetle or the common cold. That, my friends, is my answer. Cheers.
Also, if you are a bored high school sophomore with a basic understanding of science like me who wants to help create a DnD style fantasy world, click [this link](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/121156/the-new-world-project).
[Answer]
I hate to disagree with everyone but a Mummy is NOT immortal. Consider: Died @ age 50, raised 1000 years later, at 50. Lived for 30 years. Died again at 80, raised 1000 years later, at 80.
At some point, you are gonna have to let go. The dude is still aging at a normal rate. You are just adding pauses in the process, not making the living portion any longer
] |
[Question]
[
So the idea of space navies is extremely common in science fiction, with the navy as the branch that is more or less dominant. Generally speaking they have marines under them and there is rarely an army and even less frequently an air force structure that winds up mattering. This has led to a frequent debate about whether space militaries should follow air force or naval structures. In reality, given that air forces tend to be the ones who are building up the military presence in space, that seems to be dominating.
Though this led to a potentially more interesting question. How might a navy have historically been the ones to dominate aviation in the early days, such that a separate air force was never built?
Could this have then led to a situation in which a marine corps might actually more or less absorb the army rather than having the navy split off the air force into a separate branch?
There aren't any historical examples of anything like this happening that I know of, as armies tended to control aircraft over land until a separate air force was developed. While there were cases like Japan in which the navy also flew bombers, their army still had its own separate air force. In the US, the situation was far closer to the other way around, with the US Navy after WW2 struggling to find a purpose until they figured out a way to control a piece of the nuclear deterrent. Meanwhile the USMC was nearly on the chopping block given the successes of US Army amphibious operations with several politicians including President Truman arguing that the marines were mostly redundant.
[Answer]
## The Idea of the Air Ship:
Having a universal navy is more of an IDEA than a practicality. In a nation where having a significant navy is critical to defense of the nation, but armies are mistrusted as a threat to the various states (like in the early USA), there might only be a national navy by law, and states would regard a national army as a threat to their sovereignty.
But as a practicality, you need to be able to have soldiers that fight overseas. Sometimes, the national capital needs to be defended from foreign powers or even rebellious states. So the navy gradually institutes a marine corps to fill in as needed. This marine corps IS the national army in all but name, but that title, being subservient to the navy by law or constitution, is a critical one.
Now you have clever people building Dirigibles, and the military value of flying ships is obvious. These are big, expensive, and look like, well, SHIPS. An extended period of lighter-than-air craft would enhance the place of flying machines as air ships instead of air craft. So naturally, once heavier-than-air craft are built, they are called air ships (or if small, air boats), not air craft.
And finally, as land transport becomes mechanized, who understands the engines involved? Many of the first military armored vehicles were referred to as land battleships. The same concept can apply to your fictional state. While trains aren't military, land ship transports aren't a big stretch from tractors (even steam-powered ones), and you can have land cruisers, destroyers (tanks), and so on. You might have large parts of the 'navy' that never see the water, but by tradition are considered naval units. A number of '[land battleship](https://www.naval-encyclopedia.com/tech/could-land-battleships-have-existed-in-reality/)' concepts have been floated around (pun intended) and would have stood a better chance of development by a nautically-focused military.
Eventually, the militias that were the backbone of the original army fade away as all forces become naval (synonymous with national) forces.
[Answer]
**If you need a boat to go any distance.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6cWVT.jpg)
Depicted: the Archipelago Sea in Finland. If your world were nothing but small islands, you would need boats for any interaction between large groups of people and that includes war. We have armies in our world of big contiguous continents. In a world like this it would be all about the boats. If going somewhere else meant going in a boat, there would only ever have been navies.
[Answer]
**There's one possibility, but let's explain why it's impossible first**
About 1/3 of Earth's surface is land. Land has incredible advantages...
* Fuel & maintenance delivery is cheap.
* You can't sink a continent.
* You're next to the manufacturers.
* You're next to the training grounds.
* Landing at night is nowhere near as big an issue.
* Plane size is limited by the physics of the plane, not the physics of the ship.
And I could go on. Land has huge advantages when it comes to almost everything. On the other hand, your navy...
* Has more trouble launching planes in bad weather than land-based operations ever would.
* Must have raw material deliveries for fuel.
* Is susceptible to torpedoes.
* Is limited in the number of planes it can field (compared to comparatively infinite land).
* Will always limit the size of the plane.
And, above all...
* A navy is expensive. Really, really expensive.
If they must, planes can use a field to land and take off. Compare the [cost of building an airport](https://www.scmo.net/faq/2019/8/9/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-an-airport) (about \$30 Million / 3km air strip) to the [cost of the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford](https://www.cnet.com/pictures/meet-the-navys-new-13-billion-aircraft-carrier/) (about \$12.8 Billion, ignoring the nearly \$5 billion research price tag).
**Conclusion**
Frankly, the economics of the issue alone kill the deal. Aircraft carriers would have to be cheap as proverbial water, which isn't believable. And that's ignoring all the other pros and cons. It's definitely useful to have a mobile air force (air craft carriers) such that one needn't negotiate landing privileges all over the globe — but it's a long way away from never having an independent air force.
**Having said that... I did think of one possibility**
Historically, small rockets (aka fireworks and limited munitions) came first, then airplanes, then big rockets (V1/V2, etc.). By the time ICBM missiles came along, the Air Force was already established and it made logical sense to put the two flying things together in the same military unit.
But let's keep in mind that the U.S. air force (to use as my test example) started as the Army Air Corps. If we assume that rockets came *first* and practical airplanes *second,* then we might have something. And I think that's a reasonable divergence from history (frankly, given that the Chinese were using rockets hundreds of years before the Wright Brothers, it's a wonder that practical rocketry didn't come first. The mathematics of ballistics aren't that difficult, but I'm sure Werner von Braun could give me a sound whoopin' over that calloused and uneducated statement.)
Anyway, practical rocketry would make a ton of sense in the navy. Think about it, the allies used battleships to soften the beaches at Normandy during WWII before the D-Day invasion. Practical rocketry would have provided (I believe) more payload over a longer distance, making that effort much more efficient. In fact, the navy would become the primary mid-to-long distance bombing solution rather than airplanes (which didn't come until later in this new timeline).
To be fair, this suggestion would be hard-pressed to overcome the other advantages of a land-based air force. But if we let that slide for a moment, there would never have been an Army Air Corps. It would have been the Navy Missile Service (NMS), and the burgeoning air force would have been absorbed into the navy, only receiving a separation (as it did with the Army) when intercontinental plane designs necessitated abandoning ship (think B-29 Superfortress and bigger).
I don't think it's possible to justify air support staying with the navy. In other words, it would eventually split into two services anyway. But by then the "Air Force" would be modeled after the navy, not the army.
[Answer]
As in most things political, it comes down to the budget.
Those who control the purse strings, control who gets the money to spend on what.
Having more than one branch of the armed forces ALWAYS leads to increased military spending, as one branch tries to gain political power and influence over the other. A country that had every intention of keeping tight tabs on spending would have one budget line for all of the armed forces, and this budget line would be carefully controlled against redundant spending. One military branch, under which all forms of defense are centrally run and centrally budgeted for.
In point of fact, under the original American Constitution, there was only one national armed forces envisioned, and spending provided for, in the constitution, and that was the navy. Everything else, including the land armies, came after, post-constitution.
[Answer]
The basic requirement for a new branch of the military is that it can accomplish military objectives independently and in a new domain that is not covered by existing branches.
The US Navy (and I suspect others as well) already does have a huge air force. There is no sense in having the Air Force operate out of aircraft carriers, since those aircraft have the primary goal of winning naval engagements, so the Navy may as well take over there. Note that this is different even from the Marine Corps, which works closely with the Navy but handles marine engagements. They are not generally involved in naval battles.
In the land-based case, the Army's "air force" was originally used mostly for terror bombing and, more broadly, for attacking infastructure that the Army could not reach. It's primary goals where, therefore, separate from the Army's goal, and hence you get the Air Force breaking off from the Army while the Navy still has it's own "air force."
To finally answer your question, all you really would have needed to keep aircraft at sea exclusively is for the WW2 era terror bombings to be ineffective or illegal. There were actually discussions between representatives of the major powers in the 19th century about making terror bombings illegal on a moral basis, so the latter option is less implausible than it may seem at first. Moreover, prominent post-WWI military thinkers actually thought that terror bombing would be so effective that civilians would basically force their government's hand in surrendering almost immediately. This was, in fact, one of their moral justifications for the bombings (war would be brutal, but at least it would be short!). The fact that civilians could sustain years on end of bombing, sometimes while sustaining industrial output, was a big disappointment. I could have seen this leading to bombings to be outlawed as needlessly cruel for little effect. In the US, I think it's well known that the effectiveness of bombings in Vietnam were also a huge disappointment. Now that I think about it, it's sort of weird that such tactics didn't fall out of favor.
Anyway, if the Navy is the only branch with air power, I think you pretty much accomplish your goal. I know I didn't mention the Marine Corps but ... it's really hard to imagine nations not needing traditional land armies. For a lot of history, that's the only branch most nation's had.
Edit: You would very likely take interest in an episode of the Hardcore History podcast titled BLITZ Logical Insanity.
Edit 2: @RonJohn is contesting (in the comments) whether American's participated in terror bombings or only in precision raids. Rather than argue the point further, I will just point out that if you agree with @RonJohn, then you can swap out the Americans for the British in my example (as they point out) and my basic points still hold. The distinction between precision and terror bombings isn't actually that relevant to the question anyway.
[Answer]
I think you're starting from the wrong premise. It's not who is in control of the nascent space program or who is in control of which branch of the planet-bound military forces, it's the question of the environment.
So, TL;DR boils down to this: space force ends up organized as a navy because space.
Longer explanation is more fun, though. So here goes.
My contention is that space navy emerges more or less spontaneously because space is very similar to sea - unforgiving bitches both of them. To be able to operate in such hostile environment (yes, I mean it: you'd be surprised how many lives are lost at sea to simple bad luck, permanently crippling accidents not even mentioning, and both don't hold a candle to a fu\*\*-up by someone in charge). This will almost by default produce an organization along the line of a navy. If you want, your space navy can have a wet navy roots and traditions, why not, but on the whole it's not necessary.
In addition to that, neither land forces nor (but to lesser degree) air forces have the tradition of independent command of a single large unit. Tank is 5 people, large cargo plane will have 5-6 people max... Mech infantry team will be 5 ppl fire team and a IFV, so say 7-8 soldiers. This is nothing compared to a destroyer with complement of 300+ and a vessel itself on the low end and 5000+ people on a carrier. No command structure of non-naval combat unit can accommodate that monster for the simple reason that while yes, there are lots of generals commanding larger divisions, not one is trained to be able to operate them as a single unit. Literally: army has it's Organizational and command structure to provide flexibility, while navy quite often need simple and brutally enforced blind obedience to orders for EVERYONE.
This lends itself to outsized marines force, but I think it's incorrect to think of them in terms of large tactical formations (divisions) as anything except administrative. For example, today's marines have multiple different duties, but on the whole largest force of them is distributed to the naval vessels (though not all) and installations (i.e. ports). Marines are responsible for internal security of a ship, often serve as an MP unit onboard (though it's not customary), will provide screening for landing parties, boarding parties, security for small crew detachments etc. They will also - because there are no idle hands on the cruise - they will be part of damage control, will have some watch duties as well.
In other words: marines need to exist because their duties require specific training which, while not being truly multi-branch (army+navy+specops+aviation), are sitting on the intersection of them all.
That is not to say marines should, ought nor be able to absorb army. Again: different use requires different tools. Army is quite often the sledge-hammer (by which I don't mean the attitude nor complexity nor the finesse in large-scale warfare) to marine's claw-hammer. Once warfare moves planet-side (if it's there in your world) it's entirely different beast.
My recommendation would be to simply ignore the emergence and treat is as a in-your-face-fact. No need to explain it, but if it's a part of the story, why not start with air force, then add navy officers as loaners to command space vessels and then it simply became obvious those traitors turned air force into navy. Add a funny twist that first it was submarine officers, but those bas\_\_\_ds were REALLY crazy (sounds like a joke, but they REALLY, REALLY are sick moth\_\_\_\_\_\_ers) and then they started using surface commanders.
[Answer]
I think for organic outgrowths, utility is a big part.
Imagine a shallow ocean world with large, shifting shoals. Or, a great deal of marshland, where paths shift in the sediment. Or even a world with large packs of constantly shifting sea ice where real-time information about passages is the only valuable information. In all of these cases, as soon as flight becomes available, it’s valuable to the navy.
In open water, a navy can use signal flags or lights to communicate and there’s nothing the enemy can do about it. But, in the more marshes universe, plant growth obscures line of sight communication. Aircraft re-enable communication for the navy that possesses these things.
[Answer]
Your question is a bit confusing. The explicit question is how to avoid air forces from becoming a separate branch. Based on the intro paragraphs, it seems like your *real* question is how to have navies in charge of space fleets. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.
You comment that air forces seem to be the ones building up military forces in space. That might be true now, but the space fleets you see in science fiction that are referred to as "navies" aren't remotely like what we're currently doing. Those space navies have *capital ships*, gigantic vessels with hundreds or thousands of crew members, multiple levels, hangar bays, etc. These capital ships go on missions for months or years at a time, with the ship becoming a mobile military base. They're essentially battleships and carriers that can fly.
If you're building a space armada, it makes far more sense to build it from your existing navy. Migrating to flying vessels is simply an incremental technology update. Basing your space armada off of your air force would mean that air force would have to re-invent most of what the navy already knows how to do and has a lot of experience doing. That's a *lot* of unnecessary work. Your air force will likely evolve into a local air defense squad. They'd continue doing what they're good at, and that's flying a variety of smaller, specialized craft with 1-2 man crews on short-duration missions. In a universe where interplanetary travel is common, that might be a small enough niche for the air force to get re-absorbed into the army and cease to exist as a separate entity.
All that is to say, you don't need a historic change to end up with navies controlling military forces in space. That appears to be the natural path that things would evolve (eventually).
[Answer]
By chance, **the navy got there first, and did such a great job changing things was unthinkable**.
Perhaps in your world the navy was the first to equip and train military aviators - maybe the first wars of the age of flight were clearly naval matters, or float planes were very common, of the head of the navy had the foresight to see the importance of planes to the future of combat.
And in time they expanded to flying some planes from fixed bases - and to operations in support of the army.
Then the navy produced a bunch of decisive victories, the navy became national heroes and their leader became a household name. Perhaps the leading admiral had the stature of George Washington. Why take aviation away from the navy when it worked so well?
To someone in your world, that would be as absurd as splitting the army into the tank force and the infantry force.
Or alternately maybe **the air force was on the wrong side of an internal power struggle** and got disbanded or sidelined. Perhaps your fictional country had some equivalent to the soviet union's squabbles over power after the death of Stalin.
If your fictional country had a succession crisis/revolution/coup/attempted coup and the navy threw their lot in with the winning side, while the air force backed the losing side. The winning side naturally wanted to rid themselves of disloyal air force generals, so they gutted the air force's command structure and subsumed it into naval aviation.
] |
[Question]
[
This is part of my generation ship worldbuilding. I mentioned my water purification system in a different question, but I never directly asked about it. Here, I will directly ask about it. I think it will make more sense if I go step by step through the water purification process, starting at the input.
## Input
Here are all the things that are input into the system:
* Wasted water
* Poop
* Urine
* Diarrhea
* Blood
* Vomit
## Stage 1: Solid filtering
The wasted water will just move on. The rest of it though goes through the solid filtering system first. Solid poop and any solid menstrual contents won't pass through. Everything else will, leaving behind:
* Urine
* Wasted water
* Blood
* Stomach acid
* Diarrhea
## Stage 2: Gradual filtering
At this point, the contents reach a series of microfilters and nanofilters of finer and finer mesh. To make sure that the water doesn't get blocked, the finest filter is no smaller mesh than a urea molecule. Here are the average sizes of what would be filtered out:
* Blood cells: 6-8 micrometers for RBC's, 2.6-2.9 micrometers for platelets
* Bacteria: .2-2.0 micrometers
* Viruses: 20-200 nanometers
* Protein: 53kDa
* Urea: can't seem to find size for, but is definitely bigger than water
All that is left in this stage is stomach acid and water.
## Stage 3: Acid Base Reaction
This is the stage that gets rid of the stomach acid. The acidic water goes into a pH correction tank. In there are a few wires, a valve, a sensor, and a dispenser. To avoid toxicity, I chose my base wisely. The sensor is calibrated for high acidity. When all that is left is acidic water and the acid is hydrochloric acid, the pH is anywhere from 1-2 depending on how much acid there is. This is way too low for some water to be drinkable.
When the sensor senses an increase in acidity, it electrically activates the base dispenser. To avoid acid corrosion, the wires are made out of either gold or platinum. Since there is no nitric acid present, there is no way the wires would dissolve, unlike how they would if they were made out of say copper. Gold is a way better electrical conductor than platinum, so the wires would most likely be made out of gold.
Here is the acid base reaction that occurs in the pH correction tank:
HCl + NaOH → H2O + NaCl(aq)
This is what the reaction looks like:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eN0Tt2Gu0I>
The valve is also unable to corrode in hydrocholoric acid, just like the wires. Once the pH gets to 7, the base dispenser is deactivated and the valve is opened. This leaves behind saltwater, very close to the final product.
## Stage 4: Desalination
Now, to get rid of the salt, the water is repeatedly boiled and condensed. This leaves behind pure water and solid salt as byproducts. The salt is then stored and the water is ready to be used again. Since there is more water produced than was there at first after the acid base reaction, there should be no issues with the generation ship running out of water.
**Will this water purification system work at both providing a constant supply of water and making sure that it is completely safe to drink? Or would the water get blocked up at the fine filters?**
[Answer]
**Do it like it's done on Earth**
Using filters and machinery is useful when you need it fast or compact but on a generational ship, it's materials you can't spare.
You need garden/agricultural areas for oxygen and food. Human waste water is good for growing plants. Said plants absorb the water through the roots and expel as vapor through the leaves which then condenses on the walls and runs into water holding tanks.
Really you want the system to use as few moving parts as necessary as moving parts wear out and need to be replaced plus if you lose power, you want as much as possible not require it.
Generational ships would be more like giant farms and parks
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AknIW.jpg)
[Answer]
Filters will always eventually clog. The only question is how frequently you have to exchange them or clean them out.
You may want to look into how actual wastewater treatment and municipal water supply systems work. You may want to start with an initial coarse filter (just a wire mesh would be fine) to exclude big chunks of solid material, but after that you go to a setting tank. This is a large volume of relatively still water that allows non-solvated contaminants to either sink to the bottom or float to the top, where they can be skimmed off without the need for filters. At this stage, you may or may not choose to introduce bacteria to help process the waste, by predating other harmful microbes and either breaking down or accreting other chemicals in the water and helping them settle out.
After that, you could just distill water directly, with some pH balancing afterwards. The total quantity of acids in the wastewater, even if it's nothing but straight vomit to start with, won't likely be strong enough that you need to worry about dissolving your sensor apparatus. However, that is a very energy-intensive process, which no real large-scale water treatment facility actually uses. In practice, you would simply use a series of chemical treatments with coagulants to precipitate out the remaining solvated chemicals and suspended particles (alkalyzing the solution is usefulat this point), possibly combined with UV radiation treatment, and followed by another round of settling and then a final sand filtration. The final stage filters will need to be periodically regenerated, but that's relatively easy to do with a fine sand filter: you clean it simply by forcing air through it backwards to loosen the particles, followed by water to carry off the trapped contaminants.
[Answer]
You have a problem you are solving here: where will you put all the solid you are filtering out? You don't want to throw it into space, because it is useful organic material.
Do what sewer depurators do: set up an environment where bacteria and chemistry can do their work. Bacteria are very efficient at degrading any organic material suspended in water, just provide oxygen and the right pH. You will get water and organic substances you can use to fertilize your on ship agriculture, closing the loop.
[Answer]
I have a well and my drinking water goes through 5 sets of filters/treatments.
Actually, it's 6 sets. The well itself is the first. Rain water and other water that enters the water table under my property is filtered by the soil. Soil (which is living dirt, not just dirt) is perhaps the best filter there is.
My system, in order, is:
1. Well water coming up from the groundwater.
2. Large micron (30-50 microns depending on what I buy) filter to get dirt and other big things. My water is literally brown without it.
3. Water softener (which also removes iron). My water is insanely hard. You almost certainly can skip this step.
4. Carbon point of use filter (which has some particulate filters there too).
5. Ultraviolet light (not needed for municipal water but a very good idea for untreated wells like mine; helps with bacteria, viruses, and cysts that might be in the water).
6. Reverse osmosis. This creates a lot of waste water, which can be diverted for showers and etc. It's only necessary if you have stuff that needs to be filtered that way.
You also want to test your water periodically. This is really important no matter where in the universe you are.
Your suggested system is overkill. I don't desalinate my water and I *add* salt to it (that's what a water softener does). It's completely within normal limits. Remember, minerals in water are a good thing.
pH shouldn't be an issue, but you can test for it and correct it if needed. How much stomach acid are you expecting?
Particulate filters are fairly easy to make and you don't need more than a couple per water stream. Carbon filters can also be made by hand with purified charcoal. Use these after using particulate filters and before reverse osmosis (if you bother with that). They take out quite a lot of stuff.
My suggestion for your system is as follows:
1. Remove large solids and compost them.
2. Put on your farmland/gardens/etc. (only use more processed water for leafy greens, root vegetables, and crops you will be harvesting soon)
3. Collect "ground water" for further processing.
4. Run through 1-2 particulate filters (different sizes if you use more than one, perhaps 50 and 10 microns).
5. Run through a really good carbon filter.
6. Use ultraviolet light to zap baddies.
7. If you wish, use reverse osmosis for extra filtration, send waste water back for general household use.
Test and monitor for bacteria, other microorganisms, pH, salinity, hardness, minerals, etc. Adjust if needed. If you need to treat with chlorine or something else to kill things, do it between stages 3 and 4.
[Answer]
I agree with Thorne, we already do this stuff so let's not re-invent anything we don't have too.
That having been said, doing this in a space ship will have other issues not normally encountered on a planet.
From my perspective, doing Stage 4 first, will separate the liquids from the solids and have the additional bonus of killing any/all bacteria, parasites, and germs the are present in sewerage. As long as you have planned to ensure that no toxin's, heavy metals or micro-plastics enter the system then the remaining solid waste is essentially fertiliser.
From there you just need to separate the pure water from the other liquid wastes.....
Possibly graduated cooling to isolate the various chemical formulas... not sure.
This should minimise any filter-clogging by greatly reducing the solids needing to be filtered out.
[Answer]
If you have enough energy available to do what you suggest you should also have enough energy to incinerate it all, filter and condensate and distill. You would get water, nitro oxides, carbon dioxide and metal oxides. You may have to reclaim some of the oxygen in the oxides to feed the incinerator if you have too much inorganic waste. If you are near a star you can use collimators (lenses) to incinerate and distill. Benefit is being a whole lot less maintenance dependent and way simpler to operate and design.
] |
[Question]
[
In the dystopian state of the UFS, or Union of Fascist States, the leaders of government reign supreme. President Jeffrey Stevenson, the highest of all oligarchs in the UFS, keeps tabs on all the citizens that look like they have suspicion tendencies from a young age. Secret police patrol the streets and make sure no one causes trouble. And when suspected rebels and dissenters, they are usually in for a world of trouble.
***Police Force***
The UFS’s police force often let their power over the citizens of the country get to their heads. When dissenters are caught, they often get tortured for information, which is legal in the UFS, but the police often torture dissenters after information is acquired, ***which is against the UFS rules***. They also often have their way with arrested females, and other such things.
My question is, why might the UFS government not discipline its police force?
[Answer]
I'd suggest looking at historical examples, and two in particular.
First, the decay of the Ottoman Empire. Essentially, the Janissaries were originally conscripts taken from outlying provinces (usually Greek), forcibly converted to Islam, and used as elite soldiers. Over time, though, they managed to gather political power, and eventually reached the point where they were the power behind the throne. Even the Sultans had to step carefully around the Janissaries in the 18th century, and at least one was murdered when he attempted to push through reforms.
Second, and probably more widely known, would be the Praetorian Guard of Roman (in)famy. This force was created during the early days of the Empire to serve as the bodyguard of the Emperor. It wasn't long though, before Caligula took power and did all sorts of mad and insane things, and eventually a few of his own guards killed him off. Several factions tried to claim the throne after that, but it ultimately went to Claudius when he offered the Praetorians an award equal to several years' pay if they would serve him. The results were an object lesson for Roman politicians; the Guard served whoever had the most money.
I hope the theme here is becoming tolerably clear. If rulers try to enforce laws that limit the freedoms (or pay, or special benefits, etc.) of an elite faction, especially royal military groups (although this works in the more general case) with a disproportionate amount of influence, why, such rulers can be, ah, *replaced* with other candidates deemed, er, more suitable and more generous towards said faction.
Really, the Praetorian Guard is a perfect fit for what you're looking for: they essentially served as the guards of Rome, and even doubled as a sort of secret police. The Emperors could not afford to limit their privileges, else they might find themselves with the sword of one of their guards *somehow* finding their guts. So your plausible reason is simple: **your ruler does not crack down on their police force because they fear being deposed by said police force if they try to materially restrict its power**.
[Answer]
It appears that you have a post WWII viewpoint, you think people actually have rights and that governments can't do what they like.
Human rights was a concept invented during the WWII war crimes tribunals\*, until that point a government could do what it liked to its population and nobody would say anything. The sanctity of the international borders, national sovereignty, rates far higher than any abuses you might commit against your own population, hence the continued incidence of genocide even after the "never again". **The population of a country is effectively the property of the government, and anything the government does to it's own population within it's own borders is legal.** What you're not allowed to do is invade the next country over and start wiping out their population. There may also be consequences for actions against citizens of other nations within your borders.
Paying mere lip service to the rules, and doing what you like as an arm of government, is a tried and tested method of repressing populations.
---
\**In fact there were some problems introducing the concept of universal human rights. Russia wanted to continue to abuse it's population, the USA wanted to keep repressing the blacks and the British wanted to keep repressing the Irish.*
[Answer]
# Acceptable Targets
Historically, the Nazis in Germany decided to [free the Gestapo from judicial oversight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo#History) that would have applied to normal administrative actions. They argued that "[as] long as the police carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally."
So as long as the cops do what the President wants them to do, minor indiscretions are forgiven. It would be a really bad idea if they treat a party official the way you describe, unless the orders to do so come from high places, but abusing the "designated" acceptable targets does not get them into trouble.
Things to keep in mind:
* The designated target groups may be formally or informally [banned from filing complaints](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_decrees#Application). Either they know that their testimony will be disregarded, or they know that is will be inadmissable to start with.
* The internal affairs department **may** be empowered to take cases when they see it in the best interest of the service. (For example, if a suspect gets leniency in exchange for sexual acts. It is the *leniency* part of the transaction that brings internal affairs attention.)
* Many fascist societies place a high value on the "purity" of the race. That might make the sexual abuse problematic *even from their viewpoint* if it results in children.
And a big thing:
# Formal and Informal Rules
Certain regulations may be passed so that the elites can point to the regulations on the books if they are ever challenged on their human rights record. Everybody understands that those regulations are not supposed to be actually applied to actual or suspected resistance members.
In fact, abuse *after the investigative part of detention* might be seen as punishment at the discretion of the police, fitting on the scale between a stern admonishment, a fine, and actual court charges. (Court charges would go into more official records than a mere detention, interrogation, and release "without charge". With a court record, the dissenter can forget about ever getting a job.)
# Collecting Dirt on the Cops
As long as such abuses are part of the police culture, and as long as internal affairs *keeps records and does nothing*, they can later come down on the cop whenever they or their superiors want to. Collect [Kompromat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat) on everybody before they are promoted to high places.
[Amon Göth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amon_G%C3%B6th#Dismissal_and_capture), a concentration camp commander, was charged among other things with failure to feed the inmates. That's a bit strange, considering the official German policy set forth in the [Wannsee protocols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference). Of course those charges were just the icing on the cake. The more serious charges against him from the Nazi viewpoint were embezzlement of Jewish money and letting trustees into personnel records.
[Answer]
Simpliest Answer
**CHOICE**
A government can chose what they "deem" right or wrong, based on their standards.
Take Philippines for example:
The government AND law forbids murder. But the police **CAN** kill **WHOEVER**, **WHENEVER** they wish (from politicians, to kids). They'll just have to present that the victim OR the culprit possesses drugs, or is/was connected to drugs. With the governments push to "End drug trade" on the country, they'll be defending the men that upholds the justice that they "deem" right, even though there are other people who are either "cross fire victims", "looks like an addict" or plain "legal murder"
Don't get me wrong though, I know justice when I see one.
[Answer]
**Success is easily forgiven**
The wonderful thing about success is that it gives you oodles of material for positive promotion campaigns. Who's going to complain against people who are actually making the world a better place? What's a few indiscretions when the country is running so smoothly?
**They have photos of you golfing with Satan**
And the problem with a really successfull ~~intelligence~~ police force is that they have archives with information locked in vaults behind sliding doors and beneath telephone booths. Information, not to put too fine a point on it... *about you.* They like to call it an insurance policy. I mean, they learned from a master, right? You probably think a better name is "an inconvenience."
**The oversight committee is on the take**
Rumors about alleged excesses are rife in any organized society... but are there any, really? I mean, where's the paperwork? Where's the video? Where's Nixon on tape when you need him? The reality is that there's no *actual* proof of excess because the police have the oversight committee on their payroll — and what's the value of one citizen's complaint when the investigations regularly turn up no evidence of wrong doing?
**All the candidates are from Manchuria...**
And who's complaining, really? You'd be *amazed* how effective the new drug-and-psychology behavioral processing program is. With the exception of one old geezer who's so jaded about life that nothing seems to work, all our "guests" actually leave ~~interrogation~~ counseling *thanking* the police for their courtesy and a fine time!
**And this all assumes that our Glorious Dictator actually cares**
And when push comes to shove, it is a facist government. All the paperwork in the world will *not* upset their evening plans!
[Answer]
In Brazil, where I'm from, the police get away with lot of killing, torture and corruption. Mostly of the time they don't even investigate and when they do, usually it end up being archived. The main reasons are:
* The average citizen is tired of drug dealers, robbers and outlaws, so they support the police violence: "a good robber is a dead robber"
* If someone die in a favela (slums), the first thing they check is if it's a "worker" (law abiding citizen) or a drug dealer. In the first case there is going to be a quick investigation and they will point to a "mistake" from the victim or unlucky. If it's the former, they will just say that they were defending themselves and nobody will care. There are policemen with more than 30 "self defense" kills.
* The politicians explore the illegal business, and give a cut to the police (and vice-versa), therefore they all have a incentive to protect themselves from any investigation or law that could change the status quo.
* In some states the policemen in service are go to trial in special military courts (police is subjected to the military in Brazil) where the corporation tends the shield itself.
* The media don't really care when poor people die, so lot of people that could be doing something to change this situation are completely alienated and think that whatever the police does, must be right, because they are the good guys. If the police say that the torture and killing was done by a rival gang, no journalist is really interest in investigate.
[Answer]
Let's look at this from a practical point of view.
Torture is a lousy way to get information. If the UFS just wanted to get the maximum information possible from prisoners, they'd do other things. What it will do is scare people and form a community of guilt (or something like that) among the police, turning them into the sort of closed and isolated force that the UFS wants.
If citizens know that they can avoid torture by just babbling out everything they know when hauled in, they can keep quiet if they happen to know something incriminating. Under this system, they know that, if brought in for questioning, they'll be tortured. If done right, it becomes safer to volunteer possibly seditious information as soon as possible, making the job of the police somewhat easier.
Fascist police states do not generally enforce the law when it's inconvenient to do so. The law against continued torture would be for some sort of public (perhaps foreign) consumption, but as long as violating the law keeps order the authorities will not care.
[Answer]
There are two plausible reasons that I can think of to this conundrum...
**They are members of the Inner Party**
To go Orwellian, these police get the job by virtue of their fervour for the UFS, and their absolute devotion & willingness to serve the state. Sure, they can go overboard from time to time in that pursuit but those incidents are isolated and excusable given that for the most part, these officers live in the service of the state and as a consequence often don't properly understand the balance between the rights of the state and the rights of the individual. They are not trained in such understanding, and would actually struggle with the torture pre-information if they were more cognisant of the individual's rights. Ultimately it's a fine line between legal and illegal torture in your world; why risk making your officers less effective by pointing out that there's a line in the first place?
**We who are about to die...**
The fact that you have a police force that is sanctioned to commit torture for information tells me that there is by extension a resistance. People living in peace and happiness don't see the need for such an invasive force, with such sweeping powers, and the only reason that you would invest your money in such a force (dictator or not) over more useful endeavours is if there is an actual threat to contain.
If that's the case, your police have probably signed up for a death sentence and know it. They're already expected to die within a decade of signing up. Why would you (especially publicly) make the life of a policeman less attractive to potential candidates? The last thing you need in a disciplined force living in a constantly quasi-combat environment is a morale problem. So long as it isn't too large scale or seditious, you let it go. The policeman only has a few years left in all likelihood, especially if the public knows what that particular officer has been getting up to; more likely he or she will be targeted by the resistance.
Of course, the answers above assume that sanctions are the only method of behaviour control available to you. If you have a rating system for your officers (like ebay sellers) then perhaps the police can only access certain benefits (like better weapons) once they reach a certain star rating. Do things right, you get more stars. Do things wrong, you don't *lose* stars but you don't get them, either.
Perhaps the simplest possible answer is that you don't *have* to sanction your officers because that's the one group in your society you manage with carrots instead of sticks.
[Answer]
**Because punishing those involved implies wrongdoing**
Punishing those involved means that you admit your police force has been in the wrong. But how could the unsung heroes of the state ever be wrong? This would be very detrimental propaganda-wise, and might even lead to litigation (although I would suspect a regime like this has other means to deal with that)
For examples, look no further than the ongoing controversy surrounding police brutality in the US. Of course here the litigation argument has more weight than the propaganda argument, but both are in play.
[Answer]
You'll need to think carefully about the philosophy of this nation. Fascism is often used just as a synonym for bully, but it has its own intellectual tradition which is completely unique and weird. You need to make an effort to really see beyond the cliches and into the soul of their beliefs. That will help you create believable reasons why the police are behaving so oddly.
**The functionality of the Nazi state was for the most part anarchic. Which is funnily enough how your police are behaving!** For example... Hitler's office in Berlin received mail in five different rooms, and the person occupying each room would respond to letters, effectively forming policy according to their own design, signing the letters implying Hitler's approval. After all, it was a letter from his office.
Hitler almost never actually visited his office, and didn't care for details. Meetings with his senior staff would involve him rambling about any given topic, and his subordinates listening intently before leaving to try and put these ideas into action. He cared only for what he thought were ambitious, brave, or radical ideas being implemented quickly and effectively.
**German policy in Poland is a perfect example of this organised chaos, with similarly horrible results.** Occupied Poland was divided into three regions, roughly speaking; north, west, and east. Each had its own governor, and they were all told to Germanise their regions. Hitler said he wanted it done quickly, and would not ask questions about how this was achieved.
While the governors of the west and east began genocides, the governor of the north decided that the quickest solution was to give everyone German citizenship. Even though officially the Nazis believed the Poles to be subhuman. True to his word, Hitler didn't ask, and was delighted that the governor had achieved a successful Germanisation so quickly. This led to the horribly warped reality that half of one family living in the north became Germans, while their relatives living in the south were sent to death camps.
The even stranger aspect of this was that Heinrich Himmler threatened the governor, saying that as just one drop of bad blood would contaminate the master race, his policies were unacceptable. The governor however told Himmler that if he had a problem with it, he should speak to Hitler.
**This organised chaos was a direct consequence of fascist ideology, and Hitler's beliefs in particular.** Timothy Snyder is a history professor and world expert in this field. [In his book "Black Earth"](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/hitler-holocaust-antisemitism-timothy-snyder/404260/) he argues that Hitler's ideology has been misunderstood, and makes no sense as a traditional nationalist philosophy... but makes perfect sense when Hitler is considered to be a 'racial anarchist'. Hitler considered laws and ethics meaningless formalities, which prevent violent competition between 'races'.
One core fascist belief is that each nation provides an opportunity to transcend its people into their own race, which is not the means to an end, but the end in itself. Uniquely, fascists also believe that violence is a moral good in itself. Underlying the bizarre anarchic practices of the Nazi regime was the belief in a social darwinist principle of the survival of the fittest. If a Nazi official thought he should be promoted to replace his superior, he should prove himself fit for the role by seizing power from his superior one way or another.
**Police officers behave viciously, because members of the regime truly believe that the laws they follow are at best transitionary restrictions on achieving racial supremacy through violent competition.** If you can make violence in your fictional nation consistent with the beliefs and practices I have outlined, and not simply bad because fascism is bad, then you will create a very potent work of fiction that has strong historical and ideological precedent.
For further reading on fascist beliefs, [here is an informative article](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism) on why Donald Trump is not a fascist according to five domain experts. I would also recommend you try and watch an old BBC documentary, [The Nazis: A Warning from History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nazis:_A_Warning_from_History).
[Answer]
Simply put, they don't need to. They seek loyalty rather than rule following.
If the high power wants people to do dirty work for them, often they need to turn a blind eye. This lets less savory individuals into positions of power, such as the power of a police uniform, and you reap the results.
The trick is to make sure every policeman knows they can be jettisoned if they ever become a liability for the UFS. A policeman who abuses their power can rely upon the UFS to come to their aid. However, a policeman whose abuse has become a liability can find themselves hung out to dry. A known torturer who does something to put UFS in a bad position may suddenly find themselves without backup at the most inconvenient of times.
This encourages loyalty among the police force. The police know that their survival is dependent on the UFS finding their presence acceptable. A policeman who is known to be ready to die for the UFS will find that they can get away with just about anything. A policeman who merely bribed the right people to make things go away will find they can only get away with so much before acknowledging their connection to the UFS is more trouble than it's worth.
[Answer]
Look at south Africa - they don't have state police in the way that many other countries do, but it's contracted out to private firms, who then will have open fights when they try to police the other firms territory ... in short, it's legal gang warfare.
There's absolutely no interest of the state to get involved with this, because the law is enforced - kindof, and the average person won't get involved in this gang warfare (in the same way most average Joe's don't get involved in other gang warfare) and it has the same concept as the purge - it's legal as long as it's kept between the firms.
[Answer]
It's happened many times and still does to various extents. Underlying reasons are fear, apathy, collusion and greed or a combination.
When people are trained to do dehumanising things... they become dehumanised and for some it will feed on itself. So if you have a bunch of trained killers getting out of control you have two choices which most olden day armies dealt with. You either give them rein and ignore it as much as possible or you discipline them. The only way to discipline a bunch of trained killers is to have another bunch of trained killers. You don't send them an email telling them to cease and desist unless you can back that up with force, and if they know force is heading their way they may decide a preemptive strike is a better option than bending over.
[Answer]
**Incompetence.**
Your government is comprised of total and absolute hopeless bungling bumblers. This includes the police force and extends down to the meter maids and dogcatchers. The endemic halfassedness of government structures in this society has many reasons including poor education, venereal diseases, graft, addiction and inbreeding. The result is that people (including but not limited to wrongdoing police officer) who should be punished are often not punished, because their offenses are not recognized, or are recognized but the records lost, or the person set to carry out the punishment punishes someone else. Or they might be punished. Possibly for an offense committed long ago.
The saving grace of President Stevenson is that his malignity and evil designs are thwarted by his near-total lack of executive function and absence of any competent help, not only in his inner circle but in any circles nearby.
[Answer]
**Look no farther than the US of A for your answer.**
For reasons that strike me as completely stupid, my country already rarely punishes police for bad behavior. Police officers charge in guns blazing and harm civilians in their attempts to violently apprehend 'criminals' again and again, and they, with few exceptions, always come out of the resulting controversy with little more punishment besides paid sick leave again and again.
Why? Because people have an unfortunate tendency to view the people who enforce the laws as unable to break them and treat the police accordingly, largely thanks to extensive 'copaganda' that is pervasive in our society. All you need to do is amplify this for your story, and enshrine the above attitude in a law that makes it illegal to prosecute a police officer for 'doing his job'.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/54583/edit).
Closed 7 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/54583/edit)
Supposedly one were to amass 1 trillion Euro, how does one bring the most powerful nation in the world today to its knee in the shortest period of time possible? Best answer with the shortest time to shut down the government for good wins.
PS: kindly be reminded to state the **TIME** frame for your plan and be as realistic as possible within the budget, and be sure to read through all answers to prevent duplicate.
[Answer]
What you're looking for is not really hard to achieve. You got a trillion euro. Just find a very very very dumb guy, with the worst political ideas ever. You use your money to build around him a strong political party with the best advisors you can find. You then corrupt some people, pay assassins to kill some others and you make that guy the head of state of that country. Then since he obeys you, you just need to make sure he will fire the most competent people in its administration to replace them with the worst you can find. That's it, you managed to put that country on its knees.
Of course that powerful country will still look powerful, but if you choose your stupid head of state wisely, it will ruin the diplomacy, losing its allies one by one, then he'll make some mistakes leading to tensions with its neighbours. Then if because of one of his mistakes a war breaks out, that powerful country would have the worst generals ever to deal with it, thus losing, most likely.
On an economic level the same thing would happen, if that guy is really an idiot and its advisers too, then he'll make the worst political choices ever.
Stuff like that already happened in our history. There are plenty of guys who ruined their countries with bad ideas. For that you need to make sure your guy has almost unlimited freedom for enacting silly policies. Then you need to make sure he can't learn from his own silliness. Perhaps by just switching the idiot in power each 5 years, to make sure it'll always be dumb guys ruling the country. If you don't do that, at one point or another your poor silly guy will learn and try to do good things. And perhaps succeed.
It's a matter of time before people get totally sick of that. Depending on the targeted country it could take a few years or a few centuries before they just decide to get rid of any sort of government. Some can have enormous strikes just when one guy tries to enact a new law, just because it displease some people, in such country it'll not be that hard. In the one where people never reacts when their government do shit, I guess it'll need a lot more time.
[Answer]
# Eliminate the need for government
*"To summarize the summary of the summary: people, are a problem." — Douglas Adams, on the issue of governing people*
There is only one way you can get rid of government and that is if you take away the need for there to be government. We do not have government just for fun. Government exists for the following reason:
1. We, the people, have certain basic needs that we demand be fulfilled
2. The resources needed to fulfill our, the people's, needs are finite and scarce, and therefore need careful distributing
3. We, the people, are a lazy bunch that do not want to do that tedious job of distributing the resources ourselves
If you want to get rid of government, you must solve any or all of the above points. Until you have done that, we will have government.
And if you thought that **causing trouble** will cause government to go away you are sorely mistaken. Because one of those basic needs that I mentioned in point 1 is "Keep trouble away from my doorstep".
Now if you figure out a way to solve points 1, 2 and 3 with a trillion Euro, kindly let us know. Because both we, the people, and politicians all over the world have been trying that for millennia... politicians in particular, so they can finally go do something more fun with their time instead of being constantly bashed by us, the people, for doing a service that we demand.
So in short I am answering you: **it cannot be done, not for a trillion Euro**. You asked for a realistic time schedule. Well the time required to achieve what you want is "So far: the entire time span of governed human civilization, and still counting..."
[Answer]
Go to the financial sector.
* Buy most or all utility companies and hire the most inept operations managers you can find. Give them unreasonable profit goals that can only be met by cutting corners and stopping maintenance. Don't allocate any funds for technical training. Sell all spares which are 'surplus to projected requirements' -- that is, all of them.
* Buy a couple of high-tech companies and transfer their intellectual property to subsidiaries abroad. Then spin them off.
* Buy a few big, well-connected banks.
* Buy lots and lots of [financial instruments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)) that will bring a profit if the economy goes bust in a couple of months. By itself, that isn't too bad -- if you bet against the target state, someone else is betting for it. But the sudden flurry of interest in these instruments will let the markets notice. They will think that you know something they don't know ...
* Just before the blackout happens (and you're in a position to predict it) buy lots of [credit default swaps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_default_swap) with different strawmen. *It looks as if the market has lost confidence.*
* Once there is the blackout, have the traders in your banks sell all their assets in the target country. Try and buy *foreign* currency even at unfavorable rates.
Lean back and watch the panic. Most simplified market theories assume perfect knowledge and rationality by all actors, yet in practice people make profits if they know or guess things faster than other traders.
[Answer]
50 low grade nuclear dirty bombs, ship them in on your own boat to an unregulated section of cost, give them to your 50 agents, have them then proceed to the 50 most [densely populated cities](http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/uscities_100.html). In the US, this would affect a minimum of 48,000,000 people displacing them.
You then have a government that has 15% of its population on the move which it now needs to feed without its main points of distribution. Also, bonus points you have affected all the major government bases from which they would try to organise from.
This will lead to lots and lots of shanty towns and people turning to crime.
Dirty bombs do not fade quickly dependent on the material used, but their yield and technology required is limited to regular explosives.
[Answer]
Not pointing to any nation here, make your our assumption on which nation is the most powerful.
The naive approach is to kill the leader of the nation. Which will be easily replaced, because there is a succesor in line or a "vice-leader" appointed.
Let's say you kill the leader and all known succesors. The goverment would proably become parlamentary - if at all, for long enough to find a successor or organize elections.
So, at least you have to kill the leader, all ministers, and all members of the congress/parlament/senate. If we can pick the date, we would choose the appropiate time to get the majority of them in session and assault or bomb the location.
---
There are two treats still: regional or local represantives of the people and the military. There have been historical cases in which the top military leaders take the control of the goverment when the administrative power fails - that also means that if you are the leader of the army, you can do what's mentioned above and become dictator, but we are not talking about that.
What I propose is to play the leaders and the military by destroying infraestructure and keep people busy with local problems for long enough for the nation to effectively split.
You want to destroy main roads (interstate highways or equivalent), so that road transportation is innefective nation wide. The objective is to cause shortage, which they would supply by air, of course, there still airports.
You also want to destroy - if at all possible - all public electric plants. You want national backout! Why? because it is a very effective way to cut long distance communications, so the local goverments (governors and mayors) can't coordinate. Also this means mostly no entertainment, refrigeration ceasing to work for most people, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria! This will push them to get out (Except preppers, there are preppers. They don't go out, they go inside)
Now, we know people, soon enough they will be trying to steal stuff from supermarkets and similar comercial stabishments. And the local govermet and local military will be busy dealing with that.
This is why I imagine they will say, either by emergency broadcast, or just with megaphones on the streets:
>
> People, please calm down! The reason for the lack of electricity was a
> terrorist attack to the XYZ electric plant. We assure you that the
> situation is under control. We are investigating the transportits
> situation. Please remain at home. We don't know when the electricity
> service will be able to resume. Meanwhile we advice to stock on
> non-perishible foods. Thank you.
>
>
>
Rebuilding electric plants, bidges and highways can't be done fast enough. And assuming the local goverments manage to keep the situation under control and fix the food supply... they will be operating decentralized. They would be - from an administrative point of view - independent nations. This is what I mean by "split".
---
As for the time frame... all the destruction must be coordinated as to happen in the same day. But the time consumming part will be preparing it all. You need an small army to deply explosives to tear down the infraestructure across the nation - the bigger the nation, the harder it is - and it will most likely cause enough noise as to have intelligency agencies behind you.
---
And then international aid comes... How did they now? Well, if the most powerful nation goes off the grid, people notice. In particular international flights will find airports without electricity. Besides there are electric generators and satellites.
And with international aid, people are rallied toghether and a new goverment is stablished (I wonder if it will be a single nation). The End.
[Answer]
Probably Guerrilla warfare. Financing extremist that will cause as much panic and civil unrest as possible. Bombing and denying as much major services as possible, electricity, phones, internet etc. Hiring hackers and buying servers to DDOS important government sites and to spread fear and propaganda. Hiring assassins to directly target government figures.
You should continue until they either enforce more and more strict laws to the point of being police state and people getting sick and overthrowing the government or give them the ultimatum that you will not stop until the government resign.
edit: You can try adding to that corrupting politician and trying to find weapons of mass destruction, not necessary bombs but maybe deadly viruses. With that amount of money you can probably research your own program.
edit the second: It's difficult to make an estimate because there are many variables. But let's say you will need at least a month or two to find the right people. You should not do anything directly and only hire crazy people and pay them a lot of money. Give it another two months to set up as best as possible. Find weapons, bombs set up people in as many places and cities as possible. Then if you go all out with everything you got, try starting with assassinating as much political figures as possible. Then the bombing and all out terrorist attacks.
Now the most wild part depending on how much damage you cause and if you can keep it up as frequent as possible, let's say mass shooting, bombing and spreading misinformation through the media as possible. Six months to a year seems reasonable amount of time before things start getting really out of control for the government. And that is without finding some mass virus and exploiting it.
[Answer]
Use your money to destroy the government's currency. Most governments these days issue fiat money. This means money that only has value because vendors perceive it as having value. This situation is stable under normal circumstances, but it can be destabilized pretty quickly by events that cause people to doubt the future value of the currency.
By engaging in suitable buying and selling of the currency in question, you can cause an apparent instability in the currency. This may cost a lot, or it may actually bring in more money. It depends.
Once a government's money is destabilized, the destabilization of the government itself will be done by either the people or the power structures within the country. There are a few examples from history, although these were not the result of intentional sabotage.
If this is going to work at all, it should work in less than 90 days.
[Answer]
The easiest way to destroy the US is through triggering 3 or 4 things. There is a massive shelf on the african continent that is really close to falling into the ocean. When it does it will hit the US east coast with a massive tsunami. On the west coast, all you need to do is invest in figuring out how to trigger the San Andreas fault line and/or triggering the Super Volcano under Yellowstone.
If that isn't enough for you, you can also blow up a large swathe of the middle of the US by lighting the Butane reserves that are under high pressure and very explosive in the mid south. Doing so would blow a long chunk out of the US expanding the Gulf of Mexico almost to Northern most reaches of the US. Triggering these things, which may in fact trigger each other anyways would eliminate the US as a functional government with no hopes of recovering.
the best case scenario would be that there might not be an instant wipeout of a small area, but that area would have no industrial, economic, military, aggricultural, or any other base to last very long, if at all beyond a very short amount. In a century or 2 the US might be livable again, but probably not.
And I am pretty sure you could do these all for under a trillion Euro, probably under $100k. The problem is the US is a industrial, economic, military, and aggricultural powerhouse and as such people want to prevent this or slowly take it over, not instantly wipe it out, because doing so will only do damage to everyone, maybe not on the scale, but still a lot of damage. Also, these are environmental catastrophese that wouldn't just affect the US. It would kill possibly billions and even eventually the entire ecosystem of the world...
We can 100% do 3 of these things which are more recoverable and less a total knockout than the 4th... That 4th one, I'd think could be figured out fairly easily. It's just we put our research into figuring out how to stop it from happening, not how to trigger it, so we haven't done that research... at least not publicly. I wouldn't put it past all governments to have invested into figuring it out, either as a way to figure out how to stop it, or figuring out how to do it as a strike against the US and the US's allies.
[Answer]
Nothing too drastic needed. Attack the institution that governs the markets and everything else. The government.
In terms of the USA, use your trillions to put Socialist politicians in Congress. Make sure they are true believers. Eventually, the Supreme Court justices are replaced by Socialists which helps the death spiral. Once the government is under Socialist control, destruction of the government and misery of the people is guaranteed. The people will vote for the politicians that give them the most stuff. Once the Socialists are in power, they stay in power.
The reason this works is that the Socialist ideology works at cross purposes to the benefit of the individuals who must live under it. The more productive people balk, and the government responds by creating a police state.
Foolish financial policy created by agenda-driven politics guarantees complete destruction.
For larger, richer countries, this will take about 60 years. But the destruction of the government is inevitable.
Examples are Venezuela, The Soviet Union, and China. The former is currently burning. The USSR destroyed itself and split apart into its component countries. China was heading there but embraced capitalism for its people as long as the people let the politicians run amok. Counter examples are... None. There are no successful Socialist governments.
EDIT - disasters and military options do not work as the survivors simply re-implement the same government they had before. Sure, we could somehow create tidal wave and then have another country swoop in and kill the survivors, but that's hardly in the spirit of the question. "Kill all 300,000,000 of them" isn't much of an answer.
[Answer]
Homefront(videogame) try that with north korea revolution,
to do that just throw a nuke(or advanced heavy radiation machine on a sub-atomic level) every 3 months in space above that country and let them fry all microchips batteries and computers they have; it will generate caos "to its knee" in every civilized country based on digital information and electronic distribution of resources.
[Answer]
Two words:
# Beltway sniper
Now multiply that by whatever you can afford to pay people with your trillion dollars.
[Answer]
You clarified in a comment:
>
> gov shutdown for good, it's that simple I don't need casualties if
> possible but since time is of the essence I don't care about humanity
> anymore.
>
>
>
For *good*? You're asking for the most powerful nation in the world to be in anarchy *forever*? **This is simply impossible.** In political science, the reason for this is something called a *[power vacuum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_vacuum).* Simply put, it means that the moment you remove one type of government, something else is going to replace it. It may be a nice new democracy. It may be a rowdy bunch of people with rocket launchers, stolen tanks and AK47s. It may be a clever, brutal, well organized dictator. But it's going to be *someone.*
In the history of humanity, has there ever been a region with a population of more than 1000 people *completely* without any sort of government? No. Why? Because the moment there is no government, someone (usually someone with weapons, or someone popular) is going to step in and *take* power.
The country may split into parts, civil war may ravage the nation, hundreds of groups may kill and slaughter each other, but eventually, someone's going to win. And the result is going to be a nation (or possibly, several new nations) with some form of government.
**It is utterly impossible to have a large nation left in anarchy forever.**
[Answer]
I think the only possible way to bring that nation down is to cut short their supply as No nation can grow itself without taking any help. Basically the point is to make some sanctions on the Nation so that Nation would suffer financial crisis due to which it'll face Unemployment and would see the high inflation and at last it will come under recession. The country will be doomed in itself no one has to even interfere in that Nation.
[Answer]
**It Depends on the Country in Question**
More on why your solution depend son the country you want to destabilize in a minute. Before we get into that, I want to make two key points:
**Point 1: Force is Out**
You will not take down any major government with force. Dirty bombs/terrorism/etc. will not take out any major government - it will, if anything, have the opposite effect. Look at France as a recent example - after terrorist attacks, police power was significantly increased with the full support of a majority of its citizens. When attacked, people dig deeper to protect themselves.
**Point 2: Conspiracies Rarely Work Out**
Plotting with other people rarely works out. Take a look at [this research](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905) to see how quickly conspiracies unravel as more people are brought in. So big plots involving 50+ people trying to blow things up or assassinate people are out. You should plan on having to do everything yourself, which likely removes assassinations and any other 'wet work'.
**Solution A: Get Yourself Elected (see requirements)**
Time Frame: ~5-8 Years
This solution requires that you are a native citizen of the country you wish to take over. Foreigners may be allowed to run in the federal elections of whatever country you are targeting, but you will simply never win. Also the target country can't be China or any other nation that does not have real elections, for obvious reasons.
With 1Tn in reserves this should be trivially simple. The US elections are the most expensive in the world, but the record spent is still just over 1Bn, a mere thousandth of what you can bring to bear.
In advance, you will probably want to buy a number of media companies ahead of time (another few $Bn), then hire a TEAM of the best political planners and you're off and running. The team thing is important, because at the end of the day there are only maybe a dozen or so people that have experience with managing national campaigns... and you could hire ALL of them. That not only gives you a better knowledge pool, it also denies your rivals access to competent management.
At the same time, be sure to start electing cronies to all state/provincial/regional (depending on country) elections. Somewhat slimy people with no real backbone of their own who will just do whatever you say so that you will fund their re-election campaigns in the next cycle as well. Competence is not needed or desired.
Once you have been elected, start making subtle decisions that undermine public trust in other institutions. For example, start selling off significant public assets (ostensibly to pay back national debt, which nearly every country has) - this will reduce the resiliency of the federal system.
Then start a very negative PR campaign that pictures you as the leader that is finally fixing things (an idea that your media outlets are keen to promote). This is where things really stop working, because a government can only function when its citizens believe in it. For example, in the USA one might start calling the IRS a bad idea, state that you have uncovered gross fraud, and do the same with Homeland Security. Then do something nuts like encourage people not to pay their taxes - I bet it would work pretty well. It's obviously harmful to the country, but you have filled any balancing seats of power with your cronies, so you won't be impeached.
At the same time, disband significant portions of the military. Your cover will be that you are doing it because of the "unacceptable military industrial complex" and "people who are making billions of dollars off of it". You won't be required to give any hard proof. But the real kicker here is that when you do this, you fire every general (and on down) that isn't a complete crony. Then you again hire/promote cronies. At this point you have replaced the actual military with one totally under your control.
Next raise taxes on corporations radically - after all, they "don't support the 99%!" - and raise tariffs on goods imported and exported significantly. The economy will begin to crumble very quickly.
At this point you have a government that people don't trust, rampant economic crisis, and a military that you control fully. You ought to be able to affect any type of government change (including anarchy) that you desire.
**Solution B: Do What You Can**
Time Frame: 8-15 Years
Let's say you can't be elected in the country you want to destabilize - a much harder situation. Using force is out, because people will just entrench (unless you're trying to destabilize a very small country, which is another story). You can't be elected, so you can't make the decisions yourself.
But you can still buy ALL the media outlets active in the country. And you fill them with investigative journalists who probe all areas of the government. You also hire detective agencies to dig up dirt for them that the journalists can't/won't get themselves. This creates a years-long tirade in all the news about how the government can't be trusted. And yes, that would be the case in even the best-run country, because all an article needs to find is one bad worker in the millions of public workers to create a 1-week news cycle... I'm sure you can find a few hundred easily. This undermines public confidence.
As confidence erodes with the main parties, throw your financial support behind the "crazy party". The one that no-one would have voted for when they believed in the government. In the USA that might be Libertarians or Communists. Extreme right- and left-wing parties exist everywhere. Recent elections should show that in many European countries if those parties were better funded they could have won elections in many countries. Plus your detectives are digging up dirt on the other guys :)
Next you need to try to demolish major industries. If the country is heavy into tourism, find out why and attack it. As an example.... have your media outlets around the world begin to publish news of every piece of violence that occurs in the country, and call the political situation "unstable" to discourage visitors. You can also buy transportation companies used by tourists and run them into the ground. Find landmark hotels and fire 95% of the cleaning staff. Let people come in, but make sure they have nothing good to say about their visit. The industry and its feeding businesses will collapse within a few years.
[Answer]
Nation-wide electromagnetic pulse. Nobody today has any idea how to run a government, country, business, military, personal life, or pretty much anything without power.
Follow up by de-orbiting those pesky satellites and a few missiles should do for any power stations.. good luck defending them without electricity.
[Answer]
Assuming the US (though I believe this plan would have a massive world-wide impact):
**Attack the Food Supply**
Go after farmers directly. Hire them, export them into other countries, purchase their lands and drastically reduce the amount of food being produced. Currently Farms represent about 100 Billion in the US GDP. I am confident if you doubled most of the salaries of the farmers you could convince about 50% of them to relocate to another country and sell you their land. This would cost you 100B of your total and reduce the output by about 50%.
I would target corn farmers in particular as it is one of my crucial crops in the USA. You could also target the beef and chicken industries. Both of the latter would be relatively easy to persuade as they generally are not treated well already. The government has plenty in reserve to counter-act this but it will likely last less than a year.
**Arm the population/illegalize purchase of firearms**
After 3 months or so start to purchase ammunition and weapon manufacturers. Purchase as much of the gun industry as possible. Lower the costs on the weapons and ammunition to encourage the population to purchase them in bulk. Start a foundation that would organize an anti-gun movement with the funding and backing (through bribes) to be passed. I would guess this portion of the plan would likely take about 200 billion and a year or so.
You now have a lot of extremely upset people with large amounts of weapons and ammunition that are hungry. You've successfully taken away a large portion of their food and their main way to get food.
At this point I would believe that the population would start acting erratic enough to vote the wrong people into the office. If not then you can start grassroots campaigns to overthrow the government. With the amount of tension, the massive stockpile of weaponry and you having possession of a large amount of the firearm industry you'd be able to create a force that could, with the support of the people, start secession attempts from the union and split the country into multiple smaller segments. As pieces leave the union, bring the farmers back and resale them their farms.
I figure it would take about 5 years total for everything to work out. New governments would form and collapse during the split but the old one would fall for good and likely never recoup.
The reason why I believe this would cause a massive world-wide issue is because of the amount of food that is exported from the United States.
[Answer]
Offer everyone or most critical roles a job, buy politicians, decentralise/centralise the system, fire police men. Make the political system (on city, state and country level) enforce various unpopular decisions and make laws that will force them to do unpopular stuff in times of crisis.
After a few months fire everyone, beforehand make sure that most resources necessary to keep a nation are going to be depleted within 1-2 weeks. No backup of food, coal, oil etc.. Make laws against hoarding. No money to buy those and the companies that deliver them have become government controlled and/or we're mostly outlawed. Distribute some heavy weapons, distribute various conflicting media reports that look authentic with logical explanations why various groups are at fault.
Kill politicians or command police/army to violently strike down protests.
Watch the nation go down in anarchy and disrupt any attempt at rebuilding a democracy. Stage fake votes where politicians that are either extremist or ones that do nothing get elected.
Without any government or structure the economy can never recover and the nation is permanently destroyed.
Timeframe at least 1 year. 2-3 if you want to make sure the plan goes through. The slower you do it the easier it gets.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/230150/edit).
Closed 1 year ago.
This post was edited and submitted for review 1 year ago and failed to reopen the post:
>
> **Opinion-based** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/230150/edit).
>
>
>
[Improve this question](/posts/230150/edit)
Would melee weapons become more useful than guns, or would guns still be better?
For reference: in terms of speed, the enhanced humans can outpace bullets by fast-walking.
[Answer]
## It'd change less than you'd think.
Bullets aren't the only kind of weapon out there, and there are plenty of weapons designed explicitly to be hard to miss with.
Volume-of-fire would be king.
Contrary to many fictional depictions, a gatling gun sweeping across your position pretty much can't fail to hit you. thousands of bullets per minute can't really be dodged. Even if they're apparently going at tennis-ball speeds.
In a similar vein, Shotguns and similar scatter-guns are pretty well impossible to dodge even if you can treat the pellets as low subsonic. It doesn't really matter if you can get out of the way of the worst of it, being crippled by the parts you didn't dodge leaves you open to a coup-de-grace.
I would also expect a general military shift towards weapons that can't be easily dodged.
Artillery
Saturation Bombing
Flame-throwers and incendiary weapons
Grenade-launchers and similar explosive-launching weaponry such as the XM-25 which shoots airbursting grenades to hit targets in cover.
At the tactical level, use of mines and hazards to funnel enemies into a kill-zone is already a well understood practice. Being able to dodge bullets doesn't work in a confined space. If you can't get out of the way then there's nowhere to dodge to.
I would also expect an emphasis on supersonic ammunition.
If you can't hear the gun before the bullet hits you, then you won't know you need to dodge in the first place.
Being able to dodge bullets is one of those things that only works if you're under ideal circumstances, and warfare is all about making sure that your opponent never ever gets their ideal circumstances.
[Answer]
**Who Needs Guns?**
A gun is a machine that uses chemical energy to accelerate a projectile to (usually) above the speed of sound. When this projectile hits a target, it transfers that energy to the target, damaging it.
In your world, a human can move at supersonic speeds. (Analysis for scenario one: A tennis ball serve is around 120 mph, about 20% faster than a baseball pitch. In a baseball pitch, the pitcher's hand is moving at the ball's exit velocity. A typical bullet is more than 120% the speed of sound, so your scaled human's pitching hand would be supersonic. Analysis for scenario two: Trivial.)
This means that a human can throw a rock with velocity comparable to a bullet, but with an order of magnitude more mass and thus more energy. (A baseball weighs about 145 g, a 45 caliber bullet weighs about 15 g.) Why would you use a gun to accelerate a projectile when you can just throw it?
[Side note: Similarly in close-quarter combat you probably don't need melee weapons, and man-scale armor is probably useless. The sheer amount of energy in a supersonic punch will obliterate a human target absent super strength to go along with super speed and nearly-infinite energy. Carrying a weapon would be overkill, and being even slightly encumbered could only reduce your ability to dodge similarly-fast opponents.]
The question, then, is whether it's *worth* throwing projectiles at the opponent. It's very cheap to try it, ranging from the cost of carrying a bag of projectiles down to (if there are pebbles around) zero. And your opponents can move fast enough to dodge, but they can't actually hear the projectile; they have to see each individual projectile to take action to avoid it. If you ever see the back of an opponent's head, chuck a rock at it and see it explode in a red mist. If you have three buddies, throw three rocks such that dodging the first puts you in the path of one of the others. If nothing else, why not try? Unless the sun catches it just right they might not notice...
[Answer]
# They never saw it coming:
Just because your people are a lot faster doesn't mean they think faster or sound travels faster. A lot of the same weapons would still be used - they would just go through more ammo. But in addition, melee weapons and machine pistols would become a lot more popular.
Tactics in combat would need to change. It would be difficult to shoot anyone who knew they were being shot at using slow-firing weapons, since they could reasonably keep dodging around to avoid being hit. But you could still surprise people, since they wouldn't hear the bullets coming. You could still spray bullets at opponents, since they couldn't see the bullets to know exactly where the bullets were. So your troops would try to drive enemies into positions where there was little maneuvering room. While the opponents could dodge faster, shooters could also aim and fire fully automatic weapons with ease.
But troops with this kind of speed would likely be able to rush enemy positions and be extremely close to enemies. Setting off explosives and shooting projectile weapons at extremely close quarters would be a recipe for disaster. Hand-held weapons would move at the speed of the people wielding them, so a rapier or katana would be a very effective weapon. But even the humble K-bar would be deadly to opponents at close range.
Mortars, RPG's and grenades might be big and slow enough to allow people to both dodge and deflect them mid-air. To counter this, you would need these weapons to be radar triggered by proximity.
While vehicles with powerful, fast-firing guns will still be useful, really important vehicles like tanks will likely be obsolete. A man carrying a large-enough satchel charge could run up to them and blow them up.
[Answer]
Different guns have different bullet speeds. BB guns are the slowest, comparable to paintball shots. Most guns nowadays however shoot bullets that [come out of the barrel faster than sound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_velocity).
If everyone can suddenly dodge bullets from a rifle, what will happen is that armies around the world as well as Americans will demand less obsolete guns and ammunition, and more high speed weapons and bullets from their suppliers. Sabots would also become more popular. Those can make bullets faster, enough that your people wouldn't be able to outrun them.
But if your guys can dodge sabot-accelerated bullets, then your world might switch to laser guns faster than the real world. Only Judas Priest's *Painkiller* would be able to outrun that.
[Answer]
Chances are the development of laser weapons would be ramped up. Youve got a few years before we figure it out, but once practical man-portable lasers are built, these super soldiers wouldn't be so super. They can move faster than bullets, but nobody is moving faster than the speed of light.
[Answer]
The simple answer is that somebody would build a better gun. For example, they would switch to a scattershot weapon that put out a wall of fire to large to easily avoid, or they would use a gun with a higher rate of fire.
Examples might include a superposed load gun, which is a real world weapons type in which multiple projectiles are launched from a single barrel. Such as the experimental Metal Storm system [enter link description here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyAjzowYP1o&t=39s) or Gatling weapons.
Melee weapons might be given more emphasis as a backup, but it's likely that armies would deploy methods to make closing to melee range difficult. Such as using more fragmentation weapons, which would be hard to dodge.
[Answer]
If one can outrun bullets, their body would be so strong that they wouldn't need to. As others pointed out, faster bullets could solve this problem.
But, there are other weapons that could damage the bodies of the supersoldiers. The weapons could be chemical, radioactive, etc.
One could go the chemical route by finding what sort of acid, nerve agent, etc. can kill these supersoldiers. Then, one could use tanks to fire special projectiles which explode over large areas. Or they could use mines to spread the destructive chemical. When the supersoldier appears, an entire area surrounding them could be covered with the nerve agent causing the soldier to die.
Another weapon that could work, assuming these soldiers need a lot of oxygen to move fast, is some sort of thermobaric bomb. As the supersoldier suffocates because of the lack of oxygen due to the bomb, someone slower could move in for the kill with a projectile weapon.
Some strong source of gamma rays cold cause serious radiation sickness to these soldiers. If one could make a weapon with a lot of gamma radioactive material, in principle, the gamma rays could be focused on the enemy with a bunch of Laue lens. This would be impossible to dodge since gamma rays are invisible.
] |
[Question]
[
Riot police are marching across the burning fields of the UN capital on Mars to quell pro alien insurrectionists. Ethics and activism dictate that no lethal weapons can be used on other humans. But since handheld railgun tech is already widespread for anti-alien use some generals in the chain of command want to save money. Here is their paraphrased conversation:
Steve: Bob, we need to get rid of these rebels, but we can’t use our big supply of lethal railguns. How can our police quell the riots *without* using the money we have set aside for personal use?
Bob: If only all those railguns we have could be nonlethal!
The railguns are similar to assault rifles, but they can get up to 2kps and rapid fire. Is there any way to make a railgun nonlethal without spending too much of the generals' vacation money?
[Answer]
It's a railgun where the round is accelerated by the gun itself down the barrel by electronics...It's not like a gunpowder cartridge where the power level is determined by the powder charge in the round so you're trapped at whatever power level the round is.
So just dial down the acceleration in the barrel and at some point it would just be like lobbing bullets at people with your hands. Nothing says a railgun has to shoot at hypersonic speeds.
Then you would also need to to modify the bullet materials so they aren't so hard. Since there are no explosions and the acceleration is more gradual than a bullet you could conceivably use other materials designed to reduce the impact (putty or something maybe?).
The metallic part of the round would have to be minimized such that it is foil or powder and sheds so it can be slowed down by air resistance. Or impregnated through a softer medium.
That's about as nonlethal as you could manage with something like that where your impact surface is small making it difficult to distribute the force out and reduce the pressure exerted on impact. The smaller diameter your regular railgun rounds are, the more challenging this will be. Larger round diameters and round lengths let you do things like fire long sticks of putty that have much more mass but can also deform.
[Answer]
**Shock-Bayonets**
A railgun needs to have a big powersource in form of a battery to work. We could use this electric energy to power a bayonet-like device, which the police could use as a shocking stick, kinda like an electric cattle prod.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/92B8y.jpg)
[Answer]
Fit them as [rifle grenade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifle_grenade) launchers. When the railgun projectile gets to the end of the barrel, the fast-moving but lightweight projectile hits a much heavier grenade, sending it off at a sedate pace that-a-way. Inside the grenades, you have traditional less-lethal payloads: tear gas, flashbangs, etc. Disadvantages are indifferent range and accuracy, not huge drawbacks under the circumstances.
The size and shape of the railgun itself (fairly lightweight, long durable barrel) would make it ideal for close quarters combat, which may or may not be lethal depending on how much practice your troops have had with it.
[Answer]
Much depends on how the railgun technology works.
For example, would it be possible to replace the bullets with very small metal pellets (possibly metal foam or wireballs) covered in soft rubber and ablative foam? This would enormously decrease the range, but the weapons could become nonlethal - less metal to be electromagnetically accelerated, *way* less kinetic energy, no penetrative power to speak of.
Or the other way round: **heavier** projectiles, that would not be accelerated to the same disastrous speeds, and whose nature could be further rendered less lethal. Imagine a rigid steel wire, powering a nerf bullet with a soft (or not so soft) rubber tip. This could still have a significant range - it would be a sort of arrow - while not being necessarily lethal. The energy transfer from the railgun coil would probably shorten the railgun lifetime significantly - instead of a quick electromagnetic fling you'd get a comparatively slower build-up.
Or "micro-flechette rounds" - depending on the size of the flechettes, air friction could slow them down enough to not be (immediately) lethal, or not unless some vital organ gets mulched (e.g. liver or spleen). The railgun would still be lethal at point-blank range, which could be useful in some scenarios. And of course it would depend on which bullets were fired.
This might have any negative effect on the railguns' life that we might desire (from none at all, to turning them into one-shot blunderbusses when the internal linear coupled coil overloads and cracks, or even melts down).
Also the firing could have lots of attached special effects, like the ablative foam exploding with a loud bang (2 kps is way over the speed of sound), or the wireballs igniting due to atmospheric friction (that is actually very unlikely at sea level, but who knows... maybe magnesium-steel wireballs were selling for a song and someone thought they might cheaply replace pure steel ones).
"Nonlethal" means actually "not intentionally and directly lethal". Someone hit in the face, or at point-blank range, or set on fire by an unintentionally incendiary round could still die. A hard hit in the wrong place can still kill someone with [the appropriate condition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_QT_syndrome). Hitting someone who is driving... etc.
[Answer]
Gas Parachutes.
The bullets are long and include a fluid chamber. Further they have an air duct leading from the front of the bullet to a parachute-like part of the bullet. As long as the bullet is faster than x, the parachute-like part expands outwards slowing the bullet down greatly. Below speed x it doesn't expand anymore so the bullet won't instantly fall to the ground.
The bullets have a foam tip so they don't hurt.
The foam is connected to the chamber - but only when or after the parachute expands. This way you can put in a non lethal contact poison which doesn't hurt people handling the bullets.
[Answer]
A big problem with these "less lethal" guns is the projectile speed and muzzle energy are set by the explosive charge, which means they're always the same. But the large projectile slows down quickly as it flies due to air drag, so it will be "less lethal" over a short range of distance, useless at long range, and at close range it will crack skulls. If it was weak enough to be safe at close range, it would then be useless at 20 meters...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2iLP8.png)
Sure, the military want railguns because they can shoot projectiles much faster than powder, but being electric, railguns and coilguns have another feature: adjustable projectile speed.
So you could make a "less lethal" railgun by having a scope rangefinder that automatically
measures distance to target and adjusts shot power to deliver the required projectile speed at the target.
This could lead to some interesting plot twists, for example:
* The integrated face and shape recognition software which was originally designed to avoid shooting people in the face doesn't work that well with aliens, leading to various losses of appendages, and of course accusations of "racist guns designer to murder only aliens".
* Likewise, power should be adjusted depending on the target ; after all some aliens come with thick scales and would shrug off bullets and others are quite squishy and would explode if they receive a shot intended for the former. Great opportunity for unintended misbehavior of software "features" and class action lawsuits.
* If you aim at someone far away, the gun will set itself to high power, then if someone steps in front of it at the shot is fired, they get obliterated.
Although... I'd recommend a coilgun instead. Railguns require a conductive sabot to propel the round, and that will fly off and split into several pieces, possibly sharp and very hot, turning the thing into a kind of shotgun. But everyone knows the real reason it was decommissioned was cost ; after all those sabots (and lawsuits) are expensive, and if you use a coilgun you can shoot the same projectile several times if you recover it...
[Answer]
This answer considers the case where a railgun works under the same principle as current technology.
Step 1: Calculate the % of the default current needed to make the railgun bullets as slow as they need to be to be considered non-lethal. Eg: 10% of the original power makes bruises but doesn't penetrate people.
Step 2: Add a resistor (obviously low resistance, high power) in parallel to the rail-bullet-rail circuit in order to suck out the remaining percentage of the current. Resistors, and their accompanying metal connector modules, will probably be dirt cheap.
[Answer]
Ferro-fluid adhesive gel balls. The ferro-fluid provides the ferrous material necessary to accelerate the ball electromagnetically. Then the ferro-fluid causes the ball material to wrap around the target immobilizing them. Maybe a binary composition that mixes on contact and causes the ferrous particles to simultaneous repel and attract each other causing them to spread out evenly around the target. Then quickly hardening to impede movement. Removal could be done with a ceramic knife to part the gel and peel it off of the target. Or an antagonist component that breaks down the gel.
[Answer]
Bolo projectiles. When launched from the rail gun the weights separate drawing a thin cable between them. The cable hits the targets and the weights cause the cable to wrap around the target and then lock somehow when they finish wrapping. Of course, as with any seemingly non-lethal weapon, accidents will happen (wrapping around the throat, crushing the skull, etc.) but they are rare incidents.
] |
[Question]
[
My idea is a corvette is dipped in radar reflecting paint that makes it look like a 50x50x70 foot asteroid. It shuts down its reactor and the crew all huddle in the ops deck with minimal heating and life support.
The ship sets itself drifting with a slow rotation to make it more asteroid like. Since it was launched in secret and almost no one knows about no one will be looking for it. Any ship that encounters it will just think it is an asteroid until it opens it torpedo tubes and its uber high tech jammers.
Will this stealth ship be able to escape detection and make it close enough to earth to destroy the shipyards?
[Answer]
* Don't use RAM paint. Use actual rock. Either outer hull plates made of rock cut to the right shape, or a ship tunneled into one genuine asteroid.
* It is not just the crew that needs temperature. Power plants will produce waste heat, and without power the ship cannot sense, communicate, or shoot. Consider radiator panels on one side only, and hope that you are never outflanked.
* Of course using the engines will probably produce a noticeable exhaust. A maneuvering ship can be detected and if it suddenly stops to maneuver the course will be quite predictable -- it is determined by the momentum and gravity wells. Once the ship is detected, breaking contact will be hard.
* On the other hand, there are plenty of random rocks out there with different shape and albedo. Camouflaging as one of them should be relatively easy while the ship coasts.
So there are two conditions, and one potential problem:
1. The ship must launch from a base which is not under observation, and never maneuver in view of a sensor.
2. That means launching *very* far out, and coasting inward for a *very* long time.
3. Earth might have defenses against *natural* asteroids.
The intruder must plot a fine line between being distant enough to be ignored, and close enough to shoot without lengthy (and detectable) maneuvers. It would help if they had the specs of the asteroid defense ...
[Answer]
What you describe is more camouflage than a stealthy set up, since your setup disguises the ship as an asteroid, it doesn't hide it.
I think it can be spotted by checking its orbital parameters: given its apparent size and its orbit it would be possible to estimate its mass once it passes close enough to another body or a [probe is sent around it](https://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/21/determining-the-mass-of-comet-67pc-g/). That information would point that it is more empty than it looks, unless you disguise it the proper way. In other words, making it look like a icy asteroid will work better than making it look like an iron asteroid, because the apparent lower density can be more easily justified for the icy asteroid.
[Answer]
**You can't hide in space.**
Any space ship will produce waste heat, which has to be radiated into space, or else you'll cook the crew. This waste heat is very easy to pick out among the cold blackness of space. For perspective, we can pick up signals from the Voyager 1 probe, which is tens of millions of kilometers away, even though it has a paltry 20W power output, roughly the equivalent to a refrigerator light bulb. Running life support for the entire trip to earth at asteroid-like speeds without putting out any heat signature whatsoever likely is not feasible, unless your aliens can survive at extremely low temperatures.
See [Is there any way to truly hide a spaceship?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/672/is-there-any-way-to-truly-hide-a-spaceship) for lots more details on why it's impractical to carry a big heat sink and just not radiate anything, or to employ directional radiation methods.
[Answer]
**The Hiding part of this can be made to work quite well.**
Use a thin layer of actual rock. This will give it the correct radar and visual and thermal and spectroscopic appearance.
You might need to install some heat radiators to dispose of excess heat. Only operate them when facing away from all enemies, of course!
**However, this will gain you almost nothing!**
A 50x50x70 foot asteroid is a rare beast. A comparable meteor passes within 10 million km of Earth about once per year, only. (That's within 30 times the distance of the Moon!). You would have noticed the tabloid media going nuts about it every now and then.
One that happens to be headed on a near pass of any planet, base or shipyard will be scrutinized down to the last millimeter, even if only to ascertain it will not impact anything valuable. Such detail scrutiny will defeat the camouflage, rendering this approach useless.
But if you go smaller, yes. A 50x50x70 foot asteroid is a monster. But if you hide a bomb or a missile in a 5x5x7 foot asteroid, with similar grade stealth systems, then it is likely to pass inspection. Simply because there are more small asteroids than large ones. With occurrence roughly inversely related to *mass*. This tiny object, massing 1/1000th as much, will be roughly 1000 times more common (and 1/10th as easy to detect).
Earth routinely gets impacted by such smaller rocks 5-10 times per year, and **hundreds** of similar rocks pass within 1 million km of Earth each year.
What defeats your plan is the size (and thus rarity) of the fake asteroid needed to hide your ship.
[Answer]
Apart from all of the other issues mentioned: any solar system developed enough for this to be a thing is likely a solar system that has mapped out all of its asteroids of this side, at which point your ship will be immediately obvious as "the asteroid that isn't in any of the records".
[Answer]
The only way to achieve passive stealthiness is to have a ship that generates no heat, which is difficult under ideal circumstances and impossible with organic lifeforms aboard. So you need to have your "crew" be an AI, or the uploaded personalities of humans, that can be stored without energy usage.
Then you take an asteroid and build a ship into it. When the time comes to "launch" that ship, you use some kind of linear accelerator to fire it at Earth on the trajectory you desire. The ship starts off completely powered down so no heat output, but it has a timer in it set before the launch - when that timer triggers it opens a relay, and that brings your ship (and AI/personalities) online to fire whatever weapons they need. Off course, the defenders will light up your ship and crew pretty fast...
As such, this is likely going to be a one-way trip, so it's far simpler for your asteroid-ship to be controlled by a single, dumb computer program that wakes up, fires a bunch of torpedoes at a bunch of preselected targets, then overloads its reactor and self-destructs to prevent the enemy from figuring out precisely what just happened. You don't actually need a starship, just a stealthy weapons-delivery platform.
The alternative, much more reliable but much more difficult, approach is to compromise the sensor systems of your opponent (**all** of them, across all *their* ships too) so that any data read about your ship is ignored. A virus to achieve this would be incredibly difficult to detect (proving a negative) unless your enemy knows your ship is really there by some other means. This allows you to build a perfectly ordinary ship with perfectly ordinary parameters, but still remain wholly undetected - about the only stealth you'd need is black paint to prevent anyone using their can't-be-fooled organic eyes from picking your ship out.
[Answer]
## Your ship will also be SLOW as well as hot
Firstly it could only target ballistic objects i.e. ships or more probably stations/structures that are not accelerating or capable of acceleration (basically in orbit around a planet or the local star. This is because the ship in this scenario absolutely cannot alter course or change velocity once its starts the mission. (Asteroids ducking and weaving look suspicious.)
Secondly and more importantly assuming your crew *really* wanted to make people think their ship was an asteroid it would have to commence its approach to the target from the orbital plane of the local asteroid belt. And that means your ship has to have aprox the same orbital velocity (relative to the target) as the asteroid belt it came from. So in the case of say Earth an asteroid heading towards us will have a velocity of somewhere around 40Kps. That may seem fast but the belt is what? 400 million kilometers or so away from Earth. And since all natural objects not accelerating follow curved paths around the solar system *not* straight lines you are looking at travel times measured in YEARS.
Now you could start the mission closer to the target by placing your ship on a trajectory that makes it *look* like it came from an asteroid belt but that means powered maneuvering to get to that point in the first place.
**Solution;** Don't use a crewed ship. Use one or more AI controlled missiles equipped with on-board liquid coolant supplies that they can use to reduce their hull temperature to that of local space. There's a description of what I'm talking about on the **Matter Beams Tough SF blog**.
[Answer]
# Radar is not the primary detection method for near earth objects.
This method of becoming stealthy will not work by itself. Optics (taking pictures) is still the most heavily relied upon method. The answers which indicate that you should actually disguise your ship to actually look like the asteroid are better because then the optics would match the radar, if they saw something that looked like a big asteroid on radar, but under optics it just looked black, or worse like a ship, that would set off all kinds of alarms and blow your operation.
[Answer]
It depends on the scale of your fiction. In space everyone can see everywhere, you have to be a long way away to be outside of the range where you are obvious.
In the real world we have discovered about a third of all asteroids bigger than 140m that come within 50 million kilometers of Earth (roughly everything from Venus to Mars). More than 20,000 asteroids in total that come within that distance are tracked. Remember, this is using current day technology. In a world where we have space corvettes our tech will be so much better, every ship will have telescopes.
The answer to your question is: you can do it, so long as you are far enough away from everything else so you can't be seen when you begin your transit. For example, if humans in your world have colonized Mars and basically stick to the orbits between Mars and Earth, then Jupiter is outside the area of detection. You can hide out in a hidden base around Jupiter, launch your asteroid camouflaged ship (probably best to keep your ship inside an actual asteroid rather than using magic paint) and wait for the journey to Earth - just make sure to have enough supplies (including pre-cooled heat sinks) for the trip!
Other plausible ideas would be: Launch actual asteroids at extremely fast speeds at the shipyard from a very far distance. Launch tiny pre-programmed missiles that are too small to be detected and can run cold and fast. Disguise the ship as one with a legitimate purpose (combine with the asteroid idea to have an asteroid-hauler bringing a high value load of minerals into Earth orbit, only for it to actually be hollowed out and filled with ships!).
[Answer]
**Yes, but only from a single direction at a time**
As others have said the heat of the ship will make it very visible compared to 4K of deep space. however it would be possible to use, essentially the same technology as a fridge to cool a shield/screen to ~4K which you can then hide the ship behind, the downside of this is that overall you generate even more heat and therefore are more visible from other directions so it would only work if you know where the enemy is
[Answer]
**Ship is actually an asteroid.**
This would sidestep issues about being disguised as an asteroid. Use an unmodified asteroid and house your ship inside it. For storytelling purposes this could be cool. The little ship has got an engine capable of moving the asteroid when it needs to. If push comes to shove the ship can ditch out of the asteroid and the big engine then makes it very fast.
Your asteroid will be warmer than it should be in the infrared because your space people are inside and they insisted on having a hot tub, and not a small one. But that is ok. If an asteroid is hit energetically by another asteroid that will make it hot just like banging a nail with a hammer makes it hot. You have arranged that your asteroid was hit energetically (before you put the ship in it!). Someone noting excess heat will note big recently melted divot in the side of your asteroid and figure it is still warm.
In space you might actively scan with [things besides radar](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/175993/is-radar-better-than-visible-light-in-deep-space). Visible light would work well and so you need to be shaped like an asteroid. Muons or other energetic particles would scatter very differently from a ship as opposed to an asteroid. But the scatter properties of a hollow asteroid and a nonhollow but less dense asteroid would be similar.
] |
[Question]
[
>
> "They fly now?"
>
> "They fly now!?"
>
> "They fly now"
>
>
>
One of the most iconic characteristic of dragons is their ability to fly, on top of that, my intelligent (human level) dragons also use a fun chemical, called "Királyvíz" as their breath weapon.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yY2gWm.jpg)
*(Real királyvíz doesn't actually look different than this)*
[Királyvíz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia)1 is a mixture of sugar, spice and everything nice (with a hint of Professor X). It's signature ability is to chew through even *gold*en experience2 and star *platinum* with ease. It also produces chlorine gas as a side-effect. On top of that, the reaction-speed of királyvíz can be increased by upping the temperature, something that naturally occurs in flying creatures, it's called waste heat.
Now, dragons can only use powered flight for a very short time, like giant pterosaurs. Their gliding capability is on the same level as for the [Quetzalcoatlus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus) northropi. They're roughly at around the size of a large horse, but their longer necks, tail and larger head tends to make them look bigger.
**Given that, would it (gliding flight) confer advantage to a dragon, fighting humans, given they are both trying to kill each other and the human band (at around 5 in number) has crossbows, which can wound and potentially kill dragons? *The outlined situation is just a point of reference.***
1: Aqua Regia
2: Alchemists, who are also fans of JoJo, sometimes use names from the manga instead of the actual element, to avoid revealing secrets to outsiders
[Answer]
**Gliding doesn't burn much energy**
An albatross can fly non stop for days simply by gliding. For something as large as a dragon, powered flight would use massive amounts of energy, which means gliding is vitally important to avoid becoming exhausted far too quickly.
The dragon would still be gliding in combat. The dragon might have two to five minutes of powered flight, so it would use a few seconds here and there to gain lift and stay in the air. A dragon fighting another dragon would be as much about wearing each other out as fangs or flames.
[Answer]
I'd like to answer this question with a real-world example: **Lionel Messi**. Stats have shown that Messi runs for roughly 5% of a given game. Despite this, this man is breaking records - he's 5-time Ballon d'Or champion! So how does he do it, and what are the advantages of just walking/slow-jogging around as opposed to running all the time?
1. **Energy conservation**: Even if he could/wanted to, there's no reason for him to waste energy and end up exhausted. If he gets too tired mid-match, he might perform badly and *gasp* miss a few goals!
2. **Injury prevention**: Similar to above, he's trying to not pull a muscle - a *successful* football career is a marathon, not a sprint.
3. **Strategy**: This man isn't just randomly ambling about - he's watching how the players on the other team move and wants to make sure he can predict what they'll do next. This way he can exploit their weaknesses and make this game more of a math than a sport.
The combination of above factors means that if done properly, the 5% of a game that Messi spends running is brutal for the other team's goalie, because he can strike more precisely with a greater guarantee of success.
So make your dragons behave like Messi - let them glide about from above and have a good view and understanding of a battle. Once they have a plan in mind, they can strike with lethal effectiveness.
[Answer]
Gliding flight would be useful in combat by keeping them stable in flight and therefore more accurate with their breath weapon. Expending less energy would also be good in of itself, as the dragon would want to conserve its strength for when it has to dogfight or escape
[Answer]
>
> Given that, would it (gliding flight) confer advantage to a dragon, fighting humans, given they are both trying to kill each other and the human band (at around 5 in number) has crossbows, which can wound and potentially kill dragons? *The outlined situation is just a point of reference.*
>
>
>
An advantage as compared to what? Walking?
The answer is: yes, flying is much better than walking!
You say that your dragons are "roughly at around the size of a large horse" and have gliding abilities similar to [*Quetzalcoatlus northropi*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus). So let's compare the numbers on a horse, a *Q. northropi*, and a [Grob G103](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grob_G103_Twin_Astir&oldid=923302804) glider.
* **Weight**: Horse: 800 kilograms. *Q. northropi*: Unknown. Glider: 500 kilograms.
* **Length**: Horse: 2.5 meters. *Q. northropi*: 8 meters. Glider: 8.1 meters.
* **Wingspan**: Horse: 0 meters. *Q. northropi*: 10 meters. Glider: 17.5 meters.
Let's start by assuming that your dragon's weight, size, and general aerodynamic characteristics are identical to those of the Grob G103. What can your dragon do?
Well, to start with, she can fly around at 100 km/h, while only losing 75 centimeters of height per second. This means that if she starts at a height of 2,000 meters, she can fly at this speed for about 45 minutes without expending a significant amount of muscular effort. That's great for flying over humans without getting hit: if I have to go near humans armed with crossbows, I'd much rather be in the air, flying at 100 km/h, and turning randomly, than on the ground running.
And that's ignoring the fact that on a sunny day, your dragon can find columns of rising air (produced by warm spots on the ground) and use them to stay up for hours.
But can a dragon use gliding flight to kill a human? Absolutely.
The maximum permissible speed of the Grob glider is 250 km/h. (Any faster, and it's at risk of shaking itself apart.) It's easy for your dragon to attain this speed: she just has to dive, starting from at least about 500 meters up. Having attained that speed, a nice and easy way to kill the humans would be just dropping some rocks on them. Humans don't stand up very well against 250 km/h rocks.
After having dropped rocks on the humans, your dragon can *climb back up and do it again*. And that's *without* using any additional energy. But how many times, exactly?
If there were no drag on the dragon, decelerating from 250 km/h to 100 km/h would allow her to climb 400 meters. I don't quite remember enough from my calculus classes to figure out the exact amount of drag, but I did a couple of back-of-the-envelope calculations, and it's reasonable to guess that after climbing and doing a second bomb run, she'll have about 280 meters' worth of kinetic energy remaining. Subsequent attacks will use less energy, so she may have 180 meters' worth of energy after the third, 100 after the fourth, and 40 after the fifth, possibly leaving her with enough energy to make a sixth dive-bombing attack.
Let me repeat that for emphasis. **Gliding flight will allow your dragon to "dive-bomb" the humans about five or six times before having to land.**
Now, a wingspan of 17.5 meters gives you an awfully big dragon, and I don't know if you could get away with only 500 kilograms for an animal that big. But let's cut both of those numbers in half, giving you a wingspan of 9 meters and a weight of 250 kilograms. That's very similar to both the wingspan and estimated weight of *Q. northropi*, so you're in business. What effect will this have on the dragon's aerodynamic characteristics? Slim to none! Reducing both the weight and the wingspan by proportional amounts doesn't have much effect on aerodynamics, so all of the above numbers are still valid, with no changes.
My advice to the humans, by the way, is to stand near some trees.
[Answer]
Gliding flight vastly increases the angles of attack you can use during combat. Instead of being forced to walk up to your enemies and potentially get riddled with crossbow bolts, you can simply dump the chemical on them while strafing like a bombing run and fly off before anyone can retaliate. Flying low means your enemies have to be constantly looking both on the ground and in the air to figure out where you've gone, which means they have to waste time looking in more places where you aren't instead of just a 360 degree radius around them.
However, azdarchid pterosaurs like *Quetzalcoatlus* weren't really the best at gliding flight. They were really good at terrestrial walking, really good at long distance, energy-efficient flight, but not so good at the stuff in-between. They've been compared to large flying birds today like swans, geese, bustards, and storks. It's thought that azdarchids would have spent most of their time on the ground feeding, probably only taking flight if threatened by a predator or if they were migrating to a new feeding ground. Of course once they did take flight they could probably fly for extreme distances and long periods of time, especially if they caught thermals, but flight for them was an "only if you absolutely have to" kind of thing.
That's not to say there might not be better analogues. Bustards and turkeys are known to have more gliding flight than anything else.
[Answer]
Would gliding flight confer advantage to a dragon?
>
> Short Answer:
>
>
>
**Yes**
>
> Long Answer:
>
>
>
I have a few questions about the breath weapon:
Is the chlorine gas expelled from the dragon or does it stay within them internally?
If it does get expelled that's yet another hazard for the humans and possibly other dragons. In humans low levels of chlorine causes irritation to the eyes and skin. High levels of chlorine can cause perminant lung damage and cause fluid buildup.
>
> **The reaction-speed of királyvíz can be increased by upping the
> temperature**:
>
>
>
Fantastic, you've already identified waste heat from flight. But how about environmental factors?
We believe that Quetzalcoatlus northropi would use the weak thermal pockets over the ocean to extend its glide over the ocean to reach the mating grounds or better feeding areas. [See this well informed National Geographic article.](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/11/pterosaurs-weirdest-wonders-on-wings/)
If you are going to have this as a factor in your world then it could be a perfectly good reason why you are more likely to find dragons in deserts or near volcanos.
**Dragon vs Humans:**
Undoubtably, even at a gliding speed you are easily going to outpace a human on foot. Also, trying to aim a crossbow at a dragon and successfully land a shot, nevermind a crippling one would be massively difficult task.
Although made easier by it being a crossbow and not a longbow it's still quite a feet and would take years of training to master. [Check out this link for other factors that come inot play with the use of crossbows.](https://www.deeranddeerhunting.com/article-index/10-things-that-affect-your-crossbows-accuracy)
To this day people find it difficult to capture pictures of moving targets and/or shooting them even after many years of practice and with fast high impact weapons. Now try that with something you very rarely get the chance of seeing/practicing on as well as potentially fighting back and you're in for one difficult time indeed.
Going back to the chlorine note, if you thought firing a crossbow at a moving target was difficult. Try it while your eyes are burning.
Infact once we add all of your ideas together gliding, Királyvíz and human intelligence. It makes these dragons almost impossible to take down. Realstically to hunt a dragon as a human would take weeks and you would be looking to scare it down to a cool, flat open area for the best advantage.
Finally, environment comes into play here again. What weather are we fighting in? If it's dense fog with very little tree cover then humans have little to no chance of seeing the dragon until it's too late. Whereas a clear day with very little cloud coverage could lead to the dragon being exposed.
**Dragon vs Dragon:**
This brings in an interesting element to dragon vs dragon fights as it brings on endurance chases. Sure a big brawny muscular dragon may beat another in a fight but if you can "outglide" your opponent then it could reinforce the flight element in the dragons personalities and explain why they are rarely seen. (If that is your plot.) Another thing is that it would reinforce long distance flights and explain why the dragons never grew bigger than a certain size.
If you are looking to make these dragons less powerful. You could make it so that the buildup of királyvíz is quite uncomfortable for the dragons so they tend to stick to cooler climates.
**Advantages:**
* Harder to hit,
* Conserves energy [Can travel long distances without rest],
* Adds to stealth,
* Easier to flee,
* Transport young/Eggs away from threats quickly,
* Aerial attacks.
To name a few.
[Answer]
Similar to gliding flight, diving is an unpowered flight pattern that would be massively advantageous to a dragon.
Hawks, eagles, and all kinds of other predator birds use dives to increase their speed, stealth, and ability to attack something without it having the reaction time to prevent the strike. Diving by bringing the wings into the body also reduces the cross section a counter-attack can be successful against. Combining the smaller profile with a fast moving target, and you get a really difficult target to defend against, even if it is about the size of a horse.
The Peregrine falcon can reach amazing dive speeds. If your dragons can come close to that, it would be nearly impossible to hit with anything except a lucky or extremely well placed shot. Defenders would be reduced to using flack, like in WWII, which damaged the ground almost more than it did air forces. If you only have bows and crossbows, you'd have to send up a considerable volley to attempt a hit, and if you only have 5 of these, you likely aren't going to inflict serious damage.
>
> The Peregrine is renowned for its speed, reaching over 320 km/h (200 mph) during its characteristic hunting stoop (high-speed dive),[4] making it the fastest bird in the world and the fastest member of the animal kingdom.
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrine_falcon>
>
> Gravity becomes an enemy here. The British later estimated that some 25 percent of civilian casualties from German World War II bombing attacks on their cities, were from friendly fire. That is, British anti-aircraft shells eventually falling back to earth, causing property damage and casualties.
>
>
>
<https://www.quora.com/Did-anti-aircraft-flak-falling-from-the-sky-ever-kill-people-on-the-ground-in-World-War-II>
There are plenty of movie and book references that show dragons using this tactic, so I don't think I have to prove my point there.
] |
[Question]
[
**Request for Proposal**
The [planet](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/33603/6986) to host our new colony occupies a section of the universe considered off-limits by numerous militant groups opposed to the safe harbor of innocent civilians and refugees. Should the colony be discovered, it will be summarily destroyed, resulting in the loss of life in the hundreds of thousands. We cannot count on the qualities of the host planet to protect against this outcome, so we must devise a reliable and persistent means to prevent signals from being dispatched from the vicinity of the host planet.
As such, we are submitting this Request for Proposal in search of a technology that meets the following requirements:
* Capable of deflecting, absorbing, or otherwise inhibiting all outbound artificial signals from the host planet and satellites in its orbit, including signals potentially emitted by hostile actors;
* Possesses a minimal detection rating to reduce the chance of accidental discovery;
* Utilizes a renewable energy source;
* Requires minimal maintenance; and
* Does not meaningfully impede the motion of spacefaring vessels.
Cost of the technology is no object. However, the system must be deployed and operational prior to the arrival of the first colonizing ship, which is scheduled to depart in six (6) calendar years and is expected to require ten (10) months to reach the host planet.
Thank you for your attention.
Irene Caulgwoff
Director of Technologies
Intergalactic Colonization Authority
[Answer]
**Use wires as much as possible**
For instance, don't broadcast television over the air, but instead use cable exclusively. Don't use wi-fi, just wired ethernet. No cell phones, just "landlines".
**Shield everything**
Big sources of electrical power will give off detectable signals. Shielding these isn't hard, however: A simple conductive, grounded shell around it will easily block the wayward signals.
Do the same for electrical and data transmission lines as well; not only will this improve your signal integrity anyway, but it will prevent leaking signals beyond the physical wires.
Your buildings should likewise be shielded to block any wayward signals. For extra protection, build underground to get the added protection of the ground itself.
**When wireless communication is required, use as little power as possible**
A walkie-talkie is handy for communicating over open distances of up to a couple of miles, but isn't going to be detectable from orbit, let alone out in deep space -- it's just too weak of a signal to stand out against the background noise.
You can further reduce the risk of detection by using directional transmitters, such as lasers and microwave transmitters, especially for those times when you just need to boost the power to get a signal to go farther.
**Encrypt *everything***
There's lots of background noise in space, across every possible frequency and spectrum. When looking for signals from intelligent sources, then, the key is to look for patterns, and discard all the rest.
Enter encryption: A good encryption algorithm produces output that, ostensibly, is indistinguishable from randomness. You can't look at a block of such data and determine whether it is the works of William Shakespeare (encrypted), or just a whole bunch of random 1s and 0s.
Modern communications protocols require some non-encrypted header stuff, but if you were to mandate that everything that goes "on the wire" is always encrypted with, say, AES-256 using the common password "P@s5w0rd!", everyone can still decrypt and read it (notwithstanding additional encryption that might be being used for actual privacy) but the very nature of it being communication has now been effectively obfuscated.
Now, you'll of course have to modify or invent something new to encrypt not just digital 1s and 0s but also the analog carrier signals used as well, lest you produce the recognizable pattern of "highs" and "lows" that betray the use of digital technology, but that's pretty much just window dressing.
Encryption is not a panacea, however -- you will still have to rely as little as possible on wireless signals, and use as low power as possible, to minimize the risk of detection. Encryption just adds a little extra protection when you do need to use them.
**Change frequencies regularly**
At the same time, you'll want to avoid relying on certain frequencies too much, as even if it's unrecognizable the spike in certain frequencies can still betray you. This can be accomplished by using a variety of different frequencies for all methods of wireless communication, mixing the use of radio and microwave, and even using combinations thereof for the transmission of individual signals/messages. The result will be a very complicated communications infrastructure, but given the risk if you're discovered the complication is worth it.
**Make your satellites rely heavily on optics**
Signals *from* your satellites should use directional microwave; being aimed at the planet, there's very little risk of detection from beyond it, and what little does leak out will look like random noise thanks to the encryption you're using.
Sending data *to* your satellites is a bit trickier. It's hard to aim carefully at something a hundred or so kilometers straight up, and moving fast, and not accidentally send your signal into deep space where you risk revealing yourself.
So instead, equip your satellites with telescopes and have them aim at ground-based pads. These pads, using whatever technology you want, would produce optical patterns to communicate data (think those [QR codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code) you see everywhere). Your pads should be able to quickly change their patterns to communicate new data, of course. You could even just use blinking lights. Detecting such a method of communication would be impossible for anyone who isn't already looking directly at your planet -- at which point they'll simply see your colony, your satellites, and secrecy is straight out the window anyway!
**Stopping bad actors**
To maintain the requirement that ships can come and go unimpeded, you can't shield the entire planet. (Besides, even if you say cost is no object, that's a monumentally costly construction project, not just in terms of money but in logistics and time as well.) The only way to stop someone maliciously transmitting from your planet and giving you away is strict internal security: Nobody but authorized personnel is permitted transmitters of any variety, for instance, monitored by heavy surveillance and enforced by harsh penalties. (Surveillance need not mean video cameras everywhere and your version of the NSA reading everybody's emails; since it's rogue transmissions you're worried about, simply detecting unauthorized transmitters -- which can be done with passive sensors -- is sufficient for this purpose. Up to you if you want the cameras and NSA in addition, though.)
You should also equip your satellites with precision orbit-to-surface weaponry. Whether that's lasers or kinetic weapons depends on available technology and your preferences, but the idea is to monitor for *any* unauthorized transmissions that could even remotely be detected from space, and quickly vaporize the source.
Working in your favor is the fact that even a high-powered transmission has to remain on for some time before anyone beyond your system can detect it, let alone identify with any accuracy the source. Your orbital weapons are more than responsive enough to deal with this threat.
This even assumes that we're dealing with highly advanced communications technology capable of far-faster-than-light communications. If you're limited to the types of communications we know of today, then you really just don't have anything to worry about, as it would take *decades* for the signal to reach even your nearest neighbor, and odds are that one's not inhabited anyway.
All this being said, nothing you can do can prevent someone on one of these ships that's coming and going from reporting your location to the authorities after they've left, so if bad actors is your threat you're pretty much hosed without blocking everyone from ever leaving your planet again.
[Answer]
**Dear Ms Caulgwoff**
My company has at its disposal an ideal material that fits the description you provide, including very high signal attenuation, minimal maintenance and permeability to space travel. We would be happy to tender a proposal for installing it on your planet. The name of the material in question is:
**Rock**TM
Specifically we would build all habitations a significant distance underground. The RockTM would shield all signals used by the inhabitants for local communication. We would install a wired network system in the underground area for longer distance communication which, while expensive and less flexible than wireless communications, is infinitely preferable to being slaughtered by aliens. Longer range communication, outside the planet, could be done by extremely narrow band signals, detectable only at the specific place they are directed to.
Most activities would take place underground. Only trusted people would be permitted above ground. They would be limited in the communications they could use, and be closely monitored. A wide array of receivers would allow for very low power comms to be used above ground (since a receiver taking the signals underground would always be nearby).
Such an approach would not allow for satellites, and would restrict habitation to one planet, but this would be a small price to pay for the benefit of survival.
Yours
Malcolm Twisslethwaite
Cool Magma Inc.
[Answer]
There is no plausible technology which would fullfil all these requirements:
* do not suspiciously alter the spectral properties of the planet, neither for direct observation, nor when planet crosses the disk of the star viewed from a distance
* do not interfere with photosynthesis and result in ecological disaster
* do not generate so much heat that it would be suspicious for the observer or cook the planet
Any system other than magic or time travel is not going to work at blocking anything malicious while at the same time keeping the planet looking and functioning like a normal planet.
Therefore I propose extreme internal security, careful surveillance of everybody, passive monitoring of any transmissions, and rapid response to destroy any source of transmissions (orbital laser and kinetic weapons, supersonic drones). Also make any materials useful for building a high power transmitter to be controlled. So you can be sure you will find out if someone is going to phone home and can stop them, and also if someone manages to send something, they will be silenced rapidly and decisively.
Of course you also need normal precautions: No atmospheric pollution, only local power generation with small underground nuclear reactors. Only low power frequency hopping radio transmissions which won't reach space and are indistinguishable from noise when you don't know what signal you are looking for. Mostly optical communications anyway. Everything camouflaged and stealthed, especially any satellites disguised to look like rocks or old wrecks. Constant awareness od people, that being detected means death. Keeping people happy so they won't turn into rebels.
TL;DR Only way to stop transmissions is to stop anybody from sending them, by catching them first.
[Answer]
With the exception of allowing for easy passage of spaceships,the most effective way to shield the planet would be to surround it with a metamaterial shield.
The metamaterials can be refracted in any arbitrary direction according to the manufacturer's design. This could be enhanced with a secondary shield which refracts the light around the planet to prevent anyone from seeing it from space (at particular frequencies. 100% refraction would make the planet entirely dark...)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fpcxI.jpg)
For an object the scale of a planet you would need some sort of orbital shield, either a single huge metamaterial "bubble" or millions of metamaterial elements in orbit.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QOa5T.jpg)
[Answer]
I recommend heartily nuking the entire planet from orbit, such that the entire surface is far too radioactive for a colony to take root. The best defense is a strong offense.
Unfortunately, what you are looking to do is stop electromagnetic radiation. The only known way to do that is with a Faraday cage, but a Faraday cage around a planet is unreasonable based on your deployment timelines.
However, if a Faraday cage is an option, I highly recommend encasing the entire planet in a metallic shell. Airlock like structures can be placed to permit entry of space vehicles. Sunlight may be an issue, but your specifications did not include sunlight reaching the ground. If you are willing to accept a modest level of risk, you can open the shell in the direction of the sun to let light in, but paranoid people should have no problems working in the dark.
Your real solution is to weaken the "all communications must be stopped" requirements to something that is at least minimally reasonable to attain.
[Answer]
Hide your planet behind an event horizon. This will not only prevent radiaton from carrying information about your colony to the outside, but also malicious agents with freely moving spacefaring vessels will not be able to contact militant groups outside the event horizon. Note that a relativistic event horizon does not at all impede motion. It just warps the space-time.
[Answer]
The top rated answer on this page is the best answer for just external signals, this answer deals with bad actors.
First you will need two teams for this colony, one to build the colony and the second to settle it. Both teams will need a 3 year vetting process and one done before the other, you won't tell them they are being vetted during this time.
the vetting:
after placing job notices, you will interview the people in person, and explain this is a 4 year job, you will have to pay them the whole time. after you interview those you wish to take with you rig up a ship and sit them in space for 2 years, claiming your traveling to the destination. During this time take your "NSA" and whenever an electrical device stronger than a handheld gaming device turns on you confiscate it. Anyone with a device will then be added to a watch list for the remainder of the vetting. during this 2 year period you must search deeply into each person, even more deeply than the "NSA" into refugees from Syria to the united states.
the construction team:
this team will leave immediately to complete their vetting process when you start hiring settlers. when they arrive at the planet the settlement will be build between 1-2 miles below the surface; we are assuming this will be an average task for your level of technology. They will have, at most 2 years to build a settlement for 5,000 people below the surface, the amount is an estimate for large numbers of growth. These men will be brought back and then killed in space. remember only dead men tell no tales. You must still pay these men for service so that their families ask fewer questions.
settling:
now you have a colony and vetted colonists. The next task is to take them to the settlement and dump them off, this is an underground settlement so hydroponics won't be enough to feed your population, we are assuming 1,000 to start. as your settlement grows you will need to expand out and down, if you go closer to the surface before your entrenched we will assume the settler compromised the settlement. we can use geothermal power to power the whole settlement and we will only allow limited power per person, anyone using more will be killed, quietly.
the bill for this will be high, 2,000 people being paid over 3 years at 120 hours a week, and the loss of a ship, not to mention the cost of the settlement to be built and the food for the settlement over an indefinite time.
[Answer]
**For Blocking Signals**
Find a means to ionize the atmosphere to either absorb, reflect or obscure all signals to/from the planet. Any communications which must be sent or received would have to be done from orbit and be routed through relays which are not in the system.
This ionization could also be useful in limiting what ships can enter the atmosphere. If it is adjustable, only let those you want to enter the atmosphere know what shielding is required.
**Use Psychology**
These militants obviously do not like innocents. I suggest to do something similar to what Schindler did in WWII. Hide in plain sight and don't make a colony which would be perceived to anything close to what is considered peaceful. Heck, the colony may even supply those militants with arms... which could also be used to gain some advantages against them if you're at war. Spin a good story about these being rebels.
There may be no need to hide structures should this ruse work. What means you use through regulations, technology, etc. to obscure or hide signals may not be questioned. Any militants on the planet may even willingly comply since this colony arms them, may be considered a safe harbor for them and could be "attacked" by your own forces.
Actual innocent civilians and refugees would need to (1) be hidden in secret camps/underground cities or (2) work in the arms factories. Hidden cities would have to have communications by hardwire only.
[Answer]
Malicious individuals are the biggest issue here, so...
# Make them believe they did send the signal
Try to hijack their communication system before they send their signal, prevent it from going out and make them believe they received a response that the enemy fleet is coming. Then, they wont try to send further signals or try to escape the area where you can intercept the signal.
How ?
## Nanobots
Make a cloud of Nanobots all around your colony that will infiltrate any incoming vessel and hijack their communication system before they can event detect you colony. How far that cloud covers depend on how much money and material you have, since you will need more nanobots the farther you go.
You can also fake signal both ways. If an enemy suddenly lost signal to one of their vessel, it will look suspicious, but if you can fake "All is OK" signals, they wont suspect a thing.
[Answer]
As you haven't stated anything about the conditions within the colony and only a rough estimate of the number (and needs) of the inhabitants:
Ban the use of electricity and convert the colony into a (more or less) pre-industrial society.
This would eliminate any electromagnetic signals emitting from the planet.
A pre-industial society has less impact on the environment, which might be detected optically (changes in the atmosphere or appearance of the surface).
If you really need electricity, it should be concentrated (both generation and use) and placed e.g. on the ocean floor or deep inside a cave in the mountain in order to use natural shielding (as well as artificial one like a faraday cage).
Last not least, be aware that regular incoming (or leaving) vessels into an otherwise uninhabited section of space may arouse suspicion
[Answer]
I suggest a carrot, a stick, and a warning system.
## Carrot
People to live on the planet will be housed in immense domes, camouflaged to resemble the surrounding area, and outfitted lavishly. Further, the housing will extend underground; both the domes and the underground areas are shielded with Faraday cages, which eliminates accidental radio transmission.
Landing areas must all be equipped with a high-power (non-destructive) laser; this laser will target ships and act as a communication line. It will slave the ship to the landing system, which includes entirely disabling the radio system.
## Stick
Throughout the system, self-propelled satellites will monitor for radio, laser, and other transmissions. Any transmission above radio silent operation will be immediately targeted and destroyed. Similarly, any ships on approach (and thus slaved to the landing area) diverting from the slave lock will result in their immediate destruction. Since you are already in the system "illegally", destroying incoming ships is not going to get you in any more trouble than before.
Finally, satellites above the planet will monitor for any radio signals and, once detected, will destroy the transmitter.
Every satellite will be disguised to prevent detection, so there will be no worry of one being discovered accidentally.
## Warning system
It is impossible to completely stop the transmission of radio signals, barring time travel, which is an expensive and paradox-filled package. Once radio signals are detected, there is no way to keep them from leaving the system. Worse, any ship in the system can broadcast; or, if that isn't enough, a ship lightyears away from the system could broadcast a signal *past* (or in front of) the system to make it look as if the signal came *from* that system. There is no way to stop signals. If someone wanted to bring death and destruction, they could do it, and you would have absolutely no way to stop it - or even detect it, if it was outside the system.
However, radio waves are slow-moving, comparatively; it takes 5 hours for a radio link to reach Pluto from Earth, which means the residents of the system will have at least some time to hide. The moment a radio transmission is detected, its source will be destroyed, and the warning system will (via laser communication) warn every habitation. Each habitation will be stocked with single-use "flee ships", designed to exit the planet's gravity field and be picked up by a disguised rescue ship - the survivors will be planet-less again, but at least will have their lives.
[Answer]
If the only way they have is to pick you up via radio waves then you just need to cancel the radio waves out which you could do by broadcasting a reverse wave transmission so that they would match up and dissipate outside of where you want the signal to be available...
There probably is a way to do this, but I can't think of one that's "easy". The best I got is by creating a ring around the planet and setting off the second signal to cancel out the first as the first passes by the ring.
Another option would be to just build a shell around the planet and absorb the radio waves... but that really isn't a good idea.
Btw... if all they got is radiowaves to catch you with and you can build a ring around your planet, you're probably ok, so the questions is kinda moot.
[Answer]
Found a research station near the planet to research the long-term effects of artificial electromagnetic radiation on various life-forms. As part of the study the research station will produce accurate electromagnetic radiation that one would expect to be emitted from the whole range from a small colony to a modern fully colonized planet of that size.
Occasionally the research station must be resupplied with various high-tech gadgets that cannot otherwise be easily produced, such as processors or fuel for a fusion reactor to power the electromagnetic generators, or just news-items and entertainment.
The research is confidential. Unauthorized ships getting near the planet will face massive charges. Additionally our engineers have just found out that very high velocity asteroids are orbiting the nearby star in seemingly random fashion, so expect to occasionally lose a couple of ships trying to get close.
] |
[Question]
[
I was wondering whether it could be technically and economically sound to put renewable energy plants on rail wagons to deal with the intermittency of the sun and/or wind and/or... or to deal with obstruction issues (like one solar panel shading another when the sun is low on the horizon (PS2) or adjusting the distance between wind turbines depending on the wind speed so as not to put one in the wake zone of the other)? Another advantage could be that one can have production of these power units in one definite location and the logistical aspect thereafter becomes self-explanatory? Transforming the electricity of this mobile power source to a suitable large voltage could be a challenge however? To summarize: does such mobile renewable energy deserve a place in a nice solarpunk scenario?
PS1: I want to emphasize that my question is not about transportation powered by renewable energy, it is about using transportation to improve renewable energy.
PS2: I think that if one has a solar park with densely packed panels mounted on a solar tracking motor, in the mornings and evenings or when the sun is low it is best to rotate some of the panels towards the sun and completely shade the other panels in between. I think so because the general trend with these cells is that the [efficiency rises with the intensity of the incoming radiation](https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html) so that it is always better to rotate some panels to given them the best intensity at the expense of completely shading some of the other panels. I'm ignoring the partial shading problems in this reasoning for a moment.
[Answer]
Here is an idea for you. Your planet is hot, not very but hot. Humanity is living close to polar regions and migrate twice a year. Now since everyone is close to arctic, it is meaningful to have power generation closer. Now also imagine close to the poles you have no icesheet, just open ocean.
At latitude 88 degrees, you need to travel about 60km/h (~30km/h at 89) to face noon sun. Normally, without this movement you will get 1/3 of what you will obtain in equator year around but since it is always facing the noon sun, it will be more than doubled.
The amount of production is zero during winters due to 6m of night. But your people migrate in their airships to the other pole, further doubling the output. Thus in total, you will produce about 40% higher amount of energy with this strategy instead of losing 1/3. Obviously you need some power for the movement but it will not be huge as moving a ship at 60km/h does not require a lot of power. Overall a realistic result will be %25 extra power generation and the movement is mandatory for this scenario work. On the flip side you will need twice as many panels.
**More:**
Here is another fun idea
PV's will be on mobile islands. People will also live on these islands. Imagine steampunk mega ironclads moving around the equator. They will have houses, gardens on top of these massive mobile cities. Every house roof will be covered with PV cells. There will be many airship docking stations where people will use them to move to land to collect resources. At the end of the artic day, they will hop on to the same airships and will migrate to the other pole. Also mobile cities will stop moving. There could be some emergency wind power generators while the city is empty.
You could even have some sort of rogue people moving in after the high society leaves the city. They stay there in during the winter will leave without a trace before the spring. Sometimes some items will be displaced and there will be rumors...
[Answer]
This would only make any sense if the renewable energy plants were extraordinarily expensive. Think about it - you can either have one power station that you transport all over the place, or you can just build a few power stations in the places you'd be transporting the one anyway. Even if you get a net positive energy gain from transporting a single power station (and that is a very big if), you'd likely have a bigger gain just by having a second station.
[Answer]
Some quick reasoning for whether this is even theoretically viable using solar:
At most, moving around a panel could take it from 0% output to 100% output.
Current solar panels are about 25% efficient. So the theoretical maximum output for them is ~25 Watts / square foot. Current solar panels weigh something like 2-3 pounds per square foot.
So how much of a panel's output would be needed just to move itself?
---
Using these estimates for container ship efficiency:
<https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Energy-consumption-per-tonne-km-for-a-few-examples-of-ships_fig1_296561654>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8eoOe.png)
Let's go with 0.05 KWh to move 1 ton 1km.
---
So putting things in equivalent units (and doing a lot of simplifying):
1000 square-feet of solar panels weighs 1000kg. It can output, at most, 25 KiloWatts.
So that's 25 KWh per hour, and transporting it via maximally efficient container ship uses ~0.05KWh per km and you might reasonably get 40 km/h so that's 2KWh per hour.
---
So now the question is:
Could moving a solar panel array around the ocean at 40km/h conceivably increase output by 10% of its potential maximum?
I doubt it.
The solar Terminator moves across the earth's surface at approximately 1,600km/h. This would be 2.5% of that.
Typical clouds move at anywhere from 50 to 200 km/h. So you might be able to avoid/get out of the way of some clouds but your mileage will vary.
And all of this is being **very** generous with assumptions about the energy cost of moving the panels around (the numbers only work for panels stacked in shipping containers, not actually deployed).
Plus it includes none of the overhead/depreciation costs for the machinery needed to transport the panels and store the energy until it can be connected to the grid.
---
I think the numbers are close enough that this be plausible for a work of fiction. But definitely not a viable idea for the real world.
[Answer]
A solar panel generates no power at night - spending 50% of it's life doing nothing. If your rail system can move the solar panel so it's always in the sun - while using less than 50% of it's energy output, then the panel on the train is more 'efficient' than one not on a train.
However the equator is big so the train would have to travel 40,000km per day, or 1600kph or about 1.5x the speed of sound.
While it is probably possible, a supersonic train sounds like a big engineering challenge. One that hauls enough solar panels to power itself sounds even harder.
---
But there is a solution: space. A satelite is above the clouds, above the absorbtion of the atmosphere and ... spends a higher percentage of time not in night (the higher your orbit, the more sunlight you have compared to shade). But then you've got to get that power to Earth - maybe lasers? If the orbit is high enough, you can have your satelite in full sun shining it's laser at a ground-side-collector in the middle of night.
(At this point the military swings by and reminds you that your new power system is also an incredible weapon).
[Answer]
There is an [Australian Solar Powered Train](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y4QGFte3T8)
As the article suggests, this is a short, level track with one slow train, also charged from panels on the roof of the stations at either end, in a place of high sunshine. It is just viable under nearly ideal conditions.
Sailing ships use renewable energy. There are modern designs such as the [OceanBird](https://www.inverse.com/input/tech/the-oceanbird-is-a-cargo-ship-powered-by-old-school-sails). These could also carry solar cells and some storage to make getting in and out of port easier.
[Answer]
You can have a mobile solar power supply as a special logistics vehicle if you want that for your story. Just mount a bunch of solar panels on a truck. You can drive the thing wherever you need the power then you have a mobile power supply from renewable sources.
The big issue is efficiency. With current day solar panels the surface area of a typical truck generates nowhere near enough power to move the truck. So it would have to charge for a whole day and then can drive at most a few hours (maybe minutes, I didn't do the math). In a scifi setting you can of course improve the efficiency so this is not an issue anymore.
Alternatively you can say that in power generation mode (when the vehicle is parked) you just unload a whole bunch of solar panels so the area of the panels is much bigger than the surface of the truck.
Note that this seems most sensible for some kind of all terrain vehicle to generate power in remote hard-to-reach locations. If a place has a connection by rail it usually also has a connection to the electricity grid so you don't need to generate your power locally.
[Answer]
>
> I was wondering whether it could be technically and economically sound to put renewable energy plants on rail
>
>
>
Imma stop you right there. No, it couldn't be economically sound to put power sources on rail.
The reason is simple: renewable power sources like wind turbines or solar panels can be scaled down very conveniently to each individual building. And the up side is that saves you a lot of power transmission infrastructure because the power is made where it is consumed.
If you put all that on a train, you have to add the cost of trains with theirs tracks and support infrastructure to build and maintain, and then you have to bring that power from wherever your train is, all the way to your cities. That is a lot of money.
*But isn't it worth it if it somehow makes your intermittent sources continuous?*
Probably not.
The reality of any power grid is that, as all things should be, it must be perfectly balanced. That means at all times you want production to equal consumption. Not enough power is bad, but too much power is arguably worse. Your power grid needs a way to offload excess energy.
You could waste it into the aether, but it's more sensible to have a storage solution. You can spin a big hunk of metal, pump water up a mountain, heat up some salt, brew some hydrogen fuel, etc.
Your train system would still need to deal with excess energy. By storing it, you also alleviate the problem of intermittent power supply, and that makes the whole train thing redundant.
You also have to consider your train would be a single point of failure, and stopping a train is trivial. It would be a lot harder to lose power if you had panels on every roof.
---
On water? Worse. Because you have much of the same problems than with a train, but then you also have to bring all that power to land first.
In the air? Even worse. Because floating in the sky indefinitely is a lot harder than floating on water indefinitely, which is also a lot harder than just being on the ground indefinitely. And you still have to transmit power to the ground, which is still presumably where the people live.
---
You could conceivably use a train as a way to store energy though. You could use excess energy to send a train up a mountain. And then, when you need energy, you let it run down the mountain, recover some energy out of it. It's something we already do, but with water rather than trains.
Would it be more sensible than pumped-hydro storage? Probably not. But it would be more a more sensible use than as a roaming solar panel.
[Answer]
Basics (Fermi estimate): you can harvest on the order of 100 W/m^2 from sunlight. One rail car is 25 m long, 4 m high, so it produces 10 kW (peak power).
A locomotive uses 4000 kW to move 60 rail cars at normal rail speeds (100 km/h), i.e. you're drawing more power than the train generates (600 kW peak).
] |
[Question]
[
The male klepton is a unique humanoid. It has no females, and reproduces by mating with other humanoid females, who bear children that are clones of the klepton father. No females are born, and all offspring belong to the klepton species. While a settlement of these beings could simply obtain the necessary mates through kidnapping, this isn't exactly sustainable; raiding cities to enslave their women (or anyone else) isn't exactly good for diplomacy
How could this humanoid maintain a settlement, where most of the population is of the klepton species and the children end up with their fathers, without the need for any kidnapping or sex-slavery?
[Answer]
The main thing you need to decide is whether kleptons are sympathetic characters or "the bad guys".
**If they are sympathetic characters**:
* The vast proportion of kleptons don't actually kidnap human women; this is a negative stereotype, and the few individuals who actually do this are equally disdained by klepton society as they are by human society.
* Some human women may be perfectly willing to have children with kleptons. They care about having a family and want to raise children; their motivation is quite similar to women who adopt or become stepmothers of children who are not biologically their own. (Some or most) other humans either consider these women to be victims or traitors.
* Human women might live amongst kleptons if they are outcasts from human society, either abandoned at birth or rejected for some other reason.
* You presumably chose the name "klepton" to mean "an alien who steals"; instead of having this as the name they use for themselves, make it a slur used by (some or most) humans against them.
**If they are the bad guys**, then they need a motivation for kidnapping human women instead of at least *trying* to find willing partners; and they need a justification within their own moral code for why they think it is OK to kidnap human women. Don't just make it "because they're kleptons, that is what kleptons do, they are inherently evil and have no moral code". Besides the concerns mentioned above, this is also just better writing, it makes them more compelling as antagonists. Then, the way they sustain their population will depend on this motivation, which is getting towards story-writing rather than world-building.
[Answer]
Collecting baby girls
In many parts of the world, particularly in historical situations, you can obtain all the girls you want by picking them up where their parents abandoned them. It was notoriously how brothels found their staff in ancient Rome.
Kleptons gather the girls, raise them in their families, and marry them off as if they were their own daughters.
[Answer]
**Woo brides** by competing in the local courtships.
The kleptons must be as attractive as local humans. Not spectacularly more attractive -- that would cause resentment. The kleptons must be willing to engage in the local courtship rituals.
The klepton settlement cannot be large enough to distort the region's dating pool -- that would also cause resentment.
[Answer]
**Buy brides**, using classic arranged marriages with the brides' families.
[Bride Price](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_price) is the practice of the bride's family receiving payment ([dowry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry) is the practice of the groom's family receiving payment).
Bride Price tends to occur when 1) Marriageable women are relatively scarce and 2) Manual labor is valued more than accumulating capital. In turn, these suggest the settlement region is fairly rustic, has no banks, and that any local aristocracy are not rapacious.
The kleptons in this region must have a somewhat higher income than their human neighbors, balanced out by the ongoing wealth transfers for each marriage.
It certainly wouldn't hurt if the kleptons tended to be kind, devoted, intelligent, attractive, and clean-smelling spouses, and fairly trustworthy in-laws, keeping the price lower.
The settlement cannot be large enough to distort the region's marriage market -- lots of unmarried human males wandering around have never been great for stability. Alternately, perhaps the kleptons --with their extra income-- can import some brides from distant regions or towns.
[Answer]
**Animal mother.**
As you set it up, the klepton DNA evicts DNA belonging to the egg of the mother. Or more likely the klepton "males" actually are neither male nor female, but mitotically produce a single cell clone of themselves that has the ability to parasitize the reproductive tract of a female. A gamete like a sperm is a product of meiosis and cannot give rise to a clone of the parent because meiosis shuffles the genes. The kleptons are male only in that they use a penis to place the zygote in the host female.
There is no need for the female to be humanoid or sentient to participate in this endeavor. She does not contribute DNA. She only needs to be the right size to gestate the klepton. A large domestic animal would be fine in this role.
[Answer]
**Reproductive technology and commerce**
Have the species forge trade agreements with land based settlements. Then formalize a 'marketplace' where excellent prices are offered to women who are prepared to sell viable, healthy eggs. Establish (or have land dwellers acting as licensed brokers) establish registered clinics where the trade is conducted under the supervision of local (land based) authorities who also get a % via the same tax rate they charge other trades. Then just use artificial insemination and artificial wombs to grow new colony members.
[Answer]
The humanoid females don't need to be married forever; they can simply stay until the child(ren) they bore are fully developed, then they can freely go back to their places of origin to seek new mates if they so please (if they want to ensure their own DNA gets passed down).
If this is a klepton species that's closely related to other humanoid species, I think that the more likely mechanism isn't the children being clones of the males; rather, during the process of gametogenesis, the klepton species' gonads discard the portion of the genome inherited from their mothers. A similar mechanism usually goes into play among the most well-known examples of klepton species. This ensures enough genetic variation to keep the species healthy while also maintaining its distinctness.
] |
[Question]
[
AFAIK, inanimate bodies and life forms are in the end a large set of subatomic particles (and atoms, and molecules) and energy. Unless my basic knowledge of Physics fails me, you can return a particle or an object to its original position. Also, many chemical reactions can be reverted.
Could it be possible that in a very far future, people are able to track every single particle-subatomic particle that constituted a dead person, and return each particle-subatomic particle to its original position/state, reshaping the person back from death, or is there any known law in physics that makes impossible to track and/or return a particle to its original position/state, making this general idea physically impossible?
[Answer]
The most interesting issue is that of the [Ship of Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus), which is a long-standing philosophical quandary regarding identity of a thing when you take pieces off and put them back on. The question as to whether your reanimation process has a meaning is an interesting philosophical one.
Philosophy not withstanding, there is no law which prevents a form from reoccurring. Not even the mighty [uncertainty principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg%27s_uncertainty_principle) can prevent it, though uncertainty may prevent you from measuring the reanimated entity so that you may say "yea verily, this is precisely the same person as they were before." The [Pauli Exclusion Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle) could potentially get in the way if the person was already alive and you needed an *exact* copy, but if you're reviving dead people from the past, it won't apply, as there is nobody in existence with precisely the same state at that moment.
The tricky bit is the tracking thing you mention. Getting the information required to make this reanimation happen *on purpose* is tough. There are a lot of *dispersive* effects and chaotic effects in the universe, which take the information about what happened before and mix it all up so thoroughly that it is mighty difficult to piece the parts back together again.
The real problem would be electromagnetic radiation. Once dispersive effects have disseminated the information across a lot of objects, there's a good chance that some of their interactions will produce EM radiation, like light waves and radio waves. The information contained in these waves propagates outward at the speed of light. This information may not be retrieved. If you need this information (and you likely do), you may not be able to pull together all of the information you sought.
Of course, you can always weave in a little magic. If the long-dead person intentionally entangled themselves with an object, and it was believed that the "essence" of what made that person *them* was still contained in the object, there might be a process to spawn a new body from that artifact, like a tree sprouting a new branch to replace a dead one. The meaningfulness of this is also very hard to analyze, but I find it to be a rather interesting approach.
[Answer]
There is a limit to knowing the *exact* state, but reprodicing a living body and brain does not require that degree of accuracy — thermal motion is jostling things around all the time and the body is made to work under these conditions.
Consider that getting an [MRI](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging#Mechanism) with no effects whatsoever even though it changed the state of all your hydrogen atoms. The proton spin just doesn’t mean anything to the construction of biomolucles.
Consider that you get a dental x-ray as a matter of course, but the shadows mean that molecules absorbed some rays. This actually does cause some damage! But the body has redundancy and doesn’t need every single atom to be just so.
It is well within the laws of physics to scan and reproduce a human body with the necessary fidelity. As you hoped, it’s just an engineering problem. A person can be scanned and the information stored passively, serving as a backup. After death, the most recent backup can be vivified.
(If the body can be recovered, it might be customary to use the atoms from the old body to build the new, giving a psycological ease that you’re just being repaired and are somehow more continuous with your previous incarnation.)
[Answer]
# Yes there is a show-stopper to that
Ponder the following [gedanken-experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment):
>
> I had two numbers. I then added them. The sum of the numbers is 73.
>
>
> **What were the numbers?**
>
>
>
You cannot answer this question.
Your proposed procedure suffers from the same problem, in that you are looking at the results of physical processes. But an infinite number of different interactions can give the same result. So you cannot backtrack. Because even if every physical process in theory is reversible, you cannot know **which** physical process it is that you need to reverse when looking at the results.
# Another example
Here is a picture of a pen in a table.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VJOfE.jpg)
Even if you could measure every atom in that pen, their direction, energy states and so on... there is no way you can determine how that pen was put there. You cannot — ever — backtrack how that pen ended up there only by knowing the state of the pen.
You are about to say "But what if I knew the information about every atom and sub-atomic particle in the universe!". No, you cannot do that... because then you would have to use those same particles to **record** that information and then do backwards calculations on them. This is **impossible**.
This involves some pretty deep maths and logic but in short: [the Church-Turing thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis) says you cannot do it. The only way you can do this is to flip the [arrow of time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time) around. Unless you are a supernatural extra-universal deity, you cannot do that.
You also cannot prove that this has not already happened... maybe we have played out this exact conversation over a million times already. We cannot tell.
[Answer]
There are some sources of uncertainty that mess up this technology. The prime one is the Heisenberg uncertainty relations in quantum mechanics: the product of the uncertainties about the position and momentum of a particle will always be larger than a certain (small) value. This is not just a lack of instrumentation or even that the measurement will jostle the particle, but seems to be a deep part of how quantum mechanics works. Hence your measurement of the state of the world will by necessity have some small uncertainties.
These would not be a huge problem except for chaos (and perhaps quantum randomness). When backtracking the particles the uncertainty in location will grow linearly with time due to the momentum uncertainty as long as they do not interact with each other. But of course they do, and that produces a much faster growth of uncertainty. On one hand nonlinear interactions amplify uncertainties exponentially, and on the other hand individual particle reactions look random on the quantum scale. So go back far enough and you will have little clue where all those particles were.
(This is really annoying since quantum mechanics and all the other laws of physics appear to be time-reversible in the small: in a sense the information *is* there, it is just spread out to such a degree that you cannot reconstruct it)
To add to the annoyance, your measurements need to be stored somewhere. Each particle needs 6 values to denote their position and velocity (plus a few more for other particle states). There are about $10^{27}$ molecules in a body, each with about 30 particles (most are water). So if you want to simulate just a body you need $1.8\times 10^{29}$ numbers (each with a certain number of bits). Note that this is an annoyance, not a showstopper. I recently estimated that using all silicon and carbon in the solar system you could get up to $10^{46}$ bits - more than enough for that data.
Now, there is another approach to the problem. Instead of trying to scoop up all atoms and accurately predict where they truly were, make a lot of plausible scenarios instead. Not every past is likely: a cloud of air molecules *could* have been a toy that spontaneously dissolved into nearly nothing, but it is not as likely as past air. A being who wrote an email in English probably had a brain that understood English, and so on. This will not guarantee finding the one true past state. In fact, it might find a near endless number of plausible pasts that could have happened. No problem, just resurrect copies of all of them.
[Answer]
So, the problem you're going to run into before you hit on the uncertainty principle or issues of "the spark of life" or whatever else is probably a fundamental limit of thermodynamics. In simple terms, the information you want to store and process is too large to be handled feasibly.
There are, on average, about 7\*1027 atoms in the human body. Converting that to a binary yields something on the order of 292 bits of information. Of course, we need to store more about those atoms than whether or not they exist. For starters, what atom they are. There are 118 elements on the periodic table, so we can do that in 7 bits (27, or 128), so add 7 to that exponent, and we're up to 299 bits of information. We also need to know about ionization. A potassium *ion* is very different from a potassium atom. My memories of high school chemistry tells me we're not going to see anything more than a -/+8 state for ionization, so we can do that in 4 bits, which takes us to 2103. High school chemistry also reminds us that an atom sitting beside another atom is very different from two atoms bonded together, so we need to know and store something about the bond state of our atoms - what type of bond it is (like ionization states, we should be able to store this in 4 bits), and which atom(s) it's bonded to, which will take at least 92 bits (because it could be any of the atoms we originally stored information on), which will take us to 2199. There's definitely more we need to know (like positional information, for example), but let's stop there for a moment, because this brings us into the same ballpark [as one of my favorite computing tidbits](https://security.stackexchange.com/a/82412/11622).
>
> One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a
> certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To
> record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an
> amount of energy no less than kT, where T is the absolute temperature
> of the system and k is the Boltzman constant. (Stick with me; the
> physics lesson is almost over.)
>
>
> Given that k = 1.38×10-16 erg/K, and that the ambient
> temperature of the universe is 3.2 K, an ideal computer running
> at 3.2 K would consume 4.4×10-16 ergs every time it set or cleared a
> bit. To run a computer any colder than the cosmic background radiation
> would require extra energy to run a heat pump.
>
>
> Now, the annual energy output of our Sun is about 1.21×1041 ergs. This
> is enough to power about 2.7×1056 single bit changes on our ideal
> computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all
> its values. If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all
> its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer
> to count up to 2192. Of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over
> to perform any useful calculations with this counter.
>
>
>
(Bruce Schneier, from his book *Applied Cryptography*)
2199 is 128 times larger than 2192, so by Mr. Schneier's math, we're at the point where we'd need a 100% efficient Dyson sphere around the Sun for ~4100 years to have enough power to even flip all those bits, to store that information, never mind running any calculations, or actually doing the work of putting things back into place.
So before we've even addressed the fundamental issues that might make this idea of yours impossible, we've discovered that storing this information for a single body would require 4 millennia of energy output from our star, before we even get to calculations or doing the actual work (or even storing all the information we need), or getting the materials we'd need to construct our computer with.
Which brings us to the end of that Schneier snippet, which is:
>
> These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
>
>
>
He wasn't talking about storing information on all the atoms in a human body, but it sure looks to me like it applies here as well.
[Answer]
There are a couple quantum theories of interest.... The first is that all information is preserved which means that you could at least calculate any previous state of the universe from any future state, so you could figure out pretty much where everything was including every atom in a person's body...
However, another aspect is quantum state: Matter has various qualities that are un-measurable.. This does not mean it's difficult to measure, it means that the information does not exist in our universe. One example of this is how long it takes for a radioactive atom to decay--which is why decay is stated as an approximated half-life instead of a specific amount of time.
So these two pieces of data lead me to believe that you could reproduce an approximate physical state, possibly even down to the molecule or maybe atom, but could not reproduce the exact quantum state.
This last bit is more important than you'd think--every time a neuron decides to fire or not in your brain it is adding a little bit of this quantum state into the decision. It's like a super-computer built with each CPU operation adding in a little completely random factor so that even if you re-created the computer, program and data bit-for-bit the output of your program would still deviate every time.
Because of this I don't think it would be possible to get the exact same behavior even if you could reproduce the physical state exactly--at least not from within our current universe/reality/dimension/??.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/105971/edit).
Closed 5 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/105971/edit)
In this world, magic is real, and absurdly powerful. Its sole wielders are the **mages**, control the world with the power coursing through their blood.
They are organized according to **Bloodline**: Dragon, Devil, Angel, etc.. Because the magic is in their blood, many of them belong to the same family as well, but not all member of a mages family will inherit those power. But once they are confirmed to have magics, they are basically a one-man army; as powerful as a D&D Sorcerer, or a mid-high-tier Marvel mutant, but limited to a theme (Fire, Ice, Blood, etc.). And yes, they do rule (or have a high position) in most of the world.
Among the mages though, there are the very peculiar **magicians**:
* Instead of recruiting from known magical bloodlines, they go out, find the brightest willing person, then "train" the magic out of them (which is nonsensical, but only the most learned sage know that)
* Their "magic" is not limited to a theme, as long as they can prepare, they can do pretty much whatever they want. Unfortunately, that magic is not very strong (fireballs that don't burn people, work more like flashbangs than fantasy fireballs)
* Their "magic" are not hindered in magic-null zone, or countered by other mages (this will be a plot point later on, when a magician is locked in a magic-null prison, and proceed to hypnotise the guard to let him go free). They are also immune to many problems mages face.
Of course, the truth is that they don't have a drop of supernatural blood in them, the "magic" they practice are just stage tricks (boosted to [Now you see me](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1670345/) level, using gadget of their own devise), but still mostly work as distraction and confusion rather than direct damage.
On their own, no problem, few can tell the difference. But if any mages decide to challenge them to open combat, they are as good as dead (party trick << bending the rule of the universe). Their only chance is to escape (they can do disappearing tricks mid-fight, also like in [Now you see me](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1670345/), but there have to be a realistic way to do it), catch the mage off-guard and go for their weakness, which they have to figure out or research beforehand (each bloodlines is weak to different things, and that is not open knowledge).
The question is: With all those skills and gadget, they can do all sort of things: toy maker, thief, information broker (from their research). Why pretend to be a supernatural being when there is a real chance said supernatural being can come and squash you?
EDIT: About the in-universe magic system:
* A mage get a set of power following a theme from their supernatural ancestor (for example, a Giant mage grow larger, get super strength (even when taking account of size), armored skin, etc.). As they become more powerful, they existing magic increase, and get new power, still from that theme (so when our Giant mage get more magic, they might get a earth-shattering roar, hurricane breath, but he will never get teleport), and become more dependent on magic (if the Giant mage suddenly lose his magic, he get all the problem of the Square-Cube law: bone pain, difficulty breathing, even to out right collapsing on himself. And that was still better than the Specter mage, who wink out of existence without magic holding them together)
* On the other hand, magician is 100 % not magical. Their only advantage over us in this world is that they can do stuffs we consider "action movie stunt". If a person want to become a magician, they have to do it the same way our magician do: find a teacher, devoted time and effort to perfect their craft until they can do stuff David Copperfield would have approved
* The "problems" that mages faces here is basically a mundane way to make them lose their power that is not magic-null zone (which can only be created by high level magic or occur naturally). So for example, still using the Giant mage above, his weakness is, say a shattered ankle. Not exactly easy, but if you can smash a steel-reinforced battering ram through their ankle (remember, at this point the mage is basically a human-shaped mountain), even if the injury and the shock don't kill him, he will still die from the aforementioned Square-Cube law. Obviously this is a closely guarded secret among the families, even the fact that they have the weakness at all. To 90 % of the world, they are demigod. The magicians are regular people with homemade gadget, so magic-null zone is a non-issue, and even if they lose their tricks, they are still more athletic and skilled than most people
* Most members of a magical bloodline are just regular human, who are still nobles, doing most of the management jobs, while the mages are Duke/Duchess, Price/Princess or King/Queen. They cannot blow people up, but their cousin can, and family are more trustworthy than strangers, right?
[Answer]
There is a Russian fairytale about a guy who beat a giant with superpowers in a game of throwing giant hammers up. He won the contest by stating that he's waiting for a cloud to come closer so he can make a hole in it. The giant is scared of this vision of such power and folds.
So this is basically a coach story of **fake it till you make it**.
Or how would youngsters put that: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mn5z0.jpg)
Basically to call someone's bluff of being a powerful wizard you either:
1. need to be such a wizard yourself
2. be very confident in yourself because angering a real wizard with such an accusation would end up in you being dead.
AND even in the first scenario the real wizard can miss his shot, deplete his mana and be slapped with a pimp hand into oblivion.
OR the wizard with the power of fireballs would have to watch the "faker" start chanting "Super Extra Mega Soul Fire Spear of Ultimate Destruction". As the comic stated "you ain't gonna fuck around and see if he could".
Also I think it's a trope that somebody wins be sheer accident against someone powerful so everyone is scared of them because he beat the master and so he must be better than the master.
[Answer]
Real mages are rare, powerful, and have important stuff to deal with. They might not *like* fakers, but they've got bigger things to do than chase them around and beat them up.
Quite simply, fake magicians are generally beneath the notice of real mages and are therefore not in any real danger. The prospect of making easy money by captivating gullible audiences is therefore worth the minor risk of just happening to run afoul of a real mage in disguise.
Of course, if any fake magician gains significant political power that threatens a real mage's goals they'll be in trouble, so they should limit themselves to street performances or swindling ignorant peasants.
[Answer]
>
> Why pretend to be a supernatural being when there is a real chance said supernatural being can come and squash you?
>
>
>
If you can pretend that you're very powerful, you can become someone very powerful.
Like you said before,
>
> [Mages] do rule (or have a high position) in most of the world
>
>
>
If a magician can trick peasants to think he's a powerful mage, they will let him be their king. As long as he's not discovered, he will have a good life.
He can also become advisor for a king, he knows magic so he should be wise and helpful, right?
Or he can become a mercenary and gain a lot of money, he's still more powerful than common people.
[Answer]
Evolutionary game theory explains why different behavioural strategies can co-exist in a population. Initially developed by John Maynard-Smith & George Price, it was used to address the existence of non-lethal aggression: why should an animal display but not fight over desired resources? This is the 'hawk-dove' model, with two strategies: "hawk", which means fight until the opponent withdraws, and "dove", display, but run away if attacked. Bypassing all the analysis of this model, the outcome is that both hawks and doves can exist in a population if the cost of fighting is higher than than the value of the resource, and the particular values for cost and value determine the stable proportion of hawks and doves in the population. <https://web.stanford.edu/~jhj1/teachingdocs/Jones-ess-notes.pdf>. Note that at the stable proportion, both strategies do equally well.
(for a recent treatment of hawk/dove models: <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-04284-6>)
Applying this to the question, we can consider "Mage" and "Magician" as two genetically-encoded (inherited) strategies (making the reasonable assumption that "bright and willing" intelligence/personality has a genetic component). By analogy with the hawk/dove model, Magicians can only exist if the costs of 'fighting' are greater than the value of the resource over which two individuals might 'fight'.
The question suggests that status is the resource, and Mages can be extremely lethal if it comes to a contest (whether this is toe-to-toe fighting, attacking from the shadows, or something more subtle). Mages always win against Magicians, so Magicians should always beat a hasty retreat if they come across a Mage (or at least conceal the fact they are Magicians).
So the evolutionary game theory answer to the question is that Magicians exist because this is an equally successful strategy to being a Mage. The only issue that needs to be determined is what proportion of Mage vs Magician is stable!
Of course, things are slightly more complicated, because the population actually consists of three genetically-inherited strategies: Mage, Magician, and 'Normal' - 'Normal' loses out to both strategies - but the basic conclusions remain: at some proportion, being a Magician is just as successful (in terms of producing 'descendants', here, more Magicians) as being a Mage is at producing more Mages, and that is why there are Magicians despite the existence of Mages.
[Answer]
**Numbers Game**
As I asked in comments: How rare are the Mages?
If they are rare enough, then you would want helping hands to take care of dirty work (Who wants to talk to... mortals? Really?), grunt work (Clean my cavern Magician...) and other necessities (Cooking, cleaning... accounting)...
**Caste System**
Also... if you think of it as a pseudo caste system - Ruling Class, Upper Class, Middle Class, plebs... the Mages could easily fill the Ruling and Upper classes and the Magicians would find spots in the lower-upper and middle class.
If paired with the Mages needing numbers and the Clan System below, you can be a lowly mage working for a Magicians clan and, despite not having "real" powers - you'll have the weight of the clan behind you.
[You mess with one of us... you mess with all of us...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwaJey_CsyE)
**Clan System**
`Not all members will inherit the powers`
Just because you are born without the spark, doesn't mean you aren't blood. Kin. Does that mean they get cast aside into the nothingness that is the under-class? Normies? "Muggles"? Not necessarily.
In Harry Potter for example, there are more than a few "magic born" muggles. They can't cast but are useful for tasks that need that skill set (IE: Spying on muggles).
`But once they are confirmed to have magics`
At what age are they "confirmed"? 2? 5? 18? 35? If it takes long enough, the family should be sufficiently "attached" to the children and have a strong desire to keep them around. Why can't the kids be useful? What kid doesn't want to help the family - and being able to cast in "Null Zones" and make up for some of the Mage's weakness?
Make me proud son...
**Recessive Genes and Breeding Odds**
How many of a Bloodline has the trait vs doesn't? If Dad/Mom has the trait and I don't... does my kids have a chance of getting the trait still? If I'm the kid of a Mage without the power, does that increase the chances of breeding another Mage?
2 mages have a 50% chance of "breeding true"... 1 Mage has a 25% chance... 2 non mage mage-descendants have a 10% chance?
If so, then their is power in keeping me around and gainfully occupied to get more chances at the recessive genes. It becomes VERY important on keeping track who is "Of the Lineage" to give better odds of breeding true.
[Answer]
The real mage is busy at the moment, performing complicated rituals on the top of his tower involving blood of virgins to get into the good graces of ancient gods and stuff.
Therefore, they would recruit the fake magicians and hire them as delegates or ambassadors, and probably even provide them with kick-ass enchanted magical items.
Everyone wins. Mages don't need to waste time with commoners, they get to surround themselves with an aura of mysticism... And magicians get a job, plus fame and cool gadgets. It's a symbiosis really.
I mean, your average medieval Joe won't be able to tell the difference, and the almighty mage sure isn't gonna waste his time and precious mana to show off and impress a bunch of peasants. A magician shooting bits of sparkle will do nicely.
It gets interesting when the mage dies, or runs away with a girl, or gets otherwise incapacitated, and his staff of fake magicians decide to not tell anyone and keep pretending they still rule.
[Answer]
Maybe they *used* to have real magic. Then it dried up, and now they have to fake it or get Game-of-Thrones'ed.
[Answer]
What are the chances that the mage gene gets passed down; can a non-mage but some mage bloodline born a mage child yes or no? If yes then some mages could be outcasts or be a lost bloodlines (hedge wizard) then the risks are very real that some random guy in the street that's says he’s a mage could very well be the real deal. And therefor even confronted by a mage of the bloodline hes faking may not know if he’s a liar, so if one of your fakes has done his homework he could pretend to be one of these lost bloodline mages I speak of and even get away with it (would be funny if he gets recruited by a mage family being a really good fake)
] |
[Question]
[
Imagine a child of mixed race, one parent is human and one is an alien who has some ability humans do not have, for the sake of argument telepathy. I'm assuming there is some advanced medical assistance to allow the mother to conceive at all.
I'm interested in what would happen to the ability only one parent has. The closest earth example I can think of is a [quagga](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=quagga&espv=2&biw=1680&bih=925&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Y1HTVMz6B8HOaLekgOgM&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ) (half zebra and half horse). In this case the stripes do not cover the entire body of the offspring. This indicates to me that the genetic trait would only be partially passed on.
Which of the four options are most likely (or have I missed one?)
* The child would not inherit the parent's ability
* The child would inherit the parent's ability
* The child would partially inherit the trait resulting in a scaled down version (empathy instead of telepathy)
* The doctor who aided the parents conceive would decide which traits would be passed on and which wouldn't.
[Answer]
If the alien is truly alien, not some variant human in space, it is highly unlikely to be able to have children with humans. It would not be like horse and zebra, it would be closer to a horse trying to breed with a tree or a fungus. As such the offspring would basically be a genetically engineered artificial lifeform based on the traits of the parents. Thus it would be up to whoever did the design to decide what traits and systems to take from each parent. In practical terms that would be you.
[Answer]
You assume that alien's inheritance is guided also by DNA. It is very unlikely that on another planet, under very different conditions, life would evolve to use the same rather complicated mechanisms for inheritance: ATCG for DNA, proteins to guide transcription, etc. They are all complicated and co-evolved to work together. It is like a very complicated dance, with chemical signals passing back and forth.
From the point of biology, humans, animals, plants, and fungi are very similar - all are [eukaryotes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote) - **even on Earth are many organisms (prokaryotes and archea) which are radically different from eukaryotes,** (IOW more different than the difference between an animal and a plant) even if they use the same DNA mechanism for inheritance. For instance, many bacteria do not have sex, but are able to exchange plasmids (which contain some DNA info, but not as string like chromosomes of eukaryots, but as rings), directly. Alien world indeed. Interbreeding a plant and animal would be substantially easier than interbreeding with alien non-DNA life-form.
Even in humans, sometimes proteins misfold and cannot function. Or function, but wrong way. Tha's why we have so many genetic diseases. And miscarriages, when embryo is not viable (chemistry is broken in a subtle way). When cell is dividing, different biochemical signals sent to neighboring cells guide development of different organs. Wrong signal will cause errors on development of organs, and embryo could die or misform.
The only way would be **if life on both planets was seeded by some elder race to use same genetic mechanism.** Even then, after few millions of years of separated evolution, species would not be able to cross-breed naturally. This happens even on Earth. If both species use exactly same biochemistry for genetics, you **might** be able to artificially inject genes from one species to another. It is a crap shot, and in most cases this infusion will destroy some biochemical signals or another. Gene expression is **very** delicate process and there is lot what can go wrong and cell is doomed.
So it is your world, and you can postulate that it is so, but such situation would not evolve naturally - only in a Hollywood script.
Also, some viruses - [retroviruses](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrovirus) - spread by adding they own RNA to cell's. And cells have all kinds of mechanisms to prevent that. So **when someone would want to add alien DNA to the cell, cell would fight back** - and has millenia of success to count on. Big chunks of human DNA is suspected to be retrovirus genes injected, but disabled, during evolution. It is much more complicated than you imagine.
(I guess my answer not accepted, too much technical details about the real complexity of the problem :-)
[Answer]
All of the above are possible, and in fact plausible.
The most likely answer is actually your final one, in that the doctors designing the new life-form (because that is essentially what they are doing) would choose which traits were important from each parent. There may be compatibility restrictions though that mean they they are forced into choosing one in particular of the first three instances. As the person designing the universe you could choose those constraints, so if you want a certain option but don't know why they would choose it then they could be forced to make that choice for biological compatibility.
Note that alien->human telepathy is highly unlikely from a reality-check perspective unless the human has some augmentations (for example implants) to support it.
[Answer]
The child has a 100% chance of having no abilities except nonexistence... unless the alien parent is really nearly human genetically... or unless the child isn't a child the way Earth creatures reproduce, but is the product of some other alien process.
Zebras and horses can breed because they are almost the same animal. Humans can't breed with practically any other Earth species - [maybe with chimpanzees.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee) That's because we are related to them. We wouldn't be related to aliens who evolved on some other planet, unless we are (because humans or primates were dropped here by space aliens long long ago), but even so, the chance of our DNA being similar enough to produce viable children is low. But if somehow our DNA is similar, then see genetics-based answers, except it would depend on the trait you are interested in, and how many genes are involved, etc.
Another possibility is that non-human aliens, since they probably wouldn't reproduce like humans at all, might have some other reproduction abilities that would make a "child" possible, but it might really be a human clone, human clone with mutations, or something else very bizarre, such as the xenomorph in [*The Thing*](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/), or as in [*Alien*](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1), or something else quite, quite alien.
Also, as others have pointed out, genetic engineering might be necessary and could stack the deck, but then you are talking about technological abilities by design, and since those technologies don't exist, we can't know the chances of outcomes (and so as authors we can make them up without fear of breaking anyone's disbelief except that the technology would ever exist or be used).
Finally, in the case of telepathy, it's pretty clear humans and most/all other Earth species already have telepathy. Most of us just don't use it, aren't aware of it, or actively aggressively ridicule/disbelieve it.
[Answer]
Based on Mendelian genetic system, the genome should be in pair.
For example if ability to telepathy is a dominant trait:
TT -> able to do telepathy
tt -> unable to do telepathy
Human (tt) X Alien (TT)
The result: Tt, Tt, Tt, Tt -> 100% Tt
It could mean that they would still have the ability. But in some case intermediate trait occurs. Intermediate trait means that the trait is mixed. So it could be decreased ability (such as unable to do telepathy with anything over 50 meter or anything like that).
Another thing to consider is that in the example above I assume that the ability is a dominant trait. What if it's a passive trait? If it is, then the breed wouldn't be able to do telepathy at all.
---
Summary:
1. If the ability is a dominant trait, then the breed would be have the ability
2. If it's an intermediate-compatible trait, then the breed would have the ability, but with decreased effect
3. If the ability is a passive trait, then the breed wouldn't be able to have the ability.
Remember: Positive trait is usually the dominant one.
[Answer]
I would say the most likely is #4, because you already need the doctor to even make it possible and to ensure you don't get some twisted little monster. So while doing all of that, they might as well take the time to pick and choose the other traits that will be showing up as well.
[Answer]
While it'd be impossible for alien DNA (if they have DNA) and human DNA to mix, you can do it in different ways in your story:
* Half-half: So, if an alien is a telepath level 10 (let's say) the human-alien child would be a telepath (level 5). If the alien race lacks some human trait, the hybrids might inherit it. Look at Spock: he's got the Vulcan mind meld and the human capability to feel emotions.
* Random degrees: Maybe one child is a strong telepath, other is just a weak telepath but has astral projection powers. Maybe some of the hybrids are super-strong while others are weakened by their inheritance.
* If your alien race has many super-human attributes, some children might inherit just one trait (super-strength), while other hybrids inherit another one (telepathy), while other are just a bit stronger and a bit telepathic.
While human-alien DNA mix might not be scientifically feasible, most readers will give you suspension-of-disbelief as long as you are internally consistent.
I just thought of something else: you can establish that not all hybrid offspring is viable.
[Answer]
Number 4. You underestimate the difficulties involved in cross-species conception. Everyone does, because half-alien kids make for very interesting storylines, but now you're asking to bring real science to the party. And the real science is not kind to hybrids. Organogenesis and the general development of the embryo is so fantastically complicated that a hybrid is essentially non-viable.
The only way to do this is to presuppose the existence of medical technology far beyond ours, capable of designing a hybrid organism and essentially coding the directions for "how to build this creature from an embryo" from scratch. Such technology implies a genetic engineering capability equal to or beyond that what you would need to say "Here is a blueprint of exactly what I want this child to look like, go figure out how to build it."
Also, this technology will need to work well enough to be successful on - perhaps not the first attempt, but certainly before the hundredth. That means that even though such a thing might have never been done with an alien before, the doctors certainly will have to have extensive practice with the general techniques. Either that, or the origin story of this child will involve a hundred failed attempts.
Anyway, the long and short is, the technology to do this at all requires as a prerequisite the technology to bring about option four.
[Answer]
Assuming that alien-human breeding is like human-human breeding in your world...
If having powers is a recessive gene and not having powers is a dominant gene, the child has a 100% chance of being a carrier for powers but not expressing them (Nn).
If having powers is a dominant gene and not having powers is a recessive gene:
If the alien has Pp as his genotype, the kid will have a 50% chance of Pp and a 50% chance of pp - a 50% chance of having powers and a 50% chance of not having powers.
If the alien has PP as his genotype, then the kid will have a 100% chance of Pp and will have powers but will be a carrier for not having powers.
If alien-human breeding isn't like human-human breeding, it's really up to you how it works, and, by extension, what the outcome is for the powers.
[Answer]
*5th Possibility*
Both the alien race and the human race are inhabited by the same life-driving force (the one that tells the reproductive codes what to do, whichever kind they are).
In this way, the alien material organism is gathered together by a self-aware form of the life force, and the human material organism is built by either a non-self aware or self-aware form of the life force.
The alien form that is definitely self aware finds a way to meld with a human form and then proceeds to direct the human reproduction using the human dna coding system. Since it is fully self-aware it will be able to select which traits to pass along to its offspring, including the coding needed for the desired ability to be expressed at whatever level it chooses. It is similar to option 4, except it is the alien life force directing it's own effects, not a doctor.
[Answer]
I'm assuming, based on the goldilocks theory, I would say any extra solar life forms would be humanoid, thereby a high likelihood of being compatible. Telepathy is considered a higher brain function, we already know we have the ability to emit signals from our brain. Any being with the other half of that ability that allows them to receive the signals and interpret would be more highly evolved thus their genetic contribution would be more dominant, for that reason I would say the ability would not be diluted but more the offspring will either be born with the ability or they will not.
] |
[Question]
[
In a near-future alternate reality where smartphones were never invented, people rely heavily on augmented reality and highly mobile computing. High-tech clothing and accessories are everywhere. Heads-up display in your motorcycle helmet, audio-transcribing glasses and text-to-voice speakers for the deaf and mute, and extra robotic appendages are ubiquitous. And don't forget shoes! Spring-loaded jumping, retractable wheels or ice cleats, and electromagnetic Wall WalkersTM are all fair game!
The problem that needs solving is a matter of giving complex, potentially well-timed input. Sitting down at a screen, keyboard and mouse give you all you need, but what about when you're out and about? What if one hand, or neither, is available?
The meta-problem is that I'm looking for fun and flavorful solutions that would be viable enough, even if something dead-practical would realistically beat it out. Video game controllers, arm bracers with a menagerie of programmable buttons and knobs, gesture-sensing jewelry- flex your creative brain muscle and go wild! Obscure real-life tech is certainly welcome as well.
[Answer]
**[Touch-sensitive gloves](https://www.techeblog.com/tip-tap-finger-computer-input-device/) with [chorded typing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard) input schemes**
The user dons a glove which has sensors built in the fingertips. Then by touching two or more fingertips together for a specified time several different input combinations can be sent to the device in question. 20 or so signals are definitely possible with just one hand - adding timing constraints, touch-sensitive points on phalanges other than the fingertips, double taps or a second glove easily increases this to cover the whole alphabet.
The resulting input scheme is discreet (both when worn and when used), pretty much universal, quite robust and needs no new inventions. Some training and nifty UX design is certainly required for effective usage though.
[Answer]
## Direct Neuro Input
You've kind of painted yourself into a corner of inevitability with this particular detail:
>
> and extra robotic appendages are ubiquitous.
>
>
>
This fact means that the ability to hook a person's nervous system into a machine that can do stuff that our biological nervous system is not already designed to do has become ubiquitous. So just like you can give someone a 3rd robotic arm, there is nothing left preventing you from attaching a computer to a person's nervous system and allow it to respond in detail to our thoughts.
The reason I say this is inevitable when you reach this level of tech is because you no longer get any lag time or inaccuracy between your thought and your body's somatic response to that thought. You can literally "type" at the speed of thought (maybe even faster with some AI autocomplete features). You can perform pixel perfect interactions with your software because you don't need your crummy eyes and limited motor skills to tell the computer the exact path you want to draw.
Heck, you won't even need the idea of buttons or voice to speak because you will be able to just think about what your options are and make them happen. In this way, checking your email or doing a Google search is going to feel like remembering something you already know or a lucid dream where things you need are just kind of there when the need arises, and learning to do complex tasks that perform dozens of parallel operations could be as simple learning to control all the muscles in your hand to work together to hold your morning coffee.
**The question then remains, not if this is the best tech for your civilization, but how to make it flashy:**
## Cyberjacking
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GVfGK.png)
Probably the most interesting version of direct Direct Neuro Input is cyberjacking. This is where you basically install a bunch of plugs into a person (usually depicted on the neck or head somewhere) and you literally plug in. It creates a visually interesting interface even if you can't see what is happening on the inside of the person's head.
The problem of course with cyberjacking is that so much tech is wireless these days that it raises the question about why you would not just have an internal wireless device installed in you. So if go this route, I'd suggest some deep cultural problem should exist for not going wireless like wide spread brain hacking or oversaturation of wireless frequencies or needing data connections that are too complex and data intensive for wireless to be practical.
## Non-Perceptual Experiences
This may be hard to pull off in certain mediums, but if this is for a written story or you have a narrator/inner voice, then the lack of sights and sounds can become interesting unto itself. Explaining how your interactions with your computer are literally thoughts, you could make things very interesting.
## Responsive Interfaces
One of the biggest software interface trends in the past 10 years has been the idea of responsive design. The way a program looks on a phone can be very different than on a touch screen tablet, which is also very different than for a PC. Likewise, software in this world may need to be responsive to thinking styles.
Sometimes people think in words, sometimes in vague concepts, sometimes in pictures, and sometimes our thoughts are purely subconscious or instinctive... so the user experience of a program might actually adapt to a person's mentality which could lead to some very interesting experiences like the software changing how it looks, feels, sounds, and responds along with a person's emotional state or level of focus. It also means that two people using the same program may have 2 very different experiences.
## Behavioral/Cultural Anomalies
Ever see a musician listen to a song they like and they mime out the song in the air like they are playing it? Well people who were born before neuro-jacking was commonplace may do the same thing. Your elderly may still mime out mouse and keyboard or cellphone gestures while controlling thier computers, while younger people may just stand with their hands to thier side without any bias that thier hands are needed to do anything. This will become an "old folk behavior" that may get ageistly mocked. "Ugh! grandpa, you don't need to envision a keyboard to message people."
You may also notice something similar to the [echo chamber effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)) where people who think one way will get software that adapts to thier thought style which then reinforces that thinking style for them. Visual thinkers become radical visual thinkers, verbal thinkers become radical verbal thinkers, etc. This could cause a general increase in neurodivergence or intensify certain psychological disorders.
[Answer]
You already have AR and voice recognition. Throw in gesture control like in the movie "The Minority Report" and you have no need for a keyboard and mouse.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9BjFu.png)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gjU42OSFgM>
The only extra you need is a personal AI assistant so you can tell the computer what you want in plain English and it can work it out and just do it for you.
Think JARVIS from Ironman
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Zq5o.jpg)
If you want next level, then you need implants. Elon's [Neuralink](https://neuralink.com/) is looing to implant a chip in a person's brain allowing a direct computer interface so the blind can see or the paralysed to walk. You also have the possibility of the computer being able to read minds. See [Mind Reading AI](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11836553/Mind-reading-AI-turns-thoughts-pictures-80-accuracy.html)
[Answer]
Unless you directly neuro-jack the person, what you're looking for is a set of muscles on a human that can be monitored and translated into computing instructions.
The easy way to go about this is to monitor the flex state of the muscles in the hands. Keyboards basically do that indirectly by detecting where the fingertips are, but that part isn't technically necessary.
Another incredibly agile set of muscles exist in the human tongue. We don't think of it that way, but that's what makes human speech possible. Again, if you can monitor the flexure of those muscles, you don't need to actually say anything.
Beyond that, you're looking at using a set of muscles in a way that we aren't in the habit of using them, and you might not even have all of the muscle control in all of the people. A trivial example would be facial muscles, where some people can raise an eyebrow independently, but not necessarily the other, or some of us can wiggle our ears or nose. You'd have to find a set of universally available facial expressions to map your input to, but it might be worth it in an emergency.
Our eye muscles are excellent mouse/joystick inputs, with blinks effective as clicks, but that requires us to stop using our eyes for looking at non-input things. Anyone who has tried to keep up with action flicks with subtitles can tell you the flaws in that.
From there, you can get creative. We've theorized controlling battle suits with full-body muscular monitoring, of course, but you could use the roll of your shoulders to control the throttle of a vehicle while you used your hands for gunnery. With 600 muscles in the human body, you have a lot of options.
[Answer]
>
> Heads-up display in your motorcycle helmet, audio-transcribing glasses and text-to-voice speakers
>
>
>
You have part of your answer here already, just don't limit those devices to deaf or mute people.
You don't need a keyboard when using eyes, voice, gestures you can give commands to an interface which is made in such a way that can gather and understand those input. You have probably heard of Siri or Alexa, they get instructions without needing a keyboard. And augmented reality devices like the Hololens allow the users to interact with a virtual console, without needing a keyboard.
[Answer]
**Retinal cursor**
Similar I believe to the system used by some sufferers of ALS - using your Eye movement as the tracking point, then using facial and hand gestures to provide additional inputs.
[Answer]
Now I have an unorthodox option. (Main idea is not invented myself, it comes from a rather controversial Russian Sci-Fi [author](http://samlib.ru/k/kucher_p_a/), who thinks that communism married with radio would save the planet.)
# Morse code
Yes, this old thing with [dots and dashes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code) and a single key input. (Improvements and better versions, based on [Huffman code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding) or similar might be also used, but for the non-specialists it's the same idea.)
The point is that a trained operator can both transmit and receive Morse code at a quite high speed. Basically, everything else, barring the real keyboard (unsure, even, in this case) or a direct neural link (too far in the future), is slower.
Summarizing,
* Morse code a simple and elegant solution;
* it can be worn concealed or made into a glove or a clothing part;
* Morse code offers high speeds at low costs and technical development level;
* Morse code requires training, but radio operators were taught in quite the masses before, so it's doable.
# What to do with input?
But, you would say, any text input is just text. What with *Minority Report* styled AR (as mentioned in above answers) or with commands to the OS / applications?
Well, the good old UNIX-style console does wonders today and I am not convinced it could not continue doing wonders tomorrow.
So, now following on the Morse code idea, it's the audible interface (might be Morse as well) for the output and Morse key for input in a dialogue mode with a typical command-line UNIX shell.
[Answer]
# Neural implants
It might seem like sci-fi, but we can actually do a lot with the brain. Iirc a study with EEG measured the electrical activity in the motor cortex. For example, the movement of the arm. This was then translated to movement of a mouse on a screen.
The most important discoveries were that over time people got accurate control over the mouse. It was nearly as easy as controlling the arm. If this is extended to daily use it might be as easy or easier. Another was that where they initially needed to move the arm for effect, at a certain point the movement of the mouse and movement of the arm were separated. So activity in the motor area of the arm would not result in movement of the arm and only the moyse. The other way around, mouse not moving but arm is, would require more sophisticated software.
We can extrapolate this to a plausible technology in the future. With neural implants directly in/on the brain we get a much more detailed picture of the brain activity. The brain activity is measured and certain learned patterns are used for software control purposes, which is translated to the action you want. From zooming out and changing your destination on your motorcycle helmet, to controlling both your own and a robot arm simultaneously, to controlling a quadcopter drone with a grappling hook, or your spring loaded shoes.
Humans have shown a great ability to learn these things with extra translation steps. Fingers moving controller buttons and sticks. You've essentially removed the middle man, or finger.
Keep in mind that the motor cortex was probably chosen for the easy access (lots is close to the surface) and the easy human control over the patterns inside these areas. You might be able to add it to other parts of the brain as well, which can learn the required inputs. Also keep in mind that even to this date the true neural implants are horrible spiked things that destroy brain matter when implanted. It would be a good thing to solve that before subjecting people to mass neural damage.
[Answer]
## Brainscanner cap
For the input devices, most users prefer as immediate experience as possible. The less delay and more intuitive interface, the better. A direct mind-machine interface is a common sci-fi option. There are, however, valid objections against invasive data jacks, that plug directly into user's neural system. Many people are reluctant to permanently modify their bodies. A surgery is needed, whenever the hardware breaks. And imagine forgetting to seal your data jack before jumping into a swimming pool!
If you want a safe solution, that doesn't make your people look like cyborgs, try a brainscanner cap. Electrodes on the inside monitor user's brain activity, while sophisticated electronics translate those signals to a stream of data, commonly known as "intrapersonal communication" or "inner voice". First use requires a fair amount of calibration, but then the device remembers its user's mental profile.
Of course the cap shouldn't record everything the user thinks - only the parts, that the user wants to be the device input. So to start typing, the user has to think some rare keyword. Once the cap finds that word in the captured inner voice, it starts recording. When the keyword appears again, the recording is stopped.
The cap can also accept some preset instructions to figure out, what to do with the text. For example: `"...hey, this is the street, where Mike lives - let's pay him a quick visit TRANSCRIBE START Mike, are you at home? TRANSCRIBE END SEND TO MIKE SMITH MACRO END oh he really should repaint his fence, this green is getting so..."`
[Answer]
>
> arm bracers with a menagerie of programmable buttons and knobs
>
>
>
>
> Obscure real-life tech
>
>
>
On aircraft carrier flight decks, large drones such as the Boeing MQ-25 refueling tanker are operated by *deck operators* using a "Control Display Unit".
[](https://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/defense/mq25/gallery/mq-25-1067_960x600.jpg)
[Answer]
A modification of [@zovits](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/310/zovits)'s answer. The gloves + AR could cover the mouse input, but the keyboard is missing.
## Lean into AR and add binary
You can count in binary on your fingers, by either having fingers straight vs bent or the finger tip touching vs not touching something (like your on palm). Using gloves with sensors in the fingers (or hand trackers) create combination of binary. This gives you 1024 possible combinations. ASCII tables only use 128 values (some of which aren't characters). What about the other 896? Macros.
Macros are used to streamline or automate tasks that have to be done over and over. Want to open your email. Don't open it by "clicking" your browser in AR, get to your email and login. Just program a weird, 8 finger combination that does all that instantly. These macros can be context specific too. If your your phone app is open an entire block of macros are your speed dial options.
[Answer]
A natural addition to your existing tech stack would be some sort of [projected/laser keyboard](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B00LFJBP0Y). They project the image of a keyboard (or other interface) onto a surface and track your hands as you "press" the buttons. They would have a number of advantages:
* Having heads-up displays means you already have the tech for projecting an interface, just add an infrared or optical sensor to watch for "keystrokes".
* A piece of equipment can project an interface when needed, or a user can have a body-mounted projector that wirelessly connects to nearby equipment.
* The user interface is flexible and dynamic. Switch between a standard keyboard, a series of knobs and sliders, or whatever else makes sense for the use case at hand.
* For extra security and fanciness, the interface could be projected inside the user's smart glasses so that only they can see what's being typed.
[Answer]
Contact lenses with augmented reality. If you place hands in a position for text input, AR keyboard appears under them, if you are grabbing an imaginary mouse in the air, AR makes one for you.
Also works with glasses, audio-transcribing or not and heads-up displays in motorcycle helmets.
[Answer]
Rings on every segment of each finger, with a sensor on the thumb. Gives you three Glyphs per Finger, makes 12 Glyphs per Hand. Sort by usage, meaning EIAOU go on the fingertips.
Now the 2nd hand as alternator. Thumb to first Fingertip the other 2 letters. Thumb to to first mid. Big Letters. And so on and so forth. Primary Hand is the letter chooser. 2ndary hand is the alternator.
Alternatively, all fingers selectors typing away at water surface is at armslength down the body, most likely thighs. Then pants with touch markings to help find the keys.
] |
[Question]
[
The Divine City is a truly massive piece of architecture in the shape of a cube
It is over 2000km on each edge, and has 4 sturdy walls, a thick base, and a light roof
It is densely populated, with many stories going from the base to the top of the walls
It is on Earth, and does not curve with the ground
This titanic structure would have some issues with its size. It would be extremely heavy, and it seems implausible that this structure could stand up as a regular building. But, it may be able to stand up some other way, if properly designed
Could this city realistically exist?
[Answer]
**Not on Earth**
@SeanBoddy mentioned in a comment the fact that Earth's gravity would not act "downwards" through the cube. The effect would be most significant at the bottom corners.
To calculate the magnitude of this effect, we know Earth's radius ($6,400\,km$), and we know the distance from the center of the cube's lower face to one of that face's corners is $\sqrt2 \* 1,000\,km$. So we have a triangle $6.4\,Mm$ up, $1.4\,Mm$ across, which gives us an angle of a little over $12.3\,degrees$: mildly uncomfortable, but more importantly, very structurally significant, as load-bearing walls need to be vertical.
*[That $\sqrt2 \* 1,000\,km$ comes from assuming the cube is touching the sphere of the Earth at the center of the cube's bottom face. So the distance we want is from the center of that face, to one of its corners. We could just take the diagonal length of a unit square ($\sqrt2$), and multiply it by half the width of our square ($1000$), or we can go the long way round, using Pythagoras, taking the full diagonal of the bottom square as $\sqrt{2000^2 + 2000^2}$, or $\sqrt{8M}$, which is $\sqrt2 \* 2000$; then halving that to get the distance to the center instead of from corner to corner, which again gives us $\sqrt2 \* 1000$. However we get there, it's a shade over $1414\,km$ or the "$1.4\,Mm$ across" I mentioned.]*
**Not even in space**
If this cube were formed of solid rock, it'd be a sphere, as it would be about a thousand times larger (ten times in each direction) than required to surpass the ~200km "potato radius". So even taking into account that it's not solid (there are holes for rooms), you'd most likely need something a whole lot stronger in compression and lighter than concrete for this to work even in space, let alone on Earth.
However, if, for every unit of wall/floor volume, you have a thousand of empty "room" space, then it might just work.
For each room, the Walls and floors scale with N^2 and volumes scale with N^3, so this should be possible, so long as your rooms are a thousand times wider, deeper and taller than their wall thickness.
Not really feasible unless the walls themselves are only an inch thick, or are hollow skimmed either side with half an inch of material. Seems like you're not building this cube from concrete, not even in space: you're building it from sheetrock and 2x4s, like a modern Texan house.
**If it's on Earth, you may suffocate**
The volume of all air on the planet, if put at sea level pressure, forms a sphere with a diameter of $1,999\,km$. So there's not enough air in the world to put in that box and allow people to live in it. If it was relying on the Earth's air, then people would only be able to live in the bottom $7\,-\,8\,km$ or less, as that's around the altitude of the "death zone" for human breathing. Alternatively, it'd need a system of locks and pumps at least every km of altitude or so, to maintain air pressure through the cube; and to bring its own air supply as Earth wouldn't have enough.
[Answer]
**(Big) Space Cube**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nsmgi.jpg)
THE DIVINE CITY does not curve with the Earth's surface because it is too big to fit on the Earth's surface without causing the apocalypse.
THE DIVINE CITY is 2000km wide. Nearly one hundred times the height of the largest mountain in the solar system.
THE DIVINE CITY is over half as wide as the Moon. The Moon! Imagine trying to put something that big on the planet without it tearing itself apart from any of:
(a) atmospheric effects
(b) rotational forces
(c) gravity differences at the top and bottom
(d) the inside turning to magma
(e) being too big
THE DIVINE CITY is not on the planet because it is its own planet. Or maybe it is a space station. We are not sure. None of us were around when it was created. That is part of what makes it DIVINE.
THE DIVINE CITY'S denizens are called Devas. They live in tunnels that can go a few kilometers under the surface. These people are different from the Earth people due to the weaker gravity and thinner atmosphere. Their language sounds like whistling but there are also low frequency tones that make you want to go to the bathroom.
THE DIVINE CITY has its own gravity, geology and weather. They believe the center is molten but have not been down to check in person.
[Answer]
There's no way such a thing can stand on Earth.
Maximum height of earthly mountains is a bit over 8km because anything above that would sink mantle and thus become lower (mons Olympus on Mars can be higher due to lower gravity and thicker mantle) (see [this](https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/437011/view/section-through-the-earth-s-crust)).
Anything strong enough to sustain it's own weight (if that is at all possible, which I strongly doubt) would sink in the crust like an iceberg in water.
Given the size you request it would be a problem even to keep its cubic shape even in space as it would have it's own gravity and it's well over the size where asteroid try hard to become spherical.
In space, of course, you could make it much more lightweight and thus you can have little gravity to counter.
Problem with such a setup are:
* very large cross section so virtual certainty to get incoming debris daily.
* If orbiting in relatively low orbit large tidal effect trying hard to break structure apart (see: [Roche limit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit)).
Note that even "simply" adding a kilometer thick "protective" layer of the lightest material known today (graphene aerogel) would already have a mass (~3.8e15kg for the pure "shield", **nothing** inside) comparable with a fair sized asteroid like Eros.
Another "simple multiplication exercise": if you have layers 100m apart (which is a pretty high ceiling to have in all your "rooms") you will end up with 2000 \* 2000 \* 20000 Km2 of sheer surface. If you put a "moderately populated" (like Holland) 500person/Km2 (Singapore has >8000p/Km2 and it is not the most densely populated in THIS world) you get about 4 trillion people, giving them a mass of 80kg each you get 3.2e15Kg, more than enough to generate a fair gravity pull by themselves, without any life support equipment (or clothing).
[Answer]
**maybe, but your satellites won’t survive**
Most satellites are between 160 and 2000 km above earth. This means any of these satellites might impact the city unless they are take down. You could have them course correct, but given the size of the city that might not be possible.
[Answer]
In addition to the other concerns, I'm worried about where you're going to find 2,000 meters square of flat ground to stick your city. I've done some mockups to show the size of the Divine City, to give you an idea of how big the ask is.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BAgOH.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aZcYD.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/o8IMv.jpg)
I can't help but wonder if it could possibly float. But then, it's likely it would need a draught of hundreds of kilometres at least.
[Answer]
It's hard to imagine a material that could be used to build such a structure. It's likely that a structure of this size requires [active support](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_structure). Think [space fountain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain) but on a much larger scale. By accelerating pellets (or whatever) up a tube and then deflecting them back in a loop, you create a force that helps hold the structure up.
>
> A Space Fountain uses a continuous stream of electromagnetically accelerated metal pellets to hold things up at extreme altitudes using the same basic physical principles that a water fountain uses to suspend a plastic ball at the top of its vertical jet of water.
>
>
> Small metallic pellets by the millions would be shot up to a "deflector" station far overhead, which would use magnetic field scoops to catch the pellets, curve them back down with an electromagnetic accelerator, then shoot them back down to the ground. The ground station would in turn use a magnetic scoop to catch the pellets, curve them back up with a powerful electromagnetic accelerator, and shoot them back at the station in one continuous loop. The pressure exerted on the magnetic fields of the scoop and curved EM accelerator by the continuous stream of pellets would keep the station aloft.
>
>
> [ORBITAL RAILROADS: BEANSTALKS AND SPACE FOUNTAINS](http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/orbital-railroads-beanstalks-and-space-fountains/)
>
>
>
I imagine that sitting this structure on your planet can only lead to Bad Things, so an orbital structure is more reasonable. I'm imagining a black hole or something in the middle to keep it all powered.
[Answer]
It cannot be "flat to the ground", assuming you mean the base is a flat plane.
The distance from corner to corner, with sides 2000 km long, is 2828 km. Simplifying the Earth to a sphere, this means that if you place the center of the based on the surface of the Earth, the corners are at an altitude of approximately 155 km, aka Low Earth Orbit. If, on the other hand, the corners are on the surface and the base cuts through the Earth, that means that at the center it's 155 km deep, or well into the upper mantle. This is...problematic, and means that the excavation would result in an event that would have tectonic implications over the entire planet and probably result in a near total mass extinction event as it would create the largest volcanic event since the Earth finished forming.
This would be bad.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 2 years ago.
The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 1 year ago and left it closed:
>
> Original close reason(s) were not resolved
>
>
>
[Improve this question](/posts/207225/edit)
I'm creating two character classes:
* Physics warrior - Just like an ordinary warrior
* Magic warrior - Like a physical warrior but using magic. (not a mage or magician).They can attack by firing magic bullets, can create magic shields, etc... Generally speaking spells that serve the ability to fight, in any way. However since it's magic, I'm aiming for it to be easier for people with low physical strength. (Example: Magic swords or magic shields wouldn't need to be lifted so hard.)
The magic warrior is being built to be a kind of soldier whose strength is comparable to that of a physical warrior in a 1 vs 1 match and in a war. (Imagine that a student who is good at only physics and a student who is only good at chemistry will have the same scholarship value. Magic warrior just a warrior, not a mage or magician.)
What troubled me was the specification of the magic, which proved too flexible, too powerful, and far superior to physics. If you limit it too much, it won't look like magic anymore. I also can't power up physical weapons because the my world is in medieval, when science wasn't developed enough.
[Answer]
**Muscle Memory (fast) vs Conscious Decisions (slow)**
Physical warriors perform by fitness and muscle memory. When properly trained a physical warrior fights by instinct. For example they lock swords with the opponent, detect a change in the pressure of their opponent's blade, and their arm knows how to pivot around and strike their opponent without exposing themselves.
Magical Warriors on the other hand do not have this sort of haptic feedback with their weapons -- presuming the weapon is some sort of materialized melee weapon, either attached to their arm or floating nearby. That means they are slower to react and make the kind of split-second decisions needed to win the fight. They must instead physically watch the fight, judge their opponent's actions, and make conscious decisions how to move their weapon in response. This is all done while someone else is trying to kill you, and is extremely mentally taxing on the magical warrior.
Magic warriors are more versatile in terms of weapons and armor, since they can materialise different shapes and sizes. For example they can materialize armor with no holes in the armpits, or suddenly extend their sword to 12 foot long and catch their opponent off guard. They try to win by this sort of "broad strokes" strategy to trick their opponent's conscious mind.
Physical Warriors are limited by the physical constraints of their equipment. A 12 foot sword is too long and heavy to wield, and even the best armor has weak points. They try to win by closing to short range as soon as possible and overpowering their opponent's untrained unconscious mind.
[Answer]
## Using the Paper, Rock, Scissors Approach
But wait... you only have two options here, right? Not necessarily. The Early-to-High Medieval period was absolutely dominated by knights. Knights were men who were wealthy and could afford weapons of the highest quality, nearly impenetrable armor head to toe armor, and powerful warhorses that could move them quickly around the battlefield. Survivability on the battlefield was a thing that could be bought making a small number of knights more powerful than a large army of infantry.
But then in the Late Medieval period, things began to shift. Crossbows, longbows, and firearms got good enough to pierce armor. Spears got long enough to decimate a cavalry charge, and knights started to become obsolete since wealth could no longer purchase a distinct advantage on the battlefield. Knights became secondary to good old fashioned infantry armed with much cheaper weapons.
Now enter the magic warrior. These guys are a lot like common infantry in that they don't necessarily have a lot of money, but their magic makes them individually powerful warriors. Like the knights of old, it would only take a small squad of magic warriors to wipe out whole formation of cheap infantry, but thier magic would make them effective against pikes, archers, etc in a way that knights could no longer keep up... but they have one major short coming. They are helpless against knights. You see, the knights can no longer just buy invulnerability against common infantry weapons, but invulnerability against magic is totally a thing that is for sale.
Take something really expensive to make armor out of, like gold, and make it so magic is dissipated or absorbed by gold. So, now your knights with thier gilded armor are practically untouchable by magic and thier gilded weapons can cut right through mage shields. So, to a knight who can afford to dip all of his stuff in gold, a magic warrior is basically the same as an unarmed peasant.
So, your fantasy battlefield becomes a big complex game of paper-rock-scissors because Knight beats Mage, Mage beats infantry, and Infantry beats Knight, and the balancing factor is that you can not go to war without all 3 classes of troops because only having two would make you defenseless against the 3rd.
## What should gilded armor be like?
Gold in the medieval period was very expensive. The price of gold generally fell somewhere between 4.4 and 32 grams to the £1. The average knight would spend £25-150 on his warhorse, weapons and armor whereas most professional foot solders (mercenaries and the sort) spent no more than £5 on thier kits, and levees rarely owned more than £1 of gear. So, it stands to reason that if you keep the cost of gilding yourself somewhere in the £20-100 range that the resulting armor would still be affordable enough for most knights to own, while putting it well out of the cost point of commoners and mercenaries. This means that we need to assume the suit of armor needs to be gilded with about 100-1500g of gold.
Most medieval full-body steel armor weighed an average ~20,000g and was ~2mm thick. Gold is also about 2.5 times as dense as steel; so, to hit this price point, it means you need to coat your armor in gold leaf that is in the 0.004-0.123mm thickness range. While this sounds way too thin to achieve without modern technology, medieval gold smiths were actually very good at making gold leaf thin. The some medieval gold leaf was as thin as 0.016mm; so, if you just used the gold leaf they were already making in a time period where gold was on the more expensive end of the spectrum (which it will be if everyone wants to make armor out of it) it would place the cost of gilded armor squarely in the category of things that knights and only knights could afford.
Also, being this thin means that it would not significantly impact the weight of are armor; so, knights could continue to armor themselves as before, but now with the added bonus of magic resistance.
[Answer]
**Physical warrior is infantry, magic warrior is artillery**
Both are necessary in a battle, with advantages and drawbacks.
Magic warriors can strike better from a distance and perform in the role of artillery (think early rifles with "magic bullet" type of spells and cannons with "fireball" type of spells).
For balance purposes, their abilities need some drawbacks. In your typical medieval fantasy RPGs, spellcasters cannot cast spells indefinitely, they have a certain amount of magical energy they can use before they need to rest. The more powerful the spell, the less they can use it. Another usual drawback is that they usually can't wear heavy armor, but you already addressed that. This doesn't make them any less valuable in battles, since they can do things a regular long-range weapon from medieval times can't do.
A physical warrior, on the other hand, is more durable - can fight longer and resist injuries better, and they're also physically faster by nature. Of course, while they're typically "less smart" than spellcasters in medieval fantasy settings, they should have either basic training on battle tactics or be trained on how to deal with spellcasters in the same way a foot soldier is trained on how to deal with artillery. And there is always the possibility of giving them enchanted armor and weapons
I'd expect a physical warrior to be more focused on trying to get the opportunity to strike the magic warrior at close range or sneak in a well-placed long-range attack like an arrow or a bolt, while waiting for them to run out of "mana" (or whatever you want to call it), while the magic warrior will be focused on taking the physical warrior out as soon as possible and saving their mana.
[Answer]
**Fatigue**
A key element of the physical, melee weapon swinging, toe-to-toe combatant is just raw fitness.
This stuff is heavy, it's exhausting to use, and the wielder is managing a combination of adrenalin, pain, and fatigue along with the mental exhaustion of fear, planning, observation, etc.
Simply, it takes a lot of work to beat the bananas out of each other, even with swords and axes.
So.
Come up with a way to fatigue the magic users. Both mental and physical fatigue can work. A tired brain is a tired body. They all affect reaction time, planning, placement of the blow (or block), power of the blow or block, etc.
Make the magic "hurt" and wear the user out, and you'll be on the right path. This is what's happening to the melee fighter already.
[Answer]
**Magic warrior has a high school diploma in magic.**
It is the same magic the wizards use. It is just much less advanced; addition and subtraction as compared to calculus. The magic warriors did some time in magic school and they got a few skills. But magic college is tough, and expensive. Some of these folks are using their magic skills to put bread on the table, and hope to go back to school some day to learn more serious magic so they can wear purple robes and nod knowingly. Some magic warriors realize that they don't have the magic chops to play in the big leagues, or they are sick of school, and so they work with what they have. Besides magic soldiers there are some magic chefs, magic farmers and so on. People who have learned a little magic and they use it in their job. To quote the great Casten: "if you are smart, do things where your brains give you an edge". If you can learn a little magic, why not use the magic to help you make great looking pants that you can sell?
Among the magic warriors, some very few are older, and some much older. Instead of learning magic at a young age like most of them, these went back to learn magic after a life of doing something else. Nearly all of them are warriors who can no longer fight. Maybe they are too old, or maybe they have been damaged, or both - as is common for old warriors. These old magic warriors are rare because magic school takes brains, and the warrior trade is not conducive to staying smart in later life, or even achieving later life. But some do. They cannot fight like they used to even though they remember how they did. Such individuals do not know any more magic than their classmates 20 years their junior, but they are forces to be reckoned with.
Very occasionally a magic warrior spent a life doing something completely different and then late in life goes to school to become a magic warrior. These folks are wild cards, and they always have a reason, and always a good one.
[Answer]
**Spell times and comparable physics**
You say magic bullets, shields and the like. I'm not sure how far your magic goes, but it can be curtailed quite easily to be more comparable. The resulting magic can be tempered and the spell times can be increased.
First off, nothing is completely comparable. If you look at MMA, you see that not one single style is the best. You see it rotates, as new techniques or disciplines are introduced. Sometimes the new king can then be beaten by a new, or even an old technique or discipline. That means your magic and your physical warriors can trade the best. On the other hand, if you do it well enough the individual variance is greater than the technique, making it still unclear who would win.
You mention a magic bullet. Regardless how fast it goes, the important part is how it imparts its energy. A gun is a prime example. The recoil of the gun should be equal to the power the bullet has. Due to the time of acceleration/deceleration and the way the gun is handled vs the arrival method of the bullet, you see that this same energy has wildly different effects. One can rip your flesh apart, the other is some strong kickback on your arms.
That is why it really matters how the bullet imparts it's energy. Maybe it goes as fast as light, but it won't matter if it only imparts a bit of heat onto the armour. Maybe it'll only impart as much energy as a rock thrown very hard. It can certainly be damaging, but it isn't an instant win.
The magic might also require aiming. That can be hard if you need to concentrate on the conjuring of the bullet or whatever at the same time. This again reduces effectiveness.
The magic swords and such can potentially be very powerful, but also detrimental. As a hypothetical situation, imagine the mage makes a magical light sabre. Who would win then? Probably the physical warrior. The warrior is likely faster, more used to the close combat and when the warrior strikes first he will win. The remainder of the sword when the mage tries to block will still go with enough force to seriously injure the mage, after which the warrior can easily finish the job. Otherwise the warrior might just dodge the first attack and quickly go in for the kill. Incredible power is quite useless if you do not have the skill to use it.
But you can limit it further. A mage could require focus for his magic. That means less attention can be given to the true fighting. If you can break the concentration, their magic can falter. The opposite is also true. They can be so engrossed in the magic, they might not handle adequately to threats.
Finally there is the time invested in a spell. It can take a moment, or much longer. During this time the mage is very vulnerable.
**Undetermined**
It really depends on what you feel is good for the magic. It seems from your question you want magic to be very powerful and versatile, but not really many drawbacks. But the drawbacks are what you can use to give it a more equal footing. Casting times, difficulty aiming or getting the right effects, concentration and inefficient magic for the job. These and more can be used to tone down magic, while still potentially incredibly powerful.
[Answer]
**Concentration and fizzle chance.** Magic warriors need to control their equipment with their minds. They do not need physical strength but it takes mental energy to keep the weapons material. Every hit disturbs their concentration. If they loose it, their weapon/armor dematerialize and they will be left vulnerable.
This also has additional benefit, while inexperienced magic warriors will be able to summon standard weapons/armor. Experienced ones can summon magic bullets, cannon balls, decimating the opponent. Of course a better physical warrior will be able dodge these and can level the playing ground with speed and precision. Though the cap for magic warriors will be higher compared to physical ones, you may simply make it more difficult for everyone to attain higher skill in magic fighting.
[Answer]
You should be troubled by another factor instead.
An intelligent guy that fight like a warrior is BOTH a warrior and an intelligent guy.
The physical warrior is just strong, but dumb enough to not learn magic.
So, in that universe, if I had to chose a class, I'll OBVIOUSLY pick the mage warrior, sparing myself the whole fatigue of rising my strenght, as the magic fill up the gap. That will make the number of physical warriors extermely reduced and probably low society members.
The second Gygax rule of fantasy class creation: *thu shall not make fair classes*. Feeble people should be in danger when fighting, or there's no need for others to risk their lives at knighthood.
[Answer]
I suppose things you could do would be making magically resistant armor and weapons more common. Also if the magical enhancements for magic warriors include things like increasing their strength and speed then perhaps they could be born less physically gifted to begin with.
The problem is magic is essentially an addition to a standard physical person so the only way to keep things even is to either take something away from the magic user or give something to the non one.
[Answer]
You magic users have to recant a a multi word spell. That takes time which someone with a sword can use to stab you.
Also your magical items may be strong but they have short lifetimes. Thus the spell caster has to keep making new swords and shields. So they need to back out of a fight every few minutes to recast their spells. Again providing an opportunity for some with a sword to attack.
[Answer]
## Minimum Safe Distance
Physical warriors charge into close range
so as to be inside the minimum safe distance
of the magical warriors spells.
] |
[Question]
[
Conservation of energy is a "universal" law, and would be counterintuitive to have someone travelling from a universe like ours - with our physics framework - into another universe that obeyed other laws of other-physics.
So, if we keep that premise that a parallel universe accessible from ours has to be under our same laws of physics framework, to have someone or something travelling from our universe into it (and back from it into ours) would break energy conservation law as matter/energy would disappear from our universe and "be created" in another parallel universe.
I thought about a mandatory constraint that would kill someone - or "someones" - into the destination universe, but that is bad because it makes the universe "sentient" somehow and then it turns to crazy pseudoscience and not some "possible science" based on quantum speculation. Also, how would the origination universe replenish the energy/mass lost when the traveler left it.
Then, I had the idea to have a forceful exchange between a traveler and its counterpart on the destination universe. That is an amazing thing for storytelling, but creates another problem, wormholes are one-way only conduits meaning there is only one direction through the central singularity from the black hole to the white hole. That makes impossible to exchange subjects without another wormhole opened from the destination universe.
I am hitting my head against this roadblock in my worldbuilding now, as parallel universe traveling is the basis of all my stories.
What are some ways you would suggest that would make it possible to keep energy conservation universal constraint when a given mass travels from a parallel universe to another through a wormhole?
[Answer]
Energy conservation is not a universal constraint. It is a consequence of a symmetry called [time translation invariance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_translation_symmetry) and energy is not conserved if this symmetry is broken. In fact our own universe breaks this symmetry due to its expansion and as a result [the energy of the universe is not conserved](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35431/is-the-law-of-conservation-of-energy-still-valid) (though energy conservation still applies at smaller scales).
Without a precise description of the physics involved in travel between universes it is impossible to say whether the process will or won't conserve energy, but there is no reason why it must do so. Given this I think you are worrying unnecessarily.
[Answer]
In our world we know that, because of thermodynamics, the entropy of a closed system can only increase. Yet we have systems where locally the entropy decrease. This does not violate the thermodynamic laws because the local decrease is compensated by a large increase outside the system, resulting in an overall increase according to the law. Examples of this are a fridge or a teenager cleaning their room.
Another example is the conservation of mass: since the times of Lavoisier chemists knew that the mass in a reaction is conserved. Then somebody came on stage with some strange (nuclear) reactions where mass is not conserved. The conservation was saved by changing it to the conservation of mass-energy.
Go along the same way: it's the energy of the whole multiverse which has to be conserved, not the one of the local universe. If up to a certain moment the inhabitant of your local universe have thought the conservation of energy was holding true it was only because they didn't have any experimental evidence of the contrary, like it was for nuclear reactions.
[Answer]
When an object of mass $m$ enters a wormhole, the perceived mass of the entrance end increases by $m$ and the perceived mass of the exit end decreases by $m$. Energy is thus conserved locally on both ends, and globally in each universe.
This means wormholes have a finite number of uses, but if they're large enough, that won't interfere much.
[Answer]
The law of conservation of mass/energy says that within a closed system the total mass/energy can't increase or decrease.
But if someone travels by wormhole or otherwise from Universe A to Universe B, neither Universe A nor Universe B can be a closed system. The smallest closed system will have to be Universe A and Universe B. And if there are also wormholes leading to Universe C, Universe D, etc., Universe C, Universe D, etc. will also be part of the same closed system as Universe A and Universe B.
And moving mass/energy from one part of a closed system to another part of a closed system does not violate the law of conservation of mass/energy. It is something which happens all the time.
[Answer]
Suppose that energy is not conserved within a particular parallel universe. This could lead to an imbalance over time, but that imbalance could be interesting for narrative purposes. As an analogy, consider a lightning storm, where a large charge separation develops and there's eventually a large enough potential difference between the clouds and the ground to cause lightning strikes. If these parallel worlds are rubbing up against each other and sometimes exchanging energy via wormholes, then this energy imbalance might lead to interesting consequences in whatever physics powers your variant of multiverse. Perhaps the formation of wormholes in the first place is analogous to lightning strikes, openings forming as a result of an energy imbalance?
There's also nothing that says this has to be a simple tit-for-tat process. Your inter-dimensional weather, as it were, might be something that tolerates a fairly large imbalance up until it crosses a certain critical threshold, at which point wormholes start popping up all over the place. There's a lot of potential narrative there, especially if this starts happening in a universe that's been relatively low energy for a long time and suddenly has a ton of wormholes appearing from a neighboring high energy universe.
[Answer]
**It is neither created nor destroyed**
You already state that the premise is that any accessible parallel universe needs to be under the same laws. There is a free solution to your problem. If the accessible universes are under the same laws, it can be seen as one law for these universes.
When something is moved from one universe to another, you have the same amount of energy in all universes, allowing the law to be correct.
**Different problem**
Although this seems to solve the problem, it's not quite true. If one travels from a planet to the orbit of a planet on another universe, you still have some added potential energy! To correct this, you could add the constraint that extra power for transfer is needed in such cases. The energy required will automatically demand more or less energy, depending on the difference of (potential) energy the places have with each other. Energy free travel to outer space or the like!
[Answer]
If you open a portal between dimensions then the possibility exists for two-way movement of matter/energy.
It is possible that as the person/ship/whatever moves from one universe to another, an equal amount of energy/matter moves the other way in the form of subatomic particles/em waves virtual or otherwise. As you are writing the story you can choose the exact composition to suit.
Maybe the influx is detectable from far away or only close by. Maybe the effect is dangerous (think nuclear explosion), moderately dangerous (huge amount of heat/light/sound), innoculus (neutrinos).
[Answer]
*"Conservation of energy is a "universal" law, and would be counterintuitive to have someone travelling from a universe like ours - with our physics framework - into another universe that obeyed other laws of other-physics."*
There's an easy way to do this, if you are willing to bend the meaning of "travel", which is to use an avatar. You convey *information* between universes so as to create a body in the other universe and control it remotely. What the body senses is conveyed across the interuniversal void and fed into your senses. Your chosen actions in response are conveyed across the void and acted on by the body.
Gods incarnate themselves on the mortal plane as avatars, demons steal control of somebody else's body as a posession, robots are used to give the remote-body experience in "[telepresence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepresence)", and of course computer games (especially with the VR headsets and haptics) allow us to explore an artificial game universe which has different laws of physics. And as in the film "The Matrix", the experience could in principle be so immersive and lifelike that the explorers *don't even realise* that the world they experience is artificial, and they are actually controlling their bodies from another universe with different physical laws.
You can even interpret Cartesian Dualism - the idea that there are separate spirit worlds and material worlds, and our spirit-world "soul" occupies and controls our material-world body - as another instance of the same situation. How can *immaterial* spirits and souls occupy and interact with the world of matter? By "remote control".
If you don't like the idea of the traveller staying in their home universe while travelling, you can also use it as a temporary stage. You create a working copy of yourself in the other universe, fully autonomous, making appropriate changes to account for the different laws of physics (assuming they are [Turing-complete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness)), and then delete the original. Minds are software. So when an AI transfers from one computer to another - which may have different hardware and a different instruction set - you have to translate the software, but it does the same thing. It has the same memories, personality, behaviour, likes and dislikes as the original.
There are all sorts of interesting philosophical questions about personal identity if you can make multiple copies, if you can fork and merge personalities, or if you can distribute a mind across multiple universes, perhaps exploiting different rules of physics in one universe to be able to perform computations impossible in another. A quantum computer, [it is said](https://sociable.co/technology/quantum-computing-multiverse/), is a computer spread across the multiverse, harnessing the distributed computational power of computers in billions of parallel realities to be able to do things no classical computer can do. All those computers follow the same laws of physics, but what could you do if you had access to universes with different laws?
Are they multiple instances of yourself (the same person) or are they more like your children (different persons)? Are they like a society of interacting individuals (many people) or more like a hive mind or individual neurones in a brain (a single person)? There are lots of options.
[Answer]
You're assuming too much.
Quanta need not be identical in every aspect of their form (or, conceivably, in any aspect of their form) in order to satisfy the fungibility requirement: the relationship between mass and energy is fixed, but mass is "fluid" and energy is "fluid"; therefore the form required to balance the transfer is also fluid.
You're basically asking "If I remove from this universe quantity AB, and put that into a parallel universe, then how do I guarantee that "A" and "B" are transferred from that universe into this one?" It doesn't work that way:
The balance happens as a consequence of the transfer — so, there's nothing required on the part of the entity initiating the transfer.
Moreover, the balancing transfer can be either local or non-local (or both) — so, you might transfer a person from this universe to a parallel (and hopefully, compatible) neighboring universe, but both
(a) the balancing mechanism might involve countless other universes; and
(b) the points at which the balance in this universe is restored could be one or several or an incalculably great number, and the mass-energy distribution at any particular point could equal the minimal existential value.
* Let's imagine *E* = 10 and *m* = 10: *Em* = 100.
* Now let's imagine *E* = 25 and *m* = 4: *Em* = 100.
* They're different, and yet they're the same.
The implications are many more than can be competently discussed in this forum, but I hope that I've helped you to understand better how to approach this issue.
[Answer]
The wormhole, while it appears to exists in one location, actually stretches over the whole Universe. Thus when someone or something goes through the wormhole, the wormhole exerts a tiny force on everything on the other side. This mostly drags some unlucky hydrogen and helium atoms into the wormhole to balance the mass/energy of each Universe. Some scientists have speculated that this is where all the odd socks disappear too.
[Answer]
## Simply release the energy
If the trip is from a high potential energy to a lower potential energy, then the energy is released in pure form. This can result in [pair production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production) of photons, protons, neutrinos ... whatever you like. Think of it as a Big Bang in miniature. (Hmmm... was the original Big Bang from someone who tested your wormhole and found out the first step was a doozy?) There will be particles and antiparticles formed in equal numbers, so the traveller might be exposed to antimatter in some small amount, not to mention gamma rays. Shielding might handle some of that, though it released more energy to bring it through.
But what if you're going *uphill*? Same thing! Only now you release negative energy = [negative mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass), which is a sort of ridiculous concept of particles that are lighter than zero. (Some people once thought wormholes and warp drives needed to be made with it) Negative mass does funny things like run away with positive mass because the negative gravitational pull pushes on the positive but attracts the negative. But that's just another sort of radiation and eventually it should hit something and get cancelled out. The net effect from the traveller's perspective is that some of their subatomic particles *go away* without trace, leaving them with some minor radioactivity. Absurd, yes ... not as absurd as interuniversal travel with wormholes, so you should be fine.
] |
[Question]
[
In a world with magic that regenerates over time, such that taking a short break ¬Ω-2 hours long is enough for high magic individuals to restore a portion of power (and cast more if they were originally out of magic) and taking a much longer break 8+ hours is generally enough to restore all of your magic. The Mages of this world are able to create magic items to hold the power of a spell such as scrolls, wands, staves, and all manner of non-spellcasting items (swords with fire enchantments etc.).
However, when they use magic to create these items using the requisite quality of materials for holding it, the power they used to create them is not regenerated over time despite being expended. What would prevent them from regaining power?
Edit: This effect remains even for items such as single use scrolls until the scroll is used.
[Answer]
It *is* regenerated... *in the item*.
Creating a magic artifact permanently (or at least, until the artifact is destroyed or disenchanted) "displaces" part of the mage's "magic capacity", binding it to the artifact instead of the mage. When the artifact is used, it needs to regenerate just like when a mage uses magic. It can do this despite being inanimate because it is powered by a sliver of the mage's abilities that the mage carved out of himself/herself when making the artifact.
If this is permanent, I'd imagine very few magic artifacts exist, because the cost is very high for the benefit. OTOH, if destruction of the artifact causes that "sliver" to return to the mage, then artifacts may be a convenient way to maintain ready-to-cast spells, and they can always be destroyed or disenchanted if the mage wants/needs that capacity back.
[Answer]
When you enchant an item, you place a piece of you in the item. Might be an abstract piece of you, but regardless, you only regenerate that mana back when the item is destroyed or disenchanted.
This allows you to throw necromancy into the mix. Wanna enchant something, but don't want to spend your own soul into it? Use someone else's (or some animal's), [as seen in The Elder Scrolls](https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Soul_Gem_(Skyrim)).
[Answer]
**knowledge is lost**
There's already good answers above, so I decided to give it a little spin as the question might be answered differently.
When creating items, the knowledge of this spell is removed from the user and put on the item for use. This does not make the enchanter less powerful. He/she just has less options available. They might learn it again, or maybe the spell still occupies the mind but can't be accessed anymore.
] |
[Question]
[
>
> Ignorance is curable, living is forever. Robert A. Heinlein1
>
>
>
---
Cutting to the hard data:
Due to some or another reason2 the genetic information stored inside cells (aka DNA) of my Immortals does not deteriorate over time. Replacing old cells with new cells does not result in inferior/misaligned copies of the contained genetic code, thus cells can be renewed indefinitely.
The genetic code of any *born* Immortal can also not be altered by influence of radiation thus during the lifespan of an Immortal their cells will not mutate and thus will not get cancerous.
Now the cells of any *unborn* Immortal may still produce mutations and thus the species will further evolve more or less unhindered.
---
**Q**: Considering the above stated rules, *What* **diseases** will still be able to bring death to an Immortal, and *Why*?
1Well mostly at least
2Call it *magic* if that helps you
[Answer]
## Anything that isn't cancer.
You seem to describe something known as **biological immortality**, which occurs when an organism cannot simply die of old age. Lucky, a jellyfish species called *[Turritopsis dohrnii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii)* has this condition. Let's talk about what kills them.
**Pathogens**
Even if death from old age cannot occur, microbes can kill the body. Viruses may be out of the question if you're hard-set on the "no changing genetic code" aspect, but that still leaves bacteria, prions, and a host of other microorganisms - all capable of releasing deadly toxins, or overwhelming the immune system.
**Predators**
The ability to stay alive does not mean the inability to be killed. Predators of this species can still kill them, or, if they have no predators, then other members of the species can do it.
---
***Additionally, consider***
**War**
Simple enough. Shooting, or stabbing, or bludgeoning, or lasering should do the trick.
**Physical Conditions**
Things like heart attacks and strokes resulting from random chance or natural causes can kill this species.
**Environment**
Extreme temperatures, pressures, and other conditions should work.
In short, you've said "they're immune to cancer, but what else can kill them?" to which the answer is "anything but cancer"
[Answer]
If you discount every single acute event, like infections and traumas (and for which there are good treatments nowadays), I would say that the diseases that would affect your immortals the most would be **degenerative diseases**, like dementia, amiloidosis and vascular diseases.
Even if the DNA doesn't suffer damage, the natural entropy of the continuous functioning of the organism will produce deterioration.
The bones will deteriorate so much that the immortal will eventually suffer from severe **osteoarthrosis**, rendering your immortal unable to move.
The neurons will also deteriorate eventually and lead to **dementia**.
Debris from the constant metabolism will eventually accumulate on the organs, inhibiting their normal functioning through mechanisms of **amiloydosis**
Also, even if the immortal has perfect sugar or lipid control, eventually the blood vessels will be coated with hidrophobic fat, leading to **atherosclerotic events**. Sugar or other molecular radicals will bond the natural molecules of the blood vessel wall and produce damage. Lastly, blood vessels will calcify or rupture from shear continuous usage.
The blood vessels and the heart will also undergo processes of remodeling to acomodate to continuous blood flow, loosening their elastic properties. These processes will lessen the efficacy of the heart, or produce aneurisms... which could lead to fatal hemorrhages or cardiovascular events if the immortal is allocated to a situation of physical or psychological stress.
Just like the blood vessels may be blocked by atherosclerosis, the bile will cristalize in the gallbladder and these crystals will block the biliary ducts, which could lead to fatal **cholangitis and cholecystitis**
Please note that these disorders will occur even in the absence of genetic damage, but the body will be unable to repair these lesions (at least if we're talking about a human body that is similar to our own, except for the DNA repair mechanisms). Old people without cancer die from these disorders. Machines, that by definition, don't have genes, cease to be able to operate after some years due to simple overusage.
In short, the body will exhaust itself from the continuous functioning in the long run and the immortal will suffer from every kind of degenerative disease.
[Answer]
What about DNA changes from other causes than misreplication or radiation?
Viruses can affect the reproduction of DNA. For example, the Tasmanian Devil was almost wiped out by a contagious form of face cancer, and the HPV virus causes cervical cancer.
Then there are causes of death that don't involve the DNA. This will depend on the mechanism for immortality.
Parasites can cause death - even the humble tapeworm, untreated, can cause cysts in the brain and heart.
Magnesium deficiency can lead to heart attack.
Bacteria and funguses that produce neurotoxins.
Extremely high fever. Anaphylactic shock.
And so on - unless your immortality device takes care of any and all parasites, bacteria, viruses, malnutrition, allergies, etc, etc, etc.
[Answer]
Given time, theoretically only physical damage (stabbing, drowning, shooting, etc) should kill an immortal race.
Why? Because every other disease such as viral infections, bacteria, or lifestyle illnesses (diabetes, heart disease, osteoarthritis, etc) should, eventually, be selected against through targeted reproduction. Assuming your immortal race starts with the ENTIRE current earth population (i.e. we give everyone an inoculation that turns them and their kids immortal from there on out) then freezing DNA effectively halts mutation driven evolution. Your race is now static. BUT it can still adapt by mixing chromosomes via reproduction.
So HIV is a problem. But presumably a small subset of the population is immune to HIV because of their particular DNA/immune system (the part of the immune system driven by DNA rather than environmental factors). So, over time, these individuals will be selected for as HIV kills off other immortals (or, more likely, immortals selectively mate in order to increase the incidence of HIV immunity in their offspring). So now all the remaining immortals are immune to HIV. Rinse and repeat this for all other infectious organisms, lifestyle diseases, and even inherited diseases such as Huntingtons. An immortal population presumably would take a very long view on survivability and would actively cull out their weaknesses.
Now this would take a long time and would probably never be entirely successful. There may not be genetic immunities to every disease and this immortal race, unless they also have genetic engineering, can't develop any new genes through mutation. So they will start to slowly collapse towards a homogenous pool of genes and may lose important ones accidentally when culling out another gene on the same chromosome. Diseases will also continue to evolve and mutate, finding ways around the immortals immune system and as the immortals become more homogenous they are at greater risk of one disease striking them all down since they are unable to develop random mutations that might protect at least some individuals (we routinely lose entire monocrops to disease in this fashion).
But of course traditional medications, vaccines, antibiotics, and anti-virals will continue to be developed, with the benefit of not having to worry about the teratogenic side effects that cause so many problems with other drugs. So we may end up with a population immune to many diseases (which will then be eradicated if humans are the only reservoir) that also have to take a crap ton of vaccines and antibiotics to stop the spread of diseases they can not long develop any genetic immunity against unless they can also gene engineer themselves.
[Answer]
Zxyrra brings up a very good point. Your immortals have incorruptible DNA, but the rest of them is still left vulnerable.
If however, you go on to posit the rest of their physiology is equally incorruptible, my only thought is that perhaps only the physiology itself could kill itself:
## Autoimmune Disease
Maybe if the immune system is more immortal than the rest of the body, it could kill the person if it turned on them and attacked them, in [autoimmune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmune_disease) fashion. The DNA may be incorruptible, but if the rest of the body gets annihilated by an overzealous immune system, it could result in death.
(P.S.:
Harvard scientists already have [immortal mice](http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/partial-reversal-of-aging-achieved-in-mice/) because the mice telomeres have been fixed. Maybe that is what you were referring to?)
[Answer]
Have no rep to add comment, but my guess is **Mental Disease**, if topic starter is open to this idea.
I think deep depression dive can easily kill what-ever immune bio-immortal dude in matter of centuries.
I can continue this list further, but you got the idea. Dont call it one-liner. It has more sense than over9000liner.
[Answer]
Any disease that affects gut flora.
---
Immortal race must have immortal symbiotic microflora, or at least the other ways to digest their food (possible - intravenous feeding).
With gut flora being damaged by radiation, or by other bacteria/virus disease, the immortal will simply starve to death.
---
Thinking of symbiotic relationship: any disease capable of wiping most of livestock/other protein sources up to extinction would also be fatal for some of immortals.
[Answer]
Mental Diseases
Sadness: because all other died.
Bipolar Disorder: The manga "3x3 Eyes" they have a plot where the life need ups and downs, but like a drug the need for excitement always grow, not meeting the joy need, the immortals fall in depression or go insane trying to feed the never satiated need for joy.
---
Hungry: Ever-growing population causes food shortages
Parasites: A mutating parasite that fight the immortals evolution taking over the body little by little.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/38316/edit).
Closed 7 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/38316/edit)
I am thinking about a story in a setting similar to today, where there are some magical creatures (all of them human-like, such as different forms of sorcerers and witches). They keep their existence hidden as they are afraid to mingle with human business and have that lead to some sort of catastrophe like the 'ancient catastrophe' -- and that catastrophe is where I want to get some flesh on the bones:
* In ancient times, such as the Greek or Egyptian time, there had been a race completely dependent and sustaining on magic and thus very powerful, living on some continent (such as Atlantis, however cheesy, but you get the point!)
* they started seeing themselves as gods to the humans, so they revealed their existence and started to take control over mankind. That hubris made their whole race go extinct (except very very few, that got dispersed with time)
* Concerning their magic, I would not give you too many limits; nothing temporal, but all sorts of manipulating elements, pure energy and to some extent minds.
So, how could this extinction have happened?
* The humans developing their own powers, sort of evolutionary, and then dramatically destroy them all? This seems unlikely, as I imagine tens of thousands of these ancient Atlanteans be around, all of them quite powerful?
* The humans inventing some sort of superweapon, even while technically not very advanced?
* Or internal quarrels, leading to the Atlanteans turning against each other?
I'd be glad for any cues or hints into all directions! It needs to be something large, destroying a whole species, their continent and still being present as very tangible mythology, to warn magic-users of such hubris.
[Answer]
In Larry Niven's *[The Magic Goes Away](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0743416937)* series of stories, magic used a non-renewable resource. Intense magic spells used up that resource in local areas, sometimes with deadly consequences for the wizard(s) involved. Eventually wide areas were depleted of magic, with disastrous consequences for magical society.
[Answer]
I can think of various answers, but first it's necessary to discuss the nature of magic.
The current most common view of magic among fantasy readers (and writers) sees magic as just another talent, rather like the concept of psi powers in the 60's. In this view, magic conforms to at least the outline of conservation laws as expressed in the physical sciences. As Terry Pratchett put it (approximately), "Wizards have to be careful about using magic. If a wizard tries to levitate too large a body, he may drive his brains down into his boots." So, for instance, a good deal of discussion is given to the accumulation of energy and the energy needed to produce various effects. Your own phrase "all sorts of manipulating elements, pure energy" suggests that your own ideas run in this vein.
This is wildly different from the more traditional views of magic. The oldest paradigm, as far as I can tell, is the calling up of demons, of djinns, or whatever you call them. These supernatural beings are of various degrees of puissance, and once you master them by using the proper ritual, their power is at your disposal. So a djinn can build a palace in a night, or provide you with an enormous treasure of gold and jewels. Calling up such beings has its risks, of course.
A somewhat later conception of magic has the rituals themselves as the source of power, for reasons that are never well-defined. Speaking the proper spell in the proper manner produces the desired results. A modern example is the Harry Potter series, in which ritual is critical, but it must also be accompanied by magical talent. This approach also has the peculiarity that everybody's magic is somehow the same, since the rituals (including potions, for instance) work the same for everybody. It's perfectly possible to posit that each individual must develop a ritual vocabulary unique to herself. This would make the development of each magician an idiosyncratic process, and would eliminate the concept of schools of magic. One consequence would be that the development of a strong innate talent would be extraordinarily hazardous.
With these older versions in mind, a few possibilities present themselves.
1) As H.P. Lovecraft put it, "Do not call up that which you cannot put down." Summoned beings are often rather disgruntled at being put to work, and eventually the Atlanteans called one up which they could not control. It was not happy about being interrupted at its normal routine.
2) Magical beings have, shall we say, a robust sense of humor, and like nothing more than to fulfill the letter of a command while disregarding the spirit. There are any number of short stories along this line, dealing with contracts which blow up in the signer's face. Some bright boy in Atlantis wasn't quite as bright as he thought he was.
3) Ritual must be precise. The greater the results the more precision is required. Somebody in Atlantis got over-ambitious, and flubbed a really major spell. He wanted, for instance, sunny warm dry weather across all Atlantis for the King's birthday. He dropped a syllable and got dark and cold and wet, as the surface of Atlantis dropped and the sea rushed in.
4) Magic, which violates the natural order of the physical world (which is why it is called supernatural, or above natural), is subject to a different sort of conservation law. It draws order from chaos; but chaos, like entropy, can only be locally decreased. Continued magic use produces a local condition which is increasingly unstable, and the Atlanteans were eventually overwhelmed when the chaos which they had excluded came crashing down upon them, and the larger balance was restored.
5) There exists among the supernatural community a sort of ecosystem, and the ecosystem (like all ecosystems) contains some remorseless predators. These predators ordinarily ignore our mundane existence - it has neither flavor nor nutritional value. Acts of magic, however, are rather like throwing blood in the ocean when there are sharks in the area. Eventually, Atlantis attracted one of the supernatural world's Great White sharks. Or, if you prefer, a school of piranhas. If it really were a Great White there would have been nothing left of us, so we got lucky that we only attracted the piranhas.
[Answer]
A Magical virus
Magical creatures are especially more powerful and dangerous, they can grow and move faster than normal. What if a virus or bacterium fed on the host's magical energy, to cast spells. It could be freakishly dangerous.
Imagine a virus that consumes a hosts magical energy to cast "summon 500 new copies of virus" on every magical being. It could grow at speeds that biological systems have never seen before, infecting and killing all magical creatures on the planet in seconds. Imagine a virus that could cast disintegrate, or fireball, all magical creatures appear to just vanish or explode spectacularly one day.
Non/low magical creatures would be resistant, since the viruses in out bodies would have no energy to feed on, they would be no more dangerous then the flu. It would also be odd that the magic civilization's cities would be completely intact since everyone would have died to fast to react.
For your setting you can also choose if the virus was created deliberately as a weapon or evolved on its own.
A key and scary question for later mages is did any of the virus survive when it ran out of hosts?
[Answer]
You might consider looking at the extinction of the people on Easter Island, who built larger and larger stone moai as their society disintegrated. If your highly magical race sunk more and more resources into building giant magical structures, particularly if they believed, in their hubris, that a magical structure large and powerful enough would secure their future, not only can you starve them to death when the wind change, or there's a low ebb in the amount of available magic or what have you, but you also have ways to work in known landmarks as secret 'magical structures'. (For instance, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon was a last-ditch effort to ensure the now starving society had enough food; it consumed so much magic that when a magic drought came, it collapsed and was destroyed, dooming the residents who'd stopped regular farming and had stopped trade to protect their garden.)
The key is that their society has to re-orient itself around something other than survival, and in that vulnerable state, it cracks.
[Answer]
Magic does not mean invincible or immortal, unless you decide it does in your world.
Magic carries its own risks.
* As others have mentioned, magical parasites might be bad.
* As others have mentioned, the source of magic might be tricksy or evil.
* As others have mentioned, the source of magic might be limited or fading away.
* Rather than a permanent loss of magic, some great but removable antimagic could have arisen, or the source of magic could have been temporarily cut off (depending how magic works; for example, if it's astrology based, a negating planet or conjunction could come into the magical sphere).
* Magic users who become too dependent on it and then have it unavailable would have poor survivability, particularly if their lives were artificially extended, they lived in floating cities, they were served by magically bound demons, etc.
* Some authors have magic use be vulnerable to technology and science, and magic be harder to use in our real world because science exists. I have always found this deeply unsatisfying, since it in essence says that science -- and hence, mere reasoned thought -- is magical. A less offensive form of this is to have magic be dependent on belief ("I believe in fairies!") and the magical creatures weakened by disbelief.
* Magic is powerful and allows one to easily destroy one's own civilization (kinda like nukes would be if everyone had one).
* Magic might (again like radioactivity) cause sterility, either directly or because magical longevity would lower the urgency of reproduction (qv western society today).
* Magic users would become a rich, powerful society, which means they are ripe for invasion and plundering.
* Magic does not protect from natural disasters, which can wipe out an entire society.
* Magic does protect from natural disasters, so some great natural disaster or attack could have been averted by magic, but only at the cost of burning out, or draining, all magic users.
* Magic could allow moving to a new state of being. Everyone could one day just sail off to the West; or just depart their bodies and float away in spirits, leaving their husks behind. This makes for great scenery when adventurers come to their city and finds mummified corpses.
* Magic use could make you susceptible to magic effects. If you are sensitive to magic, then a devastating magical disaster or attack could deafen or cripple you but leave non-sensitives unaffected, and even unaware.
In general, it seems more interesting to me to have the vulnerabilities caused by magic be the cause of the downfall, rather than have it be something completely unrelated like a meteorite impact or something. Because those vulnerabilities make for more depth to the magic, which can be explored and exploited in the story.
[Answer]
## Destroy Atlantis
To keep with your comparison to Atlantis, you could merely destroy them with natural disasters. During th great festival of magic, when "all" magic users gather to the magical city and eat cake, their island is destroyed, whether it sank into the sea, burned, or was buried in the nearby mountains, there will be few survivors. Those who were are cursed, and no one will want to have children with them. They will eventually die out.
[Answer]
I can think of a couple of ways this could have happened.
The first is similar to the virus route. In my own story, magic has its own system in the body, similar to the respiratory or cardiovascular systems. There is a virus that specifically attacks this system, causing any use of magic to damage the body and speed up the virus' effects. Over time, the virus corrupts and corrodes the system and since this magic system is also life sustaining, the infected would die. If the magical beings couldn't find a cure for an epidemic of it, they die out, especially if they are really reliant on magic. Much like a plague.
The second idea would be to introduce a predator that feeds on magic. Using magic on it only makes it stronger. It comes, destroys their civilization, then goes into hibernation because it's food source is gone, or nearly gone; fading into legend and myth. I don't know how your story is going to play out, but it could be a potential plot point that descendants of this civilization accidentally awaken the beast, who is hungry after 1000's of years of hibernation.
Tying this into human interaction is the tricky part. You could perhaps have a especially silver tongued human in the past. He/she had a severe distrust and hatred of the magical beings because he/she wasn't blessed with the same powers. Discovering a legend/admonition about this magic attacking creature/virus he/she decides to trick some poor soul into releasing it on the unsuspecting culture. Using lies and deceit he/she makes his/her way into the good graces of an especially powerful magical being and playing on their curiosity, they convince them to (open a portal to another dimension)/(resurrect an ancient city)/(*insert cause here*) allowing the (magic eater to slip through)/(resurrecting the untamed virus) and releasing it to wreak havoc on the magic world. Ever since, all survivors of the magic race have distrusted the humans, remembering the betrayal many millennia ago...
Or something like that. It's really up to you.
[Answer]
While there are many ways to have a magical apocalypse, I think that your main requirement is that the future generations of magical beings will believe that it was the arrogance and desire to reveal their power and rule that caused it.
The easy solution, especially if they claim to be gods, would be to have some sort of deity that will consider their actions hybris and smite them. Of course, it doesn't have to be a real god, it could just be beings of greater power. And they might also fear that they need to eliminate a potential threat.
Alternatively, you can have somewhat more benevolent power that will intervene to save regular humans from oppression; perhaps a race with superior technology but no magic that sympathises because they faced something similar (potential for chicken & egg problem)?
Note that those beings can live in different planets or planes depending on the setting.
Something more interesting would be having the magical race grow extremely arrogant over the centuries, which allowed humans to defeat them. Something similar happened in the Stargate universe where an extremely technologically advanced race, the Goa'uld, posed as gods and enslaved human populations.
Perhaps they focused too much on appearances instead of raw power (think fireballs shaped like dragons) and flashy things that proved detrimental in actual battle. Or maybe they stored powerful spells in objects that could be stolen and used by (some) humans. Then when the humans started winning they could have panicked and unleashed a devastating blast of arcane might that backfired and destroyed them.
As a sidenode, it doesn't necessarily have to be true that the race's hybris caused their defeat: this could have easily been exaggerated (e.g. by the victorious humans) or outright mistaken (it might make for an interesting plot twist).
[Answer]
Maybe the Gods (who granted the magic powers in the first place) became angry with their arrogance and wiped them out. (Or maybe took away their magic and the mundanes took the opportunity for revenge)
There were several who didn't try to take over mankind as the others did and they were spared the divine punishment. These are the few (or their ancestors) who live to this day a quiet life of humility, knowing all too well the consequences of arrogance.
[Answer]
**Civil war** - Your magical society develops magical weapons of mass destruction and destroys itself.
[Answer]
Hubris.
In White Wolf's RPG [Mage: The Awakening](http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Mage:_The_Awakening) Dragons send calls to men, willing to teach them arts of Magic. There's nothing that Magic can't do - from casting fireballs and conjuring food, to creating multidimensional alternate realities and trapping other people in their own minds. One day Dragons disappear.
Men, filled with false sense of unlimited power, create mighty city-state of Atlantis (sic!), where they start to build Celestial Ladder, for they wish to reach Heavens and attain higher Ascension and more Power. During their ascension of the ladder, the conflict breaks out on how to rule the world.
Conflict escalates to battle, during which Ladder is shattered. Dramatic events happen. Atlantis sinks. People lose their Power.
[Answer]
**Electronics**. For these creatures, electrosensitivity is not all in the mind. Microwave radiation interferes with their magical abilities and gives them terrible headaches as well.
It was manageable back when it was just airstrips and communications masts they had to stay away from. But now just about every human being has a mobile phone.
Over to you for the story.
PS you said "like today" so the "ancient times" were the early 21st century and your story is set in the further future where humans are rediscovering electronic technology.
[Answer]
We have a short gestation period and get pregnant more easily. Add time.
[Answer]
They killed all the [midi-chlorians](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Midi-chlorian/Legends)? I am so sorry...
Seriously, the way to think about this might be by thinking about the fish in the sea. Fish used to be abundant, but as commercial scale fishing spread it started to impact the ability of the fish stocks to replenish. Which resulted in the current much lower levels of fish in the oceans and a real risk of the fish stocks actually collapsing.
Similarly if you think of mana as a naturally replenishing resource then as long as your people stayed on a relatively restricted area the mana they consumed would have been replaced by inflow from elsewhere without any real impact on the ability of the mana to replenish itself. But when they spread into larger area, there would have been first a magical boom caused by the increase in the amount of magic available to your people. They would have continued the same patterns of usage but on a larger scale.
But now there would have been no place for an inflow of mana to come and replenish the stock. Instead the mana levels would have dropped on a world wide scale. You can reasonably assume that lower level of mana means a lower amount of new mana being generated. This would have continued until the level of mana becomes lower than the past levels of consumption. For a civilization dependent and built on magic reducing the level of magic use enough to allow for the mana to recover would have been even more difficult than managing the fish stocks is for us. (You can look up [Tragedy of the commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) for the background of how this kind of collapse works.)
Since the collapse would have been self-accelerating and reduction of mana would have caused the society and possibly even the health of the people to collapse **and** they had subjugated servant races with a grudge... Very few survivors, I think.
] |
[Question]
[
Okay, so, how does magic work? Magic, at the end of the day, is a swarm of tiny machines (hardly visible to the naked eye, but still within the 10-100 micrometer range) that carry out a task.
Individual machines have tiny manipulators with a "hand" that they can use to lock together and share info and energy. They create larger, temporary structures to help them move across the air. Power source is usually wireless energy transfer (broadcast or narrowcast with relays) and they can cover some distance on battery power.
Usually, they either carry some kind of a substance (that could be actual nanomachines) or are they themselves are doing the "magic" like pure-carbon bots immolating themselves and creating an explosion.
Now, given this magic, I'm trying to come up with a spell that can brick any firearm and even smaller anti-aircraft guns, brick as in render unusable for the longest possible time.
The spell should consume little resources, act quickly and should be very hard to counter, even by other bot swarms.
**How could such spell work?**
Note: I found this question, it could maybe help:
<https://www.quora.com/What-parts-of-an-assault-rifle-are-most-commonly-replaced-on-say-a-M4-or-FAL>
[Answer]
With most firearms, the simplest, quickest way to "brick" the piece (without killing or maiming anyone, including the users) is to *weld moving parts together* so they become non-moving parts. The cylinder in a revolver can't rotate, the firing pin and slide in a semi-auto won't move on their rails or in their passage. The ammunition would be unsafe to attempt to fire after this treatment (bullets soldered or their jackets welded into the cartridge case), even in unaffected weapons. Microwelding requires little energy, and most firearms have enough petroleum present (in the form of gun oil) to provide all that's needed. In the absence of oil to combust for energy, the metal itself can be combined with oxygen -- rust can "weld" parts together quite effectively if they're close to begin with.
This could be a natural outgrowth of spells from the pre-gunpowder days, if magic existed then; welding the plates or rings together would render armor rigid enough to either immobilize or rapidly fatigue a wearer, a sword blade would be locked into its sheath (if only at the insertion point where a metal plate guides the blade), a crossbow trigger (if made of metal) would become impossible to release. Longbows and other manually drawn and released bows would be the only ranged weapons unaffected, and soldiers would be reduced to non-metallic armor (leather and padding).
Once guns become common and modern, this process would work better for less energy, because less welding is needed to "brick" a rifle than to immobilize a knight.
[Answer]
The simplest and most universal mechanism in firearms is the hammer/firing pin. Even old flintlock rifles had hammers that would ignite the powder. Many modern firearms have internal hammers, but they are still key components.
Prevent the hammer from striking the firing pin and you have effectively rendered the firearm useless. This could be done in any number of ways or combine several methods to ensure total failure. The hammer and/or firing pin could be seized either by wedging material around the components or welding, the firing pin could be filed down so that it's too short to be struck, or a padding layer could block the hammer from hitting the firing pin. If the hammer lacks sufficient speed, it will fail to initiate the explosive reaction, so simply slowing the hammer could be sufficient to disable the firearms.
[Answer]
Firearms are extremely useful because you can store munitions in bulk and quickly reload them. If your nano-bot swarm can work their way into a magazine and trigger munitions to detonate, then you are effectively preventing the weapons from being useful and doing collateral damage at the same time.
Carrying a large stockpile of munitions would become risky to everyone around you. Any measure to prevent nano-bots from accessing your munitions would make the weapons less efficient to fire and reload as well. Damaging the actual hardened weapons themselves will be much more difficult, considering they are made to contain explosions.
Cut off the ammo supply, or render it too risky and unpredictable to wield the weapons, and your magic will effectively "brick" firearms.
[Answer]
**Destroy all low explosives**
Low explosives (the ones detonating with speed below the speed of sound) is a family of explosives virtually irreplaceable in gun firing. Both black gunpowder and modern smokeless powder belong to it. Faster exploding "high explosives" are useless as propellants, because they would simply destroy the gun chamber rather that produce sustained thrust. Liquid propellants (typically used in rocketry) are not explosives because they require external oxidizer.
Thus, if we can eliminate low explosives, we eliminate all firearms by definition. At the same time, high explosives, used in mining and construction, would be unaffected. Also, rockets (the ones using liquid propellants) would still fly.
Depending on how permeating and quick "magical manipulators" are, people might be able to trick them by preparing gunpowder right before use.
[Answer]
**Move the aiming mechanism.**
Nanites (or just one nanite) take up residence in the sights. They move the sights slightly. The gun becomes inaccurate. It fires fine but it is just about impossible to hit anything. Multiple misses and castigations later the gunnery sergeant checks and realizes the sight is off. He recalibrates the sight.
Twenty minutes later the sight is off again. Gunny comes back and recalibrates. The nanites shift the lenses internally, little by little. The gun is again inaccurate. Gunny removes the sight and brings a good one from a different gun. The nanites reside in the gun in between their hijinks and move into the new sight. They shift it slightly.
The gun gets a reputation as a cursed gun. It is a cursed gun.
[Answer]
## How a Low Lvl Caster would do it:
Instead of summoning forth large amounts of power to weld/cut the metal parts inside the gun, you could simply fly your nanobots into the gun's moving parts and jam it up with the nanobots. A little too much grit inside a gun will prevent it from firing; so, it stands to reason that your nanobots can jam up a gun through no more effort than just being there. This would save TONS of "mana" when it comes to casting your spell.
Sadly, this is not nearly as permanent as welding, but if you remember to bring the right reagents with you, you can brick a gun by having your nanobots carry a fraction of a milliliter of Instantbond epoxy into the gun and mixing into the firing pin. A few seconds later, and the gun is just as fused and useless as if you welded it using intense heat.
[Answer]
If we are talking about firearms, the best way I can imagine is obstructing the barrel. This should cause the firearm to explode on impact. This can be done by e.g. forming bumps, holes or membranes inside the barrel.
For missile weapons, the best way would be to damage fuel canals.
Either way, you should teach your magic helpers to find something resembling a tube and mess with its tubularity.
[Answer]
Most answers here reference doing naughty things to the moving parts and/or firing pin (I particularly like the answer referencing welding, although firearms are designed to get incredibly hot by their very nature so temperatures would have to be extreme). While this is a good idea, when modern assault weapons are assembled the parts fit snugly together and modern bolts are machined this way - this becomes a question of size of the nano bots.
Also if the weapon is firing, the heat and gas expulsions might mess with your swarm should they try to get inside the weapon housing. My "dirty" recommendation would be a quick explosive strike against the weapons cocking handle. Usually the first shot needs to have the bolt moved into the rear position and then forward by hand to prepare the bolt and load the road from the magazine (subsequent "cocks" are applied by gas expulsions of the previous shot). The weapon would then have to be taken apart right then and there on the battlefield and a new cocking hand inserted before being able to reload/recock the weapon. Also the chances of a soldier just happening to have a spare cocking handle in their pocket is almost certainly 0.
Other answers have given good advice and this answer won't permanently brick a weapon, this is just my own kneejerk based on my experience with modern assault weapons. Spent many hours spent looking for lost cocking handles for now-useless weapons.
[Answer]
Create water in a volume that includes the firearm's powder. While modern cartridges will fire underwater, they won't if water gets inside the powder. Bonus: the gun's not destroyed, so after you win the fight, your side gets to use them.
NOTE: Does not apply if you're facing wizard's powder from the Guardian of the Flame universe.
[Answer]
Simply have each 'nanite' bore holes in the barrel...eventually it fails...and probably pretty quickly if it is in heavy use.
Nice to send very small robots to destroy all metal in a defined area...say goodby to many other things as well.
...maybe have the micro-bots cling to/deform the bullets during flight and change their trajectories to impact their friends?
[Answer]
## Eat the springs
Most modern firearms involve springs in some form or other, for loading, emptying, and/or firing. Springs are thin pieces of metal (whether leaf springs, coil springs, or what have you). A concentrated collection of nanomachines directed to corrode the springs could eat through them in short order, or at least eat enough so that the first shot or two from the gun would break the spring.
There are several means to achieve this:
1. Using your self-immolation technique to effectively melt the spring (or in the case of a leaf spring or the like, at least melt holes in it)
2. Carrying or synthesizing corrosive chemicals to a concentrated point(s) to make the metal rust (even stainless steel will rust when subjected to acids and some oxidizers).
3. Mechanically cutting chunks out of the metal (since these are nanomachines, each one can probably only take a nano-handful of molecules at once) -- BONUS: leave the metal "dust" in the works, so it gums things up!
4. Combine 3 and 1; nanomachines cut pieces out of one area, then self-immolate in another while "holding" the metal, welding the metal bits and their own remains into places they're not supposed to be. Ideally, weld them to a different part, so multiple parts have to be replaced to repair the gun!
[Answer]
**Jam it.**
It works for dirt all the time. A simple build up inside the firing mechanism will stop any gun from working.
You don't need to do anything tricky.
] |
[Question]
[
We have the world. Its nature and conditions are very similar to Earth, only the people are very different in one detail (but I would say it is a very important one).
People in this world are not able to imagine anything; they completely lack the creativity.
What does it mean, a little more precisely:
**They cannot think about anything that is not very strictly based on things they see around.** It is possible to create something new, but it must be very logically established on some already real cause without any intermediate innovational steps.
I can imagine that in this kind of world any progress would be very slow.
**The art, I think, is possible** - in the books people can describe their one lives, they can draw pictures or build statues of things or people they see (etc.)
But what I am not sure about: Has the art, a concept essentially based on creativity, **any reason to grow?** Why would people do that?
To communicate? To give something to the world? Would they be even interested in consuming the art anymore?
How would it look like? What kind of art would be on top?
[Answer]
The question you ask dives deep into the heart of philosophy and the eternal question "what is consciousness?" Imagination is typically considered to be something deeply entwined with consciousness, so it's hard to imagine a creature which has consciousness but lacks imagination.
Of course, defining "imagination" is hard enough. I've had several comment exchanges with the OP on this topic trying to pin down the word and it is as difficult as one can expect. Accordingly, I think it makes sense to approach the question in a multi-level fashion, starting from the most generalized philosophy and working close to the specifics the OP asked for.
---
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4XBkws.jpg) **Philosophy**
In philosophy we have a concept called "p-zombies" that we use to explore the idea of "conciousness." P-zombies are entities which are explicitly *not* conscious, but otherwise operate as we do. An example might be a player piano like machine which is loaded up with every action it will ever do. If the tape that runs through that player piano were designed by an omniscient deity, they may be able to *appear* to respond to us as a conscious individual would, but would not in fact be conscious. More advanced p-zombies are explored, of course. We can have p-zombies based on combinatorial logic or sequential logic (which are how FPGAs operate), which decreases the need for an omniscient deity to load a future-predicting tape of data, but they're all put in the same class because they are not conscious but may appear to be conscious.
For all our philosophy, we have come up with no way to identify a difference between a conscious individual and a p-zombie. They can look and act just like we can. They can even appear to feel things like pain and joy by responding properly. This is important to the story of imagination because we can imagine a conscious entity with imagination, thus we must be able to imagine a p-zombie which appears to have imagination as well. There would be no distinguishing factor between this imagination-less p-zombie and a creature with imagination, so the limitation here that "these creatures do not have imagination" is not limiting at all. They can do anything we can do. **Thus, from a philosophical perspective, they would be able to construct any art that we can.**
---
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/p3sZls.jpg) **Nature**
Taking one step away from the turbulent waters of philosophy, we can look at nature. Nature is considered by many to be a beautiful thing chock full of imagination itself. For example, consider the lowly honeybee. A honeybee who finds a flower loads up with pollen and nectar and flies back to the hive. Once at the hive, other workers crowd around them and the pollen laden worker does a dance. This dance, known as the [Waggle Dance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance), describes to the other honeybees where the flowers were with respect to the sun:
>
> The direction and duration of waggle runs are closely correlated with the direction and distance of the resource being advertised by the dancing bee. The resource can include the location of a food source or a potential .... flowers that are located directly in line with the sun are represented by waggle runs in an upward direction on the vertical combs, and any angle to the right or left of the sun is coded by a corresponding angle to the right or left of the upward direction. The distance between hive and recruitment target is encoded in the duration of the waggle runs. The farther the target, the longer the waggle phase. The more excited the bee is about the location, the more rapidly it will waggle, so it will grab the attention of the observing bees, and try to convince them. If multiple bees are doing the waggle dance, it's a competition to convince the observing bees to follow their lead, and competing bees may even disrupt other bees' dances or fight each other off.
>
>
>
From an imagination perspective, this dance is important because it conveys abstract concepts. Worker bees who observe a waggle dance observe an abstract encoding of data and make decisions off of it. Note that, in the above quote, there may be competition between multiple foragers. The "winner" is the one who expressed their idea the best, instilling in the minds of the other bees a sense of a field of flowers the other worker has not yet experienced. **Thus, you may say the interpretive waggle dance of honeybees encourages other honeybees to imagine the field of flowers well enough to encourage other honeybees into motion!**
---
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M90Ols.jpg) **Constructing your world**
Now these previous sections point to two key things:
* Non-conscious entities can act in a way indistinguishable from imagination
* Real life honeybees exhibit imagination
This creates some bounds on the question. We know that we can't rely on the metaphysical definition of "imagination" to answer the question, and we know that a lowly 1cm long animal exhibits imagination like behaviors. **Your creature is going to have to fit in this space, or else we must admit that either imagination is more nuanced than we think or your creature is less advanced than a honeybee.**
If I may quote your comments, I think we can see how to fit your world into this schema:
>
> Ok, my definition: Imagination is the ability to devise, invent or even make anything that is new at all. To do it without making the steps that weren't in front of me already. Example: I can see a crocodile so I can think about a lizard (and possibly draw it for example). I European woods so I can think about that too. What more? I can think about the lizard in the woods. But what I cannot think about is a deep African jungle with dragons (even so that is very similar to what I know). If I saw more sizes of lizards I can imagine a giant lizard (but not if I only saw one).
>
>
>
So this shows that these creatures can observe concrete things and draw abstractions from them. We can even compose an image consisting of two things we've seen. However, we can narrow this down based on your response to [TheSexyMinhir's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/68649/2252). In that answer, it was assumed that your creatures lacked the ability to create abstract thoughts, but you disagreed with that in comments, saying that you would prefer answers focusing the lack of what TheSexyMinhir called "Recombination:" the ability to take the attributes of one thing and apply them to something else.
Now we can see the important dividing line for your creature's lack of imagination. **It can *compose* a scene, but it cannot *recombine* elements of two scenes.**
This suggest how the creature will express itself. It can compose a scene in its head, and compare it to the world around it. It may then act to make that scene match the composition in its head. All creatures can do this differential comparison and expression, all the way down to the lowly yeast cells, so it's fair to assume your creatures can do this too. However, unlike most creatures, if it can't find a way to express its inner scene, it is not permitted to alter the scene. It must instead construct new scenes (via composition)
**This will be the key to art in your creatures world: the ability to compose a world that contains the art and then see if they have an action which can bring this to reality. Accordingly, I would expect their art to be tremendously subtle and terribly fierce.** Without a clear way to recombine reality with the scene in their head, their work would be inherently bimodal. Either their actions would be subtle enough that they did not need to recombine reality with their scene, or their actions would create an environment where future compositions also are actionable. Their life would be in a constant swing between just barely simmering, trying to wait for a scene which permits compositing, and loud powerful aggression.
During the simmering phase I could see time-consuming art being popular, such as the mandalas done by monks. In this approach, the art is always just barely one step away from reality, so it can grow forward by tiny steps which can be composed from reality. You may also see fractaline artwork, depending on your definition of recombining ideas. Fractals are self-similar, so recombining the scene before them with itself would yield fractaline art\*.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8uG72m.jpg)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hInI0m.jpg)
This art would be very healthy for them, as it would exercise their composition side of their mind, which is much needed for their long term survival. **They would almost certainly develop art as a form of mental exercise, given the inability to recombine.**
However, once in a while, one individual would find that the images he is composing can be acted on with great force. Sometimes when they compose their scene in their head and compare it to reality, they see that one swift action can bring reality in line with their composed scene. In these times, their art would look more like war. When they compose a scene in their head, and find that all they need to do to conceive it is to whack off your head, you'll find they are more than happy to express themselves with an axe or a sword.
This would suggest their warfare would be similar in nature to that of the Daleks from Dr. Who. The Daleks were famously uncreative, seeking nothing but to eradicate everything that was not pure Dalek. In fact, they were so uncreative that eventually they had to split off the Cult of Scara, which was a mere 4 Daleks (out of millions) who sought out imagination to find new ways to kill everyone else. **So when you consider the art they might create, I would concentrate on propaganda art which suggests this species is the only species that is worth existing.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U4hrem.jpg)
\* *For amusement, the fractal I chose was one which was run through Google Dreams. Google Dreams is clearly a piece of software with no imagination, and yet the results it produces are... provocative. However, it's exactly the opposite of your speices -- it can recombine but cannot compose.*
[Answer]
Art and innovation without any creativity does not sound realistic to me. They would always be content with what they have and would not see any reason to change anything, because they would need to imagine something better to strive for it.
But, if I imagine that creativity is non-existent in your story: In Evolution something that is negative for an individual is often a reason to be attractive for other members of their species. The reason is that this individual can survive even with a disadvantage. Something similar is how we humans tend to buy unnecessary and expensive things just to show that we can afford to give away so much money.
One reason might therefore be that your people want to impress others by showing that they have time to spend on something that is seen as a waste of time.
[Answer]
**Natural challenges**
In a world without imagination, art would consist less of pretty, not real things and more of challenging things, for example;
1. Rock Balancing
2. Complex geographical patterns
3. Extremely detailed depictions of real things
4. Sculptures of real things in great detail
[Answer]
With your question, we can go two ways.
* Mankind has only recently lost their ability to imagine things, and is forced to move on from that point,
* We have never had the ability to imagine things and therefore have never moved on to be as we are now.
The immediate problem that comes from the second assumption is that the lack of imagination will mean humanity has never wondered about how fire worked, or why we're different than other beings, why we fall in love, why others do things. In short, if we follow down this path, humanity will have **never** invented fire, and therefore, we'd still be living in caves, which means art as we know it will have never started to exist, or have any function.
So, let's go and assume humanity **did** have creativity to start with, but lost it over time. In that case, we just have to look at the functions of art in nowadays society, to be create some uses for art as we know it.
# Entertainment
Art, just like music, games, and other entertainment have always fulfilled the need for, well, entertainment. A lack of imagination does not take away that a person will still want to keep themselves busy with other things than work.
# Advertisement
Besides that, art has been a big part of product advertisement for years now. When you walk through a store, you can obviously see what brands are expensive, and which are not, simply by looking at the product. Often, the more "artsy" or "pretty" products are the better ones. If people are similar in each other way to reality, then this should have the same effect on them, as it has on us.
# Expressing emotions
Even though we do not have imagination, we still have emotions as human beings. Thus, we'll need ways to express this, and more often than not, art has proven to convey emotions very well.
In short, as long as humanity has evolved into the current society we live in, we have plenty of reasons for art to still exist.
[Answer]
I think art would (or at least could) still exist, but art appreciation would be based on technical prowess, rather than an emotional reaction to the art; whereas for us, art appreciation is a combination of the two.
[Hyperrealism](https://i.stack.imgur.com/un7z0.jpg) would probably be the highest standard of painting and sculptures, while things like M. C. Escher's art wouldn't exist at all, I could certainly see a society without imagination producing something like this [marble statue that imitates transparent cloth](https://i.stack.imgur.com/un7z0.jpg).
I could see the existence of music going either way. Perhaps it doesn't take an imagination to find particular combinations of sounds aesthetically pleasing, and perhaps the mathematical underpinnings of music theory could be used to "derive" such aesthetically pleasing combinations, or perhaps they could be found by trial and error, but it seems unlikely, or at least very difficult.
[Answer]
Let's assume some things first.
## First assumption
"Imagination" is made up of three distinctive parts:
1. In-sight: The ability to "see" something in your mind.
2. Abstraction: The ability to reduce something to only it's relevant markers (all HAIR on a ANIMAL is called FUR regardless of COLOR).
3. Recombination: The ability to take attributes of one thing, and apply them to something else (RED CHERRY + GREY ELEPHANT = RED ELEPHANT).
These abilities can be combined (Raised Heart rate + emotion + visual/mental image of a person - weird itch on my nose - anger about boss at work = love => raised heart rate = love).
## Second Assumption
In your world people are missing ability number 2.
## Third Assumption
Your people have somehow managed to reach some form of civilization that isn't completely foreign to ours (BIG handwave there).
---
So, why do people create Art?
## Recreation
Your people still have emotions, so they can still enjoy art. Any Form of Art would strife to be extremely lifelike, since your people would lack the ability to understand which parts they can leave out for an enjoyable experience to still be enjoyable (e.g. all performances would be recreations of events or combinations of events, including the viewpoint of the person originally experiencing the event).
## Communication
Your people still have a need to communicate things whicht can't be expressed through words. Art would likely have an even more important role as communicator, since people would have to convey ALL of the information of a event for other people to truly be able to be empathic about anything.
(Our World: I'm sad -> I was sad once I can understand how you fell; Your world: I'm sad, I'm slightly hungry, my nose itches, and I see a tree -> I was sad once, but my nose never itches. I have no idea what you are talking about.)
## Preserving
Your people would probably have no need to create art to preserve things. Without abstraction, they couldn't apply past situation to their current circumstances anyway, unless they match one for one.
[Answer]
Imagination is a means to create art, but entertainment is its main purpose (together perhaps with expression). People found it entertaining to listen to music, look at paintings and watch plays. The entertainment value comes mostly from the imaginative aspects of escaping to another world, the joy of seeing somebody do something skillful, and the more intangible, abstract kind of pleasure we derive from things like music.
The people in your world will probably not be able to enjoy fiction, since it requires the consumer to have some imagination as well. But they will differentiate between pleasant and unpleasant experiences.
A good example is food. most likely they enjoy eating calorie-rich foods, due to their evolutionary benefit. Surplus energy would be spent on seeking out specific foods that they prefer, and people with enough food could trade these for other goods and services. Without imagination it would take a long time to discover how to bake something like a cake, but small progress could be made by random experimentation, and with enough free time, lengthy random experimentation would be rewarded, even though people would have no concept of working towards a thing that doesn't exist yet.
Music might emerge in a similar way. People could not actively put sounds together to invent music, but they would find certain sounds more agreeable than others. They would surround themselves with things that naturally make pleasant sounds and might stumble across simple combinations of such objects. they would perhaps come up with something like a windchime.
Finally, interesting visual patterns could emerge randomly by setting certain events in motion. Cutting the head of a chicken and letting it run around in white sand as it bleeds (sorry for the gory example) might produce a pleasant pattern. Once this is noticed, the process can be repeated to achieve the same effect.
Most of their art would emerge in this kind of indirect fashion. They cannot imagine a goal and work towards it, but they would discover that when things are arranged in a certain way, the universe sometimes comes up with new things, which they can then recognize to have value. Once they have seen an example, they might be triggered to reproduce it, but they could only reproduce it by repeating the same steps. They would not think to paint the pattern in the sand themselves, but would keep slaughtering chickens in order to achieve the same pattern.
[Answer]
## Creative disciplines and ways around not being creative
There are several ways around a creative "block". You learn those techniques on universities that focus around this topic (Architecture, Sculpturing for e.g.). There *are* ways to create new things without being creative at all, but just interpreting what the result of a process is.
**Example:** Crashing frozen things on the floor, shuffling them, calling them a draft, photographing and printing it on paper just to trash the result again and to unfold a remodeled bunch of lines that you call a section, view or plan for a new building often is enough to give you input that you self lack at this moment. You do not even need a plan, just a process, in some cases some parameters that you can throw in for modification.
## Aesthetics ≠ beauty, Art ≠ creativity
One important fact to keep in mind. The same goes for *reason*. Not always is the result something that seems to be worth the process. *Curiosity* alone is enough to drive engagement.
[Answer]
As others I don't think that a creature that lacks any imagination can develop beyond the state of a trilobite. That we make models of the world around us is a key feature of intelligence, and because our information is incomplete any non-trivial model depends on some degree of imagination.
By the way, that is also true for our ability to form communities of free individuals. We can only do that because we can put ourselves in other peoples' shoes (partly because we have mirror neurons), which in turn needs some degree of imagination because *actually* we don't know at all how other people feel, or think, or perceive the color red.
---
That said, I think even without any imagination one can still see patterns in reality and create art which shows such patterns. That kind of art would always be some form of abstraction. For example, one could depict the [topology of a crystal lattice,](http://www.precisionstrobe.com/jc/sicrystal/silat.gif) or [the gravity well of the solar system,](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pdjean_CUjQ/VbOkuTlL3jI/AAAAAAAAEPU/bv0Xtc_wIcA/s1600/b1.jpg) or a [network of friendships,](http://www.fmsasg.com/SocialNetworkAnalysis/SocialNetworkAnalysis_Graph.gif) or the [geometry underlying the arrangement of sunflower seeds](http://momath.org/wp-content/uploads/spiralsBlack.jpg) in the blossom. It would probably resemble the finest examples of technical illustrations in our text books, which I think can legitimately be called art.
[Answer]
Portraits obviously, perhaps some slight embellishments on furniture or made of unusual materials. You could have some sort of art that makes itself, like adding various oils to a bowl of water and seeing what sort of colours and shapes emerge.
Oversimplified portrayals of life might take on a sort of unrealistic quality.
[Answer]
**Photography**
Simply pointing and shooting a camera by itself doesn't require creativity. I see a pretty sunset and would like to capture it, and so I take a photo. Other people like the photo, and will pay to hang it on their wall. Art. In a world where you can't imagine anything not in front of you, about all you can do is just that - make art of what's in front of you.
Of course, really good photography does require creativity to tell a story, properly frame the subjects, color correct, etc. That said, it also takes creativity to appreciate the story and subtleties in good photography, so "good" photography wouldn't be appreciated in this imaginationless world anyway.
[Answer]
I can imagine a world where abstract ideas are conveyed in a technical sense rather then an artistic one. Rather then paintings and sculptures we would see the proliferation of complex engineering designs and mechanical blueprints that convey all needed information in a clear and concise way, with no room for misinterpretation as the "true form" of that particular profession.
Other engineers/welders/architects will understand the form of something from nothing but a sheet of paper. They can "see" the form of the thing in their mind but only through a complex and ordered understanding of their professional symbolism and standards.
] |
[Question]
[
A particularly religious people living in a land filled with rivers need to get rid of their excreta. They have disfavoured sewers and dumping waste on water because they venerate oceans and rivers, these bodies of water are divine for them and should not be tainted by human waste.
They are not tremendously urbanized, 3/4 of them live on the countryside and their most populated city tops it's population at 200 thousand, and they dispose only 16th century, and earlier time's, technology.
How can they get rid of their waste without "tainting" their water, then?
[Answer]
>
> How can they get rid of their waste without "tainting" their water,
> then?
>
>
>
Night Soil holds the key.
>
> Feces were excreted into a container such as a chamber pot, and
> sometimes collected in the container with urine and other waste
> ("slops", hence slopping out). The excrement in the pail was often
> covered with earth (soil), which may have contributed to the term
> "night soil."
>
>
>
* [Night Soil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil) (Yep!) is to be collected from the cities and distributed to fermentation parlours, surrounding the towns, then upon it's ripeness, spread over the farmland as fertiliser.
(Of course any Nitrates for use in making "eherm", fireworks, "eherm", can be seperated regularly at the fermentation parlours.)
* The cost to the town's purse of doing this can be easily offset by a small levy charged on the sale of farmed goods.
* This has been done historicaly in ancient Greece, China, England, Japan, Mexico - and is currently being done in India and Japan.
[Answer]
[Long drops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_latrine) are still common in many countries. A deep hole is dug, an improvised seat put over it and people use it. Rural communities even today aren't as finicky as city people these days, you just hold your breath as best you can.
When it's full enough, you fill it in and dig another. I know several that have been in daily use for big households for at least 5 years, probably much longer.
According to the link an estimated 1.77 billion people were using them in 2013 and 85 million were built in India alone during a campaign to improve sanitisation.
[Answer]
**Building materials**
Both poo and pee (human) can be used in the making of bricks when mixed with other ingredients.
Citizens who want to build their own house must 'save up' for it in terms of their own excreta which they deposit at the out-of-town brick-making factory.
**Solid waste**
>
> Scientists Discover How to Make Bricks Out of Human Waste
>
>
> Millions of tonnes of leftover biosolids are increasingly stockpiled
> every year around the globe... However, it is estimated that 30% of
> biosolids are unused and stockpiled.” ... prototypes of these bricks
> were made and tested to compare with traditional building materials.
> The tests found that the bricks were sturdy and would hold up to the
> most stringent global building regulations. The creation of the bricks
> also uses less energy than traditional building materials, and they
> are better for insulation as well. <https://themindunleashed.com/2019/02/scientists-discover-how-to-make-bricks-out-of-human-waste.html>
>
>
>
**Liquid waste**
>
> Researchers have found a way to grow bricks sustainably from human
> urine.
>
>
> ... The "bio-brick" is made by mixing sand with a bacteria that
> produces urase — an enzyme that breaks down the urea in urine while at
> the same time producing calcium carbonate. When mixed, the result is a
> brick that is on-par with limestone bricks. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-26/cape-town-university-researchers-make-bricks-from-urine/10432766>
>
>
>
---
Your society can specialise in exporting these high quality bricks (made to a 'secret recipe') to other peoples near and far.
Of course this is where the phrase "to sh\*t a brick" originated.
[Answer]
I have often used [self composting toilets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet). They don't require a lot of maintenance, can be used daily by a small household, generate a usable byproduct and have zero smell.
I am fairly certain, the designs I've used, could be tweaked to operate in a 16th century context. The basic idea is very simple.
[Answer]
Human waste disposal is effective through creative use of composting and fecal sludge management.
Composting:
[Check out this website for a good idea on compost](https://compostingtoiletsusa.com/how-to-safely-compost-human-waste/)
[Check this article cited 119 times as well](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://scholar.google.co.in/scholar_url%3Furl%3Dhttp://orangeibook.com/the-humanure-handbook-a-guide-to-composting-human-manure-joseph-c-jenkins-new-version-book.pdf%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26scisig%3DAAGBfm0dtjFU4qNSrVvrhcE4yPQlO2ABKg%26nossl%3D1%26oi%3Dscholarr&ved=2ahUKEwjLzrrp6angAhXMp48KHY49DJEQgAMoAXoECAEQAw&usg=AOvVaw0tlEo4GrYoOJylh9R1e_gQ&cshid=1549549732948)
the attached file is the British Columbia guidelines on how to make a compost toilet. Doing it properly won't make anyone sick and can be done in any home with a garden. The government can even set up large composting structures like real life for people to engage in this together. Stuff from skit will be the order of the day.
Fecal sludge management:
From [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_sludge_management)
>
> Fecal sludge management (FSM) (or faecal sludge management in British English) is the collection, transport, and treatment of fecal sludge from pit latrines, septic tanks or other onsite sanitation systems. Fecal sludge is a mixture of human excreta, water and solid wastes (e.g. toilet paper or other anal cleansing materials, menstrual hygiene materials) that are disposed in pits, tanks or vaults of onsite sanitation systems. Fecal sludge that is removed from septic tanks is called septage.
>
>
> FSM is necessary in densely populated areas where a proportion of population is not connected to a sewerage network, and the covering and rebuilding pit latrines is not possible. This is the case in most urban areas of developing countries, but such services are also used in developed countries where sewerage systems are unavailable.
>
>
>
Using smart systems this technique can be applied Nationwide.
] |
[Question]
[
I'm trying to think of what kind of cosmic event would cause an explosion powerful enough to "shake" or disrupt the whole flow of a galaxy and on that same note what other kind of super cosmic event would have the power necessary to be felt across the known universe?
[Answer]
Gravitational waves are the closest you will get to universe-shaking.
Predicted by Einstein and proven in [2015](https://www.wired.com/2016/02/scientists-spot-the-gravity-waves-that-flex-the-universe/), these waves are caused by colliding black holes that stretch the fabric of space-time. Unfortunately, that is the closest you will get to shaking the universe. These waves require extremely sensitive lasers stretching miles apart to detect. All told, these waves change the size of the universe by only centimeters. Also, the shaking effect is not instant. The waves move at the speed of light, so they take time to spread through the universe. Even giant supernovae exploding is like a light tickle for a galaxy, and not even noticeable for the universe.
[Answer]
If you are open to sci fi responses, there are two novels from author Schmidt Stanley: “The sins of the fathers” and "Lifeboat Earth". Both tell the story of a very advanced civilization that triggers supernovas regurlarly near the center of the Milky Way in order to create raw materials. But when an accident happens, they create a chain reaction that impacts the whole galaxy. (Actually that accident is relevant to the story but it is not the main topic of the novel).
[Answer]
**No real world answer**
With our current understanding of physics, there is no kind of explosion powerful enough to shake either a galaxy or the universe. The energy released in a supernova can reach upwards 1e44 Joules, but a (very rough) calculation of the binding energy of our galaxy suggests that it is at least 1e53 Joules (I couldn't find any numbers online, so I [ballparked something that is almost certainly a crazy low underestimate](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3*G*2e42%5E2%2F(5*1.4e21))). That means that you would need an explosion of at least 1 billion supernovas to blow up the galaxy. It's worth mentioning of course that you couldn't actually "blow up" the galaxy because in practice the vast majority of the energy released in such an explosion would simply fly out of the galaxy since most of it is just empty space anyway (although you could presumably drive away all of the gas and dust clouds in the galaxy, and bake the surface of any and all planets). I doubt you would cause any problems for the stars themselves, but if you blew off enough mass the galaxy may more or less fly apart without sufficient gravity holding it all together (although this is probably also impossible since large galaxies have a high fraction of mass in dark matter, which will not be influenced by physical explosions).
**But...**
But this is worldbuilding, so who cares. Ignoring our current understanding of physics the answer to both questions is quite easy. You can easily shake galaxies or the universe using just one thing: whatever it was that created our universe in the first place. I'm not personally a big fan of M-theory (aka string theory) but it can be easily repurposed to explain our universe as a small subset of a larger universe with all kinds of exotic physics at play. The idea of the "multiverse" is common enough these days to hardly need explanation, and while it is frequently only used in the sense of people traveling back and forth between universes, the interactions of universes in a multi-verse need not be so benign.
In otherwords, you can certainly come up with any processes you want in the multi-verse that can impact our universe in fun, new, and destructive ways. What happens when our "universe" collides with another one in the multiverse (keep in mind that such a collision would not be a physical one in the sense that we mean these words)? Shaking galaxies? Absolutely! Crumpled space time? Why not! Wiggles in the fundamental constants of the universe? Bring it on! (although that would probably kill all life in the universe instantaneously, so be gentle with that one).
You're not going to get a realistic answer out of "real" physics, but there's no reason to let that stop you.
[Answer]
Well, since vibrations can't propagate through a vacuum, the 'shaking' would have to be something that can propagate through spacetime. Something like a Gravitational Wave fits the bill.
However, any event that would create a gravitational wave strong enough to shake a galaxy would probably also create a flash of radiation powerful enough to boil every planet within thousands of lightyears, and sterilise everything else.
[Answer]
I wish I could give a very elaborate answer here, but the question is just two simple. Respectively:
* A galactic collision, that is, two galaxies passing through each other. This kind of event lapses for millions to billions of years. The galaxies may or may not merge. Since space is so empty it is unlikely for stars to actually collide. They are mostly flung to new, interesting orbits, or out of the galaxies altogether.
* Big bang and, depending on the models you ascribe to, big crunch (big bang in reverse), collision with another universe, or brane collision. None of these support holywoodian apocalypses, though, because science ruins the rule of cool.
[Answer]
False Vacuum
"But another possibility that has gained traction is the Cosmic Death Bubble.
The details of this death by bubble are pretty complicated, but it’s based on the idea that the universe is metastable, which means it’s not in its lowest or most stable energy state. While we’re okay for now, there’s the (remote) possibility that the universe could drop into a lower energy state, which would set off a giant light-speed bubble that destroys everything it touches."
Read more: <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/we-now-know-when-cosmic-death-bubble-may-destroy-universe-180968687/#4rpYJgL6HmtLBkUk.99>
[Answer]
The answer to your question is dictated by the sheer vastness of space, and galaxies, themselves.
To "shake" something,means to cause it to reasonably quickly vibrate back and forth. Making a few quintillion quintillion quintillion tons of matter over many billions of light years, or even on a galactic scale, is going to need immense energy.
To "explode" matter, means to convert it to fragments, or back to energy, or similar. That's also going to take immense energy.
As far as we know, there aren't that many physical causes which might be capable of the scale and type of energy output, suitable for the question. In fact I can only think of three known or seriously believed likely to exist:
1. **A false vacuum collapse event**. This would modify all quantum fields, spreading throughout the universe at the speed of light. It would certainly be capable of "shaking" in one sense, because of loss of stability of all objects. The trouble is, the effect itself propagates at the speed of light, so an object is either unaffected yet but unaware, so it isn't shaken, or it's become "new" quantum fields (if able) and probably not "shaken" either. But this does probably fit the OP's intent, even if technically not shaking.
2. **A change to the geometry of spacetime**. On a "small" scale that might be an insanely vast black hole event or other event capable of creating gravitational waves. On a "larger" scale, there might be ways the entire metric could suddenly change, as seems to have happened during the Big Bang. The problem with the first is, it's very unlikely you'd get an event capable of creating "shaking" on even a galactic scale, which you'd notice outside a laboratory. The problem with the second is, would you get "shaking" at all? After all, when the metric changes, objects will seem to be a different distance, but no physical movement occurs, you won't feel shaking happen anywhere.
3. **Some vast concentration of energy is released somehow**. The problem again is, you need so much, that it doesn't seem feasible to concentrate the energy needed in a way consistent with physics. You might create a black hole by doing so, or blow up a small part of space, but you won't "shake" anything on a scale of even lightyears as far as I can see it, much less a galactic scale. Could you create an antimatter stellar size object, and throw it into a star? That sort of thing would be about the most concentrated form of energy we know could exist and perhaps be assembled in the "real world" (earth size objects made entirely of protons or electrons would be impossible to assemble). Maybe, but while you'd get insane amounts of gamma rays emitted, it's doubtful you'd get "shaking".
[Answer]
Nobody has mentioned quantum entanglement (or rather, I didn't look closely enough, perhaps). The problem with shaking things of cosmic proportions, is the speed of light; entanglement overcomes this, at least in theory. Physicists don't really understand why QM works, which is one reason why we haven't been able to unite it with General Relativity - but that is an advantage from your point of view, because you can construct an advanced science that explains how all particles in a galaxy got entangled so that a certain event can trigger an effect everywhere at the same time.
[Answer]
The Big Rip would count, but then nothing would be left to do the counting. :(
The idea is the opposite of the Big Bang. At some point in the future, the expansion of the universe dramatically speeds up. At first, we would see distant galaxies getting farther away faster. Then nearby galaxies. Then our own galaxy would drift apart. Then, alone in a dimming red gloaming, the planets, our own planet, and even the bonds in our own bodies would be ripped apart and flung wide. Every place in the Universe would experience the same far-to-near timeline.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip>
] |
[Question]
[
I have a post apocalyptic world where the main character is trying to learn more about the pre-apocalyptic world. However I don't know how long it would take for almost no knowledge to get to him other than from historians. The only information they have of the pre-war world is that there was a large democratic country stretching from sea to sea, and it controlled parts of other land masses (they know that there are other land masses but nothing about them). What would be a reasonable timeline for this to happen?
More detail edit: takes place in Arizona with small cities popping up long after the nukes fell down. The main concern is a different historian finding something stopping the state of no information.
[Answer]
**Whatever you want**
Scenario 1: Small rural town continuously occupied by rational authorities, war occurs "today". The town keeps itself together and starts repairing key infrastructure and scavenging from areas that were hit harder. Record-keeping may be a bit spotty for the period immediately after the Big Boom, but in 50 years when they have stabilised at a reduced tech level they will still have plenty of old books from the local library and private ownership that they can refer back to. The broad knowledge of the pre-war world will effectively never be lost.
Scenario 2: Small rural town continuously occupied by rational authorities, war occurs decades in the future. The town keeps itself together and starts repairing key infrastructure and scavenging from areas that were hit harder. However, the vast majority of written material is in electronic format stored either in a "cloud" that no longer exists or on local storage media that is not stable over prolonged periods of power outage. Society falls further before stabilising - largely because of the lack of readable technical specifications to allow items to be repaired or reconstructed. Over a few generations there are only second-hand word of mouth tales of the "old days" with inaccuracies and little detail - no one can really believe that anyone had an internet or that people had the time to waste making reality TV shows.
Scenario 3: Cult leader gathers followers and leads them into a previously unpopulated area to build a village immediately after the bombs fall. Various topics (including pre-war geopolitical realities that don't reflect the cult leader's preferences) are declared "heresy" with extreme punishments for discussing / teaching them. In this situation, any child under the age of about 2 years when the bombs fell will grow up with no knowledge of the pre-war world and will have no locally available reading material to learn from. Even children who were somewhat older will have very limited knowledge - a six year old will probably remember playing with tech toys but how many six year old children can provide much useful information about the country they live in beyond their immediate environment?
In short, you can pick whatever time scale you want and have people with vastly different levels of knowledge relatively geographically close to each other - there is nothing stopping scenario 1 and scenario 3 both happening 50 km apart. There are people today who believe that the Earth is flat, vaccinations cause autism and COVID-19 is caused by radiation from 5G - if your protagonist is raised by such people then he can be as ill-informed as you like in the first generation post-apocalypse.
[Answer]
## It's very hard to lose knowledge
I'm afraid most of the answers you've been given make some serious assumptions that are, frankly, false. It's very, very hard to lose substantial information — even after a nuclear apocalypse.
1. I apologize that this seems trite: but generally speaking, people aren't stupid. Almost everyone who survived the apocalypse would be literate (can read and write) and would pass that along to their children. Why? Because knowledge is power. Not necessarily knowledge of, say, quantum physics... but knowledge of business, fundamental mathematics, mechanics, civil and structural engineering, electricity, etc.
2. The world is a very structured place. Schools would quickly reform because, per #1, people generally aren't stupid. You'll have plenty of people who know that failing to train the next generation is a really bad idea.
3. We're addicted to technology. Yes, humans can figure out how to "live off the land." But realistically, you'll have people getting generators, computers, and the lights working very quickly. Even small town hardware stores have generators ready to sell and you can make a passable biodiesel fuel out of cooking oil (and cooking oil comes from both vegetables and animal fats...).
4. Even a nuclear apocalypse wouldn't destroy every library in every city (and university, college, school...). Books will be everywhere. In homes, in stores... everywhere. The world wouldn't lack for books unless your story drives a *reason* for those books to be destroyed.
5. 99.99% of the technology we use today was invented in the last 150 years. This is *incredibly important to understand.* If your apocalypse was so thorough that it destroyed 90% of the population (leaving some 770 million people, at least half of which are adults...), you'd still have so many people with so much knowledge in their heads that it would be believable to have everything back to today's standards in 150 years. Yes, you have the radiation problems... but you have people with modern medical knowledge and medical supplies literally everywhere. You wouldn't have the mortality problems of the middle ages.
**Conclusion**
SciFi loves the idea of a Mad Max-style apocalypse, where whole groups of people have somehow regressed and access to knowledge is mysterious. In reality, the world is swimming in knowledge. Oh, we might lose a lot of the things that don't affect everyday life (like astrophysics and quantum physics) and the destruction may have made it difficult to bring the highest tech back quickly (like nanometer-geometry computer chips). But electricity, chemistry, mechanics... and books... would all be in use from 10 seconds after the bombs hit. And there's so much ***stuff*** available that resources would exist for years... even decades....
Do not underestimate just how much knowledge is in the head of the average 35-year-old person (much less the 60-year-olds...). Your real challenge is justifying its non-existence. That will be a contrivance, not an inevitability.
[Answer]
**4 Generations (140ish years), if electricity went down.**
Once the people who were around for the Fall are dead, it's mostly over as far as retaining modern-day information goes. If you blast humans off the Grid, all you've got are books. If it takes 30+ years to get computers back into use, even things like CDs and flash drives that survived the apocalypse intact will be basically unreadable. So all you've got are hard copies. The problem is modern-day publishing techniques are made for efficiency, not longevity. I have books over 100 years old that are in far better condition than ones made in the 70s-onwards. Even with proper care and storage (which most books won't have) things will be dicey 50 years on. Arizona might get lucky, since it's not really damp there. But even so most everything will go in the years between "everything is on fire oh god oh god it's the apocalypse" and "we now have somewhat successful farming communities."
But even if you have the books, you need people to read the books. Literacy just isn't that big a deal in a post-apocalypse agricultural world. Sure, the 2nd gen will get taught to read, because the 1st gen expects it. But the crops need to come in and the rad-cows need milking and the 3rd generation's literacy rate tanks. With that drop comes less desire to maintain the records people do have. Sure the Bible/other holy works get copied by diligent priests, and agricultural stuff gets copied for its usefulness. But if you get blasted so far back that the 1st/2nd gen can't get the power working again all the technical stuff falls by the wayside. By the 4th generation reading is for priests and whatever nobility equiv gets set up. And they mostly read Holy Texts and practical works History is a super low priority. The Emberverse (starting with Dies the Fire) by S.M. Sterling does a great job of depicting this decline in historical knowledge. If your civilization is blasted back into the stone age and only hear about history via your grandad, who also tells stories about WILD things like Jedi and Captain America, how much will you actually remember? Tanks and robots and Nukes and lightsabers and F-22s and P-51s and T-65s all get mixed up because hey, they were all bedtime stories your grandpa told you about things that don't exist in your world. You tell those stories to your own kid, but they don't believe half of it. Sure everyone knows a giant gorilla called King Kong lives on a far-away island. But some war that killed 100 million+ people? IMPOSSIBLE! Even with the Ancient Weapons.
So the stories get mixed up, and the books are dissolving away, and only the most successful immediately-post-fall communities managed to keep any non-survival-oriented books at all. But it's been over 100 years and nobody is QUITE sure what the difference is between fiction and nonfiction, and hell the world's changed anyway. Not efficient to spend a ton of brainpower figuring out what's real and what's not. The harvest doesn't care either way!
**TL/DR** In 4 generations, give or take, pre-apocalypse history will be mostly forgotten, and what is remembered will be so mixed up with pre-apocalypse fiction nobody will have any idea what's true and what's false.
[Answer]
Answer flavored by talking to a startup founder from the Phillipines who showed us how much educational material is lost due to cyclones and big storms.
The usual assumption is, even if we lost the internet cloud, libraries persist.
However, if there was a weather side-effect of continual, hellish cyclones and overall extremely humid climate, almost all paper records would rapidly deteriorate. Such weather would also be very bad for any surviving electronics.
So, with that scenario, I'd say a small number of generations and most knowledge would be lost.
[Answer]
By the time two generations have passed most unessential knowledge will be lost. Anything nonessential for survival will go in the dumpster. No one cares to learn about art history if survival is your primary concern. There will be some people who are interested in preserving other areas of knowledge, but they will be seen as strange. These "librarians" could spend their whole lives gathering info, but nearly everyone they talk to just wont care to learn it. Its possible they might have apprentices who will carry on their work, but in a violent place like the post-apocalypse you can expect that many such "libraries" will have as short a lifespan as the people tending to them.
[Answer]
## **Short, but with some decent points.**
If people survive the apocolapse, which people did, then they would pass knowledge generation to generation. Bombs also only permanently eradicate things close to them, there shoudl still be plenty of rubble and the like scattered around the remains of the city. Plastics also last an absurdly long time, so take that as you will. In my eyes, there would be many ways to learn about the past. If its been a lon time, like, hundreds or thousands of years, many books probably would be destroyed, but there still would be books if it has only been like, 100 years.
[Answer]
Knowledge is basically sticky. No matter what events transpire, knowledge will be preserved and eventually restored. A nonfiction book that illustrates this tenet is *How the Irish Saved Civilization* by Thomas Cahill (ISBN 0-385-41848-5). While I am aware of criticism regarding the specific facts Cahill presents, the basic idea, I think, holds sway.
* Information exists somewhere in a medium that can be accessed and
replicated.
* People have a strong desire to retain and grow knowledge.
It is certain that some communities will be so caught up in just surviving that they will fall into ignorance. Information that is primarily available in digital formats may be lost forever due to the inherent fragility of the medium. However, those communities that do retain knowledge will eventually expand and re-educate their neighbors.
Recovery from future "dark ages" could even be accelerated by the fact that a typical encyclopedia article on the subject of the printing press should contain enough information about invention to guide future archivists in re-creating the machine (though a typical library should also contain books dedicated to that and related subjects). Of the digital formats, it seems to me that properly stored optical media will hold an edge for recovery possibilities, though the clock on those is certainly shorter than for paper.
Post-apocalyptic technologies and societies that emerge would not resemble our contemporary world very closely. They will, for example, have the advantage of knowing our failures and may be able to leverage that information to prioritize technologies and societal constructs that mitigate the issues we see in our world today.
Post-apocalyptic reconstructions of history will be incomplete and may be biased by the preserving communities' ideals, as well (especially if they selectively use books they disagree with politically for kindling before resolving to preserve what remains). Thus the "history" of the future may look quite different if preserved in Vermont, as opposed to Arizona.
[Answer]
>
> What would be a reasonable timeline for this to happen?
>
>
>
### Optimistically, 500 years
In order to lose reading and writing, you need to almost utterly destroy humanity. Not just in the sense of survivors going back to farming, but actually on the level of a near extinction level event. If you want to guess numbers of survivors, I'd put a *maximum* of 10 breeding pairs in North America, evenly distributed with no contact with the other families. Only with that kind of pressure are you even slightly likely to lose all this. Even then I'd say it's unlikely, but let's be generous.
To get back to a society which can sustain historians, you probably need at least a million people in North America. That's an order of magnitude less that the population before Columbus, but let's be optimistic. Let's assume 3 children from each generation survive to breed, which is an optimistic figure based on pre-medical survival rates. Then you need a 50,000 times increase in population for a 1.5 times per generation geometric rate of increase. My sums say that's 26 generations. Let's assume child marriage and 20 years per generation. That comes out to roughly 500 years.
### Frame challenge answer: Write a different book
Firstly, even with this level of destruction, I can't see reading and writing dying out. There are real practical uses for it, even at this kind of survival level. And there isn't going to be a shortage of books.
But more seriously, this is a very tired old trope, and you have the problem of trying to say something new in a sub-genre which is *old*. HG Wells may have been first to the party, but it's been used by so many people, and vanishingly few have been original. All that's mainly changed is the visuals, not the concepts. Think carefully about whether you do genuinely have anything new to add.
] |
[Question]
[
tl;dr: My world has airships using vacuum spheres made out of a super-strong and lightweight material. I'd like to know how versatile such airships could be used, and how big the spheres would be compared to the rest of the ship.
---
### Background & maths:
I'm building a steampunk/magipunk fantasy world that involves lots of flying islands which, naturally, means you need some kind of flight to get around. Additionally, this world features a magical material that is simultaneously both very strong and lightweight (among other unique properties).
It's visually more similar to glass than metal, but for the purpose of this question, let's call it Beskar, because just like the Mandalorian currently carries the Star Wars franchise, I intend for this material to be used to carry airships via buoyancy.
Functionally, this would work via the creation of vacuum-"filled" spheres with a Beskar hull. I haven't decided on an exact density or strength for Beskar yet, thus those are still flexible. However, assume the strength to be sufficient; it should take Hulk levels of strength to break a 1-cm-pole made of Beskar. I don't generally like handwaving stuff or soft magic systems, but I want a super-strong material, so this is going to be as strong as it needs to be.
For a first approximation, assuming a sphere with a radius of 5 meters, we can calculate a volume of roughly 523.6m³. According to some buoyancy calculator I found on the web and assuming an air density of 1.225kg/m³, the mass of the displaced volume (and thus the weight it can carry) equals roughly 640kg.
Assuming that the Beskar hull would be 0.5cm thick (i.e. a hollow sphere with a 5.01m radius), this means we have roughly 525.2m³ minus 523.6m³, or roughly 1.6m³ Beskar. Because the contraption should be actually able to float, I'll declare Beskar to have a density of about 140kg/m³. I'm aware this is lighter than any solid material in the real world (even some aerogels weigh more if my google search is accurate), but what's the point of magic if everything is exactly like in the real world?
(Quick scaling maths: 10m sphere: 6.3m³ or 880kg of Beskar, lifting capacity 5.1 tons. This is a lifting efficiency of 83% as opposed to 72% with the 5m sphere. 20m sphere: 25m³ or 3.5 tons of Beskar, lifting capacity 41 tons, 92% efficiency. These calculations assume the same hull thickness of 0.5cm)
---
### Issue:
Unlike the basic maths above, what I'm actually interested in and *can't* judge myself is how practical an airship like this would be. Mainly because I don't know anything about ships and their construction. Zeppelins in the real world are gigantic balloons with a comparatively tiny cabin, which is impractical and not what I want (there's a reason Zeppelins are generally not around anymore, except as tourist attractions).
Thus, how viable would an airship with this technology be? Would it just be a little better than a Zeppelin, could it be used as a decent transportation vehicle without being 98% balloon, or would it even be viable as a cargo ship or a military vessel with thick armor plating? And roughly how big would the spheres be compared to the rest of the ship?
Side note, as it's probably relevant: Beskar is obtainable only for significant sums of money, as - while it's far from rare - it is supremely difficult to harvest and process. Thus, I could design such ships to have a supporting skeleton made of Beskar if functionally necessary or the buyer is Beff Jezos, but the floor, walls, etc. would likely be wood or metal. If possible, I'm interested in the viability both with and without a Beskar skeleton.
[Answer]
Let's talk about airship practicality instead of lifting power.
1. Takeoff and Landing.
This is, by far, the most hazardous part of an airship journey. Winds near the ground are unpredictable. A single surprise shear can (and did!) wreck an airship in moments. It was a race to get a landed ship into a hangar or properly tied down before that inevitable deadly gust occurred. Similarly, it was a race to get a loaded ship trimmed and back into the air.
Since the wind in many places (like coastal towns) has some predicable shifts on daily cycles, ships cannot takeoff or land during those known times. Precipitation adds hazards. Lightning is a particular threat, since lightning rods cannot easily be used. Night operations are also very dangerous -- too easy for ground crew to step into a hole on the landing field.
It's expensive to carry an anchor heavy enough to be useful (and quite rude to drop it upon the town that you are visiting). Therefore your ships will depend upon large local ground crews grabbing lines and using their muscles and mass to drag the ship down from the sky.
A quiet, small landing field itself needs to be at least 1km on each side. Busy city landing fields will need to be much larger. Your airships are ungainly and slow -- they will approach from random directions as the wind shifts, and beast power will make but a moderate difference due to the enormous aerodynamic drag.
They will also be slow to rise and fall; as any child who has tried to fight a ball's buoyancy in a swimming pool will attest, it takes a LOT of force to fight buoyancy...and a vacuum ship cannot readily valve gas to lower the ship. (Note to self: Remember to add the weight of the vacuum pump(s) to the dead weight of the ship. And that technology to make vacuum pumps is needed.)
2. Weather
During World War I, bad weather destroyed as many airships as combat. An ordinary, unspectacular mid-summer thunderstorm famously ripped apart the USS Shenandoah over Ohio, raining bodies onto the plain, boring farms below.
Airships depended upon accurate and frequently-updated weather reports from stations along their route. Updating route weather was a primary task of the full-time radioman. Revising the projected route based upon updated weather reports was a primary task of the full-time navigator.
This means, of course, that you need long-distance communication to share weather data among stations, and a way for those ground stations to communicate (like heliostats or semaphores) with passing airships, both day and night.
Airships tended to rise during the day and fall at night as the hydrogen heated and valved, then later cooled. Happily, you don't have that problem with vacuum.
Clouds and fog are an irritation, since they may obscure hazards (the ground, mountains, the stars, landmarks, other ships). But cloudbanks and fogs that last several days are a life-threatening hazard when the ship can no longer measure it's position or altitude. The Graf Zeppelin carried a foghorn to gauge altitude in the fog-prone Rhone river valley.
3. Navigation
Daylight navigation in clear air over known landmarks is fairly easy. But the sun goes down, or bad weather obscures the view, or the ship needs to go someplace new.
Your ships need accurate charts. They need compasses to find their heading. They need accurate precision tools --sextant, clock, ephemeris-- to find their latitude and longitude. They need barometers and lines and noisemakers and a searchlight to gauge altitude.
Airship navigation is all about *probabilities* and *risk management*. If you're flying from Tokyo to Singapore, you don't care what Singapore's weather is right now; you are trying to predict what the weather will be in 30 hours. What direction is the wind likely to be then? Is this the rainy season? How can you approach the landing field from upwind then? Can you arrive three hours before sunset so there's time to land the ship before the winds change? Do the winds near Vietnam indicate a cyclone or not? If a cyclone, which side do you want to ride? How will that change your time of arrival? If you want to avoid dangerous night landings, then is there a safe alternate route that's slower and arrives the next morning? Does the Captain need to make a decision? If so, when is too late for the decision? Are there intermediate stations you can pass over to get updated information?
You can see why navigation is a full-time job, and why good navigation officers should be well-paid.
[Answer]
### 16% more functional / versatile than existing helium airships.
**This is not the best use of Besker in your world.**
As was already pointed out in the comments; Hydrogen has 93% of the lifting power of vacuum and helium has 86%. The improvement from helium to vacuum is a 16% improvement, so that's the performance gain you've got from the real-world. Not much in the scheme of things.
Your armoured battle-air-ships are 16% more practical than the best battle-air-ships we have today. Your freight network is 16% more practical that our current airship freight network. If it's a choice between airships made of besker and isolation - make the airships, but this isn't some groundbreaking technology.
In terms of strength/kg, besker sounds like an amazing material, up there with carbon nanotubes and graphene on the [specific strength scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_strength), if you have floating islands you need to connect:
* spin some besker into something resembling steel rope, string it between the islands, and build yourself a ski-lift-like transportation network. Or
* build a bridge made of besker between islands. This stuff should be able to span dozens of km without supports. If the islands drift in the wind, the besker sounds strong enough that it should stop that and keep the islands in a rigid formation.
[Answer]
As I calculated in [my previous answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/194483/30492)
Let's take the ideal case where the volume in the balloon is completely devoided of air, the balloon doesn't let any air leak in and can withstand the outer pressure. This means that a cubic meter of that void will have a lifting force equivalent to the weight of the displaced air, which means about 12 N. This means that to lift a 100 kg load the balloon would need a volume of about $1000/12 \approx 84 \ m^3$.
This is the most compact balloon you can get, because any other lifting gas will be denser than vacuum. However, a vacuum is the only one to require additional structural reinforcement, because the whole structure will need to withstand atmospheric pressure, while any other gas would provide that for free. If you don't provide that, this will happen
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/w6k8D.gif)
In short, what you gain with lifting power you lose with non-paying load.
[Answer]
## Alternate Vision:
**FLYING WINGS**: With such a strong, light material, why not make very thin (relatively), light airships akin to giant [flying wings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_wing) that happen to be buoyant if they stop moving? Flying wings have a fairly large internal volume and low drag. They would have all the best qualities of an airplane and an airship. Due to the strength and lightness of beskar, irregular shapes can be "filled" with vacuum (or multiple small pockets of vacuum). The same super-strength means the ships would use their vacuum tanks as armor against attacks. Since it is aerodynamic, it's fast, plus if punctured the aerodynamics should keep it airborne even if it loses buoyancy (at least long enough to go a ways and land). You might be able to overload your airships and use aerodynamics to compensate for the excess loads (give enough thrust).
**GENERATING VACUUM**: Creating a vacuum in real life is a lot harder than it might seem. But what if this weren't a problem? If you have extremely efficient pumps for creating vacuum (like teleporting out air) you could pump air in and out of your vacuum chambers to allow the ships to effortlessly control buoyancy. In fact ammonia has been proposed as a [lifting gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_gas) specifically because it can be condensed by refrigeration to reduce lift, and then evaporated to re-inflate emptied lifting chambers for superior control. Since you aren't actually using a lifting gas, yet seem to be able to easily create vacuums, this would simply involve filling with regular air and then expelling it at need. This also means you could fill an airship on the ground for stability, then empty the air for take-off/flight.
**AIRCRAFT:** Making irregular shapes would require rather more material, and you said it was expensive. Have you considered this for craft that aren't QUITE airships? A large section of an aircraft filled with such a chamber would mean that the total mass of the craft was lighter, allowing you to carry dense payloads easier. Also, in the event of loss of power, an aircraft that is not quite buoyant might be able to glide to ground like a feather. Large, light aircraft might be able to go fast when desired, but also move quite slowly if needed, so they might be very good for making VTOL/STOL planes that can fly fast, then loiter in an area using minimal power (unlike the beasts that modern armies use, requiring massive engines, jets, and huge propellers).
[Answer]
The problem is that vacuum doesn't gain you all that much over filling your balloons with hydrogen or helium. Air is a mix of roughly 80% N2 and 20% O2 (with a bit of other stuff I'll neglect for simplicity). The molecular weights of N2 and O2 are 28 & 32, respectively. Thus the average for air is about 29.
Air at 0 °C and sea level pressure weighs 1.293 kg/m^3. Thus if you have a balloon that holds a perfect vacuum (and the balloon itself is weightless), then it can lift 1.293 kg for every cubic meter of balloon.
Hydrogen has a molecular weight of 2. If that balloon is filled with hydrogen, it will weigh 0.089 kg/m^3, so it can lift 1.204 kg for every cubic meter. Likewise for helium, it would lift about 1.1 kg. Which shows that there's not a great deal of advantage to be gained by using vacuum.
[Answer]
## With your numbers, hydrogen-filled airship is still superior!
Ok, so you say a 5 m radius balloon evacuated balloon needs a shell 5 mm thick with average density 140 kg/m³ (it would probably not be solid, but a honeycomb structure; and then it can be thicker, because you need thickness for strength in bending), which weighs 220 kg.
But a 5 m radius balloon filled with hydrogen only contains 46.6 kg of hydrogen. So if you can save 50 kg by using less strong shell, you are better off.
Can you? Sure!
* The vacuum shell needs strength in bending (otherwise it would crumple upon light distortion). Strength in bending comes from one side of the material to resist compression while the other side resists tension (and the middle does nothing, which is why honeycomb structure would be better than solid shell). So more material is needed than for pure compression or tension. I am not sure just how much the strength in bending needs to be though; that's not a straightforward calculation.
* If beskar is anything like common strong materials, it is much stronger in tension than in compression.
* The hydrogen-filled balloon only needs to withstand maybe ⅕ of the pressure differential. You can keep the hydrogen pressure just a little above the ambient by filling and emptying the balancing ballonets inside and venting some hydrogen in emergency.
This together means that the shell can be at least one, but probably two orders of magnitude lighter. Even normal fabric balloon would weigh only around 40 kg at the size and you have much stronger material. That is, you save at least 200 kg by supporting the structure from inside with 50 kg of hydrogen. A gain of 150 kg of payload!
## Control
Then there is the question of control. Hydrogen airships have ballonets inside the lifting balloons that air blown into them. This maintains the pressure with changing altitude and allows adjusting the pressure and therefore the lift. This works because the ballonets are flexible.
But your vacuum shells are not flexible. You could have flexible balloons inside that you fill with ballast to reduce the buoyancy, but emptying them again requires strong vacuum pumps. The blowers for ballonets in helium-filled airship can be light, because they don't need to work with big pressure differentials.
## Safety
And don't forget the added safety. Penetrating an evacuated shell (you are fighting with the ships, aren't you?) would trigger very fast rush of air. That would create strong forces that would be likely to further tear the shell and probably lead to fairly quick collapse of the damaged balloon—and corresponding sudden loss of lifting force.
But hydrogen-filled airships are, from practical experience from WWI, quite difficult to shot down. Penetrating the lifting balloon causes leak, but since the pressure difference is small, the damage is less likely to propagate, especially if you add some rip-stop structure. And the leak is slow enough that you won't come falling down, just start to very slowly sink. During the first world war, fighters often poured hundreds of bullets into a bombing airship and it still made it home!
Of course you want to have the airship composed from multiple lifting balloons either way. But the collapse of an evacuated lift balloon is always going to be more abrupt and therefore cause more problems.
[Answer]
Other answers are right at pointing that vacuum zeppelins would be just about 16% better than helium ones. However, there's still one important difference between vacuum and gas that affects the way a zeppelin flies: In gas airships buoyancy is constant, independent of altitude, buoyancy will be higher at low altitudes and the airship will tend to remain at a constant equilibrium altitude.
In our world airships, gas in bags is at the same pressure of external air, and if managed properly (e.g. avoiding too fast descents) also at the same temperature. Since gas and air density is inversely proportional to pressure and directly proportional to temperature, density of gas and density of aire change equally. Since buoyancy equals the weight of displaced air, that weight remains constant and buoyancy is constant at all altitudes and temperatures.
However, in a rigid vacuum balloon, volume is constant, but air density varies with altitude and temperature, increasing buoyancy at lower altitudes where air is denser. An airship would float more at lower altitudes and sink at higher altitudes, tending to remain at a constant level.
That could be an advantage, specially if all air islands are at the same level, but could be a disadvantage if the airships are expected to go down to earth lever.
[Answer]
Let me note that, according to our finite element analysis <https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.05171> , vacuum balloons can be made using commercially available materials. Our article also contains references to other people's work on the topic. Improved altitude control (via pumping air in and out of the balloon) can be one of the advantages of vacuum balloons.
] |
[Question]
[
A character I have lies on why they survived in the ocean by saying they were in a blue whale's mouth. Is it possible to survive in a blue whale's mouth if the blue whale is underwater? Half-hour duration at most. No equipment. Is there some trick for surviving the pressure change and getting air within the whale?
[Answer]
**Maybe**
A blue whale's throat is only about 12 inches wide, so it cannot physically swallow you even if it wanted to. You could fit inside it's mouth but the blue whales do not eat anything bigger than krill and it would likely try to push you out of it's mouth with its tongue to prevent a throat blockage. The biggest threat is that you would be crushed or seriously injured by its massive jaws and tongue flexing and working around to try to force you back out, think about you trying to dig a popcorn kernel out of the back of your mouth with your tongue, in this situation you are the popcorn kernel, only you are a lot more squishy.
Even assuming you only sustain something like broken bones an injury underwater is extremely more dangerous than one on land for obvious reasons. You could theoretically survive but would in all likelihood not be in very good shape. Blue whales are so massive that they are capable of crushing a human by pure accident. There have been several accidents involving tourist whale watchers where blue whales capsized boats by accident, one man was hit by a blue whale's flipper as it rolled over and was thrown so hard against the control console of his small boat that he needed major reconstructive facial surgery. Blue whales are so big just rolling over and whopping you with a flipper is about like getting hit by a small car.
**(assuming you are wearing SCUBA gear in all three of these scenarios)**
**Most likely scenario:** You are crushed within the whale's mouth and die before being spit out from overwhelmingly catastrophic injuries and asphyxiation due to crushing.
**Possible scenario:** You are severely injured within the whale's mouth and spit out still alive, but are too badly injured to swim to the surface and drown.
**Most unlikely (nearly impossible) scenario:** You are taken into the whale's mouth while it is feeding with the large volume of water that it is filtering krill from. It continues on its way for a very short time (a few minutes) lazily filtering the water before it realizes something it doesn't want to eat is in there and spits you out, battered, terrified, but still in decent enough condition to swim away.
[Answer]
The oral cavity is a not a cavity when closed: the tongue fills it up.
So, if you happen to be in there, you will be squeezed between the tongue and the upper wall of the mouth. Not a comfortable place, and not a lot of air to breathe. Add the pressure of the tongue, and you can hardly survive more than few minutes, depending on your apnea skills.
[Answer]
>
> Is there some trick for surviving the pressure change and getting air within the whale?
>
>
>
No, no trick, you just die.
[Answer]
If you were in some kind of hard suit, like an [atmospheric pressure dive suit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_diving_suit) or a set of old school plate armour you'd actually have a better chance than you might think of surviving for a few minutes. In fact a lot of those diving suits have an air reserve so you could last for as long as that does. *Without* some form of crush protection though you're going to get squashed flat by the pressure when your whale dives.
] |
[Question]
[
One of the solutions I think is making the muscle go inside the bone, something look like an exoskeleton creature. either mechanical or organic making the artificial muscle developed inside the marrow, example for organic artificial muscle is develop by some single or swarm of mollusk or invertebrate creature using the skeletal death body, or nanomachine or some musclulature wire like machine or mechanical, for mechanical artificial muscle.
There also a puppet string one, but that seems boring and makes it seems not really a skeleton monster. So I want to know: Are there other realistic ideas or solutions? Or would this solution do or is there a problem with it?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/klDOt.jpg)
[Answer]
It's an extremely rare species of centipede, the Beige Frontrunner.
When you look at the part that resemble human pelvis, you notice something entirely unprecedented across the entire kingdom of Animalia -- a hole! Animals don't just make holes. They're hard to make, they don't provide any benefit, and they become a liability when the creature overlooks a tree branch at just the wrong height while they're running away. Closer inspection reveals the truth. It's a pair of chelicerae! Knowing this, we can finally figure out how the entire creature's body plan.
So... since the pelvis is actually a pair of chelicerae, then what looks like the coccyx must be the creature's head. What looks like the head must actually be the tail, and the rest must be limbs! The back pair and the front pair are extremely enlarged, while the rest are shorter and serve purely as mimicry. Some of them close at the front to make the appearance of a rib cage, while some are much shorter without much mobility.
Heck why, I hear you ask?
In the long past, the creature had two pairs of enlarged limbs that served primarily as defense. The creature's unusual posture - bipedal using the *front* pair of limbs - has evolved from how the creature used to escape from predators. You know, 20 pairs of limbs are hard to coordinate while you're trying to hit your top speed, and lifting on your hind legs requires them to temporarily move faster than your center of mass and then slow down. The Frontrunner's ancestors would instead just push against the ground and become upright in the *other* way, sacrificing the temporary boost of vantage point for a quicker departure from the impending doom.
The hind pair of limbs grew longer and stronger to make the transition to upright even faster, while the front pair grew longer and stronger to provide speed during the upright phase. Eventually the creature learned a new purpose for the hind legs - as manipulators, to grab fruit from bushes and trees. This, along metabolical benefits, pushed the creature to grow longer and thinner. In the mean time, the rest of its legs just ... stayed the same. some grew slightly longer to serve as secondary manipulators - function now lost - while some shrunk to just decorative stubs. The creature did have to grow thinner as it grew taller because otherwise it wouldn't be able to support its own weight!
Then come humans. A couple thousand years ago, one group of monkeys endemic to the Red Sea region has decided it would be a smart idea to start collecting their dead to one place to reduce the risk of being detected by predators - and Beige Frontrunners have quickly discovered a new survival strategy. Because they already resembled the skeletons of those monkeys, the Frontrunners that chose those boneyards as their resting spots found themselves mostly ignored by their usual predators. When the predators began to figure things out, Frontrunners had to improve their mimicry. It was not too long before those ridiculous bulges on their tails began to evolve, as well as the coloration and unusual head structure. The eyes finished their migration to the back of their heads. Their main limbs' tarsal claws grew longer for mimicry, and they even developed local coloration that resembles the fingers of a human hand, and a stripe that mimics the gap between the radius and ulna...
As to why Frontrunners cease to function when their tail decoration that resembles the human skull gets removed ... I would also lose my mind if somebody decided to just chop off my reproductory organs!
[Answer]
Your question boils down to "can you convert an endoskeleton to an exoskeleton?" Tto which the answer is basically "no", because each has evolved to fit its specific task and the nature of the joints in each is quite specialised.
For want of a better example, take a look at this. Its a [japanese spider crab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_spider_crab), which I think can grow to be one of the largest exoskeletonised animals in the world.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iLDeG.jpg)
See how all the joints are enclosed? That's because all of the bits of the limbs where the muscles attach must be inside for the whole range of the joint's motion. What you can't see here is how the limbs have very thin strong walls to allow sufficient space inside for muscles. In both these cases, the limbs are the polar opposite of endoskeletal limbs.
Look how long and thin those limbs are. The muscle inside is quite slender, because the crab's body is lightweight and, crucially, supported by the water around it. Absent that support, it simply woulnd't be strong enough to support its own weight. If you wanted to make it as strong as a human (because who wants weakling skeleton monsters?) it would need to have limbs as thick as human limbs in order to fit in the huge slabs of muscle we have. Crustacean muscles aren't magically stronger and better than mammalian ones!
You'd need to do some considerable re-engineering, and the end result would still basically be a slightly rubbish compromise. If you had the technology (or magic) to turn a human skeleton into an exoskeleton, you'd still be better off making something more like a zombie (or mummy) or a giant crab instead. They're both still pretty terrifying, and they're mechanically much more sound so they could be tougher, stronger and faster.
Your theoretical hermit-crab-like thing that burrows into the joints of a corpse is no better off... it just wouldn't be able to exert enough force on those inappropriate joints to be strong, or fast, or tough. You could smash it apart with a big stick, I bet. It would also have to have quite a complex proprioceptive system to keep a human body upright and walking, which is a very complex operation. Oh, and there are a lot of joints; presumably it is some kind of cooperative, communal organism too. Humans have nerves to communicate with distant parts of their bodies, how would a horde of snails do it? Not very fast, I suspect.
So maybe if you wanted a fragile creature that could crawl along the floor very slowly at you, and that you could kick the head off with no effort, then you've got the right idea.
[Answer]
To some degree, this is a question of what you mean by "skeleton".
Exoskeletons are well established, though really large exoskeletal creatures on land might have issues with lack of support during molting -- you might have to have them grow their exoskeletons in a different way. However, the existing way arthropods work allowed sizes up to *Arthropleura* (up to 2.3 m/7.5 ft long and 50 cm/20 in wide) in Carboniferous conditions. (Of course, oxygen levels were higher then, but you could just give these creatures lungs -- exoskeletons don't require tracheal breathing; spiders have book lungs, and the coconut crab, the largest land arthropod, uses a bronchiostegal lung.)
Muscles inside something like a marrow cavity probably wouldn't have enough mass, unless it was just a thin outer bone layer outside a large cavity, which more or less comes back around to an exoskeleton.
If you want a creature that *looks* more like a vertebrate skeleton (bones with gaps between them, not a completely plated exterior), you could have a creature with largely transparent flesh and external bony armor over only certain areas of the body (eg vital organs). At first glance, with the organs largely hidden by bone and mostly-transparent gaps between, this could look very much like a "walking skeleton".
EDIT: From clarification in the comments that the intent is to "re-animate" the *existing* skeleton of another creature, the only one of these options that would work is the last one. A creature with mostly-transparent flesh and no hard parts of its own (something jellyfish-like) could take over the skeleton of another creature for structural support and/or protection of its soft flesh, the way a hermit crab uses another animal's shell for protection. (This is similar to how the Mistwraiths in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series function.)
[Answer]
"Normal" (<- quotes required in questions like this) humanoid with bioluminescent skeleton and tissues transparent to the specific frequencies it produces. Works as long as any other light source is weak enough that only the bones are really visible. On a downside sunlight would probably cause death by cancer after five seconds of exposure so underground and nocturnal only.
Realistically to see it would need to use the same frequencies it produces so the pupils would be visible. Probably it would have a reflector similar to one cats have so the pupils would actually glow fairly brightly.
Giving ability to control the glow in the bones might be a good idea. If only some of the skeletons give off bright light, the others would be very hard to spot but would be able to see using light from the lit ones. Modulation of the light can also be used to communicate silently.
[Answer]
The problem here is that the muscles, or whatever else is enabling the monster to move, would have to essentially be hidden inside the joints. This would give them very little leverage to move the limbs. Just think about your bicep. It wouldn't fit inside your humerus (your upper arm bone), and its attachment is a little bit up the forearm from the elbow joint to give it some leverage.
So basically you need muscle-equivalents that are very strong, since they won't have much leverage, and very narrow, to fit inside the bones. (Or maybe just super-compact, so they fit inside the joint area like little motors.) And the bones themselves would have to be super-strong since the forces of the super-muscles would be greater.
This is a very tall order. Perhaps there could be stringy muscle-tendon things with the strength of piano wire that came out of holes in the bone and attach about where our muscles actually do. Then you could see them, and maybe even lose a finger if the monster caught it between the muscle and a skeleton. You would still have to worry about the bones being strong enough to make this work, since the attachment points are really tiny.
Remember that you also need contact surfaces for the joints. These joints will work poorly with no cartilage.
The point is that, with enough ingenuity, you can come with a non-magical explanation that would work for story purposes. But, if you want the *most* believable biological mechanism for animating a human skeleton, it's a human body. (Again, doesn't mean you can't get more daring for story purposes.)
[Answer]
Does the organism strictly have to be hidden inside the bone?
If not, consider a creature made out of extremely stretchable soft tissue that has evolved to a predator by attaching to hard objects, like rocks and sticks and use them as means of locomotion and for weapons to kill their prey and then dissolve the victim by encasing it in its gelatinous body.
Over the course of its evolution the organism realized that the bones of deceased mammals offer perfectly balanced and sturdy bodies and are already equipped with useful tools in the form of claws, beaks and teeth.
However, and this is not limited to this proposal, keep in mind that whenever an organism takes over a human skeleton, it will likely struggle to keep the body in balance, and might prefer to use it as a quadruped instead. It may even choose to not attach to a human skeleton at all and prefer simpler shapes of other animals.
[Answer]
*Warning: I have no idea if this would actually work in real life.*
Magnets.
You need something to hold the bones together at the joints. Barring externally-visible connective tissues, you're going to need something *invisible*. Fortunately, magnetic fields are A) invisible and B) all about pulling things together.
Take each individual bone and fill it up with machinery to produce and manipulate magnetic fields. Program them to interact with each other so that they'll link up with the other bones they're meant to be connected to, fluxing and flexing and reacting to what the other bones near them are doing. If you want to get fancy, throw in some radio transceivers so that the CPU in the skull can control the whole system centrally.
They're not organic, but I didn't see anything in your question that precluded robotically-powered skeleton monsters.
] |
[Question]
[
There is as a system of canals that connects a country, these canals are about 10 meters wide 15 meters deep. I am designing a ship that was built specifically to travel the canals. Its main purpose is maximum weight while maintaining a speed of 8 miles per hour or about 7 knots. The ship size should be enough for heavy transport so no small boats.
The question is what are some ways that I can achieve a 7 knots speed?
Some points to consider:
1. The material that the ship is made of is wood and whatever metals used in building a ship, keep in mind that I can invent wood with some different properties if that would help.
2. The ship transports people or animals or sometimes just cargo.
3. Winds can't be considered because these ships need to move when needed and people can't just wait for the winds.
4. There isn't a significant current or stream to use for the ship movement.
5. There is a series of outposts all along the canals something like every 5 miles. I made these to serve as posts where profesional rowers await in case an urgent message needs to be delivered so that they can keep a fresh crew. These outposts can be developed further if needed to accommodate the cargo ships.
6. There are animals that naturally dig canals that were domesticated and then used to dig the canals.
I know an obvious answer would be an engine of some sort but that would result in my world industrialization (I need it to remain medieval-like.) Rowing teams are also not ideal. An idea that I had was to use animals on both banks of the canal to pull the ship and replenish them at the outposts. That would work but I am looking for more of a mechanical solution.
I thought of using a rope that can be in reeled at each outpost but I can't just have a five-mile rope. I thought about using some form of stored power (other than a steam engine) - something like compressed gas that can be used to move the ship - but I doubt there was technology in medieval time that could compress large amounts of gas.
A steam engine would work but I would need a reason that those people don't just look at it and think of using it to build trains and cars (ruining the time period I'm looking for.)
[Answer]
First, the dimensions of your canal are all wrong. It needs to be **much** wider than deep. Straight walls are a bad idea, too. With a cross section of 150 square meters, I would go at most for 5 m depth over a 20 m channel, with a total width of 40 m.
A boat with less than 10m beam and a draft of almost 15 m sounds impractical, too.
On both sides of the canal are roads for [people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlak) who pull boats if you don't want [animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_and_Ohio_Canal#Mules). That means less than your seven knots, but any mechanical contrivance would need regular stops to hitch and unhitch ropes.
**If** you want a mechanical system, use something to turn a cable loop several miles long (hemp won't do, steel wire?) over rollers with hooks that can be "snatched" by a passing boat.
[Answer]
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AQ3ED.jpg)
This is a fifteenth century conceptualization of a solution to your need. Please forgive the awkwardness of the picture as they hadn’t really gotten the hang of perspective, yet
Your canal boats could be powered by oxen or even cattle being delivered to market. They walk a tread mill, driving paddle wheels. I think wheels at the stern would be better than how they are depicted here. They would also probably need some sort of transmission or gearing to get the speed up to 8 mph (7 knots) since the typical walking speed of these creatures is closer to 4 mph (3.5 knots)
[Answer]
7 knots forces you into mechanization. That is out of the range of animals.
## A Stevenson style steam engine running on a wood-and-strap-rail road
Essentially a primordial railway running along the far side of the tow path. Except built for tremendous side load, so possibly with the track canted or a huge thrust wall on the canal side. The track would be wood, with flat, wide rolling rails made out of strap iron. The wheels would not be train style wheels but wide, flat "roller" wheels running on the strap iron. Adhesion wouldn't matter; they will be a "rack" which engages gears powered by the steam engine, so a rack railway.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ratlr.png)
*Compressed into two dimensions. The tow rope would be at a sharp angle, obviously, and the thrust rollers, rack and traction rollers would not be in the same plane. The boat would need to apply rudder to avoid being pulled into the bank, but that's normal for canal boats. The tow rope reaches across the regular tow path, so animals can still be used. The engine is quite light compared to the boat, so the track is canted and the boiler is mounted outboard, so tow-rope forces don't flip it over. The rack would keep a light locomotive from slipping outward. The locomotive cab isn't canted, because humans have to stand up in it.*
**\*EDIT: As Patricia Shanahan points out, a long tow rope greatly eases thrust loads. As does having the locomotive closer to the bank. So let's make the animals reach across the trackway rather than the other way 'round. And move the thrust plate on the outward side, so it doesn't have to be held by tamped earth, and is held by the trackway itself, which also benefits from the weight of the locomotive. This is worth drawing: \***
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fy73y.png)
*Again, the main thrust force the unit must contend with is from the boat; it has a side roller for that purpose. Side loads from just moving around "light" are handled by the rack gears*.
There would be a ramp and bridge to allow light engines which have finished their run to climb over the canal and get on the other tow path, to haul a boat the other way. They would also be fully reversible and could use an escape track to run to the other end quickly.
The whole locomotive would weigh 10 tonne, towing a 5-tonne car behind carrying wood. Water reserves are small, because every mile there is 500 feet of trough right next to the track, fed from the canal, and the engine can dip a snorkel and pump up all the water it needs.
Using the railway straight up for direct haulage of freight is not practical, because a freight carriage that only carries 3 tonne is not nearly competitive with the canal boats, and heavier carriages are not feasible due to the wooden rail, carriage structure, bearings, draw bars, and brakes.
This needs a little elaboration. The core concept of "railway" is actually a great deal older than the 1820s. The 1820s is *when the whole shebang came together to resemble the modern railway* - recognizable track, 4' 8-1/2" gage, modernish inside-flange wheels, and a viable iron steam boiler and engines. (Literally. *Rocket* or *John Bull* would work on modern rails; *John Bull* **did**.) However, at least 50 years before that, there were things vaguely recognizable as railways, mainly used in specific industrial locations e.g. mining.
So this isn't even a proper railway: no flanged wheels, but instead, wide rollers on strap rail merely to support the weight (i.e. no adhesion). Thrust rollers to bear the sideways load and a rack to bear the forward/back load. The only technological fast-forward is a steam boiler-engine combo light enough to work, thus, out of the Stephenson camp more than the Watt camp.
Although if you're willing to build the wooden trackway strong enough to haul a 25-50 tonne machine (unlimited number of wheels since they aren't driven and aren't even braked), then yeah, a Watt style steamer would suffice.
The only purpose of weight for the locomotive is to keep it from flipping upward and inward from the tow rope's pull.
[Answer]
You could get all medieval on the **Montech Water Slope** idea.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sG1AV.jpg)
Instead of repurposed railway locomotives on rubber tyres pushing the water, you could simply mount a trio of diminutive oliphants in each of a pair of heavy waggons driven by a treadmill. Straddling the space between the waggons is a kind of wooden dam. As the oliphants are set in motion upon their treadmills, the vehicles move forward, pushing the dam through the water of the canal. The wave thus generated shall push the canal barge forward.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oZKtR.jpg)
Careful attention must be paid by the teams' Pilots and Beadles, who often use their wings as semafore signals, stationed along the length of the mighty engines. It's their job to coordinate the Gearsmen and Steersmen in their efforts to keep the paired engines going at the same speed and also guiding them so they won't plunge into the canal.
[Answer]
[Windmill ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windmill_ship) could be used.
If a large conventional windmill is positioned on board a ship it can turn to face which ever direction the wind is blowing from and the rotational power generated can be used to turn paddle wheels or better still a screw propeller.
The effectiveness of the windmill could be enhanced by using low friction hulls such as those of a catamaran or trimaran. Rowers would almost certainly still be needed to provide additional power as in case of a dead calm but a respectable speed might still be obtained and it would make the rowing easier.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AvlkZ.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fYGXq.jpg)
[Answer]
Chain boat! <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_boat_navigation>
Although the method of generating the torque remains up to you, whether it's animals or slaves or an engine, chains laid on the bottom of the canals that are pulled by the craft can be much longer than 5 miles, they reached a few hundred in the past.
Or you can have the chain itself move with the craft clamped onto it, then you could maybe have water mills powering it, but they'll have to be huge.
[Answer]
Each ship has two capstans, mounted on either side near the bow. There are a series of bollards along the sides of the canals.
The capstans can be driven by people or animals. They are designed with the right ratios to pull rope in at your target speed when turned at the natural walking pace of the drivers.
There are two teams of mounted rope movers, one on each bank. During phase 1, the end of the port rope is attached to a bollard on the port bank, and is being wound onto the port capstan to pull the boat along. Meanwhile, the starboard rope movers are unwinding the rope from the starboard capstan and carrying its end forward to the next starboard bollard. As the boat passes the port bollard, go to phase 2 in which the port and starboard roles are exchanged. The rope movers can trot, because they are not doing heavy hauling, allowing the required speed.
[Answer]
I remember seeing a documentary about (real-world) canals where they mentioned that through tunnels, people would sometimes lie on their back on the highest deck, and and "walk" along the roof of the tunnels (the tunnels were standard height, and ships were made to match that).
You could extend this by having something over the top of the canals (from bank to bank) to grab on to, e.g. a rope or arch, a little higher than the tunnels (maybe 1 meter above deck?). You go to the bow (front) of the boat, grab on, and push it to the back of the boat. Then you walk back to the front and repeat the process. You only need to accelerate enough to compensate for friction, and slightly more. Wiki says: "Hire fleets on British canals usually consist of narrow boats in varied lengths from 30 feet (9.14 m) upwards", I think you could easily leave 45 feet (15 meters) between arches - this gives you 23 feet/7.5 meters of push as you walked bow-to-aft, then you would walk forward at the same speed as it glides forward, and you would meet up with next arch just as you got to the front.
In a small, flat body of water, with no water flow, it takes very little effort to start a ship moving, and it will keep moving for quite some time (depending on the size, of course, but then you're talking about a canal, so the ships won't be too big. I've towed a 6 tonne boat in a rowing dinghy (for a laugh, but it did work).
It might be worth breaking down the problem into sub-problems - energy source (steam, human/slave, animal, chemical, spring, weights, flywheel), propulsion (pushing against something: propeller, paddlewheels, ropes, wheels pushing against the side or bottom, top of tunnels). Mix and match the options to find one that suits.
[Answer]
A hand-cranked propellor? The best image I can find is this article on the CSS Hunley.
>
> CSS Hunley was manually powered. The crew (eight men) turned a
> crankshaft, which was connected to the submarine's propeller. Hunley's
> maximum speed, when the crew was working their best, was about 3
> knots.
>
>
>
That speed is for a submerged metal vessel.
<https://uboat.net/articles/63.html>
[Answer]
The 'most sensible' option would be to plan for more reasonable speeds of a traditional draft animal canal network. Humans can move a huge volume of material in a timely fashion even if only heading along at little more than a walking pace of draft animals towing a narrow boat.
*However that's been done and is obviously boring, so...*
If our goal is to establish reliable and speedy transport of large volumes of goods and materials without readily falling into building railroads, then we have a relatively simple option if we can stomach the cost...
**Flash Lock Stairs:**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_lock>
If our society is in a location that can provide enough sources of water then we can harness that flow of water directly. Effectively we are building/rebuilding rivers in a controlled manner, then punting barges out into them to float down the line.
How fast we can allow them to go will depend on how much water we have on hand, how much engineering we're willing to invest, and possibly how brave your crews are... As we're basically building giant and stupidly long log flumes.
Quick travel is of course a one-way deal unless we want to get really creative with lock design, but otherwise we can overcome that with good loop designs. 'Flow' from point A to B down one stretch of canal, then ascend a lock-stair and flow back from B to A [Or from B to C, then another run from C to A] on a different canal.
---
To avoid excessive wear on the canals and improve control, you would likely want to have many very shallow 'steps', and probably send boats down in groups/trains. Skilled lock operators can then open and close their locks in series to maintain and control the speed of the boats, and ensure water levels don't drop too far in any given part of the system.
As a bonus you also naturally end up with stations potentially well suited for optical-telegraph... As each lock probably wants to be setup such that they can see the previous one so they can open or close as needed.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph>
---
Geography wise, such a system would likely work best for a nation which has a long and relatively narrow section of moderately level land that fronts many long mountain/highland valleys that get plenty of rain. Your society is going to need to be experts at designing aqueducts and canals.
[Answer]
Big flat spring that would power the propeller and could be changed to a fresh one at every post or just changed, given the ship can take lots of weight. Maybe even, when the ship's finally stopping, it could be re-winded by the force of the water pushing on the propeller. If not, then the spring mounted in different way could make the propeller help stop the ship.
[Answer]
I would borrow an idea that I read about in Sir Terry Pratchett's book "Snuff".
The book at one point refers to a series of riverboats going up and down a river. The design is described to be somewhat similar to riverboats that once plied the Mississippi River, but they ran on Ox power rather than steam [This wiki article contains references to animal powered paddleboats.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_steamer).
There is a paddle boat system with a paddle array on either side of the boat (like a Mississippi riverboat). This is geared and mated to a couple of large treadmills inside the hull. Oxen are on the treadmills and plod along driving the gear mechanisms, which turn the paddles and propel the boat. When an ox gets tired, harness up a rested ox and keep going. Dung is simply mucked out and tossed over the side.
This gets you moving up and down the mostly calm waters of the canal system. since you will have to dredge them occasionally, you will get a decent amount of fertilizer out of your canal system every year. It's a Win-Win! Navigability is not going to rely on current flow or wind power, and you aren't going to have to worry about animals following a footpath along the sides of the canals towing barges and such.
Just keep in mind that it's not going to smell nice.
] |
[Question]
[
The people of this world follow what is called "The Faith of the Seven". These gods represent different aspects of creation. They are:
1. Khorne: god of war
2. Tzenteech: god of change & ambition
3. Nurgle: god of life & fertility
4. Slaneesh: god of pleasure
5. Nagash: god of death
6. Sigmar: god of order
7. The Star Child: god of machinery
These seven gods are ruled over by a higher god that doesn't interact with creation. He created the seven to interact with humans and govern the human world in his stead. Each nation follows this faith differently. Some worship each god equally, while others worship one above all others, but pay homage to their existence in some way.
A large Council made up of Representatives from all faiths keeps the peace between nations, irrespective of how they follow this religion. As a result, there have been no major wars between countries that attempt to slaughter unbelievers and convert survivors to their version. This Council have locations in every nation which are interconnected through a system of portals. These provide instantaneous travel between locations that only members of the Council can use.
In our world, the Abrahamic religions have had a complicated history with each other, despite them originating from the same God. Even sects within the same faiths have had conflict over minor details or interpretations, accusing each other of heresy and whatnot.
What would religions need to allow for interfaith councils like this to be successful?
[Answer]
What you describe are not different religions, they are different cults **within one polytheistic religion**.
* Have all cults within the religion acknowledge the existence *and necessity* of the entire pantheon. Individuals can still decide to worship Khorne or Nagash, or even try to make their cult more prominent in society, but attacking other cults would be disrespect to a "relative of the boss." Bad idea ...
* Make representatives of **all cults** necessary for the most holy rites of each individual cult. *On this day, we have come together to honor Nurgle, for death requires life and life requires death ...*
The reason why it didn't work out that way in the real world is that the three big monotheistic religions are all different interpretations of the same God. Judaism is v1.0, Christianity is v2.0, Islam is v3.0. Christianity has a problem acknowledging Islam as "also valid" because they would have to explain why they didn't get the upgrade, so to speak. Talking your way around that contradiction requires some clever thinkers, which may not be there when some fanatics try to talk a village into a pogrom.
[Answer]
## Don't Let the Gods Become Too Personal
This was one of Augustine's complaints, growing up in the Roman pantheism, in 'City of God'. While Roman faith had it's mysteries, festivals, and plays, in Augustine's opinion, they were more oriented towards entertainment and education than disciplining adherents in a philosophy. As an argument to prove his point, Augustine pointed out how often Jupiter played to role of villain in plays made in his honor, performed in his own temple.
While certain cults (the Vestals come to mind) had special relationships with the gods, and expectations on both side, the general public did not.
In contrast: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have a special relationship between the believer and the god. In Judaism, every circumcised member of the race has been set apart as god's special people - with special rights, privileges, and responsibilities. Christians have a similar, but different special relationship. And Islam another. All three also try to proscribe a complete internally consistent moral philosophy that should provide for all your needs (which is not limited to just these three faiths).
Hopefully the difference is obvious. While violating the sacred spaces of the Vestals might cause some outrage and bloodshed (because they are a special case), or more generally it might be fun to pick on minority religions (Hypatia of Alexandria) or just blame those minority religions for the unsettled nature of the world (Corinthians and early Christians), this level of faith is still not as visceral as sincerely believing your father/mother/wife/husband/son/daughter can have the eternal good life, and some practitioner of some other faith is leading him/her astray.
Since you mentioned Games Workshop deities, Gav Thorpe's 'The Way of the Warrior' provides a good example. In that work there are thousands - maybe millions - of shrines on the Eldar homeworks teaching philosophies that vary from a little to a lot. There are rivalries between the schools that are run by students possessed by the founder of each denomination. Students come and go, with no lingering relationship beyond the experience.
If you can keep your faith entertaining, educational, fun, but not something as personal (or only as personal in a small number of cases; still not something everyone experiences) - I think it would work.
[Answer]
You're asking about interfaith councils, but as others have pointed out, it sounds more like an *intra*faith council. Which doesn't solve your problem (look at the schisms, sometimes violent, within Christianity and Islam), but it does change it some.
I know a clergy member who is very active in the local interfaith and intrafaith communities, and I was for a time involved in an interfaith group. My experience is that *intrafaith* efforts work more smoothly than one might expect in Jewish communities. Why the difference? I don't *know* this, but I think there is a little more acceptance of "multiple valid paths, each for its own community" there. Are there core requirements, lines you must not cross? Of course. But Judaism recognizes that some of the *details*, even important ones like what is kosher to eat, are not absolute -- there are multiple valid traditions.
Your nations are like that -- they all follow the same gods, have the same core tenets and (if applicable) texts and rules, but -- like the differences between Ashkenazim, S'fardim, and Mizrachim in Judaism -- there are differences. *And those differences are ok.* That doesn't mean anything goes; if one of the nations starts straying into whatever your core faith considers heresy, that's a problem. But if the council starts from the presumption that all of these varying national traditions are *valid*, that all the participating nations share a common religious goal and aspiration, you ought to be able to cut down on the religious wars.
No matter what you do, if it involves humans (or human-like beings) then you're going to have *some* fighting. There are arguments within Judaism about the legitimacy of some groups; I don't want to paint an overly rosy picture. There are arguments, some quite severe, but not all-out war.
[Answer]
**There was a war once**
When some followers of Khorne decided to elevate him above all others. Khorne was so disgusted with them that he persuaded his fellow gods to unite with him and found the council.
Oh the location where these people lived is still a blasted wasteland.
[Answer]
# Most wars are economical
Most wars and fighting in the history of man was not because they believed in different gods. Wars require a vast amount of resources and manpower and are usually only started if the group believes they can make a profit on the whole endeavor. Religions are a nice incentive/excuse to start a war, but as you see from the various schism and wars between people essentially sharing the same faith, people will always wage war if they can profit.
# Make war undesirable for the clergy
If most of the very influential religious figures profit from inter-faith peace and only stand to lose from participating in wars, they will not promote wars. Furthermore your religious leaders need to be strong enough in their position so they can not be easily pressured or blackmailed by political leaders - or they will be pressured to legitimize a political war with their religious power.
# Give the council high profits in international trade
One option to make war highly undesirable for the clergy is to make the council very very rich from peace-times. If the council as an institution holds shares in all major trading companies which trade between countries, they will get huge profits from stable trade routes and peace. If this money is collected monthly and distributed among all members of the council, every member will have an incentive to stay in the council and collect his share.
[Answer]
There's no problem because there's no issue with other gods existing; it's accepted by all parties they do. Moreover, in your setting, those gods actually exist and can demonstrate they exist and interact with their followers.
In the modern concept of Jewish/Christian/Islamic monotheism, God doesn't do that outside of old stories and legends. Regardless of whether you believe in the existence of the monotheistic God/Yahweh/Allah/Whatever/Whoever or not, this is demonstrably the case. If there's some dispute, everyone can argue they're doing God's will, but God (or Jesus, for Christians) doesn't show up and confirm that someone is right or that someone is completely full of crap, or that the disagreement is in itself silly. So when you get a doctrinal disagreement, it can result in violence because there's no voice thundering from the heavens to tell people to stop being stupid, and everyone involved thinks they're the one's speaking and acting for God.
This is clearly not the case in your setting. If someone starts getting heretical (say, by denying the existence of any deity but the one they worship, or denying the existence of gods in general) they could end up on the wrong end of a lightning strike. It's a lot easier to sort out disagreements if you *know* that if someone was clearly wrong, there would be a sign from the heavens that absolutely no one would ever confuse with being anything else.
[Answer]
Your council has portal technology and a desire for peace among all nations.
Unlike the religions of the real world, this is a united clergy with a technological advantage over their followers. With such an advantage, such a council's rule would be absolute for as long as it managed or obscured its inner power struggles from the outside world.
If the portal technological is interpreted as proof of divine intervention, then no other faith will be allowed to flourish without first providing a similarly irrefutable proof. To this end, keeping the portal technology guarded at the council locations will be critical.
Equally important is the presentation of a united front among council members. People will assume that the gods live peacefully with each other as long as the representatives of those gods live peacefully together. To this end, I would suggest that you give the council members an additional technological advantage. Have each of them implanted with a brain-to-brain interface linked by a radio technology based in the same advanced physics as the portals.
In this way, any council member can be in council with the rest of the council whenever they are in public. If a would-be radical tries to stir up a crowd based on the superiority of one of the gods over the others, a single council member, armed with the wisdom of the entire council can shut him down with peaceful words which simultaneously disprove his assertions while respecting and reinforcing the unifying image of a united pantheon of gods.
[Answer]
Many religions are very tolerant of other faiths. They believe that different religions are real, but that only certain gods care about them, or they believe all religions are just different explanations of the same thing. The reason certain religions have so much issue with accepting other faiths is because intolerance of other gods is part of their faith. In general, monotheists have the most trouble with other religions because their faith includes things like the 1st Commandment or the jihad which are designed to maintain focus on just the one god.
] |
[Question]
[
Given the amazing computational power of [Matrioshka Brains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain) (M-brains), all the amazing things it can do, including but not limited to the following.
1. Allotting space for an almost perfect simulation of the continuation of the last natural configuration of the star system. With a formalized Grand Unified Theory (an equation governing all the fundamental physical laws of the universe), M-brains can even be made to think about futures where they didn't exist.
2. Lifting the parent star to extend its lifespan and/or extract materials that the resident celestial bodies (like asteroids, planets, moons, etc.) cannot provide.
3. Housing digital souls in different GUT-based simulations.
4. Engineering each node to be capable of housing, securing, and providing for physical beings as well.
---
Other than the fact that they may simply choose not to, why wouldn't advanced civilizations litter the galaxy with these monstrosities?
Instead of:
1. Launching generation ships
2. Searching for habitable planets
3. Terraforming uninhabitable ones
4. Burrowing into asteroids
Why not launch Von Neumann probes that can terraform entire star systems into livable M-brains?
---
If developing civilizations are still living within the star system, surely an ethical dilemma will be encountered, but its advantages far outweigh the disadvantages so convincing natives to participate and cooperate with the M-brain creation will be the only logical course of action.
[Answer]
I can think of a number of reasons why a civilisation that managed to build one Matrioshka Brain wouldn't ever build another, here are some of them:
* slow-boat travel issues, the distances between stars means that sending conversion systems to other stars takes millions of years, assuming nothing goes wrong on the trip, a Matrioshka civilisation would of course simulate any action before taking the plunge. Sending out equipment packs to convert the neighbours will take millions of years and has at best a low chance of success. Knowing that their civilisation will never see such a plan come to fruition there's no reason to try.
* light speed, so you convert neighbouring systems to create new Matrioshka Brains and? Without some sort of instantaneous communication you still don't have neighbours you can have a meaningful conversation with, there's not much point in expending resources on grand projects that don't actually do anything to enrich your existence.
* induced isolationism, having a Matrioshka Brain, you can do anything you want to, as individuals and as a society, without ever leaving home *anything*. Such a society, with nothing to strive for, will stay home and vegetate, uninterested in anything in the outside universe.
* economic collapse, building a Matrioshka Brain may be so expensive of time and resources as to deplete the civilisation that undertakes the project to the point where they simply can't mount another large scale project like an interstellar mission.
* physical collapse, a Matrioshka Brain is potentially far more vulnerable to radiation damage, from events large and small, than any other form of civilisation ever thought up. A large event like a Gamma Ray burst, or a series of small ones like a flare swarm, could cripple a Matrioshka civilisation still in the construction phase, before it can look to send out envoys.
* anthropic incident, if the universe is at all [anthropic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle) then the creation of a Matrioshka Brain is actually extremely dangerous. Since a Matrioshka Brain is super-sapient and super-sentient if the universe is weakly anthropic it could in fact wipe out the civilisation that tried to build it by thinking of a world without itself in it, or by thinking of something worse. If the universe is strongly anthropic a Matrioshka Brain simulation of a universe without it, like the one you propose, would result in said Matrioshka Brain disappearing along with the civilisation it supports.
[Answer]
**Material Limits:**
Matrioshka Brains are big. A megacomputer so large it is wrapped around a star in multiple layers. It is virtually impossible to comprehend just how big such a structure would be, if you were actually living in one. As Robert Bradbury puts it [in this 1999 paper](https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1999-bradbury-matrioshkabrains.pdf),
>
> Matrioshka Brain construction is limited by the fundamental abundance of elements in their local region of space. Silicon may be excellent for building microprocessors and carbon (as diamond) excellent for building rod logic computers but neither of these elements is highly abundant in the universe as a whole. A major part of engineering MB will be the efficient partitioning of matter into the various components.
>
>
>
He goes on to describe some specific scenarios that would limit the construction of such a structure based upon the local situation:
>
> * Insufficient titanium, aluminum or carbon to build the maximum number of nanoscale components, particularly high pressure circulation systems and nanocomputers.
> * Insufficient aluminum or magnesium to build solar collecting apparatus capable of harvesting and redirecting the maximum amount of available solar power.
> * Insufficient copper, nickel or iron for the construction of highly efficient metal oxide radiator surfaces (though amorphous carbon, e.g. lampblack, may be a substitute).
> * Insufficient circulating fluid (Na, NH3, CH4, O2, N2, Ne, He) for the efficient cooling of computers (rod-logic, semiconductor, helical-logic, superconductor) at specified operating temperatures.
> * Insufficient rare elements (Sb, In, Cd, Te, Hg, As, B, etc.) used as semiconductor dopants or as layers in solar cells or semiconductor lasers.
> * Insufficient silver or gold to build highly effective telescopes for observing or communicating with other civilizations.
>
>
>
So with this being said, even if a civilization had the incredible energy and will to create such structures, they would likely be heavily limited in how many they could construct simply by the lack of suitable materials. You can imagine such a civilization transporting entire planets worth of silicon towards MBs currently under construction. Maybe they have entire stars covered in [starlifters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting) for the sole purpose of getting enough material for this endeavor.
It'd be a great economy for cargo companies, let's say that.
[Answer]
Besides a whole host of logistical concerns that AugustDay points out, there are a few hard theoretical bounds that preclude your first point about using these machines to perfectly simulate solar systems. These all basically hinge on one fact: the universe is very big, and there's lots of stuff in it. If you ever work in computational physics, you'll find a very large portion of the work comes down to figuring out how much you can simplify your model and not get a totally garbage result, because there's just too much stuff to simulate everything exactly.
To give a more concrete answer, let's forget about GUT level simulations and assume we just want to simulate plain old Newtonian mechanics perfectly, which is far simpler. Well, to do this, note that as a rough estimate, there are about $10^{57}$ atoms in the solar system, and for each one say 1000 bits is enough information to accurately describe it. This means that each time step will require on the order of $10^{60}$ bit operations. I'd say that a time step of at less than $10^{-15}$ seconds is necessary, as humans have measured time scales around this range. So that gives a value of at least $10^{75}$ bit operations per second of simulation time. That's astronomical-- even if you have a star at your disposal! And keep in mind this is a severe underestimate, since it doesn't take into account quantum mechanics, relativity, or even electromagnetic fields.
To get an idea of how impossibly large this number is, I'll introduce you to Landauer's Principle, which states that in irreversible computing (ie all computing we've done so far), any irreversible manipulation of information requires at least
$$kTln(2)$$
joules of energy. In space, the lowest we can get T is about 3K, which is the temperature of cosmic background radiation. You can make colder environments, but this requires additional energy for refrigeration, which would take away from the energy available for computation. Combining with the sun's luminosity of about $4\*10^{26} J/s$, we find the information theoretic limit of about
$$10^{49}operations/sec$$
for what our sun could produce. That's nothing compared to what we need, even assuming our computer works at the maximum possible efficiency (which none of our current computers even come close to). In fact, the computer using our sun wouldn't even be able to get through a single time step before the sun died!
And the situation gets even more bleak if we consider GUT level calculations like you say. In that case, the formulation of QFT requires us to create an extremely fine grid to which we assign several fields. Humans have probed to at least $10^{-18}m$, so if we want the simulation to convince them, we would need a grid with a resolution at least as fine as this. But this requires $10^{54}$ cells per cubic meter, so even simulating a single cubic meter would be pushing the limits of our computer.
Now, it might be possible to wave these concerns away by saying something along the lines of "perhaps they've utilized reversible computing", but really you can magic away any scientific objection by saying science has advanced to unforeseen frontiers. I just wanted to give you an idea of how difficult it would be to implement your plan according to modern understanding, even in an idealized world.
**EDIT-** I just realized I was thinking of years instead of seconds when I said the sun would die before a time step occurred. So in reality, the sun could perform about $10^6$ of the time steps I described. To be fair, my estimate of $10^{60}$ operations per time step is a criminal underestimate, since it doesn't take into account the operations needed to compare each particle to every other particle and do arithmetic. A more accurate number taking this into account would probably be around $10^{120}$ operations per time step.
[Answer]
**Why Should We?**
There's a pretty famous story along these lines - the 1969 moon landing was heralded as a marvelously innovative part of American history, where NASA scientists wielded the terrifying and tremendous power of supercomputers to do calculations far beyond the scope of mankind's wildest dreams before. The sheer amount of computation we needed to do to put a man on the moon would have confounded all the greatest minds of every age up until the advent of the computer, when man was suddenly supplanted by machine as the best mathematician - performing thousands of calculations per second with no need to stop and rest, these mechanisms were miracles in and of themselves. Through their might, we performed space travel.
These days? I've got more computing power in my phone :
<https://www.zmescience.com/research/technology/smartphone-power-compared-to-apollo-432/>
Of course it seems like a good idea to send starter kits to set up computers on stars all around the universe; growth is human nature. But if we did so (even ignoring the issue of moving around the raw materials and manpower it would take to build such a thing, *and* the delays caused by space travel that can't go faster than light speed), within a matter of years, the technology would be so ridiculously behind the current level that it probably wouldn't even be worth bringing up to speed : everyone buys a new computer rather than replacing their floppy disk drive with a CD-ROM. And while it seems like you may be able to derive huge benefits from such a large machine, who's to say Siri won't be able to do the same thing in just a few years?
[Answer]
The creation of a Matrioshka Brain assumes certain computational feats are possible, namely the creation of strong A.I. that can mimic a human range of thought and emotion, we have no evidence whatsoever that such a thing is in fact possible. We won't build them if:
A. that level of A.I. is not possible or
B. we can't get sufficient computational density to overcome the light lag of trying to communicate across the solar system and/or
C. we can't get sufficient energy collection efficiency to power it.
That assumes that we *want* to build one, there are a raft of social, religious, and emotional reasons we may posit for humans never building a Matrioska Brain, they are to most modern people's way of thinking at least a bit creepy, we may never grow out of that attitude.
[Answer]
I see some answers about the physical or technological constraints on such a project, but I think you might be looking for answers strictly concerning ethical constraints. Here are my thoughts:
There are groups of people today who don't want us to put anything in space because they think we're polluting it with our earth germs, and thereby potentially destroying some life which we might not know about.
So here's the issue in short: The value of such a project is measurable in terms of the level of comfort and the rate of technological advancement we can achieve with the aid of such a device, but as of yet we are unable to measure the value of a single sentient lifeform.
Although we can measure the electrical movements of the brain and correlate them with different conscious activity, but we can't account for the consciousness any more than we can say that storm clouds are conscious by virtue of their electrical activity.
Science is limited that way, because it can only account for measurable phenomena, so even if we create a computational environment which mimics the electrical activity in the brain identically, in every measurable way, we can't say that it is actually conscious without personally experiencing it. And even if we download a person into the machine, we won't know if they are really conscious or if they are just simulating the behaviors associated with consciousness.
That is to say, the ends don't justify the means. No amount of quick scientific advancement can justify taking sentient life, because the value of sentience can't be measured in a way that enables us to compare it with the value of the technological advancements.
[Answer]
Perhaps you are familiar with the works of the late Iain Banks? He is the creator of the [Culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture), a far-future, transhumanist utopia, which provides the setting for many of his books. In his exploration of the trajectory of human civilization into the distant future he tackled something akin to your question. I think his answer is a good one and rather than do you the disservice of paraphrasing his reasoning I provide an excerpt from his short essay ["A Few Notes on the Culture"](http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm).
>
> The humans of the Culture, having solved all the obvious problems of
> their shared pasts to be free from hunger, want, disease and the fear
> of natural disaster and attack, would find it a slightly empty
> existence only and merely enjoying themselves, and so need the
> good-works of the Contact section to let them feel vicariously useful.
> For the Culture's AIs, that need to feel useful is largely replaced by
> the desire to experience, but as a drive it is no less strong. The
> universe - or at least in this era, the galaxy - is waiting there,
> largely unexplored (by the Culture, anyway), its physical principles
> and laws quite comprehensively understood but the results of fifteen
> billion years of the chaotically formative application and interaction
> of those laws still far from fully mapped and evaluated.
>
>
> By Godel out of Chaos, the galaxy is, in other words, an immensely,
> intrinsically, and inexhaustibly interesting place; an intellectual
> playground for machines that know everything except fear and what lies
> hidden within the next uncharted stellar system.
>
>
> This is where I think one has to ask why any AI civilization - and
> probably any sophisticated culture at all - would want to spread
> itself everywhere in the galaxy (or the universe, for that matter). It
> would be perfectly possible to build a Von Neumann machine that would
> build copies of itself and eventually, unless stopped, turn the
> universe into nothing but those self-copies, but the question does
> arise; why? What is the point? To put it in what we might still regard
> as frivolous terms but which the Culture would have the wisdom to take
> perfectly seriously, where is the fun in that?
>
>
> Interest - the delight in experience, in understanding - comes from
> the unknown; understanding is a process as well as a state, denoting
> the shift from the unknown to the known, from the random to the
> ordered... a universe where everything is already understood perfectly
> and where uniformity has replaced diversity, would, I'd contend, be
> anathema to any self-respecting AI.
>
>
> Probably only humans find the idea of Von Neumann machines
> frightening, because we half-understand - and even partially relate to
> - the obsessiveness of the ethos such constructs embody. An AI would think the idea mad, ludicrous and - perhaps most damning of all -
> boring.
>
>
> This is not to say that the odd Von-Neumann-machine event doesn't crop
> up in the galaxy every now and again (probably by accident rather than
> design), but something so rampantly monomaniac is unlikely to last
> long pitched against beings possessed of a more rounded wit, and which
> really only want to alter the Von Neumann machine's software a bit and
> make friends....
>
>
>
[Answer]
## Better options for a mega-structure super-computer will almost certainly exist by the time that this is viable.
The idea behind the Matrioshka Brain is to harvest as much energy as possible with the highest efficiency possible. This is in order to power a mega structure super-computer. The computational power in this scenario is irrelevant since a Matrioshka Brain necessitates that the technology to make the super computers that it is composed of already exists.
**Any super computer that could be made into solar orbit sized sphere could probably be made into a different shape, more easily and with fewer resources.**
So when asking the question:
>
> "In a scenario where a civilization must have the computing power of a
> Matrioshka brain and has the available technology, why would they
> elect not to use this idea?"
>
>
>
The only thing we have to think about is, "*are there better potential energy sources?*".
If we assume the civilization can create can create a Matrioshka Brain, then we can also assume that they already have access to the kind of computers that would be used in said Brain.
So if we have the computers, and just need to find a proper energy sources, are there any better ones than a star? Are there better energy sources that don't necessitate transporting quadrillions of units of delicate hardware into very specific locations? So many units that the fuel and materials alone may be greater than what exists in the current solar system?
Almost certainly a better and more practical power source will exist.
I can already think of a few and its not even the future yet. Make a super planet sized super computer that is powered either by **kugelblitz** (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_(astrophysics)>), or **antimatter**, or some other **high energy** man made energy source.
[Answer]
Some philosophers have argued that, when considered objectively, life creates more suffering than it does joy.
[*Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence*](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0199549265) by David Benatar
If your future engineers subscribe to this belief, then they might decide that more simulations would create more suffering, and therefore the creation of more M-brains would be morally repugnant to them.
(Although it is hard to imagine how a society with such an outlook could survive more than one generation anyway. But perhaps the M-brain itself could reach the conclusion itself.)
(Then perhaps the M-brain could then be set to work doing things other than simulation. Perhaps it could try to find a way to end all universes, and thus end all suffering.)
(Or perhaps, a society with the technology to create M-brains, might have been able to prevent suffering before reaching this stage.)
---
Alternatively, they might wonder "What would have happened?" (FOMO)
Since Heisenberg reckons we cannot collect an exact snapshot of a solar system, we may never be able to simulate exactly what would have happened to that solar system in the future. The only way to know is to leave it alone to evolve on its own course.
This could also be tied to so metaphysical ideas. Perhaps they believe in a creator and they think it might have had a plan for the system which should not be disturbed. They could apply this rule selectively, only to systems they deem religiously significant.
[Answer]
If the aliens are like humans, I see two paths for this to happen.
1. They create the technology that can build a Matrioshka structure in 5 years or less. They get a sudden passion to do it, and they do. Assuming it works right the first try, then they have a Matrioshka structure. Otherwise it might take a long time before they try again. Depending partly on what they get instead of a functional Matrioshka Brain.
2. They start making a collection of little decisions that look logical to them. Each one looks like a good idea at the time. Eventually, in 10,000 years or less (or more) they look around and realize they have accidentally created a Matrioshka Brain.
At any point, people discussing one little decision might discuss where it's heading.
"We don't have enough bandwidth. People are getting unacceptable delays in their porn and political arguments."
"No problem, just put up another 1000 modules. We can easy charge enough to pay for it."
"You know, when you look at where we're heading with all this, if we keep going this way, in a thousand years we could have a Matrioshka Brain."
"That's good, let's discuss it sometime, maybe during the yearly office Christmas party. We have practical issues to deal with now."
] |
[Question]
[
I love the look and feel of 30 or so stories tall, pyramid shaped megabuildings, with rich people on the outer shell, having windows, and poor pushed to the inside.
In our current climate and economic conditions, such buildings do not make sense. They would've been built if they did. I can't wrap my head around it, such buildings would have issues with access to air etc. These issues would, to some extent, be what I need in my story, but they should be something that is handled - and thus, reasons for megabuildings of this particular shape should be financially compelling enough for them to be dealt with.
So, **what is the minimal set o changes to the real world** that needs to happen for such buildings to realistically start to appear?
For the shape, I'm flexible on that, but what I had in mind would be sci-fi version of El Castillo at Chichen Itza:
[](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chichen_Itza_3.jpg#mw-jump-to-license)
[Answer]
**Earthquake resistance.**
[Sustainability problems of the Giza pyramids](https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40494-020-0356-9)
>
> The Pyramidal shape represents an extraordinary advantage, since the
> pyramid is the most earthquake-resistant structure possible, even more
> than the domes. For the construction details; several layers of
> smoothed stones without any mortars or sticky materials between them
> actually form a kind of base isolation for the foundations, where some
> flat small stones like pillow were laid to absorb the first shock of
> earthquake force on the pre-prepared soil under foundations. Some big
> stones layers were put over these small stones. The number of layers
> in most of the times was three and no mortar was used, the large
> foundation stones are called “Orthostat” stones. The pyramid shaped
> building is suitable in earthquake prone area due to its higher
> stiffness and less displacement.
>
>
>
Failure due to earthquake is not a problem for pyramids. They are super durable because of the squat shape and can be made more so as describe in linked text. In your world, earthquakes are frequent enough that the durability of the pyramids more than compensates for their inefficient use of space.
[Answer]
A pyramid shape is simple: the weight of the lighter top part is distributed over more construction material down below, which means you can make the overall building much taller. The stronger the material, the less sloping you will need for a given height of tower, but really every building above a trivial size has pyramids built into it. That's obvious for towers like the [Burj Khalifa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa), but ostensibly rectangular buildings do have a thinner internal skeleton near the top. That's the same principle as the pyramid.
To make buildings in general more overly pyramid-shaped, what you need is to eliminate strong construction materials. Steel, for example: possibly you could make iron ore much rarer, so that while there's enough for swords and technology, nobody would build an entire building with a metal skeleton like we do today.
That still does not guarantee pyramids like the Egyptian/Mayan style. The highest medieval buildings all lacked a metal skeleton too: that was because they were largely hollow, and had a lot of external support structures like [buttresses](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttress) to keep the footprint low. The highest buildings without metal can be found in the medieval part of [this list](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_world%27s_tallest_buildings).
So in a world without metal in buildings, you would still have buildings shaped like this:
It is up to you whether you consider that pyramid-shaped enough. If you want even more obvious slopes, you might need to get rid of some of the advanced masonry techniques too - but that would be harder to justify.
[Answer]
**Bad climate or ecology**
Pyramid shape was popular since antiquity. However, for the tall buildings, they are considerably less efficient than the "tower" shape.
* It's more difficult to build a pyramid than a similar tower using modern or pre-modern technology;
* It's considerably more difficult to provide interior areas of a pyramid with light and ventilation;
(A disclaimer - I am talking about pyramids with "classic" aspect ratio, like Egyptian or Mayan pyramids. High aspect ratio pyramids, like London's Shard are "towers" as far as I am concerned).
However, if our goal is to make a large interior space rather than lot of small rooms, pyramids are better than towers. Still, they are badly losing to domes if our goal is constructing a vast interior space.
A combined purpose - lots of quarters at the surface and vast interior space inside would make pyramid a viable architectural choice. But why would that be a primary architectural shape?
If open areas are inhospitable to people - too hot, or too cold, or air quality is too poor, or ozone layer had gone away - there will be a pressure to build enclosed arcologies with large open spaces inside. They still would compete with towers and domes, but I can see that they can prevail in this competition.
[Answer]
I assume that the technology is advanced enough to solve the technical problems. So the problem would be only economical, why would people build buildings that occupy a lot of space on the ground, provide less internal space than tower shaped buildings and require a lot more fixtures? Light. The atmosphere is heavily polluted and just a small amount of light can go through. The city rules imposed the pyramid shape to let more light get to the street level.
[Answer]
Strictly speaking, the building style [doesn't](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053231/Worlds-expensive-house-Antilia-Mumbai-lies-abandoned.html) [really](https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/03/capital-gate-building-leaning-tower-of.html) [have](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/longaberger-basket-home-office) [to](https://mymodernmet.com/szotynscy-zaleski-krzywy-domek-crooked-house/) [make](https://www.archdaily.com/103991/ad-classics-palais-bulles-antti-lovag) [sense](https://www.visualatelier8.com/architecture/2020/8/sou-fujimoto-architects-larbre-blanc). At least in the modern world, people will design buildings based on what they find attractive. If your society really likes that particular look, they'll build buildings that way. Nothing really needs to make that design *necessary*, it only has to be something that people want.
As far as practicality goes, the people living in the interior will need some sort of ventilation at a minimum. Most likely, you'll see these structures have a hollow core (imagine a square- or cylinder-shaped hole in the dead center). Poorer residents still have windows to the outside, but all they can see is the wall across the way. The wealthier residents on the outside get actual views, balconies, breezes, etc. You could also use extensive artificial ventilation systems like they use on cruise ships, but a small inner courtyard open to the sky is a much cheaper and more reliable option. It also gives you a handy way to run utilities such that you can access them easily for maintenance purposes.
[Answer]
All the examples of pyramid shaped building in the other answers are from the northern hemisphere. Here's one from the southern hemisphere: the [State Government office building in Geelong, Australia](https://www.flickr.com/photos/adonline/473388957). It's stepped and inverted.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mXRFN.jpg)
[Answer]
1. People grow food on sides of the pyramid. This is fairly simple for irrigation - you only need to get water to the top and you are done. Sure, getting it all the way to the top and then flow down sounds pretty wasteful, but if you are lucky enough to have some natural geysers at suitable places you would simply build your pyramid over it and you have solved your irrigation problem. If that water is hot in an otherwise cold area (say Iceland), beyond improving farming by heating the ground you have also simultaneously solved heating of the houses. Rich people live near the sides of pyramids and farm, poor people live inside and herd ships and sheep.
2. Sun is always low on the horizon in the habitable region (say Antarctica). Almost nothing grows on the ground, but vegetation grows on anything upright very well. Building something tall is a recipe for disaster because sides would immediately get covered in dense vegetation that would threaten to collapse the house/skyscraper/etc. Initially people built low houses that grew in size as population grew. Later on, they built a house on top of that house. And another. So, the pyramid was born.
3. Make the world a fairly hot place and everyone would WANT to live sheltered by few meters of rock. Your ancient people started living in caves and never considered building houses because it was far too hot to live in one. So, once natural caves got exhausted, they built homes inside one suitable hill. Once population grew, many moved to next hills and repeated the story, until all existing hills there got occupied. So, they started digging deeper. The rich enjoyed fresh air and sun near the edge and the poor lived in stinky, damp and dark places in the middle. Sure, this isn't actually a "building" but close enough :)
[Answer]
# It's Free Real Estate
If land is cheap, you don't usually build tall buildings. Sprawl is cheaper, at least for the developers (but it's more expensive for society as a whole). You only build tall buildings in places like New York or London where there's a high demand for residential or office space but land is very expensive. A blocky tower makes the most sense because you want to use every inch of space.
If you're settling another planet, there's probably going to be more land than you can use, at least for a few generations. Concrete requires a lot of water to make, so if water is scarce it'd make more sense to use stone. It'd probably be a lot easier to make a stone pyramid than a stone tower.
Also, if the atmosphere isn't breathable, a dome doesn't provide protection until it's completely finished, but assuming they're sealed, lower levels of the pyramid would still be inhabitable while the upper levels are being built. You could even make the pyramids out of prefabricated modules, and the lower levels wouldn't have to be as strong as they would be for a tower.
It's also possible that a galactic empire might build pyramids on more settled worlds for aesthetic reasons, because they remind people of the colonies.
[Answer]
## Anti-Planned Obsolescence Culture
Modern Capitalist society is all about building things cheaply and efficiently within minimal margins under the expectation that they will eventually break down after an expected warranty period so that you can throw it away an make a new one. But many cultures throughout history did not share this sentiment. Up until the early 1900s, it was the goal of nearly every manufacturer to make the best, longest lasting products that they could... but as it turns out, doing so is bad for business.
Capitalisms is all about how successful your business is, not how successful your society is. In a capitalist society, making a product too well will ensure that you will eventually run out of work to do; so, we always do what we can to avoid permanent solutions to problems.
However, if you were to achieve some manner of ideal socialist system that is actually functional, then wealth would be a measure of how much people have, not how much they make and sell. So a socialist government may choose to spend a few years having a factory make a bunch of really durable and easily repaired cars designed to last for 100 years, then shut that factory down for a while and move those workers over to another factory making some really long lasting refrigerators instead. The idea of production being temporary and products being permeant may make products more expensive on the front-end, but the the cost-over-time of products would go way down leading to a society that is effectively wealthier despite a lower GDP.
### What does this have to do with pyramids?
Pyramids are not cost efficient, but they last a VERY long time. If you tell a capitalist, he needs to invest 10 million dollars for a tower that will last 100 years or 30 million dollars for a pyramid that will last 1000 years, then the 10 million dollar building looks like a much better option under the principle that "I won't be around in 100 years anyway". But governments live much longer than people do. So, a socialist government may look at the the same option and see that the tower will cost the nation \$100,000 per year, but the pyramid only cost \$30,000; so, the cost of a pyramid over time, despite its inefficiencies, still makes it the better investment.
[Answer]
**Problems overview**
Pyramids are difficult buildings. They have a large footprint, but greatly reducing amounts of space towards the top. The travel throughout a particularly large one can lead to multiple short elevators, stairs and the like to reduce the walking distances to something manageable. Their interior can be more difficult to design from a light and living perspective. They are likely expensive and require more difficult on site transport of materials during building.
**Standardization**
To help reduce the cost, standardization can help a *lot*. This can be done with prefabrication of a lot of elements, which are then simply inserted in the building site. After that a crew can start the finishing touches inside, if this hasn't been standardized as well.
Alternatively you can look into 3D printing. 3D printing is difficult to put to industrialization, creating untold of copies of something. But buildings can strangely enough benefit greatly from the technology. Lots of the building is automated thanks to the 3D printer, which can run at night. The interior of the building can easily be tweaked in the design stages, where the 3D printer will just incorporate these changes when it starts building. Not everything can be printed, but this can be added by a normal crew. All you need is a specialized printer for pyramids. This makes the bulk of it low in cost, while increasing build speed.
**Multi functional pyramids**
Mixing of area's is essential to a functioning neighborhood. That is why it is essential to mix living, recreation, education, work and retail together. The mix absolutely doesn't need to be perfect in a pyramid. You can have specialization, or even just different buildings nearby that fulfill the purpose. But a city where everything is easy to get to, while not locking you inside is very important for people's living idea.
The mixing also has many advantages. There are many things, like retail, that often desire to have artificial light. You can add these to the darker parts of the pyramid. On the outside you don't need to have only residential. You can add café, whole parks or activities up a slope, or part of it.
The advantage of pyramids is that they are still more efficient than rows of houses per m3.
**Architecture for better living**
Although the light might seem a problem, skylights are actually incredibly powerful ways to get light in even pretty deep places, if enough attention is taken to the placement and distribution. The same counts for fresh air and the like. That means you should prevent cramming everything full with something. That can actually be a great advantage, as this can easily result in area's where it is both feeling great and looking interesting.
**Culture**
Architecture is a lot ingrained in the culture. There are African tribes where everything is a circle. Per time period and location you can see different styles emerging. You can even see in some buildings with long building times, like churches throughout Europe, that they use different styles as they are building. Modern pyramids can become a temporary fad, that influences building. If the tools of standardization for relatively cheap and reliable building is created, it can become big. Especially with 3D printing, as in the building phase you can even have people request their own take on the apartment they'll be buying.
**Conclusion**
Theoretically the smallest change is the culture that needs to change, even just temporarily for building to start and financing to have been completed. But for a more stable method, it should be relatively low cost, well use of space in comparison to some zoning methods, nice to live in and relatively short travel distances.
[Answer]
Such buildings have actually been built in real life. Why on Earth anybody would think it's a good idea, it beats me; but the truth is that some architects did believe such buildings make sense and some corporations or public authorities paid for them.
* A 20-storey [pyramidal block of flats in Kunshan, China](https://www.alamy.com/file-aerial-view-of-a-pyramid-shaped-apartment-in-kunshan-city-east-chinas-jiangsu-province-14-december-2019-image369503052.html). (Link goes to Alamy; they want money for using the picture.)
* A 40-storey [pyramidal block of flats in New York, USA](https://www.agefotostock.com/age/en/details-photo/via-57-west-pyramid-shaped-apartment-building-with-skyline-architects-bjarke-ingels-group-hudson-river-hell-s-kitchen-manhattan-new-york-usa/IBR-4435108). (Link goes to Age Fotostock; they want money for using the picture.) (Look for "VIA 57 WEST".)
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luxury_Apartments_VIA_57_West,_Bjarke_Ingels_Group.jpg)
*Aerial photograph of the [VIA 57 West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_57_West) pyramidal apartment building along the Hudson River in the Hells Kitchen/Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Photograph by Wikimedia user David.Clay.Photography, [available on Wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luxury_Apartments_VIA_57_West,_Bjarke_Ingels_Group.jpg) under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.*
* The [Transamerica Pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transamerica_Pyramid) *"in the Financial District of San Francisco, California, United States, is a 48-story futurist building and the second tallest building in the San Francisco skyline"* (Wikipedia). It was designed by William Pereira for the Transamerica Corporation and completed in 1972.
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SF_Transamerica_full_CA.jpg)
*Transamerica building, downtown San Francisco, CA, USA. Photo taken from Coit tower. Photograph by Wikimedia user Daniel Schwen, [available on Wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SF_Transamerica_full_CA.jpg) under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.*
* The [London Shard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard) *"is a 72-storey skyscraper, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, in Southwark, London"* (Wikipedia). It was completed in 2012.
[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard)
*The Shard, view taken from the Sky Garden in 2015. Photograph by Wikimedia user Colin, [available on Wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Shard_from_the_Sky_Garden_2015.jpg) under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.*
* Note that large buildings with facades which retreat as they go up are pretty common, for the obvious reasons related to the strength of materials. Some are even iconic, as Neave Brown's brutalist [Alexandra Road estate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Road_Estate) in London, England.
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rowley_Way_03.jpg)
*Photograph by Wikimedia user Giogo, [available on Wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rowley_Way_03.jpg) under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.*
[Answer]
**Atmospheric resonance causing heavy land storms in the winter season**
At first, it was not clear what happened. The sudden climate change observed, that took about 40 years, had only visual side effects at first. Looking at satellite aerial pictures, it occurred to some scientists that horizontal bands, Jupiter-like straight clouds started to appear in the earth atmosphere. In these early years, aircraft pilots above 20.000 feet started to notice devastating turbulence zones, that coincided with the bands. Some atmospheric resonance had kicked in, resulting in massive, continuous E-W airflow and very unsafe airspace above many countries. In the winter, the altitude of the phenomenon gradually lowered. After 10 years, spontaneous hurricanes over land started to occur, devastating any vertical structure, building or tree, in their path. To be safe, people started to build pyramid-shaped buildings with strong shielding as winter time shelters. These buildings could stand 300-700 mph windspeeds. This climate change constituted a clear mass extinction event, affecting mamals on land considerably. Many species died and very strange things occurred, like African elephants found on the shores of Cuba. In the summer, people would leave the pyramids and go backpacking in the mountains. Outside the pyramids, there is only grassland. No big trees survived the appearance of the storms. Agriculture is possible in the spring and summer season. When it becomes autumn, everything is torn apart and flattened out by the storms, people go inside permanently.
[Answer]
Looking at examples in AlexP answer I started to like the idea, and here are the reasons why.
In contrary to your desire to push poor people into dark corners of such buildings, it provides more window space, and daylight as result, for the same amount of volume(apartments) and materials used. For a longer period of time if such buildings are next to each other.
* turns out it is the case for small ones
The volume of a pyramid is 1/3 of the base area multiplied by height, for a rectangular it just base multiplied by the height. So for the same efficiency pyramid building has to be 3 times higher.
Surface area, sides of pyramid 1/2 × Perimeter × [Slant Length], Slant Length is more than height so, the surface area of the pyramid is at least 1.5 times more.
If you build it more like Egyptian pyramids, not just a smooth slope, like skyscraper faces, but step-wise floors, then the building is safer in cases of emergency, you can have ladders on the outer side of the building. And even if there is no access to internal or external emergency exits, you can make few floors martial arts style, not being one. And then leave the building through standard emergency exits.
* in that sense none of the examples from AlexP is good, maaaybe via 57 west to some extent, buut yeah typical pyramid thing would be better.
The building could have a balcony or patio-type things next to an apartment, public or private. Privacy would not be so great there, but hey more like a public beach thing, almost nothing surprises people those days.
* maybe even some green roads on the exterior of the building to walk, eh? Why not. Such buildings probably can expand city surface accessible for humans to walk two times or more(I mean to expand it by the footprint of buildings, add it to the accessible surface)
The side of a building being stepwise makes it harder to throw things 200 floors down, it most likely lands 5 floors below or something. So open exit on side of the building does not create that much more dangerous to people and vehicles on ground level. (Not quite, but yeah there is something in that)
A building process of such a building by itself can be safer and easier. Maybe even faster because of that. I do disagree with someone's statement that such a building is harder to build, yes maybe for examples like in pictures there are some custom solutions, but for a typical pyramid, that step side design, it barely any different from a typical, not skyscraper building. You will have the same supporting elements from top to bottom, so it is even more unified and suitable for mass production.
The building is more stable on the ground, that is for sure. However side wind will act maybe, not necessarily, a bit more on the building, but with lesser effects on the apartment. So probably the basement has to be a bit stronger.
It is good for places with cold climates. (subjective)
Floors can be insulated and separated from each other, in some sense, soundproofing may be easier. Not just your typical soundproofing, which isn't an easy task in many constructions because of supporting beams under load/compression going basically from top to bottom and if not impossible but then it, not an easy task to stop them to conduct sounds. With a pyramid, it basically rectangular smaller, and smaller on top of each other, and between them, you can put a vibration dumping sandwich of your dreams. Metall working factory on the top floor? No problem, you will not hear a thing from there.
Such unbinding of floors also means each can have its own layout, purpose, and functions - so more flexibility for volume planning, more customizations possible. It will bring its own limitations as well, but still. There is a pair of building in NYC(if I recall correctly) which are built over a road, idea was to use space above the roads in a useful way - the smell was a problem (Elon save us faster) but also noise is a problem as I heard.
## problems
A high building is 800 meters, so for the same footprint efficiency pyramid has to be 2.4 km high. And that brings atmosphere pressure problem. And higher than that, or even at that height it will strike out some good stuff I mentioned before. So it limits the size of it if benefits are to be kept.
* not such a big limitation really, 1km by 1km base
The surface area of one building indeed is bugger, but compared to many rectangular buildings with the same footprint, with roads and stuff between them, it may(will) be less.
but on the other hand, it not necessarily bad, as there are multiple uses for "extra" internal volume, including apartments for people who prefer not to see the fusion reactor in the sky.
Internal volume can be used for storage areas, shops, datacenters, trash recycling, wastewater cleaning, drinkable water processing, energy production(modular mini nuclear reactor as an example). So yeah, arcology on the scale of a building. Which may be more energy-efficient, require fewer city communications for the building. Some production of some goods locally is possible, starting from simple handmade soap to more industrial things(this needs an explanation, but out of scope, helpful things in this direction are already in development) eliminating some logistics transportation chains/needs.
## rectangular vs pyramids
Things depend on what is the percentage of internal space to which do you have a practical and good use, per apartment. This percentage will define the maximum height of the building, for a given slope. If you use 100 percent of it for cows, chickens, pigs, poor people, horses, production facilities, recycling waste processing, parking, etc then you all in for pyramids, no question asked.
* ability to hide parking deep inside alone can be one of the reasons, as there is no way to hide the ugliness of parking buildings otherwise.
If there is not so much use for that space, and you need to have less of it, then it limits the height of the building, and as we have seen it should be 3 times of rectangular one, so if it is less than that then footprint is used less effective.
So if it more like spaceship-building, oneself sufficiency side of things then it quite futuristic approach and may have a place in the future as the main design.
If it is 50/50 volume, and the apartment surface layer is 25m deep(apartments plus that step thing), slope 45 degrees, the size of the building is about 70×70 meters base and 35 meter high, soo will be in some sense it is a less effective land use in an area where buildings are 12 meters and higher. (Numbers not exact, too lazy to calculate it properly, so I use only the base surface as reference)
If the proportion is 10/90 (external/internal) then 160×160×80 meters, not a skyscraper, but for areas where a typical rectangular building is 30m high. (Would be okay for my city)
If the proportion is 1/99 golden percent or spaceship arcology building then 500×500×250 for areas with typical buildings 80m heigh. Not a skyscraper. (More than enough for my area)
Soo the use of internal space is a limiting factor for real life, and if you find a use for it, as an example you can have full in house food production and other types of production there, and then it will require some surface/internal volume there, it will cost quite an energy production so only nuclear option because even golden percent is not enough to bring it to skyscraper territory.
Soo rectangular sticks seem more land efficient and sell better, otherwise, pyramids are good.
## So the answer is
What do you need is to find a use for internal volume, beyond rich-poor proportions. Or do not care about the land, there are one-floor cities, so why not.
[Answer]
There's really no practical reason to build pyramids. Tall buildings are built where land is expensive. Building in a pyramid shape provides less interior space for the land footprint, and so is more expensive. Where land is not expensive, people generally want individual houses surrounded by gardens.
There are only two reasons for building in a pyramid shape: religion and ego.
For religion, note that AFAIK ALL the historic examples of pyramids were built for religious purposes: to give the Pharaoh an afterlife, to get closer to the gods so they'd see you cutting the hearts out of sacrifices, and so on. So if you want pyramids, you need to invent an appropriate religion.
Ego, in its various forms, is also a motivator, as we can see from the modern examples. Want a unique-looking corporate HQ? Build the Transamerica Pyramid instead of a boring rectangular skyscraper, and make it really tall\* to boot. Want to live in a unusual apartment building so you can brag to your friends? Go for a pyramid design by a famous architect. And so on...
\*Note that ego (sometimes in the form of "national pride") is also the reason for a lot of those really tall rectangular skyscrapers, too. Want to show off your new-found wealth? Build a really tall building, regardless of whether it's of any practical use :-)
] |
[Question]
[
So, in my Post-Apocalyptic world, there’s a city down in South Nevada known as Vegas. Unlike the rest of the majority of North America, Vegas was not hit by nuclear warheads in its near vicinity. But, over the last 100 years, society in the city has devolved considerably.
Vegas lives in a state of near constant anarchy. The only government-like forces are the families, but they often cause more trouble than they stop, causing gang wars in the streets and political assassinations and such. Mostly, Vegas’s economy consists of prostitutes, gambling, and drugs.
Back far west, in the region of New California, the USC (United States of California) has arisen, and now boasts a large army and strong government. But, like the Vegas of old, these inhabitants, especially the crime families, want tourists, mainly Californian tourists, to come to their city, as they bring valuable currency that can be used to buy more weapons and armaments.
So, my question is, how can you market an anarchic city as a tourism spot to people (mainly people living in civilized government)?
[Answer]
# Organized Tours
If the Families can agree to jointly fund and protect a tourist agency (or at least agree not to gun them down), the agency can setup organized tours for adventure seekers.
Our modern-day Vegas has hotels, casinos, restaurants, and shows. Any tourist can just show up and enjoy what the city has to offer (which even today is quite possibly "prostitutes, gambling, and drugs"). But post-apocalypse Vegas isn't ready for that.
Bus in each group from Los Angeles (or partner with a New Californian company and do a bus switch at the border) then give them a 5 day (or whatever length) worldwind tour of historic Vegas.
Set them up in set-aside floor of a building that used to be a hotel (use whatever real or made-up story about that hotel's history you want), feed them well, and take them out daily to a variety of places that fit the theme of the tour. Use plenty of security (and costume them well).
Bus them back to California and bring in the next set of tourists.
One hundred years isn't long enough to lose all the stories of Vegas floating around. Play those up and mix them with exclusive tours. People will line up. You can increase the number of tours later, but your target audience will still think of them as hard to get.
If the tours are successful (no deaths), eventually some old hotels and restaurants can be opened up to general tourists. Perhaps they're open as such now, but they'll be perceived as safe (or safe enough). There can still be docent-led tours with security staff if the tourists want to go outside the "safe" zone.
Play up the danger element, but reassure people that you'll take care of them. That combo is irresistible to many who will love for you to take their money. For others, just the change to see beautiful old buildings that weren't bombed into smithereens is worth a small amount of risk.
[Answer]
Do you have a genuine **anarchy** or is it more a tribal or organized crime setting?
* The "families" do not want any city government to interfere with their business.
* The "families" want to do business with each other, so in the absence of law they must gain a *reputation for keeping their word*, and for punishing betrayals.
* The "families" want tourists to spend money.
So they put the word out, first within the family and then on the street -- anyone who touches a tourist without explicit permission from a family boss will **suffer**. Not for breaking the law, but for costing the family face.
Tourists might still be at a higher risk than in a truly law-abiding town, but to balance that they can buy all the sin they want. The rules don't protect the locals, unless the locals have family connections. In your setting, kinky demands are a matter of price.
[Answer]
**Vegas is beautiful.**
All that Road Warrior post apocalyptic wasteland Fallout stuff. Bah. It is like a stew that has pepper as its only spice. Nothing wrong with pepper but your fiction has plenty of that.
Make New Vegas clean and beautiful; an oasis in the desert. The competing families are Mormon families, with family values and they all promote that as a reason Vegas is safe and fun for visitors. Just like people might trust a Jewish diamond shop because it is run by Jews, so people trust Mormon gambling and prostitution houses because of the reputation for tables that are fair and prostitutes that are clean. Some proselytizing goes on of course but the Mormons are good at it and keep that aspect of Vegas at a low volume.
The blood and killing is an unpleasant cost of business, not personal and they do their best to clean up quick and keep collateral damage to a minimum.
[Answer]
**I think you answered it yourself:**
>
> Unlike the rest of the majority of North America, Vegas was not hit by nuclear warheads in its near vicinity.
>
>
>
Even though the citizens of the USC live somewhat comfortably and securely under an organized government, they are unfamiliar with real pre-war cities. They live in stable and secure towns and cities of their own, but many things have changed since the war and cities in the USC just don't match the grandeur and scale of pre-war cities. In fact for many tourists from the USC, visiting Vegas skews their perception of pre-war society and their impression is that before the war cities were much more dangerous and anarchic. In their minds society has settled into peace and order only under the stable hand of the USC government. But in any case, they see the trip as visiting a real pre-war city and the danger is almost expected as part of the experience - "that's just how pre-war cities are."
For others who couldn't care less about seeing a living pre-war city, the same thing draws them to Vegas as anyone present day. Drugs, prostitution, gambling are all effectively limited or outlawed by the USC, and so many people are willing to risk their safety for a hedonistic binge every once in a while in Vegas. Despite the fact that the policing forces don't really protect tourists, and that there is occasional open combat in the streets, chances of dying in Vegas are statistically quite low for a tourist and it's worth it for an experience they won't find in New California.
[Answer]
>
> causing gang wars in the streets and political assassinations and
> such. Mostly, Vegas’s economy consists of prostitutes, gambling, and
> drugs.
>
>
>
So basically, the major change is that assassinations are now hitting the body instead of the character, and everything else is mostly as before, maybe a bit pronounced?
Which means the reasons for your tourists are still the very same:
>
> It's Vegas, baby!
>
>
>
There just isn't any other place like it in what's left of the civilized world. Even more so than before. If you want all the things you can get (only) in Vegas, you have to got to Vegas.
>
> What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
>
>
>
You don't describe what your post-apocalyptic society looks like, but large army and strong government sounds like a police state in the making, so its inhabitants would certainly welcome an opportunity to do ... things. Things that might be illegal, or considered unethical or just frowned upon in their homes. Where probably populations are now smaller which means less anonymity, which means your reputation is more valuable again. Basically: If you're caught cheating on your wife with a prostitute while doing drugs you can't just move to a different neighbourhood and nobody will know you there. But in Vegas...
There's plenty of reasons for people to visit your Vegas, and they aren't much different from the reasons today.
[Answer]
The target of such tourism is people that are attracted to what Vegas can give, and have the power to take care of themselves:
1. They can engage in many activies that would be considered illegal in New California (something that might be extra appealing for the rich)
2. They boast higher technology than Vegas and are therefore not phased by the threat low level criminals might bring.
3. They are rich and therefore have the same social status as the 'families'. They are similarly overbearing, proud and arrogant. They do what they like. They might even find it fun putting some 'criminals' in their place.
[Answer]
A resort in the middle of the city.
A mid-sized resort where people can "look" at the city's chaos, abuse, and anarchy, be it with binoculars, cameras on screens, or any other apparatus or sci-fi-ish mechanism, all of this enbaled by the families, of course. They keep the show running, and people keep pouring in to watch "the spectacle" (So unciviliced!) Reminds me of something similar from the videogame MadWorld, for the Wii. I'm sure there's other similar examples in media.
You could pair this with tours, as other answers have suggested, for a truly detached experience for the tourists. It's like a play for them. Like watching animals at a zoo. That could give for an interesting world perspective, as well. (Commentary, or something?)
[Answer]
What about some sort of fusion of concepts from Discworld and Westworld?
The excessively rich can come and live out their fantasy in this haven of crime and unrest (Westworld). The 'families' agree that an influx of money is important so they form an agreement that the tourists can obtain licensed tourist status (more money) and be immune from the harder crimes that they might otherwise be vulnerable (the inverse of the Thieves Guild approach).
They could also offer ride-along/internship type holidays where they get to participate in the running of the 'families'.
All of this of course with large insurance premiums and airtight contracts. It might be small number of tourists can afford this method but they would be whales!
[Answer]
Bit of a nitpick, but what you are describing is more 'chaotic' or a 'failed state' than 'anarchic'. But anyways,...
>
> how can you market an anarchic city as a tourism spot to people
>
>
>
You answered your own question. By promoting...
>
> prostitution, gambling, and drugs.
>
>
>
People going to Vegas in 2019 certainly aren't going there for the bible classes, after all.
Other possible motivations:
* Cheaper medicine or medical care, or to access medical services that are unavailable in California (in a sci-fi context, this could mean illegal cybernetics).
* Perhaps its cheaper consumer goods (no sales tax, hard to find items).
* Some people are going back to visit family.
* Sometimes its just a rite of passage for a group of guys.
So long as your tourists are *reasonably* safe if they behave themselves and don't stick their noses where they don't belong, there will be a constant appeal to visiting.
[Answer]
If it is an "anarchy" (<= definition not relevant to my answer) there is nobody who would even want to market the city. That would require some sort of a centralized tourism agency between the families. That would actually be possible solution as such an agency would have some ability to enforce rules.
But if we assume no centralized authority exists as that seems a part of the premise, then any marketing would be done by the individual families independently of each other. They would not spend resources to promote their competition, they would promote their own tourist traps.
Which would come with concrete walls, checkpoints and armed guards. For the families to be stable at all, they'd necessarily have some ability to protect themselves and establish safe areas for themselves and their families. That implies they can extend the same protection to the tourist traps.
So despite the city in general being unsafe the locations being promoted would actually be quite safe and well managed. They'd also have well preserved pre-apocalypse architecture and furniture. Probably clothing as well. Essentially theme parks for paradise lost. Not to mention gambling, prostitutes, and drugs. And high security comes included in the stay so people who want to have security for private discussions or because of credible death threats would also come.
I do no think you'd need to do much marketing. If you can manage secure transportation to the tourist trap, the value proposition is actually pretty good for anyone not concerned with the price. I guess it would also service as a social gathering place for people not concerned with price to socialize without needing to worry about the plebeians.
[Answer]
While anarchy can be an impediment to tourism, it does not have to be if
a) Outside society possesses resources to protect themselves while visiting (i.e. the rich hire bodyguards they bring with them). If the nearby established government does not provide adequate internal security, this is likely the case.
b) Bodyguards are for hire within the city. Any tourist who is wealthy enough will hire one and those that don't will bring their own forms of protection. If someone is too stupid for either of these, then they likely get killed or robbed. This would not impact tourism because the thought is that those killed "had it coming."
c) There is something worth the danger to attract people. Being avoided by nukes, Vegas likely already has this quality. If it did not, the reputation of Vegas is such that people would come if prostitution, drugs, and gambling is still available. This is especially true if the nearby government outlaws or restricts any of these things.
d) People can get to the city. This does not need to be caused by any of the families efforts, but can be from outside agencies.
Any of the families can promote one or more of these things to attract tourists, and if these things already exist, the city may have tourists without any effort on the families' part.
However, a family could sabotage the tourism industry by targeting tourists and tourist bodyguards specifically.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/89089/edit).
Closed 6 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/89089/edit)
I have a world where a sort of magical 'mutagen' was accidentally created in the backstory that can cause children to be born stillborn or 'mutated', in a way that usually leads to disability. The exact format and severity of mutation varies with each child. These mutated children are rare now, though common in the recent past.
I want a way that people can tell the difference between a child born with a mutation due to magical pollution and a 'natural' birth defect, some common trait that generally only shows when mutated by magic.
However, I have one hero who has been 'mutated' by magic, but was lucky enough to not be disabled or leave any visible signs and in fact is *slightly* stronger as the only apparent result of the mutagen. I want his companions to not realize he was a 'mutant' for some time, but eventually discover it. Ideally I would prefer for the hero in question to not know he is a mutant either, or if he does know to not be actively trying to hide the fact. This means I need a 'tell' that, if checked, can help to confirm mutation by magic, but also subtle enough to be missed in this one hero.
Ideally I would like a 'tell' that is usually easily identified in adult mutants, but which is easily justified as being very subtle or nearly impossible to tell in the case of this one hero who won the mutation lottery.
Failing that I would not be opposed to a 'tell' which is either very subtle in adults or is only identifiable when a child is first born, in which case most people identifying mutants by the obvious deformity they usually have and simply presuming it is caused by magic until proven otherwise by the lack of the 'tell'. However, in the latter case I'd need a good reason to cause the protagonists (including the ignorant mutated human himself) to be suspicious enough of mutation for them to check and/or ask the mother of the hero about it.
[Answer]
It depends on how you want your magic radiation to work, but here is one standpoint:
Radiation of any kind causes cellular damage by (among other things) breaking apart nucleotide sequences so they cannot be easily repaired (consequently, our cells are amazing at [DNA repair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair), repairing as many as 1 million individual genetic lesions per cell ). Now, a normal level of damage is caused by all sorts of things, from environmental factors to regular oxidation due to metabolic activity, but each repair made to the nucleotides can introduce an imperfection or an error, the compounding of these errors eventually leads to diseases (such as cancer).
[Large doses of radiation lead to extreme illness and death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome), and all sorts of screwy things happen to the body post-radiation exposure. [There are stories of Hiroshima victims who had rapidly growing fingernails that had blood vessels in them, so when cut would bleed extensively.](http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/outline/index.php?l=E&id=34) Typically the damage is most severe around bone marrow, GI tracts, immune system, and hair follicles. [Given data on effects of radiation exposure to fetuses](https://emergency.cdc.gov/radiation/prenatalphysician.asp) the easiest way to cause the effects in the world that you want is to have people dosed with 1-2 GY of radiation, which will impact fetuses (by miscarriage, or genetic malformation) but not cause mass deaths among the adults.
As to how your hero became superman, it was random chance. The DNA damage that occurred to him was minor enough to not cause him to be miscarried, and early enough to impact stem cells that would become his muscles. A random repair to his genes increased his strength, and was replicated through his whole body by the fact that this damage was done to his progenitor stem cells when he was an early fetus. (Note: low-doses of radiation are the best scenario here, as higher doses would likely just kill the fetus or deform him).
The harder part becomes testing for this. In this scenario, the fact that he was born healthy (and above average) was probably taken as a blessing, and since "all babies exposed to magic radiation die" nobody bothered testing him (if they even bothered developing a test). Likely the test of exposure was more a test of overall health than a scientific test to determine exposure. It is possible at some point in the future, some test is developed that can determine if someone was ever exposed to radiation, or determine that some part of his genetics was altered by exposure to radiation, but given he had been an adventurer/hero his whole life, it is likely he had exposure at some point anyway.
Now, to get to your point of magic causing some sign that it was a magical radiation exposure and not a "natural" genetic malformation, I think we can go into CRISPR territory. Perhaps, instead of being generic radiation, the magical radiation is "smart" radiation. Based on the kind of spell that created it, it does specific things to cells. Most of the time, the level of exposure causes so many changes to fetal tissue that the fetus is changed to become incompatible with life, and terminated by the mother's body, or the changes are so severe they cause rampant birth defects. As above, perhaps your hero was lucky and only got exposed a little, or perhaps the magic that hit him did so at a perfect time, where most of the effects were compatible with one another and did not deform him (save for his improved abilities). In any case, these changes can leave a certain genetic tagging in place, perhaps some sequence all magic imprints on genes that are changed (rewriting the largely useless junk sequences that are present in all DNA sequences left over from evolution). The reason it was never discovered is as above, your hero was never sick as a child so nobody thought it was possible he was magically afflicted (which raises the question of how many others there might be). When he finally gets around to getting tested, the truth is revealed.
This could also explain any other changes you want him to have (a lessened or inability to perform magic). Since this is magic radiation, there's no reason it can't be smart enough to make specific changes and leave tags in the genetics.
[Answer]
Your mutagen tends to cause localised gigantism of body parts, having a huge head, hand, or foot for example.
In your hero's case the part of his body affected by this was only noticed when he, ahem, *became an adult* but is otherwise relatively easily concealed.
You did say he'd won the mutation lottery.
[Answer]
The 'tell' is obvious if it is checked for, but no one thought to check him because he didn't have defects. Most of the time, a child born with a disability is checked by the delivering physician (or healer or alchemist, whatever your world has) or midwife, or a physician later in life when the disability becomes apparent. But as your hero was healthy throughout his life, and as the more 'obvious' effects of his mutation were still subtle, he never had the test.
Storywise, it would make sense if it could be accidentally discovered. I'm thinking something like a blood test: maybe a mutant's blood turns a different color when mixed with sulfur and heated. Maybe he trips in a bat-infested cave and wounds himself, then cauterizes the wound, and the sulfur from the guano reacts with the blood from the wound as he heats it, thus revealing his mutation. Something like that.
[Answer]
Assuming this is the same world as your [previous question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/88872/why-are-monsters-created-by-magical-mutation-still-around-after-magic-dissipates), or at least similar, the "mutagen" is broadly present in small quantities, with some rare and remote locations which have much higher concentrations. If your story ever has a need for the characters to travel to these locations then...
**Mutants are immune to subsequent exposure**
The mutagen may not be able to cause mutation or even long-term damage after birth, but I doubt it's completely inert and whatever effects it has are likely not beneficial. Perhaps exposure to higher concentrations will cause minor conditions such as headaches and fatigue, with prolonged exposure bringing more substantial and noticeable effects such as vomiting or something like a sunburn (which could have any number of flavorful names). In extreme cases with very high concentration and very long exposure it could even lead to things such as temporary blindness, hair loss, maybe look at symptoms of Radiation Sickness for more inspiration. The point is, at levels present in respectable regions it's harmless and unnoticeable, but in dangerous wilderness everyone will feel the effects and eventually need to leave.
Everyone, that is, except your hero. Mutants have bodies that are already adapted to the mutagen (often including other, more visible effects as well) and thus will be completely unaffected even in conditions that would leave any other human unable to continue. This would likely not be visible day-to-day, but it possibly could be checked intentionally if it was necessary and it is also something that might be noticed accidentally during regular travel or adventuring.
[Answer]
# A birthmark
Your mutants could all have a certain birthmark at a certain place. Maybe this could even identify certain categories of mutants. Imagine all mutants with a similar mutation to the hero to have a birthmark in the form of a sword at their lower back. You wouldn't necessarily check there all too often. It is also easily hidden from everyones view by just wearing normal clothes. And people can easily identify it once he has to take his clothes off and turns his back to someone.
Other mutants might have birthmarks in a more common place, like the forehead or on their hands. Birthmarks could also in your magical universe vary in coloration if you want to be sure that it's a magical birthmark. So the sword is surrounded by a little red circle. Something that makes people say: "This pattern is so rare and unlikely that it simply has to be magical mutation!"
Other locations might be even harder to see. Imagine a certain little birthmark under your foot or in your arm pit. There are many places to easily hide this and you needn't necessarily be aware of it yourself. Only someone who is actively looking for it would find it.
[Answer]
1) Something at birth: mom knows, the midwife knows, and they both kept quiet. An extra placenta? Green hair that sparkles away upon exposure to air? A quickly-fading glyph of power on the baby's forehead.
2) An herb that works like asparagus, but that only makes your pee smell funny if you've got a certain something. Something dietary. With farting, if you're inclined to tell a joke? Sparkly poop!
--
After sleeping on it, I'm really happy with the placenta idea-- midwives are witchy to begin with, and then you have a scene where they're examining the baby for hidden stinger tentacles, but no, it's just a baby, a normal, gory, eerie, dreamy, writhing, staring, secretive blob.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71cAJvQX_ck>
[Answer]
Magical-mutated blood glows with [octarine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld_(world)#Octarine) color when exposed to magic fields.
Huge mutations caused by magic require weak magic fields to cause mutant blood to glow but if mutation is barely noticeable an intense magic field will be required in order to make mutant blood to glow.
So, if someone is interested in checking the origin of a mutation, a "*blood analysis under magic conditions*" would be enough. But the trick is that small mutations require huge magic fields to make blood glow and people is afraid of intense magic fields because... well, can cause mutations so: what's the point of checking if this strong, fit and healthy-looking dude is a magic-mutant?
---
So, under your requirements:
>
> A way that people can tell the difference between a child born with a mutation due to magical pollution and a 'natural' birth defect, some common trait that generally only shows when mutated by magic.
>
>
>
If someone wants to know the origin of the mutation, just get a sample of fresh blood and expose it to a magic field (a dark place would be better, to make the glow easier to spot) but if you're afraid of the effects of the magic field on your body it would be better if the magic field used is weak.
>
> I want his companions to not realize he was a 'mutant' for some time, but eventually discover it.
>
>
>
Because exposure to magic could cause mutation, the hero and his companions would not get close to magic fields unless they don't have another option.
Because bleeding isn't (or shouldn't be) a common thing in a healthy person, hero's blood wouldn't be freely exposed to his companions scrutiny unless something happened.
If *eventually* the hero and his companions are *forced* to go to a place with an intense magic field and they *by chance* get into a fight and some of them (including the hero) *oh, by chance* get injured with a bleeding wound... and his blood starts to glow... well, they will realize.
>
> Ideally I would prefer for the hero in question to not know he is a mutant either. [...] This means I need a 'tell' that, if checked, can help to confirm mutation by magic, but also subtle enough to be missed in this one hero.
>
>
>
How will he know his condition if he looks normal and he usually isn't bleeding near magic fields :)
[Answer]
Ah, the curious case of loupsgarousism. You see, usually when a child is born with this mark it's born with a fangs, or hair on their back, or tails. Some don't show sings for a few months, even years. But it shows, their feet's are more like that one of a dog. With a black pad on their soil. Or their nails are more like a claw.
Some people don't show a physical sign but they speak in certain way. For example they say "how dooooooo youuuuuu doooooooo".
But once I've a met a boy who didn't show anything. The only thing that was different in him was that he could run for hours without even breaking a sweat. Some say it was because he had very low pressure of 25 heartbeat a minute. But that's just nonsense! He was a werewolf. He later joined the couriers and delivered mail from capitol to most distant villages in a matter of days. You may heard of him, his nickname was "yahoooo".
[Answer]
A patterned skin aberration (like a tattoo) that only appears under certain situations... such as while angry, during a battle/fight, after getting wet or hot, or some event like a full moon.
This could be on the neck, shoulders or the face, and the hero would have no idea it was there until someone sees it and tells him.
[Answer]
The mutation could be visible on "ordinary mutants" (if we can tell that). I like the idea of partial gigantism because it creates monsters that will be immediately noticeable and outcast. And for the hero, its mutation could just have happened on one or more internal organs -something that doesn't show at all from the outside. "Big dick" joke apart (I liked this one to be honest), the hero could have a third kidney, bigger lungs than usual, or why not a thousands of micro-muscles all under his skin that makes him stronger, faster, harder, better. All of them are not visible but could be detected at any moment by a doctor, or if he's injured and suddenly someone discovers his heart on the wrong side "I always though everybody was like that", etc.
[Answer]
A simple way could be to identify it by the concentration of magic in a body. If magic is concentrated in just a single body part, a wizard using any form of astral vision would conclude that this must be a magic mutation. If a magical mutation however spreads through the entire body - like all muscle tissue - a wizard might conclude that this person just has a latent magical talent or has simply been enchanted.
In your story the boy could have been magically checked and the wizard (falsely) determined that the boy was under a spell. After he used an appropriate disenchant spell the magic was gone from that body and the case was closed. As there were no further irregularities, no one noticed that the magic returned slowly over time and granted that person a higher than usual strength.
[Answer]
We take for granted that birth defects are physical anomalies, but in the past, children born with teeth or fused digits or vestigial tails were considered supernaturally affected. It was in a mother's best interest to keep it secret. But in an actually magical world, you'd have true impossibilities (as far as we're concerned.)
What about a child that just forgets to breathe for long spells, to no ill effect? Or never casts a shadow? Or could speak at birth? Maybe their body temperatures have a much wider "normal" so he's almost dead cold when asleep and burning up when he's angry. Or how about retinas that flash iridescent blue instead of red? That last one sounds the most "physical", and the shimmery blue of peacock feathers and butterfly wings isn't a "real" color, but a trick of light, which makes it more mysterious. All of them could be explained away pretty easily.
Most people think their quirks are normal until some rude kid at school points it out. That's how my half-sister discovered having her adult eye-tooth grow in the center of the roof of her mouth was unusual. Also, past that age of childhood bluntness, people don't pay attention at all. A lover would notice if he stopped breathing but kept on talking or felt scalding hot after a swim, but maybe he's a loner. Or maybe his mom raised him to behave in a way that would minimize his risk of being discovered.
Anyway, I like your premise. Good luck.
[Answer]
1. Magical mutations are hereditary from magic users
Janna, a champion from League of Legends, was a human but eventually the magical pollution made her look like an elf
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fTszx.jpg)
So a magical mutation can be differentiated from a normal mutation if the parents of the child are magic users.
2. While biological mutations are almost random, the practice of centain magic increase the probability of specific mutations. Maybe the children of blood mages develope sharp fangs, or the healing mages would have children with sharped ears, etc.
3. As a result of the magical mutations, this children have higher affinity with magic and the spiritual world compared to other children (like the indigo children thing).
[Answer]
In the same way that a person can be screened for diabetes, cystic fibrosis or many other "genetic mutations", perhaps there's a simple blood test that will identify your hero as a mutant. As most mutations are physically obvious this test is rarely done.
However during a routine doctors visit or perhaps when first donating blood, your character's blood is tested and it comes up positive.
] |
[Question]
[
In my science fiction project, humans have settled in a new Galaxy, known as the Novan Cloud. In order to communicate information to other alien races humans require, alongside superluminal travel, (a problem I’ve already solved) a means of superluminal communication. And I’m stumped as to how they’re going to manage it. Any ideas?
If it helps at all, the means of interstellar travel people are using involves artificial wormholes that vanish immediately after creation, so function more like a teleporter than a permanent gateway through space-time.
[Answer]
## Send USB thumbsticks through wormholes
>
> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
>
>
>
You're not going to get information to travel faster than the speed of light if you're making it travel as EM.
But you've got teleportation. So: put all the info you want to transfer onto a portable storage device shaped like a space pony, and teleport it to the intended recipient.
Start doing it on a schedule. Design your telecommunications infrastructure to be [eventually consistent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventual_consistency), such that it can seamlessly integrate a data dump into its information universe at any point. Set up some kind of digest-production tech so that it's easy to generate each scheduled data dump.
Human society made do with long-distance comm tech that routinely had a lag of weeks or months (and which, coincidentally, was *also* shaped like space ponies). Your galactic society can probably get by with hourly sync-ups.
See also:
* [The Obligatory xkcd](https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/) (if "What If?" counts)
* [The story of the proverbial station wagon](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv3/never_underestimate_the_bandwidth_of_a_station/)
[Answer]
# Have ships transmit data when they travel
Ships will tend to have massive computers and powerful transmitters. As such, have it be standard practice for them to send over a copy of the internet whenever they move systems. The more traffic a system gets the more up to date their internet will be, and the less traffic the less up to date they'll be.
This helps make space travel cheaper and more profitable as you can charge for updates, and ensures that everyone can contribute to common communication methods.
# Use courier ships for important messages
If you need to send messages quickly you send a courier ship. This ship hangs around a good site for a wormhole and can quickly pop in to any system that you want to send a message to. It would be very expensive, but sometimes essential. They'd be built with powerful wormhole generators and powerful engines and transmitters.
[Answer]
**In Real Life, communication cannot exceed the speed of light**
That's because, insofar as we know, the speed of light is as fast as we can go.
But in your world, you have ships that travel faster than the speed of light. That means no communication can move faster than those ships (unless you invent a world rule to allow it). So, since we know very little about your world, those ships are it.
**But how to maximize this opportunity?**
If today's over-regulated transportation beauracracy is realistic*<citation required>*, then it's reasonable to assume that your ships can't just open a wormhole *anywhere.* That would be legally and beauracratically chaotic! So wormholes can only be opened at a particular location (let's say a point 1,000,000 km away from the planet and always directly opposite the sun). Knowing that said location will always be where the wormholes open, what ships will discover is that along with the ubiquitous customs agents and duty-free souvenier shops is a massive com center that's constantly uploading data to outgoing ships and downloading data from incoming ships.
By law, every ship capable of FTL travel *must have secure communications transport capacity* in the form of highly encrypted transmitters that interface with the customs stations at every planetary (and every other) location.
**If you're looking for a direct communication solution similar to your FTL travel solution, then you need to give up how your FTL works**
Because right now there's nowhere near enough information to arbitrarily invent an FTL communication process that's consistent with your existing world rules.
[Answer]
I want to stipulate at the start that I'm not an expert on this.
But, if the wormholes are cheap to make and truly instant---i.e they are created instantly and travel through them is instant---then they can be used to communicate directly.
The simplest model would be to use miniature wormholes flashing open and closed like an aldis signal lamp to communicate morse code or similar. I suppose you could also arrange small wormholes much like the lights in an 80s scrolling neon sign, either high in the sky over a planet, or miniaturized into a kind of office ansible.
But I think you[\*] could also create some kind of signal box, where the pulses of light from a fibreoptic cable, say, trigger the flash creation of a wormhole, and, on the other side, a receptor converts that information back into pulses of light.
The real question then would be what would be best for the story. Perhaps wormholes are so expensive that this is like an early telegraph? Or perhaps because it takes them 2 days to spin up, for whatever reason, messages have to be composed 48 hours in advance and are then delivered instantaneously, allowing for all sorts of confusion if events outrun them.
[\*]With a little bit of sci-fi hand-waving, to be sure.
[Answer]
**A Parallel Universe with a Faster Speed of Light**
If the universe of your story had a parallel universe where the speed of light was must faster than usual, and travel between these universes wasn't too difficult, then there could be some interesting potential for communication.
Imagine pairs of automated stations, one in the ordinary universe and one in the parallel uninverse that switched places, alternately receiving and transmitting messages.
I think it would make sense if there was a relative time dilation between these universes, with the other one running faster. So a person wouldn't usually want to spend time in this universe, or use this for travel (not without some pretty sophisticated cryostasis), but communication would be interesting.
---
Rereading the OP, you would probably want a bucket brigade of probes that teleported back and forth between locations, handing off the signals from one to the next probe.
[Answer]
**Communication Came First**
The ability to create massive wormholes, large enough to fit capital ships (presumably) didn't come out of nowhere. It developed over time, the technology slowly getting better and better. The first breakthrough was the ability to open nanoscopic bridges, connecting two tiny points in space, for a fraction of a second. With proper timing, these proto-wormholes could be used to instantly send individual photons any distance, but the cost to create them was substantial, limiting their effective use. Eventually the cost and time required to create these holes was reduced enough that effective transmission of data over any distance instantaneously was possible, albeit with severely limited bandwidth.
**Size and Duration are Inversely Proportional**
Over time, the technology improved. They were able to hold microscopic holes open for several seconds, allowing for bursts of data and greatly improving throughput, or momentarily create a hole just large enough to send tiny physical objects through. Eventually it was discovered that the amount of time a hole could be maintained was inversely proportional to its size.
**The Latest Tech**
After enough time, the technology improved so much that massive wormholes could be held open long enough for large capitol ships to get through, allowing for unbounded exploration. By this point, the technology was also able to hold open microscopic wormholes for several hours, allowing for instantaneous transmission of enormous amounts of data with almost no interference (since the transmitter and receiver are effectively adjacent to one another through the portal).
**But, it's not quite that simple...**
Wormhole endpoints are fixed in space, relative to the universe itself, not the observer. For large wormholes in the depths of space, this is a non issue as one can simply create the portal in front of wherever their total motion is taking them (i.e. when traveling against the direction of the galaxy's spin the ship might be moving forward relative to the surrounding stars, but backward relative to the universe as a whole, so the portal might need to be placed behind the ship. From the ship's perspective it would appear to move up from behind, overtaking the ship and transporting it starting from the rear).
However, opening a fixed location microscopic portal from a moving location would result (relatively speaking) in the portal shooting out in the opposite direction of the locations motion, with potentially devastating consequences. To solve this, the portal would need to be opened for a split second, sending a small batch of data through. With advanced enough technology a new portal could be opened hundreds of times a second, minimizing loss of throughput.
**Hold on, it get's worse...**
But if both ends are moving, how does the transmitter know the exact location of the receiver? The other end of the portal would need to be opened with pinpoint accuracy, but the only way to get the data there fast enough would be via a portal, creating a kind of paradox. One solution would be to have each node able to calculate a function for its own future motion and broadcast it out to all available nodes based on their motion functions. If this function changes (because a ship turns for example) a new function is calculated and broadcast. If a node does not have a particular node's motion function it can query other known nodes to see if they have it. Hooking up a new node simply requires the motion function of a predictable node (which could even exist for the express purpose of calibration). Once connected to a single other node, it is easy for the new node to scan/probe the network for all others. With a node's motion function, last known location and time since last connection, it should be possible to calculate the exact location of the receiver at any point in time.
[Answer]
# Gravity waves
Nevermind sending radio or physical storage through wormholes. Popping such holes, big enough to allow for ships to pass through, in and out of existence should cause huge gravitational waves on both ends. This would be very easily be detectable. On some accounts a 1m (~3 ft) wide wormhole should be as massive as Jupiter at the very least, so a ship-sized one would likely have considerable stellar mass.
And if you have the technology for that, you should also be able to create miniaturized versions of [LIGO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO) (a gravity wave measuring tool we have in real life).
Just open and close some smaller blackholes to send a signal encoded in gravity waves. With proper modulation and other signaling techniques, you should be able to tune into a channel and filter out the noise from the other wormholes used for ship transportation.
For the record, it has been discovered recently that gravity waves move as fast as light. Since they would be coming from the wormhole ends, it would be as fast a form of communication as radio or light.
[Answer]
## A combination of some of the below (inspired by some answers above)
I'm not sure how exactly your FTL travel works, but if you can produce wormholes for amounts of time long enough to get a spaceship through, you should also be able to use them for data packets, in various ways.
What I don't know is how hard it is to make those wormholes, and whether you can only produce them in certain places, or if you could have a machine in your basement producing small holes of the size of your fingernails, at a rate of one per minute. So depending on how hard this is (or how hard you want it to be), you could combine the methods below in different ways:
### For very large amounts of data (and permitting significant latency)
You write the data on some physical storage (flash chip, optical disc, future holographic 3D crystal matrix thing...), open a wormhole and hand/shoot/drop the medium through. It is then caught/received on the other end and read.
Depending on the achievable size/frequency for wormhole creation, and of course the number of communication partners for one node, the process could be highly automated, with several storage media popping into and out of multiple tiny wormholes multiple times per second -- or maybe there's something about those wormholes that makes them a lot harder to create on the surface of a planet, and it requires a huge installation, and regular choices about which request for data transfer should be prioritized.
### For smaller amounts of data, and much less latency
These days, wireless communication can be done via lasers (usually not in the visible spectrum, though): Effectively radio waves but coherent and directed, in order to focus the power needed to send and receive for a given signal quality.
With a well-built communications laser/receiver, you would only need a millimeter-sized (or smaller) wormhole to start transmitting. During transmission phase, network speeds could be significantly higher than wired networks on Earth these days (extremely short distance, huge possible signal intensity, using shorter wavelengths than visible light). However, you can't always be transmitting since your wormholes collapse so quickly, and the higher the wormhole creation frequency, the smaller the holes, and the lower the throughput. So realtime communications could be possible, but would achieve fairly low data rates (or be *very* expensive).
## Limiting factors
In a scenario where communications are more limited, you might also decide that creating wormholes on planets is pretty unfeasible/expensive, or has other negative consequences (radiation?), and therefore they could only be created in space, possibly at some safe distance to the machine what creates them. In that case, sending data from one planet to another might involve having a small wormhole created by a machine somewhere in orbit, and firing a communications laser through it (probably also mounted to the same machine, which receives requests for data transfers from the planet surface). This would mean no actual real-time communications unless you can pay for one of those machines to make tens of wormholes per second (to the same destination) and guarantee that your data packets will be prioritized.
Moving larger amounts of data via physical media would then also be harder because having some satellite to shoot the storage through wormholes, and catch/process what's coming back is way more involved than having them drop into some receptacle in your basement.
Some poor souls have to piggyback their communications through the big ships' wormholes, using the very short transit time to fire their communications lasers through the small part of the wormhole opening not blocked by the ship passing through it. There have been serious accidents because people used overpowered lasers and did not calibrate/aim them as they should have. That's why the practice is heavily regulated these days (read: so expensive that it's only a little cheaper than the alternatives). There's still some people who try to do this without a license, but it's dangerous for them because that kind of laser (and its origin) is quickly detected, and it's hard to make sure you're even hitting the correct receiver (and having the correct receiver in place) in such a short time frame. Yet, it's also the most secure way to send data if you don't want the transfer to be registered and logged, since all the other methods are being monitored (to various degrees in different systems, but you never know through which nodes your data will travel).
## Potential technical issues
For some of the main planets/outposts etc., there would be fixed locations where the communication wormholes are created, and fixed schedules when which node is connecting to which other node. But if you're on a ship that is moving, potentially along a trajectory unknown to your would-be communication partner, that might be more difficult. Can you initiate communications with a moving ship if you don't know the c-hole (communications wormhole) coordinates for their receiver? Can you initiate contact with a receiver if you don't know its schedule? You might try to open a wormhole while it's trying to receive communications from some other place, and then the wormholes collide, which causes packet loss (possibly in a dramatic way?) and might cause other problems too. Maybe two simultaneous wormholes in one place are a very bad thing, so there would need to be strict administrative and technical measures to prevent that?
Either way, you would probably need to have a "handshake" of some sort to agree on coordinates/wormhole schedule before being being able to establish FtL communications. That means that a spaceship must maintain some sort of communications channel at all times, or they become impossible to contact at all. Except by local communications, of course, which requires a way of getting your message within the range of their sub-light receivers.
For an expedition to an uninhabited system, this would mean that losing their FtL connection would make it impossible for anyone else to reach them unless the expedition manages to reconnect to their base of operations, or you make a much bigger hole and push a communications satellite through (assuming you had one to spare...)
## Logistics/organisation
If this is how interplanetary/-stellar communications work, I bet there would be a lot of bureaucracy, regulations, laws, and daily annoyance around it. Whoever operates these devices carries some responsibility, and that means that control of those nodes could (depending again on how hard they are to build and operate) play an important role in politics and economics. Companies/governments controlling and (mis-)using them, outlaws running their own, or some organisations/measures to ensure equal access to secure and safe communications (and the different degrees to which they succeed in that or abuse the trust put in them) could play relevant roles in such a universe.
There would also likely be some communication routes much more popular than others, some wider than others, and some heavily contested/neglected ones. Almost like IRL, where some places get crazy glass fibre speeds but don't really use them, and elsewhere you pay twice as much and still can't have a phone conversation without standing on your kitchen table, so you end up purchasing a freaking expensive satellite link from the richest guy in the known universe...
[Answer]
Imagine you have a pair of drinking straws perfectly filled with beads the same diameter as the inside of the straw. Put a bead in one end of a straw, and the bead at the other end of the same straw will immediately fall out on the other side, *with absolutely no latency.*
**This holds true no matter how long the straws are.**
The problem is the longer the straw, the more energy you need to push all the raw weight of the intermediate beads, the stronger the straw itself needs to be, and the more energy (and heat dissipation)
you need to fight friction from the straw walls.
For a sci-fi setting, you've probably already solved the energy problem. Most sci-fi settings at close inspection need an energy source that greatly outperforms what is available today.
Now you need to "invent" a particle you can use that will stay where you put it in a way that's largely immune to outside forces, and you can "push" as needed. It could be something very small, like a special not-yet-discovered variety of quark or sub-version of the higgs-boson. Of course, no such thing exists (that we know of so far!), but it's enough a lay person could believe a future civilization has worked it out.
So now we have a pair of particle "straws": one for sending, the other for receiving. At each end of the straw we have a station capable of rapidly pushing new particles in one "straw" and monitoring the changes in the other. Movement is a "1", idle is a "0", for whatever tick-rate your sensors/emitters are capable of handling, and now we have 0-latency digital comms.
A quirk of this scheme is the initial setup still has the full latency of pushing the first set of particles all the way from point A to point B, no matter how far apart they are, and you're likely limited by Einstein for this process. Between galaxies could take millenia. And if someone chooses to disrupt the flow, you may have your work cut out getting back in sync. But sometimes this kind of weakness serves the story as much as it hinders.
---
To add one more point:
**You don't have to explain yourself.**
The very fact you've accumulated over a dozen answers means people are ready and willing to believe our future selves have solved this issue. *Explaining it may do as much as harm as good*, merely creating an opportunity to introduce a glaring technical error.
[Answer]
# **Use wormhole cables instead of fibre optics**
Extending on [Tom](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/19221/tom)'s answer here. Sending usb sticks over wormhole will cause huge latency.
If the world already has the technology to create wormholes, people can make use of wormholes to shorten the length of cable. One can send packets of light over the wormhole which will be captured by fibre optic device on the other end making it work as regular internet that we have today.
[PC on Mars]====(fibre optic cable)===:{ wormhole }:====(fibre optic cable)===[PC on earth]
For more thorough explaination, you can assign each Light Packet Transfer Wormhole(LPTW) unique id everytime a new one is generated, like IP addresses in our world. The generated IDs can be used to transfer data particulary from LPTW 1 -> LPTW 2.
Depending on the usecases for LPTW, we can divide it in particular ranges .i.e.,
1. Class A (interstellar priority links)
2. Class B (government and mega corporates)
3. Class C (SMBs and hobbiyists)
4. Class D (for individuals)
For IP address ref:
* <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address>
**Update**
I missed the part where wormholes are closing immediately. Thanks to [Paŭlo](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/258/pa%c5%adlo-ebermann)'s comment.
Even if the wormholes are closing almost immediately, the LPTW can still send a bunch of packets before closing down and open again with same ID. If the humans can pass whole spaceship through the wormhole, a few packet of light shouldn't be much of an issue.
[Answer]
## Entanglement radio
I can't believe I forgot to post this, because it's something I use a lot. (I also think it's more fun than piggybacking on FTL travel.)
If two particles become entangled, changes made to one particle are applied to its entangled "twin," no matter how far away that twin is. Aspects that are propagated in this way include momentum, spin, and polarization.
So: you build a system where bits are transmitted by altering the polarization of an entangled particle. You keep one particle here, and the traveler takes the other particle with them, and now the two of you can send bits to each other.
I'm no expert in quantum mechanics, nor in information theory, but I imagine transferring a single binary bit could work in two ways:
* **Model A**: you use *two* sets of twins: one of the twins has its polarization changed to positive or negative to signal binary 1 or 0; the other twin has its polarization flipped once for each bit -- this is done to distinguish between instances of a single binary value being repeated. One particle marks out the "beat," the other particle sends the actual value.
* **Model B**: you use one twin and flip it in a rhythm (akin to Morse code), very similar to an old-school telegraph.
There are tradeoffs:
* Model A can send any sequence of *N* bits in a fixed amount of time, no matter what the actual bit values are, but it requires two particles (and thus a larger machinery footprint).
* Model B uses just one particle (and has a smaller machinery footprint), but the time it takes to send a sequence of *N* bits will vary based on the specific values being sent.
If you think it's really important to choose between the two models instead of just handwaving it, you'll need to decide how long it takes a machine to change the polarization of a particle, and how long it takes the receiving machine to measure the polarization. You'll also have to flesh out the picture of the machinery inside the radio, including how and where the particles are "installed" and what machinery must surround each to permit interacting with its polarization.
Either way, in the end you wind up with the ability to instantly transmit binary data point-to-point regardless of distance or direction.
If this sounds familiar, it might be because you know of Card's "ansible" device, which also permitted instantaneous point-to-point communication. (I don't recall whether he explicitly relied on quantum entanglement.)
Whenever I rely on this mechanism, I take it a bit further than Card did, and think about the problems and infrastructure that would arise around such a system. (To be fair, Card also had a much more interesting story to tell, which would not have been improved by adding depth to the ansible.)
* **Bandwidth**
Whether you go with Modal A or Model B, nobody is going to limit themselves to just one (or two) twins, because that is pretty tiny bandwidth. No, you'll scale it up as far as is practical. I imagine that the hardware needed to read and write the polarity of an entangled particle is non-trivial, with a really great portable version being the size a large home refrigerator. I like to think that a single such "radio" might contain a couple dozen entangled particles, which is still not enough for a vessel to stream cat videos from home all day but should be plenty for the equivalent of naval dispatches (military and commercial) and other serious-minded communication, as well personal letters during downtime.
* **Production**
I imagine it takes even bigger machinery to cause particles to become entangled in the first place such that they can be used in these radios, perhaps something on the order of the Large Hadron Collider. This means there won't be dozens of factories producing radios, but maybe just one or two, and those only on extremely well-developed planets. For a long time, Earth would be the only source. As a result, there will always be a shortage of radios, and moreso for high-bandwidth ones.
* **Networks**
An entanglement radio can only communicate with its twin -- it cannot ever be reconfigured to communicate with a different radio. And the twin radios must be born at the same time and in the same place. This means you are never going to have a ship that can contact multiple sister ships directly. I think this means that the only way to have a system that permits two randomly-selected parties to communicate is for the home planet to keep one of every single pair! The entangled particles that stay on the home planet would not be placed into a portable fridge-sized machine like the twins that go abroad, but rather will be sent to a *massive* automated routing facility on the planet, which will function like a switchboard operator.
Governments both honest and crooked will like this, because it means the vast majority of interstellar communication will depend on a very small number of hubs that they can control.
Of course, this does not mean *all* communication must go through a hub. Governments will probably requisition special pairs of traveling radios for military and espionage purposes. I'd also expect them to set up their own private hubs, with a human-mediated link to the larger civilian hub.
A pair of traveling radios could be unimaginably valuable to criminals and other folks with dark motives, so I would expect there to be a lot of illegal pressure on workers at the factory to secretly produce such radios; highly-placed individuals at the factory might be able to construct such things off the books, although those will all probably be low-bandwidth in order to fly under the radar.
Over time, I would expect all major planets to exchange particles with each other, and these would undoubtedly be the largest-bandwidth radios ever produced, because the planet-to-planet links will form the backbone of the network. But, this will be a luxury that has to compete with more-pressing needs, and so I'd expect the backbone to grow in fits and starts as permitted by the needs of military and civilian fleets.
---
The overall picture is one of a centralized galactic internet, with the links between vessels and planets having very small bandwidth, only a fraction of the speed of the slowest real-world telephone modems.
---
One thing to note is that I've always assumed that particles could only be entangled *in pairs*, and that fact shaped the design of this system. Reading up on things today, it sounds like a whole group of particles could become entangled with each other. The situation I've sketched out here has been rolling around in my head for a long time, and I'm sorry to say I haven't had time to revise it in light of this new information. If you find this useful, it may be easier for you to do that yourself.
[Answer]
In the Wing Commander universe they sent drones.
You could have a space station or satellite in orbit populated with drones, where you send the transmissions to. The satellite would then load a drone with the transmission, and then propel the drone to a wormhole generator which sends it through to the target, where the drone wirelessly transmits the data from orbit (and is recaptured and refuelled by that stations drone communications center) - this would allow for low-lag communication, still superluminal, but not real time, and not as laggy as even inter-system communications would be
[Answer]
This depends on how these wormhole thingamajigs work. If it's an all-or-nothing thing, then you have a hole specifically for data, and specially designed crafts receive light-speed data and, on a schedule, hop through and re-transmit that data to other waiting ships, hop back, do it again. If you send ships through it once per minute, you're getting far less latency than even interplanetary communications.
But maybe your wormholes are a bit more subtle. Maybe you can just slightly open one, or just perform a pre-opening pulse. Let's say you have a laser passing through the area that the wormhole is directed at, and can read the deflection of the laser as a signal. Now you have an intergalactic fiber optic.
The boring way would have small permanent wormholes with a cable passing through it. *yawn*
[Answer]
## Entangled photocopying
There are two photocopying machines, one over there and one over here. Each 20 minutes, a copy is done (or not). Both machines inject one beam of previously entangled photons onto the paper. On our side the photons will reflect and change state, on the other side they will only change state. Which can be detected, the information used to print the document.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/231989/edit).
Closed 1 year ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/231989/edit)
Imagine Mice are the sentient species on earth. Predators like snakes, owls, hawks are still a threat. Would wars between factions still involve large groups of mice travelling together and pitch battles or do you think moving around like this would be too dangerous?
[Answer]
# Apex Predators Do Not Take On Herds
And an army is a very well trained, resilient herd with many spears. Every predator is looking to get the easiest meal they can, so they are looking for stragglers or to isolate individuals. This is actually similar to armies, which also want to isolate smaller sections of their enemies and pick off stragglers. Instead of eating, though, armies are looking to control territory.
# But Military Operations!
These will hardly change, there is just another threat to worry about. Good commanders secure and protect supply lines, even against apex predators. Smaller forces (or Hannibal) can raid and pillage to sustain themselves.
# An Exception: Kaiju
In which case, everyone dies anyways and war is not part of your story!
If the predator is large enough that no combination or number of medieval weapons or poisons can harm them, mankind has bigger problems than fighting each other. It's an apocalypse and no one is waging formal war. Maybe raids and small groups/tribes, but not massive and organized *war*. War in the time of Kaiju, though intriguing, usually isn't the point of Kaiju stories.
Edit: From comments, I suppose I should clarify this section. I use Kaiju for their "unstoppable, uncontrollable force" aspect. Kaiju represent the most extreme case of a predator. If a predator has such qualities, we are looking at a breakdown of society in proportion to the predator's appetite. The question is very details light, but I feel like I had to account for such a situation but also point out that wartime logistics and strategy is unusual for the Kaiju genre. Arguably, these stories are about big monster battles ("spectacle"), distruction, forces beyond mortal control, and/or forces which shouldn't be in mortal control. (Original Godzilla, in context of Japanese culture at the time, *sure does* look like a stand in for nuclear weapons.)
[Answer]
>
> Presumably marching around in huge columns would be a big target for predators
>
>
>
## Incorrect presumption.
This presumption is incorrect for the vast majority of predators, especially those that have some co-evolution time with humans. Primarily because it is very high risk for a predator to attack a group.
### Safety in numbers.
General rule of safety is to travel as a group. Because a group is much bigger threat to the attacker. The group/heard can come to the attacked's defense. If the predator does get a kill the human heard is so very unlikely to let that predator eat the victim in peace.
In other words Attacking a group increases attackers chance of injury and decreases chance of reward compared to targeting an isolated individual. Thus high risk.
## History says mega fauna dies.
If you are envisioning larger predator of say T-rex size. Well The best way to take down such predators is with a large group of armed people. History shows that when mega fauna that is inexperienced with humans meets humans... The mega fauna die. In other words predators big enough to be a threat to an army would have long since been hunted to extinction or learned/evolved how to avoid humans.
[Answer]
# Presumption check
You say...
>
> Presumably marching around in huge columns would be a big target for predators
>
>
>
Eh... no. The **only** predator that attacks herds is the lion, and they do so only in a very careful fashion and never the herd itself:
Lions sneak *between* the herd and their prospect victim with at least two lions. Then they attack one after another to drive the separated member away from the protection of the herd and toward other members. They always choose a **separated** and weak member to attack.
This behavior **could** be emulated and have some impact: a predator that follows armies and attacks the scouts and messangers.
# Conclusion
The predator would change nothing in warfare on a grand scale (army scale) but mandate that scouting be done by several soldiers instead of single persons.
On an intermediate, troop level scale, losses of scouts to the fauna are higher than without, but in general, those losses can and will be attempted to be mitigated. Scouts and Messangers will travel in groups of 4-5 to ensure that the message or report comes through.
At times an army might end up in bad terrain because of losing their scouts, but that is less a presence of the predator but non-adaption of the army problem.
[Answer]
This question is too vague. For a definitive answer, you are going to need to provide much more detail. The answer greatly depends on the properties and capabilities of this "predator", by which I assume you mean a predator of humans.
* How fast can it run? Swim? Fly?
* Where do they live?
* How large and dense is their population?
* How often do they eat?
* Do they have prey other than humans? If so, do they have a preference?
* How smart are they? If they are comparable to human intelligence, no one will be left to fight a war.
In the absence of such specifications, I'm going to provide an answer on the assumption that these predators are comparable to existing apex land predators in our world.
Anywhere they live would probably need to be treated the same as enemy territory by all parties. If it is possible to evade detection by such predators for an extended period, any combat taking place in their habitats would be in the form of guerilla warfare. Even then, fighting is loud, and noise attracts predators, so it may be that combat is entirely impossible. In that case, the regions would simply be treated as impassable.
If it were possible to design some sort of vehicle that is impervious to attack by the predators such that troops could be transported through the region, you may end up with some strange analog for a navy that crosses predator-inhabited regions instead of oceans. Perhaps they might even carry tools and weaponry to cripple enemy vessels, or expose the soldiers inside to the predators outside. However this would likely require technology beyond the medieval era, so it's unlikely unless you are willing to fudge the technological era of your fictional world.
Put simply, man-eating predators would not alter medieval warfare so much as prevent it outright. That may not hold for more recent methods of warfare, but past a certain point advanced technology would turn the predators into prey. The only way for human warfare and human predators to exist in the same place is if humans and their predators were on a somewhat even playing field. However, that puts it closer to inter-species competition than a predator-prey relationship.
[Answer]
Everything would change if humans were not the dominant species. Let’s say the predators are the raptors from Jurassic Park. Smart, strong, fast, great at killing, deadly all around. The biggest change in that situation would be the level of protection each village, town, and house would have. If humans were commonly being hunted and killed, there would be significantly less sprawl. Humans would retreat inside walled cities and towns at night or when the predators were nearby. Populations would be smaller and grow more slowly. Trade caravans would need protection against the predators but not from robbers as nobody would be hiding out in the woods waiting to ambush someone. Expansion into new areas would take time and effort to avoid people being killed. Nobody in their right mind would grab a wagon and just head west to colonize some land. Domestication of animals and the raising of large herds would likely not happen due to losses from attacks. This means that horses, oxen, sheep, pigs, and other similar animals wouldn’t be around to help provide food, clothing, and transportation. There is an increased risk of starvation as food is harder to obtain. This increased level of town security would potentially decrease the effectiveness of warfare since every town would be a fortress. An army would be exposed to repeated attacks while the cities they sieged would be prepared at all times. Supply chains would be at risk of being attacked. Moving goods would take much longer since pack animals would be uncommon or even non-existent. Supplying meat would involve hunting wild game instead of relying on domestic herds. Sending soldiers into the forest to hunt for deer during a campaign would risk losing them. Messages would take significantly longer to arrive since it would take sending a small force as opposed to a single person and nobody would be riding horses. As the wounded piled up, the number of predators would likely increase. Scattering an army would result in a good number of them being killed by the predators if they failed to regroup before nightfall or before being attacked. Armies would travel more slowly as they would need to setup defenses each night to avoid attacks. More troops would be needed to stay awake and guard camps which increases fatigue levels. Diseases would be more likely as latrines would need to be inside camps as opposed to outside. Wars would likely be conducted during winter months when the predators are dormant, which brings up its own difficulties. It would be a snowball effect which impacted every aspect of life.
] |
[Question]
[
The problem with powered armor is that it is often approached backwards when compared to real design principles. Instead of finding a problem that is best solved with powered armor, most approaches invent the armor first and then try to justify why it is useful.
Most of the time, the problem solved by powered armor is probably better solved by either vehicles or conventional infantry. The value of vehicles is obvious, that they can give mobility, armor, and firepower vastly greater than anything soldiers can carry directly. Infantry by contrast generally offer a degree of stealth and a low logistics cost. Powered armor seems to be in a neither fish nor fowl category, in which it has a similar logistics cost to vehicles but without the same mobility, firepower or survivability as regular vehicles. It also does very little to increase the effective range that a soldier can control.
Even in cases like fighting within a building, as long as soldiers aren't that worried about damaging the environment armored suits would not be that hard to destroy with modern and especially future weapons, and given the costs involved they would be hard to support logistically in the numbers required to be effective at clearing buildings in any major operation. What is also likely more effective than powered armor is the use of fairly cheap expendable drones rather than risking a person even if that person wears armor.
The only real obvious case that justifies the use of powered armor as opposed to something else is in a somewhat confined environment in which weapons and numbers are somewhat limited. One of the few situations that applies here is that of spacecraft, as weapons have to be somewhat limited to avoid breaching the hull of the spacecraft. This means that armor could easily be made in a small enough package to be resistant to most practical ground weapons that someone would be willing to use onboard a spacecraft or space station.
So basically Bobbie Draper in The Expanse is the only good justified use of powered armor given the situation. Another thing that helps in that setting is that they apparently don't trust automation all that much, as there is a similar lack of automation on spacecraft. We've never seen a ship fly without a pilot either, so it stands to reason that we don't see automated combat drones due to a similar lack of trust.
Are there any good earthbound scenarios that qualify as a problem that would be easier to solve with powered armor than the alternative? I'm assuming a tech base mostly similar to The Expanse.
[Answer]
Instead of replacing conventional infantry entirely, a perhaps more realistic role for powered armor would be to be sparsely mixed in among conventional infantry as an augmentation to their abilities, e.g.
* to provide scouting with special sensors and augmented movement speed or endurance
* to provide fire support by carrying specialized or heavy weapons
* to act as integrated combat engineers. This emphasizes more the powered exoskeleton aspect rather than the armor aspect and uses its strength to help conventional troops to prepare combat positions rapidly, construction or removal of obstacles, and the other roles that ordinary combat engineers perform.
[Answer]
Power armor can be the swiss army knife of military equipment. It can serve as a framework for attaching any number of add-on tools and weapons each of which would be too heavy to carry without the powered framework. It can serve as hazardous environment protection and (maybe only for short periods of time) as a space suit. The combat protective component of power armor can also be adjusted to match the weaponry of the enemy and its stealth components tuned to the particulars of the expected battlefield.
It is true that dedicated vehicles can outperform powered armor on a cost vs effectiveness basis, but when you also consider mass in your efficiency calculations, power armor's advantage becomes apparent. Fully loaded power armored warriors weigh about twice as much as an unarmored warrior. So if you need to lift that warrior and his equipment into orbit or beyond, the power armored warrior is a bargain compared to a vehicle and crew.
The final advantage of power armor which clinches its place in every professional military organization is the WWR feature. The wounded warrior recovery feature lets your troops know that they are more than just canon fodder. I've seen battle damaged power armor with three of its limbs torn off, dragging its unconscious warrior back to safety without any assistance or human operated guidance. The affect which such a feature has on troop morale is worth every penny that the power armor costs and more.
[Answer]
It gives you firepower, armour and ammo in a low profile, as well as the ability to work/fight in hostile environment.
Its worth considering *what* your powered armour is, and how you want to use it.
Modern [infantry sections](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(military_unit)) tend to carry a variety of weapons. A load carrying suit that can keep up with infantry means that you have more heavy weapons on hand when you need it. You can also in theory replace your squad automatic weapon with a machine gun of higher caliber or even a mini gun, and carry extra ammunition for your other troops. It would be a significant force multiplier if folks weren't lugging around anti-tank weapons and other gear unless needed.
Your powered armour can also act as a sensor platform, act as a controller for a UAV and designate targets for fire. While I wouldn't put a commander as the sole armoured infantry in a section (too obvious a target), it would compliment traditional, more squishy infantry well.
As per the wikipedia link above
>
> Infantry sections can consist of as few as eight Marines (heavy machinegun section) to as many as 32 in an 81-mm mortar section
>
>
>
You could probably load, deploy and possibly fire mortars with a 4 man fireteam, simply cause your load carrier can lug it, ready to deploy, instead of in man portable pieces. You have heavy machine guns that can move and fire on *every* battlesuit, instead of having different folks carry, load and manage a fixed MG position.
If you go bigger, and have armour and firepower as a consideration, you might also have infantry survivability and firepower improved.
With 'full' armoured infantry, you have troops with superior firepower, and armour. Even with contemporary weapons, having infantry that can rip off doors and fire multiple anti-tank rockets on the move would be useful.
[Answer]
There are plenty of reasons to use them:
* more armor protection and a larger logistical strain for your enemy.
Current caliber weapons are chosen because they are effective at killing or incapacitating infantry despite their armor. Bringing larger calibers isn't very efficient as it means more recoil, less bullets per magazine and less total ammunition carried. Powered armor would be able to carry more armor and necessitate your enemy bringing larger caliber weapons to deal with it.
Q: but wouldn't they just bring something like a .50 caliber weapon and shoot the larger target your power armor represents?
A: you might be larger, that doesn't mean you'll be hit easily. In modern wars we spend thousands of bullets per soldier incapacitated or killed because soldiers tend to not want to die. The .50 caliber weapon will have a slower rate of fire while having to deal with the increased threat of the power armor, assuming even that a single hit would be enough to incapacitate the power armor which might not be the case depending on where you hit. Also consider that there is no reason for the power armor to be alone, having regular troops or more power armor means an easier time supressing the enemy and making use of the advantages such an armor provides.
* more carrying capacity.
Infantry is always somewhat limited by the amount of stuff they can carry. Mortar teams for example can ask members of their squad/platoon to each carry one or two mortars for them to give them the ammunition they need. The carrying capacity of power armor would greatly increase not just how many supplies and weaponry they can take but also the type they take with them.
* specialised roles.
A heavy machine gun is a great asset for any squad to have with them. Unfortunately you need to be stationary to really deploy and use one, not to mention the limited ammo capacity unless you took a defensive position and were supplied in the meantime. Power armor would be able to carry a heavy machine gun into battle, allowing squads to finally use them offensively. Similarly power armor can carry many more specialized equipment such as large caliber mortars, grenade launchers, multiple weapon systems, superior detection and reconnaissance equipment, systems that help with fighting like weapon stabilization or helping aim the weapon on the spot you are looking at instead of trying to aim at etc.
* alternative specializations.
You don't need to carry a specialized small shotgun to blast open locks if you've got a power armored guy with you. Such a power armor could also be perfect for digging trenches quickly and efficiently, breaking barricades, clearing mines designed for infantry, carrying friendlies, perform heavy maintenance tasks you would normally require machinery to perform etc.
As an example of what power armor could do, look into ground-based drones currently being designed as support units for infantry, these arw basically larger variants of what power armor could do for you: <https://images.app.goo.gl/fGcxtSU97qWxbwn16>
[Answer]
Real life military justification is special ops teams.
They have to:
1. Go on foot. A vehicle or helicopter can bring them only so far, and drone can not rescue a hostage, for example;
2. Go stealthy, and stay stealthy. Drones have to stay at a considerable distance to avoid alerting the enemy;
3. Need to carry a lot of gear. Today, this is a major limiting factor for special ops teams and infantry in general.
[Answer]
**Every situation where manpower is limited**
The idea of fighting sending human waves against the enemy, while [still considered](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDWcg8dh930), is already outdated in the modern theory of war.
In particular, when an army doesn't have a big amount of soldiers, either for social reasons (no draft, the need of high numbers of workers and farmers to sustain the army) or demographic reasons (small population), there is the need to make sure that every single soldier is the most effective possibile.
This is just the natural consequence of the idea that a small number of highly trained and equipped soldiers can win against a larger army: infantry units cannot be completely replaced by mechanized units (the human being is still the most versatile element).
As soon as the technology will make it feasible, I think that the infantry will be made in the greater part of soldiers fighting in exoskeleton.
Adding to this idea, an exoskeleton would be extremely effective to replace mechanized units in the situation of difficult terrain (city, mountain, jungle, frosted terrains), where wheeled vehicle wouldn't be able to operate, or even in some still-to-exploit scenarios, such as hypothetical undersea facilities.
[Answer]
The [Wikipedia page on powered exoskeletons](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_exoskeleton) notes the times exoskeletons have been prototyped before (not always powered), and by whom/for what purpose:
* In 1890, as a mobility aid
* In 1917, for strength augmentation
* In the 1960's, by General Electric and the US Military
* In the 1960's, as an aid in recovery from paralysis
* In 1972, also as an aid in recovery from paralysis
* In 1985, for military use
* From 1986 to 2005, by an ex-paratrooper with a back injury
It looks like the most true-to-reality motivations for developing powered armor would be medicine, strength augmentation and, not surprisingly, military.
So it could easily be justifiable for the technology to exist prior to having a combat application--maybe it was developed by engineers working on heavy equipment or by physical therapists before any military organization began to take note.
[Answer]
If you're fighting aliens the size of powered armour, you might want power armour because your vehicles aren't versatile enough but your infantry can't carry weaponry effective enough. Similarly, you might need power armour if your enemy chooses to uses power armour, whatever their reason are.
[Answer]
## Construction work
One reason why American soldiers are beloved throughout the Middle East is that they need to enter and search many, many buildings, and they believe in never using a door. While it is certainly practical to make new entryways with high explosive, a powerful portable jackhammer attachment might help to nudge consumer satisfaction up that last fraction of a percent by creating new openings with a little more finesse.
## Climbing
If you can construct your own hand- and footholds in the wall on the way up as quickly as you can climb, it may be easier to find a suitable vantage point for rifle practice or a helicopter ride.
## Falling
Occasionally a soldier might reach a high vantage point for rifle work, only to find that the locals are so excited to see him that one of them points an RPG launcher in his direction. It would be impolite to encourage local residents to waste valuable rocket-propelled grenades on pleasantries, so it would be nice to be able to simply jump off the surface, relying on the machine to deploy a small parachute or wingsuit feature to marginally slow a long descent, followed by the projection of long rods with built-in regenerative braking to slow that awkward last step to the ground.
## Lifting
It can be embarrassing to have a wheel hung up in a fox hole while a large crowd of excited friendly locals is running up to greet you. Fortunately, a pneumatic jackhammer seems just as usable as a jack, and with a little clever design, might be rapidly put to use to clear such roadside inconveniences.
## Equipment
Soldiers don't have much trouble carrying a small arm and flex cuffs. But carrying a 50-caliber weapon and a *prisoner* in those flex cuffs, at the same time, might be a little wearisome. As much as it undermines their aura of athletic prowess, sometimes they could use a little mechanical help getting around with all the things they've picked up on the road.
[Answer]
To add to the great answers already here, I'd like to mention the scenario presented in Avatar (blue people, not benders).
The armor they had wasn't designed as an exoskeleton, but rather its purpose was to level the playing field between humans and the indigenous life of Pandora. Without the armor, humans were severely outmatched, even setting aside atmospheric differences.
Additionally, I think this presents a great example of what the asker is looking for: purpose-built armor.
[Answer]
Bunkers that you want to take more-or-less intact. Powered armor is sealed rather well against the pressure wave of grenades and the defenders don't want to use light anti armor weaponry due to backblast. Makeshift barricades and reinforced doors that might take a demolition team to clear can be ripped apart by brute force.
[Answer]
# trench and tunnel warfare
Powered armor might be able to bring back trench warfare. Last time [armor was used against trench warfare in 1991 by the USA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War#Bulldozer_assault) the armor strategy was to pin down the soldiers while burying them alive. This might not work at all against powered armor.
* Due to armor suppressing fire wouldn't be as suppressing. Likewise, any initial artillery barrage will be much less effective.
* The powered armor could more effectively lift heavy weapons that can damage armored vehicles at a close range
* It would be harder to bury a powered suit than just a person. The powered suit might have room for an emergency oxygen tank as well.
Although it gives more failure points, the ability to stand up and crouch down might give powered armor a key advantage when combined with trenches. They can hide and take cover while the vehicle cannot.
[Answer]
What justifies powered armour is the obvious extension of exactly the same considerations that justified any kind of armour in the first place.
It gives the wearer a huge advantage over anyone else.
[Answer]
**THE POWER ARMOR IN FALLOUT 4**
Seriously, all this talk about Power Armor and nobody even bothered to mentioned the Fallout series even a single damn time. A shame really, considering that series pretty much answered this question on its own. The reasoning behind the Power Armor in the series has also been discussed in depth by multiple sources, so there's plenty of material to work with.
Basically, the Power Armor turns the soldier into the modern equivalent of the Knight on steroids. He can run longer, hit harder, jump higher and endure a ludicrous amount of punishment. In the Fallout world, the Power Armor soldier is canonically given the same function of an assault tank and rightfully so, because they seem to share the same strengths and weaknesses.
If you want to experience how much of a gamechanger the Power Armor is, boot up Fallout4 on the Survival difficulty and have a run-through. Once you enter your second hour of playing you WONT BE EVER GETTING OUT of your Power Armor unless it's to drink or sleep, or to repair the damn thing. After a while it starts to grow on you, like a second skin you need to properly maintain if you want to survive. That's what Power Armor is about, extended warranty and better survival...
When the Brotherhood of Steel enters the game you pretty much get to see what kind of tactics are revolved around Power Armor. There's usually one or two soldiers in Power Armor attracting all of the attention on themselves, since they wield the heaviest weaponry and cause most of the havoc the enemy will naturally prioritize them over a handful of their allies taking potshots from the sidelines.
In combat, the soldier with the Power Armor is the tip of the spear, but he's not always the first one to go. The distinctive advantage Power Armor grants to its bearer rather than having him sit in a tank is the fact the soldier can actively keep up with the foot infantry in heavily obstructed areas, structures and otherwise impassible terrain for vehicles. The additional physical power he has at his disposal allows him to clear the path for others to follow, whether it's crashing and removing obstacles, breaching doors, breaking through walls and even breaking through the damn floors if necessary. Sadly, the Power Armor's main advantage is also its worst disadvantage if the enemy happens to have larger caliber or dedicated anti-tank weaponry. Once the soldier with the Power Armor is taken out, the effective strength of the formation he's part of is dramatically reduced.
In short, the soldier in the Power Armor should be considered as single-man assault-tank and should be treated as such when trying to come up with any form of tactics.
Out of combat, the Power Armor grants its bearer far more endurance and strength he could ever achieve on his own. This could be ideal for harsh working conditions, handling of heavy objects and working for long periods of time without experiencing fatigue. All that and also an additional layer of protection if bad comes to worse and accidents happen.
[Answer]
**No-one is in the armor.**
You want your enemies to think they are fighting humans. You want your allies to think your troops are flesh and blood like they are. The power armor is human shaped and human voices come out of it. The power armor soldiers do what humans do.
But there is no-one in there. They are drones, controlled remotely.
] |
[Question]
[
IE, atmosphere density, gravity, chemical composition of land, air and sea...
Somewhat of a counterpart to my own [Are there \*plausible\* planetary conditions where jet aircraft just don't have much advantage over propeller-driven aircraft?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/175172/are-there-plausible-planetary-conditions-where-jet-aircraft-just-dont-have-mu) I've seen [How would modern naval warfare have to have developed differently for battleships to still be relevant in the 21st century?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/149149/how-would-modern-naval-warfare-have-to-have-developed-differently-for-battleship) which doesn't cover this and [Delaying the development of aircraft](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81301/delaying-the-development-of-aircraft) which *partly* covers it, but answers are unfocused for my purposes because many of them are more alternate-history stuff that fits the previous question.
No frame-challenge questions. The planet has to have an atmosphere of sufficient density to support fixed-wing aircraft and to hold liquids on the surface. Suitable materials have to exist to build and power warships and aircraft in the first place. *IMPORTANT EDIT: Forgot to specify the more basic assumption: The boats and planes are being built by a land-dwelling species, so along with air and sea, the planet must have dry land.*
[Answer]
## Water World
On a water world, everything of importance could be under water instead of on top of it. This means you can convert your whole navy into submarines where they can better access and control these under water territories. Your ocean can still have an atmosphere above it where planes could fly, and planes would still be an important technology because they can travel so much faster than submarines, but they would have very limited means to interact with what is happening below the waves. Because airplanes can't see what is under the waves without some kind of sonar device in the water to transmit them information, they would be flying blind more often than not. In fact, the fleets could be so deep that airplanes may not have a good way to engage them even if they did know where they are.
The advantage of ships would be further enhanced if we are talking about an aquatic species instead of humans. Their airplanes will need to carry a lot of water so the pilots can survive out of the ocean. Putting just a single cubic meter of water onboard to fill a small cockpit would add an entire metric ton of weight. That is the weight of the entire explosive payload of many WWII era light bombers; so, meeting the engineering needs of both breathing out of water, and packing weapons that could sink a ship would be much harder.
---
>
> IMPORTANT EDIT: Forgot to specify the more basic assumption: The boats
> and planes are being built by a land-dwelling species, so along with
> air and sea, the planet must have dry land.
>
>
>
## Water-Like World
Well this edit derails my original answer... so here is another option along the same vein of thought that should still satisfy your needs. Make the atmosphere much thicker than Earth so that it is LIKE moving in water. Airplanes experience drag in proportion to lift; so, on a planet with a much thicker atmosphere, planes would still fly just fine but much slower. Instead of being able to move in at hundreds-to-thousands of miles per hour, planes would be restricted to speeds that are not much better than ships in the sea, or cars on land.
By taking away their mobility advantage, they would be much easier to pick off with AA weapons, and much harder to deploy when and where you need them. Deployment ranges would be drastically nerfed as well since it would take more fuel and time to cover any given distance.
Apart from slowing planes down, it would also make them more maneuverable. This would make interceptors far more effective such that fighters escorting your fleet could more effectively intercept inbound bombers before they can reach their mark.
The last and perhaps most important point about planes is engagement ranges. In general, larger weapons platforms can support longer ranged weapons. In the current model of air superiority, planes often have less range than ships, but they can use their speed to close into their own kill range very quickly. In contrast, if planes were much slower, then they would have to spend a lot longer between coming into the range of the ship's heavy cannons/ long-range-missiles and being in range to launch their own much smaller, more range limited torpedoes.
Perhaps a better way to visualize this is to picture any modern conflict between a naval bombardment and tanks. Tanks should be able to harm a warship if it could get close enough to shoot back, but in general it can't so the tanks just get wiped out.
[Answer]
Depending on the tech level I would suggest intense weather conditions making flying hazardous, e.g semi-permanent dense fogs or high winds/storms.
Note that any conditions that make early/primitive flight difficult or next to impossible of the above would impact the development of more modern, advanced flight technology unless that is introduced from/by external sources.
However in your 'world' zeppelins might still be a plausible option.
[Answer]
Less dense air, for two reasons:
* It would make flight harder, [similar to Mars](https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/)
* It would make [laser weapons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_weapon) more viable. They would probably be good at targeting fast-moving aircraft, but would need such power supplies that they can used on ships, but not on aircraft.
[Answer]
I'd suggest a low-density but high-oxygen atmosphere would make it hard to develop safe flight, never mind weaponise it.
In order to attack a ship with an aircraft, you need to do two things: first you need to fly a plane to the target, then you need to drop (or propel) something explosive onto it. Explosives are heavy, and they're also dangerous to handle. A thin atmosphere relative to the surface gravity will make it hard to develop planes with high carrying capacity, and those planes that do exist will have to be larger and more ponderous, making them easier targets for AA weaponry.
Meanwhile a high-oxygen atmosphere makes it very dangerous to use rocket-propelled missiles, as well as making the whole development of flight itself much more prone to accident. This will hold back specifically the development of *long range* air offence, which was what really did for naval power, and keep the belligerents in the position of trying to overfly the ships with bomber aircraft and drop gravity-propelled (maybe guided, but still free-falling) bombs on them, while being exposed to AA fire. All in all a much more balanced confrontation.
[Answer]
Other guys put decent answers, so I do some less decent:
* Your people could have low G tolerance, making maneuvers in jet speeds above 1MACH very stressful for body, maybe only few people in your world can be trained to handle those Gs so jet pilots would be extremely rare and most of pilots would fly classics. This could be done perhaps by lowering gravity of your planet and your people are less sturdy.
* Big sea monsters which would allow only big ships to pass - only battleships and carriers could pass without being attacked, smaller ships are being often attacked by the sea monsters or cannot carry effective defense against them. I know this is not about flying, but I had idea to force the big ships as only way to fight on sea.
[Answer]
No fossil fuels. A ship could run on wood (with reduced range /speed).
But without readily available fossil fuels, the development of internal combustion engines would be greatly hampered, and without those aviation wouldn't really exist.
] |
[Question]
[
**During the early Renaissance, how might a knight-errant equip themselves to mitigate the offensive capabilities of flying, fire-breathing reptiles?**
It can be assumed that the knight, backed by a wealthy benefactor, would have the funds necessary to procure multiple sets of full plate armor. However, they might choose to spend this money on different equipment should such armor prove insufficient to the task (for example, one might invoke the imagery of a **tin-wrapped baked-potato** to illustrate the potential downfalls of metal armor).
It can also be assumed that dragons are a relatively well-known threat. Furthermore, the fire-breath of the dragon in this scenario is produced by combustible gases (rather than petroleum jelly or some napalm-like liquid you might find in a flamethrower), such that the flame is unlikely to "stick" to objects that do not immediately catch fire.
[Answer]
Drop the armor. Make [Asbestos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos) clothing.
Against a dragon, metal armor would be a poor protection. Best bet for the knight would be avoiding dragon fire altogether and try to use ranged weapons and traps. However, the question specifically asks about fire protection, and there are a few things that Renaissance era technology can offer.
Asbestos had been known for a long time, and people could even make fabric out of it, though it had seen much use only in industrial era. It should be totally possible for a Renaissance era knight to have full body asbestos clothing, which should provide flexibility as well as some degree of protection from fire.
@maxisalamone's answer had suggested the use of large shield, and I would second that suggestion. Additional benefit of a shield is that it can be easily discarded.
[Answer]
# Forget about armor
No matter what kind of armor is used, the poor sod will just be cooked inside it when it comes down to battle. What you need is Game of Thrones scorpions (pictured below):
Dragons can't breath fire if they're dead (unless they are raised as zombies, but that's another problem).
[Answer]
**Tower shields**
An external layer made of metal plates, and a wooden interior layer for isolation.
Armor will simply be in the way, heatwise. But, on the other hand a dragon would have other means to attack besides fire.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6tjfb.jpg)
\*A typical towershield
[Answer]
I think a design change to knight's armor is required.
If their armor was spaced -- having a gap between layers -- then the middle layers could be filled with cork or maybe clay (thermal insulators). The second to innermost layer would be damp -- capping the temperature of that layer at 100 C (as long as it stayed moist). This means the inner layer doesn't need to be much more than the potholder to keep the Knight safe.
The knight would have some sort of water tank on their back -- or saddles -- that would use the bouncy motion of the horse to keep water dripping into the second to the innermost layer.
The knight would also need an air supply -- because of just a like a flame thrower -- the dragon's breath would consume the oxygen in the air, leaving behind combustion products. This means that a knight that survived the flames could still suffocate until the smoke and etc cleared. It wouldn't need to be pressurized like a scuba tank. I think maybe a long hose would be good -- long enough to be out of the burning radius. But, that might be too resistive to breathe through. So a set of leather bladders -- fixed under the horse -- might give the knight enough air to charge in or run away. And the knight would take the air nozzle in his mouth and bite down to breathe in the air stored in the bladder. Only a few breathe would be needed since the goal is to keep the knight fighting while in the swirling fire or smoke. The knight would be attacking or fleeing at those times so he wouldn't be in the danger zone for all that long.
[Answer]
OP has stated this is a transitory passing of fire and flame, and not any napalm-like liquid or gel being stuck onto the knight. There's an answer for that.
## Anti-flash gear
Navies have been [dealing with this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flash_gear) for 100 years. The issue is that artillery propellants create very fiery but very, very short duration flame fronts. It's all over in less than 1 second, but it creates flash burns that wreck the skin and eyes, and put the gunners out of commission. That means that gun is silenced until medics can get the injured out and re-crew the gun with fresh sailors.
The Navy discovered this is not such a vexing problem. Sailors simply needed momentary protection from the flame front. So the answer was **anti-flash gear**, simply cloth soaked in borate fire retardent (and today, Nomex), along with some eye protection.
Of course, this knight will have to wait centuries for the Battle of Jutland, and by then the knight will be a doughboy. I'm not sure they have discovered borates in medieval times. But, the test is simple enough; soak cloth in a substance, let it dry, then wave the cloth through fire and see if it catches. I asert that alchemists, tasked with the job of treating woolen cloth to retard fire, will simply trial-and-error until they find something that performs reasonably well as anti-flash.
If nothing else, wetting the cloth would suffice, though would have to be kept wetted somehow.
[Answer]
One thing you will want to consider is that fire means hot air as well. Is it useful to have your skin safe only to have your lungs dry out and crisp when you are surrounded by super-heated air? This is something that annoy's me when I see people running around in closed areas with lots of lava in fiction stories. Well, dragon breath may create some of the same problems.
So the first thing to think about how long your dragon can deliver a gout of flame along with how big the flame is. If you have a fairly small gout of flame that only lasts a handful of seconds, you are ok. If the Dragon spews a huge gout of flame that is super-heating the air and it lasts for 30 seconds or more, your knights may have some issues no matter how good the armor is. One gulp of 1000 degree or more air is going to create some problems. If it doesn't crisp the rather fragile human lungs it could very well dry them out, which isn't good either.
I would suggest, as others, perhaps a jacket and breeches of an asbestos fabric over chain or leather armor. The helm could be interesting. Perhaps something like a diving helmet fed by a bellows with a squire hiding behind a rock.
Of course the best way to survive a battle is to not get too close, so an even better tactic is to ambush the big beastie and stay as far away as possible from the breath weapon. Heavy longbows, or better yet Ballistae. Set booby traps in the lair while it's out hunting. Poison. Things that will kill the dragon while it is a long way away from you.
[Answer]
**Evasion**
Good luck taking a hit from a flamethrower; even if you have fireproof armor made of asbestos or have a tower shield you’re still going to be dealing with all the nasty side effects a burning liquid would. Asbestos won’t help against oxygen depletion, and a tower shield could very well have flame spill over it and still burn the knight.
It’s better to treat the dragon as a tank or attack aircraft, something the infantryman must avoid and outmaneuver in order to strike it with specialized equipment at range. Perhaps the knight could have a really powerful crossbow that he uses to shoot the dragon from a concealed position, or he rides a fast horse and shoots arrows, or even better since it is a Renaissance era Knight he could have a matchlock with grapeshot to use against it
] |
[Question]
[
In my world most magic is learned through hard work and dedication, and is mostly useless for healing. However, there are a *very* rare number of individuals who can wield some of the most powerful magic without studying, for now call them sorcerers since I haven't given them a good title yet (really need to figure that out soon).
Ignoring for now certain genetic/environmental factors required to become a sorcerer one of the most significant aspects of their magic is that sorcerers gain their power based on having a single defining belief or cause that they are so passionate and driven about that it fuels a sort of emotion/dedication powered magic. This means they can wield powerful magics, but only when those magics are used towards furthering those ideals or dedications that motivate the sorcerer and fuel his/her magic. This also means any sorcerer will, practically by definition, be so passionate about their cause that they are willing to make significant sacrifices for it; if they aren't that passionate they wouldn't have become a sorcerer!
I want to have one sorcerer play a minor role in my story. Originally using his appearance early in the story to justify an info dump about what a sorcerer is in preparation for a latter reveal of a different villainous sorcerer (he has some other minor roles in the story, but none too relevant here). I've decided to make the good sorcerer's passion about stopping pain and healing anyone in need, giving him access to healing magic that is otherwise not possible with traditional magic. However, since his drive is so much about not causing pain and healing anyone, including the guilty, he can't join our heroes to *deus ex machin*a a solution to the villain. Actively setting out to fight, and potentially hurt, another person, even a villainous one, goes against his passion and thus he wouldn't be able to use any magic to aid in such a fight.
I had a nice discussion already played out in my head for how our good sorcerer/healer ends up info dumping some details about what a sorcerer is and setting up some later plot points, but this discussion can only play out if he has time to talk and joke with our protagonists. My problem is I've created someone who is the sole healer in a large city-state who is pretty much given to being willing to never take a break from healing when others are in need (he wouldn't be a sorcerer if he wasn't that passionate!). It's hard to believe that in a large city-state there wouldn't always be someone else in need of his help. So how can I justify his wasting time on a decent length conversation and joking with random protagonists who stopped in for quick healing when there should always be someone else in need of his help next?
[Answer]
When he first got to the city, he found so much healing needed that he overworked himself to the point of collapsing from exhaustion. The city leadership got together and decided that they would get more healing done, in the long term, if the sorcerer ate, slept, and spent some time relaxing than if he made himself ill from overwork and too little rest.
They came up with a plan. The sorcerer has limited working hours, enforced by the city guard. Only extreme emergencies can lead to him being allowed to heal outside those hours. To help him eat well and relax, the leaders keep running accounts for him at a couple of the best taverns in the city. He is encouraged to get a proper dinner, a mug of ale, and spend the evening in the common room chatting with anyone who interests him. Being one of those taverns is a significant status symbol, so he always gets a good table and the best food and drink.
After a while, the sorcerer and everyone around him realize he gets more done that way. Enforcement is now quite light, maybe one guardsman hanging out in a corner of the common room, in case someone sneezes and the sorcerer has to be reminded it is outside his working hours.
This evening, he feels like hearing some travel stories, so he invites a party of adventurers to join him at his table...
[Answer]
**His abilities are limited**
* Healing magic **takes a long time**, so healing everyone isn't a reasonable expectation. He could approach this logically by realizing he should adopt a moderate schedule (what difference will 5 more people make out of 100?), or he could approach this emotionally and decide to heal people 24/7, producing the opposite of the desired effect.
* Healing magic **needs to recharge**, so even if he spends all of his mana healing people whenever he's able, he isn't able very often.
* Healing magic **has side effects** (what does all that extra magic do to the body?) because all magic must come at a cost. He only reserves his healing for the desperately ill or completely incurable.
* Healing magic **can't heal everything** despite his sorcerer status. It's easier for most people to seek natural cures for minor ailments and really terrible stuff is beyond his control, so he can only treat a limited range of injuries, giving him free time.
* Healing magic **damages the sorcerer** proportionally to the amount he helps others, limiting what he can accomplish in a given day.
**Most pain is treatable in other ways**
* Frame challenge: healing magic is hard to learn but **accessible to non-sorcerers**. Very specialized professional mages can do healing. They may still be rare, but he won't be the only one.
* The majority of injuries may be **treatable without magic**. Perhaps, since his magic is limited for the aforementioned reasons, the sorcerer has developed herbal salves to treat pain, or he knows how to set bones by hand. Such practices can easily be learned by non-mages. Only severe stuff really needs magic.
* Emotional pain can be **treated through counseling**. Perhaps the reason the sorcerer is around to talk in the first place is because he is psycoanalyzing your characters in order to fix their emotional issues.
**Not everyone deserves (or wants) to be healed**
* Frame challenge: even though the sorcerer wants to heal the guilty, **many hurting people also inflict pain**. If he heals harmful people, they will create a net gain in pain in society. So he only heals the pure despite his inner drive.
* **Magic is stigmatized** by the public, so few people resort to the sorcerer's help.
[Answer]
**He's gotta eat.**
Even the most passionate among us need fuel for the fire and your sorcerer is no exception. He usually eats only one meal a day and usually at the place around the corner, where they give him his meals on the house. But your protagonists have heard about this sorcerer and for their visit they have brought along take out - warm bread from the bakery across town and grilled fish from the pier, washed down with cider from their own press.
The sorcerer is hungry and the stuff smells good. He talks while he eats.
[Answer]
This is actually a writing question.
**He doesn't stop to talk**
If you want to talk to Doc Sorcerer, you've got to follow him as he works.
From a narrative perspective, that gives you something interesting to break up your info-dump. Additionally, it would give you a chance to lay out doc sorcerer's character partly indirectly. There can be chanting, brief exchanges with the people he's treating (some of them he may even recognize from before), and threading among the wounded, or the concerned people asking him to come help.
Maybe your major characters realize they CAN'T ask him for help, that he just isn't a fighter. But show him in action.
[Answer]
**Magic Summary**
Sorcerers turn their drive and passion for *something* into magic that is directly related to that something and only usable in situations that advance that drive and passion in a sort of feedback loop. This can potentially be self-destructive if left unchecked. Also it can be powerful, doing things that magic is not known to be able to do.
Magic takes dedicated study and learning, but little is known based on the question aside from it is bad at healing. Can magic's fire spells match a sorcerer whose passion is fire?
Personally, I think that there is something missing here -- can learned magic ever match the power and ability of a sorcerer in their field, and why?
But onward to the answer:
**There is more to Healing than being a Healer**
Your sorcerer is driven and powerful, but not stupid.
First of all, his passion to not cause pain and heal "anyone in need" will actually include themselves if they push themselves hard enough to be in that level of pain. Sure, they sacrifice their free time and social life to the healer's cause, but past a certain point, they are causing real and actual pain to themselves. This will be a pain that their passion for healing would mandate that they do something about since they can. They might be able to ignore it for a while because it's a sacrifice for somebody else, but that can only last for so long.
This plays on the passion/drive angle of your system as it is. Their drive to heal everyone will include themself, even if their own healing and well-being is less important than that of others.
See the Fate series for the kinds of traps that this healer could fall into should they not take care of themselves in the pursuit of being a healer of all. Although if this healer is good enough, people might just not die if they are killed.
**Contagious Passion**
You have a person that is so passionate about healing that they have distilled it into a raw magical ability. That very passion is part of their powers. It is a drive that is somewhat infectious, with people seeing their selfless drive and joining them in the pursuit of the healing arts.
Now you have a hospital, sparked by one man's passion and held together by those that share the healer's drive to reduce pain and suffering in the world.
Now, obviously this person might be the only one driven enough to actually be a sorcerer of healing, and that's fine. Other people in this hospital can handle other less major things, like cuts, scrapes, and keeping the healer from working themselves to death. This frees up the Healer to magic away the most immediately life-threatening or painful issues, whatever is actually the driving force of their passion.
They might even work on lesser cases when the workload is less and the drive compels them to work on and heal more.
[Answer]
## The obvious answer? - conventional medical knowledge exists and is widely practiced
Just like the existence of magical swords doesn't stop society from crafting lots of mundane steel weapons the existence of (rare) magical healers doesn't mean conventional medicine and healing skills are not known and practiced. In fact if, as you say magical healing is very rare the practice of mundane medicine would be inevitable.
Depending on the setting it would be entire reasonable for a large city to have a guild or class of medical practitioners and universities or schools/ monasteries etc where medicine is taught and studied. So there are apothecaries, surgeons and midwives etc who ply their trade along side your sorcerer. All of them skilled enough to deal with day to day illnesses and emergencies like setting bones or performing basic surgery etc.
Depending on the setting it would be entirely possible for an advanced medieval society to have a basic knowledge of good public hygiene policy (e.g. things like the need for good sewer and fresh water systems and regular refuse collection) as well as knowledge of some kind of basic disease theory and human anatomy.
Add in knowledge of medicinal plants and 'alchemy' to produce crude antiseptics and anesthetics (along with a lot of placebos of course ) and you have a situation where most day to day illnesses and accidents etc can be dealt with without the Sorcerer having to be involved.
[Answer]
**He grasps the big picture**
The good sorcerer (GS) knows that taking down the evil sorcerer (ES) will save more lives than he would have normally healed in his own city during the same time period. He also knows that the party will ultimately try to kill the ES and only he (GS) has the power and knowledge to prevent this death.
By coming along with the party, even if under false pretenses of helping to end the life of the ES (up to you to decide what is the best option for your story), the GS can ensure less death than if he doesn't come with them. Maybe GS can heal the ES after the fight and drain ES's desire to be evil. Or any number of interesting paths...
[Answer]
# They have psychological issues that prevent them from being properly effective if they dedicate themselves that way.
Beyond simply dealing with the burnout of dealing with patients all the time, it’s entirely possible that they have other psychological issues that might play up if they’re on the end of their rope psychologically.
Take the character of Amy Dallon/Panacea from the superhero web serial Worm and its sequel, Ward. She’s a superhero who has the power to alter the biology of anyone she touches in any way she wants, and she primarily uses that power to heal people. She’s also dangerously psychologically unstable - and an explanation of how involves spoilers.
Unfortunately for her, she has (adoptive) superhero parents who don’t really seem to love her due to their own traumas and mental illnesses, so she wound up fixating on her (adoptive) sister who did show her love and affection, and who wound up developing a superpower that, among other things, lets her project an emotional aura that causes people to either love or fear her by altering their brain chemistry. These two factors together, combined with the fact her sister developed this power while Amy’s sexuality was developing, caused Amy to develop an incestuous, unrequited sexual crush on her sister that she repressed until a super villain psychologically manipulated her into letting go of her self-imposed rules, causing Amy to use her power to alter her sisters’s brain in order to force her to reciprocate her sexual interest. When Amy’s sister responds poorly by being manipulated that way, Panacea runs away from home and starts living in a homeless shelter healing people there.
After her sister is badly injured by one of that aupervillain’s teammates before his death, Panacea heals her before proceeding to rape and mutate her sister into an erotic superstimulus by multiplying all the features she found attractive. When she realised afterwards that she wasn’t sure how to turn her sister back, she was overcome by guilt and demanded to be sent to the super-prison her super villain biological father had been sent to or else she’d use her power to create and unleash a super-plague.
Even a few years later, after she was later released from prison and undid what she had done to her sister, she wasn’t really trusted by other superheroes because she never really took responsibility for her actions; as far as was concerned, good people did good things and bad people did bad things, and she’s a good person, so she couldn’t have really done bad things - she was having a psychotic break, so what happened to her sister wasn’t really her fault, since it wasn’t really her. The fact that she’d started dating a former top-tier supervillainess didn’t help either, nor did the fact that their relationship ended with Amy betraying and murdering said girlfriend after she’d helped her break an army of super villains out of prison with the intention of using them to reconquer said supervillain girlfriend’s home Earth - which Amy promptly did herself, using her power to “rehabilitate” said super villain army.
It’s important to note that throughout all of this (aside from when she “took a break” to rape and mutate her sister) she was genuinely trying to use her power to help as many people as possible - because she views herself as a good person, and that means to her that she needs to demonstrate that by doing good deeds.
[Answer]
# [Triage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage) and some minor slow acting spells gives him time where someone is still healing, but he's not actively focused on everyone at every time.
Of particular note of the character is this line:
>
> I've decided to make the good sorcerer's passion about stopping pain and healing anyone in need, giving him access to healing magic that is otherwise not possible with traditional magic.
>
>
>
Stopping pain, however, might be something he can do as a lower level spell (Perhaps even a custom cantrip), which doesn't necessarily heal exactly, but numbs the pain of whatever injury someone encountered, is a quicker casting time than actually fully healing someone, and as he may need a higher level healing spell slot for another person, can allow him to simply send slightly sick people back home to sleep off the minor injuries - he might even be able to bottle potions of the effect to allow someone else to hand them out while he deals with the harsher clients.
So he focuses his time on healing people who need immediate recovery due to losing blood, or missing limbs, in a way that saves them, but that person who has a hangover from last night? "Here's a painkiller spell, it won't fix the pain, but it'll stop you from feeling it, so go sleep it off today." Same to someone with a cold or flu, or a disease of some sort - he may presume that smaller issues can be monitored, but don't require an immediate use of Lesser Restoration or a higher level spell.
This can be extended a bit more - that person with a broken bone? Well, here's a lower level spell to reset the bone, but it's not fully healed, so here's a painkiller cantrip, and just rest in this healing bed. If he's out of higher level spells to actually fully heal the bone, or if he's willing to occasionally knock them out with the painkiller spell so that they don't feel pain while their bones heal, that saves him some time on casting the longer length spells.
He might have a receptionist of some sort to register people as they come in, and determine if they just need to drink the painkiller potion and come back if the pain is still there after it wears off, which would free him up to take more time on either creating those potions so they don't run out, or treat a more endangered patient.
This would give him time to give a consultation with the PCs at some timeframe, but not allow him to necessarily leave the healing area he has - this person with a broken bone isn't feeling pain right now, but to properly heal the person, he needs to be able to find time later on to actually set their broken bones, or heal the underlying condition for why someone was bleeding when they came in originally.
] |
[Question]
[
This question is a little nebulous unfortunately and perhaps a bit disturbing.
The evil-empire in my WIP captures Mages and breaks them down into loyal and obedient servants. The Mages aren't as dehumanized as the [Sul'dam](http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/Sul%27dam), no their breaking is much slower and insidious working on both mundane and magical levels and, if executed successfully, produces true subservience and loyalty.
It is from the mundane side of training and conditioning.
So I ask what are some of the techniques and practices used to breakdown an individual's will and recondition them specifically to servitude?
[Answer]
**To break people, recruit them into a cult.**
Steven Hassan has written several books about the mind control practiced by destructive cults. The acronym BITE refers to Hassan's four factors of brainwashing: behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control.
* Behavior control: The organization teaches believers to behave without questioning, not to associate with outsiders, and to spend time performing rituals or proselytizing.
* Information control: The organization is the only source of truth; other sources of information shall be distrusted.
* Thought control: Believers are expected to internalize the organization's doctrine as "truth". They are encouraged to adopt an us-and-them mentality and refrain from critical thinking.
* Emotion control: Associating love with the organization. Guilt. Fear of the outside. Fear of punishment for not meeting the organization's standards, up to and including everlasting punishment.
See also [more details about BITE](https://www.freedomofmind.com/Info/BITE/bitemodel.php) and how it [applies to human trafficking](https://www.freedomofmind.com/Services/HumanTraffickingBITE.php).
In fact, several real-world religions have been accused of practicing BITE techniques, especially [Jehovah's Witnesses](http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/fear-cult-mind-control.php) and the [Mormons](http://www.rationalrevelation.com/library/bite.html). Jehovah's Witnesses in particular are known to use shunning to cut off former members from their families. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, ISIS, Daesh) uses BITE as well, according to [Hassan's article](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-hassan/isis-is-a-cult-that-uses-_b_6023890.html) in *The Huffington Post*.
Try to catch the mages when they're children, before they've been given a chance to go to a more relatively mainstream magic school such as Hogwarts. Children are especially vulnerable to BITE techniques.
[Answer]
It's different for every person. There won't be any guaranteed method that operates on human psychology (without magic).
If you keep them for long enough then one effect might be [Stockholm Syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome). Over all situations this is not very common, occurring in about 8% of hostage situations. It's a strange thing that people do, kind of similar to [battered person syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_person_syndrome). With no guaranteed way to achieve this the attrition rate for captured Mages will be quite high.
If you allow the use of magic, including devices like for the Sul'dam, then things become a little easier.
The trick is the same as for training any animal (including humans), *consistency*. With consistent, unfailing feedback on actions that are ok and those that are not ok a person can be trained to be subservient in far less time with much better results. This is the principle that makes things like shock collars for dogs incredibly effective. It is also the reason people don't try to walk through walls on a normal basis, because the wall *always* wins.
[Answer]
I think there are 2 main ways to keep people subservient. Lets start with the more common one.
1) **Fear**
If you want to break someone, this is what you want to steer towards.
As long as you keep them scared of what could possibly happen to them, they'll behave. It's a simple concept and often very efficient. Examples that come to mind, for example, is any hostage situation. The armed villains have weapons and threaten the hostages lives - the hostages listen and do whatever the villains tell them to do, eg: get on the ground, hands on your head, etc.
Start with the initial fear, and condition it so that they're always scared, hence breaking the individuals will.
In fact, you don't have to continuously apply pain/torture techniques. You just have to do it once, bad enough that they never want to feel it again, and then remind them once in a while that they'll feel it if they don't obey.
If you're actually looking for a technique... just take one of your prisoners, put him under Chinese water torture (while hidden from the rest of the prisoners). When he breaks and goes nuts, bring him into the public and show him around to the prisoners, and don't tell them what you did to this guy. Make them use their imagination. Then, rip out his nails one by one, burn half of his body, slowly flay the other half of him with a blunt knife, and then send him to be drawn and quartered. Then go and kill his family the exact same way, in public.
(And if you really want to make it bad for them, somewhere along the flaying process start putting salt on his wounds. Literally. Don't forget to make your prisoners do the drawn and quartering of their comrade. Whip them forwards until he gets ripped apart.)
Edit: Courtesy of Jason C for reminding me of this. You can also deprive the prisoners of nourishment and make them work for it. If they don't work, they don't eat.
2) **Loyalty**
This is the nicer way to do it, if you don't want to break them after capturing them.
Give them something to obey for. A prize, perhaps. Any sort of incentive.
Or, give them someone to worship - an idol, maybe a lover? People will do (almost) anything for the people they love...
[Answer]
DJMethaneMan was IMHO on the right track. These mages would essentially be similar to slave soldiers such as [Janissaries](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissaries) or [Mamluks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk). So recruit young, strict discipline etc. And yes, the methods are not really that different from those use by any other military. Discipline is discipline. The difference is that it would encompass the entire life from early on to the grave.
But those wikipedia links should give you some ideas.
[Answer]
My father was in the USMC and they screamed and exercised his defiance out of him. If he didn't exercise and obey he got beat up (it was in the late 60's) and screamed at until he did. After a while he mindlessly obeyed without question. Run your future slaves through some sort of boot camp where those who don't make it get executed. Break their will this way and build them back up to live to serve you.
[Answer]
Have a **lobotomy** be part of the mundane training. That is a rather drastic brain surgery, which is surprisingly "easy" to perform. All you need is a chair with a clamp to really fix someone's head, a T-shaped spike with a small blade at the long end of the T and a hammer to drive the spike through the skull bone behind the patient's (i.e. victim's) eyes. Each side of the brain will be treated separately by cutting at defined depths and angles. There's no worry about damaging the brain because that's the sole reason to do this.
Medieval tech should allow this. Medieval knowledge does clearly **not**. But you got magic in your story, surely this helps figuring out how the human body works.
The long-term effect of a lobotomy is that the patient (read: victim) will never be agitated again. He or she is emotion- and partially mindless. The patient is conscious during the procedure and is asked to solve algorithmic problems. As soon as he has problems with that the procedure is deemed a success. The problems will decrease, when the brain tries to repair itself but some things may need to be learned again. However the part of the brain that controls emotions like anger, ambition and stuff that's usually driving a person is more or less irreparable. The only other short-term effect is that the victim looks, as if he had been punched brutally on both eyes.
**Before you ask:** No, I'm not making this up. The real-world inventor was driving through the USA in what he called the lobo-mobile performing this stuff multiple times a day. You can read about it on Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy>
BTW. John F. Kennedy's sister is supposed to had this done to her before disappearing from public attention. If the rumor is true, the idea was to control her lifestyle unfitting to the Kennedy's public status, i.e. she was meeting too many boys at a too young age.
Humans look like a sad species, if you know what they do to each other.
[Answer]
You mentioned the Wheel of Time in your question with the Sul'Dam. However, there is another epic fantasy series called Sword of Truth. In this series, there are 3 main ways to make mages (and others) into obedient slaves.
The first method is through the torture of a Mord'Sith. A Mord'Sith is a once kind woman who was tortured until she is broken. She has the capability of turning someone's magic against them, and basically tortures the person until they're their slave.
The second way is through a Rada'Han. this has a very similar nature to the a'dam the Seanchan Sul'Dam use to enslave their damane.
The final way is through the mind control of a Dream Walker. A Dream Walker can slip in through the cracks in a person's mind and stay there, basically controlling their mind.
[Answer]
I am not sure what you mean by mundane. But the "easiest" to break someone is physical or psychological **torture** (clockwork orange, full metal jacket or game of thrones come to mind). But that is not insidious at all.
As Aify mentioned you could play with **love**. Find someone/something each will fall in love with and they can be controlled. How many real-life fiction events prove that power. However, when there are too many Mages to subdue, that might be difficult. Furthermore, your control is only as strong as the loyalty of the object of the love. Typically if one Mage is in love with a woman loyal to you, everything is fine. If the loyalty of that woman flickers, you loose the Mage.
One efficient way, often used in fiction as well is simply **drug**. You drug them surreptitiously. If the drug is rare enough, they will have to be dependent on you to provide further. Now that would be a long-term plan. However fear/love/promises of price could work for the time the drug effect to kick in.
As an illustration, you can look at the *myth* about the [Sect of the Assassin](http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/alamut/etymolAss.html). The story goes that the leader, the "Old Man in the Mountain" was capturing some young people, bring them to their "secret" society, where they had everything: women, alcool, etc. and hashish. Then they were sent out and had to fulfill obligations for the Sect for hope of coming back to Alamut. Meanwhile the drug kept them in control. In [reality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassins_%28sect%29), the use of hashish and its etymology with assassin is probably untrue, and most likely linked to a misunderstanding of European in the region.
[Answer]
Everyone can be broken, have no doubt. I would say to find something personal to hold against them. Some kind of "lock" that keeps them in line at all times *before* they're broken, and remind them that you hold the key.
Depending on the source of magic for your WIP (either personal power, or naturally occurring pockets to tap into), you could sap their power from them and turn it against them to break them. Brainwash them in the process, showing them that the way they use it is wrong, and your method is right.
[Answer]
Sharing information and social representations are powerful tools to control people. You can think about how our opinions and emotions are shaped by mass media. Sharing responsibility and mass psychology are also interesting dynamics (see Bandura's works and classical social psychology, think about fascism, and how it was simple to venerate a dictator in a huge square crowded of people). Remember that everyone can be turned into a behavioral and cognitive circle, that nourish itself, after a single moment of moral weakness, fear or incertitude can turn to the mainstream!
[Answer]
Since you mention Wheel of Time... *(spoilers about one of the Forsaken)*
>
> Graendal, one of the Forsaken, was a master of Compulsion. This weave (*"magic"*) created an urge in the target to please the person who casted it.
>
>
>
While it was possible to cast it very strongly on a person, this usually caused mental damage. So it was best to cast a light version of it if you wanted a long-term servant.
>
> Graendal used compulsion and would also stimulate the areas of the brain which cause pleasure or pain. This combination would get people to do anything for her.
>
>
>
In the same vein of thought as the Sul-dam, you could have a collar or other object which casts a similar enchantment on whoever is wearing it.
Perhaps all mages are required to wear that "mark", as a symbol of their being a mage. Anyone wearing the mark is enchanted to want to please your God-Empress.
] |
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 8 months ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/245369/edit)
In the near future our net (digital) activity is monitored and logged into kind of social credit system. How would our protagonist go about
* Hide illegal activity (Could it be camouflaged as legal maybe?)
* Generate acceptable activity. (No activity is suspicious.)
Botting activity is a no go as bots (dumb ai) can be detected by other similar algorithms. Humans have unique irrational pattern to their activity.
[Answer]
The answer is sadly the way that most current illegal activity is done online - Mainly through the use of coded language that has both a commonly understood meaning and an alternate meaning known to those who are engaged in illicit activity.
Take, for example, the recent crusade against Child Exploitation on Twitter. No one accused of Twitter of actually hosting anything illegal, but the organization and communication between parties using language that at a glance would not attract attention:
"We have just come into possession of some 2011 vintage Sauvignon Blanc, from the vineyards of Eastern Europe. Our Sommelier can arrange a private tasting session, but spaces are limited."
Now, that message on its own doesn't raise any suspicion to a lay person and definitely not to a bot. However, someone intimately familiar with Wine might raise an eyebrow at East European Vineyards or what a 2011 vintage is - but again, it's got enough plausible deniability - someone may very well have a small business selling obscure wines.
Or it could be that 2011 vintage describes the age of the victims, Sauvignon Blanc denotes their ethnicity (it's a *white* wine), and the 'location' of the Vineyard could either be where they are being held or where they were abducted from - Sommelier tasting - well, I'll leave that to your imagination.
The more 'authentic' you can make the posts and the more obscure or esoteric you can make your hidden messages, the more likely it is to slip through any automated system and even a manual review system.
Suppose there's a website and a phone number - you call the number and are greeted by a Wine seller - you might decide 'Oh well, this is legitimate, it's just a bit odd' - How difficult would it before for an organized gang to rent a money laundering front operation that has a legitimate business? The answer is not very difficult.
[Answer]
When you say "social credit system," I assume you're talking about something [like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System):
>
> The Social Credit System (Chinese: 社会信用体系; pinyin: shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) is a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of the People's Republic of China. The social credit initiative calls for the establishment of a record system so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness.
>
>
>
There's a small but distinct difference between *trustworthiness* and *criminality.* But it's important. My father is fond of a phrase, "you can stand a politician being a fool, but not a crook." The last thing you want is your criminals *looking perfect.* That's often as obvious as being a crook. Here in the U.S., we sometimes find illegal migrant workers driving under the speed limit. They think they're avoiding discovery by not doing anything to get pulled over by the police. What they're really doing is putting a big flag on their car that says "look at me!" Believe me, they're noticed.
Real people make mistakes. But there are limits even to this. Make a big enough mistake and you're watched constantly. If your Social Credit System is competent enough, then it would notice when a citizen decided to use a TOR node....
**Misdirection**
A number of answers have given you specific examples of misdirection. Basically, the idea is to hide in plain sight. Yes, you could use military-grade encryption or create an online persona that's the epitome of the perfect citizen — but things like that *get noticed.* Misdirection means conducting your business in a way that appears to be any legitimate business.
And that's not uncommon in history. They're called ***[Front Organizations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_organization).***
>
> A front organization is any entity set up by and controlled by another organization, such as intelligence agencies, organized crime groups, terrorist organizations, secret societies, banned organizations, religious or political groups, advocacy groups, or corporations. Front organizations can act for the parent group without the actions being attributed to the parent group, thereby allowing them to hide certain activities from the authorities or the public.
>
>
> Front organizations that appear to be independent voluntary associations or charitable organizations are called front groups. In the business world, front organizations such as front companies or shell corporations are used to shield the parent company from legal liability. In international relations, a puppet state is a state which acts as a front (or surrogate) for another state.
>
>
>
The idea here is to bury the criminal activities within the normal operations of a legal, moral, and upstanding business or group.
**A specific front organization: identity theft**
A serious mistake would be to create a fake online persona. A social credit system will be very capable of discovering an *incomplete person,* someone with no history, no mistakes, no depth of behavior... just a list of facts (no matter how "complete") that don't express a living, breathing person. This is one reason why a front organization would be useful.
But equally useful would be a stolen identity. Now, to be fair, a major problem on the Internet is that it's getting easier to trace Internet activity. After all, somewhere along the line one computer needs to know enough about another computer to effectively talk to it. But let's ignore that. Finding the identities of people who have similar interests and/or behaviors to the criminal's desired *misdirection* would be an otherwise effective way to skirt the law. The stolen identity, which is complete from the Social Credit System's perspective, wouldn't be obviously identified as a "person of interest." The original identity's trustworthiness acts as a screen for the criminal's activities until caught — in which case the stolen identity takes the fall.
**But there's another possibility: chaos**
I can't speak to the effectiveness of online social tracking, but if documentaries like *[The Social Dilemma](https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/)* are to be believed, then what a truly diabolical Social Credit System would do is act as a two-way street.
1. Tracking people to assess their social trustworthiness.
2. Influencing people toward what the government believes is trustworthy behavior (like voting for the right person, dontchaknow).
I'll be honest with you, that second idea combined with the discussion from *The Social Dilemma* makes me wonder if your online criminals can effectively operate in that kind of world. The behavior of the criminal would need to be influenced consistently and predictably by the Social Credit System or it would be automatically flagged as something *suspicious.*
But...
Here's where the idea of chaos comes in. Computers are good at dealing with patterned systems. They're not particularly good at extracting patterns from chaos (or, worse, they tend to over-extract patterns from chaos, finding order where none exists). Said another way, your clever criminals could find a way to *operate within the noise margin of the system.*
A [noise margin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_margin) is the minimum "signal strength" a signal must have, below which it's integrity cannot be trusted due to the presence of uncontrollable noise, such as static from any number of sources. In other words, if your radio broadcast falls below the noise margin, there's too much static to predictably hear the music.
All data mining operations have a noise margin, meaning they always acquire data that has little to no relevance to the intent of the operation. Such information corrupts the value of the data you're actually seeking. Software must be written (as effectively as possible, this can be REALLY HARD) to identify and exclude "noise."
The social credit system will have the same problem. There will always be quirks in the system. Your moral, upstanding citizen gives into temptation and buys a copy of Playboy, an oddity as he's never done that before. Or maybe it's someone with the same name that looks like the moral upstanding citizen. Or maybe the data collection system erroneously attached the moral citizen's ID number to Ducky McNeal, who religiously purchases every copy of Playboy.... Noise.
Your criminals, if they work really hard at it, could conduct their business inside the data noise margin, allowing them to conduct business pretty much without ever being caught.
*Please don't ask me how to specifically identify examples in the present Internet world of what I just explained. I know just enough about it to be dangerous, but I don't believe I know enough about it to write a credible book. However, I'm a firm believer that if you write a good story, explaining every detail of how this can be done would be boring and unnecessary for most of your readers. And if you write a bad story, it won't matter how detailed you are.*
[Answer]
The rules of social credit system are bound to have any number of **legal loopholes**, which can be exploited relatively safely.
In the early 1990s, Polish law defined a van as 'a vehicle in which cargo space is separated from passenger space', and charged less road tax for vans than for passenger cars. As a result, [this city car](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Cinquecento) became the country's most popular, umm, *van*. All you had to do was to put a wire mesh between the back seats and the boot: within weeks, you could buy one made specifically to match the car's internal dimensions in any respectable car parts shop.
If you're like most people and are not planning on doing something bona fide criminal, this is how you circumvent a social credit system. As a bonus, a social credit system *cannot penalise sufficiently popular loopholes*, because it would undermine itself by doing so. (Think what would happen to the airlines' bottom line if say a quarter of their potential customers found themselves forbidden from flying on planes.)
[Answer]
# Impersonation
There are many variations on the theme 'do not steal too close to your own home'. Digitally this should count just as much. You want to look legitimate yourself, so the digital 'you' never does anything illegal. To do illigal stuff you'll have unrelated digital identities.
How can you do this? A fake might be hard to do, so you take a real person their digital identity. Social engineering is a great way to receive people their username and passwords, but also a copy of their sim card for example. Do this with people completely unrelated to you. If you have enough information you can impersonate them, doing the illegal activities you want. Preferably not from your own home with location services on.
Of course you communicate with code, try to further hide behind VPN or the like, but the true camouflage is simply be or look like someone else. You will make a mistake, or techniques improve that they can track you better. If they track something that is not you at all, you're much safer.
[Answer]
## Some use of AI could actually help you here
So let me give you a bit of a frame challenge. AI is becoming far more advanced than your common bot, and can even trick it’s way past CAPTCHAs <https://gizmodo.com/gpt4-open-ai-chatbot-task-rabbit-chatgpt-1850227471> AI are likely only going to get better at thwarting these types of systems. AI are also already very good at imitating certain humans (think deep-faking, voice and speech emulation, seem to be able to catch on to your likes, dislikes, and usual activity very easily, etc. Another advantage of AI is that you could practically enlist an army of AIs to also create false identities, create distractions, misdirections, etc. that make it far harder to figure out the source of this crime. So an AI could generate fake internet activity for this guy, while the guy is really doing shady stuff. I also agree with another answer that sadly criminals tend to hide their stuff in plain sight in form of a code. I hope you find this answer helpful.
[Answer]
**Decentralized, anonymized "dark web"-style platforms**
"Oh but those would be abolished". No, not really. Remember that the current Tor network was basically made viable in the early days by US military intelligence. The very organizations you would expect to crush such kind of activity. All you need is some incentive to keep an anonymous potentially-illegal network operational. IRL this was the motive of governmental agents needing covertness in foreign theaters and for this needed non-spy activity as "noise" to hide in.
As long as any sort of "foreign nation" or space exists, this incentive is still strong. It might not be the Tor network as we know it, but it's base ideas with newer encryption schemes are likely to hold up well.
Because no matter how good your AI: from the outside, it's just noise. And if necessary, the network could also produce internal actual noise between its nodes. Maybe realtime communication would be impossible due to possible input-output matching, but if messages can be randomly delayed, a demasking of users could easily be prevented.
Again, the only thing required for this is multiple state-level actors with some opposition to each others. A unified global government could simply make accessing such a network illegal (and this would likely be trackeable).
] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.